Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 55)

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Giuliana Sgrena ist von ihrer Verschwörungstheorie abgegangen. Nach der Befreiung hat sie doch wohl sehr unter Druck gstanden und eine Erklärung für die Ereignisse gesucht. Siehe vorheriges Posting.

Zu den Checkpoints und zu den Opfern an den Stellen gibt es genügend Berichte in den letzten Jahren.

Dann noch ein Hinweis auf #26962 mit einem Erklärungsversuch für die Vorfälle.

Aber eins bleibt festzustellen, dass die US-Soldaten aus welchen Gründen auch immer, erst schießen und dann fragen.

DIE ZEIT

11/2005

Todesfalle Checkpoint
http://www.zeit.de/2005/11/Checkpoint

Immer wieder sterben Unschuldige an US-Kontrollposten im Irak. Erst schießen – dann nachdenken? Über Leben und Tod müssen die Soldaten in Sekundenbruchteilen entscheiden

Von Jochen Bittner

Die amerikanischen Soldaten, die am vergangenen Freitag in Bagdad den italinischen Gemeindienstmitarbeiter Nicola Calipari erschossen und die ZEIT-Mitarbeiterin Giuliana Sgrena verwundet haben, werden ihre eigene Version der Ereignisse haben. Dies ist die Geschichte, wie Giuliana Sgrena sie erzählt.

Feierstimmung im Wagen, so muss man sich das wohl vorstellen. So kurz nach der Befreiung, so kurz vorm Ziel. Sie habe mit Nicola Calipari auf der Rückbank gesessen, erzählt Giuliana Sgrena; er erzählte von zu Hause, wie es ihrem Lebensgefährten geht, ihren Eltern, ihren Kollegen. Mit allen hat Calipari während der vierwöchigen Geiselhaft der Journalistin Kontakt gehalten, jetzt plaudern und lachen die beiden wie alte Freunde. Vorn am Steuer sitzt Carabiniere-Major Andrea Caparni. Er gibt die freudige Botschaft per Mobiltelefon an den Bürochef des italienischen Ministerpräsidenten Silvio Berlusconi durch: »Giuliana Sgrena ist frei! Eben haben ihre Entführer sie übergeben!« Das Auto fährt durch eine Unterführung, in der eine große Lache Regenwasser steht. Der Wagen kommt ein wenig ins Schleudern. »Stell dir vor«, sagt Sgrena im Scherz zu Calipari, »wir hätten jetzt einen Unfall, nach all dem, was wir hinter uns haben!« Jetzt fühlen die drei sich sicher.

»Wir sind gleich da! Es fehlen noch 700 Meter!«, sagt der Fahrer. Hinter der Unterführung macht die Straße eine Rechtskurve. Vor ihnen liegt ein dunkler Streckenabschnitt. Es ist kurz vor neun Uhr Ortszeit. Die Streitkräfte werden später behaupten, die Soldaten am Straßenrand hätten sich an alle Vorschriften gehalten: Haltesignal, Lichtzeichen, Anruf durchs Megafon, Warnschuss. Sgrena erinnert sich anders. »Plötzlich lagen wir im Feuerhagel. Alle Wagenfenster sind zerborsten. Unser Fahrer stieg aus und schrie: ›Wir sind Italiener! Wir sind Italiener!‹ Aber es half nichts. Der Beschuss ging weiter.« Calipari wirft sich von der Seite schützend über Sgrena. Noch im selben Augenblick sackt er zusammen. »Sofort, wirklich sofort, hörte ich seinen letzten Atemzug, er starb in meinen Armen«, sagt Sgrena.

Aus einem Panzerwagen laufen Soldaten auf das Auto zu und reißen die Türen auf. »Nicola fiel heraus«, berichtet Sgrena, »ich hörte, wie die Soldaten fluchten. Sie legten mich auf den Boden. Ich wusste in dem Moment nicht, ob ich tot oder lebendig war. Sie schnitten mir die Kleider auf, um zu sehen, ob ich verwundet war. Sie versuchten, mir eine Infusion zu legen, schafften es aber nicht. Es war sehr dunkel. Sie hatten nur eine Taschenlampe. Ich konnte mir nicht vorstellen, dass ich noch am Leben war. Ich hatte schrecklichen Durst, und dann blieb mir plötzlich der Atem weg. Nach einigen Minuten wurde ich mit einem Panzerwagen ins Krankenhaus am Flughafen gebracht.« Ein Splitter hat sich in ihre Lunge gebohrt. – Keine lebensbedrohliche Verletzung, wie sich bald herausstellt.

Die Nachricht vom Beschuss der Italiener lässt Europa zusammenzucken. Als hätten die Amerikaner im Irak nicht schon genug Malheur angerichtet, jetzt feuern sie auch noch auf eine gerade befreite Geisel in der Obhut ihrer Retter! Noch bevor der Pulverdampf sich verzogen hat, schießen Verschwörungstheorien ins Kraut. Haben die GIs im direkten Mordauftrag des Pentagon gehandelt, um eine missliebige Reporterin aus dem Weg zu räumen? So absurd derlei Spekulationen sind, so unbestreitbar ist die Tatsache, dass es an Militär-Checkpoints im Irak immer wieder zu regelrechten Blutbädern kommt, Unschuldige in Kugelhageln sterben. Gezählt hat sie bisher niemand, aber die »Checkpoint-Toten« sind längst zum festen Begriff geworden. Nur wenige Stunden nach dem Beschuss der Italiener erschossen US-Soldaten von einem Posten einen bulgarischen Soldaten, der sich auf Patrouille befand. Doch meist trifft es Iraker, oftmals Frauen und Kinder. Es trifft sie, weil die amerikanischen Soldaten Angst haben, selber getroffen zu werden. Vergangene Woche starb nicht nur Nicola Calipari, es starb auch der 1500. US-Soldat im Irak.

»Was geschah, war ein Schock, aber keine Überraschung«

Der Tod des italienischen Geheimdienstmannes war also in der Tat kein Zufall, sondern wohl eher die Folge eines systematischen Problems. »Was am Freitag vergangener Woche passiert ist, war ein Schock, aber keine Überraschung.« Das sagt Fred Abrahams, Mitarbeiter der Menschenrechtsgruppe Human Rights Watch, der im Oktober 2003 einen umfassenden Bericht über Todesfälle an den Kontrollposten der Amerikaner schrieb. Bei allem Verständnis für die Nervosität der Soldaten, die Tragödie, sagt er, passe genau in das Muster, welches alle seine untersuchten Vorfälle aufwiesen. »Dieses Muster besteht zum einen aus der Bereitschaft amerikanischer Soldaten, schnell tödliche Gewalt anzuwenden. Zum anderen waren zur Zeit unserer Untersuchung viele Checkpoints schlecht markiert.« Vor allem aber kritisiert Abrahams, dass GIs, die überzogen reagieren, kaum eine Bestrafung fürchten müssen.

Umso mehr gerät gleich nach dem Wochenende der Präsidentensprecher Scott McClellan im Weißen Haus unter Beschuss. »Hat der Präsident veranlasst, dass es neue Richtlinien für den Schusswaffeneinsatz an Kontrollstellen im Irak gibt?«, will ein Journalist wissen. McClellan hebt zu einem Vortrag über »Italien, den guten Freund und Partner« an. Ein »tragischer Unfall« sei da geschehen, der »genauestens untersucht« werde. Nachfrage: »Und die Richtlinien an den Checkpoints?« Es handele sich bei der Region Bagdad »um eine Kriegszone«. Noch mal nachgefragt: »Sir, die Frage nach neuen Richtlinien für die Checkpoints.« Es scheint, als habe McClellan die Frage jetzt erst verstanden: »Da müssten Sie bei den Streitkräften in Bagdad nachfragen.«

Wer das tut, bekommt eine gestanzte Antwort: »Eine Untersuchung ist im Gange.« Natürlich, eine Rekonstruktion braucht immer länger, als die Presse erlaubt. Doch immerhin lieferten die Streitkräfte in Bagdad ihre erste Version ihrer Sicht der Dinge. Die Italiener seien schnell gefahren, man habe sie gewarnt. Selbst schuld. Von »hoher Geschwindigkeit« des Wagens der Italiener war da die Rede und von »der Weigerung anzuhalten«, trotz »Handzeichen«, trotz »Blinklichtern«, trotz »Warnschüssen«. Mit anderen Worten: Alle Richtlinien seien eingehalten worden. Wie aber können die Italiener all das übersehen haben? Die Washington Post bringt unter Berufung auf eine anonyme Quelle im Pentagon eine neue Version der Ereignisse. Danach hätten Soldaten 90 Minuten vor der Schießerei einen »Impromptu-Kontrollpunkt« errichtet.

Wer würde im Konfliktfall nicht sein eigenes Leben schützen?

Dieser Begriff löst bei Bundeswehr-General a.D. Klaus Reinhard Stirnrunzeln aus. Reinhard, ehemaliger Nato-Befehlshaber im Kosovo, weiß aus Erfahrung, wie wichtig es ist, einen Kontrollposten auf der Straße rechtzeitig anzukündigen. »Auf dem Balkan«, schildert er, »haben wir mehrere hundert Meter vor dem Kontrollposten Clearing-Stellen aufgebaut, die den Straßenverkehr beobachteten und schnelle Fahrzeuge meldeten. Von ›Impromptu-Posten‹ habe ich noch nie etwas gehört.«

Dass amerikanische Kontrollstellen bei Irakern wie Ausländern oftmals Verwirrung verursachten – mit tödlichen Folgen –, berichtet Annia Ciezadlo, Korrespondentin des Christian Science Monitor. »Als amerikanische Journalistin habe ich schon viele Kontrollposten passiert und wäre mehrmals beinahe selbst beschossen worden«, berichtet sie. Woher solle man auch wissen, dass ein paar Soldaten am Straßenrand einen Kontrollposten bilden? Das merke man dann erst, wenn sie ihre Gewehre auf einen anlegten. Erst schießen – dann nachdenken? Nach diesem Prinzip, könnte man finden, wurde der Irak-Krieg begonnen, was Wunder also, wenn die GIs der Präemptionslogik ihres Präsidenten nacheifern? »Wenn man glaubt, einen ›Krieg gegen Terror‹ zu führen, gehen eben alle Regeln zum Teufel«, sagt der Direktor der Londoner Human-Rights-Watch-Zentrale, Steve Crawshaw. Ob Afghanistan oder Abu Ghraib, so Crawshaw: »Es herrscht, gelinde ausgedrückt, ein Mangel an Respekt gegenüber zivilem Leben.«

Doch wer würde im Konfliktfall nicht sein eigenes Leben schützen? Schließlich suchten sich irakische Selbstmordattentäter, vor allem in der Frühphase des Krieges, gezielt amerikanische Kontrollposten als Ziele aus. Paul Rieckhoff war von März 2003 bis 2004 U. S. Lieutenant bei der Dritten Infanteriedivision im Irak, jener Einheit, aus der auch das Team von der Flughafenstraße stammt. Er habe, berichtet Rieckhoff der ZEIT, ein halbes Jahr lang »unzählige« Checkpoints bemannt und sagt ganz offen: »Die Priorität heißt Selbstverteidigung. Letztendlich sind es in der Regel sehr junge Soldaten, die die Entscheidung treffen. Sie tragen eine enorme Verantwortung, und der Zwischenfall mit Giuliana Sgrena sagt eine Menge aus über den Umgang mit dieser Grauzone, in der sich die Soldaten der Koalition ebenso wie die Iraker Tag für Tag befinden.« Iraker beklagen oft, es sei unklar wie man sich an Kontrollposten verhalten solle. Davon könne überhaupt keine Rede sein, sagt Rieckhoff. Die meisten Kontrollposten seien sehr gut markiert. Nähere sich ein Auto, folgten die GIs einem Eskalationsprotokoll nach Dienstvorschrift.

»Es ist furchtbar, ganz klar, aber diese Soldaten sind gezwungen, innerhalb eines Sekundenbruchteils eine Entscheidung zu treffen. Ist jeder ein Feind? Leider ja.« – Erst am Tag bevor Sgrena und ihre Retter ins Fadenkreuz der GIs gerieten, sei in der Nähe des Flughafens ein Auto auf einen Kontrollpunkt zugerast und habe zwei US-Soldaten in den Tod gerissen, sagt Jonathan Laurance, Italien-Experte der Brookings Institution.

Auch wenn noch längst nicht geklärt ist, was zu den tödlichen Schüssen auf die Italiener führte – für George Bush ist die europäische Reaktion auf die Tragödie von Bagdad ein politischer GAU. Der Präsident hat eine dramatische Wende vollzogen und sucht die Annäherung an Europa. Im Nahen Osten scheinen erstmals Erfolge seiner Strategie sichtbar zu werden. Die Wiederkehr der Fratze vom bösen Amerika ärgert niemanden mehr als jene Bush-Kritiker, die den Präsidenten seit Jahr und Tag zur Versöhnung mit dem Alten Kontinent drängen. Sie befürchten nun, europäische Gegner einer transatlantischen Verständigung könnten die Affäre Sgrena/Calipari ausbeuten.

»Die ganze Charmeoffensive – alles umsonst«, klagt Julianne Smith vom Center for Strategic and International Studies. »Ich bin frustriert, nur noch frustriert«, sagt die Demokratin.

Mitarbeit: Joe Ellen Perry, Ulrich Ladurner

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DAS STILLE SYSTEM DER AUFTRAGSFOLTER
Entführt, verhört, versteckt
http://www.monde-diplomatique.de/pm/2005/03/11/a0027.text.na…

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

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Saturday, March 12, 2005
War News for Friday and Saturday, March 11 and 12, 2005
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Fifty Iraqis killed, 100 wounded in Mosul bombing.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi soldiers killed, three wounded in fighting near Diwaniyah.

Bring ‘em on: Corpses of 30 Iraqi policemen discovered near al-Romana.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed in Mosul ambush.

Bring ‘em on: Turkish truck driver carrying US supplies killed by roadside bomb near Beiji.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline ablaze near Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi killed in drive by-shooting at central Baghdad contractor hotel.

One US soldier killed in “non-hostile accident” in Al-Anbar province.

Baghdad. “By day or night, Baghdad has become a cacophony of automatic weapons fire, explosions and sudden death, its citizens living in constant fear of being shot by insurgents or the security forces meant to protect them. Streets are crammed with passenger cars fighting for space with armored vehicles and pickups loaded with hooded and heavily armed Iraqi soldiers. Hundreds of bombs in recent months have made mosques, public squares, sidewalks and even some central streets extremely dangerous places in Baghdad. On Haifa Street, rocket-propelled grenades sometimes fly through traffic. Rashid Street is a favorite for roadside bombers near the Tigris River. And then there`s Sadoun Street, once teeming with Western hotels and home to Firdous Square -- the landmark roundabout in central Baghdad where Iraqis toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein. In the two years since Hussein`s ouster, Sadoun Street has become an avenue of blast walls -- thick concrete slabs 6 to 12 feet high -- that protect government buildings and hotels now home to the few Western contractors and journalists who remain.”

Crooks. “Mike Battles needed money fast. It was June 2003 and his cash-starved company had just won a contract to guard the Baghdad airport. Battles turned to a lender that had lots of cash and few questions about how it would be spent: the U.S.-led coalition in charge of Iraq. As Battles later told criminal investigators, he descended into a vault in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein`s former palaces, where a U.S. government employee handed him $2 million in $100 bills and a handwritten receipt. Battles ‘was informed that the contracting process would catch up’ later to account for the money, according to a statement he gave investigators. By the time it did, the adventures of his fledgling security company, Custer Battles, had become a case study in what had gone wrong in the early days of the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq, not least the haphazard and often ineffective U.S. oversight of the projects.”

Civilian casualties. The US and Britain should to set up a commission to assess the number of civilian casualties in Iraq, an international group of doctors said in a statement on Friday. ‘We believe that the joint US/UK failure to make any effort to monitor Iraqi casualties, is from a public health perspective, wholly irresponsible,’ the doctors said in a statement on the British Medical Journal`s Web site.”

Snake oil saleslady. “President Bush will nominate one of his closest confidantes, Karen P. Hughes, to lead an effort at the State Department to repair the image of the United States overseas, particularly in the Arab world, administration officials said Friday. She will also be a leader in publicizing the president`s campaign for democracy in the Middle East.”

Torture policy. “Most notable about the documents is that they detail severe physical abuse that allegedly occurred at the hands of U.S. soldiers about a year before abuse was documented at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Parts of the same unit responsible for gathering intelligence at Bagram at the time, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, were sent to Abu Ghraib to set up the intelligence-gathering effort there, and Army investigators believe that some of the same tactics migrated with them. The MPs at Abu Ghraib, seven of whom were charged with maltreating detainees, said they were being instructed by MI interrogators to keep detainees awake as part of ordered sleep-deprivation programs preceding interrogations.”

No accountability. “A Pentagon official told Congress yesterday that his investigation into detention operations found no evidence of written agreements between the military and the Central Intelligence Agency about ``ghost detainees" who were hidden from the Red Cross. But a military document released separately yesterday refers to the existence of such an agreement. The apparent contradiction between the findings of Navy Vice Admiral Albert Church and the military document, one in a trove made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, underscored complaints by Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee that the admiral`s investigation was not sufficiently thorough.”

No accountability. “Admiral Church makes it clear that his focus was not on senior accountability. In other words, no evidence of complicity by Mr Rumsfeld and other senior officials fell into his lap and that, as far as he was concerned, was that. But this will not be the end of the political debate over whether the White House`s decision not to give Geneva Convention protection to fighters captured in Afghanistan led to abuses in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba that were eventually carried over to Iraq. Admiral Church argues that most of the documented cases of abuse in Iraq happened on the battlefield, where emotions run high, not in the prisons. But it`s impossible to know whether this conclusion is accurate because the details of the abuse remain classified.”

No accountability. “Vice Admiral Albert Church`s review of interrogation policy and detention operations did not place specific blame for the confusing interrogation policies that migrated from Washington to the battlefield, and he told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing that no high-level policy decisions directly led to abuse. But Church said he did not interview top officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, nor did he make conclusions about individual responsibility, saying it was not part of his mission.”

No accountability. “A military investigation has cleared the former top intelligence officer in Iraq of responsibility for the policy and command failures that led to the abuse of detainees there, and the officer will assume a prestigious command next week, the Army said Friday.”

No accountability. “Declaring that the CIA is ‘not torturing detainees,’ the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that he saw no reason for the panel to investigate allegations that the agency abused prisoners or transferred them to countries that engage in torture.”

Accountability. “Army reservist Lynndie England, the private shown in notorious photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, will go on trial May third at Fort Hood, Texas.”

Commentary

Editorial: “Just consider that it took more than a year after the military says it first learned of the nightmare at Abu Ghraib to issue the new rules. And don`t ask what they are, because they`re classified. The report spoke of the regulations approvingly. But its author, Vice Admiral Albert Church III, now director of the Navy staff, admitted on Thursday that, well, he had not actually read them. This whitewash is typical of the reports issued by the Bush administration on the abuse, humiliation, and torture of prisoners at camps run by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. Like the others, the Church report concludes that only the lowest-ranking soldiers are to be held accountable, not their commanders or their civilian overseers.”

Opinion: “Throughout US history we have defeated brutal enemies, inhumane and monstrous dictators, and met with hideous violence. Our legacy is that we uphold our commitment to justice in the face of terror and war. The test of a nation is found as much in how it wages war as in how it promotes the values of peace and democracy. Our capacity to convince others to take risks for freedom relies on our steadfast dedication to upholding these principles. There will be no victory in this war, if the values of democracy, justice and rule of law are lost in the battle. The symbol of American justice is the Greek goddess Themis, a blindfolded woman, the very image of the equal administration of the law, without corruption, prejudice, or favor. We must not replace the goddess bearing the scales of justice with the images of abuse: shackles, electrical wires, and torture chambers. Abhorring torture, in deed as well as word, is a moral principle in a world yearning for moral footing. The United States should be a proud voice for justice and democracy, not a participant in the stealthy, illegal, and reprehensible practice of ‘outsourcing’ torture.”

Book Review: “If rotten intelligence smoothed the path to Baghdad, rotten intelligence also paved the road to Abu Ghraib. Only an occupying power blind to the symbolic landscape of Iraq would have let one of Saddam Hussein`s leading torture chambers be turned into a military detention facility in the first place. It should have been razed to the ground (a post-scandal promise by the Bush administration now conveniently forgotten). Only an occupying power blind to the lessons of history would have assumed that torture was a useful instrument in counter-insurgency. Only a occupying power clueless about the real roots of the violence and insurgency preying on it would have turned to the hapless inmates of Abu Ghraib for what is euphemistically known as ‘actionable intelligence.’ The vast majority of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, it now appears, were innocents caught up in the increasingly random and panicky sweeps by U.S. forces. They knew nothing. The story of Abu Ghraib points toward many uncomfortable truths. The U.S. government has made a terrible mistake in forgoing the Geneva conventions, an error that it may never repair, even if it wished to. The U.S. army in Iraq is wrestling with an insurgency it knows too little about. Ignorance may eventually spell defeat, if it is not overcome, and it will never be overcome by the tactics of prisoner abuse. The United States is struggling in Iraq without the comforts of a ‘just war’ tradition that has sustained quasi-civilized conduct in battle since St. Augustine put pen to paper. It may even be that the United States, finding itself in an unexpectedly degraded Iraq, without flowers certainly, but also without basic services and any degree of security, is reaching that nadir in which the constraints of fundamental respect for an occupied population, and an enemy hidden within it, are lost. With that loss goes some part of the soul of the occupying power itself.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier killed in Iraq.

Awards and Decorations

Local story: Two Fort Campbell, Kentucky soldiers decorated for valor in Iraq.
# posted by yankeedoodle : 5:34 AM
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Latest Fatality: Mar 11, 2005

Augenblicklich gibt es weniger tötliche Anschläge auf Koalitionstruppen, dafür aber viele Anschläge auf Iraker.
Regelmäßige Updates:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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March 13, 2005
ESSAY
The Calvinist Manifesto
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/books/review/013FUKUYA.htm…

THIS year is the 100th anniversary of the most famous sociological tract ever written, ``The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,`` by Max Weber. It was a book that stood Karl Marx on his head. Religion, according to Weber, was not an ideology produced by economic interests (the ``opiate of the masses,`` as Marx had put it); rather, it was what had made the modern capitalist world possible. In the present decade, when cultures seem to be clashing and religion is frequently blamed for the failures of modernization and democracy in the Muslim world, Weber`s book and ideas deserve a fresh look.

Weber`s argument centered on ascetic Protestantism. He said that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination led believers to seek to demonstrate their elect status, which they did by engaging in commerce and worldly accumulation. In this way, Protestantism created a work ethic -- that is, the valuing of work for its own sake rather than for its results -- and demolished the older Aristotelian-Roman Catholic doctrine that one should acquire only as much wealth as one needed to live well. In addition, Protestantism admonished its believers to behave morally outside the boundaries of the family, which was crucial in creating a system of social trust.

The Weber thesis was controversial from the moment it was published. Various scholars stated that it was empirically wrong about the superior economic performance of Protestants over Catholics; that Catholic societies had started to develop modern capitalism long before the Reformation; and that it was the Counter-Reformation rather than Catholicism itself that had led to economic backwardness. The German economist Werner Sombart claimed to have found the functional equivalent of the Protestant ethic in Judaism; Robert Bellah discovered it in Japan`s Tokugawa Buddhism.

It is safe to say that most contemporary economists do not take Weber`s hypothesis, or any other culturalist theory of economic growth, seriously. Many maintain that culture is a residual category in which lazy social scientists take refuge when they can`t develop a more rigorous theory. There is indeed reason to be cautious about using culture to explain economic and political outcomes. Weber`s own writings on the other great world religions and their impact on modernization serve as warnings. His book ``The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism`` (1916) takes a very dim view of the prospects for economic development in Confucian China, whose culture, he remarks at one point, provides only slightly less of an obstacle to the emergence of modern capitalism than Japan`s.

What held traditional China and Japan back, we now understand, was not culture, but stifling institutions, bad politics and misguided policies. Once these were fixed, both societies took off. Culture is only one of many factors that determine the success of a society. This is something to bear in mind when one hears assertions that the religion of Islam explains terrorism, the lack of democracy or other phenomena in the Middle East.

At the same time, no one can deny the importance of religion and culture in determining why institutions work better in some countries than in others. The Catholic parts of Europe were slower to modernize economically than the Protestant ones, and they took longer to reconcile themselves to democracy. Thus, much of what Samuel Huntington called the ``third wave`` of democratization took place between the 1970`s and 90`s in places like Spain, Portugal and many countries of Latin America. Even today, among the highly secular societies that make up the European Union, there is a clear gradient in attitudes toward political corruption from the Protestant north to the Mediterranean south. It was the entry of the squeaky-clean Scandinavians into the union that ultimately forced the resignation of its entire executive leadership in 1999 over a minor corruption scandal involving a former French prime minister.

``The Protestant Ethic`` raises much more profound questions about the role of religion in modern life than most discussions suggest. Weber argues that in the modern world, the work ethic has become detached from the religious passions that gave birth to it, and that it now is part of rational, science-based capitalism. Values for Weber do not arise rationally, but out of the kind of human creativity that originally inspired the great world religions. Their ultimate source, he believed, lay in what he labeled ``charismatic authority`` -- in the original Greek meaning of ``touched by God.`` The modern world, he said, has seen this type of authority give way to a bureaucratic-rational form that deadens the human spirit (producing what he called an ``iron cage``) even as it has made the world peaceful and prosperous. Modernity is still haunted by ``the ghost of dead religious beliefs,`` but has largely been emptied of authentic spirituality. This was especially true, Weber believed, in the United States, where ``the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions.``

It is worth looking more closely at how Weber`s vision of the modern world has panned out in the century since the publication of ``The Protestant Ethic.`` In many ways, of course, it has proved fatally accurate: rational, science-based capitalism has spread across the globe, bringing material advancement to large parts of the world and welding it together into the iron cage we now call globalization.

But it goes without saying that religion and religious passion are not dead, and not only because of Islamic militancy but also because of the global Protestant-evangelical upsurge that, in terms of sheer numbers, rivals fundamentalist Islam as a source of authentic religiosity. The revival of Hinduism among middle-class Indians, or the emergence of the Falun Gong movement in China, or the resurgence of Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia and other former Communist lands, or the continuing vibrancy of religion in America, suggests that secularization and rationalism are hardly the inevitable handmaidens of modernization.

One might even take a broader view of what constitutes religion and charismatic authority. The past century was marked by what the German theorist Carl Schmitt labeled ``political-theological`` movements, like Nazism and Marxism-Leninism, that were based on passionate commitments to ultimately irrational beliefs. Marxism claimed to be scientific, but its real-world adherents followed leaders like Lenin, Stalin or Mao with the kind of blind commitment to authority that is psychologically indistinguishable from religious passion. (During the Cultural Revolution in China, a person had to be careful about what he did with old newspapers; if a paper contained a picture of Mao and one sat on the holy image or used the newspaper to wrap a fish, one was in danger of being named a counterrevolutionary.)

SURPRISINGLY, the Weberian vision of a modernity characterized by ``specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart`` applies much more to modern Europe than to present-day America. Europe today is a continent that is peaceful, prosperous, rationally administered by the European Union and thoroughly secular. Europeans may continue to use terms like ``human rights`` and ``human dignity,`` which are rooted in the Christian values of their civilization, but few of them could give a coherent account of why they continue to believe in such things. The ghost of dead religious beliefs haunts Europe much more than it does America.

Weber`s ``Protestant Ethic`` was thus terrifically successful as a stimulus to serious thought about the relationship of cultural values to modernity. But as a historical account of the rise of modern capitalism, or as an exercise in social prediction, it has turned out to be less correct. The violent century that followed publication of his book did not lack for charismatic authority, and the century to come threatens yet more of the same. One must wonder whether it was not Weber`s nostalgia for spiritual authenticity -- what one might term his Nietzscheanism -- that was misplaced, and whether living in the iron cage of modern rationalism is such a terrible thing after all.

Francis Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author, most recently, of ``State-Building.``


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |

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The Spoils of War
By MICHAEL SHNAYERSON
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050307…

Halliburton subsidiary KBR got $12 billion worth of exclusive contracts for work in Iraq. But even more shocking is how KBR spent some of the money. Former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official Bunnatine Greenhouse is blowing the whistle on the Dick Cheney–linked company`s profits of war

This time, she was sure, they were going to get her.

Bunnatine Greenhouse had been a huge nuisance since the buildup to the war in Iraq—questioning contracts, writing caveats on them in her spidery script, wanting to know why Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR (formerly known as Kellogg, Brown and Root) should be thrown billions of dollars of government business while other companies, big and small, were shut out.

And Bunny Greenhouse wasn`t that easy to ignore: she was the highest-ranking civilian at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Specifically, she was the officer in charge of ensuring that any work contracted out by the Army Corps to private industry—from help in building bridges and dams and highways to support for wartime troops—was granted in a fair and aboveboard way. For two years, Greenhouse had asked hard questions about why the head of the Corps, to whom she reported directly, kept giving exclusive, non-compete contracts to KBR that now amounted to roughly $10.8 billion. Greenhouse was fearless, and she was blunt. In the Corps`s male hierarchy, it probably didn`t help that she was a woman—or that she was black.

On October 6, 2004, Greenhouse was summoned by the Corps`s deputy commander, Major General Robert Griffin. She knew that the top brass was eager to finalize the Corps`s latest contract for KBR, a $75 million extension for troop support in the Balkans. Already it had gone through several drafts, mostly because Greenhouse kept questioning the rationale for giving it to KBR without competitive bidding. What she didn`t know was that her superiors had closed ranks against her.

When Greenhouse entered the general`s office, he handed her a letter that explained she was being demoted for poor performance—a curious indictment, given that she`d received high performance ratings before the war. The demotion would knock her down to the government rank of GS-15. That was like going from senior vice president in a Fortune 500 company to middle management. She could retire instead with full benefits if she liked, the letter went on to say. She was, after all, 60.

Greenhouse chose a third alternative: she hired a lawyer and began to fight.

All through last year`s searing presidential campaign, the mere mention of Halliburton stirred fury and bitterness in the blue states. How, Democrats asked, had the Houston-based oil-and-gas conglomerate won all those deals to provide services to troops in Iraq? What role had Dick Cheney played behind the scenes, given that the vice president had been Halliburton`s C.E.O. from 1995 to 2000, walked away from the job with an estimated $35 million, and continues to get six-figure deferred-salary compensation from the company, despite his denials that he does? True, Halliburton`s $12.5 billion division KBR had expanded over the years from oil and gas to do lots of government work: about half of its 60,000 employees in 43 countries handle military needs, from building bases to serving food. But other companies—Fluor for one, Parsons for another—service the military, too. Why hadn`t they been considered?

Worse, KBR appeared to have mismanaged the work it got. At various hearings of the House Committee on Government Reform last year, ranking minority member Henry Waxman (a Democrat from California) turned livid as he detailed charges of reckless spending, chaos in the distribution of supplies, and profiteering by KBR executives—charges less often refuted than shrugged off.

Waxman had gotten many of his talking points from a plucky group of whistle-blowers: contract staffers and truckdrivers who`d worked for KBR in Iraq. Their view was from the ground, with startling allegations of how KBR operated—and operates still—on a day-to-day basis in the war zone.

Greenhouse, though, is the first to offer that view from a top-down perspective. The picture that emerges when her account is added to the others is of a company much like the law practice in John Grisham`s novel The Firm: a rogue operation, with corrupt management, cynically conning the federal government as it rakes in billions of ill-earned taxpayer dollars.

Greenhouse knows how KBR got those contracts in the first place. She also thinks she knows why.

Not surprisingly, Greenhouse is a bit late one evening in Washington when she bustles into the offices of her lawyer, Michael Kohn, with an armload of documents. She`s still at her job, having invoked protection under the whistle-blower law of 1989, which keeps federal employees from being fired or demoted until an investigation is conducted. Between doing her job and preparing her case, she`s got a lot to juggle.

Broad-shouldered and ebullient, Greenhouse radiates the conviction of her faith as a charismatic Catholic. She`s sung in a Sunday church choir her whole adult life, and it`s easy to imagine her there: she`s the one in the back row with the booming voice. "Back in 1970, God impressed upon me that I was to be a fisher of men," she declares. "I didn`t know what that meant. But now it`s all falling together. Something good is going to come out of this. And more people who are lost right now are going to come into His fold."

Greenhouse has an up-by-the-bootstraps, all-American story. She was raised in the segregated cotton town of Rayville, Louisiana. Her father never made it to third grade. But he operated the steam compress in the middle of town that turned picked cotton bolls into bales, so he was, as his daughter recalls, an important figure in the community. He and his wife, a fervent Bible reader, urged their six children to strive for excellence, and that they did. Most earned advanced degrees. Bunny was valedictorian at Baton Rouge`s Southern University and went on to acquire three master`s degrees, all related to her work at the Corps. One of her brothers chose to excel in basketball. No one who follows the game has forgotten the Washington Bullets` and Houston Rockets` Hall of Famer, Elvin Hayes.

In 1965, Bunny married her college sweetheart, and when Aloysius Greenhouse became an army procurement officer—overseeing the purchase of supplies and services—she followed him on postings around the country and in Europe, teaching high-school and college math as she went. The only time they were apart was when her husband went to Vietnam, serving in the infantry—two tours, Silver Star. Eventually, Bunny went into procurement herself, for both government and industry. In 1997, General Joe Ballard, the Army Corps`s first black chief engineer, brought Greenhouse in as the Corps`s top procurement officer. He wanted her to shatter the cronyism that had led to bad contracts, and so she did.

At the Corps, as at other government agencies, senior officers often leave for cushy jobs with the very companies they negotiated with on the government`s behalf. Especially the biggest ones, such as Halliburton and Parsons. Greenhouse`s mission was to be sure some of the pie was saved for small and minority-owned businesses. That wasn`t just policy—it was the law. Greenhouse had to sign off on every contract valued at more than $10 million. On no less than 50 of the documents she signed, she added clauses and conditions to make sure the law was upheld. There was grumbling from the start, and after Ballard, her mentor, left in 2000, she says, underlings started chopping big contracts into parts worth less than $10 million to try to evade her scrutiny. She could deal with that. But then came the war in Iraq, with its promise of glittering profits. And suddenly everything changed.

"The meeting was in the Pentagon—one of those really secure rooms," Greenhouse recalls. The date was February 26, 2003, three weeks before the Iraq invasion. The Army Corps`s Lieutenant General Carl A. Strock was there; Greenhouse says he was the one who would lead the campaign to ax her 20 months later. There, too, were representatives from Defense, State, USAID and others, several dozen in all. A major item on the agenda was deciding which outside contractor would get the multi-billion-dollar job of putting out the oil-well fires that Saddam Hussein`s troops would presumably set once the invasion began, and then getting the wells operating again. The project was to be known as RIO, for Restore Iraqi Oil.

Several U.S. companies had the know-how. Texas-based GSM Consulting, for one, had done such work in the wake of the Gulf War. Yet the assumption in the room was that KBR had the job—an assumption underscored by the extraordinary presence of KBR representatives at the high-level government meeting. "They came in late—it was a snow day," Greenhouse recalls. "I was just flabbergasted."

Greenhouse knew that the previous fall KBR had been paid $1.9 million to draft a contingency plan for how RIO should unfold. But that was reason enough not to let KBR do RIO. It was strict protocol in the procurement business that the contractor who drew up the contingency plan for a job should not be allowed to bid on the job itself: he`d know the exact budget and other details that would give him an unfair advantage. Yet here was KBR sliding into the job without an eyebrow raised—precisely because, as the participants at the meeting agreed, it was the only company that met the criteria outlined in its own contingency plan! To Greenhouse`s greater shock, the senior officers and the KBR representatives around the table spoke of a sole-source, non-compete contract that could last five years. In the first of many detailed responses to Vanity Fair, KBR notes that the Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.) concluded that the RIO contract was "properly awarded." But the G.A.O. also concluded that the $1.9 million contingency plan on which RIO was based was improperly awarded.

Worst of all, the contract would be "cost-plus": KBR would just submit bills for whatever it spent, and the government would reimburse it, adding fees of between 2 and 7 percent as KBR`s profit. It didn`t take a genius to see that the more money KBR spent, the more profit it would make. KBR says that its award fee of up to 5 percent on RIO is based in large part on its ability to control costs. But the G.A.O. has concluded that KBR let costs spiral out of control.

Incensed, Greenhouse went over to whisper in Lieutenant General Strock`s ear that the KBR people had to leave the room. The general complied with her request, but seemed adamant that KBR get the job on the grounds of "compelling emergency." All Greenhouse could do was insist that the contract be limited to a year.

The next day, the final contract was submitted to Greenhouse for her approval. The basic terms—five years, non-compete, cost-plus—remained. Greenhouse signed—the country was, after all, on the eve of war—but only after writing, "I caution that extending this sole source effort beyond a one year period could convey an invalid perception that there is not strong intent for a limited competition." (In light of the pending investigation into Greenhouse`s charges, the Army Corps declined to comment on any details of her case.)

To KBR, the contract was potentially worth $7 billion—just the start of its business from the war in Iraq.

There were signs, though no proof, that Vice President Cheney, or someone in his office, had played a part in tipping RIO to KBR. Certainly, his office had been informed of the decision to award the RIO contingency plan to KBR. Michael Mobbs, a political appointee who reported to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, acknowledged to Congressman Waxman`s staff that he had relayed the news that KBR would prepare the RIO plan to various White House officials in an October 2002 meeting. One of those officials was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney`s chief of staff. (A Cheney spokesman, Kevin Kellems, subsequently told The Washington Post that Libby had kept Cheney out of the loop about the decision to use KBR for the plan.) And Time would unearth an Army Corps e-mail stating that the contingency plan had been "coordinated" with the vice president`s office. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Halliburton executives then met directly with Cheney`s staff. KBR, for its part, says the vice president had nothing to do with any of its Iraq contracts.

Greenhouse herself saw another dynamic was at work. "I think what this was all about was that Rumsfeld had made very negative statements about the Corps," she says. Rumsfeld saw the Corps as a bunch of geeky engineers, mostly tinkering with public works in the U.S. He`d actually raised the idea of sliding the Corps over to the Interior Department, which oversees all federally owned lands. That was anathema to the Corps, in name and tradition an integral part of the U.S. Army. So Lieutenant General Robert B. Flowers, at that time the Corps`s chief engineer, made it his goal to show Rumsfeld what the Corps could do. "He was pushing everything that he could to get the Corps in the limelight," Greenhouse says. So eager was he, Greenhouse believes, that Rumsfeld saw Flowers could be used.

Ordinarily, the Department of Defense would have coordinated the RIO contract. But Rumsfeld, Greenhouse theorizes, wanted to put some political distance between Defense and a sole-source contract for KBR that could prove embarrassing, even as it pleased the White House. So the Corps was willing to be used as the vehicle to push this through and have Halliburton get the $7 billion contract.

The Corps, Greenhouse thought, would take the heat for giving RIO to KBR, and in the process play a larger role in Iraq. With any luck, it would show Rumsfeld it was worthy of remaining in the U.S. Army. A Defense spokesman calls the theory far-fetched. "The Secretary of Defense can`t do that on his own. Congress would have to be involved, the president would be involved, it would be a decision by the administration."

To everyone`s surprise, the Iraqi oil fields sustained hardly any damage, from either U.S. bombs or Saddam`s troops, in the "shock and awe" invasion of March 2003. So there wasn`t much RIO for KBR to do. Gamely, the company suggested it change its job to handling Iraq`s immediate fuel needs: bringing in truckloads of gasoline from Kuwait for military and civilians alike. That was fine with the Corps.

The other surprise was that U.S. troops couldn`t just leave the country they`d conquered. They had to stay, and be housed and fed. That meant a lot more work for KBR, which already had a lucrative contract for troop support in the Balkans—a type of contract known by the awkward acronym of LOGCAP—and had persuaded the Corps to draw up a similar one for Iraq. Marie deYoung, one of the whistle-blowers who would later cooperate with Congressman Waxman, came to believe soon after her arrival in Kuwait as a logistics specialist for KBR, in December 2003, that LOGCAP had an almost built-in potential for chaos, abuse, and graft.

Dark-haired and lively, deYoung seems far younger than her 50 years, talking a blue streak as she sketches a life that`s taken her from orchestral conducting to social work for the U.S. Army to the seminary and back to the army again, with time out to write or co-write two books (This Woman`s Army and Women in Combat) and be a television and radio commentator on social issues in the military. Thorough and seemingly tireless, she promises to follow up on a first interview by sending documents by e-mail. By day`s end, she`s sent 24 e-mails, with documents attached to each one.

DeYoung hadn`t intended to go to Kuwait at all. She had signed on for Kosovo, where KBR needed lots of procurement help, too. There for three months, she got an up-close look at KBR`s model in action. This was the way the new, outsourced army was supposed to work. In the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, when order had been restored to the Balkans, KBR had won its first LOGCAP contract: it would supply everything that occupying U.S. forces needed, from tents and mess halls to swimming pools and generators. The federal government would be trimmed, private industry would profit, soldiers would be snappily serviced. The original architect of this plan was Dick Cheney, then assistant secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush. LOGCAP was a huge boon to KBR and its parent, Halliburton. Just four years later, Cheney was Halliburton`s C.E.O.

In Kosovo, deYoung saw, the plan had worked—up to a point. KBR had fixed war-torn cities in record time. It had employed local vendors, who acquired new expertise. To newcomers, KBR liked to show a documentary of the work it had done in the Balkans. It made for stirring footage, especially with the theme song of its booming soundtrack, "We Built This City (on Rock and Roll)," by the 80s schlock-rock group Starship.

DeYoung did notice something curious about this Utopian model. Army commanders came and went every six months or so. What they wanted was some project they could point to as the pride of their time: a new swimming pool for the troops, or heated tents. KBR could do that for them. So most commanders happily signed off on the sort of expensive projects that Bunny Greenhouse would come to call "gold-plated"—projects that KBR could cost-plus-bill to the U.S. government. In any event commanders would be gone soon enough; KBR`s employees were the ones who remained. So, as deYoung observes, "who`s in control?"

This was the model that got KBR the big contracts in Iraq. But hiring a bunch of local Arab vendors in the midst of a war that kept metastasizing wasn`t as easy as building a city on rock `n` roll.

DeYoung, who earned $8,800 a month "for a 90-hour work week," flew to Kuwait on December 14, 2003—the day that Saddam Hussein`s capture was announced. She was sent immediately to Camp Udairi, a U.S. military base near the Iraq border, to update 27 KBR subcontracts for work being done at the camp. Her first surprise was that most of the contracts had nothing to do with servicing U.S. troops. They were all about servicing KBR. "Building houses for itself, building separate gyms and rec centers from what the army had … " (KBR says that all its work in Kuwait and Iraq is done at the direction of the U.S. Army.) DeYoung found the 27 subcontracts in chaos—goods unaccounted for, invoices paid without documentation—because the KBR staffers who`d drawn them up were incompetent, she felt. Most had no bookkeeping skills and were there because of family connections.

By late February, deYoung had begun working in KBR`s LOGCAP office at the elegant Persian Gulf–front Khalifa resort, just outside Kuwait City. There she oversaw a much larger pile of 519 KBR subcontracts that appeared to her to be in no better shape than the ones for Camp Udairi. (A company spokesperson observes that KBR had gone from supporting 25,000 troops at 7 base camps to 211,000 U.S. and coalition troops at more than 60 camps on very little notice, an extraordinary challenge.)

It was at the LOGCAP office that deYoung saw how well KBR managers in Kuwait were living. They stayed in expensive waterfront hotels in Kuwait City and its environs at more than $100 a night per room. They availed themselves of hotel laundry service, even while KBR was paying outrageous prices to a subcontractor for laundry. And when they left their hotels, they didn`t carpool or take buses. They`d requisitioned expensive-brand S.U.V.`s for themselves. DeYoung did some number crunching and came up with the figure of $73 million a year. That, she concluded, was what KBR was spending for its top managers in Kuwait City to live so well. More accurately, that was what U.S. taxpayers were paying—not including the extra 2-to-3-percent profit that came with the cost-plus system. (KBR says only a few managers are in off-base housing and that those in hotel rooms are routinely doubled up. DeYoung says the only people who stayed two to a room were men with girlfriends, "often the lesser paid Balkans girls.")

What were the KBR managers actually doing there? Not overseeing construction projects, or kicking the tires of convoy trucks they`d brought in to supply the troops, or looking at blueprints for new army bases in Iraq. According to deYoung, they weren`t doing any of that. They were sitting in their hotel rooms, or out on their waterfront balconies, giving the nod to subcontractors to do all the work. (KBR says it "self performs" some jobs and subcontracts others.) Once a subcontractor was hired, the KBR team had no idea whether goods or services were delivered, deYoung asserts. The team just paid whatever invoices the subcontractors submitted, and hoped for the best. (KBR calls this a "ridiculous claim" and says that all goods and services must be verified before invoices are paid. DeYoung says that`s simply not true, and e-mails a blizzard of documents from her time in Kuwait to support her case.)

Back in Washington, Congressman Waxman had been raising a stir about KBR`s runaway costs in Iraq, so by the time deYoung reached the LOGCAP office a "tiger team" of senior KBR managers had flown over from Houston to Kuwait City for an intense examination of how the company was managing the job. The tiger team, deYoung recalls, had an odd way of pursuing the problems.

Instead of demanding accountability from all the local vendors to whom KBR had doled out contracts, the "old men," as deYoung puts it, sat by the pool, not at their desks. "Their objective was not to set up clean accounts or justify costs," deYoung explains. "Their No. 1 objective was to close the books because they were operating under the assumption that if the books were closed they wouldn`t be subject to auditing." In that, they may have been right: when teams of Defense auditors finally reached Kuwait, in the winter of 2004, to start questioning contracts, they focused only on the open, ongoing ones. DeYoung says the closed ones were ignored. KBR says that government auditors audit contracts whether they`re open or not.

The tiger team was a "social gang," deYoung says, and "insiders were rewarded with fancy digs … and promises of promotion." To stay in the gang, you had to play the game—seeing that contracts were awarded to the favored contractors. Proper contracting called for competitive bidding. But according to deYoung that`s not the way the gang did it. "Typically, the high-ranking guy would go to a young, inexperienced person and use him to award this contract to the subcontractor of choice," deYoung explains. "If the young person refused, he`d be threatened: `You have 24 hours to make a decision.` If he was adamant, he`d either be sent home or to Iraq. Which was to say they`d put his life in danger." In the subcontracts department, deYoung adds, KBR went through 12 managers in one year. "When you got too close to what was going on, you got moved." KBR denies this, saying any turnover was likely due to the demands associated with working long hours in a war zone.

What was going on?

"The subcontractor would come in with bills for four or five times the expected cost," deYoung explains, "which had to do with under-the-table payments."

In November 2004 the Pentagon would launch an investigation into allegations that two Halliburton employees in Kuwait had accepted bribes from third-party contractors, and the company would announce it had terminated its relationship with the subcontractors in question. A company spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, would say, "We are doing everything we can to make sure this particular scenario doesn`t happen again." But deYoung says that that might be hard, given that a tone was set from the top. KBR chairman Jack Stanley was forced to leave the company in June 2004 for what Halliburton vaguely termed violations of business conduct. He is said to have received "improper personal benefits" involving a Swiss bank account which French investigators say contained $5 million in bribes for KBR contracts in Nigeria. Both the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have launched formal investigations.

To deYoung these incidents seemed all too typical. She never saw money change hands. But her bosses` reaction to questions she brought up about the 519 subcontracts she was assigned left her deeply suspicious. "When I said this work was not done or there`s missing equipment, I was told that was too much information," deYoung says. "They really just wanted enough information so they could bill the U.S. government." She adds, "It makes no sense that people who were presiding over this … were not willing to fix the problems. And these inflated costs! Any normal manager would want to keep costs down, not inflate them." KBR says deYoung was a clerical assistant with no oversight responsibility, but deYoung has scores of e-mails proving she did in fact vet subcontracts to confirm that work had been properly billed.

One of the most blatant examples of misspending deYoung says she found involved a Kuwaiti company called La Nouvelle.

The 519 subcontracts dumped in deYoung`s lap added up to $l.8 billion. La Nouvelle`s contracts accounted for $400 million of that and dealt with everything from construction equipment to transportation to dining facilities. But what was La Nouvelle?

Its two principal managers, Ali Hijazi and Ahmed Al Homoud, describe it as a Kuwaiti-registered company, started in 1997, that provided supplies to U.S. armed forces and oil-field operations. But to deYoung it seemed defined much more by its third focus, interior design, and by Al Homoud`s American-born wife, Wendy Stafford, who often represented it.

La Nouvelle had no trucks of its own, or warehouses, or dining facilities. It merely hired local subcontractors and took a middleman fee. But it did know how to do that, and goods did get delivered—at prices that seemed to yield very healthy profits. DeYoung recalls Stafford in elegant, tight clothes, with expensively teased hair and "lots of jewelry—diamonds, diamonds, diamonds."

One of the La Nouvelle contracts that caught deYoung`s eye was for laundry—laundry, that is, for all contractors and military at a nearby base. The bill, she says, "went from $62,000 a month to $l.2 million a month—over about 60 days!" Given the number of people whose laundry was being done, deYoung figured that on average a 15-pound bag was costing $108. At the same time, KBR was paying $28 a bag under a different contract at another site—to La Nouvelle!

"When they chose to cut a clean contract, they were quite capable of doing that," deYoung says. "And when they chose to make a contract messy, they could do that too." (La Nouvelle spokeswoman Jennifer Thomas replies that deYoung`s $108 estimate is incorrect, and that La Nouvelle is unaware of the other contract to which deYoung refers.)

On March 16, 2004, deYoung met La Nouvelle`s troika of top personnel for the first time—Stafford, Al Homoud, and Hijazi—and asked the group for documentation on the expensive laundry contract. Stafford and the others said there wasn`t any. (In retrospect, La Nouvelle says, they don`t know what documentation deYoung was referring to, nor does their subcontractor.) DeYoung says she`d already found the paperwork herself, and it had taken her about a minute on a calculator to conclude that KBR and La Nouvelle together were overcharging on the laundry by about $1 million a month. By her estimate, the monthly bill should have been $200,000, not $l.2 million. When deYoung showed her documents to Hijazi, he e-mailed a powerful ally for help: a KBR vice president who wasn`t in procurement, deYoung says, and should have had no say over the contract. But the V.P. was a top KBR manager in Kuwait. "Within 24 hours, I was told I was off the La Nouvelle account."

Last June, Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall declared to the Houston Chronicle that the company`s own auditing system had raised concerns about La Nouvelle, and that La Nouvelle as a result had been "removed from consideration for future work." La Nouvelle, on the other hand, claimed it was owed hundreds of millions of dollars by KBR. On October 15, 2004, La Nouvelle filed suit in a Virginia federal court, seeking at least $224 million in compensation and other damages.

In May 2004, deYoung came home. She`d seen a lot, and felt she`d had enough. Her one regret was that she hadn`t gotten into Iraq; as a former soldier, she`d desperately wanted to do that. And so she didn`t see what it was like to work for KBR on the ground in Iraq, day after day.

But James Warren and David Wilson did.

Warren and Wilson were two of the hundreds of truckers who signed on for Iraq duty with KBR in the fall of 2003. Patriotism was one draw, adventure another. And the money wasn`t bad: with premiums for working in Iraq, combat duty in a convoy, and overtime, a driver could earn about $8,000 a month. Like their fellow civilian recruits, they started in Houston with a three-week orientation. For Warren, 48, a Nebraska-born ex–navy man who drives his own rig, the doubts began there.

"Things didn`t seem right to me from the first day in Houston," Warren recalls, speaking to Vanity Fair by cell phone from his truck on an all-night drive through half a dozen southwestern states. "The amount of money being spent on these drivers, recruiting them! Every job I`ve ever had, I stayed at a Motel 6 or Days Inn. These were $200-a-night hotels. And they didn`t even put two people in a room with two beds." His KBR recruiter kept saying, "We`re spending about $10,000 on each of you in orientation." Warren says, "So taxpayers were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars before KBR even found out if I was a felon or not."

The honeymoon ended in Iraq, when Warren and some of the other recruits were shuttled to the U.S. military base known as Camp Cedar, south of Baghdad. Now they were put in big tents, with 50 to 60 people to a tent. And yet, for KBR`s managers, Warren noted, the perks kept on coming.

"My first day at Camp Cedar, I noticed flatbed trucks were bringing brand-new S.U.V.`s, like Toyota Land Cruisers, Hummers, 4Runners—some of the most expensive S.U.V.`s that money can buy. I saw hundreds of them going to Iraq." The S.U.V.`s weren`t hauling anything, Warren says. They were just for KBR personnel to ride in from base to base. They had power windows and CD players. "You don`t have CD players in a car in wartime," Warren says wonderingly. On such delicate vehicles, desert conditions were brutal. "Within 90 days," he says, "they were completely trashed."

Warren`s job was to haul supplies on an almost daily basis from Camp Cedar north to Baghdad to Camp Anaconda—a distance of about 300 very dangerous miles. He realized pretty quickly that the KBR people in charge of loading up the convoys had no experience in trucking.

"A majority of the goods we transported were transported the wrong way," Warren explains. "You can`t haul paper towels and napkins on a flatbed when it`s raining and there`s no tarp. We lost millions of dollars of goods that scattered on the roads. Pants, boots, shirts, water.… And we couldn`t stop to pick that stuff up. We told KBR time and again, You can`t haul this stuff on a flatbed—you need it in a container. But they never did change. And what happens is, when you start losing things that way, you attract Iraqis. We had people following convoys so they could pick up stuff that fell off the truck."

A lot of Iraqis, unfortunately, were more aggressive than that.

David Wilson, 50, a Florida-based trucker who`d served in the U.S. Coast Guard, became head of the convoy in which Warren was driving. Wilson was a natural leader the others came to trust. But he could hardly control what the Iraqis felt—or did. "The Iraqis love to throw rocks—stoning is still a big thing over there," Wilson says wryly. They`d try to slow the trucks down, then jump on the trailers.

Wilson expected "the danger part," as he puts it. But from the start, he says, KBR made a bad situation much, much worse by doing nothing to maintain the trucks. "These trucks were going through severe duty," Wilson says. "When we started requesting maintenance and couldn`t get it, I knew that would be a problem." One day, Wilson`s truck simply shut down and stopped on the road. Its fuel filter, a $7 part, was clogged. Fortunately, Wilson was just outside the gates of a military camp when it happened. "If that had happened a mile from where it did, there`s a very good chance you and I wouldn`t be having this conversation," Wilson says. "Over a $7 fuel filter." (KBR says its truck maintenance from the start was "adequate," and that it has since improved.)

By late December 2003, trucks in the convoy began breaking down. There were a few extra trucks, but those began breaking down, too. The KBR managers told Wilson and his posse to fix the ones they had as best they could and keep on driving them. Wilson and Warren did that until one day in March 2004, when, to their astonishment, both were fired.

That July, at the congressional hearing where both Wilson and Warren testified, a KBR supervisor said the truckers were fired for running Iraqi-driven cars off the road with their trucks. "I did do this," Warren says. "But Halliburton management had told us to do it!" Wilson agrees. "We were told when we went to Kuwait that we were to do whatever we could to protect the integrity of the convoy. Even if it meant running people off the road." A KBR project manager for transportation later testified that the army, which made all decisions about KBR convoy security, "does not direct KBR drivers to run civilian vehicles off the road."

Both Warren and Wilson had become whistle-blowers after a staffer for Congressman Waxman saw them quoted in an Associated Press story about convoys in Iraq and got in touch with them. Warren says he came forward without hesitation. "I just felt the taxpayers should be aware of the money being spent on this operation, and how much was being wasted."

Wilson says he testified for the same reason, though at the House Government Reform Committee hearings Chairman Tom Davis, of Virginia, and other Republicans regarded the truckers with withering skepticism. They showed no more respect for Marie deYoung, who had come home with stacks of incriminating e-mails and decided to contact Waxman`s office on her own. "The accusations leveled by the whistle-blowers against KBR," declared Chairman Davis in his opening statement, "both in their written testimony and through personal interviews, are either in some cases, flat-out wrong or minor or a naïve or myopic view of contracting in a wartime environment."

Yet, as Waxman observed in his own opening statement, the whistle-blowers` testimony squared with reports from three government organizations: the Defense Contract Audit Agency (D.C.A.A.), the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority`s Office of the Inspector General, and the U.S. G.A.O. "All three audit agencies," Waxman declared, "have told us Halliburton is wasting our money."

After the whistle-blowers testified, Alfred Neffgen, KBR`s chief operating officer for government operations for the Americas, appeared before the committee to answer their charges. He acknowledged mistakes had been made. But, he said, the war made everything very difficult. "Under these conditions, no one should expect the assembling and complicated logistics would be the epitome of pristine precision."

Bunny Greenhouse did not testify that day before Congress: she hadn`t become a whistle-blower yet. Instead, she was still trying to make KBR accountable from the inside, by doing her job and questioning contracts. But she says she was encountering more and more resistance from her colleagues at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Since December 19, 2003, in fact, the climate in the office had turned arctic. That was the day the battle over KBR`s fuel-price gouging in Iraq came to a head.

In the invasion`s aftermath, KBR had begun importing fuel into Iraq from Kuwait as part of its revised charter for the $7 billion RIO contract. To do so, it had hired an obscure Kuwaiti subcontractor called the Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company, which had no experience in fuel procurement or transportation. An e-mail that turned up later from the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait would refer to the Altanmia arrangement as a "sop" to the U.S. government.

Altanmia had delivered the gasoline—but at an average price of $2.65 per gallon. That was well over twice the rate that Iraq`s State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO) was paying—an average of 97 cents a gallon—for gasoline imported from the same Middle Eastern countries that Altanmia had tapped. (KBR`s Neffgen would testify that only northern Iraq could get cheaper fuel, from Turkey, but Waxman`s investigators would determine that SOMO supplied southern Iraq as well, at less than $1 a gallon.) KBR was paying Altanmia`s invoices without complaint, while it was getting reimbursed by the U.S. government—at cost-plus. By the end of September 2003, the D.C.A.A. (the Defense Department`s own auditing office) would conclude, KBR had paid as much as $61 million more than it should have—and passed those costs on to U.S. taxpayers. (KBR says the army ordered it to buy gas from Kuwait, and that Altanmia had the lowest price. But Waxman`s investigators say the bidding was done by phone, in a single day, and that industry leaders were not invited to participate.)

Why had KBR paid so much for gasoline? An e-mail located by Waxman`s office reported an August 2003 meeting between Altanmia and U.S. Embassy officials in which an Altanmia official complained bitterly that it was "common knowledge" that KBR managers solicited bribes, "that anyone visiting their seaside villas at the Kuwaiti [sic] Hilton who offers to provide services will be asked for a bribe." According to this version, Altanmia officials would pay generous bribes to KBR to keep the gas contract going, then get their money back by jacking up the price per gallon. KBR could then just invoice the U.S. government at $2.65 per gallon and get reimbursed at cost-plus. (KBR says any implication that its managers were extorting kickbacks from Altanmia is "an absolutely unfounded lie.")

Yet other e-mails suggested the U.S. Embassy, not KBR, had played a leading role. On December 2, 2003, after Halliburton and the Army Corps actually proposed using other, less expensive suppliers for fuel in view of the pressure that the Pentagon and various lawmakers were bringing to bear, then U.S. ambassador to Kuwait Richard Jones sent an e-mail to an unidentified U.S. official saying, "Tell KBR to get off their butts and conclude deals with Kuwait NOW! Tell them we want a deal done with al-Tanmia [sic] within 24 hours and don`t take any excuses. If Amb. Bremer hears that KBR is still dragging its feet, he will be livid." Jones was also Bremer`s right-hand man at the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. interim government of Iraq. An embassy spokesman released a statement at the time saying the embassy had played no part in the selection of Altanmia and had not pressured the Army Corps in any way.

By mid-December 2003, KBR was under intense pressure from the D.C.A.A. to document how and why it had signed on with Altanmia for fuel at $2.65 a gallon. That`s when it turned to the Army Corps of Engineers for help.

As the contracting agency, the Corps had the unique power to decide it didn`t want to see KBR`s paperwork, and to waive KBR`s obligation to show that paperwork to anyone else. Why would the Corps want to do that? To this day, Bunny Greenhouse isn`t sure. All she knows is that on December 19, 2003, her colleagues approved the waiver behind her back.

By then, the Corps had assigned her a new deputy. Not a civilian deputy; a military one. "Because they can control the military," Greenhouse explains, referring to her superiors. "They can`t control civilians like that, because civilians are going to say, `I can go to jail.`"

Greenhouse says that her new deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Albert A. J. Castaldo, was "promised … all sorts of things if he would come in and disrupt my office and get Bunny Greenhouse out of this job." In this, she says, he was encouraged by the chief of engineers at that time, Lieutenant General Robert B. Flowers, who had advised his staff to take decisions into their own hands when necessary. Flowers went so far as to have a "Just Do It" card printed up and handed out. In an internal memo that Castaldo later sent to one of his superiors, he acknowledged what his command group had said "Just Do It" meant. "It was discussed, well known, and even expected by the USACE Command Group that I would have to take adverse positions against Ms. Greenhouse`s desires in order to protect the command and accomplish certain actions for the best of the command mission. It was fully understood that I would have to exercise the `Just Do It` card to accomplish my mission for the command."

For weeks, Greenhouse says, Castaldo hung around her administrative assistant`s desk, craning for glimpses of Greenhouse`s appointment book so he could tip his superiors to any time she`d be away from the office. On December 18, 2003, Greenhouse sent a slip saying she was sick with bronchitis and would be home the next day.

On the 19th, the KBR waiver was drawn up in the Corps`s Dallas office—a necessary first step because that office was assigned to oversee the RIO contract. Contracting Officer Gordon A. Sumner signed it. (Sumner declined to speak with Vanity Fair in view of Greenhouse`s legal dispute with the Corps, and a Corps spokesman made clear that no other Corps officers could cooperate either.) It was then flown up—that day—to Washington to be signed by Lieutenant General Flowers. Ordinarily, the waiver would have been logged into the Corps`s computer system and given a tracking number. But it wasn`t. That way, Greenhouse`s assistant couldn`t detect its lightning passage through government channels and notify Greenhouse at home. Greenhouse says that no mention of the waiver was made to her by Flowers or anyone else upon her return to the office, so she didn`t find out that it had been granted until early January, when it made the news.

As a result of the Corps`s secretly granted waiver, the Pentagon investigation into KBR`s fuel surcharges ground to a halt.

The Corps couldn`t fire Greenhouse directly; senior Corps officials are unfireable. But she could be demoted, if her colleagues laid the groundwork carefully enough. By the fall of 2004 they`d done just that. And when Greenhouse ignored warnings not to block the next no-bid KBR contract with her spidery script, they got her at last.

Since 1999, KBR had earned nearly $2 billion in the Balkans as the sole-source supplier of housing, food, and other needs for U.S. troops stationed there. As the contract`s term had wound down, the Corps had made a halfhearted attempt to let other companies bid on the job. Greenhouse was all for that: in a candid report, she`d concluded the contractor was "out of control," manipulating military command changes to push through ever more expensive items. But in July the bidding process was inexplicably curtailed; to this day, Greenhouse says, she has no idea why that was done. Instead, Lieutenant General Strock, the new chief of engineers, decreed that KBR should be granted a $75 million extension of the job until April 2005.

Greenhouse objected. She pointed out that the rationale for granting the extension—"compelling urgency"—would never hold up to scrutiny when the army had had five years to bring in other bidders. Apparently Strock realized she was right. On the contract`s final version, in early October, KBR was deemed the "one and only one source" that could do the job even though the Corps had just spent months entertaining other bids. Once again, Greenhouse objected, in a strongly worded e-mail to Strock.

Apparently, that e-mail was the last straw. The next day, she was demoted.

In the letter explaining this action, Strock informed Greenhouse her two most recent performance ratings had been "less than fully successful." Greenhouse believes this was the groundwork the Corps had to establish in order to get her out of the way. Performance ratings are issued annually, and two negative ones are necessary for punitive action to be taken. Greenhouse`s colleagues had waited two years for that, and acted as soon as it happened.

The two recent annual reviews dramatically contradicted Greenhouse`s earlier ones, copies of which her lawyer, Michael Kohn, showed to Vanity Fair. For her first year—October 1997 until October 1998—Greenhouse was described as "absolutely committed … totally loyal." She "has no equal when it comes to technical issues," the report said. On a rating basis from one to five, with one being the highest grade, Greenhouse was given a two that first year. On each of her next two annual reviews, she earned a one, with many more glowing remarks. Yet on the review signed by Lieutenant General Flowers on July 15, 2003, Greenhouse was accorded a four. And on the one that ended September 30, 2004, she got a five.

Kohn is hoping to be heard by the Corps`s Equal Employment Opportunity Office (E.E.O.), on the grounds that Greenhouse has a "mixed case" involving not only bureaucratic inequity but racial and gender prejudice. "The fact is that a black female had so much power in the institution, more than the Corps`s good old boys` network ever envisioned, because the Corps is essentially a contracting organization, so the commanders should really be taking a backseat to professional contractors. But they had found a way around that, and Bunny was standing in their way." The E.E.O. review could lead to a jury trial, which is what Greenhouse wants. Who will pay her legal bills is another question. "We hope to start a defense fund," Kohn says. "And some of this may have to be pro bono and contingency."

To the Corps`s top brass and their cronies at KBR, Greenhouse may not be the irritant she was, but other government bureaucrats are asking them pointed questions, too. Last year, a Pentagon audit found that KBR could not document more than $l.8 billion worth of work done under its LOGCAP contract in Iraq. At first the army considered withholding payments, but the prospect of bitter court battles led it to try to negotiate a settlement. Ordinarily, a contractor would be asked to come up with documentation for its claim—to date, Halliburton has charged the government $9.5 billion for LOGCAP work in Iraq. The government would then respond with its own documentation, and the two parties would reach a compromise figure. Not here: strangely, an outside auditor was hired to help decide what Halliburton would be owed if it could come up with the paperwork—and the government would then pay that amount. Whatever the final number, hundreds of millions of dollars will simply go unaccounted for—the waste of war, or the spoils of war, depending on how one looks at it. An army spokesman says the settlement will be reached this month. Meanwhile, in early February the army announced that it would not withhold any percentage of future payments to Halliburton—a precedent-setting waiver.

After all this, the lucrative LOGCAP contract for troop support in Iraq may be put out for competitive bid at last. But that`s not to say that if that happens KBR won`t win it back. Last year, when the RIO contract was finally put out for bid—as Greenhouse had called for it to be from the start—six companies vied for the new prize of $2 billion to repair Iraqi oil fields. KBR bid to fix the fields in the South—the larger chunk of the contract, valued at up to $l.2 billion—and won. Parsons won the balance, $800,000, to fix those up North. This new work is in addition to KBR`s first RIO contract, under which $2.51 billion of its potential $7 billion was actually spent before the contract was yanked. It is also not included in the current overall figure of $12 billion for Halliburton in Iraq. (That total consists of the $2.51 billion plus $9.5 billion in LOGCAP troop-support work.) So, adding the new $1.2 billion RIO contract along with future spending under LOGCAP will push the total billions higher.

Just how much Halliburton has profited from these huge Iraq contracts is a matter of some debate. David Lesar, Halliburton`s C.E.O., told analysts last fall that Halliburton`s Iraq contracts have yielded $1.4 billion, with a profit of merely $4 million after taxes and expenses. KBR, which handled most of those, actually incurred an operating loss in 2003 of $36 million on revenues of $9.3 billion, even as the rest of Halliburton increased operating profits by about $200 million to $826 million. If the company bids for more Iraq contracts, Lesar groused, it will probably "jack the margins up significantly."

But there`s another way to look at KBR`s work in Iraq. Without it, the company would be in truly bad shape. In fact, the Iraq work accounts for nearly all of KBR`s growth at a time when it has staggered under $4.2 billion in asbestos claims—thanks in large part to Halliburton`s former C.E.O. Dick Cheney.

Back in 1998, Cheney decided to merge Halliburton with Dresser Industries, a Texas-based energy company. Unfortunately, he failed to do his homework on Dresser: a mountain of lawsuits over asbestos-contamination claims were about to be filed against it. KBR, formed from the merger, bore the brunt of those. By late 2003, Dresser was forced into bankruptcy and began organizing a court-ordered settlement plan. KBR incurred huge liabilities—handily offset by those contracts in Iraq.

Now that painful ordeal is over: in December a federal judge approved Dresser`s $4.2 billion asbestos settlement. That means the company can come out of bankruptcy, and analysts seem to agree on what will happen, as a result, in the next months.

Halliburton will sell KBR.

As for learning the real extent of malfeasance in Iraq, that may never happen. The Republican majority in both houses of Congress seems disinclined to hold more hearings—or to exercise the subpoena power that only the majority wields. All the Democrats can do is shake their fists.

"If the administration shares our concern about not wasting taxpayers` money, you would think they would want to learn from the auditors and whistle-blowers what has gone wrong," Congressman Waxman says. Instead, the government has ignored its own auditors—both at the Pentagon and at the G.A.O.—who found glaring irregularities in KBR`s books on Iraq. "Why has the administration turned away?" Waxman says. "I don`t know as I have an answer to that question."

Michael Shnayerson is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. He is currently at work on a book about mountaintop coal removal in West Virginia, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Illustrations by TIM SHEAFFER

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Schöne neue Fernsehwelt.

March 13, 2005
Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged Television News
By DAVID BARSTOW and ROBIN STEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html?hp&…

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration`s "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration`s determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department`s office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government`s role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration`s efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government`s news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.

Some reports were produced to support the administration`s most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration`s efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.

Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation`s largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.

An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.

It is also a world where all participants benefit.

Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.

The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush`s recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies.

In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president`s prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration`s chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department.

What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can`t be held responsible for their actions."

Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."

It is not certain, though, whether the office`s pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency`s role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.

Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone in a broadcaster`s editing room. Some news organizations, for example, simply identify the government`s "reporter" as one of their own and then edit out any phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making.

So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department, the agency`s narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I`m Pat O`Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm news program that is shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment as being by "AgDay`s Pat O`Leary." The final sentence was then trimmed to "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I`m Pat O`Leary reporting."

Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes. "We can clip `Department of Agriculture` at our choosing," he said. "The material we get from the U.S.D.A., if we choose to air it and how we choose to air it is our choice."

Spreading the Word

Government Efforts

And One Woman`s Role

Karen Ryan cringes at the phrase "covert propaganda." These are words for dictators and spies, and yet they have attached themselves to her like a pair of handcuffs.

Not long ago, Ms. Ryan was a much sought-after "reporter" for news segments produced by the federal government. A journalist at ABC and PBS who became a public relations consultant, Ms. Ryan worked on about a dozen reports for seven federal agencies in 2003 and early 2004. Her segments for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy were a subject of the accountability office`s recent inquiries.

The G.A.O. concluded that the two agencies "designed and executed" their segments "to be indistinguishable from news stories produced by private sector television news organizations." A significant part of that execution, the office found, was Ms. Ryan`s expert narration, including her typical sign-off - "In Washington, I`m Karen Ryan reporting" - delivered in a tone and cadence familiar to television reporters everywhere.

Last March, when The New York Times first described her role in a segment about new prescription drug benefits for Medicare patients, reaction was harsh. In Cleveland, The Plain Dealer ran an editorial under the headline "Karen Ryan, You`re a Phony," and she was the object of late-night jokes by Jon Stewart and received hate mail.

"I`m like the Marlboro man," she said in a recent interview.

In fact, Ms. Ryan was a bit player who made less than $5,000 for her work on government reports. She was also playing an accepted role in a lucrative art form, the video news release. "I just don`t feel I did anything wrong," she said. "I just did what everyone else in the industry was doing."

It is a sizable industry. One of its largest players, Medialink Worldwide Inc., has about 200 employees, with offices in New York and London. It produces and distributes about 1,000 video news releases a year, most commissioned by major corporations. The Public Relations Society of America even gives an award, the Bronze Anvil, for the year`s best video news release.

Several major television networks play crucial intermediary roles in the business. Fox, for example, has an arrangement with Medialink to distribute video news releases to 130 affiliates through its video feed service, Fox News Edge. CNN distributes releases to 750 stations in the United States and Canada through a similar feed service, CNN Newsource. Associated Press Television News does the same thing worldwide with its Global Video Wire.

"We look at them and determine whether we want them to be on the feed," David M. Winstrom, director of Fox News Edge, said of video news releases. "If I got one that said tobacco cures cancer or something like that, I would kill it."

In essence, video news releases seek to exploit a growing vulnerability of television news: Even as news staffs at the major networks are shrinking, many local stations are expanding their hours of news coverage without adding reporters.

"No TV news organization has the resources in labor, time or funds to cover every worthy story," one video news release company, TVA Productions, said in a sales pitch to potential clients, adding that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news releases."

Federal agencies have been commissioning video news releases since at least the first Clinton administration. An increasing number of state agencies are producing television news reports, too; the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department alone has produced some 500 video news releases since 1993.

Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be producing more releases, and on a broader array of topics.

A definitive accounting is nearly impossible. There is no comprehensive archive of local television news reports, as there is in print journalism, so there is no easy way to determine what has been broadcast, and when and where.

Still, several large agencies, including the Defense Department, the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledge expanded efforts to produce news segments. Many members of Mr. Bush`s first-term cabinet appeared in such segments.

A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last Clinton administration spent.

Karen Ryan was part of this push - a "paid shill for the Bush administration," as she self-mockingly puts it. It is, she acknowledges, an uncomfortable title.

Ms. Ryan, 48, describes herself as not especially political, and certainly no Bush die-hard. She had hoped for a long career in journalism. But over time, she said, she grew dismayed by what she saw as the decline of television news - too many cut corners, too many ratings stunts.

In the end, she said, the jump to video news releases from journalism was not as far as one might expect. "It`s almost the same thing," she said.

There are differences, though. When she went to interview Tommy G. Thompson, then the health and human services secretary, about the new Medicare drug benefit, it was not the usual reporter-source exchange. First, she said, he already knew the questions, and she was there mostly to help him give better, snappier answers. And second, she said, everyone involved is aware of a segment`s potential political benefits.

Her Medicare report, for example, was distributed in January 2004, not long before Mr. Bush hit the campaign trail and cited the drug benefit as one of his major accomplishments.

The script suggested that local anchors lead into the report with this line: "In December, President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare." In the segment, Mr. Bush is shown signing the legislation as Ms. Ryan describes the new benefits and reports that "all people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending."

The segment made no mention of the many critics who decry the law as an expensive gift to the pharmaceutical industry. The G.A.O. found that the segment was "not strictly factual," that it contained "notable omissions" and that it amounted to "a favorable report" about a controversial program.

And yet this news segment, like several others narrated by Ms. Ryan, reached an audience of millions. According to the accountability office, at least 40 stations ran some part of the Medicare report. Video news releases distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, including one narrated by Ms. Ryan, were shown on 300 stations and reached 22 million households. According to Video Monitoring Services of America, a company that tracks news programs in major cities, Ms. Ryan`s segments on behalf of the government were broadcast a total of at least 64 times in the 40 largest television markets.

Even these measures, though, do not fully capture the reach of her work. Consider the case of News 10 Now, a cable station in Syracuse owned by Time Warner. In February 2004, days after the government distributed its Medicare segment, News 10 Now broadcast a virtually identical report, including the suggested anchor lead-in. The News 10 Now segment, however, was not narrated by Ms. Ryan. Instead, the station edited out the original narration and had one of its reporters repeat the script almost word for word.

The station`s news director, Sean McNamara, wrote in an e-mail message, "Our policy on provided video is to clearly identify the source of that video." In the case of the Medicare report, he said, the station believed it was produced and distributed by a major network and did not know that it had originally come from the government.

Ms. Ryan said she was surprised by the number of stations willing to run her government segments without any editing or acknowledgement of origin. As proud as she says she is of her work, she did not hesitate, even for a second, when asked if she would have broadcast one of her government reports if she were a local news director.

"Absolutely not."

Little Oversight

TV`s Code of Ethics,

With Uncertain Weight

"Clearly disclose the origin of information and label all material provided by outsiders."

Those words are from the code of ethics of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the main professional society for broadcast news directors in the United States. Some stations go further, all but forbidding the use of any outside material, especially entire reports. And spurred by embarrassing publicity last year about Karen Ryan, the news directors association is close to proposing a stricter rule, said its executive director, Barbara Cochran.

Whether a stricter ethics code will have much effect is unclear; it is not hard to find broadcasters who are not adhering to the existing code, and the association has no enforcement powers.

The Federal Communications Commission does, but it has never disciplined a station for showing government-made news segments without disclosing their origin, a spokesman said.

Could it? Several lawyers experienced with F.C.C. rules say yes. They point to a 2000 decision by the agency, which stated, "Listeners and viewers are entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded."

In interviews, more than a dozen station news directors endorsed this view without hesitation. Several expressed disdain for the prepackaged segments they received daily from government agencies, corporations and special interest groups who wanted to use their airtime and credibility to sell or influence.

But when told that their stations showed government-made reports without attribution, most reacted with indignation. Their stations, they insisted, would never allow their news programs to be co-opted by segments fed from any outside party, let alone the government.

"They`re inherently one-sided, and they don`t offer the possibility for follow-up questions - or any questions at all," said Kathy Lehmann Francis, until recently the news director at WDRB, the Fox affiliate in Louisville, Ky.

Yet records from Video Monitoring Services of America indicate that WDRB has broadcast at least seven Karen Ryan segments, including one for the government, without disclosing their origin to viewers.

Mike Stutz, news director at KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego, was equally opposed to putting government news segments on the air.

"It amounts to propaganda, doesn`t it?" he said.

Again, though, records from Video Monitoring Services of America show that from 2001 to 2004 KGTV ran at least one government-made segment featuring Ms. Ryan, 5 others featuring her work on behalf of corporations, and 19 produced by corporations and other outside organizations. It does not appear that KGTV viewers were told the origin of these 25 segments.

"I thought we were pretty solid," Mr. Stutz said, adding that they intend to take more precautions.

Confronted with such evidence, most news directors were at a loss to explain how the segments made it on the air. Some said they were unable to find archive tapes that would help answer the question. Others promised to look into it, then stopped returning telephone messages. A few removed the segments from their Web sites, promised greater vigilance in the future or pleaded ignorance.

Afghanistan to Memphis

An Agency`s Report

Ends Up on the Air

On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how assistance from the United States was helping to liberate the women of Afghanistan.

Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once barred from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their burkas, taking up jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters off to new schools, receiving decent medical care for the first time and even participating in a fledgling democracy. Her segment included an interview with an Afghan teacher who recounted how the Taliban only allowed boys to attend school. An Afghan doctor described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians treat women.

In short, Ms. Clark`s report seemed to corroborate, however modestly, a central argument of the Bush foreign policy, that forceful American intervention abroad was spreading freedom, improving lives and winning friends.

What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the interviews used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and shot the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the narration, much of which Ms. Clark repeated with only minor changes.

As it happens, the viewers of WHBQ were not the only ones in the dark.

Ms. Clark, now Tish Clark Dunning, said in an interview that she, too, had no idea the report originated at the State Department. "If that`s true, I`m very shocked that anyone would false report on anything like that," she said.

How a television reporter in Memphis unwittingly came to narrate a segment by the State Department reveals much about the extent to which government-produced news accounts have seeped into the broader new media landscape.

The explanation begins inside the White House, where the president`s communications advisers devised a strategy after Sept. 11, 2001, to encourage supportive news coverage of the fight against terrorism. The idea, they explained to reporters at the time, was to counter charges of American imperialism by generating accounts that emphasized American efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq.

An important instrument of this strategy was the Office of Broadcasting Services, a State Department unit of 30 or so editors and technicians whose typical duties include distributing video from news conferences. But in early 2002, with close editorial direction from the White House, the unit began producing narrated feature reports, many of them promoting American achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq and reinforcing the administration`s rationales for the invasions. These reports were then widely distributed in the United States and around the world for use by local television stations. In all, the State Department has produced 59 such segments.

United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the domestic dissemination of government propaganda. The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, for example, allows Voice of America to broadcast pro-government news to foreign audiences, but not at home. Yet State Department officials said that law does not apply to the Office of Broadcasting Services. In any event, said Richard A. Boucher, a State Department spokesman: "Our goal is to put out facts and the truth. We`re not a propaganda agency."

Even so, as a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told Congress last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such "good news" segments as "powerful strategic tools" for influencing public opinion. And a review of the department`s segments reveals a body of work in sync with the political objectives set forth by the White House communications team after 9/11.

In June 2003, for example, the unit produced a segment that depicted American efforts to distribute food and water to the people of southern Iraq. "After living for decades in fear, they are now receiving assistance - and building trust - with their coalition liberators," the unidentified narrator concluded.

Several segments focused on the liberation of Afghan women, which a White House memo from January 2003 singled out as a "prime example" of how "White House-led efforts could facilitate strategic, proactive communications in the war on terror."

Tracking precisely how a "good news" report on Afghanistan could have migrated to Memphis from the State Department is far from easy. The State Department typically distributes its segments via satellite to international news organizations like Reuters and Associated Press Television News, which in turn distribute them to the major United States networks, which then transmit them to local affiliates.

"Once these products leave our hands, we have no control," Robert A. Tappan, the State Department`s deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an interview. The department, he said, never intended its segments to be shown unedited and without attribution by local news programs. "We do our utmost to identify them as State Department-produced products."

Representatives for the networks insist that government-produced reports are clearly labeled when they are distributed to affiliates. Yet with segments bouncing from satellite to satellite, passing from one news organization to another, it is easy to see the potential for confusion. Indeed, in response to questions from The Times, Associated Press Television News acknowledged that they might have distributed at least one segment about Afghanistan to the major United States networks without identifying it as the product of the State Department. A spokesman said it could have "slipped through our net because of a sourcing error."

Kenneth W. Jobe, vice president for news at WHBQ in Memphis, said he could not explain how his station came to broadcast the State Department`s segment on Afghan women. "It`s the same piece, there`s no mistaking it," he said in an interview, insisting that it would not happen again.

Mr. Jobe, who was not with WHBQ in 2002, said the station`s script for the segment has no notes explaining its origin. But Tish Clark Dunning said it was her impression at the time that the Afghan segment was her station`s version of one done first by network correspondents at either Fox News or CNN. It is not unusual, she said, for a local station to take network reports and then give them a hometown look.

"I didn`t actually go to Afghanistan," she said. "I took that story and reworked it. I had to do some research on my own. I remember looking on the Internet and finding out how it all started as far as women covering their faces and everything."

At the State Department, Mr. Tappan said the broadcasting office is moving away from producing narrated feature segments. Instead, the department is increasingly supplying only the ingredients for reports - sound bites and raw video. Since the shift, he said, even more State Department material is making its way into news broadcasts.

Meeting a Need

Rising Budget Pressures,

Ready-to-Run Segments

WCIA is a small station with a big job in central Illinois.

Each weekday, WCIA`s news department produces a three-hour morning program, a noon broadcast and three evening programs. There are plans to add a 9 p.m. broadcast. The staff, though, has been cut to 37 from 39. "We are doing more with the same," said Jim P. Gee, the news director.

Farming is crucial in Mr. Gee`s market, yet with so many demands, he said, "it is hard for us to justify having a reporter just focusing on agriculture."

To fill the gap, WCIA turned to the Agriculture Department, which has assembled one of the most effective public relations operations inside the federal government. The department has a Broadcast Media and Technology Center with an annual budget of $3.2 million that each year produces some 90 "mission messages" for local stations - mostly feature segments about the good works of the Agriculture Department.

"I don`t want to use the word `filler,` per se, but they meet a need we have," Mr. Gee said.

The Agriculture Department`s two full-time reporters, Bob Ellison and Pat O`Leary, travel the country filing reports, which are vetted by the department`s office of communications before they are distributed via satellite and mail. Alisa Harrison, who oversees the communications office, said Mr. Ellison and Mr. O`Leary provide unbiased, balanced and accurate coverage.

"They cover the secretary just like any other reporter," she said.

Invariably, though, their segments offer critic-free accounts of the department`s policies and programs. In one report, Mr. Ellison told of the agency`s efforts to help Florida clean up after several hurricanes. "They`ve done a fantastic job," a grateful local official said in the segment.

More recently, Mr. Ellison reported that Mike Johanns, the new agriculture secretary, and the White House were determined to reopen Japan to American beef products. Of his new boss, Mr. Ellison reported, "He called Bush the best envoy in the world."

WCIA, based in Champaign, has run 26 segments made by the Agriculture Department over the past three months alone. Or put another way, WCIA has run 26 reports that did not cost it anything to produce.

Mr. Gee, the news director, readily acknowledges that these accounts are not exactly independent, tough-minded journalism. But, he added: "We don`t think they`re propaganda. They meet our journalistic standards. They`re informative. They`re balanced."

More than a year ago, WCIA asked the Agriculture Department to record a special sign-off that implies the segments are the work of WCIA reporters. So, for example, instead of closing his report with "I`m Bob Ellison, reporting for the U.S.D.A.," Mr. Ellison says, "With the U.S.D.A., I`m Bob Ellison, reporting for `The Morning Show.` "

Mr. Gee said the customized sign-off helped raise "awareness of the name of our station." Could it give viewers the idea that Mr. Ellison is reporting on location with the U.S.D.A. for WCIA? "We think viewers can make up their own minds," Mr. Gee said.

Ms. Harrison, the Agriculture Department press secretary, said the WCIA sign-off was an exception. The general policy, she said, is to make clear in each segment that the reporter works for the department. In any event, she added, she did not think there was much potential for viewer confusion. "It`s pretty clear to me," she said.

The `Good News` People

A Menu of Reports

From Military Hot Spots

The Defense Department is working hard to produce and distribute its own news segments for television audiences in the United States.

The Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense Department last year, is now being offered to every cable and satellite operator in the United States. Army public affairs specialists, equipped with portable satellite transmitters, are roaming war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, beaming news reports, raw video and interviews to TV stations in the United States. All a local news director has to do is log on to a military-financed Web site, www.dvidshub.net, browse a menu of segments and request a free satellite feed.

Then there is the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, a unit of 40 reporters and producers set up to send local stations news segments highlighting the accomplishments of military members.

"We`re the `good news` people," said Larry W. Gilliam, the unit`s deputy director.

Each year, the unit films thousands of soldiers sending holiday greetings to their hometowns. Increasingly, the unit also produces news reports that reach large audiences. The 50 stories it filed last year were broadcast 236 times in all, reaching 41 million households in the United States.

The news service makes it easy for local stations to run its segments unedited. Reporters, for example, are never identified by their military titles. "We know if we put a rank on there they`re not going to put it on their air," Mr. Gilliam said.

Each account is also specially tailored for local broadcast. A segment sent to a station in Topeka, Kan., would include an interview with a service member from there. If the same report is sent to Oklahoma City, the soldier is switched out for one from Oklahoma City. "We try to make the individual soldier a star in their hometown," Mr. Gilliam said, adding that segments were distributed only to towns and cities selected by the service members interviewed.

Few stations acknowledge the military`s role in the segments. "Just tune in and you`ll see a minute-and-a-half news piece and it looks just like they went out and did the story," Mr. Gilliam said. The unit, though, makes no attempt to advance any particular political or policy agenda, he said.

"We don`t editorialize at all," he said.

Yet sometimes the "good news" approach carries political meaning, intended or not. Such was the case after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal surfaced last spring. Although White House officials depicted the abuse of Iraqi detainees as the work of a few rogue soldiers, the case raised serious questions about the training of military police officers.

A short while later, Mr. Gilliam`s unit distributed a news segment, sent to 34 stations, that examined the training of prison guards at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where some of the military police officers implicated at Abu Ghraib had been trained.

"One of the most important lessons they learn is to treat prisoners strictly but fairly," the reporter said in the segment, which depicted a regimen emphasizing respect for detainees. A trainer told the reporter that military police officers were taught to "treat others as they would want to be treated." The account made no mention of Abu Ghraib or how the scandal had prompted changes in training at Fort Leonard Wood.

According to Mr. Gilliam, the report was unrelated to any effort by the Defense Department to rebut suggestions of a broad command failure.

"Are you saying that the Pentagon called down and said, `We need some good publicity?` " he asked. "No, not at all."

Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.

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Wenn dieses Flugzeug hinterm Haus auf der Wiese parkt, dann kommen die Schlapphüte dich abholen für eine Reise nach Syrien, Pakistan oder Ägypten. Nicht zum Kamelreiten in der Wüste, sondern um dich mal richtig durchfoltern zu lassen. Es ist doch kein Schurkenstaat zu schlecht, um ihn nicht noch als Mittel zum Zweck gebrauchen zu können.
Siehe auch #26971 (in Deutsch), #26924.
Siehe #26890 den Hinweis auf 68 Tote in US-Haft, 6 davon stehen nachgewiesenerweise in Zusammenhang mit Misshandlungen.

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This Gulfstream jet was ordered by a firm that appeared to be a front company for the CIA, according to records.
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European Probes Three official investigations have been initiated into renditions believed to have taken place in Western Europe. ITALY February 2003 A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was kidnapped in Milan, officials say. Italian investigators are pursuing the theory that covert agents -- possibly from the United States, Italy or Egypt -- were behind the abduction. GERMANY December 2003 A 41-year-old resident of Ulm, Germany, Khaled Masri, was detained during a vacation at the Macedonian border. He claims that he was flown to Kabul in January 2004, where he was held as a suspected terrorist, and that his captors spoke English with an American accent. SWEDEN December 2001 A parliamentary investigation has found that CIA agents wearing hoods orchestrated the seizure of two Egyptian nationals who were flown on a U.S.-registered airplane to Cairo. The men claim they were tortured in prison there.

washingtonpost.com
Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions
Suspects Possibly Taken To Nations That Torture
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30275-2005Mar…
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 13, 2005; Page A01

MILAN -- A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was walking to a Milan mosque for noon prayers in February 2003 when he was grabbed on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with chemicals and stuffed into a van. He hasn`t been seen since.

Milan investigators, however, now appear to be close to identifying his kidnappers. Last month, officials showed up at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy and demanded records of any American planes that had flown into or out of the joint U.S.-Italian military installation around the time of the abduction. They also asked for logs of vehicles that had entered the base.

Italian authorities suspect the Egyptian was the target of a CIA-sponsored operation known as rendition, in which terrorism suspects are forcibly taken for interrogation to countries where torture is practiced.

The Italian probe is one of three official investigations that have surfaced in the past year into renditions believed to have taken place in Western Europe. Although the CIA usually carries out the operations with the help or blessing of friendly local intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities in Italy, Germany and Sweden are examining whether U.S. agents may have broken local laws by detaining terrorist suspects on European soil and subjecting them to abuse or maltreatment.

The CIA has kept details of rendition cases a closely guarded secret, but has defended the controversial practice as an effective and legal way to prevent terrorism. Intelligence officials have testified that they have relied on the tactic with greater frequency since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Weiter:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30275-2005Mar…

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March 13, 2005
A World of Ways to Say `Islamic Law`
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/weekinreview/13rohd.html?h…

IRAQ`S new government will have a fateful question to address when it begins meeting later this month. What role will Islam have in the constitution? The answer could shape how well the country holds together.

The Shiite religious parties that won big in the January elections have called for strict Islamic laws to govern marriage, divorce and inheritance. Secular Sunni Arabs and Kurds oppose those efforts. And the Bush administration has made it clear that its goal is not an Islamic Republic of Iraq.

But the choices may not be that stark, if experience in the broad Islamic world is any guide. Islamic law - Shariah - is a widely used label. But in a surprisingly dynamic process, many systems have emerged under it that try to strike a middle ground between Islamists, who want to stone adulterers to death, and secularists, who want a pure separation of law and religion.
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In Iraq, which is debating the place Islam will have in its laws, liquor stores have been attacked.
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At one end of this spectrum is Saudi Arabia, where only Muslims can worship. At the other is Turkey, where the law decrees secularism, and Islamist parties have to worry that the army will step in to enforce it. In between, most other nations have found ways to straddle the demands of Islamists and secularists. In fact, most of the world`s 1.3 billion Muslims live in countries whose constitutions do not declare Islam the state religion. Indonesia, with more than 250 million Muslims, is the most prominent example.

One way to defuse the issue was demonstrated when Afghanistan adopted a new constitution last year. Islamic hard-liners demanded strong religious wording, notably a declaration that "no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam." American officials and Muslim moderates, including President Hamid Karzai, agreed, acknowledging that it would be politically impossible to adopt a purely secular constitution because Islam is central to the culture.

But Mr. Karzai`s government has made virtually no effort to enforce the wording. And language was also included to guarantee the rights of religious minorities.

After it was adopted, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan (and now the administration`s choice to be the ambassador to Iraq), called the document "one of the most enlightened constitutions in the Islamic world."

But some skeptics say American officials made an enormous mistake when they allowed the strongly religious language, because future Afghan governments could revive the practices of the Taliban, like the stoning to death of adulterers.
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Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House, a human rights group, praised Afghan leaders for not allowing a strict form of Islam. But he added: "What is actually in the constitution worries me. It can open the door to a very repressive state."

In Iraq, too, the argument for Islam`s cultural influence is strong, and experts expect to see a reference to Islam`s influence in the new constitution. The wording, however, is important to Iraqi Kurds, who are more secular than the Shiites and jealously guard their autonomy. Last week Shiite and Kurdish leaders were pursuing a compromise that would declare Islam a source of Iraq`s law, but not the only source.

Mr. Marshall said declaring Islam the principal inspiration for Iraq`s laws, as the Shiites might prefer, could be dangerous. "Islam undefined," he said, would then be "the constitution behind the constitution."

Other experts argue that this fear is an over-reaction. In many Muslim lands, they say, a declaration of Islam`s pre-eminence amounts to a declaration of national identity. If Americans push for their preferences, in this view, a nationalist backlash might strengthen the link to Islam.

"It`s very much an identity factor in most Muslim countries," said John Esposito, an Islamic studies professor at Georgetown. "The issue is that it has to be defined."

A world of definitions are available.

Saudi Arabia and Iran aspire to be purely Islamic. Criminal laws specify ancient punishments, like stoning for adultery and chopping off a hand for theft. The Saudi constitution does not even declare itself a constitution, but rather a "basic law." It declares the Koran and Sunna, Islam`s holy texts, the constitution.

In other countries, the system is mixed. Many apply Islamic punishments only to Muslims. Others apply Islamic law only in matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance. Indonesia recognizes five religions but allows Shariah as a local option.

Pakistan`s constitution declares the nation an "Islamic Republic," pronounces Islam the state religion and lets a federal Shariah court invalidate any law it deems "repugnant to the injunctions of Islam." Men can marry four wives. A woman`s testimony in court carries half the weight of a man`s. A woman must produce four male witnesses to prove she was raped. And in rural areas, hundreds die each year in "honor killings," in which relatives murder a young woman who has married without her parents` permission. The law lets the victim`s parents pardon the perpetrator.
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But Islamic law is also unevenly enforced, and much of Pakistan remains open in many ways. In the cities, educated upper-caste women hold high posts in government and business, and rarely wear head scarves. The government simply fails to carry out many rulings of the federal Shariah court.

Indonesia takes yet another approach. The constitution provides "all persons the right to worship according to his or her own religion or belief." But in 2003 the government allowed localities to begin enforcing a form of Shariah in some areas, like the religiously conservative Aceh province, which has a long-running separatist insurgency. Muslims who drink alcohol there can be given 40 lashes. In the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, the police have detained women for lectures on how to dress when they were deemed to be wearing un-Islamic attire.

Turkey has a constitution and laws that are strictly secular. But the steady emergence of Islamist parties and organizations there is leading more and more young people to adopt Islamic mores, like shunning alcohol and wearing head scarves.

In all these countries, one rule seems to apply: In practice, local politics and attitudes can trump what is written in a constitution. This could prove important in Iraq.

Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University, expects fierce debate in Iraq`s constitution-writing assembly over Shiite demands that men be allowed to have up to four wives, and that laws guaranteeing alimony and child support for women be repealed. But he predicted that Shiite leaders will compromise with Iraq`s other groups in the end, to hold the country together.

Even after a constitution is adopted, years of court rulings to interpret it will follow, and this, too, can add flexibility.

Frank Vogel, a law professor at Harvard, argues that if Iraqis can peacefully debate the new constitution and keep their nerve, American leaders should do the same.

"If the mere mention of Shariah or Islam is enough to send us running for the bunkers, it`s nonsense," he said. "There is no need for alarm when Islam is mentioned in the constitution context."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 13, 2005
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
Our Currency, Your Problem
By NIALL FERGUSON


Every congressman knows that the United States currently runs large ``twin deficits`` on its budget and current accounts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/magazine/13WWLN.html

Deficit 1, as we well know, is just the difference between federal tax revenues and expenditures. Deficit 2 is generally less well understood: it`s the difference between all that Americans earn from foreigners (mainly from exports, services and investments abroad) and all that they pay out to foreigners (for imports, services and loans). When a government runs a deficit, it can tap public savings by selling bonds. But when the economy as a whole is running a deficit -- when American households are saving next to nothing of their disposable income -- there is no option but to borrow abroad.

There was a time when foreign investors were ready and willing to finance the U.S. current account deficit by buying large pieces of corporate America. But that`s not the case today. Perhaps the most amazing economic fact of our time is that between 70 and 80 percent of the American economy`s vast and continuing borrowing requirement is being met by foreign (mainly Asian) central banks.

Let`s translate that into political terms. In effect, the Bush administration`s combination of tax cuts for the Republican ``base`` and a Global War on Terror is being financed with a multibillion dollar overdraft facility at the People`s Bank of China. Without East Asia, your mortgage might well be costing you more. The toys you buy for your kids certainly would.
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Why are the Chinese monetary authorities so willing to underwrite American profligacy? Not out of altruism. The principal reason is that if they don`t keep on buying dollars and dollar-based securities as fast as the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury can print them, the dollar could slide substantially against the Chinese renminbi, much as it has declined against the euro over the past three years. Knowing the importance of the U.S. market to their export industries, the Chinese authorities dread such a dollar slide. The effect would be to raise the price, and hence reduce the appeal, of Chinese goods to American consumers -- and that includes everything from my snowproof hiking boots to the modem on my desk. A fall in exports would almost certainly translate into job losses in China at a time when millions of migrants from the countryside are pouring into the country`s manufacturing sector.

So when Treasury Secretary John Snow insists that the United States has a ``strong dollar`` policy, what he really means is that the People`s Republic of China has a ``weak renminbi`` policy. Sure, this is bad news if you happen to be an American toy manufacturer. But there are three good reasons that the administration is tacitly delighted by the Asian central banks` support. Not only is it keeping the lid on the price of American imports from Asia (a potential source of inflationary pressure). It is also propping up the price of U.S. Treasury bonds; this in turns depresses the yield on those bonds, allowing the federal government to borrow at historically very low rates of interest. Reason No. 3 is that low long-term interest rates keep the Bush recovery jogging along.

Sadly, according to a growing number of eminent economists, this arrangement simply cannot last. The dollar pessimists argue that the Asian central banks are already dangerously overexposed both to the dollar and the U.S. bond market. Sooner or later, they have to get out -- at which point the dollar could plunge relative to Asian currencies by as much as a third or two-fifths, and U.S. interest rates could leap upward. (When the South Korean central bank recently appeared to indicate that it was shifting out of dollars, there was indeed a brief run on the U.S. currency -- until the Koreans hastily issued a denial.)

Are the pessimists right? The U.S. current account deficit is now within sight of 6 percent of G.D.P., and net external debt stands at around 30 percent. The precipitous economic history of Latin America shows that an external-debt burden in excess of 20 percent of G.D.P. is potentially dangerous.

Yet there is one key difference between the United States and the countries south of the Rio Grande. Latin American economies have trouble with their foreign debts because those debts are denominated in foreign currency. The United States` external liabilities, by contrast, are almost entirely denominated in its own currency.

It therefore makes more sense to compare the United States with other members of that exclusive club of countries that have produced -- and hence been able to borrow -- in international currencies. The most obvious analogy that springs to mind is the United Kingdom 60 years ago.

During the Second World War, Britain financed its wartime deficits partly by borrowing substantial amounts of sterling from the colonies and dominions within her empire. And yet by the mid-1950`s, these very substantial debts had largely disappeared. Unfortunately, this was partly because the value of sterling itself fell significantly. Moreover, sterling`s decline and fall did not reduce the U.K.`s chronic trade deficit, least of all with respect to manufacturing. On the contrary, British industry declined in tandem with the pound`s status as a global currency. And, needless to say, the decline of sterling coincided with Britain`s decline as an empire.

From an American perspective, all this might seem to suggest worrying parallels. Could our own obligations to foreigners presage not just devaluation but also industrial and imperial decline?

Possibly. Yet there are some pretty important differences between 2005 and 1945. The United States is not in nearly as bad an economic mess as postwar Britain, which also owed large sums in dollars to the United States. The American empire is also in much better shape than the British empire was back in 1945.

Even the gloomiest pessimists accept that a steep dollar depreciation would inflict more suffering on China and other Asian economies than on the United States. John Snow`s counterpart in the Nixon administration once told his European counterparts that ``the dollar is our currency, but your problem.`` Snow could say the same to Asians today. If the dollar fell by a third against the renminbi, according to Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University, the People`s Bank of China could suffer a capital loss equivalent to 10 percent of China`s gross domestic product. For that reason alone, the P.B.O.C. has every reason to carry on printing renminbi in order to buy dollars.

Though neither side wants to admit it, today`s Sino-American economic relationship has an imperial character. Empires, remember, traditionally collect ``tributes`` from subject peoples. That is how their costs -- in terms of blood and treasure -- can best be justified to the populace back in the imperial capital. Today`s ``tribute`` is effectively paid to the American empire by China and other East Asian economies in the form of underpriced exports and low-interest, high-risk loans.

How long can the Chinese go on financing America`s twin deficits? The answer may be a lot longer than the dollar pessimists expect. After all, this form of tribute is much less humiliating than those exacted by the last Anglophone empire, which occupied China`s best ports and took over the country`s customs system (partly in order to flood the country with Indian opium). There was no obvious upside to that arrangement for the Chinese; the growth rate of per capita G.D.P. was probably negative in that era, compared with 8 or 9 percent a year since 1990.

Meanwhile, the United States may be discovering what the British found in their imperial heyday. If you are a truly powerful empire, you can borrow a lot of money at surprisingly reasonable rates. Today`s deficits are in fact dwarfed in relative terms by the amounts the British borrowed to finance their Global War on (French) Terror between 1793 and 1815. Yet British long-term rates in that era averaged just 4.77 percent, and the pound`s exchange rate was restored to its prewar level within a few years of peace.

It is only when your power wanes -- as the British learned after 1945 -- that owing a fortune in your own currency becomes a real problem. As opposed, that is, to someone else`s problem.

Niall Ferguson is professor of history at Harvard and author of ``Colossus: The Price of America`s Empire.``


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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The Independent on Sunday
What the Lebanese fear most is not Syria’s army but a power vacuum
Sunday, 13th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=619…

Assad’s troops are pulling back, but who will replace them in Lebanon? Robert Fisk reports from the Bekaa Valley

S the last Syrian troops moved through the storms and blizzards of Mount Lebanon into the Bekaa Valley yesterday morning, they passed beneath the glowering statue of Basil al-Assad, the man who would have been president of Syria had he not died in a Damascus road accident. Seated astride his favourite horse, dressed in military uniform, wearing a peaked cap and graced with three withered wreaths, he has been guarded this past decade by two equally glowering Syrian intelligence officers. "No photo," they growled at me when they saw my camera. But there’s a problem.

For when the last of the Syrian troops leave Chtaura, along with their mukhabarat spooks, who will guard Basil’s statue? It was erected by local Lebanese businessmen with an eye to gaining Syria’s favours, but the Syrians can hardly cart the whole thing off to Damascus. Unguarded, no one wants to bet on its future. "Do you want to buy it?" one local shopkeeper asked me sarcastically. "We could sell it to you." The owner of a shoe store was more prosaic. "We’ll demolish it," he said, and snapped his fingers in the air.

Not that the people of Chtaura have been writhing under Syria’s military heel. "When they first came here, there were tens of thousands of them," the owner of the Adidas gun store said. "But over the years, we got used to them and they were friendly enough, just part of the scenery. They didn’t bother us and they bought food from the shops, so they contributed to the economy." Not that there’s much economy left in Chtaura. The Park Hotel, its interiors cloaked with curtains, boasts no guests. Most of the shops are shut and every businessman has changed his Lebanese pounds into US dollars. The shade of Rafiq Hariri’s murder lies heavy over the towns of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

"Look, they’ve been here for almost three decades and enough is enough," the man in Assy Sport remarked without much enthusiasm. "But the real danger is a vacuum. The Lebanese army must arrive before they leave and take over all their positions. We cannot afford to have a gap." It’s not difficult to understand why the Lebanese fear a sudden withdrawal. They do not want the old Syrian bases to be suddenly filled with pro-Syrian militias. Everyone these days is reliving their memories of the civil war.

A few of them never lost their anger, including a man who could have been only a child when the war began. "The Syrians came here to take our money and our heritage and we Lebanese let foreigners come and mess with us. We sell everything that belongs to us. I’m going to the big rally in Beirut on Monday to support the opposition. We need real freedom here and we won’t have it as long as others are in our country."

Behind the international highway, Syrian troops in steel helmets and with bayonets fixed guard the entrance to the second most important Syrian intelligence post in the Bekaa Valley - their headquarters, home to Brigadier General Rustum Gazale, is just down the road in the town of Aanjar. Three of the mukhabarat men insisted they didn’t have a departure date, but all equally insisted that they had heard their President - Bashar, Basil’s brother - say that they would all leave by the end of April and had no reason to doubt this information.

The last Syrian positions in the mountains were abandoned in the early hours and one of Syria’s big radar bases near Mdeirej - used to monitor Israeli overflights - has been dismantled. Only a few Syrian trucks are left on the lower slopes, many covered in snow after the night’s blizzard. It does not look like an army in retreat - certainly not like an army of occupation - but its departure on this bleak, cold morning provided an astonishing contrast to its arrival in June 1976. I was here in this little town of boutiques 29 years ago and watched the hundreds of Syrian armoured vehicles pour down the international highway towards Beirut. Three tanks were parked in the long grass outside the town like old dogs resting on a hot day. President Carter had given his blessing to the deployment since the Arab League had granted Syria a peacekeeping role to end the civil war.

I had stood on the same pavement then and listened to another shopkeeper mulling over the cost of free speech in the new, humbled Lebanon. "It is always nice to have visitors," he said archly. "And it is always nice when they go home again." And now those "visitors" are going home, leaving not a little fear in their wake. The desire of everyone in Chtaura to avoid being identified spoke for itself.

"Look," a man in a cell phone shop said quietly, "the Syrian border is only 15 miles away and the border is open. You know that Syria has many supporters in Lebanon. What makes you think that the mukhabarat men can’t just come back without their guns showing? What makes you believe that Syria’s influence will end now? It won’t. Syria will always be located to the east, just up there on the next mountain chain."

Certainly, few of the soldiers trucked through the town yesterday could be blamed for Syria’s sojourn. The man who first sent this army here -President Hafez al-Assad, Basil’s father - is long dead. And most of them were not even born when the first Syrian tanks arrived at the gates of Chtaura.

WARS AND PEACE

1918: After more than 400 years of mainly Ottoman rule, Lebanon is occupied by British and French forces.

1920: State of Lebanon created and League of Nations grants mandate to France.

1940: Lebanon comes under control of Vichy French government. A year later, it is occupied by Free French and British troops. Independence declared on 26 November.

1943: France recognises independence and agrees to transfer power. Three years later, British forces leave.

1967: Palestinian population rises following second Arab-Israeli War.

1973: Israeli commandos raid Beirut and kill three Palestinian leaders. Lebanese government resigns next day.

1975: Civil war erupts as Christian and Muslim communities clash. One year later, Syrian intervention begins.

June 1982: Israel launches full-scale invasion of Lebanon to counter Palestinian activity.

September 1982: Following assassination of president -elect Bashir Gemayel, Israeli forces occupy West Beirut, and Christian militias enter Palestinian refugee camps, murdering civilians.

1983: Deal struck for Israeli withdrawal.

1988: Lebanon effectively now has two governments. Christian in East Beirut and Muslim in West Beirut.

1990: Civil war ends as Syrian Air Force attacks presidential palace and Christian leaders take refuge in French embassy.

1991: National Assembly dissolves all militias, but Syria-backed Hizbollah allowed to remain.

1993: Israel launches heaviest attack in a decade on Hizbollah forces in the south.

2000: Israeli forces withdraw from southern Lebanon.

2005: Former prime minister Rafiq Hariri assassinated in Beirut. Cabinet resigns after two weeks of anti-Syria rallies. Growing calls for Syrian troops to withdraw.

2005: 14,000 remaining Syrian peacekeepers begin withdrawal to border areas.

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Es ist erst vor kurzem von US-Behörden bekanntgegeben worden, dass weitere Akten in Bezug auf US-Handlungen vom Ende des WWII freigegeben werden.
Es wird noch einiges zu erwarten sein, auch wegen deutschen Nazis, die nach dem Krieg aus D verschwanden.

American troops stole millions from Holocaust `Gold Train`
By David Usborne in New York
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

13 March 2005

Lifting the veil on one of the least advertised and least edifying scandals of the Second World War, the US government has settled a complaint that American army officers requisitioned an entire train loaded with valuables seized by the Nazis from Jewish families in Hungary and then kept much of the contents for themselves.

The US Justice Department confirmed that it will pay $25.5m (£13.3m) to the Hungarian Jewish community in America to make up for the confiscation of the contents of what has been dubbed the "Gold Train", which left Hungary on 30 March 1945 but - as the war ended - was seized by the US army. To be paid mostly to Jewish charitable causes, the money amounts to a "symbolic acknowledgement of an isolated and unfortunate chapter of the Americans` role in the Holocaust," said Gideon Taylor of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York-based group that was involved in negotiating the settlement.

The sum may represent only a fraction of the true value of the contents of the train, made up of 29 box cars crammed with treasures handed over to the Nazis by hundreds of Hungarian Jews, many of whom died in concentration camps before the war`s end. They included diamonds, art works, suitcases of gold dust, silverware, fine china, porcelain and religious artefacts.

When the Americans took control of the train it was on the understanding that they would keep its priceless contents in secure storage and arrange for their return, item by item, to the families, many of whom had receipts provided by the Nazis. That, however, is not what happened.

According to the complaint filed in the lawsuit, US army officers not only failed to secure the goods, most of which went into a warehouse in Salzburg, Austria, but turned a blind eye when US soldiers made off with many of the items. It was also alleged that the US government auctioned off remaining treasures in New York in 1947 to help cover some of the refugee costs at the end of the war.

The legal filings in the case offered startling snapshots of what transpired and of the shamelessness of some of the looting. It described, for instance, one US general making a virtual shopping list of valuables he wanted to take back home to America.

The unidentified general, the complaint said, asked for "chinaware and fine silverware sufficient for 45 people; water, highball, cocktail, champagne and liquor glasses sufficient for 90 people; 30 sets of table linens; and 60 sets of bedding". His request noted that "the general desires that all of the above listed items be of the very best quality and workmanship".

"Even now, it`s difficult to reconcile my feelings about how the US handled this issue," commented Veronika Baum, a Hungarian Jew in New York whose father died in a camp. "On one hand, they helped end the Holocaust and gave me a chance to start over. On the other hand, they took the last reminders of my family away from me, at a time when I needed to remember my family the most."

The case only began to take shape in 1999 when details of the Gold Train emerged from a report into missing property commissioned by President Bill Clinton. Hundreds of documents discovered in the US and in Hungary supported stories that had long been traded among Hungarian Jews in America about the effective heist by US soldiers of treasures that were rightfully theirs.

The two sides agreed in December last year that they would settle the case. The monetary agreement was announced late on Friday by the judge overseeing the litigation, Patricia Seitz. The Gold Train scandal may be about to reveal some more of its secrets, meanwhile. As part of the agreement, the US government has also pledged to declassify all documents involved in the case and have them archived.


13 March 2005 13:51


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Sun, March 13, 2005
Arab democracy just an illusion?
By Eric Margolis
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margol…

THE BUSH administration is crowing about what it claims is "a wave of democracy and freedom" sweeping the Middle East. And it`s all thanks to the invasion of Iraq, insists the White House, offering the umpteenth new rationale for going to war.

Just look: Iraq held an election of sorts under U.S. "guidance." Egypt`s long-time ruler, Gen. Hosni Mubarak, says he will allow multi-party elections. Tunisia and Saudi Arabia recently held elections. Lebanon, rent by pro- and anti-Syrian protests, may soon hold new elections.

All this does look like the dawn of Arab democracy -- to those who don`t know much about the region. Up close, the picture is less rosy.

Ironically, the man most responsible for pushing the Arab world towards political change is not George W. Bush, but his nemesis, Osama bin Laden.

Overthrow

For over a decade, bin Laden has agitated for the overthrow of the corrupt, despotic Arab regimes supported by the U.S., and their replacement by a traditional Islamic democratic consensus.

As bin Laden`s anti-American insurgency gathers strength and resonates among the restive Arab masses, the Bush administration has urged the frightened kings and generals running Washington`s client Arab regimes to make a show of democratic reforms to head off popular uprisings.

Most of these reforms are pure sham. Washington stage-managed Iraq`s vote to empower Shia and Kurdish yes-men who will pretend to rule while the U.S. continues to run Iraq and pump its oil. Mubarak, the U.S.-backed military ruler of Egypt, is apparently grooming his son to take over under cover of rigged "open, multi-party" elections.

In October, Tunisia`s U.S.-backed military dictator won "re-election" by a Soviet-style 94.5%. Saudi Arabia`s recent vote was an empty exercise.

Lebanon`s noisy anti-Syrian demonstrations, which Bush hailed a "democratic revolution," were staged by a minority of its citizens -- mostly anti-Syrian Maronite Christians and Druze.

Lebanon`s largest ethnic group, Shia, strongly back both Syria`s presence and Hezbollah, Lebanon`s most popular political party. Mounting U.S. involvement in Lebanon risks re-igniting that nation`s bloody, 15-year civil war.

The Arab world desperately needs democracy, rule of law, free speech and honest government. Ironically, even Israel`s Arabs, though second-class citizens, enjoy more human and political rights than in many Arab states.

But most Arabs see Bush`s "freedom" crusade as a cynical campaign to tighten U.S. control of the Mideast by ditching old-fashioned generals and monarchs for more modern, democratic-looking civilian regimes that still do Washington`s bidding.

The Arab world`s only truly free election was held in 1991 by Algeria`s U.S.- and French-supported military regime. Islamic parties won a landslide. The military annulled the vote and jailed Islamist leaders -- backed by Washington and Paris.

It`s likely any honest votes held in feudal Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, or military-run Egypt, Libya, and Syria, would produce similar results.

Most Arab states lack political legitimacy. Soldiers and ferocious secret police keep their repressive regimes in power. Once U.S. support for these oligarchies wavers, as is happening now, opposition swells up.

After Washington began voicing doubts in 1979 about the old U.S. ally, the Shah of Iran, revolution ensued. The same process is now under way in Saudi Arabia.

The Bush administration is right. Arabs need democracy. But it is behaving like a bull in the Mideast china shop and is following contradictory policies. Bush wants more popular, less dictatorial regimes, but only those catering to U.S. strategic interests.

Dangerous muddle

All this ham-handed U.S. political engineering may produce a dangerous muddle or even provoke collapse of pro-U.S. despots and their replacement by anti-U.S. revolutionary forces.

If Bush really wants real Mideast democracy, he should begin with Egypt, which contains a third of all Arabs, and is essentially a U.S. protectorate. End its military dictatorship, allow real political parties, a free press, and honest elections. Do not allow Egypt to get away with more sham elections. Set a sterling example for the democracy-deficient Muslim world.

The problem, unfortunately, is that the Arab world`s most popular political figure is very likely bin Laden.

Sun Media: Calgary Sun / Ottawa Sun / Edmonton Sun / London Free Press / Winnipeg Sun

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Sunday, March 13, 2005
War News for Sunday, March 13, 2005
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Two US contractors from Blackwater Security Consulting killed by roadside bomb in Hilla.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed during funeral procession in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Oil pipeline blown up by insurgents north of Baghad.

Ukraine begins withdrawal: Ukraine has begun pulling troops out of Iraq as part of a phased withdrawal of its complete 1,650-man contingent, the sixth largest in the U.S.-led coalition. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said 150 of its troops from a company based near As Suwayrah left Iraq on Saturday, according to The Associated Press, starting a phased pullout ordered earlier this month by President Viktor Yushchenko. The pullout is to be completed by October, the Defense Ministry said.

Still no deal: Talks between Kurdish leaders and a Shi`ite bloc to form the next Iraqi government have collapsed three days before Iraq`s first fully elected parliament meets, senior members of the two sides said on Sunday. The two groups have between them the two-thirds majority needed to form the government and their failure to reach a deal could leave Iraq in political limbo and further delay efforts to improve security and rebuild the country.

Iran

Stronger Action: U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday that if Iran doesn`t live up to its "international obligations to forego a nuclear program, then obviously we`ll have to take stronger action." Cheney made the comment in an interview with Fox News on the same day the U.S.-backed economic incentives that three European nations want to offer Iran in exchange for giving up any nuclear weapons ambitions. Cheney told Fox News that Iran doesn`t need an "enrichment process." He said the U.S. is concerned the Iranians want an "enrichment process so that they can enrich fuel far beyond what`s required for a civilian reactor to levels that would give them the capability to build a weapon." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had urged Tehran to take advantage of the opportunity. Part of the agreement with the U.S., the U.K., France and Germany is that Iran could face U.N. Security Council sanctions if it doesn`t meet its international commitments.

Attack Plan Authorized: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon`s security cabinet reportedly gave "initial authorization" last month to a plan for an air and ground attack on Iran if diplomatic efforts do not halt the Islamic republic`s nuclear program, according to a report in London`s Sunday Times. The newspaper reported that the Israel Defense Forces have built a model of Iran`s Natanz uranium enrichment plant in order to practice assaults on the facility. Israel would reportedly make use of F-15 fighter planes and teams from the Israel Air Force`s elite Shaldag unit in the attack. According to the Sunday Times, the Israeli plans have been discussed with the United States who reportedly said they would not block an Israeli attack on Iran if international diplomatic efforts fail to halt the nuclear projects.

Iran snubs offers: But Asefi said "the remedying of some of the faults and the addressing some of the restrictions that were imposed on the Islamic republic of Iran without any cause will not prevent Iran from getting its legitimate right. "The restrictions regarding (aircraft) spare parts that were of no military use should have not been imposed from the beginning, and lifting them is not an incentive," he said. "Getting into the WTO is the right of all countries of the world," he added, complaining that "whereas (US Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice talks about the lifting of some of the restrictions, Bush extends economic sanctions against Iran."

Special Reports

The mirage of reconstruction: Reinoud Leenders, Middle East analyst with the Brussels-based think-tank, International Crisis Group (ICG), and an author of the ICG`s September report on reconstruction in Iraq, says, "It`s a number game. Basically the only thing that matters is what has been spent and at the end of the day they have spent very little." He says the most accurate figure representing the amount spent by Washington in Iraq is $1.5 billion, a figure that was given by the US State Department. While $1.5 billion is far less than the figures quoted by the US spokesman, what makes this figure seem more paltry is the estimate of Leenders and others that 40% or more of the $1.5 billion figure was spent by foreign companies contracted to do the work on insurance and security. The US response to criticism over the slow progress of reconstruction in Iraq is that lack of security has hindered projects. But observers say this argument does not hold water either. "Security is not an excuse. There are many parts of the country that are relatively secure," Isam al-Khafaji, the director of Iraq Revenue Watch, a department of the Open Society Institute, said. Critics of the reconstruction plan say the exclusion that many Iraqis felt from the process exacerbated security problems. Iraqi firms were awarded few contracts, and foreign companies preferred to employ foreign workers rather than locals. The Open Society Institute report issued in September said Iraqi firms received just 2% of the $1.5 billion contracts that were paid with using Iraqi oil revenues that were managed by the occupation authorities. "As far as I can see, the Iraqis just got peanuts," ICG`s Leenders said in reference to the amount of reconstruction money that found its way to Iraqi pockets.

The A4 War: Britain went to war on the basis of a single piece of paper setting out the legality of invading Iraq, the country`s most senior civil servant has revealed. The Government`s case for war appeared to be in tatters last night after the Cabinet Secretary admitted that a parliamentary answer from Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, was the final legal opinion on the case for war. In an astonishing admission, Sir Andrew Turnbull disclosed that no "full" legal advice on an invasion of Iraq has ever existed. He confirmed that a short parliamentary answer by the Attorney General was the "definitive advice" on the war sent to the Prime Minister and that "there is no other version". The renewed doubts over the legality of the conflict are a severe setback to Tony Blair, who was hoping that Iraq would fade as a general election issue. MPs had assumed that the parliamentary answer was a précis of a longer, more detailed legal opinion and ministers had come under intense pressure from the media to publish the "full" advice under the Freedom of Information Act. The revelation astonished MPs. Sir Andrew was cross examined about the existence of full legal advice in a Commons committee after The Independent revealed Mr Blair may have breached the prime ministerial code by failing to provide the full legal advice to the Cabinet. Yesterday The Independent reported that questions were being raised by MPs about the existence of legal advice.

Satisfactory Justice? Insurgents convicted of serious weapons and explosives offences in Iraq are escaping with jail terms of as little as six months under the country`s new court system. To the dismay of both coalition forces and the new Iraqi government, people found to have hoarded or transported huge stashes of bombs, machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades are frequently being treated as leniently as drunk drivers and pickpockets.Concern is now growing among United States forces that the country`s new central criminal court, made up of many judges from the Saddam Hussein era, is being lenient to demonstrate its independence from the coalition. Some Shia judges have even complained privately that their Sunni colleagues are giving out light sentences to Sunni defendants to show a degree of sympathy with the insurgents. While coalition commanders are anxious to be seen to respect the judges` independence, a senior US officer involved in liaising with the court told The Telegraph of his concern that it did not pose a deterrent. Lt Col Barry Johnson, a spokesman for US military detainee operations in Iraq, said: "There are times when the sentences are a source of frustration for the soldiers involved, but we have committed ourselves to re-specting the independence of the court and the decisions it makes. But this is a frustration shared by other parts of the Iraqi government."

Checkpoints: The word here is that although Calipari had briefed the Americans about his mission, he withheld the details, partly because the Americans disapprove of paying off kidnappers, but more importantly because of the essential factor that foreign media coverage of Iraq usually ignores: the Iraqis. If the Italians paid a ransom, Calipari committed a serious crime in a sovereign state fighting desperately to establish the rule of law and defeat internal terrorism. Though we may never know exactly what happened, I find it hard to believe that the Army`s 3rd Infantry Division just opened fire at a car being driven in a normal, unthreatening manner. The realities of checkpoints in Iraq make random shooting at responsible drivers very unlikely. I`m currently reporting a story on a unit of American soldiers. They`re drilled with a stopwatch in the task of setting up a checkpoint -- a "serpentine" of concertina wire, at least three orange cones and, farthest out, a warning sign. These warning barriers are never forgotten, because soldiers are scared of car bombs. The farther out a car has to slow down, the better. You will never see disagreement within a platoon over this basic fact of self-preservation. Long before the Italian incident, orders had come down that deadly force was to be used only as a last resort -- after the failure of obstacles, then flares or smoke bombs or "star clusters," then warning shots, and finally efforts to take out the oncoming vehicle`s engine block. These procedures are real. I have seen our soldiers` reluctance to use force and felt the fear it brings. Car bombs cause 30 percent of military casualties. The checkpoint procedures, which the military calls "fire discipline" and "escalation of force," are designed to prevent soldiers from killing innocent Iraqis who somehow lack the information or common sense to slow down when they approach. Over the period of Sgrena`s incarceration, I stood with American troops at various checkpoints between Fallujah and Ramadi in the Sunni heartland of Iraq`s Wild West, an area that receives more than 10 times the national average of attacks on American forces. As I finished writing the previous sentence I heard the announcement over the base radio that two members of the combat team I was with had been killed -- by a suicide bomber driving up to a checkpoint. I didn`t see that explosion, but I heard it; I had spent much of the day at another U.S. checkpoint not far away. "Sitting ducks, that`s all we are," a 20-year-old combat medic from Texas said to me as we watched Iraqi vehicles thread past the "Alert" sign and through the orange cones and concertina wire of a checkpoint last week. Later, when I asked the sergeant in charge of the platoon if he was enjoying himself, he responded, "Just hanging around waiting to get blown up." This unit has suffered very high casualties, most from car bombs. If any soldiers in Iraq could be expected to be jumpy and trigger-happy, it is the grunts of central Anbar province. But as I watched them run their checkpoint, both before and after the Sgrena incident, they were thoroughly professional. Driving around this country with Iraqis, including people with quite a lot to hide, I`ve encountered scores of American checkpoints. Just about everyone knows what to do: You do a slow U-turn and go the other way, you find a route around, or you drive through slowly and wave at the polite 20-year-old from Nashville. In a very small number of cases, one side makes a mistake and something truly tragic happens. As a foreigner here, I feel threatened by the possibility that the Italian government may have rewarded the kidnappers. But Iraq is not about us foreigners. It is about Iraqis. And it is Iraqis who suffer most from kidnappings and from the transportation of the artillery shells and anti-tank mines that become roadside devices and car bombs. Kidnapping Iraqis has become an almost routine business transaction here. Local businessmen fetch sums of up to $250,000, while the child of an ordinary family might go for $5,000 or even $1,000. It happens all the time, all over the country. Iraqi Christians, being more prosperous than most, are especially victimized by this growing crime. But since the Sgrena shooting, I`ve already sensed even greater reluctance to set up these dangerous checkpoints. "The soldiers don`t like doing this, the NCOs don`t like it, even the colonel doesn`t like it," a young officer told me the other day. "These checkpoints don`t happen as much as they used to."

Opinion

Demcracy in the Middle East: After narrowly surviving a hard fought battle for re-election in November, George W. Bush found himself besieged over Iraq, with little to show but chaos and mounting costs — thousands of military casualties and billions of dollars — for the US foray. Commentators of all stripes, left to right and including neoconservatives, were highlighting the alleged shortcomings of the ambitious White House plan to reshape the Middle East. Indeed, the Arab democratic domino theory, embraced by the president and envisioned by neocon stalwarts such as Paul Wolfowitz, was deemed grossly naïve, if not catastrophic. Bush was supposed to be at his political apogee, but Iraq-related complications threatened to make him a lame duck at the infancy of his second term. Flash forward a few months, and Bush has more than rebounded, at least on the surface and in the eyes of the American press. First, Bush delivered a lofty, idealistic inaugural address, followed by a pointed State of the Union address. Both nationally televised speeches highlighted the president’s ambitious domestic and international agenda. Critics and plaudits alike pondered the feasibility of overhauling Social Security and the tax code, as others, including the influential New York Times and Washington Post, concluded his vision of democracy and reform in the Arab world was heavy on rhetoric, but light on substance. Regardless, Bush basked in the limelight, and was able to convince most that his agenda focused on serious issues that — proscribed remedy aside — needed addressing. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq did shake up the region, as did the Sept.11 terrorist attacks. But it remains to be seen what will ultimately emerge in the Middle East, or whether what does will be palatable to the United States. For now, Bush should enjoy the sunshine; but he must be guarded. His decision to embrace such a broad agenda at home and abroad — an agenda over which he has only limited control — could quickly turn day into night once again.

Bitter Irony: Many Iraqis found bitter irony in President Bush`s insistence last week that Syria must withdraw from Lebanon before it holds elections, for Iraqis have lived with foreign tanks in their streets for two years and voted barely a month ago under the watchful eye of the U.S. Army. "He must have forgotten that his army is occupying Iraq," said Sa`ad Abdul Aziz, 21, an engineering student at Baghdad University. "What about the Republican Palace that they are using as a U.S. Embassy?" While many here were glad to see Saddam Hussein driven from power by the U.S.-led invasion, almost two years later they bristle at the sight of American soldiers patrolling their streets and are deeply embarrassed that the U.S. embassy occupies Iraq`s version of the White House. As Bush harped all week on the theme that democracy could not be free in Lebanon under the occupation of Syria`s troops, jokes made the rounds at Iraqi universities, and some who have demanded the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops found themselves quoting Bush, a man they never thought they`d agree with. "America should get out of Iraq immediately and without conditions, just like it is asking neighboring Syria to withdraw from the Lebanese Republic," said Sheikh Nasir Al-Saidi, imam of a mosque in the restive Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, in a front-page article Saturday in the newspaper Azzaman.

Blogwatch

[urlSteve Clemons]http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000363.html[/url] reports on the progress (or lack thereoff) of Bolton`s nomination as US Ambassador to the UN.
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Tomgram: Greenberg on the Legal War on Terror at Home

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2256

In the rush of recent news about renditions, extraordinary renditions, the beating to death and systematic abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan, the holding of children as young as 11 in Abu Ghraib prison, the desire of Donald Rumsfeld to transfer large numbers of prisoners in Guantánamo back to their countries of origin, and other tales of detention mayhem, a piece tucked away in the crease column, deep inside last Tuesday`s New York Times, was easy enough to overlook. According to Neil A. Lewis (U.S. Eroding Inmates` Trust at Cuba Base, Lawyers Say), "Defense lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say the military has been working to undermine the inmates` trust in them."

The Guantánamo authorities have, prisoners claim, sent in lawyer-act-alikes in civvies to question them (and take away their papers), punished them in various small ways after they conferred with their actual lawyers, and "in one case, a lawyer said, a military interrogator recently told a detainee that he should not trust his lawyers because they are Jews." Here`s the full passage on that gem, which could have come directly out of Saudi Arabia:

"Mr. Wilner [a defense lawyer] said that when he interviewed a Kuwaiti, a 28-year-old whom he declined to name, the man told him that his interrogator was a young woman known to him as Meghan. He described her as attractive and blond with shoulder-length hair and said she had engaged in the kind of flirtatious techniques that have been the basis of accusations that female interrogators have tried to flaunt themselves sexually… ‘She told him several times not to trust his lawyers,` Mr. Milner said. He said she told the detainee that he would be tortured if he returned to Kuwait. When the detainee said his lawyer had told him otherwise, she replied: ‘Don`t trust your lawyers. Don`t you know they`re Jews?`"

Lt. Col. Brad K. Blackner, spokesman for the joint task force that runs the detention center, has denied that any of this took place, adding, "We are not going to respond in the media to every claim [by a defense lawyer]… Where appropriate, those matters will be addressed as part of the litigation process." Given that the wildest prisoner stories seeping out of Guantánamo over the years (like women interrogators smearing menstrual blood – evidently red ink or paint – on Muslim prisoners as an act of intended humiliation) proved accurate and the calmest of denials from American officials proved false, I think it`s clear enough who should be believed in this case. It`s a small reminder of a basic attitude towards lawyers, the law, and the courts that`s imprisoned deep in the heart of this administration. A sense of impunity -- an old-fashioned but useful word -- rules the thinking of its officials; legalities that stand in their way are seen as essentially contemptible.

Karen J. Greenberg, who runs NYU`s Center on Law and Security and is co-author of a monumental volume, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, offers below a run-down on the Bush administration`s over-hyped, less-than-striking legal battle with terrorism in our courts and suggests that that sense of impunity and contempt has worked its way deep into the Department of Justice`s efforts to deal with terrorism here. (The FBI, by the way, recently suggested that maybe the al-Qaeda version of terrorism wasn`t exactly a major presence in this country.) It`s not surprising then that what Greenberg calls "a pale version" of the coercive methods of Guantánamo has already found its way into the Justice Department`s process of plea bargaining with the various small-fry suspects it has managed to pick up in this country. Anyone who believes that Americans can use Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib methods abroad, safe from all versions of them at home, is living in his or her own bubble.
Tom

The Courts and the War on Terror
By Karen J. Greenberg

On the eve of his departure from office, Attorney General John Ashcroft boasted, "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." In this, he echoed a drumbeat of announcements by top officials who have repeatedly proclaimed that, when it came to the war on terror, the administration was succeeding in the courts as well as on the battlefield. As President Bush declared in a speech to the FBI Academy in September 2003, "We`ve thwarted terrorists in Buffalo and Seattle, in Portland, Detroit, North Carolina and Tampa, Florida."

In fact, looked at with a cold eye, the administration`s record of convictions in terrorism cases is remarkably inconsequential. Although it is extremely difficult to obtain reliable information on such cases, the facts, as best we know them, are these: Of the 120 terrorism cases recorded on Findlaw, the major information source for legal cases of note, the initial major charges leveled have resulted in only two actual terrorism convictions -- both in a single case, that of Richard Reid, the notorious shoe bomber. Of 18 actual charges of "terrorism" brought between September 2001 and October 2004, 15 are still pending and one was dismissed. In lieu of convictions for terrorist acts, the Justice Department uses another related, lesser charge – that of "material support," which means providing aid or services to a terrorist or a terrorist organization. Its extreme breadth and over-inclusiveness has rendered it the fallback charge of choice and a catch-all for anything from having trained in an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan back in the 1990s (when Al Qaeda`s focus was the war in Bosnia and other places outside of the United States) to weapons training, or even the exceedingly modest category of producing fraudulent documents, so long as they are knowingly provided to a designated "foreign terrorist organization."

But what of the six cases of "terrorism convictions," material support or otherwise, that the President himself hailed as the benchmarks of the administration`s courtroom success story? As it happens, five resulted from questionable plea bargains, often on lesser charges, not necessarily closely related to terrorism, and one has yet to be tried. Only in the Detroit case has there been an actual conviction for "terrorism," (albeit material support for terrorism), and that case has since been overturned in a manner embarrassing to the Bush administration.

When the plea bargains are considered in their own right, their apparent circumstances should cause the odd eyebrow to be raised. After all, over half of all terrorism cases tried so far have resulted in plea bargains. The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that such pleas are offered in exchange for important information in the war on terrorism and spokespersons at the DOJ invariably maintain that, as in criminal cases generally, these have yielded invaluable information. Yet despite the implementation of the Patriot Act and the re-organization of our law enforcement efforts to fight terrorism, the yield seems neither better, nor worse than that which existed prior to 9/11.

Let`s just consider the five already tried cases that the President cited. In most of them, the evidence seems to show that the use of plea bargains had a good deal less to do with getting crucial "terror" information than with getting convictions on the books in situations where a conviction at trial might have proved difficult indeed. In the Buffalo case, the defendants -- known as the Lackawanna Six – were initially accused of belonging to an "al-Qaeda sleeper cell," but instead ended up pleading to material support charges.

What`s especially interesting here, however, is the way in which some of those plea bargains seem to have been achieved. According to defense attorneys, the defendants were threatened with the prospect of being classified as "unlawful combatants," the new Bush-administration-defined status which entails imprisonment without end as well as the loss of the right to a lawyer and to communicate with anyone in the outside world. Nor did these appear to be idle threats. There were frightful precedents. The administration had seen no reason for restraint, for example, when, in 2002, it labeled Jose Padilla and Yasser Esam Hamdi, both American citizens, as "enemy combatants" and placed them in military detention and (so far) beyond the reach of the law. (Just last week, U.S. District Judge Henry Floyd ruled that the Department of Justice has 45 days to charge Padilla, jailed in the spring of 2002, or release him.)

Although we have no way of knowing how many domestic suspects have been threatened with enemy-combatant status and so with the possibility of being placed indefinitely in a black hole of detention, several defense attorneys have gone on record with similar stories in which the DOJ used warnings about potential enemy-combatant status as leverage for obtaining cooperation in a plea. Allegedly responding to such threats, Lyman Faris, who was accused in 2003 of threatening to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, pled guilty to immigration fraud. Days later, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who had been arrested in 2001 on charges of document fraud, refused to plea bargain, virtually daring authorities to reclassify him as an enemy combatant. He was, in fact, then placed in military custody without access to a lawyer, where he remains today, a potent symbol for any defendant or defense lawyer who cares to look.

The use of such "leverage" -- itself completely outside the normal justice system -- would at any other moment have qualified as an obvious kind of extra-legal coercion. While plea bargains are certainly useful tools with which prosecutors can obtain information, the question needs to be asked: If there is coercion, can whatever information is obtained be trusted? Or are we here facing a very pale version of the more directly coercive and illegal methods used against alleged terrorists at our detention centers in Guantanamo and other places not on American soil?

Of note also is the failure of DOJ prosecutors to tie many of these cases directly to terrorism. In the Portland case, for instance, seven men were arrested on material support charges. Two of the men, Patrice Lumumba Ford and Jeffrey Leon Battle, were the main focus of the government`s indictments. "Evidence" came largely from secret FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants. FISA and its secret courts were originally designed to regulate the FBI`s spying by distinguishing between counterintelligence operations and persecution of the government`s political opponents.

The Patriot Act and post-9/11 court decisions have, in effect, eliminated the requirement that FISA surveillance -- wiretapping, searches, and otherwise -- be primarily for intelligence-gathering as opposed to criminal investigatory purposes. By jettisoning that standard, Congress and the courts now permit the government to avoid the strictures of the Fourth Amendment and ordinary wiretap statutes by simply declaring anything, no matter how flimsy or marginal, is for intelligence purposes. Indeed, under the new standards, FISA warrants have mushroomed at an alarming rate; and the public sees only the tip of the iceberg, since FISA warrants and their fruits never see the light of day unless they are used in a criminal prosecution -- which represent only an infinitesimal fraction of the total number of FISA wiretaps and searches.

Nonetheless, government prosecutors, evidently worried that new post-9/11 Bush administration rules extending FISA requests to terrorism cases might sooner or later be challenged as unconstitutional, again offered plea bargains. The defendants agreed. Terrorism-related charges against Battle and Ford were dropped and each was sentenced not to life for "terrorism," but to 18 years for "treason"; the other five defendants pled on lesser charges. Despite the convictions, the administration failed, as it had failed in the Lackawanna case, to link the accused directly to a terrorist conspiracy.

The Detroit case, hailed at one point as the ultimate showpiece in the legal war on terror, now stands as the greatest rebuke to the Bush administration`s prosecution of alleged domestic terrorists. In June 2003, four Arab men were convicted of providing material support for terrorism and of conspiring to engage in fraud or the misuse of visas, permits, and other documents. Their conviction was, however, overturned in July 2004, on the grounds that the prosecution had blatantly withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense -- in this case, a videotape and photos. Though the government is currently once again trying to prosecute two of the defendants, it is doing so on the lesser charge of "insurance fraud."

The kinds of mistakes prosecutors have made in cases billed as important to national security may or may not have been intentionally fraudulent, but they certainly suggest signs of administration frustration with the very idea of using the courts to combat terror. How regularly, we should ask, are prosecutors rushing into court without solid cases, pressured to get results in a manner similar to the way the Pentagon pressured the military to obtain information from detainees in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? Has a fear of being accused of incompetence in the war on terror merely led to more incompetence?

In only one of the President`s cases, as far as we know, did significant information come from the plea bargaining process. In the Seattle case, James Earnest Thompson, who goes by the name Earnest James Ujaama, was alleged to have attended al Qaeda training camps and indicted on charges of conspiring to set up an al Qaeda terrorist training camp in Oregon. In the end, he pleaded guilty on the lesser charges of bringing money, computer equipment, and a recruit to the Taliban. His plea was entered in exchange for his cooperation in terrorism investigations. In particular, he is alleged to have given evidence on al-Masri, a terrorism suspect being held in British custody.

Overall, despite all the hype, the Department of Justice`s record in terrorism cases is unimpressive indeed and even that record now faces a new hurdle -- if information, however paltry, has been gained from suspects by illegal coercion or, in the case, of suspects held abroad, through torture, it may prove inadmissible in future court cases against other suspects. This will be yet another setback in the legal confrontation with terrorism.

Perhaps this paltry and flawed record can be explained by the administration`s well known lack of belief in the importance of law enforcement in the war on terror. As Bush suggested in his last State of the Union Address, and other top officials have emphasized elsewhere, the war on terror is not supposed to be about law enforcement at all but about the use of force, about taking the fight to the terrorists by whatever means are necessary outside the United States. Another reasonable conclusion might be that, for all the color-coded alerts we`ve lived through, there just aren`t that many terrorists among us -- at least not Al Qaeda related ones.

Terrorists do indeed exist who would like to do great damage to the United States, but convictions like those in the President`s cases are generally less than helpful in the defense against them. If anything, they lull Americans into a false sense of security, into a sense that important terrorists are indeed being convicted and jailed for crimes or plans of significance. In the meantime, most of these cases represent, at best, sloppy prosecutions; at worst, fraudulent ones. In all of them, there is a powerful sense of apparent desperation and hype, of prosecutors flailing about as if there were nothing more important than simply declaring, "Yes, we have found sleeper cells; yes, there is danger in our midst; yes, we are winning this war in the homeland."

The fact is that the political expediency of the war on terror has undermined the strategy of an effective pursuit of terrorists. The rush to prosecution, the pressure to get convictions, even the holding of detainees without charging them, speaks more to politics than to justice, more to appearances than substance. It is time for the courts to assert their professionalism, to prosecute alleged terrorists carefully, without a rush to judgment, and in so doing to help the legal war on terror take its rightful place in the annals of American jurisprudence.

Karen J. Greenberg, coauthor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law. The Center has just produced a "Terrorist Trial Report Card."

Copyright 2005 Karen J. Greenberg


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March 14, 2005
Kurds` Return to City Shakes Politics in Iraq
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/international/middleeast/1…

KIRKUK, Iraq - Muhammad Ahmed realized how wide the chasm between Kurds and Arabs here had grown when he recently ran into a former classmate on the serpentine streets of this troubled city.

Mr. Ahmed, a Kurd, and his friend, an Arab, had studied together at Kirkuk`s oil institute nearly two decades ago. But shortly after Mr. Ahmed started work at the state-owned North Oil Company in the late 1980`s, the government of Saddam Hussein, intent on solidifying Arab control of Kirkuk, forced him out of his job and made him and his family move north, where they joined tens of thousands of other Kurds exiled from this city.

That mass relocation planted the seeds for a bitter ethnic antagonism that has grown into the most incendiary political issue in Iraq outside of the Sunni-led insurgency, and the one that more than any other is delaying formation of a new government. When Mr. Ahmed met his classmate again, he discovered his friend was still working for North Oil, one of as many as 10,000 employees helping to tap the region`s vast troves of oil, estimated at 10 to 20 percent of the country`s reserves.
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"He had a great salary and a good job all these years," said Mr. Ahmed, 41, musing on the luxuries of his old friend`s house. "Arabs, Turkmen and Christians were hired, and Kurds were not." He spoke from his own home: a cinder-block building hastily erected in a squatter camp inside the city`s soccer stadium, where he and his family have been living alongside thousands of other returning Kurds since the fall of Mr. Hussein`s rule. "We wish we didn`t have oil in Kirkuk," he said. "If the oil wasn`t here, we`d have a comfortable life now. All our problems are because of this damned oil."

Mr. Ahmed`s plight encapsulates the growing struggle over Kirkuk, a drab city of 700,000 on the windswept northern plains. Efforts to restore Kurds to their jobs and property without disenfranchising Arabs are fraught with the possibility of igniting a civil war. The debate has so inflamed passions that Kurdish and Shiite Arab negotiators trying to form a coalition government in Baghdad may have to put off any real decision on Kirkuk`s future.

"As far as Kirkuk is concerned, because of the different ethnic groups in it, we have to apply a permanent solution, not a temporary solution," Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite nominee for prime minister, said.

Kurdish leaders call Kirkuk their Jerusalem, saying they should control it - and its oil fields - because it was historically Kurdish. The Kurds are pushing Shiite leaders like Dr. Jaafari to help quickly give property back to Kurdish returnees, evict Arab settlers and employ more Kurds at North Oil, the only major government institution here that the Kurds have been unable to dominate since the American invasion.

The Kurdish political parties have huge leverage. Kurds turned out in large numbers to vote on Jan. 30, securing more than a quarter of the seats in the 275-member national assembly and making themselves a necessary partner for the Shiite bloc that won the largest number of seats.

But with the oil in Kirkuk at stake, the Kurdish and Shiite parties have been unable to agree on how to carry out Article 58 of the interim constitution, which provides vague guidelines for settling the property disputes here. Equally vexing is the question of who will administer Kirkuk - the national government or the autonomous regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan.

In the 1960`s, Baath Party officials began packing Kurds and, to a lesser degree, Turkmen into trucks and evicting them from Kirkuk. As the displacement continued, the Kurds who worked for North Oil, like Mr. Ahmed, rose to the top of the relocation list. The government, dominated by Sunni Arabs, imported mostly Shiite Arabs from the impoverished south into the Kirkuk area.

Kurds began returning in large numbers nearly two years ago, when the Hussein government was toppled. Some Arab families fled, but most heeded the reassurances of American soldiers who, trying to avert an ethnic war, urged them to stay and urged the Kurds to await a legal solution.

"From my perspective, the Arab settlers who were brought into Kirkuk were also victims of Saddam Hussein," said Barham Salih, the deputy prime minister and a top Kurd. "But the question is, if we`re talking about a new Iraq, does this mean the elite of Iraq, the democratically elected elite of Iraq, are willing to acknowledge the terrible mistake that was made and put it right?"

In April 2004, the Americans created the Iraqi Property Claims Commission to rule on restitution. By the end of 2004, the commission had received 10,044 claims from Kirkuk`s province, Tamin. The commission`s statistics show that judges have decided only 25 cases.

The head of the commission said in an interview that only two judges, both Kurds, were working on cases in Kirkuk. The commission has been unable to assign more judges because Kurdish political parties insist that only Kurds review the claims, limiting the number of qualified people, said the commission head, who declined to be identified by name because one colleague had been assassinated and another kidnapped.

Turkmen and Arab officials here accuse the major Kurdish parties of having moved people pretending to be returnees into Kirkuk before the Jan. 30 elections in order to bolster the Kurdish vote. The main Kurdish coalition won 26 of 41 provincial council seats, and a Kurd will almost certainly be installed as governor.

Each ethnic group claims demographic dominance, but no reliable census has been taken since 1957. Mutual suspicions are intense.

"The families who were kicked out of Kirkuk had homes in Kirkuk," said Suphi Sabir, a senior official in the Iraqi Turkmen Front. "If these people were from Kirkuk, why did they not return to their homes? Why are they staying in the stadium?"

In the Kirkuk neighborhood of Qadisiya, from which Kurds were evicted in large numbers, a group of Arab men said on a recent afternoon that the city would remain peaceful - as long as no one tried to seize their homes.

"Those people are not from Kirkuk," a tall man in a dark blue robe, Muhammad Awad, said of the Kurds. "They came from Turkey and Iran. They`re not Iraqis. Maybe the old regime kicked out 1 or 2 percent of the Kurds, but those people came from outside the country."

At the stadium, one glance at Mr. Ahmed`s home shows why he has grown so impatient. Water runs along the floor when it rains. Children rummage in garbage barrels outside. A small kerosene heater is the sole source of warmth, and a television set the only entertainment.

Insurgents attack the stadium every week or two. On election day, a rocket landed near Mr. Ahmed as he stood outside his home, decapitating a 16-year-old named Yusef.

"We are willing to pay with our blood, like water on the floor, because Kirkuk is a Kurdish city and should stay part of Kurdistan," said Yusef`s mother, Sabrir Kareem Muhammad, as her husband kissed a photo of their son.

About 440 families live in the stadium, at least 100 more than a year ago, said Ismail Ibrahim, an unofficial mayor of the camp. Thousands of other Kurdish returnees are living in dozens of sites in and near Kirkuk, local officials say, scattered in dirt fields, abandoned government buildings and former military barracks. Many returnees started off in tents, but this winter built spartan cinder-block or mud-and-brick homes.

"Nobody is supporting us," Shakur Ahmed, 44, said as he sat on Mr. Ibrahim`s floor. "Baathists are still occupying our land."

For many Kurds, employment at the oil company is as important as winning back their property. But securing jobs there is not easy, either. Muhammad Ahmed, who worked as a supervisor of oil pumps and turbines for 10 months before he was relocated, said he was among 180 experienced Kurds who recently applied together for jobs at North Oil. Mr. Ahmed had an interview two months ago, he said, but has heard nothing.

A senior official at the Oil Ministry said he had sent to North Oil nine lists of people, half of them Kurds, who should be given jobs.

The Kurds complain that they have seen little or no results. "It`s chauvinism," Mr. Ahmed said. "They don`t want Kurds to work in oil. It`s the same as under Saddam`s plan."

On the edge of the city, out of sight of the stadium, the flames from oil processing plants leaped into the sky in the gathering dusk, the brightest light for miles around.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 14, 2005
Lebanon Needs to Act First for Syria to Exit, Envoy Says
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/politics/14diplo.html?

WASHINGTON, March 13 - The special United Nations envoy on Lebanon cautioned Sunday that a commitment by President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to withdraw all troops and intelligence forces from Lebanon in the next few months was contingent on the formation of a new government by Lebanon`s leaders.

"It will be extremely difficult to carry this out without a government in Lebanon," the envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, said in a telephone interview from Beirut, after meeting with President Émile Lahoud, Prime Minister Omar Karami and other Lebanese. "This is why the internal political processes in Lebanon are now very important."

Mr. Karami had been prime minister until resigning this month after large numbers of demonstrators protested the assassination of his predecessor, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an opponent of the Syrian troop presence and Syrian dominance of Lebanese political affairs.

Last week, however, Mr. Karami was asked to form a government, a task likely to prove extremely difficult because of Lebanon`s turbulent politics. Under a pact that ended the civil war in 1990, the Lebanese presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian, the prime minister is supposed to be a Sunni Muslim and the president of the chamber of deputies a Shiite.

Mr. Roed-Larsen announced Saturday after meeting with President Assad in Aleppo that Syria would carry out a phased withdrawal of its forces, in which, by the end of March, a third of its security and intelligence forces would be moved to Syria and the remaining two-thirds would be moved to the Bekaa region in Lebanon.
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A rally called by the militant group Hezbollah in Nabatiyeh Sunday rejected an American role in Lebanon.
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The agreement calls for an April 7 meeting between Syria and Lebanon to set a date to withdraw all Syrian forces from Lebanon, as demanded by a United Nations Security Council resolution passed last year. Mr. Roed-Larsen said Sunday that those negotiations could not proceed without a new, permanent government established in Beirut.

Mr. Roed-Larsen`s clarifying comments came even as top Bush administration officials welcomed his Saturday announcement, calling the news of Mr. Assad`s agreement "positive" and "encouraging," though they cautioned that Mr. Roed-Larsen had not yet briefed them on the details and that they were not clear on several aspects of the agreement.

In multiple appearances on Sunday television talk shows, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, concentrated their comments on the Syrian troop presence in Lebanon and the discussions aimed at getting Iran to give up what is thought to be a nuclear weapons program. "Obviously there are some positive elements to this," Ms. Rice said on the ABC News program "This Week," adding that it was "positive that Syria would begin to withdraw its forces out of Lebanon, not just to the border."

She said the United States would continue to press for "full compliance" with the Security Council resolution that calls for all troops to be removed in time for Lebanon`s elections in May.

On "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Hadley said that "initial reports are encouraging" from Mr. Roed-Larsen`s mission but that "we need to see the details" and that "it`s going to be deeds, not words, that matter."

Syria has had troops in Lebanon since the civil war, which involved fighting among sectarian-based militias and led to 100,000 deaths from the mid-1970`s to 1990.

The accords that ended the war also called for the disarming of all militias in the conflict. All complied except Hezbollah, the militant Shiite party allied with Syria and Iran. The group`s role in combating the Israeli troops that occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 earned it wide popularity.

In their television interviews, Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley repeated administration statements that the United States` priority was to get Syrian troops to pull out of Lebanon, and that they were willing to defer the issue of dismantling or disarming Hezbollah, which the United States lists as a terrorist group.

"First things first," Ms. Rice said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press." "When the Syrians go, you will see what the balance of forces really looks like in Lebanon. The Lebanese will be able to deal with their differences."

On the separate subject of Iran, Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley maintained that the administration had not compromised its tough stance against rewarding Iran in the negotiations to end what is suspected of being a nuclear arms program, even though it was announced Friday that the administration would withdraw objections to the Europeans` plan to provide economic incentives.
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Lebanese in Beirut on Sunday used candles to spell "Truth," a tribute to the slain former Premier Rafik Hariri.
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Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the committee`s ranking Democratic, praised the administration for its willingness to let Europe offer Iran a chance to join the World Trade Organization and gain access to aircraft spare parts.

In Beirut, Mr. Roed-Larsen said he planned to leave Monday to present briefings at the United Nations and then to return to Lebanon for discussions over Syrian troop withdrawal.

"It`s important that there is a confirmation here of Syrian intentions," he said Sunday. "It`s important that all parties concerned are ready to continue their dialogue with me. This is the commitment I got in Aleppo and today in Beirut from all parties. In a difficult situation, it`s important that there is an interlocutor they can all talk to."

Mr. Roed-Larsen said he was encouraged by the fact that Syrian troops had already begun to move to the Bekaa region.

"Just in the last few days, there has been an active movement of Syrian military assets and personnel being pulled out all over Lebanon and moving toward the Bekaa Valley," he said. "It`s not only a commitment on paper, but we are seeing movements on the ground."

Throughout much of last week, Syrian soldiers could be seen moving down into the Bekaa from various locations throughout Lebanon. Convoys began crossing the border into Syria as cheering Syrians, some trucked in by the government, celebrated the soldiers` arrival.

There are no reliable, independent counts of how many Syrian soldiers have withdrawn across the border; unofficial estimates suggest at least 1,000 crossed to the Syrian town of Jdeideh on Friday and Saturday. About 50 vehicles loaded with troops and equipment crossed Saturday night, according to Reuters.

Ms. Rice said it was not clear what steps the United States might support in the event of a Syrian pullout, but she left open the possibility that an international force could fill the ensuing security vacuum and prevent the kind of sectarian fighting in Lebanon that Syria used to justify its military deployment there.

"I`m quite certain that the Lebanese people may need some help in what is going to be a period of getting ready for elections, and then we will see what is needed after elections," Ms. Rice said on "This Week." "But I can be certain that the international community is ready to provide an international framework, if that is what is needed."

Protests have been frequent since Mr. Hariri`s assassination. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for a pro-Hezbollah rally in the southern city of Nabatiyeh, while in Beirut, a few thousand opposition demonstrators held a vigil in Martyrs` Square, Reuters reported. They held candles that spelled "Truth."

Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Damascus, Syria, for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32444-2005Mar…

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005; Page A01

WICHITA -- Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America`s political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.

The proposals typically stop short of overturning evolution or introducing biblical accounts. Instead, they are calculated pleas to teach what advocates consider gaps in long-accepted Darwinian theory, with many relying on the idea of intelligent design, which posits the central role of a creator.

The growing trend has alarmed scientists and educators who consider it a masked effort to replace science with theology. But 80 years after the Scopes "monkey" trial -- in which a Tennessee man was prosecuted for violating state law by teaching evolution -- it is the anti-evolutionary scientists and Christian activists who say they are the ones being persecuted, by a liberal establishment.

They are acting now because they feel emboldened by the country`s conservative currents and by President Bush, who angered many scientists and teachers by declaring that the jury is still out on evolution. Sharing strong convictions, deep pockets and impressive political credentials -- if not always the same goals -- the activists are building a sizable network.

In Seattle, the nonprofit Discovery Institute spends more than $1 million a year for research, polls and media pieces supporting intelligent design. In Fort Lauderdale, Christian evangelist James Kennedy established a Creation Studies Institute. In Virginia, Liberty University is sponsoring the Creation Mega Conference with a Kentucky group called Answers in Genesis, which raised $9 million in 2003.

At the state and local level, from South Carolina to California, these advocates are using lawsuits and school board debates to counter evolutionary theory. Alabama and Georgia legislators recently introduced bills to allow teachers to challenge evolutionary theory in the classroom. Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio have approved new rules allowing that. And a school board member in a Tennessee county wants stickers pasted on textbooks that say evolution remains unproven.

A prominent effort is underway in Kansas, where the state Board of Education intends to revise teaching standards. That would be progress, Southern Baptist minister Terry Fox said, because "most people in Kansas don`t think we came from monkeys."

The movement is "steadily growing," said Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which defends the teaching of evolution. "The energy level is new. The religious right has had an effect nationally. Now, by golly, they want to call in the chits."
Not Science, Politics

Polls show that a large majority of Americans believe God alone created man or had a guiding hand. Advocates invoke the First Amendment and say the current campaigns are partly about respect for those beliefs.

"It`s an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism," said the Discovery Institute`s Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life`s unfurling. "We are interested in seeing that spread state by state across the country."

Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush`s No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to "the full range of scientific views that exist."

"Anyone who expresses anything other than the dominant worldview is shunned and booted from the academy," Santorum said in an interview. "My reading of the science is there`s a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had."

Although the new strategy speaks of "teaching the controversy" over evolution, opponents insist the controversy is not scientific, but political. They paint the approach as a disarming subterfuge designed to undermine solid evidence that all living things share a common ancestry.

"The movement is a veneer over a certain theological message. Every one of these groups is now actively engaged in trying to undercut sound science education by criticizing evolution," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "It is all based on their religious ideology. Even the people who don`t specifically mention religion are hard-pressed with a straight face to say who the intelligent designer is if it`s not God."

Although many backers of intelligent design oppose the biblical account that God created the world in six days, the Christian right is increasingly mobilized, Baylor University scholar Barry G. Hankins said. He noted the recent hiring by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary of Discovery Institute scholar and prominent intelligent design proponent William A. Dembski.

The seminary said the move, along with the creation of a Center for Science and Theology, was central to developing a "comprehensive Christian worldview."

"As the Christian right has success on a variety of issues, it emboldens them to expand their agenda," Hankins said. "When they have losses . . . it gives them fuel for their fire."
Deferring the Debate

The efforts are not limited to schools. From offices overlooking Puget Sound, Meyer is waging a careful campaign to change the way Americans think about the natural world. The Discovery Institute devotes about 85 percent of its budget to funding scientists, with other money going to public action campaigns.

Discovery Institute raised money for "Unlocking the Mystery of Life," a DVD produced by Illustra Media and shown on PBS stations in major markets. The institute has sponsored opinion polls and underwrites research for books sold in secular and Christian bookstores. Its newest project is to establish a science laboratory.

Meyer said the institute accepts money from such wealthy conservatives as Howard Ahmanson Jr., who once said his goal is "the total integration of biblical law into our lives," and the Maclellan Foundation, which commits itself to "the infallibility of the Scripture."

"We`ll take money from anyone who wants to give it to us," Meyer said. "Everyone has motives. Let`s acknowledge that and get on with the interesting part."

Meyer said he and Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman devised the compromise strategy in March 2002 when they realized a dispute over intelligent design was complicating efforts to challenge evolution in the classroom. They settled on the current approach that stresses open debate and evolution`s ostensible weakness, but does not require students to study design.

The idea was to sow doubt about Darwin and buy time for the 40-plus scientists affiliated with the institute to perfect the theory, Meyer said. Also, by deferring a debate about whether God was the intelligent designer, the strategy avoids the defeats suffered by creationists who tried to oust evolution from the classroom and ran afoul of the Constitution.

"Our goal is to not remove evolution. Good lord, it`s incredible how much this is misunderstood," said William Harris, a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City medical school. "Kids need to understand it, but they need to know the strengths and weaknesses of the data, how much of it is a guess, how much of it is extrapolation."

Harris does not favor teaching intelligent design, although he believes there is more to the story than evolution.

"To say God did not play a role is arrogant," Harris said. "It`s far beyond the data."

Harris teamed up with John H. Calvert, a retired corporate lawyer who calls the debate over the origins of life "the most fundamental issue facing the culture." They formed Intelligent Design Network Inc., which draws interested legislators and activists to an annual Darwin, Design and Democracy conference.

The 2001 conference presented its Wedge of Truth award to members of the 1999 Kansas Board of Education that played down evolution and allowed local boards to decide what students would learn. A board elected in 2001 overturned that decision, but a fresh batch of conservatives won office in November, when Bush swamped his Democratic opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), here by 62 to 37 percent.

"The thing that excites me is we really are in a revolution of scientific thought," Calvert said. He described offering advice in such places as Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Cobb County, Ga., where a federal court recently halted an attempt to affix a sticker to science textbooks saying evolution is theory, not fact.
`Liberalism Will Die`

Despite some disagreement, Calvert, Harris and the Discovery Institute collectively favor efforts to change state teaching standards. Bypassing the work of a 26-member science standards committee that rejected revisions, the Kansas board`s conservative majority recently announced a series of "scientific hearings" to discuss evolution and its critics.

The board`s chairman, Steve Abrams, said he is seeking space for students to "critically analyze" the evidence.

That approach appeals to Cindy Duckett, a Wichita mother who believes public school leaves many religious children feeling shut out. Teaching doubts about evolution, she said, is "more inclusive. I think the more options, the better."

"If students only have one thing to consider, one option, that`s really more brainwashing," said Duckett, who sent her children to Christian schools because of her frustration. Students should be exposed to the Big Bang, evolution, intelligent design "and, beyond that, any other belief that a kid in class has. It should all be okay."

Fox -- pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, drawing 6,000 worshipers a week to his Wichita church -- said the compromise is an important tactic. "The strategy this time is not to go for the whole enchilada. We`re trying to be a little more subtle," he said.

To fundamentalist Christians, Fox said, the fight to teach God`s role in creation is becoming the essential front in America`s culture war. The issue is on the agenda at every meeting of pastors he attends. If evolution`s boosters can be forced to back down, he said, the Christian right`s agenda will advance.

"If you believe God created that baby, it makes it a whole lot harder to get rid of that baby," Fox said. "If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die."

Like Meyer, Fox is glad to make common cause with people who do not entirely agree.

"Creationism`s going to be our big battle. We`re hoping that Kansas will be the model, and we`re in it for the long haul," Fox said. He added that it does not matter "who gets the credit, as long as we win."

Special correspondent Kari Lydersen in Chicago contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Brand USA is in trouble, so take a lesson from Big Mac

Instead of changing his foreign policy, President Bush is changing the story
Naomi Klein
Monday March 14, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1436851,00.ht…

Guardian
Last Tuesday, George Bush delivered a major address on his plan to fight terrorism with democracy in the Arab world. On the same day, McDonald`s launched a massive advertising campaign urging Americans to fight obesity by eating healthily and exercising. Any similarities between McDonald`s "Go Active! American Challenge" and Bush`s "Go Democratic! Arabian Challenge" are purely coincidental.

Sure, there is a certain irony in being urged to get off the couch by the company that popularised the "drive-thru", helpfully allowing customers to consume a bagged heart attack without having to get out of the car and walk to the counter. And there is a similar irony to Bush urging the people of the Middle East to remove "the mask of fear" because "fear is the foundation of every dictatorial regime", when that fear is the direct result of US decisions to install and arm the regimes that have systematically terrorised for decades. But since both campaigns are exercises in rebranding, that means facts are besides the point.

The Bush administration has long been enamoured of the idea that it can solve complex policy challenges by borrowing cutting-edge communications tools from its heroes in the corporate world. The Irish rock star Bono has recently been winning unlikely fans in the White House by framing world poverty as an opportunity for US politicians to become better marketers. "Brand USA is in trouble ... it`s a problem for business," Bono warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The solution is "to redescribe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values".

The Bush administration wholeheartedly agrees, as evidenced by the orgy of redescription that now passes for American foreign policy. Faced with an Arab world enraged by the US occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the solution is not to change these brutal policies: it is to "change the story".

Brand USA`s latest story was launched on January 30, the day of the Iraqi elections, complete with a catchy tag line ("purple power"), instantly iconic imagery (purple fingers) and, of course, a new narrative about America`s role in the world, helpfully told and retold by the White House`s unofficial brand manager, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "Iraq has been reframed from a story about Iraqi `insurgents` trying to liberate their country from American occupiers and their Iraqi `stooges` to a story of the overwhelming Iraqi majority trying to build a democracy, with US help, against the wishes of Iraqi Ba`athist fascists and jihadists."

This new story is so contagious, we are told, that it has set off a domino effect akin to the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism. (Although in the "Arabian spring" the only wall in sight - Israel`s apartheid wall - pointedly stays up.) As with all branding campaigns, the power is in the repetition, not in the details. Obvious non sequiturs (is Bush taking credit for Arafat`s death?) and screeching hypocrisies (occupiers against occupation!) just mean it`s time to tell the story again, only louder and more slowly, obnoxious-tourist style. Even so, with Bush now claiming that "Iran and other nations have an example in Iraq", it seems worth focusing on the reality of the Iraqi example.

The state of emergency was just renewed for its fifth month and Human Rights Watch reports that torture is "systematic" in Iraqi jails. The Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena`s double nightmare provides a window into the pincer of terror in which average Iraqis are trapped: daily life is a navigation between the fear of being kidnapped or killed by fellow Iraqis and the fear of being gunned down at a US checkpoint.

Meanwhile, the ongoing wrangling over who will form Iraq`s next government, despite the United Iraqi Alliance being the clear winner, points to an electoral system designed by Washington that is less than democratic. Terrified at the prospect of an Iraq ruled by the majority of Iraqis, the former chief US envoy, Paul Bremer, wrote election rules that gave the US-friendly Kurds 27% of the seats in the national assembly, even though they make up just 15% of the population.

Skewing matters further, the US-authored interim constitution requires that all major decisions have the support of two-thirds or, in some cases, three-quarters of the assembly - an absurdly high figure that gives the Kurds the power to block any call for foreign troop withdrawal, any attempt to roll back Bremer`s economic orders, and any part of a new constitution.

Iraqi Kurds have a legitimate claim to independence, as well as very real fears of being ethnically targeted. But through its alliance with the Kurds, the Bush administration has effectively given itself a veto over Iraq`s democracy - and it appears to be using it to secure a contingency plan should Iraqis demand an end to occupation.

Talks to form a government are stalled over the Kurdish demand for control over Kirkuk. If they get it, Kirkuk`s huge oil fields would fall under Kurdish control. That means that if foreign troops are kicked out of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan can be broken off and Washington will still end up with a dependent, oil-rich regime - even if it`s smaller than the one originally envisioned by the war`s architects.

Meanwhile, Bush`s freedom triumphalism glossed over the fact that, in the two years since the invasion, the power of political Islam has increased exponentially, while Iraq`s deep secular traditions have been greatly eroded. In part, this has to do with the deadly decision to "embed" secularism and women`s rights in the military invasion. Whenever Bremer needed a good-news hit, he had his picture taken at a newly opened women`s centre, handily equating feminism with the hated occupation. (The women`s centres are now mostly closed, and hundreds of Iraqis who worked with the coalition in local councils have been executed.) But the problem for secularism is not just guilt by association. It`s also that the Bush definition of liberation robs democratic forces of their most potent tools.

The only idea that has ever stood up to kings, tyrants and mullahs in the Middle East is the promise of economic justice, brought about through nationalist and socialist policies of agrarian reform and state control over oil. But there is no room for such ideas in the Bush narrative, in which free people are only free to choose so-called free trade. That leaves democrats with little to offer, but empty talk of "human rights" - a weedy weapon against the powerful swords of ethnic glory and eternal salvation.

But we shouldn`t be surprised that the Bush administration, despite telling stories about its commitment to freedom, continues to actively sabotage democracy in the very countries it claims to have liberated. Rumour has it McDonald`s also continues to serve Big Macs.

www.nologo.org

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA (IWR News Parody) - An IWR News Poll taken over the weekend revealed that the majority of Americans now think that President Bush should get a lobotomy. The question posed to the 2,500 persons surveyed by telephone was: "What does the President need to improve his image at home and abroad?" 57% of those surveyed said that Mr. Bush should get a full frontal lobotomy, 31% said he should just shut his friggin` trap for the next four years, and 12% said that Mr. Bush should dress in a Gestapo uniform and threaten the world with nuclear annihilation.

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The Independent
UN finds evidence of official cover-up in Hariri assassination
Monday, 14th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=619…

AS the United Nations’ Irish-led special investigation team here prepares to report that the Lebanese authorities have covered up evidence of the murder on 14 February of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, his two sons have fled Lebanon after hearing that they too are in danger of assassination.

Mr Hariri’s elder son, Bahar, has flown to Geneva while Saad has left hurriedly for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after warnings that they could be the next targets of their father’s assassins.

President George Bush is expected to announce on Wednesday that Syrian - and perhaps Lebanese - military intelligence officers were involved in Mr Hariri’s death; the bombing killed 18 other civilians.

The UN’s Irish, Egyptian and Moroccan investigation team has now been joined by three Swiss bomb experts following the discovery that many of the smashed vehicles in Hariri’s convoy were moved from the scene of the massacre only hours afterwards - and before there was time for an independent investigation. Yesterday, frogmen were sent into the sea off the Beirut Corniche to recover the wreckage of the one car in the Hariri convoy that was not taken away by the authorities because it was blasted over a hotel wall into the Mediterranean by the force of the explosion. If they successfully recover parts of the vehicle, they may be able to discover the nature of the explosives. First reports that Hariri was killed by a car bomb are now being challenged by evidence that the explosives - estimated at 600kg - could have been buried beneath the seafront avenue.

A unique photograph handed to The Independent in Beirut - which is now also in the hands of the UN investigators - was taken on the afternoon of 12 February, about 36 hours before the bombing. It shows a drain cover in the road at the exact spot where the explosion was to tear a 30-foot crater in the highway, instantly killing Hariri and many of his bodyguards.

The section of roadway is marked off by "no parking" signs which have been left there innocently by staff of the nearby HSBC bank. But a mysterious object can be seen on the left edge of the drain cover. Both the metal cover and an extensive area of roadway around it were atomised by the bomb.

The picture also shows two buildings which the UN police officers are investigating as possible locations of the bomber who detonated the explosives: one is on top of the circular building in the centre of the photo - which houses a Beirut hotel as well as a Lebanese army retirement fund office - and the other is on top of the war-damaged Holiday Inn (far right) which has been empty for more than a decade. The balloon in the centre of the photograph regularly takes tourists on sightseeing tours of Beirut.

Some members of the Hariri family have been told that the report of the UN inquiry team will be so devastating that it will force a full international investigation of the murder of "Mr Lebanon" and his entourage, perhaps reaching to the higher echelons of the Syrian and Lebanese governments.

Hariri opposed the continued Syrian military presence in Lebanon and many Lebanese have blamed the Syrians for his murder. The UN investigators have become convinced that there was a cover-up of evidence at the very highest levels of the Lebanese and Syrian intelligence authorities.

In their search for information, at least one Irish police officer has now interviewed Brigadier General Rustum Ghazale, the senior Syrian army intelligence officer in Lebanon, at his headquarters in Aanjar. He is believed to have pointed out to the police that his job was only to safeguard Syrian forces in the country - an assertion which will require more than a few grains of Syrian salt to be believed.

President Bush’s expected remarks on Wednesday will follow two extraordinary days of public demonstrations in Beirut. In the first, today, opposition politicians will try to gather a million followers to protest against the government’s failure to resign and to reveal the truth about Hariri’s murder - as well as to dwarf last Tuesday’s half-million strong Hizbollah rally in support of Syria. The second, by pro-Syrian demonstrators, is planned to march to the US embassy in the Aukar suburb of east Beirut.

All this is being organised while violent rumours sweep Beirut. One says that the Syrians have been handing out weapons to pro-Syrian Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in Beirut and Ein el-Helwe in Sidon.

Investigations by The Independent strongly suggest that this in untrue; the Palestinians have quite enough weapons without being resupplied, and many of them would like to be disarmed to end lethal inter-Palestinian factional fighting. But on Saturday night in the Sabra camp, someone knifed to death an elderly Syrian fruit-seller in what was an obvious attempt to provoke violence.


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Mar 15, 2005

The beast that slouches toward democracy
By Spengler
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC15Ak05.html

A celebrated moment in US cinema had Indiana Jones facing off an Arab swordsman of evident skill. Jones gave the Arab a deprecating glance, drew his revolver and shot him dead. Put President George W Bush in the role of the swordsman and Hezbollah`s Hasan Nasrullah in place of Indiana Jones, and the events of March 8 in Beirut fall into context.

No woolier idea ever found its way into foreign policy than the premise that democracy will promote Middle East peace. Nemesis overtakes the tragic hero at the extreme of hubris, and now the Bush tragedy has plunged into its second act just when the US president was confident that democracy would sweep through the region (George W Bush, tragic character, November 25, 2003).

The great slapping sound heard around Washington last week was the shutting mouths of conservative pundits after Hezbollah put half a million supporters in the streets of Beirut March 8. On March 4, the Washington Post`s Charles Krauthammer bragged of "the dawn of a glorious, delicate, revolutionary moment in the Middle East". The National Review`s John Derbyshire opined prematurely that "this has been a bad few weeks for us pessimists ... with 1989-style demonstrations out in the streets of Beirut". A prominent Bush detractor, Newsweek`s Fareed Zakaria, conceded that "Bush is right" and "may change the world". That was then. On March 11, Krauthammer had forgotten about the Middle East and devoted his column to the ethics of frozen embryos.

Hezbollah`s Hasan Nasrullah has laid a cuckoo`s egg in the nest of US policy, conjuring up the specter of a terrorist democracy. US planners long have worried that Iraq`s Islamist al-Da`wa party might find common cause with Hezbollah. With Da`wa chief Ibrahim Jaafari about to become Iraq`s prime minister, Lebanese circumstances endanger the entire US venture in Mesopotamia. Bush appears to face a tragic choice: allow Iran to become a nuclear power with a veto on the ground in Lebanon as well as Iraq, or use force against Iran and its supporters. Unless Bush is willing to use (or permit Israel to use) nuclear weapons, the second alternative is next to unworkable. If he chooses the first alternative, the odds that radical Islam will triumph over the West rise sharply.

There is a third alternative, albeit one too terrible to enter into Washington`s present consideration, which I will sketch out below.

Civil war in either Lebanon or Iraq might turn into a single conflict, given the Islamist parties` theological and Iran-centered political connections. Nasrullah`s control of facts on the ground leaves Washington in apparent Zugzwang, a position in which a chess player is compelled to move, and any move loses. That is why Washington is talking out of both sides of its mouth about Hezbollah. Steven R Weisman quoted an unnamed US official in the March 10 New York Times to the effect that Washington was willing to accept Hezbollah into the Lebanese mainstream: "Hezbollah has American blood on its hands. They are in the same category as al-Qaeda. The administration has an absolute aversion to admitting that Hezbollah has a role to play in Lebanon, but that is the path we`re going down."

Tehran now feels bold enough to thumb its nose at Washington`s proposed economic bribes to stop nuclear-fuel production. "US officials are either unaware of the substance of the talks or hallucinating," Sirus Naseri, a senior member of Iran`s nuclear negotiating team, told Iran`s official IRNA news agency.

The roar of the American triumphalists left the few of us feeling shrill and small who fear that the Islamic world will prefer a collective identity to Western democracy, as I wrote last week (They made a democracy and called it peace, March 8). Among the neo-conservatives, only Daniel Pipes, writing in the March 8 New York Sun, offered words of caution:

Yes, Mahmoud Abbas wishes to end the armed struggle against Israel but his call for a greater jihad against the "Zionist enemy" points to his intending another form of war to destroy Israel. The Iraqi elections are bringing Ibrahim Jaafari, a pro-Iranian Islamist, to power. Likewise, the Saudi elections proved a boon for the Islamist candidates. [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak`s promise is purely cosmetic; but should real presidential elections one day come to Egypt, Islamists will probably prevail there too. Removing Syrian control in Lebanon could well lead to Hezbollah, a terrorist group, becoming the dominant power there. Eliminating the hideous Assad dynasty could well bring in its wake an Islamist government in Damascus.

US denials of the Weisman story ring a bit hollow, for Washington cannot afford to take on Hezbollah without unsettling Iraq`s Shi`ites. Some reports out of Washington allege that Nasrullah is merely the Lebanese opposite number of the marginalized Shi`ite radical Muqtada al-Sadr. In the fluid circumstances of the moment Hezbollah well might find itself closer to Da`wa. The senior Middle East specialist of the Army War College (AWC), W Andrew Terrill, warned in February 2004:

US forces must also emphasize their concern about Iraqi Shi`ite groups, which may seek to coordinate with outside radicals such as those in Lebanon. While it may be impossible to prevent Da`wa and Iraqi Hezbollah from seeking theological inspiration from radical Lebanese clerics, the formation of any kind of operational ties should be of grave concern to the United States [see Note below].

And as Ashraf Fahim wrote in Asia Times Online on March 10, "Regionally, the group has close religious ties to Iraq`s new Shi`ite-dominated government, which makes threatening it risky - Nasrullah studied in Najaf with many of the Da`wa Party`s clerics" (Hezbollah enters the fray).

Terrill updated his views in a report released by the AWC on March 5, under the title "Strategic Implications of Intercommunal Warfare In Iraq". I am astonished that Terrill`s study received not a single mention in any news outlet other than this (a Google News search turns up only the original AWC press release). Parenthetically, the same silence greeted another report of vast strategic importance, namely the United Nations` "World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision" (see They made a democracy and called it peace, March 8, link above). Terrill warns:

Many Western observers reflexively view Western-style democracy as the way to address the divisions within Iraq society that may lead to severe civil conflict. Nevertheless, the birth of democracy and development of ethnic and sectarian harmony are not always closely related, and a number of important challenges will have to be addressed for Iraq to evolve into a viable democracy that protects the rights of all religious and ethnic groups. Should Iraqis be unable to meet the challenges of accommodating and regulating key differences while forming a functioning government, civil war becomes a serious possibility.

A major concern of the US Army`s senior Middle East strategist is that:

... Civil war in Iraq will also have important implications for Lebanon. In the event of an Iraqi civil war, Lebanese Muslims, and especially the numerically dominant Shi`ites, can be expected to be concerned with the fate of Iraq`s Shi`ite community, and a few young Shi`ite men may further choose to go to Iraq. Leaders of the Lebanese Shi`ite militant group, Hezbollah, have made numerous statements about Iraq, and will probably seek to support like-minded Shi`ite radicals in Iraq, should civil war break out ... A circulation of fighters could occur between Iraq and Lebanon under conditions of protracted sectarian fighting.

Just what is it about a civil war in Iraq or Lebanon, though, that prejudices US strategic interests? Civil wars, especially the prolonged and bloody wars of attrition, benefit the outside power best equipped to intervene (Civil war: A do-it-yourself guide, August 29, 2003). The only chess move on the Middle Eastern board that frees Washington from apparent Zugzwang is to call Nasrullah`s bluff, and let him launch civil conflict in Lebanon, taking into account contagion in Iraq. This would create a meat-grinder on the ground, with the object of depleting the ranks of the militants on both sides.

Call this a Lincolnian, rather than a Wilsonian, foreign policy. US president Abraham Lincoln crushed his country`s slave-holding south by killing two-fifths of southern men of military age, a policy of attrition well understood by his generals. "Full 300,000 of the bravest men of this world must be killed or banished in the south before they will think of peace, and in killing them we must lose an equal or greater number, for we must be the attacking party," wrote General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864. "Still, we as a nation have no alternative or choice."

"Americans fail to grasp decisive strategic issues not only because they misunderstand other cultures, but because they avert their gaze from the painful episodes of their own history," I wrote in 2003 (Why radical Islam might defeat the West, July 8). Wars do not end when they are won, but when those who want to fight to the death find their wish has been granted (More killing, please!, June 12, 2003).

Note:
"The United States and Iraq`s Shi`ite Clergy: Partners or Adversaries?"Available <here>. My ATol colleague Marc Erikson drew attention to Terrill`s work in an April 27, 2004, commentary (Deadline looming, US forces the issue).

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



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Uncle Sam Really, Really Wants You...
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=27841

Katherine Stapp

A couple of months ago, Kim Rosario found an improbable e-mail message in her Monster.com inbox.

NEW YORK, Mar 12 (IPS) - The mother of a U.S. soldier, she travels the country publicly denouncing Washington`s policies in Iraq, and is a featured speaker at an upcoming rally in New York`s Central Park to mark the second anniversary of the Mar. 19, 2003 invasion.

”It was from the military, asking if I`ve ever considered a career in the Navy,” Rosario recalled. ”I said I might if you send my son back from Iraq!”

Unintended irony aside, she believes the offer is a sign of the Pentagon`s growing desperation to counter dwindling recruitment numbers -- especially in the lower-income communities once viewed as fertile ground.

Reflecting the scepticism felt by many people of colour toward the Iraq invasion, a study commissioned for the Army last August concluded that ”more African-Americans identify having to fight for a cause they don`t support as a barrier to military service..”

It added that attitudes among youth in general toward the Army had taken a downhill turn.

”In the past, barriers were about inconvenience or preference for another life choice,” the study said. ”Now they have switched to something quite different: fear of death or injury.”

Five years ago African Americans made up 23.5 percent of army recruits. Today, they are less than 14 percent.

Rosario and others are quick to point out that the low numbers are not for a lack of zeal on the part of military recruiters.

”I see them in the subways and the streets, right around the time kids are coming home from school,” said Rosario, who has started speaking at local high schools to urge students not to enlist. ”They target low-income neighbourhoods, and they use really young guys who look like teenagers to hook them in.”

Under President George W. Bush`s ”No Child Left Behind” plan, public high schools must provide military recruiters with contact information for every student or face a cutoff of federal aid.

”Kids tell me that not only do the recruiters call them at home, but they have copies of their grades, and will say, `So Johnny, you`re not doing very well in class. How are you going to get into college?`” Rosario said. ”There is an opt-out form, but a lot of parents don`t know about it.”

If the shortage of new soldiers persists, many worry that the government will be forced to reintroduce a compulsory military draft for the first time since the Vietnam War.

There are already signs that the Selective Service System (SSS), as it is known, is gearing up for business. By Mar. 31, the SSS boards in every state must certify to Washington that they are ready to induct the first young men within 75 days.

”They`re putting in place the mechanisms to actually do a draft,” said Dustin Langley, a spokesman for the Troops Out Now Coalition representing more than 400 labour, community and human rights groups.

”In the past the SSS has basically been a mailbox. They haven`t even prosecuted people for not registering,” he said. ”In their latest Performance Plan, they talk about increasing efficiency, but it is more than that. The report goes way beyond basic housekeeping.”

”They need two sets of boots at home for every one on the ground overseas. If you do the math, it`s clear that they can`t maintain the current level of the Iraq occupation -- let alone send troops anywhere else -- without a draft. It`s impossible.”

Community activists note that youth of colour are already being deployed at higher rates than whites. Minority groups make up 35 percent of the military, and black servicemen and women alone make up 20 percent of the total. That far outstrips the percentage of African Americans in society, where the figure is about 12 percent.

Nellie Hester Bailey of the Harlem Tenants Council, a group that works for affordable housing, describes the current situation as equal to ”an economic draft.”

”Blacks and Latinos and people of colour are dying disproportionately in this war, and they are mostly young people who joined because they saw themselves as having very little future in the U.S. economy,” she said.

”In the Harlems throughout the United States, we have seen the direct connection between the cuts in social programmes and the new 81 billion dollars that has been appropriated for the war,” Bailey said.

”Not to mention the unforgivable and unimaginable permanent damage to the young men and women coming back wounded and psychologically scarred, and the ones who will never return to their communities.”

As part of the Troops Out Now Coalition organising for Mar. 19, Bailey also emphasised that the demonstration planned from Harlem to Central Park would dispel once and for all the notion that anti-war activism has a white face.

”I am so tired of the established anti-war movement pointing their fingers at communities of colour and saying you`re not doing your part,” Bailey said. ”We must have a principled united front against this war, but there is a tremendous disconnect.”

”United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ, a major activist group) has not signed on and that is a travesty,” she continued. ”They will no longer be able to distance their agenda from communities like Harlem and portray themselves as a liberal organisation.”

UFPJ`s national coordinator, Leslie Cagan, told IPS that the situation was ”complicated”.

”Building alliances and strengthening the multiracial character of the movement is a concern that we take very seriously,” she said. ”At our recent national meeting, more than half of the new steering committee was people of colour.”

”We`re not trying to minimise the (Troops Out Now Coalition`s) contribution, they`re certainly part of the anti-war movement. We haven`t said anything negative about the Central Park rally, and in fact many member groups of UFPJ will be there.”

However, Cagan said that early outreach materials drafted by the Coalition included language supporting the Iraqi resistance, which was a significant political difference with UFPJ, an umbrella coalition of 1,000 national and local groups.

”It`s not that we have a negative position on the resistance, we just don`t have a position,” she said.

Others told IPS that regardless of who endorses the New York rally, new alliances have been built among a broad spectrum of communities and groups that will last well beyond Mar. 19.

”The success of the Coalition has been a wonderful, wonderful surprise,” said Nana Soul, a singer and activist featured on a new anti-war CD by Black Waxx records.

”We`re trying to energise people that normally wouldn`t come out, first and foremost, people of colour,” she explained. ”Harlem is the Mecca of black culture, and we felt it would be very symbolic for us to start there.”

The Coalition is planning to file suit early next week to demand the right to march down New York`s ritzy Fifth Avenue, which has been declared off-limits by the city. Organisers note a tradition dating back to the Vietnam War, when one of the biggest local groupings was called the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade.

They are also still angry at decisions by officials to refuse a Central Park permit to protesters during last August`s Republican National Convention, and to block a Fifth Avenue march in February 2003, when an estimated 10 million peace activists rallied around the world.

”There has been an ongoing pattern of denying, attacking and restricting the right to political dissent,” Langley said. ”At some point, we have to draw a line in the sand.” (END/2005)



Copyright © 2005 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.

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Weiß jemand weshalb man die Bilder nicht verlinken kann?
http://www.rtoddking.com/chinawin2003_hb_if.htm

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Monday, March 14, 2005
War News for Monday, 14 March 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Two policemen and two civilians killed in car bomb attack in Yusufiya.

Bring `em on: Two civilians killed when a US helicopter opened fire on insurgents in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Twelve bodies found in Babel.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi troops killed by timed explosion in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Iraqi policeman killed in mortar attack in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: American soldier killed by small arms fire in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqis killed and a third injured in an automobile accident on Saturday, when a fuel tanker traveling fast in an American convoy crashed at 8:30 p.m. along a highway in Baghdad.

Forgotten: "He`ll be forgotten in five minutes," one man murmured in Arabic after looking at Shalaal`s bullet-riddled white compact car. "That`s Iraq today."

Looting: In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein`s most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said last week in the government`s first extensive comments on the looting.

Talks deadlocked: Kurdish chieftain Jalal Talabani said Monday talks on forming a new Iraqi government were deadlocked over the matter of Kurdish peshmerga fighters and rights to the ethnically-divided northern oil city of Kirkuk. "There are disagreements about two points. The first is the fate of the peshmerga, and the second one is concerning Kirkuk. Our negotiations with the (Shiite) alliance continue," Talabani told reporters as he announced he was heading to Baghdad for Wednesday`s historic first session of the new 275-member national assembly.

He added the Kurds wanted to seal an agreement with the election-winning Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), and then bring other parties into the new government, including outgoing prime minister Iyad Allawi who has so far refused any post other than premier. "We have ... four people charged to negotiate with the Shiite list. After that we need a government with all parties, with Allawi, and our brother Sunnis. We insist all Iraqis have a role."

Court Martial: A US army platoon leader accused of ordering soldiers to force two Iraqis into the Tigris River at gunpoint was to face a court-martial today. Lieutenant Jack Saville is charged with manslaughter, assault, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and making a false statement. The 25-year-old West Point graduate faces a maximum penalty of 29 years in military prison if convicted at Ford Hood, Texas. He is accused of ordering troops to push two curfew violators into the river near Samarra last year, resulting in the drowning death of Zaidoun Hassoun, 19.

Superman?: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is planning attacks on "soft targets" in the United States, including "movie theaters, restaurants and schools," according to reported comments by a former top aide to the Islamic extremist. The comments, cited in a restricted bulletin sent out to US security agencies and published by Time magazine on its website Sunday, come two weeks after intelligence officials confirmed that Osama bin Laden had sent a message to Jordanian-born Zarqawi, urging Al-Qaeda`s frontman in Iraq to plan attacks on US soil.

Analysis

New Iraqi Forces: Iraq`s fledgling security forces are in danger of collapse if the newly elected government follows through on promises to purge the ranks of former regime members, politicians and analysts here warn. The dismantling of Saddam Hussein`s military is widely viewed as one of the gravest mistakes of the U.S.-led occupation, and the Bush administration has worked in the past year to reverse it by helping the interim Iraqi government restore the jobs of some highly skilled troops who served under Saddam.

Now, analysts say, the incoming government led by Shiite Muslims is at risk of repeating the error that was blamed for swelling the mostly Sunni insurgency. About half the troops and 75 percent of the officers in the new Iraqi military served under the old regime, said Saleh Sarhan, spokesman for the Iraqi defense ministry. There are about 30,000 troops now, he said, but the goal is to have a force of 120,000 by the end of the year. That goal is in jeopardy under the incoming government`s plans.

Several Shiite politicians have said another overhaul is necessary to cleanse a security force that`s still teeming with Saddam loyalists who act as informants and foot soldiers for the insurgency. Sunnis, on the other hand, predict catastrophe if the military dismisses its most seasoned soldiers and replaces them with new recruits who have little training or battlefield experience.

Election

Juan Cole writes:

Do you note how if a party has 51% in this parliamentary system, it automatically gets to form a government?

So why is the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shiite parties that can count on about 53% of the members of the Iraqi parliament to vote for it in the wake of the Jan. 30 elections, not able to form a government? If it were the Labor Party in the UK, which is the parliament described above, Ibrahim Jaafari would already be Prime Minister.

The US spiked the Iraqi parliamentary process by putting in a provision that a government has to be formed with a 2/3s majority. This provision is a neo-colonial imposition on Iraq. The Iraqi public was never asked about it. And, it is predictably producing gridlock, as the UIA is forced to try to accommodate a party that should be in the opposition in the British system, the Kurdistan Alliance.

Likewise, in France, a simple majority of the National Assembly can dismiss the cabinet. Likewise in India. In fact, I wouldn`t be surprised if the 2/3s super-majority is characteristic of only one nation on earth, i.e. American Iraq. I fear it is functioning in an anti-democratic manner to thwart the will of the majority of Iraqis, who braved great danger to come out and vote.

It is all to the good if the Shiites and Kurds are forced to come to a set of hard compromises. But not everything can be decided at the beginning of the process. Some issues (Kirkuk is a good example) must be decided by a long-term negotiation. I perceive this latest Kurdish demarche to consist in a power play where they grab all sorts of concessions on a short-term basis, just because they are needed to form a government, even though no national consensus has emerged on these issues.

I think there is also a real chance that Iraqis will turn against the idea of democracy if it only produces insecurity, violence, and gridlock.



Swanker of the Day

I`ve created a new title called "Swanker of the Day", my first nomination goes to none other than J Grant Swank for writing this rubbish. Someone please tell me this is cut and pasted from the Onion.

Two virtues strong and ready to be reckoned with. I believe that these two virtues are more widespread than within the security forces alone. It appears that the Iraqi citizenry is becoming more and more confident of its own freedom opportunities. With that arise more and more abilities to creatively govern and make a living.

"’I … personally have faith in the Iraqi officers that I’ve met,’ Myers said. He said coalition forces will continue to train Iraqi security forces, and NATO allies are also stepping up their training efforts.

"The chairman said he is confident ‘that with our support, our training, our equipping and our mentoring, that they will be a force for good in that country.’"
# posted by Friendly Fire : 3:18 AM
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Latest Fatality: Mar 11, 2005

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

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March 14, 2005
California Court Rules Same-Sex Marriage Ban Unconstitutional
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/national/14cnd-gays.html?h…

A California judge ruled today that the state`s ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional, despite social traditions and historical definitions that "marriage" is a union between man and woman.

Judge Richard A. Kramer of San Francisco Superior Court held, in an opinion that will surely be appealed, that "no rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners."

While many aspects of history, culture and tradition are properly embedded in the law, Judge Kramer wrote, the prohibition against same-sex marriage is not. "The state`s protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional," he wrote.

Today`s ruling came in a lawsuit brought against the state by the City and County of San Francisco and a dozen same-sex couples who had been married there. The suit was filed after the State Supreme Court ordered San Francisco to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples because the practice violated state law.

That law is contrary to the spirit of the state Constitution, the plaintiffs argued, and today Judge Kramer agreed.

"Simply put, same-sex marriage cannot be prohibited solely because California has always done so before," the judge said

Attorney General Bill Lockyer has said he expected the case to reach the California Supreme Court, The Associated Press said. It may first go to the State Court of Appeals, or it is possible the high court will bypass the appeals court and take the case directly. In any case, Robert Tyler, a lawyer with the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, which joined the case in support of the ban on same-sex marriages, told The A.P. his group would undertake an appeal. Two bills are pending before the California Legislature that would put a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the November ballot, The A.P. said. If California voters approve such an amendment, as did those in a dozen other states last year, the issue would largely be out of the reach of legislators and the courts.

Several trial judges around the country have ruled that bans on same-sex marriages violate state constitutions. But despite the intense interest in the issue nationwide, there is no obvious path - yet - for it to reach the United States Supreme Court, since state courts have the power to interpret their own respective state constitutions. But those bans could be put to a federal constitutional test if one state refused to grant legal recognition to same-sex couples who were legally married in another state.

Judge Kramer swept aside the State of California`s argument that it was all right to define marriage strictly as a union between man and woman as long as same-sex couples enjoyed virtually the same rights as married couples.

"The idea that marriage-like rights without marriage is adequate smacks of a concept long rejected by the courts: separate but equal," he wrote, alluding to the doctrine long used to justify racial segregation that the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1954 had no place in public schools.

The judge also dismissed the state`s argument that marriage has long been recognized as existing primarily for the sake of producing children. Judge Kramer said it was an "obvious natural and social reality that one does not have to be married in order to procreate, nor does one have to procreate in order to be married."

Setting aside the bar on same-sex marriage will not intrude on the state`s legitimate regulation of marriage, like setting a minimum age for effective consent, the judge said. "Thus, the parade of horrible social ills envisioned by the opponents of same-sex marriage is not a necessary result from recognizing that there is a fundamental right to choose who one wants to marry," he wrote.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 15, 2005
NEWS ANALYSIS
Reshaping Nuclear Pact: Bush Seeks to Close Loopholes
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/15/politics/15treaty.html?hp&…

WASHINGTON, March 14 - Behind President Bush`s recent shift in dealing with Iran`s nuclear program lies a less visible goal: to rewrite, in effect, the main treaty governing the spread of nuclear technology, without actually renegotiating it.

In their public statements and background briefings in recent days, Mr. Bush`s aides have acknowledged that Iran appears to have the right - on paper, at least - to enrich uranium to produce electric power. But Mr. Bush has managed to convince his reluctant European allies that the only acceptable outcome of their negotiations with Iran is that it must give up that right.

In what amounts to a reinterpretation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Mr. Bush now argues that there is a new class of nations that simply cannot be trusted with the technology to produce nuclear material even if the treaty itself makes no such distinction.

So far the administration has not declared publicly that its larger goal beyond Iran is to remake a treaty whose intellectual roots date back to the Eisenhower administration, under the cold war banner of "Atoms for Peace." To state publicly that Iran is really a test case of Mr. Bush`s broader effort, one senior administration official said, "would complicate what`s already a pretty messy negotiation."

But just three days before the White House announced its new approach to Iran - in which it allowed Europe to offer broader incentives in return for an agreement to ask the United Nations for sanctions if Iran refuses to give up the ability to make nuclear material - Mr. Bush issued a statement that left little doubt about where he was headed.

The statement was advertised by the White House as a routine commemoration of the treaty`s 35th anniversary, and a prelude to a meeting in May in New York to consider its future. It never mentioned Iran by name. But after lauding the past accomplishments of the treaty, also known as the N.P.T., in limiting the spread of nuclear arms, Mr. Bush went on to say, "We cannot allow rogue states that violate their commitments and defy the international community to undermine the N.P.T.`s fundamental role in strengthening international security.

"We must therefore close the loopholes that allow states to produce nuclear materials that can be used to build bombs under the cover of civilian nuclear programs."

On Sunday, his new national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, took the next step, making clear the connection to the current crisis with Iran. Yes, he said on CNN, the Iranians say their nuclear work is entirely for peaceful purposes. He cited no new evidence of a secret Iranian project to build a bomb, though that is what the Central Intelligence Agency and officials like Mr. Hadley insist is happening. (Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency say they join in the suspicion, but have no compelling evidence.)

But Mr. Hadley emphasized that Iran`s leaders "keep their secrets very well." They hid much of their enrichment activity from international inspectors for 18 years, then insisted that it was not really for weapons, he said. He said that "raises serious suspicions" about Iran`s true intent. Now, he said, the Europeans have come around to the view that "the best guarantee is for them to permanently abandon their enrichment facilities."

Mr. Bush could have called for renegotiating the treaty. But in background interviews, administration officials say they have neither the time nor the patience for that process. By the time all 189 signers come to an agreement, noted one official who left the White House recently: "The Iranians will look like the North Koreans, waving their bombs around. We can`t afford to make that mistake again." (North Korea has declared it is no longer a party to the treaty, though it signed it. Israel, India and Pakistan never signed it.)

After a visit to Tehran last week for a conference that Iran sponsored to explain its nuclear ambitions, George Perkovich, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said he had concluded that Mr. Bush had the right instinct, but might not be taking the right approach.

"The Iranians have decided to go on the offensive and simply assert their right, even if the treaty doesn`t explicitly say that they have a right to enrich their own uranium," he said Monday. The view expressed by Iran`s nuclear negotiators, he said, amounted to "We`re not hiding it, we`re not embarrassed by it, and no one is going to take our right away."

Iran`s leaders are still testing the Europeans, believing that in the end, Europe will decide to take the risk of letting Iran manufacture its own nuclear fuel rather than engage in a confrontation, Mr. Perkovich said.

At the heart of Mr. Bush`s concern is a fundamental flaw in the treaty. As long as nations allow inspections and declare their facilities and nuclear work, they get the atomic agency`s seal of approval and, often, technical aid. But there is nothing to prevent a country, once it has learned how to enrich uranium or reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods, from withdrawing from the treaty and moving full-bore toward a bomb. North Korea did exactly that two years ago, and now says it reprocessed a huge cache of spent nuclear fuel to make it suitable for weapons. While American intelligence estimates vary, the consensus appears to be that that is enough to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.

While Mr. Bush and the director general of the I.A.E.A., Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, have different proposals to deal with the problem, they agree that established nuclear nations should supply fuel to countries that need it. While this would help ensure that no nation could secretly produce bomb-grade fuel, smaller countries say they should not be dependent on the West or international consortiums for a crucial source of energy.

A little more than a year ago, after the arrest of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear engineer who helped arm Iran, North Korea and Libya, Mr. Bush announced a proposal: in the future, the world will not allow countries to manufacture nuclear fuel. He exempted any nation already producing it - meaning the United States, many European nations and Japan, among others. So far, he has done little to turn that proposal into legal language, and so far he has garnered almost no support.

But the nuclear clock is ticking, and some of Mr. Bush`s aides fear that Iran is heading the same way as North Korea did in the 1990`s - playing out the negotiations while its scientists and engineers pick up skills, leaving open a withdrawal from the treaty. Alternatively, some in the C.I.A. believe that there are really two nuclear projects under way in Iran: a public one that inspectors visit, and a parallel, secret one on the country`s military reservations.

The Iranians deny that, but admit they have built huge tunnels at some crucial sites and buried other facilities altogether. Mr. Perkovich said that when Iranian officials were asked about that at the conference, they answered, "If you thought the Americans were going to bomb you, wouldn`t you bury this stuff, too?"

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March 14, 2005
Q&A: Islam and Sharia

From the [urlCouncil on Foreign Relations,]http://www.cfr.org/[/url] March 14, 2005

How have various Muslim countries applied sharia?

Sharia, or Islamic law, influences the legal code in most Islamic countries, but the extent of its impact varies widely. Avowedly secular Turkey is at one extreme. It doesn`t base its laws on the Quran, and some government-imposed rules--such as a ban on women`s veils--are contrary to practices often understood as Islamic. At the devout end of the spectrum are the Islamic Republic of Iran, where mullahs are the ultimate authority, and Saudi Arabia, a monarchy where the Quran is considered the constitution. In 1959, Iraq modified its sharia-based family law system and became one of the Middle East`s least religious states. Whether sharia should be more strictly applied in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is one of the most divisive issues facing the transitional government.

What is sharia?

Literally, it means "path," or "path to water," says Clark Lombardi, an expert on Islamic law at the University of Washington`s School of Law. In its religious sense, it means God`s law--the body of commands that, if followed, will provide the path to salvation. According to Islamic teaching, sharia is revealed in divine signs that must be interpreted by humans. The law is derived from four main sources:

* the Quran, Islam`s holy book, considered the literal word of God;
* the hadith, or record of the actions and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, whose life is to be emulated;
* ijma, the consensus of Islamic scholars; and
* qiyas, a kind of reasoning that uses analogies to apply precedents established by the holy texts to problems not covered by them, for example, a ban on narcotics based on the Quranic injunction against wine-drinking.

Does sharia apply only to religious matters?

No. Sharia governs all aspects of life, from relations between men and women to ethics in business and banking. Some aspects of sharia have become part of modern legal codes and are enforced by national judicial systems, while others are a matter of personal conscience. Entirely secular law is not an option under a classical interpretation of Islam, experts say. "In Islam, there is no separation between the secular and the sacred. The law is suffused with religion," says David Powers, a professor of Islamic law and history at Cornell University.

Is there only one interpretation of sharia?

No. Five major schools of sharia developed after the death of the Prophet Mohammed and during the Middle Ages--four in the Sunni tradition and one in the Shiite tradition. A school consists of a guild, or group of scholars, that developed specific interpretations of Islamic law; over the centuries, its precedents became legally binding. Muslims in different geographical regions favored different sharia schools, a practice that continues to this day.

What are the five schools?

Middle Eastern countries of the former Ottoman Empire favor Hanafi school doctrine, while North African countries prefer Maliki doctrine; Indonesia and Malaysia favor Shafi`i doctrine; Saudi Arabia adheres to Hanbali doctrine; and Iran follows the Shiite Jaafari school.

How do the rules of each school differ?

They are broadly similar, because they are derived from the same sacred sources, experts say. However, some schools take a more literal approach to the texts; others allow for looser interpretations. And there are also important differences between Sunni and Shiite sharia. For example, Shiites recognize a practice called muta, or temporary marriage; Sunnis do not. And Shiite inheritance laws differ from Sunni practices.

Do observant Muslims have to adhere to tenets of one of the five schools?

Not necessarily. Modernist thinkers since the 19th century have argued for new interpretations of Islamic law, and actual practice varies for each individual. "The Islamic sharia is not an easily identifiable set of rules that can be mechanically applied, but a long and quite varied intellectual tradition," says Nathan Brown, an expert on Arab constitutionalism at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Do traditional sharia laws continue to apply in modern countries?

Yes. Most Middle Eastern countries continue to incorporate some traditional sharia into their legal codes, especially in the area of personal-status law, which governs marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In other areas of the law, such as the criminal code, most Islamic nations have attempted to limit the application of traditional sharia, replacing it either with secular legislation or with laws characterized as modern interpretations of sharia. Iran and Saudi Arabia are exceptions--they claim to fully implement sharia in all areas of the law. In general, each nation`s legal code is unique and reflects a variety of historical and cultural influences, experts say. Many Middle Eastern legal codes, for example, have their roots in the Napoleonic law system and the Ottoman Empire, Brown says.

How does sharia become part of the law of modern Islamic states?

Through three main routes:

* The constitution:Many Islamic countries acknowledge Islamic law in their constitutions by making Islam the official religion of the country or by stating that sharia is a source--or the source--of the nation`s laws. For example, Article II of the 1980 Egyptian constitution states that Islam is the religion of the state and "Islamic jurisprudence is the principal source of legislation." Iraq`s interim constitution, passed under the U.S.-led occupation, makes Islam "a source of legislation" and stipulates that no law may "contradict the universally agreed tenets of Islam." The 1992 Basic Law of Saudi Arabia states that the nation`s constitution consists of the Quran and the sunna, the actions and sayings of the prophet as recorded in the hadith. Article IV of the Iranian constitution states that "all civil, penal, financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political, and other laws and regulations must be based on Islamic criteria." And Article 227(1) of the Pakistani constitution reads, "All existing laws shall be brought in conformity with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Quran and sunna ... and no law shall be enacted which is repugnant to such injunctions."
* National law: Sharia has been also incorporated into Islamic national legal codes by decree or legislation. Depending on the country, sharia courts that oversee marriage and other personal law matters are headed either by a secular judge or by an Islamic judge called a qadi. In Saudi Arabia and Iran, supreme religious councils dictate how Islamic law is applied and, to a large extent, have veto power over legislation. In mixed religious-secular systems, such as in Egypt, sharia personal law courts are integrated into a Western-based legal system, and a secular supreme court has the final say, Brown says.
* Sub-national law: Some religiously and ethnically diverse nations that used a federal governmental model--including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Nigeria--allow states or provinces the option of applying aspects of sharia. Because of its adaptability, this federal model for sharia "may well be an important model going forward," Lombardi says.

How is sharia applied to banking and finance laws?

Islamic banking and finance is a rapidly expanding industry that seeks to harmonize modern business practices and traditional religious norms. Classical sharia prohibits riba, the charging of interest. It also condemns excessive profits and requires Muslims to invest only in ventures that are consistent with Islamic principles; for example, investing in a brewery or casino is forbidden. The Islamic finance industry, with estimated assets of $200 billion to $300 billion, represents a small chunk of the global marketplace, but is "already playing a significant role in the financial systems in the Middle East," said John B. Taylor, U.S. under secretary of the Treasury, in a 2004 address. Some Muslim countries, including Malaysia, are making an effort to issue national bonds that comply with sharia principles. And in 2002, eight Muslim countries--Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, Bahrain, and Kuwait--launched a new organization, the Services Board Islamic Financial, to set common standards for Islamic banking.

How does sharia influence modern criminal law?

Many Islamic nations--such as Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, and Yemen--have certain criminal laws that reflect traditional Islamic practice, banning Muslims, for example, from drinking or selling alcohol. Enforcement of these laws is often spotty, and non-Muslims are generally exempted. The vast majority of Islamic nations no longer apply the traditional corporal punishments for violations of specific Quranic criminal laws. These punishments include flogging, amputation, and stoning.

For which crimes does the Quran mandate specific punishments?

Five crimes known as the Hadd offenses, Lombardi says. Because these offenses are mentioned in the Quran, committing them is considered an affront to God. They are:

* Wine-drinking and, by extension, alcohol-drinking, punishable by flogging
* Unlawful sexual intercourse, punishable by flogging for unmarried offenders and stoning to death for adulterers
* False accusation of unlawful sexual intercourse, punishable by flogging
* Theft, punishable by the amputation of a hand
* Highway robbery, punishable by amputation, or execution if the crime results in a homicide.

Where are these laws applied?

Adopting hadd punishments is considered a symbol of a country`s Islamic identity, even if they are rarely carried out, Powers says. Saudi Arabia and Iran have hadd crimes on the books, as do some federal states in Nigeria. However, the most severe punishments--stoning and amputation--are inflicted sparingly, experts say, in part because the Quran insists on strict evidentiary standards. "They aren`t applied in cases of doubt," Powers says. States often go beyond the Quranic safeguards to add new ones. Pakistan has hadd punishments on the books, but it has set up a series of procedural roadblocks to insure they can be enforced by the state only rarely, if ever, Lombardi says. Still, vigilante applications of hadd punishments occur in Pakistan and other parts of the Islamic world.

What happens in the case of apostasy?

The traditional punishment for Islamic apostasy--leaving Islam for another religion or otherwise abandoning the Islamic faith--is death. The best-known modern case involved author Salman Rushdie, whose 1988 novel, "The Satanic Verses," offended many devout Muslims. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, declared Rushdie an apostate and condemned him to death. In 1993, an Egyptian court ruled that the writings of Nasr Abu Zayd, a professor, were evidence of apostasy. The court ordered that Zayd be divorced from his Muslim wife (Zayd now lives with his wife in the Netherlands). The vast majority of Muslim nations no longer prescribe death for apostates. On the other hand, says Powers, "Many modern Islamic nations say they guarantee freedom of religion. But this does not necessarily include the right to speak openly against Islam and act on those ideas." Conversions from Islam to other religions are generally not permitted in Muslim countries.

How is Islamic personal law implemented today?

Islamic principles still form the foundations of the legal code governing marriage, divorce, and inheritance in most Islamic nations. On the other hand, many nations have changed classical sharia restrictions, often to expand the rights of women. Such changes have become a major human rights and women`s rights issue in the Muslim world, pitting reformists--who want to modernize the law and bring it into line with international norms--against Islamists, "who want the restoration of Islamic law lock, stock, and barrel," Powers says.

What are the traditional sharia laws governing personal status issues?

* Marriage: Islamic marriage is a contract between a man and a woman. In the broadest of terms, the husband pledges to support his wife in exchange for her obedience, Brown says. Women can demand certain rights by writing them into the marriage contract, but the man is the head of the family, and traditionally, a wife may not act against her husband`s wishes. (The Quran permits men to use physical force against disobedient wives in some circumstances, Powers says.) Traditional practices still have significant impact on modern law: in Yemen and other nations, a woman cannot work if her husband expressly forbids it. In Syria, a wife can work without her husband`s consent, if she renounces her claim on him for financial support. Under sharia, a Muslim woman cannot be married legally to a non-Muslim man, but a Muslim man can be married to a non-Muslim woman. Marriages can traditionally take place at young ages--in Iran, the age of consent is 13 for females and 15 for males, and younger with a court`s permission. In Yemen, the minimum marriage age is 15.
* Divorce:Under sharia, the husband has the unilateral right to divorce his wife without cause. He can accomplish this by uttering the phrase "I divorce you" three times over the course of three months. If he does divorce her, he must pay her a sum of money agreed to before the wedding in the marriage contract and permit her to keep her dowry, Powers says. Classical sharia lays out very limited conditions under which a woman can divorce a man--he must be infertile at the time of marriage; insane; or have leprosy or another contagious skin disease. Most Islamic nations, including Egypt and Iran, now allow women to sue for divorce for many other reasons, including the failure to provide financial support.
* Polygamy: The Quran gives men the right to have up to four wives. There are some traditional limitations: a man must treat all co-wives equitably, provide them with separate dwellings, and acknowledge in a marriage contract his other spouses, if any. A woman cannot forbid the practice, but can insist on a divorce if her husband takes a second wife. Polygamy remains on the books in most Islamic countries, but some countries limit it through legislation. It is banned in Tunisia and Turkey, though reportedly it is still practiced in some areas of Turkey.
* Custody: In a divorce, the children traditionally belong to the father, but the mother has the right to care for them while they are young, Powers says. The age at which a mother loses custody differs from nation to nation. In Iran, the mother`s custody ends at seven for boys and girls; in Pakistan, it`s seven for boys and puberty for girls. Many nations, however, allow courts to extend the mother`s custody if it is deemed in the child`s interest.
* Inheritance: Mothers, wives, and daughters are guaranteed an inheritance in the case of a man`s death. In the seventh century A.D., when the law was developed, this was a major step forward for women, Powers says. However, sharia also dictates that men inherit twice the share of women because, traditionally, men were responsible for women, Powers says.

Are non-Muslims bound by personal status sharia courts?

Generally speaking, no. Minorities in Muslim nations are generally governed under separate personal-status laws reflecting their own traditions, experts say. In Egypt, for example, Coptic Christians marry under Christian law, and foreigners marry under the laws of their countries of origin, Brown says. Criminal law, which is generally no longer based on sharia, applies to both foreigners and citizens.

-- by Sharon Otterman, associate director, cfr.org

Copyright 2005 |

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Nach Michael Jackson immer noch das Hauptthema in den USA, die Rentenversicherung.
Dazu noch ein demokratischer Abweichler und Bushunterstützer, Ex-Vizepräsidentkandidat Lieberman.

March 15, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The $600 Billion Man
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/15/opinion/15krugman.html

The argument over Social Security privatization isn`t about rival views on how to secure the program`s future - even the administration admits that private accounts would do nothing to help the system`s finances. It`s a debate about what kind of society America should be.

And it`s a debate Republicans appear to be losing, because the public doesn`t share their view that it`s a good idea to expose middle-class families, whose lives have become steadily riskier over the past few decades, to even more risk. As soon as voters started to realize that private accounts would replace traditional Social Security benefits, not add to them, support for privatization collapsed.

But the Republicans` loss may not be the Democrats` gain, for two reasons. One is that some Democrats, in the name of centrism, echo Republican talking points. The other is that claims to be defending average families ring hollow when you defer to corporate interests on votes that matter.

Let`s start with the case of the bogus $600 billion.

In his Jan. 15 radio address, President Bush made a startling claim: "According to the Social Security trustees, waiting just one year adds $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security." The $600 billion cost of each year`s delay has become a standard administration talking point, repeated by countless conservative pundits - who have apparently not looked at what the trustees actually said.

In fact, the trustees never said that waiting a year to "fix" Social Security costs $600 billion. Mr. Bush was grossly misrepresenting the meaning of a technical discussion of accounting issues (it`s on Page 58 of the 2004 trustees` report), which has nothing to do with the cost of delaying changes in the retirement program.

The same type of "infinite horizon" calculation applied to the Bush tax cuts says that their costs rise by $1 trillion a year. That`s not a useful measure of the cost of not repealing those cuts immediately.

So anyone who repeats the $600 billion line is helping to spread a lie. That`s why it was disturbing to read a news report about the deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, who must know better, doing just that at a pro-privatization rally.

But in his latest radio address, Mr. Bush - correctly, this time - attributed the $600 billion figure to a "Democrat leader." He was referring to Senator Joseph Lieberman, who, for some reason, repeated the party line - the Republican party line - the previous Sunday.

My guess is that Mr. Lieberman thought he was being centrist and bipartisan, reaching out to Republicans by showing that he shares their concerns. At a time when the Democrats can say, without exaggeration, that their opponents are making a dishonest case for policies that will increase the risks facing families, Mr. Lieberman gave the administration cover by endorsing its fake numbers.

The push to privatize Social Security will probably fail all the same - but such attempts at accommodation may limit the Democrats` political gain.

Meanwhile, the party missed a big opportunity to make its case against increasing families` risk by acquiescing to the credit card industry`s demand for harsher bankruptcy laws.

As it happens, Mr. Lieberman stated clearly what was wrong with the bankruptcy bill: "It failed to close troubling loopholes that protect wealthy debtors, and yet it deals harshly with average Americans facing unforeseen medical expenses or a sudden military deployment," making it unfair to "working Americans who find themselves in dire financial straits through no fault of their own." A stand against the bill would have merged populism with patriotism, highlighting Democrats` differences with Republicans` vision of America.

But many Democrats chose not to take that stand. And Mr. Lieberman was among them: his vote against the bill was an empty gesture. On the only vote that opponents of the bill had a chance of winning - a motion to cut off further discussion - he sided with the credit card companies. To be fair, so did 13 other Democrats. But none of the others tried to have it both ways.

It isn`t always bad politics to say things that aren`t true and claim to support things you actually oppose: just look at who`s running the country. But Democrats who engage in these tactics right now create big problems for a party that has been given a special chance - maybe its last chance - to remind the country of what Democrats stand for, and why.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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The Independent
The people make a stand over the lies of Lebanon
Tuesday, 15th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=620…


NEVER before have we seen anything like it in Lebanon. Never before have we seen anything like it in the Arab world.

Almost a third of the population of Lebanon was there; they walked many miles through the city to Martyrs’ Square, they arrived by bus from the far north and from Sidon in the south, most of them young, many of them children.

This was not just a game of power. Nor was it, per se, a democratic revolution. It was an insurrection by the people against the lies and corruption of government as well as the foreign control they have lived under for so many decades.

Yes, they wanted the Syrian army out - they are leaving anyway - but they also wanted President Lahoud of Lebanon to resign. They wanted no more compliant Lebanese governments led by weak old men; and most of them - to tell from the lapel badges they wore - were demanding the truth about the murder of the former premier Rafik Hariri on 14 February.

There was an ocean of Lebanese banners. And never before had those flags, used with such cynicism and so much derision in the past, appeared so magnificent. It wasn’t just the green cedar tree in the centre - always so refreshing after the black stars and governessy eagles that grace the flags of so many Arab regimes - but the fact that it was raised in protest at dishonesty and murder. It was the young of Lebanon, so often courted by the elderly and guilty men of this country, who were using their flag to get rid of them.

Up in the palace at Baabda, President Lahoud and his entourage seem as isolated from their country’s mood as the Americans and their appointees in the Baghdad "green zone" do from Iraq’s tragedy. Indeed, from the Baabda "green zone", there had emerged one of those spectacularly inappropriate statements that only exiled presidents usually make. "Any small firecracker could lead to a catastrophe," President Lahoud said.

But what did this mean? Was it a threat? A warning? Did he know something the Leban-ese did not? Or was he merely showing his concern for the million who want him to step down - or, in the words of Lebanon’s now-returned opposition leader Walid Jumblatt, to leave with the Syrians.

But no, it turned out he feared that Hariri’s murderers might throw a hand-grenade into the crowd. "What will become of our children?" he asked.

But it was for their children that so many hundreds of thousands of Lebanese protested yesterday. And one could not fail to notice so many hopeful aspects of their demonstration. They were happy and smiling and laughing; some even brought picnics or marched to trumpets and drums.

Many were the children whose parents had sent them abroad to be educated in Geneva, London or New York in the dark years of the civil war, returned now and anxious to rid themselves of the sectarian past. The Lebanese troops who stood around the square pointedly wore their rifles reversed over their shoulders, barrels pointed to the ground. They were not going to harm their countrymen.

Of course, there were some wearying signs: Christians tended to keep to the east of Martyrs’ Square and Muslims to the west - their ethnic locations when the square was the civil war front line

There was a large and cruel cartoon of the Shia Hizbollah leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, one of his arms tugged by Lebanon, the other by Syria, with the words "Make up your mind!" written above. And yet that is the question all Lebanon is asking. For if Nasrallah remains loyal to Syria, he will cut off much of the Shia community from their fellow citizens.

There was a clutch of secondary speakers at the rally: Nayla Mouawad, widow of the assassinated president Rene Mouawad, and old Mikhail Dagher and the smart opposition MP Ghenura Jaloul who vainly tried to present Mr Lahoud with opposition demands last week. But Mr Jumblatt stayed away in his Moukhtara castle, unwilling to risk assassination on the road to Beirut. Hariri’s two sons had already fled the country.

Now all await the United Nations’ detailed report on Hariri’s killing. Who did it? That was the question they were asking yesterday in their tens of thousands. And still Mr Lahoud remains silent.

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This war needs the right general

With a US trusty for president, the World Bank won`t fight poverty
Joseph Stiglitz
Tuesday March 15, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1437702,00.ht…

Guardian
James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, has announced his intention to leave, and the search is on for a new head of the world`s most important multilateral organisation promoting development. The choice is especially important now, when poverty in developing countries is finally being recognised as our greatest problem and challenge.

The World Bank`s designation as a "bank" understates its importance and its multifaceted roles. It does lend money to countries to undertake a variety of projects, and to help them through crises (such as the $10bn it provided to South Korea in 1997-1998). It has been, and is, playing a vital role in global post-conflict reconstruction.

But the bank also provides grants and low-interest loans to the poorest countries, particularly for education and health, and advises these countries on development strategies. It has often joined with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in strong-arming countries into accepting this "advice": unless they do, they will not only be cut off by the IMF and the World Bank, but also by other donors, and capital markets will be discouraged from providing funds.

Sometimes - its critics often say - the advice provided by the IMF and the World Bank is misguided. This was certainly true in the 80s and early 90s, when rightwing ideology dominated, producing a one-size-fits-all prescription entailing privatisation, liberalisation, and macroeconomic stability (price stability), with little attention to employment, equity or the environment.

The term "bank" is a misnomer in a second sense: while the World Bank refers to its members as "shareholders", it is hardly a private bank. The World Bank is a global public institution. But, while the G7 countries, which dominate voting at the bank, all declare their commitment to democracy and good governance there is a yawning gap between what they preach and what they practice.

Indeed, the entire process of choosing these international institutions` leaders is an anachronism that undermines their effectiveness and makes a mockery of the G7 commitment to democracy. This process, established 60 years ago, is framed by an agreement that an American would lead the World Bank and a European would lead the IMF. The US president would choose the bank`s head, and Europe would collectively decide on the IMF leader, with the understanding that the other side would exercise its veto only if a candidate were totally unacceptable.

Within the US, all major presidential appointments must be ratified by the Senate; even if rejections are rare, the vetting process is important, for the president knows that he can go only so far. But the presidency of the World Bank is a rare presidential plum - an appointment that is not subject even to congressional hearings.

How can advice on democratic reforms be taken seriously when the institutions that offer it do not subscribe to the same standards of openness, transparency and participation that they advocate? Why should the search for Wolfensohn`s successor be limited to an American? Why is the search process going on behind closed doors?

The two names that have been floated so far are particularly disturbing. To put it bluntly, consideration of the US assistant defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz or former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carleton Fiorina has been highly controversial. Even if convention allows the American president to appoint the World Bank`s head, the organisation`s success depends on the confidence of others. Neither Wolfowitz nor Fiorina has any training or experience in economic development or financial markets.

There are some absolutely first-rate individuals who could step into the job, people with a command of economic development, intellect and personal integrity. Such potential candidates include former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, a Yale PhD who now teaches there and has been strongly supported in an editorial in the Financial Times; Arminio Fraga, a Princeton PhD and former head of Brazil`s central bank; and Kemal Dervis, a former World Bank vice-president who has successfully managed one of Turkey`s crises as finance minister.

It is time that the G7 countries back up their democratic rhetoric with action. Many stood up to the US as it pushed for the war in Iraq. They were right to be sceptical about US claims of imminent danger from weapons of mass destruction.

What is at stake here is no less important: the lives and wellbeing of billions in developing countries depend on a global war on poverty. Choosing the right general in that war will not assure victory, but choosing the wrong one surely increases the chances of failure.

© Joseph Stiglitz is professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel prize winner

Project Syndicate

www.project-syndicate.org
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 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, March 15, 2005

Citizenship Requested for Sistani
Kurdish-Shiite-Sunni Negotiations

Al-Zaman The provincial council of Najaf, now dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, requested that the first act of the Iraqi parliament once it is seated on March 16 be to grant Iraqi citizenship to Grand Ayatollah Alis Sistani. Sistani`s family immigrated to Iraq from Iran and settled in Najaf about a century ago, the paper claims, but could never acquire citizenship. The vice-chairman of the Najaf body, Shaikh Khalid al-Nu`mani, requested that the parliament also give citizenship to Bashir Najafi (a Pakistani) and Ishaq Fayyad (an Afghan).

Thousands demonstrated in Najaf on Monday, and hundreds in Baghdad, against the celebratory funeral held in Jordan for the suicide bomber responsible for the Hilla atrocity about a week ago. The crowd in Baghdad invaded the Jordan embassy

Al-Zaman cites Kurdish sources as saying that the key obstacle to a Kurdish/Shiite coalition government is the issue of Kirkuk, and says that a mood of pessimism has settled over the Kurdish negotiators. The Kurds want an up-front admission that Kirkuk belongs to Kurdistan, which the United Iraqi Alliance is unwilling to give.
Jalal Talabani is said to have indicated that the Kurdish paramilitary, the Peshmerga, is also an obstacle to agreement. The Kurds want to incorporate it into the Iraqi army but to have it be the only troops on Kurdistan soil.

The Kurds and Shiites have agreed to open parliament on March 16 even if they have not reached an agreement by then.

The Sunni Arabs who ran for parliament, including Ghazi al-Yawir, have formed a committee to push for Sunni Arab representation in the new cabinet and on the constituent assembly that drafts the new constitution.

Iyad Allawi indicated that he would not serve in the new government, but was preparing to form a bloc of oppositional MPs in the new parliament.

posted by Juan @ 3/15/2005 06:30:00 AM

Halliburton Over Charges US

Halliburton appears to have charged the US government $27 million to deliver $84,000 worth of fuel to Iraq. Everywhere you dig there are bodies.

The NYT says that Halliburton over-charged the US government $108 million.

posted by Juan @ 3/15/2005 06:21:00 AM

Dueling Demonstrations in Lebanon

In the duel of the demonstrations in Lebanon, the political opposition (a coalition of Christians, Druze and some Sunni Arabs), brought out hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in downtown Beirut on Monday, the one-month anniversary of the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafiq al-Hariri.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says there had been a demonstration of 200,000 to 300,000 called by Hizbullah at the southern city of Nabatiyeh Sunday, this one made up largely of pro-Syrian Shiites. Reuters reported on this rally, but it was not widely covered in the US. At the Nabatiyeh demonstration, protesters held up placards saying "US Out!", mocking the Lebanese opposition slogan of "Syria Out!"

Lebanon isn`t that big a country-- the total population is a little less than 4 million. So by now most everybody must have been involved in a demonstration.

The country appears deeply divided over how much presence Syria should have in Lebanon, and on where to place the blame for the death of former PM Hariri. a recent scientific poll by Zogby International, half of Maronites and Druze blame Syria for Hariri`s death. Only 14% of Shiites do, while 70% of Shiites blame the US and Israel. Shiites are probably over 40 percent of the Lebanese population, while Maronites are probably only about 20 percent (Lebanon may now be as much as 70 percent Muslim if Druze are counted in that group).

The spectacle of over half a million protesters coming out in Beirut while 200,000 to 300,000 came out on the other side in Nabatiya in the South the day before is worrisome, given Lebanon`s recent history of sectarian violence.

posted by Juan @ [url3/15/2005 06:08:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/dueling-demonstrations-in-lebanon-in.html[/url]

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THE WORLD
Rice Reshaping Foreign Policy
The secretary of State is displaying an affinity for quick action and a dislike for nuanced talk.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-rice15m…

March 15, 2005

WASHINGTON — Condoleezza Rice began her term as secretary of State with a tour of Europe and the Middle East last month that showed off her skills as a fence mender. The weeks that followed have revealed another side of her style.

After clashing with the Egyptians, Rice canceled a visit to Cairo. Amid tensions with the Canadians days later, she abruptly postponed a trip to Ottawa. She recalled the U.S. ambassador to Syria within 24 hours of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, as accusations of Syrian involvement swirled.

And Rice has spoken publicly in blunt terms rarely heard from her predecessor, Colin L. Powell. "States that don`t recognize that the Middle East is changing, and, indeed, try to halt that change … need to be isolated and condemned," she said in a recent PBS interview.

The tough new tone is just one of the changes that have been occurring in Foggy Bottom, the Washington neighborhood that is home to the department, since President Bush`s former national security advisor was sworn in Jan. 26.

Among other changes, Rice has begun assembling an inner circle that will assert close control over key diplomatic issues. She also is seeking to speed decision making and action. Above all, she is trying to reshape an administration`s foreign policy that has had many voices so that it has just one — that of Bush, her boss and confidant.

"We`re not even two months into the second term, and it does appear that there`s a marked shift in style," said Michele Dunn, a Middle East expert who worked at the National Security Council during the first Bush term and earlier at the State Department.

Because of Bush`s strong support, many predict Rice will be an unusually powerful secretary. She is likely to face less competition in influencing foreign policy from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is focusing on internal Pentagon reform.

At the same time, Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to continue to wield major, if often unseen, influence. Last week, a longtime Cheney ally, State Department arms control chief John R. Bolton, was nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Rice, who this week embarks on a trip to Asia that will include stops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Japan, China and South Korea, has only begun to make changes in the department. Although none of her newly appointed secretaries are yet at their posts, some differences from her predecessor are already visible.

In his four years, Powell often felt his role was diplomatic "damage control," in the words of one former top aide — restoring relationships strained by clashes over Iraq and other issues. Powell`s public language was shaded with nuance, and he often stressed both sides of issues.

"He was always charisma and harmony," said one State Department official who, like others who shared the same views, declined to be identified. "If there was a tough message to deliver, he would often deliver it in private, so that harmony was the main vibe in public."

The change in approach comes at the beginning of a second term that Bush aides hope will be focused less on war and more on diplomacy, if in a sometimes blunt form. With Iraqis preoccupied with building a government and the war on terrorism getting less public attention in the United States, the administration hopes it will have more time to focus its energy on building a record for Bush as an advocate of democracy rather than as a "war president."

During her tour of Europe and the Middle East in the opening days of her tenure, Rice showed that she could charm the French and the Germans. But she also demonstrated that, like Bush, she was willing to deliver a message in public that the other side might not like.

In February during an appearance with the Egyptian foreign minister in Washington, Rice offended many Egyptians by saying the United States had "very strong concerns" over the jailing of opposition leader Ayman Nour. Two weeks later, Rice called off her trip to Cairo because of Nour and what the Bush administration views as the Egyptian government`s sluggish efforts to push for democratic reform in the region. Under international pressure, the Egyptians released Nour on bail Saturday.

And she has put off a visit to Ottawa amid friction over Canada`s decision last month not to join the U.S. missile defense program. U.S. officials blamed a "scheduling conflict," but the move was widely read in Canada as a sign of Rice`s unhappiness with the missile decision.

Rice has shown that "she`s comfortable delivering a tough message," said Dunn, the former NSC official. "She is willing to pay the price of creating an uncomfortable situation if it`s going to advance the policy agenda."

Dunn speculated that Rice was ready to take such strong stands because the secretary of State was certain Bush would agree with them. Although many Cabinet officials hesitate to be blunt for fear the boss might have a different view, Rice is more confident.

"She knows Bush`s mind," Dunn said.

Rice`s directness has been a hit with conservatives who believe State Department officials too often paper over differences when they need to get tough.

Rice`s bluntness with the Egyptians was "very unusual, and very refreshing," said Danielle Pletka, a onetime aide to former Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and now a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

"Diplomats are always trying to sweeten the message," Pletka said. "In the Middle East, they take that as a sign that the Americans are willing to put up with what they`re doing."

With Rice echoing Bush`s message, it will gain added force around the world, diplomats say.

With Bush and Rice, there is a similarity of "tone and words and even facial expression that is remarkable," said the former top aide to Powell. "I`ve never been able to figure out whether she`s picking up on his thoughts or the other way around. But the message is identical."

But the former aide said he worried that if the president and secretary of State both are delivering tough messages, the job of maintaining relationships would be left to diplomats who have less clout.

"You could begin to injure and alienate your friends around the world more and more often," making it tough to continue cooperative efforts, he said.

And some former department officials said it would be harmful if the new similarity in thinking between top State and White House officials meant that Bush heard fewer opinions on complex foreign policy issues in internal meetings, as he did when Powell was secretary.

There are already signs that Rice will put more decision making on key issues in the hands of her inner circle, most of whom work on the seventh floor of the State Department building.

Powell, with long experience managing vast U.S. military bureaucracies, believed in empowering the chain of command at the department to solve diplomatic problems. He described them as "field commanders."

Rice is returning to the management model used by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who held the post under President George H.W. Bush. Baker focused on a handful of top issues, hoping to generate diplomatic victories and favorable headlines, while leaving other matters to the staff.

Rice`s inner circle includes three veteran diplomats who have worked closely with her and are generally seen as pragmatic internationalists. They are Deputy Secretary Robert B. Zoellick, former U.S. trade representative; R. Nicholas Burns, recently the U.S. ambassador to NATO; and Philip D. Zelikow, a lawyer, diplomat and historian who was staff director of the Sept. 11 commission.

Rice wants to accelerate the pace of the department`s work. One sign: Her office issued guidelines to the staff that reports and briefing papers headed for her inbox be as succinct as possible.

Rice and the rest of the administration`s foreign policy team already appear agile.

Rice`s public pressure on the Egyptians over the jailing of lawmaker Nour was notably quick. When Egyptian officials jailed democracy advocate Saad Eddin Ibrahim in 2000, U.S. officials were unhappy but applied only limited pressure over three years, then cut off $130 million in aid to Egypt. Ibrahim was acquitted in 2003.

After the assassination of Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, Rice recalled the U.S. ambassador to Syria and began leading an international campaign to force withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

"I think they are trying to become more nimble," a recently departed official said. "They seem to be trying to change the whole pace."

With help from a Rice State Department, some administration officials say, they hope Bush will move into his second term much as Ronald Reagan did. In his first four years, Reagan faced criticism from Europe that he was a cowboy and warmonger. Many saw him differently in the second, when he held a series of summits with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and signed deals limiting nuclear arsenals.

The first important tests for Rice and the rest of the administration foreign policy team will come this summer with elections in Lebanon, progress toward a new government in Iraq and a planned Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. "It would be huge for them," said a senior House GOP aide. "But we`re 10 car bombs away from civil war in Lebanon. So it`s a big, big if."




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Das Märchen von den gut ausgebildeten irakischen Soldaten und Polizisten.

latimes.com

THE WORLD

Strength of Iraqi Forces Questioned
A government report says the number of soldiers and police in the field has been inflated.
By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-trai…

March 15, 2005

WASHINGTON — U.S. commanders and Bush administration officials are overstating the number of Iraqi security forces on duty, providing an inaccurate picture about the training mission that is the U.S. military`s exit strategy for Iraq, a government audit agency said Monday.

The Pentagon in its latest figures said 142,000 Iraqis had been trained as police and soldiers. But the Government Accountability Office said those figures include tens of thousands of Iraqi policemen who had left their jobs without explanation.

The GAO also said the State Department six months ago stopped providing government auditors with information about the number of Iraqi troops who have been issued flak vests, weapons and communications equipment.

The unreliability of the data coming from Baghdad makes it difficult to provide an accurate accounting of the billions of dollars the U.S. is spending to train and equip Iraq`s army and police force, a GAO official told a congressional committee Monday.

"Without reliable information, Congress may find it difficult to judge how federal funds are achieving the goal of transferring security responsibilities to the Iraqis," Joseph A. Christoff, the GAO`s director of international affairs and trade, told the House Government Reform subcommittee on international relations.

Although the Defense Department has conducted several internal evaluations of the U.S. training mission in Iraq, the GAO is the first government agency to challenge the figures the Pentagon uses to chart the progress of Iraqi troops.

Specifically, the GAO criticized the Pentagon`s decision to include in its totals of trained and equipped Iraqi troops the "tens of thousands" of police officers who are absent without leave.

The most recent Pentagon figures show that nearly 82,000 Iraqis have undergone U.S. police training.

"If you are reporting AWOLs in your numbers, I think there`s some inaccuracy in your reporting," Christoff said after the hearing.

The progress of the mission has become a politically charged issue, with Democrats in Congress charging that the administration is misrepresenting the number of trained Iraqis in the field.

During confirmation hearings for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, senators challenged her assertion that the Pentagon had trained more than 120,000 Iraqi policemen and soldiers.

That number, they said, included more than 50,000 police officers who were given as little as three weeks of basic training.

"Time and again this administration has tried to leave the American people with the impression that Iraq has well over 100,000 fully trained, fully competent military police and personnel. And that is simply not true," Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Rice. "We`re months, probably years away from reaching our target goal."

At Monday`s hearing, Defense Department officials defended the practice of including in the official totals policemen who had gone AWOL. Unlike Iraqi soldiers, they said, police officers do not sleep in barracks and are not closely tracked by the Interior Ministry.

Moreover, officials said, policemen often leave their units when they are paid and return to their hometowns to ensure that the money gets to their families.

For these reasons, officials said, the total figures for Iraqi policemen are less accurate than the numbers for Iraqi soldiers.

"It`s a less precise accounting, and that`s the nature of the business we`re in," said the Pentagon`s Rear Adm. William D. Sullivan.

The total number of trained and equipped policemen "doesn`t represent the numbers that are actually in the field," he said.

According to Pentagon figures, more than 142,000 soldiers and policemen have been trained and equipped, with a goal of 271,000 trained by July 2006.

Since Iraq`s elections in January, the Pentagon has made the training of Iraqi forces the focus of U.S. military efforts, and defense officials hope that by the end of the year local troops will be leading the fight against insurgents in most parts of the country.

The U.S. has spent $5.8 billion training and equipping Iraqi forces since April 2003, and this week the House of Representatives is expected to vote on a supplemental budget request that includes an additional $5.7 billion devoted to the training.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Doris Bersing celebrates at a San Francisco City Hall rally hours after the ruling by Judge
Richard Kramer that found the state`s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional.
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[urlJudge strikes down ban on same-sex marriage / THE RULING: Law violated `basic human right`]http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/15/MNG8VBPILS1.DTL[/url]
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[urlJoy In The Castro]http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/15/MNG8VBPILQ1.DTL[/url]
Castro ist der Stadtteil in San Francisco, in dem die meisten Schwulen leben oder lebten.
In den 80ern und 90ern als das große Sterben in der Gaycommunity die Anzahl der Schwulen stark dezimierte und besonders während der Neweconomicblase sind viele der `alten` Häuser in Castro an die Yuppies verkauft worden, teilweise renoviert worden und heute lebt dort meist gehobener Mittelstand.
Empfehlenswert ist ein Spaziergang im Frühling von den Twin Peaks herunter über die Treppen und durch die Hinterhöfe der alten zumeist Holzhäusern zu der Dolores Mission.
Weiter zur Bay durch den Mission Bezirk ist kein so empfehlenswerter Weg.

Judge is Catholic and Republican -- `a brilliant guy`
- Stacy Finz, Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/15/M…
If things get really tough, Judge Richard Kramer can always break out his old flak jacket.

Five years ago, Kramer, who ruled Monday that the state law against same- sex marriage was unconstitutional, sat on the San Francisco Superior Court bench wearing a bulletproof vest during a gang trial.

"It was a very high-profile, scary case," said Joe O`Sullivan, the defense attorney in the trial. Both the judge and the prosecutor had received threats, witnesses had been killed and the jury was jittery, but Kramer commanded the courtroom, according to O`Sullivan. And no one ever saw him sweat.

"He`s a brilliant guy," O`Sullivan said. "I was fighting with him all the time in that case and most of the time I think he was wrong. But he was fair and tried to do the right thing. ... In fact, if I saw him in a restaurant, I`d shake his hand."

The native of Brookline, Mass., earned his law degree at the University of Southern California and practiced civil law in San Francisco before then- Gov. Pete Wilson named him to the bench. Over the years, the 57-year-old Roman Catholic and registered Republican has gained a reputation for being compassionate, respectful and unbiased.

In one survey of judges, an attorney wrote of Kramer, "He has a social worker attitude. He`s interested in the defendant, where he went to school, how old he is. He wants the whole picture."

As a civil judge, Kramer handled such high-profile cases as the settlement talks in the fight over Barry Bonds` record-breaking 73rd home run ball. San Francisco jurors may remember him best for his efforts to get them free parking at the Hall of Justice.

E-mail the writers at [e-mail] and [e-mail].

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Latest Fatality: Mar 14, 2005
Mar.05: 21

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

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AWOL in America: Why Over 5,500 U.S. Soldiers Discharged Themselves
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/15/1453256" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/15/1453256

Tuesday, March 15th, 2005

Show mp3
[urlWatch 256k stream]http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2005/march/video/dnB20050315a.rm&proto=rtsp&start=09:15[/url]

The Pentagon has estimated that since the start of the current conflict in Iraq, more than 5,500 U.S. military personnel have deserted. We speak with journalist Kathy Dobie who wrote the cover story for this month`s issue of Harper`s magazine titled "AWOL in America: When Desertion is the Only Option." Dobie says, "Some of them leave because they`re unwilling to kill, some because of family and personal problems and some because of the unjust recruiting process." [includes rush transcript]

"AWOL, French Leave, the Grand Bounce, jumping ship, going over the hill-in every country, in every age, whenever and wherever there has been a military, there have been soldiers discharging themselves from the ranks. The Pentagon has estimated that since the start of the current conflict in Iraq, more than 5,500 U.S. military personnel have deserted, and yet we know the stories of only a unique handful, all whom have publicly stated their opposition to the war in Iraq, and some of whom have fled to Canada. The Vietnam war casts a long shadow, distorting our image of the deserter; four soldiers have gone over the Canadian border, looking for the safe haven of the Vietnam years, which no longer exists: there are no open arms for such refugees and almost no possibility of obtaining legal status. We imagine 5,500 conscientious objectors to a bloody quagmire, soldiers like Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, who strongly and eloquently protested the Iraq war, having actually served there and witnessed civilians killed and prisoners abused, and who was subsequently court-martialed, found guilty of desertion, and given a year in prison. But deserters rarely leave for purely political reasons. They usually just quietly return home and hope no one notices."

That is from the cover story of this month`s issue of Harper`s magazine titled "AWOL in America: When Desertion is the Only Option." It is written by journalist and author Kathy Dobie - she joins us today in our firehouse studio

* Kathy Dobie, she wrote the cover story for Harper`s magazine titled "AWOL in America: When Desertion is the Only Option."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: It is called “AWOL in America: When Desertion is the Only Option.” It is written by journalist and author Kathy Dobie. She joins us today in our firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Kathy.

KATHY DOBIE: Good to be here, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: A very interesting piece that you`ve done in Harper’s. Can you talk about the reason that you started to look into this? What started the story? And then some of the people you talked to.

KATHY DOBIE: Well, what I had done is seen two news clips. One of them was in a New Jersey paper, and that clip talked about a 21-year-old actually sneaking through a window of a house, being stopped by the cops, and when they found out that it was the window of his own house, and they also found out that he had deserted from the army. And the second story was a 17-year-old who had had a car accident in a small town in Massachusetts, and the police showed up again. They ran his driver`s license and found out he had deserted from basic training in Fort Benning. So, those two stories suggested to me that there were people leaving that nobody was coming after, and that they were simply leaving and going home. So, at that point, I wanted to know why they were leaving. The stories of the conscientious objectors seem to be a handful if 5,500 people were leaving. So, that`s how it started. It started with those two news clips, and then to the G.I. Rights Hotline. They began slowly to connect me to soldiers who had left, and the vast majority do not leave because they have problems with this war, in particular. The vast majority leave well before they even get to combat, and I don`t even think they`re thinking about combat. What they`re thinking about is the training, or they`re thinking about their families. And I think I interviewed probably about a dozen soldiers and their families and then, of course, the G.I. Rights Hotline has talked to hundreds and hundreds at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about Jeremiah Adler.

KATHY DOBIE: Jeremiah grew up in a vegetarian, pacifist household in Portland, Oregon. And his -- he decided that he wanted to join the military for a couple of reasons. One, he really wanted a kind of ritual into manhood. He wanted to prove his toughness. He also thought if he got into the military as a pacifist, as a thinker, that he could change it from the inside. He took a year convincing his family and his community there that this was the right thing for him to do. He gets to Fort Benning and within three days, he is writing letters home saying you have to get me out of here. Jeremiah is a really interesting case. In some ways he is like a lot of the soldiers that I have met. It’s that they have no idea what basic training is like. They`re joining and thinking that it is going to be a physical challenge, a mental challenge. They actually do not think much about the fact that they’re going to be trained to be killed; and that was Jeremiah -- Jeremiah was shocked when he got there, the amount of talk about the joys of killing, the pleasures of killing, which is part of the whole process that they use to desensitize these guys. And Jeremiah went through many things, including pretending he was gay, to get out and finally he just escaped through the woods one night.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what his -- what the officials in charge, his superiors at the base, said from when he first started. What were they telling these grunts?

KATHY DOBIE: Well, I think it was on the second day. This is orientation week, you have to realize. They are not even in basic training yet, and they`re being told this. On the second day, a sergeant addressed the 110 recruits and said that “a lot of people asked me why I joined the Army ten years ago. Did I join it for the money? Did I join it for the women? Did I join it for the educational benefits?” And he said, “No, I joined it to shoot mother [beep].” At that point, everybody started screaming and yelling, you know, and cheering in that room, and Jeremiah at that point felt, “I can’t be here.” And then when he actually went to leave, he went to his commanding officer. Now an interesting thing I have to say here is most guys before they go AWOL ask for help. I think that is very important. They go to the military chaplain, they go to their C.O., they go to their military psychiatrist, and they ask to --they ask for help with their family problems, personal problems, financial problems. And Jeremiah went to his C.O. and said, “I can`t do this. I cannot kill.” And his C.O. actually said to him that he wished it were 100 years ago, because he could shoot him right then and there.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what did he do?

KATHY DOBIE: Jeremiah, at that point, he pretended he was -- he decided to pretend he was gay. He and another recruit got together and went to the drill sergeants and said that they had been caught kissing. And they acted very panicky about the whole thing. He said it was the best acting job of his life. The drill sergeants believed them, but they still wouldn’t release them.

AMY GOODMAN: And so?

KATHY DOBIE: Jeremiah escaped. He waited, 11:00 at night, he got another recruit to not sound the alarm for an hour, and he and two recruits went out through the woods. They were lost in those woods for about five hours, because they have no idea where they are. They bring you into recruiting 11:00, 12:00 at night, so you are completely disoriented and cut off from the world. So he had no idea how to get out. But they did get out. And then he flew home to Portland, Oregon, and then after he was dropped from the rolls, he turned himself in to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and he was given an other than honorable discharge.

AMY GOODMAN: We`re talking to Kathy Dobie. She wrote the cover story of Harper’s magazine, “AWOL in America: When Desertion is the Only Option.” Where is Jeremiah today?

KATHY DOBIE: He is in Germany. He is actually working for a group over there that’s counseling soldiers who are going AWOL. And then he is going to do some traveling, and then he is coming back, and he’s going to attend the University of Oregon.

AMY GOODMAN: How does it work? Can you talk about the recruiting process?

KATHY DOBIE: The recruiters completely integrate themselves into a life of a high school and a community. They will volunteer color guards for home – you know, for team games. They remember Secretaries` Day. They get close to the Boy Scouts leader. They are there in your life day in and day out. Now, recruiters work tremendously long hours and they have a quota. The G.I. Rights Hotline has heard many stories of recruiters misrepresenting the military and telling lies. I would say that half of the guys I talked to, there was a lie a recruiter told them that led them later to deserting. I’m going to give you an example. There was a kid called Jared in Georgia, a senior in high school. He is recruited. The recruiter meets his family, has dinner with his family, goes to his graduation. He becomes close to them. He tells this kid and his mother and stepfather that Jared will not be sent to Iraq, not to worry about it, that he is going to be stationed close to home, in fact, Kentucky. They believed him. Even though we were at war in Iraq, they believed him. They believed him because he was in uniform. They believed him because they’d had him over for dinner. They didn`t see any reason why this representative of the military and the U.S. government would lie to them. Jared goes into – he was a Marine. He goes into boot camp, makes it through that. He goes to infantry school. When he gets to his M.O.S. school, military occupational specialty, he finds out that his unit is being sent to Fallujah. So, not only has he been lied to, but at that point, he gets an injury, and he is told to take aspirin for it. And a good friend of his, who had fallen into a deep depression and tried to get help, was put into -- they put them into these orange traffic vests, and they have to wear those day in and day out, and they are always accompanied by two marines or two soldiers, and they`re often harassed by the drill sergeants. You know, “Uh-oh, here comes a crazy person. Watch out, watch out.” So, when his mother and sister said to him, “Jared, you have got to talk to somebody. Talk to somebody there,” his reply to that was, “Nobody`s interested. Nobody cares here.” So, when he was home on leave, he never went back. And that`s just one of the lies. And the betrayal they feel when they finally get into what is very tough training and that they may go to combat, and the unit that they’re fighting with and for and may die with is actually part of this unit that has lied to them, is very intense. I don`t think anything in civilian life can compare to it.

AMY GOODMAN: ”AWOL in America: When Desertion is the Only Option.” Kathy Dobie is our guest. She wrote the piece for Harper’s magazine. When we come back, we`ll also be joined by two people who are AWOL. One is willing to be identified. One is not.

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Tuesday, March 15, 2005
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Tuesday, March 15, 2005

There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: bring `em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
- George W. Bush, July 2, 2003

Bring ‘em on: Kurdish cameraman for satellite channel KurdSat killed by gunmen in northern Iraq. Four civilians wounded by suicide car bomb in Youssifiyah. Five bodyguards of the Health Ministry’s director general wounded by roadside bomb. Iraqi army captain assassinated by gunmen in Abu Ghraib district.

Bring ‘em on: One child killed and four people, including one policeman, wounded in suicide bomb attack in northeastern Baghdad that also killed the bomber.

Bring ‘em on: Three civilians, a woman and two children, inadvertently killed, and two others wounded, in crossfire when a US fired on suspected gunmen in Mosul. Five insurgents killed in the same incident. (Update on incident reported yesterday.)

Bring ‘em on: At least four people wounded in car bombing near Sunni mosque in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One US Marine killed in action in Al Anbar province.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in suicide bombing in Telafar.

Bring ‘em on: Four civilians killed, at least seven wounded, including two police officers, in car bombing on Baghdad’s airport road. Unconfirmed reports indicate that some US troops were also wounded and that when additional US troops arrived to evacuate the wounded, a second car bomb exploded, wounding more US soldiers.

Vehicle accident: One US soldier killed in vehicle accident in Ramadi.

Potemkin government: Kurdish and Shiite leaders agreed Monday to convene Iraq`s new parliament this week even if they fail to iron out some wrinkles in their deal to form a coalition government.

The Shiite clergy-backed United Iraqi Alliance and a Kurdish coalition, which won the two biggest blocks of seats in Jan. 30 elections, agreed last week to form a coalition government with Islamic Dawa party leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister. In return, Jalal Talabani will become Iraq`s first Kurdish president.

Frustration: With Iraqis increasingly concerned about a security vacuum, the man who is expected to become the next prime minister on Saturday defended the winning blocs, which have not formed a government nearly six weeks after millions of people risked their lives to vote.

In an interview, Ibrahim Jafari, the nominee of the slate that won the most votes in the Jan. 30 election, said it could take two more weeks to close a deal.

Shopkeeper Mohammed Saddoun stood in front of his storefront grocery last week with several friends, lamenting the delay.

"I am not only frustrated, I am ready to burst with anger," Saddoun said. "We put our souls in the … palms of our hands and went to the ballot centers. You remember the threats there were that they would kill people who voted.

"Well, if they cannot form a government, then I think they are not qualified to manage the country`s affairs. This vacuum of power increases the number of terrorist acts, it opens the way for the terrorists."

Into the sewer: With hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars pledged to overhaul Baghdad`s infrastructure, city officials promise a clean and shiny capital. But so far the battered and obsolete infrastructure works little better, and in some cases far worse, than it did under Hussein. Residents wonder whether the American money has gone into the sewer instead of the sewer system.

"People are frustrated," said Abdul Munem Adhem of Baghdad`s Sadr City neighborhood, which even on dry days has a fair bit of raw sewage splashing around. "They see the municipal authorities doing nothing. They know no one`s going to solve the problems because the authorities just don`t work."

Kirkuk disputes: Mr. Ahmed`s plight encapsulates the growing struggle over Kirkuk, a drab city of 700,000 on the windswept northern plains. Efforts to restore Kurds to their jobs and property without disenfranchising Arabs are fraught with the possibility of igniting a civil war. The debate has so inflamed passions that Kurdish and Shiite Arab negotiators trying to form a coalition government in Baghdad may have to put off any real decision on Kirkuk`s future.

In April 2004, the Americans created the Iraqi Property Claims Commission to rule on restitution. By the end of 2004, the commission had received 10,044 claims from Kirkuk`s province, Tamin. The commission`s statistics show that judges have decided only 25 cases.

The head of the commission said in an interview that only two judges, both Kurds, were working on cases in Kirkuk. The commission has been unable to assign more judges because Kurdish political parties insist that only Kurds review the claims, limiting the number of qualified people, said the commission head, who declined to be identified by name because one colleague had been assassinated and another kidnapped.

Anti-Jordanian demonstration: The Jordanian Embassy was broken into and its flag torn down yesterday as thousands of Shiites protested after hearing reports that relatives of an alleged Jordanian suicide bomber who killed 125 people celebrated him as a martyr.

Hundreds protested in Baghdad, and thousands took to the streets of Najaf, spiritual home of the Shiites.

Anti-Jordanian sentiment has spread since Iraqis read newspaper reports that Raid al-Banna blew himself up beside people lining up for jobs in the Shiite town of Hillah on Feb. 28 in the single bloodiest attack in postwar Iraq.

New viceroy: President Bush has named Zalmay Khalilzad, the ambassador to Afghanistan and a long-time national security adviser, as the new US ambassador to Baghdad, administration officials announced Thursday.

Khalilzad, an Afghan-American citizen, will replace John Negroponte, who is said to have found the job so “aggravating” he left after less than a year there. Last month, Bush named Negroponte as America’s first director of National Intelligence.

Shrinking coalition: The first group of the Ukrainian peacekeepers stationed in Iraq is expected to return to Ukraine on Tuesday under the program to cut down the Ukrainian contingent in that country.

Interfax earlier reported, citing the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, that about 140 Ukrainian servicemen are expected to arrive in Mykolayiv on two defense ministry planes later on Tuesday.


The Balance Sheet

Profit: Pentagon auditors have questioned more than $108 million in costs claimed by Halliburton on its $875 million contract to provide fuel in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, including a payment of $27.5 million to transport $82,000 worth of propane, according to records released yesterday.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency also faulted Halliburton subsidiary KBR for failing to provide the records necessary to evaluate spending on the contract. The data KBR gave the auditors didn`t match the company`s internal accounting records, the agency said.

Loss: Michael Warren, a native of Port Jefferson, L.I., is suing International Business Machines Corp. for firing him because since 9/11 he`s been called up too often by the Army Reserves.

Today, Warren serves his country in a time of war as he wages a second David vs. Goliath war against one of the giants of corporate America.

Profit: A U.S. military contractor in Iraq is at the center of a controversy over how American-forces disbursed and accounted for hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq.

The firm, Custer Battles is being charged in a lawsuit of defrauding the Coalition Provisional Authority of tens of millions of dollars during work in Iraq, which included securing Baghdad International Airport.

Two former employees sued the company last year under the False Claims Act, seeking to recover damages on behalf of the US government. They allege that Custer Battles repeatedly billed the occupation authorities for nonexistent services or at grossly inflated prices. A few months after they filed the suit, the Justice Department declined to intervene on the whistle-blowers` behalf.

Loss: President Bush stated that we would treat Iraqi oil money as a solemn trust to be disbursed solely for the benefit of the Iraqi people. Now nine billion dollars of Iraqi funds are missing. Over forty cents ($.40) of every Iraqi dollar supervised by the United States is unaccounted for.

Bremer says "Western" accounting methods were impossible in Iraq because it was a war zone. When Bremer arrived in May 2003 Baghdad was quiet. President Bush had just proclaimed "Mission Accomplished," the roads were safe and violence was at a minimum.

The fact that the United States has lost forty cents of every Iraqi dollar Bremer administered is a disgrace. Why did President Bush award Bremer a "Medal of Freedom" for this mass incompetence and corruption? Where is the missing money? The magnitude of the defalcated funds staggers. Nine billion dollars? Millions of dollars paid out in cash to suspect characters?

Profit: Excess billing for postwar fuel imports to Iraq by the Halliburton Co. totaled more than $108 million, according to a report by Pentagon auditors that was completed last fall but has never been officially released to the public or to Congress.

In one case, according to the report, the company claimed that it had paid more than $27 million to transport liquefied petroleum gas that it had purchased in Kuwait for just $82,000 -- a fee the auditors tartly dismissed as "illogical."

The report, by the Defense Contract Audit Agency, was one of nine audits involving a subsidiary of Halliburton: Kellogg, Brown & Root. The audits were completed in October 2004, the month before the presidential election. But the administration has kept all of them confidential despite repeated requests from both Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

Loss: On Oct. 14, as Eric Cagle drove up to an Iraqi national guard compound in Huwijah, northern Iraq, a roadside bomb detonated, shredding one side of his Humvee.

Shrapnel knifed through his cheek under his left eye and embedded in his brain. For the Arizona man, a 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry "Wolfhound" out of Schofield Barracks, it was just the start of many bad things to come.

In surgery, his carotid artery burst, leading to a massive stroke. An infection caused swelling, and doctors were forced to remove the right side of his brain.

His right eye is sutured shut to allow an ulceration of the cornea to heal, and his left eye has only a sliver of sight.

Of the more than 270 soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division (Light) and U.S. Army, Hawai`i, wounded in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan, Cagle has the unenviable distinction of being the most seriously injured.

Profit: The world`s major oil companies are dusting off their Baghdad Rolodexes as Iraq`s political factions move closer to forming a new government.

Through 15 years of conflict and sanctions, major oil companies never lost sight of Iraq`s massive reserves -- the world`s second-largest after Saudi Arabia. Efforts to form the nation`s first elected government in more than half a century are making the prospect of major contracts more tantalizingly real, even if that government could still be more than a year away.

Loss: You have to stand a ways back, but from a certain angle these look like the lucky ones. In any other war, they would be dead, having bled to death on the battlefield or died in a hospital from wounds so grievous that their armor could not protect them and the doctors could not save them. In World War II, 1 in 3 wounded soldiers died; in Vietnam, 1 in 4. In the Iraq war, the rate is 1 in 8. As of last week, just over 1,500 U.S. military personnel had died in Iraq and 11,285 had been wounded. The Pentagon does not keep counts of dead or wounded Iraqis. Human-rights groups and academics have tried to estimate the number of Iraqi deaths, speculating it could range from 15,000 to 100,000. No one has even tried to guess the number of Iraqis who have been wounded.

Every war mutilates in its own way, leaves its distinctive marks. In this war, unlike battles past, only 16% of injuries were caused by gunshots, according to a study; 69% were from explosions--the roadside booby traps, the car bombs, the rocket-propelled grenades. The vast majority of injuries are to arms and legs left vulnerable even as body armor is protecting vital organs. The amputation rate of 6% of wounded soldiers is twice that of earlier wars. But in addition, doctors are seeing new injuries, some of them inconspicuous compared with the shredded flesh of bombing victims. Traumatic brain injury occurs when the shock from an explosion damages neurological fibers. Soldiers may survive a blast with scarcely a cut, only to find over time that they suffer coordination and memory loss, dizziness, insomnia. Some have to learn to walk again--or to recognize their wives and children.

Profit: Soon after interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi took office last summer, he announced plans to create a tank division for the new Iraqi army.

The $283-million project was supposed to display the power of Iraq`s new government. But under the guidance of a task force overseen by one of America`s top generals, it has become another chapter in a rebuilding process marked by accusations of corruption.

The case raises concerns about the U.S. commitment to accountability in projects involving Iraqi money. The inspector general for Iraq`s reconstruction recently criticized the failure of the former U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to properly account for $8.8 billion in contracts issued using Iraqi funds.

Loss: In wartime, the silence of the American dead is a vacuum that the powerful in Washington try to fill. While loved ones are left with haunting memories and excruciating sadness, the most amplified political voices use predictable rhetoric to talk about ultimate sacrifices.

But the wounded do not disappear. They can speak for themselves. And many more will be seen and heard in this decade. Thanks to improvements in protective gear and swift medical treatment, more of America`s wounded are surviving - and returning home with serious permanent injuries.

This month the Defense Department released data showing that the official number of U.S. troops "wounded in action" in Iraq has gone over the 11,000 mark. Notably, 95 percent of those Americans were wounded after May 1, 2003.

In a bizarre echo of President George W. Bush`s top-gun aircraft-carrier speech on that day, the Pentagon still asserts that the U.S. casualties since then have occurred "after the end of major combat operations."

Profit: Median CEO pay at the 37 largest defense contractors rose 79 percent from 2001 to 2002, while overall CEO pay climbed only 6 percent, according to a new report from United for a Fair Economy, More Bucks for the Bang: CEO Pay at Top Defense Contractors, by Chris Hartman and David Martin.

Median pay was 45 percent higher in 2002 at defense contractors than at the 365 large companies surveyed by Business Week magazine. The typical U.S. CEO made $3.7 million in 2002, while the typical defense industry CEO got $5.4 million.

The jump in median defense contractor CEO pay far exceeded the increase in defense spending, which rose 14 percent from 2001 to 2002.

Compared with an army private’s pay of $19,585, the average CEO at a major defense contractor made 577 times as much in 2002, or $11,297,548. This is also more than 28 times as much as the Commander in Chief’s salary of $400,000.

Loss: They were prepared to die, even the truck drivers and supply clerks; any American who sets foot in Iraq must be. They made out wills, as the military requires, and left behind letters and videos for their families. The families in turn prepared for the day when they might open the door to find a chaplain on the other side. In military families the notion of duty is not confined to the battlefield. On the morning that 14-year-old Rohan Osbourne learned that his mother, Pamela, had been killed in a mortar attack on her Army base, his father dropped him off as usual at Robert M. Shoemaker High School, where three quarters of the students are the children of soldiers from nearby Fort Hood, Texas. "I might not get a lot of work done today, ma`am," Rohan politely explained to his teacher. "My mommy died yesterday in Iraq."


The MTV War

A lot of pictures: Today, video cameras are lightweight and digital technology has cut out the need for processing. Having captured a firefight on video, a soldier can create a movie and distribute it via e-mail, uncensored by the military. With editing software such as Avid and access to Internet connections on military bases here, U.S. soldiers are creating fast-paced, MTV-style music videos using images from actual firefights and killings.

Troops often carry personal cameras and video equipment in battle. On occasion, official military camera crews, known as "Combat Camera" units, follow the troops on raids and patrol. Although the military uses that footage for training and public affairs, it also finds its way to personal computers and commercial websites.

The result: an abundance of photographs and video footage depicting mutilation, death and destruction that soldiers collect and trade like baseball cards.

"I have a lot of pictures of dead Iraqis — everybody does," said Spc. Jack Benson, 22, also stationed near Baqubah. He has collected five videos by other soldiers and is working on his own.

By adding music, soldiers create their own cinema verite of the conflict. Although many are humorous or patriotic, others are gory, like McCollough`s favorite.

"It gets the point across," he said. "This isn`t some jolly freakin` peacekeeping mission."


Commentary

An interview with Scott Ritter

Comment: The top U.S. general in Iraq, Army gen. George Casey, has stated that the US had no indication that Italian officials gave advance notice of the route of the vehicle in which Giuliana Sgrena and slain officer Nicola Calipari were riding. As a former Air Force intelligence officer, I would argue that this statement is absolutely ludicrous. Based upon intelligence collection capabilities of even 3 decades ago, it is reasonable to assume that the US intercepted all phone communication between Italian agents in Iraq and Rome, monitored such traffic in real time and knew precisely where Sgrena`s vehicle was at all times, without advanced notice being provided by Italian officials.

Sgrena, herself, has provided photographic evidence of the use of cluster bombs and the wounding of children there. I have searched in vain to find these reports in any major corporate media. The American population, for the most part, is ignorant of what its military is doing in their name and must remain so in order for the US to wage its war against the Iraqi people.

Information, based upon intelligence or the reporting of brave journalists, may be the most important weapon in the war in Iraq. From this point of view, the vehicle in which Nicola and Giuliana were riding wasn`t simply a vehicle carrying a hostage to freedom. It is quite reasonable to assume, given the immorality of war and of this war in particular, that it was considered a military target.

Comment: The General Accounting Office released a study on February 17, 2005 revealing the pitfalls and the convoluted process required by our wounded upon returning stateside, further illuminated by reservists before the House Government Reform Committee. According to the GAO, the problem originated with the obsolete Active Duty Medical Extension program, set up in 2000. It was not staffed to accommodate the vast number of presently mobilized reservists. Not only has there been an unprecedented influx of continually returning reservists given the ongoing War on Terror, but many, many wounded who require aftercare.

However, unlike active-duty soldiers or non-reservist personnel returning to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, MD, wounded reservists kept in “medical holdover” (which is the limbo status patients are kept in while awaiting determination of their medical case or if they will be cleared to resume their duty with their military unit) often lose salary as well as medical benefits.

Whether one agrees or not with our military participation in Iraq and Afghanistan, we owe more to our troops and their families. The status-quo from our legislators and from our governmental institutions should no longer remain as an acceptable option. And to reward our troops with bureaucratic ‘friendly fire’ upon their return is simply tantamount to a slap in the face for those who have served our nation so proudly and so well.

Opinion: Did I miss something? Where did all the “not since Rome” bombast, talk of America’s “benevolent global hegemony,” “Pax Americana,” and the New World Order disappear to? Whatever happened to the “jodhpurs and pith helmets” crowd?

Just a year ago, in the Irving Kristol Lecture at the annual AEI dinner, columnist Charles Krauthammer rhapsodized about America’s “global dominion” and our having “acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world.”

We have “overwhelming global power,” said Krauthammer. We are history’s “designated custodians of the international system.” When the Soviet Union fell, “something new was born, something utterly new—a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe. This is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. ... Even Rome is no model for what America is today.”

Well, reality does have a way of intruding upon one’s fantasies, and, looking at our world today, it would seem multipolarism is making quite a comeback.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Mechanicsville, IA, soldier killed in Talafar.

Local story: Glendale, AZ, soldier killed near Ramadi.

Local story: Newark, DE, soldier killed in roadside bombing in Ramadi.

Local story: Rochester, NY, Marine killed in Iraq is remembered through a scholarship program.

# posted by matt : 10:45 AM
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Published on Tuesday, March 15, 2005 by the Boston Globe
Today`s Lesson About the Ides of March
by James Carroll
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

I don`t know what this column is about. My impulses collide. A year ago this week, I observed the first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. (``Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq," I concluded, ``the main outcome of the war, for the United States, is clear. We have defeated ourselves.") The second anniversary could give me a subject, especially in light of the punditry`s recent conclusion that George W. Bush was ``right" after all. But I screech against the war so often that I sound like a broken record, even to myself. (``What`s a record?" my young friend asks.)

I look over the columns I have published in this week of the year over the past decade and a half. My pride in being Irish has been a subject, especially since the humane achievement of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (``We pledge that we will, in good faith, work to ensure the success of each and every one of the arrangements to be established under this agreement.") But that was before the ancient grudge reasserted itself, London retook governing power over Northern Ireland, and the gangster-IRA, dropping the pretense of political struggle, showed itself fully for what it is. There is shame in being Irish this year.

The Passion season has begun, and that has often given me my subject. The obligation of Christians to read the story of the death of Jesus with special care to avoid a mindless reiteration of the anti-Jewish ``Christ-killer" charge has never seemed more pertinent. Last year, Mel Gibson`s ``The Passion of the Christ" prompted the most negative judgment I have ever made on this page. (``The subject of this film is the sick love of physical abuse, engaged in for power.") Such rank objection should be enough. But that was before the broad response to the film was so overwhelmingly positive (including record-breaking DVD sales, and its designation by the US Catholic Bishops Conference as one of the 10 best movies of 2004).

Now I have a new question: Is it a coincidence that the year in which so many Americans took to this cinematic celebration of the torture of Jesus is also the year in which Americans learned, with surprising equanimity, that their nation has become a sponsor of torture? (Perhaps the thought springs from John Harbison`s program note to J.S. Bach`s ``Saint John Passion," which he conducted for the Cantata Singers this week; ``In an era when we confront Torture as national policy, we must engage with Torture as part of this narrative.") Thinking of its intact hyper-violence, I could write a column about Gibson`s newly released ``recut" version, the wily commercial cynicism of it, but I don`t want to give this perversion of Holy Week any more free publicity. In fact, forget I mentioned it.

In more innocent days, I used to write regularly about the changing seasons. And sure enough, we now approach the magic moment when the sun crosses the celestial equator, the vernal equinox. This week, with the daylight and night in almost equal balance, we celebrate the possibility of all kinds of balance. The possibility of rebirth is in the air or is supposed to be. Speaking for myself, the brutal grip of winter still has me by the throat. I confess to imagining a point in the distant future when we will look back on 2005 as the year that spring failed to come; the year, that is, when winter settled in to stay forever. One cannot write a column about the change of seasons that do not change.

But today is the Ides of March. Is that a subject? ``Beware the Ides of March," the soothsayer warns Julius Caesar. He has business at the Senate and brushes the old man off. ``He is a dreamer," Caesar says. ``Let us leave him. Pass!" In her new book ``Shakespeare After All," Marjorie Garber highlights this moment in ``Julius Caesar." She says, ``The play is full of dreams, omens, portents, superstitions, and prophecies, all elements of the powerful irrational." Thinking of Caesar`s fate, Garber says that ``such signs" are ``dangerously disregarded."

This is a season of the powerful irrational. Omens everywhere. An unjust American war labeled a success, a precious Irish peace agreement trashed by its creators, a sacred Christian story made a source of contempt, torture legitimized -- even the weather seems a portent. The Ides of March are a warning. There`s the column.

James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."

© Boston Globe

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Biotechnik ist die Zukunft. Mäuse mit Menschengehirnen.

Are you a man or a mouse?

Chimeric experimentation is producing animal-human hybrids. This time, science really has gone too far
Jeremy Rifkin
Tuesday March 15, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1437701,00.ht…

Guardian
What happens when you cross a human and a mouse? Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke but, in fact, it`s a serious experiment recently carried out by a team headed by a distinguished molecular biologist, Irving Weissman, at Stanford University.

Scientists injected human brain cells into mouse foetuses, creating a strain of mice that were approximately 1% human. Weissman is considering a follow-up that would produce mice whose brains are 100% human.

What if the mice escaped the lab and began to proliferate? What might be the ecological consequences of mice who think like human beings, let loose in nature? Weissman says that he would keep a tight rein on the mice, and if they showed any signs of humanness he would kill them. Hardly reassuring.

Experiments like the one that produced a partially humanised mouse stretch the limits of human tinkering with nature to the realm of the pathological.

The new research field at the cutting edge of the biotech revolution is called chimeric experimentation. Researchers around the world are combining human and animal cells and creating chimeric creatures that are part-human, part-animal.

The first chimeric experiment occurred many years ago when scientists in Edinburgh fused a sheep and goat embryo - two unrelated animal species that are incapable of mating and producing a hybrid offspring. The resulting creature, called a geep, was born with the head of a goat and the body of a sheep.

Now, scientists have their sights trained on breaking the final taboo in the natural world - crossing humans and animals to create new human-animal hybrids. Already, aside from the humanised mouse, scientists have created pigs with human blood and sheep with livers and hearts that are mostly human.

The experiments are designed to advance medical research. Indeed, a growing number of genetic engineers argue that human-animal hybrids will usher in a golden era of medicine. Researchers say that the more humanised they can make research animals, the better able they will be to model the progression of human diseases, test new drugs, and harvest tissues and organs for transplantation. What they fail to mention is that there are equally promising and less invasive alternatives to these bizarre experiments, including computer modeling, in vitro tissue culture, nanotechnology, and prostheses to substitute for human tissue and organs.

Some researchers are speculating about human-chimpanzee chimeras - creating a humanzee. This would be the ideal laboratory research animal because chimpanzees are so closely related to us. Chimps share 98% of the human genome, and a fully mature chimp has the equivalent mental abilities and consciousness of a four-year-old human.

Fusing a human and chimpanzee embryo - which researchers say is feasible - could produce a creature so human that questions regarding its moral and legal status would throw 4,000 years of ethics into chaos. Would such a creature enjoy human rights? Would it have to pass some kind of "humanness" test to win its freedom? Would it be forced into doing menial labour or be used to perform dangerous activities?

The possibilities are mind-boggling. For example, what if human stem cells - the primordial cells that turn into the body`s 200 or so cell types - were to be injected into an animal embryo and spread throughout the animal`s body into every organ? Some human cells could migrate to the testes and ovaries where they could grow into human sperm and eggs. If two of the chimeric mice were to mate, they could potentially conceive a human embryo. If the human embryo were to be removed and implanted in a human womb, the resulting human baby`s biological parents would have been mice.

Please understand that none of this is science fiction. The National Academy of Sciences, America`s most august scientific body, is expected to issue guidelines for chimeric research some time next month, anticipating a flurry of new experiments in the burgeoning field of human-animal chimeric experimentation.

Bioethicists are already clearing the moral path for human-animal chimeric experiments, arguing that once society gets past the revulsion factor, the prospect of new, partially human creatures has much to offer the human race. And, of course, this is exactly the kind of reasoning that has been put forth to justify what is fast becoming a journey into a brave new world in which all of nature can be ruthlessly manipulated. But now, with human-animal chimeric experiments, we risk even undermining our own species` biological integrity in the name of human progress.

With chimeric technology, scientists have the power to rewrite the evolutionary saga - to sprinkle parts of our species into the rest of the animal kingdom as well as fuse parts of other species with our own genome and even to create new human sub-species and super-species. Are we on the cusp of a biological renaissance, or sowing the seeds of our destruction?

· Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Biotech Century

[e-mail]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Wenn dieser Artikel auf Tatsachen beruht, dann anerkennt die US-Regierung die unterschiedlich Struktur des Widerstands, einmal die Aufständischen aus dem Irak, die ihr Ziel darin sehen, den Irak von den Okkupanten zu befreien und auf der anderen Seite die ausländischen Terroristen, von denen Gewalt als Mittel der Zerstörung als Selbstzweck benutzt wird zur Destabilisierung der Region.

Das widerspricht fast allen Erklärungen der USA in den letzten 2 Jahren.
Es sagt auch viel über das Größenverhältnis der beiden Gruppen.
Das bedeutet, dass es nur eine geringe Anzahl von Terroristen gibt.
Die große Menge der Aufständigen sind Menschen, die für die Unabhängigkeit und den Abzug der USA aus der Region kämpfen.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 15. März 2005, 18:44

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,346574,00.html
Verhandlungen im Irak

Wie die USA aus Rebellen Politiker machen wollen

Von Yassin Musharbash

Im Irak verfahren die USA neuerdings nach der Devise: Wenn Du Deine Gegner nicht besiegen kannst, umarme sie. Weil der bewaffnete Widerstand ehemaliger Regime-Mitglieder anders anscheinend nicht zu beenden ist, verhandeln die Besatzer jetzt mit den Aufständischen.

Berlin - "Der Irak wird wegen des Ungleichgewichts der Kräfte von den USA militärisch besiegt werden", schrieb der mittlerweile gestürzte irakische Diktator Saddam Hussein im Juli 2002 an seine höchstrangigen Regime-Mitglieder. Aber nach der Niederlage bestehe die Möglichkeit, "das US-Militär in die irakischen Städte, Dörfer und Wüsten zu ziehen und sich der Taktik des Widerstandskampfes zu bedienen".

Fast genau so, wie der Schlächter vom Tigris es vorhergesehen hatte, geschah es. Saddam selbst wurde zwar im Dezember 2003 aus einem Erdloch gezerrt und wartet nun auf sein Gerichtsverfahren. Doch viele seiner Generäle und Offiziere stellen heute die Führung des bewaffneten Widerstands gegen die US-Besatzer. Millionen, vielleicht Milliarden US-Dollar soll der Tyrann schon beizeiten für diesen Guerilla-Kampf beiseite geschafft haben, von denen die Kämpfer noch heute zehren.

Bislang ist es den US-Truppen und ihren Verbündeten nicht gelungen, diese Rebellen entscheidend zu schwächen. Im Gegenteil, einige Maßnahmen, etwa die Auflösung der drei Millionen Mitglieder starken Baath-Partei oder der 700.000-Mann-Armee, haben den Widerstandskämpfern noch Zulauf verschafft. Nun soll eine neue, pragmatische Strategie Ruhe ins Land bringen helfen: In Verhandlungen mit den Militanten wollen die USA diesen den Weg in Politik und Zivilität ebnen. In der stark gesicherten "Green Zone" im Zentrum Bagdads, so berichteten das US-Magazin "Time" und die britische Zeitung "The Independent" Ende Februar, hätten sich US-Unterhändler bereits zwei Mal mit Anführern des nationalistischen Widerstands getroffen, allesamt frühere Regime-Kader.

Wird der Deal Teil der Exit-Strategie?

Der angestrebte Deal könnte den beiden Blättern zufolge so aussehen: Die Militanten legen ihre Waffen nieder, die USA helfen ihnen dafür, sich in den neuen Staat zu integrieren. Nebeneffekt, auf den die Kämpfer hoffen: Durch eine Rückkehr in die Politik könnten sie die durch den Wahlboykott der Sunniten entstandene Unterrepräsentanz dieser Glaubensgruppe ausgleichen.

Im Gegenzug hoffen die USA auf Informationen über die Netzwerke islamistischer Dschihadisten im Irak, die für die brutalsten Terroranschläge verantwortlich sind - und mit denen man nicht verhandeln kann, weil sie ihren Kampf als Heiligen Krieg betrachten. Sie sollen isoliert werden. Die Aufständischen, berichten "Time" und "Independent", hätten bei der Fühlungnahme aber auch einen Zeitplan für den Abzug der US-Armee verlangt. Außerdem bestehen sie offenbar auf Straffreiheit für Taten während der Saddam-Ära. Hier sollen die Verhandlungen ins Stocken geraten sein.

Die Verhandlungsstrategie der USA bedeutet jedoch in jedem Fall eine Kursänderung. Lange hatte es aus Washington geheißen, Verhandlungen seien ausgeschlossen, der Widerstand müsse "gebrochen" werden. Nun scheinen sich pragmatische Kräfte in der Umgebung von George W. Bush durchgesetzt zu haben. Sollte es durch den Deal gelingen, den Irak spürbar zu befrieden, könnte er gar Teil der "Exit-Strategie" der USA werden.

Irakische Regierung wurde nicht informiert

Noch aber sind die Verhandlungen informell, der Erfolg ist ungewiss. Die militanten Islamisten etwa, das zweite Aufständischen-Lager neben Nationalisten und Ex-Baathisten, würden sich von einem Deal kaum beeindrucken lassen. Der Pazifierungseffekt könnte ausbleiben. Außerdem ist unklar, welcher Verhandlungspartner mit wie viel Autorität spricht. Allein 38 sunnitische Gruppen brüsten sich mit Anschlägen gegen die USA, berichtet der "Independent".

Ein noch größeres Problem: Die neu gewählte irakische Regierung, dominiert von Schiiten und Kurden, die jahrzehntelang vom vornehmlich sunnitischen Regime unterdrückt wurden, sind unwillig, die Verhandlungen mit zu tragen. Sie wurde auch nicht informiert. "Wenn es auf diesem Wege zu irgendwelchen Vereinbarungen kommt, wird die neue irakische Regierung nicht daran gebunden sein", sagte Ahmad Tschalabi, Chef des irakischen Nationalkongresses, kürzlich der "Welt".

Baathisten sind "gutes Leben" gewohnt

Als "sehr guten Zug" bezeichnete trotzdem der US-amerikanische Terrorexperte Thomas Sanderson den US-Verhandlungsvorstoß. Die Ex-Baathisten, so Sanderson zu SPIEGEL ONLINE, seien "ein sehr gutes Leben gewohnt". Sie könnten ein Interesse daran haben, den Kampf aufzugeben. Ihr Hauptmotiv dürfte es sein, der strafrechtlichen Verfolgung zu entgehen - und ihre einzige Alternative zu einem Deal mit den USA bestehe darin, die Regierung zu stürzen, was "sehr, sehr schwierig" sei.

Sanderson glaubt auch, dass die nationalistischen Rebellen, deren Zahl er auf Zehntausende schätzt, den USA wertvolle Informationen über die Dschihadisten liefern können. Selbst wenn beide Lager kaum kooperierten, sei es letztlich doch "wie in den dunklen Straßen von New York City: Da weiß auch jede kriminelle Gruppe, wo die andere steckt", vermutet Sanderson, der zurzeit Fellow der Bosch-Stiftung in Berlin ist.

"Wir sind bereit, mit Ihnen zusammenzuarbeiten", sagte einer der irakischen Widerstandskämpfer laut "Time"-Magazin am Ende der ersten Verhandlungsrunde zu seinem US-Gesprächspartner. "Ich denke, wir haben es mit einer ziemlich flexiblen US-Regierung zu tun", zitiert "Time" einen westlichen Beobachter der Gespräche. Doch dieser hoffnungsvollen Annäherung steht ein drittes Statement entgegen, das viel weiteres Blutvergießen bedeuten könnte: Die Ex-Baathisten, erklärte Terroristen-Führer al-Sarkawi, liebten zwar die Amerikaner nicht, vor allem aber dächten sie an ihre eigene Zukunft. Seine Terrorbande hält sie für vom Glauben abgefallene Kollaborateure - und droht mit ihrer Ermordung.



© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005

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Mehr von Benson:http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/benson/

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March 16, 2005
U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/politics/16abuse.html?hp&e…

WASHINGTON, March 15 - At least 26 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, according to military officials.

The number of confirmed or suspected cases is much higher than any accounting the military has previously reported. A Pentagon report sent to Congress last week cited only six prisoner deaths caused by abuse, but that partial tally was limited to what the author, Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III of the Navy, called "closed, substantiated abuse cases" as of last September.

The new figure of 26 was provided by the Army and Navy this week after repeated inquiries. In 18 cases reviewed by the Army and Navy, investigators have now closed their inquiries and have recommended them for prosecution or referred them to other agencies for action, Army and Navy officials said. Eight cases are still under investigation but are listed by the Army as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides, the officials said.

Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, officials said, showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison`s night shift.

Among the cases are at least four involving Central Intelligence Agency employees that are being reviewed by the Justice Department for possible prosecution. They include a killing in Afghanistan in June 2003 for which David Passaro, a contract worker for the C.I.A., is now facing trial in federal court in North Carolina.

Human rights groups expressed dismay at the number of criminal homicides and renewed their call for a Sept. 11-style inquiry into detention operations and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. "This number to me is quite astounding," said James D. Ross, senior legal adviser for Human Rights Watch in New York. "This just reflects an overall failure to take seriously the abuses that have occurred."

Pentagon and Army officials rebutted that accusation. Lawrence Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that he was not aware that the Defense Department had previously accounted publicly for criminal homicides among the detainee deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, but insisted that military authorities were vigorously pursuing each case.
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"I have not seen the numbers collected in the way you described them, but obviously one criminal homicide is one too many," said Mr. Di Rita, who noted that American forces had held more than 50,000 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past three years.

Army officials said the killings took place both inside and outside detention areas, including at the point of capture in often violent battlefield conditions. "The Army will investigate every detainee death both inside and outside detention facilities," said Col. Joseph Curtin, a senior Army spokesman. "Simply put, detainee abuse is not tolerated, and the Army will hold soldiers accountable. We are taking action to prosecute those suspected of abuse while taking steps now to train soldiers how to avoid such situations in the future."

In his report last week, Admiral Church concluded that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan had been the result primarily of a breakdown of discipline, not flawed policies or misguided direction from commanders or Pentagon officials. But he cautioned that his conclusions were "based primarily on the information available to us as of Sept. 30, 2004," and added, "Should additional information become available, our conclusions would have to be considered in light of that information."

In addition to the criminal homicides, 11 cases involving prisoner deaths at the hands of American troops are now listed as justifiable homicides that should not be prosecuted, Army officials said. Those cases included killings caused by soldiers in suppressing prisoner riots in Iraq, they said. Other prisoners have died in captivity of natural causes, the military has found.

An accounting by The New York Times in May 2004, based on reports from military officials and a review of Army documents, identified 16 cases of confirmed or suspected homicide involving prisoners in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. At that time, however, just five were listed as confirmed homicides, with 11 of the cases still under investigation.

The Army defines a homicide as "a death that results from the intentional (explicit or implied) or grossly reckless behavior of another person or persons."

"Homicide is not synonymous with murder (a legal determination) and includes both criminal actions and excusable incidents (i.e., self-defense, law enforcement, combat)," according to an Army statement.

The new total of 26 cases involving prisoner deaths confirmed or suspected of being criminal homicides includes 24 cases investigated by the Army and two by the Navy, spokesmen for those services said. Two of the Army cases have since been referred to the Navy, and one to the Justice Department. The Navy said each case included a single prisoner death, but the Army said it was possible that at least some of the cases investigated by the service involved the death of more than one prisoner.

The Marine Corps said that nine Iraqi detainees had died in Marine custody, but that none of the deaths were homicides. It is unclear if this number includes the death of an Iraqi captive shot by a marine in a mosque in Falluja last November, an incident filmed by a television crew.

Neither the Army nor the Navy would provide a precise accounting of all of the cases now regarded as confirmed or suspected homicide.

At least eight Army soldiers have now been convicted of crimes in the deaths of prisoners in American custody, including a lieutenant who pleaded guilty at Fort Hood, Tex., this month to charges that included aggravated assault and battery, obstruction of justice and dereliction of duty. A charge of involuntary manslaughter in that case was dropped.

An additional 13 Army soldiers are now being tried, according to Army officials. They include Pfc. Willie V. Brand, who is facing a hearing at Fort Bliss, Tex., next week on charges of manslaughter and maiming in the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram Control Point in Afghanistan in December 2002.

But in some of the cases, including the death of an Iraqi, Manadel al-Jamadi, in Abu Ghraib in November 2003, most of those initially charged with crimes by the military have ended up receiving only nonjudicial punishments, and neither their names nor the details of those punishments have been disclosed.

Altogether, Army criminal investigators had conducted 68 detainee death investigations with 79 possible victims as of February 2005, said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman. Of those investigations, 53 have been closed and 15 cases remain pending, Colonel Hart said.

In addition to the 24 Army cases listed as criminal homicides and the 11 cases listed as justifiable homicides, 28 cases are listed as confirmed or suspected deaths from accidents or natural causes. An additional five are cases in which the cause of death has not been determined, Colonel Hart said.

Over all, the Army`s criminal investigators have examined 308 cases involving allegations of mistreating detainees. They include the 68 death investigations and 240 other allegations of potential misconduct, like allegations of assaults, sexual assaults and thefts, Colonel Hart said. Of the 308 cases, 201 cases are closed and 107 cases were pending as of mid-February 2005.

In addition to the number of detainee deaths, other conclusions in the Church report have drawn scrutiny. The report, for instance, also asserts that psychiatrists and psychologists advising interrogators did not have access to detainees` medical files. That is in sharp contrast to reports from the Red Cross and interrogators interviewed by The Times.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a confidential report last July that the detainees` medical files were open to all. The report said that was unethical and that it diminished the medical care given the detainees, because it discouraged them from seeking medical attention as they knew the information would be shared with interrogators.

One interrogator said in interviews that the files were initially open to all and that it was a regular practice for interrogators simply to go into the detainee hospital and review the records. The interrogator said that when the hospital staff became more reluctant to share the files, the interrogators found that they could ask the psychologists and psychiatrists to obtain them.

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 16, 2005
Italy Planning to Start Pullout of Iraq Troops
By IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/international/europe/16ita…

ROME, March 15 - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Tuesday that he aimed to begin withdrawing Italy`s 3,000 troops from Iraq by September, in a signal that the domestic cost of loyalty to the United States over the war was growing too high.

Mr. Berlusconi, one of President Bush`s few close allies in Europe, framed his words carefully, saying in brief comments on a talk show here that the timing of the withdrawal depended on the strength of the Iraqi government. Italy has the fourth largest contingent of foreign troops in Iraq, its soldiers acting largely as peacekeepers near the southern city of Nasiriya.

But there could be little doubt that Mr. Berlusconi was looking not only at events in Iraq, for on the same show he said that he would run for re-election in the spring of 2006. Political commentators here have long assumed that given the deep opposition to the war in Iraq among Italians, Mr. Berlusconi would be forced to begin the troop withdrawal by then.

That opposition to the war found a galvanizing new cause two weeks ago when an Italian intelligence agent was shot to death in Iraq by American soldiers after he obtained the freedom of a kidnapped Italian journalist.
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While the shooting cast a shadow over relations between Italy and Washington, it was unclear how great a role it played in Mr. Berlusconi`s decision, a rare nod to public sentiment against the war.

"I`ve spoken about it with Tony Blair, and it`s the public opinion of our countries that expects this decision," Mr. Berlusconi said in the talk show "Porta a Porta," referring to the British prime minister, who faces similar public disenchantment for his support of the war. "We have to build an exit strategy."

There was no immediate comment from Mr. Blair, but British opponents of the Iraq war were quick to applaud Mr. Berlusconi`s action. "It is time the U.K. showed a similar resolve," said Sir Menzies Campbell, the foreign affairs spokesman of the Liberal Democratic Party, which opposed the war from the beginning and plans to fight the election expected in May in part on an antiwar platform. "Britain`s objective should be to achieve the withdrawal of British forces by the expiration date of the U.N. mandate which ends in December 2005."

Mr. Berlusconi`s announcement seemed a blow to the Bush administration`s efforts both to keep up the number of troops in Iraq and to portray the war there as the effort of a broad coalition of nations, as other allies have said they, too, will begin withdrawing their troops in the coming months.

Britain, with 8,000 troops, the second largest contingent in Iraq after the United States` 150,000, has not announced any withdrawal date. But Poland, another important European ally, has announced it will withdraw several hundred of its 1,700 troops in July with the intent of leaving entirely around the start of the new year. The Netherlands and Ukraine have both begun withdrawing their combined 2,900 troops or plan to do so.

In Washington, the Bush administration had little to say, other than applauding the role Italy has played in Iraq and focusing on Mr. Berlusconi`s promise not to withdraw precipitously. "This will be based on the ability and capability of Iraqi forces and the Iraqi government to be able to assume more responsibility and that he will work in agreement with allies in the region before taking those steps," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman.

At the Pentagon, a spokesman said late Tuesday that news reports on the Italian withdrawal would require no immediate action or reaction by the American-led coalition forces in Iraq. "Although we are still awaiting the details of the apparent Italian policy decision, as we understand it, it would start in September with a phased or gradual withdrawal," the spokesman said. "There is ample time to work any potential issues that may arise."

Asked whether he thought Mr. Berlusconi had made his announcement because of the shooting of the intelligence agent, Mr. McClellan said, "I`m not sure I`d make a connection there."

The shooting of the agent, Nicola Calipari, was a deep embarrassment to Mr. Berlusconi, who demanded in strong language a full explanation from the United States government. American officials have said that the car Mr. Calipari was traveling in with the freed journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, ignored repeated warnings to stop at a temporary checkpoint near Baghdad International Airport - an allegation Mr. Berlusconi and his top aides have repeatedly denied.

Mr. Berlusconi`s decision on the troops was not all that surprising. Several of his aides had suggested in recent months that the withdrawal would most likely begin by the end of the year. But the timing did catch many off guard, in that the storm over the agent`s death had begun to recede from the front pages of Italy`s press.

Franco Pavoncello, a political science professor at John Cabot University in Rome, suggested that the shooting did not force Mr. Berlusconi into the announcement directly but rather underscored what political experts here have suggested for some time: that the benefits to Mr. Berlusconi of keeping Italian troops in Iraq were eroding.

"The political benefits ran out a while back," Mr. Pavoncello said. "I think that he sees the situation as going negative from now on. Basically he is sending a message of: `Look, we`ve done our part. We`re not running away. But it`s time to go. It`s time to move on.` "

That realization, he said, has been growing stronger with the approach of the election, in which Mr. Berlusconi, who heads a center-right coalition that is fractious at times, is likely to run against Romano Prodi, the head of the center-left and a strong voice against the war. "Everybody is going to be back by Christmas," Mr. Pavoncello said. "And by election time, everything is going to be forgotten. It makes a lot of sense."

Facing strong opposition to the war, Mr. Berlusconi was forced to adopt a two-pronged strategy to justify sending troops there - a strategy that some experts say has shown signs of fraying recently.

The idea was to portray Italy`s role in the war as a principled stand against terrorism with its ally, the United States, while at the same time preventing a slow erosion of public patience over that principle - which essentially meant keeping down Italian casualties. Twenty-one Italian soldiers have died in Iraq, 19 in a suicide bombing in Nasiriya in November 2003. The latest was killed on Tuesday in what the military here said was an accident on a firing range.

Several experts speculate that the need to keep down casualties led the Italian government to pay ransoms in the case of several Italians kidnapped, most recently for Ms. Sgrena. The Italian government has denied paying ransoms, though Ms. Sgrena suggested at one point after her release that American soldiers had shot at the car because of Washington`s opposition to striking deals with kidnappers.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington, and Jason Horowitz from Rome.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 16, 2005
Shiites and Kurds at Impasse Over Oil-Rich Zone`s Fate
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/international/middleeast/1…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 15 - On the eve of the first meeting here of the new constitutional assembly, the major Shiite and Kurdish political parties have yet to agree to form a coalition government and will have to continue talks later in the week, senior officials on both sides said Tuesday.

Nevertheless, the assembly is still expected to vote for a president and several other high-ranking officials at its first meeting, on Wednesday, Iraqi officials said.

The Kurds and the Shiites, the two blocs that won the most votes in the Jan. 30 elections, have to resolve disputes on several major issues that are hindering moves toward an alliance, the officials from the two groups said. The two sides are deadlocked over conflicting visions of the future of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk and the status of the Kurdish militia, among other things, the officials said.

The wrangling is continuing into its seventh week after the elections, and there is evidence that it is deeply shaking the public`s trust. Many Iraqis defied insurgent threats to take part in the country`s first free elections in decades and now are expressing growing disillusionment with the top parties, accusing them of selfishly grabbing for power at the expense of the country.

"A state without a government is like sheep without a shepherd, and in such a situation the wolves can play very easily," said Majida Aziz, 40, a teacher at a girls` high school in western Baghdad. "Not having a government is causing a great deal of harm to the Iraqi people and to the interests of Iraq."

On Wednesday, the 275-member assembly will try to take the first formal steps toward putting together a government, though it is unclear whether that will be enough to assuage the mounting concerns of Iraqis. The assembly will most likely select Jalal Talabani, a top Kurdish leader, as the country`s president and a prominent Sunni Arab as one of the two vice presidents, Shiite and Kurdish officials said. The other vice presidency is expected to go to a Shiite, possibly Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, said a Shiite official familiar with the negotiations.

The speaker of the assembly post is expected to go to Fawaz al-Jarba, one of the few Sunni Arabs who joined the main Shiite bloc, the official said.

A two-thirds vote by the assembly is needed to install the president and the two vice presidents, according to the transitional law approved last March.

Those three officials, who will constitute the presidency council, will have two weeks to decide on a prime minister, who will be approved, along with the new cabinet, by majority vote of the assembly. If the presidency council cannot settle on a prime minister, then the assembly will appoint a prime minister by a two-thirds vote.

Many Iraqi and American officials had hoped the Shiites and Kurds would be able to reach an accord and announce the formation of the entire top tier of a government - complete with the presidency council, prime minister and cabinet - by the first meeting of the assembly, which is charged with drafting a permanent constitution by August.

But the disagreements between the sides mean the government will have to be put together in steps, and any triumphal atmosphere at the assembly meeting will be dampened. There is also no guarantee that the assembly will elect a presidency council on Wednesday, though Iraqi and American officials put out a news release on Tuesday saying that the assembly will vote people into those positions.

The main Shiite and Kurdish blocs together control more than two-thirds of the seats in the assembly, and so could vote in a presidency council on Wednesday. But the council and the assembly could stall on appointing a prime minister and cabinet until the two sides work out their differences. Shiite and Kurdish leaders say they have drafted a document that lays out the broad principles under which the new government would operate, though they are clashing over details.

"There is more common ground than differences," said Safeen Dizayee, a senior official with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish parties. But sometimes during the negotiations, he added, "you take one step forward and then it`s two steps back."

The senior Shiite official said the two sides, despite their differences, had reached a tentative agreement on some cabinet positions. The Shiite bloc will most likely get the Interior Ministry, the Kurds will probably keep the Foreign Ministry, and a Sunni Arab will be put in charge of either the Ministry of Defense or the Finance Ministry, the official said.

If the Kurds and the Shiites cannot reach a final agreement within a week, he said, then there is a chance that the Shiites could change their prime minister nominee in order to win the confidence of the secular Kurds. The current nominee, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is a religious conservative. A possible alternative is Adel Abdul Mahdi, a more secular Shiite who is close to Mr. Talabani, the Kurdish nominee for president, the Shiite official said.

As the talks continued, the Sunni-led insurgency kept up its campaign of attacks in the capital. Two suicide car bombs detonated in western Baghdad on Tuesday morning, killing four Iraqi civilians and wounding three others, Interior Ministry officials said. The bombs were aimed at an American convoy but missed their target, the officials said.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant, claimed responsibility in an Internet posting.

The American military said a soldier on patrol was also killed Tuesday morning by a car bomb in Baghdad. Several other soldiers, Iraqi civilians and an Iraqi policeman were wounded, the military said. It was unclear whether this was the same attack that killed the four Iraqi civilians.

An American marine was killed in combat in Anbar Province on Monday, the military said Tuesday.

In Najaf, the police chief, Maj. Gen. Ghalib al-Jezaieri, said the police had arrested a man suspected of a car bomb attack in August 2003 that killed a revered Shiite cleric and at least 95 others. The suspect, Ramzy Hashem, is from Mosul, General Jezaieri said. The cleric, Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, was the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite party.

Ali Adeeb and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Die Meldung dazu #26979

March 16, 2005
EDITORIAL
And Now, the Counterfeit News
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/opinion/16wed1.html

The Bush administration has come under a lot of criticism for its attempts to fob off government propaganda as genuine news reports. Whether federal agencies are purchasing the services of supposedly independent columnists or making videos extolling White House initiatives and then disguising them as TV news reports, that`s wrong. But it is time to acknowledge that the nation`s news organizations have played a large and unappetizing role in deceiving the public.

As documented this week in an article in The Times by David Barstow and Robin Stein, more than 20 federal agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Department, now create fake news clips. The Bush administration spent $254 million in its first four years on contracts with public relations firms, more than double the amount spent by the Clinton administration.

Most of these tapes are very skillfully done, including "interviews" that seem genuine and "reporters" who look much like the real thing. Only sophisticated viewers would easily recognize that these videos are actually unpaid commercial announcements for the White House or some other part of the government. Some of the videos clearly cross the line into the proscribed territory of propaganda, and the Government Accountability Office says at least two were illegally distributed.

But too many television stations run government videos anyway, without any hint of where they came from. And while some claim they somehow stumbled accidentally into this trap, it seems obvious that in most cases, television stations that are short on reporters, long on air time to fill and unwilling to spend the money needed for real news gathering are abdicating their editorial responsibilities to the government`s publicity teams. Bush administration officials now insist that they carefully label any domestic releases as government handouts.

However disingenuous those assurances may be, in at least some cases the stations are the main culprits in the deception - as at the Fox affiliate in Memphis, where a station reporter narrated a State Department video, using the text that came with it. The Times also reported on a small central Illinois station that was so eager to snap up this low-cost filler that it asked the Agriculture Department to have its "reporter" refer to its morning show in his closing lines. The Times tracked station malpractice into bigger markets, like San Diego (the ABC affiliate) and Louisville, Ky. (the Fox affiliate).

If using pretend news is one of the ways these stations have chosen to save money, it`s a false economy. If it represents a political decision to support President Bush, it will eventually backfire. This kind of practice cheapens the real commodity that television stations have to sell during their news hours: their credibility.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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[urlKaren Hughes Sells Brand America]http://slate.msn.com/id/2114854/fr/ifr/nav/ais/[/url]
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She`s supposed to market Bush policies to the Muslim world. Good luck!
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2005, at 3:32 PM PT

As part of his plan to improve America`s image in the Muslim world, President Bush has appointed his longtime adviser, Karen Hughes, as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Condoleezza Rice, announcing the choice on Monday, said, "We must do more to confront the hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths, and get out the truth."

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Auf die Plätze fertig, los.
Das Gerangel um die Wahlen 08 geht los.

March 16, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Who Gets It? Hillary
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/opinion/16kris.html

If the Democratic Party wants to figure out how to win national elections again, it has an unexpected guide: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Senator Clinton, much more than most in her party, understands how the national Democratic Party needs to rebrand itself. She gets it - perhaps that`s what 17 years in socially conservative Arkansas does to you.

The first lesson Mrs. Clinton is demonstrating is the need to talk much more openly about God and prayer. That resonates in a country where a Pew poll found that 60 percent of Americans pray at least once a day.

"I`ve always been a praying person," Mrs. Clinton declared recently. Of course, this approach works in her case only because her religious faith is longstanding. It didn`t work for Howard Dean when he described the Book of Job as his favorite book in the New Testament. With a candidate like him, you`d worry that more talk about religion would lead to comments about how much he treasures the Twelfth Commandment.

Democrats are usually more comfortable talking about sex than God. But that doesn`t work in a country where 70 percent say that "presidents should have strong religious beliefs."

Then there`s abortion. Mrs. Clinton took a hugely important step in January when she sought common ground and described abortion as a "sad, even tragic choice to many, many women."

The Democratic Party commits seppuku in the heartland by coming across as indifferent to people`s doubts about abortions or even as pro-abortion. A Times poll in January found that 61 percent of Americans favor tighter restrictions on abortion, or even a ban, while only 36 percent agree with the Democratic Party position backing current abortion law.

That doesn`t mean that there`s no middle ground on abortion. In fact, most of America is standing, conflicted, on middle ground. Many people are deeply uncomfortable with abortions, but they also don`t want women or doctors going to prison, and they don`t want teenage girls dying because of coat-hanger abortions.

What has been lethal for Democrats has not been their pro-choice position as such, but the perception that they don`t even share public qualms about abortion. Mrs. Clinton has helped turn the debate around by emerging as both pro-choice and anti-abortion.

That is potentially a winning position for Democrats. Abortions fell steadily under Bill Clinton, who espoused that position, and have increased significantly during President Bush`s presidency. (One theory is that economic difficulties have left more pregnant women feeling that they cannot afford a baby.)

Mrs. Clinton is also hard to dismiss as a screechy obstructionist because she`s gone out of her way to be collegial in the Senate and to work with Republicans from Trent Lott to Sam Brownback. Senator John Kerry never seemed much liked by his colleagues, while other senators seem to like Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps it`s that, according to New York magazine, she surprises other senators by popping up during meetings and asking: Anybody want a coffee?

The makeover is working with New York State voters. Mrs. Clinton has an approval rating in the state of 69 percent, according to a Times poll published last month, and her negative ratings have tumbled to 21 percent. That puts her approval rating even higher than that of New York`s popular senior senator, Charles Schumer.

Still, I doubt that Mrs. Clinton can be elected president. I use my hometown, the farming community of Yamhill, Ore., as my touchstone for the heartland, and I have a hard time imagining that she could do well there. Ambitious, high-achieving women are still a turnoff in many areas, particularly if they`re liberal and feminist. And that`s not just in America: Margaret Thatcher would never have been elected prime minister if she`d been in the Labor Party.

In small towns like Yamhill, any candidate from New York carries a lot of baggage, and Mrs. Clinton more than most. Moreover, television magnifies her emotional reserve and turns her into a frost queen. Mrs. Clinton`s negative ratings nationally were still around 40 percent at last count, and Hillary-hating thrives.

So Mrs. Clinton may not be able to get there from here, and in any case it`s way too early to speculate meaningfully about 2008. But it`s just the right time for Democrats to be fretting about how to reconnect to the heartland, and they can`t find a better model for how to do that than Mrs. Clinton.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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The Independent
Murder of Mr Lebanon continues to poison political air
Wednesday, 16th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=620…

O now ’they’ have left Beirut. In the dark doorway of the Syrian mukhabarat office off Sadat Street, where for years armed men have guarded their little suburban headquarters, a middle-aged lady was washing the floors and sweeping rivers of black water into the road. "They’ve gone," an old Druze man shouted from the other side of the road. Their cheerful graffiti in praise of President Bashar Assad had already been spray-painted out in black paint.

At the larger Syrian intelligence headquarters in Ramlet el-Baida, where those who entered often emerged with bruises on their bodies - although for years now, it had been a listening post rather than an interrogation centre - furniture was piled onto trucks, pictures of Bachar and his father Hafez taken down. There was no ceremony. Like so much history in Lebanon, what had been here for decades was simply here no more.

But another of Syria’s former loyal allies here, Mohsen Dalloul, a Zahle MP who was also a defence minister, has now accused the Lebanese government of being complicit in the murder of ex-premier Rafiq Hariri. "Its slyness, absence and ignorance prove its guilt," he said, adding damningly than he knew who tried to assassinate Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s friend Marwan Hamade, last October - without naming names.

Mr Dalloul also claimed that the government here had made a decision "to deprive Hariri of government security measures a few days before his assassination." He quoted an unidentified official as saying that "Hariri was rich enough to rent security services for himself."

In fact, Mr Hariri had for years been using his own carefully chosen bodyguards. And so the drip-drip of evidence about the murder of Mr Lebanon continues to poison the political air, just as it further diminishes what is left of President Lahoud’s prestige.

Outside the American embassy in Aukar yesterday, a few thousand Lebanese pro-Syrian demonstrators protested US policy in the Middle East and the American-backed UN Security Council Resolution 1559 which forced Syria to begin its military withdrawal from Lebanon. But after an hour, the crowds left and Beirut remained, peaceful but without a government for the 29th day since Hariri’s murder.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Da geht doch so einigen MP der A* auf Grundeis.
Blair und Kumpels wollen einfach den Irakkrieg nicht mehr erwähnen im Wahlkampf und Berlusconi versucht seine wegschwimmenden Felle mit dem Abzug der Truppen aus dem Irak festzuhalten.
Lustig wäre es zu sehen, was Stotter-Ede, unser Girlieman für Verrenkungen vorführen würde, falls er gewählt worden wäre und zusammen mit dem `Flintenweib` Angela in den Krieg gezogen wäre.

No escape from the war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1438526,00.ht…

Andrew Murray
Wednesday March 16, 2005

Guardian
The front benches of both main parties would like to fight the forthcoming election on the Basil Fawlty principle of "don`t mention the war". They will not be so lucky. The invasion and occupation of Iraq - and the British public`s sustained opposition to it - continues to cast a long shadow over British politics. Some are so anxious to "draw a line and move on" that they simply court ridicule. A correspondent to this paper from South Shields called for an end to "carping" about the "Iraq misadventure". Carping? Misadventure? The Iraq war is a huge crime which has led to up to 100,000 civilian deaths, the deaths of 1,600 US and British soldiers, the ruination of a country, and the trashing of international law and the authority of the UN.

It also involved, it is now clear, the deception of the British parliament and people, from the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the content of the attorney general`s legal green light for the war. To suggest it is somehow unreasonable or obsessive to dwell on these matters or hold those responsible to account is to negate the essence of democracy. One must hope that if any power were ever to do to South Shields what was done to Falluja, we would do more than carp about it.

There are four reasons why the Iraq war and the issues raised by it - the focus of this Saturday`s anti-war march in London - deserve to remain at the top of the political agenda. First, we must bear witness to the fact that on every point, the 2 million people who demonstrated against aggression on February 15 2003 have been shown to be correct, while those making the case for the war have been proved disastrously mistaken at best, reckless liars at worst. Whether it was WMD, the legality of the war or the consequences for Iraq of foreign military occupation, those who marched knew better than our rulers. That is a democratic lesson that bears repetition.

Second, we must demand that the occupation is brought to a speedy end, our troops brought home, and full sovereignty restored to the Iraqi people. If you needed any further argument as to why the British and US military are utterly unfit to exercise control over Iraqis, surely the abuse of prisoners, photographed for posterity by their tormentors, provides it. The US-manipulated elections have done nothing to weaken the case for an end to occupation or Iraqis` overwhelming desire for thewithdrawal of British and American troops. If anything, the opposite is true.

Third, the "war on terror" is cutting closer to home than ever, with centuries-old civil rights being scrapped on grounds which closely resemble those used to promote the war against Iraq. The anti-war movement adopted defence of civil liberties as a key objective from the outset. We can neither place all our faith in peers, nor on ministers who believe it is acceptable for British Muslims to be targeted for stop-and-searches. We are proud that human rights campaigners like Liberty`s Shami Chakrabarti and the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, are now sharing our platforms.

Fourth, the threat of new wars, including an extension of conflict in the Middle East to Syria or Iran has to be taken extremely seriously. The Washington neo-conservatives are brutally frank about their objectives and we must assume they will try to attain as many as possible, by force if necessary, over the next four years.

When George Bush demands Syrian troops leave Lebanon "because you cannot hold free and fair elections under foreign military occupation", it might be tempting to think he is indulging in self-parody. But experience suggests this administration is never so dangerous as when it sounds most absurd.

Already, the repeated mobilisation of British "people power" over the past three years has made it extraordinarily difficult for a British government to support any further wars. The war party has comprehensively lost the argument - that is presumably why, in recent months, it has turned to increasingly desperate attacks on the anti-war movement.

Some of the charges against us are true: we are proud to work with Muslims, many of whom have been brought into active politics for the first time. We recognise that an invaded people will resist occupation and has the right to do so. Many of our organisers are of the left, and defend its traditions against those who would prostitute them in the service of US power.

The anti-war movement has spoken the truth on behalf of millions of citizens - there should not be a single parliamentary candidate in the forthcoming election able to hide from it.

· Andrew Murray is chair of the Stop the War Coalition and author, with Lindsey German, of Stop the War - The story of Britain`s biggest mass movement, published this week.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 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/
Wednesday, March 16, 2005

The Blogging Phenomenon

Steven Levy at Newsweek asks why blogging is dominated by white males, and what the implications of this configuration are if blogging replaces traditional media. He quotes presenters at a recent Harvard conference who worried that the newsrooms of the major print media have only recently begun to be diversified with regard to gender and race, and that the white male bloggers could crowd out the voices of these professional journalists.

Jeff Jarvis, the Republican in Democrat Clothing, replies that there is nothing wrong with being a white male.

Of course not. But white male Americans, at least, disproportionately voted for Bush, supported the Iraq war, favor racial profiling, favor tax cuts for the wealthy, favor capital punishment, oppose gay marriage, etc. Of course they are diverse, too, but their statistical center of gravity skews right in American terms, which means Pretty Far Right in the terms of the rest of the world. If they dominate a medium of news and information, it won`t give a balanced view of the world.

In his typical ad hominem fashion, Jarvis attacks Levy for being a white male. But Levy`s point is precisely that the Newsweek newsroom doesn`t just consist of people like him, whereas the blogs with the largest number of hits in the world consist of bloggers an awful lot like Jarvis.

Jarvis then makes the breathtaking observation that anyone can blog. But that isn`t the point either. Levy isn`t saying anyone is prevented from blogging. He is saying that we may find that the top five hundred blogs with regard to hits have a particular racial and gender configuration, which may not be healthy for the medium.

Jarvis argues that the bottom 7,999,999 blogs in hits get much more circulation than the top 100 blogs. This statement is true but contains a genuine fallacy of reasoning. Most blogs get only a few hits, and are seen by only a few people, and they are not the same people as see the other small blogs. So to aggregate all these readers is illegitimate. Andrew Sullivan or Jeff Jarvis or Right Wing News, on the other hand, get tens of thousands of hits a day, especially from other opinion leaders, and circulate widely. So that a million other blogs each get 3 hits a day is completely beside the point.

Jarvis then recommends some Middle Eastern bloggers as though he is thereby providing diverse opinions. But let`s stop and think about this. Jarvis doesn`t know anything serious about the Middle East, and is innocent of the languages. So he is recommending English-language blogs from the region or by expatriates, without any real metric for where they fall on their own country`s spectrum. Who knows English in the Middle East? Usually young men from wealthy or at least middle class families. They are disproportionately likely to favor capitalist, unregulated markets, to be secular in their outlook, and to be pro-Western. I.e., the views of many (not all) Western-educated Middle-Easterners are almost the complete opposite of most other Middle Easterners. You have to know something about the Middle East to know something about Middle Eastern bloggers in their own context.

Here is some support for Levy`s argument. Henry Copeland summarizes the recent results of a non-scientific blog advertisements poll. He finds that a fifth of blog readers are themselves bloggers, and that they engage in the activities typical of opinion leaders. The blogosphere is the sphere of the innovators, volunteers, networkers and entrepreneurs. In Henry`s poll, it is 3/4s male, and disproportionately upper middle class.

Jarvis is right that the problem is in what readers choose as daily fair rather than in what is available. If Mr. Jarvis wants some real diversity, he might try the blog of al-Muhajabah, "Veiled 4 Allah: The occasional thoughts of a Muslim woman. Islam, current events, my life, and whatever else interests me."

Then there is the refreshing Iranians for Peace, with postings by Mana Kia, Sima Shakhsari, and others.

If you want something as unlike Jeff Jarvis as possible, try Genia Stevens` Sisters Talk.

Ammar Abdul Hamid blogs Syria from Damascus in Amarji.

A Shiite Iraqi philosopher is Abbas Kadhim.

Or how about the staunchly anti-war pacifist journalist of the Middle East, Helena Cobban of Just World News?

The Iraqi Sunni Arab woman blogger, Riverbend, reflects the views of many in the Baghdad Sunni middle classes, and must gall Jarvis by being almost as popular as he is.

Progressive women include Melanie Mattsoon`s Just a Bump in the Beltway

and Susan Madrak`s Suburban Guerrilla

I`m not trying to be exhaustive, just attempting to make the point. There`s real diversity out there, and really important opinions being generated by it, which we ignore at our peril. Steven Levy is right that there is a danger of it being ignored, because blog readers too often look for mirrors of their own views. The mean-spiritedness of Jarvis toward those with whom he disagrees, and his celebration of often unrepresentative Middle Eastern bloggers, typifies this danger.

By the way, I regularly disagree with many of the sites I just listed, and they often disagree with one another.

The danger is all the greater because Jarvis has used his old TV Guide rollodex to convince the journalists that he speaks for the bloggers in general as the expert on the medium. He has also managed to scare them with his silly assertion that all bloggers are journalists. He should speak for himself. Me, I`m a news consolidator, translator, op-ed writer, and historian. I`m not doing journalism (i.e. news gathering on the scene and ensuring that stories are at least sourced to two or three different persons) 95 percent of the time. Most of what I do could not be accomplished without the efforts of the real journalists in the field, my heroes. And I even worked for a newspaper in Beirut for nearly a year once (mostly as a translator), so I know what real journalism looks like. I also did it with a civil war going on around me, so I know what the personal cost of journalism at the front is. People watching Fox and then bloviating at Little Green Martians or whatever are not doing journalism. Most of the people working in the studio at Fox Cable News are not even doing journalism as opposed to oral opinion columns, though there are real reporters in the field, who no doubt wish they could find some other boss than Rupert Murdoch.

News is becoming more interactive, which is all to the good. I would say that the most important feature of the blogosphere is the enabling of narrow-casting. Ten years ago who would have believed that an obscure professor of Middle East studies at a midwestern university could generate as many as a million page views a month by talking about Iraqi Shiite politics? Ten years ago I couldn`t even have gotten past the gatekeepers and slush piles to get an op-ed piece published. This is certainly some sort of revolution, but it is not a revolution in the production of journalism. It is a revolution in the interpretation, reception, and feedback-looping of journalism.

The phenomenon is not becoming less important. David Sifry reports some results of statistics gathered through Technorati.com, a web page link tracking service. He finds that up to 40,000 web logs are being created each day. Technorati now tracks nearly 8 million blogs, double the number from 5 months ago. The nearly 8 million blogs account for nearly one billion links.

As many bloggers have pointed out, the negative spin that many journalists put on a recent Gallup poll about the impact of blogging is undeserved. In fact, nearly a quarter of respondents said that they were familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs, and only 48 percent said they never read them. Obviously, it is a new medium, and what is remarkable about it is that it requires people to read. Americans are frankly not great readers, on the whole. Some 59 percent of Americans say they get their news from their local television stations. Only 42 percent even claim to have read the newspaper yesterday. But over a quarter now say they get news online. If they are reading, e.g., google.news, there is little in the way of distinction between formal journalistic news and blogs there. A lot of people may be reading blogs and not knowing it. I actually find it quite scarey that a keyword search at google.com turns up Reuters alongside American Patriot News and some bloggers. If I were google, I`d disaggregate those.

posted by Juan @ 3/16/2005 06:30:00 AM

Parliament Meets with No Government

Guerrillas detonated at least five car bombs in Iraq on Tuesday. They detonated another at Baqubah early on Wednesday, killing 3 Iraqi soldiers and wounding several others.

The Iraqi parliament meets for the first time Wednesday, but it is mainly a ceremonial event. The natural function of such a meeting, to elect a government, is absent. Ideally the parliament would elect a president and two vice presidents, who would appoint a prime minister and with him or her then approve a cabinet.

The parliament has to meet in the heavily fortified Green Zone, and one wonders whether the MPs and their families won`t just have to move there permanently if they are to avoid being killed or kidnapped. As yet, I have seen no published list of the names of the elected members of parliament, which is quite extraordinary. What other election in modern history has been this anonymous?

Al-Hayat: Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani is said to be particularly vehement that any agreement with the Shiites would require that they cede to the Kurds Kirkuk and grant the Kurds the right to keep their paramilitary, the peshmerga, as a proxy in their areas for the Iraqi army. He rejected the idea of postponing the Kirkuk issue. (It would be a little as though the governor of Alabama insisted that Atlanta be joined to his state and that the Alabama national guard substitute for the US army in that state, so that the US army should never step foot on Alabaman soil). Barzani complained that some Shiite politicians were already speaking as though they were the Iraqi state, and the Kurds were an opposition party.

Demonstrations against Jordan by Shiite crowds continued in Najaf on Tuesday, with demands that all Jordanians be expelled from Iraq. Sistani`s office denied that the Grand Ayatollah had issued a fatwa on the celebration held by the Jordanian family, whose son had detonated a bomb in Hilla last week. Sistani warned his aides against speaking about the issue of sectarian friction.

The father of the alleged bomber of Hilla denied Tuesday that his son had died in Hilla, specifying Mosul as the site of his death, and denied that the family held a celebration of his alleged "martyrdom." The family is said by ash-Sharq al-Awsat to have sent a letter to Ayatollah Sistani to this effect.

Ominously, Najaf police chief Ghalib al-Jaza`iri (who from all accounts is a little unbalanced) announced that they had finally apprehended the man who assassinated Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the Shiite clerical leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, on Aug. 29, 2003. They allege that the man, Ramzi Hashim, is a Kurd from Mosul, and that he intended to assassinate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as well, and to detonate bombs in the vicinity of the shrine of Imam Ali. This news will further inflame Kurdish-Shiite tensions. Is al-Jaza`iri, whom the government has tried without success to dismiss, attempting to influence the political negotiations with the Kurds by making this (somewhat implausible) charge public at this time?

In Kirkuk, a small crowd of 500 Turkmen and Arabs gathered to demand that the interim constitution be amended (Ash-Sharq al-Awsat) with regard to how the Kirkuk issue would be settled. (Currently, it specifies a referendum, which the Kurds are numerous enough to win.)

Ciao, baby: Italian troops will begin leaving Iraq in September. There are some 3000 Italian troops in Iraq. The US may have to replace the Italians with Australian troops.

posted by Juan @ [url3/16/2005 06:15:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/parliament-meets-with-no-government.html[/url]

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Hier sind die Blogger-Adressen aus Nahost, die Prof. Cole anführt verlinkt.

[urlIranians for Peace,]http://peaceiran.blogspot.com/[/url]
Genia Stevens` Sisters Talk.
Ammar Abdul Hamid blogs Syria from Damascus in Amarji.
Helena Cobban of Just World News
[urlRiverbend]http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/[/url]
Melanie Mattsoon`s Just a Bump in the Beltway
Suburban Guerrilla

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Querbeet:

Nachdem der Film in einem Kino in NY gestartet ist, läuft er jetzt in 46 Kinos und ist auf Platz 23 der Charts angekommen.
23. This Week+++ Downfall (Der Untergang)+++ $329,539+++ $582,198-Gesamt+++ 4 Wo+++ 46 Theater








Dieses klingt so unglaublich, dass es bald schon wieder wahr sein könnteaus dem Spiegel)
Das heißt, es gibt auch ein Universum, in dem Saddam Hussein…

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Wednesday, March 16, 2005
War News for Wednesday, March 16, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Matt is travelling today and I volunteered to stand in for him. May I say that Matt`s posts, and I am sure that all will agree with this, are absolutely brilliant in terms of the depth and quality of the material he finds on the days he posts. Matt`s research and diligence show that news from Iraq could fill a broadsheet newspaper every day.

Bring `em on: Suicide car bomb attack kills three Iraqis soldiers in Baquba.

Bring `em on: Deputy commander of Iraqi Forces in Al Anbar Province shot dead by US troops at checkpoint west of Ramadi.

Bring `em on: Italian soldier killed during routine target practice session in Nasseriyah.

Bring `em on: Casualties feared after bomb attack on English language newspaper in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: As the Iraqi Parliament convenes for the first time more than half a dozen bomb explosions occur near the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Oil pipeline attack in Fatha.

Stalemate: Iraq`s new parliament has met for the first time more than six weeks after it was elected in historic polls, but the country is still without a government as rival blocs bicker over a coalition deal. The National Assembly`s 275 members, elected during Jan 30 elections, convened amid tight security in the heavily-guarded Green Zone with US helicopter gunships hovering overhead. The delay in forming a government has angered many Iraqis, after more than eight million people defied suicide bombers and mortar attacks to vote.

Corruption: The reconstruction of Iraq risks turning into the world`s biggest corruption scandal, Transparency International has said in a report focused on a worldwide problem of bribery in the building industry.

"If urgent steps are not taken, Iraq will not become the shining beacon of democracy envisaged by the Bush administration, it will become the biggest corruption scandal in history," the independent anti-graft group wrote in its annual Global Corruption Report on Wednesday.

The 2005 report refers to the scandal-tainted United Nations oil-for-food programme and complaints of bribery affecting almost all Iraqi government operations. It criticised the United States for its poor handling of procurement and said calls for rapid privatisation to reduce debts were misguided.

Geneva Convention? At least 26 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing military officials. Investigators have closed their inquiries in 18 of those cases reviewed by the Army and Navy and have recommended them for prosecution or referred them to other agencies for action, the Times said.

Eight cases are still being probed but are listed by the Army as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides, the paper reported, citing officials.

Progress! Insurgents trying to overthrow Iraq`s U.S.-based government are increasingly targeting checkpoints, often with suicide attacks. U.S. and Iraqi officers say this shows progress in the battle against the insurgency because guerrillas are finding it harder to attack other targets.

Insurgency will not be defeated for many months, Britain admitted today. Senior Foreign Office officials said attacks were widespread and becoming increasingly sophisticated. It had been hoped January’s elections would deal a major blow to the insurgents, but officials said troops and citizens still faced months of bloodshed. "The insurgency is still very strong," said one official. "It is not going to be dealt with in a matter of months."
Thanks to Dana for this story

Italian Withdrawal

Berlusconi`s decision to start a phased withdrawal of Italian is being widely reported in the media. Whether this is a clever piece of electioneering in the face of the forthcoming regional elections, awaits to be seen. However, there are now some reports in the media that British troops will probably be asked to go to Iraq to help fill the void left by Italy`s proposed withdrawal. This could now become a major issue in the May 2005 British General Election.

See also these reports of Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Dutch and, I almost forgot, Polish troop withdrawals.

Special Reports

Counting the Dead

Counting the dead is intrinsic to civilised society. Understanding the causes of death is a core public health responsibility. The government`s white paper on public health emphasises the vital role of assessing the impact on health of all public policy. This is well recognised, and yet neither the public nor public health professionals are able to obtain reliable and officially endorsed information about the extent of civilian deaths attributable to the allied invasion of Iraq. Estimates vary between tens and hundreds of thousands.

These estimates come from reports in the press, or counting bodies admitted to hospitals, as well as surveys. The former are likely to be inaccurate and to underestimate the true numbers and do not easily allow for reliable attribution between, for example, violent and natural causes. Public access to reliable data on mortality is important. The policy being assessed—the allied invasion of Iraq—was justified largely on grounds of democratic supremacy. Voters in the countries that initiated the war, and others—not least in Iraq itself—are denied a reliable evaluation of a key indicator of the success of that policy. This is unacceptable.

Instead the UK government`s policy was first not to count at all, and then to rely publicly on extremely limited data available from the Iraqi Ministry of Health. This follows US government policy; famously encapsulated by General Tommy Franks of the US Central Command "We don`t do body counts." Its inadequacy was emphasised after the publication of a representative household survey that estimated 100 000 excess deaths since the 2003 invasion. The government rejected this survey and its estimates as unreliable; in part absurdly because statistical extrapolation from samples was thought invalid. Imprecise they are, but to a known extent. These are unique estimates from a dispassionate survey conducted in the most dangerous of epidemiological conditions. Hence the estimates, as far as they can go, are unlikely to be biased, even allowing for the reinstatement of Falluja. To confuse imprecision with bias is unjustified.



Swanker of the Day!

[urlMichelle Malkin]http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43318[/url]
# posted by Friendly Fire : 1:41 AM
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Latest Fatality: Mar 15, 2005
Drop, drop, drop!!!

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

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Backed by 37 Democrats, Minority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday accuses
President Bush and GOP Senate leaders of an "arrogant abuse of power."
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Reid threatens partial Senate shutdown
Parties hurtle toward April clash over Democratic filibusters of Bush judicial nominees
By Tom Curry
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7193614/
National affairs writer
MSNBC
Updated: 6:05 p.m. ET March 15, 2005

WASHINGTON - Surrounded by 37 Democratic senators on the steps of the Capitol, Democratic Leader Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada threatened Tuesday to shut down the Senate over the issue of filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominations. Reid would exempt from his shut-down only national defense matters and spending needed to ensure ongoing federal operations.

Right after the Senate returns from its two-week break, which begins Friday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is likely to move to change a Senate rule that requires 60 votes to cut off debate on a nomination in order to bring it to final up-or-down vote.

Frist would lower the filibuster threshold for nominations to 51.

Reid called on Americans to “oppose this arrogant abuse of power” and accused Bush and his Republican allies in the Senate of trying to “break down the separation of powers and ram through their appointees to the judicial branch.”

He charged Bush and Frist with harboring a “desire for absolute power.”

`Cataclysmic event`
“If Republicans want to go down this road, they are going to be beginning a huge, partisan, cataclysmic event, the implications of which are so profound that none of us really know the answer to it,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of the Democrats arrayed behind Reid on the Capitol steps. “It would mean the government could not function, which, more importantly, means we could not be doing the people’s work.”

Since beginning the filibuster strategy in March 2003, the Democratic minority in the Senate has killed 10 of Bush’s nominations to the federal appeals courts by threatening to keep talking on the floor until they were withdrawn.

Bush made a total of 51 appeals court nominations in his first term. Of those nominations, 35 were confirmed, 10 were killed by filibuster and six did not emerge from the Judiciary Committee.

Bush later used his recess appointment power to give two of the filibustered nominees, William Pryor and Charles Pickering, temporary spots on the federal appellate bench.

Reid made a point of noting in his statement Tuesday that “only 10 of 214 nominations have been turned down.”

Republicans counter that most of those approved were district court nominees.

District court judges conduct trials, but have little power to hand down rulings in cases with constitutional implications. The real power to affect constitutional law is on the appeals courts and the Supreme Court.

Key Democrats: Nelson, Lieberman
Conspicuous by their absence from Reid’s Capitol steps event were two Democrats: Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who has voted against all but one of the Democratic filibusters since 2003, and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Both men are up for re-election next year, and Nelson is running in a state Bush won with 66 percent of the vote.

David DiMartino, a spokesman for Nelson, said the senator has indicated that he will not vote for Frist’s proposed rule change. Instead, Nelson is working on a proposal for a permanent rules change that would allow the majority party to circumvent the filibuster. Nelson would require a specific time frame for the Senate to vote up or down on a nominee.

Under Senate rules, Nelson’s proposed change would require 67 votes in order to take effect, which makes it unlikely to pass in the current environment.

Reacting to Reid’s threat, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas said, “When the American people realize that they are threatening to shut down government because we want to restore majority rule in the United States Senate, I think it’s going to backfire on them terribly.”

Cornyn said the 2004 election results, which gave the GOP a net gain of four Senate seats, were driven largely by voter opposition to Democratic filibustering of Bush’s judicial nominees.

“If we don’t do this (lower the filibuster threshold), I think those people who gave us the large majority and re-elected the president are going to think that we have been ineffective, and you know what happens to people who voters think are ineffective: They get unelected,” he said.

Cornyn said he was confident there are enough Republican senators to get the 50 needed to approve the parliamentary move to lower the filibuster requirement.

Looking to Supreme Court vacancy
He said it was “absolutely” necessary to resolve the filibuster issue before a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court. “Once we get a Supreme Court vacancy, I think that’ll overwhelm virtually every other issue.”

There are at least a few GOP senators who have said they would oppose the filibuster change that Frist will seek.

One of them, Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, said Tuesday, “The important thing is to try to avoid these confrontations so that a nominee could get bipartisan support. I like to give the executive full leeway to make these choices, whichever party it is. The main thing is to get nominees who are not going to be lightning rods and polarize. Then we’re not in that situation of threatened filibusters.”

Chafee is up for re-election next year in a state that John Kerry carried with 60 percent of the vote.

A Republican who will vote to lower the filibuster threshold for nominees, Sen. George Allen of Virginia, predicted that “the Democrats are going to have heck of a time pulling this off. There’ll be senators like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman who will say, ‘Wait a second, we tried this play for the last two years and Tom Daschle is our former leader.”

Daschle lost his Senate seat partly due to South Dakota voters’ disenchantment with his leadership of the Senate Democrats on the filibuster strategy.

“The reality is they’re not cooperating on much of anything anyway,” Allen said of the Democrats. “Ultimately, if they try to hold up the energy bill, hold up welfare reform, I really do think they’ll just be digging a deeper grave.”

“There’s a lot of bluffing going on here and I think we ought to call their bluff. We shouldn’t cower, we should not be timid,” he said.

Democrats often point to delays and obstruction of President Clinton’s judicial nominees by Republican senators, accusing the GOP of inconsistency in its current stance.

"All we have ever asked for (Clinton nominees) Marsha Berzon and Richard Paez is that both nominees get an up-or-down vote," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in 1999. "If a senator has a problem with particular nominees, he or she should vote against them. But a nominee should not be held up interminably by a handful of senators."

Ultimately in March of 2000, both Paez and Berzon were confirmed by the Senate and both now serve on the federal appeals court for the 9th Circuit.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7193614/

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Jack Lessenberry: `Democracy is dying behind closed doors`
Posted on Wednesday, March 16 @ 09:42:46 EST
Every administration comes to town pledging a policy of openness -- which lasts until they have something they want to conceal.
http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7444
By Jack Lessenberry, Detroit Metro Times

Helen Thomas has been fighting for information the public needs to know longer than the vast majority of the public has been alive. She has covered the White House since the Kennedy administration, mostly as a straight reporter.

These days, she`s a columnist, but still works her beat hard. "I`m self-propelled, really. I care about the news," she told me a few years ago.

Earlier this month she came back to her native Detroit to speak to a radiant crop of journalism students at her alma mater, Wayne State University. What she wanted them to know was that, as she said, "Democracy dies behind closed doors," and how important it is to fight against the tendency governments at every level have toward secrecy.

A few years ago, in Washington, she told me that every administration comes to town pledging a policy of openness -- which lasts until they have something they want to conceal.



"They all do it," she told me, though she added that she thought George W. Bush`s administration is the worst she has seen. "People [who aren`t journalists] never know how difficult it is to get the straight story, to get the facts. The secrecy that`s so endemic in government, in business, in everything."

She was White House bureau chief for UPI until the Moonies took it over in 2000, and she bailed. Since then, she`s written a twice-weekly column for Hearst. She`s good at it, but one senses she misses hard news reporting. "I still really believe that when people are given the basic facts, they don`t need my opinion, really. I still think that journalism is best when it`s giving the straight story."

Thomas has a little bit of experience at this stuff. She`s been at her craft since she was in college, and will turn 85 this summer.

"Retire? That`s a dirty word," she said, chuckling.

So while others her age may go to Florida for the sunshine, she`s at work this week, the first annual "sunshine week" for journalists everywhere, those front-line troops fighting for more openness and less secrecy in government.

That`s badly needed, at virtually every level. True, it`s essential to fight the Bush administration`s attempts to conceal how it makes decisions about treating prisoners of war. Yet it may be just as crucial to insist that your city council or library board make their decisions in the open.

Local governments often resent requests by the press or the public to examine their decision-making process. In fact, everything that`s done with taxpayer dollars or in the taxpayer`s name ought to be open to all of us, with a very few exceptions for privacy and security reasons.

Naturally, politicians too often would expand "privacy and security" to cover anything they don`t feel like letting us find out. We have to constantly fight for access, though the laws are actually pretty clear; we have the right to know.

Thanks to FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, we have the right to request and see virtually any government document. We, both the press and the general public, should use it more often. And we need to press for open meeting acts for every government body.

Lots of journalists are doing just that. Ironically, some of the politicians who bluster most about people "taking responsibility for their actions," don`t want to take responsibility for theirs. In George Bush`s Texas, for example, legislators can vote on important bills without having the way they voted recorded (!) -- something the Associated Press has been pressuring them to change.

There are a lot of people at all levels of government who don`t want us paying too much attention to how they`re planning to start the next war, or to whom they`re going to give the contract for the new library addition.

This is the week to put them on notice -- and this is one of the very few issues on which conservatives and liberals should totally agree. Anyone who`s ever sported one of those "I love my country, but fear my government" bumper stickers ought to be charter members of the sunshine club.

Check out sunshineweek.com for starters to learn more, and to start to figure out what you can do to help yourself.

Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Metro Times.

(c)2005, Metro Times, Inc.

Reprinted from The Detroit Metro Times:
http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7444

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Ich habe schon andere Artikel über die Shiitische Mehrheit im Südosten von Saudi-Arabien eingestellt. Hier noch ein Artikel über die Kommunalwahlen in Saudi Arabien.

Mar 17, 2005

Saudi`s Shi`ites walk tightrope
By John R Bradley
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC17Ak01.html

Earlier this month, when Saudi Arabia`s Shi`ites voted in the kingdom`s oil-rich Eastern Province during the second of three phases of nationwide elections for municipal councils, Shi`ite candidates were returned in districts where there was a clear Shi`ite majority population. Where there was not, Sunni candidates, who had the semi-official backing of the Wahhabi religious establishment, were elected, just as their Wahhabi cousins in Riyadh had swept the board a few weeks earlier.

The more unexpected news was ignored by the Western media, namely that Hussein Abdul Rahman al-Khamis, one of the most popular Shi`ite candidates in the al-Hasa region, was disqualified from running just a day before polling day, the only candidate thus far in the two phases of elections to be removed from the list of those standing for office.

"I still don`t know why I was excluded. People who were going to vote for me are also shocked," he told al-Jazeera TV on polling day, adding that the paper which announced his exclusion had no official stamp on it.

Why was al-Khamis so hastily excluded?

One reason could be that, unlike the other Shi`ite candidates in al-Hasa region, he lived in a Sunni-majority district. The electoral rules allowed voters to cast one vote for a candidate in their own district, but also another vote for a candidate in each of the other five districts of al-Hasa.

As the only Shi`ite candidate in his own district, al-Khamis would, by default, have attracted the majority of votes from the Shi`ites living in the other five districts. The result: a Shi`ite candidate in a landslide victory in a Sunni-majority district. The prospect, it seems, was simply too awful for the 24 Sunni candidates standing against him to contemplate.

Throughout the ruling al-Saud family`s various victories and defeats and alignments and realignments with tribal chieftains, Bedouin clans and sedentary peoples over the past century, there has remained only one constant: outright hostility from the Wahhabis to the Shi`ite sect.

So the question everyone was asking, after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, was what would stop the Shi`ites of the Eastern Province, who have no obvious incentive to support the al-Saud regime that oppresses them and damns them as "infidels", from welcoming US forces if they rolled into the Eastern Province to "liberate" Saudi Arabia`s oil fields?

After the fall of Baghdad, the image of more than a million Shi`ites on the streets of Iraq marking the Ashura commemoration for the first time in living memory was not lost on the kingdom`s 900,000 Shi`ites, who have historic links with their co-religionists across the border.

Other, subtler historic tensions were also brought to the surface.

In 1802, Wahhabis supported by the al-Saud penetrated Karbala, the Shi`ite holy city in Iraq, and destroyed the mausoleum of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet whose martyrdom Shi`ites commemorate during Ashura. With that attack on the tombs of Hussein and his followers, the al-Saud ruling family, and their Wahhabi backers, declared their open hostility to the Shi`ite sect.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein, three massive car bombs exploded in Karbala, killing hundreds and maiming many more. Locals instinctively blamed "Wahhabis", meaning Saudi jihadis who had sneaked across the border to join the insurgency. The majority of suicide bombings in Iraq have been carried out by Saudi jihadis, who are seeped in Wahhabi ideology. It was as though history was repeating itself. And in Ashura this year, the Shi`ite`s worst fears were confirmed, after a car bomb in the Shi`ite city of Hilla killed 125. Again, locals marched to reiterate where they thought the blame lies: "No to terrorism" and "No to Ba`athism and Wahhabism" they shouted.

Deep loathing of Shi`ites, an ingrained habit of associating them with hostile external and internal powers, and fears among religious hardliners about the future position of Wahhabi clerics in a reformed Saudi political system that might grant Shi`ites their rights, all meanwhile continue to feed anti-Shi`ite sentiment inside Saudi Arabia itself. The exclusion of al-Khamis from the official list of candidates in al-Hasa was just another manifestation of that.

In a region obsessed with conspiracy theories, many Saudis, both Sunni and Shi`ite, think that Washington has plans to split off the Eastern Province into a separate entity, and seize control of the oil reserves after Iraq has stabilized. No amount of appeasement from the al-Saud is, in the meantime, going to pacify extremist Wahhabi elements - or, for that matter, the majority of the Shi`ites in the Eastern Province, who, not satisfied with token gestures, seem certain to exploit their ambiguous position when it comes to the issue of their loyalty to the Saudi state to push even more strongly for greater freedom and rights.

But the irony is that, as a result of the insurgency in Iraq and the suicide bombers routinely attacking Shi`ite civilians, the Saudi Shi`ites, rather than becoming more restless, may in fact see greater virtue in continuing to support the al-Saud regime.

The reason is that Iraq is proof of how, should the al-Saud be overthrown in a violent Islamic revolution led by al-Qaeda and inspired by Wahhabism, the Shi`ites are now more aware than ever that they will likely find themselves first in the firing line, at least after the al-Saud princes themselves have been done away with.

John R Bradley is the author of Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis. He has reported extensively from Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East for many publications, including The Economist, The New Republic, Salon, The Independent, The London Telegraph, The Washington Times and Prospect. His website is www.johnrbradley.com.

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

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March 15, 2005
The Overstretch Myth
By DAVID H. LEVEY AND STUART S. BROWN
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/

David H. Levey recently retired after 19 years as Managing Director of Moody`s Sovereign Ratings Service. Stuart S. Brown is Professor of Economics and International Relations in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at Syracuse University`s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

From the March/April 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs.



Would-be Cassandras have been predicting the imminent downfall of the American imperium ever since its inception. First came Sputnik and "the missile gap," followed by Vietnam, Soviet nuclear parity, and the Japanese economic challenge--a cascade of decline encapsulated by Yale historian Paul Kennedy`s 1987 "overstretch" thesis.

The resurgence of U.S. economic and political power in the 1990s momentarily put such fears to rest. But recently, a new threat to the sustainability of U.S. hegemony has emerged: excessive dependence on foreign capital and growing foreign debt. As former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has said, "there is something odd about the world`s greatest power being the world`s greatest debtor."

The U.S. economy, according to doubters, rests on an unsustainable accumulation of foreign debt. Fueled by government profligacy and low private savings rates, the current account deficit--the difference between what U.S. residents spend abroad and what they earn abroad in a year--now stands at almost six percent of GDP; total net foreign liabilities are approaching a quarter of GDP. Sudden unwillingness by investors abroad to continue adding to their already large dollar assets, in this scenario, would set off a panic, causing the dollar to tank, interest rates to skyrocket, and the U.S. economy to descend into crisis, dragging the rest of the world down with it.

Despite the persistence and pervasiveness of this doomsday prophecy, U.S. hegemony is in reality solidly grounded: it rests on an economy that is continually extending its lead in the innovation and application of new technology, ensuring its continued appeal for foreign central banks and private investors. The dollar`s role as the global monetary standard is not threatened, and the risk to U.S. financial stability posed by large foreign liabilities has been exaggerated. To be sure, the economy will at some point have to adjust to a decline in the dollar and a rise in interest rates. But these trends will at worst slow the growth of U.S. consumers` standard of living, not undermine the United States` role as global pacesetter. If anything, the world`s appetite for U.S. assets bolsters U.S. predominance rather than undermines it.

PRIME NUMBERS

Discussion of the United States` "net foreign debt" conjures up images of countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey, evoking the currency collapses and economic crises they have suffered as models for a coming U.S. meltdown. There are key differences, however, between those emerging-market cases and the current condition of the global hegemon. The United States` external liabilities are denominated in its own currency, which remains the global monetary standard, and its economy remains on the frontier of global technological innovation, attracting foreign capital as well as immigrant labor with its rapid growth and the high returns it generates for investors.

The statistic at the center of the foreign debt debate is the net international investment position (NIIP), the value of foreign assets owned by U.S. residents minus the value of U.S. assets owned by nonresidents. Until 1989, the United States was a creditor to the rest of the world; the NIIP peaked at almost 13 percent of GDP in 1980. But chronic current account deficits ever since have given the United States the largest net liabilities in world history. Since foreign claims on the United States ($10.5 trillion) exceed U.S. claims abroad ($7.9 trillion), the NIIP is now negative: -$2.6 trillion at the start of 2004, or -24 percent of GDP.

Unpacking the NIIP gives a better sense of the risk it actually poses. It has two components: direct investment, the value of domestic operations directly controlled by a foreign company; and financial liabilities, the value of stocks, bonds, and bank deposits held overseas. At the start of 2004, foreign direct investment in the United States was $2.4 trillion, while U.S. direct investment abroad was about $2.7 trillion. (Direct investment is relatively stable, changing mostly in response to changes in expected long-term profitability.) Removing direct investment from the equation leaves $5.1 trillion in U.S.-held foreign financial assets versus $8.1 trillion in U.S. financial assets held by foreign investors.

This last figure represents a whopping 74 percent of U.S. GDP--a statistic that would seem to give ample cause for alarm. But considering foreign ownership of U.S. financial assets as a percentage of GDP is less enlightening than comparing it to the total available stock of U.S. financial assets. At the start of 2004, total U.S. securities amounted to $33.4 trillion (some 50 percent of the world total). Foreign investors held more than 38 percent of the $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, but only 11 percent of the $6.1 trillion in agency bonds (such as those issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac); 23 percent of the $6.5 trillion in corporate bonds; and 11 percent of the $15.5 trillion in equities outstanding. These foreign liabilities are the result of a string of current account deficits that have grown from 1.5 percent of GDP in the mid-1990s to an estimated 5.7 percent of GDP--about $650 billion--in 2004. Economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimate that ongoing deficits of 3 percent of GDP would bring the U.S. NIIP to -40 percent of GDP by 2010, and that it would eventually stabilize at around -63 percent. If the deficit remains at today`s level, they foresee the NIIP growing to -50 percent of GDP by 2010 and eventually to -100 percent.

These estimates, however, fail to consider that future dollar depreciation and market adjustments in interest rates and asset prices will likely check the increase of the NIIP. Dollar depreciation against the euro and the yen in 2002 and 2003 kept the NIIP flat despite large current account deficits. The same result is likely for 2004 (final numbers will not be available until the end of June). Thus, although the NIIP will surely continue to grow for many years to come, its increase will be far less dramatic than many economists fear.

FALSE ALARM

The real question is just how much the United States` deteriorating NIIP threatens to undermine the economic foundations of U.S. hegemony. The precise answer depends on whether you explain current account deficits in terms of trade, domestic savings and investment, or the composition of global wealth. In each case, though, the risks are far less dire than they are made out to be. And in many ways, chronic current account deficits reflect strong economic fundamentals rather than fatal structural flaws.

A trade-oriented approach to current account deficits views them as a byproduct of robust economic growth, reinforced by a still overvalued currency and the U.S. economy`s powerful structural import bias. In this view, the U.S. has a stubborn current account deficit because it grows faster than its trading partners and spends a disproportionate share of its growing income on imported goods and services.

An alternative perspective takes as its point of departure the accounting identity that equates the current account deficit with the difference between total investment in the United States and U.S. domestic saving. Low domestic saving, according to this view, is to blame for deficits. The fear is that a sudden reluctance by foreigners to continue exporting their excess savings to the United States would choke off the investment needed to sustain economic growth, sending the U.S. economy into crisis.

This explanation becomes less alarming, however, when you consider that both savings and investment are seriously undervalued in U.S. economic accounts. Capital gains on equities, 401(k) plans, and home values are excluded from measurements of personal saving; when they are added, total U.S. domestic saving is around 20 percent of GDP--about the same rate as in other developed economies. The national account also excludes "intangible" investment: spending on knowledge-creating activities such as on-the-job training, new-product development and testing, design and blueprint experimentation, and managerial time spent on workplace organization. Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research estimate that intangible investment grew rapidly during the 1990s and is now at least as large as physical investment in plant and equipment: more than $1 trillion per year, or 10 percent of GDP. Consequently, the size and growth rate of the U.S. economy have been seriously underestimated. In fact, when tangible and intangible investment are both counted, the apparent (and much decried) increase in consumer spending as a share of GDP turns out to be a statistical artifact.

A third approach to the current account deficit focuses on the growth and composition of global wealth. In this framework, international capital movements drive the current account balance, rather than vice versa. With the United States expected to grow faster than Europe and Japan over the next several decades and wealth growing rapidly in Asia--especially in China and India--it makes sense that foreign investors will continue to flock to U.S. financial markets. This could generate a sequence of U.S. deficits as high as 5 percent of GDP, causing the NIIP to balloon. But such an increase would not mean an end to the foreign appetite for U.S. assets; NIIP ratios that appear dangerously high relative to U.S. GDP would be sustainable because of the rapid growth of global wealth.

U.S. financial markets have stayed strong even as the financing of the U.S. deficit shifts from private investors to foreign central banks (from 2000 to 2003, the official institutional share of investment inflows rose from 4 percent to 30 percent). A large percentage of the $1.3 trillion in Asian governments` foreign exchange reserves is in U.S. assets; central banks now claim about 12 percent of total foreign-owned assets in the United States, including more than $1 trillion in Treasury and agency securities. Official inflows from Asia will likely continue for the foreseeable future, keeping U.S. interest rates from rising too fast and choking off investment.

In a series of recent papers, economists Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau, and Peter Garber maintain that Asian governments--pursuing a "mercantilist" development strategy of undervalued exchange rates to support export-led growth--must continue to finance U.S. imports of their manufactured goods, since the United States is their largest market and a major source of inward direct investment. Only a fundamental transformation in Asia`s growth strategy could undermine this mutually advantageous interdependence--an unlikely prospect at least until China absorbs the 300 million peasants expected to move into its industrial and service sectors over the next generation. Even the widely anticipated loosening of China`s exchange-rate peg would not alter the imperatives of this overriding structural transformation. Ronald McKinnon of Stanford argues that Asian governments will continue to prevent their currencies from depreciating too much in order to maintain competitiveness, avoid imposing capital losses on domestic holders of dollar assets, and reduce the risk of an economic slowdown that could lead to a deflationary spiral. According to both theories, there should be no breakdown of the current dollar-based regime.

Official Asian capital inflows, moreover, should soon be supplemented by a renewal of private inflows responding to the next stage of the information technology (IT) revolution. Technological revolutions unfold in stages over many decades. The IT revolution had its roots in World War II and has proceeded via the development of the mainframe computer, the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and the personal computer to culminate in the union of computers and telecommunications that has brought the Internet. The United States--thanks to its openness, its low regulatory burden, its flexible labor and capital markets, a positive environment for new business formation, and a financial market that supports new technology--has dominated every phase of this technological wave. The spread of the IT revolution to additional sectors and new industries thus makes a revival of U.S.-bound private capital flows likely.

A SOFTER LANDING

Whichever perspective on the current account one favors, the United States cannot escape a growing external debt. The "hegemony skeptics" fear such debt will lead to a collapse of the U.S. dollar triggered by a precipitous unloading of U.S. assets. Such a selloff could result--as in emerging-market crises--if investors suddenly conclude that U.S. foreign debt has become unsustainably large. A panicky "capital flight" would ensue, as investors raced for the exits to avoid the falling dollar and plunging stock and bond prices.

But even if such a sharp break occurs--which is less likely than a gradual adjustment of exchange rates and interest rates--market-based adjustments will mitigate the consequences. Responding to a relative price decline in U.S. assets and likely Federal Reserve action to raise interest rates, U.S. investors (arguably accompanied by bargain-hunting foreign investors) would repatriate some of their $4 trillion in foreign holdings in order to buy (now undervalued) assets, tempering the price decline for domestic stocks and bonds. A significant repatriation of funds would thus slow the pace of the dollar decline and the rise in rates. The ensuing recession, combined with the cheaper dollar, would eventually combine to improve the trade balance. Although the period of global rebalancing would be painful for U.S. consumers and workers, it would be even harder on the European and Japanese economies, with their propensity for deflation and stagnation. Such a transitory adjustment would be unpleasant, but it would not undermine the economic foundations of U.S. hegemony.

The U.S. dollar will remain dominant in global trade, payments, and capital flows, based as it is in a country with safe, well-regulated financial markets. Provided U.S. firms maintain their entrepreneurial edge--and despite much anxiety, there is little reason to expect otherwise--global asset managers will continue to want to hold portfolios rich in U.S. corporate stocks and bonds. Although foreign private demand for U.S. assets will fluctuate--witness the slowdown in purchases that precipitated the decline in the U.S. dollar in 2002 and 2003--rapid growth of world financial wealth will allow the proportion of U.S. assets held by foreigners to increase.

For foreign central banks (as well as commercial financial institutions), U.S. Treasury bonds, government-supported agency bonds, and deposits in highly rated banks will remain, for the foreseeable future, the chief sources of liquid reserve assets. Many analysts have pointed to the euro as a threat to the dollar`s status as the world`s central reserve currency. But the continuing strength of the U.S. economy relative to the European Union`s and the structure of European capital markets make such a prospect highly unlikely. On the basis of likely demographic and productivity growth differentials, Adam Posen of the Institute for International Economics estimates that the U.S. economy will be at least 20 percent larger than that of the EU in 2020. The United States will maintain its 22 percent share of world output, but Europe`s share will, in the absence of serious structural reforms, shrink by 3 to 5 percent. Moreover, European government bond markets, although larger than the U.S. Treasury market, are divided among five large countries and a host of smaller ones, greatly reducing liquidity, and European corporate bond and equity markets are smaller than their U.S. counterparts. With Asian capital markets still in their infancy, it will be a very long time before the pre-eminence of the dollar and U.S. capital markets is challenged.

At the peak of its global power the United Kingdom was a net creditor, but as it entered the twentieth century, it started losing its economic dominance to Germany and the United States. In contrast, the United States is a large net debtor. But in its case, no plausible challenger to its economic leadership exists, and its share of the global economy will not decline. Focusing exclusively on the NIIP obscures the United States` institutional, technological, and demographic advantages. Such advantages are further bolstered by the underlying complementarities between the U.S. economy and the economies of the developing world--especially those in Asia. The United States continues to reap major gains from what Charles de Gaulle called its "exorbitant privilege," its unique role in providing global liquidity by running chronic external imbalances. The resulting inflow of productivity-enhancing capital has strengthened its underlying economic position. Only one development could upset this optimistic prognosis: an end to the technological dynamism, openness to trade, and flexibility that have powered the U.S. economy. The biggest threat to U.S. hegemony, accordingly, stems not from the sentiments of foreign investors, but from protectionism and isolationism at home.

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March 17, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Wink and a Fraud
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/opinion/17dowd.html?

At the Gridiron Dinner in Washington on Saturday, where Old Media gently mocked politicians with corny songs, I sat next to a presidential gag writer, Landon Parvin. He was saying jokes work best when Republicans make fun of Republicans and Democrats make fun of Democrats.

President Bush, looking spiffy in white tie and tails, swung by to talk to Mr. Parvin. He didn`t look my way, but proceeded back up to the dais.

Suddenly, W. turned around, stopped and looked right at me. Then he flashed a wink, not a flirty wink but a mischievous Clark Gable "I`ve got your number and you think you`ve got mine but I win" wink.

Bush had a cold, but he was feeling pretty hot.

He started his presidency with a tentative demeanor and a chip on his shoulder. Now, even with the Middle East still roiling and the Democrats still spoiling for a fight over Social Security, W. feels as if he`s won a lot of hands and has a big pile of chips.

He`s confident enough to send two unilateralist hawks who specialize in blowing off the globe - John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz - to run global institutions that epitomize multilateralism. (Wolfie`s biggest qualification to run the World Bank? His prediction that Iraqi reconstruction would pay for itself with Iraqi oil revenues.)

In The Washington Post, the reporter Mark Leibovich wrote that the president has been almost like a different person since the Iraqi elections, so loosey-goosey as he tries to sell his Social Security agenda and other programs that "he is resembling a Texas auctioneer pitching private accounts on the borscht belt."

When a woman at an Arkansas town meeting last month told W. she was from De Queen, he replied, "That is right next to De King."

At the Gridiron, Mr. Bush slyly joked that he had the "dangedest puppy" who would roll over on command - but only some of the time. "I renamed him `John McCain.` "

I may have gotten a presidential wink, but I still don`t have my regular White House pass back. (Maybe I`d get it back if I became a male escort?) But Bush aides have now decided to let in a blogger. Maybe they`re grateful that bloodhound bloggers ran off Dan Rather.

But this White House may not like New Media any more than Old Media. It`s already moved on to Fake Media.

Here is yesterday`s headline on the humorist Andy Borowitz`s Web site: "White House Reporter Turns Out to Be Cheney. Fake Mustache Falls Off Veep During Press Briefing."

The White House isn`t backing off its plan to replace real news with faux news. The Bushies created their own reality to convince the country that Iraq was a threat to U.S. security. So even though the war has given birth to some of the very evils it was supposed to fix - like more recruits for Osama, and Saddam`s formerly sealed weapons` falling into terrorists` hands - Bushies like the results of their war.

Now the White House has its own gulag: C.I.A. agents snatch suspects and fly them to places like Egypt and Syria to be strung up in chains and tortured. And The Times reported yesterday that at least 26 deaths of prisoners in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan may be criminal homicides. So it also has its own Soviet-style propaganda campaign.

At his news conference yesterday, the president bristled a bit when a reporter reminded him that after it was revealed that his administration was paying columnists to shill for agency programs, Mr. Bush had ordered that such tactics cease.

But, as the reporter noted, the administration is still using government money to produce stories about the government that are broadcast with no disclosure that the government is producing them.

David Barstow and Robin Stein wrote in The Times on Sunday that at least 20 agencies had made and distributed fake news segments to local TV stations; the administration spent $254 million in its first four years to buy self-aggrandizing puffery from P.R. firms.

The president joked that he could tack on an "I`m George W. Bush and I approved this disclaimer." But then he said he wouldn`t - that it was up to local stations to reveal the truth.

He said his Justice Department had found that the fake news programs are "within the law so long as they`re based upon facts, not advocacy."

And, of course, this is a White House that never makes up facts to suit its purposes or sell its programs. It serves its propaganda baldfaced, with no hint of its real agenda.

At least I got a wink.

E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 17, 2005
EDITORIAL
Why Paul Wolfowitz?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/opinion/17thu2.html

When asked why he had nominated Paul Wolfowitz, a chief architect of the Iraq invasion, as the next president of the World Bank, President Bush repeatedly pointed out that as deputy defense secretary, Mr. Wolfowitz had managed a large organization. Even he seemed slightly flummoxed about why a job that is all about international cooperation should go to a man whose work has so outraged many of the nations with which he will be expected to work.

Even those who supported the goals of the invasion must remember Mr. Wolfowitz`s scathing contempt for estimates that the occupation of Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of troops, and his serene conviction that American soldiers would be greeted with flowers. Like the nomination of John Bolton as United Nations ambassador, the choice of Mr. Wolfowitz is a slap at the international community, which widely deplored the invasion and the snubbing of the United Nations that accompanied it.

There was a time when Mr. Wolfowitz might have seemed like a reasonable choice. He served three years as the American ambassador to Indonesia during the Reagan administration. And he was the persuasive communicator who once wrote that security and poverty are connected - that the solutions to global conflicts don`t necessarily lie in arms control, but in poverty reduction and economic development. And he obviously has the president`s trust - which he will need if he is going to make the wealthiest nations fulfill their vow to make 2005 the year for development in the world`s poorest regions.

The capacity of the bank to do good is enormous. In so many places in Africa, Asia and Latin America, World Bank projects are where the rubber meets the road: they include such things as building a well in a village in Mali so young girls can spend their mornings in school instead of walking two miles to a river to fetch parasite-infested drinking water, and building all-weather roads to help 200 million people in rural India. Its decisions can mean life or death for hundreds of millions of people. As a development organization, it lends money to cure market failures, financing projects whose returns would not attract other lenders.

We can only hope that Mr. Wolfowitz reverts to his earlier incarnation in his new job. The World Bank requires a leader with a passion for the job, someone who lives, eats, drinks and sleeps economic development and poverty reduction. It is too critical a post to be used by the president to make another triumphalist political point.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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The Independent
The mystery of Mr Lebanon’s murder
Thursday, 17th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=620…

After the assassination of Rafik Hariri, his vehicles were taken from the scene on the orders of a former aide. And now, reports Robert Fisk, many believe the missing cars may hold the key to the killing

OW here’s a strange story from Beirut. Strange, because it is one of fear and suspicion about Rafik Hariri’s murder on 14 February; stranger still because - although almost everyone in Beirut knows the story -much of it has not been published in Lebanon.

It involves a man called Ali Salah Haj and Hariri himself - and the mysterious decision to move the most vital evidence of his murder from the scene of the crime. Some say it is all a mistake, the result of inexperience or ignorance. Others believe it holds the key to how the former billionaire prime minister was murdered in a bombing that cost the lives of 18 other innocents.

It all begins in the late 1990s when Hariri was prime minister. He lived in a palace of pre-stressed concrete in the Beirut suburb of Qoreitem and travelled everywhere with a government-supplied team of escorts from Lebanon’s Internal Security Force.

Of the 40 men regularly on his team, Hariri regularly drove with one of its senior officers, a man he liked, the heavily mustachioed Ali Haj. "Things were quite normal," one of Hariri’s closest associates now says, "until Sheikh Rafik found that the Syrians seemed to know everything he was saying in his car. People thought he must be bugged or that there was a tap on his phone. And after a while, he decided that Ali Haj might be telling the Syrians what he was saying."

In a land such as Lebanon - where everyone listens to everyone else (Hariri had his own security informants) - that had to be investigated.

"So he told Ali Haj something very specific that the Syrians wouldn’t like," the family associate says. "And, within minutes of meeting a Syrian official that day, the very same matter was raised with him. That day, Sheikh Rafik asked another security man to ride with him. Ali Haj was relegated to another car."

Within a short time, Ali Haj was reassigned - to a Lebanese intelligence post in the Bekaa valley where he dealt regularly with Brigadier General Rustum Ghazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon.

Now we flash forward to 14 February 2005. Hariri’s armoured motorcade, struck by a bomb of around 600kg, lies blazing in the narrow road beside the St George Hotel on the Beirut Corniche. The vehicles, pitted with shrapnel holes, perhaps bearing traces of the explosives, formed a pattern which showed how the bomb scattered the cars - as well as the order in which the convoy was travelling.

But within hours - although every other burning car was left intact beside the highway - Hariri’s vehicles had disappeared. The decision was taken by the man who is now head of the Syrian-controlled Lebanese Internal Security Force, a certain Brigadier General Ali Salah Haj.

He ordered that the wreckage should be removed from the scene of the crime - and this, remember, was the location of the murder of the most important figure in the history of independent Lebanon - and taken away on trucks to the Lebanese Charles Helou army barracks. Where they remain to this day.

Ali Haj was among the many thousands of mourners who later came to pay their respects to the Hariri family. Witnesses later recorded he was given a frosty reception. Ghenna Hariri, the young daughter of Hariri’s sister Bahiya, a Lebanese MP in the southern city of Sidon, greeted him with the words: "Your place is not here." When he offered his hand to Hariri’s widow Nazek - who now wears her late husband’s wedding ring on a chain round her neck - she touched her chest modestly rather than take Ali Haj’s hand.

In a country where everyone believes in the "moamara" - the Plot - it is essential not to point the finger. No one has yet discovered who set off the bomb that killed Hariri. But there are a number of remarkable elements about the Lebanese investigation.

The first is that, a month after Hariri’s murder, it has still given no information about it. Furthermore, the bombing took place in a part of Beirut - site of a recent Francophone conference, close to the Phoenicia Hotel where many foreign dignitaries stay and within half a mile of parliament - the most heavily guarded area of Lebanon.

For the killers to have avoided the attention of the ISF, the army, the traffic cops and a host of other security organisations as they prepared their bomb was a truly extraordinary achievement. And for anyone to have ordered the removal of the principle evidence from the scene of the crime was an even more unlikely denouement.

One of those working on the Lebanese security investigation has admitted there have been "many mistakes made", suggesting Ali Haj’s decision to move the Hariri convoy cars came about because of his conflicting loyalties - he had been one of Hariri’s own bodyguards but was now a senior security officer - rather than any desire to cover up the evidence.

He also said the police are convinced the killer was a suicide bomber, possibly an al-Qa’ida operative who targeted Hariri because of his links with the Saudi royal family. Hariri held Saudi citizenship. Hariri’s supporters are increasingly convinced the bomb was hidden under the roadway, down a drain or a telephone cable duct.

It’s easy to see how each theory suits their respective creators. An al-Qa’ida murder clears the Lebanese and Syrian security authorities of blame.

The bomb-under-the-road story suggests the Lebanese military security institutions must have been breathtakingly careless in failing to notice the planning and planting of the bomb.

The Lebanese and the Syrians believe in the al-Qa’ida plot - even they are blaming the Israelis as a poor second - but the political opposition is increasingly fingering Syria for, at the least, incompetence, carelessness, even criminal negligence.

Hence Hariri’s supporters - even many thousands of those demanding the truth about Hariri’s death - are demanding the resignation of seven principal figures, all deeply in the pro-Syrian Lebanese justice or intelligence services. They include General Ali Haj. The remainder are: Adnan Adoum, the minister of justice and prosecutor general; Jamil Sayed, the head of Lebanese General Security; Mustapha Hamdan, head of the Lebanese Republican Guard; Raymond Azar, the head of the"mukhabarat" intelligence service; Edgar Mansour, the head of "national security", and Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of the security service’s "listening department", the "Amn el-Tanassot".

The authorities have refused to accept the list, claiming all are honourable men performing their duties with patriotism and devotion.

Needless to say, there’s an old Arab argument which runs in parallel with any ordinary policeman’s first question: in whose interest was it to commit the crime? Ask the Syrians, and they say they would never commit such an act, not least because the calumny which the accusations have since brought upon Damascus have caused such political disadvantage to Syria’s young president, Bachar al-Assad - who has himself condemned the killing as a "heinous crime."

Syria’s political friends in Lebanon - some of them Bachar’s acquaintances - have been pointing out, accurately, that the American neo-conservative project for the Middle East originally drawn up by Messers Perle, Feith, Wurmser and others, called not only for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein but for diverting of Syria’s attention "by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilise Syrian control of Lebanon."

How better to destabilise Syria in Lebanon than by killing Hariri?

Those million Lebanese who demanded Syria’s withdrawal, the resignation of the Lebanese president and the truth about Hariri’s murder on Monday do not recognise themselves in this scenario. They also demanded to know who killed ex-President Rene Mouawad, the Grand Mufti Khaled and the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt.

It is worth pointing out that the Christians among the demonstrators did not call for the truth about the murder of prime minister Rashid Karami and National Liberal leader Danny Chamoun - because wartime Christian militiamen rather than the Syrians are widely regarded as their murderers.

The imminent return from self-imposed French exile of the messianic ex-General Michel Aoun - who led a hopeless "war of independence" against the Syrians in 1989 which cost thousand of innocent lives - is a clear sign that the opposition here could find themselves gravely embarrassed.

Most, in fairness, do not personally blame President Bachar al-Assad of Syria for Hariri’s murder. They were insulted by his speech in the Syrian parliament last Saturday but are well aware that far more ruthless men exist in Syria - and outside Syria’s borders - to whom Hariri’s fate could be assigned, or even self-assigned.

Many opposition leaders, including Walid Jumblatt - it was his father Kamal who was murdered - hope desperately Bachar was not involved. But it remains the case the Lebanese security officers who were appointed to guard Lebanon on Syria’s behalf have established a wretched reputation.

Why, for example, were three more bodies discovered at the site of the Hariri mass murder in the two weeks that followed the bombing?

Ali Haj could immediately take the vital evidence from the scene of the crime - something which no police force in the world would do - on the grounds that he needed to "protect" it. But how come his investigation failed to spot three corpses at the scene?

When the Zahle MP and former Syrian ally, Mohsen Dalloul, announced this week that the Lebanese authorities "knew" who had assassinated Hariri - who was the unofficial leader of the Lebanese opposition to Syria until his death - those same authorities were as silent as the proverbial grave.

Maybe they are listening to the million Lebanese who demanded the truth. Or maybe they are just following the usual trade of all security services, silently listening to their telephone lines. I say this because just three days ago, Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of the Lebanese eavesdropping department, put a tap on my home telephone in Beirut. Well, there’s only one response to that: call any time.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Democracy - by George?
By Juan Cole
Salon.com

Wednesday 16 March 2005

President Bush and his supporters are taking credit for spreading freedom across the Middle East. Here`s why they`re wrong.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/03/16/democracy/in…

Is George W. Bush right to argue that his war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is democratizing the Middle East? In the wake of the Iraq vote, anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon, the Egyptian president`s gestures toward open elections, and other recent developments, a chorus of conservative pundits has declared that Bush`s policy has been vindicated. Max Boot wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Well, who`s the simpleton now? Those who dreamed of spreading democracy to the Arabs or those who denied that it could ever happen?" In a column subtitled "One Man, One Gloat," Mark Steyn wrote, "I got a lot of things wrong these last three years, but looking at events in the Middle East this last week ... I got the big stuff right." Even some of the president`s detractors and those opposed to the war have issued mea culpas. Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star, a Bush critic, wrote, "It is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right."

Before examining whether there is any value to these claims, it must be pointed out that the Bush administration did not invade Iraq to spread democracy. The justification for the war was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaida -- both of which claims have proved to be false. And even if one accepts the argument that the war resulted, intentionally or not, in the spread of democracy, serious ethical questions would remain about whether it was justified. For the purposes of this argument, however, let`s leave that issue aside. It`s true that neoconservative strategists in the Bush administration argued after Sept. 11 that authoritarian governments in the region were producing terrorism and that only democratization could hope to reduce it. Although they didn`t justify invading Iraq on those grounds, they held that removing Saddam and holding elections would make Iraq a shining beacon that would provoke a transformation of the region as other countries emulated it.

Practically speaking, there are only two plausible explanations for Bush`s alleged influence: direct intervention or pressure, and the supposed inspiration flowing from the Iraq demonstration project. Has either actually been effective?

First, it must be said that Washington`s Iraq policy, contrary to its defenders` arguments, is not innovative. In fact, regime change in the Middle East has often come about through foreign invasion. Egypt`s Gamal Abdel Nasser intervened militarily to help revolutionaries overthrow the Shiite imam of Yemen in the 1960s. The Israelis expelled the PLO from Lebanon and tried to establish a pro-Israeli government in Beirut in 1982. Saddam Hussein briefly ejected the Kuwaiti monarchy in 1990. The U.S. military`s invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein were therefore nothing new in Middle Eastern history. A peaceful evolution toward democracy would have been an innovation.

Has Bush`s direct pressure produced results, outside Iraq -- where it has produced something close to a failed state? His partisans point to the Libyan renunciation of its nuclear weapons program and of terrorism. Yet Libya, hurt by economic sanctions, had been pursuing a rapprochement for years. Nor has Gadhafi moved Libya toward democracy.

Washington has put enormous pressure on Iran and Syria since the fall of Saddam, with little obvious effect. Since the United States invaded Iraq, the Iranian regime has actually become less open, clamping down on a dispirited reform movement and excluding thousands of candidates from running in parliamentary elections. The Baath in Syria shows no sign of ceasing to operate as a one-party regime. When pressured, it has offered up slightly more cooperation in capturing Iraqi Baathists. Its partial withdrawal from Lebanon came about because of local and international pressures, including that of France and the Arab League, and is hardly a unilateral Bush administration triumph.

What of the argument of inspiration? The modern history of the Middle East does not suggest that politics travels very much from one country to another. The region is a hodgepodge of absolute monarchies, constitutional monarchies and republics, characterized by varying degrees of authoritarianism. Few regimes have had an effect on neighbors by setting an example. Ataturk`s adoption of a militant secularism in Turkey from the 1920s had no resonance in the Arab world. The Lebanese confessional political system, which attempted to balance the country`s many religious communities after independence in 1943, remains unique. Khomeini`s 1979 Islamic Revolution did not inspire a string of clerically ruled regimes.

Is Iraq even really much of a model? The Bush administration strove to avoid having one-person, one-vote elections in Iraq, which were finally forced on Washington by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Despite the U.S. backing for secularists, the winners of the election were the fundamentalist Shiite Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Nor were the elections themselves all that exemplary. The country is in flames, racked by a guerrilla war, a continual crime wave and a foreign military occupation. The security situation was so bad that the candidates running for office could not reveal their identities until the day before the election, and the entire country was put under a sort of curfew for three days, with all vehicular traffic forbidden.

The argument for change through inspiration has little evidence to underpin it. The changes in the region cited as dividends of the Bush Iraq policy are either chimeras or unconnected to Iraq. And the Bush administration has shown no signs that it will push for democracy in countries where freedom of choice would lead to outcomes unfavorable to U.S. interests.

Saudi Arabia held municipal elections in February. Voters were permitted to choose only half the members of the city councils, however, and the fundamentalists did well. The other half are appointed by the monarchy, as are the mayors. The Gulf absolute monarchies remain absolute monarchies. Authoritarian states such as that in Ben Ali`s Tunisia show no evidence of changing, and a Bush administration worried about al-Qaida has authorized further crackdowns on radical Muslim groups.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak recently announced that he would allow other candidates to run against him in the next presidential election. Yet only candidates from officially recognized parties will be allowed. Parties are recognized by Parliament, which is dominated by Mubarak`s National Democratic Party. This change moves Egypt closer to the system of presidential elections used in Iran, where only candidates vetted by the government can run. The Muslim Brotherhood, the largest and most important opposition party, is excluded from fielding candidates under its own name. Egypt is less open today than it was in the 1980s, with far more political offices appointed by the president, and with far fewer opposition members in Parliament, than was the case two decades ago. As with the so-called municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, the change in presidential elections is little more than window-dressing. It was provoked not by developments in Iraq but rather by protests by Egyptian oppositionists who resented Mubarak`s jailing of a political rival in January.

The dramatic developments in Lebanon since mid-February were set off by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The Lebanese political opposition blamed Syria for the bombing, though all the evidence is not in. Protests by Maronite Christians, Druze and a section of Sunni Muslims (Hariri was a Sunni) briefly brought down the government of the pro-Syrian premier, Omar Karami. The protesters demanded a withdrawal from the country of Syrian troops, which had been there since 1976 in an attempt to calm the country`s civil war. Bush also wants Syria out of Lebanon, in part because such a move would strengthen the hand of his ally, Israel. Pro-Bush commentators dubbed the Beirut movement the "Cedar Revolution," but Lebanon remains a far more divided society and its politics far more ambiguous than was the case in the post-Soviet Czech Republic and Ukraine.

On March 9 the Shiite Hezbollah Party held massive pro-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut that dwarfed the earlier opposition rallies. A majority of Parliament members wanted to bring back Karami. Both the Hezbollah street demonstrations and the elected Parliament`s internal consensus produced a pro-Syrian outcome obnoxious to the Bush administration. Since then the opposition has staged its own massive demonstrations, rivaling Hezbollah`s.

So far, these demonstrations and counterdemonstrations have been remarkable in their peacefulness and in the frankness of their political aims. But rather than reference Washington, they point to the weakness and ineptness of the young Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who made the error of tinkering with the Lebanese constitution to extend the term of the pro-Syrian president, Gen. Emile Lahoud. Although some manipulative (and traditionally anti-American) opposition figures attempted to invoke Iraq to justify their movement, in hopes of attracting U.S. support, it is hard to see what these events in Lebanon could possibly have to do with Baghdad. Lebanese have been holding lively parliamentary campaigns for decades, and the flawed, anonymous Jan. 30 elections in Iraq would have provoked more pity than admiration in urbane, sophisticated Beirutis.

Ironically, most democratization in the region has been pursued without reference to the United States. Some Middle Eastern regimes began experimenting with parliamentary elections years ago. For example, Jordan began holding elections in 1989, and Yemen held its third round of such elections in 2003. Morocco and Bahrain had elections in 2002. All of those elections were more transparent than, and superior as democratic processes to, the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. They all had flaws, of course. The monarch or ruler typically places restraints on popular sovereignty. The prime minister is not elected by Parliament, but rather appointed by the ruler. Some of these parliaments may evolve in a more democratic direction over time, but if they do it will be for local reasons, not because of anything that has happened in Baghdad.

The Bush administration could genuinely push for the peaceful democratization of the region by simply showing some gumption and stepping in to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. There are, undeniably, large numbers of middle- and working-class people in the Middle East who seek more popular participation in government. Arab intellectuals are, however, often coded as mere American and Israeli puppets when they dare speak against authoritarian practices.

As it is, the Bush administration is widely seen in the region as hypocritical, backing Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and of the Golan Heights (the latter belonging to Syria) while pressuring Syria about its troops in Lebanon, into which Kissinger had invited Damascus years ago. Bush would be on stronger ground as a champion of liberty if he helped liberate the Palestinians from military occupation and creeping Israeli colonization, and if he brokered the return of the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms to Damascus in return for peace between Syria and Israel. The end of Israeli occupation of the territory of neighbors would deprive the radical Shiite party in Lebanon, Hezbollah, of its ability to mobilize Lebanese youth against this injustice. Without decisive action on the Arab-Israeli front, Bush risks having his democratization rhetoric viewed as a mere stalking horse for neo-imperial domination.

Bush`s invasion of Iraq has left the center and north of the country in a state of long-term guerrilla war. It has also opened Iraq to a form of parliamentary politics dominated by Muslim fundamentalists. This combination has little appeal elsewhere in the region. The Middle East may open up politically, and no doubt Bush will try to claim credit for any steps in that direction. But in Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon and elsewhere, such steps much predated Bush, and these publics will be struggling for their rights long after he is out of office. They may well see his major legacy not as democratization but as studied inattention to military occupation in Palestine and the Golan, and the retrenchment in civil liberties authorized to the Yemeni, Tunisian and other governments in the name of fighting terrorism.
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Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. He runs a web log on Middle Eastern affairs called Informed Comment.



© Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org

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Mar 16, 2:16 PM EST

More Than 100 Die in U.S. Custody in Iraq
http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re_ap.aspx?re=U/US_PRISON…
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- At least 108 people have died in U.S. custody in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and roughly a quarter of the cases have been investigated as possible U.S. abuse, according to government data provided to The Associated Press.

The figure, far higher than any previously disclosed, includes cases investigated by the Army, Navy, Central Intelligence Agency and Justice Department. Some 65,000 prisoners have been taken during the U.S.-led wars, most later freed.

The Pentagon has never provided comprehensive information on how many prisoners taken during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have died. The 108 figure, based on information supplied by Army, Navy and other government officials, includes deaths attributed to natural causes.

To human rights groups, the deaths form a clear pattern.



"Despite the military`s own reports of deaths and abuses of detainees in U.S. custody, it is astonishing that our government can still pretend that what is happening is the work of a few rogue soldiers," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "No one at the highest levels of our government has yet been held accountable for the torture and abuse, and that is unacceptable."

To the Pentagon, each death is a distinct case, meriting an investigation but not attributable to any single faulty military policy. Pentagon officials point to military investigations that have found that no policy condoned abuse.

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. John Skinner said the military has taken steps to reduce the chance of violent uprisings at its prisons and the use of excessive force by soldiers, and also has improved the health care available to prisoners.

"The military has dramatically improved detention operations, everything from increased oversight and improved facilities to expanded training and the availability of state-of-the-art medical care," he said in a statement.

Some death investigations have resulted in courts-martial and convictions, others in reprimands. Many are still open. In some cases, during riots and escape attempts, soldiers were found to have used deadly force properly.

The most serious sentence handed out in the completed cases is three years imprisonment, which was given to two soldiers in separate cases.

Pfc. Edward Richmond was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for shooting Muhamad Husain Kadir, an Iraqi cowherd, in the back of the head on Feb. 28, 2004; Richmond said he saw Kadir lunge for another soldier.

Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne pleaded guilty to killing a critically wounded Iraqi teenager in Sadr City, Iraq, on Aug. 18, 2004. Horne described it as a mercy killing.

In Iraq, the military is currently holding around 8,900 people at its two largest prisons, Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.

At least two prisoners died during interrogation, in incidents that raise the question of torture. Human rights groups say there are others:

- Manadel al-Jamadi, a suspect in the bombing of a Red Cross facility in Baghdad, died Nov. 4, 2003, while hanging by his wrists in a shower room at Abu Ghraib prison. Nine SEALs and one sailor have been accused of abusing al-Jamadi and others in Iraq. The CIA and Justice Department are also investigating the death.

- Four Fort Carson, Colo., soldiers, including three in military intelligence, are charged with murder for the death of an Iraqi major general who died in November 2003. The CIA has also acknowledged that one of its officers may have been involved and referred the case to the Justice Department for investigation.

Of the prisoner deaths:

- At least 26 have been investigated as criminal homicides involving possible abuse.

- At least 29 are attributed to suspected natural causes or accident.

- 22 died during an insurgent mortar attack on April 6, 2004, on Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

- At least 21 are attributed to "justifiable homicide," when U.S. troops used deadly force against rioting, escaping or threatening prisoners and investigations found the troops acted appropriately.

The majority of the death investigations were conducted by the Army`s Criminal Investigation Division, as most prisoners are held in Army-run facilities.

In many of the cases, resolution has not been swift. Military officials have attributed this in part to the difficulties of conducting investigations in war zones, and they say accuracy is more important than speed.

"Our special agents have literally been mortared and shot at while going about investigative duties," said Army spokesman Christopher Grey.

Grey said Army investigators have looked into 79 deaths in 68 incidents. Most were in Iraq. No prisoners have died at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the third major site for prisoners since the Sept. 11 attacks.

A Navy official said the Navy Criminal Investigative Service has investigated eight deaths. One of those, of al-Jamadi, has also been investigated by the Army and is counted among their numbers, officials said.

The CIA and Justice Department have looked into four deaths that may have involved agency personnel or contractors. One CIA contractor has been charged with assault in connection with a third death investigation in Afghanistan. The fourth death was attributed to hypothermia, not mistreatment.

---

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defense.gov

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Informed Comment
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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, March 17, 2005

Iraqi Parliament Meets to Sound of Bombs

Al-Zaman: Guerrillas detonated a car bomb near a US facility in southern Baghdad on Tuesday, but only managed to kill an Iraqi and to wound 12 others. Another bomb exploded at the offices of the Mirror, the only English-language newspaper in Baghdad. Police colonel Yusuf Chalabi was assassinated in broad daylight in the Najjar quarter. In Baquba, a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint, killing 5 Iraqi troops and wounding 12.

Dan Murphy of the CSM reports on how all the roads out of Baghdad are extremely dangerous. He reports a conversation with an Iraqi truck driver:


The road north through Baquba? "Pretty dangerous,`` he says. Due south through Mahmudiyah? "It`s bad, but I haven`t heard of any drivers being killed there in a few weeks." How about west through Abu Ghraib and on to Fallujah? "Very, very dangerous. We try not to go past Abu Ghraib."

The volley of mortar fire that dropped a few hundred yards short of where the opening session of Iraq`s new parliament was held Wednesday rattled the ceremonial gathering and was a reminder that the city remains under siege.


US Embassy employees are forbidden to travel by land the ten miles to Baghdad airport because it is so dangerous, and have to be helicoptered in and out of the capital.

The London Times`s Catherine Philp in Baghdad reports the opening of the Iraqi parliament with perhaps the least enthusiasm and most acuteness of anyone in the mainstream media. The parliament did not really open, as in, open for business, because it is not able to form a government by electing a presidential council that would choose a prime minister. It just met for two hours.

Despite calls for the meeting to be held outside the heavily fortified "Little America" compound of the Green Zone, it was of course far too dangerous to meet anywhere else. The capital was locked down for security,a nd three major bridges were closed by the US military. As it was, mortar shells exploded only a few yards from the building where they were meeting.

There was a minor controversy over whether the oaths should be administered bilingually, in both Arabic and Kurdish, but even Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani thought such a requirement too much. Although the Times implied that it was farcical, I have to say that the very outbreak of such a controversy in a country so long dominated by a frankly racist form of Arab nationalism is a welcome change. Maybe eventually Berber will be an official language alongside Arabic in some North African countries.

As for the rest, Philpin writes:


` Because the rival political factions had failed even to agree on a candidate for Speaker, the proceedings were chaired by the oldest member present, Sheikh Dhari al-Fayidh, 82. He paid tribute to all “the martyrs who died for this country”, including what he called “the victims of the north”. “Kurdistan, Kurdistan,” came an angry cry from the floor. “Sorry,” the Sheikh muttered. “Kurdistan.” The meeting was encouraging at least in its nods to free speech. A glance across the assembly floor revealed the diversity of Iraq. There were 79 women, 11 with heads uncovered, the rest split between headscarves and black flowing abayas; 11 Shia turbans, 22 yashmaks, one Kurdish tribal headwrap and a sea of Western suits. `



The conservative dress of most of the women came about because they are religious Shiites on the United Iraqi Alliance list. A third of each list had to be women, but the UIA found many Shiite fundamentalist women to run.

Al-Zaman: Ibrahim Jaafari, the likely new prime minister, said in his speech that he thought the UIA could make a deal with the Kurdish Alliance within two weeks. It looks as though Iraq will lack a new executive well into April. It is worrisome that if the government is not formed soon, political pressures could mount and social turmoil ensue.

In contrast, the secular female physician Raja` al-Khuzai, a member of parliament on Allawi`s Iraqiya list, thought that parliament would meet again in as little as a week to elect a speaker of the house and a presidential council.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the UIA and of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in his speech called for the crafting of a new constitution that "respects human rights and the Iraqi, Islamic identity of the people, and grants everyeone equal rights before the law, and will please the Iraqi people." The phrase "Islamic identity" is a code phrase for the implementation of shariah or Islamic law in the place of civil law.

Al-Hakim also attacked Jordan for not doing enough to stop attacks on Iraqis by radical Muslim Jordanians, and for "instigating" terrorism against Iraqis by Jordanian extremists.

There are only six Sunni Arab members of parliament from Sunni parties and independents (there is also one from the United Iraqi Alliance). Ghazi al-Yawir, the outgoing president and a Sunni from the Shamar tribe, along with several other Sunni Arab parliamentarians, threatened to resign from parliament if the Shiites imposed their Sunni UIA member, Fawaz al-Jarba, as one of the two vice-presidents. Mashaan al-Juburi said that other party lists cannot represent the Sunni Arabs in government post set aside for Sunnis.

UN envoy Ashraf Jahangir Qazi said that only after a permanent constitution is achieved will Iraq come together politically. Drafting this document is the chief business of the new parliament. I know Iraqis, though, who think that the parliament is incapable of forging a new constitution. If they are right, Qazi`s prediction actually becomes pretty discouraging.

Among the concerns of the Kurds is the likelihood that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani might play key role in constitution-making, as Hamza Hendawi points out. Sistani`s position is complex and hard to convey to a Western audience. It should be noted that he does speak about the need for the "guardianship of the jurisprudent," but confines the top cleric`s authority to "the social order" (Nizam al-mujtama`). That is, Sistani believes that clerics have the obligation to intervene in matters affecting Muslim society, but makes a distinction between that and intervening in government or politics. I don`t think he wants to run the government, but I do think he wants to shape the social order through his influence on Shiite politicians and decision-makers.

Al-Zaman reports that the Kirkuk provincial assembly finally met, but only 15 members out of the total of 40 actually showed up. The Sunni Muslims and the Turkmen are mostly refusing to cooperate because they mistrust the Kurds, who have come to dominate the security apparatus of Kirkuk.

Iraq is on the verge of being the most corrupt environment in the world, according to a new report. Actually, people on the ground in Iraq dealing with economic reconstruction tell me that it was the most corrupt situation on earth a long time ago.

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from the March 17, 2005 edition -

Why graft thrives in postconflict zones
A report issued Wednesday said Iraq could become `the biggest corruption scandal in history.`
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0317/p06s01-wogi.html

By Mark Rice-Oxley | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

LONDON - Five Polish peacekeepers are arrested for allegedly taking $90,000 worth of bribes in Iraq. Several Sri Lankan officials are suspended for mishandling tsunami aid. US audits show large financial discrepancies in Iraq. Reports of aid abuse taunt Indonesia.

Two of the world`s biggest-ever reconstruction projects - Iraq and post-tsunami Asia - are facing major tests of credibility, as billions of dollars of aid and reconstruction money pour in.

And according to a major report released Wednesday by Transparency International (TI), an international organization that focuses on issues of corruption, the omens are not good.

From Iraq and Afghanistan to Cambodia and Bosnia, from the wrecked coasts of Asia to the kleptocratic carve-up in some African countries, crisis zones are proving to be fertile soil for corruption, the report argues.

"Many postconflict countries figure among the most corrupt in the world," says Philippe le Billon of the University of British Columbia, Canada, in the TI report. "Corruption often predates hostilities and in many cases it features among the factors that triggered political unrest or facilitated conflict escalation."

The report cites weak government, haphazard law and order, armed factions that need appeasing, and a scramble for rich resources as factors that render a country prone to corruption.

Nations that face security threats are even more vulnerable, since they require protection money and may not be able to keep monitors safe.

Bosnia is a good example. During the breakdown of communism in the late 1980s, factions scrambled for assets by plundering state companies, a situation exacerbated by the 1992-1995 war.

Wartime sanctioned nefarious activity. Criminal gangs became cherished paramilitary groups; black markets flourished; underworld players became rich and powerful. After peace was declared in 1995, the world community was wary of upsetting the status quo. It`s still unclear how much of the $5 billion spent on aid after the war ended up in the pockets of shady characters.

"These elements were either part of the ruling political parties, or criminal elements that were financing the ruling political parties," says James Lyon, an analyst in Belgrade with the International Crisis Group.

In Iraq, allegations range from petty bribery to large-scale embezzlement, expropriation, profiteering and nepotism. The TI report says it could become "the biggest corruption scandal in history."

"I can see all sorts of levels of corruption in Iraq," says report contributor Reinoud Leenders, "starting from petty officials asking for bribes to process a passport, way up to contractors delivering shoddy work and the kind of high-level corruption involving ministers and high officials handing out contracts to their friends and clients."

The recent elections may help, he adds, but already he notes a tendency for political bargaining indicative of "dividing up the cake of state resources."

But it is not just about Iraqis dividing up the cake. US audits of its own spending have found repeated shortcomings, including a lack of competitive bidding for contracts worth billions of dollars, payment of contracts without adequate certification that work had been done, and in some cases, outright theft.

A report on the disbursement of Iraqi oil revenues to ministries by the Coalition Provisional Authority, which governed Iraq until last July found a $340 million contract awarded by the electricity ministry without a public tender.

A January report by special inspector Stuart Bowen found that $8.8 billion dollars had been disbursed from Iraqi oil revenue by US administrators to Iraqi ministries without proper accounting.

And earlier this week, it emerged that the Pentagon`s auditing agency found that Halliburton, the Houston oil services giant formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, overcharged by more than $108 million on a contract.

A Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, faces a number of investigations for overcharging, including one case where it charged the Army more than $27 million dollars to transport $82,000 worth of fuel from Kuwait to Iraq, according to excerpts of the report released this week by Rep. Henry Waxman (D) of California.

In a written statement. Halliburton defended the cost, explaining that delivering the fuel was "fraught with danger."

Analysts also point to an entrenched culture of graft in the Iraqi government.

It doesn`t help that much of Iraq needs physical rebuilding, which involves the sector more vulnerable to corruption than any other: construction.

"Public works and construction are singled out by one survey after another as the sector most prone to corruption - in both the developing and the developed world," says TI chairman Peter Eigen.

Construction is considered prone to sleaze for several reasons: the fierce competition for "make or break" contracts; permits and approvals that are open to requests for backhanders; opportunities for delays and overruns; and the physical cover-up opportunity presented by plaster and concrete.

With whole swaths of Southeast Asia requiring rebuilding after the tsunami, experts worry that construction corruption could take a deadly toll.

"The cost will be lives lost," said Eigen, noting that cheap materials and corner-cutting can prove lethal in earthquake-prone parts of the world.

So how to battle corruption? Good governance is clearly the No. 1 priority, but TI identifies several other initiatives that can help improve probity.

These include vetting contractors and blacklisting those with shady records, ensuring competitive bidding for deals and assuring independent auditing and multilayered monitoring involving local communities, rotating staff in sensitive positions, and encouraging donors to disburse funds in a timely fashion to reduce pressure on local officials and prevent accounting trickery.

"We are simply making the case that a series of norms should be applied which make it much more feasible to avoid the kind factors driving corruption," says Lawrence Cockcroft, chairman of TI UK.

• Dan Murphy in Baghdad, Beth Kampschror in Sarajevo, and Peter Ford in Paris contributed to this report.


www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

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Die einzigen auf die Wirtschaft bezogenen Aussagen von Wolfowitz ist die zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung im Irak:
the war`s cost would be reimbursed by post-Saddam oil revenues


Sheep in Wolf`s Clothing
Why Paul Wolfowitz may be a good choice to run the World Bank.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, March 16, 2005, at 3:30 PM PT
http://slate.msn.com/id/2114929/fr/ifr/nav/ais/

What to make of Paul Wolfowitz being tapped to run the World Bank?

On the one hand, this is a man who has displayed strikingly poor analytical judgment as deputy secretary of defense. You may recall his smug assurances to congressional skeptics that our troops would be welcomed to Iraq with flowers and that the war`s cost would be reimbursed by post-Saddam oil revenues. There was also his dismissive riposte to the prediction by Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, that a few hundred thousand U.S. troops would be needed for post-war stabilization. "It`s hard to conceive," Wolfowitz testified, "that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam`s security forces and his army. Hard to believe."

Wolfowitz is not an economist. He has had little experience in development work beyond a stint as Ronald Reagan`s ambassador to Indonesia. And because he was the intellectual architect of the war in Iraq, the European members of the World Bank`s board are sure to see his appointment as an affront. There has long been a deal: The United States picks the head of the World Bank; the Europeans pick the head of the International Monetary Fund. Vetoes are rare and awkward. Bill Clinton rejected an IMF candidate; some Europeans will be tempted to return the favor now—though they`ll probably refrain, knowing how George W. Bush responds to international naysayers. Besides, they may recognize that Wolfowitz is not so bad a choice for World Bank boss.

Of all the administration`s war-pushing neoconservatives, Wolfowitz has seemed the most genuinely, if somewhat naively, idealistic—the one who really believed that toppling Saddam would have a domino effect throughout the Middle East. He may even consider himself vindicated by recent developments—though this would be a bit self-deceiving. Before the war, Wolfowitz theorized that democratic governance in Iraq—presumably presided over by his comrade, Ahmad Chalabi—would light the fuse that spread Western values across the region like wildfire. He also assumed that a democratic Iraq would be a modern Iraq, led by secular Shiites, and wistfully recited de Tocqueville to this effect.

Still, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney seemed to favor war chiefly for old-fashioned geopolitical reasons. His fellow Pentagon senior neocon, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, seemed focused on Israel`s well-being. But Wolfowitz appeared to take seriously—or more seriously than did his colleagues—democratic rationales that are consistent with the values of the World Bank.

Wolfowitz is a sort of optimistic globalist who believes in the World Bank`s essential tenet: that the developed world can improve the troubled, less-developed world with the aid of rational principles. Another intriguing sign: In a conversation with Eric Alterman at a Manhattan book party last week (duly summarized on Alterman`s blog), Wolfowitz suggested that he`d pushed for more aid to Liberia and Sudan than the administration at first had been willing to dispense.

Some who know Wolfowitz tell me that he wanted to fill the impending vacancy at the bank. He may be, in this sense, a latter-day Robert McNamara—a war-weary Pentagon master seeking refuge to wring the blood from his hands. McNamara suffered something close to a public breakdown when he moved from secretary of defense to president of the World Bank in 1967, as the Vietnam War spiraled out of control. Lyndon Johnson had been complaining to aides for months that McNamara had "gone dovish" on him. It`s unlikely that Wolfowitz has exactly turned tail on George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld. Still, Wolfowitz is a smart guy, smart enough to know that Iraq has not gone at all as he thought it would, and perhaps he sees McNamara`s personal exit strategy as a model to emulate.

There`s another dimension to this transfer. Wolfowitz may have wanted to leave the Pentagon, but it`s possible that his days there were numbered. (McNamara, too, was never quite sure whether he was fired or he quit.) Are we seeing the opening stages of a second-term shift of power in the Defense Department—a belated (though, if it comes, unacknowledged) reckoning with the first term`s grand mistakes?

A few months ago, Doug Feith announced that he would be leaving his job this summer, for personal reasons. Now Wolfowitz heads toward the door. Will the neocon triumvirate`s third peg, Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence, be the next to fall? And what of Rumsfeld himself? The face-saving has been accomplished. His archrival, Colin Powell, was booted while he stayed on in triumph. He escaped official blame for Abu Ghraib. Having thus emerged from the firestorms unscathed, he too may be working up an appetite to spend more time with his family.

Rumsfeld`s fingerprints, which were smeared all over Bush`s first-term foreign policy, have thus far left no marks in the second term. There are three possible explanations: Rumsfeld is insinuating himself more subtly than before; Condoleezza Rice shares his views, so he doesn`t need to raise a fuss; or, just maybe, the winds are shifting over the Potomac.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114929/

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Refuge Has Long Been a Major Environmental Battleground
The nation`s oil and gas needs help Bush gain support for drilling. But foes say the limited supply isn`t worth the lasting damage.
By Julie Cart and Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writers
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-arctic1…

March 17, 2005

No environmental battle in the last 25 years has aroused more passion than the seesaw struggle over the future of a strip of coastal tundra at the northern tip of Alaska.

The Senate`s vote Wednesday to allow oil and gas drilling there did not seal the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Legislative hurdles remain. But for the first time in more than 20 years of debate, the president and Congress have signaled that they agree the nation`s energy needs justify tapping into the nation`s largest wildlife preserve, a place many Americans believe should be untouchable.

How they voted The 51-49 roll call by which the Senate voted to open the ecologically rich Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling showed 41 Democrats, seven Republicans and one independent opposed to opening the refuge, and three Democrats and 48 Republicans in favor. The proposal still must survive a Senate vote on the overall budget resolution to which it is attached, followed by House-Senate negotiations. Democrats Opposed to Opening Refuge Baucus, Mont.; Bayh, Ind.; Biden, Del.; Bingaman, N.M.; Boxer, Calif.; Byrd, W.Va.; Cantwell, Wash.; Carper, Del.; Clinton, N.Y.; Conrad, N.D.; Corzine, N.J.; Dayton, Minn.; Dodd, Conn.; Dorgan, N.D.; Durbin, Ill.; Feingold, Wis.; Feinstein, Calif.; Harkin, Iowa; Johnson, S.D.; Kennedy, Mass.; Kerry, Mass.; Kohl, Wis.; Lautenberg, N.J.; Leahy, Vt.; Levin, Mich.; Lieberman, Conn.; Lincoln, Ark.; Mikulski, Md.; Murray, Wash.; Nelson, Fla.; Nelson, Neb.; Obama, Ill.; Pryor, Ark.; Reed, R.I.; Reid, Nev.; Rockefeller, W.Va.; Salazar, Colo.; Sarbanes, Md.; Schumer, N.Y.; Stabenow, Mich.; Wyden, Ore. Republicans Opposed Chafee, R.I.; Coleman, Minn.; Collins, Maine; DeWine, Ohio; McCain, Ariz.; Smith, Ore.; Snowe, Maine. Independent Opposed Jeffords, Vt. Democrats in Favor Akaka, Hawaii; Inouye, Hawaii; Landrieu, La. Republicans in Favor Alexander, Tenn.; Allard, Colo.; Allen, Va.; Bennett, Utah; Bond, Mo.; Brownback, Kan.; Bunning, Ky.; Burns, Mont.; Burr, N.C.; Chambliss, Ga.; Coburn, Okla.; Cochran, Miss.; Cornyn, Texas; Craig, Idaho; Crapo, Idaho; DeMint, S.C.; Dole, N.C.; Domenici, N.M.; Ensign, Nev.; Enzi, Wyo.; Frist, Tenn.; Graham, S.C.; Grassley, Iowa; Gregg, N.H.; Hagel, Neb.; Hatch, Utah; Hutchison, Texas; Inhofe, Okla.; Isakson, Ga.; Kyl, Ariz.; Lott, Miss.; Lugar, Ind.; Martinez, Fla.; McConnell, Ky.; Murkowski, Alaska; Roberts, Kan.; Santorum, Pa.; Sessions, Ala.; Shelby, Ala.; Specter, Pa.; Stevens, Alaska; Sununu, N.H.; Talent, Mo.; Thomas, Wyo.; Thune, S.D.; Vitter, La.; Voinovich, Ohio; Warner, Va. Source: Associated Press

Moreover, both proponents and critics of drilling in the preserve see Wednesday`s vote as the opening wedge in a broader campaign, reflected in pending legislation to open other areas currently off limits to energy exploration, including areas off California`s coast.

Oil industry executives have tied exploring the preserve to a larger agenda of opening areas that are closed to exploration. In a speech in Washington in June, Exxon Chief Executive Lee R. Raymond said: "We will need to muster the political will, based on a realistic energy outlook, to allow further development of the energy resources to be found in the United States. This includes those that may be [in] offshore California and Florida, in the Rocky Mountains and in northern Alaska."

Language in the pending energy bill would give the Interior secretary the authority to override California`s bipartisan opposition to exploratory drilling off the coast, where, according to some industry estimates, there are at least 1 billion barrels of untapped oil.

"If this refuge is not special enough to be saved, then there is no place in the United States that is safe from oil rigs, including the coastlines that for now are protected from offshore drilling," said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.

The 19-million-acre refuge, which lies between the Beaufort Sea and the 9,000-foot peaks of the Brooks Range, was created in 1960 to protect wildlife. In 1980, Congress and President Carter earmarked the 1.5-million-acre coastal slice of the preserve as a potential site for energy development.

Although drilling in the Alaskan preserve would affect, at most, 8% of the total area, opponents argue that the targeted zone that borders the Beaufort Sea is the biological heart — a marshy tableland that supports millions of migratory birds, polar bears, marine mammals and musk oxen. It is also the summer range for the 150,000-strong Porcupine caribou herd that travels hundreds of miles each year to bear its offspring on the coastal plain.

Only one exploratory well has been drilled in the refuge, and that was nearly two decades ago. Environmentalists contend that the Arctic contains a six-month supply of oil at most, and will never supply more than 2% of the national demand.

The oil industry, in contrast, has long regarded the preserve as potentially one of the most significant petroleum fields in the nation. When fully developed, it would produce an estimated 1.5 million barrels of oil a day for 20 years, or roughly as much oil as the U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia, according to the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry trade group in Washington.

In economic terms, it would reduce the U.S. trade deficit by $19 billion annually and create several hundred thousand new jobs in Alaska and the rest of the nation, according to Ed Porter, research chief at the American Petroleum Institute.

But drilling in the Arctic refuge, however successful it proves to be, won`t offer a quick fix to the nation`s oil needs. Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton has said it will be 10 years before oil from the refuge flows into America`s refineries.

Environmentalists and many scientists have long argued that oil development, with its sprawling industrial infrastructure and risk of spills, would degrade air and water quality, impair wildlife habitat and forever change the wild character of the northern landscape.

Last week Norton led a group of Republican legislators on a tour of Alaskan oil production facilities around Prudhoe Bay, 50 miles west of the Arctic refuge. Industry officials told the delegation that they took pains to protect the environment, even placing pans under engines to catch oil drips.

"It`s cleaner than a Sam`s Club parking lot," said James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who accompanied Norton on the trip.

Conservationists counter that energy production has caused massive environmental damage around Prudhoe Bay. They say the industry is responsible for more than 400 offshore oil spills a year and releases 43,000 tons of nitrogen oxides in the air annually, and that excavation and waste disposal activities have destroyed 17,000 acres of animal habitat.

The preserve`s remoteness, harsh weather and formidable terrain limit the number of visitors.

Still, protecting the refuge has been a cause celebre for a broad range of organizations, including the Episcopal Church, Reform rabbis, Quakers, the National Council of Churches and a group of evangelical Christians. A variety of hunting and fishing groups also opposes drilling.

On the other hand, Alaska`s congressional delegation and its governor, reflecting the majority view of residents, have long advocated drilling. That majority includes many Native groups, some of which stand to profit from increased oil production.

But Natives such as the Gwich`in, who have lived for centuries along the migration route of the Porcupine caribou herd and depended on the animals for food and other necessities, are bitterly opposed.

"No one has the right to deprive a people of their subsistence rights," said Jonathon Solomon, chairman of the Gwich`in Steering Committee.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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March 20, 2005
FRANK RICH
Enron: Patron Saint of Bush`s Fake News
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/arts/20Rich.html?8hpib

JUST when Americans are being told it`s safe to hand over their savings to Wall Street again, he`s baaaack! Looking not unlike Chucky, the demented doll of perennial B-horror-movie renown, Ken Lay has crawled out of Houston`s shadows for a media curtain call.

His trial is still months away, but there he was last Sunday on "60 Minutes," saying he knew nothin` `bout nothin` that went down at Enron. This week he is heading toward the best-seller list, as an involuntary star of "Conspiracy of Fools," the New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald`s epic account of the multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme anointed America`s "most innovative company" (six years in a row by Fortune magazine). Coming soon, the feature film: Alex Gibney`s "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a documentary seen at Sundance, goes into national release next month. As long as you`re not among those whose 401(k)`s and pensions were wiped out, it`s morbidly entertaining. In one surreal high point, Mr. Lay likens investigations of Enron to terrorist attacks on America. For farce, there`s the sight of a beaming Alan Greenspan as he accepts the "Enron Award for Distinguished Public Service" only days after Enron has confessed to filing five years of bogus financial reports. Then again, given the implicit quid pro quo in this smarmy tableau, maybe that`s the Enron drama`s answer to a sex scene.

The Bush administration, eager to sell the country on "personal" Social Security accounts, cannot be all that pleased to see Kenny Boy again. He`s the poster boy for how big guys can rip off suckers in the stock market. He also dredges up some inconvenient pre-9/11 memories of Bush family business. Enron was the biggest Bush-Cheney campaign contributor in the 2000 election. Kenny Boy and his lovely wife Linda flew the first President Bush and Barbara Bush to the ensuing Inauguration on the Enron jet. Even as Enron was presiding over rolling blackouts in California, Dick Cheney or his aides had at least six meetings with the company`s executives to carve up government energy policy in 2001. Even now what exactly transpired at those meetings remains a secret.

But never mind. The president himself gave his word when the Enron scandal broke that Kenny Boy was really more of a supporter of Ann Richards anyway. Feeling our pain, Mr. Bush told us of his own personal tragedy: his mother-in-law lost $8,000 she had invested in Enron. Soon stuff was happening in Iraq, and the case was closed, or at least forgotten.

Yet the larger shadows linger. Revisiting the Enron story as it re-emerges in 2005 is to be reminded of just how much the Enron culture has continued to shape the Bush administration long after the company itself imploded and the Lays were eighty-sixed from the White House Christmas card list.

The enduring legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose source of profits was an utter mystery - and yet it thrived, unquestioned, for years. How? As the narrator says in "The Smartest Guys in the Room," Enron "was fixated on its public relations campaigns." It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many). In a typical ruse in 1998, a gaggle of employees was rushed onto an empty trading floor at the company`s Houston headquarters to put on a fictional show of busy trading for visiting Wall Street analysts being escorted by Mr. Lay. "We brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look like the area was lived in," a laid-off Enron employee told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. "We had to make believe we were on the phone buying and selling" even though "some of the computers didn`t even work."

If this Potemkin village sounds familiar, take a look at the ongoing 60-stop "presidential roadshow" in which Mr. Bush has "conversations on Social Security" with "ordinary citizens" for the consumption of local and national newscasts. As in the president`s "town meeting" campaign appearances last year, the audiences are stacked with prescreened fans; any dissenters who somehow get in are quickly hustled away by security goons. But as The Washington Post reported last weekend, the preparations are even more elaborate than the finished product suggests; the seeming reality of the event is tweaked as elaborately as that of a television reality show. Not only are the panelists for these conversations recruited from administration supporters, but they are rehearsed the night before, with a White House official playing Mr. Bush. One participant told The Post, "We ran through it five times before the president got there." Finalists who vary just slightly from the administration`s pitch are banished from the cast at the last minute, "American Idol"-style.

Like Enron`s stockholders, American taxpayers pay for the production of such propaganda, even if its message, like that of the Enron show put on for visiting analysts, misrepresents and distorts the bottom line of the scheme that is being sold. We paid for last year`s phony television news reports in which the faux reporter Karen Ryan "interviewed" administration officials who gave partially deceptive information hyping the Medicare prescription-drug program. We paid Armstrong Williams his $240,000 for delivering faux-journalistic analysis of the No Child Left Behind act.

The administration cycled the Ryan and Williams paychecks through the PR giant Ketchum Communications. Ketchum was also one of the companies hired to flack for Andersen, the now-defunct Enron accounting firm that shredded a ton of documents. We don`t know what, if any, role Ketchum is playing in the White House`s Social Security propaganda push, though we do know the company has received at least $97 million from the government, according to a Congressional report.

That $97 million may yet prove a mere down payment. The Times reported last weekend that the administration told executive-branch agencies simply to ignore a stern directive by the Congressional Government Accountability Office discouraging the use of "covert propaganda" like the Karen Ryan "news reports." In other words, the brakes are off, and before long, the government could have a larger budget for fake news than actual television news divisions have for real news. At last weekend`s Gridiron dinner, Mr. Bush made a joke about how "most" of his good press on Social Security came from Armstrong Williams, and the Washington press corps yukked it up. The joke, however, is on them - and us.

USA Today reported this month that the Department of Homeland Security, having failed miserably to secure American ports and air transportation from potential Al Qaeda attacks, has nonetheless shelled out $100,000-plus to hire "a Hollywood liaison": Bobbie Faye Ferguson, an actress whose credits include the movie "The Bermuda Triangle" and guest shots on television schlock like "Designing Women" and "The Dukes of Hazzard." She will "work with moviemakers and scriptwriters" to give us homeland security infotainment - which is to actual homeland security what the movie "Independence Day" is to an actual terrorist attack.

Another propagandist with a rising profile is Susan Molinari, the onetime CBS News personality who appears regularly on news shows like "Hardball" and "Capitol Report." As she bloviates from the right about Social Security or the fake newsman Jeff Gannon, she is invariably described as "a former Republican Congresswoman" or a "CNBC political analyst." But her actual current jobs remain mysteriously unmentioned: C.E.O. of the Washington Group, Ketchum`s lobbying firm, and president of Ketchum Public Affairs. Were the Ketchum link disclosed, perhaps some real NBC reporter might find the nerve to ask her what other Karen Ryans and Armstrong Williamses might be on the Ketchum payroll. Or not.

The Bush propagandists have been successful at many tasks, from fomenting the canard that Iraqis attacked on 9/11 to deflecting moral outrage from Abu Ghraib and toward indecency as defined by its Federal Communications Commission. But Social Security may be a bridge too far even for propaganda machinery of this heft. Polls find that an ever-increasing majority of the country rejects the idea of letting Wall Street get its hands on its retirement savings.

Americans do have short memories, but it`s the administration`s bad luck that not just Kenny Boy but a whole brigade of bubble plutocrats have lately been yanked back into the spotlight by their legal travails: WorldCom`s Bernard J. Ebbers, Tyco`s L. Dennis Kozlowski, HealthSouth`s Richard M. Scrushy, Global Crossing`s Gary Winnick. No one is glad to see them. The public knows that the economy has not fully mended, and that there remain different economic rules for insiders than for the panelists drafted for the presidential Social Security roadshow. The new bankruptcy bill embraced this month by Republicans and Democrats alike throws Americans paying usurious credit-card interest to the wolves even as wealthy debtors remain protected.

You can catch the public mood in the reaction to Martha Stewart`s homecoming. Despite the news media`s heavy-breathing efforts to hype her emergence from jail as the heartwarming comeback of a born-again humanitarian, the bottom line shows that few in the audience are buying it. The Martha Stewart Omnimedia stock price started tumbling the moment she was back on camera, in line with the cratered circulation and ad sales of her magazine. Handing out hot cocoa to reporters at her Bedford, N.Y., estate did not turn the tide, and her spinoff of "The Apprentice" may be arriving just as the country is getting sick of C.E.O.`s again. Coincidentally or not, ratings for the existing "Apprentice" are off in tandem with the filing for bankruptcy protection by Donald Trump`s casino empire, the saturation coverage of his lavish nuptials and the introduction of a Trump fragrance.

It`s against this backdrop that the returning Mr. Lay - completely unrepentant, still purporting on "60 Minutes" that he`s an innocent victim of others - could be the Democrats` new best friend. A Texas tycoon who helped create the political career of George W. Bush only to be discarded when scandal struck has re-emerged at just the precise moment when he might do his old buddy the most harm.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Tomgram:
Dilip Hiro on Playing the Democracy Card
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2268


Have we really almost rolled around -- yet again -- to the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, this time amid much Bush administration and neocon self-congratulation, as well as media congratulations (grudging or otherwise) for an Iraqi-election-inspired spread of democracy in the Middle East? And what will we be congratulating ourselves on next year, when the usefulness of "democracy" passes, oil prices continue to rise, and the war in Iraq grinds on?

Right now, we`re in "Arab Spring," "the Cedar revolution," "a mighty storm," and opinions on what`s actually going on in the Middle East are varied indeed. Youssef M. Ibrahim, a thoughtful former New York Times reporter, writes from Dubai for the Washington Post:

"Listen to the conversations in the cafes on the edge of the creek that runs through this Persian Gulf city, and it is hard to believe that the George W. Bush being praised by Arab diners is the same George W. Bush who has been widely excoriated in these parts ever since he took office… Nowadays, intellectuals, businessmen and working-class people alike can be caught lauding Bush`s hard-edged posture on democracy and cheering his handling of Arab rulers who are U.S. allies… It`s enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush`s attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right."

Or could it be, as Robert Kuttner suggested recently in the American Prospect magazine, that democracy is indeed threatening to break out in the Middle East, but no thanks to Bush? Or are the Bush people just using a new "Arab Spring" logo to "rebrand" their failing efforts, as Naomi Klein suggests in the Nation? ("Faced with an Arab world enraged by its occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the US solution is not to change these brutal policies; it is, in the pseudo-academic language of corporate branding, to `change the story.`")

Or is it possible, as conservative Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis proposes, that the man responsible for springtime in Lebanon is not George Bush, but Osama bin Laden, and that the democratic reforms breaking out in American client states in the Middle East are mostly "pure sham"? Or could it be that, in Lebanon at least, we`ve confused the urge of a significant segment of the public to be free of an occupying force with "democracy." After all, as Juan Cole writes at his Informed Comment website, "The Lebanese have been having often lively parliamentary election campaigns for decades. The idea that the urbane and sophisticated Beirutis had anything to learn from the Jan. 30 process in Iraq is absurd on the face of it."

Or could it be that, as Seumas Milne writes in a fierce column in the British Guardian:

"The claim that democracy is on the march in the Middle East is a fraud. It is not democracy, but the US military, that is on the march… What has actually taken place since 9/11 and the Iraq war is a relentless expansion of US control of the Middle East, of which the threats to Syria are a part. The Americans now have a military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar -- and in not one of those countries did an elected government invite them in. Of course Arabs want an end to tyrannical regimes, most of which have been supported over the years by the US, Britain and France: that is the source of much anti-western Muslim anger. The dictators remain in place by US licence, which can be revoked at any time -- and managed elections are being used as another mechanism for maintaining pro-western regimes rather than spreading democracy."

At the very least, there can be little question that the Iraq invasion and occupation has destabilized the region (as the neocons, who had long assumed that chaos would be their ally, hoped it would). But the Bush administration must know that genuinely free elections in its various client and allied states would likely sweep Islamic parties, including in some places the Muslim Brotherhood, into power. Not exactly a dream for them. So, in Iraq, they created a "democracy" so weak (a gridlock-inducing two-thirds vote is needed in the new National Assembly even to form a government) that it would be unlikely to rule successfully over anything; while no administration official spoke up when Tunisia`s military strongman, in another U.S.-allied regime, won re-election with 94.5% of the vote (a total that might have made Saddam Hussein proud).

Less noted as well have been other destabilizing signs that might not serve the Bush administration`s story-line so admirably. For instance, the spread of terrorism in Kuwait as well as Saudi Arabia (with Jordan waiting in the wings), or the rise in the price of an AK-47 assault rifle in Lebanon from $100 in the pre-Cedar Revolution days to $700 now -- a sign of the jitters and, undoubtedly, of fears that the country`s civil war might return. Or what about another kind of "spreading" story: The Pentagon is set to introduce Matrix, a new remote-controlled land-mine system, in democratic Iraq by May. (These mines can evidently be set off by a soldier stationed at a laptop computer miles away, based on blips registering on his screen -- a surefire formula for democratic "collateral damage.")

Meanwhile, cheering away for an Arab spring, the Bush administration is also reportedly at work on the beginnings of a democratic winter in Latin America. The British Financial Times reports that a new policy is being formulated -- "at the request of President George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice" -- to "contain" Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. (Of course, the Bush administration has already tried to overthrow the man -- a democratic coup d`état, naturally.) Don`t these Financial Times quotes from Roger Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary for western hemisphere affairs at the Department of Defense, sound familiar? "Chávez is a problem because he is clearly using his oil money and influence to introduce his conflictive style into the politics of other countries… He`s picking on the countries whose social fabric is the weakest. In some cases it`s downright subversion." Don`t they do a pretty reasonable job of describing the Bush administration?

In addition to an Arabian Spring and a Latin Winter, it looks like we`re going to get a variety of bonus seasons: What about a UN Fall, thanks to the nomination of John Bolton as our ambassador there? Or a long, hot World Bank Summer, given the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be the bank`s next head? Or an Alaskan Thaw, thanks to the Senate`s vote this week paving the way for the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

When I consider the Iraq War and the Arab Spring, I can`t help thinking of the myth of Pandora. It seems, at least as Gustav Schwab tells the story in his Gods and Heroes, Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece, that Zeus, angry at Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods, had the fire-god Hephaestus create a beautiful woman, Pandora ("she who has gifts from all"). Zeus then sent her as a present to Prometheus`s not-so-sharp brother, carrying a tightly closed box the gods had filled with baleful "gifts" for humanity -- and you know the rest. When Pandora opened the box, all the ills that humanity until then had avoided came tumbling out, leaving only one small good thing at the bottom -- hope. Whether hope even made it out of the box seems to depend on which version of the myth you read.

For the global gamblers of the Bush administration, Iraq was that box. When they blasted its lid off, the resulting shock-and-awe blew back on everyone. But at the bottom of the box, there`s always that one small unpredictable thing. Thank the Bush administration, if you will, for the mayhem of the Middle East, but (as veteran journalist and Middle Eastern expert Dilip Hiro makes clear in the piece that follows,) don`t thank any American government of recent times for an Arab spring, if it really comes. The historical record tells us otherwise. Just thank the gods above, or luck, or our natures, for the fact that, even amid mayhem, there`s usually hope somewhere; and that, despite every horror, there are usually human beings ready to make some modest use of it.
Tom

Playing the Democracy Card
How America Furthers Its National Interests in the Middle East
By Dilip Hiro

The United States flaunts the banner of democracy in the Middle East only when that advances its economic, military, or strategic interests. The history of the past six decades shows that whenever there has been conflict between furthering democracy in the region and advancing American national interests, U.S. administrations have invariably opted for the latter course. Furthermore, when free and fair elections in the Middle East have produced results that run contrary to Washington`s strategic interests, it has either ignored them or tried to block the recurrence of such events.

Washington`s active involvement in the region began in 1933 when Standard Oil Company of California bid ten times more than the British-dominated Iraq Petroleum Company for exclusive petroleum exploration rights in Saudi Arabia`s eastern Hasa province.

As a leading constituent of Allied forces in World War II, the U.S. got its break in Iran after the occupation of that country by the British and the Soviets in August 1941. Eight months later President Franklin Roosevelt ruled that Iran was eligible for lend-lease aid. In August 1943, Secretary of State Cordell Hull said, "It is to our interest that no great power be established on the Persian Gulf opposite the important American petroleum development in Saudi Arabia."

The emergence of Israel in 1948 added a new factor. Following its immediate recognition of Israel, Washington devised a military-diplomatic strategy in the region which rested on the triad of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the new state of Israel, with the overall aim of keeping Soviet influence out of the Middle East. While each member of the troika was tied closely to the U.S., and links between Iran and Israel became progressively tighter, Saudi Arabia and Israel, though staunchly anti-Communist, remained poles apart. Nonetheless, the overall arrangement remained in place until the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979.

Besides pursuing the common aim of countering Soviet advances in the region overtly and covertly, each member of this troika had a special function. Being contiguous with the Soviet Union, Iran under the Shah helped the Pentagon by providing it with military bases. By inflicting a lightning defeat on Egypt and Syria -- then aligned with Moscow -- in June 1967, Israel proved its military value to the U.S. This strengthened Washington`s resolve to get Israel accepted by its Arab neighbors, a policy it had adopted in 1948 and implemented soon after, even though it meant subverting democracy in Syria.

In March 1949, following Brig.-General Husni Zaim`s promise to make peace with Israel, the CIA helped him mount a military coup against a democratically elected government in Syria. After Zaim had signed a truce with Israel on July 20, he tried to negotiate a peace treaty with it through American officials. A month later, however, he was ousted by a group of military officers and executed. The military rule that Washington triggered lasted five years albeit under different generals.

As the possessor of the largest reserves of petroleum in the region, Saudi Arabia helped the U.S. and its Western allies by keeping oil prices low. Furthermore, as a powerful and autocratic monarchy Saudi Arabia played a leading role in helping to suppress democratic movements in the small, neighboring, oil-rich Gulf States.

American clout increased when Britain -- the dominant foreign power in the region for a century and a half -- withdrew from the Gulf in 1971. The British withdrawal allowed the U.S. to expand its regional role as the four freshly independent Gulf States -- Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman -- struggled to adjust to the new reality. But instead of pressuring these sheikhdoms to institute democracy, Washington either opted for secret defense agreements with them or let the House of Saud implement an anti-democratic agenda in the region unhindered.

The Saudi Anti-Democratic Mission

In 1962, during a severe crisis in the House of Saud, Crown Prince Faisal promised political reform, especially the promulgation of a written constitution specifying a Consultative Council, with two-thirds of its members elected. But when he ascended the throne two years later he reneged on his promise.

Washington said nothing. It also remained silent when Riyadh helped suppress democracy in neighboring countries.

After its independence from Britain in 1961, Kuwait acquired a constitution which specified a National Assembly elected on a franchise limited to males belonging to families domiciled in Kuwait since 1921 -- in other words, about a fifth of adult citizens. Despite its limited nature, the Assembly evolved into a popular forum for expressing the aspirations and grievances of several important constituencies. Stung by criticism of official policies by its representatives, and encouraged by the Saudi monarch, Kuwaiti Emir Sabah ibn Salim al Sabah suspended the Assembly in 1976, accusing it of "malicious behavior," and then dissolved it. Its revival in 1981 lasted a mere five years.

At no point did Washington criticize the ruler`s undemocratic actions.

Since 1992, when limited parliamentary elections were restored, voters have returned more Islamist MPs than pro-Western liberals. Emir Jabar ibn Ahmad al Sabah`s efforts to extend the vote to women have failed, while he has made no move to extend the vote to the remaining four-fifths of adult male citizens -- nor has America pressured him to do so. He and the Americans fear, of course, that a universal adult male franchise would bolster the strength of the Islamist bloc in the Assembly.

Bahrain: Limited Democracy Derailed

In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia`s anti-democratic mission melded with America`s military needs. Bahrain became independent in August 1971. Its constitution, drafted by a constituent assembly (half nominated, half elected on a limited franchise), specified a National Assembly of 42 deputies, 30 of whom were to be elected on a restricted franchise. The first Assembly convened in December 1972 while Saudi Arabia watched warily.

As in Kuwait, however, the elected representatives criticized the government, angering the ruler, Shaikh Isa al Khalifa. This -- combined with pressure from Riyadh -- led the Emir to dissolve the Assembly in August 1975 and suspend the constitution.

Once again, Washington said nothing about the quashing of limited democracy in Bahrain. Why? In 1971, after the Pentagon leased naval facilities previously used by the British, Bahrain became the headquarters of the American Middle East Force. In 1977, the ruler extended the US-Bahraini agreement; and in 1995 Bahrain became the headquarters of the U.S. Navy`s Fifth Fleet.

Jordan: An Election Law Altered by Decree

Jordan provides another telling example of how American administrations have dealt with democracy in the Middle East. In an uncommonly free and fair election in November 1989, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, won 32 seats in the 80-member House of Representatives. It joined the government and ran five ministries.

During the 1990 Kuwait crisis which culminated in the 1991 Gulf War, the Jordanian king took into account popular opinion, both inside and outside parliament, which was opposed to joining the US-led alliance against Iraq, and advocated a negotiated solution to the crisis. By so doing, he acted as a constitutional monarch.

Instead of praising this welcome democratic development, the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush pilloried Hussein as "a dwarf king." Unable to stand the pressure, King Hussein crawled back into Washington`s fold after the 1991 Gulf War. To thwart the possibility of the IAF emerging as the leading party in the next election, he altered the election law by decree. In quietly applauding his action, the elder Bush`s administration showed its cynical disregard for democracy.

Egypt: Supporting the Autocrat

While King Hussein manipulated the Jordanian political system with some sophistication to achieve the result he wanted, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt blatantly used the government machinery and state-run media to produce a pre-ordained electoral result to endorse his signing of the U.S.-brokered bilateral peace treaty with Israel in 1978-79 after he had broken ranks with the Arab League.

The depth and durability of popular antipathy towards peace with Israel, while it continues to occupy the Palestinian Territories, is highlighted by the fact that a quarter-century after the peace treaty, relations between the two neighbors remain cold. While remaining firmly under American tutelage, President Husni Mabarak has continued to spurn offers to visit Tel Aviv.

As in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest political party in the Middle East and long outlawed in Egypt, offers a credible challenge to the semi-dictatorship of Mubarak (in power since 1981). His regime has continued to be the second largest recipient of the U.S. aid after Israel under both Democratic and Republican Presidents.

Several months ago, Mubarak mused that democracy in Egypt would mean Muslim Brotherhood rule over the country. The key question now is: Will Mubarak -- who recently agreed to hold the Presidential election scheduled for September through "direct, secret balloting" instead of simply rubber-stamping his sole candidacy in a stage-managed referendum -- let the Brotherhood challenge him?

The answer will come in the wording with which Article 76 of the constitution will be amended and passed by a Parliament dominated by Mubarak`s National Democratic Party. At present, it specifies a single presidential candidate, endorsed by at least two-thirds of parliamentary deputies, to be offered to the voters for approval.

Yemen: Rebuffing Democracy

Another victim of the way American administrations have placed their narrow interests above any program to democratize the Middle East was Yemen. Ever since the creation of Republic of Yemen, following the union of North Yemen and South Yemen in 1991, the country has had a multiparty political system. Indeed, since North Yemen had been governed by the General People`s Congress and South Yemen by the Yemen Socialist Party, a peaceful unification could only come about through the creation of a multi-party system.

In April 1993, the government organized the first general election on the Arabian Peninsula based on universal suffrage. It was for a 301-member House of Representatives and the Presidency. This historic event went unnoticed in the United States where the Clinton administration continued to rebuff the Yemeni government because of its insistence on an Arab solution to the 1990-91 Kuwait crisis and its negative vote on United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 authorizing military action against Iraq.

Encouraged by the Yemeni election, six Saudi human rights activists -- professors, judges, and senior civil servants -- established the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR) in Saudi Arabia. It demanded political reform in the kingdom, including elections based on universal suffrage. Government persecution followed, including job dismissals and arrests. Prof. Muhammad al Masaari, the head of the CDLR, managed to flee first to Yemen, and then to Britain.

Yet Washington did not protest.

Now George W. Bush loudly applauds the local elections held recently in the Saudi Kingdom. His administration ignores the fact that only half of the seats were even open for contest, and so distrustful were Saudi citizens of their government`s electoral promise that only a quarter of eligible voters even bothered registered. Women were, of course, barred from voting.

By contrast, Bush endlessly laments the absence of freedom for the people of Iran, which his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently described as "a totalitarian state." These statements run counter to the facts. Since the 1979 revolution in that country, the Islamic regime has held seven parliamentary, eight presidential, and two local elections -- as well as four Assembly of Experts polls -- all of them multi-candidate and based on universal suffrage with a voting age of 15.

What explains this blatant myopia? While practicing an Islamic version of democracy, Iran is actively opposing the economic, military, and strategic ambitions of America in the region.

Actually, the historic pattern of American administrations in the Middle East -- downgrading democracy at the expense of narrow national interests -- is in line with what the United States has been practicing in Central and South America for a much longer period -- a phenomenon that has gone largely unnoticed in the United States itself.

Dilip Hiro is the author of The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide (Caroll & Graf) and Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After (Nation Books).

Copyright 2005 Dilip Hiro

A printed version of this article will appear in Middle East International, no. 746.


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Paul Wolfowitz (R-Vampire) is Bush`s latest cruel joke on the world
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"I will suck the world`s money dry."
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Video:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/tvseq/newsnight/newsnight.…

Published on Thursday, March 17, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq`s Oil
by Greg Palast
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0317-23.htm

The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq`s oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC`s Newsnight has revealed.

Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq`s oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists."

"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.

Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush`s first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.

An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant Falah Aljibury says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d`etat.

Mr. Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.

Secret sell-off plan

The industry-favored plan was pushed aside by yet another secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq`s oil fields. The new plan, crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq`s oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.

The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel. Mr. Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, flew to the London meeting, he told Newsnight, at the request of the State Department.

Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan`s "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq`s oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.

"Insurgents used this, saying, `Look, you`re losing your country, your losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable," said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.

"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatization is coming."

Privatization blocked by industry

Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq`s oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.

Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."

The chosen successor to Mr Carroll, a Conoco Oil executive, ordered up a new plan for a state oil company preferred by the industry.

Ari Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatize Iraq`s oil fields. He advocated the plan as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision.

Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."

New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper`s Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favored by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004, Harper`s discovered, under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas. Former US Secretary of State Baker is now an attorney. His law firm, Baker Botts, is representing ExxonMobil and the Saudi Arabian government.

View segments of Iraq oil plans at: www.GregPalast.com/opeconthemarch.html

Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq`s oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia`s energy privatization. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves.

Jaffe said "There is no question that an American oil company ... would not be enthusiastic about a plan that would privatize all the assets with Iraq companies and they (US companies) might be left out of the transaction."

In addition, Ms. Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec, "They [oil companies] have to worry about the price of oil."

"I`m not sure that if I`m the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."

The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight, "Many neo-conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this that and the other. International oil companies without exception are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don`t have a theology."

Greg Palast`s film - the result of a joint investigation by BBC Newsnight and Harper`s Magazine - will broadcast on Thursday, 17 March, 2005. You can watch the program online - available Thursday, March 17 after 7pm EST for 24hrs - from the Newsnight website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/default.stm. You can also read the story in greater detail in the latest issue of Harper`s magazine - now available at your local newsstand.

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March 17, 2005

COMMENT

Behind the neocon nomination
By Rhys Blakely, Times Online
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8210-1529470,00…


While Africa battles to keep the wolf from the door, Europe’s leaders are lining up to keep Wolfowitz from the World Bank.

Germany and France are "underwhelmed" at the prospect of the US Deputy Secretary of Defense - widely regarded as the architect of America`s war in Iraq - taking the helm of an institution which is supposed to be battling only poverty. The 2 billion who, according to the Bank itself, live on less than $2 a day deserve a champion with the relevant know how, say the dissenters.

"We need someone with professional experience in helping people to escape from poverty, which Mr Wolfowitz does not have," said Professor Jeffrey Sachs – the Nobel Prize-winning director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and adviser to Kofi Annan.

Dig a little deeper, however, and the resistance to Paul Wolfowitz`s nomination for the World Bank post by US President George W Bush involves more than an objection to an amateur taking the post.

Earlier this year, James Wolfensohn, the outgoing chief of the Wold Bank, told Times Online that it was the organisation’s job "to enhance security for poor people by reducing their vulnerability to ill health and economic shocks".

But parts of what he might term "old" Europe will always associate Mr Wolfowitz with the "shock and awe" tactics that were used to break the will of Baghdad. The creative role the World Bank aspires to, in crafting hope and a future for the impoverished, does not sit easily with memories of the terrible destructive forces wrought on Iraq.

Today, prominent voices in Washington even suggested that the appointment of the new head of the World Bank should indeed be part of the "War on Terror". So counter-intuitive is President George Bush’s nomination of Mr Wolfowitz, fair-minded analysts are calling it the "mother of all wind-ups". But Mr Bush, fresh from the appointment of John Bolton, the fiery State Department hawk, as the US Ambassador to the United Nations, is deadly serious and on something of a roll.

Aiming to thwart this, Europeans are raising the spectre of Caio Koch Weser, the former World Bank official – and aide to Robert McNamara, no less – who five years ago was blocked from heading the IMF. Sauce for the goose will do for the gander, say Mr Wolfowitz’s opponents. Even the American-friendly press department at No10 was moved yesterday to point out that Mr Wolfowitz’s nomination was just that, a nomination, and that there may be others on the way.

But should Mr Wolfowitz`s billing as the neocons’ necon preclude him from taking the job?

It is plain that the world is failing Africa. An audit last year of the UN Millennium Development Goals Project, an ambitions plan launched in 2000 that called for the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, uncovered a disturbing lack of progress. Not one part of the scheme was judged to be "on track" in sub-Saharan Africa. In some areas the situation had worsened. The number of Africans suffering from tuberculosis, for example, had actually increased since the scheme`s launch.

Prof Sachs recently heaped praise on Gordon Brown’s proposal for a "New Marshall Plan" for Africa. The analogy with the US aid programme directed at Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War was, he said, spot on.

"There are several reasons why it is right to invoke the original Marshall Plan," Prof Sachs told Times Online. "First, it was intensive, second it was successful, third it may remind the United States of a time when it showed a greater interest in its global role."

On two of these scores, Mr Bush’s nomination has shown himself to be adept. Like it or not, in sending its troops to Iraq, the US executive, following a plan of action advocated primarily by Mr Wolfowitz, has shown that it is prepared to assume a global role in an intensive fashion.

But America’s execution is open to criticism. A report by Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister, recently warned that "bad or corrupt" business practices have contributed to poverty and human rights abuse. The various debacles in Iraq involving Halliburton and US Army contracts and the spectacle of Abu Ghraib have raised a massive question mark over the executive abilities of those who run the US Defense Department. There is simply no room for such doubts, many will argue, at an international institution as important as the World Bank. In many ways, the organisation does not need the baggage borne by Mr Wolfowitz.

Finally, there remains from Prof Sach’s development triptych the prickly question of success. For some, the Wolfowitz-designed war will forever represent an indefensible and illogical act of aggression that rode roughshod over international law. Others see the episode as a profound military blunder. And then there are others for whom the possibility of a "cedar revolution" in Lebanon justifies the strategy of pre-emptive action that toppled an evil dictator in a nearby state.

Such debate could rage for decades. Africa cannot wait.


Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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March 18, 2005
Un-Volunteering: Troops Improvise to Find Way Out
By MONICA DAVEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/national/18soldiers.html?h…

The night before his Army unit was to meet to fly to Iraq, Pvt. Brandon Hughey, 19, simply left. He drove all night from Texas to Indiana, and on from there, with help from a Vietnam veteran he had met on the Internet, to disappear in Canada.

In Georgia, Sgt. Kevin Benderman, 40, whose family ties to military service stretch back to the American Revolution, filed for conscientious-objector status and learned that he will face a court-martial in May for failing to report to his unit when it left for a second stint in Iraq.

One by one, a trickle of soldiers and marines - some just back from duty in Iraq, others facing a trip there soon - are seeking ways out.

Soldiers, their advocates and lawyers who specialize in military law say they have watched a few service members try ever more unlikely and desperate routes: taking drugs in the hope that they will be kept home after positive urine tests, for example; or seeking psychological or medical reasons to be declared nondeployable, including last-minute pregnancies. Specialist Marquise J. Roberts is accused of asking a relative in Philadelphia to shoot him in the leg so he would not have to return to war.

A bullet to the leg, Specialist Roberts, of Hinesville, Ga., told the police, seemed his best chance. "I was scared," he said, according to a police report on the December shooting. "I didn`t want to go back to Iraq and leave my family. I felt that my chain of command didn`t care about the safety of the troops. I just know that I wasn`t going to make it back."
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Sgt. Kevin Benderman in Hinesville, Ga., with letters of support
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Department of Defense officials say they have seen no increase in those counted as deserters since the war in Iraq began. Since October 2002, about 6,000 soldiers have abandoned their posts for at least 30 days and been counted as deserters. (A soldier who eventually returns to his unit is still counted as a deserter for the year.) The Marine Corps, which takes a snapshot of how many marines are missing at a given point in time, reported about 1,300 deserters in December, some of whom disappeared last year and others years earlier. The figures, Pentagon officials said, suggest that the deserter ranks have actually shrunk since the years just before Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, many things have changed since then, including the seriousness of deserting during a time of war.

Many of the tactics also defy simple categories like official desertion.

"There are a lot of people, many more than normal, who are trying to get out now," said Sgt. First Class Tom Ogden, just before he left for a second trip to Iraq with his Army aviation unit from Fort Carson, Colo. He said he had seen fellow soldiers in recent months who seemed intent on failing drug tests because they believed they would be held back if only their tests "came back hot," while others claimed bad backs and necks, with the same hope.

"I`ll tell you what," Sergeant Ogden said, "they`re coming up with what they consider some creative ways to do it now."

In the fall of 2003, Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia of Miami, in the Florida National Guard, was among the first to announce he was refusing to return to Iraq and filing for conscientious-objector status. A year ago, Pfc. Jeremy Hinzman, a South Dakotan, vanished from his post only to reappear in Canada, his family in tow.

Word of such cases spread among soldiers. Some reacted with disgust, accusing their colleagues of cowardice: how could they let down other soldiers in a time of war, when, unlike the draftees of the Vietnam War, they had all volunteered? Others, though, say the cases made them think more about their ambivalence.

"What I`ve seen is that soldiers are more afraid to make a stand for themselves than they are to go into combat," said Sergeant Mejia, who was released in February after nearly nine months of confinement at Fort Sill, Okla., for desertion. "Until I took a stand, I was really going against my own conscience. I was so afraid to be called a coward."

In the months since his case, more organized efforts have arisen.

A group of former soldiers who succeeded in achieving conscientious-objector status has created a Web site, www.peace-out.com, showing people how to apply. The site reported 3,000 hits the first day.

In Canada, residents banded together to help American soldiers who arrive there, supplying money, food and rooms. Michelle Robidoux, a leader of the War Resisters Support Campaign, said members were lobbying Canadian officials to grant the soldiers refugee status.

These soldiers come from all different towns, all over the country, but their reasons for wanting out echo one another. Some described grisly scenes from their first deployments to Iraq. One soldier said he saw a wounded, weeping Iraqi child whom no one would help; another said he watched as another soldier set fire to wild dogs just to pass time. Others said they had simply realized that they did not believe in war, or at least not in this war.

"It wasn`t what I thought it would be," Private Hughey said. He said he enlisted at 17 from his home in San Angelo, Tex., because a recruiter promised that the military would buy him the education his father could not afford. He said he had tried to push aside little doubts he had, even back in basic training, but realized as his unit prepared to leave Fort Hood, Tex., for Iraq last March that he could not go.

"There are people who would want to hang me for this," he said in a telephone interview from Toronto. "The thing is, yes, I did sign up for this. And, when I did, I had this vision that I`d be a good guy and defend my country. But killing people for something I don`t believe in just to fulfill a contract just didn`t seem right to me either."

At a base in Germany, Specialist Blake Lemoine, 23, who served in Iraq last year, sent his chain of command a letter this year, announcing all the reasons he should be allowed to quit: the Army conflicts with his religious beliefs and rituals; he and his wife are not monogamous, counter to military policy; he is bisexual. In February, Army officials brought court-martial charges, accusing him of refusing to perform his assigned duties.

Army officials have said the number of people searching for escape routes is relatively small and no different from that of the past.
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Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia last month in Florida after he was released from military jail. He was among the first soldiers
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"There will always be some people who do this sort of thing, but I haven`t seen any evidence at all of a trend," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman. "There are more people that we hear about volunteering to be deployed, who want to go and serve. Remember, these are all volunteers."

Although available Pentagon records date back only a few years, they show a rise in applications for conscientious-objector status. In 2002, 31 soldiers and marines applied, compared with 92 in 2003. As of November, the latest month for which records were available, 75 soldiers and marines had applied in 2004. Of the 75 applications, 34 were approved, 41 turned down.

That path, though, can be slow and complex. Military rules require that a service member show that he has developed a true moral, ethical or religious opposition to all war.

Sergeant Benderman applied in December, days before his unit shipped to Iraq without him.

His conscientious-objector application is being processed, but so far, one military official has recommended against its approval, he said. He faces a general court-martial on charges of desertion and missing his unit`s deployment. He could face penalties as severe as seven years in confinement, forfeiture of all pay, reduction in rank and a dishonorable discharge.

"Everybody wants to put you in a little box, wants you to have some grand epiphany and bolts in the sky when it comes to this," Sergeant Benderman said recently. "But it`s not that way. Here`s what happened: I spent six months over there, and I came back and thought about it. What I know is that it`s inhumane. It`s turning 18-year-old men and women into soulless people."

Among some desperate soldiers, the process of applying for conscientious objector may seem as remote a possibility as leaving for Canada.

In his interview with the police, Specialist Roberts said that his wife, worried about his imminent return to Iraq, had suggested a shooting: "She said, `Why don`t you do what everyone else is doing?` She meant for me to try to find some way out of it."

A hearing is scheduled for next week. The rest of his unit, meanwhile, is in Iraq.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Am 20.03. jährt sich der Beginn des Irakkrieges zum 2.Mal.

One of the few positive domestic consequences of the war has been the nation`s determination.. to honor the memory of each American man and woman who has died in Iraq.
Das ist doch wohl das Mindeste, was ein Soldat erwarten kann. Hätte man die Soldaten wie Müll verscharren sollen? Ein seltsamer Beweis für ein Positivum des Irak-Krieges.

March 18, 2005
EDITORIAL
Two Years Later
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/opinion/18fri1.html

The invasion of Iraq, which began two years ago this weekend, was a world-changing event. We can see many of the consequences already. The good ones, so far, exist mainly as hopes and are fewer than the bad ones, some of which are all too concrete. One of the few positive domestic consequences of the war has been the nation`s determination - despite obstruction from the White House and its supporters - to honor the memory of each American man and woman who has died in Iraq. The administration has been shockingly callous about the tens of thousands of Iraqi victims, whom ordinary Americans cannot count let alone name.

The Real Reasons

The Bush administration was famously flexible in explaining why it invaded Iraq, and the most important reason, in the minds of Americans and in the arguments made by American diplomats, turned out to be wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction to destroy. Worse, the specialized machinery and highly lethal conventional weaponry that Saddam Hussein did control was looted during the invasion and is now very likely in the hands of terrorists. As James Glanz and William Broad reported in The Times, among the things missing is high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms. The WMD argument was not only wrong, but the invasion might have also created a new threat.

However, there was another theory behind the invasion. Mr. Bush might have been slow to articulate it, but other prominent officials were saying early on that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would shake up the hidebound, undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and free the natural democratic impulses of Arab and Islamic people. This rationale may still hold up. Iraqi and Afghani voters marching stolidly to the polls was by far the most hopeful image in the past two years.

There is an endless list of qualifications. Many of the most promising signs of change have little to do with Iraq. The peace initiatives in Israel were made possible when Yasir Arafat died and was replaced by a braver, more flexible leader. The new determination of the Lebanese people to throw out their Syrian oppressors was sparked by the assassination of the Lebanese nationalist, Rafik Hariri, not the downfall of Saddam Hussein. And in Iraq itself, the voting largely excluded the Sunni minority, without whose cooperation Iraq will never be anything more than a civil war battleground or a staging platform for a new dictatorship.

With all that said, even the fiercest critic of George Bush`s foreign policy would be insane not to want these signs of hope to take root. That would not excuse the waging of an unnecessary war on false pretences, but it could change the course of modern history. Grieving families would find the peace that comes with knowing that spouses, parents or children died to help make a better world.

The Real Losses

Even with the best possible outcome, the invasion is already costly. America`s alliances, particularly those with Europe, have been severely frayed since President Bush turned his back on the United Nations in the fall of 2002. Even some of his early supporters, like Spain, have edged away. Tony Blair remains the exception, mainly because of his willingness to ignore public opinion. If there is such a thing as the European street, anti-American feeling is strong and universal.

Things are even worse on the Arab street. While hope for change may be rising, opinion about the United States has never been as profoundly negative. Even under the best circumstances, it would have been hard for the proud people of the Middle East to acknowledge any benefit from an armed intervention by a Western power. And the occupying forces have made themselves easy to hate with maddening human-rights disasters. When the average Egyptian or Palestinian or Saudi thinks about the Americans in Iraq, the image is not voters` purple-stained fingers but the naked Iraqi prisoner at the other end of Pfc. Lynndie England`s leash.

The atrocities that occurred in prisons like Abu Ghraib were the product of decisions that began at the very top, when the Bush administration decided that Sept. 11 had wiped out its responsibility to abide by the rules, including the Geneva Conventions and the American Constitution. For the United States, one of the greatest harms from the Iraq conflict has been the administration`s willingness to define democracy down on the pretext of wartime emergency.

Mr. Bush was not honest with the American people in the run-up to the war. He hyped the WMD evidence abroad and played down the cost at home. The results of last fall`s election ensured that he would pay no political penalty. But other people sit in judgment as well. Mr. Bush`s determination to have his war and his tax cuts at the same time meant masking the real price of invading Iraq, and even now the costs are being borne mainly by overseas holders of American debt. The international markets know this, and over the long run are most likely to be less forgiving than American voters.

The New Challenges

Those stains on the index fingers of proud Iraqi voters have long faded. As Robert Worth of The Times discovered in interviews with average citizens, an inevitable disillusionment has set in. People reasonably want to know what comes next. More chilling, they seem to be prepared to blame competing ethnic groups for anything that goes wrong.

Iraq`s newly elected leaders must organize a government that Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and smaller ethnic and religious groups feel has their best interests at heart. They must also accomplish some practical matters - more electrical power, cleaner water, better security - to give their constituents the confidence that things really can get better.

The first challenge is up to the Iraqis, and so far, there are not many signs that any group is prepared to compromise for the common good. Americans must help with the second problem, and almost no one inside Iraq seems to feel the infant government can survive right now without the Western military.

It is hard to imagine a quick exit that would not make things much worse. But at the same time, it`s clear that the presence of American troops is poisoning the situation. Under constant fire from Sunni insurgents, the soldiers are seldom free to provide the good-will services that many would undoubtedly like to do. Instead they stand behind barricades, terrified that the next vehicle will be driven by a suicide bomber. The inevitable consequence is what happened to the Italian journalist and her protectors whose car was riddled with bullets en route to the airport. Far more often, the people inside the cars are Iraqis.

The invasion has stirred up other dreadful side effects that must be addressed. One is that other rogue nations watched what happened to Saddam Hussein and not unreasonably took the lesson that the only way to keep American forces away permanently was to acquire nuclear weapons quickly. Curbing the international market of the most lethal weapons must be the top priority for the White House, but it is not possible without the multilateral cooperation they scorned before the invasion. North Korea, which any sensible person regards as a far more deadly threat than Saddam Hussein ever was, can be kept in check only by allies working together.

The Enduring Principles

Like a great many Americans and most Europeans, this page opposed the invasion of Iraq. Our reasons seem as good now as they did then. Most important is our belief that the United States cannot work in isolation from the rest of the world. There are too many problems, from global warming to nuclear proliferation, which can be solved only if the major powers collaborate. Americans need both the counsel and restraint of other world leaders. The White House has almost unthinkable power, and the rest of the globe has the right to take a profound interest in making sure it is exercised wisely.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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3 Leserbriefe aus der Times zu Wolfowitz, Bolton und Co.

March 18, 2005
A Neocon at the World Bank? (3 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re "Wolfowitz Gets Bush Nomination for World Bank" (front page, March 17):

President Bush continues to show his true colors. After promising to be a president who unites, not divides, Mr. Bush has sent two of the most controversial conservative ideologues to the United Nations and the World Bank.

The appointment of John R. Bolton as chief United States representative at the United Nations, who has openly showed disdain and contempt for the world organization, was a slap in the face to international diplomacy. Now the appointment of Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the most divisive figures in the administration, flaunts Mr. Bush`s contempt for international cooperation.

Repeatedly, Mr. Bush has spoken of unity and cooperation, while his actions reveal a man bent on propagating a right-wing ideology shared by very few in the United States. His actions continue to isolate the United States and to portray the country as an arrogant unilateralist concerned only with its own desires.

Samuel Brooks
Philadelphia, March 17, 2005

•

To the Editor:

The United States` nomination of Paul D. Wolfowitz to be the next president of the World Bank represents the outcome of an opaque and undemocratic selection process ("Why Paul Wolfowitz?," editorial, March 17).

The nomination suggests a narrowing convergence between United States geopolitical interests and the operations of international financial institutions.

Mr. Wolfowitz is not an obscure figure but a controversial actor on the world stage whose nomination reflects substantial political maneuvering by the United States. Allowing this process to proceed unchecked or unchallenged would be a troubling development at a time of heightened global concern about the role of the United States in the international arena.

While reactions to Mr. Wolfowitz`s candidacy emerge and public opposition mounts, member governments of the World Bank must propose additional candidates and push for a genuine opening of the process to greater public scrutiny.

Urgent efforts are needed to render the presidential selection more democratic and transparent and ultimately to reinforce the accountability of the World Bank`s governing body to the public that the institution is intended to serve.

Manish Bapna
Executive Director

Bank Information Center
Washington, March 17, 2005

•

To the Editor:

Does anyone really think that the same Paul D. Wolfowitz who assured us that the Iraqi reconstruction would pay for itself is the right choice to head any bank, let alone the World Bank?

With John R. Bolton, a critic of multinational institutions, as the new United States representative at the United Nations, with Karen Hughes managing America`s public relations to the world from the State Department, and with Paul D. Wolfowitz steering World Bank policy to coincide with American national interests as defined by the neoconservatives, America is on track to become more isolated and despised around the world than ever before.

Not that the Bush administration cares much about that result, as shown by its recent appointments.

Michael J. Kelly
Omaha, March 17, 2005
The writer is an associate professor of international law at Creighton University.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 18, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Ugly American Bank
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/opinion/18krugman.html

You can say this about Paul Wolfowitz`s qualifications to lead the World Bank: He has been closely associated with America`s largest foreign aid and economic development project since the Marshall Plan.

I`m talking, of course, about reconstruction in Iraq. Unfortunately, what happened there is likely to make countries distrust any economic advice Mr. Wolfowitz might give.

Let`s not focus on mismanagement. Instead, let`s talk about ideology.

Before the Iraq war, Pentagon hawks shut the State Department out of planning. This excluded anyone with development experience. As a result, the administration went into Iraq determined to demonstrate the virtues of radical free-market economics, with nobody warning about the likely problems.

Journalists who spoke to Paul Bremer when he was running Iraq remarked on his passion when he spoke about privatizing state enterprises. They didn`t note a comparable passion for a rapid democratization.

In fact, economic ideology may explain why U.S. officials didn`t move quickly after the fall of Baghdad to hold elections - even though assuring Iraqis that we didn`t intend to install a puppet regime might have headed off the insurgency. Jay Garner, the first Iraq administrator, wanted elections as quickly as possible, but the White House wanted to put a "template" in place by privatizing oil and other industries before handing over control.

The oil fields never did get privatized. Nonetheless, the attempt to turn Iraq into a laissez-faire showpiece was, in its own way, as much an in-your-face rejection of world opinion as the decision to go to war. Dogmatic views about the universal superiority of free markets have been losing ground around the world.

Latin Americans are the most disillusioned. Through much of the 1990`s, they bought into the "Washington consensus" - which we should note came from Clinton administration officials as well as from Wall Street economists and conservative think tanks - which said that privatization, deregulation and free trade would lead to economic takeoff. Instead, growth remained sluggish, inequality increased, and the region was struck by a series of economic crises.

The result has been the rise of governments that, to varying degrees, reject policies they perceive as made in America. Venezuela`s leader is the most obstreperous. But the most dramatic example of the backlash is Argentina, once the darling of Wall Street and the think tanks. Today, after a devastating recession, the country is run by a populist who often blames foreigners for the country`s economic problems, and has forced Argentina`s foreign creditors to accept a settlement that gives them only 32 cents on the dollar.

And the backlash has reached our closest neighbor. Mexico`s current president, Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive, is a firm believer in free markets. But his administration is widely considered a failure. Meanwhile, Mexico City`s leftist mayor, Manuel López Obrador, has become immensely popular. And his populist rhetoric has raised fears that if he becomes president he will roll back the free-market and free-trade policies of the past two decades.

Mr. Fox is trying to use a minor violation of the law to keep Mr. López off the presidential ballot. If he succeeds, many Mexicans will believe that democracy was sacrificed on the altar of foreign capital.

Not long ago, the growing alienation of Latin America from the United States would have been considered a major foreign policy setback. So much has gone wrong lately that we`ve defined disaster down, but it`s still not a good thing.

Where does Mr. Wolfowitz fit into all this? The advice that the World Bank gives is as important as the money it lends - but only if governments take that advice. And given the ideological rigidity the Pentagon showed in Iraq, they probably won`t. If Mr. Wolfowitz says that some free-market policy will help economic growth, he`ll be greeted with as much skepticism as if he declared that some country has weapons of mass destruction.

Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, says that the Wolfowitz nomination turns the World Bank into the American Bank. Make that ugly American bank: rightly or not, developing countries will see Mr. Wolfowitz`s selection as a sign that we`re still trying to impose policies they believe have failed.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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Atomic clock ticks down to fallout with Iran

Simon Tisdall
Friday March 18, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/0,15205,144043…

Guardian
Iran and the western powers are on a collision course as the clock ticks towards crucial talks in Paris next week about Tehran`s nuclear programme.

Iranian diplomats insist that their country`s development of nuclear technology is for peaceful, civilian purposes only. They say Iran is merely exercising its right, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to enrich uranium for reactor fuel.

But the EU "troika", comprising Britain, France and Germany, and the Bush administration do not believe them. Brandishing evidence of past concealment gathered by UN inspectors, they suspect that Iran is seeking weapons-grade uranium to build atomic bombs.

The talks are highly technical in nature. Yet the basic problem underlying complex disputes about yellowcake and centrifuges is more easily understood. It boils down to an abiding, mutual lack of trust. Unless somebody gives ground soon, the Paris talks between the EU and Iran could mark a parting of the ways.

"The US is using the nuclear issue as a pretext for regime change," a senior Iranian official said this week. "The issue is a diversion. The US wants to weaken Iran. Even if the nuclear issue was solved, they would want another thing and another thing."

Iran had agreed a temporary suspension of uranium enrichment as a confidence-building measure, not a complete cessation, the official said. And the suspension would not necessarily last much longer.

President Mohammad Khatami drove the point home in Isfahan this week: "Cessation of these activities is unacceptable to us. If the Europeans insist ... whatever happens after, the responsibility lies with them."

Determined not to repeat its North Korea mistakes, the US is equally adamant that Iran must give way before it acquires full nuclear weapons capabilities. "It really is now up to the Iranians to do what they need to do," Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, warned.

By offering limited incentives to Iran for the first time last week, she said the US had "forged a common front with Europe ... I`m sure it makes the Iranians uncomfortable."

Stephen Hadley, the US national security adviser, dismissed Iran`s proffered "objective guarantees". "The best guarantee is to permanently abandon their enrichment facilities," he said.

Stuck in the middle, the EU is in the increasingly awkward position of holding the ring between Tehran and Washington, which is not directly involved in the talks. While it worries about Iran, Europe`s bottom line is avoiding an Iraq-style rift with the US.

British officials are urging Tehran to agree to an indefinite suspension of enrichment while talks on trade and normalisation issues proceed. "Like history, diplomacy never ends," a senior official said. But this approach does not recommend itself to Washington neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who assert that only regime change in Tehran can ultimately solve the problem.

"The belief that there`s a diplomatic solution to be had here is increasingly the triumph of hope over experience," the Wall Street Journal commented. On the American right, distrust also extends to the EU, whose leadership on Iran is resented and whose post-Iraq solidarity is doubted.

Iranian officials have been quick to suggest that by agreeing with the US to carpet Iran in the UN security council if incentives flop and the talks fail, the troika is walking into trap.

"The Americans are trying to create an environment so the US can hit Iran," one diplomat said. "And I don`t think the Europeans would ultimately accept this."

That could be a serious miscalculation. But any Iranian attempt to play the EU off against America would test Europe`s unity of purpose. Mr Khatami is due to visit the French president, Jacques Chirac, next month.

British diplomats point out that the Iranians have long sought US engagement. Now it is forthcoming, they say, Tehran detects a plot.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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[urlCool reaction to Wolfowitz move- European governments]http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1440597,00.html[/url]

[urlWhat the papers said about Wolfowitz and the World Bank]http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1440493,00.html[/url]

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The Independent
Security chief ’sues himself’ to clear name over Hariri
Friday, 18th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=621…

IN Lebanon, tragedy and farce often go hand in hand. But tragedy turned to vaudeville yesterday when Syria’s top Lebanese intelligence officer called a press conference to announce that he and his colleagues would "sue themselves" to clear their names of negligence over the murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February.

Even more incredibly, Jamil Sayed, the head of the Lebanese General Security Directorate, announced that he had decided to bring these legal proceedings "without consulting" his colleagues. "All the heads of security institutions are ready for trial and accountability," he said. "We have no secrets to be embarrassed about."

It appeared that Mr Sayed, an intelligent man who does not speak without much forethought, was warning the political opposition to stop their attacks on him, on the prosecutor general, on the Internal Security Forces head, and other senior officers. Those who were calling for their resignations, he said, should "not mix politics with crime ... Let justice decide."

The honour of the Lebanese security forces was at stake, Mr Sayed said - the anti-Syrian opposition would certainly agree with that - and claimed he was starting his own legal proceedings against himself since no members of the opposition had filed a lawsuit. This begs a few questions. How can Mr Sayed be interrogated? Will he question himself? And how can he carry out such an interrogation when all the Lebanese evidence about Mr Hariri’s murder is in the hands of - well, Mr Sayed.

"They should stop under- estimating people’s intelligence," was the only comment to come from Walid Eido, a former judge and a member of Hariri’s parliamentary party.

He might be wise to treat Mr Sayed less dismissively. The security head is possibly the most powerful man in Lebanon and controls passports, all border crossings and censorship.

But what did the announcement mean? Is Mr Sayed preparing for his resignation if the UN investigation into Hariri’s murder condemns the Lebanese security services? Or is he telling Lebanese MPs that they will have to sue him before he resigns?

His statement followed only a few hours after Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hizbollah guerrilla movement, rejected President Bush’s latest demand for the organisation’s disarmament. "We are ready to remain until the end of time a ’terrorist organisation’ in Bush’s view, but we are not ready to give up protection of our country, our people, their blood and their honour," he said.

Mr Nasrallah regards the Hizbollah as an anti-Israeli resistance group and thus hopes to avoid UN Security Council Resolution 1559’s stipulation that all Lebanese "militias" must be disarmed.

In fact, Hizbollah’s best defence was offered by Bahiya Hariri, the murdered prime minister’s sister, when she told the million-strong crowd of Lebanese in Beirut on Monday that they must "protect" Hizbollah. It was an attempt to bring Nasrallah over to the opposition cause - although this would mean at least the partial abandoning of its military alliance with Syria. The Hizbollah have not responded to this offer.

At least 4,000 of Syria’s troops in the country have crossed the international frontier; the remaining 10,000 are now in the eastern Bekaa Valley.

Syria’s one million workers in Lebanon, however, continue to pay the price for the revived hatred of their country. Up to 30 have been murdered in the past four weeks - with scarcely a headline in the Lebanese press about this outrage.

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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, March 18, 2005


Wolfowitz`s Plot to Destroy OPEC
And Why it was always Ridiculous

Joe Conason presents some excellent reasons why Paul Wolfowitz should not head the World Bank. But there may be others.

The BBC Newsnight reports the titanic struggle between the Neoconservatives and Big Oil over Iraqi petroleum. If this story is true, it is some of the best reporting to come out of the Iraq scandal for months, and Greg Palast and his colleagues have scooped the Washington Post and the New York Times.

It is a story that also has a bearing on Paul Wolfowitz`s bid to become chairman of the World Bank. I have some questions for him. Does he want to reduce the Arabs to poverty? Is he hostile to the very existence of OPEC and of producer cooperatives in primary commodities? Does he favor the use of warfare by states to permit their corporations to take over public energy resources in the Global South? Are his economic policies going to be rooted in a desire to further the interests of the Likud and other rightwing parties in the Global South?

As Palast tells the story, the Neoconservatives (presumably Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith) and the Department of Defense were dedicated to privatizing the Iraqi petroleum industry as a key plank of their Iraq project. They hoped that Iraq`s privately-owned (presumably by American petroleum corporations) petroleum industry would secede from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and would pump large amounts of petroleum, refusing to stay within the bounds of the Iraq OPEC quota. By setting quotas for members, OPEC attempts to keep the price of petroleum from falling too far or from oscillating too wildly.

That there was a cult of privatization at the Pentagon has never been in doubt. Iraq has been a socialist country since at least 1968 (and had elements of socialism in the period of military rule 1958-1968). Most major industries were publicly owned. Moreover, the Iraqi population liked it that way. Opinion polls show that 80% of Iraqis think the purpose of a government is to take care of people.

Paul Bremer, the second US civil administrator of Iraq is a fanatical laissez-fairiste. The privatizers would set up private corporations to sell you creek water and oxygen if they could get away with it. In a BBC interview, Jay Garner alleged that the Department of Defense dissolved the Iraqi army and sent it home, causing all of us no end of trouble, because they were afraid that retaining a large Baath institution like that would form an obstacle to radical privatization. Bremer wanted to allow foreign companies to buy any firm in Iraq and to be able to expatriate profits immediately. (The abolition of currency regulations, advocated by Washington Consensus free marketeers, contributed to the meltdown of the East Asian economies in 1997; Malaysia escaped devastation by thumbing its nose at the privatizers and slapping on currency controls. It turns out that if there are no regulations about currency transfers, speculators take advantage of it; Surprise!)

Obviously, the real prize in privatization would be the petroleum industry. No other state-owned Iraqi industries are worth much, and will be difficult to sell to private owners because they are bloated bureaucracies and inefficient.

The prospect of the Iraqi petroleum going into foreign hands, however, impelled many Iraqis to begin sabotaging the pipelines, or to support the saboteurs. Palast reports,


Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan`s "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq`s oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces. "Insurgents used this, saying, `Look, you`re losing your country, you`re losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable,`" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco. "We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming."


Iraq should be able to produce 3 million barrels a day, but it has often only done a million or a million and a half because of sabotage, reducing the Iraqi government income from petroleum to only $10 billion or so a year, when it could have been $20 billion or more.

According to Palast, it was the Coalition Provisional Authority officials from a Big Oil background, like Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who told Bremer "No!"

The US petroleum companies haven`t been interested in owning Middle Eastern petroleum for decades. Most Middle Eastern oil producers nationalized their industries in the 1970s. The US companies moved into refining and distribution, which is plenty profitable. Trying to own the oil fields had long caused them a lot of trouble. The attempt of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddegh to nationalize Iranian oil in 1951-1953 had led to a US/UK boycott of Iranian petroleum and ultimately a CIA-backed coup that ended the last democratically elected government in Iran in 1953. Since that time, Middle Eastern peoples had become much more politically and socially mobilized, and popular demands for ownership of national resources became irresistible.

(Max Boot, who thinks Middle Easterners are just Filipino peasant villagers circa 1902--poor, illiterate, unconnected and politically naive--exemplifies the basic Neocon fallacy. The Neocons haven`t even caught up to the 1950s or read Karl Deutsch on the social mobilization of the Global South. People can`t be occupied so easily once they are urbanized, industrialized, literate, connected by modern communications, and politically aware. This is why Boot and Wolfowitz did not anticipate a long-term guerrilla war in Iraq, or how savvy and effective it would be. They really think they are Lord Curzon dealing with backward WOGs).

So the Neoconservative/ Department of Defense plan to privatize the petroleum industry was swimming against history, and proved impossible to implement because a) the Iraqis wouldn`t put up with it and b) even US Big Oil could see that it was a disaster waiting to happen.

The other thing wrong with the Wolfowitz/Perle/Feith plan to destroy OPEC via Iraq is that it cannot be done. If they thought it could be done, they are ignorant of the petroleum industry and also of basic economics. About 80 million barrels of petroleum are produced in the world each day (it fluctuates, so this figure is inexact). The Saudis can produce as much as 11 million of that (they are expanding capacity now to 12 or 13). The Saudis can, however, get along with only producing 7 million barrels a day (maybe even less at today`s prices). Most oil producers use a lot of their own petroleum. The US, Russia, China, etc., produce petroleum but then they consume a lot of it themselves. The Gulf producers, in contrast, have small populations and cannot absorb much petroleum use, so they are the ones who can export in large amounts.

The Saudis are now and for the foreseeable future the major swing producer. It takes them three days to gear up production from 7 million barrels a day to 11, or to ratchet things back down. They can put 5 million of the approximately 80 million on the market or take it off, virtually at the stroke of a pen. Between this ability and their influence in OPEC, the Saudis have some ability to influence (but by no means control) petroleum prices.

Iraq can only produce about 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day now if there is no sabotage. With the investment of billions and lots of security and rebuilding, they might get that up to 5 million a day within 5 years. It would take them 15 to 20 years to have a capacity similar to that of Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, OPEC countries will probably increase their capacity by 20 million barrels a day, completely offsetting any Iraq increases. Moreover, Iraq is a real country, with a population of 25 million and many industries, and Iraq will use a lot of its own petroleum. What it has available for export will be only a portion. Iraq will never be the kind of swing producer that Saudi Arabia is.

There are already a lot of countries that are not in OPEC and pay no attention to quotas. They haven`t destroyed OPEC, and one more (Iraq) wouldn`t, either. The cartel effect of OPEC is simply not that great, and oil prices have fluctuated dramatically every decade since it was formed. OPEC has mostly failed even to dramatically influence, much less control prices. In 2004-5, Bush administration policies in Iraq plus a rise in demand from China and India plus strikes and other problems in places like Nigeria and Venezuela put the petroleum price up to as much as $55 a barrel, whereas OPEC`s target for many years was $25 a barrel. The Neocons by their Iraq war have managed to double OPEC`s income, beyond even what OPEC wanted!

So Iraqi petroleum cannot destroy OPEC for the foreseeable future, even if whoever was in charge of it wanted too. In fact, there is every reason for any Iraqi government to want to keep petroleum publicly owned, and to cooperate with OPEC in attempting to smoothe out extremes in the price cycle.

Primary commodities suffer from big swings in prices. You see this in coffee and cotton, too. There are booms and then busts and then booms. If you are a producer, this rollercoaster ride is inconvenient and could bankrupt you some years. High prices bring in more money but also bring lots of new competitors who can only compete when the prices are high because of natural disadvantages. Really low prices are devastating. So coffee growers, petroleum producers, and other primary commodity producers often form cartels in an attempt, not so much to keep prices high, as to keep them from jumping all around. With the exception of the DeBeers diamond racket in South Africa, most cartels have only a minor effect on price cycles.

Now the Neocons are all becoming Greens and arguing for solar or other forms of power in order to cut down on US oil dependence. This is code for making sure the Arabs cannot use petroleum to influence the US in the Arab-Israeli dispute. I`m all for getting off the carbon-based treadmill. But petroleum has other uses than providing energy, especially petrochemicals, and Arab producers are going to be rich off such uses for decades or centuries.

The story Palast tells isone of crackpotism run wild, and it would be more than tragic if it is what dragged us into the Iraq quagmire.

posted by Juan @ [url3/18/2005 06:30:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/wolfowitzs-plot-to-destroy-opec-and_18.html[/url]
Thursday, March 17, 2005

Poll Shows Bush Popularity on Iraq Plummeting

A new ABC/Washington Post poll shows the number of Americans who approve of Bush`s handling of Iraq way down.

Gary Langer tells us:

* ` [Bush`s] approval specifically on Iraq was 75 percent as the main fighting ended [in 2003]; it`s 39 percent now, a career low. `

* 70% of Americans say that the level of US casualties in Iraq is "unacceptable."

* ` 53 percent, on balance, say the war was not worth fighting. `

* 41 percent say the Iraq war has made the US weaker in the world. Only 28 percent say it has made the US stronger. These numbers are a reversal from the year before.

* 2/3s of Americans oppose military action against Iran

posted by Juan @ [url3/17/2005 05:18:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/poll-shows-bush-popularity-on-iraq.html[/url]

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Friday, March 18, 2005
War News for Thursday and Friday, March 17 and 18, 2005
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Sunni cleric assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi police colonel assassinated in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi police general assassinated in Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis killed, six US soldiers wounded by car bomb in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqi soldiers killed, 11 wounded by car bomb attack on Baquba checkpoint.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqis working for US Army assassinated near Balad.

Coalition of the Crumbling. “Bulgaria intends to reduce the number of its troops in Iraq in July and bring home the last of the 460-member force by year`s end, Bulgarian Defense Minister Nikolai Svinarov said Thursday.”

Lieutenant AWOL, please call Planet Earth. “Asked whether the coalition was crumbling, Bush said, ‘No, quite to the contrary. I think the coalition has been buoyed by the courage of the Iraqi people’ in defying death threats to vote.”

Progress. “In southern Baghdad, the hazards of life have come to this: gangs of militant Islamists are warning barbers that it is haram - forbidden - to shave men`s beards or do Western-style haircuts. As many as 12 barbers have been killed, Iraqi officials say, including five in one day in late January. With little hope of police protection, most now refuse to offer the offending cuts, and have placed prominent signs in their front windows saying so.”

Rummy’s Army. “The US Army asked Congress to allow it to extend enlistment contracts signed by soldiers by two years as top defense officials warned that key recruitment targets for the year could be missed. The request came as House of Representatives put its stamp of approval on an 81.4-billion-dollar supplemental spending bill that contains new benefits for US soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the new money notwithstanding, Army Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Franklin Hagenbeck told a House subcommittee that yearly recruitment goals for the Army reserve and the National Guard were ‘at risk.’”

Anniversary. “Saturday, March 19, will mark two years since the official start of the war in Iraq. Two months after the war began, Jesse Givens became the first Fort Carson soldier killed there after his tank fell into a canal and he drowned. ‘I tell myself it`s nearly been two years. I should be over this now. I should be further than I am. I should be better,’ his 28-year-old widow said. ‘People say I look fine. I must fake it pretty well.’”

Commentary

Editorial: “Those stains on the index fingers of proud Iraqi voters have long faded. As Robert Worth of The Times discovered in interviews with average citizens, an inevitable disillusionment has set in. People reasonably want to know what comes next. More chilling, they seem to be prepared to blame competing ethnic groups for anything that goes wrong. Iraq`s newly elected leaders must organize a government that Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and smaller ethnic and religious groups feel has their best interests at heart. They must also accomplish some practical matters - more electrical power, cleaner water, better security - to give their constituents the confidence that things really can get better. The first challenge is up to the Iraqis, and so far, there are not many signs that any group is prepared to compromise for the common good. Americans must help with the second problem, and almost no one inside Iraq seems to feel the infant government can survive right now without the Western military. It is hard to imagine a quick exit that would not make things much worse. But at the same time, it`s clear that the presence of American troops is poisoning the situation. Under constant fire from Sunni insurgents, the soldiers are seldom free to provide the good-will services that many would undoubtedly like to do. Instead they stand behind barricades, terrified that the next vehicle will be driven by a suicide bomber. The inevitable consequence is what happened to the Italian journalist and her protectors whose car was riddled with bullets en route to the airport. Far more often, the people inside the cars are Iraqis.”

Analysis: “Wrong about geopolitics in general, Wolfowitz has been wrong about Iraq in particular. Unembarrassed by their ridiculous overestimation of Soviet strength, Wolfowitz and other veterans of the Committee for the Present Danger in the late 1990s took part in the Project for the New American Century. They proceeded to exaggerate the alleged threat to the U.S. from the bankrupt statelet left in Saddam Hussein`s hands after the Gulf War even more shamelessly than they had hyped the Soviet menace. Focusing on Saddam and regional threats to Israel, Wolfowitz and the other strategic geniuses of the PNAC circle never mentioned Osama bin Laden.”

Analysis: “There has been virtually no accountability on the war spending. Despite Congress requiring it, the administration has flatly refused to account for how our tax dollars have been spent in Iraq, or what the future costs will be. Given the failure to provide our troops with adequate equipment and the documented cases of waste and fraud perpetrated by contractors like Halliburton, it is the height of hypocrisy for members of Congress to say they support our troops and to fail to insist on accountability on why these resources have not been spent to protect our young men and women.”

Opinion: “Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the president`s newfound dedication to freedom is that it completely ignores the fact that his aggressive push to liberate Iraq has made us much less safe here at home. And this, more than anything else, should be the highest priority of any government. Yet our ports, railways and borders remain porous. Our first responders remain underfunded. But the White House continues to razzle-dazzle the Beltway with its command of the Undistributed Middle: The president invaded Iraq. There have been no terrorist attacks in America since 9/11. Therefore, the invasion of Iraq has made us safer. And lighted the torch of freedom throughout the Arab world. In any freshman course in logic, this reasoning would collapse, shot full of holes. In Washington, it`s become the conventional wisdom.”

Opinion: “In the prevailing shallowness of America, the shrewd can inherit the earth. They can lead an anxious but trusting nation into a war of choice by sounding as if they had no other option. They can push through tax breaks that cost trillions and plump up record deficits by sounding as if fiscal restraint would be folly. They can promote private accounts as saving supplements to Social Security by sounding as if personal investment is preferable to government checks, reliability notwithstanding.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Michigan Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Louisiana Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Utah soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Missouri contractor wounded in Iraq.
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Latest Fatality: Mar 16, 2005
Military Fatalities: Total: 1696 , US: 1520 , Mar.05: 25

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

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The New PC

by RUSSELL JACOBY
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050404&s=jacoby

[from the April 4, 2005 issue]

The Yale student did not like what he heard. Sociologists derided religion and economists damned corporations. One professor pre-emptively rejected the suggestion that "workers on public relief be denied the franchise." "I propose, simply, to expose," wrote the young author in a booklong denunciation, one of "the most extraordinary incongruities of our time. Under the "protective label `academic freedom,`" the institution that derives its "moral and financial support from Christian individualists then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists."

For William F. Buckley Jr., author of the 1951 polemic God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom" and a founder of modern American conservatism, the solution to this scandal was straightforward: Fire the wanton professors. No freedom would be abridged. The socialist professor could "seek employment at a college that was interested in propagating socialism." None around? No problem. The market has spoken. The good professor can retool or move on.

Buckley`s book can be situated as a salvo in the McCarthyite attack on the universities. Indeed, even as a Yale student, Buckley maintained cordial relationships with New Haven FBI agents, and at the time of the book`s publication he worked for the CIA. Buckley was neither the first nor the last to charge that teachers were misleading or corrupting students. At the birth of Western culture, a teacher called Socrates was executed for filling "young people`s heads with the wrong ideas." In the twentieth century, clamor about subversive American professors has come in waves, cresting around World War I, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and today. The earlier assaults can be partially explained by the political situation. Authorities descended upon professors who questioned America`s entry into World War I, sympathized with the new Russian Revolution or inclined toward communism during the cold war.

Today the situation is different. The fear during the cold war, however trumped up, that professors served America`s enemies could claim a patina of plausibility insofar as some teachers identified themselves as communists or socialists. With communism dead, leftism moribund and liberalism wounded, the fear of international subversion no longer threatens. Even the most rabid critics do not accuse professors of being on the payroll of Al Qaeda or other Islamist extremists. Moreover, conservatives command the presidency, Congress, the courts, major news outlets and the majority of corporations; they appear to have the country comfortably in their pocket. What fuels their rage, then? What fuels the persistent charges that professors are misleading the young?

A few factors might be adduced, but none are completely convincing. One is the age-old anti-intellectualism of conservatives. Conservatives distrust unregulated intellectuals. Forty years ago McCarthyism spurred Richard Hofstadter to write his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In addition, a basic insecurity plagues conservatives today, a fear that their reign will be short or a gnawing doubt about their legitimacy. Dissenting voices cannot be tolerated, because they imply that a conservative future may not last forever. One Noam Chomsky is one too many. Angst besets the triumphant conservatives. Those who purge Darwin from America`s schools must yell in order to drown out their own misgivings, the inchoate realization that they are barking at the moon.

Today`s accusations against subversive professors differ from those of the past in several respects. In a sign of the times, the test for disloyalty has shifted far toward the center. Once an unreliable professor meant an anarchist or communist; now it includes Democrats. Soon it will be anyone to the left of Attila the Hun. Second, the charges do not (so far) come from government committees investigating un-American activities but from conservative commentators and their student minions. A series of groups such as Campus Watch, Academic Bias and Students for Academic Freedom enlist students to monitor and publicize professorial conduct. Third, the new charges are advanced not against but in the name of academic freedom or a variant of it; and, in the final twist, the new conservative critics seem driven by an ethos that they have adopted from liberalism: affirmative action and a sense of victimhood, which they officially detest.

Conservatives complain relentlessly that they do not get a fair shake in the university, and they want parity--that is, more conservatives on faculties. Conservatives are lonely on American campuses as well as beleaguered and misunderstood. News that tenured poets vote Democratic or that Kerry received far more money from professors than Bush pains them. They want America`s faculties to reflect America`s political composition. Of course, they do not address such imbalances in the police force, Pentagon, FBI, CIA and other government outfits where the stakes seem far higher and where, presumably, followers of Michael Moore are in short supply. If life were a big game of Monopoly, one might suggest a trade to these conservatives: You give us one Pentagon, one Department of State, Justice and Education, plus throw in the Supreme Court, and we will give you every damned English department you want.

Conservatives claim that studies show an outrageous number of liberals on university faculties and increasing political indoctrination or harassment of conservative students. In fact, only a very few studies have been made, and each is transparently limited or flawed. The most publicized investigations amateurishly correlate faculty departmental directories with local voter registration lists to show a heavy preponderance of Democrats. What this demonstrates about campus life and politics is unclear. Yet these findings are endlessly cited and cross-referenced as if by now they confirm a tiresome truth: leftist domination of the universities. A column by George Will affects a world-weariness in commenting on a recent report. "The great secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: `Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find.`"

The most careful study is "How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities?" Conducted by California economist Daniel Klein and Swedish social scientist Charlotta Stern, it has been trumpeted by many conservatives as a corrective to the hit-and-miss efforts of previous inquiries by going directly to the source. The researchers sent out almost 5,500 questionnaires to professors in six disciplines in order to tabulate their political orientation. A whopping 70 percent of the recipients did what any normal person would do when receiving an unsolicited fourteen-page survey over the signature of an assistant dean at a small California business school: They tossed it. With just 17 percent of their initial pool remaining after the researchers made additional exclusions, some unastounding findings emerged. Thirty times as many anthropologists voted Democratic as voted Republican; for sociologists the ratio was almost the same. For economists, however, it sank to three to one. On average these professors voted Democratic over Republican fifteen to one.

What does it show that fifty-four philosophy professors admitted to voting Democratic regularly and only four to voting Republican? Does a Democratic vote reveal a dangerous philosophical or campus leftism? Are Democrats more likely to deceive students? Proselytize them? Harass them? Steal library books? Must they be neutralized by Republican professors, who are free of these vices? This study opens by quoting the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks on the loneliness of campus conservatives and closes by bemoaning the "one-party system" of faculties. Nonleftist voices are "muffled and fearful," the researchers say. They do not, however, present a scintilla of information to confirm this. It is not a minor point. No matter how well tuned, studies of professorial voting habits reveal nothing of campus policies or practices.

The notion that faculties should politically mirror the US population derives from an affirmative action argument about the underrepresentation of African-Americans, Latinos or women in certain areas. Conservatives now add political orientation, based on voting behavior, to the mix. "In the U.S. population in general, Left and Right are roughly equal (1 to 1)," Klein and Stern lecture us, but in social science and humanities faculties "clearly the non-Left points of view have been marginalized." This is "clearly" not true, or at least it is not obvious what constitutes a "non-Left" point of view in art history or linguistics. In any event, why stop with left and right? Why not add religion to the underrepresentation violation? Perhaps Klein, the lead researcher, should explore Jewish and Christian affiliation among professors. A survey would probably show that Jews, 1.3 percent of the population, are seriously overrepresented in economics and sociology (as well as other fields). Isn`t it likely that Jews marginalize Christianity in their classes? Shouldn`t this be corrected? Shouldn`t 76 percent of American faculty be Christian?

The Klein study and others like it focus on the humanities and social sciences. Conservatives seem little interested in exploring the political orientation of engineering professors or biogeneticists. The more important the field, in terms of money, resources and political clout, the less conservatives seem exercised by it. At many universities the medical and science buildings, to say nothing of the business faculties or the sports complexes, tower over the humanities. I teach at UCLA. The history professors are housed in cramped quarters of a decaying Modernist structure. Our classiest facility is a conference room that could pass as generic space in any downtown motel. The English professors inhabit what appears to be an aging elementary school outfitted with minuscule offices. A hop away is a different world. The UCLA Anderson School of Management boasts its own spanking-new buildings, plush seminar rooms, spacious lecture halls with luxurious seats, an "executive dining room" and--gold in California--reserved parking facilities. Conservatives seem unconcerned about the political orientation of the business professors. Shouldn`t half be Democrats and at least a few be Trotskyists?

Another recent study heralded as proving leftist campus domination was sponsored by the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni; it sought to document not the political orientation of professors but, more decisively, the political intimidation of students by faculty. Claiming an "error rate of plus or minus four," the sponsors assert that their study demonstrates widespread indoctrination, that almost 50 percent of students report that professors "use the classroom to present their personal political views." According to the sponsor, "The ACTA survey clearly shows that faculty are injecting politics into the classroom in ways that students believe infringe upon their freedom to learn."

Closer examination of the study reveals dubious methodology. Most questions were asked in a way that nearly dictated one answer. Students were asked if they "somewhat agree" that "some" professors did this or that. A key statement ran: "On my campus, some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views." And the possible responses ran from "Strongly agree" and "Somewhat agree" to "Somewhat disagree" and "Strongly disagree." Of the 658 students polled, 10 percent answered "Strongly agree" and 36 percent "Somewhat agree," which yields the almost 50 percent figure that appeared in headlines claiming half of American students are subject to political indoctrination.

Yet the statement is too imprecise to negate. Asked whether "some" professors on campus--somewhere or sometime--interject extraneous politics, most students (36 percent) respond that they "Somewhat agree." That is the intelligent and safe answer: "somewhat" agreeing that "some" professors misuse politics. To partially or even completely negate the statement would imply that no professors ever mishandled politics. Yet a vague assent to a vague assertion only yields twice as much vagueness. The statement does not so much inquire whether the student him- or herself directly experienced professors misusing politics, which might be more revealing. Yet these murky findings are heralded as proof of campus totalitarianism.

These scattered studies are only part of the story. A series of articles, books and organizations have taken up the cause of leftist campus domination. An outfit called Students for Academic Freedom, with the credo "You can`t get a good education if they`re only telling you half the story," is sponsored by the conservative activist David Horowitz and boasts 150 campus chapters. It monitors slights, insults and occasionally more serious infractions that students suffer or believe they suffer. The organization provides an online "complaint" form, where disgruntled students check a category such as "Mocked national political or religious figures" (mocking local figures is presumably acceptable) or "Required readings or texts covering only one side of issues" and then provide details.

At the organization`s website the interested visitor can keep abreast of the latest outrages as well as troll through hundreds of complaints in the Academic Freedom Complaint Center. Most listings concern professors` comments that supposedly malign patriotic or family values; for instance, under "Introduced Controversial Material" a student complained that in a lecture on Reconstruction the professor noted how much he disliked Bush and the Iraq War. A very few complaints raise more serious issues, and some of these are pursued by other Horowitz publications or are seized on by conservative columnists and sometimes by the national news services. A Kuwaiti student who defends the Iraq War recounts that he fell afoul of a leftist professor in a government class, who directed him to seek psychological counseling. "Apparently, if you are an Arab Muslim who loves America you must be deranged." To his credit, Horowitz`s online journal also ran a story from the same college about a student who was penalized after he defended abortion in an ethics class conducted by a strident prolifer [for background on Horowitz, see Scott Sherman, "David Horowitz`s Long March," July 3, 2000].

Virtually all "cases" reported to the Academic Freedom Abuse Center deal with leftist political comments or leftist assigned readings. To use the idiom of right-wing commentators, we see here the emergence of crybaby conservatives, who demand a judicial remedy, guaranteed safety and representation. Convinced that conservatives are mistreated on American campuses, Horowitz has championed a solution, a bill detailing "academic freedom" of students; the proposed law has already been introduced in several state legislatures. Until recently, if the notion of academic freedom for students had any currency, it referred to their right to profess and publish ideas on and off campus.

Horowitz takes the traditional academic freedom that insulated professors from political interference and extends it to students. As a former leftist, Horowitz has the gift of borrowing from the enemy. His "academic bill of rights" talks the language of diversity; it insists that students need to hear all sides and it refashions a "political correctness" for conservatives, who, it turns out, are at least as prickly as any other group when it comes to perceived slights. After years of decrying the "political correctness police," thin-skinned conservatives have joined in; they want their own ideological wardens to enforce intellectual conformity.

While some propositions of the academic bill of rights are unimpeachable (for example, students should not be graded "on the basis of their political or religious beliefs"), academic freedom extended to students easily turns it into the end of freedom for teachers. In a rights society students have the right to hear all sides of all subjects all the time. "Curricula and reading lists," says principle number four of Horowitz`s academic bill of rights, "should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge" and provide "students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate."

"Where appropriate" is the kicker, but the consequences for teachers are clear enough from perusing the "abuses" that Students for Academic Freedom lists or that Horowitz plays up in his columns. For instance, Horowitz lambastes a course called Modern Industrial Societies, which uses as its sole text a 500-page leftist anthology, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. This is a benign book published by a mainstream press, yet under the academic bill of rights the professor could be hauled before authorities to explain such a flagrant violation. If not fired, he or she could be commanded to assign a 500-page anthology published by the Free Enterprise Institute. Another "abuse" occurred in an introductory class, Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, where military approaches were derided. A student complained that "the only studying of conflict resolution that we did was to enforce the idea that non-violent means were the only legitimate sources of self-defense." This was "indoctrination," not education. Presumably the professor of "peace studies" should be ordered to give equal time to "war studies." By this principle, should the United States Army War College be required to teach pacifism?

In the name of intellectual diversity and students` rights, many courses could be challenged. A course on Freud would have to include anti-Freudians; a course on religion, atheists; a course on mysticism, the rationalists. The academic bill of rights seeks to impose some limits by restricting diversity to "significant scholarly viewpoints." Yet this is a porous shield. Once the right to decide the content of courses is extended to students, the Holocaust deniers, creationists and conspiracy addicts will come knocking at the door--and indeed they already have.

The bill of rights for students and the allied conservative watchdog groups that monitor lectures and book assignments represent the reinvention of the old un-American activities committees in the age of diversity and rights. The witch hunt has become democratized. Students for Academic Freedom counsels its members that when they come across an "abuse" like "controversial material" in a course, they should "write down the date, class and name of the professor," "accumulate a list of incidents or quotes," obtain witnesses and lodge a complaint. Rights are supposed to preserve freedoms, but here the opposite would occur. Professors would become more claustrophobic and cautious. They would offer fewer "controversial" ideas. Assignments would become blander.

More leftists undoubtedly inhabit institutions of higher education than they do the FBI or the Pentagon or local police and fire departments, about which conservatives seem little concerned, but who or what says every corner of society should reflect the composition of the nation at large? Nothing has shown that higher education discriminates against conservatives, who probably apply in smaller numbers than liberals. Conservatives who pursue higher degrees may prefer to slog away as junior partners in law offices rather than as assistant professors in English departments. Does an "overrepresentation" of Democratic anthropologists mean Republican anthropologists have been shunted aside? Does an "overrepresentation" of Jewish lawyers and doctors mean non-Jews have been excluded?

Higher education in America is a vast enterprise boasting roughly a million professors. A certain portion of these teachers are incompetents and frauds; some are rabid patriots and fundamentalists--and some are ham-fisted leftists. All should be upbraided if they violate scholarly or teaching norms. At the same time, a certain portion of the 15 million students they teach are fanatics and crusaders. The effort, in the name of rights, to shift decisions about lectures and assignments from professors to students marks a backward step: the emergence of the thought police on skateboards. At its best, education is inherently controversial and tendentious. While this truth can serve as an excuse for gross violations, the remedy for unbalanced speech is not less speech but more. If college students can vote and go to war, they can also protest or drop courses without enlisting the new commissars of intellectual diversity.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chait18…
JONATHAN CHAIT
Greenspan, a Fiscal Policy Hack
Jonathan Chait
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chait18…

March 18, 2005

For the last four years, Alan Greenspan has cast himself as a champion of fiscal responsibility while lending crucial support to policies that undermine it.

Finally this week, while testifying before the Senate, he was asked about his ludicrously bad advice in 2001 that played no small part in our current budgetary morass. He explained, "It turns out we were all wrong."

Uh, "we"? Not quite.

Certainly Greenspan was wrong when he predicted huge, endless surpluses four years ago. Moderates and liberals, on the other hand, consistently warned that the projected surpluses were unlikely to materialize. We pointed out that the inflated stock market was probably making tax revenues appear too high, that President Bush`s budget assumed that spending would drop far lower than was realistic, that it left no room for emergencies such as war, and that it deliberately underestimated the cost of the Bush tax cut.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a hugely influential (among liberals, anyway) research group, warned in 2001 that the cost of Bush`s tax cut "exceeds the surplus that is likely to be available under realistic assumptions." The New Republic published a cover story by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman arguing that "the fiscal predictions that enable Bush to pay for his tax cut and contingency fund are not mere errors but deliberate efforts to deceive the public." Democrats repeated this theme constantly. "We have said all along these [budget forecasts] are nothing more than projections that could change almost immediately," insisted Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

Even more fantastic than the budget projections Greenspan endorsed was the logic he used to justify permanent tax cuts. Greenspan argued that if Congress did not cut taxes, it would either spend the surplus (which he thought would be bad) or use it to pay down the national debt. If it paid down the debt, eventually all the Treasury bills held by the public would disappear. The government would then either have to enact a huge tax cut, causing the economy to grow so fast that inflation would accelerate, or else start buying up stocks, which would amount to socialism. So we had to cut taxes right away in order to prevent the government from one day buying up private industry. This scenario sounds convoluted literally to the point of insanity, but I swear that`s what he said.

Was Greenspan crazy enough to believe that gibberish? Of course not. The truth is that he`s a libertarian at heart who wants to shrink the size of government. He was concocting a macroeconomic rationale to justify policies he found ideologically appealing.

Greenspan`s allies offer three unconvincing defenses to the charge of hackery. First, they defend his nonpartisanship by pointing out that he endorsed Bill Clinton`s 1993 deficit reduction package. That happened, though, when Democrats controlled the White House. Slashing taxes was off the table, so Greenspan did the next best thing by trying to keep a lid on spending. Later, when Republicans took control of the government, he suddenly took less interest in fiscal responsibility.

Second, they point out that he also advocated a "trigger" in 2001 that would cancel out tax cuts if the surplus disappeared. But that recommendation would have made a difference only if Greenspan had said it was a precondition for tax cuts, which he didn`t. And when the surplus did disappear, far from advocating a repeal of long-term tax cuts, Greenspan gave the green light to even more.

Finally, Greenspan apologists say he merely answers the questions he`s asked, so why is it his fault if members of Congress seek his opinion? The answer is, they shouldn`t ask about fiscal policy, and they certainly shouldn`t treat his opinions as received wisdom. Greenspan`s views on monetary policy (setting interest rates) ought to count for a lot. His views on fiscal policy (taxes and spending) should count no more than those of a random senator. The trouble is, if a senator challenges Greenspan, he`s likely to get slapped down. When Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tried to do it, NBC`s Tim Russert thundered, "Should the chairman of the Federal Reserve be described as a political hack?" If Greenspan wants to act like a political hack, he doesn`t deserve lofty treatment.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Roads out of Baghdad become no-go zones
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2326&e=19&u=…
Thu Mar 17, 3:00 AM ET

The first meeting of Iraq`s National Assembly was rattled by a bombing, a reminder that the city remains under seige.

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD - Mohammed Ghazi Umron has a front-row seat for the perils of Iraq (news - web sites)`s roads: the cab of his truck. And while this Shiite in his 30s enthusiastically voted in Iraq`s January election, from where he sits the country is as dangerous as ever.


The road north through Baquba? "Pretty dangerous,`` he says. Due south through Mahmudiyah? "It`s bad, but I haven`t heard of any drivers being killed there in a few weeks." How about west through Abu Ghraib and on to Fallujah? "Very, very dangerous. We try not to go past Abu Ghraib."

The volley of mortar fire that dropped a few hundred yards short of where the opening session of Iraq`s new parliament was held Wednesday rattled the ceremonial gathering and was a reminder that the city remains under siege.

Nearly two years since President Bush (news - web sites) declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, Baghdad is still one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It is ringed in peril. Travel in any direction a few miles outside city limits and the risks intensify. The ferocity and growth of these no-go zones underscores the need for additional Iraqi security forces in and around Baghdad as the US begins to reduce its manpower here.

Because of kidnappings and murders on the road immediately south of Baghdad, that area has been dubbed the "triangle of death" by journalists. The areas immediately north and west of the city that have long been called the Sunni triangle has also become shorthand for a no-go zone.

While the term "triangle" makes it seem as if the danger zone is a well defined area with borders, the frontier of danger around the city flexes and shifts almost daily, sometimes surging into the middle of Baghdad and at other times withdrawing to what feels like a safe distance.

These often lawless zones provide staging points for ongoing attacks inside the city. Though the mortars that were fired Wednesday in Baghdad fell harmlessly as legislators were sworn in, the attack on parliament came even as most of Baghdad`s main bridges across the Tigris were shut.

"We`ve arrested some bandits, some really bad people, but it`s hard to say that we`re making a lot of progress,`` says Col. Faisal Ali al-Doseky, head of an anti- kidnapping task force for the western half of Baghdad. "The police are unskilled, and we have a lot of interference from the Americans. When your house is in ruins, it takes time to build a new one."

While most reporting focuses on spectacular attacks like the Wednesday suicide bombing that killed four Iraqi soldiers in Baquba, 20 miles north of Baghdad, or the one that killed 118 in Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, at the end of February, dozens of Iraqis quietly disappear on the roads around Baghdad every month, and this contributes as much as anything to the average Baghdadis sense of danger.

Kidnap for ransom is big business in Iraq and many kidnappers end up killing their victims whether ransom is paid or not. "I fear for my children the moment they walk out the door,`` says Ghassan Abdul Hussein, a mechanic. "I can`t go to visit the shrine cities, not even to Khadimiya in Baghdad. We all know what happens on those roads."

Colonel Doseky says his task force has dealt with 38 kidnappings since it was created at the end of last November but says "many, many kidnappings aren`t reported to us. People are afraid for their family members."

One of those kidnappings was three months ago on the road to the Shiite city of Kerbala, 45 miles south of Baghdad. A cab with five passengers and a driver was stopped at an insurgent roadblock. After being taken to a nearby home and questioned about their religious beliefs, the one Sunni Arab in the car was freed. The other four, all Shiites, haven`t been heard from since.

"This is what it`s like for us now - the good people are in danger and the bad people do whatever they want,`` says the best friend of one of the kidnapped men, having trouble holding back tears. "By now, the news probably isn`t good. But if there`s a small chance he`s alive, getting the Americans or the Iraqi government involved will put him in even greater danger."

Mr. Umron, the truck driver, owns seven trucks and knows the dangers of the road from both sides. In a convoy with four other trucks two months ago outside the southern city of Basra, he used the AK-47 he keeps in his cab to fight off hijackers.

Three months ago he was hauling a load for the US military when he was stopped at a checkpoint by gunmen in civilian cloths. "They were definitely terrorists,`` he says. As he wondered if he was going to live, a US military convoy appeared in the distance and the men melted away.

While US soldiers are often under fire for mistaken shootings like the one last week that killed an Italian intelligence agent while he was ferrying journalist Giuliana Sgrena out of the country, many Iraqi police and citizens complain that US forces aren`t tough enough.

"The Americans are part of the problem - they should either take over responsibility for everything, or leave,`` says Doseky. "We arrest criminals - the Americans take them from us and then let them go in three days. But we know who the bad people are. They should leave it to us."

"Sometimes I feel like the Americans must be helping the insurgents - they`re not tough enough,`` says Jassim Mohammed, a carpenter in Baghdad. "I`m glad they got rid of Saddam [Hussein], but we should bring back a lot of his security agents. They have a lot of experience and know how to deal with criminals. We were safer then. "



Copyright © 2005 The Christian Science Monitor

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PART 5: Militarism and
the war on drugs
By Henry C K Liu

PART 1: The failed-state cancer
PART 2: The privatization wave
PART 3: The business of private security
PART 4: Militarism and mercenaries
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GC18Aa01.html

The 1878 Posse Comitatus law that barred US federal troops from engaging in arrests, searches and seizures within US borders did not cover the use of the National Guard to quell "civil disorders", but it virtually eliminated the military`s role in normal police work. The logic is that while the National Guard is the nation`s militia, composed of citizen soldiers, each state unit is under the separate command of its governor for the purpose of maintaining domestic order within each state, without infringing on the principles of local community control of police power. Laws enacted since the early 1980s have weakened Posse Comitatus restrictions, enabling military and police bodies to collaborate in law enforcement. The shift toward militarism began with seemingly innocuous loans of military equipment to civilian agencies for drug control. US ground troops then began conducting training exercises along the border for the interdiction of drug traffic. The introduction of the military into police work invariably escalates the degree of violence in the maintenance of order.

In 1989, at the urging of the administration of president George H W Bush, the military consolidated its role in law enforcement by creating Joint Task Force-6 (JTF-6), based at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The task force`s initial mission was to coordinate military support for anti-drug efforts along the Mexican border.

JTF-6 matches police requests with military units; police agencies get free assistance while the military gets extra funds and real-life, off-base training. For the Border Patrol, JTF-6 provides a variety of military aid, including equipment, construction assistance, intelligence support, vehicles and aerial surveillance. The task force also coordinates training in small-unit tactics, raid planning and execution, interrogation, pyrotechnics, target selection, booby-trap techniques, rappelling and more.

The military`s anti-drug missions along the Mexican border always have been difficult to distinguish from immigration control. The administration of president Bill Clinton erased the line completely for 90 days in 1996, ordering the military to participate in "enhanced enforcement" of immigration laws in Arizona and California. In 1995, the military broadened JTF-6`s geographic focus to the entire continental United States. Since then, more than half of JTF-6 missions have been devoted to police forces outside the southwestern US. By 1998, JTF-6 had coordinated more than 72,000 troops on some 3,300 missions in 30 states.

An example of militarized law enforcement within US borders was the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that ended with 86 deaths on April 19, 1993. Specious drug and illegal-firearm allegations against the Branch Davidians became the pretext for military units aiding the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) in their raid to eliminate a religious cult. The Branch Davidians had their origins in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which in turn had its origin in the "Millerite" movement, a group who followed the teachings of Baptist William Miller, who in 1833 concluded that Bible prophecy told the date for the end of the world. JTF-6 arranged for military equipment and for Army Special Forces troops to assist with deadly raid preparations. The task force also arranged for armored vehicles retrofitted for gas warfare and tank-like army vehicles used in the assault. Some aspects of the military role, including the FBI`s use of military incendiary devices, flammable CS gas grenades that killed 86 people, including 17 children, were concealed from the public until years later. After the disclosure, attorney general Janet Reno appointed former senator John Danforth, a Republican from Missouri, to investigate the military involvement. Danforth`s report concluded that the involvement was technically legal, without addressing whether it ought to be legal.

On May 20, 1997, camouflaged on a surveillance mission for the Border Patrol, a team of four marines hiding in bushes near the village of Redford, Texas, shot and killed 18-year-old Mexican-American Esequiel Hernandez, who was herding his family`s goats more than 180 meters away. Hernandez` death came only a year after the US "see no evil" policy on Nicaraguan Contra drug dealers had been exposed. The incident was the first time military troops engaged in drug control had killed a civilian on US territory. The case led to the first attempted civilian prosecution of military soldiers on a drug mission, but defense lawyers successfully argued that the troops had performed appropriately "in defense of national interests". The incident sparked no congressional hearings over the military`s role in law enforcement. On the contrary, just three months after the shooting, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to send 10,000 federal troops to the border, but the Senate did not take up the measure.

The military, for its part, suspended the use of armed ground troops along the border while reviewing their role in the drug war. In January 1999, the Pentagon announced that such troop deployment would require explicit authorization by the secretary or deputy secretary of defense. The change did not affect other JTF-6 anti-drug support: aerial surveillance, training, equipment loans, construction and so on. The defense secretary can reintroduce ground troops at any time, and the Pentagon is not required to report JTF-6 missions, not even to Congress, even though they occur on US soil and even though their stated purpose is to enforce domestic laws.

The policy change did not affect the National Guard, which could fill any ground-troop void. In Arizona, where illegal crossings have become endemic, property-owning vigilantes rounded up thousands of illegal immigrants and demanded that Governor Jane Hull send the Guard to aid the Border Patrol, but she refused.

If border tensions continue to increase, and anti-illegal-immigration sentiments turn ugly, fanned by the likes of CNN journalist Lou Dobbs, frequent military deployment to restore "order" can be anticipated. Sandia National Laboratories, an Energy Department nuclear-weapons facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that works closely with the US military, assessed border "security" for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in 1993, depicting all unauthorized crossers as "adversaries". A 1997 military intelligence mission for the Border Patrol designed a "threat assessment" for undocumented immigrants. At a higher level, the Pentagon`s Center for the Study of Low Intensity Conflict helped design the Border Patrol`s "Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond". The plan is almost entirely devoted to immigration enforcement, under cover of the drug war. It designed the blockades to close off preferred crossing points. The model was Operation Hold the Line, set up in El Paso, Texas, in 1993. Three other blockades were set up, with "Gatekeeper" being the largest. United Nations human rights secretary Mary Robinson and Amnesty International USA both condemned "Gatekeeper" for human-rights abuse, saying it "maximizes the physical risks, thereby ensuring that hundreds of migrants would die".

Under the strategic plan, the number of armed Border Patrol officers has doubled, making the agency larger than even the FBI. The military has built nine walls and dozens of fences, and provided an array of equipment, from trucks and helicopters to searchlights and heat sensors. Since 1994, the INS budget has tripled to US$4.3 billion, and the United States spends $6 billion annually on enforcement along its southern border. The show of force has been deadly. A University of Houston study estimated that 1,600 migrants died while trying to evade the border blockades from 1993-97. The American Friends Service Committee says the blockades have led to more than 1,300 deaths since 1995. Most of the victims drowned in the Rio Grande, the river that separates Mexico from Texas. Southeastern California and southern Arizona, meanwhile, have seen sharp increases in deaths as immigrants try to traverse that harsh land. The militarization also seems to encourage police mistreatment of immigrants. Complaints of misconduct by Border Patrol agents doubled between 1995 and 1998; the accusations include entrapment, illegal searches, brutality, sexual assault and excessive firearms use. Militarization has created a warlike atmosphere in which hate groups and vigilantes feel free to attack all immigrants, legal and illegal.

The "war on terrorism" has also become a license for domestic anti-immigrant hysteria. As a result, numerous legislative proposals have been made and laws passed targeting undocumented immigrants with racial and ethnic profiling. Former governor Pete Wilson of California proposed denying citizenship to US-born children of undocumented parents. California has recently passed legislation that denies driver`s licenses and identity cards to undocumented immigrants. In California, a state with little public transportation, to be denied a driver`s license is to be denied a livelihood. New York state is currently embroiled in the issue. Meanwhile, large sectors of the US economy survive through the open exploitation of illegal-immigrant laborers, who are left with no legal protection. The US immigration policy and operational abuse contribute significantly to the status of the US as a failed state.

For the most part, border-control operations remained a civilian law-enforcement operation until Operation Wetback in the 1950s. This military-style operation by the Border Patrol and other elements of the INS was led by an ex-general who participated in John Joseph Pershing`s expeditionary force in World War I. It was the most massive roundup and deportation of undocumented Mexican immigrants in US history. This was not the last time ex-generals would be involved with the INS. President Jimmy Carter, in response to concerns about undocumented immigration and drug trafficking, appointed another ex-general to head the INS in efforts to strengthen the Border Patrol. Under the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush, this "concern" grew to be called the "war on drugs", or what many would call the "war on immigrants". In 1981 the US Congress amended the Posse Comitatus Act , loosening the military`s restriction on involvement with domestic law enforcement. In 1986 Reagan declared the narcotics trade a "national security" threat and shortly thereafter launched Operation Alliance, a multi-agency law-enforcement initiative targeting the border area.

Bordering on racism
In 1993, Canada, Mexico and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which became effective in January 1994, bringing the three countries together to create the world`s largest free-trade area. The purpose of NAFTA is to reduce trade barriers and promote cross-border investment in the region and thus increase economic and job development throughout North America that may affect immigration by changing the regional economy.

NAFTA itself discussed the temporary entry of the three signatory parties in Chapter 16. The provisions for temporary entry were modeled after those under the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement (USCFTA). However, the US immigration advantages extended to Canadians under USCFTA are not available to Mexican citizens under NAFTA for unspoken racial, ethnic and cultural reasons.

The greatest controversy over NAFTA`s immigration provisions is the 5,500 limit on the number of Mexican professionals who can be admitted to the US in one year, while there is no number limit on Canadians. NAFTA also states that admission could be refused to a person whose entry might affect adversely the settlement of a labor dispute or the employment of a person involved in such a dispute.

NAFTA proponents expected Mexican migration, especially undocumented immigrants, to decrease as soon as the agreement was signed. Former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari explained the relationship between NAFTA and migration in this way: "Today, Mexicans have to migrate to where jobs are being created, the northern part of our country. With NAFTA, employment opportunities will move toward where people live, reducing drastically migration, within the country and outside the country" (San Diego Tribune, November 14, 1993). However, NAFTA did not reduce, let alone eliminate, illegal immigration to the US from Mexico.

NAFTA displaced about 1.4 million rural Mexican workers, largely due to changes in Mexican farm policies and freer trade in agriculture products. With jobs not being created for these displaced farmers in the areas where they live, they are forced to emigrate to where the jobs are, mainly across the border to the US. One study estimated that about 600,000 NAFTA-caused illegal migrants to the US would be added to the "normal" flow of legal and illegal Mexican worker arrivals. The driving factor behind NAFTA-increased illegal immigration to the US is free trade in corn. Between 30% and 50% of all days-worked in rural Mexico are devoted to the production of corn and beans. US farmers can produce both crops cheaper than Mexican farmers; the US corn price of $95 per ton early in 1994 was less than half of the Mexican price of $205 per ton. Liberalizing trade in corn over the 15-year NAFTA phase-in is expected to shift North America`s corn production northward, since Iowa alone produces twice as much corn as Mexico at low US prices.

Some sectors of the US economy have great demands for cheap, Mexican immigrant labor, legal and illegal. Illegal labor is made even cheaper to US employers by the fact that these employees receive no benefits and necessitate no payroll-tax contributions from employers. Decades ago, the US did little to discourage the entry of illegal workers from rural Mexico. US employers were not punished by law for employing illegal low-wage Mexican workers. Legalization in 1987-88 permitted Mexican workers to become significant components of the labor force in food processing, construction, service and manufacturing throughout the US. Welfare reform and continued immigration continued to add unskilled workers to the US labor supply in the 1990s. On the other hand, the US unemployment rate dropped to its lowest level in 1997 and there were reports of labor shortages, especially in low-wage labor markets in areas with unemployment rates of less than 2%. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, warned Congress that a labor shortage would drive up wages and inflation rates unless lawmakers relaxed immigration restrictions. With Mexican-born workers spreading throughout the US in a period of rapid job growth and low unemployment, networks bridging the border were strengthened, increasing the availability to meet the rising demand for immigrant workers and making Mexican immigrant workers a permanent enough feature of many US industries and areas to temporarily delay the inevitable outsourcing of jobs to low-wage locations.

Another factor in NAFTA-increased illegal immigration is massive unemployment. Recurring Mexican financial crises, peso devaluation, and International Monetary Fund (IMF) "conditionalities" imposed on Mexican fiscal policies as well as neo-liberal prescriptions such as privatization of government-owned industries all resulted in mass layoffs. The economic restructuring of rural Mexico made small-scale farming unprofitable. In some areas of west-central Mexico, illegal migration to the US has become a way of life. Another factor that affected Mexican immigrants is the diverse networks of friends and relatives, employers, labor smugglers and moneylenders who can tell potential migrants about conditions in the US and provide them with the means to take advantage of illicit opportunities abroad.

Most industrialized nations realize they should prevent the depopulation of rural areas. The European Union and the United States pay farmers directly to stay on the farms - though gross domestic products (GDPs) would rise faster if they left the land. The 2002 Farm Bill pays US farmers a record $190 billion over 10 years, with big farmers getting the biggest checks. Mexico is too poor and has too many farmers to subsidize at European or US farm rates. US farmers, 2.7% of the workforce, receive an average per capita subsidy of $20,000 annually. EU farmers, 4.8% of the workforce, receive $16,000. Mexican farmers, 20% of the workforce, receive $1,000. Chinese farmers, 80% of the workforce, receive $35.

What is missing in NAFTA is precisely the element that makes the EU work as a free-trade bloc. The EU`s regional policy pays money directly from wealthy industrialized nations such as Germany to less wealthy agricultural nations such as Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain. The result is that EU farmers stay on their farms. Like the US Farm Bill, EU subsidies violate the principles of free trade and comparative advantage, but do so for a higher cause: social stability. The absence of a regional stability mechanism in NAFTA is its great weakness. Unlike the rural nations of Europe (which included France and Italy when the EU treaty was signed in 1955, and later Spain), Mexico lacked the political muscle to insist on a regional pact when NAFTA was signed. Washington, unfortunately, was not farsighted enough, or did not care enough, to see the need for one. The result is that Mexico now faces an agricultural crisis that affects the United States as well. The pressures NAFTA puts on Mexico as farm tariffs are gradually removed and as the date for still-broader reductions comes nearer can only be solved bilaterally. The administration of President George W Bush should propose negotiations leading to a transfer of funds that helps Mexico`s farmers stay on their farms and reduces illegal immigration. Instead, the US opts for using illegal immigrant workers to fight inflation and for increasing the budget of the Border Patrol through militarization to prevent illegal immigration. NAFTA contributes to the advent of failed statehood for both the US and Mexico.

The war on drugs: A poor example
Because the US National Guard is both a state and federal militia, it may be exempt from the limitations of the Posse Comitatus Act when acting under the authority of a state governor. That is, the Posse Comitatus Act does not apply to state militias. A proposal by Senator Barbara Boxer of California takes advantage of this loophole by placing the Guard`s new immigration role under the auspices of the state governor. The National Guard, in addition to the army and the marines, has taken a more prevalent role along the border. Using high-tech equipment, it carries out reconnaissance missions and other technical border-control activities. In addition, it provides much labor in the inspection of cargo at the border, building and repairing fences and metal walls along the border, etc. The National Guard, in addition to providing support for the Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law agencies in the interception of drugs, will now augment the Border Patrol in its campaign against undocumented immigrants. Drug and immigrant interception are new and precedent-setting roles for the National Guard, whose traditional missions have been to fight in wartime and help states during natural disasters or civil disorders.

US drug czar John Walters announced on February 22 that the US would employ in its war on drugs some of the techniques it has been using to fight international terrorism. In his annual drug-strategy document, President Bush proposed spending a total of $12.4 billion in fiscal 2006, an increase of 2.2% over fiscal 2005. The anti-narcotics budget had increased from $1 billion in 1980 to $17 billion in 1998 and has continued to climb since. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the United States has increased 800% since 1980, helping the US achieve the highest imprisonment rate in the industrialized world: 550 per 100,000. Under the banner of the war on drugs, a kind of creeping totalitarianism tramples more human rights and civil liberties each year: tens of millions of "clean" citizens are subjected to supervised urine tests at work; hundreds of thousands are searched in their homes or, on the basis of racist "trafficker profiles", at airports or on highways; possessions are seized by the state on suspicion alone. The protection of the innocent is forfeited as part of the collateral damage of homeland security. Americans are protected at the expense of their liberty. Such tradeoffs are the standard rationalization of dictatorial governments and failed states.

Official US surveys show that illicit drug use by American youth has increased in five of the past six years. The US Drug Enforcement Administration admits that hard drugs are more available, less expensive, and more pure than ever on the streets. Hard-drug abuse and addiction among the urban poor remains widespread. Cocaine continues to be a deal-making substance in Hollywood and investment banking. Some judges have even refused to apply harsh drug laws, such as the Rockefeller drug laws in New York state, the reform of which is supported by organizations such as Human Rights Watch. Critics have called the Rockefeller drug laws and the mandatory imprisonment of minor offenders a form of institutional racism. Opinion polls now show that a majority of Americans do not believe the war on drugs can be won. More and more people are voicing their opposition and seeking alternatives to punitive prohibition. The drug-policy reform movement in the US is growing larger and more diverse. The "war on terrorism" needs to take to heart the dismal record of the "war on drugs", rather than the war on drugs placing false hopes on applying the techniques of the war on terrorism. The very concept of waging war on anything as a solution is fundamentally flawed.

An army of mercenaries
One of the systemic propositions about the capacity of the US military being tested in Iraq these days has to do with the staying power of its all-volunteer force for long conflicts. The end of the US draft in 1973 and the conversion to an all-volunteer force fundamentally changed the force structure of the US military designed to prevail on short and narrowly focused conflicts in a peacetime environment. For long, drawn-out wars, volunteers tend to lose their enthusiasm and become increasingly reluctant to enlist. The draft supplied the citizen soldiers for the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam. Ten million of the 15 million US soldiers who served in World War II were drafted. An all-volunteer force also changed the nature of the military, in essence to a mercenary force. Mercenaries can often be effective fighting machines, as demonstrated by the French Foreign Legion. But mercenaries, fighting for pay, lack the strong commitment to national values that is necessary for winning an all-out war.

The father of the all-volunteer force was allegedly economist Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel laureate in economics for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy. In fact, it was largely the doing of his friend and fellow economist, W Allen Wallis, president of the University of Rochester, who died in 1998. On November 11, 1968, Wallis was asked to speak to the local chapter of the American Legion, a veterans` organization, on the 50th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I. The title of his speech was "Abolish the Draft". The backdrop was, of course, the escalating opposition to the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson had announced a military-selection lottery in hopes of reducing resentment of America`s burgeoning commitment in a senseless war. Presidential candidate Richard Nixon responded, "It is not so much the way they are selected that is wrong, it is the fact of selection."

Wallis was a graduate-school classmate of economists Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s. Stigler later became the 1982 Nobel laureate in economics for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation. During World War II, Wallis had, at the age of 30, organized the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University for his teacher Harold Hotelling, under contract to the War Department. Its stellar cast included Friedman, Frederick Mosteller, professor of mathematical statistics Abraham Wald, the founder of the field of statistical sequential analysis, and Jack Wolfowitz (father of now Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a chief architect of the present-day war in Iraq). The elder Wolfowitz developed with Wald the Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT). Sequential analysis is a branch of statistical experimentation in which observations are taken sequentially, one at a time or in groups. After each observation, a decision is made based on all previous results whether to continue sampling or stop. At termination, an inference is made, for example, an estimate or hypothesis test, concerning the distribution of the observed random variables or some parameter(s) or functional(s) of it. Wald and Wolfowitz were the pioneers of modern sequential analysis, proving the optimality of the procedure.

After the war, Wallis returned with Friedman to Chicago. As dean of its business school, he recruited Stigler to Chicago before moving to Rochester in 1962. Friedman and Stigler (and Friedrich Hayek, 1974 Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase, 1991 Nobel laureate for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction cost and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy, and elsewhere, James M Buchanan, 1986 Nobel laureate in economics for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making) then proceeded to overturn much of the view of government that had underpinned Franklin D Roosevelt`s New Deal and sowed the seed for the lasting anti-government ideology that followed in its wake.

In his Armistice Day speech in 1968, Wallis put forth his objections to conscription: "First, it is immutably immoral in principle and inevitably inequitable in practice. Second, it is ineffective, inefficient and detrimental to national security." A month later, Wallis saw Arthur Burns, an economist at Columbia University who was head of Nixon`s transition team and who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Burns told Wallis that if it could be shown that a volunteer force could be instituted for less than $1 billion in its first year, he would put the matter before the incoming president. Wallis quickly assembled a research team to create a blueprint, formed a bipartisan presidential commission, including liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, with enlisted pay quietly raised to market levels. In 1973, the volunteer army became a reality. The last draftee was discharged in September 1975 as the Vietnam War ended.

By most accounts, the volunteer force, a euphemism for a mercenary military, has been a success as a peacetime military, though recently, as the US has applied the doctrine of preemptive war, it has been showing signs of strain. One-third of those entering fail to complete their enlistments, compared with one out of 10 among draftees. The retention of highly skilled personnel requires periodic pay and benefit adjustments. Blacks compose about a third of army enlisted ranks, but less than 10% of its combat arms, so the service represents far more of an opportunity to get ahead for those shut out of the civilian economy than a chance to serve as cannon fodder, as had been feared. Some 85,000 Hispanic-Americans are on active duty, representing about 7% of all active-duty personnel. Latinos represent more than 6.2% of the army, 8.1% of the navy, 11% of the Marine Corps, and 4.4% of the air force, numbers that should continue to increase as all three branches of the armed forces step up their recruitment of minorities.

The most significant aspect of the all-volunteer army is that it had not had to face any major war of long duration until the second Iraq war in 2002. In a fundamental way, a nation that relies on a mercenary force instead of a people`s army is a failed state, especially when volunteerism is motivated mostly by the search for income and job training by the poor.

From 1989-93, Paul Wolfowitz served as under secretary of defense for policy under then-secretary Dick Cheney for matters concerning strategy, plans and policy, with responsibilities for the reshaping of strategy and force posture at the end of the Cold War, the essence of which was to shift from a strategy for being prepared to fight a global war, to being focused on two possible regional conflicts, and to downsize the US military by some 40%. The first Gulf War in 1991 showed the US military to be very good at what it does. The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown it to be mismatched with postwar aims of occupation to spread freedom and democracy. These wars of regime change pose critical challenges to the all-volunteer army. If the volunteers realize they are no longer volunteering for a peacetime army but for long-term occupation assignments in distant and hostile lands, will they demand higher pay and benefits for re-enlistment? And if a volunteer is a specialist, even among common soldiers, what happens to the military culture of all for one and one for all? Can a volunteer army motivated by money sustain a long war?

In Vietnam, the US Army explicitly contracted with its drafted troops beforehand for a one-year tour of duty. Grunts who made it that far, whether on the front line or in the rear, and usually some of each, could go home - no ifs, ands or buts about it. But the Iraq tour of duty has been happening on the fly, and now many troops who began their training a year ago have been told that they cannot go home. The stop-loss policy prohibits a volunteer from leaving his or her unit to return to civilian life even though his or her term of enlistment has expired. This policy has been invoked for people in units that have received notification of being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan or are already in one of those countries.

Now the Pentagon is planning to call up two 5,000-soldier National Guard brigades to begin 13-to-16-month deployments in 2005 in relief of soldiers and marines. Also in Vietnam, a little-noticed concomitant of the draft was never in doubt. It was understood that the military was a planned social organism. Like the family, the university and the church, it was almost entirely free of market forces or economic logic. Its organization was communitarian, ironically communistic: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Its ethic was one of absolute ends: to win in war. Its motto was: whatever it takes, do the necessary. As a result, those who became involved in military service learned to attach a great deal of importance to respect for the opinions of others, even if it were grudging respect, at least in the early years of the conflict, before morale faltered in an aimless and unwinnable war. True, orders were given, often unpopular and senseless orders, but it was recognized that commands would lose their effectiveness if troops were unwilling to obey. Combat effectiveness was measured not in competence or loyalty, but by sheer willingness to fight, or at least remain in place under extreme hostility and hopelessness.

Nearly two years into an Iraq war has left more than 1,500 US troops dead and another 11,200 wounded. Recruiters are having difficulty as the US Army strives to sign up 80,000 recruits this year to replace soldiers leaving the service. The army in February, for the first time in nearly five years, failed to achieve its monthly recruiting goal. It is in danger of missing its annual recruiting target for the first time since 1999. Recruiting for the army`s reserve component - the National Guard and Army Reserve - is suffering even more as the Pentagon relies heavily on these part-time soldiers to maintain troop levels in Iraq. The regular army is 6% behind its year-to-date recruiting target, the Reserve is 10% behind, and the Guard is 26% short. The Marine Corps, the other service providing ground forces in Iraq, has its own difficulties. In January and February, the marines missed their goal for signing up new recruits - the first such shortfall in nearly a decade - but remained a bit ahead of their target for shipping recruits into basic training.

Iraq marks the first protracted conflict for US forces since the end of the draft in 1973, which ushered in the era of the all-volunteer military. If the military fails to attract enough recruits and the US maintains a large commitment in Iraq, the nation may have to consider some form of conscription, predicts Cato Institute defense analyst Charles Pena. The question is whether the "war on terrorism" can survive the domestic politics of a general conscription.

A top-to-bottom audit of the effectiveness of the all-volunteer force is unavoidable in the coming years, in the context of the current "global war on terrorism", where the opponent is not another army but local insurgents. In gauging the success of the US Army`s experiment with market ways, it`s important to keep in mind not just its performance as a fighting unit, but the role of the military in manifesting the basic values of society at large. Most of the political leadership of the generation born after 1955 lacks any battlefield military experience, and defense of the United States is reduced to a commodity that can be purchased at the lowest possible price.

The pervading importance of the army
The key mission of the US strategy of wars to implement regime changes in rogue or failed states around the world rests squarely on the army. The other services serve important offensive functions, but it is the army and only the army that can bring about the end game with manpower-intensive operations. The US Army currently is composed of more than a million volunteers. About half of these men and women are on full-time active duty. The other half is in the reserve component, which is composed of the Selected Reserve and the Individual Ready Reserve. These three groups compose the total army. The Selected Reserve, sometimes known as the Drilling Reserve, consists of people who belong to organized units that train or drill one weekend a month and spend at least two weeks a year on active duty. The army`s Selected Reserve has two branches: the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve. Both components serve as backups to the active-duty army.

Army National Guard units, which are in all 50 states, can be used by the states as militias for natural disasters or civil disorders when they have not been mobilized by the federal government, which pays for more than 90% of their costs and thus has first call on their services. It comprises combat and combat support units such as civil affairs, transportation and military police. Army Reserve units are under the control of the Department of the Army and can be mobilized by the secretary of the army. The Army Reserve is composed mainly of combat support units.

The Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) is composed of individuals who have completed their active-duty service and have not joined a Selected Reserve unit, but who still have time left on their eight-year military-service obligation, which, by law, they incurred when they joined the army. For example, a person who enlisted in the army for four years in 1998 would have been released from active duty in 2002, but would remain in the IRR until 2006. Members of the IRR receive no pay, training or benefits. Currently there are about 100,000 people in the IRR.

Special Operations forces, elite or commando units from the army, navy and air force, are trained to perform clandestine missions behind enemy lines. Currently, there are about 50,000 personnel in these units. About 8,000 Special Operations forces are deployed in 54 countries.

The active army is organized into 10 divisions and the Army National Guard into eight. Each division has between 10,000 and 18,000 people organized into at least three brigades or regiments composed of 3,000-5,000 people. These brigades, in turn, consist of battalions of between 500 and 800 people each.

The ability of any military to perform its missions depends on smart people more than on smart bombs. As Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon`s secretary of defense and the architect of the all-volunteer army put it this way: "People, not hardware, must be our highest priority."

The priority given to the men and women of the US armed forces today, especially those in the army, appears to have diminished, as overextension and overuse, as well as inattention to quality-of-life issues, place severe strain on the troops. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed deeply troubling cracks in the organization and structure of the million-strong volunteer US Army. These problems have been exacerbated both by the current challenges of the global international-security environment and the way in which the Bush administration has used the active-duty and reserve components since September 11, 2001. As a result, the US is closer to breaking its volunteer army today than at any other time in its 30-year history.

Since September 11, 2001, the volunteer US Army has been called upon to assume greater and broader responsibility than ever before. US soldiers are needed to battle terrorism around the globe, protect the US homeland, and engage in occupation, peacekeeping, stabilization, and nation-building operations. Few imagined that the total volunteer army would be used in such a manner when it was designed 30 years ago, and the Bush administration has failed to make the appropriate changes to reflect the new environment. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s famous defense was, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wished you had." As a result, the active-duty US Army is not large enough and it does not have the mix of skills necessary to meet current needs; moreover, the reserve component is being used at unsustainable levels. This threatens not only the quality and readiness of the all-volunteer army, but also its ability to recruit and retain troops.

The Total Force
Richard Nixon put the all-volunteer model into place in 1973, in response to widespread public dissatisfaction with conscription and its use during the Vietnam War, when most of the United States` elite managed to avoid service in what Colin Powell has referred to as an "anti-democratic disgrace". While the draft had allowed the government to pay subsistence wages, the creation of the all-volunteer force required a dramatic increase in military salaries at a time when it was also necessary to increase spending on military equipment and technology. To keep costs under control, the Pentagon decided it had no choice but to reduce substantially the size of its active-duty military to some 2.2 million people, or about 18% below its pre-Vietnam level of 2.7 million. Because finding volunteers was always harder for the army than for the other services, the army bore the brunt of these reductions, dropping from more than a million people before the Vietnam War to 780,000 in 1974, its lowest level since before the Korean War. Yet the new task of wars to implement regime changes place heavy demand on US Army manpower.

To compensate, the Pentagon developed the concept of the "Total Force". Under this plan, the US military`s Selected Reserve component would, theoretically, receive enough resources to make it a full-fledged part of the military. The National Guard and Reserves were given separate accounts, and the Selected Reserve`s share of the budget was doubled. To prevent a repetition of Vietnam, where successive presidents managed to avoid the political costs of waging an unpopular war by using only the active-duty force and not calling up the Reserves, General Creighton Abrams, as army chief of staff, put fully half of the army`s combat units (divisions and brigades) in the reserve component. In addition, certain non-combat components that were deemed to be in essence civilian functions, such as military police, engineers and civil-affairs personnel, were allocated almost entirely to the Reserves. These skills would be needed only for postwar stabilization, or what is now called "peacekeeping".

By the mid-1980s, the all-volunteer force became the most professional, highly qualified military the United States had ever fielded, and a high-tech fighting machine at that. One of the reasons for its success is that norms and standards were established for the use of both the active and reserve components. When reservists were called up for the first Gulf War or for peacekeeping duties in the Balkans or the Sinai, they were not kept on duty for more than six months, which most analysts felt was necessary to get and keep people in the reserve component. This was in keeping with a long-standing Pentagon personnel policy that forces should not spend more than one-third of their time away from home. In fact, many reservists actually volunteered to go. Moreover, active-duty forces sent on peacekeeping missions were rotated home after six months and were not deployed overseas again until they had spent at least a year at home. These standards and norms for the use of the volunteer army began to break down after September 11, 2001, however, due in part to extremely poor planning for the postwar transition in Iraq and the inability of the United States to get substantial combat-troop contributions from other nations.

When Donald Rumsfeld took charge of the Pentagon in January 2001, he did so with a mandate to transform the military by ensuring that its weapons systems and tactics took advantage of advances in technology. He did not, however, focus on the question of the size of the army and the balance between active-duty and Reserve soldiers, which became critical issues only once the United States launched the "global war on terrorism" and went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq (see The war that could destroy both armies, December 23, 2003). http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EJ23Ak01.html

Thomas Hall, the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, indicated two years ago that the Pentagon`s civilian and military leadership was aggressively studying such issues. In his first press briefing of 2004, Rumsfeld admitted that rebalancing the way reserve forces are used should be his first priority for the coming year. The army has begun the process of shifting the duties of some 100,000 personnel, but this process is not yet complete. Thus the percentage of military functions currently allocated to the Reserves is substantially the same as it was in 1973 - and better represents the challenges of that era than of the present one. Reserves currently account for 97% of the army`s civil-affairs units, 70% of its engineering units, 66% of its military police, and 50% of its combat forces. Moreover, the size of the active-duty army has shrunk: at about 480,000 soldiers, it currently makes up a smaller proportion of the total US military, about 35%, than at any other point in US history. As a result, the all-volunteer army is being overstretched and misused in an effort to meet the new challenges presented by national and homeland security threats.

By the numbers
The US Army currently has about 350,000 soldiers deployed in more than 120 countries around the globe. The bulk of these troops - about 200,000 - are in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea and the Balkans. In 2004, 26 of the active-duty army`s 33 combat brigades (or almost 80%) will have been deployed abroad. Nine of the 10 active-duty divisions in the army were deployed to, getting ready to deploy to, or returning from Iraq or Afghanistan this year. About 40% of the 140,000 troops in Iraq are from the reserve component, as are almost all of the US troops in the Balkans. All told, three combat brigades from the Army National Guard are currently in Iraq and four are preparing to be deployed to Iraq in the next year.

According to a Defense Science Board study presented to Rumsfeld last August 31, the US military does not have sufficient personnel for the nation`s current war and peacekeeping demands. This overstretching leaves the US potentially vulnerable in places such as South Korea. In fact, one of the two US Army brigades stationed in South Korea has already been sent to Iraq. It also means that combat units have been sent on back-to-back deployments or have had their overseas tours extended unexpectedly beyond the duration that had been promised. For example, the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division spent December 2002 to August 2003 in Afghanistan, was deployed to Iraq only five months after its return, where it served until April 2004, and is now slated to return to Afghanistan for at least another year. The 3rd Infantry Division, the 1st Armored Division, and the 2nd Infantry Division`s 2nd Brigade had similar experiences. In July 2003, the military announced that army units would have to spend a full year in Iraq, double the normal tour for peacekeeping duties.

Experience over the past 30 years shows that retention rates will decline if the army keeps soldiers away from home for more than one year out of three, especially among mid-career personnel such as army captains, senior non-commissioned officers, and seasoned warrant officers, most of whom have not made a lifetime commitment to the army. This is how the career army was broken in Vietnam. Not retaining sufficient numbers of mid-career personnel will result in a hollow army that will be less capable and less ready to carry out the demanding challenges it currently faces and challenges that are expected to intensify in the future, with flashpoints such as Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Taiwan and North Korea.

Since September 11, 2001, more than 400,000 reservists have been called to active duty. Several National Guard and Reserve units have been kept on active duty for longer than anticipated, sent overseas to Iraq and Afghanistan without effective training for the missions they are expected to carry out, and mobilized without reasonable notice. This practice not only undermines the readiness of the reserve soldiers to carry out their tasks, it also puts an unfair burden on the families and the employers of the reservists by leaving them with very little time to adjust to the absence of the soldier. Members of the Michigan National Guard, for example, were sent to Iraq with only 48 hours` notice. In another example, the Maryland National Guard`s 115th Military Police Battalion has deployed three times since September 11, 2001, and by the end of their last tour, some of these soldiers had been on active duty for more than 24 months. All of this has occurred in spite of the fact that Lieutenant-General James Helmly, the commander of the US Army Reserve, has stated that a reserve soldier ideally should be given at least 30-day notice before being mobilized and not be kept on duty for more than nine to 12 months in a five-year time frame.

The Bush administration has been forced to notify about 5,600 Individual Ready Reservists that they will be called to active duty in order to replace casualties in the Guard and Reserve units deployed to Iraq or to fill out understaffed units that have been mobilized to go to Iraq. These are men and women who have completed their active-duty service and have not joined a Guard or Reserve unit but who still have time left on their eight-year military-service obligation. In addition to facing the unfairness of being called back involuntarily after having already served their country, many of these individuals are being sent to combat zones without any recent training. Thirty-seven percent of those Individual Ready Reservists who were to report to duty by last October 17 failed to show. All told, more than 2,000 of these former soldiers have resisted returning to active duty. The trend can be expected to continue if not escalate as initial patriotic sentiment for the war subsides.

The Bush administration has compounded this problem by invoking its stop-loss authority for individuals in both active-duty and reserve units. This policy prevents an individual in a unit that has been notified that it is being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan - or is already in one of those countries - from leaving the service until three months after the unit returns from overseas. To date, more than 40,000 men and women have had their enlistment extended or retirements put on hold, some for as long as two years, because of stop-loss. On December 6, eight of these soldiers challenged this army policy in court. And on December 8, a soldier in Kuwait who was headed to Iraq publicly asked visiting Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld how much longer the army will continue to use its stop-loss power to prevent soldiers from leaving the service who are otherwise able to retire or quit.

Many of the reservists who have been called up without appropriate notice and kept on duty too long are police officers, firefighters and paramedics in their civilian lives, that is, first responders who are vital to the safety of their local communities. When these personnel are called up for military service and kept on active duty for long periods, it can reduce the ability of their communities to deal with terrorism. In addition, the fact that National Guard units have been deployed overseas undermines the ability of states to deal with natural disasters as well as potential terrorist attacks on the homeland. For example, Governor Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican from Idaho and departing chairman of the National Governors Association, said recently that he was worried because 62% of Idaho`s National Guard had been called up to active duty by the Pentagon. Like his colleagues in California, Washington, Oregon and Alaska, where wildfires are a significant problem, Kempthorne was concerned that he would not be able to use the Guard troops to help with firefighting.

The current system has led to a decline in the overall operational readiness of the US Army. In fiscal year 2003, the army canceled or postponed 49 of its 182 scheduled training exercises because the units were either going to or returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. In December 2003, a senior army official informed reporters that four divisions due to rotate back from Iraq in the spring of 2004 would not be fully combat ready for as long as six months. This, in turn, would leave only two of the army`s 10 active-duty divisions ready for conflict outside Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, the army has decided to send the 11th Cavalry Regiment, its elite training unit, to Iraq this year, taking them away from their mission of training other units.

Personnel readiness, which depends on the experience level of the soldiers in a unit, is also declining. According to a survey of US troops in Iraq by the military`s own Stars and Stripes newspaper in late 2003, the Bush administration`s approach to Iraq risks doing to the all-volunteer force what Vietnam did to the conscript service. After polling almost 2,000 troops, Stars and Stripes found that about one-third of them thought the war against Saddam Hussein had been of little or no value and that their mission lacked clear definition. A full 40% said their missions had little or nothing to do with what they had trained for. And, most ominously, about half of the soldiers surveyed indicated that they will not re-enlist when their tours end and the Pentagon lifts the stop-loss order that prevents troops from retiring or leaving the service at this time. A survey of Guard and Reserve units conducted last May by the Defense Manpower Data Center had similar findings. According to the survey, fewer than half of the Army and Marine Corps reserve personnel who served in Iraq say they will likely or very likely stay in uniform. Compared with a similar survey from May 2003, even non-deployed personnel are less inclined to stay in because of the threat of being recalled, and the morale of all reservists declined over the past year.

Were it not for the stop-loss policy, which even high-ranking US officials admit is inconsistent with the principles of voluntary service, the all-volunteer force and the Total Force would be in severe jeopardy, lacking the necessary personnel to complete their missions. For example, one infantry battalion commander deployed in Kuwait and headed for Iraq said he would have lost a quarter of his unit over the next year were it not for the stop-loss order. Through a series of such stop-loss measures, the army has prevented more than 24,000 active-duty troops and 16,000 reservists from leaving its ranks. Yet even with these rules in place, the Army Reserve failed to achieve its re-enlistment requirements for fiscal year 2003. The Army National Guard fell 12% short of its overall recruiting requirement for 2004 and missed its goal of reactivating people from the active force by 44%. The active-duty army, meanwhile, met its recruiting requirement for 2004 only by dipping into its delayed-entry pool of people scheduled to go on active duty in 2005, and lowered its educational and aptitude standards for the new recruiting year.

The Pentagon is also having difficulty keeping enough experienced Special Forces personnel on active duty as more and more of these elite warriors are beginning to accept offers from private security contractors who are performing military functions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ironically, the US needs to use so many private security contractors because the Special Forces are not large enough to carry out all of the functions they are assigned. The US taxpayer thus ends up paying twice, once to train the personnel for the Special Forces and then again for contractor services. These contractors pay up to $1,000 per day for work in war zones such as Iraq, far above the average military salary for generals. Currently, the Special Forces units are manned only at the 85% level. The experience and capability level of the army has also been hurt by the discharge of thousands of men and women for being openly homosexual and violating the "don`t ask, don`t tell" policy. A number of those discharged were soldiers with critical skills, such as Arab-language abilities and operators of special equipment.

The Bush administration has exacerbated personnel problems by attempting to cut back benefits that members of the volunteer military and their families need. The timing of these cuts fueled the perception of disregard for the well-being of the same troops that the administration relies on to execute its foreign policy. For example, the administration proposed cutting imminent danger combat pay by one-third for US troops in the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also proposed cutting family separation allowances by nearly two-thirds for those troops away from their home base. Public pressure ultimately forced Congress to reject the White House proposals. In addition, thousands of US soldiers have been injured abroad, yet fewer than one in 10 applicants to the military`s disability compensation system is receiving the long-term disability payments they request. Almost one-third of sick or injured National Guard and Reserve veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are forced to wait more than four months to find out if they will be compensated. The majority of those who do receive disability pay leave the military with a one-time, lump-sum payment that is inadequate to make up for the loss they have suffered. David Chu, the Pentagon`s under secretary for personnel and readiness, announced on February 1 that the lump-sum death gratuity of $12,420 would be increased to $100,000 in the 2006 budget. Life-insurance payments for deaths in the two "combat zones" would be raised from $250,000 to $400,000, with the government paying the extra premiums necessary.

Finally, the Bush administration also requested a 14% cut in assistance to public schools on military bases and other federal property. In what one army commander called an act of betrayal, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon is considering closing or transferring control of the 58 schools it operates on 14 military installations. These decisions threaten not only the quality of education for the children of soldiers, but also the morale and support of military families. Ultimately, these decisions threaten the long-term viability of the all-volunteer force.

The Pentagon 2005 Third Quadrennial Review (QDR3) put together by the Rumsfeld team is focused on four core challenges that resemble a matrix of future threats, identifying four types of dangers - conventional warfare, "irregular" challenges such as the insurgency in Iraq, "catastrophic" attacks employing weapons of mass destruction, and "disruptive" breakthroughs that give adversaries a sudden gain in capabilities. The matrix assumes that the likelihood of major conventional combat is receding, while the probability of the other, unconventional dangers is rising. Defense contractors and analysts will parse QDR3 debate for hints of which weapons programs might be favored, cut or terminated, strongly impacting the future of the defense industry. The US Air Force, for example, will press its case for restoring cuts made in the Lockheed Martin Corp F/A-22 fighter program. The Pentagon`s fiscal 2006-11 budget forecasts savings of $10.4 billion by ending the program in 2008 and cutting 96 aircraft, bringing the total down to 179. But the air force suggests the plane might be useful in countering China`s growing inventory of new Russian-made aircraft. The F/A-22 fighter will upgrade US capability to counter growing threats in the Pacific from China.

If the US plans to spread democracy unilaterally by destroying, occupying and rebuilding countries such as Iraq around the world, in essence by itself, while also meeting its other global commitments, protecting its homeland, and treating the men and women of the military fairly and in a way that ensures that they will join and remain in the volunteer army, it must increase the army`s budget, taking funds from other parts of the overall 2005 baseline defense budget of $420 billion. Defense experts have suggested that programs that can be reduced without undermining US ability to wage a "global war on terror" include the national missile defense program, new nuclear-weapons research programs, and Cold War-era programs such as the F/A-22 fighter and the Virginia Class submarine. The cost of adding to the army budget can also be offset by reducing the number of people on active duty in the navy and air force, both of which are currently exceeding their target end-strengths.

`China threat` to the rescue
Supporters of threatened programs are seeking justification for preserving them. They have found it in the issue of China`s alleged military ascendance. With Central Intelligence Agency support, the Pentagon is preparing to ratchet up its assessment of the threat of China`s expanding military, in a signal that the Bush administration is increasingly concerned about China`s growing ambitions in the region. The CIA, battered by intelligence failure related to the September 11 terrorist attacks, is desperately seeking to identify new dangerous enemies. Reaching into its overused bag of tricks, the new CIA director, Porter Goss, pulls out China as the reliable standby target. "Beijing`s military modernization and military buildup is tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait," Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 16. "Chinese capabilities threaten US forces in the region," he said. It was more than a casual warning. The Taiwan Relations Act, a US domestic law, stipulates that the United States must sell more arms to Taiwan to maintain a balance of power.

The 2005 QDR3, the formal assessment of US military policy, is expected to take a more gloomy view of the challenge posed by an emerging Chinese superpower than the 2001 overview of four years ago. Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, identifies the rise of the People`s Republic of China (PRC) as one of the most important issues being examined in QDR3, which is expected to be completed this September. A Pentagon spokesman stated that the manner in which national-security capabilities are organized to address the "global war on extremism" will continue to dominate ongoing activities, but it is important to step back and examine the strategic landscape beyond these ongoing activities, and "the PRC`s emergence as a global actor is one undeniable reality".

The CIA report and QDR3 are dismissed by China as overreaction. Beijing insists that the theory of the China threat is unsupported by data. Citing Western media, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing at a press conference on March 5 took note that US defense expenditures had reached $455.9 billion, 3.9% of its GDP in 2004, while China spent 211.7 billion yuan ($25.5 billion) on national defense, 1.6% of its GDP. In 2003, US defense expenditures took up 47% of the global total, exceeding the accumulated expenditures of the following 25 biggest defense spenders. "China is a staunch force for peacemaking, and it`s ridiculous to accuse China of [being] a threat," Li said.

After the US-Japan Security Consultative Committee in Washington held by the foreign and defense ministers of the two countries, the United States and Japan issued a joint statement on February 19 listing for the first time "encouraging" the peaceful resolution of issues concerning the Taiwan Strait through dialogue as one of their common strategic objectives. In their joint statement, the US and Japan tried to mollify China by listing development of a "cooperative relationship" with Beijing as another strategic goal. The US and Japan have agreed on a new joint security arrangement, which calls on China to increase transparency in reporting its military expenditure and expansion. For the first time, Japan publicly identified Taiwan as a shared security concern with the US. China denounced the joint statement as interfering in China`s sovereign rights, internal affairs and territorial integrity. The US-Japan security alliance has shifted from a Cold War-era anti-Soviet posture to a post-Cold War era anti-China focus. Japan`s 2000 White Paper on defense said for the first time that Chinese military development poses a threat to Japan. In its 2004 White Paper on defense, Japan claimed that it is facing direct missile threats from China. Beijing is deeply concerned about Tokyo`s increasingly assertive approach to security issues, a concern that has become an obstacle to improved relations between the two Asian neighbors.

Washington and Tokyo have never before explicitly listed Taiwan as a bilateral strategic issue, and Japanese officials have generally avoided public discussion of cross-strait issues while privately calling for a peaceful resolution. China has repeatedly served notice that Taiwan`s move toward independence will trigger an immediate military response. Washington is legally committed by the Taiwan Relations Act to supplying Taipei with adequate arms for defense, and has long hinted that the US will "help" Taiwan defend itself in the event of a military threat from Beijing. Whether that means direct US involvement remains ambiguous.

In response, China has passed its own domestic law against secession as a countermeasure for the United States` Taiwan Relations Act. Now, both governments are obliged by domestic law to military confrontation over the issue of Taiwan independence, with China committing itself by law to use force to stop Taiwan from any move toward independence and the US committing itself to help Taiwan defend itself. Thus the Taiwan issue is taken out of the flexible sphere of diplomacy to the fixed realm of a conflict between the domestic laws of two nations. It is a conflict that leaves little room for diplomacy and will lead to war.

There is also a change on the issue of Taiwan for Japan. In the past Japan had said that war across the Taiwan Strait would have an impact on East Asian security. Now it says China`s use of force to prevent Taiwanese independence will "threaten" Japan directly. For Japanese strategists and politicians, it is vital that Japan can hold back an overall strategic challenge from China by the so-called curb on China`s use of force in s

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Freiheit und Demokratie ist auf dem Weg. Ein Dominostein nach dem anderen fällt, bis ganz Nahost in Flammen steht. Und dann sagt Klein-Georgie mit seiner Neocon-Rasselbande`Das haben wir nicht gewollt`

March 19, 2005
Beirut Car Bomb Injures 7
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Lebanon-Syr…

Filed at 2:13 a.m. ET

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- With Lebanese politicians deadlocked over the formation of a new government as Syria withdraws its forces after 29 years, a car bomb rocked a largely Christian neighborhood in north Beirut early Saturday, injuring seven people and causing extensive damage.

The target of the attack wasn`t immediately clear but it added to the political turmoil after the Feb. 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian troops to east Lebanon and Syria.

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have been participating in demonstrations for and against Syria since Hariri was killed. Anti-Syrian opposition demonstrations have included large numbers of Maronite Christians.

The explosion played to concerns among some Lebanese that pro-Syrian elements might resort to violence to show, in their view, the need for continued presence by Damascus forces.

The efforts to form a new government have bogged down over divergent demands from factions for and against Syria, raising concerns that the deadlock that could threaten upcoming elections and even the final withdrawal of Syrian forces.

Premier-designate Omar Karami has insisted on a ``national unity`` government, but the anti-Syrian opposition is refusing to join before its demands are met. Some opposition members accuse Karami of stalling to kill the chances of holding an election they believe the pro-Syrian camp will lose.

Walid Jumblatt, an opposition leader, said parliamentary elections should be held as planned for April and May.

``Why postpone the parliamentary elections? Let them hold the elections according to the electoral law they deem suitable, but we will not participate in the government,`` he said in an interview with Future Television.

The opposition has demanded a neutral Cabinet to arrange for elections, the resignation of security chiefs and international investigation into Hariri`s death.

The explosive injured at least seven people, blew off the fronts of some structures, left a seven-foot-deep crater, damaged parked cars and shops and shattered windows for several blocks in the New Jdeideh neighborhood.

Witnesses said the car attempted to stop in front of a bingo hall, but security guards asked its driver to move along. The driver then parked the car a short way down the road. Minutes later it exploded.

Shaken residents, many in their pajamas and night gowns, came out into the street and stood outside the damaged building behind a police cordon.

``We were sleeping when it happened,`` said a white-haired man, wearing blue pajamas, who declined to be identified. ``We don`t know what and why. No one important lives here.`` He said two of his children were injured by flying glass.

Bomb explosions had been rare since Lebanon`s civil war ended in 1990, but Hariri was killed in a massive explosion that ripped through his motorcade in downtown Beirut and killing 17 other people. After Hariri`s assassination, pressure built on Syria to remove its troops that arrived in 1976 as a peacekeeping force in the early years of the Lebanese civil war.

On Thursday, Syria completed the first phase of its withdrawal in Lebanon, redeploying all of its remaining soldiers and military intelligence officers to the eastern Bekaa Valley. Of the 14,000 troops that were in Lebanon last month, at least 4,000 soldiers have returned to Syria.

At the United Nations, Maronite Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir said that Syria had given assurances it would withdraw its troops from Lebanon before the country`s elections in April and May, as top U.N. and American officials want.

``Syria has given assurances to Mr. Larsen and Mr. Annan, and I am hoping those assurances will happen,`` Sfeir told reporters, referring to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen. He added, however, that he had not spoken with the Syrians about it himself.

Asked later whether Sfeir`s comments were accurate, the U.N. official said on condition of anonymity that the United Nations has a commitment that Syria will withdraw -- and has gotten ``signals`` that it would happen before the vote. The official would go no further.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

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March 19, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Captains of Piracy
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/opinion/19kristof.html

In Russia, those who manipulate capitalism to gain fabulous wealth are called the oligarchs, and they sometimes end up in prison. Here we just call such people C.E.O.`s, and we put them in prison less often.

This is the time of year when corporate financial statements offer snapshots of their executives` mugging shareholders. Over the next few weeks, we`ll find out precisely how much public companies overpaid their chief executives, but the news filtering out so far underscores the market failure in the boardrooms.

Carly Fiorina was fired last month as chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. So why did the board reward her with a total of $8.15 million in her last full year before booting her out?

Then there`s Michael Eisner, who is finally being pushed out of the Walt Disney Company`s chief executive post for running his company almost into the ground. Yet the Disney board recently gave him a $7.25 million cash bonus.

Both instances are a reminder that the executive suite in America is the last bastion of socialism in the world today. If Kim Jong Il traveled to America, he would be bewildered by most of corporate America but would immediately feel at home on a board`s compensation committee.

A study for The Wall Street Journal by Mercer Human Resource Consulting found that at 100 major U.S. corporations, bonuses for C.E.O.`s last year rose more than 46 percent, to a median of $1.14 million. Both the amount and the percentage increase were the highest since comparable studies began five years ago.

Companies have shaved costs by laying off workers and reducing health care coverage - and then using those savings to slather more pay on top executives. It`s true that companies are now cutting back on stock options for C.E.O.`s, but it`s hard to be impressed by that restraint when bonuses are soaring.

Since 1993, the average pay for C.E.O.`s of the S.&P. 500 companies has tripled to $10 million at last count, while the number of Americans without health insurance has risen by six million.

If America`s chief executives really earned their money, I`d be more sympathetic. But in 5 of the 100 companies in The Journal`s study, bonuses rose as the companies` income dropped.

As John Kenneth Galbraith once put it: "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."

Indeed, C.E.O. pay increased most rapidly at companies with weak governance and few shareholder rights, according to a study this year by Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard and Yaniv Grinstein of Cornell.

That study also found that public companies devoted about 10 percent of their profits to compensating their top five executives, up from 6 percent in the mid-1990`s. That`s a hijacking of corporate wealth by top managers.

Companies typically claim that C.E.O.`s are rewarded highly only when they outperform their peers. Poppycock. One study found that when companies didn`t outrank their peers, they just redefined their peers.

Another study found that of the 1,000 largest companies, two-thirds claimed to have outperformed their peers. That`s the "Lake Wobegon effect": All C.E.O.`s in America are paid as if they were above average.

If only my buddies determined my compensation: I`d like my earnings "peers" to be a New York journalism figure and someone with an interest in the third world - people like Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates. What a bonus that would be!

Boards sometimes argue that they need to pay huge sums to hang on to talent. Really? Consider Mr. Eisner, who did a great job in his early years but has been a walking pay scandal ever since Disney earnings fell 63 percent in 1993 (after an accounting change) and he received $203 million. He has been so desperate to stay at Disney that he virtually Super-glued himself to his chair. If the board had wanted to pay the market price necessary to keep him, it could have offered a penny.

Or less.

Brian Halla, the C.E.O. of National Semiconductor, received a $5 million bonus last year. But he told The Wall Street Journal, "I feel I should pay somebody for doing this job." Now there`s a smart suggestion.

So I called to ask Mr. Halla why, since he feels that way, his board shouldn`t save the shareholders a bundle and charge him a fee to keep the job. He didn`t take my call.

E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Christopher Griffin posed with the huge hog dubbed "Hogzilla" that he killed on the River Oaks Plantation in Alapaha, Ga., in 2004.

Mr. Holyoak tended "Hogzilla`s" final resting spot at the River Oaks Plantation.

March 19, 2005
Tall Tales and the Unlarded Truth About Hogzilla
By SHAILA DEWAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/national/19hog.html
ALAPAHA, Ga., March 17 - Few episodes in this modern age have drawn the Southern talent for tall tales like the legend of Hogzilla, the alleged 12-foot, 1,000-pound wild hog shot and killed on a South Georgia farm last June.

Documented by only a single photograph before the carcass was buried, Hogzilla drew television crews from as far away as Japan and appeared on the cover of Weekly World News. The pig became the theme of the town`s annual festival. People from California and New Jersey called to order hog T-shirts.

So tall did the tale become that in November, a team of scientists exhumed Hogzilla and went at him with calipers and DNA tests. Now all of Berrien County awaits their findings, which are to be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday night.
Weiter:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/national/19hog.html

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Es ist schon erschreckendes Bild, was die US-Army abgibt. Sie haben nur wenige Soldaten, die den Ansprüchen einer moderen Armee genügen.
Die meisten Soldaten sind Menschen, die in den letzten Jahren zur Army gegangen sind, um ihr Überleben zu sichern oder es sind zwangsverpflichtete Nationalgardisten, die aus ganz anderen Motiven zur Garde gegangen sind z.B. Notstandshelfer oder Freizeitsrambos.
Nur weder für die Natioal Guard noch für die Army ist augenblicklich ausreichend Nachwuchs zu bekommen.
Schon aus diesen Gründen müssen die NeoCons ihre Pläne zur Rettung der Welt und der Menschheit erstmals mangels Masse verschieben.
Ich muß da Rummie einmal loben, denn er hat das schon längst erkannt und hat versucht die US-Truppen in eine Art Eingreifarmee umzuwandeln, aber das scheint zu scheitern, denn was sollen dann die Rüstungsfirmen mit all ihren großkotzigen Waffen machen, die sie für teueres Geld fürs Pentagon entwickelt haben und die dann nicht mehr gebraucht werden.

washingtonpost.com
Two Years Later, Iraq War Drains Military
Heavy Demands Offset Combat Experience
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48306-2005Mar…

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 19, 2005; Page A01

Two years after the United States launched a war in Iraq with a crushing display of power, a guerrilla conflict is grinding away at the resources of the U.S. military and casting uncertainty over the fitness of the all-volunteer force, according to senior military leaders, lawmakers and defense experts.

The unexpectedly heavy demands of sustained ground combat are depleting military manpower and gear faster than they can be fully replenished. Shortfalls in recruiting and backlogs in needed equipment are taking a toll, and growing numbers of units have been broken apart or taxed by repeated deployments, particularly in the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve.

"What keeps me awake at night is, what will this all-volunteer force look like in 2007?" Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army vice chief of staff, said at a Senate hearing this week.

The Iraq war has also led to a drop in the overall readiness of U.S. ground forces to handle threats at home and abroad, forcing the Pentagon to accept new risks -- even as military planners prepare for a global anti-terrorism campaign that administration officials say could last for a generation.

Stretched by Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States lacks a sufficiently robust ability to put large numbers of "boots on the ground" in case of a major emergency elsewhere, such as the Korean Peninsula, in the view of some Republican and Democratic lawmakers and some military leaders.

They are skeptical of the Pentagon`s ability to substitute air and naval power, and they believe strongly that what the country needs is a bigger Army. "The U.S. military will respond if there are vital threats, but will it respond with as many forces as it needs, with equipment that is in excellent condition? The answer is no," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).

To be sure, the military has also benefited from two years of war-zone rotations, and from a historical perspective it is holding up better than many analysts expected. U.S. troops are the most combat-hardened the nation has had for decades, and reenlistment levels have generally remained high. The war has also spurred technological innovation while providing momentum for a reorganization of a military that in many ways is still designed for the Cold War.

Moreover, military leaders are taking steps to ease stress on the troops by temporarily boosting ranks; rebalancing forces to add badly needed infantry, military police and civil affairs troops; and employing civilians where possible. Yesterday, defense officials worried about recruiting announced that they will raise the age limit, from 34 to 40, for enlistment in the Army Guard and Reserve. The Pentagon is spending billions to repair and replace battle-worn equipment and buy extra armor, radios, weapons and other gear.

Yet such remedies take time, and no one, including senior officials, can predict how long the all-volunteer force can sustain this accelerated wartime pace. Recruiting troubles, especially, threaten the force at its core. But with a return to the draft widely viewed as economically and politically untenable, senior military leaders say the nation`s security depends on drumming up broader public support for service.

"If we don`t get this thing right, the risk is off the scale," said Lt. Gen. Roger C. Schultz, director of the Army National Guard, the military`s most stressed branch.
A Tough Sell

At dusk the night the Iraq war started in March 2003, Staff Sgt. Spurgeon M. Shelley was near the Kuwaiti border, watching the orange glow of missiles streak overhead as he guided one Marine ammunition convoy after another north across the line of departure.

Manning a dirt berm while wearing his gas mask and full chemical suit, Shelley was determined to make it home alive to see his daughter, Lena, 2. "I`m going to do whatever I have to, to survive," he told himself.

Today, Shelley is on duty in what he calls a "one-man fighting hole" on another battlefield -- a Marine recruiting station in Lexington Park, Md., in St. Mary`s County -- with a mission to persuade young men and women to enlist, and probably go to war.

One recent night, after making dozens of fruitless phone calls to high school students, Shelley said his recruiting job is more taxing than combat. "I hear `no` more times in one day than a child would hear in their entire childhood," he said. "If I had hair, I`d pull it out."

The active-duty Army and Marine Corps, and five of six reserve components of the military, all failed to meet at least some recruiting goals in the first quarter of fiscal 2005, according to Defense Department statistics. The active-duty shortfalls came amid rising concern among Army and Marine officials that their services risk missing annual recruiting quotas for the first time this decade.

Shelley, for example, has signed up four people in nearly six months, despite working 16-hour days. Asked why recruiting is so difficult, he has a quick reply: "The war."

Increasingly, surveys show that the main reason young American adults avoid military service is that they -- and to a greater degree their parents -- fear that enlisting could mean a war-zone deployment and death or injury. One survey showed such fears nearly doubling among respondents from 2000 to 2004.

Indeed, today`s recruiting problems reflect a widespread concern dating from the conception of the all-volunteer force in 1973 -- that a military composed wholly of volunteers would not supply adequate troops for a lengthy ground war.

But confidence in the force has since grown as it gained discipline and professionalism. Meanwhile, overseas missions proliferated, even as the military downsized drastically. The Army shrank from 40 active-duty and National Guard divisions during the Vietnam War to 28 when the Cold War ended, and it has 18 now.

The military is seeking to rebuild forces, adding temporarily 30,000 Army soldiers and 5,000 Marines. But the war isn`t the only obstacle. Rising college attendance and an expanding job market are giving high school graduates more choices. "It`s times like this when unemployment is reaching 5 percent that is a critical level" for undercutting recruitment, said Curtis L. Gilroy, director of accession policy for the Defense Department.

To meet its targets, the Army is considering expanding the use of enlistment bonuses of as much as $20,000. Both the Army and the Marines are adding hundreds of recruiters, who "will have to work very, very hard," Gilroy said.

Shelley`s situation exemplifies the pressure on today`s recruiters. Up at 6:30, he consults his "plan of attack," a white sheet of paper on which he pencils in his activities by the hour. At lunchtime, he hits fast-food restaurants. When school lets out at 2:45, he starts calling potential recruits at home. In early evening, he goes to gas stations or the 7-Eleven, scouting for youths with "less desirable" jobs. At night, he is out "AC-ing," or "area canvassing," until 10:30.

Palming the steering wheel of his steel-gray Dodge Stratus one night, Shelley cruises slowly past a Chick-fil-A. Scanning the cars, he estimates who`s in the restaurant and whether it`s worth going in. It`s not.

He makes one last, failed pitch of the day -- to an overweight young man stacking tomatoes at Giant -- and heads home. As long as the war drags on, recruiting won`t improve, he predicts. "I think it`s going to get worse."
Growing Demands

As the military struggles to find fresh recruits, there is unprecedented strain on service members and their families.

Since 2001, the U.S. military has deployed more than 1 million troops for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with 341,000, or nearly a third, serving two or more overseas tours.

Today, an entrenched insurgency in Iraq ties down 150,000 U.S. troops, inflicting upwards of 1,500 deaths so far -- more than 10 times the number killed in the major combat operations that President Bush declared ended on May 1, 2003.

Because of the spreading violence from the insurgency, coupled with a smaller foreign coalition than was hoped for, the U.S. Army and Marines in particular have scrambled to keep a force of roughly 17 brigades in Iraq until now, rather than draw down to eight brigades or even be out altogether, according to previous military projections.

Lt. Gen. James J. Lovelace Jr., the Army`s operations chief, is a kind of circus master responsible for juggling limited units and equipment and prioritizing who does what. Ringed by organizational charts in his Pentagon office, the West Point graduate from Richmond ticked off the far-flung corners from which the Army has had to muster forces.

"We`ve deployed units of the Old Guard!" he said, referring to the first-ever deployment of the ceremonial guard from Fort Myer, when a company was dispatched to Djibouti last year. "We`ve reached up inside of Alaska and grabbed the forces up there," he said. "Korea! Who would have ever thought that we would have deployed a combat formation?" he said, referring to a brigade sent from South Korea to Iraq.

Two years ago, the Army released 2,500 recruiters so they could ship out with tactical units, officials say. The Marines also sent scores fewer people to recruiting school because they were needed for military operations.

Reenlistment rates, which have remained strong despite lengthy combat tours, took a slight downturn in the active-duty Army and Army National Guard during the first four months of fiscal 2005. The Army met 94 percent of its target for getting first-term soldiers to reenlist, and it hit 96 percent among those in mid-career. An earlier study of troops in Bosnia showed they were initially more likely to reenlist than those who had stayed home, but their renewal rates dropped as the number, length and danger of deployments increased.

"I worry about the soldiers with the second and third tour . . . since 9/11," Cody, the Army vice chief, told reporters Thursday.

As it rounds up troops for deployments, the Army has had to allocate limited equipment. It has shuffled thousands of items from radios to rifles between units, geared up new industrial production, and depleted the Army`s pre-positioned stocks of tanks, Humvees and other assets to outfit units for combat.

Army stocks in Southwest Asia are exhausted, and those in Europe have also been "picked over," one U.S. official said. Roughly half of the Army and Marine equipment stored afloat on ships has been used up, the official said. Refilling the stocks must wait until the Iraq war winds down, Army officials say.

Meanwhile, a sizable portion of Marine and Army gear is in Iraq, wearing out at up to six times the normal rate. Battle losses are mounting; the Army has lost 79 aircraft and scores of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. "We are equip-stretched, let there be no doubt about it. . . . This Army started this war not fully equipped," Cody said in recent congressional testimony.

The priority on allocating scarce resources to deployed units means that forces rotating back home -- especially reserve units -- are dropping in readiness. In many cases, they are being rated at the lowest level, C4, because of a lack of functioning equipment, required training or manpower.

"The Army in the aggregate is reporting readiness levels that are less today than they have been in the past," said Paul W. Mayberry, deputy to the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.

The Pentagon says that by rotating duties, it maintains enough ready forces and pre-positioned equipment to handle a crisis on the Korean Peninsula and other contingencies. But U.S. lawmakers are concerned.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) said he worries primarily about the U.S. ability to respond if "some problem should arise on the Korean Peninsula."

"How capable are we of handling another major conflict?" asked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "It`s pretty obvious that it would be incredibly difficult because of the portion of our resources devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan. What if a conflict broke out with North Korea or Iran?"
Feeling the Strain

Of all the military branches, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve are suffering the most, as they provide between a third and half of the troops in Iraq, despite a legacy of chronic shortages in their manning and equipment.

"The real stress on the system was the fact that no one envisioned that we would have this level of commitment for the National Guard," which shipped seven combat brigades to Iraq and Afghanistan for the most recent rotation, Cody said.

Because the Army traditionally undersupplies Guard and reserve units, few had the troops or gear needed when mobilized. As a result, large numbers of soldiers and equipment were shifted from one unit to another, or "cross-leveled," to cobble together a force to deploy.

"We were woefully underequipped before the war started. That situation hasn`t gotten any better. As a matter of fact, it gets a little bit worse every day, because we continue to cross-level," Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told Congress this month.

The widespread fracturing of units is making it increasingly difficult for the Army to assemble viable forces from the remaining hodgepodge -- most of which have low readiness ratings, Army figures show. "It`s a little bit like Swiss cheese. We`ve taken out holes in the units," Lovelace said. "Those holes are a lot of times leaders, and they are hard to grow."

Already, the Guard and Reserve have deployed the vast majority of their forces most needed for fighting counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan -- such as military intelligence, civil affairs, infantry and military police -- bringing into question whether the Pentagon`s two-year limit on reserve mobilizations is sustainable.

"Can we do this forever? No. We can`t do this forever at current levels," the Army National Guard`s Schultz said in an interview.

In a sign of deeper problems, career citizen-soldiers frustrated by broken units and long, grueling war-zone duties are increasingly leaving the Guard. Attrition among career guardsmen is running at nearly 20 percent, said Schultz, who expects that as many as a third of the members of some units rotating back from Iraq will quit.

Recruitment is sluggish, reaching just 75 percent of the target for the first quarter of fiscal 2005 -- meaning that the Guard is unlikely to reach its desired strength of 350,000 soldiers this year.

The viability of the Army Guard and Reserve will prove decisive, senior Army leaders say, as they consider in 2006 whether to permanently increase the size of the active-duty Army, and if so by how much. It also marks a critical test of the military`s ability to appeal to the civilian population, not only with bonuses and education benefits, but also with an ethos of self-sacrifice that it considers the bedrock of the all-volunteer force.

"For the all-volunteer force to work, it has to work all the time, not just in peacetime," Schultz said. "It`s now time to answer the call to serve, to assemble on the village green."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Wir erinnern uns! Ab 20.03.2003 wurde zurückgeschoßen. 2 Jahre Irakkrieg.

washingtonpost.com
Nothing `New` in This War

By Andrew J. Bacevich
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48480-2005Mar…

Saturday, March 19, 2005; Page A25

"We are redefining war on our terms." So declared an exuberant George W. Bush just two years ago as the U.S. military completed its stunning demolition of Saddam Hussein`s regime.

The president seemingly had good reason to boast. In its initial stages, Operation Iraqi Freedom surpassed all expectations, affirming the verdict first rendered more than a decade before by Operation Desert Storm: The United States, the greatest power the world had ever seen, had apparently mastered the art of war. America`s armed forces appeared invincible.

Two years later war is no longer doing the president`s bidding. In recent weeks, much of the news from the Middle East has been about the movements for democracy and free elections in Iraq and neighboring countries. But the claims that "freedom is on the march" cannot conceal this fact: In Iraq, protracted conflict is draining the lifeblood from America`s armed services.

Evidence that U.S. forces are badly overstretched has become incontrovertible. Recruits for the all-volunteer force are drying up. Only the quasi-permanent mobilization of tens of thousands of part-time soldiers allows the Army to meet its day-to-day requirements -- an arrangement that the chief of Army reserves has declared unsustainable. Meanwhile, revelations of GI misconduct accumulate, a worrisome sign of eroding discipline. Worst of all, the casualty list grows ever longer. To the discerning observer, stress fractures in the imposing edifice of American military supremacy have begun to appear.

How are we to account for this surprising turn of events? Among some observers, incompetence in the Pentagon`s upper echelons has found favor as the preferred explanation. But blaming Donald Rumsfeld for our predicament in Iraq makes as much sense as blaming Paris Hilton for the trashiness of American pop culture: It`s an exercise in scapegoating that lets too many others -- including the American people -- off the hook.

The conflict in Iraq derives from a specific estimate of U.S. military capabilities, fostered by hawks such as Rumsfeld but casually endorsed by far too many Americans. According to that estimate, a combination of matchless technology and professionalism enabled the United States in the heady aftermath of the Cold War to devise a radically new way of war. Armed force in American hands had become both effective and economical -- not a bludgeon, as in days of old, but a scalpel. So, at least, we convinced ourselves.

In Iraq, this assessment and the expectations to which it gave rise have been found wanting. Rather than demonstrating a novel approach to war, combat there has become distressingly familiar.

Whereas technology was supposed to render the battlefield transparent, the "fog of war" settled over Iraq like a suffocating blanket. Never have U.S. forces fought in such ignorance of the enemy`s purpose, strength, leadership and order of battle. George Armstrong Custer knew more about the warriors he faced in 1876 than U.S. commanders today know about their adversaries.

Whereas precision weapons were supposedly making error, waste and collateral damage a thing of the past, the fight to control Iraqi cities has given the past a new life. Comparisons between the "liberation" of Fallujah and the Marines` assault on Hue in 1968 are only too apt. In both cases, victory was gained the old-fashioned way: through brute force.

Toppling Saddam Hussein opened a Pandora`s box of unanticipated complications. Whether it was attacks on oil pipelines or insurgents infiltrating into the new Iraqi security forces, events time and again caught U.S. officials flat-footed. Even success proves transitory, with yesterday`s apparent accomplishment becoming unglued today.

To which anyone with even a passing knowledge of history would reply: of course. This is what war has always been -- grueling, filthy, confusing, replete with accidents and miscues that victimize the innocent, giving rise to unforeseen consequences and loose ends. What qualifies as truly perplexing is not that the conflict in Iraq has reaffirmed this reality but that so many Americans, seduced by claims that this nation could bend war to our purposes, indulged in the fantasy that it would be otherwise.

Well, now we know better. But let this be said: If our experience in Iraq demolishes once and for all the martial illusions to which the current generation of Americans has proven susceptible, then the United States may yet derive some benefit from this costly misadventure.

The writer is a professor of international relations at Boston University and author of "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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`One huge US jail`

Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the frontline in America`s `war on terror`, where arrest can be random and allegations of torture commonplace. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark investigate on the ground and talk to former prisoners
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1440836,0…

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
Saturday March 19, 2005

Guardian
Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it`s a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan. Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it`s owned by an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won`t scare away his new friends.

Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate. Even a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.

Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.

When we landed in Kabul, Afghanistan was blue with a bruising cold. We were heading for the former al-Qaida strongholds in the south-east that were rumoured to be the focus of the new US network. How should we prepare, we asked local UN staff. "Don`t go," they said. None the less, we were able to find a driver, a Pashtun translator and a boxful of clementines, and set off on a five-and-a-half-hour trip south through the snow to Gardez, a market town dominated by two rapidly expanding US military bases.

There we met Dr Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, established in 2003 with funding from the US Congress to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to ensure that women`s and children`s rights were protected. He was delighted to see foreigners in town. At his office in central Gardez, Bidar showed us a wall of files. "All I do nowadays is chart complaints against the US military," he said. "Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them. Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who`ve been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails." He pulled out a handful of files: "People who have been arrested say they`ve been brutalised - the tactics used are beyond belief." The jails are closed to outside observers, making it impossible to test the truth of the claims.

Last November, a man from Gardez died of hypothermia in a US military jail. When his family were called to collect the body, they were given a $100 note for the taxi ride and no explanation. In scores more cases, people have simply disappeared.

Prisoner transports crisscross the country between a proliferating network of detention facilities. In addition to the camps in Gardez, there are thought to be US holding facilities in the cities of Khost, Asadabad and Jalalabad, as well as an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed "Camp Slappy" by former prisoners. There are 20 more facilities in outlying US compounds and fire bases that complement a major "collection centre" at Bagram air force base. The CIA has one facility at Bagram and another, known as the "Salt Pit", in an abandoned brick factory north of Kabul. More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many other countries are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows for sure because the US military declines to comment.

Anyone who has got in the way of the prison transports has been met with brutal force. Bidar directed us to a small Shia neighbourhood on the edge of town where a multiple killing was still under investigation. Inside a frozen courtyard, a former policeman, Said Sardar, 25, was sat beside his crutches. On May 1 2004, he was manning a checkpoint when a car careened through. "Inside were men dressed like Arabs, but they were western men," he said. "They had prisoners in the car." Sardar fired a warning shot for the car to stop. "The western men returned fire and within minutes two US attack helicopters hovered above us. They fired three rockets at the police station. One screamed past me. I saw its fiery tail and blacked out."

He was taken to Bagram, where US military doctors had to amputate his leg. Afterwards, he said, "an American woman appeared. She said the US was sorry. It was a mistake. The men in the car were Special Forces or CIA on a mission. She gave me $500." Sardar showed us into another room in his compound where a circle of children stared glumly at us; their fathers, all policemen, were killed in the same incident. "Five dead. Four in hospital. To protect covert US prisoner transports," he says. Later, US helicopters were deployed in two similar incidents that left nine dead.

In his builders` merchant`s shop, Mohammed Timouri describes how he lost his son. "Ismail was a part-time taxi driver, waiting to go to college," he says, handing us a photograph of a beardless, short-haired 19-year-old held aloft in a coffin at his funeral last March. "A convoy delivering prisoners from a facility in Jalalabad to one in Kabul became snarled up in traffic. A US soldier jumped down and lifted a woman out of the way. She screamed. Ismail stepped forward to explain she was a conservative person, wearing a burka. The soldier dropped the woman and shot Ismail in front of a crowd of 20 people."

Mohammed received a letter from the Afghan police: "We apologise to you," the police chief wrote. "An innocent was killed by Americans." The US army declined to comment on Ismail`s death or on a second fatal shooting by another prison transport at the same crossroads later that month. It also refused to comment on an incident outside Kabul when a prison patrol reportedly cleared a crowd of children by throwing a grenade into their midst. However, we have since heard that the CIA`s inspector general is investigating at least eight serious incidents, including two deaths in custody, following complaints by agents about the activities of their military colleagues.

There are insurgents active in the Gardez area, as there are throughout the south of Afghanistan, remnants of the old order and the newly disaffected. Every morning it takes Afghan police several hours to pick along the highway unearthing explosives concealed overnight. And so it was mid-morning before we were able to leave town, crawling over the Gardez-Khost pass, some 10,000ft high. No one saw us slipping on to the fertile Khost plain, where Osama bin Laden once had his training camps - the camps were destroyed by US cruise missiles in August 1998. Today a shrine to Taliban loyalists still greets travellers to the city, although no one here would say they preferred the old life.

US Camp Salerno, the largest base outside Kabul, dominates the area around Khost. Inside the city, Kamal Sadat, a local stringer for BBC World Service, told how he was detained last September and found himself locked up in a prison filled with suspects from many countries. "Even though I showed my press accreditation, I was hooded, driven to Salerno and then flown to another US base. I had no idea where I was or why I had been detained." He was held in a small wooden cell, and soldiers combed through his notebooks, copying down names and phone numbers. "Every time I was moved within the base, I was hooded again. Every prisoner has to maintain absolute silence. I could hear helicopters whirring above me. Prisoners were arriving and leaving all the time. There were also cells beneath me, under the ground." After three days, Sadat was flown back to Khost and freed without explanation. "It was only later I learned that I had been held in Bagram. If the BBC had not intervened, I fear I would not have got out." After his release, the US military said it had all been a misunderstanding, and apologised.

Camp Salerno, which houses the 1,200 troops of US Combined Taskforce Thunder, was being expanded when we arrived. Army tents were being replaced with concrete dormitories. The detention facility, concealed behind a perimeter of opaque green webbing, was being modernised and enlarged. Ensconced in a Soviet-era staff building was the camp`s commanding officer, Colonel Gary Cheeks. He listened calmly as we asked about the allegations of torture, deaths and disappearances at US detention facilities including Salerno. We read to him from a complaint made by a UN official in Kabul that accused the US military of using "cowboy-like excessive force". He eased forward in his chair: "There have been some tragic accidents for which we have apologised. Some people have been paid compensation."

We put to him the specific case of Mohammed Khan, from a village near the Pakistan border, who died in custody at Camp Salerno: his relatives say his body showed signs of torture. "You could go on for ages with a `he said, she said`. You have to take my word for it," said Cheeks. He remembered Khan`s death: "He was bitten by a snake and died in his cell." He added, "We are building new holding cells here to make life better for detainees. We are systematising our prison programme across the country."

For what reason? "So all guards and interrogators behave by the same code of behaviour," the colonel said. Is it not the case that an ever-increasing number of prisoners have vanished, while others are being shuttled between jails to keep their families in the dark? Cheeks moved towards his office door: "There are many things that are distorted. No one has vanished here ... Look, the war against the Taliban is one small part. I want the Afghan people with us. They are the key to ending conflict. If they fear us or we do wrong by them, then we have lost."

However, many Afghans who celebrated the fall of the Taliban have long lost faith in the US military. In Kabul, Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights Commission, told us, "Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has spawned serious human rights abuses, a system of which Afghanistan is but one part." In the past 18 months, the commission has logged more than 800 allegations of human rights abuses committed by US troops.

The Afghan government privately shares Nadery`s fears. One minister, who asked not to be named, said, "Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability."

What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace Guantánamo Bay. When that detention centre was set up in January 2002, it was essentially an offshore gulag - beyond the reach of the US constitution and even the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July 2004. The US supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington had jurisdiction to hear a case that would decide if the Cuban detentions were in violation of the US constitution, its laws or treaties. The military commissions, which had been intended to dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray, too. No prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed by a federal judge who ruled in January that they were "illegal". Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of American and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

Since September 11 2001, one of the US`s chief strategies in its "war on terror" has been to imprison anyone considered a suspect on whatever grounds. To that end it commandeered foreign jails, built cellblocks at US military bases and established covert CIA facilities that can be located almost anywhere, from an apartment block to a shipping container. The network has no visible infrastructure - no prison rolls, visitor rosters, staff lists or complaints procedures. Terror suspects are being processed in Afghanistan and in dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia in the southern Indian Ocean. Those detained are held incommunicado, without charge or trial, and frequently shuttled between jails in covert air transports, giving rise to the recently coined US military expression "ghost detainees".

Most of the countries hosting these invisible prisons are already partners in the US coalition. Others, notably Syria, are pragmatic associates, which work privately alongside the CIA and US Special Forces, despite bellicose public statements from President Bush (he has condemned Syria for harbouring terrorism, for aiding the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime, and most recently has demanded that Syrian troops quit Lebanon).

All the host countries are renowned for their poor human rights records, enabling interrogators (US soldiers, contractors and their local partners) to operate. We have obtained prisoner letters, declassified FBI files, legal depositions, witness statements and testimony from US and UK officials, which document the alleged methods deployed in Afghanistan - shackles, hoods, electrocution, whips, mock executions, sexual humiliation and starvation - and suggest they are practised across the network. Sir Nigel Rodley, a former UN special rapporteur on torture, said, "The more hidden detention practices there are, the more likely that all legal and moral constraints on official behaviour will be removed."

The only "ghost detainees" to have been identified by Washington are a handful of high-profile al-Qaida operatives such as Abu Zubayda, Bin Laden`s lieutenant, who vanished after being picked up by Pakistani authorities in Faisalabad in March 2002. In June of that year, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Zubayda was "under US control". He did not say where, although sources in the Pakistani government said Zubayda was being held at a CIA facility in their country.

In May 2003, Bush clarified the fate of Waleed Muhammad bin Attash, an alleged conspirator in the USS Cole bombing, who disappeared after being arrested by police in Pakistan in April 2003. Bush described Attash as "a killer ... one less person that people who love freedom have to worry about"; he is also one more person who has never appeared on a US prison roll.

In June 2004, a senior counterterrorism official in Britain confirmed that Hambali (a nom de guerre) - accused of organising the October 2002 Bali bombings and unseen since Thai police seized him in August 2003 - was "singing like a bird", apparently at the US base on Diego Garcia.

Evidence we have collected, however, shows that many more of those swept up in the network have few provable connections to any outlawed organisation; experts in the field describe their value in the war against terror as "negligible". Former prisoners claim they were released only after naming names, coerced into making false confessions that led to the arrests of more people unconnected to terrorism, in a system of justice that owes more to Stanley Milgram`s Six Degrees Of Separation - where anyone can be linked to everyone else in the world in as many stages - than to analytical jurisprudence.

The floating population of "ghost detainees", according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000.

The roots of the prison network can be traced to the legal wrangles that began as soon as the first terror suspects were rounded up just weeks after the September 11 attacks. As CIA agents and US forces began to capture suspected al-Qaida fighters in the war in Afghanistan, Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, looked for ways to "dispense justice swiftly, close to where our forces may be fighting, without years of pre-trial proceedings or post-trial appeals".

On November 13 2001, George Bush signed an order to establish military commissions to try "enemy belligerents" who commit war crimes. At such a commission, a foreign war criminal would have no choice over his defence counsel, no right to know the evidence against him, no way of obtaining any evidence in his favour and no right of attorney-client confidentiality. Defending the commissions, Gonzales (now promoted to US attorney general) insisted, "The suggestion that [they] will afford only sham justice like that dispensed in dictatorial nations is an insult to our military justice system."

When the first prisoners arrived at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002, Donald Rumsfeld announced that they were all Taliban or al-Qaida fighters, and as such were designated "unlawful combatants". The US administration argued that al-Qaida and the Taliban were not the official army of Afghanistan, but a criminal force that did not wear uniforms, could not be distinguished from civilians and practised war crimes; on this basis, the administration claimed, it was entitled to sidestep the Geneva conventions and normal legal constraints.

From there, it was only a small moral step for the Bush administration to overlook the use of torture by regimes previously condemned by the US state department, so long as they, too, signed up to the war against terror. "Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and even Syria were all asked to make their detention facilities and expert interrogators available to the US," one former counterterrorism agent told us.

In the UK, a similar process began unfolding. In December 2001, the then home secretary David Blunkett withdrew Britain from its obligation under the European human rights treaty not to detain anyone without trial; on December 18, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act was passed, extending the government`s powers of arrest and detention. Within 24 hours, 10 men were seized in dawn raids on their homes and taken to Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons (some of them will have been among those released in the past week).

Subsequently the Foreign Office subtly modified internal guidance to diplomats, enabling them to use intelligence obtained through torture. A letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office directorate sent to Sir Michael Jay, head of the diplomatic service, and Mathew Kidd of Whitehall liaison, a euphemism for MI6, suggested in March 2003 that although such intelligence was inadmissible as evidence in a UK court, it could still be received and acted upon by the British government. The government`s attitude was spelt out to the Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs and peers by foreign secretary Jack Straw who, while acknowledging that torture was "completely unacceptable" and that information obtained under torture is more likely to be embellished, concluded, "you cannot ignore it if the price of ignoring it is 3,000 people dead" [a reference to the September 11 attacks].

One former ambassador told us, "This was new ground for the FCO. As long as we didn`t do it, we`re OK. But by taking advantage of this intelligence, we`re encouraging the use of torture and, in my opinion, are in contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture. What worried me most was that information obtained under torture, given credence by some gung-ho Whitehall warrior, could be used to keep another poor soul locked up without trial or charge."

Although the true extent of the US extra-legal network is only now becoming apparent, people began to disappear as early as 2001 when the US asked its allies in Europe and the Middle East to examine their refugee communities in search of possible terror cells, such as that run by Mohammed Atta in Hamburg which had planned and executed the September 11 attacks. Among the first to vanish was Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian asylum seeker who had been living in Sweden with his wife and children for three years. Hanan, Agiza`s wife, told us how on December 18 2001 her husband failed to return home from his language class.

"The phone rang at 5pm. It was Ahmed. He said he`d been arrested and then the line went dead. The next day our lawyer told me that Ahmed was being sent back to Egypt. It would be better if he was dead." Agiza and his family had fled Egypt in 1991, after years of persecution, and in absentia he had been sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. Hanan said, "I called my mother-in-law in Egypt. Finally, in April, she was allowed to see Ahmed in Mazrah Torah prison, in Cairo, when he revealed what had happened."

On December 18 2001, Agiza and a second Egyptian refugee, Mohammed Al-Zery, had been arrested by Swedish intelligence acting upon a request from the US. They were driven, shackled and blindfolded, to Stockholm`s Bromma airport, where they were cuffed and cut from their clothes. Suppositories were inserted into both men`s anuses, they were wrapped in plastic nappies, dressed in jumpsuits and handed over to an American aircrew who flew them out of Sweden on a private executive jet.

Agiza and Al-Zery landed in Cairo at 3am the next morning and were taken to the state security investigation office, where they were held in solitary confinement in underground cells. Mohammed Zarai, former director of the Cairo-based Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, told us that Agiza was repeatedly electrocuted, hung upside down, whipped with an electrical flex and hospitalised after being made to lick his cell floor clean. Hanan, who was granted asylum in Sweden in 2004, said, "I can`t sleep at night without expecting someone to knock on the door and send us away on a plane to a place that scares me more than anything else. What can Ahmed do?" Her husband is still incarcerated in Cairo, while Al-Zery is under house arrest there. There have been calls for an international independent investigation into the roles of the Swedish, US and Egyptian authorities.

We were able to chart the toing and froing of the private executive jet used at Bromma partly through the observations of plane-spotters posted on the web and partly through a senior source in the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). It was a Gulfstream V Turbo, tailfin number N379P; its flight plans always began at an airstrip in Smithfield, North Carolina, and ended in some of the world`s hot spots. It was owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, incorporated in Delaware, a brass plaque company with nonexistent directors, hired by American agents to revive an old CIA tactic from the 1970s, when agency men had kidnapped South American criminals and flown them back to their own countries to face trial so that justice could be rendered. Now "rendering" was being used by the Bush administration to evade justice.

Robert Baer, a CIA case officer in the Middle East until 1997, told us how it works. "We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on civilian transport to a third country where, let`s make no bones about it, they use torture. If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the US cannot be blamed as it is not doing the heavy work."

The Agiza and Al-Zery cases were not the first in which the Gulfstream was used. On October 23 2001, at 2.40am at Karachi airport, it picked up Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiologist who had been arrested by Pakistan`s ISI and was wanted in connection with the USS Cole attack. On January 10 2002, the jet was used again, taking off from Halim airport in Jakarta with a hooded and shackled Mohammed Saeed Iqbal Madni on board, an Egyptian accused of being an accomplice of British shoe bomber Richard Reid. Madni was flown to Cairo where, according to the Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, he died during interrogation.

Since then, the jet has been used at least 72 times, including a flight in June 2002 when it landed in Morocco to pick up German national Mohammed Zamar, who was "rendered" to Syria, his country of origin, before disappearing.

It was in December 2001 that the US began to commandeer foreign jails so that its own interrogators could work on prisoners within them. Among the first were Haripur and Kohat, no-frills prisons in the lawless North West Frontier Province of Pakistan which now hold nearly as many detainees as Guantánamo. In January, we attempted to visit Kohat jail, but as we drove towards the security perimeter our vehicle was turned back by ISI agents and we were escorted back to the nearby city of Peshawar. We eventually located several former detainees, including Mohammed, a university student who described how he was arrested and then initially interrogated in one of many covert ISI holding centres that are being jointly run with the CIA. Mohammed said, "I was questioned for four weeks in a windowless room by plain-clothed US agents. I didn`t know if it was day or night. They said they could make me disappear." One day he was bundled into a vehicle. "I arrived in Kohat jail. There were 100 prisoners from all over the Middle East. Later I was moved to Haripur where there were even more."

Adil, another detainee who was held for three years in Haripur after illegally crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan, where he had escaped from the Taliban, says, "US interrogators came and went as they pleased." Both Mohammed and Adil said they were often taken from the hot cell and doused with ice-cold water. Adil says, "American women ordered us to get undressed. They`d touch us and taunt us. They made us lie naked on top of each other and simulate acts."

Mohammed and Adil were released without charge in November 2004 but, according to legal depositions, there are still 400 prisoners detained in the jails at the request of the US. Among them are many who it is extremely unlikely took part in the Afghan war: they are too young or too old to have been combatants. Some have taken legal action against the Pakistani authorities for breach of human rights.

A military intelligence official in Washington told us that no one in the US administration seemed concerned about the impact of the coercive tactics practised by the growing global network on the quality of intelligence obtained, although there was plenty of evidence it was unreliable. On September 26 2002, Maher Arar, a 34-year-old Canadian computer scientist, was arrested at New York`s JFK airport as a result of a paper-thin evidential chain. Syrian-born Arar told us, "I was pulled aside by US immigration at 2pm. I told them I had a connecting flight to Montreal where I had a job interview." However, Arar was "rendered" in a private jet, via Washington, Portland and Rome, landing in Amman, Jordan, where he was held at what a Jordanian source described as a US-run interrogation centre. From there, he was handed over to Syria, the country he had left as a 17-year-old boy. He says he spent the next 12 months being tortured and in solitary confinement, unaware that someone he barely knew had named him as a terrorist.

The chain of events that led to Arar`s arrest, or kidnapping, began in November 2001, when another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, from Montreal, was arrested at Damascus airport. He was accused of being a terrorist and asked to identify his al-Qaida connections. By the time he`d endured two years of torture, El-Maati had reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal, including Abdullah Almalki, an electrical engineer. Almalki was arrested as he flew into Damascus airport to join his parents on holiday in May 2002, and would spend the next two years being tortured in a Syrian detention facility.

Almalki knew Arward Al-Bousha, also from Ottawa, who in July 2002, upon arriving in Damascus to visit his dying father, was also arrested. El-Maati, Almalki and Al-Bousha all knew Maher Arar by sight through Muslim community events in Ottawa. After his release from jail in Syria, uncharged, in January 2004, El-Maati admitted that he had erroneously named Maher Arar as a terrorist to "stop the vicious torture". Arar, who was eventually released in October 2003 after a Syrian court threw out a coerced confession in which he said he had been trained by al-Qaida, told us, "I am not a terrorist. I don`t know anyone who is. But the tolerant Muslim community I come from here in Canada has become vitriolic and demoralised." Arar`s case is now the subject of a judicial inquiry in Canada, but since his release and that of Al-Bousha and Almalki, another five men from Ottawa have been detained in Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Five days after the US supreme court ruled in July 2004 that federal courts had jurisdiction over Guantánamo, Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old computer programmer from Karachi, disappeared during a business trip to Lahore. He was not taken to Guantánamo. His father Hayat told us that he learned of his son`s fate after a neighbour called on August 2 to say that US newspapers were running a story about "the capture of a figure from al-Qaida in Pakistan" who had led "the CIA to a rich lode of information". An unnamed US intelligence official claimed Naeem Noor Khan operated websites and email addresses for al-Qaida. The following day Pakistan`s information minister trumpeted the ISI`s seizure of Naeem Noor Khan on behalf of the US on July 13. The prisoner had "confessed to receiving 25 days of military training from an al-Qaida camp in June 1998". No corroborative evidence was offered.

Babar Awan, one of Pakistan`s leading advocates, representing the family, said he had learned from a contact in the Pakistani government that Naeem Noor Khan was wanted by the US, having been named by one of a group of Malaysian students who had been detained incommunicado and threatened with torture in Pakistan in September 2003. Awan said, "The student was subsequently freed uncharged and described how he was threatened until he offered the names of anyone he had met in Pakistan. There is no evidence against Naeem Noor Khan except for this coerced statement, and even worse he has now vanished and so there is no prison to petition for his release."

Khan had been swallowed up by a catch-all system that gathers up anyone connected by even a thread to terror. Unable to distinguish its friends from its enemies, the US suspects both.

Dawn broke on the festival of Eid and four US army vehicles gunned their engines in preparation for a "hearts and minds" operation in Khost city, Afghanistan. A roll call of marines, each with their blood group scrawled on their boots, was ticked off and we were added to the muster. The convoy hurtled towards the city. Men and boys began to run alongside. First a handful and then a dozen. The crowd was heading for a vast prayer ground, and soon there were thousands of devotees in brand newEid caps and starched shalwas marching out to pray. The US Humvees pulled over. The armoured personnel carriers, too. A dozen US marines stepped down, eyes obscured by goggles, faces by balaclavas.

They fell into formation and stomped into the crowd while a group of Afghan police looked on incredulously. "Keep tight. Keep tight. Keep looking all around us," a US marines captain shouted. More than 10,000 Pashtun men were now on their knees praying as a line of khaki pushed between them.

An egg flew. Then another. "One more, sir, and the guy who did it is going down," a young sergeant mumbled, as the disturbed crowd rose to its feet. Bearded men with Kalashnikovs emerged from behind a stone wall and edged towards us, cutting off our path. The line of khaki began to panic, and jostled the children. "Back away, back away now," shouted the sergeant. Suddenly an armoured personnel carrier roared to meet us. "Jump up, people," the captain shouted, and the convoy sped back to Camp Salerno.

And perhaps this event above all others - of a nervous phalanx of US marines forcing its way across a prayer ground on one of the holiest, most joyous days in the Islamic calendar, an itching trigger away from a Somalian-style dogfight of their own making - is the one that encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with the global war against terror. The US army came to Afghanistan as liberators and now are feared as governors, judges and jailers. How many US marines know what James Madison, an architect of the US constitution, wrote in 1788? Reflecting on the War of Independence in which Americans were arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial by British forces, Madison concluded that the "accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny"
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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President Bush to Iraqis: "We`re puttin` freedom on your families."
Besonders in Fallujah

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Informed Comment
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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, March 19, 2005

Two Car Bombings of US Troops
Iraqi Politics Still Unsettled

[urlWire service report]http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_19-3-2005_pg7_47[/url] that ` Insurgents attacked US troops with two suicide car bombs in the western Iraqi town of Haditha on Friday, local witnesses said. They said a suicide bomber detonated a car next to a US patrol after American troops entered the town looking for insurgents. A second suicide car bomb exploded as US troops were securing the area after the first attack, witnesses said. ` Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that 5 Iraqis were killed in separate guerrilla attacks.

[urlAFP reminds us that]http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=13553[/url] Iraq remains highly insecure 2 years after the American invasion. It reports that of the $18 billion appropriated by the US Congress for reconstruction aid, $5 billion has been spent (or earmarked for?) security.

[urlThe Financial Times]http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0080ca18-97d9-11d9-912c-00000e2511c8,dwp_uuid=c1a5b968-e1ed-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html[/url] tells the harrowing tale of shooting first and paying later in Iraq, including by private security teams-- not just US military.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that there is a big strike by students and professors at Basra University, protesting the incursions onto the campus of members of the Sadr Movement, who are attempting to establish control over the university and its style of life.

It also says that a technical and architectural team from Iran is visiting Basra, having been invited by the city authorities to come help with reconstruction.
The BBC`s Becky Branford has done an article on the controversial character of the Iraqi interim governing council or transitional administrative law (TAL). She quotes my complaint that requiring a 2/3s majority to form a government is a recipe for gridlock, as well as defenders of the TAL who say that it forces the parties to find a consensus. I think there were other and better ways to encourage consensus, including a bicameral legislature where the upper house over-represented the Kurds and Sunni Arabs. Making it extremely difficult to form a government is highly unwise in a parliamentary system, and allowing smaller parties to virtually hold the majority hostage to maximalist demands is a recipe for resentment, not for consensus.

[urlRod Nordland of Newsweek]http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7234649/site/newsweek/[/url] is also beset by doubts and worries arising from the difficulties the Iraqis are having in forming a government.

[urlArdeshir Moaveni details the ways]http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav031805a.shtml[/url] in which Iran may benefit from the new political configuration in Iraq. His suggestion that we keep our eye on what the United Iraqi Alliance decides about the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) as a barometer of Iraq/Iran relations is an excellent one.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Five elected provincial councils chose governors by secret ballot this week. All are dominated by the parties of the United Iraqi Alliance (primarily the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party). Results:

Aziz Kadhim `Alwan - Governor of Nasiriyah
Muhammad al-Wa`ili - " " Basra
Latif Muhammad Tarfah - governor of Kut
Adil Mahudar Hasan - Amara
Muhammad Ali Hassani - Samawah

Earlier reports had suggested that the Sadrists might dominate Kut and Amarah, but that appears not to have panned out.

posted by Juan @ [url3/19/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/two-car-bombings-of-us-troops-iraqi.html[/url]

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CONDI RANKS PAKISTAN’S DEMOCRACY HIGHER THAN FLORIDA, OHIO
Musharraf Basks in Secretary of State’s Praise
http://www.borowitzreport.com/default.asp

In her first visit to Pakistan since becoming Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice praised President Gen. Pervez Musharraf for leading his nation on the road to democracy, saying that Pakistan is now more democratic than either Florida or Ohio.

“Pakistan is still very much a work in progress on its way to becoming a democracy,” said Dr. Rice, standing beside a beaming President Musharraf. “Having said that, it is still a whale of a lot more democratic than Ohio, and it leaves Florida in the dust.”

Musharraf graciously accepted the Secretary of State’s praise, adding, “We know that we have to walk before we can run, and in our case, being more democratic than Florida or Ohio is an important first step.”

According to Dr. Jonah Lebeau of the University of Minnesota’s Democracy Institute, Pakistan’s democracy surpassed that of several counties in Florida, such as Miami-Dade, as early as 2002.

But, Dr. Lebeau says, Dr. Rice’s comments point at a new problem looming on the horizon for the U.S.: “We have been so busy exporting democracy lately that we may actually need to import some soon.”

Shortages of democracy in such states as Florida and Ohio, he says, may force the U.S. to look abroad for foreign sources of democracy, such as Switzerland or Belgium.

In other news, a bouquet of flowers presented to Dr. Rice in Afghanistan turned out to be heroin-producing poppies.

Elsewhere, an attorney for Saddam Hussein said that the former Iraqi dictator wanted to be tried by a jury of Robert Blake’s peers.

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THE NATION
Policy OKs First Strike to Protect U.S.
Pentagon strategic plan codifies unilateral, preemptive attacks. The doctrine marks a shift from coalitions such as NATO, analysts say.
By John Hendren
Times Staff Writer

March 19, 2005

WASHINGTON — Two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon has formally included in key strategic plans provisions for launching preemptive strikes against nations thought to pose a threat to the United States.

The doctrine also now stipulates that the U.S. will use "active deterrence" in concert with its allies "if we can" but could act unilaterally otherwise, Defense officials said.

The changes codify the more assertive defense policy adopted by the Bush administration since the Sept. 11 attacks and are included in a "National Military Strategy" and "National Defense Strategy," reports that are part of a comprehensive review of military strategy conducted every four years.

"The president has the obligation to protect the country," said Douglas J. Feith, the Defense Department`s undersecretary for policy. "And I don`t think that there`s anything in our Constitution that says that the president should not protect the country unless he gets some non-American`s participation or approval of that."

Pentagon managers use the strategic plan to guide such decisions as where to place bases, which bases to eliminate, what weapons to buy and where to position them. The heads of the United States` regional commands across the globe, in turn, use the strategy to prioritize spending and form strategies for eliminating threats in their regions.

"The potentially catastrophic impact of an attack against the United States, its allies and its interests may necessitate actions in self-defense to preempt adversaries before they can attack," the National Military Strategy states. A previous version, compiled in 1997, did not include plans for preemptive attacks.

However, Feith said that the United States would for the first time invite close allies such as the United Kingdom to review classified portions of U.S. defense strategy as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review, a four-year military policy and spending plan.

But the new strategy document further shifts the nation from the Cold War strategy of containing Eastern Europe to a global strategy of taking on enemies that emerge unexpectedly — as the administration argues Afghanistan did after the Sept. 11 attacks — and even terrorist organizations within friendly nations.

It appears to move the nation further from reliance on such international coalitions as NATO and more toward what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called "coalitions of the willing" under clear American leadership, analysts said.

"NATO is kind of missing in action now in their strategy," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute, a public policy group in Arlington, Va. "During the Clinton years coalition warfare with the other members of NATO was a centerpiece to our strategy, and now the administration is expecting almost nothing from the Europeans."

In some cases, respected global organizations seem to be viewed with suspicion. In describing the vulnerabilities of the United States, the document uses strong language to list international bodies — such as the International Court of Justice, created under a treaty that the United States has declined to sign — alongside terrorists.

"Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international [forums], judicial processes and terrorism," the document states.

The concern, Feith explained, was that some nations would try to criminalize American foreign policy by challenging it in international courts.

During the Cold War, the United States used the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance in an effort to build world consensus against anticipated threats from the Chinese and the now dissolved Soviet bloc. The new strategy highlights the United States` increasing inability to predict where the next conflict will occur, Feith said.

"I don`t think that the world gives us the luxury of picking areas," Feith said. "We have interests all over the world. I dare say that if anybody before September 11, 2001, was listing places that we would want to focus on as a matter of priority, Afghanistan would have been rather low on the list."


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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ANWR - The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

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Saturday, March 19, 2005
War News for Saturday, March 19, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed, seven wounded in Kirkuk bombing.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in Baghdad ambush.

Bring ‘em on: US-funded Iraqi newspaper offices bombed in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: US convoy attacked by car bomb in Ramadi.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting reported in Ramadi after insurgents attack municipal building.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline ablaze near Beiji.

Bring ‘em on: US patrol ambushed by two car bombs near Haditha.

Bring ‘em on: Turkish businessman assassinated near Dujail.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi soldier kidnapped near Tuz.

Three Iraqi civilians killed in accident with US military vehicle near Tikrit.

Things you don’t see in the US media. “Though US President George W Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been giving the impression that the insurgency situation in Iraq is improving, the American Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), which monitors the situation daily, says it has worsened. ‘The insurgency in Iraq has grown in size and complexity over the past year. Attacks numbered approximately 25 per day one year ago,’ DIA Director Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington.”

Rummy’s Army. “Two years after the United States launched a war in Iraq with a crushing display of power, a guerrilla conflict is grinding away at the resources of the U.S. military and casting uncertainty over the fitness of the all-volunteer force, according to senior military leaders, lawmakers and defense experts. The unexpectedly heavy demands of sustained ground combat are depleting military manpower and gear faster than they can be fully replenished. Shortfalls in recruiting and backlogs in needed equipment are taking a toll, and growing numbers of units have been broken apart or taxed by repeated deployments, particularly in the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve. ‘What keeps me awake at night is, what will this all-volunteer force look like in 2007?’ Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army vice chief of staff, said at a Senate hearing this week. The Iraq war has also led to a drop in the overall readiness of U.S. ground forces to handle threats at home and abroad, forcing the Pentagon to accept new risks -- even as military planners prepare for a global anti-terrorism campaign that administration officials say could last for a generation.”

No-go zones. “Nearly two years since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, Baghdad is still one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It is ringed in peril. Travel in any direction a few miles outside city limits and the risks intensify. The ferocity and growth of these no-go zones underscores the need for additional Iraqi security forces in and around Baghdad as the US begins to reduce its manpower here. Because of kidnappings and murders on the road immediately south of Baghdad, that area has been dubbed the ‘triangle of death’ by journalists. The areas immediately north and west of the city that have long been called the Sunni triangle has also become shorthand for a no-go zone. While the term ‘triangle’ makes it seem as if the danger zone is a well defined area with borders, the frontier of danger around the city flexes and shifts almost daily, sometimes surging into the middle of Baghdad and at other times withdrawing to what feels like a safe distance.

Fasal. “At the request of both parties, the FT put Mr Dulaimi`s family and the security company in question in contact with each other. In these situations, the amount of compensation is decided on a case-by-case basis. The US military`s standard payout is $2,500 - about two days` pay for a western ex-military security man, or two years` wages for a mid-level Iraqi civil servant. Many security companies (although not necessarily John`s) use this as a base. ‘This is the price of an Iraqi citizen,’ snorted one Kerrada policeman in disgust. In fact, fasal - blood money - is often paid when an Iraqi kills an Iraqi, particularly in a rural area. Representatives of the victim`s tribe will sit down with the killer`s tr ibe and discuss among themselves the amount of compensation. In these disputes, $2,500 would be a fairly average payout. However, while Iraqis resign themselves to the tribal system of arbitration in the absence of a functioning judicial system, when foreigners get involved the process can become insulting. Tribal arbitration sessions are meetings of equals, often held in bedouin-style tents with all the pomp and circumstance of traditional Iraqi society. For a relative of an Iraqi shot by a foreigner to even find out whom to contact for compensation, he must often stand for hours outside the barbed wire of bases and police stations, endure intense questioning and weapons pat-downs. When the money is paid, it seems more like a token payout to make a problem go away.”

Support the troops! “According to doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., 60 percent of the wounded soldiers coming back from Iraq have traumatic brain injuries. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has recently completely zeroed out funding for the Federal TBI Act, which provides exactly this kind of help.”

Family values. “Tammy Burleson moved to Dallas last fall when her son was sent to the closest spinal cord injury center to Louisiana. By then, she`d already taken about two months off from her job at a center that works with mentally disabled people. Although she lost her $7-an-hour income, the center kept paying for her health insurance until early March. Now, she has no insurance, and caring for her son full time won`t allow her to work again soon. Kristi was taking college classes in preparation for nursing school and planned to resume her studies next semester after taking some time off for the baby. Her plans changed as well, although if she returns to college someday she will receive financial help from the VA. As a 100 percent disabled veteran, Burleson will receive lifetime compensation and medical care from the VA. But the family struggles to cover other expenses. Friends, church and the community are trying to help.”

Commentary

Analysis: “But after two years in Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘now we have transformation defined as building more Army divisions, building more Marine divisions with lighter forces,’ Zinni said, adding: ‘Now we have a military that is malformed for the obligations thrown on it.’ Moreover, American society continues to have a complex and changing relationship with its military, he said. The relationship has gone from the ‘aura and glow of the greatest generation,’ which won World War II, to being blamed for the very confusing Vietnam War, to being ignored because it comprised professional fighters, not the citizen soldiers of decades past, Zinni said. ‘It seemed like some alien institution out there you didn`t have to relate to,’ he said. But things have come full circle because citizen soldiers-National Guardsmen and reservists-are in the thick of fighting, which the media brings into American living rooms, Zinni said. Most Americans now respect the military even if they disagree with the political decision to go to war, he said. But magnetic yellow ribbons are not enough, the retired general said. ‘This is your military. This is your security; this is your protection. It is the image you project overseas,’ Zinni said. ‘You need to re-embrace that military. You need to demand that the military be the military you want.’” Link via Hairy Fish Nuts.

Analysis: “At one of his rare news conferences this week, Bush was asked about a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. He replied: ‘Our troops will come home when Iraq is capable of defending herself.’ He praised the Iraqi people for their bravery and determination to vote and form a democratic government; he said the future was in their hands; and he called the first meeting of the National Assembly ‘a bright moment in history.’ He did not talk about the fact that this was the week of the second anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. He did not talk about the mistakes and miscalculations that were made. He did not talk about these things because he wasn`t asked."
# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:55 AM
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Latest Fatality: Mar 18, 2005

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

[Joerver]

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Doping im Sport ist seit Wochen ein Thema in den USA.

free-range eggs [agr.] Eier aus Freilandhaltung

[Incidit]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 20. März 2003, 6:19
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,241106,00.html

Bush-Rede im Wortlaut

" Wir werden als Ergebnis nur den Sieg akzeptieren"

US-Präsident George W. Bush hat in der Nacht in einer nur vier Minuten langen Rede den Beginn des Krieges gegen den Irak angekündigt. Die Rede im Wortlaut:

" Liebe Landsleute, zu dieser Stunde befinden sich amerikanische und verbündete Streitkräfte in der Anfangsphase der militärischen Operationen zur Entwaffnung des Iraks, um seine Bevölkerung zu befreien und die Welt vor einer ernsten Gefahr zu schützen. Auf meinen Befehl hin haben die Streitkräfte der Koalition begonnen, ausgewählte Ziele von militärischem Wert anzugreifen, um Saddam Husseins Fähigkeit zu unterminieren, Krieg zu führen. Dies sind die ersten Stufen eines breit angelegten und koordinierten Feldzugs.

Mehr als 35 Länder gewähren entscheidende Unterstützung, von der Benutzung von Marine- und Luftwaffenstützpunkten bis zu Informationen und Logistik zum Einsatz von Kampfeinheiten. Jedes Land in dieser Koalition hat entschieden, die Pflicht und die Ehre zu übernehmen, sich an unserer gemeinsamen Verteidigung zu beteiligen.

Allen Männern und Frauen der US-Streitkräfte im Nahen Osten sage ich, der Frieden einer besorgten Welt und die Hoffnungen eines unterdrückten Volkes hängen jetzt von Ihnen ab. Dieses Vertrauen ist wohl begründet. Die Feinde, die Ihnen gegenüberstehen, werden Ihre Fähigkeit und Tapferkeit kennen lernen. Die Menschen, die Sie befreien werden, werden Zeugen des ehrenhaften und ehrenwerten Geistes des US-Militärs werden.

In diesem Konflikt steht Amerika einem Feind gegenüber, der Konventionen des Krieges oder moralische Regeln missachtet. Saddam Hussein hat irakische Truppen und Ausrüstung in zivile Gebiete gebracht, um unschuldige Männer, Frauen und Kinder als Schutzschild für sein Militär zu benutzen, eine letzte Grausamkeit an seinem Volk.

Die Amerikaner und die ganze Welt sollen wissen, dass die verbündeten Streitkräfte alles tun werden, um unschuldige Zivilisten zu verschonen.

Ein Krieg im harten Terrain eines Landes von der Größe Kaliforniens könnte länger und schwieriger sein, als einige voraussagen, und es wird unsere anhaltende Verpflichtung erfordern, um den Irak zu einem geeinten, stabilen und freien Land zu machen. Wir kommen in den Irak mit Respekt für seine Bevölkerung, für seine große Zivilisation und für die Religionen, die sie ausübt. Wir haben keine Ambitionen im Irak, außer die Bedrohung zu beseitigen und die Kontrolle der Bevölkerung über ihr eigenes Land wieder herzustellen.

Ich weiß, dass die Familien unserer Soldaten für ihre sichere Heimkehr beten, und dass Millionen von Amerikanern für die Sicherheit ihrer Lieben und den Schutz der Unschuldigen beten. Für ihr Opfer haben sie die Dankbarkeit und den Respekt des amerikanischen Volkes und die Gewissheit, dass niemand von der Gnade eines rechtlosen Regimes abhängig sein wird, das den Frieden mit Waffen des Massenmords bedroht.

Wir werden uns dieser Bedrohung jetzt mit unserer Armee, Luftwaffe, Marine, Küstenwache und Marineinfanterie stellen, so dass wir es nicht später mit einer Armee von Feuerwehrleuten und Polizei und Ärzten in den Straßen unserer Städte tun müssen. Nun, da der Konflikt da ist, ist der einzige Weg, seine Dauer zu begrenzen, entschlossen zuzuschlagen. Und ich versichere Ihnen, dies wird kein halbherziger Feldzug, und wir werden als Ergebnis nur den Sieg akzeptieren.

Meine Mitbürger, die Gefahren für unser Land und die Welt werden überwunden. Wir werden diese gefährlichen Zeiten hinter uns lassen und mit der Arbeit des Friedens fortfahren. Wir werden den Frieden verteidigen. Wir werden Anderen den Frieden bringen. Und wir werden siegen. Möge Gott unser Land schützen und alle, die es verteidigen."

[Incidit]

[Joerver]

Deconstructing Iraq: Year Three Begins
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2274


A Little Background Music

Shakar Odai, the head of the Internal Affairs Department of the Baghdad police was recently interviewed by David Enders of Mother Jones magazine who wrote: "‘More than 98` percent of the police officers (a force known alike for its use of torture and its widespread corruption) returned to work after the war, [Odai] said, and added that the police force has been greatly expanded as well. Some of the officers definitely sympathize with the resistance, he says. As he speaks, a bomb goes off outside, rattling the windows. Odai doesn`t even turn around to look. ‘That happens sometimes fifteen times a day,` he sighs before continuing. ‘Before the war, we had six months to do background checks on any police officer we hired,` he said. ‘After the war, the Americans just began appointing officers.`

"Before he refers me to the seventh floor, where the MOI`s human rights department is located, he offers me a piece of wardrobe advice, specifically in regard to the power-blue Oxford I`m wearing, the same color the police wear. ‘You should change your shirt. Someone might try to assassinate you.`"

Caryle Murphy and John Ward Anderson of the Washington Post offered the following on the opening of the Iraqi National Assembly inside "little America," also known as "the Green Zone" in a completely shut down Baghdad: "Amid tight security and the sound of explosions, Iraq`s new parliament met for the first time Wednesday as Iraqi politicians and citizens alike urged lawmakers to stop bickering, form a new government and tackle the country`s numerous problems, particularly the violent insurgency. The source of the blasts, which apparently came from mortars, was under investigation by the U.S. military. The explosions rattled windows in the auditorium inside Baghdad`s heavily fortified Green Zone, where lawmakers gathered… for the first meeting of a freely elected parliament in Iraq in almost 50 years. U.S. helicopters hovered overheard, and several bridges approaching the Green Zone were closed because of the threat of suicide bombings, car bomb attacks and other potential insurgent strikes."

A Little Road Static

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports on the difficulty of leaving Baghdad in safety heading in any direction now that guerrilla and criminal "no-go" areas have spread so completely around the capital: "Mohammed Ghazi Umron has a front-row seat for the perils of Iraq`s roads: the cab of his truck. And while this Shiite in his 30s enthusiastically voted in Iraq`s January election, from where he sits the country is as dangerous as ever. The road north through Baquba? ‘Pretty dangerous,`` he says. Due south through Mahmudiyah? ‘It`s bad, but I haven`t heard of any drivers being killed there in a few weeks.` How about west through Abu Ghraib and on to Fallujah? ‘Very, very dangerous. We try not to go past Abu Ghraib.`… Nearly two years since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, Baghdad is still one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It is ringed in peril. Travel in any direction a few miles outside city limits and the risks intensify."

Juan Cole at his Informed Comment blog reminds us that: "US Embassy employees are forbidden to travel by land the ten miles [from the Green Zone] to Baghdad airport because it is so dangerous, and have to be helicoptered in and out of the capital." Too bad they didn`t bother to tell that to the Italians before intelligence operative Nicola Calipari headed by car for the airport with the freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena.

A Little Vietnam Buzz, or Thanks for the Memories (how brief they are!)

Back in late January, John Hedren of the Los Angeles Times reported: "The latest attempt to overhaul the U.S. approach [to the Iraqi forces] will incorporate lessons of military training successes in Afghanistan -- where American advisors remain with Afghan units for two years -- and will address what commanders describe as the scarcity of mid-level Iraqi leadership." In the minds of American planners, this represents a "sea change in methods" enabling "U.S. military strategists to assign an expanded cadre of American advisors to work closely with Iraqi units after they receive basic training… Under one proposal being considered, Americans would lead Iraqi military units, which U.S. commanders say suffer from a `leadership gap.`"

This Friday, in a piece on exceedingly modest American troop cuts planned for Iraq in 2006 (if everything goes peachily), Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported: "To speed the training, General [Richard A.] Cody [the Army vice chief of staff] announced Thursday that 666 Army officers and senior enlisted soldiers would be dispatched to Iraq to work with the Iraqis as part of a shift away from combat operations. In addition, he said 1,140 officers and senior enlisted troops would be drawn from Army units already in Iraq to comprise 10-member training teams to work with Iraqi forces." (It`s surprising, given this administration, that the Pentagon would ship exactly 666 soldiers anywhere -- that number, of course, representing the Mark of the Beast.)

On the plan to station "advisors" with Iraqi forces over the long term, Hedren quotes Centcom commander Gen. John Abizaid as saying, "There are certainly lessons that we can take from Afghanistan and apply to Iraq." Of course, those of us of a certain age can actually remember the odd event from the dark ages that preceded the military glory that is now America; and, in that murk of history, the "lessons" that come to mind are from Vietnam, not Afghanistan, where our "advisors," despite endless years of effort, could somehow never quite turn "our" Vietnamese into the sort of fighting force the other side had. (Anyone wanna lay a bet about which model better applies to Iraq?)

Donald Rumsfeld recently put the new policy this way: "I think that you will see over the coming weeks and months a modest refocusing of U.S. efforts towards increasing the mentoring and training and assisting of the Iraqi forces as the Iraqi forces take over more and more responsibility for the security in the country." "Mentoring," it sounds so darn nurturing and sensitive as we start into year three in Iraq.

The Killing Fields

Way back in March 2002, then-Centcom Commander Tommy Franks, speaking of the Afghan dead in our recent war, famously said, "I don`t believe you have heard me or anyone else in our leadership talk about the presence of 1,000 bodies out there, or in fact how many have been recovered… You know we don`t do body counts." (At least in that distant year, there was still a fighting man implicitly ready to claim some memory of the "lessons" of Vietnam!)

Even as the Bush administration moved its operations forcefully to Iraq, which has since become a monster killing field, its officials, military and civilian, have remained consistent on this matter. The American dead are to be slipped home in the dead of night -- none of those disturbing Vietnam-era "body bags" in sight – and foreign "body counts" are out. No toting up of Iraqi bodies, no matter how many may be lying around or how civilian they might be.

Nonetheless, in a piece published last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, a group of researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad did a household study of civilian deaths in Iraq (knocking on doors in 33 places in the country for almost 8,000 interviews, a dangerous task indeed). They estimated, based on their work, that somewhere around 100,000 Iraqi civilians, a majority of them women and children, had died due to the invasion and the ongoing occupation of the country and the insurgency. This study, for reasons well explained by Lila Guterman (Dead Iraqis) in the Columbia Journalism Review, was barely reported on in the American press, though the figures, approximate as they must be, are nonetheless probably conservative, or so concludes Guterman. Based on this study, it would not, she adds, be unreasonable to assume that in the five months since the paper came out, if "the death rate has stayed the same, roughly 25,000 more Iraqis have died."

Oh, one figure on the Iraqi and Afghan dead did come to light last week. One hundred and eight of them managed to die "in American custody," and "most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press. Roughly a quarter of those deaths have been investigated as possible abuse by U.S. personnel." This is assuredly but the tip of some iceberg or other.

As it happens, when it comes to the grim statistics of death, we know far more, and far more precisely, about the non-Iraqi (and Afghan) dead.

For American troops, 1,521 died between March 19, 2003, when the invasion of Iraq began and March 19, 2005; 1,384 since our President essentially declared the war won. According to Pentagon figures (which are in dispute), 11,344 of our troops have officially been wounded. In Afghanistan, there have been 153 American military deaths.

Some Americans, as it happens, are far more likely to die in Iraq and Afghanistan than others: "43 percent of those killed in action in Iraq and 44 percent killed in Afghanistan through mid-February came from towns of 20,000 people or fewer. Less than 23 percent of the U.S. population lives in towns that size."

Among other nations whose governments sent troops to Iraq, there have been 171 deaths, ranging from 86 British troops to 1 Hungarian soldier. Among contractors working in Iraq, there have been at least 212 deaths and this has to be a partial listing, given that the privatized world of contractors remains firmly hidden in the shadows of our Iraqi policy.

Among journalists (and "assistants"), 48 seem to have died since the war began; according to the Columbia Journalism Review, Iraq remains "the most dangerous place in the world to work as a journalist" and (depending on whom you are counting) between 33 and 39 of them died in 2004 alone. Above all, according to CJR`s Mariah Blake, you don`t want to be an Arab journalist in Iraq. It`s practically the equivalent of a death sentence. As a result, while Iraq`s insurgency has grown ever fiercer, devolving events in the country have become ever harder to cover. "[E]ven the Arab media are finding themselves increasingly reliant on secondhand accounts and official reports from Washington and Baghdad, and less able to gauge how events are playing out in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. `We can no longer get close to people`s suffering, people`s hopes, people`s dreams,` says Nabil Khatib, Al Arabiya`s executive editor for news. `We no longer know what`s really going on because we can no longer get close to reality.`"

All sides (including Iraqi criminals) are now, it seems, targeting journalists in one fashion or another. Steve Weissman of the Truthout.org website has done the most interesting work on the American aspect of this, a four-part, open-ended, open-minded investigation of the subject.

On the home front, Newsweek reports that "as of last week 1,043 American children had lost a parent in Iraq. To put it another way, nearly two years after the invasion on March 19, 2003, among the 1,508 American troops who have died as of March 11 were an estimated 450 fathers, and 7 mothers."

All in all, this is no small record for a mission our President declared "accomplished" back in the spring of 2003.

The mayhem in Iraq can be measured in other ways as well. Here, for instance, are some figures from the air war: Total air sorties, 41,000; Strike Sorties, 15,500; Bombs Dropped, 27,000. And that only covers the pre-"Mission Accomplished" phase of the war. Since then, even as our Air Force has been loosed on Iraq`s cities, the air war has simply fallen out of the media. Even though the old city of Najaf and just about all of Falluja were essentially destroyed, in part from the air and numerous other cities bombed, missiled, and strafed, American reporters have evinced no interest whatsoever in the destruction of heavily populated urban areas from the skies.

Or perhaps instead of more figures, a description might do fuller justice to the Iraqi mayhem -- this one from Juan Cole. (Had we not had his Informed Comment blog, we would be in the dark on all sorts of matters.):

"Readers often write in for an update on Fallujah. I am sorry to say that there is no Fallujah to update. The city appears to be in ruins and perhaps uninhabitable in the near future. Of 300,000 residents, only about 9,000 seem to have returned, and apparently some of those are living in tents above the ruins of their homes…. The scale of this human tragedy -- the dispossession and displacement of 300,000 persons -- is hard to imagine. Unlike the victims of the tsunami who were left homeless, moreover, the Fallujans have witnessed no outpouring of world sympathy. While there were undeniably bad characters in the city, most residents had done nothing wrong and did not deserve to be made object lessons--which was the point Rumsfeld was making with this assault. He hoped to convince Ramadi and Mosul to fall quiet lest the same thing happen to them. He failed, since the second Fallujah campaign threw the Sunni Arab heartland into much more chaos than ever before. People forget how quiet Mosul had been. And, the campaign was the death knell for proper Sunni participation in the Jan. 30 elections (Sunnis, with 20 percent of the population, have only 6 seats in the 275 member parliament). However much a cliché it might be to say it, the US military really did destroy Fallujah to save it."

The Killings Fields

While the killing has gone on ceaselessly in Iraq, the country has also essentially been looted, as has the American treasury, to the tune of multi-billions of dollars by Bush-friendly corporations on the make. Tales of the corruption involved pour out weekly, one more unbelievable than the next (or is it all too believable?) in what can only be called the "killings fields" of Iraq.

Not surprisingly, our Veep`s former company, Halliburton, has been right up there at the front of the line with its corporate hand out for hand-outs. In the last week alone, David Ivanovich of the Houston Chronicle revealed that Halliburton`s KBR subsidiary "charged the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating fuel" to Iraq. (And critics assume that this but a fraction of the overcharges Halliburton dumped on the Pentagon -- and so on us all.) At the same time, Ken Silverstein and T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times discovered that a pet project of Iyad Allawi, the creation of a tank division for the new Iraqi Army (to the tune of $283 million), overseen by an American task force headed by Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, may have resulted in enormous cash kickbacks to officials of the Iraqi Defense Ministry through a Lebanese middleman. Dale Stoffel, a contractor/weapons dealer who tried to expose this scheme by emailing a Petraeus aide, was shot to death in an ambush near Baghdad only 8 days later. (Good luck to the FBI agents who are now investigating his death.) As a little footnote to the above, even after Stoffel`s killing, the Americans evidently didn`t blink an eye about continuing to work with the Lebanese middleman who promptly took over part of Stoffel`s contract.

And that`s just this week`s news. Iraq is quite literally a cesspool, when it comes to the American taxpayer`s dollar. If you want a little glimpse of how it all works, in the case of Halliburton`s KBR, check out Vanity Fair writer Michael Shnayerson`s, The Spoils of War.

On Enthusiasm for the War, or Voting with Their Feet

As news of the Iraq War filters into this country, recruits for our all-volunteer military, many having signed on for the promise of a good education in return for their time, are proving increasingly resistant to taking classes in Baghdad or environs:

"The Marine Corps for the second straight month in February missed its goal for signing up new recruits."

"The Army in February, for the first time in nearly five years, failed to achieve its monthly recruiting goal."

With the military being stretched to its limits, "part-time soldiers now make up about 40 percent of the 150,000 troops in Iraq, a Pentagon spokesman said." And the National Guard and the Reserves are fairing even worse than the regular military when it comes to volunteers: "Recruiting for the Army`s reserve component -- the National Guard and Army Reserve -- is suffering even more as the Pentagon relies heavily on these part-time soldiers to maintain troop levels in Iraq. The regular Army is 6 percent behind its year-to-date recruiting target, the Reserve is 10 percent behind, and the Guard is 26 percent short."

In early January, "Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly -- commander of the Army Reserve -- … said morale was slipping and that the reserve might become a ‘broken` force because of the burdens it has taken on since the 9-11 attacks. ‘I do not wish to sound alarmist. I do wish to send a clear, distinctive signal of deepening concern,` Helmly wrote in a memo to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker." All this, despite skyrocketing financial incentives and bonuses meant to get people into the military and keep them there.

Even the look of the military has been affected: "Since fiscal 2000, when African Americans made up 23.5 percent of Army recruits, their numbers have fallen steadily to less than 14 percent in this fiscal year, officials said. A similar trend has reduced the number of female Army recruits, who have dropped from 22 percent in 2000 to about 17 percent of this year`s new soldiers."

Among Americans more generally, enthusiasm for the war, according to the latest Washington Post poll, continues to sink below the horizon. Asked in mid-March, "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?" 39% of Americans approved and 57% disapproved. Compare that with the 75%/22% response to the same question in late April of 2003.

The Coalition of the Willing Is Increasingly Willing to Go

Loss of enthusiasm isn`t just a national phenomenon. As Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson recently put the matter, the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq is turning into the Coalition of the "Wilting." Even in countries (other than the United States) whose governments were willing to send troops, the war in Iraq was never anything but unpopular. But the enthusiasm of those governments is now fast receding. The Netherlands and the Ukraine are withdrawing their troops. The Poles are planning to do so, and even Italy`s Silvio Berlusconi, our President`s closest non-Anglo war-pal, made his first withdrawal sounds last week, pressured by future elections and the war`s immense unpopularity in Italy, before the Bush administration pressured him into backing down on his modest statements.

If you want to see the figures on foreign withdrawals, check out this New York Times chart (scroll down and click on "graphic"). What no one counts when counting forces in Iraq, however, are the possibly tens of thousands of mercenary security types, who make ever more money as the situation gets ever worse.

Other than the mercenaries, for whom the going gets good only when it gets really bad, the sole major players unwilling to speak of setting up schedules for withdrawal are Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Just this week, our President refused to discuss a "timetable" for withdrawal and insisted, "Our troops will come home when Iraq is capable of defending herself," which, given present realities, is more or less like saying: Never!

War Architects Heading for Other Planets, or Will This Be the Year of Consolidation?

Something else may be wilting -- the neocon grip on the upper levels of the Bush administration. Two key neocons crucial to pushing through an Iraq invasion policy at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ("the Mr. Magoo of American foreign policy… the Mozart of ineptitude, the Einstein of incapacity."), are heading out of the administration, while former State Department Neanderthal John Bolton has been farmed out to -- from the Bush point of view -- the minor leagues. (Senator Jesse Helms once recommended him in the following way: "John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, or what the Bible describes as the final battle between good and evil.") Feith announced that he was leaving his job as undersecretary of defense "for personal reasons… citing the desire to spend more time with his four children. `For the last four years, they haven`t seen me a lot.`" (Why is it that important men suddenly discover the need for family time only when their jobs evaporate?) Wolfowitz (the World Bank) and Bolton (the UN) are evidently being dumped on the international community (as in the Vietnam era, President Lyndon Johnson also dumped his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the World Bank). Donald Rumsfeld is reputedly planning to leave town within the year (possibly ceding his post to former State Department hardliner and "realist" Richard Armitage), and Dick Cheney is said to be spending much of his time on the President`s social security package.

Meanwhile, the so-called realists are evidently being brought in to clean up shop and possibly consolidate the gains, such as they are, out there in the imperium. Evidently Afghanistan is the model they have in mind. While the hard-headed John Negroponte flies off from (or is it flees?) Baghdad for Washington to become the nation`s first "intelligence czar," the administration is reputedly getting ready to fly in our present ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, the former oil company consultant who has steered the ex-Taliban principality into a Bush-style democracy -- that is, a warlord-divided narco-state of a grim sort with a desperately weak "central" government.

But look on the bright side, just the other day and possibly a tad early, Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers proclaimed Afghanistan "secure" and promptly suggested that "the United States is considering keeping long-term bases here as it repositions its military forces around the world."

Perfect! Now that the Khalilzad-installed government of Hamid Karzai is, we are told, seeking what`s so charmingly referred to as a "strategic partnership" with the United States. U.S. Major General Eric Olsen added to the picture by mentioning our desire to hang onto the sprawling Soviet-era base at Bagram, north of Kabul. Already a major American base, he called it "a place where we see a long-term presence of coalition and, frankly, U.S. capabilities."

Frankly indeed.

Right now, Baghdad may be ungovernable, the insurgency remains fierce, the new Iraqi government unable to chose its leaders, gas lines endless in Baghdad, electricity supplies desperately low in significant parts of the country, allies dropping away, and security dismal, but what-we-worry. After all, above all, chaos or not, we`re still there, the self-invited guests who came for dinner, and stayed on and on and on….

In fact, though it`s hardly mentioned in our media, we`ve been digging in. Joshua Hammer of Mother Jones magazine reported in a recent issue that approximately $4.5 billion dollars has gone to -- who else? -- KBR for the construction and maintenance of up to 14 "enduring camps" or permanent military bases in Iraq. Many of these bases have a look of permanency that undoubtedly has to be seen to be imagined. But here`s Hammer`s description of just one:

"Camp Victory North, a sprawling base near Baghdad International Airport, which the U.S. military seized just before the ouster of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. Over the past year, KBR contractors have built a small American city where about 14,000 troops are living, many hunkered down inside sturdy, wooden, air-conditioned bungalows called SEA (for Southeast Asia) huts, replicas of those used by troops in Vietnam. There`s a Burger King, a gym, the country`s biggest PX -- and, of course, a separate compound for KBR workers, who handle both construction and logistical support. Although Camp Victory North remains a work in progress today, when complete, the complex will be twice the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo -- currently one of the largest overseas posts built since the Vietnam War."

And let`s just remember what those 14 bases sit on.

The Word That Cannot Be Spoken or Written

There`s a word that can`t really be spoken, or written, not at least in conjunction with "Iraq," or off the business pages of our papers (even though this week, the price of a barrel of the stuff broke $56). Fortunately, I can spell it for you: It`s o-i-l. Take, as the Village Voice pointed out, the New York Times piece on the possible Khalilzad appointment which "ran 592 words and referred to Khalilzad`s high school basketball career and his graduate work at the University of Chicago," but not his "experience as a consultant to a major oil company," one that once negotiated with the Taliban to build a pipeline across Afghanistan.

Iraq, as it happens, sits on top of probably the second largest oil deposits in the Middle East (after Saudi Arabia where we`ve been drawing down our bases for a while) and right in the strategic heartland of the oil lands of the Earth. As far as I can tell, there hasn`t even been much oil exploration in the country in the last two decades, so who knows how much of what may lie under its territories? As is too seldom mentioned, the Bush administration is an energy regime with a number of its major players connected at various past moments to energy companies of various sorts. (Failing sorts in the case of our President.) Our present Secretary of State, a Chevron director from 1991-2001, once even had an oil tanker named after her.

As a group, they quite naturally look on the planet in an energy sort of way and dream of global control, at least in part, in terms of controlling energy flows. (That some of these dreams may prove quite irrational is beside the point. Just recall the mad fantasies of gold that once drove Spaniards deep into the New World and that have left us with land developers who give their projects historically bizarre names like El Dorado Acres? After all, they don`t call oil "black gold" for nothing.) In the future, can there be any question that historians will look upon our most recent Iraq War as an energy war? If you have your doubts and want a sense of just how much oil was on the mind of the Bush administration as it invaded Iraq, consider Greg Palast`s most recent piece of reportage, Secret U.S. Plans for Iraq`s Oil, based on revelations by the BBC`s Newsnight (or Juan Cole`s take on it).

Or just think about the "withdrawal" news in the New York Times piece mentioned above. If all goes really well, we might draw down to 105,000 troops in Iraq by 2006. And if the Iraqis can begin to take over basic internal security jobs, then, as in Afghanistan, perhaps we`ll try to organize one of those "strategic partnerships" and claim at least some of those KBR bases that are now as much a part of the Iraqi landscape as any ziggurat.

The most significant fact of our Iraq War and occupation (and war), which can`t be repeated too many times, is that the Bush administration busted into the country without an exit strategy for a simple reason: They never planned to leave -- and they still don`t. If you have a better reason for taking a withdrawal position and pressing for it, let me know by at least the beginning of Year Four of the Iraqi Deconstruction Era. Tom

[Special thanks for research work goes to Nick Turse.]


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Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq`s Oil

By: Greg Palast
Reporting for BBC Newsnight

03/17/05 - "BBC" - The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq`s oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC`s Newsnight has revealed.
Video:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/video1/PalastBBC.wmv


Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq`s Oil

By: Greg Palast
Reporting for BBC Newsnight
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March 20, 2005
Now You See It: An Audit of KBR
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/weekinreview/20eckh.html?

AS it prepared to attack Iraq in early 2003, the Pentagon gave a multibillion-dollar contract, without competitive bidding, to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root to repair oil fields and import consumer fuels. Almost from the first, the Bush administration and the company were hounded by allegations of favoritism and reckless spending under that contract, for which KBR eventually billed $2.5 billion.

In the American debate, colored by election politics last fall, one part of the story was often overlooked: most of the money used to pay KBR was not taxpayer dollars but Iraqi money, mainly oil revenues. The United Nations had authorized the American occupiers to spend Iraqi funds - for the good of the Iraqi people and "in a transparent manner" - and created a special international board of auditors to insure that those conditions were met.

As American critics leveled their accusations at Halliburton and the Pentagon, those international overseers began expressing concerns, too. The board of monitors repeatedly asked for data on the no-bid fuels contract and was repeatedly rebuffed by the Pentagon. Last October, the board was handed copies of the Pentagon`s own audits of the nine components of that KBR contract, with numbers and many conclusions blacked out.

Last week, when Representative Henry Waxman, minority leader of the House Committee on Government Reform, released a largely unexpurgated version of one of those October audits, covering $875 million worth of fuel imports, news reports focused on the numbers. The Pentagon`s own monitors, it turned out, found excess billing of more than $100 million and criticized KBR for poor record-keeping.

But a comparison of the original with the blacked-out, or "redacted," version that was sent to the international board last fall also raised new questions about the basis on which the Pentagon, at Halliburton`s suggestion, had chosen the items it had edited out of the document.

By law, commercially sensitive information provided by a company may be concealed when government documents are released. On that basis, it was proper to show KBR the audits before sending them along.

But in reply, KBR officials asked for, and then received, far more expansive deletions than is customary, said Thomas M. Susman, an attorney and regulatory expert with Ropes & Gray in Washington, including calculations and conclusions reached by the government that Mr. Susman said cannot be called proprietary.

Michael A. Morrow, KBR`s contracts manager, said in a Sept. 28, 2004, letter to the contracting agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, that the company insisted on blacking out proprietary information and also any statements "that we believe are factually incorrect or misleading and could be used by a competitor to damage KBR`s ability to win and negotiate new work."

Nearly every number and comment critical of KBR in the report was blacked out in the redacted copy. Last week, in an e-mail message, The New York Times asked Halliburton`s chief information officer for further clarification of which aspects of the audit the company considered to be inaccurate or unfair, but received no reply.

Mr. Susman, who has examined Mr. Morrow`s letter and both versions of the audit report, said: "KBR proposed redacting anything that could be embarrassing to the company plus anything it disagreed with."

"They apparently felt they could get away with this," he added.

Final judgment was up to the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Pentagon has not explained why it accepted so many deletions.

Still feeling thwarted, the international board secured a promise from the administration that it would perform a "special audit" of the non-competitive contracts involving Iraqi funds, to be completed in the spring of 2005.

But the Pentagon, which itself is still trying to decide how much of KBR`s disputed bills to pay, has been in no hurry. "Procuring the services of an internationally recognized auditing firm to conduct the special audit is ongoing," a Pentagon spokeswoman said last week.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Es kommt mir vor, als ob Mr.Friedman das Fell des Bären schon verteilt hat, bevor er erlegt worden ist.

March 20, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Nobel for Sistani
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/opinion/20friedman.html

As we approach the season of the Nobel Peace Prize, I would like to nominate the spiritual leader of Iraq`s Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for this year`s medal. I`m serious.

If there is a decent outcome in Iraq, President Bush will deserve, and receive, real credit for creating the conditions for democratization there, by daring to topple Saddam Hussein. But we tend to talk about Iraq as if it is all about us and what we do. If some kind of democracy takes root there, it will also be due in large measure to the instincts and directives of the dominant Iraqi Shiite communal leader, Ayatollah Sistani. It was Mr. Sistani who insisted that there had to be a direct national election in Iraq, rejecting the original goofy U.S. proposal for regional caucuses. It was Mr. Sistani who insisted that the elections not be postponed in the face of the Baathist-fascist insurgency. And it was Mr. Sistani who ordered Shiites not to retaliate for the Sunni Baathist and jihadist attempts to drag them into a civil war by attacking Shiite mosques and massacring Shiite civilians.

In many ways, Mr. Sistani has played the role for President George W. Bush that Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev played for his father, President George H. W. Bush. It was Mr. Mandela`s instincts and leadership - in keeping the transition to black rule in South Africa nonviolent - that helped the Bush I administration and its allies bring that process in for a soft landing. And it was Mr. Gorbachev`s insistence that the dismantling of the Soviet Empire, and particularly East Germany, be nonviolent that brought the Soviet Union in for a soft landing. In international relations, as in sports, it is often better to be lucky than good. And having the luck to have history deal you a Mandela, a Gorbachev or a Sistani as your partner at a key historical juncture - as opposed to a Yasir Arafat or a Robert Mugabe - can make all the difference between U.S. policy looking brilliant and U.S. policy looking futile.

Mr. Sistani has also contributed three critical elements to the democracy movement in the wider Arab world. First, he built his legitimacy around not just his religious-scholarly credentials but around a politics focused on developing Iraq for Iraqis. To put it another way, says the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen, "Sistani did not build his politics on negating someone else." Saddam Hussein built his politics around negating America, Iran and Israel. Arafat built his whole life around negating Zionism - rarely, if ever, speaking about Palestinian economic development or education. The politics of negation has a deep and rich history in the Middle East, because so many leaders there are illegitimate and need to negate someone to justify their rule. What Mr. Sistani, the late Lebanese Sunni leader Rafik Hariri and the new Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas all have in common is that they rose to power by focusing on a positive agenda for their own people, not negating another.

The second thing that Mr. Sistani did was put the people and their aspirations at the center of Iraqi politics, not some narrow elite or self-appointed clergy (see: Iran), which is what the Iraqi election was all about. In doing so he has helped to legitimize "people power" in a region where it was unheard of. In Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine - where Hamas recently said it would take part in parliamentary elections - the ballot box and popular support, not just the gun, are showing signs of becoming real sources of legitimacy. Both Hezbollah and Hamas will have to prove - with turnout, not terrorism - that they are entitled to a larger slice of power.

Third, and maybe most important, Mr. Sistani brings to Arab politics a legitimate, pragmatic interpretation of Islam, one that says Islam should inform politics and the constitution, but clerics should not rule.

The process of democratizing the Arab world is going to be long and bumpy. But the chances for success are immeasurably improved when we have partners from within the region who are legitimate, but have progressive instincts. That is Mr. Sistani. Lady Luck has shined on us by keeping alive this 75-year-old ayatollah, who resides in a small house in a narrow alley in Najaf and almost never goes out the door. How someone with his instincts and wisdom could have emerged from the train wreck that was Saddam Hussein`s Iraq, I will never know. All I have to say is: May he live to be 120 - and give that man a Nobel Prize.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Schiavo ist die gehirntote Frau, der ein US-Gericht erlaubt hat zu sterben.

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A man is arrested after blocking traffic with other anti-war demonstrators in Times Square in New York yesterday. Hundreds of anti-war protesters, some carrying cardboard coffins draped in American flags, marked the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by gathering at armed forces recruiting stations and demanding that U.S. troops be brought home.
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[urlThousands of war dissidents jam Central Park to protest]http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050320/NEWS03/503200313/1017
By PAUL NELSON
[e-mail]
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: March 20, 2005)

NEW YORK — Thousands of people marked the second anniversary of the war in Iraq with a protest in Central Park yesterday.

In the park`s East Meadow, many clutched anti-war signs or banners with messages such as "Military recruiters, out of our schools" and "Bush is the symptom, capitalism is the disease, revolution is the cure," while others milled about the park enjoying a sunny day.

Demonstrations were also held in other parts of the city and across the United States. In Europe, tens of thousands packed streets and public parks.

In Times Square, more than two dozen protesters marked the anniversary of the war in Iraq by lying down on Broadway, alongside flag-draped cardboard coffins, near the armed forces recruiting station.

The act of civil disobedience stopped traffic for about five minutes as police moved in with plastic handcuffs and arrested 27 of the protesters....[/url]

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The Independent
Memories of war, fear and friendship in my home city, where time has stood still
Saturday, 19th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=621…

Reality, normality, was back in Beirut, with its burning garbage tips and its matchstick crackle of gunfire

Y home in Beirut has been a timebox for almost 30 years, a place where time has stood still. I have sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean in the sticky, sweating summer heat and in the tornadoes of winter, watching the midnight horizon lit by a hellfire of forked lightning, the waves suddenly glistening gold as they slide menacingly below my apartment. I have woken in my bed to hear the blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain smashing against the shutters until a tide of water moves beneath the French windows and into my room.

I came to Lebanon in 1976 when I was just 29 years old, and because I have lived here ever since - because I have been doing the same job ever since, chronicling the betrayals and treachery and deceit of Middle East history for all those years - I felt I was always 29.

Abed, my driver, has grown older. I notice his stoop in the mornings when he brings the newspapers, the morning papers in Beirut and The Independent, a day late, from London. My landlord Mustafa, who lives downstairs, is now in his 70s, lithe as an athlete and shrewder, but sometimes a little more tired than he used to be.

The journalists I knew back in 1976 have moved on to become associate editors or executive editors or managing editors. One founded a brewery and became a millionaire. They have married, had children. Some of them have died. Sometimes, reading the newspaper obituaries - for there is nothing so satisfying as the narrative of a life that has an end as well as a beginning - I notice how the years of birth are beginning to creep nearer to my own.

When I came to Beirut, the obituary columns were still recording the lives and deaths of Great War veterans like my Dad. Then the years would encompass the 1920s, the 1930s, at least a comfortable 10 years from my own first decade. And now the hitherto friendly "1946" is appearing at the bottom of the page. Sometimes I know these newly dead men and women - spies and soldiers and statesmen and thugs and murderers whom I have met over the past three decades in the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Sometimes I write these obituaries myself.

And still I was 29. I could look back over the years with nightmare memories but without dreams or pain. Lebanon had a brutal history but it had been a place of great kindness to me. It taught me to stay alive. And amid all the memories of war, of friendships, of fear, of books read past midnight - long into the early hours, when dawn shows the crack between the curtains - there had always been the idea that Beirut was the place one came home to.

How many times have I sat on the flight deck of Middle East Airlines’ old 707s - from the Gulf, from Egypt, from the Balkans or other parts of Europe - and watched the promontory of Beirut lunging out into the Mediterranean "like the head of an old sailor" and heard a metallic voice asking for permission to make a final approach on runway 1-18 and known that, in half an hour, I would be ordering a gin and tonic and smoked salmon at the Spaghetteria restaurant in Ein el-Mreisse, so close to my home that I can send Abed to his family and walk back to my apartment along the seafront to the smell of cardamom and coffee and corn on the cob.

Of course, I know the truth. Sometimes when I get out of bed in the morning, I hear the bones cracking in my feet. I notice that the hair on my pillow is almost all silver. And when I go to shave, I look into the mirror and, now more than ever, the face of old Bill Fisk stares back at me. Yet I am surrounded by so much history that an individual age seems to have no meaning.

The knights of the First Crusade, after massacring the entire population of Beirut, had moved along the very edge of the Mediterranean towards Jerusalem to avoid the arrows of Arab archers; and I often reflect that they must have travelled over the very Lebanese rocks around which the sea froths and gurgles opposite my balcony. I have photographs on my apartment walls of the French fleet off Beirut in 1918 and the arrival of General Henri Gouraud, the first French mandate governor, who travelled to Damascus and stood at the most green-draped of tombs in the Omayyad mosque and, in what must be one of the most inflammatory statements in modern Middle East history, told the tomb: "Saladin, we have returned."

A friend gave me an antique pair of French naval binoculars of the mandate period - they may well have hung around the neck of a French officer serving in Lebanon - and in the evenings I would use them to watch the Israeli gunboats silhouetted on the horizon or the Nato warships sliding into Beirut bay. When the doomed multinational force had arrived here in 1982 to escort Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian fighters from Lebanon - and then returned to protect the Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Chatila camps massacre - I counted 28 Nato vessels off my apartment. From one of them, the Americans fired their first shells into Lebanon. And one night, I saw a strange luminosity moving above the neighbouring apartment blocks and only a minute afterwards realised that they were the lights of an American battleship towering over the city.

War gave a kind of symmetry to Beirut. The smell of burning garbage became a symbol of summer evenings. The wartime electrical cuts would have me racing on foot up and down floors without elevators - war keeps you fit, I once churlishly remarked to a friend. I remember once, flying off to Geneva to see a beautiful girl (by chance, sitting next to me, was a certain Ahmed Chalabi, but that’s yet another story), feeling that Switzerland, where I couldn’t throw a cigarette packet out of a car window, was unreal, false, a bubble of luxury in a cruel world. Reality, normality, would be back in Beirut with its burning garbage tips and its matchstick crackle of gunfire.

I was here on the very last day of the civil war, following the Syrian tanks under shellfire up to Baabda. In conflict, you never believe a war will end. Yet it finished, amid corpses and one last massacre - but it ended, and I was free of fear for the first time in 14 years.

And then I watched it all reborn. The muck along the Corniche below my balcony was cleared and flower beds and new palm trees planted. The Dresden-like ruins were slowly torn down or restored and I could dine out in safety along the old front line in fine Italian restaurants, take coffee by the Roman ruins, buy Belgian chocolates, French shirts, English books. Slowly, my own life, I now realise, was being rebuilt. Not only did I love life - I could expect to enjoy it for years to come.

Until, of course, that Valentine’s Day morning on the Corniche just down from my home when the crack of a fearful explosion sent fingers of dark brown smoke sprouting into the sky only a few hundred metres from me. And that was the moment, I think, when the beautiful dream ended, as it did for tens of thousands of Lebanese. And I no longer feel 29.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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The Independent on Sunday
Beirut car bomb fuels rumours of Syrian plot
Sunday, 20th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=621…

AN explosion early yesterday wounded eight people and left a crater two metres deep in Jdeide, a Christian district of Beirut. Was it meant to kill far more?

That one has to mention the ethnic origin of the people in Jdeide shows just how fragile life for the Lebanese has become in the aftermath of the murder of the ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, also in an explosion, on 14 February. And it was pathetically inevitable that Pierre Gemayel, whose family did so much to destroy the unity of Lebanon during the civil war, should have been the first to respond to the bombing.

"This has been the message to the Lebanese people for a while - to sow fear and terror among Lebanese citizens," Mr Gemayel told the al-Jazeera television channel. "If there is a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, look what Lebanon will face."

Unfortunately for Mr Gemayel, eyewitnesses said the attack might have been the result of a business dispute - the bomber originally wanted to park his vehicle in front of a bingo hall - rather than a political statement. The bomb, say the police, was placed beneath the car of a Lebanese-Armenian. Yet for a country without a government, and with the Syrian army continuing its withdrawal from Lebanon, Mr Gemayel was playing his own tune.

The pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, said Lebanon was experiencing "exceptional circumstances" which required immediate talks between the government and the opposition, which evaded the issue of the bombing and what many Lebanese suspected: that it had Syrian origins.

In New York, the Lebanese Maronite patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, said he believed Syria would withdraw the last of its 14,000 troops from Lebanon before elections planned for April and May, as the UN and the United States demand.

At Dhour Choueir, near Beirut, Syrian intelligence officers left in such haste that they abandoned documents implicating Lebanese citizens in their work. Letters found in the building, used for 29 years by the Syrians, were from Lebanese supporters of Syria, denouncing anti-Syrian Phalangists.

But were these documents deliberately abandoned to cause dissension between the Lebanese who would no longer be under the "protection" of Syria?


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Informed Comment
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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, March 20, 2005

Wave of Bombings in Middle East

The continued instability in the Middle East, which may or may not have been exacerbated by President Bush`s interventionism, yielded on Saturday a harvest of deadly bombings in the region.

Qatar was shaken Saturday by a bombing near a theater where British were playing Shakespeare. One British subject was killed, and several people were wounded.

In Lebanon, guerrillas detonated a bomb in the Christian, East Beirut part of the city. The incident raised fears of a renewal of sectarian tensions in that country.

Sunni radicals in Pakistan, who possibly have links to al-Qaeda, blew up a Sufi-Shiite mosque in the Baluchistan city of Quetta.

These bombings were unconnected, and mean something distinctive in eaqch setting. But it soes seem incraeasingly clear that we need to start taking journalists out

posted by Juan @ 3/20/2005 06:35:00 AM

Jaafari: Iraq headed toward Religious Law

On the second anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War, crowds demonstrated throughout the world. Among the larger rallies were those in London (45,000) and Istanbul (15,000). The crowds were smaller than those that demonstrated in late winter 2003 as the war was gearing up.

Such relatively large anti-American demonstrations in Turkey, which has long had secular governments and been pro-Western, are particularly worrisome.

Prospective Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari has given an interview to Der Spiegel, to appear Tuesday, in which he says his government will press for the implementation of religious law in personal status matters:


` "It`s understandable in a country where the majority of people are Muslim . . . Iraq should become a Muslim country but without falling under the influence of Iran or Saudi Arabia . . . Everyone will have the same rights, even members of the many minor religious communities," he said, explaining there would be multiple forms of jurisprudence. `


Jaafari is using the techniques of misdirection here. The system he is proposing would put Shiites under their ayatollahs with regard to laws governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony, custody of children, etc. Sunnis would be under their clergy, and Catholics would be under canon law. Since 97 percent of Iraqis are Muslims, 97 percent will be under shariah or Islamic law.

Jaafari hastens to say women will not be made to veil. But in fact, in Basra and some other parts of Iraq, Sadrist and Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq young men are forcing girls to veil in public already. Nor is veiling the main issue in women`s status. Jaafari`s system will give girls half the amount of inheritance that their brothers receive, and may well make women`s testimony worth half that of a man in court. If strict gender segregation is enforced, and coeducation ended, Iraqi women may find it difficult to get post-BA training, since they won`t be allowed in the professional schools (now coded as "male"), and mostly won`t have professional schools for women, or in any case many fewer than for men.

How far the system goes toward that of Iran or Saudi Arabia remains to be seen. Just having personal status law judged according to religion is the same system that exists in Israel and Lebanon, so it isn`t exactly the end of the world or unprecedented (Iraqi personal status law was religious before the 1958 revolution).

posted by Juan @ [url3/20/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/jaafari-iraq-headed-toward-religious.html[/url]

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Crime as Lethal as Warfare in Iraq
As morgues fill, police blame sectarian rivalries suppressed by Hussein. Kidnapping and the trade in arms and drugs are also on the rise.
By Monte Morin
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-crime20…

March 20, 2005

BAGHDAD — It`s been more than a month since Hassan Hadi watched as his co-workers were executed one by one at the Happiness Bakery, and he can`t stop replaying the moment when fate spared him.

In a small apartment just a block from the scene of the slaughter, a relative of one of the victims tucks a pistol into his waistband and slides a dull green grenade into his coat pocket as he ponders revenge.

And in the gloomy dissecting hall of Baghdad`s central morgue, a doctor who examined the bakery victims laughs weakly to himself as still more bodies arrive at the crowded facility.

"The cases we are getting are unbelievable," Dr. Taha Qassim says. "Huge crimes, assassinations, beheadings. Why, only today I dissected three beheaded bodies. We will probably break the record for beheaded cadavers in any forensic department in the world."

As Iraq`s newly elected leaders cobble together the foundation of a fledgling democracy, a killing epidemic has taken hold of this troubled nation. Ministry of Health statistics show that record numbers of Iraqi civilians are coming to violent ends, particularly here in the capital.

Assassinations and bombings have garnered worldwide attention. But Iraqi officials say violence unrelated to the insurgency is growing, and Iraqis are more likely to die at the hands — or in the cross-fire — of kidnappers, carjackers and angry neighbors than in car bombings.

In some cases, authorities say, the motives are so opaque that they cannot tell whether they are investigating a crime disguised as an act of war or a political assassination masquerading as a violent business dispute.

In Baghdad alone, officials at the central morgue counted 8,035 deaths by unnatural causes in 2004, up from 6,012 the previous year, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. In 2002, the final year of Saddam Hussein`s regime, the morgue examined about 1,800 bodies.

Of the deaths occurring now, 60% are caused by gunshot wounds, officials say, and most are unrelated to the insurgency. Twenty to 30 bodies arrive at the morgue every day, and the victims are overwhelmingly male.

Much of the violence, officials say, is inspired by the ethnic, tribal and religious rivalries that were held in check by Hussein`s brutal rule, and facilitated by a ready supply of firearms. That deadly combination has let loose a wave of vengeance killings, tribal vendettas, mercenary kidnappings and thievery.

"The only virtue of the old regime is that Iraq enjoyed a state of stability," said Lt. Faris Jubrail of the Baghdad police. "It was a reaction to the huge size of punishment that the regime would practice. This would never have happened then."

Police say they are also growing increasingly worried about the recent arrival of organized criminal groups who trade in arms, drugs and stolen cars and blackmail people. In some cases, police say, insurgents have paid gangs of thugs to kidnap doctors and engineers or kill barbers for giving Western-style haircuts.

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed the police, saying Tuesday in Baghdad that criminals-for-hire were playing a growing role in the insurgency.

Police say the gangs aren`t motivated by a desire to end the occupation; they`re just looking to make a buck.

"There are many different ways people meet martyrdom now," an Iraqi police spokesman said dryly. "In the old days, these things were contained by the regime, but now they are unleashed."

One such incident, the officer said, was the brazen killing of 11 workers and customers Feb. 11 at the Happiness Bakery in New Baghdad, a working-class Shiite Muslim suburb on the capital`s east side.

Investigators first suspected Sunni Muslim insurgents — the bakeries had images of Shiite clerics and posters urging customers to vote in the Jan. 30 elections, and the attack occurred just before Ashura, a major Shiite holiday.

Police changed their thinking when witnesses recognized several killers as Shiites. Authorities now suspect a tribal vendetta. They speculate that a gang may have been hired to commit the crime and make it appear as though rebels were behind it.

Hadi, 30, said a crowd of hungry customers was clamoring for warm loaves of breakfast samoon that Friday morning at the popular bakery on Martyrs Street. Hadi was busy twisting gobs of dough into loaves, while baker Ali Salim hoisted them into the oven with a broad, wooden paddle.

They joked as they worked. "We were kidding our younger worker, Mustafa," Hadi recalled. "We were making fun of his big nose."

The laughter stopped abruptly when gunfire exploded just outside. Beyond Hadi`s view, three cars loaded with armed men had emptied onto the street and the gunmen were rushing the stores. "God is the greatest!" a gunman screamed. "There is no god but God!"

Alarm turned to terror within the Happiness Bakery as a second burst of gunfire shattered the front window and tore through the cashier, killing him.

Hadi slipped behind an enormous bread mixer and peeked at the front door. He watched a man wearing a T-shirt and a black mask enter the bakery. He was holding a Kalashnikov rifle.

"I was so terrified to know what kind of weapon it was," Hadi said. "Then the most terrible moment came: The shooting was inside the shop and I was feeling the bullets were killing us one by one."

Salim, the baker, died in front of his oven. Employee Abdul Rehman was shot as he leaped over the bread mixer. Hadi felt a bullet tear through his hip.

As he braced himself for the coup de grace, Hadi suddenly heard someone shouting at the gunman: "Come on, finish them up! We are under attack! Let`s go!" Within seconds, the gunmen were gone, and 11 people lay dead or dying.

Hadi`s brother Farooq, 23, also works at the bakery. He and Mustafa, the boy they were teasing, had locked themselves in a toilet during the attack. As bullets smashed into the door and transom, they held their breath and dared not make a noise.

When it was over, Farooq Hadi drove his brother and Rehman, who had been shot several times, to a hospital.

"Even when we drove to the hospital, [Rehman] was only repeating, `Oh, Ali,` " Farooq Hadi said, referring to an expression Shiites often use in moments of pain or trouble. Ali was the prophet Muhammad`s cousin and son-in-law.

"Then, as we were getting closer and closer, his voice was getting fainter and fainter, until he was silent by the time we reached the hospital. It seems he had died by then."

The documentation of such deaths in Iraq is extremely spotty. Neither the United States` military nor its embassy claims to track or tabulate civilian deaths in Iraq.

In addition to the morgue statistics, which cover only Baghdad, the Ministry of Health reported that 5,158 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of military and insurgent activity across the country during the last six months of 2004.

That figure, like others released by the ministry, is dismissed as absurdly low by human rights groups and highly unreliable by officials in the U.S.-backed coalition in Iraq.

"We don`t regard their statistics on civilian deaths as being at all reliable, but they are the only ones available," said a Western official who spoke off the record. "It`s nearly impossible to determine with any accuracy how many Iraqis die, especially through violence. There is war, terrorism, vendettas, common crime, kidnapping…. In other words, it`s simply impossible to know."

Some groups insist that the Iraqis killed by U.S.-led forces far outnumber the victims of crimes.

The independent organization Iraq Body Count tabulates Iraqi deaths reported in the local media.

They estimate that as many as 19,432 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the United States invaded two years ago.

A study published in the British medical journal Lancet estimated that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the invasion and attributed most of the deaths to coalition forces, aerial bombings in particular.

The study was unique in that it was an extrapolation from surveys conducted in nearly 1,000 households across Iraq.

Its conclusions proved controversial in the final days before the U.S. presidential election last year, but the report`s lead author, Les Roberts, stands by them.

On a bullet-pocked wall outside the Happiness Bakery, black mourning banners list the names of the dead and condemn the attackers` "cowardly and treacherous acts."

Many such banners hang in the neighborhood; gun battles are not altogether rare here. Weapons are easily obtained, and neighbors say they are more than prepared to respond to attacks with their own arsenals.

One resident, Abu Ali, 37, speaks with pride of his one-man counterattack during the bakery raid. The account provides a vivid example of how violence has permeated Iraqi society.

Ali, a cousin of the bakery`s owner, grew concerned when he heard continuous shooting that day.

The former soldier grabbed his Kalashnikov and dashed to the scene. He said he saw a masked man with an automatic rifle standing in the street and he assumed he was attacking the bakery.

Ali said he opened fire on the man, dropping him to the ground in three blasts.

When other gunmen began firing at Ali, he said, he ran back to his home, where he had a collection of grenades. He grabbed two of them, climbed onto the roof of his house and tossed one into the street, where it exploded.

Ali said the attackers began firing at him and he lobbed the second grenade, but this one hit a wall and bounced back at him. He said he managed to get back inside the house before it detonated.

Ali said he was more than pleased to hear that the attackers were seen dragging two of their comrades` bodies into their cars before driving off.

Ali reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, light-green grenade.

"After the incident, I never go out without carrying one of these in my pocket," he said with a grin.

Outside the gates of Baghdad`s central morgue, relatives of the dead wail and weep. A steady procession of flimsy, wooden caskets tied to car hoods or stuffed in trunks makes its way down the morgue driveway to the duty officer, who will sign over the corpse.

Beset with emotion, the relatives are sometimes overcome with rage when they encounter the medical staff.

"So much has changed. It seems like the crime rates are increasing day to day," said Dr. Abed Razaq, the morgue`s acting director. "Even the people we deal with are different now. Most people put in a critical situation tend to act abnormally or in a vulgar manner. With circumstances as they are today, with security and laws missing, people in grief will scream at us, intimidate us and even threaten us."

The doctor said that he and his staff had become very skilled in dealing with their anger and had learned to absorb it "like a sponge sucks in water."

"We have to do this in order to do our job," Razaq said. "Everything in Iraq has changed. Only the laws of forensic medicine remain the same."

Times staff writers Caesar Ahmed and Suhail Ahmad in Baghdad contributed to this report.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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[url]http://makingfiends.com/[/url]

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Sunday, March 20, 2005
War News for Sunday, March 20, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Body of an Iraqi policeman found in the Misaiab surburb of Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi contractors working for the US Army killed and three civilians wounded in a drive-by shooting in Baquba.

Bring `em on: US troops wound three as they mistakenly fire on a group of policemen in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Two Egyptians claimed to be kidnapped west of Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Gunmen kill regional police commissioner in the Doura suburb of Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Top anti-corruption police officer assasinated in Mosul.

Unbelievable: "The cases we are getting are unbelievable," Dr. Taha Qassim says. "Huge crimes, assassinations, beheadings. Why, only today I dissected three beheaded bodies. We will probably break the record for beheaded cadavers in any forensic department in the world." As Iraq`s newly elected leaders cobble together the foundation of a fledgling democracy, a killing epidemic has taken hold of this troubled nation. Ministry of Health statistics show that record numbers of Iraqi civilians are coming to violent ends, particularly here in the capital.

Assassinations and bombings have garnered worldwide attention. But Iraqi officials say violence unrelated to the insurgency is growing and Iraqis are more likely to die at the hands or in the cross-fire of kidnappers, carjackers and angry neighbors than they are from car bombs. In some cases, authorities say, the motives are so opaque that they cannot tell whether they are investigating a crime disguised as an act of war or a political assassination masquerading as a violent business dispute.

Wider Instability? A car bomb blast tore through a theater frequented by Westerners in Qatar, command center for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq which began exactly two years ago, killing one Briton and wounding at least 12 people.

A Qatari official investigating the blast said a suicide bomber rammed a vehicle into the theater near a British school in the capital Doha on Saturday, badly damaging the playhouse. "There are two dead, including the suicide bomber," said another Qatari source, who also declined to be named.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack -- the first of its kind in the small oil-producing Gulf Arab state, a U.S. ally and host to the American military`s Central Command.

Commentary

Analysis: With the increase in Iranian influence, Iraq has the potential to become a battlefield between a Sunni minority that is backed by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and a Shia majority supported by non-Arab Iran. Given the potential for a civil strife between the Shia, the Sunnis and the Kurds, and the possibility of a regional conflict between Arab states and Iran, the United States cannot afford leaving Iraq any time soon. The departure of the U.S. troops at this time would also undermine the credibility of the United States in the region and it would encourage an increase in terrorist acts, and perhaps more importantly, it would undermine U.S. efforts to restore the peace process between Palestinians and Israel.

While the United States legitimizes its occupation of Iraq in the name of establishing a democratic government in that country, Washington cannot continue its unconditional support for repressive and tyrannical regimes that violate the most basic human rights of their citizens. American support for these repressive regimes has allowed the Islamist opposition groups in these countries to mock U.S. foreign policy as an exercise in hypocrisy.

We will not be able to create democracy in Iraq as long as our allies are the like of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the Saudi royal family.

Deadlock by Design? It’s a long list, but in effect the Kurds already have it in hand, as they have controlled most of the territory they claim under US protection since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, and now control most of the Kirkuk area too. The new “Iraqi” Army that has been created under the US occupation has no ability to drive the Kurds back — indeed, many of its troops in the north ARE Pesh Merga wearing a different uniform — and the US would not allow it to be used in that way anyway.

The Shiite coalition cannot contest the Kurdish claims by force — but neither can it accept them without being seen by most Arab Iraqis (including its own Shiite supporters) as a traitor to Iraq. That is why it’s taking so long to create a new transitional government in Baghdad, and may take quite a while yet. This is not just petty bickering over government jobs: The basic structure of the future Iraqi state is being negotiated between the Kurds and the Shiite Arabs right now (with practically no Sunni Arabs present at the table).

Paul Bremer did not design this whole mess, but he did write the voting rules that give the Kurds an effective veto on any coalition government in the new assembly (and a veto on the new constitution, too, if and when it is finally written).

One is tempted to see a Machiavellian calculation here: Maybe we lose the rest of Iraq, but at least we get to keep Kurdistan and half the oil. However, the temptation should be resisted. The Bush administration hasn’t even accepted yet that it has lost in Iraq.

The Democracy Lie: The modern history of the Middle East does not suggest that politics travels very much from one country to another. The region is a hodgepodge of absolute monarchies, constitutional monarchies and republics, characterized by varying degrees of authoritarianism. Few regimes have had an effect on neighbors by setting an example. Ataturk`s adoption of a militant secularism in Turkey from the 1920s had no resonance in the Arab world. The Lebanese confessional political system, which attempted to balance the country`s many religious communities after independence in 1943, remains unique. Khomeini`s 1979 Islamic Revolution did not inspire a string of clerically ruled regimes.

Is Iraq even really much of a model? The Bush administration strove to avoid having one-person, one-vote elections in Iraq, which were finally forced on Washington by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Despite the U.S. backing for secularists, the winners of the election were the fundamentalist Shiite Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Nor were the elections themselves all that exemplary. The country is in flames, racked by a guerrilla war, a continual crime wave and a foreign military occupation. The security situation was so bad that the candidates running for office could not reveal their identities until the day before the election, and the entire country was put under a sort of curfew for three days, with all vehicular traffic forbidden.

The argument for change through inspiration has little evidence to underpin it. The changes in the region cited as dividends of the Bush Iraq policy are either chimeras or unconnected to Iraq. And the Bush administration has shown no signs that it will push for democracy in countries where freedom of choice would lead to outcomes unfavorable to U.S. interests.

Special Request

An Iraqi exile living in Canada emailed me this week and asked me to cover the story regarding new laws introduced by the Coalition Provisional Authority concerning the patenting of seeds used by Iraqi farmers.

What he is referring to is the favourable treatment given to Monsanto; the US multinational. Many of our readers here will have come across this story before; but for the benefit of those that haven`t here is a summary of what has happened.

As part of sweeping "economic restructuring" implemented by the Bush Administration in Iraq, Iraqi farmers will no longer be permitted to save their seeds. Instead, they will be forced to buy seeds from US corporations -- which can include seeds the Iraqis themselves developed over hundreds of years. That is because in recent years, transnational corporations have patented and now own many seed varieties originated or developed by indigenous peoples. In a short time, Iraq will be living under the new American credo: Pay Monsanto, or starve.

When the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) celebrated biodiversity on World Food Day on October 16, Iraqi farmers were mourning its loss.

A new report by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South has found that new legislation in Iraq has been carefully put in place by the US that prevents farmers from saving their seeds and effectively hands over the seed market to transnational corporations. This is a disastrous turn of events for Iraqi farmers, biodiversity and the country`s food security. While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has been made near impossible by these new regulations.

"The US has been imposing patents on life around the world through trade deals. In this case, they invaded the country first, then imposed their patents. This is both immoral and unacceptable", said Shalini Bhutani, one of the report`s authors.

The new law in question heralds the entry into Iraqi law of patents on life forms - this first one affecting plants and seeds. This law fits in neatly into the US vision of Iraqi agriculture in the future - that of an industrial agricultural system dependent on large corporations providing inputs and seeds.

In 2002, FAO estimated that 97 percent of Iraqi farmers used saved seed from their own stocks from last year`s harvest or purchased from local markets. When the new law - on plant variety protection (PVP) - is put into effect, seed saving will be illegal and the market will only offer proprietary "PVP-protected" planting material "invented" by transnational agribusiness corporations. The new law totally ignores all the contributions Iraqi farmers have made to development of important crops like wheat, barley, date and pulses. Its consequences are the loss of farmers` freedoms and a grave threat to food sovereignty in Iraq. In this way, the US has declared a new war against the Iraqi farmer.

"If the FAO is celebrating `Biodiversity for Food Security` this year, it needs to demonstrate some real commitment", says Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, pointing out that the FAO has recently been cosying up with industry and offering support for genetic engineering. "Most importantly, the FAO must recognise that biodiversity-rich farming and industry-led agriculture are worlds apart, and that industrial agriculture is one of the leading causes of the catastrophic decline in agricultural biodiversity that we have witnessed in recent decades. The FAO cannot hope to embrace biodiversity while holding industry`s hand", he added.



Blogwatch

A new blogger, [urlThe Bloogeyman]http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/[/url] has added Today in Iraq to his blogroll. In this post he sets out the reasons why this site should be on his blogroll. You may wish to visit his site and leave some words of encouragement.
# posted by Friendly Fire : 12:50 AM
Comments (3) | Trackback (0)

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Die regelgerechte Durchführung der Wettkämpfe ist dem deutschen Schiedsrichter Robert Hoyzer übertragen worden.
Da sieht man wieder welch guten Ruf wir Deutsche in der arabischen Welt genießen!

Thursday, March 17, 2005
[urlMarch Madness, Part 1: Iraqetology]http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/03/march-madness-part-1-iraqetology.html[/url]

Well, March Madness has arrived and it looks to be a doozy. In fact, I’m a little late to the party because by my count March Madness actually started two years ago: I just never got around to filling out my brackets. Of course, I’m talking about Iraqi March Madness – the biggest, baddest bracket fest ever. So, sharpen your pencils because, without further ado, here is the bracket:


This looks like an exciting tournament - make sure to fill out your brackets and get ready for some madness!


posted by Bloogeyman at 12:05 PM Comments (3) | Trackback (0)

Hier noch mal die Zusammenfassung der Ergebnis der Ermittlungen über die Affaire um den seltsamen Gast bei Bushs Pressekonferenzen.
Gannongate: Who Got Gannon’s Cannon?
http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/02/gannongate-part-1-sho…
http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/02/gannongate-part-2-thi…
http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/02/gannongate-part-3-de-…
http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/02/gannongate-part-4-who…
http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/02/gannongate-part-5-dem…
http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/03/gannongate-part-6-rep…
http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/02/sire-bloggers-are-sto…

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Iraq -- a halftime assessment
- Thomas J. Raleigh
Sunday, March 20, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

New York -- Recognizing the complexity of the challenges that confront coalition forces and the embryonic Iraqi government, it would be wise to observe developments in Iraq with a certain degree of pessimism. Premature predictions of victory, best-case planning assumptions, turning points, tipping points and other expressions of gratuitous optimism have not served the Iraqi people and certainly not American troops fighting in Iraq.

This thing is far from over.

The coalition is still in the early stages of a prolonged struggle to achieve a safe and secure environment in Iraq that will allow democracy to take root. A good deal of fighting may lie ahead. In any engagement, our troops will prevail.

However, our leaders should not become obsessed with attaining victory or success solely on the battlefield. Were they to do this, historians might say again that we won the battles but lost the war. This can be avoided by soberly assessing the tactical situation and adopting a more multidimensional and flexible approach.

While the recent elections in Iraq were encouraging, there has also been a downside. Sectarian violence -- Sunni versus Shiite -- has increased dramatically. Our troops find themselves in the position of simultaneously fighting an insurgency -- one that enjoys popular support -- and a terrorist threat from al Qaeda -- one that continues to elude wholesale detection and destruction.

These are different groups with different goals. Lumping Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda together as "terrorists" is not only inaccurate, it precludes the very strategy that the coalition ought to pursue: divide and conquer, or perhaps better, "divide and persuade."

Despite the recent arrest of several high-ranking insurgent and terrorist leaders, it still appears that our tactical intelligence remains abysmal. Lacking reliable sources who have access to information and are inclined to share it, coalition forces don`t have an accurate picture of the size and scope of the insurgency, or of a footprint of al Qaeda and other mercenaries in Iraq. Nor do our troops know to what extent these hostile groups are coordinating their efforts.

The insurgents, on the other hand, have guys in our locker room before the game. Exploiting a network of informants that once worked on behalf of the Baathist regime, hostile operatives have penetrated coalition and Iraqi government institutions; Army bases, police stations and municipal offices are likely riddled with informers working for the other side. The results are the grisly attacks against coalition troops and Iraqi civilians we read about daily

This "intelligence gap," unfortunately, is not easily corrected. In the meantime, 30,000 insurgents (the latest estimate I have seen) can cause a lot of destruction. Moreover, I have been struggling for some time to recall a successful counterinsurgency -- one of similar magnitude fought in the 20th century in which the insurgents were defeated exclusively on the battlefield, and in a manner that could not be characterized as excessively brutal or as genocide. I have not come up with one.

It is time to re-evaluate how best to achieve American objectives in Iraq. In terms of a way ahead, I suggest a threefold approach.

First, train and validate the readiness and reliability of Iraqi security forces. Though this has been a key component of our strategy for some time, it remains unclear that the focus is where it ought to be. There has been a preoccupation with the number of Iraqis that have been trained rather than a focus on the number of Iraqi companies and battalions ready to fight. Progress is being made for sure, but there is little chance that the Iraqis will be in a position to provide their own security by yearend.

Second, marginalize al Qaeda. If, indeed, there is presently some degree of cooperation and coordination between the insurgency and al Qaeda, the coalition ought to drive a wedge between the two groups. The main effort might be psychological operations and a public information campaign that makes it clear that the coalition will not negotiate with al Qaeda, and those who provide aid and comfort to al Qaeda operatives will have no future in Iraq.

Third, pressure and persuade Sunni insurgents to accept a political solution. However despicable their tactics might be, Sunni insurgents are pursuing their objectives of legitimacy and power, as military strategist Carl von Clausewitz would say, "by other means." The insurgents are not terrorists and the coalition ought to make it clear that it understands this by recognizing a political wing of the insurgency (as Sinn Fein is to the IRA in Northern Ireland) and demonstrating a willingness to negotiate.

What do the Sunnis want? A share of the power? A time table for troop withdrawals? A degree of self-rule in Sunni populated regions? These and a great many other things can be negotiated (save any accommodation with al Qaeda), and all that it will likely require is an announced cease-fire and a suspension of the bombing campaign.

If our plan in Iraq is to "stay the course" under the delusion that "resolve" will carry the day, we are making a big mistake. We must recognize that we face a sophisticated, determined and multidimensional enemy, and that success in Iraq will require a sophisticated, flexible, and multidimensional approach; one that does not necessarily require the utter defeat of the insurgency on the battlefield.

If we do little more than "gut it out" until Iraqi security forces are trained, another 500 to 600 American soldiers and Marines will die this year fighting in Iraq; and come 2006, we may not be much closer to achieving U.S. goals than we are now. As of March 16, 185 Americans have been killed in Iraq in 2005. There is no doubt -- our troops are in for a very tough year.

Watch the trends, do the math, come to your own conclusions.

Thomas Raleigh is a retired Army lieutenant colonel, who served in infantry troop assignments, and as a military diplomat in Moscow and Vienna. He is the managing director for Real Textiles, an international consulting firm in New York City.

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

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Es ist schon erstaunlich welche Wirkung der Irakkrieg auf den Ölpreis gehabt hat .
Der Verlauf des Ölpreises entspricht genau den Voraussagen unserer Neocons zu allen Entwicklungen durch den Irak-Krieg.
Noch so einen erfolgreichen Krieg und dann haben sich die Grünen mit den 5 DM für den Liter Sprit durchgesetzt.

Iraq invasion may be remembered as start of the age of oil scarcity
Production tumbles in post-Hussein era as more countries vie for shrinking supplies
- Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, March 20, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2005%…

Instead of inaugurating a new age of cheap oil, the Iraq war may become known as the beginning of an era of scarcity.

Two years ago, it seemed likely that Iraq, with the world`s third-largest petroleum reserves, would become a hypercharged gusher once U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein. But chaos and guerrilla sabotage have slowed the flow of oil to a comparative trickle.

The price of crude on global markets hit an all-time record Friday, and oil experts say U.S. consumers are likely to keep feeling the pinch.

"Global supply hasn`t kept up, and it isn`t likely to in the near future, and one of the causes is Iraq," said John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York.

The war coincided with the start of a sharp rise in oil imports by booming China and India, and experts say this alignment of factors may keep prices permanently high.

Iraq`s oil production averaged about 3 million barrels a day before the war and now lags below 2 million, while prewar projections had pegged production to have hit at least 4 million by now. This missing production would have covered much of the annual growth in global oil demand, which is expected to increase by 1.8 million barrels a day this year, to 84.3 million barrels.

"If it weren`t for the insurgency, Iraq would produce at least another million barrels day -- and maybe two," said Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington. "Iraq is very much missing from the market, and it`s one of the reasons why prices have risen so much."

Iraq has earned only about $31 billion from oil exports in the two years since the U.S. invasion, far below the prewar predictions by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who claimed that Iraqi oil would generate $50 billion to $100 billion in the same period.

Foreign oil companies have withdrawn almost all their staff from Iraq because of the dangers. "The risk to operate there is a very serious risk, and it`s not about to go away," Lichtblau said. "People are killed and kidnapped, and those pipelines are being blown up a week after they`re repaired, again and again."

The companies are keeping their feet in the door. About 20 firms have provided free services to Iraq -- training for oil personnel, geological studies or other help -- as a way to maintain good contacts until things improve.

To make matters worse, there are few new sources of oil elsewhere. Russia is embroiled in the government confiscation of its biggest oil producer, Yukos; Nigeria`s biggest oil region is riven by social conflict; Venezuela is in a worsening dispute with Washington; and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has no extra capacity to pump more crude.

"More and more people are realizing that the real story of Iraq, and more generally after 9/11, is our vulnerability as a nation to our dependence on imported foreign oil," said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.

"The problem is access. Where do you go to find oil you do need to replace what you`re producing? There aren`t many alternatives," said Robert Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "And most countries have government oil companies -- they keep it for themselves, so you can`t get in."

All these factors may be causing a sea change in attitudes among American politicians, some analysts say.

Fast-rising energy prices helped the Bush administration rally votes in Congress for its proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. That proposal squeezed out a victory by a two-vote margin in the Senate last week.

If the plan is able to clear several more legislative hurdles over the next few months, it will be a huge victory for the administration, which has long argued that environmental regulations on the oil industry should be loosened.

Yet in addition to boosting support for domestic oil and gas drilling, the Iraq situation has begun to create consensus behind some positions formerly held only by environmentalists.

Gaffney, who was a prominent conservative voice calling for the Iraq invasion since the late 1990s, has joined an unlikely left-right coalition that is proposing a crash program of energy conservation programs, alternative transportation fuels and lightweight, energy-efficient vehicles.

Members of the coalition, Set America Free, range from religious conservatives such as Gary Bauer to neoconservatives such as former CIA Director James Woolsey to liberal groups such as the Apollo Alliance, which includes environmentalists and labor unions.

"All those security hawks in the coalition have not become born-again environmentalists," said Luft. "They may be driving a Prius, but believe me, they`re doing it not because of global warming, but to help cut U.S. economic dependence" on foreign oil. "Iraq was part of the reason why."

E-mail Robert Collier at [e-mail].

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/20/M…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Und entlastet die Rentenkasse.

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US frees Iraqi kidnappers so they can spy on insurgents
Americans undermining local police attempts to crack down on wave of abductions
By Patrick Cockburn
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?st…

20 March 2005

US intelligence and military police officers in Iraq are routinely freeing dangerous criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

In one case where the IoS has seen documents, police rescued a doctor after a gun battle with his kidnappers and arrested two of the kidnap gang, who made full confessions. But US military police took over custody of the two men and let them go. The doctor had to flee to Egypt after being threatened by the gang.

The police station where the men were held recorded that they had been handed over to an American military police lieutenant for transfer to the US-run Camp Cuervo detention centre. But an American military spokesman told the IoS that there was no record of the two prisoners in their database.

"The Americans are allowing the breakdown of Iraqi society because they are only interested in fighting the insurgency," said a senior Iraqi police officer. "We are dealing with an epidemic of kidnapping, extortion and violent crime, but even though we know the Americans monitor calls on mobiles and satellite phones, which are often used in ransom negotiations, they will not pass on any criminal intelligence to us. They only want to use the information against insurgents."

An Iraqi government source confirmed that criminal suspects were often released if they agreed to inform on insurgents, despite the dangers to ordinary Iraqis. The Iraqi middle class has been heavily targeted by kidnappers since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Many doctors, a favourite target, and businessmen have fled to Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The police admit that they have been unable to do anything to stop the wave of abductions.

Dr Thamir Mohammed Ali Hasafa al-Kaisey, 60, a GP, was seized by a gang of 11 kidnappers in three cars as he drove home from his clinic in Baghdad at 6.30pm on 23 December. "I was 50 metres from my house when men with guns in a Jeep Cherokee stopped me and beat me with their fists," Dr Hasafa later told police. "They put me in their car with my face on the ground and tied me up with my own jacket."

Although kidnappers operate with near impunity in central Iraq, Dr Hasafa had an extraordinary stroke of luck. His captors ran into a police checkpoint, and shooting broke out. Even though his leg was broken in the beating, the doctor was able to crawl out of the back of the car and shout to the police: "I am a doctor and I was kidnapped."

The case was a rare breakthough for the police. In their confessions, obtained by the IoS, the two suspects - one a serving police lieutenant - give a unique picture of how the gangs work, and the extraordinarily high number of kidnappings they carry out.

Mohammed Najim Abdullah al-Dhouri, the police lieutenant, and Adnan Ashur Ali al-Jabouri are both members of powerful tribes from which Saddam drew many of his inner circle of security men and army officers. But the motive of the gang seemed to have been purely criminal.

Adnan Ashur told the investigating judge that the leaders of the gang were Eyhab, nicknamed Abu Fahad, who ran a mobile phone shop, and his brother, Hisham. Eyhab, he said, was a criminal sentenced to 40 years in jail by the old regime. He had apparently been freed during a general amnesty by Saddam at the end of 2002.

Mohammed Najim, who was based in Sadr City in east Baghdad, lived in special police housing. He said: "I was involved with Hisham prior to the fall of Saddam. Later he approached me about kidnapping prominent men. My task was to provide security for the gang." All the gang members were armed with pistols. They had safe houses in which to keep kidnap victims. Both suspects said they had taken part in numerous other kidnappings in the previous few months, with their victims paying up to $60,000 (£31,000) each. Ironically, the informant who had told them that Dr Hasafa was worth kidnapping was a guard hired by householders to protect the street where he lived.

The Iraqi police were jubilant that they finally had detailed information on how a kidnap gang operated. The two captured men were willing to provide the names and addresses of other gang members, and the success was lauded by Iraqi television and the local press. To the consternation of the police, however, on 30 December a convoy of US military police arrived at al-Khansa police station, where Mohammed Najim and Adnan Ashur were being held. The Iraqi police officer at the station recorded: "They have requested the custody of the two assailants." Iraqi police dropped the case against the rest of the gang.

Dr Hasafa, meanwhile, received two visits from the families of the prisoners. The first was from the father of Mohammed Najim, who offered money if the kidnap charge was withdrawn. He said he had been an officer in the Republican Guard and added menacingly: "You know what we are capable of doing."

During the second meeting Dr Hasafa learned that his kidnappers had been freed. He refused to withdraw charges, despite death threats to his family, but in January he fled to Jordan and then Egypt.


20 March 2005 17:39


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Das Endlager für nuklearen Restmüll in Nevada war schon ein Thema vor den Wahlen. Yucca Mountain liegt an der Strecke von Las Vegas nach Reno.

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Sunday Herald - 20 March 2005
Noam Chomsky ... still furious at 76
By Alan Taylor
http://www.sundayherald.com/48388

ON my way to meet Noam Chomsky in Boston, I pick up a copy of The American Prospect, whose cover features snarling caricatures of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, and of Chomsky: the man dubbed by Bono “the Elvis of academia”. Cheney is presented as the proverbial bull in an international china shop, Chomsky is portrayed by this “magazine of liberal intelligence” as the epitome of high- minded dove-ish, misguided idealism. Chomsky, of course, is well used to such attacks. For every cloying article by a disciple, there is a rocket from the enemy camp revelling in his perceived failings and undermining his reputation, denigrating his scholarship as a linguist and joyfully repeating statements which, when taken out of context, seem tinged with fanaticism.

To his credit, Chomsky puts them all on his website, whether it’s The New Yorker describing him as “the devil’s accountant” and “one of the greatest minds of the 20th century”, or The Nation, which lampooned him as “a very familiar kind of academic hack” whose career has been “the product of a combination of self-promotion, abuse of detractors, and the fudging of his findings”. He stands accused of asserting that every US President since Franklin D Roosevelt should have been impeached as war criminals; of supporting the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia; and of comparing Israel to the Third Reich.

Leaving behind red-brick Harvard, where the winter snow is at last beginning to melt, one enters a vast industrial estate. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Chomsky has been professor of modern languages and linguistics since 1976, is home to more than 10,000 students, each of whom pays around $50,000 a year for the privilege of studying at America’s self-styled “ideas factory”.

Chomsky, who at 76 is technically retired, inhabits a suite of offices overflowing with foreign translations of his books and dusty academic journals. A photograph of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell hangs above a door, as a picture of the Pope might decorate a priest’s study. The professor, his gatekeeper says, has gone for a walk, but he should return soon, if he can find his way back. Apparently, he is exploring a hitherto uncharted underground route on the campus.

I am shown into his office, which looks as if it has been burgled. Papers are piled high and strewn on every available surface. On a desk are photographs of his grandchildren. Chomsky, who has been married to the same woman for more than half a century, has three children, two daughters – one of whom works for Oxfam, the other is a teacher – and a son, who is a software engineer. When finally he does appear, I am informed that my allotted hour has shrunk magically to 45 minutes. Interviewers, it’s intimated, are lining up like planes on a runway waiting for take-off. “Don’t take it personally,” I’m told.

I remind Chomsky of his 1990 visit to Scotland, when he spoke on “self-determination and power” at the Pearce Institute in Govan, Glasgow. “You’ve got to remind me what this is about,” says Chomsky. This does not seem a promising start. I remind him that he is coming to Edinburgh to deliver a Gifford Lecture. “I know that,” he says, rather testily. “But who are you?”

Chomsky is quietly impatient, his voice subdued and crackly. He has retained his wavy hair, which flops over his ears, and he dresses like a style-unconscious academic – black trainers, white socks, denims, charity-shop jumper. To some interviewers he comes across as bitter and despairing but others, including me, find a seam of laconic humour beneath the serious, restrained manner. When he starts to talk he often forgets to stop and in the course of our foreshortened hour he proves as difficult to interrupt as the Queen’s Christmas message. Wind him up and away he goes.

But with Chomsky it’s hard to know where to begin. Having spent more than 50 years at the MIT, he is the author of dozens of books and countless articles. A decade ago, Nature mentioned him in the same breath as Darwin and Descartes. Among his modern peers are Einstein, Picasso and Freud. Apparently, only Shakespeare and the Bible have been cited in scholarly publications more often than Chomsky has been. His influence is equally formidable, including generations of media students and the likes of John Pilger, Harold Pinter, Naomi Klein and James Kelman.

“If Chomsky has a specialist subject,” wrote Kelman, “then some would argue it is not linguistics, nor the philosophy of language, rather it is US global policy, with particular reference to the dissemination of all related knowledge.”

Not all of Chomsky’s devotees would agree with Kelman. Some, such as author and columnist Paul Johnson, wish he’d stuck with linguistics and kept his nose out of politics. Through his study of language and, in particular, syntax, Chomsky is credited with transforming the way foreign languages are taught through his theory of a “universal grammar”, and of “revolutionising our view of the mind”. Several of his books, including Syntactic Structures and Theory Of Syntax, published in 1957 and 1965 respectively, are invariably referred to as essential documents, though they’re hardly accessible to the layman.

Meanwhile Manufacturing Consent, which he co-wrote with Edward Herman in 1988, is on every rookie journalist’s reading list. Chomsky is the sceptics’ sceptic, believing that the true nature of the US’s role in the world is distorted and hidden from the American people by the corporate-owned media elite and federal government representatives who protect business interests in order to get re-elected or keep their jobs in the administration. Though he reluctantly supported Democrat John Kerry’s failed pitch for the presidency last November, Chomsky is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. From his perspective, there’s not a lot to choose between them ; they’re both “business parties”.

We begin by talking about the piece in The American Prospect. “It’s the journal of what they modestly call ‘the decent left’,” he says, oozing contempt. “It’s kind of moderate social democrat and they see themselves as embattled. You know, caught between two powerful forces which are crushing them. One is Dick Cheney, representing the White House, the Pentagon, one of the most powerful forces in history, and the other one – an equal and opposite force – is me. Do you think any intellectual or academic in history has ever received such praise? I mean, it’s way beyond the Nobel Prize. I already got someone to put it on the website. It tells you something about their attitudes. They’re pathetic, frightened, cowardly little people.”

Interesting, I note, that though his face is on the magazine’s cover, his name is nowhere to be seen in the piece. “Oh, no, no, no,” Chomsky says, grinning at my naivety, “you can’t mention it. You can’t mention anything. You can’t read anything. All you can do is report gossip . So you heard some gossip saying that I was in favour of Pol Pot or I support Osama bin Laden. That I’m in favour of [Slobodan] Milosevic. And then you heard it at a dinner party so it must be true. My previous interviewer is doing a documentary mainly on Palestine. She just got a PhD at New York University. She was telling me that if she ever so much as mentioned my name her faculty members practically collapsed in terror. The idea that you could look at anything of mine was so frightening it couldn’t happen. Which is standard. You can’t think because that’s too dangerous. Or you can’t look at public opinion. You should see public opinion. It’s amazing.”

In what way? Just before last November’s presidential election, he says, two of America’s most prestigious public attitude monitoring institutions – the Program on International Policy Attitudes and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations – published studies which showed that both political parties, the media and what he calls “the decent left” are far to the right of the American public on most major issues. “I’m right in the mainstream,” says Chomsky. “And, of course, it wasn’t reported.”

“ The major facts were just suppressed,” he says. “Actually, these two reports were reported in two local papers in the country and a couple of op eds. That’s it. In the entire country. The most important information possible right before an election.”

What the reports showed, he explains, was that the American public are strongly opposed to the use of force, except in terms of the UN charter, and in the face of imminent attack. “The public wants the UN, not the US, to take the lead in an international crisis,” says Chomsky. “That includes reconstruction, security and so on in Iraq. A majority of the public is actually in favour of giving up the veto at the UN so the US would go along with the majority. An overwhelming majority supports the Kyoto protocol. In fact, so enthusiastically that Bush voters assumed that he was in favour of it, because it was so obviously the right thing to do.

“The same huge majority is in favour of joining the International Criminal Court. A large majority of the population takes it to be a moral issue for the government to provide health care for everybody. It goes on and on like this. The public is far to the left of anything in the establishment.”

Come the elections, he says, the public suffered from mass delusion. They didn’t understand what the candidates stood for. What they were voting for was imagery. “Elections are run by the public relations industry; the same guys who sell toothpaste.” Issues don’t register on the radar. “You don’t talk about what the candidates stand for, what you have is John Kerry goose-hunting and riding his motorcycle and George Bush pretending to be a simple kind of guy, who chops wood and takes care of his cattle …”

And plays golf?

“No, no. You don’t push that too much, that’s elitist. He is supposed to be an ordinary guy. Take a look at him! His sleeves are rolled up; he’s just getting ready to go back to the ranch. You don’t present him as what he is: a spoiled frat boy from Yale who only got somewhere because of his parents.”

Chomsky, one suspects, could continue in this vein ad nauseam. Even now, at an age when most people would rather be in a gated Florida compound than constantly locking horns with the establishment, he persists in banging his head against closed doors. In the US, he is either a pariah or a prophet, “a kind of modern-day soothsayer”, according to his biographer Robert Barsky.

“Unlike many leftists of his generation,” says Barsky, “Chomsky never flirted with movements or organisations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, and elitist … He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century.”

Nobody can deny Chomsky’s commitment to the cause of truth. His father was a renowned Hebrew scholar who emigrated from the Ukraine to the United States in 1913 to avoid being drafted into the army. His mother was also a Hebrew scholar and wrote children’s books. Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928, and his precocity was nurtured at an experimental elementary school. By 10, he was reading the proofs of his father’s edition of a 13th-century Hebrew grammar, and writing about the rise of fascism in Spain for his school newspaper. As a teenager he would often take a train from Philadelphia to New York to visit his uncle, who had a newspaper stand and a changeable political viewpoint. “First he was a follower of Trotsky,” Chomsky says, “then he was an anti-Trotskyite. He also taught himself so much Freud he wound up as a lay psychoanalyst with a penthouse apartment.”

At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Chomsky met his mentor, Zellig Harris, a politically active professor of linguistics. It was Harris who dissuaded him from abandoning his studies and going to Israel where the new state was in formation. In 1956, at an MIT symposium on information theory, Chomsky presented a paper which overturned conventional linguistic wisdom. “Other linguists had said language had all the formal precision of mathematics,” said George Miller, a psychologist who was in the audience, “but Chomsky was the first linguist to make good the claim.”

Throughout his life, Chomsky has maintained his twin interests in politics and linguistics but it is the former which has consumed his energies in recent years and given him such a public profile. When he speaks, he says, crowds turn up in their thousands. In Sweden, the venue changed from a small hall to a football stadium. He turns down many more requests than he accepts. Rarely does he agree to appear on American television, because – as I can testify – he will not compromise by talking in sound bites. Proper discourse requires time to allow arguments to develop.

“You can only be on television if you have concision,” he says. “That means you can say something between two commercials. That’s a terrific technique of propaganda. On the rare occasions when I’ m asked to be on television, I usually refuse for this reason. If you’re gonna be asked a question, say, about terrorism and you’re given three sentences between commercials, you’ve got two choices. You can repeat conventional ideology – you say, yeah, Iran supports terrorism. Or you can sound like you’re from Neptune. You can say, yeah, the US is one of the leading terrorist states. The people have a right to ask what you mean. And so if it was a sane news channel – al-Jazeera, say – you could talk about it and explain what you mean. You’re not allowed to do that in the United States.”

On occasion, one suspects, Chomsky doth protest too much. Like fellow American “dissidents”, such as Michael Moore and Gore Vidal, he may complain about the manipulative power of the media and government but he can hardly complain that he has been rendered voiceless. Indeed, these days the internet is a potent weapon in his armoury. He can’t be both the most cited living person and marginalised.

There is little doubt, however, that his relentless monitoring of the American media and his fundamental distrust of the denizens of Washington DC make him a formidable and eloquent adversary and, consequently, persona non grata in certain quarters. In general, he believes that the US should stay out of other countries’ affairs. Bush’s White House, he says, only believes in democracy when it serves American interests. The same guys who backed Saddam Hussein’s brutal suppression of the Shi’ites are the ones who ordered the invasion of Iraq.

He is in full flow, bashing Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the war in Iraq and US nominee for the presidency of the World Bank, rubbishing Tony Blair – “I suppose Hitler believed what he was saying too” – and recalling how, in 1985, Ronald Reagan declared a national emergency because he thought Nicaragua was about to march into Texas, when his assistant pokes her head round his door and says my 45-minute hour is up. On the way out, Chomsky draws my attention to a ghoulish painting hidden behind a filing cabinet.

“It’s a terrific Rorschach test,” he says menacingly. “When I ask people from North America what it is, nobody knows. When I ask people from South America, everybody knows. If you ask people from Europe, maybe 10% know. What it is, is Archbishop Romero on the 25th anniversary of his assassination [in El Salvador], six Latin American intellectuals – Jesuits – who were also murdered, all by elite forces armed and trained by the United States who also killed another 70,000 people. Nobody knows a thing about it.

“Suppose it had been in Czechoslovakia. Suppose the Russians had murdered an archbishop and killed [Vaclav] Havel and half-a-dozen of his associates. Would we know about it? Yeah. We probably would have nuked them. But when we do it, it doesn’t exist. It reminds me of the world.”

Noam Chomsky will give the Gifford Lecture – Illegal but Legitimate: A Dubious Doctrine for the Times – at the McEwan Hall, Edinburgh, at 5.15pm on Tuesday


Copyright © 2005 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088

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Published on Sunday, March 20, 2005 by the Telegraph/UK
Stiglitz Warns of Violence If Wolfowitz Goes to World Bank
by Robert Preston
http://www.money.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money…

Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the world`s most influential economic thinkers, has launched a savage attack on US plans to appoint Paul Wolfowitz as the World Bank`s new president.

In an exclusive interview, the American Nobel laureate said: "The World Bank will once again become a hate figure. This could bring street protests and violence across the developing world." He described President Bush`s determination to appoint his deputy defense secretary to the important post as "either an act of provocation or an act so insensitive as to look like provocation". Wolfowitz is widely regarded as the creator of the policy that led to the US war in Iraq.

The choice of Wolfowitz has also created a dilemma for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They fear he would stand in the way of their high-profile initiative to alleviate African debt and poverty. However, they are reluctant to spark a dispute with the White House by going public with their concerns. "This is a big problem for us," said an official close to the chancellor. "We are still working out what to do."

The presidency of the World Bank is in the gift of the White House, while the International Monetary Fund, its sister body, is normally run by a European. The Bank is the world`s most important development institution. It is the main lender to poorer countries for a whole range of projects, including the fight against poverty and HIV/Aids.

In an interview with Liam Halligan, the economics correspondent of Channel 4 news, Stiglitz said he was concerned that the Bank would "become an explicit instrument of US foreign policy". He added: "It will presumably take a lead role in Iraqi reconstruction, for instance. That would jeopardize its role as a multilateral development body."

This is Stiglitz`s first public utterance since last week`s nomination. When he was the World Bank`s chief economist - under the current president James Wolfensohn, whose decade-long tenure ends in June - he played a major role in rebuilding its battered reputation.

Stiglitz said Wolfowitz was unsuitable in part because the US war in Iraq remains profoundly unpopular in many of the territories where the World Bank works. But he also complained that Wolfowitz has the wrong skills.

"He has no training or experience in economic development or financial markets," Stiglitz said. The Bank was the most important institution addressing poverty, he said. "We need someone in charge who knows. . . development."

© Copyright 2005 Telegraph Group Limited

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Am 23.Juli 2002 hatte Tony Blair ein Treffen mit Sir Richard Dearlove dem Leiter von MI6, dem britischen Geheimdienst und dieser berichtete ihm, dass, so wurde es protokolliert,
"the facts and the intelligence" were being "fixed round the policy" by the Bush Administration.
Oder wie es der damalige Außenminister, Robin Cook, sagte
"They didn`t have the proof"
Eine BBC-Dokumentation.


Blair`s case for war questioned
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/4366843.stm

Iraq, Tony and the Truth
BBC One, Sunday, 20 March 2005, 22:15 GMT


On the 23rd July 2002 the Prime Minister chaired a highly sensitive meeting. It may prove to have been one of the most significant on his road to war in Iraq.

The BBC`s Panorama programme has been told by several reliable sources that Sir Richard Dearlove was minuted as saying that "the facts and the intelligence" were being "fixed round the policy" by the Bush Administration.

By fixed, it is understood that the Head of MI6 meant the Americans were trawling for evidence to support a policy of regime change.

Just back from Washington, Dearlove reported that military action was inevitable. In the same meeting and not for the first time the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, questioned whether Saddam posed a sufficient threat to justify invasion.

The build up of intelligence

Panorama has also learnt that the government tasked MI6 to extract as much information as possible from their limited sources in Iraq to build up an intelligence case.

Our shared reaction was that that would be a considerable challenge because of the relatively sparse nature of the intelligence available
Dr Brian Jones, chief WMD analyst at the MOD, on the dossier
The results of this new intelligence trawl were intended to support a new dossier which was subsequently published on the 24 September 2002.

Dr Brian Jones, the chief Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) analyst at the MOD, recalls that there was "an appeal... [for] people to look and think very closely about the evidence that was available."

News of the Government`s dossier on Iraq`s WMD threat, first reached Dr Jones in the summer of 2002.

"It was mentioned to me by a colleague in the margins of a meeting in Whitehall. Our shared reaction was that that would be a considerable challenge because of the relatively sparse nature of the intelligence available on Iraq`s WMD."

"A lack of candour"

I think the real dishonesty of the government`s position is that Tony Blair could not be frank with the British people
Robin Cook, former Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary who resigned over the Iraq war, says of the Prime Minister`s actions that

"... he knew perfectly well what he was doing... I think there was a lack of candour"

"I think the real dishonesty of the government`s position is that Tony Blair could not be frank with the British people about the real reason why he believed Britain had to be part of an invasion which was to prove to the United States President that we were his most reliable, most sound ally¿ His problem was he could not be honest about that with either the British people or Labour MPs, hence the stress on disarmament."

"They didn`t have the proof"

His view comes alongside further evidence from senior figures which once again bring into question the validity of pre-war claims made about Iraq`s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programmes.

Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, the former Mexican Ambassador to the UN, was invited to a private intelligence briefing about the WMD evidence.

"I asked them, `Do you have, full proof of the existence of these weapons, at any one of these particular sites that you are referring to?` And the MI6 officer told me, "No, we don`t."

He continues by saying that

"... it was very clear they didn`t have the proof, that they had circumstantial evidence of a funny behaviour, of a suspicious behaviour. But I knew that, we all knew that, because that was what we were getting from the inspectors"

We stretched the legal argument to breaking point in my view...
Sir Stephen Wall, the Prime Minister`s former European Affairs Advisor
The former secretary of the Defence Notice Committee, Rear Admiral Nick Wilkinson told Panorama that

"... the government perhaps allowed the public to be misled as to the degree of certainty about weapons of mass destruction."

Sir Stephen Wall, the Prime Minister`s former European Affairs Advisor says on the matter that "We stretched the legal argument to breaking point in my view..."

Panorama`s documentary "Iraq, Tony and the Truth" is broadcast on BBC One at 22:15 GMT, Sunday 20 March 2005.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/panorama/43…

Published: 2005/03/20 21:42:19 GMT

Published on Sunday, March 20, 2005 by Agence France Presse
[urlMI6 Chief Told Blair That US `Fixed` Case for Iraq War]http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0320-06.htm[/url]

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March 21, 2005
There Are Signs the Tide May Be Turning on Iraq`s Street of Fear
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/international/middleeast/2…

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Nearly two years after American troops captured Baghdad, Haifa Street is like an arrow at the city`s heart. A little more than two miles long, it runs south through a canyon of mostly abandoned high-rises and majestic date palms almost to the Assassin`s Gate, the imperial-style arch that is the main portal to the Green Zone compound, the principal seat of American power.

When most roads in central Baghdad are choked with traffic, there is rarely more than a trickle of vehicles on Haifa Street. At the day`s height, a handful of pedestrians scurry down empty sidewalks, ducking into covered walkways that serve as sanctuaries from gunfire - and as blinds for insurgent attacks in one of Iraq`s most bitterly contested battle zones.

American soldiers call the street Purple Heart Boulevard: the First Battalion of the Ninth Cavalry, patrolling here for the past year before its recent rotation back to base at Fort Hood, Tex., received more than 160 Purple Hearts. Many patrols were on foot, to gather intelligence on neighborhoods that American officers say have been the base for brutal car bombings, kidnappings and assassinations across Baghdad.

In the first 18 months of the fighting, the insurgents mostly outmaneuvered the Americans along Haifa Street, showing they could carry the war to the capital`s core with something approaching impunity.

But American officers say there have been signs that the tide may be shifting. On Haifa Street, at least, , insurgents are attacking in smaller numbers, and with less intensity; mortar attacks into the Green Zone have diminished sharply; major raids have uncovered large weapons caches; and some rebel leaders have been arrested or killed.

American military engineers, frustrated elsewhere by insurgent attacks, are moving ahead along Haifa Street with a $20 million program to improve electricity, sewer and other utilities. So far, none of the work sites have been attacked, although a local Shiite leader who vocally supported the American projects was assassinated on his doorstep in January.

But the change American commanders see as more promising than any other here is the deployment of large numbers of Iraqi troops. American commanders are eager to shift the fighting in Iraq to the country`s own troops, allowing American units to pull back from the cities and, eventually, to begin drawing down their 150,000 troops. Haifa Street has become an early test of that strategy.

Last month, an Iraqi brigade with two battalions garrisoned along Haifa Street became the first homegrown unit to take operational responsibility for any combat zone in Iraq. The two battalions can muster more than 2,000 soldiers, twice the size of the American cavalry battalion that has led most fighting along the street. So far, American officers say, the Iraqis have done well, withstanding insurgent attacks and conducting aggressive patrols and raids, without deserting in large numbers or hunkering down in their garrisons.

If Haifa Street is brought under control, it will be a major step toward restoring order in this city of five million, and will send a wider message: that the insurgents can be matched, and beaten back.

Still, American commanders are wary, saying the changes are a long way from a victory. They note that the insurgents match each tactical change by the Americans and Iraqi government forces with their own.

"We know that we face a learning enemy, just as we learn from him," said Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, who left Baghdad recently after a year commanding the First Cavalry Division, responsible for overall security in Baghdad and for the 800-member task force dedicated to Haifa Street. "But I believe we are gaining the upper hand," he said.

A Downturn in Rebel Fire

For now, the days when rebels could gather in groups as large as 150, pinning down American troops for as long as six hours at a time, have tapered off. American officers say only three Haifa Street mortars have hit the Green Zone in the past six months; in the last two weeks of September alone, 11 Haifa Street mortars hit the sprawling zone.

In recent weeks, with the new Iraqi units on hand, the Americans have sent up to 1,500 men at a time on sweeps, uncovering insurgent weapons caches and arresting insurgent leaders like Ali Mama, the name taken by a gangster who was once a favored hit man for Saddam Hussein.

He is now in Abu Ghraib; others who have become local legends with attacks on the Americans have been killed, including one who used the nom-de-guerre Ra`id the Hunter, American intelligence officers say.

The two Iraqi battalions, backed by a new battalion from the Third Infantry Division, will now bear the main burden of establishing order in the sprawling district around Haifa Street - three miles deep and about half as wide, encompassing about 170,000 people, the city`s main railway yards, current and former government buildings, and the Mansour Melia Hotel, favored by many Westerners based in Baghdad.

By any measure, it is a tough patch. When Mr. Hussein ordered Baghdad`s old walled city bulldozed in the 1980`s, he gave the street at its heart a new name, Haifa, to honor the Israeli port city that many Arabs hope will become part of a Palestinian state. In the forest of new high-rises, Mr. Hussein housed thousands of loyalists: Baath Party stalwarts, middle-class professionals from his favored Sunni minority, migrants from his hometown, Tikrit, and fugitives from other Arab countries, including Egypt, Syria and Sudan.

After Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, the area was primed to become an insurgent redoubt. Mr. Hussein established his first hide-out somewhere along the alleyways of Sheik Marouf, a neighborhood that is still a rebel stronghold.

In some ways, Haifa Street is a microcosm of Iraq. Behind the apartment blocks lie a patchwork of Shiite communities where residents, repressed like other Shiites under Mr. Hussein, are mostly friendly to the Americans.

Interlaced with these are predominantly Sunni neighborhoods that have been insurgent bases, like Al Sadr; Fahama; Sheik Ali, a district of Sheik Marouf; and the area along the Tigris that Mr. Hussein named for himself, Saddamiya, where he attended school in the 1950`s.

The Sunni neighborhoods, along with the area`s Arab migrants, proved a bountiful recruiting pool for the two principal groups that form the resistance - pro-Hussein loyalists who believe they can somehow restore Baath Party rule; and militants loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant who has spawned a web of terrorist groups and attracted a $25 million bounty as America`s most-wanted man in Iraq.

From their Haifa Street hide-outs, the rebels have been remorseless. American units report having found headless bodies in garbage dumps and floating in the river. Twelve-year-old boys have thrown grenades. Six-year-olds have approached American patrols with whispers of insurgent hideouts, then lured them into ambushes. A missing Iraqi soldier`s bloodied uniform turned up hanging from a wire near the river, with a sign in Arabic pinned to it saying, "Let this be a warning for spies."

A year ago, the American cavalry division took a major risk in shifting to foot patrols from drive-throughs in Bradley armored troop carriers. The change took its toll: the division`s Haifa Street force lost five soldiers, and 25 were seriously wounded, the core of a wider group of injured men who received those Purple Hearts. But the unit estimates that it killed 100 to 200 enemy fighters, and the yield in intelligence was rich.

With the foot patrols, the Americans made friends in the Shiite communities, particularly in Showaka, a poor area where back streets are dotted with carved, Ottoman-era balconies. Ties improved with a special $2 million reconstruction program - part of the wider reconstruction in the district - that has brought 12,500 Showaka families their first indoor toilets, buried sewage pipes and modernized the electricity grid. Gone, for these people, are the centuries when sewage ran down open channels in the alleys into the Tigris.

American morale, for the moment, is high. Lt. Col. Thomas D. Macdonald, the cavalry division officer who commanded the Haifa Street task force, believes that the Iraqis, with an affinity for their own people, can push the rebels farther back.

"I`ve got the enemy to the point where he can`t do large-scale operations anymore, only the small-scale stuff," he said recently, during one of his last patrols, at the head of a company of 120 soldiers. "If we put in more Iraqi garrisons like this, that will be the final nail in the coffin."

Iraqi Units With `Heart`

When Iraqi units began to serve in combat zones, desertion rates were high. During the first offensive in Falluja, last April, some soldiers refused to fight. But over the past nine months, a $5 billion American-financed effort has bought Iraqi units more than 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 100,000 flak jackets, 110,000 pistols, 6,000 cars and pickup trucks, and 230 million rounds of ammunition. In place of the single Iraqi battalion trained last June, there are more than 90 battalions now, totaling about 60,000 army and special police troops. No one is certain how many insurgents they face; the number, including foot soldiers, safe-house operators, organizers and financiers, is estimated to be 12,000 to 20,000.

Iraqi units still complain about unequal equipment, particularly the lack of the heavy armor the Americans use, like Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks. But the complaints among American officers about "tiny heart syndrome" - a caustic reference to some Iraqi units` unwillingness to expose themselves to combat - have diminished.

"Now, they`re ready to fight," said Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American officer overseeing the retraining effort, in a recent interview at his Green Zone headquarters.

Lethal intimidation of recruits - the suicide bombing of army barracks, police stations and recruiting lines, with scores of volunteers killed - remains the single biggest problem in building the Iraqi forces, the general acknowledged. But an overwhelming majority of new recruits have refused to buckle, he said, and they understand that they are fighting, not for the Americans, but for their own country. "Guys who get blown up in the morning get themselves bandaged up, and they`re back in the afternoon," he said.

The uncompromising image is one that Gen. Muhammad al-Samraa, 39, the commander of the Iraqi 303rd Battalion, based on Haifa Street, is eager to push. "My aim is 100 percent clear: all the terrorists living here, they go now," he said, in halting English. He was a major in Mr. Hussein`s air defense force, and spent a year as a bodyguard and driver for a Shiite tribal leader in Baghdad before signing up for the new army.

A Shiite himself, commanding a unit composed mostly of Shiites, General Samraa has made his headquarters in the old Sajida Palace, on the riverbank at Haifa Street`s northern end, a sad, looted, sandbagged relic of the pleasure dome it was for Mr. Hussein`s first wife, Sajida. But the general insisted the new Iraqi forces had history on their side. "Saddam, we`ve seen the movie, and it`s finished," he said. "He`s broken. Now is the new Iraq."

Among Shiites, Good Will

In the Shiite neighborhoods of Haifa Street, the good will for Americans is pervasive. A fruit seller, Majid Hussein Hassan, 40, rose from his stall to ask Colonel Macdonald for help getting hospital treatment for an infant nephew with a heart deformity. From a balcony, an old woman appealed for better garbage removal. "We`re counting on you Americans," she said. "Iraqi officials do nothing!"

In Showaka and other Shiite neighborhoods, residents clustered around the Americans, offering slivers of information about insurgents. A man in the black cloak of a Shiite religious student gave the names of a brother and sister from a Sunni street who had left in haste after a bombing on the eve of the Jan. 30 elections that killed 17 people, including 6 children, in a Shiite district of Sheik Marouf.

The Sunni neighborhoods are another matter. There, American and Iraqi troops face continuing attacks from a mix of insurgents: the Hussein loyalists, Baath Party irreconcilables dreaming of restoring Sunni rule, Islamic militants under Mr. Zarqawi, and criminal gangs that thrived under Mr. Hussein.

For an overview of the area, Colonel Macdonald led a platoon to the roof of an apartment block roof overlooking Tala`i Square, notorious for a Dec. 19 attack when masked insurgents ambushed Iraqi election officials, hauling them from their car and shooting them in the head.

With helicopters armed with missiles circling overhead, the colonel offered what sounded like a valedictory for the Haifa Street insurgents. "We`ve gotten to the point where the bad guys really aren`t fighting us here anymore," he said. "The battle is all in the back alleys now."

Still, on the streets of Sheik Ali, the insurgents leave plenty of traces. When an American patrol of 120 men passed through the nearly deserted streets at noon, the few residents who glanced through half-opened doors and curtains offered furtive smiles and waves.

But on the walls, the message was one of defiance. "Death to the Americans!" the slogans said, freshly painted after older ones were spray painted over by Iraqi troops. "Victory to the mujahedeen!"

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 20, 2005
U.S. Avoids Role of Mediator as Iraqis Remain Deadlocked
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/politics/20diplo.html?page…

WASHINGTON, March 19 - Senior Bush administration officials said this week that the administration was avoiding direct intervention to break the deadlock among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions, still trying to form a government in Iraq six weeks after national elections.

The officials said they had concluded that despite the bitter wrangling over how much power to distribute among the factions, particularly Shiites and Kurds, any attempt by the United States to mediate would be likely to backfire.

"So far, we`re letting it happen," a senior administration official said, referring to the Kurdish-Shiite dispute. "That`s really by design. If we try to impose a solution, then anyone who gets the short end of the stick will hold a grudge, not only against us, but against the deal that was reached. It could lead to instability down the road."

Another senior official said that Kurds, Shiites and some of Iraq`s Arab neighbors want the United States to play a facilitating role in forming a new government, but that Washington is resisting. "There`s pressure from the players out there, but not here," he said. "We are comfortable exactly where we are."

The passive American approach contrasts sharply with the involvement early last year of L. Paul Bremer III, who was the top civilian official of the American occupation, in working with Iraqis to produce a "transitional administration law" to guide the country while it writes a constitution this year. Mr. Bremer`s efforts alienated the Kurds, among others.

To a lesser extent, the approach contrasts with the active American encouragement later last year in trying to get an Iraqi government dominated by former exiles to work with Sunni leaders to get them to participate in the elections.

The detached American approach, described by officials who did not want to be identified because they said they wanted to keep the spotlight on Iraq, has irritated some Kurds, who charge that the United States could end up selling out the Kurds` interests.

On the other hand, some administration officials say that Kurdish leaders, in pressing "maximalist" demands for power, are engaging in theatrics intended to please their constituencies.

The Kurds have long been expected to press three main demands once the government is formed. They oppose establishment of Islam as the main source of law, insist on keeping their own militia independent and want to control substantial oil resources, particularly in the oil-producing city of Kirkuk, in the north.

What has happened, however, is that the Kurds are pressing these demands even before the government is formed, mainly because they have greater leverage now, with a requirement of a two-thirds majority to elect a president and two vice presidents.

It will take only a simple majority of the 275-member legislature to approve provisions in a constitution, and once the president and two vice presidents are selected, they are supposed to choose a prime minister, who must then be approved by a majority of the assembly.

Since the Kurds have 75 seats, they are close to wielding an effective veto over the selection of a government but would lose the veto in passing elements of the constitution.

"Realistically, the Kurds realize that once the government is formed, their leverage will decline precipitously," one of the senior officials said.

Still other experts warn that the Kurds may be overplaying their hand, however, especially by entertaining the idea that they could eventually break away from Iraq.

"Irrespective of what Kurdish leaders say, the Kurds` passion is for independence," said Laith Kubba, an Iraqi who is senior program officer for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Endowment for Democracy, a federally funded independent vehicle for financing democracy movements around the world. "But if that is what they want, they have to take responsibility for it. A Kurdish state would be surrounded by hostile neighbors - Turkey, Iran and even Iraq."

The timetable for forming a government is rushed, since the transitional law calls for a constitution to be written by August and approved by October, paving the way for elections under the new charter in December.

American and Iraqi officials say that in a gesture to the Kurds, leaders of the Shiite alliance, which has 140 seats in the assembly, have signaled that they will not press for Islam to be the central source of power in a new government, but the Kurds are holding out for an independent Kurdish militia and effective control of Kirkuk.

"Let`s be realistic," a Kurdish official said. "All coalitions need a certain element of trust, and the entire history of Kurdish relations with the rest of Iraq is one of broken promises."

This official said that in recent days Shiites began making various gestures to the Kurds, and that Ambassador John D. Negroponte, who left Baghdad last week to return to Washington to become national director of intelligence for President Bush, tried at the last minute to coax the Kurds into making a deal.

The Kurdish dispute with the Shiites has become so prominent in Iraq that it has tended to overshadow the parallel problem of bringing Sunnis into the government, especially among the Sunni groups that boycotted the election on the ground that too few Sunnis had been able to vote because of security problems.

An informal committee among Sunnis, both those that participated in the election and those that did not, had begun negotiating with Shiite and Kurdish leaders.

But administration officials said these talks had been hampered by infighting among the Sunnis themselves.

"We`re getting complaints from the Iraqis that the Sunnis can`t tell us what they want," said one of the senior administration officials.

There have been suggestions that the United Nations envoy, Ashraf Qazi, a veteran Pakistani diplomat, could help negotiate between Sunnis and the others, but his ties with Sunnis are said to be strained by his opposition to the Sunni election boycott.

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Populismus, der Bushs durch den Versuch der Reform der Rentenversicherung angekratztes Ansehen wieder aufpolieren soll.

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Das Schlimmste ist, dass die USA mit ihrer Hysterie eine ganze Region destabilisieren.

March 21, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Dissing Democracy in Asia
By LARRY PRESSLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/opinion/21pressler.html

Washington

ONE big story from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice`s trip to South Asia was that once again Washington`s policymakers are trying to send F-16 jet fighters to Pakistan. This is like a broken record - the argument has come up repeatedly since 1990, when an amendment I wrote quashed a deal involving 28 of the planes - but unfortunately this time the sale may well happen.

Pakistan is a declared ally in the fight against terrorism, and thus we give it huge amounts of military aid. But F-16`s have nothing to do with fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. So what is really going on here? The answer is entwined in two decades of misguided United States policy toward India and Pakistan.

The truth is, we should have a robust pro-India stance. India is a democracy with a free market and a highly developed system of human rights. It could become our major bulwark against China in East Asia. It also has a large Muslim minority and, generally speaking, is an example of tolerance. And we have a mutually beneficial trade relationship with India that is helping us keep our technological edge. (Disclosure: I am on the board of Infosys Technologies, an Indian software company.)

Pakistan, on the other hand, is a corrupt, absolute dictatorship. It has a horrendous record on human rights and religious tolerance, and it has been found again and again to be selling nuclear materials to our worst enemies. It claims to be helping us to fight terrorism, although many intelligence experts have suggested that most of our money actually goes to strengthening the rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Yes, during the cold war India often sided with the Soviet Union while Pakistan went with the United States. Some old hands at the Pentagon still seem to think we should be rewarding Pakistan for that. But the cold war is long over. We have given the Pakistanis their due many times over.

From the late 1970`s to the mid-1990`s, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I repeatedly warned that Pakistan was selling nuclear materials to other nations. Administrations, both Democratic and Republican, turned a blind eye; they even got leaders of our intelligence community to say that I didn`t know what I was talking about. Well, everything I said has been proved absolutely true - to an even more worrisome degree than I had described.

Our military-industrial complex, which I believe dominates our foreign policy, favors Pakistan not only because we can sell it arms, but also because the Pentagon would often rather deal with dictatorships than democracies. When a top Pentagon official goes to Pakistan, he can meet with one general and get everything settled. On the other hand, if he goes to India, he has to talk to the prime minister, the Parliament, the courts and, God forbid, the free press.

Meeting with Pakistani leaders last week, Secretary Rice did say she looked forward to "the evolution of a democratic path toward elections in 2007." But she neither asked for nor received any sort of guarantees about elections, human rights or freedom of the press. She did bring up nuclear proliferation, but only in a perfunctory way. Likewise, President Bush had General Musharraf as a guest at Camp David in 2003, apparently without ever mentioning the administration`s democracy program. This all makes a mockery of President Bush`s inaugural speech in January, and is a prime example of the sort of dictator-coddling that, eventually, always comes back to haunt us.

We need a fundamental policy shift for the subcontinent. First, we should enthusiastically improve our treatment of India. We should not reject Pakistan entirely - we need it as an ally - but to treat India and Pakistan the same is a great mistake. Instead, we need to speak frankly in public about Pakistan`s democratic and human-rights failures, as well as acknowledge that we can achieve our objectives in Pakistan with a much lower level of aid and a closer eye to ensuring that it goes toward the fight against terrorists. And we should not sell it any F-16`s.

We should also make it clear that we will favor India in all major regional disputes. Without American support, Pakistan would be forced to drop its claims to the disputed region of Kashmir, as well as end its support of the region`s Muslim militants (whom many in our intelligence services feel have ties to Al Qaeda).

Freeing ourselves from our profitless Pakistan policy would allow us to look clearly at the biggest problem in the region: China. We should tell Beijing that we will help India match China`s arms buildup and that we will work toward a modified free-trade agreement with India to help it offset China`s state-dominated trade practices.

The Bush administration is right to put the expansion of liberty and democracy at the center of its foreign policy. But as long as we favor dictatorships like Pakistan over free countries like India, the world will be right not to take our words seriously.

Larry Pressler is a former Republican senator from South Dakota.

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washingtonpost.com
Negroponte`s Time In Honduras at Issue
Focus Renewed on Intelligence Pick`s Knowledge of Death Squads in 1980s
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52001-2005Mar…

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 21, 2005; Page A01

It has been two decades since John D. Negroponte left his post as ambassador to Honduras, but the man President Bush has chosen to become the United States` first intelligence czar is still being hounded by human rights activists such as Zenaida Velasquez.

Their paths first intersected in 1983, when Velasquez asked for the ambassador`s help in tracing dozens of Hondurans, including her brother, allegedly kidnapped by agents of the U.S.-backed Honduran military. Little came of the meeting, and the disappearances continued for at least another year.

Over the years, Velasquez has gotten the CIA, an official Honduran ombudsman and an international human rights court to acknowledge that the Honduran army was responsible for her brother Manfredo`s kidnapping and presumed killing. But Negroponte has repeatedly insisted that military-backed death squads did not operate in Honduras while he was ambassador.

The selection of Negroponte for the new post of national intelligence director has focused renewed attention on the question of how much he knew about the Honduran military`s involvement in nearly 200 unsolved kidnappings during the 1980s, and what he did about it. The subject has dogged him in the past, and Democratic staff members said it is likely to be revisited when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence holds nomination hearings, tentatively scheduled for April 12.

A review of hundreds of declassified State Department and CIA documents suggests that Negroponte was preoccupied with "managing perceptions" about a country that had become a key U.S. ally in a decade-long campaign to stop the spread of communism in Central America. The documents show that he sought to depict Honduras in a generally positive light in annual human rights reports to Congress, and played down allegations of government abuse.

Opinions differ sharply over whether Negroponte, who served most recently as U.S. envoy to Iraq and the United Nations, ever suppressed pertinent intelligence information for fear of undermining support for U.S. policies.

Negroponte`s admirers see him as a tough-minded, professional diplomat who loyally implemented Reagan administration policies in Central America during an exceptionally difficult period. His critics view him as a symbol of what they consider a dark chapter in American history, when the United States closed its eyes to crimes by Third World strongmen because they were seen as partners in a larger anti-communist crusade.

For Velasquez, who founded a relatives` committee to investigate the spate of kidnappings and disappearances in Honduras in the early 1980s and is now a U.S. citizen living in California, the controversy is more personal. She wants Negroponte to do something he has so far declined to do: acknowledge the existence of death squads in Honduras, and their ties with the U.S.-backed Honduran security forces.

"It`s like a slap in the face," she said of Negroponte`s selection to the intelligence post. "He knew what was going on, but he still refuses to speak the truth."

Negroponte declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this article, in accordance with the tradition that presidential nominees refrain from public statements before their confirmation hearings. Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2001, before assuming the U.N. post, he continued to insist that the disappearances were not the result of Honduran "government policy."
Human Rights Concerns

When John Dmitri Negroponte arrived in Tegucigalpa as ambassador in December 1981 at age 42, Honduras had just become key to the Reagan administration`s strategy of rolling back communism in Central America. Over the next six years, Honduras would become the principal staging ground for U.S.-backed contra rebels struggling to overthrow Nicaragua`s Sandinista government.

Honduras had a better human rights record than its neighbors -- Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala -- and was fairly tranquil. The army was transferring power back to an elected civilian government, while retaining control over security matters.

After winning the 1980 election, President Ronald Reagan needed someone reliable in Honduras to replace Jack R. Binns, a Carter administration holdover. The new ambassador would coordinate a huge increase in military assistance, from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million in 1984. Negroponte had hawkish credentials: A former aide to Henry A. Kissinger, he had criticized his patron for making too many concessions to the North Vietnamese in the previous decade.

Before his departure, Binns had sent cables to Washington warning of some ominous human rights trends. Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who was selected to be commander in chief of the Honduran armed forces, told Binns privately that "extralegal" methods might be necessary to "take care" of subversives, declassified State Department documents show. He praised the "Argentine method" of dealing with the problem, which Binns took to refer to the kidnappings and disappearances of thousands of government opponents.

In June 1981, Binns cabled the State Department to say that he was "deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations," which suggested that the repressive policies Alvarez favored were being implemented "much faster than we anticipated." The State Department`s response, Binns said, was to instruct him to use "back channels," meaning the CIA, to report on sensitive human rights issues that could create problems for Honduras if they were leaked to Congress or the media.

A 1994 report by Oscar Valladares, a lawyer appointed by the Honduran parliament to investigate human rights abuse, blamed the Honduran army and the contras for 174 disappearances and kidnappings in the 1980s. Most of the incidents took place before the March 1984 ouster of Alvarez as armed forces chief.

The kidnapping of Manfredo Velasquez in September 1981, a few weeks before Negroponte arrived in Honduras, established what would be a familiar pattern. A university student and left-wing political activist, Velasquez was seized in daylight in a public parking lot by several men in civilian clothes, one of whom was later identified as a Honduran police sergeant. They bundled him into a car, and he was never seen again.

According to a November 1985 CIA report, which has since been partly declassified, the kidnapping was the work of the Honduran Anti-Communist Liberation Army, or ELACH. A 1997 CIA study identified ELACH as a "death squad" with close ties to a special security unit reporting to Alvarez.

In a 1988 ruling, the Inter-American Commission Court on Human Rights found the government of Honduras responsible for Velasquez`s disappearance and ordered it to pay damages to his family.
Disappearances Continue

The disappearances continued after Negroponte became ambassador. The Valladares report cites 17 disappearances and kidnappings in 1982, 20 in 1983 and 18 in 1984. There were 26 disappearances in 1985, but they were mainly the work of the contras, rather than Honduran security forces, the report says. The kidnapped included trade union activists, journalists and professors opposed to the military authorities.

The embassy played down the problems in the annual human rights reports on Honduras that it was required to submit to Congress, according to declassified cables collected by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group. In 1982, for example, the embassy recommended including a sentence asserting that there was "no evidence of systematic violation of judicial procedures" by the Honduran police.

"Allegations to the effect that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras appear to be totally without merit," the embassy cable added, reflecting a position Negroponte has maintained ever since.

In an interview, Binns noted that reporting about killings and disappearances "would have made it much more difficult to sustain our economic and security assistance" to Honduras.

A 1997 report by then-CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz on CIA activities in Honduras contains numerous references to Negroponte`s concerns about the possible "political ramifications" of negative human rights reporting. It cites several instances when reports were "suppressed" or given very limited circulation because of fears that they "would reflect negatively on Honduras." Hitz quoted an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency as saying that "the Embassy country team" wanted to keep human rights reporting "benign" in order "to avoid Congress looking over its shoulders and to keep Congress satisfied with the ongoing implementation of U.S. policy." The analyst`s name was redacted.

Raymond Burghardt, head of the embassy`s political section under Negroponte, said he never felt any pressure from Negroponte to "pull our punches or delude anybody in Washington as to what the real situation was." But he did not contest references in the 1997 CIA report to attempts by Negroponte to "manage perceptions" of Honduras in Washington at a time when the political debate about Central America was highly partisan.

"There are two ways you can manage reporting," said Burghardt, who is now director of seminars at the East-West Center in Hawaii. "One way is to make sure that reports are balanced. . . . The other is to steer people away from reporting on certain topics, and lie about what is going on. Negroponte`s approach was the former, not the latter."

Negroponte and his supporters have criticized some of the conclusions of Hitz`s report, saying that the ambassador never "suppressed" information about human rights abuse. During Negroponte`s 2001 Senate confirmation hearing, then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) quoted from a letter written by a senior CIA officer at the Tegucigalpa embassy asserting that decisions on disseminating such information were made entirely on "intelligence merits, and not on any extraneous political considerations."

In his own testimony, Negroponte described the Hitz report as "grossly unfair" and "misleading." He said his attitude about human rights reporting was "almost the opposite" of the picture presented in the inspector general`s report.

Desperate to draw attention to the disappearance of her brother and dozens of other activists, Zenaida Velasquez tried every avenue available to her. She organized street demonstrations, filed complaints to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and helped set up a Honduran committee for the relatives of the missing. She also badgered the U.S. Embassy for a meeting with Negroponte.

Velasquez says she and other relatives met with the ambassador around March 1983. "It was like a bucket of cold water," she said. "Our hopes were high, because we knew the influence that the embassy had with the government. But he denied knowing anything, and said it was an internal affair of Honduras. We got out of there wanting to cry."

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2001, Negroponte said he had no recollection of that meeting, but did not deny it took place. He expressed "surprise" that he would have described the disappearances as an "internal" Honduran affair.

Negroponte said he preferred "quiet diplomacy." On some occasions, he approached Alvarez and other Honduran leaders about the disappearances. The most frequently cited case was the July 1982 abduction of Oscar Reyes, a Honduran journalist sympathetic to the Sandinistas, and his wife, Gloria.

Reyes, who now edits the Spanish-language Catholic newspaper El Pregonero from an office near Catholic University, said in a recent interview that masked men took him and his wife from their house in Tegucigalpa to another house, where they were beaten and subjected to electric shocks. At one point, he was forced to undergo a mock execution in front of a tree, but the torturers changed their minds at the last moment, saying, "We`ll kill him another day."

Cresencio Arcos, who was then the embassy media attache, said that he talked to Negroponte about the Reyeses` disappearance and that the ambassador took the matter up with Alvarez. Reyes and his wife were subsequently brought before a judge and eventually released.

While Reyes is grateful to Negroponte for "helping to save our lives," he said his case proves that U.S. diplomats exercised influence with Honduran authorities and were well-informed about what was going on. "If they saved our lives, they could have saved a lot of other people`s lives as well," he said.

No attempt was made to find and arrest those who seized and tortured the Reyeses before handing them over to police. The embassy did not mention the incident in its annual human rights report on Honduras, which said the Honduran government had taken action "to discipline police who violated legal procedures."
CIA Group Backs Claims

In 1983, even as a dissident Honduran army officer accused Alvarez of masterminding "death squads," Reagan awarded him the Legion of Merit for "encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras."

Alvarez`s fellow generals were less confident about his commitment to democracy. In March 1984, they accused him of abuse of authority and sent him into exile. He was hired by the Pentagon as a consultant on unconventional warfare, and was assassinated by leftist guerrillas in Tegucigalpa in 1989 while exploring a political comeback.

A CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras found that "the Honduran military committed most of the hundreds of human rights abuses reported in Honduras" between 1980 and 1984. The report added that "death squads" linked to the military had used tactics such as "killings, kidnapping and torture" to deal with people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas.

U.S. "intelligence collection and reporting requirements on human rights abuses [in Honduras] were subordinated to higher priorities," the CIA working group reported, according to a summary released to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2001, before confirmation hearings on Negroponte`s nomination to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Attempts by Democratic senators to block the appointment evaporated after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Meeting just two days later, the Foreign Relations Committee voted 14 to 3 to support the nomination, on the grounds that the Bush administration needed an experienced diplomat at the United Nations at such a crucial time.

While acknowledging that there had been occasional "abuses of authority" by Honduran police officials, Negroponte reiterated his assertion that they were not officially sanctioned. He told the committee that he associated the term "death squad" with events in El Salvador, where more than 50,000 people had disappeared.

"I did not think that any activities that were occurring in Honduras at that time fit that description," Negroponte said.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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WASHINGTON (IWR Parody News) - President Bush today strongly denied that he ever told the [urltruth about North Korea exporting nuclear material to Libya.]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50241-2005Mar19.html

In fact, Mr. Bush stated that he never tells the truth about anything.

"You know, it`s like when Pickles wants to make whoopee at night, and I always tell her no because I got a headache.

"Or for example, how could I ever win at golf if didn`t take a mulligan on every hole and cheat on my score card? Sure, it might take me 15 stokes to finish a par three, but I just call it a hole in one!

Everybody does that, don`t they?

If it`s in your own self-interest, it`s OK to lie. That`s what my Bush Doctrine is all about!

Besides, if I started telling the truth about all our harebrained Neocon plans, everybody in the world would probably crap their friggin` pants for Christ sakes," said Mr. Bush to reporters.[/url]
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The Independent
The impact of the Iraq war is now being felt across Middle East
Monday, 21st March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=622…

SO now they have struck in Qatar. Nice, friendly, liberal Doha, with its massive US air base and its spiky, argumentative al-Jazeera television, its modern shops and expatriate compounds and luxury hotels. Ever since al-Qa’ida urged its supporters to strike around the maritime Arab kingdoms of the Gulf, the princes and emirs have been waiting to find out who’s first. Saturday’s suicide bomber - and the killing of a Briton - gave them their answer.

The first indications were that the killer was an Egyptian called Omar Ahmed Abdullah Ali, for it was his car which exploded outside the Doha Players Theatre in the suburb of Farek Kelab. But there was no doubt about the seriousness of the original warning. "To the brothers of Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the Emirates and to all the lions of jihad in the countries neighbouring Iraq, everyone of us has to attack what is available in his country of soldiers, vehicles and air bases of the crusaders and the oil allocated for them," it said.

The audiotape was made by Saleh al-Aoofi, a Saudi follower of Osama bin Laden who is credited as leading al-Qa’ida’s operations in the Gulf.

America’s largest air base is in Qatar. Bahrain is home base to the US fleet in the Gulf. American and British warships are regularly alongside in the emirate of Dubai. Oman has long been an ally of the US and Britain. And all have substantial expatriate populations. In Dubai, they used to say, it was difficult to find a citizen of the Emirates because of the vast population of Britons, French, Russians, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and Indians. In the old days, you could ring the Omani defence ministry and, like as not, the phone would be answered by a lady from Godalming.

So the Iraqi insurgency is now, it seems, to embrace all these "safe" locations. The last time Qatar witnessed violence was the car bomb which killed the former Chechen rebel leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev - for whose murder two Russian agents are now languishing in jail. But the weekend’s bombing was directed at a specifically Western target - albeit that a theatre hardly qualifies as an air base.

So safe was Qatar believed to be that the US imprisoned Saddam Hussein there. Indeed, his first wife, Sajida, and her children live in the emirate at the private invitation of Sheikh Mohamed bin Khalifa al-Thani. The Qatari interior ministry stated that the Egyptian was solely responsible for the explosion - which seems highly unlikely. It takes considerable sophistication to rig a car bomb, and those who prepare the vehicles are too valuable to their organisations to be sacrificed in an attack.

Sheikh Mohamed received the usual rash of phone calls from his opposite numbers in Kuwait, Bahrain and the Emirates. Compared with recent attacks in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Saturday’s was small-scale.

Qatar’s own population has long been friendly to foreigners even though these are increasingly military. There is also a large CIA base in the emirate and US special forces troops live in guarded compounds in residential areas of Doha.

The real purpose of the bombing, however, may have been economic. Al-Qa’ida’s assaults on Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were almost certainly intended to raise the price of oil. Qatar exports gas. Iraq’s oil exports have been interrupted by hundreds of insurgent attacks on its pipelines. The idea that "regime change" would bring new-found stability to the countries of the Gulf - another of President George Bush’s excuses for the 2003 invasion - now appears to be a myth.

That this weekend marks the second anniversary of the invasion may have been in the bomber’s mind. Certainly it coincided with attacks inside Iraq, including a suicide bombing in Mosul, the killing of another US soldier near Tikrit and a roadside bomb near Basra. The crisis in Lebanon provoked by the former premier Rafik Hariri’s murder has drawn attention away from Iraq even as the insurgency grows in strength.

The reality is that the Iraqi invasion now reverberates across the Middle East. Hariri was the leading proponent of a Syrian military withdrawal - which the US supports, primarily because it holds Damascus responsible for helping Iraqi insurgents. Lebanese officials have even claimed privately that Hariri’s friendship with the Iraqi interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi - himself half-Lebanese - brought about his death, a suggestion which neither the Americans nor the UN takes seriously.

Now the smaller Arab nations of the Gulf await the next assault - which no amount of expatriates and foreign soldiers can protect from al-Qa’ida.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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We have entered a world where reality is just a minor blockage in a flood of official, upbeat declarations and statements. Each new dispatch from the departments of irony on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that truth can be created by assertion, principle can be established by deception and democracy can be imposed through aggression. These people would claim credit for the good weather and deny responsibility for their own signature if they thought they could get away with it.



In a warped reality

Two years on, the occupiers justify the war by embracing the irrelevant and ignoring the inconvenient
Gary Younge
Monday March 21, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1442261,00.ht…

Guardian
This is a tale of one war, two anniversaries, three different demonstrations - and inconsistencies, contradictions and civilian deaths that are too numerous to count.

On April 18 2003, tens of thousands of Sunni and Shia protesters took to the streets of Baghdad to call for the Americans to leave Iraq. "You are the masters today," Ahmed al-Kubeisy, the prayer leader, told the Americans as he addressed the men emerging from Friday prayers. "But I warn you against thinking of staying. Get out before we kick you out."

Two years later, the US is still there. The anti-American protest was hailed in the White House as a vindication for the US strategy of bombing and then occupying the country. "In Iraq, there`s discussion, debate, protest - all the hallmarks of liberty," said President George Bush that week. "The path to freedom may not always be neat and orderly, but it is the right of every person and every nation."

On February 22 2005, tens of thousands of Lebanese protesters took to the streets of Beirut to call for the Syrians to leave the country. Within a week the Syrians announced indefinite plans to leave. Front covers of magazines carried pictures of pretty young Lebanese women waving flags (at last, some Arabs editors could fancy) proclaiming a "cedar revolution" and "people power". The protest was hailed in the White House as a vindication for the US strategy of bombing and occupying Iraq. "By now it should be clear that authoritarian rule is not the wave of the future," said Bush. "We want that democracy in Lebanon to succeed, and we know it cannot succeed so long as she is occupied by a foreign power."

On March 8 2005, 500,000 pro-Syrian protesters took to the streets of Beirut to oppose US and European interference. The demonstration was backed by Hizbullah, which the US has branded a terrorist organisation. People carried banners saying "Death to America". It was several times bigger than the first anti-Syrian protest. They too waved Lebanese flags. But editors didn`t find them pretty. They did not appear on the front pages of the news magazines. Their protest was not hailed in the White House. In fact, its existence was barely acknowledged.

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side," George Orwell once wrote. "He has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

So it is on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, where the occupying powers are still so desperate to create a moral framework to justify the war that embracing the irrelevant and ignoring the inconvenient has become the only viable strategy left to them.

We have entered a world where reality - like the photographs of torture or the absence of weapons of mass destruction - is just a minor blockage in a flood of official, upbeat declarations and statements. Each new dispatch from the departments of irony on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that truth can be created by assertion, principle can be established by deception and democracy can be imposed through aggression. These people would claim credit for the good weather and deny responsibility for their own signature if they thought they could get away with it.

Two years on, the death toll keeps rising, the size of the "coalition" keeps shrinking and global public support for this reckless occupation has maintained its downward spiral from a low base. Indeed, the only thing that changes is the rationale for starting the war, where the sophistry of the occupying powers keeps plumbing new depths and selective amnesia has attained new highs.

We are supposed to believe that there is no link between the American shooting of an Italian intelligence agent on a rescue mission and Rome`s decision to withdraw its troops 10 days later. "I don`t see a connection there," says the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan. We are supposed to remember Saddam Hussein`s gassing of the Kurds 17 years ago in graphic detail and forget everything that happened in Abu Ghraib 16 months ago.

"If our guys want to poke somebody in the chest to get the name of a bomb maker so they can save the lives of Americans, I`m for it," said Republican senator Jim Talent at a recent hearing on torture. How about ramming someone who does not have the name of a bomb maker in the anus with a truncheon, Mr Talent. Are you for that too?

Most recently, we have been told to believe that the limited and as yet untested moves towards democracy in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the thawing in Palestinian-Israeli relations (largely the result of Yasser Arafat`s death) and the proposed withdrawal of Syrian troops (prompted by an outcry over the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri) all justify the bombing.

As further proof they point to January`s elections in Iraq. This was a vote that the Americans wanted to postpone, in which many people could not participate, that produced a victory for Islamists with close ties to Iran who want the US troops out as soon as possible. If all of this amounts to victory, I would hate to see what their idea of defeat looks like.

The truth is that you cannot even begin to make a justification for the war unless you take into account the lives of innocent Iraqis lost as a result of it. The simplest way to deal with that is to pretend that these deaths do not exist - the occupying powers simply do not count them. The only other defence is that their deaths are a price worth paying and that good things can come from bad acts - a claim every bit as offensive and wrong-headed as arguing that 9/11 was a price worth paying for waking America up to the consequences of its foreign policy.

But the Iraqis are not the only ones to have suffered these past two years. While the occupiers have been busy failing to export democracy abroad, they have been busy undermining it at home. All of them lied to their electorates about the reasons for going to war. With the exception of America, all of them went to war despite overwhelming opposition from the public. And through their anti-terrorist bills and patriot acts they have removed some of the most basic legal rights of their citizens and criminalised the most vulnerable.

The elections last year in Spain and recent events in Italy are encouraging. They show that while the anti-war movement failed to stop the war, it has maintained a sufficiently effective presence to make a crucial difference at key moments to disable and discredit it.

In the meantime, the department of irony will keep moulding its own version of reality until it is sufficiently warped to fit its own agenda. US troop withdrawal, said Bush last week, "would be done depending upon the ability of Iraqis to defend themselves". They are already defending themselves Mr Bush - from you.

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Creveld, Martin van

Martin van Creveld, einer der führenden Militärhistoriker der Gegenwart, wurde 1946 in Holland geboren. Seit 1950 lebt er in Israel. Er studierte an der London School of Economics und an der Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wo er seit 1971 als Professor für Geschichte lehrt. Darüber hinaus ist er als militärischer Berater und Referent in der gesamten westlichen Welt tätig.

Weshalb die USA Eroberungskriege nicht gewinnen können.
An Hand von Moshe Dayan Bericht über den Vietnam-Krieg zeigt van Creveld die Mängel der US-Kriegsführung auf.


The Blemish of Conquest

Moshe Dayan questioned American goals in Vietnam. What would he say about Iraq?
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR30.1/vancreveld.html

Martin van Creveld

8 In 1966, Israel’s leading newspaper, Maariv, invited the legendary military commander Moshe Dayan to be its war correspondent in Vietnam. Dayan, then 51 years old, jumped at the chance. He had been working in politics since 1959, eventually serving as minister of agriculture under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, but he had left his post in 1964 when Ben-Gurion fell out with the new prime minister, Levi Eshkol. He had been casting about for a new project.

Although he knew nothing about Vietnam, Dayan—whose brilliance and ruthlessness as a strategist against Arab hostilities had led to his elevation to chief of staff of Israel’s armed forces in the early years of independence—did what came naturally: he prepared himself.

First he flew to France, where he had many acquaintances from the time of the Israeli–French alliance of the mid-1950s; some of them had served in, and helped lose, the First Indochina War. In his first meeting a retired air-force general named Loission blamed the situation in Vietnam on the American public for not giving the war its full support (even though, at the beginning, that support had been overwhelming). He thought the war could be easily won if only the American public would approve the bombing of North Vietnam back into the stone age. As he saw it, Viet Cong propaganda had prevented the world, including the South Vietnamese themselves, from seeing how righteous the American cause was; he even believed that, had free elections been held, the Vietnamese might have wanted the French back. He asked that his ideas be kept secret. Dayan, who did not think those ideas constituted “a ray of light to an embarrassed world,” readily agreed.

Dayan’s other French contact was a General Niceault. For his role in the 1961 attempt to overthrow the Fifth Republic, Niceault had just spent five years in jail. As so often happens, jail provided an opportunity to think and learn. Niceault explained that the Americans were using the wrong forces against the wrong targets. Their intelligence was simply not good enough, and most of their bombs hit nothing but empty jungle. He thought the solution was to use small groups of five to seven men who would shadow the Viet Cong and act as guides, calling in air power or artillery when contact was made. He also claimed that American attempts to prevent the North Vietnamese from infiltrating South Vietnam across the demilitarized zone were not working; each time a path was blocked, another one opened. Perhaps the war could be won by sending in a million-man army and killing all male Vietnamese, but the days in which such things were possible had gone. Besides, he thought, there was no point in going to Vietnam—the Israeli guest would see nothing. Dayan answered that he would go nevertheless. Even if he did not see the enemy or the war, he would see that he could not see; that, too, would be enlightening.

Next, in England, he met Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of Alamein. The old gentleman was blunt: the Americans’ biggest problem was that they did not have a clear objective. He himself had tried to get an answer on that subject from no less than former vice president Richard Nixon. In response he had been treated to a 20-minute lecture that left him as much in the dark as he had been at the beginning.

To Montgomery the Americans’ lack of a clear overall policy meant that field commanders were calling the shots. They did what they knew best, screaming for more and more troops, locking up entire populations in what were euphemistically called “strategic hamlets,” and bombing and shelling without giving a thought to what, if anything, they were achieving. Montgomery asked Dayan to tell the Americans, in his name, that they were “insane.” Again Dayan did not disagree, though perhaps this time for different reasons.

* * *

From Britain, Dayan flew to the United States. Eighteen years had passed since he first visited there. Like many others, he was impressed by its tremendous power. It was a society racing into the 21st century, with the rest of the world barely keeping pace.

At his first meeting at the Pentagon three colonels briefed him. He noted that, while they humbly called him “the glorious General Dayan,” they seemed to want to provide not only answers, but the questions he was to ask. He was subjected to a flood of statistics—so-and-so many enemies killed, so-and-so many captured—meant to prove that the situation was well under control and that large parts of the territory of South Vietnam, as well as its population, were now safe against terrorist attack. As he noted, though, even a few elementary questions revealed that things were far from simple. Later he was to discover how right he had been in this; in the whole of South Vietnam there was not a single road that was really safe against the Viet Cong. Nor was there anything to prevent the enemy from returning even to those places that had been most thoroughly “cleansed” and “pacified.” In particular, he wondered why, given the four-to-one superiority that the Americans and their South Vietnamese Allies enjoyed over the Viet Cong, General Westmoreland would not give the latter a chance to concentrate and attack so that he himself could smash them to pieces. The answer he received—that Westmoreland thought doing so was too risky—he considered unconvincing.

The three most important figures he met during his visit to the United States were Walt Rostow, the deputy head of the National Security Council; Maxwell Taylor, the former chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then acting as special adviser to President Johnson; and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Rostow, a Harvard economist, had published a famous book in which he explained how the developing world would catch up with the developed one in four clearly defined stages. Now he told Dayan that the desire for economic growth would drive the peoples of Asia closer to the United States. Dayan, who had observed how determined Israel’s Arab neighbors had been to get rid of their Western overlords even at heavy economic cost, doubted it.

Rostow also believed, or pretended to believe, that the forthcoming elections in South Vietnam would be free and democratic and would thus strengthen the government in waging the war. Still, he was the first American to admit to Dayan that the American objective was not just to help South Vietnam but to set up a permanent military presence in southeast Asia to counterbalance China’s growing power.

Taylor was the first American who offered a comprehensive plan for winning the war. It consisted of four elements: improving U.S. Army operations on the ground; making full use of the U.S. Air Force to bomb North Vietnam; strengthening the economy of South Vietnam; and reaching an “honorable” peace with Ho Chi Minh. Yet Taylor could not produce any convincing evidence that the United States was making progress toward these goals. As the Americans themselves admitted, in spite of the heavy casualties being inflicted on the Viet Cong—Taylor estimated 1,000 a week—their operations kept growing more extensive and more dangerous. Nor could Taylor point to any clear progress as a result of the air campaign. He did, however, believe that the bombing constituted a “heavy burden” on North Vietnam; sooner or later, the enemy would break.

Dayan was pleasantly surprised when Robert McNamara’s reputation for being hard to approach turned out to be unjustified. At a small dinner party with Margot McNamara (Robert’s wife), Walt Rostow, and several journalists, the secretary of defense did his best to answer Dayan’s questions. He admitted that many of the figures being floated by the Pentagon—particularly the percentages of the country and population “secured”—were meaningless. No more than anybody else could he explain how the Americans meant to end the war. What set him apart was that he was prepared to admit it, albeit only in a half-hearted way; as we now know, he already had his own doubts, which would lead to his resignation the next year. At the time he consoled himself by saying that the war was not hurting the American economy.

Flying to Vietnam by way of Honolulu and Tokyo, Dayan summed up his impressions so far. Everywhere he was received courteously. Everywhere the people he encountered were committed and extremely hard-working. Intensely patriotic, they seemed proud of what they were doing, yet they lacked a critical perspective. Asking whether they had changed their methods since they first went to Vietnam. Dayan was told that they did not have to: everything worked much better than expected. That day he noted in his journal that the U.S. military never made any mistakes. Yet no one could tell him how they were going to win the war. Most could not even give a convincing reason why the United States was in Vietnam in the first place; at least one told him that, had President Johnson been presented with a way to get out, he would have jumped at it and withdrawn his troops.

What struck Dayan most was that any attempt to question the American motives infuriated them. As far as they were concerned their cause was noble and just. For them, it was unfortunate but understandable that the communist states supported the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. What puzzled them was the strong criticism voiced by their European allies. These Europeans supposedly shared America’s liberal-democratic values. At a loss to explain the problem, the Americans attributed it to cowardice, envy, and the resentment that arose from Europe’s own recent failure in waging “imperialist” war. Dayan, on his part, believed that in ignoring European opinion the Americans were making a big mistake.

Stranger still, to Dayan, was the American decisionmakers’ extreme sensitivity to the views of their own electorate. At that time, polls said that 75 percent of Americans were in favor of bombing North Vietnam—just as in April 2004 a majority of Americans still believed that the war in Iraq was worthwhile. For Dayan, permitting public opinion to determine such issues seemed a strange way to run a war, and one he thought was likely to have grave consequences for the future.

* * *

On July 25, 1966, Dayan arrived in Saigon. He spent two days being “processed.” He was issued an American uniform, a rucksack, water bottles, and a helmet; as he wrote, had it been up to the soldiers in charge he would also have received a gun and hand grenades.

In his spare time he met with a Vietnamese professor of nuclear physics to whom he had been referred by an Israeli friend. The professor told him—in strict confidence, since saying anything contrary to the official line was dangerous—that the Viet Cong were much stronger than the Americans knew, or wanted to know. He also met with the South Vietnamese deputy prime minister and minister of defense, General Nguyen Van Thieu, as well as the chief of the general staff of the army of the Republic of Vietnam. Both owed their positions to the Americans who had conspired in Diem’s assassination. Both, he thought, were highly intelligent men. Both, interestingly enough, reserved their greatest admiration not for an American commander but for the North-Vietnamese General Giap. Giap had been the hero of the struggle against the French. Now they hoped he might force Hanoi to make peace.

On July 28 Dayan boarded the USS Constellation, the largest aircraft carrier then cruising off the Vietnamese coast. He was a professional military man and had heard about such ships, but what he saw made a “breath-taking impression.” The vessel constituted five acres of sovereign American territory that was protected, Dayan wrote, “from the air, the sea, the ground, outer space, and under water.” If Dayan was being ironic—after all, the enemy consisted of little brown men wearing straw hats—he did not say so. What he could not help noting was the fact that, every 90 minutes, amid a numbing outburst of fire and noise, flights of combat aircraft took off to strike at targets in Vietnam; but when he asked his hosts about the precise nature of those targets they evaded his questions. At the end of the day Dayan wrote that the Americans were “not fighting against infiltration to South [Vietnam], or against guerrillas, or against North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, but against the entire world. Their real aim was to show everybody—including Britain, France, and the USSR—their power and determination so as to pass this message: wherever Americans go, they are irresistible.”

Dayan spent most of August visiting various units throughout South Vietnam. First he joined a Marine company patrolling only about a mile south of the Demilitarized Zone to prevent infiltration from the north. Led by First Lieutenant Charles Krulak, they stomped up and down hills for two nights and three days. They waded through streams, at times coming close to drowning in them; at one point Dayan lost his footing and had to be pulled out. Yet the only target they fired on was an unidentified animal, whose cries then kept the unit awake all night. Thirty-five years later the retired General Krulak, ex-commandant of the Marine Corps, told me that, as they set up camp one evening, Dayan had asked them what they were doing there. He then offered his opinion that the American strategy was wrong. They should be “where the people are,” not vainly trying to chase the Viet Cong in the mountains, where they were not.

A few days later Dayan’s wish was granted. Near Da Nang, he visited another Marine unit engaged in pacification. The Marines were responsible for security—he noted their excellent discipline—but most of the actual work was done by civilians. Once again, he found the Americans on the spot committed and immensely proud of what they were doing. Once again, he left the district clear in his own mind that much remained to be done; so much so that it was doubtful whether the Americans were making any progress at all. Nor was he impressed with the attempts to help the South Vietnamese peasants improve their standard of living by introducing new agricultural methods, better livestock, and so on. One is reminded of the statistics coming out of Iraq concerning schools and clinics reopened, doctors’ pay raised, and other “improvements.”

Back in Paris Niceault had told him that the “battle for hearts and minds” would fail, because the Vietnamese had their own cultural traditions. Dayan had some experience with this. During his term as minister of agriculture (from 1959 to 1963) he used American funds to send Israeli experts to carry out agrarian reforms in various Asian and African countries. He had visited some of those countries in person, only to find out how hard it was to change long-standing traditions. Clearly doing so in the midst of a war, when every achievement was under threat from Viet Cong terrorists, was much harder still.

* * *

But perhaps the most telling encounter during Dayan’s trip was the visit he paid to the 1st Air Cavalry Division. Organized only a few years before, it was the most up-to-date fighting force in the world. Operating under conditions of absolute air superiority, the division did exactly as it pleased. It required no more than four hours’ warning to land an entire battalion at any location within its helicopters’ range. As it turned out, though, four hours were often four hours too many. On arrival at a selected spot, the troops would often find that the enemy had gone.

It must have been during his stay with 1st Cavalry that the following incident took place. Dayan wanted to visit the front, as was his custom. In the case of Vietnam this meant going on patrol. His hosts reluctantly agreed, and fearing that something might happen to the celebrity for whom they were responsible, they selected a route supposedly free of Viet Cong. As often happened, their information proved wrong. They came under fire and were pinned down. Looking around from where he was lying, the American captain in charge discovered that Dayan had disappeared. He finally found Dayan; the middle-aged visitor from Israel was sitting comfortably on top of a grassy knoll. With great effort, the captain crawled toward him and asked what he was doing. “What are you doing?” Dayan answered. “Get your — up here and see what this battle is all about.”

To Dayan, the problem was intelligence. As he wrote in his journal:

According to [the commanding officer’s] information, there was a Viet Cong division in this highland area. It was not concentrated in a single base but split into several battalions, each about 350 men strong. It was Norton’s plan to land a battalion . . . in the Viet Cong divisional area and then, in accordance with the developments of the battle, to rush in additional ‘reaction troops’ to reinforce, seal off, and carry out flank attacks. All this was fine, except for one small item missing in the plan: the exact location of the Viet Cong battalions was not known. Air photos and air reconnaissance had failed to pick out their encampments, entrenched, bunkered and camouflaged with the jungle vegetation. The U.S. intelligence sources were largely technical—air photos and decoded radio intercepts, for Viet Cong units from battalion strength and up used transmitters. Only scanty information could be gleaned from POWs. Many of the latter spat in the Americans’ face and swore to die rather than talk.

Contrary to what had been written about the enormous logistical requirements of the American troops—from iced beer to go-go girls—he was impressed by the spartan nature of the arrangements. The Americans knew how to improvise—throw a flak jacket into the helicopter, hop in, and off you go. The entire division was “a huge force, fast and efficient. It used its weapons—including artillery support and tactical and strategic air support—very effectively indeed.” In Dayan’s view, it was as superior to other forces as the German tanks had been to their enemies at the beginning of World War II. “[Its] battle procedures operated like an assembly belt. First came the shelling of the landing zones by ground artillery. Then came aerial bombardment. And the landings themselves were covered by ‘gunships,’ [i.e., armed helicopters] firing their rockets and machine guns almost at our feet.” It was an amazing operation, “but where was the war?... Where were the Viet Cong? And where was the battle?” As it turned out the Viet Cong were there, a few hundred yards away. And the battle Dayan could not see came half an hour later when the company, which had landed 300 yards to the south, ran into an ambush after it had started moving off. Within minutes the company was shot to pieces, suffering 25 dead and some 50 wounded, including the commander. Calling in their firepower, the 1st Cavalry gave pursuit. When they met resistance they would radio for the B-52s bombers; to what effect, it was not clear.

Throughout Dayan’s visit he reported that American officers were committed, very hard-working, and as frank as circumstances permitted. Many of them enjoyed the war; which, at this time, was still in its “forward” phase. He found General Westmoreland pleasant and informal, if lacking the “astute expression” that Dayan found in some other senior commanders. Still, there could be no question of American officers being incompetent oafs who delighted in setting alight Vietnamese huts and were fragged by their own men; that image only rose after the war. But the officers did have one problem—the need to get their names mentioned in the media to advance their careers. This, Dayan thought, did not turn them into better persons or, what was more important, better commanders.

Dayan admired the American rank and file, particularly the Marines and the Green Berets. They were physically fit, very well trained, and—this being 1966—still did their jobs willingly. They were, in his words, “golden guys”; the fact that they were being rotated in and out of the country too fast to learn its ways and become really effective soldiers was scarcely their fault. He was even more impressed by the tremendous military-industrial muscle that enabled 1,700 helicopters to be deployed in a single theater of war.

Still, nothing could make up for the lack of accurate and timely tactical intelligence. Its absence was due in part to cultural obstacles. Wherever he went, translators were scarce; the few who were available said exactly what they pleased. It was also due to the physical conditions of the country and the nature of the war itself. In Dayan’s words, the information available to the Americans was limited to “1. What they could photograph; 2. What they could intercept . . .; and 3. What they could glean from low-ranking prisoners.” As a result, most of the time they were using sledgehammers to knock holes in empty air.

Even if the Americans did succeed militarily, he thought, it was hard to see how the South Vietnamese would be able to set up a viable government in the shadow of the gigantic machine that “protected” them; whether that machine would ever be withdrawn was anybody’s guess. And as to what he was told of the war’s objectives, such as defending democracy and helping the South Vietnamese people, he considered it “childish” propaganda. If many of the Americans he met believed in them, clearly nobody else did.

Over a year before the Tet Offensive proved that something was very, very wrong, Dayan left Vietnam with the definite impression that things were not going well. “The Americans are winning everything,” he wrote, “except the war.” Perhaps this was one reason why, instead of flying home by way of the United States as both Taylor and McNamara had asked him to do, he chose the other route.

* * *

Today comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq are fashionable. Some people emphasize the differences between the two, claiming that the former was essentially a conventional war. I disagree. Based on Dayan’s account, I would argue that the similarities are more important than the differences.

First, according to Dayan, the most significant operational problem the American forces were facing in Vietnam was lack of intelligence—the inability to distinguish the enemy from either the physical surroundings or the civilian population. Had intelligence been available, the Americans’ enormous superiority in every kind of military hardware would have enabled them to win the war. In its absence, most of the blows they delivered—including no fewer than six million tons of bombs—missed their targets. Their only effect was to disperse the enemy into the civilian population. Worst of all, lack of accurate intelligence meant that the Americans kept hitting noncombatants by mistake. They thus drove huge segments of the population straight into the arms of the Viet Cong; nothing is more conducive to hatred than the sight of relatives and friends being killed.

Second, as Dayan saw clearly, the campaign for hearts and minds was a failure. Many of the figures published about the progress of the war turned out to be bogus, designed to ease the minds of the folks at home. In other cases any progress made laboriously over a period of months was undone in a matter of minutes as the Viet Cong attacked, destroying property and killing “collaborators.” Above all, the idea that the Vietnamese people wanted to become Americanized was an illusion. The vast majority wanted only to be left alone.

The third of Dayan’s observations, and the most relevant to a comparison with the current war in Iraq, is that the Americans found themselves in the unfortunate position of beating down the weak. As Dayan wrote, “Any comparison between the two armies was astonishing. On the one hand there was the American army, complete with helicopters, an air force, armor, electronic communications, artillery, and mind-boggling riches; to say nothing of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, and equipment of all kinds. On the other there were the [North Vietnamese troops], who had been walking on foot for four months, carrying some artillery rounds on their backs and using a tin spoon to eat a little ground rice from a tin plate.”

That, of course, was precisely the problem. In private life, an adult who keeps beating down a five-year-old—even one who had originally attacked him with a knife—will be accused of committing a crime; he will lose the support of bystanders and end up being arrested, tried, and convicted. On the world stage, an armed force that keeps beating down a weaker opponent will be seen as committing a series of crimes; therefore it will end up losing the support of its allies, its own people, and its own troops. Depending on the character of the forces (whether they are draftees or professionals), the effectiveness of the propaganda machine, the nature of the political process, and so on, this outcome may come about more or less quickly. But it is always the same. He who does not understand this does not understand anything about war—or, indeed, about human nature.

In other words, he who fights against the weak—note, in this connection, that the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed—and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins, also loses. To kill a much weaker opponent is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force, however rich, however powerful, however advanced, or however well motivated, is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if American troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did—with the last American troops fleeing the country while hanging onto their helicopters’ skids.

As for Dayan, in late August of 1966 he returned to Israel. His journal served him as the basis for a series of articles that were published in Maariv as well as the British and French press. In 1977, by which time he was serving as foreign minister under Menahem Begin and engaged in peace talks with Egypt, the Hebrew-language material was collected in book form and published. In the preface Dayan explains that it was too long to be included in the memoirs he had published a year earlier; perhaps his real aim was to warn Israelis of the consequences that might ultimately follow if they did not get rid of what he called “the blemish of conquest.” If so, unfortunately he did not succeed. <

Martin van Creveld is a professor of history at Hebrew University. He is the author of Fighting Power, Command in War, and The Transformation of War.

Originally published in the February/March 2005 issue of Boston Review

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Crefelds Theorien über die Kriege der Zukunft haben für Aufregung gesorgt.
Besonders seine Rechtfertigung des Terrorkrieges als Mittel der unterentwickelten Länder gegen die hochgerüsteten Staaten. Asymetrische Kriege.
Hier der ein Ausschnitt aus einem Interview am Vorabend des Beginns des Irak-`Krieges`.
[urlMehr über Creveld]http://www.google.de/search?q=Martin+van+Creveld&hl=de&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:de-DE:official&start=0&sa=N[/url]


Interview: Martin van Creveld

geführt von Moritz Schwarz im Auftrage der „Sezession“

http://www.swg-hamburg.de/Armee_im_Kreuzfeuer/Interview__Mar…

Erstveröffentlichung in Heft 1, April 2003 Sezession www.sezession.de

Sezession: Herr Professor van Creveld, am Persischen Golf droht derzeit ein neuer Krieg auszubrechen. Die Deutungen reichen vom „Krieg ums Öl“ bis zum „Kampf der Kulturen“. Wie deuten Sie diesen Konflikt?

Creveld: Um die Wahrheit zu sagen: Ich weiß es nicht. Der Irak ist militärisch sehr schwach, er verfügt nur noch etwa über ein Drittel der militärischen Macht, die er noch vor zehn Jahren besessen hat, als ihn die USA in nur hundert Stunden Landkrieg geschlagen haben. Somit ist der Irak im Moment militärisch keine Bedrohung. Vergleichen Sie den bevorstehenden Krieg nur einmal mit dem Krieg von 1991: Die USA setzen heute weniger als halb so viel Flugzeuge und weniger als die Hälfte der Heeresstärke von damals an. Zwar dürfte Bagdad noch chemische und biologische Waffen versteckt halten, aber man verfügt nicht einmal mehr über ein Kernwaffenprogramm. Nach zehn Jahren Sanktionen, nach beinah täglichen Bombardements irakischer Militäranlagen ist jede Schlagkraft verloren gegangen. Und so entstehen die kühnsten Theorien: Mal muß der Familienstolz der Familie Bush als Erklärung herhalten, mal die Gier nach Öl, mal der christliche Fundamentalismus. Und natürlich fehlt auch nicht die Behauptung, Israel verleite die USA dazu, diesen Krieg zu führen. Weil niemand etwas weiß, scheint alles möglich.

Sezession: Kommt nach Ihrer Einschätzung dem Konflikt historische Bedeutung zu oder handelt es sich nur um einen taktischen Krieg zur Erlangung eines Vorteils für die USA?

Creveld: Ich bezweifle die epochemachende Bedeutung, die diesem Krieg von einigen Interpreten zugesprochen wird. Eine Supermacht „bestraft“ einen winzigen Übeltäter vorauseilend, damit er in Zukunft nicht erneut „straffällig“ wird. Im Grunde handelt sich um eine Art „Polizeiaktion“.

Sezession: Also nur die Vollendung des 1991 geführten Krieges?

Creveld: Ich weiß es nicht, ich gehöre zu den Millionen von Menschen auf der Welt, die nicht verstehen, was die Amerikaner überhaupt wollen, und ich möchte mich unprofessioneller Spekulationen enthalten. Ich befürchte nur, die USA werden den Krieg zwar gewinnen, aber den Frieden verlieren. Denn was passiert nach dem Sieg? Ich bin kein IrakExperte, aber wie wollen die Amerikaner mit einem möglicherweise gar kollabierenden Irak fertig werden?

Sezession: Außer dem Angriff auf den Irak drohen noch weitere Kriege. Auf der FeindstaatenListe der Amerikaner stehen angeblich 60 Staaten. Sie haben dagegen schon 1991 in Ihrem Buch Die Zukunft des Krieges das Ende des Krieges prophezeit.

Creveld: Nicht des Krieges an sich, nur der großen Kriege zwischen Staaten.

Sezession: Sie nennen das den „trinitarischen Krieg“, also die Form von Kriegsführung, die auf der Dreiteilung in Staat, Armee und Zivilbevölkerung beruht. Augenscheinlich handelt es sich beim Feldzug gegen den Irak noch um einen solchen Krieg althergebrachten Typs.

Creveld: Sie haben natürlich Recht, daß dieser Krieg nach seiner Struktur noch trinitarisch ist, daß heißt, er wird zwischen Staaten mit regulären Streitkräften mehr oder weniger nach dem Kriegsrecht geführt werden. Was ich dagegen 1991 in Die Zukunft des Krieges prognostiziert habe, ist nicht das Ende des Krieges, sondern dessen Verwandlung.

Sezession: Sie beschreiben die Ablösung des trinitarischen Krieges durch den low intensity conflict, der zwar weniger waffenmächtig, dafür aber unkontrollierbarer ist und keine Regeln mehr kennt. Der low intensity conflict erscheint wie ein Rückfall in die Zeit vor der Entwicklung der taktischen und moralischen Kriegsregeln. Sie fassen darunter zum Beispiel Guerillakrieg, Terrorismus, Aufstände a la Intifada etc. zusammen. All dies kennen wir schon seit Jahrzehnten und länger. Haben Sie nicht lediglich einen neuen Oberbegriff für diese Phänomene gefunden?

Creveld: Nein, entscheidend für die Charakterisierung des low intensity conflict sind aus analytischer Sicht weniger dessen Kampfmittel, Angriff aus dem Hinterhalt, Bomben legen etc., sondern das Verschwinden der trinitarische Dreiteilung des Krieges. Das hat weitreichende Auswirkungen und kann mit dem bisherigen Auftreten von Partisanenkampf oder Terrorismus nicht gleichgesetzt werden. Es geht darum, daß in Zukunft die Staaten nicht mehr Träger, die regulären Streitkräfte nicht mehr Mittel, und die Zivilbevölkerung laut Kriegsrecht unantastbar nicht mehr vom Gefecht ausgenommen sein werden. Statt dessen wird alles durcheinander gewirbelt werden. Führen werden den Krieg alle Arten von nichtstaatlichen Organisationen. Kämpfen werden ihn Einzelpersonen, Terrorgruppen, GuerillaTruppen und KommandoEinheiten. Und Zielscheibe werden in erster Linie nicht mehr gegnerische Kämpfer, sondern die Zivilbevölkerung sein. Ein solcher Konflikt neuen Typs war zum Beispiel der 11. September, aber auch der Krieg danach in Afghanistan. So haben die USA dort zum Beispiel nicht gegen den afghanischen Staat, sondern gegen die Gruppe der Taliban gekämpft.

Sezession: Dennoch, Sie sprachen selbst von einer „Polizeiaktion“. Entspringt das Übergehen des Begriffes „Krieg“ auf diese Art von Konflikt nicht der Selbsttäuschung des Westens, der in Ermangelung echter Kriege beginnt, vom „Krieg gegen die Armut, vom „Krieg gegen die Drogen“ und nun auch vom „Krieg gegen den Terrorismus“ zu sprechen?

Creveld: ja, und ich beschreibe diesen Wandel. Dabei gehen natürlich der Untergang des trinitarischen Krieges und das Aufkommen des low Intensity conflict Hand in Hand. Angesichts der Vernetzung, die Attacken von bisher unvorstellbarem Ausmaß planbar macht, und neuer Waffen, die Anschläge von enormer Wirkung ermöglichen, sowie der globalen Flexibilität von Gruppen wie al-Qaida, die eine nach klassischen militärischen Gesichtspunkten gefährliche Ortlosigkeit ermöglichen, gewinnt die Bedrohung durch solche Konflikte eine neue Dimension. Die Frage ist, mit welcher Art Konflikt müssen wir rechnen, für welche Art Krieg müssen wir in Zukunft rüsten? Es wird eine moderne Form des natürlich bekannten Terrorismus und Guerillakrieges sein. Diesen Vorgang erfasse ich mit dem Begriff „Transformation des Krieges“, wie die direkte Übersetzung meines Buchtitels eigentlich lautet. Sie können die Dinge analysieren und dabei unzulänglich bleiben oder darauf verzichten und sich dann eines Tages umschauen und die Augen reiben.

Sezession: Wird der althergebrachte trinitarische Krieg tatsächlich verschwinden oder wird er als seltenes aber durchaus noch mögliches Szenario weiterhin ein Faktor bleiben?

Creveld: Schon der IrakKrieg ist ja nur noch mit Mühe und Not ein trinitarischer Krieg, denn wie Sie wissen, wird als entscheidende Auseinandersetzung ein Häuserkampf in Bagdad angenommen. Eine Form des Kampfes, bei der es sich bereits um einen Übergang zum low intensity conflict handelt. Die rüstungstechnischen Dinosaurier, die die Armeen des Kalten Krieges darstellen, denken Sie zum Beispiel an das nach wie vor gewaltige Panzerheer der Bundeswehr, werden zugunsten kleinerer, flexiblerer und spezialisierter Truppen verschwinden.

Sezession: Aber bleibt der trinitarische Krieg nicht zwangsläufig erhalten, weil auch die Dreiteilung von Staat, Armee und Volk der westlichen Staaten erhalten bleiben wird?

Creveld: Natürlich werden die westlichen Staaten weiterhin noch ein gewisses Maß an Trinität wahren. Aber denken Sie zum Beispiel an Israel, wo parallel zur trinitarischen Institution der Armee Siedlermilizen und sogar israelische Terroristen in Erscheinung treten, die nicht-trinitarisch die Palästinenser bekämpfen. Oder denken Sie an Nordirland, wo ebenfalls neben der königlichen Armee protestantische Kampfbünde die IRA bekämpfen und Katholiken terrorisieren.

Sezession: Die USA werden ihre konventionellen Waffen dennoch nicht verschrotten, das heißt weiterhin ein trinitarisches Instrument unterhalten.

Creveld: Ja, aber sie werden die Streitkräfte mit FBI und CIA vernetzen, und es werden neue Truppenteile entstehen. Denken Sie an das nach dem 11. September geschaffene Home-Command. Das sind erste Anzeichen einer fundamentalen Veränderung.

Sezession: Langfristig prophezeien Sie allerdings mit dem Ende des trinitarischen Krieges das zwangsläufige Ende des Staates.

Creveld: Der Staat war ursprünglich eine Maschine, um Krieg zu führen. Tut er das nicht mehr, verfällt er. Was bietet der Staat seinem Bürger: Schutz! Natürlich auch sozialen Schutz, aber in Europa vergisst man auf Grund der komfortablen geopolitischen Lage gerne, daß es ursprünglich um militärischen Schutz ging. Wenn der Staat das nicht mehr leisten kann, werden sich die Bürger anderswo Schutz suchen, die Loyalität des Staatsbürgers schwindet, der Staat verfällt.

Sezession: Wie ist das zu verhindern?

Creveld: Nach meiner Meinung gar nicht. Ich bin Determinist und glaube schlicht an die Macht historischer Prozesse.

Sezession: Einerseits ist die Atombombe in ihrer Wirkung zu grobschlächtig für den low intensity conflict, andererseits erhält sie durch die Proliferation neue Bedeutung. Welche Rolle wird sie in Zukunft spielen?

Creveld: Auf Grund des atomaren Wettrüstens zwischen Nato und Warschauer Pakt verstehen wir Atomwaffen als Waffen des trinitarischen Krieges. Tatsächlich aber sind sie Waffen der kommenden Kriege. Die trinitarische Struktur hat verhindert, daß Atomwaffen wegen des Prinzips der Abschreckung eingesetzt werden konnten. Im flexiblen Krieg der Zukunft aber ist ihr Einsatz plötzlich denkbar. Ich bin überzeugt, daß diese Waffen in Zukunft wieder eine Schlüsselstellung einnehmen werden. Denn egal wie klein und arm ein Land oder eine Terrororganisation ist, über kurz oder lang wird man sich Kernwaffen besorgen können.

Sezession: Sie haben den Krieg als Zustand beschrieben, in dem man sowohl dazu bereit ist zu töten, wie auch zu sterben. Bereits im Golfkrieg 1991 tötete allerdings nur noch die eine Seite, während es den Soldaten der anderen Seite vorbehalten war, zu sterben.

Creveld: Ja, allerdings verwandelt sich dieser Vorteil des Westens in einen Nachteil, denn die damit einhergehende forcierte Todesbereitschaft einiger Kämpfer der Gegenseite ermöglicht es überhaupt erst, Attacken wie die vom 11. September erfolgreich durchzuführen. Andererseits macht gerade unsere mangelnde Bereitschaft, für die eigene Gemeinschaft zu sterben, unserer Gesellschaft, trotz ihrer militärischen Überlegenheit, besonders leicht verwundbar.

Sezession: Wenn man im Westen nicht mehr bereit ist zu sterben, haben wir dann noch das Recht zu behaupten, wir führten Krieg?

Creveld: Eigentlich nicht, und auch in dieser Hinsicht sind unsere militärischen Operationen inzwischen nur noch Polizeiaktionen.

Sezession: Besteht nicht die Gefahr, daß schon die Todesbereitschaft der anderen Seite langfristig zu einer Traumatisierung unserer Gesellschaft führt?

Creveld: Durchaus, denn der Angriff eines Selbstmordattentäters stellt für uns natürlich auch einen Angriff der Irrationalität auf unsere Rationalität dar.

Sezession: In welchem Zusammenhang stehen Todesbereitschaft und Wehrwille?

Creveld: In entscheidendem Zusammenhang, aber ganz generell können Sie mit einem Blick auf unsere westlichen Gesellschaften feststellen, daß sie im Gegensatz zur ihren Herausforderern ihren Willen bereits verloren hat.

Sezession: Sie ersetzt ihn durch Technik, aber ist der Wehrwille so zu ersetzen?

Creveld: Ich glaube nicht.

Sezession: Das heißt wir werden unterliegen?

Creveld: Das Prinzip des Krieges der Zukunft ist es gerade, die technische Überlegenheit der entwickelten Länder zu unterlaufen. Man liest heute oft, wir brauchen keine Krieger mehr, sondern Techniker, Leute die nicht mehr kämpfen, sondern nur noch Waffen lenken. Aber schauen Sie doch genau hin: Selten waren mehr Soldaten im Einsatz als heute. Die USA lassen eine Viertelmillion Mann am Golf aufmarschieren, und nach dem 11. September mobilisierte man sogar die Reservisten. In Israel kommen auf einen palästinensischen Terroristen fünfzig israelische Soldaten und es hilft doch nichts!

Sezession: Dennoch erscheint der low intensity-Herausforderer machtlos gegenüber dem Militärapparat des Westens. Oder ist sein Sieg doch denkbar?

Creveld: „Sieg“ wird in Zukunft anders definiert sein. Man wird darunter nicht mehr „erobern und besetzen“ verstehen, wie zu Zeiten des trinitarischen Krieges, sondern, den Gegner aus dem Gleichgewicht zu bringen und deshalb antworte ich mit ja.

Es geht weiter über D.

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Das ist nicht der erste Artikel, der behauptet, dass Bolton und Wolfowitz deshalb die Treppe raufgefallen sind, um sie los zu werden.
Auch Feith ein anderer Pentagon Neocon, der wegen seiner undurchsichtigen Verbindungen zum Likud zurückgetreten wurde, hat auch keine Fürsprecher gefunden.
Bush kämpft um seinen Platz in den Geschichtsbüchern, entweder als worst president ever oder?

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 01:51 21/03/2005
Now it`s all up to Bush
By Akiva Eldar
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/554551.html

Since U.S. President George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term, some of his greatest critics (including this writer) are wondering whether they were mistaken when they prophesied that the 43rd president would barely rate a footnote in American history, not to mention a place in world history.

A recent series of appointments - or to be more precise, the "kicking upstairs" that has taken place in the top echelons of the administration - seem to testify that the president no longer adheres to the neoconservative approach, which holds that what doesn`t work by force, will work by greater force. To appoint Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who once said that nobody would notice if 10 stories of the UN building were shaved off, as ambassador to the UN, and to send the deputy secretary of defense, isolationist Paul Wolfowitz, to the World Bank, is like ordering the class he-man to play with dolls alongside the girls. Nor did the White House go out of its way to try to change the decision of the undersecretary, neocon Douglas Feith, to go home.

The "upgrading" of Condoleezza Rice to the office of the secretary of state and the promotion of Steve Hadley, who was her deputy in the White House, to national security adviser, are seen as a sort of clipping of the wings of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - the leaders of the gang of neocons. Apparently the new duo is succeeding where former secretary of state Colin Powell and the foreign service professionals have failed: They convinced Bush that the policy of "I`m the only one who counts" has exhausted itself, and that translating the military achievement in Iraq into a political victory in the Middle East requires close cooperation with Europe and the Arab countries.

Washington is no longer plugging its ears to the claims of the leaders of Great Britain and France, Egypt and Jordan, that the key to stabilizing the Middle East lies in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even the Europeans who belittled Bush`s vision of the Palestinian state, and the Arabs who believed that his demand for democratization in their countries was only a way out of realizing that same vision, are having second thoughts. Whether out of a desire to join the group that is turning out to be the victor, or whether from a desire to grasp the Bush vision, in the European Union and the Arab League there is a growing tendency to adopt the president`s line. The quick Syrian response to the American-European demand to withdraw its forces from Lebanon has demonstrated to all the sides the advantage of a Western peace coalition. The mass demonstrations in Beirut, as well as Mubarak`s declaration regarding election reform in Egypt, demonstrate that if America wants it, Arab democracy is no dream.

The adherence of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the disengagement plan paved the way for Europe`s leaders to attend the dedication ceremony of the new Yad Vashem museum last week. His meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) provided Egypt with an excuse to send an ambassador to Tel Aviv. King Abdullah of Jordan did not make do with returning his ambassador: He spent recent weeks in an information and pressure campaign in Arab capitals, in an effort to elicit from the Arab League summit that will convene tomorrow in Algiers a decision that will demonstrate more generosity toward Israel than did the Arab peace initiative of three years ago. The refusal of most of the Arab countries to support the Jordanian formula does not have to detract from the importance of the initiative, which includes recognition of the 1967 borders, normalization and a consensual solution with Israel to the problem of the Palestinian refugees.

A series of Palestinian terror attacks accompanied by Israeli retaliation actions would suffice to turn all this into a swamp. The steps taken by the Abu Mazen and Sharon governments will determine not only the fate of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip that will begin on July 20. Israel`s policy in the territories will have a decisive influence on the results of the elections in the territories. The worse the situation there, the better the situation of Hamas at the polls. And if the day after the disengagement it turns out that "Gaza-first" is also "Gaza-the end," the Europeans will once again attack us, the Arabs will recall their ambassadors, and the extremists of both nations will once again reign in the territories.

Everything now depends on the president of the United States, the only person with an influence on Sharon. On April 12, the day after the meeting with Sharon on the Texas ranch, we will know whether we have to apologize to George W. Bush.

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Monday, March 21, 2005
War News for Monday, March 21, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Turkish driver shot dead in Bayji.

Bring `em on: Two Jordanian students found dead in Hillah.

Bring `em on: Bomb attack kills civilian and injures policeman in Basra.

Bring `em on: Four Iraqi policemen killed and nineteen injured in truck bomb attack in Baquba.

Bring `em on: US soldier killed and three injured in bomb attack in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Insurgents blow-up municipal building in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Insurgents kill civilian and wound three policemen in coordinated attack in Samarra.

Bring `em on: Civilian killed and two others injured after mortar attack on the Iraqi army base in Mahmoudiyah.

Bring `em on: Gunmen open fire at the funeral of top Iraqi anti-corruption policeman (killed earlier in the day) killing two mourners in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Twenty four insurgents killed and six US troops injured in a major gun battle following the ambush of a convoy in Salman Pak.

Bring `em on: Reuters still running with the story that the Iraqi Minister for the Provinces, Wael Abdul al-Latif, has been kidnapped by insurgents in Suwayra.

Bring `em on: US soldier killed Sunday in Al Anbar province.

Singapore ends its involvement in the crumbling coalition.

Iraq has withdrawn its diplomatic envoy in a tit-for-tat move following Jordan`s earlier decision to pull its envoy out of Baghdad. Jordan withdrew its charge d`affaires Damai Haddad saying that anti-Jordanian protests outside its Baghdad embassy had made it unsafe for him to remain. Shia protesters say that Jordan had a role in a suicide bombing last month. Now Iraq has pulled its envoy out of Amman for consultations, saying relations were "in crisis mode". Protests were held outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad on Friday, and an Iraqi flag was raised over the building, while Jordanian flags were burnt.

More Rummy diplomacy:

On the political front, Mr Rumsfeld warned Iraq`s political leaders they had to be "darned careful" about the make-up of their new government. "The important thing is that they be competent people. They have to be darned careful about making a lot of changes just to be putting in their friend or to be putting in someone else from their tribe or from their ethnic group. This is too serious a business over there and the United States has got too much invested and too much committed and too many lives at stake for people to be careless about that."



Asked if he had any regrets looking back at the US campaign of the past two years, Mr Rumsfeld said he wished US troops had not been "blocked" from entering Iraq through Turkey, saying this had boosted the insurgency. "Given the level of the insurgency today, two years later, clearly if we had been able to get the 4th Infantry Division in from the north, in through Turkey, more of the Iraqi, Saddam Hussein, Baathist regime would have been captured or killed." Mr Rumsfeld said on Fox. "The insurgency today would be less." he said, adding that the resulting thrust of the US invasion through southern Iraq had enabled many insurgents to evade capture in the north.



On March 18, US Ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman resigned from both his post in Ankara and the US foreign service. "This is a personal decision. It has nothing to do with Turkish-US relations and what was happening here in Turkey." he said. He was referring to a period of unusual coolness in Turkish-US ties.

Sistani is getting impatient: The spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has lamented the absence of a new government nearly two months after the landmark elections which he strongly backed, said senior Shiite politician Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

"The sayed (honorific) was sorry for the delay in forming the Iraqi government because this will adversely affect people’s lives and called for it to be formed soon," Hakim told reporters late Sunday after meeting with Sistani, who is based in the shrine city of Najaf, south of Baghdad.

"According to the latest information that I have, there is progress in negotiations and I think all points should be finalised by Thursday, if not the unveiling of the new government will be a few days after that."

Media Independence and Iraq

The BBC last night gave another sign that it is determined to maintain its editorial independence by screening a Panorama programme strongly critical of Tony Blair`s manipulation of thin intelligence, on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

In the programme, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, was reported as having told Mr Blair that Washington had fixed policy on a war against Iraq and was going to fit the intelligence around that policy. Despite the humiliation of losing its director general, Greg Dyke, over its allegations concerning David Kelly, the government arms control officer, the film contained powerful condemnation of the government. It included interviews with former officials who had already broken in public with the government`s Iraq strategy. It also quoted extensively from leaked documents first revealed by the Daily Telegraph.

In the most startling revelation, the programme claimed that at a meeting on July 23 2002, Sir Richard said a war was inevitable, adding that the facts and the intelligence were being fixed round the policy set out by George Bush`s administration.

Commentary

Higher Oil Prices: Instead of inaugurating a new age of cheap oil, the Iraq war may become known as the beginning of an era of scarcity. Two years ago, it seemed likely that Iraq, with the world`s third-largest petroleum reserves, would become a hypercharged gusher once U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein. But chaos and guerrilla sabotage have slowed the flow of oil to a comparative trickle. The price of crude on global markets hit an all-time record Friday, and oil experts say U.S. consumers are likely to keep feeling the pinch.

"Global supply hasn`t kept up, and it isn`t likely to in the near future, and one of the causes is Iraq," said John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York. The war coincided with the start of a sharp rise in oil imports by booming China and India, and experts say this alignment of factors may keep prices permanently high. Iraq`s oil production averaged about 3 million barrels a day before the war and now lags below 2 million, while prewar projections had pegged production to have hit at least 4 million by now. This missing production would have covered much of the annual growth in global oil demand, which is expected to increase by 1.8 million barrels a day this year, to 84.3 million barrels.

"If it weren`t for the insurgency, Iraq would produce at least another million barrels day -- and maybe two," said Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington. "Iraq is very much missing from the market, and it`s one of the reasons why prices have risen so much."
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Latest Fatality: Mar 20, 2005
Mar.05: 27

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

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Sharia: Iraq`s Dark Cloud
An Islamic constitution is huge peril.
By Susan Jacoby
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jacoby2…
COMMENTARY" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jacoby2…
COMMENTARY

Susan Jacoby is the author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" (Metropolitan Books, 2004) and director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York.

March 21, 2005

One of the more disturbing byproducts of the U.S. involvement in Iraq is the recent outpouring of rationalization from across the American political and cultural spectrum for the incorporation of Islam into the new Iraqi constitution.

There`s nothing particularly surprising about such rationalizing on the right. Vice President Dick Cheney responded predictably to January`s Iraqi election, which expanded the power of Shiite religious parties, with the declaration that "we have a great deal of confidence in where they`re headed." What else is an architect of the war going to say?

On the Christian right, such reactions are even more understandable; these are the very people who routinely denigrate America`s own constitutional separation of church and state. Why should they worry if the new Iraqi government prevents a woman from divorcing without her husband`s consent and gives her legal testimony only half the weight of a man`s? As long as the Iraqis steer clear of a Saudi-style ban on all other forms of worship (read Christianity), a religion-based Iraqi constitution poses no logical obstacle for U.S. fundamentalists.

But the neocon hawks and religious right are far from alone in their sanguine view of Islam as the basis for a friendly government. Some on the left, succumbing to a patronizing multiculturalism — freedom of conscience for me but not for thee — are also spouting rationalizations for looking the other way if Islamic law, or Sharia, is imposed on the people of Iraq.

Many members of the new Islamic studies establishment in U.S. universities see objections to a union between government and Islam as one more example of American provincialism. "The mere mention of Islam in a constitutional context should not cause an overreaction," asserts Frank E. Vogel, director of Harvard University`s Islamic legal studies program.

"This could be a legitimate cause for alarm, or it could be purely symbolic," adds Vogel, whose official academic title is "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Adjunct Professor of Islamic Legal Studies." (The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, as it happens, is one of the official titles of the king of Saudi Arabia.)

But if history teaches us anything, it is that government enforcement of religious law has always been the natural enemy of individual and minority rights. One person`s religious symbolism may be another person`s real pain.

One of the "compromises" suggested by multiculturalists is a framework of secular law that nevertheless gives religious authorities full jurisdiction over sensitive matters like marriage and divorce. That was precisely the compromise that the new Israeli state made with Orthodox rabbis in 1948.

Although most Israeli law is secular, Orthodox rabbinical courts have near-total jurisdiction over marriage and divorce. A Jewish woman (even a non-observant Jewish woman) may divorce only if her husband gives her permission in the form of a get, a religious divorce decree. This "compromise" has consigned thousands of unhappy Israeli wives — known as agunot, which literally means "chained women" — to legal limbo. Without a get, a Jewish woman cannot remarry in Israel and her children from subsequent unions — even if she marries abroad — are considered illegitimate.

Does anyone seriously think that Islamic jurisdiction over family law will produce fairer treatment for Iraqi women than the Orthodox Jewish jurisdiction has produced for Israeli women?

In Afghanistan, the U.S gave in to the Islamic hard-line demand that the post-Taliban Afghan constitution prohibit passage of any law "contrary to the sacred religion of Islam." Defenders of this Faustian bargain take comfort from the unwillingness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to enforce it. But what happens when Karzai is succeeded by someone who may not share his moderate views? A constitution that gives religion a "sacred" status offers a standing invitation for politicians and clerics to define sanctity for the rest of society.

Optimists about a church-state compromise in Iraq dreamily suggest that the new Iraqi government, whatever its constitution actually says about religion, will most likely adopt the de facto moderate course of Afghanistan instead of the repressive models of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Let`s hope so — not for our own sake but for the sake of those Iraqis who yearn for personal freedom and do not want their lives controlled by religious fanatics.

The sad and disgraceful common strand running through the many rationalizations for an Islam-based Iraqi constitution is an implicit and, in the case of the Bush administration, explicit denial of the importance of secular Enlightenment values in American history. Without the administration`s constant political drumbeat equating U.S. patriotism with religious faith, it would be much harder to argue on behalf of theocracy in other cultures.

If we fail to honor the secular side of our civic heritage at home, it certainly follows that we cannot object to majority-rule theocracy abroad.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Mar 22, 2005

COMMENTARY
THE ROVING EYE
Shocked and awed into `freedom`
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC22Ak06.html

Two years after being shocked and awed into "freedom", freedom on the ground is a meaningless concept for large swathes of the Iraqi population. Sunnis and Shi`ites alike tell Asia Times Online of a brutalization of every-day life.

Highways in and out of Baghdad are suicidal: the Americans can`t control any of them. Anyone is a potential kidnapping target, either for the Sunni guerrilla or criminal gangs. Officials at the Oil and Electricity Ministries tell of at least one attack a day. Oil pipelines are attacked and distribution interrupted virtually every week. There`s a prison camp syndrome: almost 10,000 Iraqis incarcerated at any one time, in three large jails, including the infamous Abu Ghraib. There`s also an Abu Ghraib syndrome: all-round denunciation of torture, electroshocks and beatings. The Americans and the Iraqi police proceed with the same "round up the usual suspects" tactic: but even if the "suspects" are not part of the resistance, their families are always well taken care of, so they inevitably join the resistance actively when they leave jail.

The Sunni guerrillas register an average of scores of attacks a day, all over the country. Roadside and car bombs are still exploding in leveled Fallujah. The Baghdad regional police commander was assassinated on Saturday. The resistance has infiltrated virtually all government and police networks. American counterinsurgency methods are going nowhere, because as the Sunni guerrillas keep killing masses of Iraqi security forces, these forces are retaliating in kind - abuses detailed, among others, by Human Rights Watch. The majority of the Sunni population, complaining about official brutality, has withdrawn support for the American-trained Iraqi security forces. So the culture of brutalization has merged with the emergence of sectarianism.

In contrast, life inside the Green Zone bubble is totally virtual. There`s no government yet - the elections were on January 30 - so the Sunni guerrillas keep up the pressure, while popular disillusionment with the political process is on the rise. Prime-minister-in-waiting Ibrahim Jaafari of the Da`wa Party recently said he would favor direct elections for prime minister and parliament - not the American-imposed indirect method: it was not good enough to placate popular impatience.

The Kurds for their part block any move toward a new government as long as they don`t get written assurances establishing their control over Kirkuk - their Jerusalem. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), is basically worried about reimplementing de-Ba`athification: the SCIRI in the next few days and weeks will virtually take over the Interior Ministry.

And all of this soaked in corruption
In its Global Corruption Report 2005, Berlin-based Transparency International (TI) blasted the widespread corruption in Iraq, which has benefited US contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel. TI stressed that the new Iraqi government, the American occupying power and international donors, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, must urgently insist on decentralizing governance, loans and aid projects; otherwise "Iraq will become the biggest corruption scandal in history".

Many businessmen in Baghdad say that`s already the case. According to the TI report, the defunct L Paul Bremer-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), alongside the Pentagon, initially had only 80 people supervising the largest reconstruction agenda in history; both eventually outsourced the oversight to private companies, and corruption spiraled out of control. No one knows what happened to the US$ 8.8 billion of Iraqi money which disappeared into a CPA-controlled black void.

Meanwhile, there`s no government because of the Kirkuk tinderbox. The Kurds want it all: total control over Kirkuk, its oil, and their 100,000-strong peshmerga (paramilitary) fighters detached from the future Iraqi national army, in addition to army funding by the Iraqi national budget. This means that a Kurdistan government, with Kirkuk as its capital, would be able to block the Baghdad-controlled Iraqi armed forces from entering Kurdistan. Kirkuk`s Arabs and Turkomen are predictably furious. Inevitable consequence: sectarianism on the rise.

From a strategic Washington viewpoint, these questions are all minor.

Iraq is a crucial pawn in the US oil strategy - which includes the former Yugoslavia (now with a permanent US military base in Kosovo, right in the pipeline route from Russia and the Caspian to Europe); the Caspian and Venezuela (major oil reserves); Afghanistan (now also with a permanent US military base); Ukraine (a crucial pipeline route to Europe); Moldova (oil reserves); Iran (oil reserves); and Syria (on the route of a pipeline through which Israel wants to get Iraq`s oil).

Bremer`s CPA imposed myriad laws over Iyad Allawi`s transitional government. Washington controls almost every excruciating detail of Iraq`s economy: that`s how the "new" Iraqi administration was conceived by the neo-conservatives. The Ministry of Energy is in effect American-controlled. American-paid officials control all the key administrative positions in each relevant Iraqi ministry. Their mandate lasts for five years. Gung-ho privatization has not even started in full - and it will make a mockery of all the warnings included in the TI report.

Hakim says that the Iraqi population wants a full American troop pullout, and no American "permanent military bases". He may be right, but it won`t happen. A Sunni Baghdad businessman was savvy enough to note, "We all know the Americans are building 14 military bases all over the country. And we all know they won`t leave them. Does that sound like freedom to you?"

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

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Published on Monday, March 21, 2005 by The Australian
Guantanamo Abuse `Videotaped`
by John Sheed
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,126130…


VIDEO footage of the treatment of prisoners by the US military at Guantanamo Bay would reveal many cases of substantial abuse as "explosive as anything from Abu Ghraib", a lawyer said today.

Adelaide lawyer Stephen Kenny, who represented Australian David Hicks during the early part of his detention at the military prison in Cuba, told a law conference today 500 hours of videotape of prisoners at the US base existed.

Hicks, 29, from Adelaide, has been in American custody awaiting trial since being captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and accused of having links to terror group al-Qaeda. He is charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder and aiding the enemy.

Mr Kenny said the full story of abuse at Guantanamo Bay would not be told until the tapes were released, but they could be as damaging as the images of Iraqi prisoners being abused by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison.

"I believe that these videos, if they are ever released, will be as explosive as anything from Abu Ghraib," Mr Kenny told the LawAsia Downunder conference.

Abu Ghraib is the prison outside Baghdad from where pictures emerged of US guards abusing prisoners while some of them were forced into humiliating, sexually suggestive poses.

Mr Kenny said the US military videotaped the actions of the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF) who were responsible for prisoner control at Guantanamo Bay.

He said evidence of the violence used by the IRF came to light when a member of the US military, whom he identified as Specialist Baker, applied for a medical discharge after being involved in a training session.

"He was dressed in an orange jump suit and the IRF squad was instructed that he was a detainee who had abused a guard and was to be moved to another cell.

"What happened to him only came to light in Specialist Baker`s later hearing for a medical discharge from the military for the brain damage he suffered in the beating he received at the hands of that trainee squad."

Mr Kenny told the conference the American Centre for Civil Liberties was pressing for the tapes to be released after an American journalist reported that a secret military review of 20 hours of the tapes had identified 10 substantial cases of abuse.

But he said the Government was refusing to release the tapes because of "privacy concerns".

© 2005 The Australian

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Mar 22, 2005
Or, The Slave of Democracy
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC22Ak04.html
Much of what US President George W Bush and his representatives have said lately might have been extracted from a W S Gilbert libretto. To put the matter in context, I have sketched the sort of libretto that Gilbert might have prepared for Arthur Sullivan were the pair alive today, and embedded in it some of these utterances. [1] Links to MIDI files for the songs are provided in footnotes, and readers are encouraged to sing along with Spengler. Direct quotations from US officials are indicated by italics.







Scene I: The Oval Office
Chorus of White House officials: [2]

Pour the democratic sherry,
Quaff the democratic ale,
And to make us more than merry
Let democracy prevail!

Let the force of human freedom
Break the reign of hatred when,
We have planted `em and seeded `em
Fire in the minds of men.

For every ruler and every nation
We will clarify the choice.
Free dissent and participation
Helping them to find their own voice. [3]
The President: How many terrorists have we actually caught?
Secretary of State Rice: Actually, we haven`t caught any at all. Every time we catch one, we ask him whether he is a true democrat at heart, and invariably he replies in the affirmative, leaving us no choice but to turn him loose. [4]
The President: That is a conundrum. After all, we want to encourage democracy.
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Secretary of State Rice: It is even more paradoxical than that. It appears that there are no terrorists, at least by a strict interpretation of the definition you included in your last National Security Directive.
The President: But surely that cannot be the case, for in the National Security Directive we defined terrorists as persons engaged in the act of terrorism.
Secretary of State Rice: That`s just the problem. It`s the use of the present tense. If you had said "engaged in the act of terrorism until the day before yesterday", or "through the end of the last fiscal year", Guantanamo Bay would be overflowing with prisoners. But under your definition we cannot call someone a terrorist unless we catch him at the precise moment that he detonates his bomb-belt, and that presents logistical problems of a special nature.

(All sing: "A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! A Paradox!")
The President: But everyone expects me to pursue a war on terror. How can I do this if there are no terrorists, except for the ones flying apart at the precise moment of detonation?
Vice President: Actually, you never promised a war on terrorists.
The President: I didn`t?
Vice President: No, you promised a war on terror. That is another thing altogether. Firefighters do not fight fires until one actually ignites. They don`t go about confiscating matches. You only need to pursue a war on terror when an act of terror is occurring.
The President: But under my definition that would only be true for an instant.
Vice President: So it would appear.
The President: And in between those instants we must assume they are democrats gone wrong. I first said that Hezbollah is on the terrorist list for a reason: because they have killed Americans in the past, and they are a violent organization. I like the idea of people running for office. It`s a positive effect when you run for office, you know. Maybe someone will run for office and say, "Vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America." I don`t know. I don`t know if that`ll be their platform or not.

(The President with White House chorus:] [5]

When the suicidal bomber`s not a-bombing,
(Not a-bombing)
When the sniper isn`t looking down his sight,
(Down his sight)
There is nothing in their actions that`s alarming,
(That`s alarming)
And surely not a pretext for a fight.
(For a fight)
I had promised them a bully war on terror,
(War on terror)
But of terrorists made not a mention one,
(Mention one)
Let`s assume the other fellow was in error,
(Was in error)
And if asked to, will make plowshares of his gun.
(Oh! But of terrorists he made not mention one, mention one,
And we hope they will make plowshares of their gun, of their gun.)

The President: But surely an organization must be "terrorist" if at any given moment one of its members is engaged in a terrorist act. Take Hezbollah. They killed hundreds of American Marines with a truck bomb, and otherwise have murdered 800 people in 200 separate attacks. Surely the activities of the Hezbollah are sufficiently continuous to permit us to designate them as "terrorists".
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Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield: It depends upon which Hezbollah you mean, sir.
The President: What do you mean, "Which Hezbollah"?
Satterfield: Our concern is with Hezbollah`s engagement - globally and regionally - in violence and terror. That is the concern. Not Hezbollah as a political force in Lebanon.
The President: How shall we find out which Hezbollah it is that we confront?
Satterfield: Let us send an ambassador to ask them.

Scene II: The Rocky Shore of the Mediterranean, Near Beirut
(Hezbollah militiamen carousing. Sheikh Hasan Nasrullah enters.)
Hezbollah captain: Sheikh Nasrullah, there is a message from the Great Satan. The Great Satan requests that we lay down our arms and adopt to parliamentary democracy.
Nasrullah: You know that our sacred principles require us to repudiate such offers unless, of course, we are caught, in which case we declare ourselves to be the most ardent democrats in order to regain our freedom.
Hezbollah captain: But what shall we tell the Great Satan?
Nasrullah: As we have not been caught yet, and are not likely to be soon, we shall proclaim our defiance! (Sings) [6]

Oh better far to live and die
Under the bright green flag I fly,
Than to take a sanctimonious bent
And to stand for a seat in the parliament!
I never will lay down my arms.
Until they give up the Saabah farms,
And climb back down from the Golan Heights,
They`d better prepare for glorious fights!
For I`m on a mission from God!
(Chorus: Yes! Yes! He`s on a mission from God!)
And although you may find this terribly odd,
I`m on a mission from God!

Nasrullah: Have you inventoried our stockpile of rockets?
Lieutenant: Yes, Great Sheikh. They are 8,000 count.
Nasrullah: And our stockpiles of explosives?
Lieutenant: Enough to blow up a thousand barracks - full of Marines.
Nasrullah: Then let us continue our jihad!
Lieutenant: But hark! Who is it that so rashly intrudes upon our camp?

(Enter American ambassador)

Ambassador: Stay your hand! For the new era of democracy is upon you! (Sings) [7]

I am the very model of a State Department Diplomat
I`ve studied your geography from Sinai through to Ararat
I speak of local dialects a smidgen and a smattering
And spend my time at cocktail parties gossiping and chattering.
I know a charging rhino from a bathing hippopotamus,
and trace my genealogy to Homo foggybottomus.
I dine at Arab restaurants in Mayfair and Belgravia
And memorize the dialogue from Lawrence of Arabia. When I can promise Syria a leaseback on the Golan Height
When I can tell a Twelver from a Sunni or a Maronite
In short when you are ready to expostulate: "Let`s gas the bore!"
You`ll think I`m an exemplary American Ambassador.

Hezbollah chorus:

In short, when we are ready to expostulate: "Let`s gas the bore!"
We`ll see he`s an exemplary American Ambassador.

First Hezbollah militiaman: You shall pay dearly for this tasteless lampoon, Ambassador.
Second Hezbollah militiaman: As a matter of fact, we have ways of dealing with people like you.
Nasrullah: Stop! For this man is here under my protection.
First Hezbollah militiaman: We just wanted to play with him.
Second Hezbollah militiaman: Especially with his head.
Nasrullah: This would be a convenient moment, ambassador, for you to explain the purpose of your visit before I allow my men a harmless diversion from their grim and weary duties.
Ambassador: We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. I charge you yield in Democracy`s name!

(Chorus of Hezbollah militiamen:]
We hear these words on bended knee;
We yearn, like all of mankind, to be free.

(Nasrullah:]
What from common cutthroats sets my men apart
Is that they are invariably democrats at heart.

Ambassador: We would not presume to ask true democrats to lay down their arms. Would you perhaps find it convenient, however, to change your name to something less menacing, for example, "The Lebanese Army"? [8]
Lieutenant: What`s the catch?
Nasrullah: There is no catch. We shall simply state that the phase of armed resistance has ended, adopt the uniform of the Lebanese Army, and arrange for the speedy retirement of the army`s present officer corps. As we shall make up the largest block of seats in the parliament, we in our capacity as a political party shall stand surety for our control of the army. As for armed resistance: Should certain of you choose to form a splinter faction committed to the bombing of American installations, for example, we should deplore this course of action, just as Yasser Arafat did when he set up the al-Aksa Brigades. No one ever called Arafat to account! Unless we were to catch you in the very act of detonating a bomb, we could not in good conscience describe you as terrorists. Every third man, fall out and join the splinter faction!
Ambassador: Your democratic instincts tug at the American heartstring and, more pertinently, at the American checkbook. The Palestinian Authority is floating upon a sea of generosity after having embraced democracy, and the same happy state of affairs well might apply to you. (Sings) [9]

Poor Wand`ring One!
Though thou hast surely strayed,
Take heart of grace,
Thy steps retrace,
Poor Wand`ring One!
Poor Wand`ring One!
If some American aid
Can make you vote,
On you we`ll dote,
And trust me, you`ll get paid.

Endnotes:
1. For example, "The Pirates of Penzance, Or, The Slave of Duty". This libretto is available along with musical examples here.
2. To the tune of Pour, Oh Pour the Pirate Sherry.
3. From George W Bush`s Second Inaugural Address. Italicized passages are direct quotations from the statements of US officials.
4. The Pirates of Penzance were so tenderhearted as to refrain from stealing from orphans. As all of their captives claimed to be orphans, they had to let them all go.
5. To the tune of When the Felon`s Not Engaged in His Employment.
6. To the tune of The Pirate King`s Song.
7. To the tune of I Am a Very Model of a Modern Major-General.
8. Rumored by the Beirut Daily Star, March 19, 2005.
9. To the tune of Poor Wand`ring One.

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

The Complete Spengler

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DER SPIEGEL 12/2005 - March 21, 2005

World Bank

Wolfowitz Choice May Lead to a New Nomination Process

By Georg Mascolo
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,347505,00…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,347505,00…


US President George W. Bush`s nomination of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank is highly unpopular. He is seen as totally unfit for the position. The controversy may lead to the jettisoning of the agreement allowing the US to appoint the Bank boss and Europe to choose the head of the IMF.

Paul Wolfowitz, US President George W. Bush`s highly unpopular nominee for the position of World Bank president, was at least able to come up with an elegant repartee for one of the many points of criticism with which he has been confronted. It`s not possible for him, as many have charged, to know virtually nothing about the complex internal workings of the World Bank, the 61-year-old deputy secretary of defense said. After all, his Tunisian paramour has been on the bank`s management board for years.

But Wolfowitz, a former professor of political science who has become one of the masterminds behind the American conservative movement, will find it more difficult to dispel most other concerns. It seems almost inconceivable that one of the most resolute hawks in the Bush administration, a man Time magazine awarded the well-deserved title of "intellectual godfather of the (Iraq) war," could be the right man to lead the Bank in combating hunger and poverty in the Third World. In Berlin, German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul sarcastically commented "The enthusiasm (over the nomination) in old Europe is not exactly overwhelming." Mexican President Vicente Fox noted that the nomination was "a good proposal," but added "there may be others. There are people of great value."

Despite his express promise to consult with allies about his nomination for World Bank president -- traditionally a position filled by the United States -- in advance, Bush merely picked up the phone prior to the official announcement to notify other heads of his decision. "Real consultation looks quite a bit different," complained one German diplomat.

With his recent nominations -- of Wolfowitz to the World Bank position and John Bolton as new US ambassador to the United Nations -- Bush is, however, keeping at least one promise, at least in his own way. His administration has let it be known that Bush`s second term will be less characterized by unilateral decisions than by cooperation with the global community. And it`s precisely for this reason that he wants the most loyal members of his administration to serve in key international positions. Of course, their task will be to make sure the rest of the world understands exactly what Bush means when he promises "cooperation".

For America`s allies, the two nominations must have been "slap in the face," wrote the New York Times. Political scientist Michael Cox, of the London School of Economics, sees Bush`s move as evidence of the continuing influence of neoconservatives, whose goal is to change the world, on the course of the Bush administration: "The revolution is alive and well."

From Washington`s point of view the World Bank, which spends $15-20 billion a year to support the development of healthcare and education systems, as well as water and power supplies in the Third World, is the ideal instrument to support the power of democracy Bush so often invokes. But in the Bush administration`s view, the world`s most important third-world development organization has deteriorated into a sort of financial United Nations devoid of a concept. It`s a perception that has often led to friction, such as when Washington managed to push through generous aid for Pakistan, a country considered indispensable in combating terrorism, despite the country`s authoritarian tendencies while other Muslim countries have been left empty-handed precisely because of democratic deficiencies.

Officials at World Bank headquarters in Washington now fear that such political double standards will shape the way the organization does business in the future. Indeed, they fear that Wolfowitz may become so enthusiastic about supposed democratic advances in the Middle East that the world`s poorest nations, especially in Africa, could end up being sidelined. Senior World Bank officials are now saying that despite his intellect, the nominee knows nothing about the business of finance, and that his experiences in the Third World are limited to the four years he spent as US ambassador to Indonesia -- plus a few helicopter flights over the Asian regions devastated by last year`s tsunami. Indeed, Wolfowitz gladly admits that this most recent experience in Asia is precisely what led to his being considered for the World Bank post.

When Wolfowitz was mentioned a few months ago as a potential president of the World Bank, he was the first to demur, saying he couldn`t imagine life without his boss US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. But the White House believes that "Wolfie," as Bush likes to call the zealous neoconservative, is perfect for the job. He is, says Bush, "a compassionate, decent man who will do a fine job at the World Bank."

Outrage over Wolfowitz`s nomination has been so great that it could spell the end of the current procedure for filling the Bank boss position. "The US administration`s decision to advance such a brilliant but divisive candidate presents a golden opportunity for the world to challenge the outmoded US prerogative to appoint the head of the World Bank," Harvard economics professor Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief analyst at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the Financial Times. The idea of completely revamping the selection process is also making the rounds in World Bank circles, even though this would deprive the Europeans of their traditional right to fill the position of director of the International Monetary Fund.

But the White House apparently anticipates no more than a bit of rumbling from its European allies. After all, more vocal resistance could jeopardize the recent thaw in trans-Atlantic relations. Meanwhile Wolfowitz, who is likely to assume his new post in June, is doing his best to portray himself as an enthusiastic candidate: "It is a noble mission to lift people out of poverty and in doing so to strengthen the whole political movement towards democracy, and I hope my critics understand this," he told the New York Times.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

© DER SPIEGEL 12/2005

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Für echte Republikaner ist die Einmischung der augenblicklichen US-Regierung ins Private ein Graus.

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March 21, 2005
US exporters fail to reap benefits of lower dollar
By FT.COM
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT20050321_29…

When the US dollar reached its peak three years ago Kendig Kneen, whose Indiana-based business makes car crushers and landfill equipment, all but abandoned foreign sales.

Now after a 30 per cent fall in the currency, Kendig is once again expanding overseas. "The noose of the strong dollar has been removed from our neck," he says. "But it is still far from comfortable out there."

Many economists are equally ambivalent about the performance of US exports over the past year. Despite the dollar`s slide, US companies are still losing market share and appear to be finding some export markets an uphill struggle. Last year total world imports excluding the US rose 11.3 per cent while US exports rose by just 8.5 per cent in real terms.

The rise in exports has not been nearly enough to narrow the ballooning trade deficit. The dollar has fallen by 54 per cent against the euro since February 2002, while the trade deficit with western Europe has risen from $100bn (€76bn, £53bn) to $114bn in the past year.

Similarly the US bilateral deficit with Canada rose from $124bn to $162bn during last year, in spite of the 25 per cent fall in the dollar since February 2002.

"The benefits of depreciation have not been as great as expected so far," says Nigel Gault, director of US research at Global Insight. "US exporters may be losing market share at a slower rate than in 2002 but they are still lagging behind the growth in world trade."

Part of the reason for this uninspired export perform-ance from the US appears to be the strength of domestic demand.

Some US exports appear to have been diverted away from foreign markets to satisfy voracious domestic demands. "We have sometimes had to ask ourselves, why go overseas for what you have on your own doorstep," says Mr Kneen. With corporate profits at record levels more than $1,100bn annualised few economists are weeping for US businesses.

However, not all of the disappointing export growth appears to be voluntary.

Some economists believe that as US exports become more focused on the higher end of the market, demand has become less sensitive to changes in price. "Currency movements don`t seem to matter quite so much when you are buying very top-end goods," says David Bloom, currency strategist at HSBC in London. "You either buy Microsoft or you don`t.

Meanwhile, the lower-end production that is more sensitive to price has been shifting to places such as China, India and Mexico." Ultra-price sensitive apparel exports have fallen as a share of total overseas sales from 1.4 to 0.8 per cent. This may help explain why exports have not had quite the boost from the falling dollar that some economic models might have predicted.

After so many lean years, US exporters may also have decided to fatten up their margins again rather than reduce prices and grab market share.

In addition, the falling dollar may have helped US companies hold their own against domestic competition in Europe, Japan and Canada. But they have still had to confront growing competition in these markets from Chinese exporters. Because of the renminbi`s peg to the dollar, Chinese companies have been enjoying exactly the same competitive boost in these markets as US businesses. "Aside from the currency advantage, Chinese companies have been going through a productivity boom with unit labour costs falling fast," says Ian Morris, an economist at HSBC in New York.

The weakness of demand in many of the world`s biggest economies has made things even harder. US consumer spending rose by 3.8 per cent last year but only 3.1 per cent in the UK, 1.5 per cent in Japan and just 1.1 per cent in the eurozone. Consumers have been particularly cautious in Germany, Europe`s biggest economy, where structural reforms have been making it easier for companies to make workers redundant.

"In the long run, these reforms should mean stronger growth," says Paul Donovan, global economist at UBS. "In the short run, it has meant that workers are putting more money aside rather than spending in case the axe falls on them at work."

Even assuming that the full effects of the dollar`s fall have not yet come through, rising US exports are unlikely to be enough to narrow the deficit.

According to calculations by HSBC, if the economy grows 3.5 per cent next year then the US import bill may be expected to rise 10 per cent. This means US exports would need to grow by 15 per cent in real terms just to prevent the deficit widening further.

The conclusion, says Ray Attrill, director of research at 4Cast, is that unless US consumption slows considerably, a much greater fall in the dollar is necessary to narrow the trade gap. "It appears that we have got only half the fall that we need in the dollar in order to help close the deficit," he says.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005.

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washingtonpost.com
Wolfowitz Closing In On Bank Post
Germany Softens Stance As Nominee Woos Others
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55122-2005Mar…

By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 22, 2005; Page E01

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz closed in on the presidency of the World Bank yesterday when Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Germany would not try to block Wolfowitz`s candidacy.

Schroeder said on German television that President Bush phoned him to discuss the nomination, "and I told him Germany would not stand in his way," according to news service reports. "I even think that people will be positively surprised" by Wolfowitz`s leadership at the bank.

The statement virtually extinguished the already-fading chances of a rebellion by other World Bank member nations against Wolfowitz, whose nomination by Bush last week became the focus of controversy because of his role in promoting the invasion of Iraq.

With France, the other major European opponent of the Iraq war, Germany posed a potential threat to Wolfowitz`s candidacy, which must be approved by the board of the 184-nation institution. The United States traditionally chooses the World Bank president as part of an informal agreement in which the European Union gets to name the head of the International Monetary Fund. But the boards of the two institutions operate by consensus -- indeed, a German candidate for IMF chief was forced to withdraw five years ago for lack of support from Washington and other capitals.

Schroeder`s comments made it clear that a European-led challenge to Wolfowitz is not in the offing. Although there is still a chance that developing countries could put forward an alternative candidate around whom Wolfowitz`s critics could rally, sources at the bank said that board members from developing nations have shown no desire to take such a step.

"It`s a closed matter, because there is no willingness on the European side to oppose the nomination," said a European source at the bank who spoke on condition of anonymity, as did the other sources, because of the highly charged nature of the controversy.

European board members are likely to interview Wolfowitz together on Wednesday, the source added, and Wolfowitz will probably meet with higher-ranking European officials next week, with formal approval by the board scheduled for March 31.

A spokesman for the European Commission was quoted in news service reports yesterday as saying that Wolfowitz would travel to Brussels to meet with commission officials. Rob Nichols, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, which oversees U.S. participation in the World Bank, would not comment on specific plans but said that Wolfowitz "has reached out to a broad array of European organizations and ministries. He has had some very positive conversations, and he looks forward to meeting them at the earliest opportunity."

Wolfowitz`s apparent success in preempting opposition to his candidacy reflected a number of factors, including his own spirited effort to dispel concerns about how he would run the bank.

His nomination aroused fears that the Bush administration would use the bank -- which lends about $20 billion annually to developing countries for anti-poverty projects -- to further U.S. foreign policy aims, especially in the Middle East. But Wolfowitz, a former academic and ambassador to Indonesia, began meeting with board members and granted interviews in which he repeatedly stressed his dedication to the bank`s antipoverty mission and said he understood that his role would become that of an "international civil servant" responsible to the entire board.

More important, according to board sources and many outside observers, was the simple recognition by governments wary of Wolfowitz that challenging him directly could carry a steep price.

European governments felt they were in no position to do so because the United States readily acceded to Europe`s choice last year of Rodrigo de Rato, Spain`s finance minister, as head of the IMF; future European candidates for other jobs would almost certainly be at risk if the Europeans challenged Wolfowitz.

In addition, a battle over his nomination would reopen the bitter wounds inflicted on the transatlantic relationship by the Iraq war, which have only recently begun to heal.

Some officials in Europe have privately voiced disgust that nations such as South Africa and Brazil have refrained from putting forward an alternate candidate, since developing nations have complained loudly about rich countries` control of international financial institutions. But poor countries would be taking an enormous risk in challenging a U.S. candidate for the World Bank presidency, since their opposition might put at risk their prospects for getting loans.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Wrong Man for This U.N.

By Peter Beinart
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55428-2005Mar…

Tuesday, March 22, 2005; Page A17

John Bolton owes his recent nomination as ambassador to the United Nations to an analogy. It goes something like this: In 1975, when anti-Americanism was on the march, Gerald Ford chose a distinctly undiplomatic diplomat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to represent the United States at the United Nations. Unlike his predecessors, who had listened politely while America was defamed, Moynihan denounced the tin-pot dictatorships running wild at the United Nations. And a new movement called neoconservatism -- of which Moynihan was a leading voice -- made its entrance onto the international stage. Six years later, Ronald Reagan gave the U.N. job to another prominent neocon, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and she proved equally blunt.

Bolton -- a fierce U.N. critic -- is the supposed heir to that tradition. When Condoleezza Rice announced his nomination, she specifically invoked Moynihan and Kirkpatrick. Numerous right-leaning commentators have done the same. To some members of Congress, sending a man who has repeatedly trashed the United Nations to be America`s representative there seems perverse. But for neocons with a sense of history, that`s precisely the point.

Problem is, the history`s misleading. Moynihan and Kirkpatrick were effective because their oppositional styles suited the time -- a time when there was little the United States could do at the United Nations other than oppose. Today the United States has an opportunity to lead. And by choosing Bolton, the Bush administration may be squandering it.

Moynihan became America`s U.N. ambassador at one of the lowest moments in the history of U.S. foreign policy. In April 1975, the month he was nominated, North Vietnam overran Saigon, handing the United States its greatest military defeat of the 20th century. The United Nations was dominated by leftist Third World dictatorships with a fondness for the Soviet Union and a hostility to the United States. The previous year they had proposed a resolution essentially endorsing government expropriation of foreign property. The United States had opposed the resolution, and been outvoted 120 to 6.

In fact, Moynihan was given the U.N. job largely on the strength of an essay he published in Commentary called "The United States in Opposition," in which he noted that, "We are a minority. We are outvoted. . . . The question is what do we make of it."

Moynihan said America should go down fighting. And so, less than five months into his tenure, when the United Nations passed its infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism, Moynihan declared, "This is a lie." When Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin went before the General Assembly to demand the "extinction of Israel as a state," Moynihan called him a "racist murderer." By defending America, Moynihan kindled national pride. Time put him on its cover. National Review named him "man of the year."

When Kirkpatrick took the job in 1981, America`s international standing was not much higher. The Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan, and the Iranian hostage crisis had been an extended national humiliation. Often citing Moynihan, Kirkpatrick denounced America`s critics, responding to their lectures on imperialism with lectures on democracy. The United States was still a beleaguered minority. But as one of Kirkpatrick`s aides put it, it was no longer "a willing victim."

Like Moynihan and Kirkpatrick, Bolton loves a good fight. He has denounced international treaties on small arms, biological weapons and the International Criminal Court. He has said that if the United Nations lost 10 of its 38 floors, no one would notice. And as if to underscore his incendiary reputation, he reportedly keeps a fake hand grenade in his office.

But in today`s United Nations, bomb-throwing is no longer what America needs. The Third World-Soviet alliance that dominated the organization in the 1970s and 1980s has collapsed. Eastern Europe is now filled with pro-U.S. democracies, and across the Third World governments have moved toward the capitalist economic systems they once decried. According to Freedom House, the number of countries deemed "free" has more than doubled since 1974, from 41 to 89. And while the United States is still resented at the U.N., its influence there is enormous. In 1996 the United States almost single-handedly deposed U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Today his successor, Kofi Annan, is scrambling to avoid a similar fate.

America`s challenge at the United Nations is to forge a new ideological majority and harness it for cooperative efforts against terrorism, nuclear proliferation, poverty and AIDS. Bolton -- who specializes in alienating America`s democratic allies -- is uniquely ill-suited to that task. By choosing him, the Bushies are signaling one of two things: Either they think America is still isolated in the world or, worse, they want it to be.

The writer is editor of the New Republic and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He writes a monthly column for The Post.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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US-Politik hatte noch nie Skrupel. Hier ein gutes Beispiel von vor 100 Jahren.
Was mich an diesen Ereignissen stört, ist dass es so gut wie kein kritisches Hinterfragen über ihre Taten der Vergangenheit gibt. Siehe die Ward Churchill Diskussion.


http://www.selvesandothers.org/article9315.html
U.S. Genocide in the Philippines
A Case of Guilt, Shame, or Amnesia?
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005
by E. San Juan,Jr.

Very few people know what the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was all about, even though historian Bernard Fall called it America’s "First Vietnam." Amid the war in Iraq following the invasion of Afghanistan, can we still learn from history?

EXCEPT during the sixties when the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was referred to as “the first Vietnam,” the death of 1.4 million Filipinos has been usually accounted for as either collateral damage or victims of insurrection against the imperial authority of the United States. The first Filipino scholar to make a thorough documentation of the carnage is the late Luzviminda Francisco in her contribution to The Philippines: The End of An Illusion (London, 1973).

This fact is not even mentioned in the tiny paragraph or so in most U.S. history textbooks. Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image (1989), the acclaimed history of this intervention, quotes the figure of 200,000 Filipinos killed in outright fighting. Among historians, only Howard Zinn and Gabriel Kolko have dwelt on the “genocidal” character of the catastrophe. Kolko, in his magisterial Main Currents in Modern American History (1976), reflects on the context of the mass murder: “Violence reached a crescendo against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval....” Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) cites 300,000 Filipinos killed in Batangas alone, while William Pomeroy’s American Neo-Colonialism (1970) cites 600,000 Filipinos dead in Luzon alone by 1902. The actual figure of 1.4 million covers the period from 1899 to 1905 when resistance by the Filipino revolutionary forces mutated from outright combat in battle to guerilla skirmishes; it doesn’t include the thousands of Moros (Filipino Muslims) killed in the first two decades of U.S. colonial domination.

The first Philippine Republic led by Emilio Aguinaldo, which had already waged a successful war against the Spanish colonizers, mounted a determined nationwide opposition against U.S. invading forces. It continued for two more decades after Aguinaldo’s capture in 1901. Several provinces resisted to the point where the U.S. had to employ scorched-earth tactics, and hamletting or “reconcentration” to quarantine the populace from the guerillas, resulting in widespread torture, disease, and mass starvation. In The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (2003), Prof. Gavan McCormack argues that the outright counterguerilla operations launched by the U.S. against the Filipinos, an integral part of its violent pacification program, constitutes genocide. He refers to Jean Paul Sartre’s contention that as in Vietnam, “the only anti-guerilla strategy which will be effective is the destruction of the people, in other words, the civilians, women and children.” That is what happened in the Philippines in the first half of the bloody twentieth century.

As defined by the UN 1948 “ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” genocide means acts “committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It is clear that the U.S. colonial conquest of the Philippines deliberately sought to destroy the national sovereignty of the Filipinos. The intent of the U.S. perpetrators included the dissolution of the ethnic identity of the Filipinos manifest in the rhetoric, policies, and disciplinary regimes enunciated and executed by legislators, politicians, military personnel, and other apparatuses. The original proponents of the UN document on genocide conceived of genocide as including acts or policies aimed at “preventing the preservation or development” of “racial, national, linguistic, religious, or political groups.” That would include “all forms of propaganda tending by their systematic and hateful character to provoke genocide, or tending to make it appear as a necessary, legitimate, or excusable act.” What the UN had in mind, namely, genocide as cultural or social death of targeted groups, was purged from the final document due to the political interests of the nation-states that then dominated the world body.

What was deleted in the original draft of the UN document are practices considered genocidal in their collective effect. Some of them were carried out in the Philippines by the United States from 1899 up to 1946 when the country was finally granted formal independence. As with the American Indians, U.S. colonization involved, among others, the “destruction of the specific character of a persecuted group by forced transfer of children, forced exile, prohibition of the use of the national language, destruction of books, documents, monuments, and objects of historical, artistic or religious value.” The goal of all colonialism is the cultural and social death of the conquered natives, in effect, genocide.

In a recent article, “Genocide and America” (New York Review of Books, March 14, 2002), Samantha Power observes that US officials “had genuine difficulty distinguishing the deliberate massacre of civilians from the casualties incurred in conventional conflict.” It is precisely the blurring of this distinction in colonial wars through racializing discourses and practices that proves how genocide cannot be fully grasped without analyzing the way the victimizer (the colonizing state power) categorizes the victims (target populations) in totalizing and naturalizing modes unique perhaps to the civilizational drives of modernity. Within the modern period, in particular, the messianic impulse to genocide springs from the imperative of capital accumulation-the imperative to reduce humans to commodified labor-power, to saleable goods/services. U.S. “primitive accumulation” began with the early colonies in New England and Virginia, and culminated in the 19th century with the conquest and annexation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines.With the historical background of the U.S. campaigns against the American Indians in particular, and the treatment of African slaves and Chicanos in general, there is a need for future scholars and researchers to concretize this idea of genocide (as byproduct of imperial expansion) by exemplary illustrations from the U.S. colonial adventure in the Philippines.
E. San Juan, Jr. was recently Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, Republic of China.

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Auch eine Dominotheorie.

The price of a protection racket

The Qatar bombing suggests that al-Qaida is shifting its frontline
Faisal Bodi
Tuesday March 22, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1443103,00.ht…

Guardian
To the large expatriate community in Doha, Saturday`s bombing came as a shock. But apart from the fact that the attack in the Qatari capital had no local precedent, there is little to justify the astonishment. The tiny desert outcrop on the northern coast of the Arabian peninsula has been a key western ally in the so-called war on terror, and is therefore a likely target.

Sentiment in the conservative Sunni Muslim emirate against the US and British governments has been running high since the invasion of Iraq. In the mosques, before and during the invasion, even state control could not prevent imams condemning a "Judaeo-Christian crusade".

The sermons reflected local indignation at the decision of Qatar`s Sandhurst-educated emir, Hamad al-Thani, to play host to the American foreign legion after pressure from armed dissidents had forced the government in neighbouring Saudi Arabia to ask it to leave in 2003.

The concentration of American forces in Qatar had been rising since the first Gulf war in 1991. The US-built air base at al-Udeid outside the capital serves as Washington`s main combat operations HQ in the region - in 2001 a Qatari was shot dead after he opened fire at the base. US forces also operate a newer base in al-Sayliyah, the largest pre-positioning base for US military equipment in the world, from where the 2003 attack on Iraq was managed.

In common with many of the bite-sized emirates and sheikhdoms, the Qatari royal family sees the foreign contingent as an insurance policy against being gobbled up by more powerful neighbours, in this case Saudi Arabia. This policy of paying protection money to superior powers has kept the ruling clans of the region enthroned for generations.

Britain - as part of its 19th-century Trucial agreements designed to protect its ships in the Persian Gulf - served as protector before the emergence of "independent" sheikhdoms and emirates in the 1970s. Since the discovery of oil and gas, the region has fallen under US hegemony to the extent that there is now an American military presence in all the countries of the Arabian peninsula.

However, protection rackets demand a heavy price, and the Gulf rulers have had to strike some Faustian bargains - of which collaboration in the Iraq war is the biggest.

The attack on the Doha theatre last weekend (the second anniversary of the Iraq invasion), in which one Briton died, suggests that operations might be fanning out from Saudi Arabia, where unrest continues despite official claims to have broken the back of al-Qaida.

In recent months, Kuwait has seen several deadly shootouts with Islamist dissidents. Oman last year arrested scores of people believed to be forming an armed group. In Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet, seven men were detained last July for plotting attacks against government, economic and tourist facilities.

A warning published on an Islamist website last week attacked the neighbouring United Arab Emirates for allowing US navy vessels to dock in its ports and their crews to rest after "bombarding our Muslim brothers in Iraq". It also accused the regimes of training and equipping Iraqi police to pursue their brethren.

As with previous warnings from Islamists linked to al-Qaida, it urged the Gulf regimes to eliminate western influence in the holy land, defined as the whole Arabian peninsula. In keeping with their lack of political sophistication, the authors do not attack autocratic rule, preferring to proffer "sincere advice" to the rulers to mend their ways within 10 days or be considered clients of the "infidel Christians and Jews".

Saturday`s attack also demonstrates that the presence of al-Jazeera in the city is not enough to shield Qatar from dissident Islamists. Westerners labour under a misconception that al-Qaida and the satellite channel are umbilically connected.

Islamist dissidents enjoy a love-hate relationship with al-Jazeera. They know the channel, owned by a cousin of Sheikh Hamad, is an extension of the regime that is aiding and abetting the western crusade. But denied airtime in the western media, they rely on it to put out their messages. The relationship is fraught, with al-Jazeera accused of not televising all the material it receives, and even receiving threats of violence.

As we saw with the Bali bombing in 2001, and attacks on Israeli-patronised resorts in Kenya and Egypt, al-Qaida and its allies have displayed a skilful ability to move their frontline whenever they seem to be boxed in. With Saudi Arabia increasingly frustrating the militants, their cadres in the peninsula could be widening their operations. Qatar and the Gulf states, with their record of collaboration with the western "axis of evil", present an obvious target.

· Faisal Bodi worked until last month in Doha as a senior editor for aljazeera.net

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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For Bush, science is a dirty word

In America`s right-to-die controversy the facts were not allowed to get in the way of evangelical populism
Tristram Hunt
Tuesday March 22, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1443104,00.ht…

Guardian
The interference by the White House in the case of Terri Schiavo - the woman at the centre of America`s latest right-to-die controversy - marks another milestone in President Bush`s campaign for faith over fact. More concerned with the wonder of miracles than Schiavo`s 15-year irreversible vegetative state, Bush and his allies have blithely overturned multiple court decisions to maintain artificial feeding and let evangelical populism triumph over medical opinion.

Thanks to the policies and prejudices of the Bush administration, science has become a dirty word. The American century was built on scientific progress. From the automobile to the atom bomb to the man on the moon, science and technology underpinned American military, commercial and cultural might. Crucial to that was the presidency. From FDR and the Los Alamos laboratory to Kennedy and Nasa to Clinton and decoding the genome, the White House was vital to promoting ground-breaking research and luring the world`s scientific elite. But Bush`s faith-based, petro-chemical administration has reversed that tradition: excepting matters military, this presidency exhibits an abiding aversion to scientific inquiry that is in danger of affecting the entire country.

Neal Lane, former science adviser to Clinton, has spoken of "a pattern of abuse of science" in policy making within today`s White House. What they don`t like, they suppress and distort. Official publications on the science of climate change have been brazenly replaced with drafts from utility lobbyists. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report linking industry emissions to global warming had to be withdrawn at the behest of West Wing advisers - not many of them noted climatologists.

Uncomfortable data on stem cell research has been rubbished. Scientific advisory panels have been vetted for presidential supporters. Public interest groups questioning air pollution plans have had their tax records demanded by pliant senators. And in the push to open up wilderness for energy exploitation, submissions from coal, gas or oil corporations are given greater credence than evidence from government scientists. No wonder last year 20 Nobel laureates warned that "the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented".

Given the cultural influence of the White House, it is no surprise this disregard for science is trickling down into civil society. In some school districts, the study of evolution is now in danger of extinction. A New York Times survey revealed that not only was it being replaced in certain curricula by creationism, but even where it was on the syllabus some teachers were too afraid to teach "the E word" for fear of evangelical reaction.

In many classrooms, the teaching of evolution is hampered by the teachers themselves - circumstantial evidence suggests that about a third of American biology teachers support the unscientific theories of "intelligent design". With the successful assault on evolution behind them, evangelicals are starting to train their sights on the earth sciences of geology and physics.

Meanwhile, in a belated attempt to stem the steady collapse in foreign students and scientists entering the US, the state department has begun to revise its onerous visa requirements. However, it will take more than a few shifts in security clearance to reverse the first enrolment decrease since the 1970s.

More broadly, science is playing a diminishing role within public debate. America is experiencing a range of irregular weather patterns from unprecedented rainfall in California to powerful storm cycles across Florida. The suggestion that such extreme weather - along with hotter summers and wetter winters - might just have something to do with climate change is rarely entertained. Instead, the Bush administration continues to befuddle the science (despite a consensus within the US National Academy of Sciences that human activity is causing climate change), and so quietly sanctions the culture of excess.

Just as it cut taxes during war, this presidency sees no need to foster resource conservation in the face of global warming. On the contrary, average house sizes are mushrooming while gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles are frankly passe. In American cities, the three-tonne Hummer is a regular sight, with a "drive-thru" at Starbucks starting to resemble a security sweep outside Falluja.

The talk of the Chicago Auto Show was the International CXT. Part of a new generation of extreme trucks, the CXT is nine feet high, weighs seven tonnes, costs $90,000 and does 7-10 miles to the gallon. TV stars Jay Leno and Ashton Kutcher are already proud owners. It won`t be long before it hits Main Street.

Rather than attempting to mitigate climate change trends, the White House seems intent on encouraging them. Its most recent budget proposal cuts funds for the EPA while increasing resources for the truly baloney science of missile defence. The Orwellian Clear Skies Act lets industry polluters off the hook while its truth-speak twin, the Healthy Forests Initiative, encourages more logging and road-building in national forests.

Even if the department of homeland security starts to let foreign scientists back in, many have to be asking: given such official disdain, is there any point doing the science?

· Tristram Hunt is a visiting professor of history at Arizona State University

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Tuesday, March 22, 2005

10 Killed in Iraq
Sistani Impatient

Ed Wong does his usual good job of reporting on developments in Iraq. The guerrilla war continued apace, with ten Iraqis killed in separate incidents. Guerrillas in Anbar Province killed a US Marine on Monday, as well.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is expressing impatience with the inability of the elected parliament to form a government. He appears to be pressuring the religious Shiite parties to make the compromises with the Kurdish Alliance that are necessary to form a government.

Khaled Oweis of Reuters points to one reason Sistani is so eager to have a government-- only once one is formed can parliament proceed to the task of implementing Islamic law in at least some spheres of life.

The move to Islamic law has been particularly hard on middle class Iraqi women, as Reuters points out.

The International Crisis Group has issued a report on Iran`s interests and activities in Iraq. They conclude:


` Iran . . . is intent on preserving Iraq`s territorial integrity, avoiding all-out instability, encouraging a Shiite-dominated, friendly government, and, importantly, keeping the U.S. preoccupied and at bay. This has entailed a complex three-pronged strategy: encouraging electoral democracy (as a means of producing Shiite rule); promoting a degree of chaos but of a manageable kind (in order to generate protracted but controllable disorder); and investing in a wide array of diverse, often competing Iraqi actors (to minimise risks in any conceivable outcome). `



Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of two majot victors in the Jan. 30 elections, is demanding that its paramilitary, the Badr Corps, be allowed to play a bigger role in the Shiite south.

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The Schiavo Case and the Islamization of the Republican Party

The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model.

The Muslim fundamentalists use a provision of Islamic law called "bringing to account" (hisba). As Al-Ahram weekly notes, "Hisba signifies a case filed by an individual on behalf of society when the plaintiff feels that great harm has been done to religion." Hisba is a medieval idea that had all be lapsed when the fundamentalists brought it back in the 1970s and 1980s.

In this practice, any individual can use the courts to intervene in the private lives of others. Among the more famous cases of such interference is that of Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid in Egypt. A respected modern scholar of Koranic studies, Abu Zaid argued that, contrary to medieval interpretations of Islamic law, women and men should receive equal inheritance shares. (Medieval Islamic law granted women only have the inheritance shares of their brothers). Abu Zaid was accused of sacrilege. Then the allegation of sacrilege was used as a basis on which the fundamentalists sought to have the courts forcibly divorce him from his wife.

Abu Zaid`s wife loved her husband. She did not want to be divorced. But the fundamentalists went before the court and said, she is a Muslim, and he is an infidel, and no Muslim woman may be married to an infidel. They represented their efforts as being on behalf of the Islamic religion, which had an interest in seeing to it that heretics like Abu Zaid could not remain married to a Muslim woman. In 1995 the hisba court actually found against them. They fled to Europe, and ultimately settled in Holland.

Likewise, a similar tactic was deployed against the Egyptian feminist author, Nawal Saadawi, but it failed and she was able to remain in the country.

One of the most objectionable features of this fundamentalist tactic is that persons without standing can interfere in private affairs. Perfect strangers can file a case about your marriage, because they represent themselves as defending a public interest (the upholding of religion and morality).

Terri Schiavo`s husband is her legal guardian. Her parents have not succeeded in challenging this status of his. As long as he is the guardian, the decision on removing the feeding tubes is between him and their physicians. Her parents have not succeeded in having this responsibility moved from him to them. Even under legislation George W. Bush signed in 1999 while governor of Texas, the spouse and the physician can make this decision. (The bill Bush signed in Texas actually made ability to pay a consideration in the decision!)

In passing a special law to allow the case to be kicked to a Federal judge after the state courts had all ruled in favor of the husband, Congress probably shot itself in the foot once again. The law is not a respecter of persons, so the Federal judge will likely rule as the state ones did.

But the most frightening thing about the entire affair is that public figures like congressmen inserted themselves into the case in order to uphold religious strictures. The lawyer arguing against the husband let the cat out of the bag, as reported by the NYT: ` The lawyer, David Gibbs, also said Ms. Schiavo`s religious beliefs as a Roman Catholic were being infringed because Pope John Paul II has deemed it unacceptable for Catholics to refuse food and water. "We are now in a position where a court has ordered her to disobey her church and even jeopardize her eternal soul," Mr. Gibbs said. `

In other words, the United States Congress acted in part on behalf of the Roman Catholic church. Both of these public bodies interfered in the private affairs of the Schiavos, just as the fundamentalist Egyptian, Nabih El-Wahsh, tried to interfere in the marriage of Nawal El Saadawi.

Like many of his fundamentalist counterparts in the Middle East, Tom Delay is rather cynically using this issue to divert attention from his own corruption. Like the Muslim fundamentalist manipulators of Hisba, Delay represents himself as acting on behalf of a higher cause. He said of the case over the weekend, ` "This is not a political issue. This is life and death," `

Republican Hisba will have the same effect in the United States that it does in the Middle East. It will reduce the rights of the individual in favor of the rights of religious and political elites to control individuals. Ayatollah Delay isn`t different from his counterparts in Iran.

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U.S. Turns to Iraqi Insiders in Battle Against Insurgency
Commanders focus on intelligence and use tip lines, job offers, `unity meetings` and other tactics to chip away at militants` cells.
By David Zucchino
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-inte…

March 22, 2005

TIKRIT, Iraq — Rather than trying to defeat the insurgency in Iraq militarily, U.S. commanders now taking charge here say they are focused on developing better intelligence and using unorthodox tactics to chip away at militant cells with help from Iraqi security forces.

As part of that strategy, commanders and their Iraqi allies say they have had informal contacts with Sunni Muslims who either support the insurgency or are active participants. Some of these Sunnis want to take part in the country`s fledgling political process, intelligence officers say.

The overall strategy reflects the Pentagon`s emphasis on turning over security responsibilities to Iraqis. The commanders say intelligence developed by Iraqi security forces is disrupting some insurgent cells while also leading to roundups of low- and mid-level insurgents.

"We won`t be the ones to defeat this insurgency. It`ll be the Iraqis themselves," said Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto, who took over command late last month of four provinces north of Baghdad in the so-called Sunni Triangle. "This insurgency can go on low grade for a long time, and the Iraqis will eventually have to put it out."

After a brief dip following Jan. 30 elections, insurgent attacks have returned to preelection levels, intelligence officers say. Commanders concede that the core of the insurgency will fight indefinitely.

The insurgents are still able to "conduct spectacular attacks, suicide attacks that create mass casualties," Taluto said. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, police and government officials have been killed or wounded.

"Nobody here is minimizing the insurgency," Taluto said from his spacious office at Saddam Hussein`s former palace complex in Tikrit, the deposed leader`s hometown. "We certainly respect it. These people are smart and committed. On the other hand, they`re not 10 feet tall."

Commanders acknowledge that past U.S. intelligence efforts have been spotty, particularly in the early months of the insurgency in late 2003 and early 2004. They say top-level insurgent leaders are still able to direct a network of largely independent local cells whose attacks have crippled reconstruction efforts.

But they say several cells have been broken up by using Iraqi soldiers as undercover infiltrators. Cell members who are captured are told, falsely, that they were turned in by other cell members, intelligence officers said. They said the tactic had prompted some insurgents to provide the names of other cell members.

"If they think they`ve been dimed out by one of their own people, they`ll start naming names," one intelligence officer said.

In addition to turning to Iraqis for better intelligence, the newly arriving commanders are creating small reconstruction projects designed to provide jobs for Iraqis. They say many Iraqis who plant roadside bombs are not committed insurgents but unemployed young men paid to mount attacks.

"That`s the way to get security established — get essential services, get jobs for people," said Army Brig. Gen. James Huggins, who took over last month as chief of staff for multinational forces. "This is just as important as good intelligence."

Even so, commanders say resentment toward the U.S. occupation remains so strong that the Vietnam-era concept of winning hearts and minds does not necessarily apply in Iraq. Instead, they are trying to deflect attention from U.S. forces while building public trust in the Iraqi army, police and political institutions.

"We`ll never win their hearts and minds, but we will win their respect," said Army Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, an assistant commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which took over control of greater Baghdad late last month.

The size and competence of the Iraqi security forces have been questioned by some U.S. congressional leaders. Last week, the Government Accountability Office accused the Pentagon of inflating the number of trained soldiers and police officers on duty.

Yet commanders say new Iraqi army and police units have improved intelligence-gathering through their knowledge of neighborhoods and local political currents.

And tips by citizens have led to several arrests of cell leaders and seizures of weapons and bomb-making equipment, commanders say. Many tips have come through toll-free lines. Callers are guaranteed anonymity and sometimes offered rewards. Billboards — 250 in Baghdad alone — and TV ads urge Iraqis to report suspicious activity.

In Baghdad, tip lines are producing 40 calls a week, said Army Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond.

As part of U.S. operations, government-run TV stations have aired tapes in which captured insurgents tearfully confess their complicity in deadly attacks. In addition, U.S. commanders are taking part in call-in shows on Iraqi TV — such as "Kirkuk and the New Iraqi Future" in the north and "Good Morning Orange City" near the insurgent stronghold of Baqubah, known for its orange groves.

Some insurgents have shown up at "unity day" meetings, in which Iraqis are invited to air grievances with U.S. commanders and Iraqi army, police and council officials. These informal discussions have led to agreements for more substantive meetings with insurgents, intelligence officers say. The U.S. military hopes it can co-opt some of these Sunnis into the political process and end their support of the insurgency.

"These guys recognize that the single biggest threat to the insurgency now is the new government and the new political process. They don`t want to be left out in the cold," said Army Maj. Michel Natali, an intelligence officer with the 42nd Infantry Division, commanded by Taluto.

Iraqis invited to unity day meetings are assured that they will not be arrested. At a recent unity day in Baqubah, several supporters of the insurgency discussed political accommodation. But five insurgents, along with a representative of the anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, vowed to "wage jihad forever," said a U.S. officer who attended the meeting.

"We didn`t try to arrest them, but we damn sure took their pictures," the officer said.

Such contacts have helped. Intelligence officers say they are developing a better understanding of the insurgency. These officers say most cells have an operations director, who assigns deputies to organize ambushes or to hire people to place roadside bombs or build car bombs. Most cells have at least one financier who raises money, and several pay agents who disburse cash for operations. The typical cell is based on blood and tribal ties, insuring insularity.

Trying to dismantle such cells requires more than just mounting raids or combat patrols, intelligence officers say.

"This is a thinking man`s game now," said Army Lt. Col. Roger Cloutier, whose battalion outside Muqdadiya northeast of Baghdad has teamed with an Iraqi army unit to develop intelligence that has led to the arrests of 80 members of local cells. "It`s like we`re in the middle of a Tom Clancy novel."

"Or an episode of `The Sopranos,` " added Cloutier`s operations officer, Maj. Mark Borowski.

The battalion`s intelligence officer, Capt. Alex Marrone, said it was difficult to decide what information to trust and what to ignore. Insurgents have called in phony tips and then attacked Iraqi soldiers who responded, Taluto said.

"You don`t always know who to trust, but I`ll tell you this: I truly trust the IA [Iraqi army] guys I deal with every day," Marrone said.

Capt. Ed Ballanco, a U.S. military advisor to the brigade, said Iraqi soldiers` local contacts and rapport had proved invaluable.

"They are infinitely better at counterinsurgency than we are," he said. "When we get intel on a bad guy, we ask them. And since they are almost all from Haifa Street [a notorious stretch of central Baghdad where insurgents hold sway], they usually know the guy … and they grab him. It`s really amazing."

Commanders say they are encouraging Iraqis to fend for themselves. In Tikrit, Taluto said, a police chief was attacked by insurgents as he arrived home from work. Taking cover inside his house, he radioed for help — not to U.S. forces, but to the provincial government center, which dispatched an Iraqi army unit that drove off the insurgents.

Although commanders say combined U.S. and Iraqi army tactics are disrupting the insurgency, they acknowledge that it may take years to subdue it. They are still struggling to penetrate cells directed by Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks against U.S. and Iraqi soldiers.

Huggins said intelligence analysts were sifting through information provided by U.S. and Iraqi officers — and tips from Iraqi civilians — to better understand Zarqawi`s network of cells.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Mar 23, 2005


New jihadis, new threats
By B Raman
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC23Ak01.html

International jihadi terrorism of the al-Qaeda model will continue to pose the most serious challenge to the intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies and the police forces of the world in the short and medium terms, that is, for another five to 10 years. It shows no signs of any dilution of motivation and determination. There has been no dearth of volunteers. The more the number of terrorists killed or captured by the security forces, the more the number of volunteers for suicide and other terrorist missions. Their ability to learn from their successes and failures, to profit from the advances in science and technology and from the inadequacies in the intelligence and security set-up of the state, their spirit of innovation and their resilience remain impressive and even forbidding.

The end of the jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the late 1980s led to a crop of terrorists of Afghan vintage, with their morale strengthened by their successes against the troops of the Soviet superpower, spreading across to other states and creating havoc. They commonly came to be known as the Afghan alumni. The end of the current jihad in Iraq against the United States could result in a similar spread of terrorists of Iraqi vintage (the Iraqi alumni) to other countries and their creating a new wave of violence and destruction. Suicide terrorism through human bombs, car bombs and other means will continue to be their main repertoire. The states confronting them will continue to face difficulty in finding an effective response to suicide terrorism.

The ability of small cells to operate autonomously of each other without over-dependence on a centralized command and control and, at the same time, to effectively network with each other is a defining characteristic of the jihadi terrorists coming out of the Iraqi school.This will continue to be so in the years to come in other countries too.

The ease with which they have been able to expand their areas of operations circumventing the counter-terrorism firewalls built by the states of the international coalition led by the US is a cause for worry. Examples of such expansion could be seen in the recent incidents in Kuwait, Lebanon and Qatar.

Anti-US anger is a common motivating factor of all international jihadi terrorist groups belonging to the International Islamic Front from wherever they operate. They may talk of their ultimate objective of forming regional Islamic caliphates, but their short and medium-term objective is to punish the US and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq wherever they can, whenever they can and in whatever manner they can. They have no qualms over killing innocent civilians in whatever number they have to and over collateral deaths of the members of their own community as a result of their operations directed against their perceived adversaries.

Since reprisals and the urge to humiliate the US and force it to leave the Islamic world are their basic motivating force, there is little scope for political and economic approaches for dealing with them and little possibility of countering them intellectually and ideologically and of winning their hearts and minds. The campaign against international jihadi terrorism will, therefore, have to depend on a basket of professional, operational and psychological measures such as better collection, analysis and use of intelligence, better physical security, better scientific and technical means, better arms and ammunition, better tradecraft, better tactics, better psywar etc. Since the terrorists` modus operandi keep changing fast, the counter-terrorism techniques of the state agencies have to change fast too. The campaign against jihadi terrorism will be long and hard before jihadi fatigue and the weakening of the will triggers off the process of their withering away.

Just as there has been what has been projected as a revolution in military affairs and a revolution in intelligence affairs, there has also been a revolution in the unconventional way non-state actors, particularly domestic and international terrorists, operate against the state. Even while confronting what they see as the evils of globalization such as the dilution and distortion of religious values and the religious conviction of the communities to which they belong, Westernization or Americanization of their way of life and culture etc, they have shown a remarkable capability for adopting very effectively the scientific and technological advances made by a globalized world for making their terrorist operations more lethal.
They often network better than the agencies of the state. While operating in wide areas, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have been remarkably able to avoid more successfully than the security agencies of the state pitfalls of intense and swift operations, such as killings due to friendly fire. They have not allowed the absence of air cover and armor support to affect their morale and mobility on the ground. Their psywar and counter-psywar methods have considerable sophistication as seen from their ability to break the will of those captured by them without resorting to the kind of brutal methods such as those adopted by the US forces. Allegations of misbehavior toward the local population, particularly women, are more common against the security forces than against the international jihadi terrorists.

Two examples of their ability to adapt to modern technological innovations for improving their operational capability can be found in their use of the Internet for clandestine communications, networking, command and control, virtual training and psywar and in their use of the mobile phones for detonating explosive devices on the ground as well as in the air, as was seen during the reported blowing up of two Russian passenger planes by the Chechen terrorists from the ground in August last year.

The question before the international community in its fight against international jihadi terrorism will continue to be not how to wean the terrorists away from the path of violence. This is unlikely unless and until their will is broken. The real question is how to wean their own community and co-religionists away from the terrorists. For this to succeed, it is important to contain the spread of anger in the Islamic world and to remove the causes of anger. The dilemma faced by the international community in this task is due to the fact that only the US, because of its material and technological resources, has the ability to lead the international coalition in the so-called "war against terrorism", but its over-militarized approach, its inability to understand the Muslim mind and the Islamic culture and its insensitivity to what hurts Muslim pride are aggravating Muslim anger, instead of making it subside. Its counter-terrorism methods, with the use of the air force and heavy armor, are themselves becoming an important root cause of terrorism.

The dilemma before the international community is: it cannot prevail over the international jihadi terrorists without US leadership and assistance. At the same time, it cannot prevail with US leadership and assistance either, unless and until the US realizes its mistakes, has the humility to admit them and changes its methods.

Weapons of mass destruction and mass disruption (WMD) terrorism will continue to be the likely threats of the future against which the state has to be well-prepared. Weapons of mass destruction or the threat to use them to achieve demands or objectives need not necessarily aim to cause actual destruction. They could also aim to cause mass panic and demoralization and consequent public pressure on the state to bend to the will of the terrorists, by claiming to have smuggled in WMD and threatening to use them if their demands are not met. It would be difficult for the state to verify their claims of having smuggled in WMD and to reassure the public that it has nothing to fear. Effective physical security for establishments producing and storing WMD material and a crisis management drill for dealing with different scenarios involving the use or threatened use of WMD material will continue to require high priority in the short and medium terms.

Among the possible mutations of weapons of mass disruption terrorism are attacks on economic targets, such as the tourist industry, capture and/or destruction of oil and gas production and distribution facilities, capture of power in key oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq and the use of the oil weapon to achieve their objectives and maritime terrorism. As one saw in Bali in Indonesia and Mombasa in Kenya toward the end of 2002 and in Casablanca and Madrid subsequently, the disruption of tourist economies through well-planned attacks on soft targets is easy to plan and achieve.

The fact that they succeeded in the places mentioned above spoke poorly of the physical security set-up in those countries. The fact that they have not succeeded in similar measure subsequently shows how effective physical security and international cooperation in investigation can prevent terrorist attacks against physical targets. On the negative side, there are so many such physical targets available to the terrorists that it would be very difficult to provide equal physical security to all of them. Effective physical security need not necessarily be in the form of static security for physical targets. Vigorous investigation, surveillance and law enforcement to detect and neutralize sleeper cells as they are getting ready for a terrorist operation can help in preventing such attacks even on soft targets not having physical protection.

The possible use of oil for causing massive disruptions in the world economy has been receiving increasing attention from the international jihadi terrorist elements. The need for attacks on oil installations is a frequently occurring theme in the messages of Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. Till now, the attacks on the oil industry have been in the form of one reported attack on a oil tanker at the Aden port, attacks on the foreign experts working in the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and the blowing-up of oil pipelines in Iraq. The attacks, though spectacular, have not had a sustained effect. The oil industry, like the tourism industry, has shown itself to be resilient despite its vulnerability. Both the tourism and oil industries have so far been able to recover from the sporadic attacks on them fairly quickly. The economic disruption, though considerable, was temporary and did not have a serious effect on the availability and affordability of oil. This should not lead to any feelings of complacency that attacks of a more disastrous nature are unlikely. Counter-terrorism techniques tailor-made for the energy sector need urgent attention.

The terrorist situation in Saudi Arabia should be a cause for great concern in this connection. Till now, the Saudi security agencies have been able to absorb the sporadic terrorist strikes in the country without the terrorists being able to cause serious political or economic destabilization. At the same time, despite the successes of the Saudi security agencies in detecting and neutralizing many terrorist cells in the country, the motivation and determination of the terrorists remain high.

The international jihadi terrorists look on Iraq and Saudi Arabia as the key elements in their grand strategy for bringing about the defeat and humiliation of the US forces and their withdrawal from the Islamic world and for disrupting the oil economy in order to disrupt the economy of the Western world. If they manage to capture power in Saudi Arabia or seriously disrupt its oil industry, the Western economies would not be the only one to suffer. The aspirations of India and China to emerge as major economic powers of the region, if not the world, could equally receive a setback.

India`s plans for ensuring the supplies of energy to fuel its expanding economy through a network of pipelines from Turkmenistan and Iran via Pakistan and from Myanmar via Bangladesh would remain a pipe dream till the already-established international jihadi terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the fast emerging one in Bangladesh are neutralized by the international community through appropriate pressure on these countries.

The surviving terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan continues to pose a threat to peace and security and economic prosperity in South, West and Central Asia. The emerging one in Bangladesh has serious implications for South and Southeast Asia.

International threat perceptions of maritime terrorism are high and will continue to remain high in the foreseeable future. The fact that till now there has been no major terrorist strike on the high seas except a claimed, but unproved one by the Abu Sayyaf last year in the waters off the Philippines should not lead to a feeling of complacency that the international jihadi terrorists feel more comfortable operating on land and are, therefore, unlikely to expand their operations to the high seas. The fact that the Malacca Strait and other areas in the Southeast Asian region continue to witness a large number of piracy attacks on the high seas despite the temporary setback to piracy operations caused by the recent tsunami disaster and that some of the terrorist groups operating in the South and Southeast Asian regions such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka and the Free Acheh movement of Indonesia have proved seafaring capabilities would make this region particularly vulnerable to the emergence and growth of maritime terrorism.

Despite the rapid development of the technological element, the human element will continue to be the most important factor in determining the outcome of the campaign against terrorism. In spite of the superiority of the state in numbers and material and technological resources, the international jihadi terrorists do not show as yet any signs of withering away. The quality of the human element they have at their disposal would substantially account for this. The quality of the human element available to the security and counter-terrorism agencies should surpass that of the terrorists if the state has to ultimately prevail.

With an only mediocre human element, even the best of technological capability cannot produce adequate results. The best human element can ultimately prevail even if the technological capability is not up to the mark. The human element is very important at every stage of counter-terrorism - intelligence collection and analysis, use of the intelligence for prevention, neutralization of the capability of the terrorists, investigation of terrorist strikes and successful prosecution. How to develop an unbroken chain of human competence of high quality? That is a question which would continue to need attention in the years to come.

There has to be a revolution in the intelligence culture and tradecraft or operating techniques in order to be able to prevail over the terrorists. The existing tradecraft served adequately the purpose of the penetration of the state adversaries in order to collect human intelligence (humint). It has been found to be inadequate, if not unsuited, for penetrating the set-ups of non-state actors, particularly the terrorists, who operate on the basis of the principle of autonomous cells. The progress toward the evolution of new tradecraft and new techniques has been unsatisfactory.

A revolution in the intelligence culture also calls for the effective networking of national and foreign intelligence agencies and the sharing without inhibition of all relevant intelligence. The intelligence and counter-terrorism networking has to be as effective as the networking by the terrorists. Such networking was found difficult even in days when the number of intelligence agencies in each nation was small and manageable. How to ensure this in an era of mushrooming agencies is another question which needs urgent attention.

There has been some progress toward international intelligence cooperation at the bilateral level, but the progress toward multilateral cooperation is still years away. Since the US is and will continue to be a predominant player in all intelligence cooperation networks, suspicions of its real intentions and fears of its using such networks for serving its hegemonistic and strategic interests would continue to dog any progress towards multilateral cooperation.

There is an equally urgent need for a revolution in counter-terrorism training methods with an emphasis on joint training in specialized counter-terrorism schools for the officers and staff handling counter-terrorism in all intelligence and security agencies and police forces and the improvement of language capability. The training should develop in the officers an ability to think and act unconventionally with the help of suitably devised counter-terrorism games similar to the war games.

It has been seen from the experience of the ideological terrorist groups of West Europe of the 1970s and the 1980s, which withered away after the collapse of the USSR and other communist states of West Europe, that trans-national terrorist groups cannot survive without the sponsorship and complicity of another state in matters such as sanctuaries, training, supply of funds and arms and ammunition. If international jihadi terrorism continues to thrive despite the united action of the international community, it is largely because of the continued availability of sponsorship and complicity from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh. The provision in the UN Security Council Resolution No 1373 calling on all member-countries to stop providing direct or indirect assistance to terrorists remain unheeded by these countries. Unless and until these three states are called to account by the international community, it is unlikely to prevail over international jihadi terrorism.

Despite the improvement in the atmospherics in Indo-Pakistan relations since November 2003, there is no evidence to show that Pakistan has given up the use of terrorism as a weapon for achieving its strategic objectives vis-a-vis India. It is unlikely to do so, so long as it remains reassured that the US will continue to close its eyes to its use of terrorism against India if it helps in putting an end to terrorism threatening American lives and interests. India`s victory over jihadi terrorism emanating from Pakistan and Bangladesh is, therefore, not for tomorrow or the day after. This is a campaign which we have to fight with very little prospects of significant assistance from the US and the rest of the world. We have fought it for decades at tremendous human sacrifice, without letting it affect our emergence as a major economic and technological power. We can continue to do so in the future too, provided we continue to learn the right lessons from our successes and failures and keep our counter-terrorism methods constantly evolving to meet the needs of the situation.

Despite India having the second largest Muslim community in the world, we have managed to keep al-Qaeda out till now. The jihadi terrorism in our territory is largely due to pro-al Qaeda jihadi organizations from Pakistan, which have joined bin Laden`s International Islamic Front. In the past, their members used to consist largely of Pakistanis. The investigation into the twin Mumbai blasts of August 25, 2003, and the recent unearthing of some cells of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), which were reportedly planning terrorist strikes in Dehra Dun and Bangalore, indicate a disturbing trend of elements from our Muslim community in growing numbers volunteering their services for organizations such as the LET aligned with al-Qaeda. This is a trend, which needs to be checked through better attention to the grievances of the Muslim community and other appropriate measures.

(Copyright B Raman, 2005)

B Raman is additional secretary (retired), cabinet secretariat, government of India, New Delhi, and, presently, director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and, distinguished fellow and convenor, Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter. Email: [e-mail]

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Mar 23, 2005

The US vision for Musharraf
By Praveen Swami
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GC23Df04.html

(Turkey) had lost her leadership of Islam and Islam might now look to leadership to the Muslims of Russia. This would be a most dangerous attraction. There was therefore much to be said for the introduction of a new Muslim power supported by the science of Britain ... It seemed to some of us very necessary to place Islam between Russian communism and Hindustan.
- Sir Francis Tucker, General Officer-Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command.

A little over half a century on, driven by the forces unleashed by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, imperial Britain`s Pakistan project is being reinvented. It is hard to imagine a more unlikely caliph than Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, but that is precisely what the United States seems determined to anoint him.

Pakistan, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Musharraf at their recent meeting in Islamabad, is "a model country for the Muslim world". Among other things, she praised Pakistan`s president and chief of army staff, who came to power in a coup in 1999, for his "bold vision for South Asia and initiatives to promote peace and stability in the region".

Speaking in New Delhi, she emphasized the need to help Nepal - where the monarch has seized power - "get back on a democratic path". But evidently she felt no need to suggest something of the kind might be desirable in Pakistan as well. If the US felt any ire at Musharraf`s inflammatory proclamation on his official website that the Kargil war of 1999 "proved a lesson to the Indians", it was not mentioned, at least not in public.

All of which makes it necessary to ask the question: just what is the United States` own vision of stability in South Asia - and how precisely does it mean to go about achieving it?

Casual readers of media reportage on Rice`s recent visit to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan might be forgiven for thinking that the United States` principal interests in the region are arms sales and Iran, in that order. Much of the public discourse of Rice`s visit focused on the prospect of the possible sale of F-16 aircraft to Pakistan, and the Patriot II anti-ballistic missile defense system to India.

The United States` concerns about the construction of a gas pipeline from Iran to India, passing through Pakistan, ranked second in terms of the space it occupied. Little was said, unless it figured behind closed doors, about continued terrorism directed at India, nuclear proliferation, the persistence of jihadi infrastructure in Pakistan, and, yes, democracy.

F-16 aircraft and missile defense issues are, of course, important, and have a vital bearing on the security environment in South Asia. Neither, however, is a cause of instability; both are, rather, a consequence of a long-running disputation between India and Pakistan.

Historically, the US has seen such sales, or their denial, as a way of addressing the security anxieties of the antagonists - principally, of Pakistan. It is quite obvious that the strategy, if it can be called one, has failed. The provision of weapons to Pakistan did not deter it from initiating wars in 1965 and 1999; nor, notably, have its nuclear-weapons and missile capabilities meant an end to its fears about India`s superior conventional capabilities. A few F-16s or a missile defense system will change little.

What, then, are we too make of Rice`s pronouncements? Part of the problem is the Washington policy establishment`s mode of understanding South Asia. Pakistan is cast within the frame of what is called "the Muslim World", and the United States` relations with that country are seen as integral to engagement with other countries where the bulk of the population happens to be of Islamic persuasion.

Much policy production in the US rests on the a priori assumption that an entity called "the Muslim World" in fact exists, and that the cooptation of elements of this transnational entity is central to containing terrorism. Among the key corollaries of this credo is the notion that Islamist terrorism is the product of a confrontation between two immutable adversaries, "the West" and "the Muslims".

In this vision, Musharraf`s perceived "enlightened moderation" is the key not just to securing a purely tactical set of interests - in Afghanistan, for example - but to a far larger ideological project. Perhaps as a consequence, Musharraf has never been pressed to explain the content of his "enlightened moderation": the words themselves, evidently, are adequate.

In the vision of the United States` policy establishment, this enlightened moderation stands opposed to the Islamist postures of al-Qaeda, notwithstanding the considerable evidence that exists of cooperation and accommodation between the two. In essence, the US has thrown its weight behind the fabrication of an ummah, or community of believers, from a welter of peoples with different, often adversarial, histories, cultures and interests. It is a project that closely resembles that of the Islamists, even if its projected outcome is, of course, very different.

Where might India fit into this vision? Although Rice`s area of scholarly expertise is the former Eastern Bloc, she had articulated at least the outlines of a position on South Asia before her current assignment.

Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs in 2000, Rice suggested that the US ought to "pay closer attention to India`s role in the regional balance". "There is a strong tendency," she pointed out, "conceptually to connect India with Pakistan and to think only of Kashmir or the nuclear competition between the two states. But India is [also] an element in China`s calculation, and it should be in America`s, too. India is not a great power yet, but it has the potential to emerge as one."

Put simply, Rice and the policy establishment she represents see India as a potential strategic counterweight to China. Many in India, notably former defense minister George Fernandes, have characterized its relationship with the US in much the same terms.

This position, it needs to be noted, is not new. Until the US began a cautious detente with China in the 1970s, it underwrote Indian covert and sub-conventional military activities targeting Tibet. Among other things, the US supplied aircraft and technological equipment to what became the aviation research center of the Research and Analysis Wing, and provided training and weapons to the ethnic-Tibetan irregular force called Establishment 22, which fought with great distinction in the 1971 war.

It is hard to miss the limitations of an India-US relationship founded mainly on a common set of concerns about China, however. Speaking prior to her arrival in New Delhi, Rice placed emphasis on "opportunities - economic, in terms of security, in terms of energy cooperation - that we can pursue with India".

The United States` alarm at the prospect of an Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline illustrates the problems that arise from the fact that India must of necessity look west and north, and not just to its east. On the face of it, the sharing of assets between the three countries would be a factor for stability, something in which the US has a common interest. Criticism of the pipeline project has mainly emanated from a section of analysts in India, where some see enriching a hostile Islamabad as an exercise in folly, and not in the US. US reactions to the proposed pipeline deal, however, show the ways in which concerns about West Asia, in fact, shape policy toward South Asia, just as they did a half-century ago - and the problems that inevitably arise.

Almost unnoticed is the fact that Rice`s visit marks a step toward what critics in both India and Pakistan have long demanded - the end of hyphenation, or the removal of the implicit linkages of policy on one country and policy toward the other.

Yet Pakistan is not just part of "the Muslim World", whatever this might be, nor India merely a piece of a non-Muslim Asia that has China at its center. The destinies of both countries are intimately linked. The future of their relationship depends on Pakistan`s ability to re-imagine itself as a secular, progressive and democratic state, not as a carriage-bearer for an Islamist ideological enterprise.

Should Pakistan be encouraged to move in this direction, India will benefit - and so too would the authoritarian states to its west. The administration of President George W Bush has repeatedly proclaimed its commitment to the processes of democracy, and yet seems curiously bereft of the conceptual wherewithal to bring this about.

Praveen Swamiis Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow, United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC.

Published with permission from the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal

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Latest Fatality: Mar 21, 2005
Military Fatalities: Total: 1700 , US: 1524 , Mar.05: 29

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

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Tomgram:
Michael Klare on our Oil-Crunch Planet
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2277

Back in August 2004, I took up the issue of the Bush administration, Dick Cheney, oil, and Iraq. As an introduction to Michael Klare`s latest oil piece for Tomdispatch, over half a year later, with the price of a barrel of oil nudging the $57 mark and gas at the pump Tomgram: up above $2.10 a gallon and climbing, I don`t think I`d change a word:

With prices peaking (and peaking… and peaking…), the world looks a tad more peaked than it did not so many months ago and "peak oil" -- the possibility that the limits of fossil fuel resources on this globe of ours might in our lifetime, even in the coming decade, run up against the soaring desire for the stuff -- looks ever less like the stuff of fantasy. In that light, I thought it might be interesting to revisit a few comments Dick Cheney made back when he was the CEO of a giant energy company. Now, we all know, courtesy of our media, that control of global energy resources had nothing (or next to nothing) to do with the invasion of Iraq and that global energy flows and resources were the last things on the minds of neocon and Pentagon hawks, national security advisors, or even vice presidents while they were hatching plans to dominate the world forever and a day.

But you see, back before Dick Cheney became our Veep, a whole year-plus earlier, before, that is, he forgot all about the importance of energy in our world and cut all ties with Halliburton, the company most involved in (and that seems to have sucked the most money out of) our Iraqi adventure, he had a few choice words for a sympathetic audience gathered at the Institute for Petroleum on a relevant subject or two. He was introduced by Chris Moorhouse, who reviewed his career in and out of government and then commented, "Not surprisingly, with such a wide ranging career in politics and now at Halliburton, Dick Cheney [h]as a deep interest in the geo-politics of the energy industry."

Cheney then went on point out that oil remains basically "a government business" and to lay out briefly some of the math behind peak-oil fears:

"For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?"

If you happened to be a vice president with the kind of power no vice president has ever had, you might give a passing thought or two to securing some of that oil -- if you were still worried a year-plus later about where it was going to come from. He also offered the following assessment of oil in our world back in the distant days of 1999:

"Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature. We are not talking about soap flakes or leisurewear here. Energy is truly fundamental to the world`s economy. The [1991] Gulf War was a reflection of that reality. The degree of government involvement also makes oil a unique commodity. This is true in both the overwhelming control of oil resources by national oil companies and governments as well as in the consuming nations where oil products are heavily taxed and regulated… It is the basic, fundamental building block of the world`s economy. It is unlike any other commodity."

Actually, here`s the strange thing about our media and the latest Iraq war: If Iraq had indeed been the global capital of soapflakes or leisurewear, I guarantee you fears and speculations about either product would have garnered far more press during those months of war and occupation than (until very recently) oil did.

Mike Klare, author of an indispensable book on the role of oil (and arms) in our world, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America`s Growing Petroleum Dependency, recently revisited the question of oil, the invasion of Iraq, and the Bush administration`s desire to put in place a post-Saddam-Hussein regime "disposed to satisfy U.S. energy objectives," at the ZNET website. Below he explains the potential crisis that lies behind the American urge to put, as they say at the Pentagon, our "footprint" (and all those little prints from our military bases) down on the "arc of instability," which is basically a term for the major oil lands of our planet. When you read Klare on the potential oil crunch to come, you can understand all too well why the rush to secure oil supplies by hook or crook (or cruise missile) is only accelerating.
Tom

The Energy Crunch to Come
Soaring Oil Profits, Declining Discoveries, and Danger Signs
By Michael T. Klare

Data released annually at this time by the major oil companies on their prior-year performances rarely generates much interest outside the business world. With oil prices at an all-time high and Big Oil reporting record profits, however, this year has been exceptional. Many media outlets covered the announcement of mammoth profits garnered by ExxonMobil, the nation`s wealthiest public corporation, and other large firms. Exxon`s fourth-quarter earnings, at $8.42 billion, represented the highest quarterly income ever reported by an American firm.

"This is the most profitable company in the world," declared Nick Raich, research director of Zacks Investment Research in Chicago. But cheering as the recent announcements may have been for many on Wall Street, they also contained a less auspicious sign. Despite having spent billions of dollars on exploration, the major energy firms are reporting few new discoveries and so have been digging ever deeper into existing reserves. If this trend continues -- and there is every reason to assume it will -- the world is headed for a severe and prolonged energy crunch in the not-too-distant future.

To put this in perspective, bear in mind that the global oil industry has, until now, largely been able to increase its combined output every year in step with rising world demand. True, there have been a number of occasions when demand has outpaced supply, producing temporary shortages and high gasoline prices at the pump. But the industry has always been able been able to catch up again and so quench the world`s insatiable thirst for oil. This has been possible because the big energy companies kept up a constant and successful search for new sources of oil to supplement the supplies drawn from their existing reserves. The world`s known reserves still contain a lot of oil -- approximately 1.1 trillion barrels, by the estimates of experts at the oil major BP -- but they cannot satisfy rising world demand indefinitely; and so, in the absence of major new discoveries, we face a gradual contraction in the global supply of petroleum.

Signs of an Energy Crunch

It is in this context that the following disclosures, all reported in recent months, take on such significance.

* ConocoPhillips, the Houston-based amalgam of Continental Oil and Phillips Petroleum, announced in January that new additions to its oil reserves in 2004 amounted to only about 60-65% of all the oil it produced that year, entailing a significant depletion of those existing reserves.

* ChevronTexaco, the second largest U.S. energy firm after ExxonMobil, also reported a significant imbalance between oil production and replacement. Although not willing to disclose the precise nature of the company`s shortfall, chief executive Dave O`Reilly told analysts that he expects "our 2004 reserves-replacement rate to be low."

* Royal Dutch/Shell, already reeling from admissions last year that it had over-stated its oil and natural gas reserves by 20%, recently lowered its estimated holdings by another 10%, bringing its net loss to the equivalent of 5.3 billion barrels of oil. Even more worrisome, Shell announced in February that it had replaced only about 45-55% of the oil and gas it produced in 2004, an unexpectedly disappointing figure.

These and similar disclosures suggest that the major private oil companies are failing to discover promising new sources of petroleum just as demand for their products soars. According to a recent study released by PFC Energy of Washington, D.C., over the past 20 years, the major oil firms have been producing and consuming twice as much oil as they have been finding. "In effect," says Mike Rodgers, author of the report, "the world`s crude oil supply is still largely dependent on legacy assets discovered during the exploration heydays." True, vast reservoirs of untapped petroleum were discovered in those "heydays," mostly the 1950s and 1960s, but these reserves, being finite, will eventually run dry and, if not replaced soon, will leave the world facing a devastating energy crunch.

The notion that world oil supplies are likely to contract in the years ahead is hotly contested by numerous analysts in government and industry, who contend that many large fields await discovery. "Is the resource base large enough [to satisfy rising world demand]? We believe it is," affirmed ExxonMobil president Rex W. Tillerson in December. But other experts cast doubt on such claims by pointing to those disappointing reserve-replacement rates. "We`ve run out of good projects," said Matt Simmons, head of the oil-investment bank Simmons & Co. International. "This is not a money issue.... If these companies had fantastic projects, they`d be out there [developing new fields]."

That the major oil firms see few promising new fields to invest in right now is further suggested by reports that these companies are sinking their colossal profits in mega-mergers and stock buy-back programs rather than in exploration and field development. ExxonMobil, for example, spent $9.95 billion to buy back its own stock in 2004, while ChevronTexaco put out $2.5 billion to do the same. Meanwhile several big companies, including ChevronTexaco, are said to be eyeing California-based Unocal Corp. as a possible acquisition, and ConocoPhillips recently announced a $2 billion investment in Lukoil, the Russian energy giant. These moves are consuming funds that might have gone into new-field exploration -- yet another indicator of diminished expectations for major new discoveries. "If they had attractive things to invest in, they`d be investing their little heads off," explained PFC Energy managing director Gerald Kepes. But the great exploration opportunities of yesteryear "have largely dried up."

It is true, of course, that the private energy firms are largely barred from investment in Mexico, Venezuela, and the Persian Gulf countries, where oilfield development is the exclusive prerogative of state-owned companies. Hence, a major goal of the Bush administration`s energy policy is to persuade or compel these countries to open up their territories to exploration by U.S. firms -- which, it is claimed, possess the advanced technological know-how that would make possible the discovery of previously unknown fields. But the energy professionals who run the state-owned companies insist that they do not need outside help to search for oil and that they have already mapped their countries` major prospects. Here, too, there has been a marked slowdown in new discoveries over the past decade or so.

The worldwide decline in new discoveries has profound implications for the global supply of energy and, by extension, the world economy. Given a recent surge in energy demand from China and other rapidly-developing countries, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) predicts that, for all future energy needs to be satisfied, total world oil output will have to climb by 50% between now and 2025; from, that is, approximately 80 million to 120 million barrels per day. A staggering increase in global production, that extra 40 million barrels per day would be the equivalent of total world daily consumption in 1969. Absent major new discoveries, however, the global oil industry will likely prove incapable of providing all of this additional energy. Without massive new oil discoveries, prices will rise, supplies will dwindle, and the world economy will plunge into recession -- or worse.

Where Is Oil`s Peak?

Just how soon such an energy crunch will arrive and just how severe it is likely to be are matters of considerable debate. To a great extent, this debate hinges on the concept of "peak oil," or maximum sustainable daily output. In the 1950s, a petroleum geologist named M. King Hubbert published a series of equations showing that the output of any given oil well or reservoir will follow a parabolic curve over time. Production rises quickly after initial drilling and then loses momentum as output reaches its maximum or "peak" -- usually when half of the total amount of oil has been extracted -- after which production falls at an increasingly sharp rate. In 1956, using these equations, Hubbert predicted that conventional (that is, liquid) U.S. oil output would peak in the early 1970s. His prediction provoked much derision at the time, but earned him considerable renown when U.S. output did indeed achieve its peak level in 1972. Because of insufficient data at the time, Hubbert was unable to apply his equations to non-U.S. production. He did, however, predict that global output -- just like U.S. output -- would eventually reach a peak level and then begin an irreversible decline.

Today, the concept of global peak oil is widely accepted in the energy field, though debate rages over when this moment will actually occur. Those who believe that oil supplies are abundant tend to put this date far in the future, well beyond our immediate concern. The DoE, for example, noted in its International Energy Outlook for 2004 that it expects "conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century." But other analysts are not so sanguine. "It is my opinion that the peak will occur in late 2005 or in the first few months of 2006," says Princeton geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes in a new book, Beyond Oil. A more conservative estimate by Mike Rodgers of PFC Energy locates the peak somewhere in the vicinity of 2010-2015. If either of these predictions proves accurate, global oil supply can never climb high enough to satisfy the elevated consumption levels projected by the DoE for 2025 and beyond.

Where one stands on this critical issue depends on one`s estimate of how much petroleum the Earth originally possessed. Those like Deffeyes, who contend that peak oil will arrive soon, believe that our petroleum inheritance amounted to roughly 2,000 billion barrels when commercial oil drilling first commenced in 1859. Since we have already consumed approximately 950 billion barrels and are now burning some 30 billion barrels each year, in this scenario the halfway point of total world extraction -- and so the moment of peak production -- should be just a year or two away. By contrast, those who hold that peak oil is safely in the distance claim that the world`s total inheritance is closer to 3,000 billion barrels. This more optimistic figure would include the 950 billion barrels already consumed, "proven" reserves of approximately 1,150 billion barrels, and as-yet-undiscovered fields believed to hold another 900 billion barrels. This latter amount, it should be noted, represents the equivalent of all the known oil in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa combined.

Where might these mammoth still-undiscovered reservoirs lie? This is no idle question, given that the major oil companies have scoured the world for over a century in the search of new sources of supply -- and, in recent years, have come up virtually empty-handed. True, a handful of impressive finds -- in the 1 billion barrel range -- have been uncovered off the west coast of Africa, and one very large field (the 10-billion barrel Kashagan field) was discovered in Kazakhstan`s portion of the Caspian Sea.

Most other recent discoveries have been relatively small, and often located in deep offshore waters or other remote locations where the costs of production are high. "The reason [investment] is not increasing," Mike Rodgers has observed, "is that, in so many regions of the world, the fields have gotten so small that even though you might be able to drill a well and get a positive rate of return, the incremental value doesn`t mean a lot." It is conceivable, of course, that Iraq and Saudi Arabia could harbor large fields that have simply escaped discovery in earlier sweeps. Perhaps these could indeed be located through the use of advanced seismic technology, as advocated by the Bush administration.

Put all of this together, however, and none of it comes remotely close to the scale of discovery needed to generate that additional 900 billion barrels of oil, which is why the recent oil-company reports are so significant. If the more optimistic estimates of global oil are on the mark, it stands to reason that the major firms should be finding more new oil every year than they are producing; yet the very opposite has been the case for the last 20 years. If this continues to be the case, it is hard to imagine that the approach of global peak oil can be that far in the future.

Whether peak oil arrives in 2005, 2010, or 2015, and whether the maximum level of daily oil output turns out to be 90 or 100 million barrels will not matter much in the long run. In any of these scenarios, global oil production will level off and begin to decline at a level far below the anticipated world demand of 120 million barrels per day in 2025. True, some of this shortfall may be absorbed by the accelerated development of "unconventional" petroleum fuels -- liquid condensate from the production of natural gas, fuels derived from tar sands and oil shale, liquids extracted from coal, and the like -- but these materials are exceedingly costly to produce and their manufacture entails too many environmental risks to make them practical substitutes for conventional oil.

Even with increased production of such substitutes, the inevitable contraction in global petroleum supplies would only be postponed for a few years. Eventually, scientists and engineers may develop entirely new sources of energy -- for example, geothermal, biomass, or hydrogen-based systems -- but at current rates of development, none of these alternatives will be available on a large enough scale when petroleum products become scarce.

So while the major stockholders of Exxon, Chevron, and the other oil giants may be exulting at the moment, the rest of us should be deeply disturbed by their recent reports. Despite all the optimistic talk from Washington, we are facing a substantial and inescapable threat of global energy scarcity, which can only have dire consequences for our economy and the world`s. Indeed, we are beginning to see hints of that today, with rising prices at the neighborhood gas pump and a perceptible decline in consumer spending.

This coming scarcity cannot be wished away, nor can it be erased through drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which contains far too little petroleum to make a significant difference even in U.S. oil supplies. Only an ambitious program of energy conservation -- entailing the imposition of much higher fuel-efficiency standards for American automobiles and SUVs -- and the massive funding of R&D in, and then the full-scale development of alternative, environmentally-friendly fuels can offer hope of averting the disaster otherwise awaiting us.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America`s Growing Petroleum Dependency (Metropolitan Books).

Copyright 2005 Michael Klare

posted March 22, 2005 at 1:16 pm

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Tuesday, March 22, 2005
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Tuesday, March 22, 2005

"There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: bring `em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
- George W. Bush, July 2, 2003

Bring ‘em on: Twenty-six Iraqi militants killed, seven wounded and seven US troops wounded in clash southeast of Baghdad. (Update to story posted yesterday)

Bring ‘em on: Two militants killed, two wounded in two separate incidents in Salaheddin province. One Iraqi soldier killed, four wounded when their vehicle was struck by an RPG in western Baghdad. One Iraqi soldier killed and one wounded in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad. One Iraqi soldier killed in mortar attack on army base in Sherqat. About a dozen civilians wounded in Samarra car bombing. Iraqi driver seriously wounded while the head of Baghdad’s Kazimiyah neighborhood police force escaped injury in an assassination attempt by gunmen.

Bring ‘em on: Four civilians killed in roadside bombing that targeted a nearby US patrol in Mosul. US casualties figures not available. Seventeen militants killed and fourteen captured after they ambushed a convoy of Iraqi security forces in Mosul that included the city’s top security official. A police spokesman stated that no Iraqi troops were injured in the attack by militants carrying mortars, RPGs, and AK-47s. One person injured when five mortar shells landed in a Kurdish enclave in Mosul. One child killed in Iskandariyah in rocket attack according to a police official who declined to be named out of fear of retribution by militants. Bodies of six Iraqi army soldiers received at the mortuary in Kut with their hands tied behind their backs and multiple gunshot wounds to their chests and heads. Two militants killed and one wounded in the Baghdad neighborhood of Dora after three carloads of militants opened fire on shoppers and local merchants who returned fire. One policeman killed by gunmen in the same quarter of the city.

Two years in: At least 45 people died in violence in Iraq, including a US soldier, as Washington defended its decision to lead an invasion exactly two years ago amid protests around the world.

With talks on a new governing coalition still dragging on seven weeks since landmark January elections, Iraq was plunged into a diplomatic crisis with neighbouring Jordan as the two countries recalled their respective envoys following accusations of a Jordanian’s involvement in a deadly suicide bombing.

Insurgents struck around Iraq hitting the fledgling security forces hard at a time when the US government is channelling all its resources into training and equipping them to pave the way for the exit of US-led troops.

Priorities: US intelligence and military police officers in Iraq are routinely freeing dangerous criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

In one case where the IoS has seen documents, police rescued a doctor after a gun battle with his kidnappers and arrested two of the kidnap gang, who made full confessions. But US military police took over custody of the two men and let them go. The doctor had to flee to Egypt after being threatened by the gang.

The police station where the men were held recorded that they had been handed over to an American military police lieutenant for transfer to the US-run Camp Cuervo detention centre. But an American military spokesman told the IoS that there was no record of the two prisoners in their database.

"The Americans are allowing the breakdown of Iraqi society because they are only interested in fighting the insurgency," said a senior Iraqi police officer. "We are dealing with an epidemic of kidnapping, extortion and violent crime, but even though we know the Americans monitor calls on mobiles and satellite phones, which are often used in ransom negotiations, they will not pass on any criminal intelligence to us. They only want to use the information against insurgents."

Iraqi and Area Politics

Islam: When Iraq`s recently elected parliament starts debating a new national constitution, one of its thorniest tasks will be to agree on the role of Islam.

Kurds, who have 75 assembly seats, and other secular-minded members say Islam should remain a source of legislation but not the sole one -- the formula adopted for an interim constitution drawn up a year ago under the U.S.-led occupation authority.

Islamists in the parliament`s Shi`ite majority may seek a greater role for Muslim sharia law.

Given Iraq`s sectarian mix and secular traditions, there is no obvious model for the parliamentarians to follow.

It’s going great, they just can’t agree: “The talks are being carried out smoothly and in some positive climate”, said Kurdish negotiator Kamal Fuad, noting that the Kurds and the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) were also meeting outgoing Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

But no politician wanted to predict when Iraq’s mosaic of Shiites, Kurds, Sunnites, Christians and Turkmens would unveil their government and the parliament would reconvene.

The Shiite candidate for prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, told reporters it could take as long as two weeks.

A Shiite negotiator and senior member of Jaafari’s Dawa Party was optimistic that a deal could be struck by the end of the month.

“The assembly will not be meeting again until there is an agreement”, Jawad Maliki told reporters. “We’re putting the final touches on our agreement”. He spoke about the possibility of a senior role for Allawi.

And as for the common folk…: Regimes come and go, but decades of political revolutions in Iraq have hardly changed a thing for the destitute tribesmen who cultivate wheat and dates here on the east bank of the Euphrates.

This is the fiefdom of Sheik Humaid Sagban, age 77: a patch of chicken-scratched farmland that`s a half-hour by car from Najaf but feels like an Iraqi village from a century ago.

``Life always has been hard, and we always have been poor," Sagban said as he received visitors in his dirt-floored living room, which doubles as a tribal headquarters.

Iraq`s historic elections probably will not change much for his rural tribesman either, said Sagban, whose grip on politics is so hazy that he is not even sure for whom he voted Jan. 30, when he cast his ballot at a school across the river.

So Sagban stays focused on the problems he can solve -- marriages, quarrels, property disputes. The greater and more painful issues that have persisted throughout his lifetime, he leaves to God.

``Most of us are poor," he said. ``Suppose we are not happy. What can we do?"

Iraq the model: Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Aboul-Gheit has disputed US President George W. Bush’s contention that democracy is catching on in the Middle East, in an interview published by The Washington Post.

“What model are we talking about in Iraq? Bombs are exploding everywhere, and Iraqis are killed every day in the streets”, Aboul-Gheit said. “Palestinian elections? There were elections seven years ago”.

The Egyptian official was reacting to Bush’s speech at the US National Defense University in which he spoke of a “thaw” melting authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and cited the recent Iraqi and Palestinian elections and demonstrations in Lebanon as examples that democracy was on the march in the region.

A similar view was taken by Egypt’s official press, which is increasingly challenging the American claim that its democratic model for the Middle East is prevailing and is urging Washington to pull out of Iraq to prove its good intentions.

But the insurgency is Turkey’s fault: Rumsfeld told "Fox News Sunday" that if the United States had able to get its 4th Infantry Division into northern Iraq through Turkey, more of Saddam`s Baathist regime would have been captured or killed, diminishing the insurgency.

U.S. forces had to enter Iraq from the south, so by the time Baghdad was taken, much of Saddam`s military and intelligence services had dissipated into the northern cities, Rumsfeld said. "They`re still, in a number of instances, still active," he said.

As Iraqi security forces develop, Rumsfeld said, they will take increasing responsibility and the insurgency will diminish over time. He estimated current Iraqi security forces at over 145,000.

U.S. forces in Iraq are being reduced from 153,000 to 137,000 or 140,000, Rumsfeld said, although it`s possible more security will have to be put into place when new elections take place next year.

Our Creeping Stalinism, Part One: The Use Of Euphemism

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language


“Aggressive questioning”: U.S. law enforcement agents at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison for terrorism suspects concluded that the military`s aggressive questioning yielded information that was "suspect at best," according to newly released portions of an FBI document.

Another FBI e-mail, also dated May 10, 2004, said that in weekly Justice Department meetings, officials had often discussed the military`s interrogation techniques and "how they were not effective or producing intel that was reliable." (The term "intel" is short for intelligence.)

“Professional interrogation technique”: Porter Goss, the director of central intelligence, claimed in Senate testimony that the C.I.A. is not now using torture, and that "waterboarding" is a "professional interrogation" technique. He can`t have it both ways.

Waterboarding, known in Latin America as the submarino, entails forcibly pushing a person`s head under water until he believes he will drown. In practice, he often does. Waterboarding can be nothing less than torture in violation of United States and international law.

Mr. Goss, by justifying the practice as a form of professional interrogation, renders dubious his broader claim that the C.I.A. is not practicing torture today.

“Exceptional techniques”: Never let it be said that the U.S. State Department lacks chutzpah.

The department recently issued its annual report on human rights practices of nations around the world, pointedly criticizing perennial violators as well as allies, including the U.S.-sponsored interim Iraqi government.


But the report doesn`t discuss accusations of human rights abuses at the U.S. prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Gharib, Iraq, where prisoners of war and terrorism suspects are held.

Some nations were accused of torturing prisoners and inflicting them with sleep deprivation and blindfolding.

If that sounds familiar, it`s probably because similar criticism has been levied against U.S. interrogators, who were accused of punitive methods to create anxiety and fear. The torture took many forms, including "water boarding," which simulates drowning.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a plan to allow "exceptional techniques" during 20-hour interrogations, including face slapping and stripping captives to create a feeling of helplessness and dependence, and using dogs to create anxiety.

“Active deterrence”: Two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon has formally included in key strategic plans provisions for launching preemptive strikes against nations thought to pose a threat to the United States.

The doctrine also now stipulates that the U.S. will use "active deterrence" in concert with its allies "if we can" but could act unilaterally otherwise, Defense officials said.

The changes codify the more assertive defense policy adopted by the Bush administration since the Sept. 11 attacks and are included in a "National Military Strategy" and "National Defense Strategy," reports that are part of a comprehensive review of military strategy conducted every four years.

In some cases, respected global organizations seem to be viewed with suspicion. In describing the vulnerabilities of the United States, the document uses strong language to list international bodies — such as the International Court of Justice, created under a treaty that the United States has declined to sign — alongside terrorists.

Our Creeping Stalinism, Part Two: Gulags, Corruption, and Secrecy

What’s the real number?: At least 108 people have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press. Roughly a quarter of those deaths have been investigated as possible abuse by U.S. personnel.

The figure, far higher than any previously disclosed, includes cases investigated by the Army, Navy, CIA and Justice Department. Some 65,000 prisoners have been taken during the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although most have been freed.

The Pentagon has never provided comprehensive information on how many prisoners taken during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have died, and the 108 figure is based on information supplied by Army, Navy and other government officials. It includes deaths attributed to natural causes.

To human rights groups, the deaths form a clear pattern.

"Despite the military`s own reports of deaths and abuses of detainees in U.S. custody, it is astonishing that our government can still pretend that what is happening is the work of a few rogue soldiers," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "No one at the highest levels of our government has yet been held accountable for the torture and abuse, and that is unacceptable."

Institutionalized and international: What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace Guantánamo Bay. When that detention centre was set up in January 2002, it was essentially an offshore gulag - beyond the reach of the US constitution and even the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July 2004. The US supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington had jurisdiction to hear a case that would decide if the Cuban detentions were in violation of the US constitution, its laws or treaties. The military commissions, which had been intended to dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray, too. No prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed by a federal judge who ruled in January that they were "illegal". Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of American and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

Since September 11 2001, one of the US`s chief strategies in its "war on terror" has been to imprison anyone considered a suspect on whatever grounds. To that end it commandeered foreign jails, built cellblocks at US military bases and established covert CIA facilities that can be located almost anywhere, from an apartment block to a shipping container. The network has no visible infrastructure - no prison rolls, visitor rosters, staff lists or complaints procedures. Terror suspects are being processed in Afghanistan and in dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia in the southern Indian Ocean. Those detained are held incommunicado, without charge or trial, and frequently shuttled between jails in covert air transports, giving rise to the recently coined US military expression "ghost detainees".

This is a very important article and well worth reading in its entirety.

Secrecy, corruption, and "national security": As it prepared to attack Iraq in early 2003, the Pentagon gave a multibillion-dollar contract, without competitive bidding, to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root to repair oil fields and import consumer fuels. Almost from the first, the Bush administration and the company were hounded by allegations of favoritism and reckless spending under that contract, for which KBR eventually billed $2.5 billion

The board of monitors repeatedly asked for data on the no-bid fuels contract and was repeatedly rebuffed by the Pentagon. Last October, the board was handed copies of the Pentagon`s own audits of the nine components of that KBR contract, with numbers and many conclusions blacked out.

Last week, when Representative Henry Waxman, minority leader of the House Committee on Government Reform, released a largely unexpurgated version of one of those October audits, covering $875 million worth of fuel imports, news reports focused on the numbers. The Pentagon`s own monitors, it turned out, found excess billing of more than $100 million and criticized KBR for poor record-keeping.

But a comparison of the original with the blacked-out, or "redacted," version that was sent to the international board last fall also raised new questions about the basis on which the Pentagon, at Halliburton`s suggestion, had chosen the items it had edited out of the document.

Nearly every number and comment critical of KBR in the report was blacked out in the redacted copy.

The bureaucratic reflex: The government does a remarkable job of counting the number of national security secrets it generates each year. Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent, said William Leonard in March 2 congressional testimony. His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004.

Yet an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, Web sites, and official databases. Once freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred to the public as "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." Less of a goal-directed policy than a bureaucratic reflex, the widespread clampdown on formerly public information reflects a largely inarticulate concern about "security." It also accords neatly with the Bush administration`s preference for unchecked executive authority.

US Military News

Hey, Jonah!: The U.S. Army, stung by recruiting shortfalls caused by the Iraq war, has raised the maximum age for new recruits for the part-time Army Reserve and National Guard by five years to 39, officials said on Monday.

The Army said the move, a three-year experiment, will add about 22 million people to the pool of those eligible to serve, from about 60 million now. Physical standards will not be relaxed for older recruits, who the Army said were valued for their maturity and patriotism.

(Thanks to alert reader whisker for catching the story)

220 less medical workers in Queens: Miguel Pachebat tucked two things into his camouflage shirt Sunday as he prepared to ship out to Iraq: a palm frond and a snapshot of his newborn son.

The items would remain there, pressed against his heart, until the end of his yearlong tour, the U.S. Army specialist said at a deployment ceremony at Fort Totten.

Pachebat, 26, an emergency room technician, is one of 220 other reservists in the Queens-based Army medical team who are leaving Monday. Before going to Iraq, the group will train at a Wisconsin base, with the expectation that they`ll arrive in the war zone within two months.

There Is Good News

A fighter: The father of a British soldier killed in Iraq has announced that he plans to challenge Prime Minister Tony Blair for his seat in parliament.

Reg Keys, 52, said he would run as an independent in Blair`s home district of Sedgefield, in northeastern England, in national elections expected in May.

"I`m coming for you, Mr. Blair, but I`m going to do it in a civilized way," Keys said in a news conference at the London studio of music producer Brian Eno. "I want to get the troops brought safely home. Get them out and replace them with U.N. peacekeeping forces."

First: In a Sunday editorial marking the second anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, The Orange County (Ca.) Register called for a U.S. pullout from that country, becoming perhaps the first newspaper in a Top 25 market to do so. The Register`s daily circulation is around 300,000.

"We opposed this war from the beginning and we believe the United States should withdraw its troops sooner rather than later, under a sensible exit strategy," the editorial declared. "While some argue that chaos would follow an American withdrawal, it is also true that U.S. troops have become a lightning rod, attracting the very attacks they are working to prevent.

"Saddam Hussein is out of power, which is good. Now it is time to leave Iraq, for better and for worse, to the Iraqis."

500 cities in the USA: Saturday was being called a global day of protest, as it marked the two-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.

Rallies and marches took place in more than 500 cities across the country, including in Seattle.

The anniversary drew about 1,000 demonstrators to the Seattle Center. They carried signs and banners urging the United States government to get its troops out of Iraq.

Tens of thousands: Tens of thousands of protesters rallied in cities and towns across America over the weekend to mark the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and to demand that U.S. troops stationed there be brought home.

The protests on the anniversary Saturday as well as on Sunday reflected the U.S. anti-war movement`s growing diversity. But they also highlighted the challenges of sustaining growth in new areas like suburban America and maintaining unity of purpose as the movement grapples with issues that elude consensus.

3,000 in Fayetteville: Raphael Zappala winces as he describes the April day nearly a year ago when he came home to find his dad in the doorway and his mom inside sobbing. A man in a military uniform heavily decorated with medals had knocked on the door at 7:02 p.m. His brother, Sherwood Baker, a 30-year-old Pennsylvania National Guard sergeant who had moved in with the family as a 13-month-old foster child, had been killed in Baghdad on April 26, the 720th fallen soldier in a war that started two years ago.

"I think about him every day," said Zappala, 26, a food stamp advocate in Philadelphia.

The fallen soldiers and those still on active duty in Iraq were on the minds of nearly 3,000 peace advocates Saturday as they gathered in this Army-base city to commemorate the second anniversary of the war and protest continued occupation of the oil-rich country.

150 in Englewood: Eunice Dartey, whose 22-year-old son left for Iraq the day after Christmas, broke into tears as she watched about 150 protesters wave banners and chant anti-war slogans Saturday.

"It was just the two of us. I don`t have any other family here," said the Guyana native.

Some with children serving overseas might have resented such an anti-war demonstration, one of hundreds held across the nation this weekend to mark the second anniversary of the United States` invasion of Iraq.

But Dartey wiped away her tears and said she felt comforted by it. "There are at least some people sensible enough to know this war is wrong. I very much salute these people to come out and do this. It means a lot," said the Englewood resident.

I wish her peace and love: Some honked and gave a thumbs-up. Others honked and gave just one finger. Sometimes the protesters were encouraged to keep on. Others told them to go home.

On the second anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the nation — on down to the local level — remains divided about the war in the Mideast.

However, to teacher and protester Joanie Heydt-nelson, the people who were passing by the demonstration on the corner of Frontenac Drive and Mankato Avenue all sounded the same to her.

"I presume they`re supporting me," Heydt-nelson said. "I think they are saying, ‘You go girl.` The hand gestures? Well, all I see is the victory sign. I am old and can`t see so good, so I am assuming they`re wishing me peace and love."

Commentary

Comment: The Bush White House has masterfully used the public`s general indifference to all things overseas to its advantage in war and peace - but mostly war. It has successfully reinforced the notion that finessing foreign sensibilities is a fickle experiment at best and citizens need not trouble themselves unduly over multilateral tangos.

Moreover, to display its faux affinity for the common man, the administration has boiled down the whole foreign relations thing to one easy understanding. You`re either fer or agin` us, said the man from Midland, Texas. Simple, straightforward, and as shallow as they come. Yet it was all the gunslingers in Washington had to say to the world before shooting their way into Baghdad to spread democracy, topple an evil empire, and destroy weapons of mass destruction.

Three years and more than 1,500 American deaths later, with the U.S. nowhere close to escaping the warfare it started there, Americans still nod like lemmings when the President insists "democracy is on the march" amid the rubble of Iraq and resurging Taliban influence in Afghanistan.

Interview: BuzzFlash: Let me ask about soldiers dying in Iraq. We’re all aware that the Bush Administration won’t allow photographs of soldiers returning in caskets to the United States. What is the justification for that with the media? With the Vietnam war, we felt we were there when we watched the news. We saw soldiers dying, we saw the blood and guts. Today the media completely comply with the Bush Administration request not to show injuries or deaths of soldiers. It`s almost a war that doesn’t exist, except in sound-overs and accounts in the newspaper.

Bonnie M. Anderson: It exists only within the framework in which this Administration wishes to show the war. It’s an outrage that networks are going along with this. The American people need to know the cost of war, and the cost of war is body bags coming home. The cost of war is the injured coming back. This is what the public needs to know. It`s a perfect example of the lack of integrity or ethics in the news organizations that are going along with another propaganda move by an administration.

I want to say very clearly, I would say the same thing if it were a Democratic administration. My issues are not left or right. My issues are journalistic principles and ethics. We’re not informing the American public, we don’t want them to see these things. But we will, of course, allow them to spend hours watching the statue of Saddam Hussein come tumbling down, because that glorifies and justifies the invasion of Iraq.

Comment: We have entered a world where reality - like the photographs of torture or the absence of weapons of mass destruction - is just a minor blockage in a flood of official, upbeat declarations and statements. Each new dispatch from the departments of irony on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that truth can be created by assertion, principle can be established by deception and democracy can be imposed through aggression. These people would claim credit for the good weather and deny responsibility for their own signature if they thought they could get away with it.

Two years on, the death toll keeps rising, the size of the "coalition" keeps shrinking and global public support for this reckless occupation has maintained its downward spiral from a low base. Indeed, the only thing that changes is the rationale for starting the war, where the sophistry of the occupying powers keeps plumbing new depths and selective amnesia has attained new highs.

Opinion: One of the more disturbing byproducts of the U.S. involvement in Iraq is the recent outpouring of rationalization from across the American political and cultural spectrum for the incorporation of Islam into the new Iraqi constitution.

There`s nothing particularly surprising about such rationalizing on the right. Vice President Dick Cheney responded predictably to January`s Iraqi election, which expanded the power of Shiite religious parties, with the declaration that "we have a great deal of confidence in where they`re headed." What else is an architect of the war going to say?

On the Christian right, such reactions are even more understandable; these are the very people who routinely denigrate America`s own constitutional separation of church and state. Why should they worry if the new Iraqi government prevents a woman from divorcing without her husband`s consent and gives her legal testimony only half the weight of a man`s? As long as the Iraqis steer clear of a Saudi-style ban on all other forms of worship (read Christianity), a religion-based Iraqi constitution poses no logical obstacle for U.S. fundamentalists.

Editorial: The coalition of the willing is losing its will. Italy has announced it will withdraw its 3,000 troops from Iraq by fall. Netherlands, Poland and Ukraine also are in the process of pulling out or preparing to pull out an additional 4,750 troops.

President Bush downplayed Italy`s imminent abandonment in a press conference last week. Bush said Berlusconi reassured him in a phone call "that there was no change in his policy; that, in fact, any withdrawals would be done in consultation with allies and would be done depending upon the ability of Iraqis to defend themselves. ... that`s the position of the United States. Our troops will come home when Iraq is capable of defending herself."

This is political satire. Bush has no clue when Iraqis will be able to defend themselves.


Casualty Report

Local story: Hampton, VA, soldier killed in Baghdad.

# posted by matt : 9:20 AM
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Published on Tuesday, March 22, 2005 by the Boston Globe
If Kennan Had Prevailed
by James Carroll
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

The death last week of George F. Kennan concentrates the mind. The great American statesman was 101 years old. His longevity was second to his influence, though, and a chorus saluted him as the father of ``containment," the foundational idea of US Cold War thinking. But Kennan always insisted that his famous formulations -- the Long Telegram and the ``Mister X" article -- were misunderstood. His warnings about Soviet intentions and ideology, he said, were meant as a call to political action, not military build-up. The threat was less the Red Army than the discontent of impoverished peoples who might turn to Communism.

Beginning almost 50 years ago, Kennan decried the American emphasis on war-readiness at the expense of diplomacy and economic development. Across the US reliance on a massive nuclear arsenal that prompted Moscow to reply in kind. The waste and dangers of the arms race were unnecessary. The arc of Kennan`s life suggests that American responses to the Soviet Union could have gone another way. What would the world be like today if his views had prevailed?

The civil war on the Korean peninsula would not have been magnified into a transcendent East-West clash, licensing the permanent Stalinism of the north.

Washington would have seized the diplomatic opportunity offered by the death of Stalin, supporting the emergence of reform-minded leaders in Moscow before the arms race began in earnest.

The United States would have refrained from testing and deploying the hydrogen bomb, with notice to Moscow that such grave escalation to a genocidal weapon would take place only if the Soviets went first.

The revolutionary movements of the Third World would have been seen as rejection of colonialism and normal nationalism instead of as global conspiracy centered in Moscow.

There would have been no American war in Vietnam.

The US crusade for ``freedom" would have been mitigated by a sense of modesty, with respect for the differing political impulses of other cultures.

Washington would have remained faithful to the post-World War II American sponsorship of structures of international cooperation, centered in the United Nations.

How we remember the past determines the shape of the future. If Kennan`s life reminds us that there was nothing inevitable about the militarized confrontation of the Cold War, it can also help us see an alternative to the belligerent course now being set by Washington. Here is what a Kennan-like preference for political and diplomatic responses over military ones would mean today:

An aggressive movement away from US dependence on nuclear weapons, which is the best way to check proliferation.

Avoiding the militarization of conflict with China, which can needlessly lead to a new Cold War, complete with a rekindled arms race, only now rushing into space.

A prompt end to the war in Iraq, the first step of which is a withdrawal of American forces, paired with a renunciation of all US military bases in the Middle East.

Depriving terrorists of their raison d`etre by defusing Arab and Islamic resentment of American intrusions in the Middle East.

Meeting the gravest threat to national security, which is the global degradation of the environment, by renewing structures of international cooperation.

Bush administration policies run in an exactly opposite direction from the way shown by the life of George Kennan.

As with communism in the early days of the Cold War, we have made a transcendent enemy for ourselves with ``terrorism," imagining a globally organized, ideologically driven threat that far exceeds what actually exists. We have made an idol of a particular notion of ``freedom," forgetting again that freedom from hunger and disease is what the vast majority of humans long for. Once more, we fail to see the ways in which American-style freedom includes dehumanized elements (violence, prurience, greed) that others might properly resist.

In Iraq, we reenact the perverse American script that saves by destroying. In Korea, once again (Secretary Condoleezza Rice resplendent in a military bunker), we imagine that saber rattling helps. As for international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank, we express our contempt by appointing as representatives their sworn enemies.

George F. Kennan was a good man. Despite himself, he helped launch his nation down a dangerous road. In regretting that, he spent his life calling for another way. The ultimate ``realist," he legitimized the idealist`s dream. War is not the answer. America can honor this prophet by heeding him at last.

James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."

© 2005 Boston Globe

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washingtonpost.com
Cheney Defends Bush Appointments
Vice President Says Loyalists in Diplomatic Posts Will Strengthen U.S. Position
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58398-2005Mar…

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 23, 2005; Page A01

Vice President Cheney said yesterday that the elevation of White House loyalists and supporters of the Iraq war to key diplomatic posts puts the United States in a stronger position to force changes at the United Nations and improve the U.S. image abroad.

In an interview aboard Air Force Two, Cheney said the nomination of John R. Bolton to serve as ambassador to the United Nations in particular shows President Bush`s commitment to ending corruption and changing the culture at the world body.

"There is clearly a lot that needs to be done at the United Nations," he said pointing to the oil-for-food scandal and recent charges of sexual assault by a U.N. official. "There is ample evidence here at home a great many Americans are not happy with the performance of the United Nations," Cheney said.

"We are the host country, we`re the biggest contributor to its budget, and success long-term, I think, depends on the continued support of the U.S. and the American people," he continued. Cheney said the fact that Bolton has been a critic of the United Nations will give him "a great deal more credibility" tackling the challenges there.

In the interview conducted en route from Reno, Nev., the vice president bluntly acknowledged the administration`s shortcomings in overcoming international hostility to American foreign policy and communicating a positive image of the United States abroad, especially to the Arab and Muslim worlds.

"If we are going to be successful long-term in the war on terror and in the broader objective of promoting freedom and democracy in that part of the world, we have to get the public diplomacy piece of it right," Cheney said. "Up until now, that has been a very weak part of our arsenal."

Cheney has been a driving force in the administration`s foreign policy and privately advocated for Bolton to get the U.N. job and for longtime ally Paul D. Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. The vice president said top-level changes at the State Department should help set a better course.

"What the president has done . . . is make some personnel changes that he felt would strengthen our capacity as an administration to achieve our objectives," Cheney said.

The vice president said the decision to put three of the most influential women from Bush`s first-term White House -- Condoleezza Rice, Karen P. Hughes and Dina Powell -- at the State Department signifies a new approach for Foggy Bottom. Privately, White House aides said the department is now a power center and one of the few agencies with a significant second-term role, especially dealing with Bush`s inaugural pledge to spread democracy.

"Having Karen Hughes over there with Dina Powell and Condi gives us the best possible combination of people [to] actively and aggressively address those issues," Cheney said.

Conservative Fred Barnes, in an article on yesterday`s Wall Street Journal editorial page, said the moves are part of "Mr. Bush`s shake-up-the-world view." Bolton, Hughes and Powell still must be confirmed by the Senate, and Wolfowitz needs the approval of the World Bank; all are expected to overcome any opposition.

The rise of close White House allies is not over and may include Cheney`s chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, replacing Wolfowitz as deputy defense secretary, according to White House officials. When asked about the possible change, all Cheney would say is: "I need Scooter."

Cheney, who sometimes clashed with then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell over the Iraq war, said he would not discuss whether the new team is working better than the first-term one because he did not want to offend anyone.

Critics charge the White House is purging its voices of dissent and sending the wrong signal to the world with Bolton and Wolfowitz, two controversial architects of the Bush foreign policy.

"I can`t think of anybody more qualified than Paul Wolfowitz to run the World Bank," Cheney said.

During the interview, Cheney continued to take a hard line with Syria and Iran but did not express serious concerns about China`s policies. He said he had not been briefed on Rice`s trip to Asia this week, during which China`s role in pressing North Korea to return to negotiations over its nuclear program was left unsettled.

Citing diplomatic sensitivity, Cheney said he did not want to discuss China`s more bellicose tone toward Taiwan. Some senior White House officials expressed concern over the growing instability in rural China, where poverty is ubiquitous and is leading to demonstrations, as well as China`s dealings with North Korea and Taiwan.

"Generally, the relationship is in pretty good shape," Cheney said. "That does not mean we agree on everything."

As international pressure intensifies on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon before the spring elections, Cheney said: "It`s not clear yet they will do what they need to do." If not, he said the United Nations will be "obliged" to consider other actions, though he would not discuss if or how forcefully the United States would push for punitive sanctions. "Syria is pretty isolated at this point," he said.

Cheney, who is described by administration officials as a leading proponent of a hard-line policy toward Tehran, said he is uncertain whether Iran has nuclear weapons. "We have made the judgment that they are seeking to acquire" such weapons, the vice president said.

He did not set a timetable for Iran to reach an international agreement on its nuclear program, and said the United States will continue to work through European allies for now. "It is important to make clear to the Iranians that they need . . . to give up any aspirations they might have had to acquire nuclear weapons."

Iran denies it is using that program to develop nuclear weapons and says it needs nuclear energy.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Informed Comment
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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, March 23, 2005

30 Killed on Tuesday, Including US Soldier

Early on Monday, Iraqi troops supported by US forces fought a firefight in northern Baghdad, killing several guerrillas, according to US military sources as reported by the LBC satellite channel.

UPI reports that at least 30 persons died in violent incidents in Iraq on Tuesday.

The biggest such incident was a firefight in Mosul, sparked by an attempted assassination by guerrillas, to which US forces replied, killing 17 fighters and capturing 11.

Several persons were killed by unexploded ordnance, which is likely to be a long-term problem in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and is one of those seldom-considered costs of war. (Unexploded munitions and mines are a big danger to civilians in the aftermath of wars, and most often clean-up is completely inadequate after the war is over. The poor Tunisians had to beg on bended knee for years for the US and the Germans to do something about all the dangerous materials they had left behind after WW II, which went on injuring unwitting civilians for a long time after the war.)

The US military also stumbled upon a training camp in Iraq for foreign jihadis. I doubt this sort of discovery is very significant for counter-insurgency. Foreign fighters are probably only 5 percent of the guerrillas. The most dangerous ex-Baathists don`t need training-- they got it years ago, in the Iran-Iraq or Gulf Wars.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that engineering students at Basra University continued their strikes and demonstrations Tuesday, protesting the violence they experienced from students adhering to the Sadr Movement, the radical Shiite trend, who disrupted a picnic last week and attempted to intimidate students into a puritan style of life. Iraqi national guards arrested students from both factions (liberals and Sadrists). The university administration has called for an end to the strike, and has pledged to ban party politics from university life.

posted by Juan @ [url3/23/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/30-killed-on-tuesday-including-us.html[/url]

Government to be Formed by Sunday?

Iraqi official sources maintained on Tuesday that negotiations between the United Iraqi Alliance and the Kurdish Alliance to form a government are well advanced, and that the ministries have been apportioned among the two. Iraq nowadays is like the United States was in the early 19th century, during the spoils system. For a party to get a ministry means that it will bring its supporters in to staff the ministry, and will use it to give out patronage. The Kurds will get the foreign ministry and the Ministry of Petroleum, in addition to a few others, as well as the presidency.

The plan is apparently to give as few as 4 cabinet ministries to the Sunni Arabs, who did not vote in any numbers and are poorly represented in parliament. They would also get a vice presidency and the post of speaker of the house. I should think this lack of generosity toward them by the victors will spur further resentments. In early 20th century Lebanon, when the Shiites were the poorest and least powerful group in Lebanon, they were given the post of speaker of the house. It is not even clear that the position is that influential. The interim constitution does not guarantee that the speaker can control the legislative agenda in any way.

Three possible days have been bruited about for holding another session of parliament, in hopes of forming the government-- Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. There is, of course, no guarantee that the negotiations will be done within a week.

Most Iraqis are appalled that this process of forming a government is taking so long, and Grand Ayatollah Sistani attempted to hurry it along with sharp criticisms on Monday, as well as by meeting some of the principals, such as Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani. Veteran Middle East journalist and blogger Helena Cobban has been warning for some time about the dangers that Paul Bremer`s interim constitution makes forming a government too difficult.

The plan was for the new Iraqi parliament to craft a constitution by August, and then submit it to a national referendum in October. Given that it is almost April and there is still no government, the likelihood that the parliamentarians will be able to resolve all the difficult issues in framing a permanent constitution by August is extremely low. The interim constitution will remain in effect until a new one is drafted and approved by the Iraqi people.

PS

Al-Zaman says that negotiations were slowed by Now-Ruz, the New Year celebrated by the Kurds (rooted in ancient Iranian Zoroastrianism, this holiday commemorates the spring solstice --usually March 21-- as the beginning of a new year). The Kurds tie their celebration to the legends of the Shahnameh, which tells the story of how in ancient times an evil ruler emerged, Dahhak or Zohak, who overthrew the glorious king Jamshid. Dahhak was a wizard who grew serpents on each of his shoulders, which needed to eat human brain every day. So Dahhak had young men rounded up from the subject populations, and two were sacrificed each day. Dahhak was finally overthrown by a young knight, Faridun, aided by the blacksmith Kaveh, who freed the captured young men on Now-Ruz. The Kurds have a legend that they are descended from those freed prisoners, and they celebrate their manumission on March 21. The story of Jamshid, Dahhak and Faridun is a variation on a widespread Indo-European myth cycle. In the ancient Indian sources the three are the king of the underworld, Yama; the world-serpent, Vrta, and Indra, who slays Vrta. The story is also echoed in the Nordic myth of Thor and the Midgaard serpent (Thor is a composite of Faridun the prince and Kaveh the blacksmith). At some point in Iran, the snake figure was historicized as an evil foreign king who brought drought and had serpents growing from his body, and he was also racialized. Dahhak or Zohak is a clearly Semitic word, whereas Jamshid and Faridun are Indo-Europeans. This development reflects the fights that took place when the Iranian peoples from Anatolia immigrated into Elamite and Assyrian territory in the 800s BC. Assyrians and Babylonians spoke Semitic languages related to Arabic and Hebrew. (Some US newspapers last year reported the struggle of Kaveh with Zohak as a historical event of the 7th century BC!)

The casting of the serpent monster as a Semitic ruler made it easy for Kurds to identify Dahhak with Saddam, and perhaps with the virulent strain of Arab nationalism he represented. You could imagine how Now-Ruz in Kurdistan, with its celebration of doomed enslaved youth being freed from the clutches of the Semitic tyrant-monster, would slow down a political negotiation requiring Kurds to accept once again Arab rule from Baghdad.

In my own view, applying ancient myths to current politics, especially where they have been racialized, is unhealthy. Myths have a positive power if they remain on the level of symbol and archetype. Historicize them, and they become perverted and a source of blind hatred.

posted by Juan @ [url3/23/2005 06:20:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/government-to-be-formed-by-sunday.html[/url]

Wolfowitz Romancing Tunisian World Bank Employee?

I can`t vouch for the accuracy of this gossipy story that Paul Wolfowitz is romantically involved with Shaha Ali Riza, a Tunisian woman brought up in Saudi Arabia formerly married to Bulent Riza, a Turk.

I don`t think the private lives of people are relevant to their public service (and I would stand up even for those with scandalous private lives as long as they were good at their jobs and hadn`t materially harmed anyone). I object to the article`s implication that this relationship is any reason for which Wolfowitz should not be president of the World Bank. Obviously, he couldn`t be in charge of Ms. Riza`s salary or promotions, but there are ways to delegate those things. (In universities, deans sometimes are married to faculty, and they just recuse themselves from oversight over a spouse).

Actually, if the article is true, it is the best thing I`ve ever heard about Wolfowitz.

Now that Germany has supported him, Wolfowitz will almost certainly be confirmed, so the question is anyway moot.

I am afraid he is a fanatical free marketeer whose ideological blinders may lead him to support policies that are not good for poor people. In the struggle in India between peasants on the one side, and the Enron Narmada Dam project on the other, which side would Wolfowitz support? Would he be with Arundhati Roy or with Ken Lay? Is Wolfowitz capable of understanding the need for economic democracy alongside his devotion to parliamentary government?

That`s the sort of issue that will matter to the poor of the global South, not whom he dates.

posted by Juan @ [url3/23/2005 06:11:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/wolfowitz-romancing-tunisian-world.html[/url]

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washingtonpost.com
Bomb Attack Kills Two in Lebanon
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58196-2005Mar…

By HUSSEIN DAKROUB
Associated Press
Tuesday, March 22, 2005; 10:16 PM

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- An explosion tore through a business center in a Christian town near Beirut early Wednesday, killing at least two people in the second deadly attack against an anti-Syrian stronghold since the murder of Lebanon`s former prime minister last month.

The political turmoil touched off by the assassination of Rafik Hariri continued Tuesday as about 1,000 students shouting "Death to America!" and shredding a portrait of President Bush marched on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut to criticize what they said was Washington`s interference in Lebanon.

Hariri was an opponent of the 15-year Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and his assassination set off demands that Syria pull its troops out as demanded by a U.N. Security Council resolution and the United States.

Syria and its Lebanese allies in government denied opposition accusations of having roles in Hariri`s assassination. The killing brought Syria`s long domination of Lebanon into the spotlight. Syria`s military, which entered the country in 1976 during the 1975-90 civil war, made Damascus the power broker of Lebanese politics.

The latest attacks have raised concerns among some Lebanese that pro-Syrian elements might resort to violence to show the need for a continued presence by Damascus forces. More broadly, they have aroused fears of the return of the sectarian violence that charaterized the civil war.

Shortly after midnight, a 45-pound bomb rocked the shopping center near Jounieh, the main Christian port city about 10 miles north of Beirut. Police said they believed it was placed at the center when it was closed.

Police said two people were killed and two wounded. LBC TV, the leading station in the country, said three people were killed and eight wounded. It was the second bombing since Saturday, when a car bomb in a northern Christian suburb of Beirut injured nine people.

The demonstrators on Tuesday, mostly supporters of the militant group Hezbollah, shouted "Death to Israel!" and waved Lebanese flags as they tried to push through barbed wire and a Lebanese army checkpoint.

It was the second anti-U.S. protest in eight days organized by student groups backing the pro-Syrian government.

Hariri`s Feb. 14 assassination sparked unprecedented anti-Syrian protests that led Prime Minister Omar Karami to dissolve his government and brought intense international pressure on Syria to completely withdraw its army from Lebanon. Damascus withdrew troops to eastern Lebanon earlier this month and has promised a total pullback.

Both sides are competing on the street to show they have the most public support.

A March 8 rally organized by Hezbollah drew a half-million people in a sign of its determination to ensure no future Lebanese government would consider peace with Israel or pressure the militant group to disarm.

The U.S. government blames the pro-Iranian Hezbollah for the 1983 bombing of its Beirut embassy which killed 63 people, 17 of them Americans.

On Tuesday, protesters called for the U.S. ambassador`s expulsion and tore a portrait of Bush, who has repeatedly called on Syria to remove its troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon.

Also Tuesday, a newspaper owned by the Hariri family said a U.N. team investigating his Feb. 14 assassination is expected to accuse Lebanese authorities of negligence and evidence tampering.

The team completed its probe March 16 and is due to release its confidential report later this week, but leaks have emerged.

Hariri`s Al-Mustaqbal newspaper quoted unnamed sources said the fact-finding team found Lebanese security authorities had "tampered with evidence by rushing to tow away Hariri`s motorcade from the scene of the crime" to a police barracks, "then sending on the same night a bulldozer to fill the crater and cleaning the road in order to open it to traffic."

The government has said it is conducting its own investigation.

Syria`s foreign minister, indicating the pressure his nation is under from the United States to pull its troops out of Lebanon, said his country is implementing last year`s U.N. Security Council resolution calling for its withdrawal and hoped the United States would not intervene militarily.

© 2005 The Associated Press

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THE WORLD
Iraq Moves to Expel Foreign Arabs
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-arabs23ma…

March 23, 2005

BAGHDAD — In a bid to rid the country of foreign insurgents, the Iraqi government is using strict new residency rules to detain and expel non-Iraqi Arabs.

Any Arab without the proper permit can be detained, interrogated and asked to leave the country, Interior Ministry officials said. So far the program has swept up mostly Syrians, Sudanese, Saudis and Egyptians, and about 250 people have been asked to leave.

Far more are being detained — as many as 200 a day in the Baghdad area alone — although most are released within a few days. Though some are taken in for suspected terrorist activities, others are held with no evidence other than not having proper residency permits under the new rules. Such people can be deported without any evidence of having committed crimes. Although the focus has been on Arabs, a few Chechens and Iranians also have been detained.

"The fact is that some, not all, Arabs and foreigners have destroyed the reputation of Arab and foreign countries in Iraq," said Brig. Gen. Taif Tariq Hussein, who heads the Interior Ministry`s residency office. "They have either helped in executing sabotage operations or they have carried out sabotage themselves.

"Both Arabs and some foreigners have been harmful to this society," he said.

The ostensible reason for the policy, established last month after extensive consultations among Iraqi security agencies, is to stem the insurgency. But many Arabs who have lived in Iraq for years fear that they will be lumped in with wrongdoers and deported. Many of these tens of thousands of Arab residents do not have papers that meet the new requirements.

The current Iraqi administration is making no promises, and the incoming government could enforce the rules even more stringently.

For decades, Baghdad had been a magnet for Arabs from other Middle Eastern nations who came for work and study. The new regulations have brought fear to foreign-Arab neighborhoods, some of which have existed for more than a generation.

Many non-Iraqis say they now face a wholesale campaign to make their lives difficult. They are being unfairly harassed by soldiers and police, they say, as well as being taken into custody for what once would have been minor paperwork irregularities.

`It Is Unfair`

The crackdown has unnerved many longtime foreign Arab residents of Iraq because they enjoyed favored status under Saddam Hussein, in part because the former president was a strong proponent of pan-Arabism, which advocated mutual assistance among Arabs regardless of their countries of origin.

"It is unfair that even those of us who have been here for decades should be treated like this," said Mustafa Mohammed, 43, a Syrian car mechanic who has been in Iraq since 1984 and who lives and works in the crime-ridden Bataween neighborhood of Baghdad.

Most deeply alarmed are Palestinians, whose community in Iraq numbers more than 30,000, most of them in Baghdad. Many came here in 1948, when the British mandate in Palestine ended and the state of Israel was created.

They married other refugees and had children. Initially they did not become Iraqi citizens because they feared the move would threaten their right to return home. Later, Hussein`s government issued Iraqi travel documents to Palestinians who wished to leave the country, but it refused to give them citizenship, wanting them to remain loyal to the cause of freeing their homeland from Israeli occupation. Hussein offered citizenship to other Arabs who wanted it.

Most Palestinians here have nowhere to go. Their original hometowns are now in Israeli territory or under Israeli control, and Israeli officials have no interest in adding to the burgeoning number of Palestinians in either area. Without residency documents or passports, Palestinians are also unwelcome elsewhere.

Iraq`s deportation policy has been widely publicized in newspapers and through graffiti in some of Baghdad`s central squares. The scrawled messages sound a note of hostility: "Arabs out of Iraq" and "We agree with the government — Arabs go home."

The Al Taakhi newspaper, one of Baghdad`s major dailies, carried a headline last week that read, "Life Sentence for the Illegal Arab Residents." The article quoted an anonymous official from the Interior Ministry saying: "The punishments are strict and will be imposed on the illegal residents. Some may even receive a life sentence."

The new rules were agreed to after consultations among several Iraqi security agencies.

"We know the neighborhoods where there are these bad people, so we started to make some sweeps," said residency office director Hussein. "Whoever lacks one of the requirements for residency will be asked to leave the country."

For those who have lived here for years, the xenophobia is painful. Most Arabs came for work, often with proper papers. But unless they have returned periodically to their native countries to update their passports and renew their Iraqi entry documents, they may no longer have proper legal status.

The new requirements are stiff. A person must have a valid passport or travel document from his or her native country; an entry visa for Iraq; and, if coming for work, a signed contract. The Ministry of Work and Social Security can decide not to honor the contract if the work can be done by an Iraqi. However, anyone married to an Iraqi is exempt.

The rules for non-Iraqis are the same for longtime residents and newcomers.

In the 1970s and `80s, jobs for manual laborers were plentiful, especially while native-born men were fighting the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. For a time, for instance, many of the gravediggers were Egyptians, Baghdad natives say.

Relatively few Arabs have come to work in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, in part because of broad disapproval in the Arab world of the subsequent occupation. Some of those who came legally, mainly Kuwaitis and Egyptians, have been attacked by the anti-American insurgents.

Sudanese Targeted

In addition to Palestinians, Sudanese Arabs are easy targets of the new regulations, standing out on the Baghdad streets with their darker complexions and lanky frames. Many came here legally to work as manual laborers and stayed on. They are poorly organized and readily intimidated.

Fadlulla Abdullah, 42, came to Iraq 15 years ago, bringing his Sudanese wife and children. So far he has had no trouble because he works for one of Baghdad`s largest hotels. But he views himself as lucky.

"Some of my fellow Sudanese living and working in Iraq have been insulted and badly treated recently by some ING [Iraqi national guard] soldiers," he said.

"The soldiers are not differentiating between the good guys and the very, very few bad guys," he said. "There are many Iraqis living in Khartoum [the Sudanese capital]. Let us suppose that a few of them would commit some violations or a crime…. Is it logical that they would all be expelled from Sudan?"

Other Sudanese face uncertainty about whether they will be able to continue to work in Iraq.

"My problem is that the notary public at the court is now refusing to certify my renewed contract with the Kubaysa Construction company," said Othman Mohammed, 45. "They told me they are still waiting for new instructions from the government regarding residence."

Palestinians feel particularly vulnerable. They were often hated by Iraqis because they were favored by Saddam Hussein, who used them to justify his anti-Americanism. Most married within the Palestinian community, and despite 30 or more years in Iraq, they have nothing official to show for it.

"By existing law, almost all of them could be deported," said a senior U.S. official working on Iraqi security issues. "But I don`t think you`re going to see a hard line."

The U.S. official added that things could get tougher because many Iraqis blame foreigners for the insurgency, though most officials believe that attacks on civilians have largely been carried out by Iraqis.

"If you can`t control the people in your own country, then rightly or wrongly, you look at outsiders, and they are very sensitive if not paranoid about them," the official said.

That matters little to most Palestinians, who no longer feel at ease in their adopted country.

"We don`t know what is going to happen to us," said Amer Mahmoud, 39, who was born in Baghdad and used to work in a sewing factory but is now unemployed.

"It is possible they`ll use the new rule to get rid of us, but where will we go? They are going to throw us on the border…. No country will accept us — even Arab countries will not," he said as he tightly gripped his 9-year-old daughter`s hand, as if afraid they would be separated.

Already he has come down in the world. As a Palestinian under Hussein, he lived in government-subsidized housing, had a guaranteed job and could attend college for free. Now he and his family are eking out an existence in a refugee camp on the eastern edge of Baghdad.

The many ironies are not lost on the Palestinians. Although they are Arabs, they know they are seen as outsiders. And in this case, that means they are viewed as potential saboteurs of the country that has given them refuge for decades.

"We are getting lost and mixed up with all of these other people. Wherever there is terrorism, they will say it`s Arabs behind it," Mahmoud said. "If they decide all Arabs have to go, we will have to go and our fates will be tied to theirs."


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Why Does God Hate Caribou?
Drill for oil and screw Alaska`s wildlife? Why, sure, all part of the imminent Rapture!
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

God wants oil. This is the message. This is the belief. God wants more oil and also uranium and coal and iron and nuclear waste and whatever the hell else we want to pump into or out of this godforsaken lump of floating space rock. Word to the GOP.

In other words, God wants us, if the happily bleak and decidedly nasty interpretation of Bible verse currently extolled by the rabid evangelical mind-set now mauling the American political and social landscape is to be believed, to use up the Earth however we see fit and stomp all over this pointless ecological blob with our macho SUVs and manly tanks and badass army boots because it`s all just one giant disposable sandbox o` fun anyway, right?

Hey, it`s all part of the Master Plan to destroy the Earth and smite our enemies and hasten the arrival of the Rapture. Didn`t you know?

We are all merely waiting until the Big Battle happens in Israel, the bloody clash between the True Believers and the Antichrist Heathens, to be followed immediately by Jesus gliding down on gilded wings made of fine Egyptian cotton and cheap American flags and wearing kickass robes of fire and ready to suck the true believers up to heaven through a giant Crazy Straw and wipe the whole goddamn secular slate clean. Right?

Crazy rantings, you might say. Pseudo-religious babbling, you might titter. I have no idea what the hell this guy is talking about, you might blink.

You would, of course, be wrong.

Let us clarify just what the hell this means. Let us look at one recent, juicy example of How It All Works. Shall we?

Let us look, for example, at the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, because the odds are now just sickeningly good that Big Oil is going to drill in that massive hunk of unspoiled nature, going to stomp on in and take 10 years to build massive oil rigs and enormous networks of pipelines and in the process destroy miles of delicate ecosystems in order to squeeze out one precious drop of oil into the vast bucket of America`s gluttonous oil needs.

And sure you can believe the GOP lie that it`s all some noble effort to get us off foreign oil a tiny bit, and what with oil prices so ridiculously high and gas-sucking SUVs so obviously stupid and BushCo`s absolute refusal to enact conservation measures or to pressure automakers to build even slightly more fuel-efficient cars, screwing the environment and drilling for more oil is the only option neocons give a damn about.

But it`s more than that. Because oil drilling in Alaska is merely the visible rash, the resultant twitch from the much deeper and more disturbing disease now plaguing `Murka: the evangelical nutjob belief in the Second Coming, the big Jesus Farewell Tour, coming real soon to a sad warmongering nation near you. BYO Mel Gibson bobblehead.

Don`t believe it? Just follow the Line o` Sanctimony. It goes like this:

A huge chunk of BushCo`s voting bloc is evangelical or born-again Christian. Millions of otherwise decent and sincere Americans who actually believe the Bible as literal world-for-word truth, verbatim, no questions asked, not metaphor and not parable and not lovely set of nice, same-as-every-other-religion mythologies by which we set our moral compasses, but a set of actual facts told in cautionary dramedy, like a silly locust-ridden reality-TV show. Extreme Jesus: Apocalypse Edition.

And by many measures, the people who believe this are the same deeply terrified, misguided folk who tipped the electorate scale and put BushCo back in office, along with a great many other newly spawned power players in Washington and across the social strata, from judges to teachers to Cabinet members to congresspersons to the borderline insane Parents Television Council, people so terrified of the human female nipple that it screamed loud enough so that now uttering the word s-- on the radio will cost you $500,000.

So then. The evangelicals are in power, having their bleak and apocalyptic moment in the white-hot sun. And Bush, by all accounts, is their leader, their spokesman, their crusader, smashing those damned gays and repressing them uppity women and attacking those gul-dang Muslims and -- here`s the kicker -- doing his God-sanctioned duty to bring about a grand holy war that will hasten the arrival of, you guessed it, Armageddon.

And baby, for any evangelical worth his secret homosexual fantasy, Armageddon is where it`s at.

Do you see? This means that the war in Iraq is a good thing, because war brings us closer to the Final Conflict. War is what God wants. And nature, that pathetic and disposable handmaiden to humankind`s happy bloodlust, is merely the fuel, the playpen, for that happy eventuality. Earth is but a finite resource given by God to humanity and meant to be all used up as fast as possible and the faster we use it all up the sooner Jesus comes. Just like Santa. Only, you know, not.

Put another way: The environment does not matter because the Earth does not matter because all the sinful nonbelievers do not matter and all that does matter is the imminent return of the bloody Christ, and therefore, so what if BushCo supports the most appalling array of environmentally abusive polices in American history? So what if we permanently scar some silly wildlife refuge in Alaska?

So what if Dubya wants to gut the EPA and the Clean Air Act and clean water and wants to log national forests and relax all major pollution regulations on his buddies in big industry? It`s all just a matter of time, anyway, until it`s all over (most predictions put the Second Coming somewhere between the next 12 seconds and within 40 years). And in the meantime, while the believers wait, God will provide. Simple!

So then. Go ahead and look at the nasty ANWR vote as a mere power grab, vicious and mostly pointless GOP maneuvering that will do absolutely nothing to solve the impending oil crisis. See it as a simple and typically heartless neocon power/money grab at your peril. That`s just the surface.

The truth is, the ANWR vote is merely a small part of a larger and nastier neoconservative attitude that has, at its engine, at its black and godless core, a silly fundamentalist belief in the End Times, in the Apocalypse. Don`t believe it? Have yourself a nice read of famed journalist Bill Moyer`s delicate, excellent essay "Welcome to Doomsday" via the New York Review of Books, which brings in all the numbers and data into a beautifully articulate essay on the state of the American religious landscape.

Apparently, God really doesn`t give a damn about caribou and oceans and air quality and the future of humankind. God is not, as most every enlightened mystic and poet and divine spiritual movement throughout history has believed, a luminous and deeply felt force to be found equally in every rock and tree and fish and caribou on the land.

Enough of that. This is the new message. The Earth is, let it be known -- let us shout it from the rooftops of the White House and Congress and every budget-ravaged school across the land -- the Earth is no longer sacred. Not anymore. Not with this regime. What, protect a hunk of land and save some stupid animals when the Rapture is at hand? When Jesus is about to reappear? And when we can, until then, make heaps of cash and stomp the poor and pollute like crazy and have all manner of self-righteous fun? What kind of silly hell is that, you lost sodomite sinner?


Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…
©2005 SF Gate

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March 23, 2005
Iraqi and U.S. Forces Raid Insurgent Camp, Killing Dozens
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/international/middleeast/2…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 23 - Iraqi and American forces killed up to 80 insurgents Tuesday in a fierce battle during a morning raid on what appeared to be the largest guerilla training camp to be discovered in the war, American and Iraqi officials said today. Seven Iraqi policemen were killed and six were wounded.

The number of fighters killed was the most reported in a single battle since the American invasion of the city of Falluja, an insurgent stronghold, last November. The size and location of the camp, with scores of guerrillas living in tents and small buildings in a marshy lakeside encampment in western Iraq, revealed a new strategy among the insurgents, American military officials contended. It is the first time the military has come across insurgents organizing in such numbers in a remote rural location, similar to Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, the officials said.

"A year ago, they preferred to organize in small cells in urban areas," said Maj. Richard Goldenberg, a spokesman for the 42nd Infantry Division, which sent soldiers and attack helicopters to aid the hundreds of Iraqi commandos who raided the camp. "Here, they organized into a large group in a remote site, perhaps under the impression that coalition forces wouldn`t look for them there."

Along with munitions, training manuals and suicide bomb vests, the Iraqi and American forces discovered identification papers that showed some of the fighters had come from outside Iraq, said Major Goldenberg. He declined to identify the nationalities of the foreign insurgents, though Iraqi officials said they came from Arab countries.

General Flaiyeh Rashid, the head of the police commandoes in Salahuddin Province, where the battle took place, gave a statement to a state-run television network saying that the fighting lasted for seven hours and that American and Iraqi forces killed 80 guerillas. Major Goldenberg said the American military estimated the battle took two hours and that there were about 80 insurgents at the camp, but could not give a count of how many were killed. The major said no prisoners were taken during the assault.

The fighting came just two days after an American convoy fended off a highly organized ambush by a band of 40 to 50 insurgents on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American military said 26 attackers were killed in that battle, on Sunday in the town of Salman Pak, 12 miles southeast of the capital. It was the most ambitious assault against the American military since the Jan. 30 elections, and showed that the guerrilla war was still burning fiercely here two years after the Americans invaded Iraq and despite the high voter turnout in the elections.

The battle on Tuesday began at about 11 a.m., as members of the Interior Ministry`s First Police Commando Battalion, acting on tips from residents of the area, approached the guerrilla camp by Lake Tharthar, Major Goldenberg said. Before the American invasion, the large lake was a popular tourist spot for Iraqis and was the site of a fish farming project begun by the government of Saddam Hussein. It lies in a barren, arid region 100 miles northwest of Baghdad and straddles the border between Anbar and Salahuddin Provinces, both insurgent strongholds dominated by the former governing Sunni Arabs.

As the commandos neared the camp, guerrillas began firing with assault rifles, machine guns and mortars or rockets. "This was a remote site," Major Goldenberg said. "It was quite likely they could see the approach of other forces from a distance."

The Iraqi police then called for support from the 42nd Infantry Division, based out of a palace complex in the nearby provincial capital of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein`s hometown. The Americans sent in Apache attack helicopters and smaller OH-58D Kiowa helicopters, as well as ground troops. An Interior Ministry spokesman said some insurgents tried escaping by boat across the lake, but were killed on the water or as they disembarked on the far shore.

The training camp was so extensive that American and Iraqi troops were still searching it today, Major Goldenberg said. Among the items seized were manuals with "techniques they would have used to train other insurgents to conduct operations," he said, declining to go into details. The 42nd Infantry Division, charged with securing the northern Sunni triangle, has never "come across such an organized facility for the Iraqi insurgent elements," the major said. Iraqi and American troops burned four vehicles found at the camp, the Interior Ministry spokesman said.

He estimated that 500 to 700 Iraqi commandos took part in the assault. The same unit has been working alongside the 42nd Infantry Division and was involved in a brief offensive sweep earlier this month in the volatile town of Samarra. In that operation, Iraqi commandos and American soldiers blocked off sections of Samarra to arrest suspected insurgent leaders, but found that the leaders had gone into hiding or fled.

Officers of the 42nd Infantry Division have been training Iraqi security forces at its palace headquarters on a bluff overlooking the Tigris River in Tikrit. The training has been taking place on an island in the middle of the river, and experienced Iraqi officers are increasingly doing some of the teaching, American commanders say. The use of Iraqi forces as the spearhead for an ambitious assault like the one on Tuesday "reflects the trend we expect to see for the rest of the year," Major Goldenberg said.

Today, violence flared in the capital, as an insurgent mortar attack killed an Iraqi girl and wounded another child at a primary school in western Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. The mortar crashed into a school in the Amariya neighborhood, an area rife with insurgents between downtown Baghdad and Abu Ghraib prison. In the neighborhood of Etafiyah, two policemen were killed and their driver injured as they tried unsuccessfully to defuse a roadside bomb near a prominent Shiite mosque, the official said.

Two insurgents tried to set off a suicide car bomb in the northern Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya, but injured only themselves as they failed to detonate the explosives properly. The Interior Ministry official identified the driver of the car, a golden Opal sedan, as Ahmed al-Janabi, an Iraqi.

Ordinary Iraqis often blame foreign jihadists for suicide car bombings and contend that even the most militant of Iraqis could never pull off such horrendous acts of bloodshed.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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In Texas, critics question Bush`s `life` culture
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=%2Fnm%2F20050322%2Fp…

Posted on Wednesday, March 23 @ 09:46:06 EST By Jeff Franks, Reuters

HOUSTON (Reuters) - President Bush`s intervention for Terry Schiavo has opened old wounds in Texas where death penalty opponents say his words of support for a "culture of life" ring hollow after so many executions during his time as governor of the state.

Bush said he stepped into the Schiavo case because the United States should have "a presumption in favor of life," but there were 152 executions in Texas during his administration, including some in which the convict`s guilt was in doubt, critics said.

"It`s hypocrisy at a thousand levels," said University of Houston law professor and death penalty defense attorney David Dow.

"I saw many, many cases where there was substantial doubt about whether someone was guilty or whether the death penalty was the appropriate sentence, but he never said anything," said David Atwood, head of the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty. "I really can`t say he cares about life."

"We all recognize there is a difference between an innocent person and someone who has committed a heinous crime, but to say one life is important and one isn`t, that`s politics," Atwood said.

Bush has defended the high number of executions by saying he was confident everyone put to death in Texas was guilty because they had had a fair hearing in the courts he believed capital punishment was a deterrent to crime.

He interrupted a Texas vacation and flew to Washington to sign an emergency law passed by Congress Monday that forced a review of the Schiavo case in federal court.

Schiavo, 41, has been in a vegetative state since a heart attack in 1990. Last week, a Florida court, at her husband`s request, ordered the removal of the feeding tube keeping her alive, but her parents argued it should stay in place.

"In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life," said Bush, who has spoken often of creating a "culture of life" by limiting such things as abortion and stem cell research.

Death penalty opponents said Bush did not give the same presumption to death row inmates in Texas, where he used his power to grant an execution stay only once while governor from 1995 to 2000.

In 2000, the state set a U.S. record with 40 executions, including that of Gary Graham, whose guilt was hotly contested and became an international controversy.

"In the face of pretty substantial evidence that Gary Graham was not a murderer, George Bush didn`t say anything about a `culture of life,"` Dow said.

Legal experts say Bush has not been totally consistent on the "right-to-die" issue because in 1999 he signed a Texas law similar to the Florida law under which a judge ordered the removal of Schiavo`s feeding tube.

The Texas law allows for life support to be stopped under certain circumstances at the request of a family member or other appropriate surrogate.

"If this case had been in Texas the same thing would have happened as happened in Florida," said John Robertson, professor at the University of Texas law school and author of a book on bioethics called "The Rights of the Critically Ill."

But, he said, Bush`s support of the emergency bill for Schiavo was not "a direct contradiction" of the Texas law.

"He`s saying he thought it was good enough from the state`s perspective at the time, and now he`s saying there may be cases that might need a second look," he said.

Diane Clemens, head of the Houston-based Justice for All victims` rights group, said death penalty opponents were not making legitimate comparisons.

"This woman is an innocent, brain-damaged individual who has harmed no one. Killers are convicted murderers who have harmed many people. They have had a fair process," she said.

"They have had the very process these people would try and deny Schiavo -- and that is a request for life at the federal level, in the federal courts."

Monday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the president`s decision was based on principle, not politics.

"It (Schiavo case) is a complex case, where serious questions and significant doubts have been raised," he said. "And the president is always going to stand on the side of defending life."

Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited.

From Reuters:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/
20050322/pl_nm/rights_schiavo_texas_dc_1

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BUCK UP, THE WORLD HATES US MORE THAN EVER
Why the Left Was Right After All
http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/

NEW YORK--Liberals have their faults, but no one can accuse them of being pigheaded. Two years after left-of-Bush Americans marched against the invasion of Iraq and a year after the Administration admitted it had lied about Saddam`s non-existent weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, the sprouting of a few protodemocratic weeds in the microscopically-cracked cement of Arab dictatorship has prompted them to wonder whether the neoconservatives maybe did the right thing after all by going into Iraq.

"[Bush] may have had it right," NPR`s Daniel Schorr writes in the Christian Science Monitor. Even Harry Reid, the Democrats` fiery-as-these-things-go leader in the Senate, is swooning over the image of flag-waving Lebanese demanding a Syrian withdrawal: "Any breakthrough we get there, whether it is in Lebanon or Egypt, is a step in the right direction and I support the president in that regard."

As far as I`m concerned, Bush deserves to be impeached for lying to his employers--us--about Iraq`s WMDs. He should face prosecution at a war crimes tribunal for the murder of the 100,000-plus Iraqis he ordered killed by U.S. troops. He deserves life in prison for ordering the torture, and allowing the murder under torture, of countless innocent Afghans and Iraqis. Nothing, not even if the Iraq war sparked the transformation of the entire Muslim world into peaceful and prosperous Athenian-style democracies, could retroactively justify such murderous perfidy. I`m not convinced a Riyadh spring is about to bloom. It will take a lot more than male-only Saudi municipal elections held in half the country, in which six of the seven winners were illegally promoted by the kingdom`s extremist Wahabbi religious establishment.

Take courage, wobbly self-doubters! Even taking recent events into account, your "no blood for oil" signs will come in handy during the America-hating years ahead.

Never mind the dead, the lies or the cash, say the connies. As Britain`s John Maples, originally a Bush supporter of the Iraq war, wrote: "The real reason for the war, at least in the U.S., was to create a reasonably democratic, free market Iraq to act as both a beacon and a rebuke to other countries in the region." The Project for a New American Century, the neocon think tank that started Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. along the charred road to American Empire, stated in 1997 that U.S foreign policy leaders should strive "to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests [around the world]." Iraq was the first big test of their approach.

It may be premature to judge Bush`s frat pack by their own standards but it`s also fair. They`ve already declared victory. Ross Terrill, whose editor at The Weekly Standard signed the 1997 PNAC statement of purpose, writes: "Success in Iraq, Bush`s victory on November 2, Arafat`s demise, and the ongoing appeal of economic and political freedom to ordinary folk, all triggered political changes across the globe that lessen the need for massive U.S. military intervention again soon."

Bush`s current foreign policy report card is a mixed bag: a B in Phys Ed and a string of Ds and Fs in more important, heavily weighted subjects.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has eased somewhat, largely thanks to an event that had nothing to do with Bush, Arafat`s death and replacement with Mahmoud Abbas. But even the Palestinian Authority`s own polls show that fewer than half of Palestinians accept recent elections as legitimate, while 84 percent of the population say they live without safety or security in their daily lives. Basic issues, such as Israeli colonies on Arab land, remain unresolved. Peace with Israel? Not in the near future.

Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarek, 76, has finally agreed to allow candidates to run against him for the presidency, but his most formidable challenger, Ayman Nour, was rotting in prison until January. He`s now under virtual house arrest, which makes campaigning a tad inconvenient. Even the deployment of government goons against pro-Nour demonstrators hasn`t reduced the flow of U.S. foreign aid (Egypt comes in second after Israel) or Egyptian anti-Americanism. "[Egyptian-American] relations are going through a seriously bad patch," a diplomat tells the UK Telegraph.

Libya has agreed to suspend its nuclear program and Syria is being pressured to pull its troops out of Lebanon, but neither move--both in strategic backwaters--significantly affects the economic or security prospects of American interests.

On to the big subjects:

Iran has long sought improved relations with the U.S. It is a rare opportunity to form a friendship with an oil-rich, politically influential regional player. North Korea, on the other hand, poses our biggest challenge: a nuclear capable state, led by a paranoid and isolated autocrat who has threatened to incinerate the West Coast. Bush`s charm offensive has been so badly botched that he has been reduced to promising that he has no immediate plans to invade Iran. "I hear all these rumors about military attacks, and it`s just not the truth," he says. But the U.S. is better poised to invade Iran than North Korea (and oil adds to the motivation). Bush has also failed to reassure North Korea. "We have taken a serious measure by increasing nuclear arms in preparation for any invasions by enemies," the North Korean regime said March 22. So long, Seattle.

Even the stirrings of electioneering in Iraq and Afghanistan have left the Muslim world cold. Both contests, held amid pervasive fraud, violence and corruption in active war zones where millions are too afraid to venture outdoors, are interpreted as ersatz democracy imposed upon puppet regimes created by a hostile occupation force. And the stooges are disorganized. Iraq`s fractious parties haven`t been able to form a government; Afghanistan`s elections have been delayed until the fall owing to the continuing war with the Taliban. A BBC poll taken in Turkey, a staunch American ally and the model secular state in the Islamic world, finds that 82 percent of Turks consider the United States under George W. Bush to be the greatest threat to world peace.

Is this a world "favorable to American principles and interests"? Clapping your hands is fun, but it doesn`t change jack.

COPYRIGHT 2005 TED RALL

RALL 3/22/05

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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Mehr auf der Seite:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Wednesday, March 23, 2005

"There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: bring `em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
- George W. Bush, July 2, 2003

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in Kirkuk roadside bombing.

Bring ‘em on: One officer killed and two wounded in roadside bombing in Baghdad. Three Iraqis, including two women, killed, and six others, including two children, wounded in explosion of old Iraqi army munitions in Beiji. Four women and three children killed in Azizya in explosion of bomb believed to be left over from the 2003 US invasion. Iraqi brigadier died in Kirkuk of wounds he received in an assassination attempt last Sunday.

Bring ‘em on: Eighty-five militants and seven Iraqi commandos killed in a joint US-Iraqi raid on a suspected guerilla training camp near Lake Tharthar, according to Iraqi officials. One child killed and three wounded in a mortar or rocket attack on a west Baghdad elementary school. One policeman killed and another wounded while trying to defuse a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One policeman and one sapper killed, three others wounded, while trying to defuse a bomb outside a Baghdad school. (Note: This may be the same incident described in the entry above)

An indicator: A poignant indicator of how the American occupation is going two years after the initial invasion of Iraq came last week. Iraq’s National Assembly met, a sign that the new transitional government chosen in the inspiring elections of Jan. 30 is beginning to govern. But the meeting was shaken by a volley of mortar fire that fell only a few hundred yards short of the assembly hall.

Baghdad is still one of the most dangerous cities in the world, rocked by daily violence. Mohammed Ghazi Umron, a truck driver who voted enthusiastically Jan. 30, told the Christian Science Monitor the roads leading from Baghdad range from "bad, but I haven’t heard of any drivers being killed there in a few weeks" to "very, very dangerous. We try not to go past Abu Ghraib."

The assembly meeting failed to name a prime minister, president and other top officials. Shiite and Kurd members, who together control about two-thirds of the assembly but have been unable so far to agree on top officials, said they hope to reach agreement by the next meeting, scheduled for Friday or Saturday. Numerous news stories say ordinary Iraqis, who experienced something close to euphoria in the days following the election, are impatient that after seven weeks the elected politicians can’t get their act together.

Sistani losing patience: The most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq has called for quick agreement on a new government, expressing displeasure with the weeks of drawn- out haggling, which has begun to stir unrest in the Iraqi public.

The cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, appeared to be putting pressure on Kurdish politicians in talks on forming a governing coalition.

Even though he has no constituency in the mostly Sunni Kurdish territory, the ayatollah has proved to be the most influential authority in the new Iraq. He brought together the largest and most successful Shiite bloc in the elections, and he has been able to call up huge street protests and get large numbers of voters to the polls.

Agree on almost everything: Leading Shia politicians said yesterday that they had finally brokered a deal with Kurdish parties to end a debilitating impasse over the formation of Iraq`s first freely elected government in decades.

They said Iraq`s new parliament, which held its largely ceremonial inaugural session last week, would reconvene on Saturday to try to form a coalition administration.

"We have agreed on almost everything, and expect to present an agreement on a government of national unity to parliament by the end of the week," said Jawad al-Maliki, a senior aide to Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister in waiting.

But similar positive noises have been made over the past fortnight and negotiators admitted yesterday that the distribution of key cabinet posts, including oil, defence and finance, had yet to be decided.

Might be a bit further along than the above indicates: On the political front, Iraq’s Shiite political juggernaut will take 16 to 17 ministries in the next government, the Kurds will hold seven to eight and the Sunni minority will be awarded four to six, Shiite negotiator Maryam Rayes said.

The cabinet lineup will solidify the grip on power of the election-winning Shiite majority nearly two months after some eight million Iraqis voted in national elections.

The Shiites will take the interior and finance ministries, along with the cabinet post of national security advisor, said Rayes, a negotiator with the United Iraqi Alliance, which won 146 seats in the 275-member parliament.

The second-placed Kurds, with 77 seats, will receive seven to eight ministries, including the foreign ministry and probably oil, Rayes said, echoing similar reports from a Kurdish source.

Other posts that were locked up for the Kurds included the presidency, to be held by Jalal Talabani, and the post of deputy prime minister, the source said.

We sure do win this war a lot: Two years after he started the Iraq war, President George W. Bush seems ready to once again declare victory, this time in the cause of democratization. But the course of self-rule in Iraq is as complicated and fraught with pitfalls as the war itself.

The actors in Iraq are driven by agendas that have little do with the rhetoric in Washington. And they are certain to try American patience in the months ahead.

The intense negotiations to form a new government exposed the fissures between the two victors that emerged from the January parliamentary elections -- the Shia Arabs and the Kurds.

The other major player, the Sunni Arabs, boycotted the vote and still fuel the insurgency, though there are efforts to bring them into the political tent.

Iraq-Jordan tiff over?: Jordan`s King Abdullah ordered Monday his chief envoy to Iraq to return to Baghdad. The move was announced in Algiers by Jordanian Prime Minister Faisal al-Fayez, reported the BBC.

The diplomatic dispute began after Iraq protested over the reported involvement of a Jordanian citizen, Raed Mansour al-Banna, in a suicide bombing that killed some 125 people in Hilla, south of Baghdad, Feb. 28.

Friday, protests were held outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad and an Iraqi flag was raised over the building while Jordanian flags were burnt.

Now this will piss Bush off: Iraq`s interim government is refusing to make payments on some contracts with foreign companies including Raytheon Co. and A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S because they overcharged or failed to deliver everything they promised, an official said.

``It`s a problem all ministries are dealing with because of the lack of paperwork provided by the U.S.-led administration on contracts they signed before handing over power in June,`` Iraq`s deputy transport minister, Atta Nabil Hussain Auni Atta, said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan, on March 21.

The refusal of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi`s government, which took power June 28, 2004, to pay bills may discourage foreign companies from working in the country, said analysts including Youssef Ibrahim, managing director of Strategic Energy Investment Group, a consulting firm in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Spreading more liberty, we are: Aamal, a ministry consultant, shot dead. Wijdan, a women`s rights activist and election candidate, murdered. Zeena, a businesswoman, kidnapped, shot and dumped on a highway in a headscarf she never wore.

Their crime? Wearing western clothes, having jobs or speaking out to make women`s voices heard in efforts to rebuild Iraq, plagued by relentless violence, spiraling crime and creeping religious fundamentalism.

Women in Iraq have increasingly become a target for extremists, criminals or insurgents bent on thwarting efforts to form a new government and forcing out U.S. troops.

Many have been driven into their homes, out of schools and universities and off the streets. Leading women keep a black hijab on the peg by the door to wear when venturing outside. Women who never wore the headscarf turn to it for safety.

Women politicians fear female voices have become a whisper.

Presenting America’s New Face to the World

Casualty Reports

Another liberal traitor Democrat: A Tennessee lawmaker on National Guard duty in Iraq suffered head wounds but is expected to make a full recovery, his mother said.

State Rep. John Mark Windle, D-Livingston, was wounded Friday and has been hospitalized at an Air Force Base in Iraq, his mother, Onita Windle, told the Cookeville Herald Citizen in a story published Tuesday.

<>Windle, 42, is a major in the Tennessee Army National Guard`s 278th Regimental Combat Team.


Local story: Clark County, OH, Marine killed in Al Anbar province.

Local story: Fort Worth, TX, soldier killed in Tamin.

# posted by matt : 10:20 AM

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· · Vol 26 · Issue 1268 · PUBLISHED 3/23/2005

The Undoing of America

Gore Vidal on war for oil, politics-free elections, and the late, great U.S. Constitution.
www.citypages.com/databank/26/1268/article13085.asp
by Steve Perry

For the past 40 years or so of Gore Vidal`s prolific 59-year literary career, his great project has been the telling of the American story from the country`s inception to the present day, unencumbered by the court historian`s task of making America`s leaders look like good guys at every turn. The saga has unfolded in two ways: through Vidal`s series of seven historical novels, beginning with Washington DC in 1967 and concluding with The Golden Age in 2000; and through his ceaseless essay writing and public appearances across the years. Starting around 1970, Vidal began to offer up his own annual State of the Union message, in magazines and on the talk circuit. His words were always well-chosen, provocative, and contentious: "There is not one human problem that could not be solved," he told an interviewer in 1972, "if people would simply do as I advise."

Though it`s a dim memory now, Vidal and commentators of a similarly outspoken bent used to be regulars on television news shows. Vidal`s most famous TV moment came during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when ABC paired him with William F. Buckley on live television. On the next to last night of the convention, the dialogue turned to the question of some student war protesters raising a Vietcong flag. The following exchange ensued:



Vidal: "As far as I`m concerned, the only sort of proto- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I`ll only say that we can`t have--"

Buckley: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I`ll sock you in the goddamn face and you`ll stay plastered."



That was TV in the pre-Information Age for you. These days Vidal, who put his Italian villa on the market a few months ago and moved full-time to his home in Los Angeles, speaks mostly through his essay writing about the foreign and stateside adventures of the Bush administration. In the past five years he has published one major nonfiction collection, The Last Empire, and a book about the founding fathers called Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. But mainly he has stayed busy producing what he calls his "political pamphlets," a series of short essay collections called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (2002), Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2003), and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004). Last month at Duke University, he produced a short run of On the March to the Sea, an older play about the Civil War that he has rewritten entirely.

I spoke to Vidal, who will turn 80 this October, by phone from his home in Los Angeles on March 9.



City Pages: I`ll start with the broadest of questions: Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point?

Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we`re in uncharted territory. We`re governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what`s being done in their name.

And that`s really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It`s a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there`s one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.



CP: You`ve observed many times in your writing that the United States has elections but has no politics. Could you talk about what you mean by that, and about how so many people have come to accept a purely spectatorial relationship to politics, more like fans (or non-fans) than citizens?

Gore Vidal: Well, you cannot have a political party that is not based upon a class interest. It has been part of the American propaganda machine that we have no class system. Yes, there are rich people; some are richer than others. But there is no class system. We`re classless. You could be president tomorrow. So could Michael Jackson, or this one or that one. This isn`t true. We have a very strong, very rigid class structure which goes back to the beginning of the country. I will not go into the details of that, but there it is. Whether it`s good or bad is something else.

We have not had a political party since that, really, of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the highest class, an aristocrat who had made common cause with the people, who were in the midst of depression, not to mention the Dust Bowl, which had taken so many farms in the `30s. We were a country in deep trouble, and he represented those in deep trouble. He got together great majorities and was elected four times to the presidency. And launched us on empire--somewhat consciously, too. He saw to it that the European colonial empires would break up, and that we would inherit bits and pieces, which we have done.

If we don`t have class interests officially, then therefore we have no political parties. What is the Republican Party? Well, it used to be the party of the small-town businessman, generally in the Middle West, generally sort of out of the mainstream. Very conservative. It now represents nothing but the gas and oil business. They own it. And the people who go to Congress are simply bought. They are lawyers who are paid to represent Halliburton, big oil, big banking. So the very rich corporate America has a party for itself, the Republican Party. The Democrats don`t have much of anything but a kind of wistful style. They just want everyone to be happy, and politically correct at all times. Do not hurt other people`s feelings. They spend so much time on political correctness that they haven`t thought of what to do politically about anything. Like say "no" to these preemptive wars, which are against not only the whole world`s take on war and peace, but against United States history.

This is something new under the sun--that a president, just because he feels like it, can declare war on anybody. And Congress will go along with him, and the courts will support him. The founding fathers would be mortified if they saw what had happened to their handiwork, which wasn`t very great to begin with but is now done for. When you have preemptive wars, and you have ambitious companies like Bechtel who will build up what, let us say, General Electric has helped to destroy with its weaponry--these interests are well-represented.

There is no people`s party, and you can`t even use the word. "Liberal" has been demonized. A liberal is a commie who`s also a pedophile. Being a communist and a pedophile, he`s so busy that he hasn`t got time to win an election and is odious to boot. So there is no Democratic Party. We hope that something might happen with the governor of Vermont, and maybe something will or maybe it won`t. But we are totally censored, and the press just follows this. It observes what those in power want it to observe, and turns the other way when things get dark. Then, when it`s too late sometimes, you get some very good reporting. But by then, somebody`s playing taps.



CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?

Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the `50s and `60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They`re not allowed on now. Or they`re set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there`s the donkey who brays, there`s the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don`t want the people to know anything, and the people don`t.



CP: You wrote at the end of a 2002 essay that so-called inalienable rights, once alienated, are often lost forever. Can you describe what`s changed about America during the Bush years that represent permanent, or at least long-term, legacies that will survive Bush?

Vidal: Well, the Congress has ceded--which it cannot do--but it has ceded its power to declare war. That is written in the Constitution. It`s the most important thing in the Constitution, ultimately. And having ceded that to the Executive Branch, he can declare war whenever he finds terrorism. Now, terrorism is a wonderful invention because it doesn`t mean anything. It`s an abstract noun. You can`t have a war against an abstract noun; it`s like having a war against dandruff. It`s meaningless.

But you can terrify people. The art of government now, the art of control as practiced by the current junta, is: Keep the people frightened. It`s exactly what Adolf Hitler and his gang did. Keep them frightened: The Russians are coming. The Poles are killing Germans who live within the borders of Poland. The Czechs are doing the same thing in the Sudetenland. These are evil people. We must go after them. We must save our kin.

Keep everybody frightened, tell them lies--and the bigger the lie, the more they`ll believe it. There`s nothing the average American now believes (because he`s been told it 10,000 times a day) that is true. Now how do you undo so much disinformation? Well, you have to have truth squads at work 24 hours a day every day. And we don`t have them.



CP: I`d like to ask you to sketch our political arc from Reagan down to Bush II. It seemed to me that Reagan took a big step down the road to Bush when he was so successful in selling the ideology of the market, the idea that whatever the interests of money and markets dictated was the proper and even the most patriotic course--which was hardly a new idea, but one that had never been embraced openly as a first principle of politics. Is that a fair assessment?

Vidal: He was small-town American Republican, even though he started life as a Democrat. He believed in the values of Main Street. Sinclair Lewis`s novels are filled with Ronald Reagans, though Babbitt doesn`t get to the White House. But this time Babbitt did. So it was very congenial for Reagan to play that part, not that he had a very clear idea of what his lines were all about. Those who were writing the scenarios certainly knew.

I`d say the downward skid certainly began with Reagan. I came across a comment recently, someone asking why we had gone into both Grenada and Panama, two absolutely nothing little countries who were no danger to us, minding their own business, and we go in and conquer them. Somebody said, well, we did it because we could. That`s the attitude of our current rulers.

So they will be forever putting--what they do is put us all at risk. You and I and other civilians are going to be the ones who are killed when the Moslems get really angry and start suicide-bombing American cities because of things the Bush/Cheney junta has done to them. We will be the ones killed. Bush/Cheney will be safe in their bunkers, but we`re going to get it. I would have thought that self-interest--since Americans are the most easily terrified people on earth, as recently demonstrated over and over again-- we would be afraid of what was going to befall us. But I think simultaneously we have no imagination, and certainly no sense of cause and effect. If we did have that, we might know that if you keep kicking somebody, he`s going to kick you back. So there we stand, ignoring the first rule of physics, which is that there is no action without reaction.



CP: Didn`t the previous successes of our economy and our empire, post WWII, condition people to expect that consequences were for other people in other places?

Vidal: Well, wishful thinking, perhaps. I spent three years in World War II, and it was a clear victory for our team. But it was nothing to write Mother about, I`ll tell you. Walt Whitman once said, of the Civil War, that it is a lucky thing the people will never know what happened in the war. One can think of a lot of things, one can imagine a lot of things, but...

The sense that there are no consequences--that can happen if you keep the people diverted. Television changed everything. Some 60 or 80 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was a partner of Osama bin Laden. They hated each other, and they had nothing to do with each other. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. But if you keep repeating it and repeating it--and Cheney still does; nobody`s switched him off, so he just babbles and babbles like a broken toy--how are they to know otherwise? Yes, there are good journals here and there, like The Nation, but they`re not easily found. And with our educational system, I don`t think the average person can read with any great ease anything that requires thought and the ability to exercise cause-and-effect reasoning: If we do this to them, they will do that to us. We seem to have lost all track of that rather primitive notion that I think people all the way back to chimpanzees have known. But we don`t.



CP: In your latest book, Imperial America, you refer to Confucius`s admonition to "rectify the language." In that regard I`m wondering about the Clinton years, and about the success of the Clinton/Morris strategy of "triangulation," which mainly consisted of talking to the left and governing to the right. Did that play a role in setting the stage for a figure like Bush, who throws around words like "democracy" and "freedom" when they bear no relation to reality?

Vidal: Well, certainly it did. Clinton represented no opposition to this. He was so busy triangulating that he was enlisting under the colors of the other team, hoping to pick up some votes. I don`t think he did, but he got himself reelected by not doing the job of an opposing political party. In other words, the Republican Party as it now is funded, is the party of corporate America, which is no friend to the people of America. Now that`s a clear division. The people of America, if you ever run for office, you find out they`re very shrewd about figuring out who`s getting what money, and who`s on their side. But you have to organize them. You have to tell them more things than they get to know from the general media.

Clinton just gave up. Also, to his credit, or rather, to explain him, the Republican Party realized that this was the most attractive politician since Franklin Roosevelt, and that he had a great, great hold over people. They also realized that if he got going, we really would have National Health--we would actually become a civilized country, which we are nowhere near. I mean, we`re in the Stone Age again. He was working toward it, and they saw he had to be destroyed. Later they got a cock-sucking interlude to impeach him. If I were he, I would have called out the Army and sent Congress home.



CP: Really.

Vidal: Yes, really. They went beyond anything in the laws of impeachment. They have to do with the exercise of your powers as president, abuses of power as president. He wasn`t abusing any powers. He was caught telling a little lie about sex, which you`re not supposed to ask him about anyway, and he shouldn`t have answered. So they use that: oh, perjury! Oh, it`s terrible, a president who lies! Oh, God--how can we live any longer in Sodom and Gomorrah? You can play on the dumb-dumbs morning, noon, and night with stuff like that.



CP: Clearly Bush does represent something radical and new, and there`s been an understandable tendency on the part of people who don`t like where the country is going to focus their outrage exclusively on Bush and the Republicans. But don`t the media and the Democrats come in for a great deal of blame for creating the political vacuum in which he rose?

Vidal: Well, the media is on the other side. The media belongs to the big money, and the big money, their candidates, their party, is the Republican Party as now constituted. So everybody is behaving typically [in media]. What isn`t typical is a Democratic Party that has also sold out. There are just as many lobbyists and propagandists there as on the other side. They`re never going to regain anything until they remember that they`re supposed to represent the people at large, and not the very rich.

But they need the very rich in order to be able to run for office, to buy television time. I`d say if you really want to date the crash of the American system, the American republic, it was in the early `50s, when television suddenly emerged as the central fact of American life. That which was not televised did not exist. And any preacher, because religion is tax-free--I would tax all the religions, by the way--any evangelical who wants to get up there and say, send me millions of dollars and I will cure you of your dandruff, he gets to spend the money any way he likes, and there`s no tax on it. So he can have political action groups, which he`s not supposed to have but does have. So you have all that religious money, and then you have the enormous cost of campaigning, which means every politician who wants to buy TV time has got to sell his ass to somebody. And corporate America is ready to buy.



CP: Likewise, there`s a great tendency among his detractors to call Bush stupid. You`ve called him "dumb," albeit not as dumb as his dad. But I`m recalling what you wrote about Ronald Reagan years ago in your review of the Ronnie Leamer book about him: that no one who`s stupid aces every career test he faces. The same is clearly not true of George W. Bush, who had failed in a lot of things before he entered politics. But he hasn`t failed in politics. Do you think Bush possesses a kind of intelligence akin to Reagan`s in that regard, or is that giving him too much credit? How do you think his mind works?

Vidal: I should think very oddly. He`s dyslexic, which means--it`s a problem of incoherence. I have some dyslexia in my family, and they can be reasonably intelligent about most things, but they have problems with words, the structure of language. Not really getting it. There`s an inability to study anything. Sometimes they also have an attention deficiency and so on.

I would say that he is undisturbed by these things. His is a mind totally lacking in culture of any kind. I`m not talking about highbrow culture, just knowledge of the American past, and our institutions. He`s got rid of due process of law, which is what the United States is based upon. Once you can send somebody off and put them in the brig of a ship in Charleston Harbor and hold them as long as you like uncharged, you have destroyed the United States and its Constitution. He has done those things.



CP: How did so many Americans come to embrace and even celebrate these bullying, anti-democratic displays of authoritarian, censorial governance? There`s a palpable sense of mean- spiritedness about a good deal of public sentiment, it seems.

Vidal: I wouldn`t call it the public. There are groups that rather like it. And these are the same groups that don`t like black people, gay people, Jews, or this or that. You always have that disaffected minority that you can play to. And it helps you in states with small populations. If you get eight of those states, you don`t get much of a popular vote, but you can get the Electoral College--a device that our founders made to make sure we never had a democratic government. In other words, I don`t blame the public. He`s not popular. I`ve just been reading a report on Conyers`s trip to Ohio with his subcommittee`s experts. Ohio was stolen. The Republican Congress will never have a hearing on it. But I think attempts are being made to publish the details of what was done there, and elsewhere too in America.

In other words, I put the case that Bush was never elected--not in 2000, and not in 2004. This is a new game in the world. Through the magic of electronic voting, particularly through Mr. Diebold and friends, you can take a non-president and make him president. But how to keep the people, including the opposition who should know better, so silent, this introduces us to a vast landscape of corruption which I dare not enter.



CP: I saw a recent CIA report that referred to the United States as a "declining superpower." To your knowledge, has the government ever said so before?

Vidal: Well, their style is hortatory and alarmist. And I think they say we`re declining every day and every minute. We must do this, we must overthrow this government, we must do that, stop China. Why not nuke China? [The American right] was all set to do that at one point, I remember. William F. Buckley Jr. was in favor of a unilateral strike at their nuclear capacity. A whole bunch of people, moderately respectable, were in favor of that. It all comes from propaganda. It all comes from knowing how to use the media to your own ends, and keep the people frightened.

It was very striking--before the inauguration, CNN showed a bunch of inaugural addresses starting with Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a master politician. What theme does he hit first? "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Well, that`s it. He intuited it, having followed the Nazis and knowing how Hitler was putting together his act, which was creating fear in the Germans of everybody else so he could mobilize them and make the SS. Roosevelt was saying that it was this unnameable fear that we had to watch out for. Then we skip over to Harry Truman, a real dunce, but there was a genius behind him in Dean Acheson. We jump over to him, and he is declaring war on communism, all over the world. They`re on the march! Wherever you look, there they are, and we must be on our guard!

He instituted loyalty oaths for everybody--for janitors in high schools as well as members of the cabinet. Unthinkable, the distance from Roosevelt to his admittedly despised successor. We`ve gone from, we must not succumb to fear itself, to the next one saying, oh, there`s so much to be afraid of! We must arm! We must militarize America and its economy, which he did.



CP: One theory about the reason the US invaded Iraq concerns currency--the fear that European deals for Iraqi oil might lead to oil`s being denominated in euros rather than dollars. Do you think that notion holds any water?

Vidal: I do. Perhaps more oil than water, but yes, that`s what it`s about--the terror that Europe...Europe, after all, is more populous than the United States, better educated, better quality of life for most of its citizens. And it has actually achieved, here and there, a civilization, which we haven`t. There`s a lot of nasty response on the part of those Americans who are eager for more oil, more money, more this, more that, to put Europe down, to regard Europe as a rival and perhaps as an enemy. It was America that saw to it that we got a weak dollar, though. The Europeans had nothing to do with it. In fact they were rather appalled, because they own an awful lot of treasury bonds that will be worthless one day.

So yes, it was a power struggle. Ultimately the whole thing is about oil. We should be looking to hydrogen, or whatever is the latest replacement for fossil fuels. All the money we put into these wars in the Middle East, we should have put into that. Then we wouldn`t be so desperate at the thought that in 2020, or in 2201 or whenever, there will be no more oil.



CP: Talk a little more about public education`s decay in the current scene. Much of the Bush administration`s spending on No Child Left Behind is earmarked for private corporate tutors.

Vidal: I don`t think Bush himself is particularly relevant to any of this, since he avoided education entirely throughout his life. Which gives him a sort of purity. He was a cheerleader at Andover, where he learned many skills that have been very useful to him since.

The educational system was pretty good once. I never went to a public school, and the private schools here are generally good, though we are also better indoctrinated than the public schools. It certainly got bad around the `50s. Just as we became a global empire, the first thing I was struck by was that they stopped teaching geography in public schools. Now here we are a global power, and nobody knows where anything is. I loved geography when I was a kid. It`s really the way to get to know the world. The success of Franklin Roosevelt was that he was a great philatelist. He collected stamps, and he knew where all the countries were and who lived in them. Now we have people who don`t know where anything is. I remember a speech Bush gave in which he was reaching out not only to the "Torks" but the "Grecians" at some point. We live in total confusion time.

There is also something in the water--let us hope it was put there by the enemy--that has made Americans contemptuous of intelligence whenever they recognize it, which is not very often. And a hatred of learning, which you don`t find in any other country. There is not one hamlet in Italy in which you can fail to find kids desperate to learn. Yes, there are areas where they might be desperate to become members of the Mafia, but that`s because they don`t have any money. And a country like Italy is not rich, not as rich as we are. But there isn`t a kid in Italy who can`t quote Dante. There`s no one in America now who knows who Shakespeare is, because they stopped teaching him in high schools.

So we are out of it. And no attempt is being made to put us back into it.



CP: When does this current bout of foreign adventurism end? You`ve said in other interviews that it ends with us going broke. Can you explain?

Vidal: I haven`t changed my line. We don`t have the money for these adventures. We don`t even have the money to operate those prisons which are the delight of Iraq. All we were doing at Abu Ghraib was export what we do to our own people in our own prisons, you know. We are sharing with the rest of the world penology-- in every sense. No, there isn`t the money to do it. And the few who are making most of the money are probably investing it elsewhere, preparing islands for themselves to escape to. And then their followers, who are not very many, will be experiencing rapture. They won`t be here.



CP: Is there any winning back some semblance of the older republic at this point?

Vidal: You have to have people who want it, and I can`t find many people who do.



CP: What can average people do about this state of affairs at present, if anything?

Vidal: Well, some of the internet has been very useful. Radio has been very useful. There are means of getting things across. It`s why I write those little books of mine, the pamphlets as I call them. Our first form of politics was pamphleteering in the 18th century. They serve a purpose--more pamphlets, more readers, more this, more that. There`s a battle to do an interesting kind of guide to the American centuries, and how we got where we are and how we can get out of it. I`m engaged with some people working on that. Further, deponent sayeth not.

· · Vol 26 · Issue 1268 · PUBLISHED 3/23/2005
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/26/1268/article13085.asp
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Hijacking Democracy in Iraq
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/21566

By Scott Ritter

03/23/05 "AlterNet" - - The official results of the Jan. 30, 2005 elections are in. The Shi`a emerged as the big winners, grabbing 48 percent of the vote, followed by the Kurds who garnered 26 percent, and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi`s coalition party netting a paltry 13 percent. Behind the scenes political infighting rages as the victorious political parties vie to get their candidates positioned in the new government. On the surface, this looks like the sometimes messy aftermath of democracy; squabbling, rhetoric, and posturing. The Iraqi elections have been embraced almost universally as a great victory for the forces of democracy, not only in Iraq, but throughout the entire Middle East. The fact, however, is that the Iraqi elections weren`t about the free election of a government reflecting the will of the Iraqi people, but the carefully engineered selection of a government that would behave in a manner dictated by the United States. In Iraq, democracy was hijacked by the Americans.

Elections have been used in the past to cover up inherently non-democratic processes. Stalin had elections, as did Hitler. So did Saddam Hussein. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Ba`athist Iraq were not burgeoning democracies, but totalitarian dictatorships. The point here is that elections don`t bring democracy. The roots of any democracy lie in a people united in their desire to govern in accordance with a rule of law that guarantees the rights of all. Such people then create conditions in which elections can certify their desire by selecting those who will govern. This produces democracy. What occurred in Iraq on Jan. 30, 2005 was anything but such an expression of Iraqi national unity.

The Iraqi election was an American-brokered event: the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority set the terms of the election, and its date (not sooner than Dec. 31, 2004, but no later than Jan. 30, 2005) in its `Law number 92,` signed into effect by former CPA chief Paul Bremer on May 31, 2004. The U.S. then had this act certified a week later by the Security Council of the United Nations, which passed resolution 1546, a Chapter VII resolution which carries the weight of international law and which endorsed the U.S.-dictated timetable for elections.

`Law number 92` is part of a larger body of Iraqi law, known as the `Transitional Administrative Law`, or TAL. The TAL was approved by the Interim Iraqi Governing Council on March 1, 2004; on June 1, the IIGC voted on an Annex to the TAL which certified as law all of the CPA`s laws, regulations, orders and directives, regardless of the TAL. Iraq today is still governed under these conditions, which provide the U.S. occupiers in Iraq de facto control over what happens behind the scenes in the Iraqi Government. Iraq`s `democratic` elections were held under these conditions.

The main objective of the Iraqi election was to elect a national assembly which would then draft a new constitution by August 2005. This new constitution will be brought up to the national assembly for vote on Oct. 15, 2005. If the constitution is adopted, the new parliamentary elections would be held in December 2005 based on this constitution. If the constitution is rejected, then there will be a new national assembly election (a repeat performance of the Jan. 30 vote), and Iraqis will have another year to sort out their constitutional crisis.

Iraq`s future rests on this issue of a new constitution. And herein lies the rub. It is the fervent wish of the Bush administration, and its ally, interim Prime Minister Alawi, that the new National Assembly rubber stamp the interim constitution that is already in place. This constitution contains language which precludes Iraq from becoming an Islamic Republic like Iran, where religious law (i.e., the Shar`ia), versus secular law, reigns supreme. Iraq`s Shi`a majority have rejected this notion, and as such will not support the constitution as it currently exists.

The interim Iraqi constitution was dead on arrival. The Bush administration just hasn`t accepted this fact. It had no chance of survival had the Shi`a won an outright majority of the vote in the Iraqi election. `If it [i.e., the percentage of Shi`a votes] had been higher, the [Shi`a] slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation,` a senior U.S. State Department official said, once the official Iraqi election results were announced on Feb. 14. The problem is, there is good reason to believe that the percentage of votes for the Shi`a was higher – much higher. Well-placed sources in Iraq who were in a position to know have told me that the actual Shi`a vote was 56 percent. American intervention, in the form of a `secret vote count` conducted behind closed doors and away from public scrutiny, produced the Feb. 14 result.

The lowering of the Shi`a vote re-engineered the post-election political landscape in Iraq dramatically. The goal of the U.S., in doing this, is either to guarantee the adoption of the U.S.-drafted interim constitution, or make sure that there are not enough votes to adopt any Shi`a re-write. If the U.S.-drafted Iraqi constitution prevails, the Bush administration would be comfortable with the secular nature of any Iraqi government it produces. If it fails, then the Bush administration would much rather continue to occupy Iraq under the current U.S.-written laws, than allow for the creation of a pro-Iranian theocracy. In any event, the Shi`a stand to lose.

Whether this re-engineering will succeed in the long run has yet to be seen. What is clear, however, is that many senior Shi`a know the real results that occurred on Jan. 30, and will not walk away from what they believe is their rightful destiny when it comes to governing of Iraq: a Shi`a controlled state, operating in accordance with Shar`ia law.

The post-election `cooking` of the results in Iraq all but guarantees that the Shi`a of Iraq will rally together to secure that which they believe is rightfully theirs. This journey of `historical self-realization` may very well ignite the kind of violent backlash among the Shi`a majority in Iraq that the U.S. has avoided to date. It could also complicate whatever strategies the Bush administration may be trying to implement regarding Iraq`s neighbor to the east, Iran. But in any case, the American `cooking` of the Iraqi election is, in the end, a defeat for democracy and the potential of democracy to effect real and meaningful change in the Middle East. The sad fact is that it is not so much that the people of the Middle East are incapable of democracy, but rather the United States is incapable of allowing genuine democracy to exist in the Middle East.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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RUMSFELD WARNS IRAQ NOT TO DO ANYTHING STUPID WITHOUT CALLING HIM FIRST
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1093&srch=

Scolds Iraqis in Televised Tongue-lashing

In a televised interview today, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that Iraq’s nascent democracy was entering “a crucial stage” and warned the Iraqi people, “Don’t do anything stupid without calling me first.”

Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing on the Fox News Channel, looked directly into the camera to address the Iraqi people in a surprisingly stern tone of voice: “Listen up, you Iraqis, because I am only going to say this once.”

The Defense Secretary then warned the Iraqi people against any “horsing around” or “monkey business” when it comes to choosing members of their first democratic government.

“I have personally busted my hump to bring democracy to that infernal country of yours and I don’t want to see you putting any Tom, Dick or Harry in charge,” he said.

Leaving little doubt that he intended to back up his words with action, Mr. Rumsfeld added, “I gave democracy to you and I can take it away – and don’t think I wouldn’t dare.”

He then recited his home phone number for Iraqis to call “before you do anything stupid,” adding, “If I’m not there, leave a message with Mrs. Rumsfeld.”

Turning to other matters, Rumsfeld had harsh words for the nation of Turkey, who in March of 2003 refused to let the U.S. invade Iraq from the north: “They don’t call your country ‘Jive-ass Turkey’ for nothing.”

Elsewhere, the National Rifle Association criticized the practice of allowing terrorists to buy guns at gun shows, arguing that terrorists should “go get their own gun shows.”

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March 24, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
George W. to George W.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/opinion/24friedman.html

Of all the stories about the abuse of prisoners of war by American soldiers and C.I.A. agents, surely none was more troubling and important than the March 16 report by my Times colleagues Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt that at least 26 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 - in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide.

You have to stop and think about this: We killed 26 of our prisoners of war. In 18 cases, people have been recommended for prosecution or action by their supervising agencies, and eight other cases are still under investigation. That is simply appalling. Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, reported Jehl and Schmitt - "showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison`s night shift."

Yes, I know war is hell and ugliness abounds in every corner. I also understand that in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, we are up against a vicious enemy, which, if it had the power, would do great harm to our country. You do not deal with such people with kid gloves. But killing prisoners of war, presumably in the act of torture, is an inexcusable outrage. The fact that Congress has just shrugged this off, and no senior official or officer has been fired, is a travesty. This administration is for "ownership" of everything except responsibility.

President Bush just appointed Karen Hughes, his former media adviser, to head up yet another U.S. campaign to improve America`s image in the Arab world. I have a suggestion: Just find out who were the cabinet, C.I.A. and military officers on whose watch these 26 homicides occurred and fire them. That will do more to improve America`s image in the Arab-Muslim world than any ad campaign, which will be useless if this sort of prisoner abuse is shrugged off. Republicans in Congress went into overdrive to protect the sanctity of Terri Schiavo`s life. But they were mute when it came to the sanctity of life for prisoners in our custody. Such hypocrisy is not going to win any P.R. battles.

By coincidence, while following this prisoner abuse story, I`ve been reading "Washington`s Crossing," the outstanding book by the Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer about how George Washington and his troops rescued the American Revolution after British forces and German Hessian mercenaries had routed them in the early battles around New Jersey.

What is particularly moving is one of Mr. Fischer`s concluding sections, "An American Way of War," in which he contrasts how Washington dealt with prisoners of war with how the British and Hessian forces did: "According to the `the laws` of European war, quarter was the privilege of being allowed to surrender and to become a prisoner. By custom and tradition, soldiers in Europe believed that they had a right to extend quarter or deny it. ... In these `laws of war,` no captive had an inalienable right to be taken prisoner, or even to life itself."

American attitudes were very different. "With some exceptions, American leaders believed that quarter should be extended to all combatants as a matter of right. ... Americans were outraged when quarter was denied to their soldiers." In one egregious incident, at the battle at Drake`s Farm, British troops murdered all seven of Washington`s soldiers who had surrendered, crushing their brains with muskets.

"The Americans recovered the mutilated corpses and were shocked," wrote Mr. Fischer. The British commander simply denied responsibility. "The words of the British commander, as much as the acts of his men," wrote Mr. Fischer, "reinforced the American resolve to run their own war in a different spirit. ... Washington ordered that Hessian captives would be treated as human beings with the same rights of humanity for which Americans were striving. The Hessians ... were amazed to be treated with decency and even kindness. At first they could not understand it." The same policy was extended to British prisoners.

In concluding his book, Mr. Fischer wrote lines that President Bush would do well to ponder: George Washington and the American soldiers and civilians fighting alongside him in the New Jersey campaign not only reversed the momentum of a bitter war, but they did so by choosing "a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution. They set a high example, and we have much to learn from them."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 24, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
DeLay, Deny and Demagogue
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/opinion/24dowd.html

Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy.

Are the Republicans so obsessed with maintaining control over all branches of government, and are the Democrats so emasculated about not having any power, that they are willing to turn the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the church?

The more dogma-driven activists, self-perpetuating pols and ratings-crazed broadcast media prattle about "faith," the less we honor the credo that a person`s relationship with God should remain a private matter.

As the Bush White House desperately maneuvers in Iraq to prevent the new government from being run according to the dictates of religious fundamentalists, it desperately maneuvers here to pander to religious fundamentalists who want to dictate how the government should be run.

Maybe President Bush should spend less time preaching about spreading democracy around the world and more time worrying about our deteriorating democracy.

Even some Republicans seemed appalled at this latest illustration of Nietzsche`s observation that "morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."

As Christopher Shays, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill to allow the Terri Schiavo case to be snatched from Florida state jurisdiction and moved to federal court, put it: "This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy. There are going to be repercussions from this vote."

A CBS News poll yesterday found that 82 percent of the public was opposed to Congress and the president intervening in this case; 74 percent thought it was all about politics.

The president, who couldn`t be dragged outdoors to talk about the more than a hundred thousand people who died in the horrific tsunami, was willing to be dragged out of bed to sign a bill about one woman his base had fixated on. But with the new polls, the White House seemed to shrink back a bit.

The scene on Capitol Hill this past week has been almost as absurdly macabre as the movie "Weekend at Bernie`s," with Tom DeLay and Bill Frist propping up between them this poor woman in a vegetative state to indulge their own political agendas. Mr. DeLay, the poster child for ethical abuse, wanted to show that he is still a favorite of conservatives. Dr. Frist thinks he can ace out Jeb Bush to be 44, even though he has become a laughingstock by trying to rediagnose Ms. Schiavo`s condition by video.

As one disgusted Times reader suggested in an e-mail: "Americans ought to send Bill Frist their requests: `Dear Dr. Frist: Please watch the enclosed video and tell us if that mole on my mother`s cheek is cancer. Does she need surgery?`"

Jeb, keeping up with the `08 competition, vainly tried to get Florida to declare Ms. Schiavo a ward of the state.

Republicans easily abandon their cherished principles of individual privacy and states rights when their personal ambitions come into play. The first time they snatched a case out of a Florida state court to give to a federal court, it was Bush v. Gore. This time, it`s Bush v. Constitution.

While Senate Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who are trying to curry favor with red staters, meekly allowed the shameful legislation to be enacted, at least some Floridian House members decided to put up a fight, though they knew they couldn`t win.

The president and his ideological partners don`t believe in separation of powers. They just believe in their own power. First they tried to circumvent the Florida courts; now they`re trying to pack the federal bench with conservatives and even blow up the filibuster rule. But they may yet learn a lesson on checks and balances, as the federal courts rebuffed them in the Schiavo case.

Mr. DeLay moved yesterday to file a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court asking that Ms. Schiavo`s feeding tube be restored while the federal court is deciding what to do. But as he exploits this one sad case, Mr. DeLay has voted to slash Medicaid by $15 billion, denying money to care for poor people in nursing homes, some on feeding tubes.

Mr. DeLay made his personal stake clear at a conference last Friday organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. He said that God had brought Terri Schiavo`s struggle to the forefront "to help elevate the visibility of what`s going on in America." He defined that as "attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others."

So it`s not about her crisis at all. It`s about his crisis.

E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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A confederacy of shamans

The Republicans have cynical motives for trying to stop Terri Schiavo being taken off life support
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday March 24, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1444470,00.ht…

Guardian
The politics of piety were transparently masked by Republicans attempting to make capital over the fate of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman who has been locked in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years and whose feeding tube was ordered to be removed by a Florida state judge at the request of her husband.

At last, the case that had been considered by 19 judges in seven courts and appealed to the supreme court three times, which refused to hear it, seemed resolved. But Republican congressional leaders and President George Bush seized upon the court ruling as the moment for "a great political issue", as a memo circulated among Senate Republicans put it. The Democrats, it declared, would find it "tough" and the conservative "pro-life base will be excited". The president, who had hesitated for three days before making a statement on the tsunami in December, rushed from his Texas ranch back to the White House to sign the legislation.

The Schiavo case is unique among all medical cases, including 35,000 other people in persistent vegetative states. It is the only one in which the parents, who are not legal custodians, have been granted by an act of Congress and the president a federal court review of state court rulings. Wresting jurisdiction from the state judiciary is an unprecedented usurpation, a travesty of the federal system, displacing the constitution with an ill-defined faith-based "culture of life", enthroning by edict theology above the law.

In 1999, as governor of Texas, Bush signed a state law permitting hospitals to cease artificial life support when doctors decide reasonable hope is gone, even if the patient`s family objects. Now, two months into his second term as president, his major domestic initiative to privatise social security is doomed, his budget dead on arrival and his poll ratings down to 45% approval, his low point.

His brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, has campaigned for years on the Schiavo holy crusade and has hired a prominent religious rightwing leader as the lawyer to represent the state in the case. In their legal battle the agonised Schiavo parents have made themselves financial dependents of two conservative groups, one anti-abortion, the other whose stated mission is to "confront and challenge the radical legal agenda advocating homosexual behaviour".

The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, is a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. For him, the Schiavo case is the beginning of the struggle for Bush`s succession. A heart surgeon before his entry into politics, the nameplate on the front door to his Capitol Hill office reads "William H Frist, MD", and he signs correspondence "Bill Frist, MD".

Amid the debate, after watching snatches of video tape of Schiavo, he proclaimed a diagnosis that she was not vegetative, contrary to the neurologists who have personally examined her. Several months ago, in a national TV interview on ABC, Frist refused to acknowledge that saliva and tears cannot transmit Aids-HIV, one of the shibboleths of the religious right.

The house majority leader, Tom DeLay of Texas - thrice rebuked by the house ethics committee, who has paralysed the committee in order that it not consider new, more serious charges against him, whose closest aides are on trial in Texas for corruption, and who has taken measures to try to protect his power from being stripped if he is indicted - explained the Schiavo case as divinely inspired to rescue conservatives from martyrdom at a meeting of a rightwing group. "One thing God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo," said DeLay. "This is exactly the issue that`s going on in America, the attacks on the conservative movement against me and many others... This is a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in... and we have to fight back." Like Frist, DeLay plays doctor. "She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts," he declared.

"Come down, President Bush," said the anguished husband, Michael Schiavo. "Come talk to me. Meet my wife. Talk to my wife and see if you get an answer. Ask her to lift her arm to shake your hand. She won`t do it."

Terri Schiavo cannot speak or gesture, but to true believers, even though she is silent, she is making sounds only they can hear. They see what they want in order to believe, and they believe in order to see. For the first time public policy in the US is being made on the basis of pitting invisible signs versus science.

As in tribal cultures, a confederacy of shamans - Bush, Frist and DeLay - have appeared to conduct rites of necrophiliac spiritualism. Only the shamans can interpret for the dying and control their spirits hovering between heaven and earth. The public opinion polls show overwhelming disapproval of the Republican position. But these polls are just so much social science. In this operation, for the tribe, there is no way of proving failure.

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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The Iraq war revives long-suppressed ethical questions among many Vietnam-era `expats` who fled the U.S. and still live up north.
By Tomas Alex Tizon
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-nelson2…
COLUMN ONE
In Canada, Flashback to the `70s" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-nelson2…
COLUMN ONE
In Canada, Flashback to the `70s

March 24, 2005

NELSON, Canada — At some point early in his new life in Canada, Don Gayton stopped being "Don Gayton the draft dodger" and became simply Don Gayton. It was no magical moment, no grand transfiguration.

It was, he says, "a matter of moving on."

Life had turned tumultuous for him in the early 1970s. Gayton, who spent his childhood in Los Angeles, had received a draft notice and been denied conscientious objector status. He and his wife packed up their two kids and drove north in a `53 Chevy pickup, crossed the border near this funky town in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, and never looked back.

Like so many of the estimated 50,000 American war resisters — draft dodgers, military deserters, pacifists — who migrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, Gayton worked hard to blend in in his new country and that meant, in part, cutting loose from his old life and identity as a Yankee.

Border crossings in those years became points of dispersal: War resisters arrived in steady streams, but on crossing the line, scattered into their own separate lives.

Once settled, Gayton didn`t seek out other draft dodgers, and they didn`t seek him out.

Over three decades, Gayton became a cowboy, an ecologist, a stalwart husband and busy father of five. He became, he says, a super patriot of Canada while diligently following the news south of the border.

Then in March 2003, a lifetime removed from the trauma of the Vietnam War, the United States invaded Iraq, and something in him revived.

"It reawakened some very intense emotions," he said. "All those moral and ethical issues, about war, about patriotism — all those questions: `Did I do the right thing?` `Am I a coward?` They weren`t on the radar for a long time. They`re back on the radar."

Gayton reached out to other American expatriates. It wasn`t difficult. He`d been living around them for decades, even chatting with them at the post office or supermarket.

They knew one another as "expats" but were not interested in delving far into personal histories. They spoke as small-town neighbors, as ruralites, as Canadians.

But the conflict in Iraq tapped a common vein. Their "old country" was at war again, and the arguments over America`s actions, to them, paralleled the debates over Vietnam. Their stories as war resisters became relevant again.

Casual encounters in the street became intense reminiscences. Phone numbers and e-mail addresses were exchanged. Some expatriates began meeting regularly.

Gayton didn`t know it, but the same thing was happening in other parts of the country. The Iraq war was having a uniting, galvanizing effect. War resisters throughout Canada seemed to be networking as never before, rising up to oppose a different war, distant and yet strangely familiar to them.

"The war in Iraq disgusts me," says Jeff Mock, a draft dodger from Long Island, now a tofu-maker in Nelson. His sentiments echo those of many expatriates. "The United States government is doing it again, being the bully. That`s why I left."

In Toronto, expatriates started an organization to help gain refugee status for U.S. soldiers opposed to the Iraq war. In Vancouver, filmmakers began documenting the lives of Vietnam draft dodgers and military deserters who settled in the area.

In Nelson, organizers proposed a monument to American draft dodgers and their Canadian allies. Town leaders, at first supportive, killed the project after American veterans threatened an economic boycott. But the same organizers, fired up by the controversy, are planning the first-ever Canadawide gathering of American war resisters. "Our Way Home" is scheduled in Nelson for the summer of 2006.

Most of the town seems open to the event, says Mayor Dave Elliott, who points out that Nelson has long been a haven for political exiles.

Native Americans fled here in the 19th century; then came Christians exiled from Russia in the early 20th century and Quakers in the 1950s. Some of the Americans have been here so long that they are considered old-timers in town.

John Hagan, a sociology professor at Northwestern University and the University of Toronto, plans to attend the resisters` gathering. A draft dodger who migrated to Canada in 1969, Hagan wrote "Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada" (Harvard, 2001). Hagan said the Iraq war coincided with a particular life phase among war resisters who are now in their 50s and 60s.

When they were young, the focus was on starting new lives and forging new identities. "Now, in late middle age, we`re more into reviewing our lives" and more able and willing to talk about it with others, Hagan said. For many, the Iraq war reaffirms their decision to leave the United States.

Hagan estimates that roughly half of those who fled to Canada decided to stay — even after President Carter granted draft dodgers amnesty in 1977. Of those who stayed, about 40% — 10,000 or so — settled in British Columbia, many in the Kootenay region that makes up the southeast corner of the province, just north of the Washington-Idaho border.

At the heart of the region, like a mossy pearl wedged between snow-capped mountains, sits Nelson.



For a lot of war resisters who ended up in nearby farms and valleys, Nelson was the place to buy supplies, do laundry, grab a couple of bottles of wine and a bag of organically grown coffee beans. Today it`s a place where old hippies rub elbows with clean-cut urban refugees here for the mountains, and some, for the counterculture.

The town`s main drag, Baker Street, looks like a miniature version of Berkeley`s Telegraph Avenue, with hole-in-the-wall coffee shops and bookstores, and a constant buzz of people of every color and nationality, more than a few sporting tattoos and dreadlocks and tattered fatigues from the local Salvation Army.

A large segment of the population (officially 9,300) is a shaggy, eclectic, peace-loving, pot-smoking lot. Marijuana is freely discussed, grown, smoked and distributed, with police mostly turning a blind eye. Even mainstream travel guides comment on the high quality — and quantity — of the region`s pot.

On the sidewalk patio of a popular coffee shop, Gayton, 58, sips from a cup as he tells his story. He is tall and big-boned, with glasses and gray hair. He has a mountain man`s full beard.

His decision to move to Canada, he says, alienated his father, a Boeing engineer who worked on the development of the B-29 bomber. "We didn`t speak for 10 years," Gayton says, and their bond was never the same after that decade. "It was a real break, one of my biggest regrets."

In retrospect, Gayton says, he can almost understand why he and his father saw things so differently: Fate had given them opposite circumstances.

"He and his generation lived through the ultimate just war, World War II," Gayton says. "Vietnam was the ultimate unjust war."

Within 10 minutes, Gayton spots or greets four expatriates passing by or getting coffee.

"Too many hippies here," one jokes to Gayton as he passes.

Another stops to chat. Ernest Hekkanen, 57, a writer and painter, fled Seattle and the draft in 1969. He and Gayton didn`t strike up a friendship until after the U.S. invaded Iraq, introduced by a mutual peace-activist friend.

Both are passionately opposed to the war, and both are in contact with organizers of Our Way Home.

Nobody knows how many war resisters still live in the region, but most agree there`s a high concentration here. They seem to be everywhere.

Last fall, just before the U.S. presidential election, residents organized a coffeehouse gathering to discuss and poke fun at their neighbors to the south. Skits were performed, antiwar songs played, stories of harrowing border crossings retold.

More than 80 people attended, three-quarters of them "old Yanks," said Lane Haywood, herself an old Yank. Haywood, from San Marino, came to Canada in 1968 to join her future husband, a draft dodger from Arcadia.

Many of the migrants who settled here were Californians, and Michael Pratt, 72, recalls how the migration began. Pratt was living in Vancouver, Canada, during the early part of the Vietnam War and became part of the underground railroad of peace activists who smuggled draft dodgers across the border and helped them get settled. Pratt says he and his wife aided about 20 Americans in the 1960s.

One was a young man from Riverside named Timmy Sullivan. In 1967, Sullivan wanted to settle north, but the only free ride he could find was headed east. So east he went for about 400 miles, stopping in the Slocan Valley, near Nelson.

There, he was taken in by members of a Christian sect from Russia called the Doukhobors, who had settled the valley in the early 1900s. They were political exiles — forced out of Russia for refusing to fight in the czar`s wars. Their pacifist views and communal ways appealed to Sullivan. According to Pratt, Sullivan sent word back home that he had "found a cool place to live."

Three friends from Riverside soon joined him, and after that, a steady stream came from California, and then from all along the West Coast. Sullivan stayed there until he died of throat cancer three years ago.

Pratt himself moved to the Slocan Valley in 1969, buying a 39-acre farm for $5,000. Cheap land, gorgeous mountain vistas and a culture of pacifism and laid-back living all made the place a Shangri-La for counterculture types and people who wanted a simpler life connected to the land.

By the mid-1970s, thousands of American war resisters settled in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. Thousands more went north to the Sunshine Coast and east to the Kootenay region. Pratt said hundreds made their way to the Nelson area.

"So that`s the answer to `Why Nelson?` " Pratt says. "It was by accident. Pure chance."



Just a block from where Gayton and Hekkanen chat outside the coffee shop, Isaac Romano strolls down Baker Street, hobnobbing with other locals.

Romano, 56, came to Nelson from Seattle in 2001, drawn here by a woman. The woman left and Romano stayed. It was his kind of place. A family counselor and lifelong peace activist who got a military deferment during Vietnam, Romano says it broke his heart when U.S. forces invaded Iraq.

A few months after the invasion, Romano came up with the idea of building a bronze monument to honor Vietnam-era war resisters. It would be the sculpted figures of a man and woman greeted by a Canadian with outstretched arms. With supporters by his side, Romano held a news conference to announce it.

When news reached the United States, the 2-million-strong Veterans of Foreign Wars organization lobbied President Bush to persuade Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin to quash the project. There were calls to boycott Nelson, and the town`s official website was inundated by e-mails like this one from Charles A. Rahn of Jacksonville, Fla:

"The ones that want to build a war resister memorial, they should all be lined up and shot at sunrise."

Nelson officials, with prompting from the local chamber of commerce, pressured Romano to withdraw the idea. But the controversy drew attention to the Our Way Home gathering, when the monument was to be unveiled. The monument was dropped, but the gathering, Romano says, is gaining momentum.

"There could be hundreds, there could be thousands," said Gary Ockenden, a Canadian national board member of Amnesty International, who is one of the key planners.

Not all war resisters in Canada share the enthusiasm.

Lee Zaslofsky, 60, of Toronto, says he won`t attend. Zaslofsky deserted from the U.S. military in 1970 and is coordinator of the War Resisters Support Campaign, a group founded to help Iraq war deserters.

The organization is helping five American deserters who have openly sought refugee status in Canada. Zaslofsky says there are about 100 deserters from the Iraq war in the country who have not yet gone public.

One person who definitely plans on being in the Nelson area is Woody Carmack, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Maple Ridge, near Vancouver. He is president of a group called Vietnam Veterans in Canada. It is estimated that 10,000 to 40,000 Canadians enlisted in the U.S. military and fought in Vietnam.

Carmack has announced plans to hold a festival for Vietnam veterans in Nelson at the same time. That event has been named Firebase Canada 2006.

Gayton looks forward to Our Way Home. He doesn`t regret moving to Canada, but he still wonders about some things.

Last fall, he attended his 40-year high school reunion at Franklin High in Seattle. A number of his pals on the football team had gone to Vietnam; five didn`t return. Their faces were featured in a memorial. Gayton spent a long time looking at them. He asked himself whether his courage matched theirs.

At one point in the evening, one classmate who did return from Vietnam approached him. The two assessed each other guardedly.

"He said, `We did the right thing. And you did the right thing too,` " Gayton recalls. "That was huge for me."

A part of Gayton had waited more than 30 years to hear something like that.

They talked civilly and, in moments, almost intimately, two graying men with two divergent stories to tell, standing only a few feet apart.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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[urlIraqi Lullaby]http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/iraqi_lullaby.rm[/url]
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Vocals by Laura Bush and Mothers of America

Pictures provided by President G W. Bush

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IRAQ:
Govt Begins to Take Shape
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28000

Mohammed Amin Abdulqadir Close to two months after the announcement of election results, Shia and Kurd leaders say an agreement over the formation of a new government is imminent.

Agreement on a S hia-Kurd coalition is expected to be signed Saturday.

The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a Shia coalition backed by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is set to be the leading party in government with 146 seats in the 275-member Iraqi National Assembly.

The Kurdistan Alliance List (KAL) dominated by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) was placed second with 77 seats after the election Jan. 30. That makes Kurds essential to formation of a government, and put them in a strong bargaining position.

Kurd leaders have been negotiating hard on four major conditions for joining a government.

Prime among these is a guarantee of regional autonomy which would give them the right to administer their region without interference from Baghdad.

Kurds have asked also for settlement of the status of oil-rich Kirkuk in accordance with article 58 of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL). That law provides for the return of tens of thousands of Kirk and Turkomen refugees to Kirkuk. They had been ethnically cleansed from the city earlier by the Saddam Hussein regime. Kurd leaders want Kirkuk to be a part of Kurdistan, and within its regional government.

Kurdish leaders have also insisted on retaining their force of peshmegras - a traditional paramilitary force. And they have asked for a generous slice of the budget keeping in view their numbers (disputed, but estimated around 3.5 million in an Iraqi population of 24 million) and the destruction they suffered under Saddam.

Kurdish leaders indicated earlier this week that they could get most of what they had asked for. PUK leader Jalal Talabani and KDP leader Massoud Barzani said at a press conference that the Shia party is likely to accept their demand for settlement of Kirkuk in line with the TAL.

Agreement has also been reached, some leaders said, on integration of some of the peshmegra into the army and for the remaining to be placed under command of the Kurdistan regional government.

The Shia-Kurd deal is likely to include allocation of 17 percent of the budget for the Kurdish region.

Shia leaders had said earlier that no agreement could be reached in the face of such Kurdish demands. Kurd leaders insisted they had not asked for more than their due - and they seem to have prevailed.

”We have never been an obstacle in the way of forming a new government,” Talabani told journalists. ”We are rebuilding a new state of Iraq, and this is quite decisive and fateful for Kurds. We have only asked for the implementation of the decisions of the Iraqi opposition conferences in London and Salahaddin (near Arbil in Kurdistan) and the TAL.”

The last round of negotiations was held in Baghdad March 16, which was the 17th anniversary of the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabjah. More than 5,000 people were killed in that gas attack, and Kurds made a strong emotional plea for their rights during the round of talks on that anniversary day.

Kurd and Shia leaders have already reached agreement over distribution of top positions in government. The post of prime minister is expected to go to Ibrahim al-Jaffari from the UIA while Talabani takes the mostly ceremonial post of president.

Speakership of the assembly is likely to offered to leading Sunni representative Ghazi al-Yawar whose slate won five seats. Most Sunnis had boycotted the elections.

”Certainly there would be a Sunni participation in the future government and in writing the constitution,” Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the powerful Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq told the Sabah Arab daily published in Baghdad.

But despite the apparent gains many Kurds remain doubtful how far the Shia majority will keep its pledges to the Kurds.

”The prevalent mentality among the Shia parties does not want to recognise Kurd rights,” former judge Dr Mohammed Omar Mawloud, 53, told IPS. ”Arab religious and nationalist views have a great influence on UIA candidates not to accede to the demands of Kurds.”

Talks were continuing this week, with the inclusion also of Sunnis and representatives from the list of interim prime minister Ilyad Allawi (END/2005)



Copyright © 2005 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.

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AP Breaking News[urlSupreme Court Won`t Hear Schiavo Case]http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/03/24/national/w072914S58.DTL[/url]

March 27, 2005
FRANK RICH
The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/arts/27Rich.html?incamp=ar…

AS Congress and the president scurried to play God in the lives of Terri Schiavo and her family last weekend, ABC kicked off Holy Week with its perennial ritual: a rebroadcast of the 1956 Hollywood blockbuster, "The Ten Commandments."

Cecil B. DeMille`s epic is known for the parting of its Technicolor Red Sea, for the religiosity of its dialogue (Anne Baxter`s Nefretiri to Charlton Heston`s Moses: "You can worship any God you like as long as I can worship you.") and for a Golden Calf scene that DeMille himself described as "an orgy Sunday-school children can watch." But this year the lovable old war horse has a relevance that transcends camp. At a time when government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake America according to its dogma, the half-forgotten show business history of "The Ten Commandments" provides a telling back story.

As DeMille readied his costly Paramount production for release a half-century ago, he seized on an ingenious publicity scheme. In partnership with the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a nationwide association of civic-minded clubs founded by theater owners, he sponsored the construction of several thousand Ten Commandments monuments throughout the country to hype his product. The Pharaoh himself - that would be Yul Brynner - participated in the gala unveiling of the Milwaukee slab. Heston did the same in North Dakota. Bizarrely enough, all these years later, it is another of these DeMille-inspired granite monuments, on the grounds of the Texas Capitol in Austin, that is a focus of the Ten Commandments case that the United States Supreme Court heard this month.

We must wait for the court`s ruling on whether the relics of a Hollywood relic breach the separation of church and state. Either way, it`s clear that one principle, so firmly upheld by DeMille, has remained inviolate no matter what the courts have to say: American moguls, snake-oil salesmen and politicians looking to score riches or power will stop at little if they feel it is in their interests to exploit God to achieve those ends. While sometimes God racketeers are guilty of the relatively minor sin of bad taste - witness the crucifixion-nail jewelry licensed by Mel Gibson - sometimes we get the demagoguery of Father Coughlin or the big-time cons of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.

The religio-hucksterism surrounding the Schiavo case makes DeMille`s Hollywood crusades look like amateur night. This circus is the latest and most egregious in a series of cultural shocks that have followed Election Day 2004, when a fateful exit poll question on "moral values" ignited a take-no-prisoners political grab by moral zealots. During the commercial interruptions on "The Ten Commandments" last weekend, viewers could surf over to the cable news networks and find a Bible-thumping show as only Washington could conceive it. Congress was floating such scenarios as staging a meeting in Ms. Schiavo`s hospital room or, alternatively, subpoenaing her, her husband and her doctors to a hearing in Washington. All in the name of faith.

Like many Americans, I suspect, I tried to picture how I would have reacted if a bunch of smarmy, camera-seeking politicians came anywhere near a hospital room where my own relative was hooked up to life support. I imagined summoning the Clint Eastwood of "Dirty Harry," not "Million Dollar Baby." But before my fantasy could get very far, star politicians with the most to gain from playing the God card started hatching stunts whose extravagant shamelessness could upstage any humble reverie of my own.

Senator Bill Frist, the Harvard-educated heart surgeon with presidential aspirations, announced that watching videos of Ms. Schiavo had persuaded him that her doctors in Florida were mistaken about her vegetative state - a remarkable diagnosis given that he had not only failed to examine the patient ostensibly under his care but has no expertise in the medical specialty, neurology, relevant to her case. No less audacious was Tom DeLay, last seen on "60 Minutes" a few weeks ago deflecting Lesley Stahl`s questions about his proximity to allegedly criminal fund-raising by saying he would talk only about children stranded by the tsunami. Those kids were quickly forgotten as he hitched his own political rehabilitation to a brain-damaged patient`s feeding tube. Adopting a prayerful tone, the former exterminator from Sugar Land, Tex., took it upon himself to instruct "millions of people praying around the world this Palm Sunday weekend" to "not be afraid."

The president was not about to be outpreached by these saps. The same Mr. Bush who couldn`t be bothered to interrupt his vacation during the darkening summer of 2001, not even when he received a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," flew from his Crawford ranch to Washington to sign Congress`s Schiavo bill into law. The bill could have been flown to him in Texas, but his ceremonial arrival and departure by helicopter on the White House lawn allowed him to showboat as if he had just landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Within hours he turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a Social Security rally. "It is wise to always err on the side of life," he said, wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when he mocked the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again Texas death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker Carlson.

These theatrics were foretold. Culture is often a more reliable prophecy than religion of where the country is going, and our culture has been screaming its theocratic inclinations for months now. The anti-indecency campaign, already a roaring success, has just yielded a new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin J. Martin, who had been endorsed by the Parents Television Council and other avatars of the religious right. The push for the sanctity of marriage (or all marriages except Terri and Michael Schiavo`s) has led to the banishment of lesbian moms on public television. The Armageddon-fueled worldview of the "Left Behind" books extends its spell by the day, soon to surface in a new NBC prime-time mini-series, "Revelations," being sold with the slogan "The End is Near."

All this is happening while polls consistently show that at most a fifth of the country subscribes to the religious views of those in the Republican base whom even George Will, speaking last Sunday on ABC`s "This Week," acknowledged may be considered "extremists." In that famous Election Day exit poll, "moral values" voters amounted to only 22 percent. Similarly, an ABC News survey last weekend found that only 27 percent of Americans thought it was "appropriate" for Congress to "get involved" in the Schiavo case and only 16 percent said it would want to be kept alive in her condition. But a majority of American colonists didn`t believe in witches during the Salem trials either - any more than the Taliban reflected the views of a majority of Afghans. At a certain point - and we seem to be at that point - fear takes over, allowing a mob to bully the majority over the short term. (Of course, if you believe the end is near, there is no long term.)

That bullying, stoked by politicians in power, has become omnipresent, leading television stations to practice self-censorship and high school teachers to avoid mentioning "the E word," evolution, in their classrooms, lest they arouse fundamentalist rancor. The president is on record as saying that the jury is still out on evolution, so perhaps it`s no surprise that The Los Angeles Times has uncovered a three-year-old "religious rights" unit in the Justice Department that investigated a biology professor at Texas Tech because he refused to write letters of recommendation for students who do not accept evolution as "the central, unifying principle of biology." Cornelia Dean of The New York Times broke the story last weekend that some Imax theaters, even those in science centers, are now refusing to show documentaries like "Galápagos" or "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" because their references to Darwin and the Big Bang theory might antagonize some audiences. Soon such films will disappear along with biology textbooks that don`t give equal time to creationism.

James Cameron, producer of "Volcanoes" (and, more famously, the director of "Titanic"), called this development "obviously symptomatic of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science." Faith-based science has in turn begat faith-based medicine that impedes stem-cell research, not to mention faith-based abstinence-only health policy that impedes the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and diseases like AIDS.

Faith-based news is not far behind. Ashley Smith, the 26-year-old woman who was held hostage by Brian Nichols, the accused Atlanta courthouse killer, has been canonized by virtually every American news organization as God`s messenger because she inspired Mr. Nichols to surrender by talking about her faith and reading him a chapter from Rick Warren`s best seller, "The Purpose-Driven Life." But if she`s speaking for God, what does that make Dennis Rader, the church council president arrested in Wichita`s B.T.K. serial killer case? Was God instructing Terry Ratzmann, the devoted member of the Living Church of God who this month murdered his pastor, an elderly man, two teenagers and two others before killing himself at a weekly church service in Wisconsin? The religious elements of these stories, including the role played by the end-of-times fatalism of Mr. Ratzmann`s church, are left largely unexamined by the same news outlets that serve up Ashley Smith`s tale as an inspirational parable for profit.

Next to what`s happening now, official displays of DeMille`s old Ten Commandments monuments seem an innocuous encroachment of religion into public life. It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto last weekend, and what`s most scary about it is how little was heard from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy did not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to "try to undo the processes of a state court." But faced with McCarthyism in God`s name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding and stayed silent. Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines than poor Terri Schiavo`s brain.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Baghdad Burning
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_riverbendblog_a…
Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Two Years...
We`ve completed two years since the beginning of the war. These last two years have felt like two decades, but I can remember the war itself like it was yesterday.

The sky was lit with flashes of red and white and the ground rocked with explosions on March 21, 2003. The bombing had actually begun on the dawn of the 20th of March, but it got really heavy on the 21st. I remember being caught upstairs when the heavier bombing first began. I was struggling to drag down a heavy cotton mattress from my room for an aunt who was spending a couple of weeks with us and I suddenly heard a faraway ‘whiiiiiiiiiiiiiz’ that sounded like it might be getting closer.

I began to rush then- pulling and pushing at the heavy mattress; trying to half throw, half haul it down stairs. I got stuck halfway down the staircase and, at that point, the whizzing sound had grown so loud, it felt like it was coming out of my head. I shoved again at the mattress and called E.’s name to help lug the thing downstairs but E. was outside with my cousin, trying to see where the missiles were going. I repositioned and began to kick the heavy mattress, not caring how it got downstairs, just wanting to be on the ground floor when the missile hit.

The mattress finally budged and began to slip and slide down the remaining 10 steps, finally landing in a big pile at the end of the staircase. I followed it in a hurry, taking two steps at a time, expecting to feel a big “BOOM” at any moment. I tripped on the last step in the mad dash for the ground floor and ended up in a heap on the cotton mass on the ground. The explosion came the same moment- followed by a series of larger explosions that didn’t sound like the ordinary missiles we had been experiencing the last 40 hours or so.

The house was chaotic that moment. The parents were running, dad trying to locate his battery-powered radio and mother making sure the stove was turned off. She was also yelling orders over her shoulder, commanding us to go into the “safe room” we had specially decorated with duct tape and soft cushions, or ‘bomb-proofed’ as my cousin liked to say. The aunt that was staying with us was running around, shrilly trying to find her two granddaughters (who were already in the safe room with their mother). The cousin was rushing around turning off kerosene heaters and opening windows so that they wouldn’t shatter with the impact. E. hurried in from outside, trying to keep his expression casual under the paleness of his face.

Through all of this, the bombing was getting louder and more frequent- the earth rumbling and shuddering with every explosion. E. was saying something about the sky but the whooshing sound coming from above was so loud, we couldn’t hear what he was saying. “The sky is full of red and white lights…” He yelled, helping me rise shakily from the mattress. “You want to go outside and see?” I looked at him like he was crazy and made him help me drag the mattress into the living room. We rushed back into the safe room and the bombs were still falling loud and fast, one after the other. Sometimes they felt like they were falling right next door, and other times, it felt like they were falling a few blocks away. We knew they were further than that.

The faces in the safe room were white with tension. My cousin’s wife sat in the corner, a daughter on either side, her arms around their shoulders, murmuring prayers softly. My cousin was pacing in front of the safe room door, looking grim and my father was trying to find a decent radio station on the small AM/FM radio he carried around wherever he went. My aunt was hyperventilating at this point and my mother sat next to her, trying to distract her with the voice of the guy on the radio talking about the rain of bombs on Baghdad.

A seemingly endless 40 minutes later, there was a slight lull in the bombing- it seemed to have gotten further away. I took advantage of the relative calm and went to find the telephone. The house was cold because the windows were open to keep them from shattering. I reached for the telephone, fully expecting to find it dead but I was amazed to find a dial tone. I began dialing numbers- friends and relatives. We contacted an aunt and an uncle in other parts of Baghdad and the voices on the other end were shaky and wary. “Are you OK? Is everyone OK?” Was all I could ask on the phone. They were ok… but the bombing was heavy all over Baghdad. Shock and awe had begun.

Two years ago this week.

What followed was almost a month of heavy bombing. That chaotic night became the intro to endless chaotic days and long, sleepless nights. You get to a point during extended air-raids where you lose track of the days. You lose track of time. The week stops being Friday, Saturday, Sunday, etc. The days stop being about hours. You begin to measure time with the number of bombs that fell, the number of minutes the terror lasted and the number of times you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunfire and explosions.

We try to put it out of our heads, but it comes back anyway. We sit around sometimes, when there’s no electricity, or when we’re gathered for lunch or dinner and someone will say, “Remember two years ago when…” Remember when they bombed Mansur, a residential area… When they started burning the cars in the streets with Apaches… When they hit the airport with that bomb that lit up half of the city… When the American tanks started rolling into Baghdad…?

Remember when the fear was still fresh- and the terror was relatively new- and it was possible to be shocked and awed in Iraq?

- posted by river @ 5:36 PM

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March 25, 2005
Pentagon Sees Aggressive Antidrug Effort in Afghanistan
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/politics/25military.html

WASHINGTON, March 24 - The American military will significantly increase its role in halting the production and sale of poppies, opium and heroin in Afghanistan, responding to bumper harvests that far exceed even the most alarming predictions, according to senior Pentagon officials.

The military will support efforts by Afghan and American agencies, rather than lead them. It will move antidrug agents by helicopters and cargo planes and assist in planning missions and uncovering targets in a stepped-up war on the trade and the heavily armed forces that protect it.

Under previous guidelines, the American military in Afghanistan was held back from such missions. The 17,000 American troops were authorized to seize or destroy drugs and drug equipment only if they came across them in the course of traditional military activities to capture or kill insurgents and terrorists.

To support the new effort, the Defense Department is requesting $257 million, more than four times the amount last year, in emergency financing for military assistance to the counternarcotics campaign, in addition to the $15.4 million in the Pentagon`s budget for fiscal 2005, which began last Oct. 1.

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A sweep by Afghan policemen last May near Kandahar yielded bundles of poppy buds.
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The official modifications to the guidelines, now being finalized, are aimed at a poppy harvest that rose 64 percent in 2004, making Afghanistan the world`s leading source of heroin and opium.

There is wide consensus in the government and the military and among humanitarian organizations that the drug trade now threatens all of America`s goals in Afghanistan. Terrorists and insurgents there finance their activities largely with drug revenues, and the trade could undermine the nascent democratic government of President Hamid Karzai, who has called for a holy war against the opium trade.

The United States government has been repeatedly warned about the dangers of letting the Afghan poppy trade flourish, and has been criticized for failing to curb its growth after American forces toppled the Taliban government and routed Al Qaeda fighters in 2001. The Taliban, using often brutal tactics, had greatly suppressed poppy production.

In Congressional testimony last May, for example, Mark L. Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, a humanitarian organization operating in Afghanistan, called on the American-led coalition to "state clearly that one of its missions is counternarcotics and helping Afghan government agencies to destroy the Afghan drug-trafficking problem."

He urged the military to change its rules of engagement to make intervention easier, and also urged increased American financing for Afghan governors who pay local forces to eradicate the poppy crop.

Planners at the Pentagon and at the Central Command, which directs coalition military efforts in Afghanistan, acknowledge that the new tasks will force American commanders to accept some risk in the counterinsurgency effort as they divert personnel and equipment from combating terrorists and guerrillas. The next few weeks will be especially telling because insurgents are expected to mount a spring offensive.

For years the military has resisted having its troops take control of attempts to stem drug growth abroad. That resistance continues, and the question of whether to order the military to seek out and destroy laboratories and to hunt down major traffickers is expected to generate debate.

The Drug Enforcement Administration is already conducting missions with Afghan law enforcement officers. The State Department, in coordination with the government in Kabul, is in charge of American efforts to eradicate poppies and pay farmers to cultivate other crops. Britain has been assigned command of the coalition`s military counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan.

But Pentagon officials and American military officers express frustration at the results thus far.

"When we started developing this interagency plan, everybody knew the narcotics numbers would be bad," said one senior Pentagon official. But when the Central Intelligence Agency and the United Nations released reports on Afghan poppy cultivation for 2004 - the United Nations said Afghanistan was now responsible for 87 percent of the world`s illicit opium production - "they were beyond most people`s worst nightmares," the official added.

One military officer who has served in Afghanistan gave a more pointed assessment: "What will be history`s judgment on our nation-building mission in Afghanistan if the nation we leave behind is Colombia" of the 1990`s?

Up to now, the American military`s primary role in the effort involved training Afghan military and police officers, and supplying them with weapons and other equipment. But that has already begun to change in recent weeks.

On March 15 the American military in Afghanistan provided transportation and a security force for 6 D.E.A. officers and 36 Afghan narcotics policemen who raided three laboratories in Nangahar Province. One laboratory was described by officials as a primary source of Afghan opium.

Under the new mission guidance, the Defense Department will provide "transportation, planning assistance, intelligence, targeting packages" to the counternarcotics mission, said one senior Pentagon official.

American troops will also stand by for "in-extremis support," the official said, particularly to defend D.E.A. and Afghan officers who come under attack, and to provide emergency evacuation, the official said.

Pentagon and military officials caution that support for the coalition`s overall mission in Afghanistan could become unhinged if American forces are seen eradicating a crop that is the only livelihood for many Afghans, and they stress the importance of allowing Afghan forces to take the lead.

"We know the military is not the best tool for fighting drugs," said one senior Pentagon official. "We have the best troops in the world. We did in days what the Soviets could not do in a decade. But this is not about burning crops or destroying labs. Eventually it is about finding a better option for Afghans who have to feed their families."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Jeb bereitet sich auf die Zeit nach 2006 vor. Eine Wiederwahl in Florida ist nicht möglich, aber sonst ein Pöstchen dürfte für ihn da sein.
Er hat zwar gesagt, dass er sich 2008 nicht um die Präsidentschaft bewerben will, aber es gibt noch spätere Termine und er ist gerade 52 (February 11, 1953) geworden.
Jeb hat gute Verbindungen zur Bauwirtschaft.

March 25, 2005
In a Polarizing Case, Jeb Bush Cements His Political Stature
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, March 24 - Gov. Jeb Bush`s last-minute intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, even after the president had ended his own effort to keep her alive, may have so far failed in a legal sense, but it has cemented the religious and social conservative credentials of a man whose political pedigree is huge and whose political future remains a subject of intense speculation.

On one level, the Florida governor`s emergence as the most prominent politician still fighting, despite a string of court and legislative defeats, to have a feeding tube reinserted in Ms. Schiavo was very much in keeping with someone who has repeatedly declared a deep religious faith.

Several associates noted that he had been devoutly religious longer than President Bush, and even critics said his efforts - prodding the Florida Legislature and the courts and defying much of the electorate - were rooted in a deep-seated opposition to abortion and euthanasia rather than in political positioning.

Yet inevitably, the events of recent days have fed the mystique of Mr. Bush as a reluctant inheritor of perhaps America`s most famous dynasty since the Adams family two centuries ago.

He has assumed a very high profile in this polarizing case just as Republicans are contemplating the void that will be left when President Bush begins his walk off the stage in two years or so. At a time when many of the most frequently mentioned possibilities to lead the party are moderates like John McCain and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the governor now certainly has a place, if he wants it, as a prime contender in what is shaping up as a fight to represent a conservative wing that has proved increasingly dominant.

"He has strongly identified himself with the Christian conservative movement," said Matthew Corrigan, a political science professor at the University of North Florida. "If the Republican Party is looking for someone with good ties with the Christian conservative movement, he is the one who is going to have them."

Mr. Bush is barred by term limits from seeking a third term in 2006, and associates say they cannot imagine his running for a third term even if he were permitted to do so. Further, he has said he will not run for the presidency in 2008, an assertion that all but a few associates say they accept, though some Republicans think he may well run in 2012 or 2016.

"He`s got no - as far as I know, and I really believe him - he`s got no future political ambitions," said Cory Tilley, a longtime adviser. "And even if he did, he would be doing exactly what he is doing now. This is very clearly an issue that strikes at his core beliefs."

Susan McManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, said: "He is a very ideologically consistent person. He made no bones about that from the first day he ran for office. Those of us who watch him think this is Jeb, and how he truly believes and what he truly believes, and this may be one of those instances where he`s putting politics aside."

Still, several Republicans said that while Mr. Bush might be ignoring any political calculations in a case that has etched grief on his face, it would be foolish to underestimate the political skills of someone who has managed to win two elections to lead one of the nation`s most divided states. His decision to continue the Schiavo battle on his own, within hours after the White House had effectively withdrawn, followed a letter in which Bill Frist, the Senate Republican leader, urged that he make sure the Florida Legislature acted "expeditiously on Terri`s behalf."

Dr. Frist is arguably the other most prominent Republican seeking to inherit the president`s mantle as leader of the party`s conservative wing. But Mike Murphy, a close adviser to the governor, disputes the notion of any rivalry between the two men, especially in regard to the Schiavo case.

"I don`t think it`s a competition at all: Jeb`s the guy on the spot," Mr. Murphy said. "He`s the governor of the state."

Some Democrats were skeptical, however.

"This is less about Terri Schiavo and more about shoring up the Republican base, and that`s a shame," said Scott Maddox, who is departing as chairman of the Florida Democratic Party and is a potential candidate for governor. "Politics has to be in play here."

At times this week, it almost seemed as if the Bush brothers were working in tandem; the governor`s decision to re-enter the case once the White House had dropped it in the face of repeated judicial rebuffs may have saved the president criticism from the right. (Paradoxically, the governor himself was pummeled Thursday by some conservative activists, who demanded that he have state authorities physically seize custody of Ms. Schiavo and reinsert the tube.)

That would not be the first time the governor has come to the aid of his brother. But it is also not the first time he has intervened in the Schiavo case. In 2003, after a court ordered the tube removed, he and the Legislature enacted a law that empowered him to order it reinserted. That measure was later overturned in another judicial decision.

"Jeb Bush is not doing this for political reasons, in my opinion," said Jim Kane, chief pollster for Florida Voter, a nonpartisan polling organization. "Jeb Bush is smart enough to know that he is not going to gain anything from this, and he`s probably going to lose something."

Pressing the issue could prove particularly problematic in a state like Florida, with a heavy population of elderly voters, who analysts say are more likely to recoil at government intervention in such a case.

In any event, some of Mr. Bush`s associates suggest that for all the intensity stirred by the Schiavo case now, it will ultimately fade.

"Issues have a way of coming and going," Mr. Tilley said. "This one is a very deep one. But it seems like other ones always come up, especially here in Florida."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Das Wichtigste ist, dass sich auch wirklich etwas ändert, dass nicht eine korrupte Bande durch die nächste ersetzt wird. Von Georgien gibt es Berichte, dass sich nach dem Machtwechsel nicht viel geändert hat, dass die jetzige Regierung genauso korrupt ist wie die Vorgängerregierung. Und in Kirgisien blickt sowieso keiner durch.
Nur sind es nachher vom Westen unterstützte Halunken.
Wie der Fall Usbekistan zeigt.
Zu der Region Human Rights Watchhttp://hrw.org/doc/?t=europe

March 25, 2005
EDITORIAL
Breakthrough in Bishkek
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/opinion/25fri1.html

One more post-Soviet autocracy appeared to have crumbled yesterday as the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akayev, fled with his family while opposition protestors swarmed into the presidential compound in the capital city of Bishkek. It was a shabby but deserved ending to almost 15 years of rule by a man who was once praised as Central Asia`s most democratically inclined leader. Of course, that is something of a backhanded compliment in a region where repressive troglodytes are the norm.

Over the years, Mr. Akayev`s political views became less enlightened as he grew more attached to the rewards of power. He showed no qualms about jailing opposition leaders, rigging elections and grooming his daughter as a possible successor. The most recent election fraud, in parliamentary voting earlier this month, set off the nationwide protests that finally sent him running.

Kyrgyzstan has now followed the examples of Georgia and Ukraine, which threw out the corrupt cliques that latched on to power after the Soviet Union fell part in 1991. It needs to keep emulating them by holding early elections to establish a democratically legitimate government. Once it does, Kyrgyzstan itself can set a positive example for the remaining misruled and undemocratic post-Soviet republics, particularly its nearby neighbors - Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. All five Central Asian republics are examples of the kind of despotic misgovernment that the West has been too willing to accept and even collude with in the Muslim world.

It has been Central Asia`s unhappy fate over the years to get swept up in rivalries among major powers - initially Russia and Britain; now Russia, China and the United States. That pattern was reinforced after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when the Bush administration began courting the region`s rulers and minimizing their dictatorial abuses to secure air bases near Afghanistan. One particularly useful base is located in Kyrgyzstan, just outside Bishkek. That may explain why the State Department voiced only mild criticism of this month`s election fraud, while taking the opposition to task for taking over and trashing government buildings. What a contrast with Washington`s forthright support for huge antigovernment protests in Kiev last year and in Beirut earlier this month.

The hasty flight of Mr. Akayev shows just how shortsighted such cynical realpolitik can be. The best thing America can do now for Kyrgyzstan is work with democracies in Europe and elsewhere to help it move from the chaos of this week`s upheaval toward a more stable democratic future.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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The New York Times Company

3 OP-ED Artikel zur Umweltproblematik.
Anmelden bei der Times kostet nichts.
Artikel sind nur für kurze Zeit kostenfrei zugänglich.
1. Ende des Öls
2. Wasserstoff aus Kohle
3. Das Hybrid Auto

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[urlWhat Happens Once the Oil Runs Out?]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/opinion/25deffeyes.html

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[urlCoal in a Nice Shade of Green]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/opinion/25homer-dixon.html
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[urlMe and My Hybrid]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/opinion/25sachs.html
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Publish or be damned
Editorial
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/story.jsp?…
The Independent

25 March 2005

A brutal prospect now faces the British Government. It is that unless and until it publishes the full documentation behind the legal advice to go to war in Iraq, the impression will grow that it took the country into an illegal war, threw its troops into battle and at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of civilians on the basis of a false prospectus and fluctuating advice from its senior law officer.

It`s a quandary entirely of Tony Blair`s own making. Yesterday in the Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, repeated the old mantras that convention demands that legal advice be always kept discreet and that the advice of the Attorney General was finally clear and unequivocal. But what he also accepted was that Lord Goldsmith`s advice had changed in the weeks immediately prior to the war for reasons he refused to divulge.

This is no mere matter of legal niceties or party politics. We are talking here not of some minor government political embarrassment or policy point. We are talking of a country going to war and the reasons it did so. The question of the legality of that war and the Attorney General`s advice was absolutely crucial to the willingness of the armed forces to undertake the campaign, of parliament`s support for it and of the public`s acceptance of so drastic and terrible a step.

The point of the Attorney General`s advice, given finally in a summary parliamentary answer on 17 March, is that it (alongside the evidence of Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction) was used to convince the country to undertake a step they might very well have refused if they had known the full facts.

The decision to go to war had been made early on. Once it was made, the Prime Minister turned to his legal officers, and his intelligence chiefs, to find the reasons to justify that decision and give him legal cover.

We now know, thanks to the evidence before the Butler review as well as the letter of resignation of the Foreign Office lawyer, Elizabeth Wilmhurst, finally revealed this week, that the Government`s legal officers initially took the view that an invasion of Iraq could not be legally justified on either grounds of self defence or on the basis of the resolutions of the United Nations, without further authority from the Security Council.

"My views," said Ms Wilmhurst in a paragraph deliberately blanked out by the Government when it released the letter in which she said she could not go along with a war she regarded as illegal, "accord with the advice that has been given consistently in this office before and after the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1441 and with what the Attorney General gave us to understand was his view prior to his letter of 7 March."

It is that 13-page letter of 7 March that the Government refuses to release, although we know, partly from the evidence to Lord Hutton, that it was full of caveats about the war. Those doubts led the Attorney General to insist that the Government put in writing its assurance that there was real proof that Saddam Hussein was in breach of the terms of the UN resolutions demanding he disarm.

His advice, in the words of the Hutton report, "did require the Prime Minister, in the absence of a further UN Security Council resolution, to be satisfied that there were strong factual grounds for concluding that Iraq had failed to take the final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations under relevant resolutions of the Security Council and that it was possible to demonstrate hard evidence of non-compliance and non- co-operation with the requirements of Security Council Resolution 1441, so as to justify the conclusion that Iraq was in further material breach of its obligations."

Ten days later, Lord Goldsmith gave his final verdict in a written answer to Parliament shorn of all caveats and any doubts that the Government did have the authority of the UN to go to war.

What changed his mind in those 10 days? No new evidence of Saddam`s intentions or weaponry had been found. The UN inspectors said they needed more time. A second resolution was failing.

Jack Straw says that a lawyer has a right to change his mind or to firm-up his opinions. Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary, suggests that it was not the evidence but the failure of a second resolution and the US military timetable that was forcing the legal advice to back it.

At this stage we can`t know, not for certain. All we do know is that this country went to war on the basis of intelligence that proved to be deeply flawed, if not deliberately manipulated, and a legal advice that mysteriously altered from the equivocal to the certain in the last days before the invasion.

Only full disclosure can begin to answer some of the questions raised by that enterprise. Parliament can insist on publication, so can the Information Commissioner, charged with overseeing the Freedom of Information Act. Both should act now. This is too important an issue to be pushed aside with cavils about precedent and the proprieties of an election that has yet to be called.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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washingtonpost.com
Minnesota Killer Chafed at Life On Reservation
Teen Faced Cultural Obstacles And Troubled Family History
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64315-2005Mar…

By Blaine Harden and Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 25, 2005; Page A01

RED LAKE, Minn., March 24 -- In the months before he killed his grandfather, his classmates and himself, Jeff Weise painted an utterly nihilistic -- and often eloquent -- word portrait of life here on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

He described the reservation in Internet postings as a place where people "choose alcohol over friendship," where women neglect "their own flesh and blood" for relationships with men, where he could not escape "the grave I`m continually digging for myself."

In his dark and self-pitying depictions of life on the reservation, Weise appears to have drawn from his troubled personal history: When he was 8, his father committed suicide on the reservation after a standoff with police. About four months later, his mother suffered severe brain damage in an alcohol-related car accident.

Before that accident, while Weise was living with her in the suburbs of Minneapolis, his alcoholic mother often locked him out of her house and her boyfriend locked him in a closet and made him kneel for hours in a corner, said his grandmother, Shelda Lussier, 54, in whose home on the reservation the boy had lived since age 9.

In an interview outside her home, Lussier said that Weise, a hulking boy who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and was almost always dressed in black, tried to hurt himself 14 months ago by jabbing his arms with a pen.

With his self-professed loathing of reservation life and burdened by the psychopathologies of his parents, Weise on Monday joined the ranks of America`s schoolhouse mass murderers. The 16-year-old killed nine people -- his grandfather, his grandfather`s female companion, a school guard, a teacher and five schoolmates -- before killing himself.

Still, Weise was not all wrong in his assessment of Red Lake. Like many Indian reservations, especially the poor and isolated ones in and around the Great Plains, this can be a dangerous, soul-crushing place to grow up.

Compared with the tidy Denver suburb where two teenage boys went on a well-armed rampage at Columbine High School, killing 13 people and then themselves in 1999, Red Lake exists in a distant and exponentially more dismal dimension of the American experience.

"I`m living every mans nightmare," Weise wrote online in January. "This place never changes, it never will."

If that sounds like teenage overreaching, Sister Sharon Sheridan, 73, principal at St. Mary`s Mission School on the reservation, said this of the shootings: "You can`t condone what happened here, but you sure can understand it."
Warning Signs

In Washington this week, the director of behavioral health for the Indian Health Service, which provides health care here and for hundreds of other reservations, said the complex behavioral problems that have scarred several generations of Weise`s family are all too common.
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"This is a tragedy that I have seen the potential for in so many other places in Indian country," said Jon Perez, who is also a psychologist for adolescents. "I am worried about making sure that this doesn`t have to happen again."

As the months, weeks and days ticked by before Monday`s shooting, Weise was sending clear signals -- what Joe Conner, a clinical psychologist and expert on mental health care for Native Americans, described as "huge red flags and baggage everywhere" -- of serious adolescent mental illness.

Twice in the past school year, he stopped attending Red Lake High School -- and received home tutoring -- because he became severely depressed and was unable to handle teasing from his classmates, his grandmother said. She said the last time he had been at school -- before he stormed in with guns blazing on Monday -- was about five weeks ago.

The last time he saw a mental health professional at the Red Lake hospital was on Feb. 21, she said. She remembers the date because it was the same day he refilled his prescription for 60 milligrams a day of Prozac, which he had been taking since last summer.

Online, he seemed to be reaching out in strange directions, especially for a Native American kid. He wrote sympathetically about Hitler and grumbled about racial interbreeding among tribal members.

But there appears to have been no one in the school or on the reservation who saw the red flags.
Ethnic Hardships

A bleak mountain of federal research suggests the extraordinary risks and hardships of growing up Indian, compared with growing up as a member of any other ethnic group in the United States.

The annual average violent crime rate among Indians is twice as high as that of blacks and 2 1/2 times as high as that for whites, according to a survey last year by the Justice Department.

Indian youths commit suicide at twice the rate of other young people, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The overall death rate of Indians younger than 25 is three times that of the total population in that age group.

Compared with other groups, the commission found, Indians of all ages are 670 percent more likely to die from alcoholism, 650 percent more likely to die from tuberculosis, 318 percent more likely to die from diabetes and 204 percent more likely to suffer accidental death.

And despite considerable income gains in the past 15 years, some of it because of Indian gambling operations, Native Americans remain the poorest ethnic group in the country, with about half the average income of other Americans.

When it comes to young Indians, the statistical picture here on the Red Lake reservation, home to about 5,000 tribal members, is even bleaker than the national average. A third of teenagers on this reservation are not in school, not working and not looking for work (compared with 20 percent on all reservations), according to census figures.

A survey last year by the Minnesota departments of health and education found that young people here are far more likely to think about suicide, be depressed, worry about drugs and be violent with one another than children across the state. At St. Mary`s Mission School, an elementary school student recently painted a poster for her father: "Dad, don`t do cocaine any more."

The state survey of ninth-graders found that at Red Lake High, 43 percent of boys and 82 percent of girls had thoughts about suicide, with 20 percent of boys and 48 percent of girls saying that they tried it at least once.

Three months ago, Weise wrote online about suicide: "I`m starting to regret sticking around, I should`ve taken the razor blade express last time around. . . . Well, whatever, man. Maybe they`ve got another shuttle comin` around sometime soon?"
The Region`s History

Compared with other reservations in Minnesota and across the country, Red Lake appears to have had an especially toxic history of violence, drug problems and gang activity. The curriculum now includes courses in anti-gang training, anti-bullying training, drug and alcohol abuse prevention, and instruction in fetal alcohol syndrome.

School Superintendent Stuart Desjarlait said a gang shooting at the high school in 1996 prompted federal funding for metal detectors, security cameras and security guards. The security system, however, proved all but useless when Weise showed up at the high school on Monday, driving a police cruiser he had stolen from his slain grandfather, wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with three weapons. Police responded quickly, but it took only about 10 minutes for Weise to kill seven people and himself.

Across the reservation in the past 30 years, there have been periodic outbreaks of violence that caused fatalities. During a riot over tribal leadership in 1979, two teenagers were killed and several buildings were burned as scores of tribe members, many drunk and carrying rifles, took over the tribal police station.

The tribe`s geographic isolation here in the northwest corner of Minnesota has been exacerbated by a long tradition of self-enforced isolation. For more than a century, the tribe has resisted federal programs that would open up the reservation to private land ownership. "We have just not ever been too crazy about white people coming around the reservation," said Lee Cook, a former member of the tribal council.
Portrait of a Boy

Weise was born in Minneapolis but spent most of his first three years with his father on the reservation, his grandmother said. His parents never married, she said, and his mother took the boy back to Minneapolis when he was 3. This shuffling from reservation to city is common among Native Americans, as two-thirds of them now live in and around cities.

The boy was often unhappy with his mother. According to Gayle Downwind, a teacher on the reservation who knew Weise and whose son, Sky Grant, was one of his best friends, he was often tormented by his mother`s problems with alcohol.

"When he was younger, he said he would run out of the house because there would be yelling and alcohol," she said. "He wasn`t sure where he would be going. He ended up at a police station."

He did not like being on the reservation, said his friend Grant, who had Weise at his home for sleepovers nearly once a week for seven years. He refused to participate in powwows and avoided all traditional Indian activities, Grant said.

At school, he was an indifferent student. Peers teased him about his black outfits and his ungainly bulk (well over 200 pounds), and he often became agitated in class. He failed eighth grade and was required to take a nonacademic class, making wigwams, growing wild rice and doing other traditional activities. His friend`s mother, Downwind, was his teacher. "He wasn`t doing any work," she said. "He didn`t function academically. He just sat there and drew pictures."

Grant called all of Weise`s drawings "dark," saying, "He drew pictures of war, people getting shot."

Seventeen days before the shooting, Weise brought a videotape of the movie "Elephant," based on the killings at Columbine High, to Grant`s house and insisted that they fast-forward to the shooting scenes. "He liked the gore," Grant said.

When the gory part was over, Grant said, Weise got up and went to his grandmother`s house. He said he was going home to get his medication and gave the impression that he would be right back. He never came back, and that was the last time Grant saw him.

Whatever the trigger might have been for Weise to turn fantasy in action, it was not apparent to the people he lived with -- his grandmother, an aunt and a 15-year-old cousin.

At noon on the day of the shootings, his grandmother returned home for lunch and found Weise sitting on the couch in the living room, eating a turkey sandwich and drawing. When she came home again at 3 that afternoon, he was gone. He did not leave a note.

Staff writers Ceci Connolly in Minneapolis and Sylvia Moreno in Red Lake and special correspondent Dalton Walker in Red Lake contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Is This A New Dark Age?
Little proof to the contrary that we are indeed in a very long, bleak tunnel. Is there any light?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, March 25, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

Then come those times when you read about a 16-year-old girl slashing the throat of a 75-year-old woman for no apparent reason, a woman who was merely walking with her husband near a Berkeley public garden and it`s right next to the one about the 16-year-old kid smiling and waving and donning a bulletproof vest before shooting nine people and himself to death in a remote, poverty-stricken region of Minnesota and you can feel the numbness like a wave.

And alongside that is the morbid and insipid case of poor Terry Schiavo and the equally insipid Bush evangelicals who trumpet the backward morality of maintaining her vegetative brain-dead state and the sad, tormented parents who can`t face reality and the insidious GOP that has zero shame in using her decrepit body as a political football and that kowtows to its pseudo-religious contingency by making humiliating and rather illegal congressional maneuvers to try and keep a feeding tube in place and you just go, oh my God just stop already.

And it all seems to line up with one of those weird phases when everyone in your own life seems to be getting hit by something tragic or sad or somehow ridiculously painful -- a sister with a neck trauma, a best friend going through major depression, a parent struck by illness, certainly almost everyone on the progressive Left feeling sucker-punched and morally eviscerated -- friends and family and loved ones all seeming to suffer in ways you don`t want to imagine and it`s all against a backdrop of more war dead and more violence and the most bleak and Bush-ravaged era in recent American history and you say to yourself, what the hell is going on?

Because something in you knows. Something in you senses there is more at play right now in the world than mere depressing coincidence, that all the war and disease and brutality has more surrounding it than mere chance or fluke. Do you think? Do you feel it?

Proof? All you have to do is spend five minutes with any true healer or energy worker or divinely connected spiritual teacher in the world right now and they all say the same thing: This is not a good time. This is not the lightest, not the brightest, not the best period to be a human being. In fact, it`s one of the darkest. Fiercest. Meanest.

It is, in other words, a low period in human, and especially American, history. And it`s only getting lower.

We are in dark times. Five years of economic bloodshed and three of brutal warmongering and the worst environmental president in American history and you simply cannot deny that as the ruthless American agenda goes, so goes the populace, so goes the collective attitude, the shared vibration, the health of the planet and the feeling that this particular karmic sinkhole has no known bottom.

In other words, it is all connected. It is all of a piece. There is a direct correlation between the violent and heartless tone and attitude of our country and the mental and spiritual health of its people and by way of comparison just look at the Clinton era, which brought eight years of unprecedented prosperity and peace and a nearly balanced budget and high economic flush.

It`s true. There was, we forget, a decided lack of sexual anxiety and uptight moral rigidity in the nation, minimal pseudo-religious puling from the uptight Right and much moderate lawmaking and I don`t care a whit for what you say about the man`s personal moral compass -- under Clinton, America had deeply supportive allies, intelligent foreign policy, more genuine concern for the planet and the health of our forests and oceans and air, and we had a president who was incredibly articulate and deeply intelligent and greatly beloved the world over and the nation enjoyed one of its most prosperous and nondivisive and peaceful periods in its history.

And now, the exact opposite. Everywhere you look, the culture is fractured and divisive and mean. Everywhere you look it`s war and pollution and more toxins, red versus blue, good versus evil, more garbage and less concern where to shove it, fewer restrictions on industrial polluters and fewer controls on corporate abuse and an administration that has so shamelessly leveraged the worst tragedy in American history to further its brutal and hawkish right-wing agenda it would embarrass Mussolini.

The sad fact is, there are a great many among us who believe we have entered into a new Dark Age, that it will be a long and brutal slog indeed and BushCo is merely the precursor, the devil`s handmaiden, and that we have a long way to go into the bleak and the bloody and the environmentally devastating before the pendulum begins its slow swing back toward the light.

Just look around. No one anywhere, not priests, not nuns, not healers or mystics, not Christians, not pagans, not Repubs or Demos or Libertarians, no one anywhere in this country is saying, hey, doesn`t it feel like we`re entering into a new era of health and healing and positivism and spiritual rebirth? Aren`t our schools just teeming anew with eager students who seem to be getting smarter and more articulate? Isn`t the air getting cleaner and aren`t we proud of our government for protecting the health of future generations by pushing for more natural foods and signing on to the Kyoto Treaty and advocating antitoxin regulations and by protecting our forests and improving school textbooks and revolutionizing the hideous national health care system?

Doesn`t that tone of enthusiasm and hope sound just completely silly, wrong, out of place, like so much Prozac-grade bulls--? Damn right it does.

There`s a reason for that. We are not headed for light. Not yet, anyway. The coming years are not going to be about friendship and repaired foreign relations and a sense of our shared humanity, about equality and sexual freedom and a renewed sense of human rights. To believe this is to believe in fairy tales almost as insidious and hopeless as evangelical Christians who are right now stuffing themselves with Cheez-Its and pink wine and praying for Armageddon.

So, you do what you have to do. You focus inward and work on the self and radiate as much love and open-hearted support as possible, grit your karmic teeth and hope you survive this dark house of mirrors without cancers or tumors or bloodshed or getting stabbed in the garden by a vicious teenage girl as you ignore the fact that in all of North America, from Mexico to Canada`s Prince Edward Island, there exists only one state, province or territory that does not yet have a McDonald`s. (Nunavut, in northern Canada, inhabited by the Inuits at a density of one person per 3,300 square miles). Small solace, indeed.

So you pray your ass off to a forgiving and ambisexual and dogma-free pantheistic feminine god and you digest the increasingly nasty headlines as best you can, ever seeking that pinpoint, that tiny speck of light way, way down, at the end of this rank and desperate tunnel. Do you see it? Is it even there? It`s one of those things you just have to believe.


Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

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March 25, 2005
Bush Approval Drops Amid Souring Economic Views
Two-year low in economic rating of the future
http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/?ci=15373

by David W. Moore

GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- President George W. Bush`s approval rating is now at 45%, according to the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, conducted March 21-23. This is the lowest such rating Bush has received since taking office, although it is not significantly different from the 46% approval rating he received in May 2004.

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In the last three Gallup surveys, conducted in late February and early March, Bush`s job approval rating was 52%. The timing of the seven-point drop suggests that the controversy over the Terri Schiavo case may be a major cause. New polls by ABC and CBS News show large majorities of Americans opposed to the intervention by Congress and the president in the Schiavo case, and Gallup`s Tuesday-night poll shows a majority of Americans disapprove of the way Bush has handled the Schiavo situation. Almost all recent polling has shown that Americans approve of the decision to remove Schiavo`s feeding tube.

But the CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey suggests that the public`s increasingly dismal views about the economy, and about the way things are going in general, could also be factors in Bush`s lower approval rating.

A month ago, the public was more dissatisfied than satisfied with the country`s direction by a margin of seven points; 52% of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the United States at that time, compared with 45% who were satisfied. But the current poll shows that the margin of dissatisfaction has increased to 21 points, 59% dissatisfied to 38% satisfied.

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Gallup`s economic measures also show a continual decline since the beginning of the year. Thirty-two percent of Americans rate current economic conditions as excellent or good, while 24% say poor. That eight-point positive margin is the smallest since Gallup found a two-point margin last May. At the beginning of this year, 41% rated the economy as excellent or good, while just 17% said poor -- a 24-point positive margin. Earlier this month, the positive margin was 19 points, 35% to 16%.

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Even more dramatic is the greater pessimism about the future of the nation`s economy. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say the economy is getting worse, just 33% say better -- a 26-point negative margin. Earlier this month, the net negative rating was just nine points, with 50% saying the economy was getting worse, and 41% saying better. This is the worst rating on this measure in two years.


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Friday, March 25, 2005
War News for Thursday and Friday, March 24 and 25, 2005
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Eleven Iraqi soldiers killed, nine Iraqi and two US soldiers wounded by Ramadi car bomb.

Bring ‘em on: Five female Iraqi translators working for US Army assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting between insurgents and Iraqi security forces reported in Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Two US patrols ambushed by roadside bombs near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in fighting near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: US troops fighting insurgents in Tal Afar for two days.

Bring ‘em on: Twelve Iraqis soldiers wounded in Baghdad ambush.

Bring ‘em on: Insurgents execute two Iraqi soldiers near Abu Ghraib.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi soldiers kidnapped near Beiji.

Bring ‘em on: Four US soldiers wounded in ambush near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi soldiers killed, six wounded by car bomb near Iskandariyah.

Bring ‘em on: Joint US/Iraqi patrol ambushed by car bomb near Abu Ghraib.

Five Iraqi soldiers killed in fratricide incident near Rabia.

Contractor casualties. “Titan Corp., the largest supplier of translators and linguists to the U.S. military, had at least 131 personnel or subcontractors killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion - the most for any contractor, according to the Labor Department. The dead numbered 15 in 2003 and at least 116 since 2004. Halliburton Co. units had the second-highest death toll - 61 - including 26 employees and 35 subcontractors. An Iraqi subcontractor for Environmental Chemical Corp., which cleans up ammunition sites, had the third-highest casualties - 22. Overall, there have been at least 273 contractor deaths, including 23 in 2003, 209 last year and 41 so far this year, according to Labor Department figures. That`s over 50 percent more than the 173 deaths of U.K. and allied troops, according to figures compiled by the Brookings Institution in Washington.”

They wouldn’t lie to us, would they? “New details from an intense battle between insurgents and Iraqi police commandos supported by U.S. forces cast doubt Thursday on Iraqi government statements that 85 insurgents were killed. Accounts of the fighting continued to indicate that a major battle involving dozens of insurgents occurred Tuesday on the eastern shore of Lake Tharthar, about 50 miles northwest of Baghdad. But two U.S. military officials said Thursday that no bodies were found by American troops who later arrived at the scene. A spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, meanwhile, said he presumed that the death toll was accurate but played down the scope of the fighting.”

Oh, Canada. “An American war dodger who fled the U.S. military because he believed the invasion of Iraq was criminal has lost his bid for refugee status in Canada in a case closely watched on both sides of the border. In a written ruling released yesterday, the Immigration and Refugee Board said Jeremy Hinzman had not made a convincing argument that he faced persecution in the United States.”

Rummy’s Army. “The U.S. Army is ordering more people to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan involuntarily from a seldom-used personnel pool as part of a mobilization that began last summer. They are part of the Army`s Individual Ready Reserve, made up of soldiers who have completed their volunteer active-duty service commitment but remain eligible to be called back into uniform for years after returning to civilian life. The Army, straining to maintain troop levels in Iraq, last June said it would summon more than 5,600 people on the IRR in an effort to have about 4,400 soldiers fit for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan after granting exemption requests for medical reasons and other hardships. Lt. Col. Pamela Hart said on Wednesday the Army has now increased the number of IRR soldiers it needs to about 4,650, which means a total of about 6,100 will get mobilization orders."

Ghost detainees. "Senior defense officials have described the CIA practice of hiding unregistered detainees at Abu Ghraib prison as ad hoc and unauthorized, but a review of Army documents shows that the agency`s ‘ghosting’ program was systematic and known to three senior intelligence officials in Iraq. Army and Pentagon investigations have acknowledged a limited amount of ghosting, but more than a dozen documents and investigative statements obtained by The Washington Post show that unregistered CIA detainees were brought to Abu Ghraib several times a week in late 2003, and that they were hidden in a special row of cells. Military police soldiers came up with a rough system to keep track of such detainees with single-digit identification numbers, while others were dropped off unnamed, unannounced and unaccounted for.”

Torture policy. “The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan says that over the past three years, the United States has routinely handed over dozens of low-level terrorism suspects to Uzbekistan, an authoritarian regime that systematically uses torture to obtain terrorist confessions during interrogations. The former ambassador, Craig Murray, also contends that the CIA and the British intelligence agency MI6 routinely cited information in their regular intelligence briefings that has been passed on by Uzbek authorities and was almost certainly obtained under torture. Murray`s assertions, made in a telephone interview with the Globe and in a series of confidential memos to the British Foreign Office, raise questions about the close cooperation between the United States and war-on-terror allies such as Uzbekistan. The State Department`s annual human rights reports detail how Uzbek authorities routinely use torture to elicit confessions, allegedly burning one man on his genitals, killing another with a pair of pliers, and apparently boiling two prisoners alive.”

Commentary

Editorial: “Perhaps as shocking as reports that more than 100 people have died, nearly a quarter of them in homicides, in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan was the lack of outrage over this news. While Congress has been busy trying to save a single life and questioning baseball players about steroid use, no one has called for an investigation of the ongoing treatment of prisoners at the hands of the American military. Someone should. When news of the prison abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq began to leak out, U.S. defense officials said such behavior was an aberration. Hundreds of photos and subsequent investigations showed this was not the case. Now, with the disclosure that the number of detainee deaths is far higher than the military previously reported, officials are again downplaying the severity. If Congress learned its lessons from Abu Ghraib, it will not take the military`s word this time.”

Analysis: “Two years after being shocked and awed into ‘freedom’, freedom on the ground is a meaningless concept for large swathes of the Iraqi population. Sunnis and Shi`ites alike tell Asia Times Online of a brutalization of every-day life. Highways in and out of Baghdad are suicidal: the Americans can`t control any of them. Anyone is a potential kidnapping target, either for the Sunni guerrilla or criminal gangs. Officials at the Oil and Electricity Ministries tell of at least one attack a day. Oil pipelines are attacked and distribution interrupted virtually every week. There`s a prison camp syndrome: almost 10,000 Iraqis incarcerated at any one time, in three large jails, including the infamous Abu Ghraib. There`s also an Abu Ghraib syndrome: all-round denunciation of torture, electroshocks and beatings. The Americans and the Iraqi police proceed with the same ‘round up the usual suspects’ tactic: but even if the ‘suspects’ are not part of the resistance, their families are always well taken care of, so they inevitably join the resistance actively when they leave jail.”

Opinion: “So let me get this straight. Rice believes that our region harbors ‘ideologies of hatred’ and that it is populated by ‘those people.’ Those terrorists. This absurd generalization embodies the fallacy that underlies the entire U.S. ‘war on terrorism,’ which has severely damaged America`s reputation and credibility around the world and which has led to the disastrous policies that will harm relations between the U.S. and the Arab world for decades to come. To suggest that a group of extremists is representative of the people of the Middle East is outrageous. It`s as if someone were to suggest that the criminals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are representative of American people and American values. It`s like considering the criminals of massacres such as Sabra and Chatila, or Deir Yasin, as representative of their people and their religious values.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Minnesota soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Iowa Guardsman wounded in Iraq.
# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:06 AM
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Latest Fatality: Mar 23, 2005


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

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March 26, 2005
Vital Signs of a Ruined Falluja Grow Stronger
By ROBERT F. WORTH


FALLUJA, Iraq, March 20 - Four months after American bombs and guns pounded much of this city into ruins, some signs of life are returning. A kebab shop and a bakery have reopened on the bullet-scarred main boulevard. About a third of the city`s 250,000 residents have trickled back since early January. American marines and Iraqi police officers patrol the streets, and there has been little violence.

But the safety has come at a high price. To enter Falluja, residents must wait about four hours to get through the rigid military checkpoints, and there are strict nightly curfews. That has stunted the renascent economy and the reconstruction effort. It has also frustrated the residents, who are still coming to grips with their shattered streets and houses. Many have jobs or relatives outside the city.

"Falluja is safe," said Hadima Khalifa Abed, 42, who returned to her ruined home in January with her husband and 10 children. "But it is safe like a prison."
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American military officials here say they face a difficult choice. Easing the harsh security measures might help revive the economy and cut the 50 percent unemployment rate; it could also allow the return of the insurgents who ran Falluja from last April until the American intervention in November. Even now, insurgents lob occasional mortar shells into the city, and a number of contractors have been killed here.

There are other obstacles. Falluja still lacks a mayor and a city council because of the new Iraqi National Assembly`s failure to form a government. The American military is reluctant to make decisions that will shape the city for decades, and the resulting power vacuum has been crippling.

Hundreds of new police officers, trained in Jordan, are expected to arrive in the city soon, American military officials say. Nongovernmental organizations have donated truckloads of equipment for fire stations, hospitals and schools. But there are no police stations for the officers to work in, and there are no new fire stations because no one has the authority to decide where to build them.

"Without a mayor, no one settles the disputes," said an American military official who is involved in the reconstruction effort and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Without a city council how do you get a design approved, and how do you coordinate a plan for a functioning city?"

All the same, much has improved since residents first returned to a nearly deserted city almost three months ago.

On a tour of the city`s central neighborhoods with an American convoy, civilian cars and taxis could be seen cruising the streets. Customers shopped at fruit and vegetable markets, and a crowd waited outside a new branch of the Rafidain Bank.

At the Palestine School, where classes started again two months ago, the cheerful shrieks of students could be heard in the hallways.

"Things are almost back to normal here," said the headmaster, Samer Eyd Jawhar, 60, a portly man in a light blue jacket and tie. "We have teachers and books. Things are getting better."

Everywhere, there are complaints about the strict military control of the city. Najim Abed, the director of an emergency clinic, said its one ambulance often has trouble getting in and out of the city. It is also hard to reach patients at night, because the ambulance must be accompanied by a military patrol, he said.

There are still two battalions of marines operating in the city, with some added units like a Navy Seabee engineering team. There are at least two battalions of Iraqi police officers, though military officials declined to give any exact figures.

Meanwhile the rebuilding efforts are proceeding, however slowly. After the American incursion in November, Falluja`s utilities lay in ruins. Today, electricity and running water are available in 40 percent of the city`s homes and shops, American officials say, and will reach the rest within the next month. The sewer drainage system is working again, and longer-term plans are under way to completely replace the city`s rickety electrical grid.

Insurgents have killed a few of the contractors who have done rebuilding work, contractors and American officials say. Others have received death threats. Many contractors refuse to work in the city at all. No Shiite Arab contractors have done work here, because the largely Sunni Arab insurgency has made them targets, said one Western contractor who asked that he and his firm not be named for safety reasons.

The effect of the threats is apparent even in the American military headquarters here, where the bathroom is still unfinished. The contractor working on that bathroom received a threat to stop working or die, said the American military official. The work stopped. But the owner of the company, who did extensive work with the American military and lived in Baghdad, was killed last week anyway.

"We have tried to hire a new contractor to finish the job, but have not found one yet willing to work here," the American official said.

But American and Iraqi officials agree that the city`s residents have worked hard to prevent the intimidation. A group of Falluja residents, including some tribal figures, have formed an anti-intimidation council, said the Western contractor.

An effort to compensate residents for damage to their homes has begun in the past two weeks.

On Sunday, Ms. Abed was among the second group to receive a compensation check in the former youth center where the American military has its Falluja headquarters. The checks were given out by members of the Falluja Working Group, a mix of former government employees and others who form an ad hoc city council.

Each person received an initial payment equal to 20 percent of the cost of the damage as assessed by a group of Iraqi engineers. The money comes from the interim Iraqi government.

Ms. Abed, dressed in a full-length black abaya, explained that she returned to her home in the city`s Andalus district in January to find the kitchen and pantry almost totally destroyed, with open sky visible through the ceiling. The rest of the house was a relief: there were some holes in the walls, nothing more. The refrigerator, television and anything else of value were gone.

When her name was called, Ms. Abed went to the front of the room and received a check for 2,400,000 dinars, about $1,655. Like many of the 30 people who received checks that day, she said it was nowhere near enough. Her husband and four of her children are suffering from mental illness, she said, and the entire family talks constantly about their fears for the future.

Compared with her neighbors, though, she feels lucky.

"When I saw their houses were totally destroyed, I said, `Thank God, we are O.K.; we are better off than the others,` " Ms. Abed said.

Falluja`s future is full of questions. The Iraqi government has determined that compensating the city`s residents for their damaged homes will cost $496 million, of which $100 million has been allocated, American officials say.

The city`s identity, too, is uncertain. In an effort to push Falluja in a new direction, American and Iraqi officials have carefully screened applicants for police and government jobs to make sure they have no insurgent ties.

"We listen to the voice of the people, not the voice of the former regime," said Lt. Col. Harvey Williams, an Army civil affairs officer working on economic development issues in Falluja. "We`re trying to set a whole new paradigm."

But Falluja has a history of sympathy with the insurgents, and it is still not clear how they will react as the reconstruction continues.

"When you are insulted, it is not enough to get money," said Sabih Shamkhi, 61, who was also waiting to receive a compensation check for his damaged house. "But money is better than nothing. We hope the government will fulfill the rest of its obligations to us."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 25, 2005
EU hits at plan to ban lighters on US flights
By FT.COM
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT20050325_29…
Financial Times

Washington and the European Union are at odds over new US rules banning airline passengers from carrying cigarette lighters in their hand luggage, in the latest dispute over tighter travel security.

"The EU questions the effectiveness of such a rule," EU member states wrote in a document that a European official said would soon be sent to the US State Department. The document, seen by the Financial Times, stresses the EU`s view that x-ray machines would be unable to detect the lighters.

This, it said, could result in all passengers facing hand searches that would "paralyse airport operations in Europe". Such blanket searching was deemed "unacceptable and inapplicable".

The rules, which come into effect on April 14, do not bar passengers from carrying matches on aircraft, although the US authorities are to review this. Passengers can still carry up to four boxes of matches on flights under US rules.

"We realise the technology does not allow detection of all lighters, but certainly many lighters contain metal, which would be picked up during screening," the US Transport Security Administration said.

The question of lighters on aircraft came to the fore after Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe-bomber", attempted to detonate explosives concealed in his shoe with a match while on a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001.

The Europeans also expressed concern that the move would encourage passengers to put lighters in their main luggage, despite rules against having them in the aircraft hold.

The dispute is one of a number that have arisen over efforts to tighten travel and border security.

Members of the European parliament are challenging in the EU`s top court a controversial deal in which Brussels agreed to let airlines pass to US agencies details of passengers flying to the country.

The agreement, reached last April, authorised airlines to share e-mail and credit card information.

But the parliament argued the deal violated data protection laws and in July formally challenged the decision at the European Court of Justice, which could derail it.

Many EU member states are also likely to miss a US deadline to start issuing high-tech passports this year. The US has threatened to demand visas from many EU nations if they do not start issuing the passports, which include digital photographs stored in a microchip, by October 26.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005.

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March 26, 2005
Pentagon Will Not Try 17 G.I.`s Implicated in Prisoners` Deaths
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/politics/26abuse.html

WASHINGTON, March 25 - Despite recommendations by Army investigators, commanders have decided not to prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, according to a new accounting released Friday by the Army.

Investigators had recommended that all 17 soldiers be charged in the cases, according to the accounting by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. The charges included murder, conspiracy and negligent homicide. While none of the 17 will face any prosecution, one received a letter of reprimand and another was discharged after the investigations.

To date, the military has taken steps toward prosecuting some three dozen soldiers in connection with a total of 28 confirmed or suspected homicides of detainees. The total number of such deaths is believed to be between 28 and 31.

In one of the three cases in which no charges are to be filed, the commanders determined the death to be "a result of a series of lawful applications of force." In the second, the commanders decided not to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. In the third, they determined the soldier involved had not been well informed of the rules of engagement.

A spokesman for the Army Criminal Investigation Command, Chris Grey, said in a statement: "We take each and every death very seriously and are committed and sworn to investigating each case with the utmost professionalism and thoroughness. We are equally determined to get to the truth wherever the evidence may lead us and regardless of how long it takes."

Human rights groups and others have criticized the military for not pursuing prosecution more aggressively.

The accounting was the most detailed the military has yet made public of the deaths of prisoners in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of the 28 deaths investigated, 13 occurred in American detention centers in those countries and 15 occurred at the point where prisoners were captured. Only one occurred in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which has been known until now as the site of the most extensive abuses by American military personnel.

The 28 deaths include two cases involving members of the Navy Seals, which are still being investigated by the Navy, according to military officials. They also include a prisoner in Marine Corps custody whose death resulted in the conviction of two marines on charges including assault and dereliction of duty, according to a Marine spokesman.

Not included in the 28 are three other deaths of prisoners involving marines but under investigation by the Navy.

With the disposition of the three cases involving the 17 soldiers not prosecuted, the Army now has 21 soldiers listed as subjects for prosecution on criminal charges including, among others, murder, negligent homicide and assault.

Of those 21 soldiers, at least 3 have been convicted in general courts-martial, and at least 3 others are awaiting trial, the Army accounting showed.

The Army said one of the three deaths for which soldiers would not be prosecuted was that of a former Iraqi lieutenant colonel determined by investigators to have died of "blunt force injuries and asphyxia" at an American Forward Operating Base in Al Asad, Iraq, in January 2004.

In that case, Army investigators had recommended that 11 soldiers from the Fifth Special Forces Group and the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment face charges. The decision not to prosecute in that case, as well as one other, was made by the Army Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., the Army said.

A senior Army legal official acknowledged that the Iraqi colonel had at one point been lifted to his feet by a baton held to his throat, and that that action had caused a throat injury that contributed to his death.

The Army accounting said the Special Forces Command had determined that the use of force had been lawful "in response to repeated aggression and misconduct by the detainee."

The former Iraqi colonel was not identified but has been named in other reports as Jameel.

The senior Army legal official said the prisoner`s resistance to his captors` instructions had caused them to gag him and to lift him to his feet with the baton, actions that contributed to the death.

The Army Special Forces case that commanders decided to drop for lack of evidence involved the shooting death of a prisoner in Afghanistan in August 2002, the Army said.

The case not prosecuted because the soldier involved was not well informed of the rules of engagement, involved the Fourth Infantry Division. The detainee, who died in September 2003, was an Iraqi prisoner at an American detention center.

The Army said it has now closed its investigations into 16 of the deaths, and referred five of them to the Navy, the Justice Department or foreign governments for possible prosecution.

Some of the deaths described in the Army accounting have already been widely reported, including two deaths at Bagram in Afghanistan in December 2002; the death at Abu Ghraib in November 2003 of an Iraqi who was being questioned by a Central Intelligence Agency officer; and the death the same month of an Iraqi major general who had been stuffed head-first into a sleeping bag.

An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, said the prisoners who died represented a tiny fraction of what he said had been some 70,000 detainees held by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Altogether, more than a million American soldiers have taken part in those operations, Colonel Martin said.

A spokesman for the Army Special Operations Forces Command, Maj. Robert E. Gowan, said a "careful review of the facts" surrounding each of the two incidents involving that command indicated that "no U.S. Army Special Forces Command soldiers were found to have participated in any misconduct or detainee abuse."

"U.S. Army Special Forces Command takes all allegations of detainee abuse and homicide very seriously," Major Gowan said in an e-mail statement in response to an inquiry. "As with any case, U.S. Army Special Forces Command will consider all relevant evidence and facts. This command will make appropriate disposition of such cases as warranted by the facts and evidence derived from the investigations."

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[urlTranscript: Secretary of state`s interview Friday with Post reporters and editors.]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2015-2005Mar25.html[/url]

washingtonpost.com
Rice Describes Plans To Spread Democracy
Elections in Egypt Among Priorities
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1911-2005Mar2…

By Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 26, 2005; Page A01

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday set out ambitious goals for the Bush administration`s push for greater democracy overseas over the next four years, including pressing for competitive presidential elections this year in Egypt and women`s right to vote in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

Rice, in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, said she was guided less by a fear that Islamic extremists would replace authoritarian governments than by a "strong certainty that the Middle East was not going to stay stable anyway." Extremism, she said, is rooted in the "absence of other channels for political activity," and so "when you know that the status quo is no longer defensible, then you have to be willing to move in another direction."

Rice, who became secretary of state two months ago today, took stock of a period of tumultuous change in the one-hour interview, touching on relations with Russia, China, Israel and Latin America and addressing a range of conflicts across the globe.

Since taking charge of State from her predecessor, Colin L. Powell, Rice has moved quickly to put her stamp on the agency, enlisting a tight-knit group of political operatives who make sure the message and images of her diplomacy are consistent with White House policy. Rice has traveled extensively, impressing diplomats in Europe, Asia and the Middle East with a combination of charm and bluntness -- and a clear sense that her words reflect President Bush`s thinking.

After Rice canceled a trip to Egypt recently to protest the continued imprisonment of an opposition leader, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced the nation would hold multi-party elections this year for the first time, though with potentially significant caveats. Rice cautioned yesterday that Egyptian elections "will not look like American competitive presidential elections," but she said the United States believes "competitiveness is an important element of the democratic enterprise."

Asked whether she hopes to see women vote in Saudi Arabia, where they are barred, Rice replied: "In terms of women, I hope they are voting everywhere." She said she recalled a photograph of the recent Saudi municipal elections "that was very striking to me": a man having his daughter put his ballot in the box, which she interpreted as demonstrating his hopes for his daughter.

One of the most difficult challenges for the Bush administration is how to balance the push for democracy with its relations with Russia, which has become increasingly authoritarian under President Vladimir Putin.

With Kyrgyzstan this week becoming the third former Soviet republic to fall to a popular uprising, Rice stressed that "nobody is trying to encircle Russia." She said that "the space around Russia" is changing rapidly and the United States is trying to impress upon the Russians that liberalization and democracy around Russia will lead to greater prosperity within Russia.

"It`s very important that Russia not get isolated," she said, adding that Russian cooperation during the Kyrgyzstan revolution has been much better after the tensions over the Ukrainian elections last year. "We don`t need a new dividing line on the other side of the Ukraine."

Rice, who visited Beijing this week, said she had been told by the Chinese leadership that they will begin to make amends for the recent passage of a law authorizing the use of force against Taiwan if it moves toward formal independence. She said Chinese leaders understood that the law -- mainly drafted for internal political reasons -- had negative consequences overseas. "They talked a good deal about what they were going to try to do to reduce tensions in the Taiwan Straits," she said. "And we`ll see. That would be a good next step."

Rice also said she made the case to Chinese officials that they cannot make a distinction between stability on the Korean Peninsula and North Korea possessing nuclear weapons. In more than two years of talks over North Korea`s nuclear ambitions, a major problem for U.S. policy has been that China has been hesitant to press North Korea too hard for fears of sparking instability in the closed communist country on its border.

"My discussion with the Chinese was to suggest to them that those two [concepts] are indivisible," Rice said. "They understand that a nuclear North Korea on the Korean Peninsula has potentially unpredictable effects that will not make the Korean Peninsula very stable, will not make the region very stable. And so I didn`t find much pushback on that."

Rice denied reports from Israeli officials -- and some U.S. officials -- that the Bush administration had struck an arrangement with Israel that would allow for some settlement growth in Palestinian areas. Israeli officials had said that the administration would allow for growth within settlements as long as additional housing units did not exceed existing construction lines. The U.S.-backed "road map" plan for peace calls for Israel to freeze settlement growth.

Rice said the "only commitment or assurance" was made last April, when Bush announced that because of "new realities on the ground" -- existing settlements in Palestinian areas -- Israel could expect to retain some settlements as part of a final peace deal. She said that since then the United States has asked Israel for more detail on its settlement activity because "there is so much information, misinformation . . . that the picture was just too confusing."

After the interview, Rice called a reporter twice to expand on her remarks on the administration`s settlement policy. The administration has had "discussions about steps toward a settlement freeze," she said in one of the phone calls. "But we`ve never reached closure on that. It`s complicated."

On Latin America, Rice said there needs to be "a new focus in the hemisphere on how democratic governments deliver better for their people." With corruption and growing gaps between the wealthy and poor in terms of education and health care, she said the region is increasing susceptible to what she called "a kind of demagoguery about class differences."

"In the hemisphere there`s a gap between economies that are growing and the status of people, and it`s leading to fertile ground for populism," Rice said. She added there are "very strong signs" that Venezuela -- headed by a president, Hugo Chavez, who makes clear his disdain for the Bush administration -- is interfering in the affairs of Colombia and other countries.

The secretary defended the administration`s decision to sell F-16s to Pakistan, even though it is run by a military leader who ousted an elected government in a bloodless coup. Under Gen. Pervez Musharraf, "Pakistan has come a long way, it`s on a better trajectory than it`s ever been, or that it`s been in many, many years," she said.

Rice said that she was struck by the conclusions of the Sept. 11 commission: "Basically invest in the relationship with Pakistan, because if you don`t, you`re going to create the same situation we created in the `90s," when Pakistan forged close ties with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Pentagon analyst Franklin returns to work
By Nathan Guttman, Haaretz Correspondent
Last Update: 26/03/2005 04:21
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArtVty.jhtml?sw=Na…


Adar2 15, 5765

WASHINGTON - Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin was reinstated a few weeks ago, after sitting at home for half a year and being barred from returning to his job on the Iranian desk in the Department of Defense`s policy division. Franklin was at the center of a lengthy FBI investigation after suspicions arose that he transferred classified information about U.S. policy on Iran to members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee).

In the seven months since the affair made headlines on the CBS evening news, the investigation has been kept under tight wraps, but its ramifications are already being felt.

While Franklin is back at work, and, say well-placed sources, is expected to reach a plea bargain, the spotlight has moved to the AIPAC officials - two senior members were suspended for the duration of the case and four other senior officials were forced to testify at length before the special investigative jury in Virginia, whose proceedings are classified.

Even if the investigation is nowhere near completion, it has definitely reached a crossroads, at which investigators must decide on the suspects in the case - Larry Franklin alone; Franklin and two AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman; or whether, on top of those three, the entire AIPAC organization has acted unlawfully.

Sources close to the investigation suggested recently that it would end in a plea bargain. Franklin would plead to a lesser crime of unauthorized transfer of information, Rosen and Weissman would be charged with receiving classified information unlawfully, and AIPAC would remain unstained. Franklin`s lawyer, Plato Cacheris, Thursday denied the reports, stating: "We have not entered any plea of defense with the Justice Department."

AIPAC refused to say anything about the possibility of a plea bargain.

As for Franklin`s reinstatement, a Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Paul Swiergrosz, confirmed that "Dr. Franklin is still a U.S. government employee," but declined to identify his position. Haaretz has learned that Franklin has been moved to a post different from the one he held previously and kept from handling classified information.

From AIPAC`s standpoint, the issue at hand is containment: can the affair be limited to Rosen and Weissman, or is the investigation directed at the lobby as a whole? It is clear that the FBI has as its objective an extensive investigation against AIPAC. Investigators have been looking into AIPAC`s entire manner of operating, not just in the Franklin instance. An official questioned twice by the FBI, as a witness, was astounded by investigators` intimate familiarity with AIPAC. "They know everything there. They asked very precise questions regarding the organization`s operations," he said.

The intended breadth of the investigation is also evident from the FBI`s dramatic moves - raiding AIPAC offices in December and issuing subpoenas to its four top executives. Executive Director Howard Kohr, Managing Director Richard Fishman, Research Director Rafael Danziger and Communications Director Renee Rothstein appeared before the investigative jury and were questioned at length.

Investigators also reportedly tried to use Franklin, after the affair erupted, to incriminate as many senior AIPAC officials as possible. The Jerusalem Post reported four months ago that investigators informed Franklin of the suspicions against him and asked for his cooperation. In a sting operation, he received information from the FBI agents that Iran was planning to attack Israelis operating in the Kurdish region in Iraq. Franklin, at the FBI`s instructions, telephoned AIPAC`s Rosen and Weissman and gave them the information, and they rushed to pass it on to Israeli diplomats, thereby falling into the FBI trap.

AIPAC refuses to comment on the case, saying, "We do not comment on personnel matters." A spokesman for AIPAC, Patrick Dorton, said Thursday that "it would not be appropriate for AIPAC to comment on issues that have to do with an ongoing federal investigation."

The suspension of the two AIPAC officials, though never officially explained, is certainly a key turning point in the case. According to one assessment, AIPAC understands that regardless of whether a plea bargain is reached, it will be tough to get those two off the hook, so AIPAC is keeping its distance for now. Their lawyer, Nathan Lewin, refused requests from Haaretz for a comment.

A source close to the case said that since the investigation began, AIPAC`s ability to maintain good ties with U.S. administration officials has suffered. While Congress was quick to express support for AIPAC, its activists began having trouble getting appointments. "Obviously, after a case like this blows up, no one`s in a hurry to return your calls," said the source.

© Copyright 2005 Haaretz. All rights reserved

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Energy Special:

Oil in troubled waters
By Michael Peel
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/7bce01e8-9d9e-11d9-a227-00000e2511c…
Financial Times

Published: March 26 2005

In the mangrove swamps of Nigeria’s oil-producing Rivers State, the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force was in restless repose. A fighter worked out with dumbbells while others lounged on mattresses in front of a large outbuilding. One young man was reading, aloud in English, from a copy of Macbeth.

Their leader, Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, was preparing to take me to a swamp facility where he claimed to refine oil taken from a pipeline operated by Royal Dutch/Shell, the energy multinational. (Asari says this is not stealing; it is the Nigerian government that is stealing.) He had just changed out of a black tracksuit into a bright orange jumpsuit with the Shell logo on the back. He put on a white hard hat belonging to Willbros, the oil services company. “Do I look fine?” he asked, running his hands over his ample stomach.

On this, the third of four occasions I visited Asari, he had not yet quite become the symbol of a Robin Hood-like quest by the poor for a share of the nation’s oil wealth that he claims to be today. But he was fast gaining notoriety: his critics, outside government as well as within, saw him as a gangster rather than a political revolutionary. Either way, his rising profile says much about the way the Delta is being choked by a violent and corrupt web of relationships between oil multinationals, government officials, smugglers, ethnic fighters and local communities. I wanted to find out whether he was a true challenge to the inequities - perhaps even the existence - of Nigeria’s multinational-operated oil regime. The country already provides about 10 per cent of US oil imports, while Britain expects to source a similar proportion of its energy needs from the Delta by 2010.

The more than $300bn of revenues earned by Nigeria from Delta oil since independence in 1960 has in substantial part been stolen and squandered by generals and civilian governments, leaving its people among the poorest in the world. In September last year, Asari threatened to launch an offensive called “Operation Locust Feast” unless government troops backed off from the area in which he operated and the authorities began talks about oil-resource control. He denounced oil companies and said he could not be responsible for the safety of foreign nationals working in the area. This helped push the price of oil on the world markets through $50 a barrel for the first time. Shell evacuated over 200 staff. Nigeria’s government invited Asari to Abuja, the capital, where he and another militia leader agreed to make peace and disarm. The Rivers State government claimed it later collected over a thousand weapons from the militias, but many Deltans still see the whole process as an emergency arrangement aimed at reassuring oil markets, rather than a serious attempt to end the region’s conflict.

Asari was cultivating media interest before the deal, so a colleague and I accepted an invitation to meet his men early one morning at a jetty about an hour and a half’s drive from the oil city of Port Harcourt. They eventually arrived by speedboat and moored, half-hidden behind the end of the jetty. We quickly climbed aboard. A machine gun and three Kalashnikov rifles lay behind benches on the floor: one of the youths apologised as he passed the machine gun over my head. The men were swigging gin, which blew in my face in a fine spray as we picked up speed. They said sorry again; then one of them fired two shots in the air.

The camp, reached after an exhilarating high-speed ride through a series of branching waterways, was full of the signs of expansion. A new accommodation block was being built and boat engines were being repaired by the waterside. Asari told us there was no shortage of willing expert helpers who support his idea of an independent nation for his Ijaw people, although none was around that day. “Doctors have been coming twice a week, we have people volunteering, we have lawyers,” he said.

The struggle of the Ijaw people is a defining feature of Nigeria’s post-colonial politics, which have been dominated by dictatorship, corruption and infrastructural collapse. The country was created by British colonial order in 1914, binding together people from hundreds of ethnic groups who speak hundreds of different languages. The Ijaw, the Delta’s largest ethnic group, have in effect been disenfranchised by modern political boundary-setting: being a widely dispersed people concentrated around the Delta’s coastline and rivers, their communities form parts of many states, rather than a single homogeneous zone. In the Delta, a long-running conflict over the distribution of local government posts between the Ijaw and the Itsekiri peoples is thought to have killed hundreds of people in the past few years, and even led, in 2003, to a temporary shutdown of more than a third of the nation’s oil output.

The political context is critical to understanding why even Ijaw campaigners who disapprove strongly of Asari’s violent and self-promoting methods say they have a certain regard for him. “Emotionally speaking, he has a heart for his people,” says Dimieari Von Kemedi, a respected activist who, though Ijaw, runs a multi-ethnic non-governmental group called Our Niger Delta. “How he goes about searching out what he thinks is in the best interest of his people is a completely different matter.”

As Asari sat at his makeshift patio table, periodically answering two mobile phones that played drum ‘n’ bass ring tones, the difference in sophistication between him and his men was obvious. He speaks excellent English and is one of only a handful of Muslims in a community that, despite including many Christians, is steeped in the worship of Egbesu, an Ijaw god widely believed to protect its worshippers from being harmed by bullets. Asari, who has just turned 40, has had a life of some privilege, as he himself admits. The descendant of a slave trader and the son of a judge, he says he dropped out of university and travelled the world, finding himself attracted by the revolutionary spirit of Islam, to which he converted in 1988. He spoke of a “wonderful year” in Libya, where he said he met Charles Taylor, Liberia’s warlord former president. Asari also said Osama bin Laden was one of his heroes, although in the past he has denied links with al-Qaeda and said he disagrees with bin Laden’s methods.

The force’s training area was a short walk from the main camp, past a small shrine to Egbesu containing empty spirits bottles. Four men were smoking hash under a wooden shelter next to a patch of open ground. I knew from a rota posted on the walls of the main building that the fighters were supposed to spend six hours a day training, so I asked if there was anything going on that afternoon. One of the men replied that there was, but said they were resting for “one hour, two hours”. The marijuana was to give them strength to work and fight, added Blessing Iblubor, another fighter. “That’s why we want to take it always,” he said.

The anti-government feeling shared by Asari, his men and huge numbers of ordinary Nigerians was crystallised by President Olusegun Obasanjo’s controversial re-election in 2003. Many Nigerians believe that rich nations, eager to project an image of progress in the country and to secure both oil supplies and the position of the Christian and generally pro-western Obasanjo, all but ignored widespread ballot-rigging and intimidation of opposition supporters and their leaders, including the runner-up, Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim northerner. Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary, proclaimed the elections “a landmark in the advancement of Nigeria’s democracy”.

The elections in Rivers State, where Obasanjo officially won almost 93 per cent of the vote, were among the worst anywhere. In a day spent travelling in and around Port Harcourt, I did not see a single person cast their vote legitimately. Instead, I saw ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of electors by ruling-party agents, and heard accounts of voting materials being stolen by armed thugs. In the Ogoni region, I watched as returning officers leafed through a sheaf of results sheets recording 100 per cent turn-outs and 100 per cent votes for the president. In Port Harcourt, a group of young men identified by locals as ruling- party supporters tried to persuade me that a large street protest complaining about the non-distribution of ballot boxes was being staged by people who were mentally disturbed.

Rivers State officials have attempted to discredit Asari by portraying him as a corrupt oil thief. He admits he takes oil, but says he sells it to local people for subsidised prices or gives it away free, rather than selling it for large profits or trading it for weapons with tankers offshore. Many people doubt this: one oil executive raged to me that Asari should have been locked up when he came to Abuja, rather than being received by senior government officials. A confidential report commissioned by Shell concluded that between 275,000 and 685,000 barrels were stolen on average each day, generating between $1.5bn and $4bn annually for the thieves, although Shell’s official figures put the volumes mostly in the 40,000- to 100,000-barrels-a-day range. Oil theft is widely thought to be done with high-level official complicity: two rear-admirals were sacked in January after a court martial found them guilty of involvement in the disappearance, in 2003, of an impounded tanker that had been shipping stolen oil from the Delta.

The Shell report, by WAC Global Services, a group of conflict management specialists, says earnings from oil theft have made it possible for militias to buy thousands of weapons, including former Soviet-type small arms, rocket launchers and possibly short-range missiles. Unrest in the Delta could force the company out of onshore production by 2008 unless it was prepared to violate its business principles, the report concludes. “It is clear that [Shell] is part of Niger Delta conflict dynamics and that its social licence to operate is fast eroding,” the report says. “Whereas some groups argue that [Shell] consciously fuels conflict as part of a ‘corporate conspiracy’, the...links result rather from a quick-fix, reactive and divisive approach to community engagement expressed through different areas of policy, practice and corporate culture.”

Late in the afternoon, we finally leave Asari’s camp for the refinery. The weather is bad and we spend the first part of the hour-long speedboat ride crouched with heads down, trying to stay out of the rain. Asari had said we would probably see a military base and barges belonging to oil thieves out on the river, but we come across only a few fishermen in canoes. Beyond a stretch of blackened mangroves - burnt by a fire at the refinery, Asari says - we arrive at a gap in the vegetation across which some fallen trees lie. A thin green pipe is just visible above the waterline. Asari says that this is where his men tap the oil, but that unfortunately we cannot go further and see the refinery because the tide is high and the route blocked. It seems surprising that an Ijaw man apparently so conscious of his roots and environment should be caught out by the ebb and flow of the Delta’s waters.

On the way back, we pass Shell facilities where two huge orange plumes of burning gas - Nigeria’s oil industry is thought to be the world’s most polluting flarer of waste gas - illuminate the overcast sky. Another Shell facility, with the company’s distinctive yellow and black railings, stands apparently deserted, a ladder leading conveniently down to the water. There appears to be nothing to stop us climbing up ourselves, emulating the gangs and community protesters who periodically occupy facilities and disrupt production all over the Delta. We make a final stop at the nearby community and Asari stronghold of Sangama. We leave our soaked-through footwear at the doors of the neat, tiled front room of the community chief’s house, where some of the chairs are so new they are still encased in their plastic covers. A large and loud television is showing an action film starring Sylvester Stallone. Boma Briggs, a community leader, explains that oil production has brought nothing except pollution, making it harder to catch fish. The area lacks clean drinking water, network electricity, and school and medical facilities, he adds. “We resettled in 1999, and since then there has not been any government support or oil company here.”

Briggs talks about the problems of conflict and security in the area, explaining that local fishermen voluntarily pay protection money to community leaders. The cash is put into an account administered by a local commander, who gives donations to those in need. At the back of the room Briggs shows us evidence of some of the proceeds from the arrangement: four Panasonic television boxes and one for a JVC sound system. “All these are gifts,” he explains. “’Thank you for your good security work.’”

As we leave, dusk is approaching and members of a crowd - dozens of people - are chanting, smoking and drinking in boisterous appreciation of Asari. Clutching his blue Beretta pistol, Asari sings a motivational Ijaw song to the gathering, which replies in kind. We speed back to land in disorderly convoy, the drivers demonstrating their skills with sharp, fast turns that more than once threaten to capsize us. One or two of the fighters whoop, enjoying their power and freedom on the deserted waterway: one boat flies a skull and crossbones flag; another is guarded by a machine gun manned by a fighter in ripped leather jacket and black beret.

Before we part, I ask Asari what will happen to his organisation now. He replies that, “One small mistake can bring everything down. Like all revolutionary movements, such mistakes can be very expensive,” he says. “It can lead to the deaths of so many people. So we are trying to prevent that.”

Four months elapse before my next encounter with Asari, which takes place just before Christmas in Port Harcourt. I wait with some of the former militia members in the courtyard outside a law firm’s office. Much has changed since we last met: the peace deal means Asari and his fighters have come out of the bush and are supposed to be reintegrating into urban life.

Now many of the men are restless and bored, complaining that they have no work. One sleeps on the bonnet of a car, while others ask for money for food.

As dusk approaches, Asari sweeps in, wearing white robes that have a preternatural appearance in the fading light. Addressing the young men from under the mess of power and telephone lines that hangs precariously over the courtyard, he calls out a list of names of people to come forward and stand in a line. In the background, one of his assistants gives out one or two gifts, including at least one Swiss-made Calvin Klein watch. The men picked will work for Asari’s security company. One of those chosen looks ecstatic: he makes a thumbs-up sign to someone in the crowd and gestures to his eyes as if to say, “Can you believe what you are seeing?” Afterwards, Asari hands out cash to some of those not chosen. “Money, money, money,” one of them says aloud in his excitement.

As it is now dark, Asari asks if we can do our interview in the back of his Lincoln luxury four-wheel drive. He tells me later that he owns seven vehicles: the Lincoln, four Mercedes and two buses. As a secret police officer detailed by the government to stay with Asari sits silently in the Lincoln’s back seat, the erstwhile militia leader says he is not happy with the authorities. Many of his bases, including the one we visited, have been damaged or destroyed by the security forces, he says. He is angry at what he says is official failure to address broader issues, including demands for greater control of oil wealth and self-determination for the Ijaw. These issues are touched on in the peace deal, although no specific commitments are made about addressing them. Asari insists his struggle will be peaceful from now on, and is likely to focus on “civil disobedience, [oil-production] stoppages, demonstrations, boycotts and so on”. He is intrigued by a shutdown of at least 100,000 barrels a day of Shell and ChevronTexaco production in the Kula community near Port Harcourt. He claims his group is not involved, but he quotes it as an example of what can be done. “It’s part of the design by the communities to assert themselves and take what belongs to them,” he says.

Three days later, I am sitting near the top of Shell’s high-rise office in Lagos, the commercial capital. This building, with its commanding views of sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest city, is the base for Chris Finlayson, Shell’s chief executive for exploration and production in Africa. Shell accounts for almost half of Nigeria’s oil output and the country accounts for about 10 per cent of the company’s production. Among other things, Finlayson, too, is preoccupied with the Kula shutdown. Far from wanting to avoid discussing an awkward issue, he volunteers his thoughts on it: he says he has some sympathy with the community, who feel they have been “well behaved” but have yet to see a development project they were promised by government. “We need to be in a position where we reward communities that display good relationships and good interactions, and don’t take them for granted,” he says. “I think there is a good wake-up call to everybody in the industry and government there: that we don’t over-focus on communities that are giving us problems.”

His words sound conciliatory, but many activists would see them as part of a familiar pattern. The oil industry in Nigeria has gone through cycles of investment in community projects, followed by heavy public criticism, corporate contrition and reform. The companies say they are happy to spend on development, but add that they can be held responsible neither for the lack of infrastructure nor the behaviour of the authorities towards their own people, even though members of the country’s often brutal security forces guard oil multinational facilities. In the most widely known Nigerian case of the junction between oil and political repression, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were executed in 1995 by the then military dictatorship. Shell shut down its wells in Ogoni, which is about an hour’s drive from Port Harcourt, more than 11 years ago. It has never reopened them.

In January this year, Shell launched its latest, revamped Delta-wide community-relations policy. Finlayson says the changes are supposed to take account of criticisms over unfulfilled projects and potentially divisive practices such as making direct cash payments to communities whose “leaders” may be unrepresentative or who may have poor and resentful neighbours. The flow of large numbers of banknotes - Nigeria’s biggest bill is worth less than $4 - is widely seen as encouraging corrupt and collusive relationships between favoured Deltans and oil company managers. Finlayson admits the company has experienced “significant” staff corruption in “the challenging areas of interface with community where there has been, shall we say, a lot of money going around”. Shell is in talks with the Nigerian government about the implementation of a programme based on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a British government-backed plan for increased disclosure of payments made by natural resource companies to the countries in which they operate.

Shell’s past approach has had its shortcomings, Finlayson says, although he disagrees with the WAC report’s conclusion that the company could be forced to choose between working in the Delta and having to admit publicly that it cannot take the Delta’s oil without breaking its business principles. “We believe we can make sure that things do not continue in a downward spiral by changing the way we interact with the communities,” he says. “What we disagreed with was the sense of inevitability in the report.”

The Nigerian government has just relaunched its Niger Delta Development Commission, a body that is jointly funded by the authorities and the oil companies, but which has been criticised as ineffective and corrupt. At the time of the peace deal with Asari, President Obasanjo condemned “undue militancy” in the Delta, although he admitted the region’s people had legitimate grievances and he criticised local officials for failing to bring development. “The obvious assessment so far is that not much impact has been made on the lives and living standards of most ordinary people of the Niger Delta,” he said.

Which captures well the significance of the enigmatic figure of Asari, who has skilfully played up his principles, and played down his violent opportunism, to acquire an aura of power and influence. In the words of one activist who has worked on Delta conflict issues for many years, and who asked not to be named for fear of security-force harassment, the best way to evaluate Asari is as a sign of what the Delta is becoming in the absence of fundamental change. “Asari is an example of what can happen in the next year or two,” the activist says. “If a real leader comes through, he will be able to do what Asari is pumping himself up to do, and then some. Because the guns are out there.”

Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2005.

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Energy Special:

The houses that gas built
By Shawn Donnan
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a8a1ee52-9d9c-11d9-a227-00000e2511c…

Financial Times

Published: March 26 2005

Yusuf Agopha was eight years old when I met him last August, and he should have been in school. He certainly wanted to be in school. Rattling around on his back, empty, was a Pokemon school bag, a burst of primary colours and cartoon characters that, according to his father, he eagerly donned each day. The Indonesian school year was more than a month old and classes should have been under way hours ago. But instead of sitting in a class, Yusuf was hovering nervously around our group, watching as we surveyed the new elementary school that the energy company BP had built for him and the other children of New Onar.

I was in New Onar because Yusuf, his family and 25 other families had moved into the fishing village six weeks before. It was the smaller of two such communities built by BP to house the more than 700 people it had moved from the future site of a $5bn natural-gas project in the far-flung Indonesian province of Papua. New Onar was, as a result, home to two-dozen freshly built $30,000 homes, whose running water, septic systems and mains electricity were at odds with the ramshackle thatched huts the villagers had left behind in one of the world’s remotest corners.

If Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, largely evades the international radar other than in times of Biblical-scale disaster or epic political transition, then Papua’s anonymity is even greater. A separatist conflict simmers, causing Indonesia to control access tightly. And it’s still home to Melanesian tribesmen who wear elongated gourds to cover their manhood as they wander through dense jungles populated by tree kangaroos, wild boars and the man-sized and occasionally ferocious cassowary bird. BP has begun work to extract trillions of cubic feet of gas from under the seabed of Bintuni Bay: by 2008, the “Tangguh” project should begin feeding millions of tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to voracious markets in China, the US, and beyond. But in response to what is now a growing pressure on energy corporations worldwide to consider the plight of those living close to such projects, BP is also undertaking an ambitious social experiment, one with the potential to reshape the way resource projects are undertaken around the world.

BP has already played an important role in Yusuf Agopha’s young life. Courtesy of the energy giant, he has his new home and new jungle surroundings to revel in. Over the coming decades, whether the company wants to admit it or not, BP will continue to be responsible for his education, his health, his security and, in all likelihood, his employment and economic future. Yet by the time I met Yusuf, it looked like BP was stumbling at the first hurdle.

The school in New Onar was a vivid example. There were freshly hewn wooden desks in its classrooms. There were bookshelves in the library. There were, however, no books, or teachers, or students. Schoolbooks had been bought and were sitting in a warehouse in the nearby town of Sorong. In New Tanah Merah, the bigger of the two fishing villages, an elementary school was up and fitfully running, but a junior high school had yet to open. Relations with some community leaders were growing strained. There were structural problems - overtaxed power grids and faltering water supplies - and what might easily become longer-term issues: in New Tanah Merah most of the local fishermen had stopped fishing and no one was planting vegetables. As BP was due to stop delivering food parcels a few months after my visit, such inactivity raised the spectre of an emerging culture of dependency. Plus, some 5,000 workers were about to descend on the place to build the BP gas plant. It would be, in the preferred description, a challenge.

The people of Papua, a former Dutch colony ruled by Indonesia since 1962, have long been familiar with the so-called “resource curse”. Remote as it is, the mangrove-lined and shrimp-filled Bintuni Bay where BP is now at work has drawn curious oil men its way for almost a century: the Netherlands New Guinea Oil Company sent expeditions to the area as early as 1907. But Papua’s main engagement with the resource world has been with Freeport-McMoRan, the New Orleans-based mining company which since the 1980s has operated, via an Indonesian subsidiary, the province’s massive Grasberg gold and copper mine.

Freeport’s role in Papua has often been held up by its critics as an example of the worst the resource industry has to offer. It is at the centre of a battle over the distribution of the billions in royalties and taxes it generates, and has been criticised for its close ties to the Indonesian military, whose soldiers guard the mine and have been accused of human-rights violations in the area around it.

The rules have now changed, however. This is an era in which corporate social responsibility is a mainstream idea. And at the core of that idea is this as-yet open question: can resource projects ever be friendly to the people who live closest to them?

The Tangguh project has moved only 127 families - a tiny fraction of the 15 million people who, according to the World Bank, are displaced by development projects around the world each year. But “it’s not a quaint case”, according to Michael Cernea, a Romanian-born sociologist and expert on resettlement who heads a Tangguh monitoring group convened by BP. “The BP case is small in extent,” he says, “but it is huge in content.” That, Cernea argues, is primarily because it provides a “laboratory case for what can be done when there’s a commitment and adequate resources are put to work”. In a context where, he says, “unmitigated disaster” is the norm, a multinational company is adopting what amounts to the best practices. Cernea was in a position to know about the disasters he described - he had drafted the World Bank’s resettlement policy and over the years tackled the issue of relocation through countless Bank-funded dam projects. “The test is in the process, not in the product,” he told me. If BP succeeds, it can reshape the way things are done in the oil and mining industries as a whole - and how the rest of us views them. If it fails, it will be just another example of the cost people in the developing world pay for providing the fuel and raw materials for the rest of the world’s economic engines.

BP, even its most vocal critics cautiously agree, appears determined to try to do the right thing with Tangguh. Eager to avoid a repeat of the PR disaster that beset it in Colombia in the 1990s - when the company was accused of funding military units implicated in human-rights abuses - BP wants to avoid hiring Indonesian security forces to guard its facilities in Papua. It has engaged in protracted consultations with local villagers, and deployed “community development” teams to provide latrines, walkways and clean water supplies to fishing communities that are often ignored by the local governments around Bintuni Bay. Eminent experts, such as retired US Senator George Mitchell, have been brought in to monitor BP’s progress. And it has turned to people such as Cernea to help it draft its resettlement policies.

But most experts are still reserving judgment on the project. In a report released quietly last month and due to be presented to stakeholders in Washington and London just over a week ago, an advisory panel chaired by Mitchell warned that while the Tangguh project had widespread support in Papua and Bintuni Bay, “serious concerns remain and complaints continue”. John O’Reilly, who as a BP vice-president was in charge of all Tangguh’s “external relations” and community-development programmes, left in 2003 after, he says, falling out with the company over how best to react to human-rights abuses, should they occur. The company, he says, didn’t want to address the issue, one he holds dear after working for BP in Colombia. As a result, O’Reilly argues, “it’s too early even to say that the aspirations that Tangguh has promised are capable of being delivered.”

By the time I visited Papua last August, BP had spent $20m on building the two new villages, and there had been countless delays before the new residents could move in. It had taken me more than a year to get BP to allow my visit, the first - and still, at present, the only - one allowed by a foreign journalist. “Welcome to the club of very few non-BP people who have had a first-hand look at what’s going on there!” a former consultant e-mailed me, shortly after my return.

But the feeling of being involved in a project occurring in isolation wasn’t shared by BP’s managers in the field. “We’ve got tons of people watching this,” Rick Harrison, the lanky 47-year-old Californian leading BP’s relocation project, told me the night after my trip to New Onar.

Harrison and I were sitting on the porch of his office, drinking herbal tea and smoking the Indonesian clove cigarettes that, after a non-smoking lifetime, he had taken up in response to the stress of Papua. We were discussing a long list of difficulties he and his team of nine Indonesians and expats had been confronted with; from this alone it was plain that BP had run into a project far more complex than it originally envisioned. When Harrison was recruited for the relocation job in November 2001 - he was pulled off a team of engineers working on the design criteria for the Tangguh LNG plants - his bosses had described the relocation to him as a “six-month assignment”. Almost four years later, Harrison remains in Papua, and has a more realistic view of the work at hand. “The fact of the matter,” he wrote to me in an e-mail after my visit, “is these people have undergone a change that will affect them for the rest of their lives. I honestly think it’s going to work out. There’s going to be some bumps and scratches along the way. Some will benefit, some will not. But on the whole, the project is producing an opportunity to improve their lives.”

BP had managed to build some impressive facilities for the villagers. On the first day I walked into New Tanah Merah, music was blaring out of almost every home, a raucous testament to the wonders of free-flow electricity drawn from a new solar-power station. Families sat proudly on their new porches. Small kiosks sold snack foods, cigarettes and soft drinks. With more than 100 identical houses laid out in neat rows, New Tanah Merah looked like a tropical Levittown, the Long Island suburb that set the 20th-century standard for suburban replication. BP was eager to show that off. “Maybe you want to ask about the electricity?” my minder, Jacob Kastanja, interjected during an interview early in my visit. “It’s a big change for them. They have TVs now.” The village also has a Catholic and a Protestant church, a mosque, two schools, a health clinic and new sports fields. There is a new pavilion for the village market and new docks to house what should, if all goes as planned, one day be a fishing fleet composed of new boats promised for each household. Together with New Onar, the result was what Cernea rightly called a community that could “probably compete successfully... for the title of best physically endowed villages in all of Indonesia”.

That endowment continues to cause problems outside New Tanah Merah. In its recent report, George Mitchell’s panel warned that the BP-built village was fuelling “jealousy and confusion” among villagers on the opposing north shore of Bintuni Bay. But when I visited, there was also a palpable unease within New Tanah Merah itself. Not about the facilities but about the people themselves: BP people, and local people. The company, say its managers privately, is confronting limits to its institutional capacity. It’s asking engineers and geophysicists to do social work - which is “very different from building LNG plants”, said one. The locals, too, are confronting a very different world. “There are a lot of people who are still struggling to adjust,” Thomas Mayera, the chairman of the elected committee which represented Tanah Merah’s residents during the resettlement process, told me. “In the old village we weren’t dependent on BP. But here we need time to learn.”

You could see it in the faces of the idle teenagers and the fishermen who had downed nets. It was there in the poor attendance at a boatbuilding class BP was providing in order to improve the community’s fishing fleet. And it was there late one afternoon, when a villager armed with a megaphone was calling residents to a meeting about who would be allowed to sell what at the village market. I asked if we could join the meeting, due to start half an hour later, and received an enthusiastic invitation. So I waited with my guide and translator on the steps of a house near where the meeting was due to take place, and watched a group of children playing volleyball. More than an hour later there was no sign of any meeting.

That unease will not live in isolation for long. Tangguh’s construction phase will involve up to 5,000 workers, and most big resource projects generate their own economies. An influx of mostly male workers flush with cash soon creates boom towns, with all the attendant ills. Tony McMullen, the Australian doctor directing the project’s health programmes, told me prostitutes had already begun scouting the Tangguh site (a daunting prospect - Papua has the highest HIV infection rate in Indonesia). So BP is asking its contractors, a consortium led by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root, to maintain a closed construction camp. It will recruit workers from three surrounding towns rather than locally, and pay them only where they are recruited. It is also promising to hire as many local Papuans as it can, and to provide at least one job on the construction project for each of the 600 households in the nine villages around Bintuni Bay deemed to be “directly affected”. And it has hired locals as guards, as part of a “community-based” security plan designed to help keep the Indonesian security forces at bay.

There are, however, doubts over how much control BP can really exert. By the time I visited last August, there were already at least 30 outsiders who had arrived in search of work, according to Philips Kamisopa, the village head. Harrison also said “in-migration” was a “longer-term concern” and already a sensitive issue. The authority to recommend which locals were hired lay with the village heads of New Tanah Merah and Saengga, an adjacent village. And that, Harrison said, had already generated a local industry - or “profit opportunity”, as he put it to me - that promised to “complicate an already strained relationship”.

”Strained” was Harrison’s way of referring to BP’s testy relationship with Philips Kamisopa. The week of my visit, Kamisopa had confronted a security guard imported from Java, Indonesia’s dominant island, at the site of the by-then demolished old village. The problem was simple - the guard had not recognised Kamisopa as the local village head or been suitably obsequious when he arrived at the site. The two scuffled, and a seething BP security manager was threatening to file assault charges against Kamisopa.

When I met him, Kamisopa seemed embarrassed by the incident and sought to play it down. But the village head had plenty of other gripes. “We feel very disappointed,” he declared, as we sat in the living room of his new home. His principal complaint was about land. Unlike their old home, which was surrounded by jungle where they could plant fruit trees and other crops freely, New Tanah Merah had strict boundaries. Customary law dictated that only the clan from which BP had bought the land - who lived in neighbouring Saengga - could exploit the land beyond the village line.

There was also a nagging problem with the empty, BP-built junior high school. The local government had declined an offer to run it, and BP was scrambling to find a non-profit foundation instead. At best, Rick Harrison said, it would be a year before the school would open. By October, talk was of using the buildings for a vocational training centre instead. And when I got in touch with Harrison again in late January, the plan had changed yet again. BP, he said, had decided to take charge of the schools in New Tanah Merah and New Onar. They would finally open in July, and be run by BP “over a three- to five-year period”. Harrison admitted that the “delays relate primarily to the Project’s reluctance to go headlong into commitments that by all rights should be the government’s”. But that kind of candour wasn’t enough to avoid the wrath of the Mitchell panel, which last month said the failure of the school to open “illustrated a considerable lack of advance planning”.

BP’s stance had actually been encouraged by Michael Cernea, the World Bank relocation expert. When I first talked to him in late October, before a visit of his monitoring team to the project site, he took a hard line. “The worst thing that BP could do is substitute itself for the government of Papua and manage everything,” he said. “It would be a disaster. Not only would the people be dependent on it, but so would the government.” By the time Cernea returned from his visit in November, he was frustrated enough by the impasse over the schools to start recommending a change in policy. But he laid plenty of blame on the villagers, too. “It is now time for the community to learn to do the things for which it was given the tools,” he declared.

Today, with the Indonesian school year more than half over, the classrooms in New Onar remain empty and will remain that way for another three months. But the school’s emptiness is just one of the many issues still facing the villagers as they adjust to their new lives.

The day I landed last August, the school was one of many pressing concerns facing Johannus Agopha, Yusuf’s uncle and wild-haired village head. I first met him by the community’s water supply, which had, because of a design flaw, gone dry two days before. Without a phone or radio to call for help - or the tools needed to fix the problem - the people of New Onar had sent a messenger by boat to tell BP about the problem. So when I was introduced to him, Agopha was standing in orange coveralls watching two BP workers trying to engineer a solution, and pondering what felt to him like broken promises.

Agopha swore New Onar had been promised a church by BP, for example. But until then nothing had been built. Nor was there any sign of work on houses he claimed BP had promised for the school’s teachers. Yet as burdened as he seemed, Agopha was also remarkably upbeat. With the project - and its likely societal costs - an hour’s boat ride away, New Onar had the virtue of relative isolation. Thanks to what Harrison called Agopha’s more “pro-active” leadership, the community also seemed to be adjusting better to their new life than people in New Tanah Merah. It wasn’t hard to imagine this eventually making the village a reduced priority for BP. But Agopha seemed to have etiquette on his mind as well.

”There was an agreement with the company that when we moved here everything would be ready,” he told me. When that hadn’t been the case, it made relocation “difficult”, he added. “But we can’t push BP to build the facilities faster.”

”Why not?” I asked.

Melanesian manners, it turned out. “During the move we realised that BP was busy already,” Agopha said, shrugging. “We didn’t want to push BP.”

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2005

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Energy Special:

How low can they go?
By John Reed
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d4ee6ae4-9d9c-11d9-a227-00000e2511c…

Financial Times

Published: March 26 2005

One muggy afternoon, I stood on the deck of the Girassol, a floating oil-production and storage vessel moored in deep sea some 200km northwest of Luanda. I watched as a supertanker finished the 32-hour-long process of loading a million barrels of oil - equivalent to Angola’s entire daily output - destined for a refinery in France. Time is of the essence and mistakes are costly. Total, Girassol’s operator, runs it with balletic precision. An orange speedboat was lowered from the deck to help disconnect the pipelines from the tanker moored a nautical mile away. A second supertanker lurked greedily on the horizon. Girassol produces on average 240,000 barrels of crude a day, and tankers visit every four days. Moored by 16 anchors, in water deeper than the height of four Eiffel Towers, Girassol is the length of three football pitches.

I recommend a visit to the Girassol as a soothing antidote to oil-anxiety - a growing modern phenomenon. Today’s offshore oilmen exude the easy optimism of the railroad barons of a century ago. Deep-water drilling, one of the industry’s biggest growth areas, is pumping more oil than ever, and at a safe remove from the pipeline attacks of Iraq, Nigeria and Colombia. Meanwhile, improving technology is allowing the industry to drill at greater depths than ever, pushing supply forecasts into the future. Better seismic imaging and real-time data processing allow geologists to locate and exploit reservoirs more accurately. Engineers are learning to fashion pipes that can turn corners to negotiate tricky geology. Remote-operated vehicles can trouble-shoot at depths of 2km or more, so costly equipment stays in working condition for longer.

Water deeper than 500m accounts for more than 60 per cent of the world’s surface. Even modest jumps in the industry’s capabilities could significantly push back estimates on global reserves. The Girassol project was green-lit at a conservative break-even assumption of $17 a barrel; but though Total recently adjusted its break-even for projects to $21 a barrel, prices are more than double that at the moment. “Deepwater offshore is the single most important exploitable resource within the grasp of our generation,” Peter Odell, author of a recent book on carbon fuels says. “It’s the flavour of the decade,” he adds, in a world where an estimated two-thirds of proven oil reserves remain unexploited.

Two days after I visited Girassol, I flew to Block 31, one of Angola’s outermost deep-sea oil patches. Water depths there exceed 2km, and drill “strings” - when both water and the seabed are included - extend to 4km or more. The industry informally defines deep water as below 500m, and anything below 1,500m as “ultra-deep”. BP, which operates Block 31, drilled at a depth of 2,020m in June 2002, a record for Angola, so Block 31 can accurately be called an industry frontier.

My visit had begun in Soyo, a sleepy port town at the mouth of the River Congo, which in recent years has become a logistics hub for Angola’s burgeoning offshore industry (and surely one of the world’s remotest places with a $200-a-night hotel). From there I joined eight riggers and geologists in boarding a chopper for the 45-minute flight to the Leiv Eiriksson, a floating rig operated by Norwegian drilling contractor Ocean Rig.

In the drilling control cabin, the platform’s nerve centre, known in roughneck parlance as the “doghouse”, I watched as John Hughes, a Scots driller with North Sea experience, operated a joystick to manipulate machinery to lift a 9.56m drill joint (about the size of six men standing on each other’s shoulders) so that it could be connected by two Angolan employees on the drilling floor below him. Old-style doghouses were claustrophobic places with rudimentary technology: the driller worked, essentially, with a clutch and a massive brake. But Ocean Rig’s is glass-walled, roomy and fully electronic, with computerised indicators. “It’s like sitting on a spaceship,” said Hughes. I visited the platform’s bridge and spoke to two exquisitely bored men in charge of monitoring this technology. “It took me 10 years to get my captain’s ticket, and now I’m sitting here,” joked Juha Salonen from Finland. His Swedish colleague Stefan Skobowitsh described what they do as “the science of going nowhere”.

BP, like Total, has been spending roughly a billion dollars a year in Angola. When the investment pays dividends, it does so handsomely. In mid-February, BP, with its partner Sonangol, the Angolan state-owned oil company, announced its fifth successful discovery in the ultra-deep waters of Block 31. The well, in 1,602m of water, was tested at a maximum rate of 5,330 barrels of oil a day.

A relative latecomer to oil markets, Angola is spoken of by industry experts as an oil province that could rival the North Sea, or even Alaska. Over millions of years, the River Congo deposited the sediment that became oil in present-day Angola’s deep waters. Chevron-Texaco has been drilling in Angola since the country was a Portuguese colony. But technological hurdles and Angola’s civil war, which lasted in fits and starts from 1975 until 2002, deterred most of the majors from exploring until the 1990s. Angola’s output is now expected to match Kuwait’s by 2010.

On the Leiv Eiriksson I watched as a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) sent back pictures from its 40-minute descent to the seabed to inspect drilling equipment, which it can install or remove if necessary. Harry Brennan, its operator, manipulated the ROV with clicks of a mouse and flicks of a joystick. “When I came here, this was the lowest depth I’d ever seen,” he told me, peering at two screens on the ROV’s control panel. The ocean’s depths are bitterly cold and pitch-dark. But the ROV camera has spotted tuna as far down as 1,000m, and Brennan once had to arm-wrestle an octopus. Photogenic gadgets such as ROVs - a new generation of which is now being developed - get lots of attention. Yet the industry’s ability to plumb new depths also owes something to more prosaic, if equally important factors. Improved seismic imaging means wildcatters are likelier than ever to hit oil. Imaging is now available not just in three dimensions, but in what geologists call “4-D” - the ability to track reservoirs, and adjust exploitation, over time.

Are there any limits to how deep and how far the industry can go? Some oilmen speak of exploiting the “ultra-ultra-deep” - in Angola’s case the next swathe of waters west of Blocks 31 and 32. Turbulent geopolitics in the world’s main onshore oil-producing areas are likely to keep the offshore industry pumping at record levels in years to come. A recent article in Petroleum Economist referred, with refreshing candour, to what it called offshore oil’s “isolation factor”, defined as “a more comfortable operating climate, free from vociferous communities and sabotage”.

But the dream of isolation is still that. In Angola’s case at least, onshore politics could, with time, intrude on the offshore business’s splendid isolation. Oil is Angola’s largest industry by far, contributing more than 80 per cent of GDP. Oil revenues helped President dos Santos’ MPLA party win the war against the rebel group Unita, and could play a role in postwar reconstruction.

But all evidence indicates that much of the oil money ends up squandered or stashed away by top officials. The International Monetary Fund and Human Rights Watch have separately concluded that some $4bn of the country’s oil money has gone unaccounted for in recent years. Angola remains one of the world’s poorest countries, where one in four children die before their first birthday. Luanda, a city designed to accommodate half a million people, now houses some four and a half million, the majority of them in noisome, rubbish-strewn slums. Foreign and Angolan oil executives inhabit walled villas on the city’s outskirts, not unlike the Portuguese colonialists of old.

”The oil industry is offshore in every sense of the word - the money doesn’t come to Angola,” Rafael Marques told me the day after my return from Girassol. A journalist and political activist who until recently headed George Soros’s Open Society Institute in Angola, he has in the past antagonised the Angolan government and at one point served a brief jail sentence. “Even the expats come here in a pattern of 28 days in, 28 days out,” he said. “The experts are offshore, which leaves very little to the local economy.”

The oil companies have, justifiably or not, become a lightning-rod for the disaffection some Angolans feel for their government. On a separate visit last year to Cabinda, Angola’s richest oil region, I observed the industry as many Angolans do: peering over the hermetic, barbed wire-protected walls of an expat compound. Gas flares from Chevron’s shallow offshore wells light the night sky of the region, a non-contiguous piece of Angolan territory wedged between Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo. On a walkabout through the enclave, Agostinho Chicaia, a local activist, pointed scornfully at the sky, where a helicopter ferried Chevron people - who rarely set foot in town - overhead en route to Luanda or Houston. “They could invest their money for the development of this country,” he said. “Instead, there they are, living in a compound.”

The oil companies avoid discussing Angolan politics on the record but privately point out, with some justification, that Angola is for the Angolans to govern. BP, Total and other companies have, in keeping with global trends, been stepping up their social responsibility programmes and commitments to “Angolanise” their operations by hiring more local employees. In May last year, when Chevron-Texaco signed an agreement extending its concession in Cabinda for another 30 years, the company pledged an $80m “social bonus”, some of it to be spent in Cabinda.

That African politics and Big Oil do not mix is confirmed by a series of scandals and allegations involving the majors in Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea. In Angola, whether the companies are helpless bystanders or parties to poor governance, local activists remain, on balance, unimpressed. As Marques put it: “The oil companies are the life jacket that keeps this government floating.”

On my second and final day aboard the Leiv Eiriksson, I waited in the platform’s TV lounge for a meeting with Stan Van de Cappelle, BP’s company man aboard Ocean Rig’s vessel. Cappelle, a Canadian, has been in the industry for 33 years, and joined BP in 1998. He recalled working on his first deep-water well in 1978, when “deep water” was 1,200ft. Divers sent down to work on the rig often had to be isolated in decompression for up to 10 days.

The block where we were sitting, he noted, was the outer limit of what had been put up for sale. Formations this far offshore are more faulty and trickier to exploit. However, he said: “The future is going to be deep water: it’s the last exploration frontier we have.” Predicting more “big discoveries” offshore, he said: “We’ll keep going farther until we don’t find anything more.”

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2005.

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Informed Comment
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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, March 26, 2005

Massive Protest in Bahrain

Reuters is estimating that 80,000 demonstrators came out in Bahrain on Friday to demand a new constitution. The demonstration, which was peaceful, had been forbidden by Minister of Interior Sheikh Rashed bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, but he was ignored. He is now talking about trying to prosecute the leaders of the demonstration.

(His predecessor was dismissed last May for cracking down on a much smaller demonstration of Shiites against US military action in the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, so he should be careful.)

The ruler of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, who came to power in 1999, declared himself a king in February of 2002 and high-handedly amended the constitution. He held elections for parliament in fall of 2002, but they were deeply flawed as an exercise in any real democracy.

1. The parliament has two chambers. Only the lower chamber was elected.

2. The king appoints the upper chamber.

3. The majority Shiite population boycotted the election and was poorly represented in the lower house. They were enraged about points number one and two above.

4. Sunni fundamentalists did remarkably well, and with allies probably have 21 of the 40 seats in the lower house, i.e. a majority. Bahrain is a Shiite-majority country (65% are Shiites), so having a parliament dominated by Sunni fundamentalists is highly unrepresentative.

5. The (Sunni) king appoints the prime minister rather than allowing him to be elected from the parliament.

6. The fundamentalist members of parliament have no respect for freedom of speech, and many of their deliberations have been about how to stop Bahrain newspapers from carrying criticism of the government and of the parliament. The fundamentalists led a campaign in parliament to stop a concert in Manama planned for the Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram, on the grounds that she wriggles when she sings. Bahraini Bloggers have been jailed, but subsequently released. (An outspoken but generally anti-Shiite Bahrain blog by a Sunni is Mahmood`s Den; other Bahrain blogs are listed here).

If democracy has anything to do with popular sovereignty and majority rule, then this situation is not very much like democracy.

Some of the background to the current problems is explained in this article from last year in MEI.

Shaikh Ali Salman, the clerical leader fo the rally, addressed the crowd and demanded that parliament be permitted to legislate on its own account and that there be a genuine separation of powers.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says that the demonstrators only carried Bahraini flags and placards politely asking for reform. Usually in Bahrain pictures of Iran`s supreme jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, and recently of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf, are raised. Apparently these protesters wanted to make the point that their political context and demands were completely local and that they could not be dismissed as cat`s paws of Iran. (In fact, a majority of Bahrain`s Shiites don`t even follow a school of the religion that allows laypeople to give absolute allegiance to clerics like Khamenei).

Salman emphasized that the reform movement is peaceful and has the best interests of the nation at heart. He said it wants Bahrain to go ahead with hosting the Formula 1 race early in April, and will refrain from demonstrating during it.

The US has a naval base in Bahrain and its king has been a helpful ally. Will George W. Bush support Shaikh Salman or King Hamad? Bush spoke out forcefully against the Syrian presence in Lebanon and in favor of Lebanese democracy. Will he speak out in favor of majority rule and popular sovereignty in Bahrain?

And if he doesn`t, won`t the rest of the Middle East assume he is just hypocritically hiding behind catch phrases like "democracy" to make trouble for the countries in the region like Syria and Iran, which Bush does not like, and which are seen as threats by his expansionist friends in Israel`s Likud party?

posted by Juan @ 3/26/2005 06:35:00 AM

23 Dead in 4 Car Bombings, Other Violence

The guerrilla war in Iraq marched on, on Friday, with four big carbombs and other attacks that left a total of some 23 persons dead, including at least one US soldier in Anbar province. (This conclusion is reached on the basis of the report linked here as well as late news in the Arab press). Two of the car bombs were detonated by suicide bombers in Iskandariyah in Babil province south of Baghdad, and two more in the western city of Ramadi. At a checkpoint in Ramadi, a car bomb killed 11 Iraqi gendarmes. Another convoy was attacked just south of Baghdad with rocket fire.

In addition to the car bombs, there were several other attacks. Guerrillas assassinated Col. Salman Muhammad Hasan, who commanded an Iraqi army unit in Basra, while he was in Baghdad for a funeral. Near Kirkuk, guerrillas kidnapped a Col. Siraj al-Din, an officer in the Ministry of Defense.

In Baghdad, guerrillas shot down five women translators who worked for the US military.

Guerrillas blew up an oil pipeline near Abu Ghuraib, which links a refinery near Baghdad with the northern oil fields.

posted by Juan @ 3/26/2005 06:30:00 AM

News roundup

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee spy case is heating up again. The FBI clearly believes that AIPAC is at the center of an important political conspiracy, but may not be able to make the whole case in the legal system.

Whatever the outcome of the case, AIPAC should have to register as a foreign agent. It is shameful that a small and fanatical group of rightwing devotees of colonial settlerism in the West Bank should be virtually controlling the foreign policy of the US Congress toward the Middle East-- especially since colonial settlerism in the West Bank causes so many people in the Middle East to hate the United States for supporting it-- and to lash out at us.

Related links:

Gee, I wonder who is funding those illegal colonies in Palestinian territory? Alas, it is I. The Israeli government funds them, while orally distancing itself from them, and the Israeli government gets $10 a year from each American, including me. I`m funding the illegal colonies. I don`t like funding them. You know why I have to? Because all my representatives in Washington are deathly afraid of being targeted for un-election by AIPAC. It is not a completely irrational fear, though AIPAC is not nearly as powerful as Capitol Hill seems to think.

The Israeli Right is so virulent that it already killed one prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for daring make peace with the Palestinians, and is threatening to kill Ariel Sharon for planning a withdrawal of settlers from the vast and desperately poor slum of Gaza. (People commiserate with me for being constantly attacked, smeared and harassed by far rightwing Zionists in the US press, but it is minor compared to what they are saying about Sharon himself! Some people, you`re not allowed to disagree with, Or Else.

Of course, it is not as if Sharon is himself a peace-maker. He stole more land on a vast scale this week, with a plan to put 3500 new settlers into the West Bank, , which is euphemistically called "settlement expansion" in the Western press, and which will draw no more than a rap on the knuckles from Condi Rice.

posted by Juan @ [url3/26/2005 06:18:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/news-roundup-american-israel-public.html[/url]

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A vote for immortality
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1445962,00.ht…

Oliver James
Saturday March 26, 2005

Guardian
It was fear of death wot won it for George Bush in last year`s presidential election, if a series of psychological experiments are to be believed. Whether the same could be true for Tony Blair in May is less sure.

The four experiments were conducted before the presidential election and originally designed to test terror management theory (TMT), rather than as political analysis. TMT posits that human awareness of mortality makes it our core terror; we use culture in general, and leaders in particular, to create a protective shield against fears arising from the inevitability of this demise.

In the first experiment, reminders of death were provided to a sample of subjects by asking them to respond to questions about death and dying. Members of a control sample were given questions about watching TV.

Both samples were then asked to read a highly favourable opinion of the measures taken by Bush after 9/11 and to say how much they endorsed his actions. Those previously reminded of their death were significantly more likely to endorse his policies.

The second experiment established that, on its own, being reminded of 9/11 increased subjects` awareness of their own mortality. The third showed that reminders of 9/11 and reminders of mortality, per se, were equally effective in generating support for Bush, whether the subjects were leftwing or conservative.

The experimental coup de grace directly assessed how likely subjects were to vote for Bush or Kerry after exposure to reminders of mortality or 9/11. Both reminders increased Bush`s vote.

According to TMT, a leader who has the a priori status conferred by being president, who has a charismatic style and advocates strong home security with aggressive military solutions overseas, will ring the bell of our need for security from death.

Another study presented subjects with a hypothetical charismatic leader who promised citizens a significant role in a noble mission. If they had previously been reminded of their death they were more likely to want to support him. Indeed, President Roosevelt`s approval ratings surged after Pearl Harbor, likewise John F Kennedy`s in the Cuban missile crisis and George Bush Senior`s after the start of the first Gulf war. Blair got a similar boost after the invasion of Iraq.

But the implications of the study for Blair may not be as simple as they were for Bush. After all, it was the Americans who were attacked. Banging on about 9/11 or the World Trade Centre probably does not equate as directly with death for people in Britain.

Whether some boffin in the Cabinet Office has drawn Alastair Campbell`s attention to these studies or not, there has certainly been plenty of "terror-threat" talk recently. But it may not have the same impact on British voters as it did on Americans when it came from Bush. As the opinion polls show, a great many voters just think "liar, liar, pants on fire" when reminded of terrorism threats by Blair.

Having said all that, I do occasionally feel that it might be advisable to move out of London in case of a dirty bomb. With that kind of thought probably sloshing around in the back of many minds, would it not be possible to activate our fear of death subliminally, convincing us that Father Tony at the helm will protect us?

Trouble is, the leader stirring up the fear needs to be perceived as charismatic (so don`t bother trying it, Michael Howard). If the opinion polls are right, British voters now think of Tony in the same way as a wife does during a blazing row with her faithless, philandering husband.

Of course, if the warnings came from that nice Gordon Brown next door, it might be another matter ...

· Oliver James is the author of They F*** You Up - How to Survive Family Life

[e-mail]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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The Independent
When weeping for religious martyrs leads to the crucifixion of innocents
Passion and redemption were part of our parents’ religious experience. It would be wiser to reflect on the sins of our human gods
Saturday 26th March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=623…

"About suffering," Auden famously wrote in 1938, "they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ its human position; how it takes place/ While someone is eating or opening a window/Or just walking dully along." Yet the great crucifixion paintings of Caravaggio or Bellini, or Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Vatican - though they were not what Auden had in mind - have God on their side. We may feel the power of suffering in the context of religion but, outside this spiritual setting, I’m not sure how compassionate we really are.

The atrocities of yesterday - the Beslan school massacre, the Bali bombings, the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, the gassings of Halabja - can still fill us with horror and pity, although that sensitivity is heavily conditioned by the nature of the perpetrators. In an age where war has become a policy option rather than a last resort, where its legitimacy rather than its morality can be summed up on a sheet of A4 paper, we prefer to concentrate on the suffering caused by "them" rather than "us".

Hence the tens of thousands of Iraqis who were killed in the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation, the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam war, the hundreds of Egyptians cut down by our 1956 invasion of Suez are not part of our burden of guilt. About 1,700 Palestinian civilians from the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps - equal to more than half the dead of the World Trade Center - were massacred in Lebanon.

But how many readers can remember the exact date? September 16-18, 1982. "Our" dates are thus sacrosanct, "theirs" are not; though I notice how "they" must learn "ours". How many times are Arabs pointedly asked for their reaction to 11 September 2001, with the specific purpose of discovering whether they show the correct degree of shock and horror? And how many Westerners would even know what happened in 1982?

It’s also about living memory - and also, I suspect, about photographic records. The catastrophes of our generation, or of our parents’ or even our grandparents’ generation - have a poignancy that earlier bloodbaths do not. Hence we can be moved to tears by the epic tragedy of the Second World War and its 55 million dead, by the murder of six million Jews, by our families’ memories of this conflict - a cousin on my father’s side died on the Burma Road - and also by the poets of the First World War. Owen and Sassoon created the ever-living verbal museum of that conflict.

But I can well understand why the Israelis have restructured their Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem. The last survivors of Hitler’s death camps will be dead soon. So they must be kept alive in their taped interviews, along with the records and clothes of those who were slaughtered by the Nazis. The Armenians still struggle to memorialise their own 1915 Holocaust of one and a half million at the hands of the Ottoman Turks - they struggle even to keep the capital H on their Holocaust - because only a pitiful handful of their survivors are still alive and the Turks still deny their obvious guilt. There are photographs of the Armenians being led to the slaughter. But no documentary film.

And here the compassion begins to wobble. Before the 1914-18 war, there were massacres enough for the world’s tears; the Balkan war of 1912 was of such carnage that eyewitnesses feared their accounts would never be believed. The Boer war turned into a moral disgrace for the British because we herded our enemies’ families into disease-ridden concentration camps. The Franco-Prussian war of 1871 - though French suffering was portrayed by Delacroix with stunning accuracy, and photos survive of the Paris Commune - leaves us cold. So, despite the record of still photographs, does the American civil war.

We can still be appalled - we should be appalled - by the million dead of the Irish famine, although it is painfully significant that, although photography had been invented by the mid-19th century, not a single photograph was taken of its victims. We have to rely on the Illustrated London News sketches to show the grief and horror which the Irish famine produced.

Yet who cries now for the dead of Waterloo or Malplaquet, of the first Afghan war, of the Hundred Years’ War - whose rural effects were still being felt in 1914 - or for the English Civil War, for the dead of Flodden Field or Naseby or for the world slaughter brought about by the Great Plague? True, movies can briefly provoke some feeling in us for these ghosts. Hence the Titanic remains a real tragedy for us even though it sank in 1912 when the Balkan war was taking so many more innocent lives. Braveheart can move us. But in the end, we know that the disembowelling of William Wallace is just Mel Gibson faking death.

By the time we reach the slaughters of antiquity, we simply don’t care a damn. Genghis Khan? Tamerlane? The sack of Rome? The destruction of Carthage? Forget it. Their victims have turned to dust and we do not care about them. They have no memorial. We even demonstrate our fascination with long-ago cruelty. Do we not queue for hours to look at the room in London in which two children were brutally murdered? The Princes in the Tower?

If, of course, the dead have a spiritual value, then their death must become real to us. Rome’s most famous crucifixion victim was not Spartacus - although Kirk Douglas did his best to win the role in Kubrick’s fine film - but a carpenter from Nazareth. And compassion remains as fresh among Muslims for the martyrs of early Islam as it does for the present-day dead of Iraq. Anyone who has watched the Shia Muslims of Iraq or Lebanon or Iran honouring the killing of Imams Ali and Hussein - like Jesus, they were betrayed - has watched real tears running down their faces, tears no less fresh than those of the Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem this week. You can butcher a whole city of innocents in the Punic War, but nail the son of Mary to a cross or murder the son-in-law of the Prophet and you’ll have them weeping for generations.

What worries me, I suppose, is that so many millions of innocents have died terrible deaths because their killers have wept over their religious martyrs. The Crusaders slaughtered the entire population of Beirut and Jerusalem in 1099 because of their desire to "free" the Holy Land, and between 1980 and 1988, the followers of the Prophet killed a million and a half of their own co-religionists after a Sunni Muslim leader invaded a Shia Muslim country. Most of the Iraqi soldiers were Shia - and almost all the Iranian soldiers were Shia - so this was an act of virtual mass suicide by the followers of Ali and Hussein.

Passion and redemption were probably essential parts of our parents’ religious experience. But I believe it would be wiser and more human in our 21st century to reflect upon the sins of our little human gods, those evangelicals who also claim we are fighting for "good" against "evil", who can ignore history and the oceans of blood humanity has shed - and get away with it on a sheet of A4 paper.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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[urlStraw rejects call to publish all Iraq legal advice]http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1445602,00.html[/url]

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Saturday, March 26, 2005
War News for Saturday, March 26, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers killed, two wounded by roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One US Marine killed fighting in Al-Anbar province.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi soldier killed, four wounded in car bomb ambush near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi Army general assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline ablaze near Abu Ghraib.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi colonel kidnapped near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: US/Iraqi convoy ambushed by car bomb in Ramadi.

Bring ‘em on: US patrol ambushed near Baquba; three insurgents killed.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi soldier killed in mortar attack near Suleiman Beg.

Bring ‘em on: Turkish truck destroyed in mortar attack on convoy near Tikrit; driver missing.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis killed, 19 wounded by cat bomb at police station near Hilla.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi and US troops seize 131 insurgents and material in raid near Karbala.

Two Iraqi civilians killed as US troops detonate booby-trapped car in Baghdad.

Escape foiled. “U.S. military guards discovered a 600-foot tunnel dug with makeshift tools leading out of the main prison facility for detainees in Iraq before anyone had the opportunity to escape, officials said Friday. The tunnel at Camp Bucca was 12 to 15 feet deep and as wide as 3 feet and had reached beyond the compound fence, said Army Maj. Flora Lee, a spokeswoman at the Army`s Combined Press Information Center in Iraq said by telephone. She did not know when guards discovered the tunnel.”

Torture policy. “Newly released government documents say the abuse of prisoners in Iraq by U.S. forces was more widespread than previously reported. An officer found that detainees ‘were being systematically and intentionally mistreated’ at a holding facility near Mosul in December 2003. The 311th Military Intelligence Battalion of the Army`s 101st Airborne Division ran the lockup.”

Detainee deaths. “The Army has concluded that 27 of the detainees who died in US custody in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002 were the victims of homicide or suspected homicide, military officials said in a report released yesterday. The number is higher than Pentagon officials have previously acknowledged, and it indicates that criminal acts caused a significant portion of the dozens of prisoner deaths that occurred in US custody.”

Accountability. “Despite recommendations by Army investigators, commanders have decided not to prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, according to a new accounting released Friday by the Army. Investigators had recommended that all 17 soldiers be charged in the cases, according to the accounting by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. The charges included murder, conspiracy and negligent homicide. While none of the 17 will face any prosecution, one received a letter of reprimand and another was discharged after the investigations.”

Political notes. “The delay in forming a new government in Iraq has stalled important projects at ministries and is sowing confusion among current government workers about their duties, senior Iraqi officials say. After the Jan. 30 elections, the office of the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, ordered the country`s more than two dozen ministries not to start any long-term projects or make any major policy decisions because the new government was expected to be installed quickly. Last week, as negotiations over a new government dragged on, Dr. Allawi`s office rescinded its order. But some ministry officials say they were not aware of that change or remain hesitant about pushing ahead with long-term projects. Many government employees are also working at a slower pace because they are distracted by the political negotiations and insecurity of their own jobs, the officials say.”

Ambush. “The April 9, 2004, mission is best-known for the kidnapping and dramatic escape of its leader, Mississippi dairy farmer Thomas Hamill, whose safe return weeks later was cause for celebration. But others weren`t so lucky. Six truck drivers for Halliburton Co. were killed that day, and nine were injured. One trucker remains missing. Two U.S. soldiers escorting the convoy were killed, and one is missing. Of 43 men on the convoy, 25 were killed or injured. It remains the deadliest incident involving American contractors in the war in Iraq.
Interviews with surviving drivers and families of the dead, and a U.S. Army report obtained by the Los Angeles Times, show that the U.S. military and Halliburton missed numerous warnings in sending the men on the ill-fated mission. From the moment it left the gate, the convoy may have been doomed by a series of errors that escalated into disaster.”

Fobbits. “The war beyond the wire is so draining that each of the more than 100 fobs in Iraq is a hardened refuge for the nearly 150,000 U.S. troops here. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, a 3rd Infantry Division commander based at the Baghdad airport`s FOB Liberty, calls them ‘little oases in the middle of a dangerous and confusing world.’ This is a war without a front but with plenty of rear. Many soldiers spend a year in Iraq without ever leaving their fortified bases. Others may never meet an Iraqi, much less kill one. A soldier may patrol for months without ever seeing the enemy, yet risk death or disfigurement at any moment. Each day in Iraq will end, almost without exception, with an American on patrol losing an arm, a leg, an eye or a life to an earth-shattering detonation of high explosives. That these bombs are embedded in the most prosaic emblems of Iraqi life — a car, a donkey cart, a trash pile, a pothole — only intensifies the dread that attends every journey outside the wire.”

Huckster. “The Army expects to miss its recruiting goals this month and next and is working on a revised sales pitch appealing to the patriotism of parents, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey said Wednesday.” Why don’t you start by appealing to those patriotic Bush brats?

Fallujah report. "Four months after American bombs and guns pounded much of this city into ruins, some signs of life are returning. A kebab shop and a bakery have reopened on the bullet-scarred main boulevard. About a third of the city`s 250,000 residents have trickled back since early January. American marines and Iraqi police officers patrol the streets, and there has been little violence. But the safety has come at a high price. To enter Falluja, residents must wait about four hours to get through the rigid military checkpoints, and there are strict nightly curfews. That has stunted the renascent economy and the reconstruction effort. It has also frustrated the residents, who are still coming to grips with their shattered streets and houses. Many have jobs or relatives outside the city. Falluja is safe,’ said Hadima Khalifa Abed, 42, who returned to her ruined home in January with her husband and 10 children. ‘But it is safe like a prison.’ American military officials here say they face a difficult choice. Easing the harsh security measures might help revive the economy and cut the 50 percent unemployment rate; it could also allow the return of the insurgents who ran Falluja from last April until the American intervention in November. Even now, insurgents lob occasional mortar shells into the city, and a number of contractors have been killed here. There are other obstacles. Falluja still lacks a mayor and a city council because of the new Iraqi National Assembly`s failure to form a government. The American military is reluctant to make decisions that will shape the city for decades, and the resulting power vacuum has been crippling.”

Commentary

Editorial: “Mr. Bush`s re-election hasn`t announced the end of unilateralism. And if the Europeans, knowing they have the ability to do so and knowing that numerous NGO`s are demanding them to do so, veto Mr. Wolfowitz`s nomination, they will bear the responsibility for a new crisis with the United States. In short, Mr. Bush`s proposal makes a warming of trans-Atlantic relations all the more difficult.”

Analysis: “The Turkish anti-Americanism today is based on the George W. Bush administration`s attitude towards Iraq and the Palestinian issue. The Bush administration`s patronizing attitude towards everyone, ignoring all advice, and its tendency to impose its will has produced a reaction in Turkey, just like everywhere else in the world. This attitude of the Bush administration, intentionally or not, is reflected in the attitude of the U.S. bureaucracy. The expectations and stance of the White House affect the posture of the entire bureaucracy, starting from the State Department.”

Analysis: “Indeed, from Europe to Asia to Latin America, the formative experiences of those in or rising toward political power were no longer those of Lee Hong Koo in Seoul or Helmut Kohl in Germany, but of another generation forged in opposition to American-backed military governments, or the American war in Vietnam, or the installation in the 1980s of American missiles in Europe. The paradigm for this generation was less America-the-liberator than America-the-imperialist. It was therefore not surprising that darker images of the United States nursed over time blossomed like some bitter harvest as bombs fell on Baghdad. The fact that America`s power had, by 2001, become exponentially greater than that of any other country only reinforced this tendency. Countries around the world that had become liberal democracies under American protection wanted equal treatment just as America`s reason to regard them as equals, or anything close to that, had eroded. Karen Hughes, the close aide to Bush appointed this month to the job of repairing America`s image in the world, would, I suspect, be well advised to pay attention to these underlying trends. What allies from Europe to Asia want, above all, is to be treated as equals. Rough translation: please, listen to and respect us. Asking for gratitude, or expecting it, will get America nowhere. The cold war is history - even if relics like North Korea remain - and people live in the present. The struggle to defeat the Soviet Union is part of a heroic American narrative, but in the Middle East, as in Asia and Latin America, that victory involved acts of hypocrisy, ruthlessness or worse that are more alive in the minds of many people than the heroism. Those people form the generation in power.”

Opinion: “Compulsory military service is politically unpalatable -- even more so in an unpopular war. Although the administration has done a masterful job of shielding the public from photos of the coffins of the dead flown into the Dover, Del., military mortuary, the reality of war is getting through. If the Army continues to be all-volunteer and enlistments keep falling, the good side of the equation is that it could force Bush and his saber-rattling strategists to slow down before launching another pre-emptive foreign adventure. Bush may then try something new -- such as peacemaking.”
# posted by yankeedoodle : 6:06 AM
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Latest Fatality: Mar 26, 2005
Mar.05: 33

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

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[urlNoam Chomsky Edinburgh Lecture]http://boombox.ucs.ed.ac.uk/ramgen/chomsky/chomsky.smil[/url]
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"Illegal but Legitimate: a dubious doctrine for the times."

Noam Chomsky delivered the last in the Gifford Lecture series at Edinburgh University’s McEwan Hall on Tuesday, 03/22/05
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The Gifford Lectures

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Democrats: MIA
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050411&s=editors1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050411&s=editors1


After giving George W. Bush far too easy a ride in his first term, the Democratic leadership in Congress promised that the second term was going to be different. "This is not a dictatorship," announced Senate minority leader Harry Reid. The new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, declared, "The President neither has the mandate he thinks he has nor a majority to make policy." But three months of watching the Democrats` stumbling, often incoherent responses to Administration appointments and initiatives shows clearly that the party is making the same mistakes that cost it so dearly in the 2002 and 2004 elections.

It`s easy simply to blame the GOP majorities in the Senate and House when bad legislation passes those chambers. But too frequently it has been Democratic disorder rather than Republican treachery that has made possible the Bush White House`s legislative victories. That`s what happened with the mid-March Senate vote on a budget amendment that would have protected the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Seven Republican senators voted to protect ANWR from oil drilling. Had the Democratic caucus simply held firm in support of the amendment, it would have won by a 52-to-48 margin. But three Democrats--Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana--broke ranks to back the Administration. All three had their excuses, and if this had been the only bill on which Democrats failed to hold together, it might not be a cause for serious concern. But this is hardly an isolated example of Democrats doing the bidding of the President and the special interests that support him.

Consider the February Senate vote on tort "reform," another issue on which Democrats are supposed to be the defenders of the common good against the rapacious Republicans. The battle lines could not have been clearer: Bush and his allies wanted to limit sharply the ability of citizens to file class-action lawsuits against corporations that injure or defraud them. A united Democratic opposition in the Senate could have mounted a populist challenge that might well have won GOP allies for a fight to preserve the sovereignty of state courts, which will be lost under the legislation. Instead, Democrats helped give Bush the first major legislative victory of his second term. Only twenty-six Senate Democrats opposed the proposal, while eighteen--including serial compromisers Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh and some who ought to know better, like Charles Schumer and Jay Rockefeller--sided with the GOP. It was just as bad in the House, where fifty Democrats--including Rahm ("no mandate") Emanuel--backed the bill, handing Bush an easy win that provides momentum for an agenda that includes proposals to restrict asbestos litigation and curb medical malpractice suits.

Even more disappointing was the mid-March vote on legislation designed to make it harder for middle-class and poor Americans to declare personal bankruptcy, leaving crooked companies like Enron free to declare bankruptcy themselves and thus be protected from claims like those by employees who lost their pensions. The vote on the measure, which had been blocked for years by such progressive Democrats as the late Paul Wellstone and a timely veto from then-President Bill Clinton, passed by an overwhelming 74-to-25 vote. Eighteen Democrats--including Reid and key players like Joseph Biden of Delaware and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico--aligned themselves with the President and the credit card companies that wrote and promoted the bill.

Apologists for these egregious compromises would have us believe that Democrats, as a minority party, have little leverage. But the Social Security debate belies such claims; with Democrats sticking together against privatization, it is the Republicans who have found themselves under pressure to compromise. The same goes for the Democratic refusal to give ground on ethics issues, which has done so much to increase pressure on scandal-plagued House majority leader Tom DeLay. Unfortunately, shows of solidarity on Social Security and ethics issues represent the exception rather than the rule when it comes to checking and balancing the White House and its Congressional allies. Again and again Democrats have failed the basic tests of an opposition party. They couldn`t muster the forty votes needed to mount a Senate filibuster against Alberto Gonzales`s nomination for Attorney General, only twelve Democrats opposed the nomination of Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State and none opposed the nomination of Michael Chertoff to head the Department of Homeland Security, despite concerns about Rice and Chertoff that were as troubling as those regarding Gonzales`s role in approving torture.

House Democrats have been even less effective in their opposition than their Senate colleagues. Despite polls showing that the vast majority of Americans opposed federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, only fifty-three Democrats opposed DeLay`s move to override Florida state law and judicial rulings in a rush to satisfy the demands of the GOP`s most extreme constituencies. Only thirty-six opposed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which Representative Jan Schakowsky correctly identified as a move to "put Big Brother in charge of deciding what is art and what is free speech." And just thirty-nine rejected the Administration`s demand for another $81.4 billion to maintain the occupation of Iraq and related military misadventures.

In 2002 and 2003 the Democrats tried the strategy of giving the President blank checks for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and then criticizing how the President spent them. That strategy cost the Democrats any chance to frame the debate about the war and ultimately cost them at the polls. But while some individual Democrats, like California Representative Henry Waxman, have come to recognize the folly of such an approach, the party as a whole continues to cede too much ground to the President--on Iraq and on most other issues.

Perhaps being shamed publicly, and being pressured by the grassroots, will help Congressional Democrats get their act together. Toward that end, we`ve initiated a biweekly "Minority/Majority" feature that identifies--by name--Democrats who give succor to the GOP. (It also praises those who`ve helped the cause of Democrats becoming the majority party again.) If Democrats don`t define themselves as an effective opposition soon, they could end up being an ineffective one for a long time to come.

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A portrait by a British graffiti artist known as `Banksy`
is shown in this undated photo. The work hung on the
wall at the Brooklyn Museum, after the artist
surreptitiously hung his own works of art in four
New York museums.
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Published on Friday, March 25, 2005 by the Multinational Monitor
Every Nook and Cranny
The Dangerous Spread of Commercialized Culture
by Gary Ruskin and Juliet Schor
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2005/012005/ruskin.htm…

In December, many people in Washington, D.C. paused to absorb the meaning in the lighting of the National Christmas Tree, at the White House Ellipse. At that event, President George W. Bush reflected that the “love and gifts” of Christmas were “signs and symbols of even a greater love and gift that came on a holy night.”

But these signs weren’t the only ones on display. Perhaps it was not surprising that the illumination was sponsored by MCI, which, as MCI WorldCom, committed one of the largest corporate frauds in history. Such public displays of commercialism have become commonplace in the United States.

The rise of commercialism is an artifact of the growth of corporate power. It began as part of a political and ideological response by corporations to wage pressures, rising social expenditures, and the successes of the environmental and consumer movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Corporations fostered the anti-tax movement and support for corporate welfare, which helped create funding crises in state and local governments and schools, and made them more willing to carry commercial advertising. They promoted “free market” ideology, privatization and consumerism, while denigrating the public sphere. In the late 1970s, Mobil Oil began its decades-long advertising on the New York Times op-ed page, one example of a larger corporate effort to reverse a precipitous decline in public approval of corporations. They also became adept at manipulating the campaign finance system, and weaknesses in the federal bribery statute, to procure influence in governments at all levels.

Perhaps most importantly, the commercialization of government and culture and the growing importance of material acquisition and consumer lifestyles was hastened by the co-optation of potentially countervailing institutions, such as churches (papal visits have been sponsored by Pepsi, Federal Express and Mercedes-Benz), governments, schools, universities and nongovernmental organizations.

While advertising has long been an element in the circus of U.S. life, not until recently has it been recognized as having political or social merit. For nearly two centuries, advertising (lawyers call it commercial speech) was not protected by the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1942 that states could regulate commercial speech at will. But in 1976, the Court granted constitutional protection to commercial speech. Corporations have used this new right of speech to proliferate advertising into nearly every nook and cranny of life.

Entering the schoolhouse

During most of the twentieth century, there was little advertising in schools. That changed in 1989, when Chris Whittle’s Channel One enticed schools to accept advertising, by offering to loan TV sets to classrooms. Each school day, Channel One features at least two minutes of ads, and 10 minutes of news, fluff, banter and quizzes. The program is shown to about 8 million children in 12,000 schools.

Soda, candy and fast food companies soon learned Channel One’s lesson of using financial incentives to gain access to schoolchildren. By 2000, 94 percent of high schools allowed the sale of soda, and 72 percent allowed sale of chocolate candy. Energy, candy, personal care products, even automobile manufacturers have entered the classroom with “sponsored educational materials” — that is, ads in the guise of free “curricula.”

Until recently, corporate incursion in schools has mainly gone under the radar. However, the rise of childhood obesity has engendered stiff political opposition to junk food marketing, and in the last three years, coalitions of progressives, conservatives and public health groups have made headway. The State of California has banned the sale of soda in elementary, middle and junior high schools. In Maine, soda and candy suppliers have removed their products from vending machines in all schools. Arkansas banned candy and soda vending machines in elementary schools. Los Angeles, Chicago and New York have city-wide bans on the sale of soda in schools. Channel One was expelled from the Nashville public schools in the 2002-3 school year, and will be removed from Seattle in early 2005. Thanks to activist pressure, a company called ZapMe!, which placed computers in thousands of schools to advertise and extract data from students, was removed from all schools across the country.

Ad creep and spam culture

Advertisers have long relied on 30-second TV spots to deliver messages to mass audiences. During the 1990s, the impact of these ads began to drop off, in part because viewers simply clicked to different programs during ads. In response, many advertisers began to place ads elsewhere, leading to “ad creep” — the spread of ads throughout social space and cultural institutions. Whole new marketing sub-specialties developed, such as “place-based” advertising, which coerces captive viewers to watch video ads. Examples include ads before movies, ads on buses and trains in cities (Chicago, Milwaukee and Orlando), and CNN’s Airport channel. Video ads are also now common on ATMs, gas pumps, in convenience stores and doctors’ offices.

Another form of ad creep is “product placement,” in which advertisers pay to have their product included in movies, TV shows, museum exhibits, or other forms of media and culture. Product placement is thought to be more effective than the traditional 30-second ad because it sneaks by the viewer’s critical faculties. Product placement has recently occurred in novels, and children’s books. Some U.S. TV programs (American Idol, The Restaurant, The Apprentice) and movies (Minority Report, Cellular) are so full of product placement that they resemble infomercials. By contrast, many European nations, such as Austria, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom, ban or sharply restrict product placement on television.

Commercial use of the Internet was forbidden as recently as the early 1990s, and the first spam wasn’t sent until 1994. But the marketing industry quickly penetrated this sphere as well, and now 70 percent of all e-mail is spam, according to the spam filter firm Postini Inc. Pop-ups, pop-unders and ad-ware have become major annoyances for Internet users. Telemarketing became so unpopular that the corporate-friendly Federal Trade Commission established a National Do Not Call Registry, which has brought relief from telemarketing calls to 64 million households.

Even major cultural institutions have been harnessed by the advertising industry. During 2001-2002, the Smithsonian Institution, perhaps the most important U.S. cultural institution, established the General Motors Hall of Transportation and the Lockheed Martin Imax Theater. Following public opposition and Congressional action, the commercialization of the Smithsonian has largely been halted. In 2000, the Library of Congress hosted a giant celebration for Coca-Cola, essentially converting the nation’s most important library into a prop to sell soda pop.

Targeting kids

For a time, institutions of childhood were relatively uncommercialized, as adults subscribed to the notion of childhood innocence, and the need to keep children from the “profane” commercial world. But what was once a trickle of advertising to children has become a flood. Corporations spend about $15 billion marketing to children in the United States each year, and by the mid-1990s, the average child was exposed to 40,000 TV ads annually.

Children have few legal protections from corporate marketers in the United States.

This contrasts strongly to the European Union, which has enacted restrictions. Norway and Sweden have banned television advertising to children under 12 years of age; in Italy, advertising during TV cartoons is illegal, and toy advertising is illegal in Greece between 7 AM and 11 PM. Advertising before and after children’s programs is banned in Austria.

Government brought to you by...

As fiscal crises have descended upon local governments, they have turned to advertisers as a revenue source. This trend began inauspiciously in Buffalo, New York in 1995 when Pratt & Lambert, a local paint company, purchased the right to call itself the city’s official paint. The next year the company was bought by Sherwin-Williams, which closed the local factory and eliminated its 200 jobs.

In 1997, Ocean City, Maryland signed an exclusive marketing deal to make Coca-Cola the city’s official drink, and other cities have followed with similar deals with Coke or Pepsi. Even mighty New York City has succumbed, signing a $166 million exclusive marketing deal with Snapple, after which some critics dubbed it the “Big Snapple.”

At the United Nations, UNICEF made a stir in 2002 when it announced that it would “team up” with McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast food company, to promote “McDonald’s World Children’s Day” in celebration of the anniversary of the United Nations adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Public health and children’s advocates across the globe protested, prompting UNICEF to decline participation in later years.

Another victory for the anti-commercialism forces, perhaps the most significant, came in 2004, when the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control became legally binding. The treaty commits nations to prohibit tobacco advertising to the extent their constitutions allow it.

Impacts

Because the phenomenon of commercialism has become so ubiquitous, it is not surprising that its effects are as well. Perhaps most alarming has been the epidemic of marketing-related diseases afflicting people in the United States, and especially children, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and smoking-related illnesses. Each day, about 2,000 U.S. children begin to smoke, and about one-third of them will die from tobacco-related illnesses. Children are inundated with advertising for high calorie junk food and fast food, and, predictably, 15 percent of U.S. children aged 6 to 19 are now overweight.

Excessive commercialism is also creating a more materialistic populace. In 2003, the annual UCLA survey of incoming college freshmen found that the number of students who said it was a very important or essential life goal to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” fell to an all-time low of 39 percent, while succeeding financially has increased to a 13-year high, at 74 percent. High involvement in consumer culture has been show (by Schor) to be a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints in children, findings which parallel similar studies of materialism among teens and adults. Other impacts are more intangible. A 2004 poll by Yankelovich Partners, found that 61 percent of the U.S. public “feel that the amount of marketing and advertising is out of control,” and 65 percent “feel constantly bombarded with too much advertising and marketing.” Is advertising diminishing our sense of general well-being? Perhaps.

The purpose of most commercial advertising is to increase demand for a product. As John Kenneth Galbraith noted 40 years ago, the macro effect of advertising is to artificially boost the demand for private goods, thereby reducing the “demand” or support for unadvertised, public goods. The predictable result has been the backlash to taxes, and reduced provision of public goods and services.

This imbalance also affects the natural environment. The additional consumption created by the estimated $265 billion that the advertising industry will spend in 2004 will also yield more pollution, natural resource destruction, carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.

Finally, advertising has also contributed to a narrowing of the public discourse, as advertising-driven media grow ever more timid. Sometimes it seems as if we live in an echo chamber, a place where corporations speak and everyone else listens.

Governments at all levels have failed to address these impacts. That may be because the most insidious effect of commercialism is to undermine government integrity. As governments adopt commercial values, and are integrated into corporate marketing, they develop conflicts of interest that make them less likely to take stands against commercialism.

Disgust among yourselves

As corporations consolidate their control over governments and culture, we don’t expect an outright reversal of commercialization in the near future.

That’s true despite considerable public sentiment for more limits and regulations on advertising and marketing. However, as commercialism grows more intrusive, public distaste for it will likely increase, as will political support for restricting it. In the long run, we believe this hopeful trend will gather strength.

In the not-too-distant future, the significance of the lighting of the National Christmas Tree may no longer be overshadowed by public relations efforts to create goodwill for corporate wrongdoers.

Gary Rusk in is Executive Director of Commercial Alert. Juliet Schor is a professor of sociology at Boston College, and author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. She serves on the Board of Directors of Commercial Alert.

© 2005 Multinational Monitor

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March 27, 2005
New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/politics/27exodus.html

WASHINGTON, March 26 - The episode has been retold so many times in the last three and a half years that it has become the stuff of political legend: in the frenzied days after Sept. 11, 2001, when some flights were still grounded, dozens of well-connected Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, managed to leave the United States on specially chartered flights.

Now, newly released government records reveal previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show.

The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts because they said they were concerned for their safety in the wake of the attacks, and the F.B.I. - which was then beginning the biggest criminal investigation in its history - arranged to have agents escort them to their local airports, the documents show.

But F.B.I. officials reacted angrily, both internally and publicly, to the suggestion that any Saudis had received preferential treatment in leaving the country.

"I say baloney to any inference we red-carpeted any of this entourage," an F.B.I. official said in a 2003 internal note. Another F.B.I. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this week regarding the airport escorts that "we`d do that for anybody if they felt they were threatened - we wouldn`t characterize that as special treatment."

The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, which provided copies to The New York Times.

The material sheds new light on the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it provides details about the F.B.I.`s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the departing Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden.

The Saudis` chartered flights, arranged in the days after the attacks when many flights in the United States were still grounded, have proved frequent fodder for critics of the Bush administration who accuse it of coddling the Saudis. The debate was heightened by the filmmaker Michael Moore, who scrutinized the issue in "Fahrenheit 9/11," but White House officials have adamantly denied any special treatment for the Saudis, calling such charges irresponsible and politically motivated.

The Sept. 11 commission examined the Saudi flights in its final report last year, and it found that no Saudis had been allowed to leave before national airspace was reopened on Sept. 13, 2001, that there was no evidence of "political intervention" by the White House, and that the F.B.I. had done a "satisfactory screening" of the departing Saudis to ensure they did not have information relevant to the attacks.

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, with major passages heavily deleted, do not appear to contradict directly any of those central findings, but they raise some new questions about the episode.

The F.B.I. records show, for instance, that prominent Saudi citizens left the United States on several flights that had not been previously disclosed in public accounts, including a chartered flight from Providence, R.I., on Sept. 14, 2001, that included at least one member of the Saudi royal family, and three flights from Las Vegas between Sept. 19 and Sept. 24, also carrying members of the Saudi royal family. The government began reopening airspace on Sept. 13, but many flights remained grounded for days afterward.

The three Las Vegas flights, with a total of more than 100 passengers, ferried members of the Saudi royal family and staff members who had been staying at Caesar`s Palace and the Four Seasons hotels. The group had tried unsuccessfully to charter flights back to Saudi Arabia between Sept. 13 and Sept. 17 because they said they feared for their safety as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. documents say.

Once the group managed to arrange chartered flights out of the country, an unidentified prince in the Las Vegas group "thanked the F.B.I. for their assistance," according to one internal report. The F.B.I. had interviewed many members of the group and searched their planes before allowing them to leave, but it nonetheless went back to the Las Vegas hotels with subpoenas five days after the initial flight had departed to collect further information on the Saudi royal guests, the documents show.

In several other cases, Saudi travelers were not interviewed before departing the country, and F.B.I. officials sought to determine how the apparent lapses had occurred, the documents show.

The F.B.I. documents left open the possibility that some departing Saudis had information relevant to the Sept. 11 investigation.

"Although the F.B.I. took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/2001 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed," a 2003 memo said, "it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without F.B.I. knowledge."

The documents also show that F.B.I. officials were clearly riled by public speculation stirred by news media accounts of the Saudi flights. They were particularly bothered by a lengthy article in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, which included charges that the bureau considered unfair and led to an internal F.B.I. investigation that the agency named "Vanitybom." Internal F.B.I. correspondence during the review was addressed to "fellow Vanitybom victims."

Critics said the newly released documents left them with more questions than answers.

"From these documents, these look like they were courtesy chats, without the time that would have been needed for thorough debriefings," said Christopher J. Farrell, who is director of investigations for Judicial Watch and a former counterintelligence interrogator for the Army. "It seems as if the F.B.I. was more interested in achieving diplomatic success than investigative success."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, called for further investigation.

"This lends credence to the theory that the administration was not coming fully clean about their involvement with the Saudis," he said, "and we still haven`t gotten to the bottom of this whole affair."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 24, 2005
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | `CONSPIRACY OF FOOLS`
Untangling the Threads of the Enron Fraud
By CHARLES R. MORRIS

In early 2000 Fortune magazine selected Enron as America`s best-managed and most innovative company, and Enron`s stock market valuation peaked at $73 billion that August. The following March the company announced that 2000 revenues had more than doubled, to $100 billion. The company paid its normal quarterly dividend in October 2001, announcing that regular earnings were up 26 percent and that it was "on track" to meet its full-year profit targets.

Six weeks later, Enron filed for bankruptcy.

Two questions arise: How could financial and investing professionals have been so badly gulled? And behind all the Potemkin-village financial reports, what was actually going on at Enron? The first question may be one for aficionados of mass hallucination, but Kurt Eichenwald`s "Conspiracy of Fools" brilliantly answers the second.

CONSPIRACY OF FOOLS A True Story. By Kurt Eichenwald. 742 pp. Broadway Books. $26.

It is astonishing how utterly out of bounds almost all the Enron operations were. Of the $100 billion in revenues that dazzled the markets in 2000, $3 billion came from Enron`s gas pipelines, its original business. Almost all the rest was smoke and mirrors. There was a runaway energy trading business that was an accounting disaster, a misconceived broadband venture to deliver movies to American living rooms and a trading operation in "dark fiber," the overbuilt optical networks that were about to bankrupt much of the telecommunications industry.

EXCERPT: From `Conspiracy of Fools` [urlThe Last Days of Enron]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/business/yourmoney/13enron.html?ex=1111986000&en=aa8c44c591bace22&ei=5070 It has become the icon for an era of excess: the precipitate collapse of Enron, played out over the final weeks of 2001. Now, Kenneth L. Lay, Enron`s former chairman, faces federal charges that he lied about the company`s financial state in those weeks; his criminal trial is scheduled to begin next January.

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Enron`s electricity traders joked about ripping off California`s grandmothers even as they siphoned power from the state to make a blackout crisis worse. The company`s power development managers spun lies about their disastrous projects in India and Argentina. Without even rudimentary financial controls, its directors gazed benignly at the slapdash growth as if their coffee were spiked with anesthesia.

There were plenty of clues that things were not as they seemed. Even the much-doctored official accounts showed the slimmest of profit margins, less than 1 percent of sales. A few skeptics who dug into the financials correctly divined that Enron was actually hemorrhaging cash. The late accounting giant Arthur Andersen aided in the deception. Kowtowing to a lucrative client, the local Andersen audit partner repeatedly signed off on gimmicks that the headquarters accounting gurus had expressly disapproved.

Wall Street, in any case, didn`t want to know. These were the days when analysts whooped and danced around any company claiming to offer "an Internet-based eCommerce system" and "high-bandwidth high-capacity data transport," whether it made any money or not.

The closest Enron came to a core business strategy was its way of dealing with each financial disaster that came flopping its way over the thick carpets of the executive office. Jeffrey Skilling, the former McKinsey whiz who was either the No. 1 or the No. 2 executive during most of this period, and his chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, would construct "hedges" - usually outside financial partnerships, with names like Raptor and Talon that, in return for a payment, would assume any possible loss so it wouldn`t appear on Enron`s books.

EXCERPT: From `Conspiracy of Fools` [urlWashington, We Have a Problem ...]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/business/yourmoney/20book.html In Enron`s final weeks, years of incompetence, mismanagement and crime finally emerged into public view. But behind the scenes, a desperate - and at times farcical - effort was unfolding to avert what proved to be its inevitable destruction.

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Almost all the hedges were fraudulent, since Enron typically guaranteed the new partnerships against losses, so no risk transfer actually occurred. Some of the world`s most reputable financial institutions helped them do it. The Securities and Exchange Commission has so far extracted hundreds of millions in Enron-related fraud settlements from J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, among others.

Compounding the sordidness, Mr. Fastow was working a meta-scam of his own. Instead of finding outside investors for the minimum equity capital required for each partnership, Mr. Fastow and his underling Michael Koppers acted as the equity investors under assumed names, often that of Mr. Koppers`s domestic partner. Since the equity investors collected most of the upfront payments from Enron, the two may have embezzled as much as $100 million.

The structural challenge for Mr. Eichenwald, a reporter for The New York Times, was how to lay out multiple story lines unfolding over a nearly 15-year period without getting hopelessly tangled. His solution was to construct the book from short, cinematic scenes, presented in fairly strict chronological order with a minimum of embroidery. Although he uses reconstructed dialogue, mostly from anonymous sources, it is parsimoniously deployed, and by the slipshod standards of popular contemporary histories each scene is meticulously documented. The writing is crisp and clear, and as the stories take on their separate lives, the march toward catastrophe builds inexorably from tentative little steps to determined strides, and finally to a wide-eyed, wild-haired, all-out sprint to the cliff. The overall effect is riveting.

I have a few reservations. Kenneth Lay, the company`s longtime chief executive, who hired Mr. Skilling and mostly turned over the management reins, emerges in Mr. Eichenwald`s telling as a kind of amiable simpleton, glad-handing his way through Houston`s moneyed upper crust. But unlike, say, Bernard Ebbers, the recently convicted former bouncer and high school coach who ran WorldCom onto the rocks, Mr. Lay is a Ph.D. economist and a former deputy under secretary of the interior, who had transformed the natural gas industry. Does Mr. Eichenwald believe that he really had no clue? That he never noticed the mad scramble to manufacture profits at the end of each reporting period? That he never wondered about the plausibility of a tenfold jump in revenues in just five years?

And one might lament the editorial decision against financial tables of any kind. Even an appendix displaying the financial ebbs and flows of all the constituent enterprises would have been a helpful reference point.

But those are quibbles. "Conspiracy of Fools" is a splendid achievement. Mr. Eichenwald has an encyclopedic grasp of a watershed business collapse, and has turned it into a gripping read, a true tale for our times.

Charles R. Morris wrote "Money, Greed, and Risk" (1999) and "The Tycoons," to be published this fall.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Die USA ist mal wieder dabei die Windeln zu wechseln.

DER SPIEGEL 13/2005 - 26. März 2005

Filmgeschäft

Feuer frei aufs Patriotenherz
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,348187,00.html

Von Lars-Olav Beier und Marco Evers

Weil im Irak schon mehr als 1500 US-Soldaten starben, sind viele Amerikaner kriegsmüde - das soll Hollywood ändern helfen: Neue Kinofilme wie Steven Spielbergs "Krieg der Welten" beschwören den Heldenkampf fürs Vaterland. Gegen den Einfluss des Pentagon regt sich Kritik.

Diesmal sind es die Außerirdischen. Wie Terroristen sind sie aus dem All gekommen, um Städte auszulöschen und Millionen Menschen zu töten. Heldenhaft stellen sich ihnen die US-Streitkräfte entgegen: Auf einem Hügel, etwa eine Autostunde von Los Angeles entfernt, haben ein paar Dutzend Marines in Panzern und "Humvees" Stellung bezogen. Die meisten von ihnen sind gerade heil aus dem Irak zurückgekehrt - und jetzt steht ihnen ausgerechnet daheim die Schlacht aller Schlachten bevor.

Mit rauer Stimme brüllt Steven Spielbergs Aufnahmeleiter "Action", und schon feuern die Marine-Infanteristen aus allen Rohren. Ein furchterregendes Gefecht hat begonnen, und es ist gut möglich, dass die kampferprobten Amerikaner gegen die später computergenerierten Aliens ihr Waterloo erleben, aber das ist nicht so wichtig. Was zählt, ist, dass die Soldaten im Spielfilm "Krieg der Welten" (Kinostart: 29. Juni) sogar gegen Außerirdische eine gute Figur machen. Amerikas Krieger sind tapfer, professionell und jederzeit zu allen Opfern bereit, um Volk und Vaterland zu schützen - das ist die Botschaft, die Major Todd Breasseale gern unter die Leute bringt.

Major Breasseale, 37, steht wenige Meter von Spielberg entfernt. Spielberg prüft, ob die Szene gut aussieht. Breasseale prüft, ob die Soldaten gut aussehen und ob die Art, wie Spielberg sie zeigen will, dem Pentagon gefallen wird. Falls nicht, sagt er Spielberg, was zu tun sei, und Spielberg, der wohl mächtigste Mann der Filmindustrie, hat seine Einwände zu akzeptieren, denn dazu hat er sich per Vertrag verpflichtet.

Breasseale dient als Verbindungsoffizier der US-Army an Amerikas wichtigster Heimatfront: Hollywood. Wenn Breasseale will, dann öffnen sich für Regisseure Türen und Tore, dann bekommen sie für eine Hand voll Dollar Soldaten und fotogenes Kriegsgerät wie Black-Hawk-Hubschrauber, Kanonen, auf Wunsch vielleicht sogar einen Flugzeugträger. Wenn Breasseale nicht will, dann muss sich der Regisseur mit weniger Wumm begnügen und sich womöglich Panzer aus Pappe bauen.

Regisseure, Produzenten und Drehbuchautoren sind gut beraten, Breasseale bei Laune zu halten, denn Hollywood braucht Panzer nötiger denn je. Zu Korea- und Vietnam-Zeiten hat Hollywood noch Jahre verstreichen lassen, ehe sich die Studios an aktuelle Kriege wagten. Das ist jetzt anders. Den Kinos steht eine Invasion der Kriegsfilme ins Haus, darunter

* "Jarhead": Regisseur Sam Mendes ("American Beauty") dreht derzeit ein Golfkriegs-Drama mit Jake Gyllenhaal und Oscar-Preisträger Jamie Foxx ("Ray") als irrlichternde Marines im Wüstensand (Deutschland-Start: Januar 2006).

* "Die Schlacht um Falludscha": Harrison Ford ("Indiana Jones") spielt darin einen US-General im Irak, der Dutzende Männer verliert als Folge verquerer Befehle aus dem Weißen Haus.
* "The Bomb in My Garden": Johnny Depp hat sich die Rechte gesichert an einem Film über Mahdi Obeidi, einen von Saddam Husseins Atomwaffenforschern, der wichtige Bauteile in seinem Garten verbuddelt hat.
* "Death and Dishonor": Clint Eastwood ist vorgesehen für die Rolle eines Ex-Militärpolizisten, der herausfindet, dass sein vom Kampfeinsatz im Irak heimgekehrter Sohn von dessen Kriegskameraden ermordet wurde.
* "Flags of Our Fathers": Eastwood arbeitet vorher als Regisseur an einem Weltkriegsspektakel zur Schlacht um Iwo Jima, wo innerhalb eines guten Monats rund 7000 Amerikaner und 22 000 Japaner gefallen sind.

Viel Arbeit für das Hollywood-Büro des Pentagon. "Die Summe der eingeschickten Drehbücher", sagt Breasseale, "hat sich im letzten Jahr verdreifacht." Er liest sie und prüft. Etwa die Hälfte der Bücher schickt er rasch zurück, weil sie "einfach irre" seien.

So erging es zum Beispiel dem Regisseur von "Jarhead", obwohl der Film auf dem Erfahrungsbericht eines Marine-Infanteristen basiert, der am "Desert Storm" teilgenommen hat. Seine packenden Schilderungen von Langeweile, Todesangst, Sex und Schikanen müssen ohne Unterstützung der Militärs verfilmt werden.

Längst regt sich Kritik am Einfluss des Pentagon in Hollywood. In seinem Buch "Operation Hollywood" wirft der Journalist David Robb den Militärs vor, mit ihrer Lobby- und Requisitenarbeit gegen die Verfassung zu verstoßen. Die Meinungsfreiheit sei nicht mehr gewährleistet, wenn das US-Verteidigungsministerium nur Filme unterstütze, die ihm politisch genehm seien. Robb rief sogar den Kongress auf, der Zensur ein Ende zu machen - angesichts der derzeitigen Mehrheitsverhältnisse im von den Republikanern dominierten Haus dürfte ihm allerdings wenig Erfolg beschieden sein.

Das konservative Establishment der USA bezweifelt seit jeher, dass in den Hollywood-Studios genug an die Interessen des Vaterlands gedacht wird. Die politisch traditionell eher liberale Traumfabrik gilt dem rechten Amerika als Hochburg der potentiellen Verräter. So erzählten zwei von Hollywoods kommerziell erfolgreichsten Kriegsfilmen der vergangenen Jahre, "Black Hawk Down" (2001) und "We Were Soldiers" (2002), von schmutzigen Kämpfen und sinnlosen Blutbädern.

Auch die neuen Filme über den Irak-Krieg, die zurzeit in Planung sind, wollen nicht ausschließlich Patriotenherzen erwärmen, sondern auch von der Unentschlossenheit der militärischen Führung (wie "Die Schlacht um Falludscha") oder gar vom Krieg in den eigenen Reihen (wie "Death and Dishonor") erzählen.

So sagt der "Death and Dishonor"-Autor Paul Haggis, der für sein Drehbuch zum Boxer-Drama "Million Dollar Baby" für den Oscar nominiert war, er wolle beschreiben, wie die Erfahrung des Kampfs die Soldaten brutalisiere und zum Sicherheitsrisiko für die Zivilgesellschaft werden lasse. "Ich habe gedacht, bei diesem Stoff würde jedes Studio das Weite suchen." Nun hat Warner den Stoff optioniert.

Zu den Leinwand-Epen, in denen die GIs noch zweifelsfrei für eine gute Sache kämpfen und notfalls auch sterben, gehören fast alle Filme über den Zweiten Weltkrieg: So erzählt Eastwoods Iwo-Jima-Epos von den sechs amerikanischen Helden, die 1945 auf der umkämpften Pazifikinsel die Flagge hissten. Das berühmte Foto ihrer Aktion gilt vielen US-Bürgern bis heute als kostbare Ikone.

Im Science-Fiction-Spektakel "Stealth" (Deutschland-Start: 11. August) bringen US-Piloten mit heldenhaftem Einsatz einen computergesteuerten, futuristischen Kampfjet unter Kontrolle - als gelte es, jenen Traum von der waffentechnischen Überlegenheit wiederzubeleben, der sich im blutigen Bodenkampf des Irak-Kriegs schon lange als Chimäre erwiesen hat.

Auch andere Zweige der US-Unterhaltungsindustrie sind im Kriegsfieber. Der Fernsehsender NBC schilderte in "Saving Jessica Lynch" das Los jener amerikanischen Soldatin, die im März 2003 in irakische Gefangenschaft geriet, schon wenige Monate nach ihrer Befreiung; der konkurrierende Kanal FX wird in diesem Sommer die Serie "Over There" ausstrahlen, die in einer Armee-Einheit im Irak spielt; und selbst die höchst erfolgreiche Soap-Opera "Days of Our Lives" erzählt von einem Marine im Fronteinsatz.

Nebenbei werden Computerspiele, in denen GIs global für eine bessere Welt kämpfen, in den USA immer populärer: Der Held des Spiels "Full Spectrum Warrior" führt eine US-Spezialeinheit an, die im Nahen Osten aufräumt. Im Spiel "Mercenaries" sorgt ein US-Soldat in geheimer Mission in Nordkorea für Recht und Ordnung.

Patriotische Filme in diesem Stil wünschen sich die US-Militärs auch von Hollywood. Die Kinobilder sollen den Schaden reparieren, den die Nachrichtenfernsehbilder aus dem Irak angerichtet haben. Erstmals seit Jahren können die Streitkräfte ihr Rekrutierungssoll nicht mehr erreichen. Bei Army, Navy, Air Force und den Marines fehlt frisches Blut.

Um das zu ändern, könnte "Krieg der Welten" ein hilfreicher Film sein: Das 130 Millionen Dollar teure Spektakel, inspiriert von H. G. Wells` Romanklassiker von 1898, startet Ende Juni weltweit mit rekordverdächtigen 15 000 Kopien. Tom Cruise spielt die Hauptrolle und stellt sicher, dass sich vor der Leinwand die richtige Zielgruppe versammelt: überwiegend jung, überwiegend männlich.

Cruise hat schon 1986 für die Navy ein Rekrutierungswunder bewirkt, als er mit dem Fliegerfilm "Top Gun" zum Superstar aufstieg. Und Steven Spielberg hat mit dem D-Day-Drama "Der Soldat James Ryan" (1998) einen Kriegsfilm abgeliefert, den viele Kritiker für einen der besten der Filmgeschichte halten. Zusammen sind die beiden eine Wunderwaffe.

Fast 400 Soldaten hat das Pentagon an insgesamt vier Drehorten für "Krieg der Welten" abgestellt. Sie kosten die Produzenten nur ein paar Dollar Essensgeld. Für jeden "Humvee" verlangt das Militär 67 Dollar pro Tag. Der "Hummer", die von Arnold Schwarzenegger geliebte zivile Version des Kampfvehikels, kostet bei jeder Autovermietung ein Vielfaches. Eine "Paladin"-Haubitze ist für 624 Dollar zu haben, einen hochmodernen Abrams-Panzer gibt das Pentagon schon für täglich 1400 Dollar her. Das sind Kampfpreise. Billiger ist ein Filmkrieg nicht zu haben.

Dabei hatten sich die Militärs vom Außerirdischen-Kino bisher eher fern gehalten. Für "Mars Attacks!" (1996) hatten sie jede Waffenhilfe verweigert - dort konnten die tollsten Geschosse nichts gegen die Marsmännchen ausrichten. Noch schwerer wog, dass am Ende eine Oma zusammen mit ihrem Enkel und nicht ein Soldat die Erde rettete. Auch Roland Emmerichs "Independence Day" (1996) hat den Pentagon-Zensoren missfallen. Da spielt ein versoffener Agrarflieger die Heldenrolle, die nach ihrem Geschmack einem Uniformierten gebührt hätte.

Dem "Krieg der Welten" zeigten sich die Militärs jedoch von Beginn an gewogen. In einer Szene trifft ein Flüchtlingstreck auf Soldaten, die mitten im Gefecht stehen. Die Flüchtlinge stürmen auf den Hügel, um ihren tapferen Kriegern beizustehen. Doch dann sehen sie, wie furchtbar es bei der Schlacht zur Sache geht; sie begreifen, dass dies ein Geschäft für Profis ist, und rennen wieder weg. Das findet Todd Breasseale absolut vorbildlich, denn da verstehe das Publikum, "was das Militär für Amerika leistet".

Und an den Leistungen des Militärs hat Breasseale keinen Zweifel. "Die Army hat in ihrer Geschichte viele Dinge getan, auf die wir nicht sonderlich stolz sind. Aber sie war immer in der Lage, sich selbst zu rehabilitieren." So kann sich Breasseale sogar einen Film über das Foltergefängnis von Abu Ghureib gut vorstellen und würde ihn auch mit allem notwendigen Gerät ausstatten - "solange die Geschehnisse von Abu Ghureib authentisch dargestellt werden".

Was authentisch ist in Hollywoods Kriegskino, das möchten die Militärs aber möglichst allein bestimmen.

© DER SPIEGEL 13/2005

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March 27, 2005
For Army Recruiters, a Hard Toll From a Hard Sell
By DAMIEN CAVE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/nyregion/27recruit.html

The Army`s recruiters are being challenged with one of the hardest selling jobs the military has asked of them in American history, and many say the demands are taking a toll.

A recruiter in New York said pressure from the Army to meet his recruiting goals during a time of war has given him stomach problems and searing back pain. Suffering from bouts of depression, he said he has considered suicide. Another, in Texas, said he had volunteered many times to go to Iraq rather than face ridicule, rejection and the Army`s wrath.

An Army chaplain said he had counseled nearly a dozen recruiters in the past 18 months to help them cope with marital troubles and job-related stress.

"There were a couple of recruiters that felt they were having nervous breakdowns, literally," said Maj. Stephen Nagler, a chaplain who retired in March after serving at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where the New York City recruiting battalion is based.

Two dozen recruiters nationwide were interviewed about their experiences over four months. Ten spoke with The New York Times even after an Army official sent an e-mail message advising all recruiters not to speak to this reporter, who was named. Most asked for anonymity to avoid being disciplined.

A handful who spoke said they were satisfied with their jobs. They said they took pride in seeing awkward, unfocused teenagers transform into confident soldiers and relished an opportunity to contribute to the Army effort.

But most told similar tales: of loving the military, of working hard to complete a seemingly impossible task, of struggling to carry the nation`s burden at a time of anxiety and stress.

The careers and self-esteem of recruiters rise and fall on their ability to fulfill a mission, said current and former Army officials and military experts who were also interviewed.

Recruiters said falling short often generates a barrage of angry correspondence, formal reprimands, threats or even demotion.

"The recruiter is stuck in the situation where you`re not going to make mission, it just won`t happen," the New York recruiter said. "And you`re getting chewed out every day for it. It`s horrible." He said the assignment was more strenuous than the time he was shot at while deployed in Africa.

At least 37 members of the Army Recruiting Command, which oversees enlistment, have gone AWOL since October 2002, Army figures show. And, in what recruiters consider another sign of stress, the number of improprieties committed - signing up unqualified people to meet quotas or giving bonuses or other enlistment benefits to recruits not eligible for them - has increased, Army documents show.

"They don`t necessarily have real bullets flying at them," said Major Nagler. "But there are different kind of bullets they need to contend with - the bullets of not producing numbers, of having a station commander shoot them down."

The Army is seeking 101,200 new active-duty Army and Reserve soldiers this year alone to replenish the ranks in Iraq and Afghanistan, elsewhere around the world and at home. That means each of the Army`s 7,500 recruiters faces the grind of an unyielding human math, a quota of two new recruits a month, at a time of extended war without a draft.

The mission puts them in a different kind of cross-fire: On one side, the military`s requirement that new soldiers be found. On the other, resistance by many parents to Army careers for their children in wartime.

Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, commander of the Army Recruiting Command, acknowledged it is a stressful time for recruiters, who face "the toughest challenge to the all-volunteer Army" since it began in 1973.

"I do not deny being demanding," said General Rochelle, leader of the command since 2002. "We have a vitally important mission in terms of providing volunteers for an army that is at war and that is growing."

He said the Army has already added recruiters and taken measures to expand the pool of potential soldiers, by accepting older recruits and more people without high school diplomas. Other changes are being considered, he said.

But many recruiters said the Army continues to minimize how difficult it has become to find qualified volunteers during a war and in a growing economy.

For the first time in nearly five years, the Army missed its active-duty recruiting goal in February. The Reserve has missed its monthly quota since October. Army officials said the goals would most likely be missed the next two months as well.

Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army vice chief of staff, told Congress on March 16 that he is concerned about whether the Army can continue to provide the troops the nation needs.

"What keeps me awake at night," he said, "is what will this all-volunteer force look like in 2007?"

The Marines also missed monthly recruiting goals in January, for the first time in a decade. The Navy and Air Force, which provide fewer people for the war, are on track to meet their quotas.

Trying to refill the ranks solely through recruitment in wartime is rare. Historians say the Spanish-American War, Mexican-American War and Gulf war were the only major conflicts since 1775 that did not rely, in part, on conscripts.

Since 1973, the Army has usually maintained an all-volunteer force of a million active-duty, Reserve and National Guard soldiers, primarily through a marketing campaign that promoted opportunities for adventure, new skills, college money and other personal goals - enticements that, in wartime, often do not outweigh fear of combat and death, Army surveys show.

While some in Congress have raised the specter of a draft, the Bush administration has rejected that idea, saying higher skilled soldiers are needed in a high-tech age, and are best found through recruitment.

But several senior officers interviewed, including Col. Greg Parlier, retired, who until 2002 headed the research and strategy arm of the Army Recruiting Command, said the pressure on recruiters shows the policy should be re-examined, and initiatives like national service should be considered.

Courting Mom and Dad

The Army is the nation`s largest military branch, comprising 80 percent of the 150,000 troops in Iraq. Its recruiters are among its best soldiers. Most are sergeants with 5 to 15 years of experience, pulled randomly from the top 10 percent of their specialty, as defined by their commanding officers. More than 70 percent did not volunteer for the job.

Some soldiers are better suited to the task than others. Staff Sgt. Jose E. Zayas, 42, is outgoing, bilingual and embraces his mission. Recently, canvassing in the Bronx, he had little trouble persuading a couple from Massachusetts to accept a few pamphlets.

But for every Sergeant Zayas, there is a recruiter like Sgt. Joshua Harris, 29, a former personnel administrator in a New Jersey recruiting station, who struggles when talking to strangers. Seven weeks of instruction in approaching prospects helped him, he said. But many recruiters said few soldiers possess the skills they need.

Recruiters are paid about $30,000 a year, plus housing and other allowances, including $450 a month in special-duty pay for recruiting. They live where they recruit, often hundreds of miles from a base.

These men, and occasionally women, spend several hours a day cold-calling high school students, whose phone numbers are provided by schools under the No Child Left Behind Law. They also must "prospect" at malls, at high schools, colleges and wherever else young people gather.

The follow-up process often takes months. Though parents do not have to sign off on the decision to join, recruiters said it is virtually impossible to enlist a new recruit without their approval. Over dinners and on the phone, they make the Army`s case over and over to win parents` support.

If they succeed, they are responsible for bringing the recruit in for 5:30 a.m. processing , organizing physical fitness training or, in the case of one California recruiter, taking 3 a.m. phone calls to comfort a recruit crying over a breakup with her boyfriend.

The whims are many from the young, restless and uncertain, experts said.

Recruiters have "the only military occupation that deals with the civilian world entirely," said Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University.

Even before the war, recruiters contacted on average of 120 people before landing an active-duty recruit, Army data showed. That number is growing, recruiters said.

One recruiter in the New York area said that when he steps outside his office for a cigarette, he often is barraged with epithets from passers-by angry about the war.

In January, the brother-in-law of a prospective recruit lashed into him. "He swore at me," the recruiter said, "and said that he would rather have his brother-in-law in jail for selling crack than in the Army."

The recruiter said, when out of uniform, he often lies about his profession. "I tell them I work in human resources," he said.

Still, they must sign up two recruits a month. Anyone with outstanding criminal cases, health problems or poor test scores is disqualified. Most months, at least one must have a high school diploma and score in the top 50 percent of an aptitude test.

Lt. Col. William F. Adams, a psychologist at the United States Military Academy who has counseled recruiters, empathized with the pressure but said it came with the job. Of the recruiting goal, he said, "It is not a goal or a target; it is a mission. If you don`t do it, you`re a failure."

A December report from the commanding officers overseeing about 40 recruiters in West Houston reflects the mission-driven culture of recruitment. Sent by e-mail to station commanders, it started by declaring, "We can sum up the month of Dec with one word - Unprofessional!"

The document noted that in a month`s-end drive to meet quota, seven recruits had appeared for processing. Of those, two did not meet weight requirements and needed a waiver, while two others lacked paperwork.

"We are processing crap," the report stated, "double and triple waivers, waivers which get approved and the applicant refuses to enlist (two this month), waivers on people with more than 20 charges, etc. We are putting these people in our Army!"

The cause, it said, was a lack of leadership: "I challenged you to fix your stations. No one has stepped forward."

Asked to respond to the document, the Houston recruiting battalion declined.

The report was followed on Jan. 6 by an e-mail message from Command Sgt. Maj. Frank Norris, the second in command of 212 recruiters in and around Houston, threatening to deny all requests for leave.

"There are no excuses and I am tired of entertaining such lack of discipline and focus," he said in the e-mail message forwarded to The Times by a recruiter who received it. "Let this serve notice that any station commander that is holding this great battalion back will not be a station commander in this battalion very much longer."

Neither document contained any mention of the war, nor other possible obstacles. Sergeant Major Norris declined through an Army spokesman to be interviewed. General Rochelle said most battalions do not resort to such tactics.

Brawling Over Prospects

The recruiter in New York who had considered suicide said he has seen at least four marriages break up among the 9 or 10 recruiters in his area since 2002. He said he has been subjected to threats of discharge and "zero-roller training," when superiors comb through recruiters` phone logs and other materials, then lambaste them for failing to enlist anyone.

After more than a decade in the military, he said he still loves the Army. "It`s just this detail," he said. "This is hell."

A Texas recruiter - a gruff man whose home is decorated with military commendations - said that he suffers from severe headaches lasting up to six hours. "I never had them until I got out here," he said. "They`re from recruiting."

He and other recruiters said they sometimes feel angry enough to hit someone. Two years ago, he said, two recruiters in his office brawled over who should get credit for a new recruit. "We call this the pressure plate, like on a land mine," he said, pointing to the recruiter patch on his uniform. "If you push it too hard, we`ll explode."

His wife, like spouses in California and elsewhere, is furious at what she sees as the Army`s lack of support. "What we are doing is good; recruiting is good and important work," she said. "But the fact of the matter is that it`s killing our soldiers."

Many of the recruiters said they have asked for other assignments. One of them is Sgt. Latrail Hayes. Now 27, Sergeant Hayes enlisted in the Army 10 years ago, out of high school in Virginia Beach, continuing a family tradition of military service. He volunteered to be a recruiter in 2000, after 52 jumps as a paratrooper, and at first his easy charm, appeals to patriotism and offers of Army benefits enticed dozens of recruits.

But Sergeant Hayes said he started rethinking his assignment as the war went on. Mothers required months, not weeks, of persuasion. And stories he heard from some of his recruits who had gone to Iraq and Afghanistan made him reluctant to pursue prospects by emphasizing the Army`s benefits. When his cousin, whom he had recruited, returned from Iraq with psychological trauma, he filed for conscientious objector status in June, to get a new assignment.

The application was rejected in November. Now, instead of serving 20 years in the Army, he intends to leave in December, when his tour ends. "There`s a deep human connection when you try to persuade someone to do something you`ve done," he said. "So when it turns into something else - maybe even the opposite - it`s difficult."

Some recruiters said they witnessed more "improprieties," which the Army defines as any grossly negligent or intentional act or omission used to enlist unqualified applicants or grant benefits to those who are ineligible. They said recruiters falsified documents and told prospects to lie about medical conditions or police records.

An analysis of Army records shows that the number of impropriety allegations doubled to 1,023 in 2004 from 490 in 2000. Initial investigations substantiated 459 violations of Army enlistment standards in 2004, up from 186 in 2000. In 135 cases, recruiters - often more than one - were judged to have committed improprieties, up from 113 in 2000. The rest were defined as errors.

General Rochelle acknowledged that the impropriety figures "may be a reflection of some of the pressure that is perceived at the lower levels." He also said that the increase could partly be explained by improvements in tracking violations.

"We hold every recruiter responsible for being a living and breathing example of Army values," he said.

The quotas will remain unchanged, General Rochelle said. But the commanders should be held responsible for finding ways to meet their goals. "It does no good to pass the heat, as it were, or the correction down to the individual soldier," he said.

The Army announced in September that it would add about 1,200 active-duty and Reserve recruiters to the field. It has also more than doubled bonuses for three-year enlistments to $15,000 and increased its advertising budget.

For the first time since 1998, the Army has lowered its standards, last week increasing its age limit for Reserve and National Guard recruits to 39. Last year, it agreed to accept thousands more recruits without high school diplomas.

In a small concession to recruiters, Army brass announced in February that they can trade the green slacks and shirts that they said made them feel and look like security guards for battle fatigues.

General Rochelle said the uniform swap was part of a new recruiting strategy to stress patriotism over salesmanship and enlist veterans to help make the Army`s pitch. "It`s less materialistic, in terms of the focus, once we get a recruiter face to face with a young American," he said.

The recruiter in Texas, for one, said the changes are too little too late. He said he would prefer to be in Iraq.

"I`d rather be getting shot at, because at least I`d be with my guys," he said. "I`m infantry. That`s what I`m trained to do."

Margot Williams contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Panel Ignored Evidence on Detainee
U.S. Military Intelligence, German Authorities Found No Ties to Terrorists
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3868-2005Mar2…

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 27, 2005; Page A01

A military tribunal determined last fall that Murat Kurnaz, a German national seized in Pakistan in 2001, was a member of al Qaeda and an enemy combatant whom the government could detain indefinitely at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The three military officers on the panel, whose identities are kept secret, said in papers filed in federal court that they reached their conclusion based largely on classified evidence that was too sensitive to release to the public.

In fact, that evidence, recently declassified and obtained by The Washington Post, shows that U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or terrorist activities.

In recently declassified portions of a January ruling, a federal judge criticized the military panel for ignoring the exculpatory information that dominates Kurnaz`s file and for relying instead on a brief, unsupported memo filed shortly before Kurnaz`s hearing by an unidentified government official.

Kurnaz has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since at least January 2002.

"The U.S. government has known for almost two years that he`s innocent of these charges," said Baher Azmy, Kurnaz`s attorney. "That begs a lot of questions about what the purpose of Guantanamo really is. He can`t be useful to them. He has no intelligence for them. Why in the world is he still there?"

The Kurnaz case appears to be the first in which classified material considered by a "combatant status review tribunal" has become public. While attorneys for Guantanamo Bay detainees have frequently complained that their clients are being held based on thin evidence, Kurnaz`s is the first known case in which a panel appeared to disregard the recommendations of U.S. intelligence agencies and information supplied by allies.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Daryl Borgquist, said the government will not answer questions about the decisions made by the tribunals. "We don`t comment on the decisions of the tribunals," he said. "They make the best decision based on what they saw before them at the time."

About 540 foreign nationals are detained at Guantanamo Bay as suspected al Qaeda or Taliban fighters, or associates of terrorist groups. In response to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June that allowed the detainees to challenge their imprisonment, the military began holding new review tribunals last fall.

During tribunal hearings, a panel of military officers considers public and secret evidence, and the detainee is offered an opportunity to state his case and answer questions. The panel then decides whether a captive should be designated an enemy combatant and be further detained. A second panel later reviews how dangerous the detainee would be if released.

According to the Defense Department, 558 tribunal reviews have been held. In the 539 decisions made so far, 506 detainees have been found to be enemy combatants and have been kept in prison. Thirty-three have been found not to be enemy combatants. Of those, four have been released.

In January, U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green ruled that the tribunals are illegal, unfairly stacked against detainees and in violation of the Constitution. The Bush administration has appealed her decision.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, who, like Green, sits in the federal district for the District of Columbia, has ruled that the tribunals provide an appropriate legal forum for the detainees. Detainees are appealing his ruling.

In Kurnaz`s case, a tribunal panel made up of an Air Force colonel and lieutenant colonel and a Navy lieutenant commander concluded that he was an al Qaeda member, based on "some evidence" that was classified.

But in nearly 100 pages of documents, now declassified by the government, U.S. military investigators and German law enforcement authorities said they had no such evidence. The Command Intelligence Task Force, the investigative arm of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the Guantanamo Bay facility, repeatedly suggested that it may have been a mistake to take Kurnaz off a bus of Islamic missionaries traveling through Pakistan in October 2001.

"CITF has no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaida or making any specific threat against the U.S.," one document says. "CITF is not aware of evidence that Kurnaz was or is a member of Al Quaeda."

Another newly declassified document reports that the "Germans confirmed this detainee has no connection to an al-Qaida cell in Germany."

Only one document in Kurnaz`s file, a short memo written by an unidentified military official, concludes that the German Muslim of Turkish descent is an al Qaeda member. It says he was working with German terrorists and trying in the fall of 2001 to reach Afghanistan to help fight U.S. forces.

In recently declassified portions of her January ruling, Green wrote that the panel`s decision appeared to be based on a single document, labeled "R-19." She said she found that to be one of the most troubling military abuses of due process among the many cases of Guantanamo detainees that she has reviewed.

The R-19 memo, she wrote, "fails to provide significant details to support its conclusory allegations, does not reveal the sources for its information and is contradicted by other evidence in the record." Green reviewed all the classified and unclassified evidence in the case.

Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington-based expert in military law, said Green appropriately chided the tribunal for not considering the overwhelming conclusion of the government that Kurnaz was improperly detained and should be released.

"It suggests the procedure is a sham," Fidell said. "If a case like that can get through, what it means is that the merest scintilla of evidence against someone would carry the day for the government, even if there`s a mountain of evidence on the other side."

Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who supports the tribunal process, said the lack of evidence against Kurnaz is "very troubling" and should prompt a military review of this particular tribunal.

"Failing to do that would undercut the argument that the military, in times of war, is capable of policing itself."

Azmy, Kurnaz`s attorney, said reading the classified records at first "exhilarated" him, because they corroborated his client`s account. Now that Kurnaz remains detained and some of the information about his case can come to light, Azmy said he is deeply disturbed at what he calls the government`s "whitewash."

"No American could possibly understand why we are holding someone we know we don`t need to hold," said Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey. "Having concluded long ago that he has no links to terrorists, what is keeping him there?"

Azmy said the Pentagon seems unable to admit it was wrong to detain someone so long. "Or perhaps it`s just a bureaucratic trap that Murat cannot get out of," Azmy said.

Justice Department lawyers told Azmy last week that the information may have been improperly declassified and should be treated in the foreseeable future as classified.

Kurnaz, 23, told the tribunal he was traveling to Pakistan with an Islamic missionary group. He said he is a religious man who pays no attention to politics and detests terrorists for violating the Koran`s teachings to practice nonviolence, according to transcripts of his appearance before the tribunal, which are available in federal court.

One of the tribunal`s assertions is that Kurnaz was traveling to Pakistan with Selcuk Bilgin, who Kurnaz said was a friend from his gym and who the military said is suspected of being "the Elalananutus suicide bomber."

Military records do not make it clear what the incident was, but in November 2003, an Istanbul synagogue was bombed and suspected bomber Gokhan Elaltuntas died.

Bilgin, who is still alive and living in Germany, did not go on the trip with Kurnaz, according to German court records that are part of the tribunal process. He was detained at the airport in Germany for failing to pay a fine on his dog.

Uwe Picard, the German prosecutor who investigated the case against Bilgin, said in an interview last week that there was no evidence of Bilgin being a suicide bomber and that authorities there had to drop the case.

"We don`t have proof the two wanted to go to Afghanistan or had any terrorist plans," he said through a German translator.

He said German state security agencies told him they had never heard of an Elalananutus bombing or a group by that name.

"As far as I`m concerned, this group is just a series of letters that means absolutely nothing," he said. "And as I see it, the Americans really have no reason to hold Mr. Kurnaz. That wouldn`t be allowed under German law."

Staff writer Dita Smith and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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March 27, 2005
WORD FOR WORD | REPORT CARD
China Gives America a D
By PETER EDIDIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/weekinreview/27word.html

SINCE 1977, the United States State Department has issued an annual global report card called the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

The document has long been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments, including

China`s, which responds with a nettled review of its own, called "The Human Rights Record of the United States," the 2004 version of which was

recently released. (It is available in English at:http://english.people.com.cn/200503/03/eng20050303_175406.ht…

http://english.people.com.cn/200503/03/eng20050303_175406.ht… Full text of Human Rights Record of the US in 2004 Following is the full text of the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004, released by the Information office of China`s State Council Thursday, March 3, 2005. The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004 By the Information Office of the State Council of the People`s Republic of China March 3, 2005 In 2004 the atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the dark side of human rights performance of the United States. The scandal shocked the humanity and was condemned by the international community. It is quite ironic that on Feb. 28 of this year, the State Department of the United States once again posed as the "the world human rights police" and released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. As in previous years, the reports pointed fingers at human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions (including China) but kept silent on the US misdeeds in this field. Therefore, the world people have to probe the human rights record behind the Statue of Liberty in the United States. I. On Life, Liberty and Security of Person American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people`s rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee for people`s rights to life, liberty and security of person. Violent crimes pose a serious threat to people`s lives. According to a report released by the Department of Justice of the United States on Nov. 29, 2004, in 2003 residents aged 12 and above in the United States experienced about 24 million victimizations, and there occurred 1,381,259 murders, robberies and other violent crimes, averaging 475 cases per 100,000 people. Among them there were 16,503 homicides, up 1.7 percent over 2002, or nearly six cases in every 100,000 residents, and one of every 44 Americans aged above 12 was victimized. The Associated Press reported on June 24, 2004 that the number of violent crimes in many US cities were on the rise. In 2003 Chicago alone recorded 598 homicides, 80 percent of which involved the use of guns. The Washington D.C. reported 41,738 murders, robberies and other violent crimes in 2003, averaging 6,406.4 cases per 100,000 residents. In 2004 the District recorded 198 killings, or a homicide rate of 35 per 100,000 residents. Detroit,which has less than 1 million residents, recorded 18,724 criminal cases in 2003, including 366 murders and 814 rapes, which amounted to a homicide rate of 41 per 100,000 residents. In 2003 the homicide rate in Baltimore was 43 per 100,000 residents. The Baltimore Sun reported on Dec. 17, 2004 that the city reported 271 killings from January to early December in 2004. It was reported that on Sept. 8, 2004 that by Sept. 4, 2004 there had been 368 homicides in the city, up 4.2 percent year-on-year. The USA Today reported on July 16, 2004 that in an average week in the US workplace one employee is killed and at least 25 are seriously injured in violent assaults by current or former co-workers. The Cincinnati Post reported on Nov. 12, 2004 that homicides average 17 a week and there are nearly 5,500 violent assaults a day at US job sites. The United States has the biggest number of gun owners and gun violence has affected lots of innocent lives. According to a survey released by the University of Chicago in 2001, 41.7 percent of men and 28.5 percent of women in the United States report having a gun in their homes, and 29.2 percent of men and 10.2 percent of women personally own a gun. The Los Angeles Times reported on Jul. 19, 2004 that since 2000 the number of firearm holders rose 28 percent in California. About 31,000 Americans are killed and 75,000 wounded by firearms each year, which means more than 80 people are shot dead each day. In 2002 there were 30,242 firearm killings in the United States; 54 percent of all suicides and 67 percent of all homicides were related to the use of firearms. The Associated Press reported that 808 people were shot dead in the first half of 2004 in Detroit. Police violence and infringement of human rights by law enforcement agencies also constitute a serious problem. At present, 5,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States use TASER - a kind of electric shock gun, which sends out 50,000 volts of impulse voltage after hitting the target. Since 1999, more than 80 people died from TASER shootings, 60 percent of which occurred between November 2003 and November 2004. A survey found that in the 17 years from 1985 to 2002, Los Angeles recorded more than 100 times increase in police shooting at automobile drivers, killing at least 25 and injuring more than 30 of them. Of these cases, 90 percent were due to misjudgment. (The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 29, 2004.) On Jul. 21, 2004 Chinese citizen Zhao Yan was handcuffed and severely beaten while she was in the United States on a normal business trip. She suffered injuries in many parts of her body and serious mental harm. The New York Times reported on Apr. 19, 2004 a comprehensive study of 328 criminal cases over the last 15 years in which the convicted person was exonerated suggests that there are thousands of innocent people in prison today. The study identified 199 murder exoneration, 73 of them in capital cases. In more than half of the cases, the defendants had been in prison for more than 10 years. The United States characterizes itself as "a paradise for free people," but the ratio of its citizens deprived of freedom has remained among the highest in the world. Statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last November showed that the nation made an estimated 13.6 million arrests in 2003. The national arrest rate was 4,695.1 arrests per 100,000 people, 0.2 percent up than that of the previous year (USA Today, Nov. 8, 2004). According to statistics from the Department of Justice, the number of inmates in the United States jumped from 320,000 in 1980 to 2 million in 2000, a hike by six times. From 1995 to 2003, the number of inmates grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the country, where one out of every 142 people is behind bars. The number of convicted offenders may total more than 6 million if parolees and probationers are also counted. The Chicago Tribune reported on Nov. 8 last year that the federal and state prison population amounted to 1.47 million last year, 2.1 percent more than in 2003. The number of criminals rose by over 5 percent in 11 states, with the growth in North Dakota up by 11.4 percent and in Minnesota by 10.3 percent. Most prisons in the United States are overcrowded, but still cannot meet the demand. The country has spent an average of 7 billion US dollars a year building new jails and prisons in the past 10 years. California has seen only one college but 21 new prisons built since 1984. Jails have become one of the huge and most lucrative industries, with a combined staff of more than 530,000 and being the second largest employer in the United States only after the General Motors. Private prisons are more and more common. The country now has over 100 private prisons in 27 states and 18 private prison companies. The value of goods and services created by inmates surged from 400 million US dollars in 1980 to 1.1 billion US dollars in 1994. Abuse of prisoners and violence occur frequently in US jails and prisons, which are under disorderly management. The Los Angeles Times reported on Aug. 15 last year that over 40 state prison systems were once under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding, poor food and lack of medical care. The NewsWeek of the United States also reported last May that in Pennsylvania, Arizona and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of others before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. Male inmates are often made to wear women`s pink underwear as a form of humiliation. New inmates are frequently beaten and cursed at and sometimes made to crawl. At a jail in New York City, some guards bump prisoners against the walls, pinch their arms and wrists, and force them to receive insulting checks nakedly. Some male inmates are sometimes compelled to stand in the nude before a group of women guards. Some female inmates go in shackles to hospital for treatment and nursing after they get ill or pregnant, some give births without a midwife, and some are locked to sickbeds with fetters after Caesarean operation. Over 80,000 women prisoners in the United States are mothers, and the overall number of the minor children of the American women prisoners is estimated at some 200,000. The country had more than 3,000 pregnant women in jails from 2000 to 2003 and 3,000 babies were born to the prisoners during this period (see Mexico`s Milenio on Feb. 21, 2004). It is estimated that at least more than 40,000 prisoners are locked up in the so-called "super jails", where the prisoner is confined to a very tiny cell, cannot see other people throughout the year, and has only one hour out for exercise every day. Sexual harassment and encroachment are common in jails in the Unite States. The New York Times reported last October that at least 13 percent of inmates in the country are sexually assaulted in prison (Ex-Inmate`s Suit Offers View Into Sexual Slavery in Prisons, The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2004). In jails of seven central and western US states, 21 percent of the inmates suffer sexual abuse at least once after being put in prison. The ratio is higher among women inmates, with nearly one fourth of them sexually assaulted by jail guards. Weiter auf der Home Page.

China`s assessment, unlike the sober State Department tome, is a frank indictment and draws a picture of America that approaches caricature. But that doesn`t mean it won`t buttress the negative image of the United States held by its critics around the world.

Excerpts follow, with the document`s grammatical and other errors intact.

Life, Liberty and Security of Person

American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people`s rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee for people`s rights to life, liberty and security of person.

The United States has the biggest number of gun owners, and gun violence has affected lots of innocent lives. About 31,000 Americans are killed and 75,000 wounded by firearms each year, which means more than 80 people are shot dead each day.

The United States characterizes itself as "a paradise for free people," but the ratio of its citizens deprived of freedom has remained among the highest.

According to statistics from the Department of Justice, the number of inmates in the United States jumped from 320,000 in 1980 to two million in 2000, a hike by six times. The number of convicted offenders may total more than six million if parolees and probationers are also counted.

Political Rights and Freedom

The United States claims to be "a paragon of democracy," but American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractices are common. Elections in the United States are in fact a contest of money. The presidential and Congressional elections last year cost nearly $4 billion.

Campaign advertisement and political debates were full of distorted facts, false information and lies.

Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Poverty, hunger and homelessness have haunted the world richest country.

Upper middle- and upper-class families that constitute the top 10 percent of the income distribution are prospering while many among the remaining 90 percent struggle to maintain their standard of living. According to the statistics released by the United States Census Bureau in 2004, the number of Americans in poverty has been climbing for three years. It rose by 1.3 million year on year in 2003 to 35.9 million.

Racial Discrimination

Racial discrimination has been deeply rooted in the United States, permeating into every aspects of society. The colored people are generally poor, with living condition much worse than the white. The death rate of illness, accident and murder among the black people is twice that of the white. The rate of being victim of murders for the black people is five times that of the white. The rate of being affected by AIDS for the black people is ten times that of the whites while the rate of being diagnosed by diabetes for the black people is twice that of the whites.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the United States received 29,000 complaints in 2003 of racial bias in the workplace

The Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal, so the gap between black and white people is simply an insult to the founding essence of the United States.

After the Sept. 11 incident, the United States openly restricts the rights of citizens under the cloak of homeland security, and uses diverse means including wire tapping of phone conversations and secret investigations, checks on all secret files, and monitoring transfers of fund and cash flows to supervise activities of its citizens, in which, people of ethnic minority groups, foreigners and immigrants become main victims.

The Rights of Women and Children

The situation of American women and children was disturbing. The rates of women and children physically or sexually victimized were high. According to F.B.I. Crime Statistics, in 2003 the United States witnessed 93,233 cases of raping. The statistics also showed that every two minutes one woman was sexually assaulted and every six minutes one woman was raped.

Children were victims of sex crimes. Every year about 400,000 children in the U.S. were forced to engage in prostitution or other sexual dealings on the streets.

In recent years scandals about clergymen molesting children kept breaking out.

It is believed that from 1950 to 2002 more than 10,600 boys and girls were sexually abused by nearly 4,400 clergymen.

The Human Rights of Foreign Nationals

In 2004, United States Army service people were reported to have abused and insulted Iraqi prisoners of war, which stunned the whole world. The United States forces were blamed for their fierce and dirty treatments for these Iraqi P.O.W.`s. They made the P.O.W.`s naked by force, masking their heads with underwear (even women`s underwear), locking up their necks with a belt, towing them over the ground, letting military dogs bite them, beating them with a whip, shocking them with electric batons, needling them sometimes and putting chemical fluids containing phosphorus on their wounds.

The United States frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks. Spain`s Uprising newspaper on May 12, 2004, published a list of human rights infringement incidents committed by the United States troops, quoting two bloodthirsty sayings of two American generals, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead" by Gen. Philip Sheridan, and "we should bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age" by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay.

A survey on Iraqi civilian deaths, based on the natural death rate before the war, estimates that the United States-led invasion might have led to 100,000 more deaths in the country, with most victims being women and children. In addition, the United States troops often plunder Iraqi households when tracking down anti-United States militants since the invasion. The American forces has so far committed at least thousands of robberies and 90 percent of the Iraqis that have been rummaged are innocent.

Despite tons of problems in its own human rights, the United States continues to stick to its belligerent stance, wantonly trample on the sovereignty of other countries and constantly stage tragedies of human rights infringement in the world.

Instead of indulging itself in publishing the "human rights country report" to censure other countries unreasonably, the United States should reflect on its erroneous behavior on human rights and take its own human rights problems seriously.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 27, 2005
THE SECURITY ADVISER
Is a State Sponsor of Terrorism Winning?
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/magazine/27ADVISER.html

Imagine with me a nation`s security leaders sitting around the conference table being briefed on the progress of things in Iraq. They celebrate the overwhelming victory of their favorites in the Iraqi elections. They are pleased with the effectiveness of their huge investment in building schools and hospitals in Shiite communities. They are delighted that the thousands of their security forces in Iraq are doing well, with few casualties. The nation? Iran.

Yes, Iran, the nation the Bush administration calls the greatest state sponsor of terrorism, is having some good days, largely at our expense. In the 1980`s, Iran suffered an estimated one million casualties in a seven-year war against Iraq. From Iran`s perspective, the purpose of the war was to place Iraq`s majority Shiite religious faction in charge, to unseat Saddam Hussein, to protect the Shiite holy places and, perhaps, to get its hands on Iraq`s vast oil deposits. The costly war ended in a draw, after the two sides exhausted themselves. Seventeen years later, Iran has now achieved three of those four war goals, thanks to 13,000 American casualties and scores of billions of American-taxpayer dollars.

Unlike American aid to Iraq, Iran`s assistance is having little problem getting through. Estimated at many hundreds of millions of dollars per year, Iranian aid has a low overhead and is buying Tehran influence in Shiite communities. Intelligence sources report that Iran`s secret service and Revolutionary Guards have heavily infiltrated Iraq, with perhaps as many as 5,000 personnel. That would make Iran the third-largest force in the coalition, but it does not, of course, participate in the coalition. Iran operates on its own agenda in Iraq. Iran`s goal is to have a government in Baghdad under strong Iranian influence, not to create a mirror image of Tehran. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is widely agreed to be the most influential person in Iraq. He and many of the new leaders of Iraq spent many years living in Iran, with the help of the Tehran government.

European and American pressure on Syria has driven President Bashar al-Assad into the arms of Tehran. Although Syria`s forces may withdraw from Lebanon, the Hezbollah terrorist force created by Iran will stay and has now gained Washington`s acceptance as a legitimate Lebanese political party. Hezbollah is widely believed to have been responsible for the terrorist murders of more than 300 Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, as well as many Israelis.

With oil costing more than $50 a barrel, the money keeps on flowing into Tehran`s treasury. Western oil companies, including a Halliburton subsidiary, work with the Iranians, planning new oil pipelines to increase their output. The hope of American national security planners has been for democracy to flourish in Iran. Unfortunately, when a progressive parliament was elected, the ruling mullahs vetoed its actions and then stacked it with their supporters. There will soon be another election in Iran, but it is likely to be fixed by the mullahs.

Iran`s nuclear strategists are also succeeding. President Bush has agreed to give Iran trade concessions to get it to abide by nuclear-nonproliferation agreements. Optimists think such concessions will halt the Iranian nuclear weapons program and buy agreement to a reliable inspection regime. Cynics suggest that Iran is playing for time to finish making bombs in hidden facilities. Either outcome, trade concessions or nuclear weapons, will strengthen Iran.

The president recently said that reports of the United States preparing to attack Iran were ``simply ridiculous.`` He then quickly added, ``All options are on the table.`` There are reports that Pentagon planners, reacting to the prospect of drawn-out negotiations, are developing strike packages to take out W.M.D. sites in Iran. Some planners say such strikes would cause the people to overthrow the mullahs. Actually, if we struck Iran, I think we would unite it, trigger a spasm of terrorist attacks against America and Israel and start another war for which we have no exit strategy. Thus, we need an honest national dialogue now on how much we feel threatened by Iran and what the least-bad approaches to mitigating that threat are.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 27, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Vatican Code
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/opinion/27dowd.html

Some may mock the Vatican for waiting until everyone on earth has read "The Da Vinci Code" to denounce "The Da Vinci Code."

I am not one of them. It`s Easter, and I don`t want to blot my catechism.

It`s a little late, now that the two-year-old thriller by Dan Brown is a publishing miracle - with 25 million copies sold in 44 languages, a cascade of other books inspired by the novel and a movie with Tom Hanks set to start filming this spring - for Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to intone on a Vatican radio broadcast: "Don`t read and don`t buy `The Da Vinci Code.` "

But when you think of the history of the Catholic Church, the Vatican is acting with lightning speed. It took the church more than 350 years to reverse its condemnation of Galileo. The Vatican only began an inquisition of the 16th-century Inquisition in 1998. It wasn`t until the reign of Pope John Paul II that the Vatican apologized for the crimes of the Crusaders and offered contrition for the silence of Catholics in the Holocaust. The church has still not apologized for shameful dissembling by its hierarchy on the sex abuse scandal. And America`s Catholic bishops only last week announced they were finally going to get serious about opposing the death penalty.

The 70-year-old cardinal assigned by the Vatican to exorcise the success of the novel is the archbishop of Genoa, a former soccer commentator and a contender to succeed the ailing pope. "There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true," he told Il Giornale.

It evokes the Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown flap for a Vatican official to slam Dan Brown`s fictional characters, but a former Vatican reporter explained it this way: "The church is founded on a story that some people believe and some people don`t, so the Vatican tends to get very threatened by other versions of that story, especially racier ones."

Mr. Brown`s zippy version has Jesus and Mary Magdalene marrying and having children. This "perverts the story of the Holy Grail, which most certainly does not refer to the descendants of Mary Magdalene," Cardinal Bertone said. "It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies."

The novelist is not the first one to conjure romantic sparks between the woman usually painted as what one writer calls "the Jessica Rabbit of the Gospels" and the eligible young Jewish carpenter and part-time miracle worker.

For years, female historians and novelists have been making the case that Mr. Brown makes, that Mary Magdalene was framed and defamed, that the men who run Christianity obliterated her role as an influential apostle and reduced her to a metaphor for sexual guilt.

The church refuses to allow women to be ordained as priests because there were no female apostles. So if Mary Magdalene was a madonna rather than a whore, the church loses its fig leaf of justification for male domination and exclusion.

It`s obvious that Vatican officials did not read to the end of Mr. Brown`s novel or they never would have denounced it.

(Caveat lector: If you have somehow missed reading the blockbuster or are one of the thrifty souls waiting for the paperback to finally come out, do not read further.)

After whipping you into a feminist frenzy over the hidden agenda of the church`s unjustly perpetuating itself as an all-male, all "celibate" institution - precepts that have clearly led to some unnatural perversions and attracted a disproportionate number of priests fleeing sexual confusion - Mr. Brown abruptly deflates you at the end, going along with the notion that women should stay silent and submissive, letting the men who run the church continue to run the church with men.

The woman who is the descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus tells Robert Langdon, Mr. Brown`s Harvard symbologist hero, that the secret saga of how the church smeared her ancestor as a slut and swindled all women out of serious roles in the church does not need to be aired. It can continue to remain a secret.

"Her story is being told in art, music and books," the woman says, adding that things are gradually changing for women: "We are beginning to sense the need to restore the sacred feminine."

No whistle is blown. No alarm is sounded. Talk about an anticlimax for a fantastic ride. As it turns out, Mr. Brown is not the tormentor of the Vatican, but an ally.

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Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Sunday, March 27, 2005
War News for Sunday, March 27, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: US soldiers raid paediatric hospital in Ramadi.

Bring `em on: Iraqi police officer and off-duty guardsman shot dead in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: One person killed and three injured in shooting incident in cafe in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Video of the execution of Iraqi liason officer posted on the internet.

Bring `em on: Insurgents injure one civilian in roadside bomb attack on Iraqi police in Basra.

No Proof: New details from an intense battle between insurgents and Iraqi police commandos supported by U.S. forces cast doubt Thursday on Iraqi government claims that 85 insurgents had been killed at what was described as a clandestine training camp.

Accounts of the fighting continued to suggest that a major battle involving dozens of insurgents had occurred Tuesday on the eastern shore of Lake Tharthar, about 50 miles northwest of Baghdad. But two U.S. military officials said Thursday that no bodies had been found by American troops who arrived later at the scene. A spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, meanwhile, said he presumed the death toll was accurate, but he played down the scope of the fighting.

US appoint new Democracy Czar for the Middle East.

Allawi issues warning to Al Sistani? Iraq`s interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said on Saturday Shi`a Muslim religious leaders should stay out of politics, an unprecedented public criticism of the powerful clergy.

"Thrusting the religious establishment into daily political affairs could distance it from its guiding role and disrupt relations between the political forces, which could create an imbalance," his National Accord Party said in a letter sent to Shi`a and Kurdish politicians.

"Everyone must agree on the role of the religious leadership in the interim period," it said. State-owned al-Sabah newspaper published the letter. Public criticism of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq`s most influential Shi`a cleric, is almost unheard of in the country.

It could deepen a political crisis sparked by the failure so far to form a government after the January 30 elections.

Special Report

Reconstruction: Two years on from the start of the war in Iraq, reconstruction is in many areas still largely stalled. Wars, years of sanctions and looting have devastated the oil-rich nation`s infrastructure. In 2003, after Saddam Hussein`s fall, the World Bank said Iraq needed $36bn for reconstruction by 2007. The US authorities in Baghdad added another $19bn to the estimate, to cover areas such as security and the oil industry. At a special conference held in October 2003, donor nations and institutions pledged to contribute $32bn toward the reconstruction effort. Over half that sum was pledged by the US. By September 2004 only $2.5bn had been released, largely because the security situation has not allowed rebuilding work to proceed. Over half the $1.2bn released by the US was spent on security-related measures.



Commentary

Quagmire? On Tuesday, in a raid on an insurgent training camp, Iraqi troops called in U.S. helicopter gunships that killed close to 80 foreign trainees, including Jordanians, an Algerian and a Filipino. The Times quoted Maj. Richard Goldenberg of the 42nd Infantry Division as saying his outfit, whose job is to secure the northern Sunni Triangle, had never "come across such an organized facility for the Iraqi insurgent elements."

Two years into the war, what have we accomplished? Oh yes, that’s right: elections. Remember?

Here’s what elections have brought to Iraq: not much. Innocents still risk their lives by having anything to do with Americans, and operations to train foreign recruits are getting bigger and more sophisticated as opponents of the American occupation dig in for a long resistance.

Oh, and last Sunday, a band of 40 to 50 attacked an American convoy.

Optimistic observers like to point out signs that democracy is making inroads in the Middle East, inspired, they think, by the victory over Saddam and the spectacle of Iraqis lining up to vote. Something like a Berlin Wall is falling, they hope.

There’s only one problem with this evaluation: It doesn’t fit. While Eastern Europe’s communism was clearly a rotten fruit ready to drop from the branch, militant Islam is an enthusiastic thing, and the American presence in Iraq gives it new purpose and vigor.

Missing Weapons

Dozens of ballistic missiles are missing in Iraq. Vials of dangerous microbes are unaccounted for. Sensitive sites, once under U.N. seal, stand gutted today, their arms-making gear hauled off by looters, or by arms-makers.

All the world now knows that Iraq had no threatening "WMD" programs. But two years after U.S. teams began their futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has something else: a landscape of ruined military plants and of unanswered questions and loose ends, some potentially lethal, an Associated Press review of official reporting shows. The chief U.N. arms inspector told AP that outsiders are seeing only a "sliver" of the mess inside Iraq. Demetrius Perricos reports that satellite images indicate at least 90 sites in the old Iraqi military-industrial complex have been pillaged.

The U.S. teams paint a similar picture. "There is nothing but a concrete slab at locations where once stood plants or laboratories," the Iraq Survey Group said in its final report. But that report from inside Iraq, though 986 pages thick, is at times thin on relevant hard information and silent in critically important areas. Just days after the report was issued last fall, for example, news leaked that tons of high-grade explosives had been looted a year earlier from the Iraqi complex at Qaqaa. It was a potential boon to Iraq`s car bombers, but the U.S. document did not report this dangerous loss.

Similarly, the main body of the U.S. report discusses Iraq`s Samoud 2s, but doesn`t note that many of these ballistic missiles haven`t been found. Only via an annex table does the report disclose that as many as 36 Samouds may be unaccounted for in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. Seventy-five of the 26-foot-long, liquid-fueled missiles were destroyed under U.N. oversight before the war, because they too often exceeded the 93-mile range allowed for Iraqi missiles under the 12-year-old U.N. inspection regime. After the U.N. inspectors were evacuated on the eve of the U.S. invasion, they lost track of the remaining missiles.

The Iraq Survey Group, which ended its arms hunt in December, says a complete accounting of the Samouds "may not be possible due to various factors."

Blogwatch

This is Rumour Control on the failed manhunt for Osama bin Laden.
# posted by Friendly Fire : 1:05 AM
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Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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Special Report

[urlReconstruction:]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/post_saddam_iraq/html/1.stm[/url] Two years on from the start of the war in Iraq, reconstruction is in many areas still largely stalled. Wars, years of sanctions and looting have devastated the oil-rich nation`s infrastructure. In 2003, after Saddam Hussein`s fall, the World Bank said Iraq needed $36bn for reconstruction by 2007. The US authorities in Baghdad added another $19bn to the estimate, to cover areas such as security and the oil industry. At a special conference held in October 2003, donor nations and institutions pledged to contribute $32bn toward the reconstruction effort. Over half that sum was pledged by the US. By September 2004 only $2.5bn had been released, largely because the security situation has not allowed rebuilding work to proceed. Over half the $1.2bn released by the US was spent on security-related measures.

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March 28, 2005
An Army Program to Build a High-Tech Force Hits Cost Snags
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/politics/28weapons.html?hp…

The Army`s plan to transform itself into a futuristic high-technology force has become so expensive that some of the military`s strongest supporters in Congress are questioning the program`s costs and complexity.

Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the "technological bridge to the future" would equip 15 brigades of roughly 3,000 soldiers, or about one-third of the force the Army plans to field, over a 20-year span.

That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not include a projected $25 billion for the communications network needed to connect the future forces. Nor does it fully account for Army plans to provide Future Combat weapons and technologies to forces beyond those first 15 brigades.

Now some of the military`s advocates in Congress are asking how to pay the bill.

"We`re dealing today with a train wreck," Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a March 16 Congressional hearing on the cost and complexity of Future Combat Systems.

"We`re left with impossible decisions," said Mr. Weldon, a strong supporter of Pentagon spending who was lamenting the trillion-dollar costs for the major weapons systems the Pentagon is building. One of those decisions, he warned, might cut back Future Combat.

The Army sees Future Combat, the most expensive weapons program it has ever undertaken, as a seamless web of 18 different sets of networked weapons and military robots. The program is at the heart of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld`s campaign to transform the Army into a faster, lighter force in which stripped-down tanks could be put on a transport plane and flown into battle, and information systems could protect soldiers of the future as heavy armor has protected them in the past.

Army officials say the task is a technological challenge as complicated as putting an astronaut on the moon. They call Future Combat weapons, which may take more than a decade to field, crucial for a global fight against terror.

But the bridge to the future remains a blueprint. Army officials issued a stop-work order in January for the network that would link Future Combat weapons, citing its failure to progress. They said this month that they did not know if they could build a tank light enough to fly.

The Army is asking Congress to approve Future Combat while it is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose costs, according to the Congressional Research Service, now exceed $275 billion. Future Combat is one of the biggest items in the Pentagon`s plans to build more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of more than $1.3 trillion.

The Army has canceled two major weapons programs, the Crusader artillery system and the Comanche helicopter, "to protect funding for the Future Combat System," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a member of the Armed Services Committee. "That is why we have to get the F.C.S. program right."

David M. Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, said in an interview that the Pentagon`s future arsenal was unaffordable and Congress needed "to make some choices now."

"There is a substantial gap between what the Pentagon is seeking in weapons systems and what we will be able to afford and sustain," said Mr. Walker, who oversees the Government Accountability Office, the budget watchdog of Congress. "We are not going to be able to afford all of this."

He added, "Every dollar we spend on a want today is a dollar we won`t be able to spend on a need tomorrow."

Paul L. Francis, the acquisition and sourcing management director for the accountability office, told Congress that the Army was building Future Combat Systems without the data it needed to guide it. "If everything goes as planned, the program will attain the level of knowledge in 2008 that it should have had before it started in 2003," Mr. Francis said in written testimony. "But things are not going as planned."

He warned that Future Combat Systems, in its early stages of research and development, was showing signs typical of multibillion-dollar weapons programs that cost far more than expected and deliver fewer weapons than promised. Future Combat is a network of 53 crucial technologies, he said, and 52 are unproven.
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Brig. Gen. Charles A. Cartwright, deputy director for the Army research and development command, said in an interview that Future Combat was a work in progress, evolving in an upward spiral from the drawing board to the assembly line.

"We are working through the affordability," General Cartwright said. He acknowledged that the Army`s cost estimates could spiral upward as well.

The Army`s publicly disclosed cost estimates for Future Combat stood at $92 billion last month. That excluded research and development, which the G.A.O. says will run to $30 billion. Mr. Boyce, the Army spokesman, said on Saturday that Future Combat costs were estimated at $25 billion for research and development and from $6.1 billion to $8 billion for each of 15 future brigades, or as high as $145 billion.

The Army wants Future Combat to be a smaller, faster force than the one now fighting in Iraq. Tanks, mobile cannons and personnel carriers would be made so light that they could be flown to a war zone. But first they must be stripped of heavy armor. In place of armor, American soldiers in combat would be protected by information systems, so they could see and kill the enemy before being seen and killed, Army officials say.

Future Combat soldiers, weapons and robots are to be linked by a $25 billion web, Joint Tactical Radio Systems, known as JTRS (pronounced "jitters"). The network would transmit the battlefield information intended to protect soldiers. It is not included in the Future Combat budget.

If JTRS does not work, Future Combat will fail, General Cartwright said. The Army halted production on the first set of JTRS radios in January, saying they were not progressing as planned.

"The principle of replacing mass with information is threatened," Mr. Francis said in an interview. "Now you`d have light vehicles fighting the same way as the current force, without the protection. This is one reason why we don`t know yet if Future Combat Systems will work."

Another factor is the weight of the new weapons. Future Combat`s tanks and mobile cannons, all built on similar frames, were supposed to weigh no more than 19 tons each. At that weight, they could be flown to a war zone in a few days, rather than taking weeks or months to deploy.

They will weigh "less than 50 tons, perhaps less than 30 tons," Claude M. Bolton Jr., the Army`s acquisition executive, told Congress at the March 16 hearing. "Will it be 20 tons or 19? I don`t know the answer to that."

That doubt may damage a conceptual underpinning for Future Combat: the ability to deploy armed forces quickly in a crisis. Unless the weapons are as light as advertised, they will have to arrive in a theater of war by ship.

Boeing, best-known for making commercial aircraft and military space systems, is designing Future Combat Systems in the role of lead systems integrator, acting as architect and general contractor. It is also responsible for the JTRS radios.

Boeing is being paid $21 billion through 2014 for its work on Future Combat Systems. "It`s certainly a key element of our defense business," said Dennis Muilenburg, the vice president and general manager for Future Combat Systems at Boeing. The Army`s Future Combat contract with Boeing, which has suffered several Pentagon contracting scandals in the last few years, exempts the company from financial disclosures demanded under the federal Truth in Negotiations Act.

The challenge for the Army and Boeing is to build "an entirely new Army, reconfigured to perform the global policing mission," said Gordon Adams, a former director for national security spending at the Office of Management and Budget, "and that is enormously expensive."

Mr. Rumsfeld told the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee last month about the challenge of remaking an Army in the middle of a war. "Abraham Lincoln once compared reorganizing the Union Army during the Civil War to bailing out the Potomac River with a teaspoon," he said. "I hope and trust that what we are proposing to accomplish will not be that difficult."

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March 28, 2005
Rings That Kidnap Iraqis Thrive on Big Threats and Bigger Profits
By JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/international/middleeast/2…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 27 - While Westerners are transfixed by the occasional kidnapping of one of their own here, Iraqis are far more vulnerable. As many as 5,000 Iraqis have been kidnapped in the last year and a half, according to Western and Iraqi security officials.

Some of the kidnappings are of Iraqis who work with Westerners, said Col. Jabbar Anwar, head of a major crimes unit in Baghdad that works extensively with American intelligence groups on kidnapping cases. But ransom is a far greater motive than intimidation, he said: the threat of death for collaboration is usually just a way to drive up the price of freedom.

"The only reason they kidnap people is for money," Colonel Jabbar said.

Ransom demands, security officials say, range from a few hundred to half a million dollars. The death rate among hostages is uncertain, but the officials say many simply disappear even after a ransom is paid.

Seen in one way, kidnapping is just another facet of the security vacuum created by the American-led invasion of Iraq and never really filled despite the hiring and training of tens of thousands of Iraqi police officers. But because of the harrowing effect the kidnapping industry has on Iraqi families, especially the prosperous and educated families whose children are special targets, investigators see kidnapping as a thing unto itself.

Scattered anecdotal evidence suggests that the epidemic of kidnapping, especially of children, is a force like no other in driving from Iraq the educated professionals who are critically needed for the rebuilding of the country. As stoic as Iraqis often are about the perils they face in their daily lives, kidnapping contributes to the national sense of instability and fuels mutual distrust - particularly because many kidnappings rely on people close to the target who pass information on net worth, daily habits and other matters of interest to hostage takers.

The head of the office of kidnapping in the major crimes unit, Col. Faisel Ali, called kidnapping "the first and biggest problem in Iraq."

Colonel Jabbar, who has responsibility for dealing with the full range of crime in Iraq, from murder to embezzlement to run-of-the-mill extortion rackets, agreed. "I put it at the top," he said.

Iraqi families are so well schooled in the new commerce of kidnapping that, in spite of the mortal danger to their loved ones, they seldom agree to the initial ransom demand, because the price will only increase, said Abdul Razzak Hassan, an engineer. He was forced into his expertise on the topic when he was snatched on a highway west of Baghdad on Dec. 25. His captors kept him blindfolded in a filthy steel container for five days and tortured him.

Mr. Hassan, 45, a widely traveled man who speaks passable English, said his family was aware that he was being tortured but haggled with the kidnappers by telephone for five days before paying 20 million dinars, about $15,000, for his release.

Even at that price, Mr. Hassan knew that he was fortunate not to be killed once the payment was made.

"You are lucky when people who catch you are not the killer man," Mr. Hassan said.

The kidnappers warned his family never to report the incident. Dreading what many Iraqis believe to be corrupt and infiltrated police departments, they have not.

Also unreported was the kidnapping of a wealthy 64-year-old woman named Um Sattar, who was taken by men dressed as Iraqi police officers and held for the colossal sum of $500,000. During the negotiations, she was kept behind a locked door in a family home in Baghdad as children played outside and relatives stopped by for tea. Investigators, tipped off by an informant 13 days into her imprisonment, raided the house and freed her.

But she thought that the new set of police officers was part of the kidnapping gang, recalled First Lt. Abbas Jassim of the Baghdad major crimes unit, who took part in the raid. She begged them not to kill her and swore her family would pay. The investigators tried again and again to convince her that they were not criminals, but the terrified woman repeatedly refused to accept their bona fides. Finally, a disgusted investigator told her to shut up.

"Yes, we`re a gang," the investigator said in frustration.

Despite the distrust, more than 1,000 kidnapping cases have been reported to the American-led administration in Iraq over the last 18 months, said a Western security adviser. Even among those cases, expected to be heavily tilted toward incidents involving Westerners, more than 70 percent involved hostages from Iraq or surrounding Arab countries, said the adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A tiny proportion of the cases reported to the Americans involved high-profile Western hostages like Nicholas Berg, the American engineer who was kidnapped and beheaded a year ago, or Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist taken hostage on Feb. 4 and set free exactly a month later.

"It`s first and foremost an Iraqi crisis," the security adviser said. "The reality of it is, it`s a business."

The kidnapping office has made modest inroads on the problem, according to statistics kept by the major crimes unit. From January 2004 to February 2005, 80 kidnapping cases, involving 73 hostages, were referred to the office by police stations in the western Baghdad jurisdiction of the unit. (The number of cases and hostages do not match because some reports turn out to be false alarms.)

In 28 of those cases, investigators freed the hostages and arrested the gangs holding them, making 171 arrests in all, the statistics show. Most of the arrests were made in sting operations connected with a ransom payment, Colonel Faisel said.

The origins of the gangs vary, he said. Some are literally crime families, a group of relatives who at some point decided to make a few extra dinars by taking hostages. Some are bands of college students; others, groups drawn from a particular mosque; still others, gangs of hardened criminals released during the general amnesty declared by Saddam Hussein on the eve of the invasion. Investigators also suspect that at least some of the kidnappings are undertaken specifically to finance the insurgency.

The kidnappings are almost never random, Colonel Faisel said; the targets are carefully selected, the planning obviously substantial. Some cases evoke cold-war thrillers, with scrawled instructions left in back-alley trash bins and dead drops for ransoms.

A profusion of mobile phones and SIM cards - memory chips for the phones - sold throughout Iraq from small and often unregistered shops made tracing calls from sophisticated kidnappers all but impossible, Colonel Faisel said. And he said that for all their help, American military and intelligence officials in Iraq had been slow to share surveillance technology that could aid the Iraqis in nailing the callers.

The files of the major crimes unit are bulging with strange kidnapping cases. In one, a 6-year-old, Hussein Fathi Mahmood, was grabbed in front of his school in the Baghdad district of Kadhimiya. Investigators recovered him after following a tortuous trail that began with an acquaintance of the boy`s parents, a talkative man who spent much of his time in the company of magicians and quack doctors.

In another case, a man being held for $350,000 ransom was found shackled in a room that the police raided in Baghdad`s Adhamiya district. According to a report on the incident, the police took him back to the station, where he abruptly pointed to an officer, First Lt. Athier Majid Mustafa, and said that he was one of the kidnappers.

Mr. Hassan, the engineer, said several cars carrying armed men cut him off on the highway west of Baghdad. The men then dragged him out of his car, beat him and stuffed him into the trunk. Several hours later he ended up at what seemed to be a kind of "hostage hotel" - steel storage containers where victims of various kidnappings were kept as ransom negotiations took place. Though blindfolded, Mr. Hassan could hear orders being given on the other hostages.

At least three different groups of kidnapping entrepreneurs became involved in his case, he said, the one that kidnapped him, another that guarded the container, and a third that tortured him periodically with steel-bristled brushes. The third group bargained with the first group to "purchase" him. He was occasionally allowed to talk with his family by phone. The torture, Mr. Hassan concluded, was supposed to drive up the price his family would be willing to pay, allowing the third group to turn a profit.

The kidnappers continually accused him of working with Americans, but that, too, he said, seemed little more than a means to terrify him and squeeze the family for more money, Mr. Hassan believed. He was in fact working for Iraqis, and the kidnappers seemed to have every other major aspect of his life down cold. Finally, his family paid, and he was abandoned in a miserable state on a dark highway near the Abu Ghraib prison, one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq.

Because Mr. Hassan never reported his case, the police never had a chance to track down his kidnappers. But a raid on a house in the New Baghdad district netted Um Sattar and the family that investigators allege was holding her. The investigators said the family, which had not been involved in the kidnapping itself, was to be paid a flat fee of $2,500 no matter how the ransom negotiations ended up.

Visited in prison, the head of the family, Ibrahim Abdul Hussein, who during the raid had sat outside the house and calmly smoked a cigarette, denied culpability.

"I don`t know anything," he said. "Because I live upstairs and she was downstairs."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 28, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Is No One Accountable?
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/opinion/28herbert.html

The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging. But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one. People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process. No charges. No lawyers. No appeals.

Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations. He was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked - hooded and naked - in a wooden, coffinlike box. He said he was told by his captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.

(This was not a boast from the blue. On Saturday, for example, The Times reported that the Army would not prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Mr. Ali`s story is depressingly similar to other accounts pouring in from detainees, human rights groups, intelligence sources and U.S. government investigators. If you pay close attention to what is already known about the sadistic and barbaric treatment of prisoners by the U.S., you can begin to wonder how far we`ve come from the Middle Ages. The alleged heretics hauled before the Inquisition were not permitted to face their accusers or mount a defense. Innocence was irrelevant. Torture was the preferred method of obtaining confessions.

No charges were ever filed against Mr. Ali, and he was eventually released. But what should be of paramount concern to Americans is this country`s precipitous and frightening descent into the hellish zone of lawlessness that the Bush administration, on the one hand, is trying to conceal and, on the other, is defending as absolutely essential to its fight against terror.

The lawsuit against Mr. Rumsfeld was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, a New York-based group, on behalf of Mr. Ali and seven other former detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan who claim to have been tortured by U.S. personnel.

The suit charges that Mr. Rumsfeld personally authorized unlawful interrogation techniques and abdicated his responsibility to stop the torture and other abuses of prisoners in U.S. custody. It contends that the abuse of detainees was widespread and that Mr. Rumsfeld and other top administration officials were well aware of it.

According to the suit, it is unreasonable to believe that Mr. Rumsfeld could have remained in the dark about the rampant mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. It cites a wealth of evidence readily available to the secretary, including the scandalous eruptions at Abu Ghraib prison, the reports of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, myriad newspaper and magazine articles, internal U.S. government reports, and concerns expressed by such reputable groups as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

(The committee has noted, among other things, that military intelligence estimates suggest that 70 percent to 90 percent of the people detained in Iraq had been seized by mistake.)

Whether this suit will ultimately be successful in holding Mr. Rumsfeld personally accountable is questionable. But if it is thoroughly argued in the courts, it will raise yet another curtain on the stomach-turning practices that have shamed the United States in the eyes of the world.

The primary aim of the lawsuit is quite simply to re-establish the rule of law. "It`s that fundamental idea that nobody is above the law," said Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First. "The violations here were created by policies that deliberately undermined the rule of law. That needs to be challenged."

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States. Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you`re left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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/
Monday, March 28, 2005

No Government and 16 Dead

US Generals revealed on Sunday that a) guerrillas in Iraq are able to keep the number of attacks at about 60 a day and b) that the proportion of fighters that is foreign jihadis has increased somewhat in the past few months. (The proportion seems to have been about 5 percent through last fall). The CIA is worried that the jihadis are getting training in Iraq that will allow them to contribute to destabilizing the Middle East and might impel them to attack the United States, as the veterans of the Reagan Afghanistan Jihad did.

By the way, if there are 60 attacks a day, why do I only read about 7 or 8 of them?

A different kind of violence, social violence, broke out on Sunday. About 50 building guards demonstrated outside the ministry of Science and Technology, protesting that they had not been paid their salaries in full. Bodyguards for the minister, Rashad Mandan Omar, shot into the crowd and killed one.

Generally, I`d say you want to avoid killing the people who guard your building if you are a cabinet minister in Iraq (many ministers have had assassination attempts on their lives). In fact, I`d say if you made sure anyone was paid, it should be the guards outside your building. (Does this mean the Iraqi government is broke, having been badly hurt by oil pipeline sabotage?)

This incident shows how horrible and jumpy the atmosphere is in Iraq.

Guerrillas killed 16 persons in Iraq on Sunday, including three members of the Badr Corps in a drive-by shooting at Baquba. The Badr Corps is the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite party that is one of two big winners in the recent parliamentary elections. Badr itself ran on the United Iraqi Alliance slate as a political party, the Badr Organization.

Since SCIRI won the recent elections, it has been talking about integrating Badr into the Iraqi police and military, and about purging the police, army and secret police of Baath sympathizers and ex-Baathists. The US may be getting used to cooperating with Badr (early on they tried to close it down but failed), since it clearly is going to be a factor in the new Iraq. My guess is that Badr is providing some of the good intelligence that has allowed a number of successful operations against Sunni guerrillas, and that this assassination was payback.

There was also significant violence in Basra in the far south, and in Tel Afar in the Turkmen north, Dhuluiyyah and Balad, mostly attacks by guerrillas on police and Iraqi military.

There seems little likelihood of a government being formed before the beginning of April. Two sticking points in the negotiations are the role of Islam in the new government and who gets the ministry of petroleum. The Kurds want it, as a way of getting hold of the city of Kirkuk, which they covet. The Shiites want it, because they have the huge Rumaila oil field in the south. In fact, there have been several demonstrations in Basra recently by the Rumaila oil rig workers demanding that the post go to a Shiite from the deep south. The director of the South Oil Co., which is theoretically government-owned, appears to just be doing as he pleases down in Basra without much consulting the "government" in Baghdad.

CBC reports that, "Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the Alliance, recently told an Iraqi TV station that "we will continue to work according to the directions and the advice of the religious authority," a transcript shows."

CBC adds, "Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of the Shias and organizer of the Alliance, told a UN official on Sunday that he was not going to become involved in politics – except in crises."

So Abdul Aziz will be consulting Sistani regularly, but Sistani will only directly intervene if he feels a crisi has developed. As I have mentioned before, this role for Sistani sounds somewhat like that of a king in a contemporary Western constitutional monarchy.

Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post profiles SCIRI preacher Jalal al-Din Saghir of the Baratha Mosque in Baghdad. Shadid finds him full of a rhetoric of excess, a black and white view of the world, and a Shiite triumphalism that scares the Sunnis.

It was Saghir`s election to parliament, as part of the United Iraqi Alliance slate, that Americans got all happy and excited about last January 30.

Richard Ingram on the current role of the British Army in the south of Iraq::
"According to Ms Philp, the town of Basra is today controlled by fanatical religious militias which disapprove of things like picnics. So what has happened to the British army which, we thought, was in charge? When one of the students appealed for help at the British military base he was told to `go to the Iraqi authorities`. From this account, it appears that our army is confined to barracks waiting to be told what to do by a government that doesn`t exist. That probably suits Mr Blair, as the last thing he wants is more British casualties hitting the headlines. But one wonders what the army thinks about it. "

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Entries for a Devil’s Dictionary of the Bush Era

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2288

For the last few years we have been ruled by lexicographers. Never has an administration spent so much time creating, defining, or redefining terms, perhaps because no one (since George Orwell) has grasped the power and possibility that lay hidden in plain sight in the naming and renaming of words. In a sense, our post-9/11 moment began with two definitions: The Bush administration named our global enemy "terrorism" and called the acts that followed a "war," which was soon given the moniker "the global war on terror" (later reduced to the acronym GWOT, also known as World War IV), which was then given an instant future -- being defined as a "generational struggle" that was still to come. All this, along with "war" itself, was simply announced rather than officially "declared."

Given that we were (by administration definition) at war, it should have been self-evident that those we captured in our "war" on terrorism would then be "prisoners of war," but no such luck for them, since their rights would in that case have been clearly defined in international treaties signed by the United States. So the Bush administration opened its Devil`s Dictionary and came up with a new, tortured term for our new prisoners, "unlawful combatants," which really stood for: We can do anything we want to you in a place of our choosing. For that place, they then chose Guantánamo, an American base in Cuba (which they promptly defined as within "Cuban sovereignty" for the purposes of putting our detention camps beyond the purview of American courts or Congress, but within Bush administration sovereignty -- the sole kind that counted with them -- for the purposes of the Cubans).

In this way, we moved from a self-declared generational war against a method of making war to a world of torture beyond the reach of, or even sight of, the law in a place that (until the Supreme Court recently ruled otherwise) more or less didn`t exist. All this was then supported by a world of pretzeled language constantly being reshaped in the White House Counsel`s office, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon so that reality would have no choice but to comply with the names given it.

The way gunmen once reached for their six-guns, so the various legal and other counselors of this administration reach for their dictionaries. The lawyer-authors of the various tortured memos about torture that came out of the White House Counsel`s office and the Justice Department, for instance, expended much effort acting as if they were part of a panel for a new edition of some dictionary. Here are just a couple of examples along their tortuous path to redefining responsibility for the inflicting of pain:

"The word `profound` has a number of meanings, all of which convey a significant depth. Webster`s New International Dictionary 1977 [2nd ed. 1935 defines profound as...]"

"The word ‘other` modifies ‘procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses.` As an adjective, ‘other` indicates that the term or phrase it modifies is the remainder of several things. See Webster`s Third New International Dictionary 1598 (1986) (defining ‘other` as ‘the one that remains of two or more`) Webster`s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary 835 (1985) (defining ‘other` as ‘being the one (as of two or more) remaining or not included`)."

It seems they sat surrounded by the Webster`s New International Dictionary (sometimes the 1935 edition, sometimes later ones), the American Heritage Dictionary, and the Oxford English Dictionary, medical dictionaries, and who knows what else, as they decided just how much pain wasn`t actually pain for the benefit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the President.

While they consulted piles of dictionaries and other reference materials to draw the pain out of a global torture regime, their true definitional focus was on removing all fetters, all checks and balances, from George W. Bush`s power as president. Since we were "at war," they did so, in large part, by highlighting the role of our "war President" as commander-in-chief; and then redefining what his "wartime" powers would be. Their definitional goal: To place presidential power (in the form of the powers of the commander-in-chief to prosecute war) in a kind of constitutional Guantánamo; that is, beyond the "sovereignty" of any other powers in the American political system, thus removing from Bush and his subordinates any responsibility for acts he may have ordered committed. In the process, they redefined torture so narrowly that it became the definitional property of the torturer.

This unfortunately is but part of our unfinished journey through the language of the Bush era. Every day brings new and strange "wonders," the equivalent of the news of bizarre creatures and weird races -- the Cynocephali (dog-headed men), the Anthropophagi (whose heads were said to grow beneath their shoulders), the Blemmyae (with faces on their breasts), and the Sciopods (swift one-legged creatures)-- brought back to Europe by Medieval travelers. To take but a single example, the newest National Security document (pdf file) out of the Pentagon redefines the category of Weapons of Mass Destruction or WMD (which itself blunted the world-destroying impact of nuclear weapons by sweeping them into a larger category of potential weaponry) with a new acronym WMD/E:

"The term WMD/E relates to a broad range of adversary capabilities that pose potentially devastating impacts. WMD/E includes chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and enhanced high explosive weapons as well as other, more asymmetrical `weapons`. They may rely more on disruptive impact than destructive kinetic effects. For example, cyber attacks on US commercial information systems or attacks against transportation networks may have a greater economic or psychological effect than a relatively small release of a lethal agent."

Soon, in addition to going to war with "terrorism" (al Qaeda) and "rogue nations" (Iraq), it seems that we will be able to go to "war" with cyber-hackers, a generational battle which will undoubtedly be known as the Global War on Computer Hackers (GWOCH)

Recently, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation magazine, has been focusing on Bush-administration-speak in the on-line columns she writes at her Editor`s Cut weblog. She`s been attempting to demystify what she calls "a veritable Orwellian Code of encrypted language." Her definitions are amusing, biting, and on target. ("Neoconservatives, n. Nerds with Napoleonic complexes.") At some point, she opened her column up to Nation readers and now plans to put together a Republican Dictionary out of the various definitions that are coming in.

I thought that Tomdispatch might lend a hand and so asked a number of Tomdispatch writers if they would contribute their own Bush-era definitions. You`ll see the results below -- along with a few definitions of my own -- directly from the "pens" of Rebecca Solnit, Chalmers and Sheila Johnson, Arlie and Adam Hochschild, and Nick Turse among others (including one definition sent in by Bill Moyers; admittedly, not as yet a Tomdispatch writer but nonetheless brought in to bat clean-up). Should Tomdispatch readers care to enter the fray and submit definitions for possible use in the Nation`s future book, Katrina vanden Heuvel suggests that you send them to [e-mail] or click here and fill out the form. (In either case, put "GOP dictionary" in the subject line.)

A small Tomdispatch treat: Joshua Brown, who does the on-line cartoon series Life During Wartime, has prepared a set of visual definitions especially for this dispatch to go with the verbal ones below. (Unfortunately, my site can`t post images, so you`ll have to click to his.)

When asked if he would like to submit a Bush-era definition or two, Noam Chomsky replied, "I suspect that I`ll have to fall back on Mark Twain`s despair when trying to satirize General Funston: `No satire of Funston could reach perfection, because Funston occupies that summit himself....[he is] satire incarnated.`" (General Frederick N. Funston was a commander of part of the American expeditionary force that crushed the Philippine independence movement as the twentieth century began.)

Herewith, then, entries (or are they entrees?) for a modern Devil`s Dictionary (with a small bow to Ambrose Bierce). Tom

JOSHUA BROWN

Click here for the definitions in Joshua Brown`s "My First Book of Government."

TOM ENGELHARDT

Homeland n: A term successfully used by the Germans and the Soviets in World War II, less successfully (and in the plural) by Apartheid-era South Africa. It means neither home, nor land, has replaced both country and nation in American public speech, and is seldom wielded without the companion word "security." It is the place to which imperial forces return for R&R.

Homeland Security: synonymous with Homeland insecurity.

Homeland Security Department: The new Defense Department, known for declaring bridges yellow and the Statue of Liberty orange.

Homelandism n: a neologism for love of the Homeland Security State as in, "My Homeland, ‘tis of thee, sweet security state of liberty…"

Intelligence n: What Dick Cheney wants and the CIA must provide -- or else. (See, Iraq, weapons of mass destruction)

Nationalism n: How foreigners love their country (when they do). A very dangerous phenomenon that can lead to extremes of passion, blindness, and xenophobia. (See, Terrorism)

Oil n: 1. Black gold. 2. (defunct acronym) Operation Iraqi Liberation or OIL (name changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, OIF, without explanation). 3. What the Bush administration wasn`t after in Iraq and isn`t after in Iran. (See, Democracy)

Patriotism n: How Americans love their country. A trait so positive you can`t have too much of it, and if you do, then you are a super-patriot which couldn`t be better. (Foreigners cannot be patriotic. See, Nationalism)

Pentagon n: Formerly, the Defense Department, but since we now have a new defense department (see, Homeland Security Department), soon be renamed the Global Forward Deployment Department or GFDD (Ge-Fudd). Its forward-deployed headquarters will be established in a two-sided building, the Duogon, now being constructed in Bahrain out of sand imported from the beaches of Texas by Halliburton subsidiary KBR. From there, it plans to rule the known world.

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD

Environmental Protection Agency: Economic Predators Inc.

Homeland Security Advisory System: Color-coded program for emotional destabilization.

Leave No Child Behind: Social class divide maintenance system

ADAM HOCHSCHILD

Senate n: Exclusive club, entry fee $10 to $30 million.

House of Representatives: Exclusive club, entry fee $1 to $5 million.

Washington Press Corps: Extension of White House and Pentagon press offices.

CHALMERS AND SHEILA JOHNSON

Stuff Happens: Donald Rumsfeld as master historian.

March of Freedom Around the World: John Negroponte`s career.

Shock and Awe: A classic combination like "surf and turf"; special effects produced at missile point by the U.S. military. (See, State Terrorism).

BILL MOYERS

"Burning Bush": A biblical allusion to the response of the President of the United States when asked a question by a journalist who has not been paid to inquire.

JONATHAN SCHELL

Republican Party: A party that assails the foundations of the Republic, attacking the balance and separation of powers (See, Assertions of Untrammeled Presidential Authority -- to violate domestic and international laws forbidding torture); habeas corpus (See, Assertion of Right to Lock Away "Enemy Combatants" Forever -- without due process of law); and federalism (See, Legislative and Executive Rampage -- to overturn state court decisions in the Terry Schiavo case).

ORVILLE SCHELL

Strategic Competitor (China branch): Containing China militarily while using it as an industrial park for outsourcing low-paying and often polluting industries.

MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Democracy n: A country where the newspapers are pro-American.

Public Opinion Polls: Progress reports for spin doctors.

STEPHEN SHALOM:

Checks and Balances. The system whereby the campaign checks of the few balance the interests of the many.

Free Speech Zone The area to which those who differ from the administration are confined should they be so audacious as to wish to exercise their right of free speech.

Free Press: 1. Government propaganda materials covertly funded with a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money but given out for free to the press and then broadcast without any acknowledgment of the government`s role in their preparation. 2. Newspapers that obscure the truth on behalf of corporate and government interests for free.

Town-hall Meeting: A meeting in a hall in a town where all the participants have first been vetted for loyalty to the Bush administration.

Mandate: 1. The opinion expressed by about a quarter of the eligible voters. 2. The opinion reflected in an electoral-vote margin smaller than in any 20th century election other than 1916 and 2000. 3. The opinion expressed by the smallest popular vote margin obtained by a sitting president since 1916.

REBECCA SOLNIT

China: See WalMart.

Death n: An increasingly rare phenomenon, no longer occurring among soldiers of the U.S. army or civilians in affected countries. However, the media reports that death is still caused by lone gunmen and over-consumption of saturated fats as well as natural disasters.

Democracy n: 1. A product so extensively exported that the domestic supply is depleted. 2. When they vote for us. (See, tyranny: When they vote for someone else.)

Liberal adj: Widely used after the words progressive, radical, left, revolutionary, and insurrectionary were banned from the mainstream media, having the double benefit of making moderates seem vaguely dangerous and making revolutionaries seem vaguely embarrassing and ineffectual. Liberal media: Ted Koppel and anarchist zines.

Negroponte, John: Good diplomat, in the sense that Pol Pot is a good family-planner.

Ownership Society: You no longer own your national parks, your public transit, your commons, your government, your Bill of Rights, or your future, but you may purchase a Burger King franchise or some stocks with your WalMart earnings.

Peace n: What war is for.

Security n: Something to be applied to the homeland but not to the social.

Social Security: A good idea except for two problems: Social verges on socialism and guarantees of security violate a free market.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Buy low, sell high.

WalMart: The nation-state, future tense.

NICK TURSE

Abuse n: Modern word for what was once referred to as torture. An interim term, soon to be replaced by "tough love" (which, in turn, is expected to be replaced by "freedom`s caress").

Mullah n: 1. (archaic) Religious teacher or leader, a title of respect in Islamic countries, pronounced "mull-a." 2. (informal) In the modern presidential vernacular, a title of disrespect (pronounced "moo-lah") in reference to Muslims deemed too fanatical to be bought-off by American "moo-lah."

Rummy slang: 1. (archaic) A person so drunk he can`t recall a thing. 2. (modern) A SECDEF so drunk on power that he refuses to remember anything.

Support the Troops: A mandatory mantra which need no longer be mouthed since full "support" can be offered with a simple $1 investment in a magnetic yellow ribbon to affix to the back of your SUV.

CHIP WARD

Healthy Forests: Forests made safe from the ravages of nature, i.e. bugs and fires, by removal to pulp mills and lumber yards.

Wilderness n: 1. Publicly owned former habitat for wildlife, often endangered, where private corporations go wild drilling for oil and gas, grazing cattle, logging, and building roads. 2. Off-road vehicle theme parks characterized by abundant stumps, oil slicks, tire tracks, flattened owls, and coughing caribou.


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March 29, 2005
Panel`s Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons
By DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/politics/29weapons.html?hp…

WASHINGTON, March 28 - The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein`s political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report`s executive summary.

The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies.

Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in April in the confirmation hearings of John D. Negroponte, whom President Bush has nominated to be national intelligence director and who is about to move to the center of the campaign against terror.

The report particularly singles out the Central Intelligence Agency under its former director, George J. Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to North Korea and Iran, the two nations now posing the largest potential nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies. Most of that discussion appears only in a much longer classified version.

In the words of one administration official who has reviewed the classified version, "we don`t give Kim Jong Il or the mullahs a window into what we know and what we don`t," referring to the North Korean leader and Iran`s clerical leaders.

Mr. Bush is expected to receive the report officially on Thursday.

As early copies of the report circulated inside the government on Monday, officials said much of the discussion of Iraq went over ground already covered by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the two reports of the Iraq Survey Group, which was set up by the government to search for prohibited weapons after the Iraq invasion, and came up basically empty-handed.

After Iraq`s defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, international inspectors dismantled an active nuclear program - which had not produced a weapon - along with biological agents and chemical weapons. Much of the flawed intelligence was based on a series of assumptions that Mr. Hussein reconstituted those programs after inspectors left the country under duress in 1998.

But in retrospect, those assumptions by American and other intelligence analysts turned out to be deeply flawed, even though some of Mr. Hussein`s own commanders said after they were captured in 2003 that they also believed the government held some unconventional weapons. It was a myth Mr. Hussein apparently fostered to retain an air of power.

The discovery of the false assumptions forced Mr. Bush to appoint, somewhat reluctantly, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which has operated largely in secret under the direction of Laurence H. Silberman, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals, and former Governor Charles S. Robb of Virginia.

According to officials who have scanned the document, the unclassified version of the report makes a "case study" of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the major assessment that the intelligence agencies produced at the White House`s behest - in a hurried few weeks - in 2002.

After the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the White House was forced to declassify part of the intelligence estimate, including the footnotes in which some agencies dissented from the view that Mr. Hussein had imported aluminum tubes in order to make centrifuges for the production of uranium, or possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories.

The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein`s fleet of "unmanned aerial vehicles," which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim, repeated last year, that the "mobile laboratories" were probably part of a secret biological weapons program, and his office has repeatedly declined to respond to inquiries about whether the evidence has changed his view.

One issue the commission grappled with is whether the intelligence agencies failed to understand what was happening inside Iraq after the inspectors left in 1998, a period that David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group, referred to last year as a time when the country headed into a "vortex of corruption." Mr. Kay, who also testified before the commission, said Mr. Hussein`s scientists had faked some of their research and development programs, and Mr. Hussein was reported by his aides to be increasingly divorced from reality.

One defense official who had been briefed on an early draft of the report said Monday that one of its conclusions was that "human intelligence left a lot to be desired" in the global war against terror.

The official also indicated that there was already considerable anxiety about the final report and its recommendations. "We`re all wondering what it will say," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report had not been publicly released yet. "We all know there were shortcomings before 9/11," the official said. "Will this report take into account what we`ve done since then?"

The commission`s mandate was to examine the intelligence agencies` ability to "collect, process, analyze and disseminate information concerning the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers." Besides Iraq, Iran and North Korea, that mandate covered terrorist groups and private nuclear black market networks created by Dr. A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist.

The classified version of the report is particularly critical of American failures to penetrate Iran`s program, and notes how much of the assessment of the size of North Korea`s suspected nuclear arsenal is based on what one official called "educated extrapolation." Officials and outside experts who were interviewed by the commission or its staff said they had been asked at length about the absence of reliable human intelligence sources inside both countries.

The commission`s conclusions, if made public, may only fuel the arguments now heard in Beijing, Seoul and the capitals of Europe that an intelligence system that so misjudged Iraq cannot be fully trusted when it comes to the assessments of how much progress has been made by North Korea and Iran. North Korea has boasted of producing weapons - but has never tested them - and Iran has now admitted to covering up major elements of its nuclear program, even though it denies that it is building weapons.

The nine-member commission has met formally a dozen times at its offices in Arlington, Va., and in November visited Mr. Bush at the White House to speak with him and his staff. It had formal meetings with most top administration intelligence and foreign policy officials and interviewed former C.I.A. directors and academic experts on weapons proliferation. The commission, which has a professional staff of more than 60 people, mostly longtime mid-level intelligence professionals, has had access to even the most secret government documents.

All the sessions have been closed to the news media and the public, and the commission members and staff have been tight-lipped about the contents of their report.

"We and the staff have made a commitment in blood not to discuss the report in advance," said Walter B. Slocombe, a former defense official and member of the commission.

David Johnston and Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 29, 2005
Ex-Diplomats to Urge Rejection of Bolton as U.N. Ambassador
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/politics/29bolton.html?

WASHINGTON, March 28 (AP) - A group of former American diplomats plan to send a letter to urge the Senate to reject John R. Bolton`s nomination to be the next United States ambassador to the United Nations.

"He is the wrong man for this position," the group of 59 former diplomats say in the letter, addressed to Senator Richard G. Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, has scheduled hearings for April 7 on Mr. Bolton`s nomination.

"We urge you to reject that nomination," the former diplomats said in a letter dated Tuesday that was obtained by The Associated Press.

The former diplomats have served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, some for long terms and others briefly. They include Arthur A. Hartman, ambassador to France and the Soviet Union under Presidents Carter and Reagan and assistant secretary of state for European affairs under President Nixon.

Others who signed the letter include Princeton N. Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under President Reagan, the elder President Bush and President Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration.

Their criticism dwelt primarily on Mr. Bolton`s stand on issues as the State Department`s senior arms control official. They said he had an "exceptional record" of opposing American efforts to improve national security through arms control.

But the letter also chides Mr. Bolton for his "insistence that the U.N. is valuable only when it directly serves the United States."

That view, the letter says, would not help him negotiate with other diplomats at the United Nations.

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March 29, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
What`s Going On?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/opinion/29krugman.html

Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people`s beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.

We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous.

But it`s also true of the United States, where dangerous extremists belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and wield great political influence.

Before he saw the polls, Tom DeLay declared that "one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America." Now he and his party, shocked by the public`s negative reaction to their meddling, want to move on. But we shouldn`t let them. The Schiavo case is, indeed, a chance to highlight what`s going on in America.

One thing that`s going on is a climate of fear for those who try to enforce laws that religious extremists oppose. Randall Terry, a spokesman for Terri Schiavo`s parents, hasn`t killed anyone, but one of his former close associates in the anti-abortion movement is serving time for murdering a doctor. George Greer, the judge in the Schiavo case, needs armed bodyguards.

Another thing that`s going on is the rise of politicians willing to violate the spirit of the law, if not yet the letter, to cater to the religious right.

Everyone knows about the attempt to circumvent the courts through "Terri`s law." But there has been little national exposure for a Miami Herald report that Jeb Bush sent state law enforcement agents to seize Terri Schiavo from the hospice - a plan called off when local police said they would enforce the judge`s order that she remain there.

And the future seems all too likely to bring more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law.

The religious right is already having a big impact on education: 31 percent of teachers surveyed by the National Science Teachers Association feel pressured to present creationism-related material in the classroom.

But medical care is the cutting edge of extremism.

Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a prediction: soon, wherever the religious right is strong, many pharmacists will be pressured into denying women legal drugs.

And it won`t stop there. There is a nationwide trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation.

But the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer.

We can`t count on restraint from people like Mr. DeLay, who believes that he`s on a mission to bring a "biblical worldview" to American politics, and that God brought him a brain-damaged patient to help him with that mission.

What we need - and we aren`t seeing - is a firm stand by moderates against religious extremism. Some people ask, with justification, Where are the Democrats? But an even better question is, Where are the doctors fiercely defending their professional integrity? I think the American Medical Association disapproves of politicians who second-guess medical diagnoses based on video images - but the association`s statement on the Schiavo case is so timid that it`s hard to be sure.

The closest parallel I can think of to current American politics is Israel. There was a time, not that long ago, when moderate Israelis downplayed the rise of religious extremists. But no more: extremists have already killed one prime minister, and everyone realizes that Ariel Sharon is at risk.

America isn`t yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren`t sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.

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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, March 29, 2005

Car Bomb Targeting Shiites Kills 7, Wounds 9

The war in Iraq is the most important problem facing the US in the eyes of the American public, according to a recent poll. Iraq is more important than the economy, terrorism or social security. You`d think the US media and the Democratic Party could take a hint and foreground Iraq. But they are letting it fade . . .

At least 18 persons were wounded by a car bombing in the northern oil city of Kirkuk early on Tuesday.

Shiite pilgrims were targeted by a suicide bomber on Monday. Reuters reports: "Police in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, said the car bomber struck on a road leading toward Kerbala, a sacred Shi`ite city where this week hundreds of thousands of pilgrims will mark Arbain, an annual mourning ceremony." The bomb killed 7 and wounded 9.

Another suicide bomber on a bicycle blew up a police car and killed two policemen, also on the road from Baghdad to Karbala.

In southwest Baghad, guerrillas killed a police colonel. In Najaf, US troops at a checkpoint accidentally shot down a high police officer.

Some 8 corpses of police officers were found dead in southern Tikrit, according to al-Jazeerah.

The violence on Monday had a dangerous undertone of sectarian strife.

Ghazi al-Yawir withdrew his name from consideration as speaker of the Iraqi parliament, setting off a scramble to find a Sunni Arab alternative.

Negotiations drag on about who gets what cabinet post, but no new government is in sight as the parliament plans a second largely ceremonial meeting on Tuesday.

The parliament`s main task is to draft a new Iraqi constitution by an August 15 deadline, wich it very obviously will not meet.

Robert Worth reports that Shaikh Hareth al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars continues to reject Sunni Arab participation in the government as long as the US does not set a precise timetable for withdrawal from the country.

The Telegraph raises similar issues, but seems to me to answer them more pessimistically: "If Mr Pachachi is right, the development could signal a turning point in Iraq`s insurgency, which is dominated by Sunni Arabs. But Sunni scholars were quick to deny a change of heart. "The elections have changed nothing," said Omar Ghalib, a member of the scholars. "It was an American rather than an Iraqi process." He reiterated a demand for a two-year timetable for the withdrawal of American troops as a condition for not calling for a fresh boycott ahead of the December polls. `

posted by Juan @ 3/29/2005 06:35:00 AM

Florida Funeral Director Buries Universities

Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, has introduced a Horowitz-inspired so-called Academic Freedom Bill of Rights in the Florida State legislature. In our Orwellian world, this is actually a bill to destroy academic freedom and take away rights of free speech on campus. Baxley is a funeral director, and apparently he wants to bury higher education in this country along with his other clients.


"The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue."



Let me explain some things to Representative Baxley, and to do so I suggest we look at how well he is doing his job.

The per capita income in the United States is $37,800.

Florida`s per capita income in 2003 was $27,610.

And what of Ocala, for which Mr. Baxley supposedly is working? "The per capita income for the city is $18,021. 18.1% of the population and 13.2% of families are below the poverty line. Out of the total population, 28.6% of those under the age of 18 and 9.8% of those 65 and older are living below the poverty line."

Hmmm. Ocala isn`t doing very well. Its people are making about half what Americans generally do, and quite a few of them are dirt poor. I wonder if Baxley has done anything lately for the 18 percent of his constituents who are doomed to live below the poverty line? Or, indeed, has he provided jobs and income to his hardworking constituents. If I were them, I`d find a state representative who would work hard to lift people out of their difficult circumstances, instead of one who seems to want to keep people mired in ignorance and poverty.

So if Baxley, who desperately needed to take Biology 101 at Florida State (which should consider revoking his BA), succeeded in his little ploy, what will likely ensue?

If I were Baxley I wouldn`t stand anywhere near I-95 north of Gainesville, since he`s likely to get run over by the rush of professors fleeing the state at 95 miles an hour. Post-secondary teachers already suffer from low salaries and poor working conditions compared to their peers who go into the professions. The only trade-off they get is that academics have more control over their lives and the time to research and teach things they are interested in. Given a choice between being made Baxley`s slaves and braving hurricanes in Florida or living in a state that respects its thinkers, Florida`s educators will pour out of the state faster than a `gator chasing a fat, balding funeral director through the swamps.

Baxley may be happier without any of those intell-Ec-tu-al riffraff cluttering up his state. But maybe his constituents won`t be. Knowledge workers, you see, are the geese that lay the golden eggs. Post-secondary teachers are the ones who train the people who found computer software, biotechnology and other companies key to the twenty-first century economy. They also train society`s managers and middle managers. The more high-powered academics you have in your state, the wealthier your state will be.

Ocala, and Florida more generally, look to me like they would benefit from some biotech companies. But you know what? That requires being good in a little thing called biology. Baxley clearly can`t think straight on that subject, being blinded by fanaticism. And he wants to make Florida inhospitable to high-powered biologists. The people of Florida, and more specifically Ocala, should give some thought to whether they really want this loud-mouthed ignoramus to plunge them into poverty and make them mule drivers and ditch diggers by his destruction of education in the state.

In fact, Ocala has a Central Florida Community College where that dangerous subject of science is actually taught. Want to make a bet that Baxley has never done anything in the legislature to try to expand it into a four-year college so that some of his constituents could get their education without having to leave town or going to a private university? Wouldn`t such an expansion create a multiplier effect, helping with Marion County`s poverty? Instead of expanding education for the people he says he is serving, Baxley is trying to destroy the state`s universities.

All this is without regard to the practical effects of this horse manure on our intellectual environment on campuses. If Baxley`s bill passes, professors who teach the history of the Holocaust will just have to give A`s to students who deny it ever happened, I guess.

Finally, the post-secondary educators in Florida might just form a Political Action Committee similar to the one in Alabama. They might reach out to the faculty in the medical schools, who are mysteriously attached to the academic study of biology, and who are not without resources. Perhaps they will decide to channel large sums to Baxley`s opponents in the next election, whether a Republican challenger or a rival from another party. You wonder if educators should let a thing like this be forgotten, or just lie down and let themselves be walked all over by paleontologically-challenged funeral directors.

posted by Juan @ 3/29/2005 06:21:00 AM

Dutchess Community College Stands up for Academic Freedom

More on the subject from a different state (this thing is spreading like the Black Plague).



"Professional Staff Organization
Dutchess Community College
24 March 2005

In response to the “Academic Bill of Rights” (ABOR), currently under consideration by SUNY administration, the Professional Staff Organization (PSO) of Dutchess Community College (DCC) hereby ASSERTS:

that DCC has already stated its commitment to academic freedom in clear and unambiguous terms;

that the ABOR, which purports to promote intellectual diversity, actually threatens the tradition of academic freedom at DCC;

that the ABOR’s implication that knowledge is “unsettled” in most academic disciplines except for the sciences is dubious, at best;

that the ABOR distorts the principle of academic freedom by erroneously extending all of its protections to students;

that DCC students are already protected from racial, religious, and sex discrimination under applicable federal and state law;

that in addition to these legal safeguards, DCC students enjoy other rights and privileges pursuant to the policies of the College, including a grade appeal procedure;

that by setting narrow limitations on what teachers may consider when grading student work, the ABOR makes it harder for teachers to maintain academic standards;

that the vagueness of ABOR’s language appears to invite the imposition of outside political pressures on teachers;

that the ABOR would subject many of the College’s activities—including the selection of public speakers, formation of curricula, and hiring and promotion of employees—to external, non-academic standards;

that the intent of the ABOR appears to be to expose faculty and staff to civil action from those who claim to be victims of discrimination because of their “political beliefs”; and finally,

that the combined threat of lawsuits and external political pressure will have a chilling effect on the presentation of controversial topics in DCC classrooms.

Therefore, it is RESOLVED:

that the PSO rejects the proposed “Academic Bill of Rights” and urges SUNY to do the same; and

that the PSO remains unwaveringly committed to the principle of academic freedom, as defined in its public documents. "

posted by Juan @ 3/29/2005 06:10:00 AM

Hariri Likely Killed by Truck Bomb

The truck, parts of which the UN had alleged were planted by the Syrian government has been identified in a video broadcast by al-Arabiya.

This discovery bolsters the case for Hariri`s death having been the work of a suicide bomber, Abu Adas, a radical Muslim who had travelled in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and may have had links to Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

If Abu Adas did blow up the van and kill Hariri, and if he was connect to Ansar al-Islam, it would be an indication that Bush`s Iraq misadventure is destabilizing Iraq`s neighbors, and not in a good way.

Syria itself remains a suspect, of course. But the urban legend that there was no truck bombing and that the Syrian secret police set up a bomb in the sewers, seems less likely now.

posted by Juan @ [url3/29/2005 06:02:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/hariri-likely-killed-by-truck-bomb.html[/url]

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ROBERT SCHEER
A Con Job by Pakistan`s Pal, George Bush
Robert Scheer
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheer2…

March 29, 2005

Trying to follow the U.S. policy on the proliferation of nuclear weapons is like watching a three-card monte game on a city street corner. Except the stakes are higher.

The announcement Friday that the United States is authorizing the sale to Pakistan of F-16 fighter jets capable of delivering nuclear warheads — and thereby escalating the region`s nuclear arms race — is the latest example of how the most important issue on the planet is being bungled by the Bush administration.

Consider this dizzying series of Bush II-era actions:

We have thrown away thousands of Iraqi and American lives and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars after crying wolf on Iraq`s long-defunct nuclear weapons program and now expect the world to believe similar scary stories about neighboring Iran.

We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen.

We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our "ally," Pakistan.

Now, Lockheed Martin has been saved from closing its F-16 production line by the White House decision to lift the arms embargo on Pakistan and allow the sale. The decision, which ends a 1990 embargo put in place by the president`s father in reprisal for Pakistan`s development of a nuclear arsenal, is especially odd at a time when we are berating European nations for considering lifting their arms embargo on China.

The White House says the F-16s are a reward to Islamabad for its help in disrupting terrorism networks, despite a decade of Pakistan`s strong support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Yet Pakistan`s ruling generals could be excused for believing that Washington is not seriously concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How else to explain invading a country — Iraq — that didn`t possess nukes, didn`t sell nuclear technology to unstable nations and didn`t maintain an unholy alliance with Al Qaeda — and then turning around and giving the plum prizes of U.S. military ingenuity to the country that did?

Even as the Bush administration continues to confront Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, Islamabad has admitted that Pakistani nuclear weapons trafficker Abdul Qadeer Khan — the father of his nation`s nuclear bomb — provided Iran with the centrifuges essential to such a program. Further, new evidence reveals that Khan marketed to Iran and Libya not only the materials needed for a nuclear bomb but the engineering competence to actually make one.

Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insists Khan was running his nuclear smuggling operation under the radar of the military government that brought Musharraf to power. And although this is a highly implausible claim given the reach of the military`s power and the scope of the operation, the White House has found it convenient to buy it hook, line and sinker — all the better to remarket Pakistan to the American people as a war-on-terrorism ally.

While Pakistan was receiving such heaping helpings of benefit of the doubt, North Korea became the Bush administration`s scapegoat for the rapid nuclear proliferation happening on its watch, according to the Washington Post. "In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya," wrote the Post. "But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction." Sources told the paper that "Pakistan`s role as both the buyer and the seller [of uranium hexafluoride] was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington`s partner."

One result of the United States shortsightedly pulling this fast one has been the collapse of multilateral nonproliferation talks with Pyongyang. Yet in the long term, the cost is much greater: a dramatic erosion of trust in U.S. statements on nuclear proliferation.

From Iraq to Iran, North Korea to Pakistan, the Bush administration has pulled so many con jobs that it is difficult for anybody to take it seriously. Unfortunately, though, the proliferation of nuclear weapons is as serious as it gets.



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COMMENTARY
U.S. Embrace Can Be Fatal to Arabs
The opposition in Lebanon owes no thanks to Washington.
By Adam Shatz
Adam Shatz is literary editor of the Nation.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-shatz28…

March 28, 2005

Only a year ago, American supporters of the Iraq war were in despair. The spread of the Iraqi insurgency — and of anti-American sentiment throughout the Arab and Muslim world — had undercut the claim of Paul Wolfowitz and others that Saddam Hussein`s downfall would spark a wave of democratization in the region. If democracy meant burning cities, suicide attacks, life-threatening checkpoints and Abu Ghraib-style torture, Arabs and Muslims wanted nothing of it, something deeply reassuring to their autocratic rulers.

Today, the mood of the pro-war camp has changed to euphoria. The Iraqi and Palestinian elections, the mass demonstrations by Lebanese seeking an end to the Syrian presence, signs of a thaw in Hosni Mubarak`s Egypt — all these developments have breathed new life into the Wolfowitz Doctrine. The Iraqis may not have thrown rice and flowers our way, but, so the story goes, their liberation has prompted Arabs to challenge their own regimes, and the United States stands poised to reap the benefits of "democratization." (Even sensible observers like historian David Fromkin have likened the changes to the fall of the Berlin Wall, although the only thing resembling that wall in the region is the "separation barrier" Israel has built on Palestinian land.)

It`s an appealing story but, unfortunately, it isn`t true. If anything, the war was a gift to the jihadists. And to the extent that the Middle East has moved toward democracy, it`s as much in spite of American pressure as because of it.

The current neoconservative object of desire is Lebanon, and it`s a good case study of what`s really happening in the region. When the anti-Syrian opposition gathered in Beirut`s Martyrs Square to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops, everyone from Thomas Friedman of the New York Times to Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute was quick to credit the Bush administration for inspiring the Lebanese. Never mind that the mobilization of Lebanon`s opposition to Syrian rule was detonated by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, not the Iraqi elections; that the cry was for independence, not democracy; and that Shiites, who at 40% of the population make up the country`s largest religious group, were conspicuously absent from the demonstrations. Never mind that Lebanon already has elections (although they are held, as in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, under the watchful eye of an occupying power).

For President Bush, the "Cedar Revolution" marked the beginning of an Arab spring. But in reality, despite their genuine yearnings for independence, the Martyrs Square demonstrators represented only a portion of the country`s fractured polity — the more educated, secular members of the Christian, Druze and Sunni elites — which is why unsympathetic observers preferred the term "BMW Revolution." And its leaders, notably Walid Jumblatt, a Druze chieftain, and the exiled Maronite Christian leader Michel Aoun, who in 1990 staged a failed coup backed by Hussein, are not exactly liberal democrats.

Not for the first time, the romantic port city of Beirut had seduced Western intellectuals who saw in it only what they wanted to see: an educated middle class, a large Christian population and the stirrings of a pro-Western, pro-democracy movement.

Then came the enormous, largely Shiite pro-Syria rally organized by Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. It was the equivalent of a bucket of ice water poured over the cedar revolutionaries.

These demonstrators, who also raised the Lebanese flag, came to the protests not out of love for Syria but out of suspicion of the motives of the opposition and of the White House, which had given the Cedar Revolution not only its blessing but its very name. Having suffered under the domination of the Christian minority before the civil war, many Lebanese Shiites feared the anti-Syrian opposition was a proxy of American, Israeli and Christian interests seeking to humiliate Lebanon`s neighbor, to dismantle Hezbollah (which is widely admired for ending the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon) and to force Lebanon to sign a separate peace with Israel, on terms favorable to Israel.

Among Shiites who lived through Israel`s 22-year occupation in the south, it did not go unnoticed that the U.S. was demanding a full and immediate Syrian withdrawal before Lebanon`s next elections, even as it hailed the elections in occupied Palestine and Iraq as models of Middle Eastern democracy.

Washington`s praise for "democracy," in other words, had precious little credibility with a huge portion of Lebanon`s citizens. It didn`t have to be this way. If the U.S. hadn`t invaded Iraq, endorsed Israeli land grabs in the West Bank and threatened both Iran and Syria, Lebanese Shiites might have trusted our word and even joined the Martyrs Square protests in greater numbers. Instead, they lined up behind Hezbollah, which depends on Syrian support to continue the fight with Israel on Lebanon`s southern border.

That outpouring of support has left Jumblatt and other opposition leaders scrambling to woo Hezbollah — something that hardly pleases the American government, which views the guerrilla movement and political party as a terrorist organization. The counterdemonstration also backed the Americans into a corner and led the Bush administration recently to signal that it would not oppose Hezbollah`s continued participation in Lebanese parliamentary politics, even as it unconvincingly insisted that its position hadn`t changed. As with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, the American government was forced to soften its opposition to Islamist participation — to bend to Arab reality.

In the days after the Hezbollah demonstration, yet another rally was held — a counter-counterdemonstration of sorts, organized by the opposition — in which the Lebanese people bravely restated their desire for full sovereignty. It drew even more people than the Hezbollah rally had, and even some Shiites participated.

But what the Lebanese example reveals is not, as Wolfowitz would have you think, the influence of American hard power, but rather its destructive effect on American soft power. It was Rafik Hariri`s assassination, not the Iraq war, that gave the Lebanese the courage to say "enough is enough" to the Syrians. The excessive use of American military force has not only eroded our tarnished reputation in the Arab and Muslim world, it has made our support even more of a liability for groups like the Lebanese opposition seeking an end to Syrian domination.

As a result, the groups most likely to benefit from democratization, especially if it is pursued precipitously, are those that are the best organized and with the strongest claims to "authenticity." In a world where the only relatively free spaces have been mosques, these will invariably be the Islamist groups like Hezbollah and the Shiite bloc in postwar Iraq.

It`s not that we shouldn`t encourage democracy in the Arab world. Of course we should. But if we continue to be seen as dishonest brokers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and as occupiers of countries that have not made war on us, Washington`s embrace is likely to be a fatal one for Arab and Muslim democrats.



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US admits killing Arab journalists in Iraq
http://today.reuters.com/News/News.aspx
By Aljazeera

03/29/05 - - The US military has acknowledged it was responsible for killing two journalists working for Dubai-based satellite channel al-Arabiya who were shot close to a checkpoint in the Iraqi capital earlier this month.

Al-Arabiya cameraman Ali Abd al-Aziz died on 18 March from a gunshot wound to the head. Correspondent Ali al-Khatib died from his wounds in hospital the next day. Both were Iraqis.

Colleagues said US troops fired on their car near a checkpoint in central Baghdad. The US military initially said it was unlikely its bullets had killed them.

On Monday, a US military official said an investigation into the deaths showed troops were responsible, but had acted "within the rules of engagement".

US soldiers were aiming at a different car, a white Volvo that had driven through the checkpoint at high speed, the investigation said. Al-Arabiya`s grey Kia car was 50m to 150m down the road, trying to turn when it was accidentally hit, the military said.

"The investigation concluded that no soldiers fired intentionally at the Kia," the US military said in a statement.

"Only one soldier saw the Kia leave the scene and was unaware that the Kia had been struck by gunfire or that its occupants had been killed or injured. We regret the accidental shooting of the al-Arabiya employees."

The driver of the Volvo was also killed in the incident.

`Self-defence` claim

A senior military official claimed troops fired at the Volvo in self-defence. He said it was driving at high speed, and rammed a US Humvee hard enough to push it back 4m.

He said eight soldiers, worried about car bombs, had fired up to 10 bullets each at that car. Its driver was killed.

Several bullets accidentally struck the Arabiya car.

"The soldiers were acting within the rules of engagement," he said. "At this point this is seen as an accident. At this point the soldiers were working within the rules of engagement."

He said the investigation was finished.

Before the 18 March incident, at least four journalists had been killed by US forces in Iraq.

Iraq `most dangerous`

Last week, an Iraqi cameraman working for US network ABC was shot and killed while covering clashes west of Baghdad. Witnesses said he was shot by US troops.

A senior military official said on Monday that the US military was considering whether to investigate the incident.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said: "Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world to work as a journalist." In 2003 alone, according to the CPJ`s estimates, 13 journalists died in "hostile acts". Others died due to illness or accidents.

Amongst those killed was Aljazeera TV`s correspondent, Tariq Ayoub, who died in a US air strike on the satellite channel`s Baghdad bureau.

Reuters

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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Bring ‘em on: Mortar rounds land on bank of Tigris river just outside of Green Zone. One pilgrim killed and two wounded in bombing at shrine compound in Khalis.

Bring ‘em on: Three Romanian journalists feared kidnapped in Iraq.

Bring ‘em on: Seven Shiite pilgrims killed and nine wounded in car bombing on the road to Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: Suicide car bomber killed when he detonated his vehicle in the path of an American convoy in Mosul, no word on US casualties.

Bring ‘em on: A policeman and a road cleaner killed by roadside bomb in Baghdad. One policeman killed, body received by Yarmuk hospital. Two Shia pilgrims gunned down in Mahawil. Two policemen killed, ten wounded in bombing in Mussayib. Iraqi Major shot dead by US troops on highway between Najaf and Diwaniyah. One Iraqi soldier killed trying to defuse a roadside bomb in Mushahda. One person killed and another wounded in Balad when an Iraqi army unit fired on their car, suspecting they had dropped a bomb on the highway. One man shot dead and his son wounded by soldiers at a joint US/Iraqi checkpoint. One woman killed in roadside bombing in Baiji. Iraqi businessman working with US forces gunned down in Baiji.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi driver killed when he pulled in front of a US tank in Ad Duluiyah, incident under investigation. Two Iraqi army soldiers injured when attackers opened fire on their car in Mosul. One university professor shot to death in Mosul.


Iraqi Politics

The ink`s wearing off their fingers: Iraqi politicians delayed the start of a session of parliament on Tuesday for last-minute talks to try to overcome an impasse over forming a government two months after historic elections.

Officials said the sitting, the second since the assembly was elected, would now start at midday (4 a.m. EST) after talks to try to reach a deal on who would be parliament speaker.

The Shi`ite Islamist alliance that came top in the election and the Kurdish coalition that came second have been haggling for weeks over cabinet posts and the principles that should guide the new government, but little progress has been made.

Officials had hoped at least to appoint a speaker and two deputies on Tuesday, a basic step that would allow the parliament to start discussing issues even if no government was in place. But consensus was still proving elusive.



This should go over well with the Sunnis: US soldiers have stormed a women and children`s hospital in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, a hospital director says.

Dr Ahmad Ibrahim, the assistant director of the city`s paediatric hospital, told Aljazeera on Saturday that the soldiers entered the hospital on Friday after an explosion on Ramadi`s main road.

The soldiers ordered medical staff and patients to leave, he said, before destroying the hospital`s doors and detaining members of staff.

The assistant director also said US troops raided Ramadi and Haditha general hospitals a few days ago, and questioned whether doctors had become military targets and if the raids were aimed at closing hospitals.


Another Rhetorical Question

How many guys like this: Cpl. Isaiah Ramirez endured the rigors of Marine Corps basic training and two tours of high-risk duty in Iraq.

But since his lower right leg was shot off in January, Ramirez says he`ll be happy just to walk again.

Ramirez was on foot patrol in Ramadi on Jan. 11 when he was hit above his right ankle by an anti-tank round. He said he was alert while a combat medic quickly performed a crude amputation on the city street.

"I`ve learned that I`ve got to stop thinking about the things I could have done," said Ramirez, who had planned to be a career Marine. "I`m just glad to be here."

Came to this place: The Air Force Theater Hospital, located 50 miles north of Baghdad at Balad Air Base, plays a central role in the treatment of combat trauma in Iraq. The hospital, part of the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group, is a provisional structure of ventilated tents set on a cement foundation, powered by rumbling generators and fortified by sandbags and towering concrete blast walls. Many of the hospital`s staff members had not treated combat trauma before arriving in Iraq; they typically spent their careers as medical professionals performing procedures like hip replacement and kidney-stone removal.

Now they handle deep flesh wounds, burst eardrums, shattered teeth, perforated organs, flash burns to the eyes, severed limbs. In addition to tending to American soldiers, the hospital treats many Iraqi National Guard members, Iraqi civilians and insurgents.

Over four days last November, when these photographs were taken, doctors and staff members at the 332nd saw a flood of injuries and casualties from counterinsurgency operations in Falluja and insurgent strikes elsewhere in the country. That month, the hospital cared for 620 patients and performed 510 operations, a 65 percent increase from the previous two months. ``These young kids are heroes,`` says Col. Joseph Brennan, a head and neck surgeon. ``Somebody`s got to pay the price. And these kids are paying the price.``

A very good photo gallery with this article. I’m surprised the Pentagon let it be published.


Because of this?: In June 2003, the U.S. Army realized that it didn`t have enough armored Humvees in Iraq to protect soldiers from a growing number of attacks by insurgents. By Friday, officials expect to correct that problem by having almost 22,000 armored Humvees in Iraq - up from 235 when the war began.

Why did it take the government almost two years to remedy a deficiency that the Army acknowledges was costing soldiers` lives?

An examination of Army records, correspondence with members of Congress and Pentagon documents shows that the military repeatedly underestimated the need for more armored Humvees. Even after recognizing its miscalculations, the Army was slow to order more armored Humvees, and then transported them to Iraq from its existing worldwide supply in fits and starts. Officials also failed to take full advantage of a defense contracting firm that says it could have increased production to meet the Army`s needs.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has suggested the lack of armored Humvees was simply beyond the Pentagon`s control.

Rumsfeld declined to comment for this story.

But it’s not his fault!: Newsweek: Do you take responsibility for any mistakes made in planning for the war in Iraq, and what do you see as the key mistakes? Dissolving the Army?

Paul Wolfowitz: There`s so much finger-pointing that goes on. It`s a long exercise to dissect all the things that are wrong [in what has been] said about why this has proven to be difficult. And the notion that there was no planning is simply wrong.

Now, Paul, we`re not claiming there was no planning, we`re just saying that the planning you did do was a miserable failure. It doesn`t take long to dissect at all.



Oil And Money, Money, Money

Iraq and OPEC: However, in plotting the destruction of OPEC, the neocons failed to predict the virulent resistance of insurgent forces: the U.S. oil industry itself. Rob McKee, a former executive vice-president of ConocoPhillips, designated by the Bush Administration to advise the Iraqi oil ministry, had little tolerance for the neocons` threat to privatize the oil fields nor their obsession on ways to undermine OPEC. (In 2004, with oil approaching the $50 a barrel mark all year, the major U.S. oil companies posted record or near-record profits. ConocoPhillips this February reported a doubling of its quarterly profits.)

In November 2003, McKee quietly ordered up a new plan for Iraq`s oil. For months, the State Department officially denied the existence of this 323-page plan, but when I threatened legal action, I was able to obtain the multi-volume document describing seven possible models of oil production for Iraq, each one merely a different flavor of a single option: a state-owned oil company under which the state maintains official title to the reserves but operation and control are given to foreign oil companies.

According to Ed Morse, another Hess Oil advisor, the switch to an OPEC-friendly policy for Iraq was driven by Dick Cheney.

Big bucks: The biggest oil price boom of a generation is under way, proving wildly wrong predictions by the U.S. Department of Energy last year that oil prices would decline to $23.57 a barrel.

Instead, prices hit all-time highs last week, with light crude topping $56.46 a barrel in New York — a whopping 50 percent increase from a year earlier — and some analysts are saying the days of $80-a-barrel may not be far off.

Every time motorists fill up at $2.15 a gallon in the United States, the swishing sound you hear in this desert kingdom is billions of fresh petrodollars pouring in. Oil profits are being spent with such abandon that Dubai`s economy grew last year at a rate of 16.7 percent, compared with U.S. growth of 4.4 percent and China`s 9 percent.

The ones who got caught: By many accounts, Custer Battles was a nightmare contractor in Iraq. The company`s two principals, Mike Battles and Scott Custer, overcharged occupation authorities by millions of dollars, according to a complaint from two former employees. In the fall of 2004, Deputy General Counsel Steven Shaw of the Air Force asked that the firm be banned from future U.S. contracts, saying Custer Battles had also "created sham companies, whereby [it] fraudulently increased profits by inflating its claimed costs." An Army inspector general, Col. Richard Ballard, concluded as early as November 2003 that the security outfit was incompetent and refused to obey Joint Task Force 7 orders: "What we saw horrified us," Ballard wrote to his superiors in an e-mail obtained by Newsweek.

Yet when the two whistle-blowers sued Custer Battles on behalf of the U.S. government—under a U.S. law intended to punish war profiteering and fraud—the Bush administration declined to take part. In recent months the judge in the case, T. S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Virginia, has twice invited the Justice Department to join the lawsuit without response. Even an administration ally, Sen. Charles Grassley, demanded to know in a Feb. 17 letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales why the government wasn`t backing up the lawsuit. Because this is a "seminal" case—the first to be unsealed against an Iraq contractor—"billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake" based on the precedent it could set, the Iowa Republican said.

The administration`s reluctance to prosecute has turned the Iraq occupation into a "free-fraud zone," says former CPA senior adviser Franklin Willis. "If urgent steps are not taken, Iraq ... will become the biggest corruption scandal in history," warned the anti-corruption group Transparency International in a recent report. Grassley adds that if the government decides the False Claims Act doesn`t apply to Iraq, "any recovery for fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars ... would be prohibited."

(Many thanks to alert reader a fan of this site for the link.)


Britain and America

Documented lies: The Hutton inquiry and Lord Butler`s review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction established beyond doubt that in the year before the invasion a tightly knit group at Downing Street controlled, finessed and manipulated the advice and information supplied by the executive to the Prime Minister, ostensibly so that he could decide whether to go to war.

In a country where legal advice on these matters still counts, Blair could not possibly have backed America without arguing that Britain was in some way menaced by Iraq. That case had to be proved and demonstrably ratified by the Secret Intelligence Service and the government`s legal advisers before a vote in parliament.

This is where the issue of trust turns. In his desperate need to oblige America `for what may indeed have been an honourable misconception of his country`s interests` Blair bludgeoned the machinery around him until it gave him the answer he wanted.

The issue of Lord Goldsmith`s advice is about the trustworthiness of the Prime Minister and not about the war. Though Blair is apparently bewildered by such accusations, the evidence accumulates that in the ruthless suppression of the Executive`s prudence and wisdom, he betrayed our trust and his duty to good governance. That is an issue for all of us, and will remain so until Blair leaves Downing Street.


And the British people and media actually care about it!: Everything should be going so well for Tony Blair. The pre-election campaign seems mostly to be about the troubles in the Conservative camp, the opinion polls are favourable to Labour.

Yet decisions his government took more than two years ago, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, simply refuse to go away.

But in America it’s not worth an investigation: Last July the Senate Intelligence Committee released a much-anticipated report on the prewar intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The study concluded that the intelligence community -- led by the CIA--had "overstated" and "mischaracterized" the intelligence on Iraq`s (nonexistent) WMDs. The massive report repeatedly detailed instances when the intelligence services botched the job by ignoring contrary evidence, embracing questionable sources and rushing to judgments that just happened to fit the preconceived notions of the Bush Administration. "What the President and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was...flawed," declared Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the committee. Jay Rockefeller, the committee`s senior Democrat, noted that the report outlined "one of the most devastating...intelligence failures in the history of the nation."

But the committee`s report did not cover a crucial area: how the Bush Administration used -- or abused -- the prewar intelligence to build support for the Iraq invasion. Roberts claimed his committee was hot on that trail: "It is one of my top priorities," he said. The problem, he explained, was that there was not enough time before the November election to complete the assignment. Rockefeller took issue with that and complained that the "central issue of how intelligence was...exaggerated by Bush Administration officials" was being relegated into a "Phase II" investigation that would not begin until after the election. A Democratic committee staffer said that such an inquiry could easily be completed within months.

Now -- with Bush re-elected -- Roberts no longer considers Phase II a priority.

Why does Pat Roberts hate America?

More Weasel Wolfowitz

What a pud: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, 3/27/05:

[T]he real problem is that the conflict hasn’t ended…I think people shouldn’t have been surprised that a regime that had burrowed into Iraqi society over 35 years and killed and tortured and intimidated people so effectively didn’t quit just because they were driven out of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.

Uh, Paul...

Vice President Cheney, 3/16/03:

I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators…I think it will go relatively quickly…(in) weeks rather than months.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2/7/03:

It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.

(This post swiped more or less intact from Think Progress. Thanks guys, I’d give you a trackback if I had any idea how to do it.)


Our Creeping Stalinism

We don’t need no stinking trials: Tonght`s evening news broadcast on French public television carried an account of "Terror in the Hands of Justice," a series that is running twice a day on Al Iraqiya, the state-controlled television financed by the U.S., and operated under a contract to a major Republican party contributor. This is one of the most appalling TV shows one could possibly imagine, for it blatantly encourages lynch-mob justice and individual acts of revenge against alleged "terrorists"--who are presented as such without benefit of any trial or judicial proceeding.

However, it is the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund a TV show that encourages violent, extra-judicial revenge on people who have not been tried or convicted of any crime that stands in sharp contradiction of the Bush administration`s claims to have successfully exported "democracy" to Iraq. CorpWatch detailed in December how Al Iraqiya TV is financed by the U.S. as part of a $96 million grant to the Australian-based Harris Corporation-- a high-tech defense contractor that has been a huge contributor to the Republicans


Or no stinking evidence neither: A federal judge has criticized a secret military tribunal for keeping a German national jailed in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely based on a flimsy unsigned memo, despite information suggesting he had no terror ties, the Washington Post reports.

In a declassified portions of a January ruling obtained by the Post, the judge criticized the panel for ignoring the conclusions of U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities, in nearly 100 pages of documents, that Murat Kurnaz has no terrorist links.

The panel instead based its decision on a brief, unsupported memo filed just before Kurnaz`s hearing by an unnamed government official.

We don`t need no stinking Geneva Convention: Government documents released last week say the abuse of prisoners in Iraq by US forces was more widespread than has been reported.

An officer found that detainees ``were being systematically and intentionally mistreated" at a holding facility near Mosul in December 2003. The 311th Military Intelligence Battalion of the Army`s 101st Airborne Division ran the lockup.

Earlier records released by the Army have detailed abuses at Abu Ghraib and other sites in Iraq, as well as at sites in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The documents released Friday were the first to report abuses at the jail in Mosul, and are among the few to allege torture directly.

``There is evidence that suggests the 311th MI personnel and/or translators engaged in physical torture of the detainees," a memo from the investigator said.


And we don`t need no stinking rule of law: The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging. But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one. People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process. No charges. No lawyers. No appeals.

Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations. He was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked -- hooded and naked -- in a wooden, coffin-like box. He said he was told by his captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.

No charges were ever filed against Ali, and he was eventually released. But what should be of paramount concern to Americans is this country`s precipitous and frightening descent into the hellish zone of lawlessness that the Bush administration, on the one hand, is trying to conceal and, on the other, is defending as absolutely essential to its fight against terror.

And no one`s gonna be punished for it: When the world first saw photos of the sexual abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, apologists for the US soldiers involved minimized the incidents by noting that the prisoners might have been on leashes or menaced by dogs but were not killed. Gradually, however, military investigators and journalists learned that US troops had, in fact, killed as many as 31 detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq in cases that are confirmed or suspected homicides.

This is a stain on the reputation of the US armed services. Any hope that commanders would vigorously prosecute all such cases to deter future deaths dimmed with last week`s report from the Army that officers had decided not to bring charges against 17 soldiers implicated in three prisoner deaths in Iraq. Military investigators had recommended that the 17 be prosecuted. In some other cases of detainee deaths, the military has brought charges against US servicemen.


Of course, a serious crime is a different matter: Ten members of an Army military police unit should be disciplined for staging a mud-wrestling match at a U.S. military prison in Iraq, an investigation concluded. No detainees saw the episode last October at Camp Bucca, one of the largest U.S.-controlled detention centers in Iraq, officials said.


Commentary

Not Iraq related but for some reason it made me think of Iraq: Before he saw the polls, Tom DeLay declared that "one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America." Now he and his party, shocked by the public`s negative reaction to their meddling, want to move on. But we shouldn`t let them. The Schiavo case is, indeed, a chance to highlight what`s going on in America.

One thing that`s going on is a climate of fear for those who try to enforce laws that religious extremists oppose. Randall Terry, a spokesman for Terri Schiavo`s parents, hasn`t killed anyone, but one of his former close associates in the anti-abortion movement is serving time for murdering a doctor. George Greer, the judge in the Schiavo case, needs armed bodyguards.

Another thing that`s going on is the rise of politicians willing to violate the spirit of the law, if not yet the letter, to cater to the religious right.

And the future seems all too likely to bring more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law.


Opinion: I can`t tell whether America is in denial or despair over events in Iraq, but I suspect it`s some of each. The denial comes amid a flurry of flag-waving that`s followed Iraqi elections and the Bush administration`s insistence that peace is breaking out all over because of its own aggressive actions. Conventional wisdom this month is that the president is right. Conventional wisdom has turned an already meek press corps into church mice. But conventional wisdom in this war has been wrong many times before.

The despair, I suspect, keeps many people who are bitterly opposed to this war at home - and deflates turnout at those underpublicized and undercovered antiwar rallies.

Americans, it seems, would just as soon ignore the fact that 150,000 of our troops remain stationed in Iraq; that tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children have died in the crossfire; that some inadvertently have been gunned down at checkpoints where American troops - fearful, with good reason, of suicide attacks - sometimes shoot first and ask questions later; that the tens of billions of dollars we`re investing there each year could handily cover health insurance for the millions of uninsured American children. And that even so, corruption in Iraq is rampant, unemployment stands near 50 percent, electricity is off more than on, and that nearly two years after the end of "major combat" reporters are still writing about the dangerous drive from the Baghdad airport to the Green Zone a few miles away.

If the US government has figured out an exit plan, it`s not telling us what it is. No. The message is strictly hail to the chief and let freedom ring.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Two Louisiana soldiers, one from Natchitoches and one from New Orleans, killed in Baghdad in incident where two more Louisiana troops were wounded.

Local story: New Orleans, LA, soldier killed in Baghdad.

Local story: Sevier County, TN, soldier killed in Iraq.


Note to Readers: I`d like to take a moment from reading these depressing and discouragingly endless reports of mayhem and inhumanity to offer a salute to one of our long time loyal readers and commenters, Susan - USA. She is a voice of conscience and humanity and her focus on positive action is genuinely inspirational. Thanks, Susan, for the efforts you are making to restore justice and the rule of law to our country and for all you have given to us who come to this blog. And thanks for your loyalty - your regular remembrances of the badly missed Not Anonymous get me every time.

matt

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Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 by Reuters
Iraq Parliament in Uproar Over Stalemate
by Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Mariam Karouny
http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=topNe…


BAGHDAD -- Iraq`s parliament erupted in acrimony at only its second sitting on Tuesday and journalists were thrown out after lawmakers berated leaders for failing to agree on a new government, two months after historic elections.

When parliamentarians were told that despite last-minute talks that delayed the session no agreement had been reached, even on the post of parliamentary speaker, several stood up to say leading politicians were letting down the Iraqi people.

"The Iraqi people who defied the security threats and voted -- what shall we tell them? What is the reason for this delay?" Hussein al-Sadr, a politician in the bloc led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, asked the assembly before the news blackout.

As the meeting grew heated, the interim speaker ordered journalists to leave and Iraqi television abruptly switched to Arab music. Allawi walked out of the session shortly afterwards.

"You can say we are in a crisis," Barham Salih, a leading Kurdish politician, told reporters.

Ahead of the meeting blasts echoed across Baghdad and a militant group said in an Internet statement it had fired four mortars into the fortified Green Zone where politicians were meeting. There were no reports of damage.

Two months after more than 8 million Iraqis braved suicide bombers and insurgent threats to vote in the Jan. 30 polls, many are increasingly angry that despite haggling no agreement has been reached on forming a government.

"It is a farce," said 30-year-old taxi driver Mohammed Ahmed Ali. "If they couldn`t form a government till now, how will they lead a country?"

STALEMATE

The mainly Shi`ite alliance, which holds just over half the seats, and the Kurdish coalition that came second in the polls have been arguing for weeks on a cabinet line-up.

They have been trying also to involve Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein but have been left with little representation because most voters in Sunni Arab areas stayed away from the polls.

But no deal has been reached, and several government officials say the delay has stalled key projects, deepened chaos and hampered efforts to defeat the Sunni insurgency. Political uncertainty also dents Washington`s plans to increasingly hand over security to Iraqi forces and cut back foreign troops.

The Shi`ite bloc accuses Allawi of contributing to the delay in forming of government. Shi`ites and Kurds also say Sunni Arabs need to speed up the nomination of a speaker.

MPs said they would meet again on Sunday to try to agree a speaker.

The Shi`ite alliance and the Kurdish coalition have agreed that the speaker should be a Sunni Arab, to give the Sunni minority more involvement in politics.

Most of the 17 Sunni Arabs in the 275-member parliament favor Adnan al-Janabi as their candidate, but he is an ally of Allawi, a secular Shi`ite who has so far declined to join the government, saying his bloc will move into opposition.

The Shi`ite alliance is backing Fawaz al-Jarba -- a Sunni who joined their bloc. But other Sunnis are against this as he is seen as too close to the Shi`ite alliance.

Mishan al-Jibouri, a Sunni Arab politican, said if Jarba was pushed through as speaker -- which the Shi`ites could do with their majority -- Sunni Arabs would walk out of parliament, leaving attempts to draw them into politics in tatters.

LONG ROAD AHEAD

Once a speaker is agreed, the National Assembly`s next task will be to elect a president and two vice presidents. A two- thirds majority is needed for that, which will mean the Shi`ites and Kurds must reach a deal to muster enough votes.

The presidential triumvirate will then have two weeks to choose a prime minister, who will then appoint a cabinet.

"It could take up another two weeks to name a cabinet after the presidential council names a prime minister," said Jawad al-Maliki, a Shi`ite politician.

The Shi`ites and Kurds have broad agreement that Shi`ite Ibrahim Jaafari will be the next prime minister with Kurdish politician Jalal Talabani taking the president`s post.

But officials have not agreed on the distribution of cabinet posts. The Kurds are expected to retain the Foreign Ministry, with the Defense Ministry going to a Sunni Arab. But the key Oil Ministry is a source of disagreement -- the Kurds covet it, but the Shi`ite alliance insists it should get the ministry.

"The Kurds will have enough key posts. We insist on retaining the Oil Ministry," Maliki said.

As politicians focused on horse-trading, insurgents pressed on with their campaign of violence.

Three Romanian journalists -- Marie Jeanne Ion and Sorin Miscoci of Prima TV and Ovidiu Ohanesian of Romania Libera newspaper -- were kidnapped in Iraq on Monday, officials said.

In Kirkuk, a car bomb exploded near an Iraqi army patrol and the convoy of a local official, killing one person and wounding 15. In Basra, the head of the South Oil company survived an assassination attempt, police said.

Insurgents posted video footage on the Internet showing them shooting dead three Arab drivers who said they worked for a Jordanian firm that transports goods to U.S. forces.

Additional reporting by Omar Anwar in Baghdad

Copyright © Reuters 2005

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Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Revelations from an Insider
Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on the Bush Administration, Civil Disobedience and the Eternal Fires of Hell
by Mira Ptacin
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/…

The sound of Daniel Ellsberg`s voice could falsely identify him as a softy. It`s delicate and cottony, but the Pentagon insider-turned-peace activist has wit cut sharp as a razor and insight that hasn`t faded with age.

At 73 he is out of the limelight but still trying to shake up our nation. Ellsberg recently finished a U.S. `Truth-Telling` tour, spoke in Israel and will soon be traveling to Hiroshima. And after publishing his first memoir `Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers`, he`s polishing off his second book about America`s fatal attraction to nuclear threats.

Ellsberg publicized the Pentagon Papers 30 years ago, helping tip public opinion against our last major attempt at imperial democracy. And on this day in 1973, the last American combat troops left Vietnam, ending the direct involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Now Ellsberg is talking again. Shouldn`t we be listening?

Where do you see the US relationship with Iran heading in the next 6 months?

Well, every sign is that they`re still on course on the program that some of these people laid out on The Project for the New American Century, going back to when they all worked under Dick Cheney back in `91-92. Enforcing regime change in Iraq was at the head of the list. In general it was a remaking of the Middle East. I noticed former weapons inspector Scott Ritter says June is the likely time [to strike Iran] and I think Ritter`s predictions are to be taken very seriously.

The question is: Will it be Israel as Cheney prepared us for recently who makes the attack, or will it be us? It could well be that the game here is that Israel is making such strong noises in doing it, knowing that it would entirely set the Middle East on flame. That the US will give an excuse for a strike--that we had to forestall the Israelis--it would`ve been even worse, and we had to do it because otherwise the Israelis would do it, better that we did. One theory that is even worse in the Middle East is the Israelis taking action like that before we do. That`s just a conjecture. The Israelis have used their influence before in that fashion. They`ve even threatened before at various times that if we didn`t act forcefully they would have to use nuclear weapons.

That`s so frightening, because it seems when we went into Iraq, Bush was confident that we were going to be greeted with flowers, etc. etc., and now it`s a mess. Where would we get troops and the resources that the US would need if we were to go head to head with Iran and Syria?

They would probably have to shy away from ground actions, so what are they thinking of doing? They`re not actually directly threatening use of nuclear weapons and I don`t think they`d be quick to do that, but they very well refuse to rule that out. First use is on the table. There`s no reason to think their intelligence is good enough to actually knock out whatever it is the Iranians have. How can they be thinking of doing such a radical and reckless step without even being sure of succeeding? The answer seems to be, and I`ve heard this now from two people who are very good sources in the administration, that this administration actually believes they will achieve regime change by an air attack. They think the mullahs there, the theocracy, is so unpopular that a demonstration of their vulnerability and the fact that they can`t protect their people would topple them and would leave to people overthrowing them.

Do you think they really believe what they`re saying or do you think they just don`t care?

Well, we could`ve asked that three years ago when they were talking about what was going to happen in Iraq and say `Could they really believe that?` and that`s a fair question. But you can`t really believe from what they say. That`s true of all politicians--Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative--you cannot tell what they really believe from what they tell us. But, on the other hand, we now know of this group we can`t say `Well, they can`t believe that because it`s crazy`. That`s not sound either because they`ve proven that one. They can believe what`s crazy. I think there`s a passage somewhere in Alice in Wonderland when Alice says to the king, `I can`t believe that`, and the king says `I dare say you haven`t had enough practice. Every day I make it a point to believe six impossible things before breakfast.` These guys have had a lot of practice.

. . . Let me move ahead for a minute to what I think lies ahead. Can I?

Sure.

I think our democracy is going to be tested to the breaking point by some very dark days ahead and before long. I do expect there to be another major terrorist event. Ports, the nuclear power plants and the chemical factories are extremely vulnerable to an attack. To a considerable event, the war against terrorism has been a hoax because the president has not only spent so much money on the war in Iraq, but because the war in Iraq virtually subverts the war on terror. You cannot reduce the appeal and the strength of Al Qaeda while we occupy Iraq. You can only strengthen it, and strengthening it is what we`ve been doing steadily for the last couple of years. This is the worst public policy decision making, most antidemocratic and most inclined to be authoritarian, I would say, since the Nixon administration, but Nixon was confronting a Democratic House and Senate and a relatively liberal population in media 40 years ago. John Mitchell and John Connolly and Nixon himself had quite authoritarian instincts, but they weren`t allowed to act on them, and to the extent that they did act on them -- it brought them down.

Virtually all the things Nixon did against me that were illegal to keep me from exposing his secret policy are now legal under the Patriot Act. Going into my doctor`s office to get information to blackmail me with, wiretaps without warrants, overhearing me--all legal now. The CIA supplied the burglars in my doctor`s office with disguises and with cameras and they did a psychological profile on me. That was illegal then, legal now.

I would have said that one thing that Nixon did against me was not yet legal and that was to bring a squad of a dozen Cuban-American assets of the CIA up from Miami to beat me up or kill me on May 3rd, 1973 on the steps of the Capitol. Right now there`s at least one Special Forces team under control of the White House operating in this country to take `extra legal actions`. Now, that sounds to me like a White House-controlled death squad. And that is what the White House sent against me. It`s not clear whether the intention was to kill me then, the words were to `incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally`. When I asked their prosecutor, `does that mean to kill me?`. He said, `The words were `to incapacitate you totally.` But he said, `You have to understand these guys that were CIA assets never use the words `kill`.`

I think that`s the kind of thing we do have in our future, especially when there`s another terrorist attack. In that case, I think we`ll see enacted very quickly a new Patriot Act, which I`m sure has already been drafted which will make the first Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights will be a historical memory.

Before we spoke, I asked some of my close friends and family if they could ask you any question, what would it be. And most of the responses I received from good friends of mine, younger ones, were `What can we do?!` We`re reading about things we don`t stand for. We`re part of the peace movement or we just don`t stand for the war. What could the little peons like us do to stop an administration that doesn`t seem to be listening to its people?

We as citizens--young or old--are irresponsible if we lie back and say, `Well, it`s a difficult and dangerous problem, I guess we`ll have to let them to do best.` We know, by now, that they are not going to do best. It is a very serious problem and we have to take a very active concern and if we don`t, not only does our security get worse and worse, but our democracy goes way down the drain.

I haven`t said anything about the unusual case that this administration relies on a constituency of right-wing Christian fundamentalist who entertain ideas as crazy as any that can be found, and who believe, for instance, that nuclear war will be God`s Will and a necessary precursor for the return of the Messiah in their lifetime. Therefore they`re not very concerned about nuclear arms control but more seriously who believe that Israel must be in control of a greater Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates, as promised in the bible, in order for their Messiah to return. And therefore, that Likud`s policy and Sharon`s policy of holding on to the West Bank is absolutely essential and has to be expanded. That`s a disastrous influence on our foreign policy and it`s a very big influence.

I`d like to see the president directly asked (I believe he holds this, by the way, as does Tom Delay and other top republican leaders. . . John Ashcroft and others in Congress) `Do you, Mr. President, believe that a Palestinian state in the West Bank would postpone the return of the Messiah?` I think he`d find it hard to say that he doesn`t believe that, because he`s supposed to witness for what he believes in his religious faith and he`d lose a lot of support if he denied that.

The kind of activity that I think is potentially helpful in our situation is revelations from insiders as to what has been done in our name and what is being planned. In other words, whistle blowing, unauthorized disclosures. We`ve had more of that than probably ever before but in very small dribbles here and there, and without much in the way of documents. What I really hope to see is somebody putting something out on the scale of the Pentagon Papers, thousands of pages of classified documents--which sounds like a lot, by the way, but it really just means a whole file drawer. They could show comprehensively what the real policy is, where it`s going and what the cost of those are to be, in a way that we just haven`t seen at all. Nobody`s really done that.

But the alternative is to be silent and not do what you could to end war that involves 100,000 Iraqi lives so far and almost 1500 American lives at this point and more to come. So it really is at this point for people to consider sacrificing their own freedom to have a chance to end a war. We need to take risks and we need to protest. People are capable but don`t think of being called on for it. We are a rogue superpower and this is not a time to postpone and save ourselves for another time. Nonviolence and truthfulness is essential.

For more information on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, go to http://www.ellsberg.net.

Mira Ptacin is assistant editor at CommonDreams.org. She can be reached at [e-mail].

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Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal
`We Are America` For Sure, But on Borrowed Time?
by Pierre Tristam
http://www.news-journalonline.com/03ColEssays.htm

The day after New Year`s, The News-Journal ran a huge map on the front of the business section highlighting retail`s "coming attractions" in Flagler and Volusia counties. I counted eight major developments adding up to more than 2 million square feet of retail and commercial space. Counting the smaller strip malls that invariably escort the larger ones, and a few other big ones likely to be announced in the next few years, the shopping makeover in Flagler and Volusia -- just the new stuff -- will probably add up to more retail space than the Mall of America`s 2.5 million square feet. That place, in Bloomington, Minn., attracts 35 million to 40 million visitors a year to stay viable, or as many visitors as Disney`s Big Four theme parks in Orlando combined (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, MGM and Animal Kingdom attracted 38 million visitors in 2003).

Shopping is the nation`s leading time-killer next to television, so maybe Flagler and Volusia are onto something. "Because you see the main thing today is -- shopping," Solomon tells Victor in "The Price," the late Arthur Miller`s play. "Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn`t know what to do with himself -- he`d go to church, start a revolution -- something. Today you`re unhappy? Can`t figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping."

So we have. The nation has been adding more than 250 million square feet of retail space every year since 1998. Wal-Mart alone is building or expanding 250 supercenters this year. Lowe`s, the home-improvement giant, will open 150 stores. Lowe`s must have its eyes on the projected $120 billion in construction spending for the year, which would break the $112 billion record set in 2000. With debts and deficits all around, you wonder where the money to sustain this frenzied pace is coming from.

Your imagination is a good place to start, because much of the money is imaginary. Consumer debt, already at a record $2.2 trillion, rose at an annual 6.6 percent rate in January. The number rises to $10.3 trillion when you include mortgages (up from $4.6 trillion 10 years ago). That works out to a $35,000 debt for every man, woman and child, or $140,000 for the average family of four, at a time when median household income has fallen for the past three years, to $43,300.

When Arthur Miller published "The Price" in 1968, Victor could heed Solomon`s words comfortably enough to splurge. For all of Vietnam`s and the Great Society`s burdens on the economy, the federal budget deficit was $25 billion, and ran up a $3 billion surplus the following year (compared with a $412 billion deficit in 2004). The United States was still the world`s fattest creditor. The entire national debt accumulated through the Republic`s history was a measly $358 billion, or less than $2 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. It grew by $2 trillion just in the first four years of George Bush`s "conservative" presidency.

There isn`t just a lot of borrowing going on. There`s a growing deficit between assumptions and reality. The assumption is that because the sun shone on the nation`s prosperity yesterday, it will shine again tomorrow. The assumption is based on something President Bush likes to say whenever his assumptions about just about anything under the sun are challenged: "We are America." The phrase once evoked the noble notion of inalienable right. Somehow it has devolved into the more prosaic notion of inalienable might. The notion has its purpose. It helps prolong an illusion of strength. But it is just another form of borrowing -- on public trust, on global confidence, on the future: take your pick.

The day before the "coming attractions" map ran in this newspaper, The New York Times ran a long op-ed by Jared Diamond on "The ends of the world as we know them." Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for "Guns, Germs and Steel," a book that links the rise and fall of human societies to factors less conventional than white power or black plagues. He makes a specialty of tracing nations` fates to their relationships with the environment. "A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions," Diamond wrote. "Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that`s no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can`t continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the world." The piece in the Times sums up his argument in a new book called "Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed." We have been choosing to fail, Diamond argues.

The historical evidence on his side is more convincing than the speculative evidence of the "we-are-America" crowd. To take one example: America`s consumer debt is not just a debt of dollars, but a reflection of how much we`ve borrowed against the world`s financial and environmental banks. It reflects an imbalance of resources which, if not righted, will mean a lot worse than the collapse of a few malls. Those emporiums about to hum with shoppers and ozonated air all over Flagler and Volusia are a sign of great economic optimism. They`re also local versions of the same collective wager on a future of endlessly greater consumption. Not only are the bet`s assumptions unsustainable. The bet itself is on credit. Our coming attractions, in other words, may not have a happy ending.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. He can be reached at [e-mail]

© 2005 News-Journal Corporation

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Der Artikel, der in #27385 angesprochen wird, entweder über den Link NYT oder #25118 .

The Ends of the World as We Know Them
By Jared Diamond
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/opinion/01diamond.html

Saturday 01 January 2005

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Approaching Spiritual Death

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm
Gary G. Kohls, MD

03/29/05 "ICH" - - Those were the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous speech 38 years ago, April 4, 1967, [url(Listen to full speech here)]http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm[/url]
one year to the day of his1968 assassination in Memphis, TN. The people who heard that speech recognized it as one of the most powerful speeches ever given articulating the immorality of the Viet Nam War. Some also saw that King was signing his own death warrant by exposing so forcefully the perpetrators of what was known as “the overwhelming atrocity that was Viet Nam.”

King was speaking out from his deeply felt sense of outrage and anguish over the horrible suffering of millions of innocent and unarmed Vietnamese civilians. King knew that women and children were the main victims of a whole host of highly lethal US weapons, including one of the US Air Force’s favorites, napalm, which burned the flesh off of whatever part of the body that the flaming, jellied gasoline splashed on.

King knew of the atrocities that our GIs were ordered to commit in the name of “anti-communism.” He saw the connections between the killing of dispensable “gooks” on the battlefields of Southeast Asia and the oppression, impoverishment, imprisoning and lynching of “dispensable blacks” in America.

King was being faithful to his commitment to the nonviolence teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth by speaking out against injustice wherever he saw it. He knew that the violence of racism, the violence of orchestrated poverty and the violence of militarism have the same sources: fear of “the other” and the willingness to protect one’s own wealth and privilege from the poor and underprivileged.

King knew that the opposition to his nonviolence movement was formidable: from cruel racists in the south to indifferent bystanders everywhere to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the north. Those violent forces were dangerous enough, but by speaking out he was opposing an entrenched system with the capability for unleashing enormous violence against any and all perceived enemies, domestic and foreign.

Tremendous fortunes are made in every war, and the Viet Nam War was no exception. Weapons manufacturers thrived, becoming more deeply entrenched with every passing year. Huge expenditures were made for weapons research and development. Huge numbers of workers were hired for weapons production. And the economy boomed – but on borrowed money. And so the war was popular with the power elite, the Pentagon, the CIA, the politicians, the defense industry and the people who needed the work. But King threatened those groups’ self-interest, and exactly one year later he was dead.

King’s April 4, 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in New York City was too truthful for the masters of war who tried to convince the populace that the Viet Nam War was the patriotic thing to do. And so at first they tried to silence him by a massive disinformation campaign discrediting him, as is done to idealistic and dangerously progressive thinkers such as Jesus of Nazareth, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Paul Wellstone. The easily brain-washable public bought the lies, and support for King and his civil rights movement waned. The US Army, the FBI and various law enforcement officials led the disinformation campaign and, on April 4, 1968 a hired assassin other than the framed James Earl Ray pulled the trigger that ended the life of another in a long string of prophetic voices.

King was right about a lot of things, including his prophecy that America was losing its soul. Violence of all types in epidemic, especially the violence of poverty. Gun violence, from homicide to suicide, is all too common. Those making obscene profits in the weapons industry have sabotaged even the most modest logical handgun and assault rifle controls – all the while flooding America and the world with increasingly lethal weapons. It may be too late now to stop the oncoming carnage.

Both The affluent and the poor have succumbed to the addictions of exploitative, corrupt capitalism – an economic system that has run amok. Addictions involving entertainment, gambling, shopping, drugs (both legal and illegal), sports and religion have overwhelmed the lives of many Americans who then have no time or energy left to tend the soul.

The 1980s and 1990s Decades of Greed I and II, were spent trying to attain wealth at any cost. Greed blows out the spark of spirituality in all addicts, simultaneously worsening the desperate poverty of the losers and those suffering billions who live in the exploited developing world whose resources are being stolen from them.

At the end of his Viet Nam speech, King concluded: “War is not the answer. We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the developing world – a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.”

“Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons (and daughters) of God, and our brothers (and sisters) wait eagerly for our response.”

America, especially its majority Christian lay or clergy leaders (whether fundamentalist, conservative, moderate or liberal), has failed the vision of Martin Luther King. It is on the brink of spiritual death. The hundreds of billions of American tax dollars wasted annually for war and war preparation is money that is then unavailable for programs of social uplift, including hunger relief, poverty reduction, affordable housing, education, medical care or useful jobs. America may have sealed its doom when the various militarist administrations of the last 25 years started incurring the massive national debt, currently, under the Cheney/Bush war-mongering regime, reaching a crippling $7 trillion – initially for war-readiness and then for the mass slaughter of innocent, unarmed civilian women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wealthy financiers and investors are profiting handsomely making money in the form of interest on bonds that we the people and our children and grandchildren will have to pay back some sad day.

America’s spiritual corpse is being hoisted up on top of the idolatrous altars to godless, soulless capitalism, compassionless militarism, excess luxury wealth, blind patriotism and the decidedly unChristlike God of War.

Is it already too late for a resuscitation attempt on the hulk? Or is there no political will to even try?

April 2005 - Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN for Every Church A Peace Church (www.ecapc.org)

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March 30, 2005
EDITORIAL
The Verdict on Kofi Annan
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opinion/30wed1.html?hp

The independent panel investigating possible corruption in the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq has delivered a mixed verdict on Secretary General Kofi Annan. On the most explosive issue, the panel largely exonerated Mr. Annan of personal corruption in the awarding of a contract to a company that employed his son. That contract was awarded by officials who had no idea the son even worked for the company. But the panel faulted Mr. Annan for failing to begin a serious investigation six years ago when his son`s involvement became known. This was a grievous lapse, for which the United Nations is now paying the price as critics accuse it of conflicts of interest and corruption in high places.

This second interim report from the panel, headed by Paul Volcker, focused primarily on Mr. Annan`s knowledge of and involvement in the awarding of a contract in 1998 to Cotecna Inspection Services, a small Swiss company, to monitor the importation of goods into Iraq under the oil-for-food program. That company had hired Kojo Annan, the young son of Kofi Annan, in 1995 to work at its offices in Africa when he was fresh out of college. Kojo got the job through a family friend, and the company hoped his contacts in Africa would help procure government contracts there. Many suspect that the company also hoped his U.N. connection would be useful some day.

Nothing has caused the United Nations more grief than the appearance of a conflict of interest. Although the Cotecna contract was a small slice of the oil-for-food program, the link to the secretary general put a face on the allegations of corruption in the program and triggered calls for Kofi Annan`s resignation from critics who were enraged by his opposition to President Bush`s war with Iraq.

The panel has largely undercut that line of attack. It found no evidence that Mr. Annan intervened in the bidding or selection process, and no clear evidence, just a few possibilities, that the secretary general even knew Cotecna was bidding. The panel concludes that Cotecna got the contract because it was the lowest bidder and was deemed capable of performing the work.

Where Mr. Annan dropped the ball most grievously was in his response to public disclosures in 1999 that Cotecna employed his son and, in a separate matter, was being investigated by Swiss authorities for allegedly making illicit payments on behalf of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan. All Mr. Annan did was ask his top aides to look into the Cotecna selection process. They reported back - the same day - that Cotecna got the contract because it was the lowest bidder and was thought, on the basis of a Dun & Bradstreet report, to be free of administrative or criminal investigations. The Volcker panel argues persuasively that the secretary general should have referred the matter to U.N. investigators for a more thorough inquiry. Had it done so, the panel believes, Cotecna`s contract would not have been renewed repeatedly.

It is not clear whether Cotecna`s departure would have changed anything in Iraq. But it would clearly have eliminated a weak spot and a perceived conflict of interest.

This latest report cites a lot of questionable practices at U.N. headquarters. Mr. Annan`s former chief of staff authorized the destruction of files. Procurement officials failed to get required financial information from Cotecna before awarding the contract. Even worse behavior was shown by Kojo Annan and Cotecna, who strove mightily to deceive the public, the United Nations and the Volcker panel about Kojo`s continuing financial ties to the company even after he allegedly resigned. Kojo lied repeatedly to his own father.

All this might have been avoided had the secretary general responded properly in 1999. The panel is surely right that the United Nations badly needs stronger conflict-of-interest rules that spell out how to resolve possible conflicts of interest. A cavalier response is the road to trouble, and Kofi Annan needs to demonstrate that he has learned from past mistakes and can still be the strong, effective leader the United Nations needs so badly at this time.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Michael Miersch 30.03.2005
Kolumne von Maxeiner & Miersch, erschienen in DIE WELT am 30.03.2005:

Zu Ostern waren die Titelseiten traditionsgemäß der Religion gewidmet. Bei mäßigem Feiertagswetter war Zeit zum Lesen, und so blieben auch wir am Thema Glauben hängen. Gemeinschaftlicher Glauben spielt ja nicht nur beim religiösen Bekenntnis eine Rolle, sonder auch im säkularen Diesseits. Brauchen offene Gesellschaften kollektive Sinnstiftung? Oder zeichnen sie sich gerade dadurch aus, auf solche geistigen Bindemittel verzichten zu können?

Liberale hegen einen gut begründeten Widerwillen gegen große verbindende Entwürfe. Sie wittern das ideologische Gift darin und denken stirnrunzelnd an die Irrwege des 20. Jahrhunderts. Doch das Jahrhundert bestand nicht nur aus totalitärer Verblendung. Auch im demokratischen Deutschland - und in anderen westlichen Gesellschaften – gab es Aufbrüche, die durch Ideen angespornt wurden. Und manche davon haben durchaus Gutes bewirkt.

Eine der erfolgreichsten Ideen hieß „Wohlstand für alle“. Sie löste eine unideologische Dynamik aus, die viele Menschen anspornte und Westdeutschland in eine wohlhabende Demokratie verwandelte. In Amerika sorgten Kennedys Weltraumziele für technologische Schübe und das Bewusstsein, Grenzen überwinden zu können. Heute spürt man solchen Optimismus, wenn man mit Menschen aus Schwellenländern wie Indien oder Brasilien spricht. Sie fühlen, wohin die Reise gehen soll. Das kleine und rohstoffarme Israel baut an einer Zukunft aus Informationstechnologie und High-Tech-Landwirtschaft. Die vermeintlichen Hinterwäldler in Neuseeland fiebern darauf, Hollywood etwas vom Kuchen der Filmwirtschaft abzujagen. Und wir? Vielleicht kommt die lähmende Verzagtheit in Deutschland auch aus diesem Mangel an mitreißenden Zielen und Zukunftsträumen?

Über die notwendigen ökonomischen Werkzeuge herrscht inzwischen große Einigkeit: Subventionsabbau, weniger Steuern, weniger Bürokratie. Regierung und Opposition streiten nur noch darum, wie heftig das Umsteuern ausfallen soll. Doch was wird, wenn diese oder die nächste Regierung die ökonomischen Reformen erfolgreich durchgesetzt haben? Geht dann der berühmte Ruck durch die Gesellschaft, oder gehört noch eine andere Schwungmasse dazu? Als letzte Woche der Kanzler zum großen Fernsehinterview antrat, beteuerte er, das Land sei in guten, ruhigen Händen: Kein Grund zur Sorge. Zum Thema Ziel und Richtung der Regierung sagte er nichts. Und was noch seltsamer war: die Interviewerin frage ihn nicht einmal danach.

Der Mangel hat auch eine außenpolitische Seite. Das amerikanische Ziel, die weltweite Ausbreitung der Demokratie zu unterstützen, wird in Deutschland als naiv belächelt, als frivole Gefährdung der Stabilität verdammt oder als zynische Tarnung wirtschaftlicher Interessen entlarvt. Kein Gedanke an die mögliche Leuchtkraft eines gemeinsamen westlichen Projekts.

Die Scheu ist verständlich, denn die Ziele der jüngsten Vergangenheit waren Strohfeuer. Das siebziger Jahre Projekt, den Sozialismus neu zu erfinden, sah schon im jugendlichen Stadium alt aus. Das achtziger Jahre Projekt, denn Weltuntergang abzuwenden, erwuchs aus Angst und beruhte auf falschen Prämissen. Die deutsche Einheit war kein gemeinsamer Traum sondern ein unverhofftes Geschenk, obendrein eines, das viele nicht haben wollten.

Die Skepsis vor neue hehren Ziele und überdimensionalen Ideen ist berechtigt. Doch ohne eine positive Zukunftsvorstellung wird ein Aufschwung nicht zu erreichen sein. Keine Utopie, aber irgendeine realistische Idee von Fortschritt werden wir wohl brauchen. Sonst bleibt nur das Motto des Umweltministeriums vom letzten Bundestagswahlkampf: „Deutschland – Weltmeister im Aussteigen.“

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Die Einen nennen es Verbreiten von Demokratie in der Welt, die Anderen nennen es Folter.

March 30, 2005
Harsh Tactics Were Allowed, General Told Jailers in Iraq
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/international/middleeast/3…

WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - The top United States commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation tactics that were harsher than accepted Army practice, including using guard dogs to exploit "Arab fear of dogs," a memo made public on Tuesday showed.

The memo, dated Sept. 14, 2003, and signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the senior commander in Iraq, was released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained it from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

The Abu Ghraib scandal, in which United States forces physically abused and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners at a jail on the outskirts of Baghdad, occurred under General Sanchez`s command.

In the memo, General Sanchez laid out which interrogation techniques were permitted in Iraq, and said some required his prior approval. Some of the harshest techniques were disallowed the next month because of opposition from some military lawyers.

The memo also noted that the Geneva Conventions "are applicable" and that detainees must be treated humanely.

The fact that the Sanchez memo existed was previously known, but not its contents.

The memo allowed for military working dogs, or M.W.D., to be present during interrogations, saying the practice "exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations."

"Dogs will be muzzled and under control of M.W.D. handler at all times to prevent contact with detainee," the memo added.

The memo also permitted isolation, "stress positions" (in which prisoners are placed in potentially painful positions to try to get them to talk) and "environmental manipulation," like making a room very hot or very cold, or using an "unpleasant smell," or disrupting normal sleep patterns.

A military official who asked not to be identified said, "It`s important to note that Lieutenant General Sanchez and his staff thoroughly reviewed the policy for compliance with Geneva Conventions prior to its approval."

The official said a Pentagon investigation into detainee policies led by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, released March 10, found that "none of the techniques contained in [General Sanchez`s] interrogation policy would have permitted abuses such as those at Abu Ghraib."

The A.C.L.U. said the Pentagon initially refused to release General Sanchez`s memo on the ground of national security.

"It is apparent that the government has been holding this document not out of any genuine concern that it will compromise national security, but to protect itself from embarrassment," said a lawyer for the group, Amrit Singh.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |

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March 30, 2005
Suit by Detainee on Transfer to Syria Finds Support in Jet`s Log
By SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/international/americas/30p…

This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Ford Fessenden and written by Mr. Shane.

WASHINGTON, March 29 - Maher Arar, a 35-year-old Canadian engineer, is suing the United States, saying American officials grabbed him in 2002 as he changed planes in New York and transported him to Syria where, he says, he was held for 10 months in a dank, tiny cell and brutally beaten with a metal cable.

Now federal aviation records examined by The New York Times appear to corroborate Mr. Arar`s account of his flight, during which, he says, he sat chained on the leather seats of a luxury executive jet as his American guards watched movies and ignored his protests.
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The tale of Mr. Arar, the subject of a yearlong inquiry by the Canadian government, is perhaps the best documented of a number of cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which suspects have accused the United States of secretly delivering them to other countries for interrogation under torture. Deportation for interrogation abroad is known as rendition.

In papers filed in a New York court replying to Mr. Arar`s lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers say the case was not one of rendition but of deportation. They say Mr. Arar was deported to Syria based on secret information that he was a member of Al Qaeda, an accusation he denies.

The discovery of the aircraft, in a database compiled from Federal Aviation Agency records, appears to corroborate part of the story Mr. Arar has told many times since his release in 2003. The records show that a Gulfstream III jet, tail number N829MG, followed a flight path matching the route he described. The flight, hopscotching from New Jersey to an airport near Washington to Maine to Rome and beyond, took place on Oct. 8, 2002, the day after Mr. Arar`s deportation order was signed.

After seeing a photograph of the plane and hearing its path, Mr. Arar, 35, of Ottawa, said in a telephone interview: "I think that`s it. I think you`ve found the plane that took me."

He added: "Finding this plane is going really to help me. It does remind me of this trip, which is painful, but it should make people understand that this is for real and everything happened the way I said. I hope people will now stop for a moment and think about the morality of this."

Records of the jet`s travels also show a trip in December 2003 to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States holds hundreds of detainees, suggesting that it was used by the government on at least one other occasion.

If the plane was used to move Mr. Arar, it is the fourth known to have been used to transport suspected terrorists secretly from one country to detention in another.

Among the three identified in previous news reports is one owned by a company apparently set up by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to The Washington Post. Another, first described by The Chicago Tribune, is an ordinary charter jet that was also used by the Boston Red Sox manager between missions ferrying detainees and their guards to Guantánamo, with the Red Sox logo attached to the fuselage or removed, depending on who was aboard.

Maria LaHood, a lawyer for Mr. Arar, said the new information on the Gulfstream jet lent support to his lawsuit.

"The facts we got from Maher right after he was released are now corroborated by public records," said Ms. LaHood, who works for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group in New York that advocates investigation of human rights abuses. "The more information that comes out, the better for showing that this is an important public issue that can`t be kept secret."

She said Mr. Arar and his attorneys believe that American officials wanted him to undergo a more brutal interrogation than would be permitted in the United States in the hope of getting information about Al Qaeda.

After 10 months in a cell he compared to a grave, and 2 more months in a less confined space, Syrian officials freed Mr. Arar in October 2003, saying they had been unable to find any connection to Al Qaeda. The Syrian ambassador to the United States called the release "a gesture of good will toward Canada."

Charles Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said the government had no comment on the case. The administration has refused to cooperate with the Canadian inquiry into Mr. Arar`s case and has asked a judge to dismiss most of his lawsuit, saying that allowing it to proceed would reveal classified information.

President Bush has said it is United States policy neither to engage in torture nor to deliver prisoners to countries where they are likely to be tortured. Former intelligence officials say rendition is useful for cases in which secret information has identified a suspected terrorist but cannot be used for a public prosecution in an American court.

Mr. Arar has told a consistent story since his release: He was detained at Kennedy International Airport in New York on Sept. 26, 2002, while changing planes on the way back to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia. He was then held for nearly two weeks, awakened at 3 a.m. and taken to an airport in New Jersey, where he was put aboard a small jet.

Shackled in place, Mr. Arar says, he followed the plane`s movements on a map displayed on a video screen, watching as it traveled to Dulles Airport, outside Washington, to a Maine airport he believed was in Portland, to Rome, and finally to Amman, Jordan, where he was blindfolded and driven to Syria.

According to F.A.A. flight logs for Oct. 8, 2002, only one aircraft flew from New Jersey to the Washington area to Maine to Rome: the 14-passenger Gulfstream III jet, operated by Presidential Aviation, a charter company in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The jet left Teterboro, N.J., for Dulles at 5:40 a.m.; proceeded at 7:46 a.m. to Bangor, Me.; and left Bangor for Rome at 9:36 a.m.

The only conflict with Mr. Arar`s story is that the Maine airport was Bangor, not Portland. And the logs cover only flights departing from the United States, so they document the trip only as far as Rome. Court records show, however, that immigration officials ordered him deported to Syria.

Nigel England, director of operations for Presidential, said he would not divulge who rented the Gulfstream that day or discuss any clients.

"It`s a very select group of people that we fly, from entertainers to foreign heads of state, a whole gamut of customers that we fly and wouldn`t discuss one over the other," he said.

The plane flew about 50 flights a month to various destinations in 2002 and 2003, according to federal records. Presidential`s Web site says a similar jet would now rent for about $120,000 for an itinerary like the one on which Mr. Arar apparently was flown.

Records show that the plane was owned in 2002 by MJG Aviation, a Florida company that lists its manager as Mark J. Gordon, an entrepreneur who also owned Presidential at the time. Mr. Gordon could not be reached. The plane has since been sold and the tail number has been changed to N259SK, records show.

As for Mr. Arar, he said he felt the identification of the plane helped establish his credibility. "I don`t know for sure but probably people had some doubts about what I said," he said. "This goes to prove and corroborate at least part of my story. I hope even more information will come forward."

Shane Scott reported from Washington for this article, Stephen Grey from London and Ford Fessenden from New York. David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington and Margot Williams from New York.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 30, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
In the Name of Politics
By JOHN C. DANFORTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opinion/30danforth.html

St. Louis — BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.

Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.

Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.

High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.

In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer`s, Parkinson`s and juvenile diabetes.

It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.

I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God`s call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.

The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.

When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.

Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.

During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.

But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.

John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations. He is an Episcopal minister.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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The world should not be swayed by this campaign of vilification against the UN
Editorial
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/story.jsp?…

The Independent

30 March 2005

The United Nations must treat the conclusions of Paul Volcker`s interim report on the Iraqi oil-for-food programme with the utmost seriousness. The report, by the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, makes it clear that the conduct of Kofi Annan fell below that expected of someone in his position. The UN secretary general should have been more alive to the potential dangers of awarding a UN oil-for-food contract to Cotecna, a firm that employed his son. And as the report points out, Mr Annan should have made greater efforts to determine the nature of his son`s relationship with Cotecna. It is difficult to find fault with the conclusion that, by failing to do so, Mr Annan created a perception of a conflict of interest.

But it is important to maintain a sense of perspective. The secretary general`s sin was one of omission, rather than commission. And the report makes it clear that this does not constitute sufficient grounds for his resignation. Furthermore, the real issue is not the behaviour of the secretary general, but the oil-for-food programme itself. Here, the conclusions to be drawn are far less clear cut - and much less convenient for those who will use yesterday`s report to renew their calls for Mr Annan`s resignation.

The final Volcker report will not be released until the summer, but it is already clear the oil-for-food programme was a deeply flawed mechanism. Allowing Saddam Hussein to choose the middlemen to whom his regime would sell oil was a big mistake. It enabled him to get round the sanctions, imposed since the first Gulf War, by demanding kickbacks in exchange for lucrative contracts. Yet it is important to remember the programme`s primary purpose was to prevent the Iraq regime buying arms and materials with which it could threaten its neighbours. As the failure of US weapons inspectors to discover any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has shown, it was wholly effective in this respect.

It is also worth bearing in mind some stubborn realities about the international trade in oil. The rising price of crude oil since the programme was instituted in 1996 meant that any seller would inevitably be in a position of strength - even one as restricted as Saddam Hussein. And if the programme had not been in place, it is likely that even more barrels would have been smuggled over Iraq`s borders.

None of this is to condone the mismanagement of the oil-for-food programme. But it does emphasise the difficulties of policing such a complex sanctions-related mechanism. And the US is arguably just as much to blame as any other nation for the flaws of the scheme. The programme was administered by the United Nations Security Council - on which the US is a permanent member. All the contracts had to be approved by the council`s sanctions committee.

This is relevant because the US is by far the most vigorous critic of the UN. And it is American politicians who have made the most strident accusations of corruption. Ever since the UN Security Council refused to back the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has seized on every opportunity to discredit the organisation and smear its leader.

It is instructive to trace the course of the way the oil-for-food scandal has emerged. Information was carefully leaked to the US press, that blurred the substantial involvement of US companies and individuals in playing the system. The abuses that emerged, at first, involved mainly companies from France and Russia - two nations that took the lead in opposing the US invasion of Iraq in the Security Council.

The rest of the world must not be swayed by this campaign of vilification. When prominent Republicans called for Mr Annan`s resignation last December, the UN ambassadors of 191 countries publicly backed the secretary general. This support is needed more than ever now. John Bolton - who believes "the UN is valuable only when it directly serves the United States" - is soon likely to be approved as the new American ambassador to the organisation. This is no time to concede ground to the world`s last remaining superpower in its long struggle to undermine this flawed, but still vitally important, multilateral platform.


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Eine Untersuchung in den USA hat festgestellt, die US-Bürger sind zu müde zum Sex.

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We must not accept this repression

The Muslim conscience demands a halt to stonings and executions
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1447867,00.ht…
Tariq Ramadan
Wednesday March 30, 2005

Guardian
The application of the Islamic penal code - known by the widely misunderstood term sharia - in Muslim societies is one of the most controversial subjects in the dialogue between the west and the Muslim world. The imposition of corporal punishment, stoning and execution in the name of religious texts on an entire society cannot be accepted. We must condemn such repressive applications, which are carried out without due legal process.

The Islamic world, for its part, sends contradictory messages: strong condemnations of such punishments are made by a minority of intellectuals, prominent figures and Muslim activists, while some governments try to legitimise their Islamic character by applying repressive interpretations of religious texts and sources. An important discussion on sharia is taking place in the Muslim world, but a fruitful debate has yet to materialise.

Muslim populations from Nigeria to Malaysia claim to strictly apply the sharia and yet the majority of ulama (Muslim scholars) insist that these penalties "are almost never applicable" because of the difficulty of establishing the necessary conditions. But they avoid expressing themselves clearly so as not to lose credibility with the masses.

The debate has become a case study in relations between civilisations and cultures. Should one call on the entire Muslim world to condemn these practices? Is it not possible to stipulate universal values where basic respect for human dignity is non-negotiable, while recognising the diversity and specificity of religious, cultural and historical references?

A proposal for a moratorium on corporal punishment, stoning and the death penalty generates opposition from all sides. Voices from the west assert: "This is unacceptable, is not enough!" While the Muslim world exclaims: "This is unacceptable, it is a betrayal of our sacred texts."

The call for a moratorium is necessarily addressed to the Muslim world from within its own terms of reference. We are convinced that an evolution in mentality is only possible on the basis of an internal social dynamic. Today, in the name of Islamic principles, we are launching a call for an immediate moratorium in the Muslim world.

We argue that, first, the ulama are not in agreement on the interpretation or authenticity of texts referring to such injunctions, nor on the political and social contexts in which they would be applicable. Second, the application of the sharia today is used by repressive powers to abuse women, the poor and political opponents within a quasi-legal vacuum. Muslim conscience cannot accept this injustice.

Third, Muslim populations, without direct access to many of the relevant texts, tend to believe that devotion to Islam requires a strict and visible display of punishment, partly an opposition to "the west". It is necessary to resist such a formalistic drift.

The ulama and socially engaged Muslims recognise that an internal debate is necessary and injustices carried out under a religious guise are unacceptable. The call for a moratorium has a double advantage: it would mean the immediate suspension of these practices in the name of justice in Islam and a beginning of a process of reflection on how to apply the sharia today.

Evolution of thinking cannot occur without this debate. It would allow the Muslim universe of thought to reconcile itself with the essence of its message of justice, equality and pluralism, rather than being obsessed by the formalistic application of severe punishments in the name of frustration or feelings of alienation perpetuated by the domination of the west. It is necessary to open the debate and reply with the Islamic imperative of ijtihad (critical exegesis of religious texts).

The unilateral condemnations one hears in the west will not help to move things along. On the contrary, Muslim populations are convincing themselves of the Islamic character of these practices through a rejection of the west, on the basis of a simplistic reasoning that stipulates that "the less western, the more Islamic". It is necessary to escape this perversion.

Meanwhile, western governments and intellectuals have a responsibility to allow the Muslim world to involve itself calmly in this debate within Islam: the claim to universality in the west cannot be to the detriment of understanding the cultural and religious references of "the other", the logic of his thought system and the path that leads to a common universal understanding.

On the political level, it is imperative that the selective denunciations stop: whether it is a poor or rich country, an ally or an enemy. The rejection of injustice must be made without concession. In the end, the paths that lead to dialogue and encounters demand a readiness to question one`s own certainty.

· Tariq Ramadan is a Muslim academic. His books include Western Muslims and the Future of Islam

For the full text of this appeal, see http://www.tariqramadan.com/
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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washingtonpost.com
A New Era for Oil?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11311-2005Mar…
By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, March 30, 2005; Page A15

The interesting question about the advent of $50-a-barrel oil is whether it signals a new era in the economics and politics of energy. To sharpen the question: Have we entered a period when, owing to consistently strong demand and chronically scarce supplies, prices have moved permanently higher? We don`t know, but the answer could be "yes" for at least one reason: China.

Americans consume almost 21 million barrels of oil a day, a quarter of the world total of 84 million barrels a day, reports the International Energy Agency. But China is now second at 6.4 million barrels a day, and its demand could double by 2020, various analysts told a conference last week held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. Moreover, China will import most of its new needs; its domestic output is steady at about 3.5 million barrels a day. It`s unclear how much China`s extra demand -- and that of other developing countries, especially India -- will stimulate extra oil production.

Oil markets do undergo seismic shifts. Until 1974 the United States was the world`s largest oil producer. Supplies were plentiful; Americans controlled their own oil prices, as Daniel Yergin explained in his 1991 book "The Prize." With surplus production capacity, the Texas Railroad Commission -- which despite its name regulated the state`s oil -- limited output to stabilize prices while maintaining a "security reserve" for times of crisis, wrote Yergin. In March 1971 the commission allowed all-out production to meet rising demand. America`s oil surplus had vanished. Worldwide prices rose, and OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) became more powerful.

We could now be at a similar inflection point, where the global oil system changes dramatically. Certainly the short-term outlook already has. From 1991 to 1999 world oil demand rose annually about 1 million barrels a day, Guy Caruso, head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, told the CSIS conference. But in 2004 demand unexpectedly jumped 2.7 million barrels a day. A third of the increase came from China, and much of that reflected electricity shortages. Unable to get reliable power, factories installed their own generators. China`s regular power plants overwhelmingly use coal, but the new generators used imported diesel fuel. China could solve this problem by building more power plants and easing rail bottlenecks that hinder coal shipments. But there will still be new sources of oil demand. China now has about 20 million cars and trucks, energy consultant James Dorian said; by 2020 it could have 120 million. (In 2001 the United States had about 230 million cars, vans and trucks.) Higher oil demand has now strained the global production system to its limits. Spare capacity of about 1.5 million barrels a day is the lowest in 30 years, said CSIS`s Frank Verrastro. Most is located in Saudi Arabia. Higher prices partly reflect fear of more supply disruptions -- from terrorism, war, political upheavals, weather or accidents. In theory, higher prices should be partially self-correcting. They should dampen demand and encourage supply. But theory must always be revised for new realities. Here, there are two.

One is that in rich countries -- notably the United States -- rising incomes make it easier to afford higher energy prices. In the latest month, American oil demand was actually up 2 percent from a year earlier (and, yes, adjusted for inflation, today`s gasoline prices are still roughly a third below levels reached in 1980 and 1981). A second reality is that big oil companies seem less willing or able to find new oil. A study by Credit Suisse First Boston reports that major companies have replaced more than half their depleted oil reserves by buying reserves from other companies or re-estimating existing reserves. In 1990 companies replaced two-thirds of reserves with new discoveries. The poor performance may partly reflect the fact that 72 percent of the world`s oil reserves are controlled by state-owned oil companies, says Verrastro. Private companies can often get exploration rights only on terms that involve (to them) too much risk and too little profit.

Anything could now happen to oil. Prices could drop if the immediate fears behind today`s buying don`t materialize. But the long-term trends are unpromising. Global demand is rising inexorably; global supply seems less expansive. Dependence on precarious Persian Gulf oil will probably increase. The global economy remains hostage to uncertain or expensive fuel. Producing countries may become stronger, consuming countries weaker. There may be more competition among consuming nations to secure long-term supply contracts. China has already made a few such deals.

The message for Americans is simple. We import nearly 60 percent of our oil. We can`t eliminate imports any time soon, but we could limit them by producing more at home and conserving more (meaning higher fuel taxes, tougher gasoline standards, smaller vehicles and more hybrid engines). That would lessen our own vulnerability and ease pressures for the rest of the world. The debate that pits greater production against greater conservation is wrong. We need both.

© 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/
Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Parliament Fiasco

Mortar shells landed in the green zone near parliament at one point during its meeting on Tuesday, emptying the room briefly of frantic reporters, according to al-Hayat. The wrangling over cabinet posts continued, with the petroleum ministry coveted by both Shiites and Kurds.

The United Iraqi Alliance rejected as candidate for speaker of the house a parliamentarian on Allawi`s Iraqiya list, Janabi, on the grounds that his brother had worked closely with Saddam. This blackballing of a politician for links to the old regime infuriated Iyad Allawi, who stalked out of the building. He was followed by the major Sunni politician in the talks, Ghazi al-Yawir. No speaker of the house was chosen.

There are behind the scenes maneuverings to dump Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister. Ahmad Chalabi seems to be making another push to be prime minister himself, supported by the Kurds and by dissidents in the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance. If the religious Shiites are cheated of their proper role in government, now that they have over 50 percent of seats, there is danger of a popular revolt.

Part of the governing council in Kirkuk walked out of the meeting today in protest at the high-handed way the Kurdish majority was running it.

UPI is rightly anxious at the failure of Iraq`s politicians to form a government. The mood in the street is turning ugly. Quotes:


` Iraqi voters aren`t happy.They don`t care that some of the biggest political changes ever to happen in their lifetime are going on in their country. All they know is that the electricity still is off for hours every day, the water doesn`t always flow out of the faucets, there are still long gas queues at the stations, and the situation still seems pretty lawless in the streets. "We`re very disappointed," said Hathem Hassan Thani, 31, a political science graduate student at Baghdad University."Some personalities are trying to make the political operation fail, and they don`t want to give positions to the Sunni Muslims."



and here is the really alarming one:


The Iraqi people are very itchy.The street is very nervous," said Saad Jawar Qindeel, a spokesman for the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of two dominant religious-based parties that won the United Iraqi Alliance ticket."There`s a lot of talk of people ready to protest."



Despite all the talk of draw-downs and tipping points, the guerrillas are in fact inflicting substantial attrition on our Abrams tanks. The guerrillas in Afghanistan had their biggest successes against the Soviets when they learned out to take out the Soviet tanks, so this news is pretty scarey.

Likewise, that the Americans have had to double the number of arrestees in the Iraqi prisons in the past five months is another bad sign. (Prisoners are now 10,400). It looks as thought he guerrillas are growing in sophistication and are succeeding in recruiting increased numbers of Iraqis.

posted by Juan @ [url3/30/2005 06:27:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/parliament-fiasco-mortar-shells-landed.html[/url]

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THE NATION
Rumsfeld Is Getting His Players in Position
The Defense secretary has names to offer to President Bush for the Pentagon`s top civilian posts. Dozens of other vacancies remain.
By John Hendren
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-rums…

March 30, 2005

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has chosen replacements for the No. 2 and No. 3 civilian posts in the Pentagon, but said he was awaiting action in the White House and on Capitol Hill to help the Pentagon cope with a growing list of top job vacancies.

Rumsfeld said Tuesday he had recommended successors to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who is leaving soon to head the World Bank, and Undersecretary for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Rumsfeld also is said to be actively seeking a replacement for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers, who is due to retire Sept. 30. And five of the top six civilian posts in the Air Force, as well as the job of secretary of the Navy, are waiting to be filled.

Among the 47 Pentagon appointments requiring presidential nomination and Senate confirmation, Rumsfeld said, as many as one-fourth have been vacant in recent years because of delays in approval. Even Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon`s acting press secretary, is due to be replaced after he withdrew his name from consideration by the Senate late last year.

The delays occur at all levels, attributable to screening by the FBI and vetting by the White House as well as political turmoil in Congress, Rumsfeld said at a news conference Tuesday.

Rumsfeld would not name his choices for the posts, deferring to President Bush, who must make the nominations. But the range of open positions offers Rumsfeld the chance to continue his transformation of the Pentagon`s top leadership. Rumsfeld has canceled other meetings recently to devote more attention to personnel issues, spending hours each week in high-level conferences discussing nominees, Defense officials said.

Navy Secretary Gordon R. England is likely to replace Wolfowitz as the second-ranking civilian official, senior Defense officials said on condition of anonymity. England, considered Rumsfeld`s "go-to guy," left the Navy in 2003 for the Homeland Security Department. Rumsfeld brought England back to the Pentagon later that year. While embroiled last year in the prison abuse scandal, Rumsfeld gave England the job of overseeing reviews of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

With 30 years` experience in defense and technology industries, including four years as executive vice president of defense contractor General Dynamics Corp., England has the managerial skills Rumsfeld valued in Wolfowitz, who was given much of the job of running the Pentagon on a day-to-day basis, Defense officials said.

England was considered Rumsfeld`s top choice for Air Force secretary until Wolfowitz resigned the No. 2 post to pursue the job of World Bank president.

England acknowledged Tuesday that he had been interviewed for the job, but declined to say whether Rumsfeld had recommended him. "But I`d be pleased to serve if I was nominated," England told reporters at the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld declined to say whom he had recommended to replace Feith in the No. 3 Pentagon spot. Speculation has centered on the departing U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Eric S. Edelman, as the top choice. Edelman announced his resignation from the Foreign Service on March 18, calling it a personal decision.

Edelman previously served as national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and as ambassador to Finland. He also served as a diplomat in Prague and Moscow.

The Pentagon`s top uniformed position, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will be vacant once Myers retires. Rumsfeld`s former executive assistant, Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., head of Joint Forces Command, is among two leading contenders for the post. The second is Myers` vice chairman, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, according to senior Defense officials familiar with Rumsfeld`s thinking.

One senior Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there had been consideration given to installing Giambastiani as the vice chairman under Pace. But under military rules, Pace could only serve two years as chairman because of his tenure as vice chairman, unless the White House invoked a wartime exception.

Rumsfeld has faced demands for his resignation over the Iraq war and the prison abuse scandal, but now plans to remain in his job, the senior Defense officials said. Some of his past personnel moves have proved controversial.

In an unusual move in 2003, Rumsfeld, dissatisfied with the Army, rankled many in the nation`s oldest armed service by passing over every general to pull Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker out of retirement to serve as chief of staff of the Army.

A noted failure for Rumsfeld was his novel effort to move Air Force Secretary James G. Roche into the same job in the Army. Roche eventually withdrew his name for the post after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) opposed action on the nomination following a contracting controversy that resulted in the dismissal of an Air Force official who sought to steer an air refueling contract to Boeing in exchange for a job with the aircraft maker.

The appointment process has often irked the blunt-spoken Rumsfeld, who said confirmation delays of as long as 18 months threatened the nation`s civilian control of the military.

"The process today is not working well," Rumsfeld said.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Do You Need A Living Will?
Keep Congress and rabid Christians off your sad, brain-damaged body -- fill this out today!
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/

You could be hit by a bus tomorrow. You could fall horribly ill, get a tumor, be struck in the head by unimaginably heavy things. You could get mercury poisoning as a result of a laughable, Bush-gutted Environmental Protection Agency that just doesn`t give a damn anymore. Hey, it could happen.

Will you be ready? Do you have the proper paperwork?

Because most of us don`t. I`m guessing the vast majority of us do not have a living will and never thought of having a living will and maybe didn`t even know what the hell a living will was until we reluctantly read all about the nasty and morally nauseating Terri Schiavo case.

Until we read, that is, about those hordes of creepy and fanatical born-agains and right-to-lifers who prayed at endless candlelight vigils for not only Schiavo`s vegetative and lifeless survival but also for savage moral punishment and even the harsh fiery death of the various judges and lawmakers and doctors who dared uphold Florida law and make honest decisions about Schiavo`s tenuous condition and told the government to butt the hell out.

While at the exact same moment these same people, these rabid evangelicals and congresspersons and right-to-life Bushites, had in their warped little hearts exactly zero spiritual or ethical or even commonsense issue with this country killing whomever the hell we want in Iraq, including our own troops, our own kids. Warmongering: good. Death with dignity: bad. Ah, hypocrisy, thy playpen is America.

But back to the point. Because just last week, into my in-box came an e-mail from a Chronicle reporter who was covering the Schiavo case, and this fine missive reminded everyone in the newsroom of the existence of the living will and included the form itself as an attachment and I have printed it out and read it thoroughly and fully intend to fill it out ASAP, and maybe you should, too. Start by clicking here. Or just Google "living will" or "advance directive." It ain`t all that hard. But it should be easier.

A living will, for the uninitiated, is a simple legal document (also known as the Advance Health Care Directive) that describes, in clear if somewhat cold detail, just what the hell you want done -- or not done -- with your flesh should you for some tragic or otherwise unforeseeable reason become unable to speak or eat or think or move or function for yourself. It is designed, blessedly, to be completed without the need for a lawyer.

Here is what you do. You fill out the simple form and designate an agent (spouse, parent, friend, whomever) to make health care decisions for you, and you make a bunch of copies and sign them in the presence of a couple witnesses who understand what you just did.

And then you disperse them to trusted loved ones and keep one in your personal file and then, during the next major holiday, when the whole family`s gathered around, you stand up and clink your wineglass and make your wishes for your potentially lifeless body known like right goddamn now.

You say, Merry Christmas everyone and I love you all and hey by the way just FYI, I do not under any circumstances want to be kept alive by a goddamn feeding tube for 15 years especially if I have acute bulimia-induced brain damage and can`t focus or speak or eat or move or function in any substantive way whatsoever and never will again, and under no circumstances will you let me become in any way a decrepit political football or a cause célèbre for the obnoxious Right-to-lifer sect or hypocritical Republican fund-raising jackals, thank you and cheers and ho ho ho.

Do it. Do it soon. Do it no matter how young or how healthy or how far away from becoming a Schiavo case yourself you feel you are because, well, this is the way it is. This is what we have become. This is what you have to do.

Do it because we are now in a country where it`s OK to vote for brutal unwinnable wars and it`s OK to kill over 20,000 innocent Iraqis and it`s OK to justify the death of over 1,500 U.S. soldiers over a presidential lie, OK to blindly support environmental devastation and industry deregulation that will lead to all manner of pollution and illness and cancer and death in future generations but oh my God if you should want to follow the law and be allowed to pass from this life with a shred of dignity, you are a monster, or a lightning rod, or a bizarre martyr, not to mention a cash cow for the GOP.

Do it because we are now in a country where you need to protect yourself from hordes of people who insist on praying for you when theirs are the kind of prayers that make God cringe.

See, there is this rift. This chasm, this nasty hypocritical rupture in America right now and it has to do with a lot of pseudoreligious types cramming their beliefs down everyone`s throat via new laws and silly moral codes and really awful B-grade slasher movies featuring a beaten blood-soaked Jesus wondering just what the hell happened to his real message.

All of which is inducing a collective nausea among anyone with a brain and an active soul and a self-defined sense of their own spiritual path until they go, oh holy hell, now I need to fill out some forms to make sure misguided sanctimonious types don`t stomp into my hospital room and refuse to let me pass into nirvana with a tiny shred of peace and self-respect and maybe my favorite nipple ring.

So then, I`m filling out these forms. And, by the way, I say this now to all Christians and congresspersons and right-to-lifers and anyone else who thinks they know God but really seem to know only fear and sanctimony and sad religious myopia, should I even find myself in Terri Schiavo`s condition, please, do not pray for me.

Not that you would, I know, because I`m not exactly your type, given how I`m such a happy sinner, more of a Zen Atheist Buddhist Taoist Pagan Zoroastrian Wiccan Orgasmican than a Christian and I vote liberal and read books and I am not, according to current evangelical Christian doctrine, going anywhere near heaven. Not your heaven, anyway. But still.

So, no prayers. No vigils. No camera crews. No snarling attacks on my family or my naturopath or my dog. Just a few loved ones meditating calmly and maybe some Bach cello or Chopin nocturnes or old Massive Attack playing softly in the background as a large dose of Laphroaig 15 pumps quietly through the intravenous and a warmhearted spiritual healer/energy worker sits nearby to help point me to the correct Exit sign leading to the moist afterlife. That`s all.

Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

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Tomgram: Brown on a Global War That Doesn`t Sell
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2293

Earlier this month, having long been bothered by the claims of various neocons that we were in "World War IV" (also known as "the Global War on Terrorism"), I wrote a piece, Are We in World War IV?, considering the idea. I pointed out among other things that whatever the Cold War might have been, it wasn`t World War III -- the war that certainly would have ended the world as we then knew it. As I usually do, I let a number of other websites know that I had posted the piece.

An editor at Tompaine.com promptly sent me an e-note saying that, back in October, they had published a long piece on the same subject, The Return of the World Warriors, by a former State Department official named John Brown who had also done something most admirable (and rare). In an open letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the very eve of the coming invasion of Iraq, he had resigned from the Foreign Service in protest against our "war plans." ("Throughout the globe the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force. The president`s disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century. I joined the Foreign Service because I love our country. Respectfully, Mr. Secretary, I am now bringing this calling to a close, with a heavy heart but for the same reason that I embraced it.") Among other things, Brown now compiles a fascinating blog on public diplomacy filled with gems like the following passage from a piece by R. J. Eskow that I might otherwise have missed:

"I have to infer from that (statement) that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power" - Paul Wolfowitz.

"It`s the classic retort given by neocons and other war supporters when anyone questions the wisdom of the Iraq War… But let`s say I get disturbed by a spider crawling the garage wall. I slam the car into it at 50 miles an hour, destroying the car and causing a few thousand dollars in damage to the garage. When my wife objects, I say: `I have to infer from that statement that you would be happier if that spider were still crawling up the wall.` No, schmuck, she says, I`d be happier if we still had a car and didn`t have to fork out ten thousand dollars to fix the garage."

Brown`s World War IV piece was exceedingly intelligent, on target, and -- had I known it was there -- would have saved me time and effort. Not long thereafter, Brown himself wrote me -- a kind note about my piece, but with the following caveat: "The WWIV metaphor seems to be losing its immediacy among supporters of the administration`s policies. It just doesn`t sell well among ordinary Americans (not to speak of foreign audiences)." Hence, he suggested, the sudden arrival of "democracy" with a Middle Eastern twist on the Presidential agenda. I was intrigued, especially since I was just then pondering Bush`s "Arab spring" democracy blitz (and all those columns by press pundits wondering agonizingly whether the President hadn`t been right after all), and so I suggested to Brown that he consider writing his thoughts up for Tomdispatch. I present the results of that request with special pleasure.
Tom

Why World War IV Can`t Sell
By John Brown

In a recent essay (Are We in World War IV?) Tom Engelhardt commented quite rightly that "World War IV" has "become a commonplace trope of the imperial right." But he didn`t mention one small matter -- the rest of our country, not to speak of the outside world, hasn`t bought the neocons` efforts to justify the President`s militaristic adventures abroad with crude we`re-in-World War IV agitprop meant to mobilize Americans in support of the administration`s foreign policy follies. That`s why, in his second term, George W. Bush -- first and foremost a politician concerned about maintaining domestic support -- is talking ever less about waging a global war and ever more about democratizing the world.

A Neocon Global War

The neocons have long paid lip service to the need for democracy in the Middle East, but their primary emphasis has been on transformation by war, not politics. You`ll remember that, according to our right-wing world warriors, we`re inextricably engaged in a planetary struggle against fanatic Muslim fundamentalists. There will, they assure us, be temporary setbacks in this total generational conflict, as was the case during World War II and the Cold War (considered World War III by neocons), but we can win in the end if we "stay the course" with patriotic fortitude. Above all, we must not be discouraged by the gory details of the real, nasty war in Iraq in which we`re already engaged, despite the loss of blood and treasure involved. Like so many good Soviet citizens expecting perfect Communism in the indeterminate future, all we have to do is await the New American Century that will eventually be brought into being by the triumphs of American arms (and neocon cheerleading).

Since at least 9/11, the neocons have rambled on… and on… about "World War IV." But no matter how often they`ve tried to beat the phrase into our heads, it hasn`t become part of the American mindset. Peace and honest work, not perpetual war and senseless conflict, still remain our modest ideals -- even with (because of?) the tragedy of the Twin Towers. True, right before the presidential election, WWIV surfaced again and again in the media, fed by neocon propaganda; and even today it appears here and there, though as often in criticism as boosterism. Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo have recently used the phrase to criticize neocon hysteria in their columns; and in its winter 2005 issue, the Wilson Quarterly published "World War IV," an important article by Andrew J. Bacevich, which turns the neocons` argument on its head by suggesting that it was the U.S. which started a new world war -- a disastrous struggle for control of Middle Eastern oil reserves -- during the Carter administration. For Bacevich, it appears, the neocons` cherished verbal icon should not be a call to arms, but a sad reminder of the hubris of military overreach.

Try It Long

For all the absurdity of their arguments, neocons are, in many ways, men of ideas. But they do not live on another planet. They know that "World War IV" or even the milder "Global War on Terrorism" are not the first things ordinary Americans have in their thoughts when they get up in the morning ("Does anyone still remember the war on terror?" asked that master of the zeitgeist, Frank Rich of the New York Times, early in January). This unwillingness among us mere mortals to see the world in terms of a universal death struggle, which neocon sympathizer Larry Haas, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, believes is caused by "our faith in rationality," upsets some of the Spengler-like neocons, most noticeably their cantankerous dean, Norman Podhoretz.

In February in Commentary (a magazine he once edited), Podhoretz offered the world The War Against World War IV, a follow-up to his portentous and historically falsifying September 2004 piece, World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win. In his latest piece, stormin` Norman castigates Americans right and left -- including "isolationists of the paleoconservative Right," "Michael Moore and all the other hard leftists holed up in Hollywood, the universities, and in the intellectual community at large," and "liberal internationalists" -- for being "at war" with his Rosemary`s baby "World War IV." Somewhat defensively (for a rabid warmonger), he assures us that we, the American people, will, despite the best efforts of the critics, continue to support Mr. Bush, who in turn will not fail to uphold the "Bush Doctrine," which reflects, Podhoretz leaves no doubt, his own "brilliant" World War IV ideas (as admiring fellow neo-pundit William Safire described them in a New York Times column last August).

Mr. Podhoretz is angry at those who simply cannot accept his crude Hobbesian view of humanity, so he keeps shouting at us, but less virulent neocons and their allies, realizing "WWIV" has not caught on, are thinking up new terms to con Americans into the neos` agenda of total war.

Foremost among these is "the long war," evoking -- to my mind at least -- World War I, "the Great War" as it was known, which did so much to lead to the rise of fascism in Europe. (But how many Americans actually care about WWI?) A Google search reveals that as early as May, 2002, in a Cato Policy Analysis, "Building Leverage in the Long War: Ensuring Intelligence Community Creativity in the Fight Against Terrorism," James W. Harris wrote of a "long war" in describing post-9/11 world tensions. In June of last year, John C. Wohlstetter, a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, proclaimed:

"Now George W. Bush must rally the nation in the latest fight to the finish between imperfect civilization and perfect barbarism, that of free countries versus mega-death terror from both ‘WMD states` and groups like al-Qai`da. The Gipper`s testamentary gift to us is what should be our goal in a long war that strategist Eliot Cohen calls World War IV."

Podhoretz himself mentioned the "long war" in his September Commentary article. "[W]e are only," he noted, "in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war." But the real star of the long-war proponents is Centcom commander General John Abizaid, about whom pro-Iraqi invasion journalist David Ignatius wrote a fawning portrait in the Washington Post in late December. "If there is a modern Imperium Americanum," Ignatius announced, "Abizaid is its field general." Playing the role of intrepid "action" journalist at the forefront of the global battle lines in "Centcom`s turbulent center of operations," Ignatius breathlessly informs his readers that

"I traveled this month with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and other areas of his command. Over several days, I heard him discuss his strategy for what he calls the ‘Long War` to contain Islamic extremism … Abizaid believes that the Long War is only in its early stages. Victory will be hard to measure, he says, because the enemy won`t wave a white flag and surrender one day … America`s enemies in this Long War, he argues, are what he calls ‘Salafist jihadists.` That`s his term for the Muslim fundamentalists who use violent tactics to try to re-create what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Muhammed, who is sometimes called the ‘Salaf.`"

So now we understand why we`re in a Long War: to free ourselves of the salacious Salaf.

If You think It`s Not Long Enough, How About Millennium?

Former CIA Director James Woolsey, an early proponent of WWIV, is now turned on by the Long War idea as well. In December, in remarks titled The War for Democracy he said:

"Well, let me share a few thoughts with you this morning on what I have come to call the Long War of the 21st Century. I used to call it World War IV, following my friend Eliot Cohen, who called it that in an op-ed right after 9/11 in the Wall Street Journal. Eliot`s point is that the Cold War was World War III. And this war is going to have more in common with the Cold War than with either World War I or II.

"But people hear the phrase World War and they think of Normandy and Iwo Jima and short, intense periods of principally military combat. I think Eliot`s point is the right one, which is that this war will have a strong ideological component and will last some time. So, in order to avoid the association with World Wars I and II, I started calling it the Long War of the 21st Century. Now, why do I think it`s going to be long? First of all, it is with three totalitarian movements coming out of the Middle East."

The three totalitarian movements, Woolsey goes on to say, are "Middle East Fascists"; "the Vilayat Faqih, the Rule of the Clerics in Tehran -- Khamenei, Rafsanjani and his colleagues"; and "the Islamists of Al Qaeda`s stripe, underpinned, in many ways, by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia."

With all this war-talk from the neocons, it`s always reassuring to hear the voices of those who, if our world warriors had their way, would enthusiastically give up their lives for the "long war." On December 31, reader Robert S. Stelzer wrote a letter to the Denver Post in which he said the following regarding Ignatius`s paean to Abizaid:

"I interpret the article as a propaganda piece to get the American population used to the idea of a long war, and then a military draft. Maybe we need an empire to maintain our standard of living, but if we have democracy we need an informed electorate."

Despite rare dissident voices like Stelzer`s, the reaction of most Americans to the Long War jingle (as to "World War IV") has essentially been that of a silent majority: nothing. Count on the neocon bastion the Weekly Standard (in January) to try to whip up those silent Americans with a ratcheted up attack-the-mortal-enemy battle cry headlined "The Millennium War" by pundit Austin Bay, a colonel, who noted that "the global war on terror is the war`s dirt-stupid name. One might as well declare war on exercise as declare war on terror, for terror is only a tactic used by an enemy… In September 2001, I suggested that we call this hideous conflict the Millennium War, a nom de guerre that captures both the chronological era and the ideological dimensions of the conflict."

But Austin B`s MW (apologies to the German carmaker) has not sold either, being even less repeated in media commentaries than the Long War itself -- which brings us to the Bush administration`s current attitude toward the neocons` WWIV branding.

Drop that War! The Product No Longer Sells!

If there`s one thing the sad history of recent years has amply demonstrated, it`s that the Bush White House is profoundly uninterested in ideas (even the superficial ones promulgated by the neocons). What concerns Dubya and his entourage is not thought, but power. They pick up and drop "ideas" at the tip of a hat, abandoning them when they no longer suit their narrow interests of the moment. (The ever-changing "justifications" for the war in Iraq are a perfect illustration of this attitude). The Bushies are short-term and savvy tacticians par excellence, with essentially one long-term plan, rudimentary but focused: Republican -- as they interpret Lincoln`s party -- domination of the United States for years to come. Karl Rove`s hero, after all, is William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president of the United States, who, some argue, was responsible for creating GOP control of American politics for decades.

The current administration, perhaps more than any other in history, illustrates George Kennan`s observation that "[o]ur actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities." Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that the war in Iraq was begun essentially for domestic consumption (as White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. suggested to the New York Times in September 2002, when he famously said of Iraq war planning, "From a marketing point of view, you don`t introduce new products in August"). While all the reasons behind this tragic, idiotic war -- which turned out far worse than the "mission-accomplished" White House ever expected -- may never be fully known, it can be said with a strong degree of assurance that it was sold to the American public, at least in part, in order to morph Bush II, not elected by popular vote and low in the polls early in his presidency, into a decisive "commander in chief" so that his party would win the upcoming congressional -- and then presidential -- elections.

The neocons -- including, in all fairness, those among them honest in their unclear convictions -- happened to be around the White House (of course, they made sure they would be) to provide justification for Bush`s military actions after 9/11 with their Darwinian, dog-eat-dog, "us vs. them" view of the world. And so their "ideas" (made to sound slightly less harsh than WWIV in the phrase Global War on Terrorism) were cleared by Rove and other GOP politicos and used for a while by a domestically-driven White House to persuade American voters that the invasion of Iraq was an absolute necessity for the security of the country.

But now Americans are feeling increasingly critical of our Iraqi "catastrophic success." "The latest polls show that 53 percent of Americans feel the war was not worth fighting, 57 percent say they disapprove of Mr. Bush`s handling of Iraq, and 70 percent think the number of US casualties is an unacceptable price to have paid." To the Pentagon`s great concern, the military is having difficulties recruiting; national Guardsmen are angry about excessively long tours of duty in Iraq; spouses of soldiers complain about their loved ones being away from home for far too much time.

So, as their pro-war manifestos become less and less politically useful to the Bush administration, the neocons are getting a disappointing reward for their Bush-lovin`. Far from being asked to formulate policy to the extent that they doubtless would like, they have been relegated to playing essentially representational roles, reminiscent of the one performed by the simple-minded gardener named Chance played by Peter Sellers in the film Being There -- at the U.N. (John Bolton) and at the World Bank (Paul Wolfowitz), two institutions which no red-blooded Republican voters will ever care about, except as objects of hatred.

At the same time, and despite disquieting many foreigners by the selection of Bolton and Wolfowitz (widely perceived abroad as undiplomatic unilateralists) to serve in multinational organizations, the President appears to have recognized the existence of anti-American foreign public opinion, which has been intensely critical of the neocons` bellicose views and U.S. unilateral action in Iraq. The selection of spinmeister Karen Hughes, a Bush confidante who happened to be born in Paris (no, not Paris, Texas), as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department suggests that the White House staff has begun (against its gut instincts) to acknowledge what it dismissed in Bush`s first term -- the usefulness of "soft power" in dealing other nations. This may only be from fear of excessively bad news coming from abroad that could lead to lower opinion polls at home and thus threaten current Republican hegemony in America, but no matter.

We Don`t Demolish, We Democratize!

Few have actually been conned into the neos` war, whatever ingredient it be flavored with -- "IV," "long," or "millennium." Now the White House, far from promulgating neocon WWIV ideas, has been dropping most references to war as Bush`s second term begins. Our commander in chief, still undergoing an extreme make-over as a man who considers peaceful negotiations at least an option, is being turned into an advocate of the politically oppressed in other countries and so has come up with a new explanation to sell his dysfunctional foreign "policy": global democratization, with a focus on the Middle East.

Bush did mention democratization in his first term, but today it has suddenly become the newest leitmotif for explaining his misadventures abroad. What, he now asks the American people, are we doing overseas? And he responds, we`re not demolishing the world -- we`re democratizing it! And thanks to OUR democratizing so far in the Middle East, including the bombing and invading of Iraq, the Arab world is like Berlin when the wall came down. (Forget about the fact that these two events took place during different centuries and in very different parts of the world base on the implementation of very different American policies)!

And don`t you forget, Bush tells us, that we`re on a path to reform our social security system, far more important than the war in Iraq -- though Dubya`s call for personal accounts may, in appeal, prove the World War IV of domestic policy. As for democracy at home, that can wait.

So, after all the administration has done to ruin America`s moral standing and image overseas -- "preemptive" military strikes that violate simple morality and the basic rules of war; searching in vain for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction; mindlessly rushing to implement "regime change" in a far-off Third-World country, an ill-planned effort that could result in the establishment of an anti-western theocracy harmful to American interests; brutally incarcerating "terrorists" with little, if any, respect for international law; arrogantly bashing "old Europe" just to show off all-American Manichean machismo; and insulting millions abroad by writing off their opinions -- Americans are now being told by Dubya and his gang what we`ve really been up to all this time across the oceans: We`re democratizing the Middle East, and with great success thus far!

I don`t believe a word of it.

Here`s what the military newspaper Stars and Stripes wrote in 1919:

"Propaganda is nothing but a fancy name for publicity, and who knows the publicity game better than the Yanks? Why, the Germans make no bones about admitting that they learned the trick from us. Now the difference between a Boche and a Yank is just this -- that a Boche is some one who believes everything that`s told him and a Yank is some one who disbelieves everything that`s told him."

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned in protest against the invasion of Iraq, is affiliated with Georgetown University. Brown compiles a daily Public Diplomacy Press Review (PDPR) available free by requesting it at [e-mail]. Aside from public diplomacy, PDPR covers items such as anti-Americanism, cultural diplomacy, propaganda, foreign public opinion, and American popular culture abroad.

Copyright 2005 John Brown


posted March 30, 2005 at 11:07 am

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Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Das ganze Posting:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Bring ‘em on: One person killed and seventeen others wounded, five seriously, in Kirkuk car bombing targeting a Kurdish official. Another Kurdish official escaped an assassination attempt on Saturday.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi soldiers injured in car bombing east of Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi soldiers and four guerillas killed in two hour firefight in Al-Touz. Three Iraqi truck drivers executed by guerilla group, video of killings released. US Embassy in Bucharest announces that it has received report that an American was kidnapped along with the three Romanian journalists mentioned yesterday. Director of South Oil Company survived an assassination attempt in Basra. One Iraqi contractor killed and his driver injured east of Balad. Three farmers injured in roadside bombing in Al-Is’haqi.

Bring ‘em on: Four civilians killed in bomb attack aimed at a US Humvee on a bridge in Mosul, no word on US casualties. Convoy of security forces ambushed in Mosul, police claim they killed 17 attackers and captured 14.

“Non-hostile”: One US Marine killed in a “non-hostile incident” in Iraq. The statement said the soldier died "in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Executions: A video surfaced Tuesday on the Internet showing three drivers who said they worked for a Jordanian trucking company being shot by gunmen claiming to belong to a militant Islamic group in Iraq.

The three men were shown being shot in the back of the head in a desert-like area. The identities and nationalities of the men were unclear due to the poor quality of the tape, but their accents appeared to be Iraqi.

"We don`t see any difference between them and the Americans," a statement attached to the video said. "On the contrary, they work night and day in aiding the Americans to find the houses and locations of the mujahedeen (holy warriors)."

Kidnapping: One of three Romanian journalists abducted Monday night near their Baghdad hotel later sent a text message to her newsroom saying, "Help, this is not a joke, we`ve been kidnapped."

Petre Mihai Bacanu, managing editor of Romania Libera, said the three had disappeared shortly after interviewing interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

Bacanu said no group had claimed responsibility and no ransom demand had been made.

Iraqi security forces: Over the past 18 months, Washington`s estimate of the number of trained Iraqi security forces has gyrated up and down as if it were a stock market index.

In April of 2004, for instance, the Defense Department estimated that 206,000 Iraqi security forces were in place. But that number simply reflected personnel on the payroll - many of whom were either administrative officials, or otherwise unprepared to fight. So a year ago the Pentagon revised its Iraqi force figure downward, to 132,000.

By September of 2004, the number had crept back up to 160,000. But further investigation proved that this figure included substantial numbers of people who protect facilities - in essence, night watchmen. In addition, some trained forces did not have equipment rendering them able to fight.

So last fall the number was revised downward again, to 90,000, Rear Adm. William Sullivan, Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a House hearing. "We are just now beginning ... a qualitative assessment of how the various Iraqi security forces are doing, modeling it after the kinds of systems we use for our own military to measure unit readiness," said Adm. Sullivan.

Due to missteps and a misjudgment about the strength of the insurgency at its onset, the US really did not begin a concerted training effort until 10 months ago, said Cordesman. "The Iraqis actually involved in shaping Iraq`s new forces are not pessimistic," he noted. "Most believe that Iraqi forces are growing steadily better with time, will acquire the experience and quality to deal with much of the insurgency during 2005, and should be able to secure much of the country by 2006."


Fundamentalists: Celia Garabet thought students were roughhousing. Sinan Saeed was sure a fight had erupted. Within a few minutes, on a sunny day at a riverside park, they realized something different was afoot. A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles, pistols, thick wire cables and sticks had charged into crowds of hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students and hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men dancing and singing, music playing and couples mixing.

That melee on March 15 and its fallout have redrawn the debate that has shadowed Iraq`s second-largest city since the U.S. invasion in 2003: What is the role of Islam in daily life? In once-libertine Basra, a battered port in southern Iraq near the Persian Gulf, the question dominates everything these days, from the political parties in power to the style of dress in the streets.


Iraqi Politics

Crisis: Iraq`s parliament erupted in acrimony at only its second sitting on Tuesday and journalists were thrown out after legislators berated leaders for failing to agree on a new government, two months after elections.

When parliamentarians were told that despite last-minute talks that delayed the session no agreement had been reached, even on the post of parliamentary speaker, several stood up to say leading politicians were letting down the Iraqi people.

"The Iraqi people who defied the security threats and voted -- what shall we tell them?" Hussein al-Sadr, a politician in the bloc led by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, asked the assembly before the news blackout.

As the meeting grew heated, the interim speaker ordered journalists to leave and Iraqi television abruptly switched to Arab music. Allawi walked out of the session shortly afterwards.

"You can say we are in a crisis," Barham Salih, a leading Kurdish politician, told reporters.


Allawi walks out: Prime Minister Iyad Allawi walked out of a meeting of Iraq`s parliament on Tuesday after angry scenes erupted, with assembly members berating Shi`ite and Kurdish leaders for failing to agree on a government.

The speaker of parliament ordered journalists to leave and declared the meeting would be held in secret, after politicians -- one of them a leading member of Allawi`s bloc -- denounced a failure to reach agreement two months after the historic Jan. 30 polls.

Deadlines move back: At immediate issue was the appointment of a speaker for the 275-member parliament. But the broader concern was the failure to form a transitional government and start work on a new Iraqi constitution.

With the setback yesterday, the seating of a government remains several days if not weeks away. And leading officials admitted that a mid-August deadline for the writing of the constitution now seems impossibly optimistic.

Instead, they predicted, the assembly ultimately would have to invoke a clause in the transitional law giving it an extra six months to work. That would delay full elections for a permanent government, perhaps until June 2006.

"Realistically you cannot write a constitution in three and a half months," said Hajem al-Hassani, the interim minister of industry and minerals who is a member of the largest — with only five seats — Sunni bloc in the assembly. "Some people say we have lots of things in common, but I think this is just wishful thinking. It is going to be very difficult. There are going to be lots of negotiations."

Writing the constitution is expected to be a far thornier process, with far greater implications, than setting up an interim government that is scheduled to hold office only until the end of 2005. Yet the Shiites and Kurds have spent weeks negotiating and renegotiating issues of authority, territory and money.

Public reaction: After a chaotic session yesterday that was delayed for nearly three hours, then abruptly closed to the public, the Sunni Arab minority – dominant under former dictator Saddam Hussein and believed to be the backbone of the insurgency – was given until Sunday to come up with a candidate to serve as speaker.

“We saw that things were confused today, so we gave (the Sunnis) a last chance,” said Hussein al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric and member of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s coalition. “We expect the Sunni Arab brothers to nominate their candidate. Otherwise, we will vote on a candidate on Sunday.”

Iraqis, already frustrated with drawn-out negotiations, were angered by the meeting.

“They haven’t been able to even name a parliament speaker, so how will they rule Iraq when they’re only after their personal interests and gains?” said 35-year-old Sunni Sahib Jassim, a college student. “They don’t care about the Iraqi people.”

More public reaction: Iraqi voters aren`t happy. They don`t care that some of the biggest political changes ever to happen in their lifetime are going on in their country. All they know is that the electricity still is off for hours every day, the water doesn`t always flow out of the faucets, there are still long gas queues at the stations, and the situation still seems pretty lawless in the streets.

"We`re very disappointed," said Hathem Hassan Thani, 31, a political science graduate student at Baghdad University. "Some personalities are trying to make the political operation fail, and they don`t want to give positions to the Sunni Muslims."

"The Iraqi people are very itchy. The street is very nervous," said Saad Jawar Qindeel, a spokesman for the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of two dominant religious-based parties that won the United Iraqi Alliance ticket. "There`s a lot of talk of people ready to protest."

Commander Codpiece weighs in: President Bush, on a day of political turmoil in Baghdad, acknowledged Tuesday that Iraqis are divided over the future of their country but said the differences "will be resolved through debate and persuasion instead of force and intimidation."

In Baghdad, the fledgling parliament failed to agree on who would be its speaker in a chaotic session that exposed deep divides among the National Assembly`s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish members who were elected Jan. 30.

Bush called Tuesday`s session "another step on the road to a free society" and said the United States looks forward to working with the government that emerges.

So exactly why is it that the Iraqis must settle their internal differences through debate and persuasion but we got to settle our differences with Iraq through force and intimidation?

Our new model for the Arab world: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has alarmed many reformist Arabs with comments suggesting a new U.S. approach that promotes rapid political change without regard for internal stability.

Rice said in an interview with the Washington Post last week the Middle East status quo was not stable and she doubted it would be stable soon. Washington would speak out for "freedom" without offering a model or knowing what the outcome would be.

"This a very dangerous scheme. Anarchy will be out of control," said Hassan Nafaa, a professor of political science at Cairo University and an advocate of gradual change.

A liberal Arab diplomat, who asked not to be named, said: "They seem to be supporting chaos and instability as a pretext for bringing democracy. But people would rather live under undemocratic rule than in the chaotic atmosphere of Iraq, for example, which the Americans tout as a model."

Helena Cobban, a writer on Middle East affairs based in the United States, said: "She (Rice) reveals a totally cavalier attitude to the whole non-trivial concept of social-political stability in Middle Eastern countries."

"So it looks as though Arc of Instability may now actually be the goal of U.S. policy, rather than its diagnosis of an existing problem," she added.

Yes, that’s the same Helena who regularly graces our comments section. Kudos to her for being a voice of sanity. We might add to her analysis that that the interim rules established by the CPA all but guarantee a deadlock in forming a permanent Iraqi government and there are also credible reports that the Shiite votes were deliberately undercounted to ensure that they couldn’t muster a majority without a coalition, thus rendering the whole situation even more unstable.

Traitor Bob explains: Determination high in the Bush administration to begin irreversible withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq this year is reinforced by the presence at the State Department of the most dominant secretary since Henry Kissinger three decades ago. Condoleezza Rice is expected to support administration officials who want to leave even if what is left behind does not constitute perfection.

Amid the presidential campaign`s furious debate over Iraq, I reported last Sept. 20 ("Quick exit from Iraq is likely") about strong feeling in the policymaking apparatus to get out of Iraq in 2005 even if democracy and peace had not been achieved there. My column evoked widespread expressions of disbelief, but changes over the last six months have only strengthened the view of my Bush administration sources that the escape from Iraq should begin once a permanent government is in place in Baghdad.

Traitor Robert Novak is a revolting excuse for a human being and he belongs in prison but he does have excellent sources throughout the Bush administration. This column is worth a read to help put the above articles into a perspective. It would be just like the Busheviks to declare victory and pull out enough troops to make it look credible just in time for the 2006 elections. You can’t get more cynical than this crew.

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Latest Fatality: Mar 28, 2005

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

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[URLDie Welt des Paul Wolfowitz]http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/do…[/url]

Herkommen, Lehre und politischer Aufstieg eines "demokratischen Realisten" / Von Bernd W. Kubbig

Der stellvertretende US-Verteidigungsminister Paul Wolfowitz gilt als maßgeblicher Stratege des Irak-Kriegs. Nun soll er nach dem Willen von US-Präsident George W. Bush Weltbankpräsident werden. Gegen diese Pläne regt sich international Unbehagen. Der Autor analysiert die Entwicklung und das Profil des umstrittenen Politikers.

"Je mehr Sie sich die internationalen Angelegenheiten ansehen, desto mehr erkennen Sie, dass die Verhinderung eines ‚nuklearen Holocaust` (‚holocaust of nuclear war`), die Verhinderung eines konventionellen Krieges und die Sache menschlicher Freiheit wirklich Dinge sind, die Hand in Hand gehen. Sie können wirklich nicht sagen, nun, die Welt kann friedlich sein, so lange die halbe Welt versklavt ist."

Mit diesen - progressiven - Sätzen, die zum Teil ähnlich in der von Wolfowitz mitverfassten Nationalen Sicherheitsstrategie vom September 2002 stehen, beschreibt der Stellvertretende Verteidigungsminister rückblickend seinen intellektuellen Paradigmenwechsel. Dieser "paradigm change" begann mit seiner Tätigkeit 1983 als Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs der Reagan-Administration auf den Philippinen, und er setzte sich in seiner dreijährigen Tätigkeit als Botschafter in Indonesien, dem Inselreich mit der größten muslimischen Bevölkerung, fort. Wolfowitz war nur einer von mehreren ehemaligen "Scoop Jackson Republicans", die in der neuen republikanischen Administration einen führenden Posten bekamen; dies unterstreicht sowohl die ideelle Herkunft dieser Gruppierung von Neokonservativen als auch ihren Grad an stabiler Vernetzung. Jeane Kirkpatrick wurde UN-Botschafterin, Joshua Muravchik ihr Stellvertreter, Richard Perle Assistant Secretary of Defense (er nahm Frank Gaffney und Douglas Feith in seinen Stab auf), General Rowny wurde zum Chefunterhändler in den strategischen Rüstungskontrollgesprächen mit der UdSSR ernannt, der Sowjetunion-Fachmann Richard Pipes in den Nationalen Sicherheitsrat im Weißen Haus berufen, und Max Kampelman erhielt den Posten des Hauptunterhändlers für die Menschenrechtsgespräche mit der Sowjetunion.

Erfahrungen in Asien

Die jahrelangen Erfahrungen in Asien prägten Paul Wolfowitz nachhaltig und fügten seinem Weltbild eine neue Dimension zu. Wie viele Neokonservative hat er versucht, Ronald Reagan zum Ursprung des programmatischen Engagements von Republikanern für demokratische Transformationen zu machen. Dabei war es Wolfowitz selbst, der auf die Übereinstimmungen mit der interventionistischen Außenpolitik Clintons hinwies; sie wurde indes von der Mehrheit der eher zurückhaltend-konservativ denkenden Republikaner skeptisch beurteilt. Dessen ungeachtet hat es den Anschein, dass auch der Neokonservative Wolfowitz der Demokratischen Partei ihre ureigenste Domäne liberaler, demokratiemissionarischer Weltordnungspolitik streitig machen will. Diese Tradition verbindet sich mit dem Namen von US-Präsident Woodrow Wilson aus der Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs. Wilson hat die blutigste Antinomie eines demokratischen Friedens formuliert, als er es in seiner Botschaft an den Kongress am 2. April 1917 rechtfertigte, einen letzten Krieg für die menschliche Freiheit zu führen - "making the world safe for democracy" - um Kriege für immer zu beenden. Aber Wolfowitz (wie auch viele andere Neokonservative ) setzen sich aus mehreren Gründen von Wilson ab. Er steht für zwei von ihnen abgelehnte Prinzipien: für Multilateralismus (Völkerbund) und für das Selbstverständnis eines US-Hegemons, der sich in seiner außenpolitischen Handlungsfreiheit einschränkt. Wilson konnte zudem bei der Demokratisierung keine optimistisch stimmende ‚Erfolgsbilanz` vorweisen.

Wolfowitz` Versuch, Ronald Reagan zum Ausgangspunkt des programmatischen Engagements von Republikanern für das Ziel demokratischer Transformationen zu machen, beginnt mit einem Beispiel der Entschlossenheit des gerade gewählten Präsidenten und seiner engsten Beratern im Weißen Haus. Reagans persönlicher Freund, der damalige Stellvertretende Außenminister William Clark, machte sich stark dafür, das Büro für Menschenrechte in seinem Ministerium nicht zu schließen. Dabei hatte der Kongress die Nominierung von Reagans erster Wahl für den Posten des Assistant Secretary for Human Rights gerade abgelehnt. Im Außenministerium waren es die "so genannten Realisten", die Wolfowitz zufolge dieses Büro "weghaben" wollten.

Die Fragen der Menschenrechte, der Demokratisierung und der Intervention haben bei Wolfowitz nicht nur eine lange Vorgeschichte, wenn man den letzten Irakkrieg als Bezugspunkt nimmt. Vielmehr weisen sie auch ein beständiges Profil des "demokratischen Realisten" auf, deren Kernelemente lauten:

1. Maßgeblich, wo und wie die Vereinigten Staaten demokratisieren und intervenieren, bleiben die nationalen Interessen der USA, wie diese von der Bevölkerung und ihren gewählten Vertretern definiert werden. Der Vorrang nationaler US-Interessen gilt besonders für den Einsatz militärischer Gewalt.

2. Demokratisierung kann kein absolutes Prinzip amerikanischer Außenpolitik (und anderer demokratischer Staaten) sein. Vielmehr muss man die Förderung von Demokratie von Fall zu Fall entscheiden.

3. Zwischen US-Interessen und -Idealen muss es keine "scharfe Trennung" geben - Demokratisierung kann vielmehr amerikanischen Interessen dienen.

4. Die Zusammenarbeit mit Diktatoren ist dann moralisch gerechtfertigt, wenn es sich um autoritäre - im Gegensatz zu totalitären - Regimen handelt, die offen für einen evolutionären "institutionellen Wandel" sind und keines "revolutionären Wechsels" bedürfen.

5. Freiheit führt letztlich zu Frieden - Beziehungen in einer Welt totalitärer Staaten konstituieren keinen Frieden, auch wenn dies im Umkehrschluss heißen kann, dass demokratische Länder nicht so friedlich sein müssen, wie ihnen unterstellt wird.


Doppelte Standards

Kurzum, die Demokratisierung ist bei Wolfowitz ein - flexibel-opportunistisch zu handhabendes - Element, dem im Falle des Irak eine große Bedeutung zukommt. Zu diesem Profil des "demokratischen Realisten" Wolfowitz gehört implizit auch die "nicht-demokratische" Komponente, die er aber, soweit ich sehen kann, nirgendwo explizit anspricht: dass es im dominierenden "nationalen Interesse" der USA notwendig ist, mit autoritären oder gar totalitären Staaten zu kooperieren; diese wiederum sind jedoch nicht nur wegen ihrer inneren Struktur, sondern auch aufgrund ihres Außenverhaltens mit den demokratischen Prinzipien der amerikanischen Hegemonie unvereinbar. Die von Jeane Kirkpatrick getroffene Unterscheidung zwischen den beiden despotischen Ausprägungen kann als eine moralisch-politische Legitimation verstanden werden, um mit den meisten Regierungen der Welt wegen ihrer prinzipiellen Reformierbarkeit "demokratiekompatibel" zusammenzuarbeiten. Die - Kritik geradezu einladende - Politik "doppelter Standards" ist damit programmiert.
Wolfowitz` Erfahrungen mit den Philippinen sind für sein handlungsleitendes Weltbild besonders bedeutsam, auch im Hinblick auf den Irak. In seiner Zeit als Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs war er Mitgestalter eines friedlich-reformerischen Regimewandels, der Ferdinand Marcos und seine Clique zum Abdanken zwang. Die Philippinen fielen unter den Bedingungen des dominierenden Ost-West-Konflikts für Wolfowitz exemplarisch in die Kategorie autoritärer, aber zur Reform fähiger Regime, die durch kommunistische Subversion bedroht waren. Dort erschien es aus Wolfowitz` Sicht damals aussichtslos, sowohl die anwachsenden Proteste gegen das Marcos-Regime einzudämmen als auch die Despotie durch einen militärischen Staatsstreich abzuschaffen. Die Filipinos sollten letztlich selbst entscheiden, was sie wollten, und die USA nutzten nach Kräften die "Revitalisierung demokratischer Institutionen" als das wirksamste Steuerungsmittel. Die Demokratisierung erschien für Washington unabdingbar und vorteilhaft. Denn die sich abzeichnende Alternative - ein kommunistisches Regime - hätte für die Vereinigten Staaten in der gesamten Region bedeutet, im geopolitischen und ideologischen Konkurrenzkampf insbesondere mit den Sowjets in die Hinterhand zu geraten. Das ideelle Ziel der Demokratisierung und der angestrebte evolutionäre Regimewandel waren also keine Werte für sich genommen, sondern fügten sich vorzüglich in das Geflecht übergeordneter US-Interessen ein. Die Unterstützung von Reformen erwies sich damit als der viel versprechende Weg, um in jener Region Stabilitäts-, Friedens- und Freiheitspolitik zu betreiben, die gleichbedeutend war mit einer Sicherung amerikanischer Interessen und Einflussnahme.

Zwischen den gegensätzlichen Demokratisierungsmodellen Philippinen und Irak lagen vier US-Interventionen, die Wolfowitz in den Neunzigerjahren zustimmend oder ablehnend beurteilte. Das zentrale Kriterium des "demokratischen Realisten" war auch jetzt das nationale Interesse der Vereinigten Staaten: Somalia - hier gab es kein signifikantes US-Interesse; sich dort auf das "nation-building" einzulassen, war der eigentliche Fehler, weil es eine Überforderung darstellte. Haiti - war für ihn die Anstrengung nicht wert. Dagegen Bosnien und der Kosovo - hier plädierte er für ein US-Engagement, einschließlich Militäraktionen, weil es sich in beiden Fällen um Opfer von anhaltenden Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit handelte. Vielleicht ist dies das Ereignis, bei dem die Sozialisation des polnischen Emigrantenkindes zu Buche schlug, dessen jüdischer Vater bereits 1920 in die Vereinigten Staaten emigriert war, und dessen Verwandte später in den Konzentrationslagern umkamen.

Im April 2002 äußerte Wolfowitz:

"(…) das, was in Europa im Zweiten Weltkrieg geschah, hat meine Ansichten über Politik und Außenpolitik im Allgemeinen beträchtlich geprägt. Ich denke, dass es eine schlimme Sache ist, wenn Menschen andere Menschen auslöschen und Menschen Minderheiten verfolgen. Das heißt nicht, dass wir jeden solcher Vorfälle verhindern können (…)."

Pauls Vater hielt diese Vergangenheit in den Gesprächen mit dem heranwachsenden Sohn beständig wach. Diese Sozialisation erklärt mit, warum Wolfowitz nicht nur für schutzbedürftige Minderheiten vor allem auf dem europäischen Kontinent eingetreten ist, sondern warum er Totalitarismus, auch in seiner terroristischen Variante, entschieden bekämpft. Bei ihm, und damit im politischen Washington, ist dieses "Weimar-Syndrom" gegenwärtig, also die Kombination einer schwachen Republik, des aufkommenden Nazi-Totalitarismus, verbunden mit einer Politik der Beschwichtigung gegenüber einem Diktator wie Hitler. In dieser Form, in seinen geschichtlichen Bezügen und in seinen Schattenseiten, ist der "alte Kontinent" für Wolfowitz prägend, der - anders als etwa der Emigrant Henry Kissinger - nie wirklich Transatlantiker war.

So sehr Wolfowitz sich in den 80-er, und vielleicht noch mehr in den 90-er Jahren, zu einem "demokratischen Realisten" oder "pragmatischen Idealisten" entwickelte, so sehr blieb das Moment des nationalen Interesses letztlich ausschlaggebend für sein Denken und Handeln. Aber das ideelle Moment selbst ist stark, und es ist ebenfalls nicht ohne die Tatsache zu erklären, dass der Akteur Wolfowitz auch Einwandererkind ist:

"Als Sohn eines Immigranten habe ich eine große Wertschätzung dafür, wie glücklich und gesegnet wir sind, in diesem Land zu leben - frei von Verfolgung und Furcht zu leben. Ich glaube seit langem, dass, sogar mehr noch als unsere großen Ressourcen, mehr noch als die Schönheit, die wir alle um uns herum sehen, mehr noch als unsere Schmelztiegel-Kultur und unsere militärische Macht, Amerikas größte Macht ist, wofür es steht."

Grenzen der Demokratieförderung

In Reagans Amtszeit wurde Wolfowitz auch Zeuge des großen "regime change" in der Sowjetunion, der gleichzeitig der historische Wandel einer Konfliktformation war. Wolfowitz gehörte zu jenen "hardlinern", die das autokratische Regime in Moskau mit seinen revolutionären Zielen dafür verantwortlich machten, dass es nicht zu einem gemeinsamen Verhaltenscode und zu einem Geflecht von gegenseitigen Abhängigkeiten kommen konnte. Deshalb war aus seiner Sicht die Entspannungspolitik der Nixon/Kissinger-Administration von Anfang an zum Scheitern verurteilt. Im Hinblick auf den ideologischen Hauptgegner von einst hat Wolfowitz ebenfalls wiederholt die "amerikanischen Ideale" als das "vielleicht stärkste Instrument" der USA bezeichnet, um das sowjetische Imperium zu schwächen und schließlich aufzulösen, mächtiger als die enormen Rüstungskapazitäten. "Demokratie" erwies sich selbst bei dieser historischen Transformation als "Machtinstrument". Was seine Argumentation ausblendet, ist, dass das von ihm grundsätzlich abgelehnte und bekämpfte Entspannungskonzept durchaus eine reformorientierte Umsetzung "westlicher" (also keinesfalls nur "amerikanischer") "Ideale" war; zudem leistete die Détentepolitik einen Beitrag zum friedlichen Zusammenbruch der UdSSR.

Der oftmals nur revolutionären Rhetorik stand zudem eine pragmatisch-moderate Praxis gegenüber, die sich mit dem Namen des - von Wolfowitz verehrten - Außenministers George Shultz verband. Aber selbst Wolfowitz war sich der Tatsache bewusst, dass die Demokratieförderung der USA an ihre Grenzen stoßen könne. Das gilt wegen des totalitären Charakters nicht nur für die Sowjetunion bis kurz vor ihrem Zusammenbruch, sondern im Übrigen auch im Hinblick auf China. Ein demokratisches China, so Wolfowitz, dürfte sich auch friedlicher verhalten; damit argumentiert er wie ein vorsichtiger Vertreter des demokratischen Friedens, der um die "Antinomien" dieses Konzepts zu wissen scheint.

Wirtschaft: [URLWolfo-Witz]http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/wirtschaft_und_boerse/wirtschaft/?cnt=653866[/URL]

Zur Person

Paul Wolfowitz, geboren 1943, ist politischer Berater von George W. Bush und Vizechef des Pentagons. Er gilt als Neokonservativer, der sich leidenschaftlich für Israel und eine starke US-amerikanische Militärmacht vor allem auch im Nahen Osten einsetzt. Auf Grund der von vielen als fragwürdig angesehenen Rechtfertigung des militärischen Einsatzes in Irak ist Wolfowitz äußerst umstritten.

Ende der 80er Jahre war er unter Präsident Ronald Reagan US-Botschafter in Indonesien. Damals befand sich Osttimor im blutigen Unabhängigkeitskampf gegen den indonesischen Diktator Hadji Mohamed Suharto, dessen Truppen Osttimor okkupiert hielten.

In den 90er Jahren leitete Wolfowitz als Dekan die Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C. SAIS ist eine Einrichtung der Johns Hopkins University mit Hauptsitz in Baltimore, Maryland und hat sich auf Internationale Beziehungen (International Relations) spezialisiert.

US-Präsident Bush schlug Wolfowitz als Nachfolger von Weltbankpräsident James Wolfensohn vor, dessen fünfjährige Amtszeit am 1. Juni 2005 endet. ber


Der Autor

Bernd W. Kubbig ist Koordinator der US-bezogenen Forschung an der Hessischen Sitftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK). An der Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität lehrt er als Privatdozent. Er studierte in Marburg (Lahn) und an der Harvard-Universität in Cambridge (US-Bundesstaat Massachusetts).

Seine Habilitationsschrift erschien im November 2004: Wissen als Machtfaktor im Kalten Krieg. Naturwissenschaftler und die Raketenabwehr der USA, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag 2004.

Der dokumentierte Beitrag ist ein Auszug aus dem Habilitationsvortrag des Autors .Gehalten hat er ihn in der vorliegenden, aktualisierten Fassung im Rahmen des "Dialogforums deutscher und iranischer Experten" am 26. September 2004 in Teheran und bei einer Tagung der Heinrich-Böll- Stiftung, der Bogazici Universität Istanbul und des Verbandes der Unternehmer und Geschäftsleute in der Türkei (Tüsiad) am 28. Februar 2005 in Istanbul.

Auf der Website des von ihm geleiteten Projekts "Raketenabwehrforschung International", das von der Deutschen Stiftung Friedensforschung (DSF) gefördert wird, ist sein HSFK-Report mit dem Titel "Wolfowitz` Welt verstehen: Entwicklung und Profil eines ‚demokratischen Realisten`" ist im Volltext hier abrufbar. ber

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Über Senator `Scoop` Jackson, der im vorherigen Posting erwähnt wird, gibt es einige interessante Geschichten.
Er war der Erste, der vorschlug die UDSSR mit Atombomben zu belegen und gilt als Ziehvater von Perle und auch von Wolfowitz.
Über ihn habe ich vor längerer Zeit mal eine Folge von Artikel aus einer US-Tageszeitung in diesen Thread eingestellt.

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Published on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 by David Corn
John Bolton: Ally of CIA-linked Drugrunners
by David Corn
http://www.davidcorn.com/

John Bolton is a bad penny. He keeps coming back. As I`ve written before, there are plenty of reasons why he`s a horrible pick to be US ambassador to the United Nations. Even if you believe the UN needs reform, you don`t send a pyromaniac to fix a house of sticks. Beyond his UN-bashing, Bolton has not just been extreme in his foreign policy views, he has been wrong and reckless: accusing Cuba of developing biological weapons and Syria of posing a serious WMD threat without proof. (The CIA felt obliged to block him from testifying before Congress on Syria and WMDs.) He also has had his brushes with scandal, receiving money from a political slush fund in Taiwan and advocating for Taiwan in congressional testimony (when he was not in government) without revealing he was paid by a Taiwanese entity to write policy papers for it. (He might have even broken the law by failing to register as a foreign agent.) Recently 59 former US ambassadors signed a letter opposing Bolton`s nomination as ambassador to the UN; forty-six of these ambassadors served in Republican administrations. (For a full text of the letter, click here.) Now, an alert reader has uncovered more information critical of Bolton. It just happens to be something I wrote with Jefferson Morley for The Nation sixteen years ago--a column which had totally escaped my aging mind.

Readers over the age of 40 might recall that in the late 1980s, there was a fierce fight pitting the Reagan and Bush I administrations against a few gutsy Democrats in Congress--Senator John Kerry among them--who were trying to investigate allegations that supporters of the Reagan-backed contra rebels in Central America were involved in drugrunning. Rather than cooperate in the search for truth, Reagan and Bush I officials withheld documents from the Democrats. They also badmouthed the investigations and did all they could to marginalize these inquiries as nothing but partisan-driven efforts of conspiracy-minded wingnuts. And, to a degree, the GOP obstructionists succeeded. The Iran-contra committees stayed away from the matter. The report produced by Kerry`s subcommittee--which concluded there was evidence that supporters of the CIA-assisted contras were drug smugglers--received little media attention. Yet years later, the CIA`s own inspector general released two reports that acknowledged the CIA had knowingly worked with contra supporters suspected of drugrunning. Kerry and the others had been right. But the sly spinners of the Reagan-Bush administrations had succeeded in preventing the contra drug connection from becoming a full-blown scandal.

And who was one of the Reagan/Bush officials who strove to thwart Kerry and other pursuers of this politically inconvenient truth? By now you have guessed it: John Bolton. Read on:

From Meese to the UN; John Bolton, nominee for Assistant Secretary of State
for International Organization Affairs
The Nation, April 17, 1989
By David Corn and Jefferson Morley

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee should take a good look at John Bolton, the nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, a position in which he would, among other things, act as a liaison between the US government and the UN. Currently Assistant AG in the Justice Department`s civil division, Bolton was known to be one of Edwin Meese 3rd`s most loyal lieutenants. At Justice, Bolton developed a reputation for combativeness. When he attacked the independent counsel law, even a White House spokesman accused him of being intemperate.

Bolton`s record as Assistant AG for the Office of Legislative Affairs in 1986 and 1987 merits special scrutiny. He "tried to torpedo" Sen. John Kerry`s inquiry into allegations of contra drug smuggling and gunrunning, a committee aide says. When Kerry requested information from the Justice Department, Bolton`s office gave it the long stall, a Kerry aide notes. In fact, says another Congressional aide, Bolton`s staff worked actively with the Republican senators who opposed Kerry`s efforts.

In 1986 this chum of Meese also refused to give Peter Rodino, then chair of he House Judiciary Committee, documents concerning the Iran/contra scandal and Meese`s involvement in it, Later, when Congressional investigators were probing charges that the Justice Department had delayed an inquiry into gunrunning to the contras, Bolton was again the spoiler. According to Hayden Gregory, chief counsel of a House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, Bolton blocked an arrangement by which his staff had agreed to let House investigators interview officials of the US Attorney`s office in Miami. Bolton refused to speak to us on the subject.

Last year Legal Times reported that Bolton, who earned $330,000 in 1984 as a partner at a blue-blood DC law firm, had contacted several private firms hoping to parlay his government experience into a lucrative lobbying job. None were interested in a tainted Meese disciple. Fortunately for him, George Bush and James Baker are less discriminating.

That article is a blast from the past. But Bolton`s truth-smothering endeavors back then are consistent with his subsequent career. He has been an ideological hatchet man, saying whatever he needs to say (whether it`s true or not) to press forward his hawkish agenda. Back in the 1980s, he blocked inquiries into the CIA`s involvement with drug runners. Now he complains about corruption at the UN and claims to be a force for truth and reform. As a cynical and partisan situationalist who poses as a frank and blunt idealist, he does indeed represent the Bush administration. But the nation deserves better representation at the UN.

© 2005 David Corn

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Das ist ein Artikel über Sen. Jackson und die Ursprünge der NeoCons. Jackson war Demokrat.
Ich habe aber noch einen ausführlicheren mehrteiligen Artikel hier im Thread.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/115505_focus06.shtml

P-I Focus: The road the U.S. traveled to Baghdad was paved by `Scoop` Jackson

The hawks` hawk

Sunday, April 6, 2003

ROGER MORRIS

America`s attack on Iraq started 65 years ago in the wooded curving inlets and gentle fog of Snohomish County.

At least that`s one genealogy of the war, curling back through closed-door politics where so much of U.S. history happens.

Nineteen thirty-eight was the year Henry Martin Jackson, an ambitious 26-year-old Democrat from Everett fresh out of the University of Washington Law School, was elected prosecuting attorney for Snohomish County. As usual, few outside Washington state noticed the obscure local vote. But it launched a fateful political career, and ultimately led to the U.S. missiles, tanks and troops flung into Iraq last month.

Jackson rose rapidly from the Everett courthouse. Making a name for himself chasing bootleggers and gamblers, he shot on to Congress in 1940. He served five terms in the House, broken by a stint as a World War II GI, and by 1952, had gained the Senate, where "Scoop," as he was called, became a national force. A middle-of-the-road, pro-labor Democrat on domestic issues and an early champion of environmental causes, Jackson was chairman for nearly two decades of the Interior Committee (later Energy and Natural Resources) and sat on the Government Operations Committee and Joint Committee on Atomic Energy -- all major fiefdoms in dispensing federal money and wielding influence in politics and policy. One of Capitol Hill`s more vigorous legislators, he was a main author and driving force of the legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency, major wilderness preservation and other landmark acts.

With another local prosecutor raised to Senate power, King County`s Warren Magnuson, Jackson also saw to it that generous appropriations and contracts were sluiced to his home state, especially the Puget Sound area. "Scoop" especially would be known scathingly in congressional corridors as the "Senator from Boeing" for being on-call to the corporate giant.

But it was in national security that Jackson`s impact was deepest. The hawks` hawk, he was to the right of many in both parties. Not even the massive retaliation strategy and roving CIA interventions of the Eisenhower `50s were tough enough for him. Perched on the mighty Armed Services Committee as well as his other bases of power, he went on over the next decade to goad the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, urging the Vietnam War, fatter military budgets, stronger support of Israel in the Middle East and a more aggressive foreign policy in general.

It was then, 40 years ago, that Jackson began to be linked directly, if furtively, to some of the uglier and little-known origins of the war on Iraq in 2003. Overseeing the CIA`s "black budget" for covert operations and interventions from a subcommittee of Armed Services, he was one of a handful of senators who gave a nod to two U.S.-backed coups in Iraq, one in 1963 and again in 1968. Those plots brought Saddam Hussein to power amid bloodbaths in which the CIA, exacting the price for its support, handed Saddam and his Baath Party cohorts lists of supposed anti-U.S. Iraqis to be killed.

The result was the systematic murder of several hundred and as many as several thousand people, in which Saddam himself participated. Whatever the toll, accounts agree that CIA killing lists comprised much of Iraq`s young educated elite -- doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military officers and political figures -- Iraqis who would not be there to oppose Saddam`s growing tyranny over ensuing years or to help rebuild or govern Iraq, as the United States now hopes to do, after the current war.

By 1969, Jackson was so prominent in military and national security affairs, and so at odds on those issues with many in his own party, that newly elected Republican Richard Nixon thought to name the Washington Democrat his secretary of defense, though the senator declined the job.

But Snohomish County`s favorite son coveted the White House himself and was soon a sharp critic of Nixon`s arms control and détente. Added to his cold warring was even greater zeal for Israel, a certainty that the United States should endorse the Israelis` own hard line -- absorbing the West Bank after its conquest in the 1967 Middle East War, the long-term subjugation of Palestine and an abiding hostility to Iraq and other Arab states.

As Jackson grew nationally prominent, he attracted the inevitable ambitious staffers and partisans boarding his coattails to advance both their own hawkish views and themselves. Among them was a recent graduate of the University of Southern California who was fanatic about amassing and projecting U.S. power, especially on behalf of Israel, and not least about his own strategic genius. The young New Yorker named Richard Perle became Jackson`s chief assistant from 1969 to 1980.

I saw these origins firsthand working in the Senate in the early `70s after resigning from Henry Kissinger`s National Security Council staff over the invasion of Cambodia. Seen from the inside, Jackson`s Senate heft was considerable. Though a relatively small, unprepossessing figure as politicians go, he usually did his homework, could be incisive about important details his colleagues let slip and struck a shrewd balance between conviction and expedience. Much of his Capitol Hill power derived from his unique role, which he played well, as a northern Democrat with solid labor backing and other party credentials yet whose hard-line international view drew the support of many Republicans and the most conservative Southerners on either side of the aisle.

His belligerence also exerted (and still does) a kind of extortionist pull on liberal Democrats deathly afraid of appearing "weak" on national defense or in standing up to the Russians and anyone else. There was no question that "Scoop," from the mountains and straits of the far northwest corner of the continental United States, caught the unease and reflexive combativeness of much of America in dealing with a planet we knew so little despite our power. Still, in the `70s, a more worldly post-Vietnam moderation and sensibility in the leadership of both parties appeared to have passed Jackson by, leaving his chauvinism and foreign policy animus marginal, sometimes looking a bit crazed.

As for Perle, he was a pear-shaped, slightly fish-eyed man of self-consciously affected locution, the too-hungry, too-sly and too-toadying aide familiar in bureaucracies public and private. His views were patently uninformed, and he wore his conference-room warrior`s zealotry no more gracefully than his expensive blue pinstriped suits. It seemed obvious that the bellicose policies he and Jackson embodied were not only wrong for America, but would also usher Israel into the ruinous isolation I and other admirers of its brave people most feared. "Scoop" & Co. would remain, I assumed, an extremist fringe. How wrong I was.

Jackson, of course, never got the White House. With big pro-Israeli money though stolid style, he lost the presidential nomination in 1976 to Jimmy Carter, who offered a fresh face in the national weariness in the wake of the Watergate scandal. But when Jackson died seven years later back in Everett, ending more than four decades on the national scene, he had spawned a cult following. There was always much less substantively than met the eye in the lavishly financed and much-propagandized neoconservative cabal taking power under President Reagan, and now again under George W. Bush. In any case, its throwback foreign policy was, and is, "Scoop" Jackson warmed over -- the red, white and blue, Israel-first, bombs-away dawn of an old era.

For his part, Perle missed a long-coveted chance to make presidential policy when Jackson stumbled in 1976. But the aide promptly moved on to the next coattails in classic, if banal, Washington, D.C., style. Relentlessly levering the system he learned under Jackson, he cultivated the media, courted politicians in both parties and used old allies in the politically potent pro-Israeli and military-industrial lobbies. By the Reagan `80s, he was an assistant secretary of defense, veteran of the now-venerated Jackson tradition of military expansion and a self-promoted strategist for a Republican president as comfortably as for a Democratic senator.

Whatever "Scoop" Jackson`s mix of political principle and opportunism, Perle`s politics were largely himself.

On the way up, Perle gathered his own disciples -- Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and others who would go on themselves in similar fashion to become key officials in the current administration. Like Perle, who was appointed to chair the administration`s influential Defense Policy Board, they`re all longtime advocates, years before the Sept. 11 attacks, of pre-emptive American military invasions in Iraq and elsewhere and of implicit, if not open, support for the expansionist and repressive policies of their right-wing counterparts in Israel. By all accounts, their concerted influence was decisive in going to war in Iraq.

Grown wealthy in the revolving door between government and corporate plunder, Perle has drawn notoriety lately not only for his intimate ties to Israel but also for his connections to companies standing to profit obscenely from the war he`s mongered. When Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr. and Sen. Carl Levin began to prod Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the disreputable dealings, Perle angrily resigned March 27 from the chairmanship of the board, though he continues to sit as a full-fledged member of the pivotal body. Token resignation aside, it all reeks of the seedy conflict-of-interest "Scoop" once would have prosecuted in Snohomish County. But in the rest of their martial provincialism, Perle and his minions are Jackson`s offspring.

By the way, Snohomish County`s current prosecuting attorney, if you hadn`t noticed, is a young woman named Janice Ellis. She seems dedicated to her job. But you can`t tell where these county officials may go. Please let us know if Ellis begins to take an unusual interest in national security.

Roger Morris, who served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, is an investigative journalist and historian. He is at work in Seattle on a book on U.S. covert policies in the Near East and South Asia.

© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Das ist der andere Zweig der Neocons mit Kristol als Mittelpunkt und Chicago als Ausgangspunkt. Ein Teil von ihnen hat bei Leo Strauss in Chicago studiert. Strauss ist wiederum ein Schüler von Carl Schmitt.

All in the Neocon Family
Jim Lobe, AlterNet
March 26, 2003
Viewed on March 28, 2003

What do William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, and Robert Kagan have in common? Yes, they are all die-hard hawks who have gained control of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. But they are also part of one big neoconservative family -- an extended clan of spouses, children, and friends who have known each other for generations.


Neoconservatives are former liberals (which explains the " neo" prefix) who advocate an aggressive unilateralist vision of U.S. global supremacy, which includes a close strategic alliance with Israel. Let`s start with one of the founding fathers of the extended neocon clan: Irving Kristol. His extensive resume includes waging culture wars for the CIA against the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War and calling for an American " imperial" role during the Vietnam War. Papa Kristol, who has been credited with defining the major themes of neoconservative thought, is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative powerhouse on her own. Her studies of the Victorian era in Britain helped inspire the men who sold Bush on the idea of " compassionate conservatism."


The son of this proud couple is none other that William Kristol, the crown prince of the neoconservative clique and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. In 1997, he founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a front group which cemented the powerful alliance between right-wing Republicans like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Christian and Catholic Right leaders like Gary Bauer and William Bennett, and the neocons behind a platform of global U.S. military dominance.


Irving Kristol`s most prominent disciple is Richard Perle, who was until Thursday the Defense Policy Board chairman, is also a " resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, which is housed in the same building as PNAC. Perle himself married into neocon royalty when he wed the daughter of his professor at the University of Chicago, the late Alfred Wohlstetter -- the man who helped both his son-in-law and his fellow student Paul Wolfowitz get their start in Washington more than 30 years ago.


Perle`s own protege is Douglas Feith, who is now Wolfowitz`s deputy for policy and is widely known for his right-wing Likud position. And why not? His father, Philadelphia businessman and philanthropist Dalck Feith, was once a follower of the great revisionist Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his native Poland back in the 1930s. The two Feiths were honored together in 1997 by the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).


The AEI has long been a major nexus for such inter-familial relationships. A long-time collaborator with Perle, Michael Ledeen is married to Barbara Ledeen, a founder and director of the anti-feminist Independent Women`s Forum (IWF), who is currently a major player in the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and another neo-con power couple -- David and Meyrav Wurmser -- co-authored a 1996 memorandum for Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu outlining how to break the Oslo peace process and invade Iraq as the first step to transforming the Middle East.


Though she doesn`t focus much on foreign-policy issues, Lynne Cheney also hangs her hat at AEI. Her husband Dick Cheney recently chose Victoria Nuland to become his next deputy national security adviser. Nuland, as it turns out, is married to Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol`s main comrade-in-arms and the co-founder of PNAC.


Bob`s father, Donald Kagan, is a Yale historian who converted from a liberal Democrat to a staunch neocon in the 1970s. On the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Donald and his other son, Frederick, published " While America Sleeps," a clarion call to increase defense spending. Since then, the three Kagan men have written reams of columns warning that the currently ballooning Pentagon budget is simply not enough to fund the much-desired vision of U.S. global supremacy.


And which infamous ex-Reaganite do the Kagans and another leading neocon family have in common? None other than Iran-contra veteran Elliott Abrams.


Now the director of Near Eastern Affairs in Bush`s National Security Council, Abrams worked closely with Bob Kagan back in the Reagan era. He is also the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of the influential conservative Jewish publication Commentary, and his wife, Midge Decter, a fearsome polemicist in her own right.


Podhoretz, like Kristol Sr., helped invent neo-conservatism in the late 1960s. He and Decter created a formidable political team as leaders of the Committee on the Present Danger in 1980, when they worked with Donald Rumsfeld to pound the last nail into the coffin of detente and promote the rise of Ronald Reagan. In addition to being Abrams` father-in-law, Norman Podhoretz is also the father of John Podhoretz, a columnist for the Murdoch-owned New York Post and frequent guest on the Murdoch-owned Fox News channel.


As editor of Commentary, Norman offered writing space to rising stars of the neocon movement for more than 30 years. His proteges include former U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Pipes, who was Ronald Reagan`s top advisor on the " Evil Empire," as the president liked to call the Soviet Union. His son, Daniel Pipes, has also made a career out of battling " evil," which in his case is Islam. And to tie it all up neatly, in 2002, Podhoretz received the highest honor bestowed by the AEI: the Irving Kristol award.


This list of intricate, overlapping connections is hardly exhaustive or perhaps even surprising. But it helps reveal an important fact. Contrary to appearances, the neocons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tighly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and personal connections, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them grab control of the future of American foreign policy.




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© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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Noch 2 Artikel zum Thema NeoCons. Mehr hier im Thread.

Und die London Times weiß auch weshalb das so ist. Auch #3355
[urlMein Gott! America is the new Germany]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1065-720253,00.html[/url]

#5452 #5486(Deutsch) Die Leo Konservativen aus dem Spiegel

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Manche sehen in der Bestallung von Wolfowitz auch ein Abschieben auf einen mehr representativen Posten. McNamarra u.a. waren auch Falken, die versorgt werden mußten.
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March 31, 2005
Europe on Wolfowitz as Banker: Once Chilly, Now Tepid
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/international/europe/31wol…

PARIS, March 30 - Paul D. Wolfowitz came to Europe on Wednesday as a supplicant for its good will, shedding his image as a unilateralist hawk and entreating his hosts to approve him as the world`s banker for the poor.

The five-hour visit to Brussels by Mr. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense and President Bush`s nominee to head the World Bank, was a response to a request by the European Union for a meeting.

It was intended to prove that the man who is viewed by many here as an unrelenting neoconservative and leading architect of the invasion of Iraq can shift course and run the global organization that lends money and sets economic policy for much of the developing world.

"I understand that I am, putting it mildly, a controversial figure," Mr. Wolfowitz told reporters. "But I hope as people get to know me better they will understand that I really do believe deeply in the mission of the bank."

He vowed to create a multinational team to run the bank, without explicitly promising to appoint a European as his deputy.

The engagement strategy with Europe, by Mr. Wolfowitz on Wednesday and during visits by President Bush and his security aides last month, seems to be working.

The Europeans, who hold 30 percent of the voting shares on the bank`s board, could have tried to take revenge for what they see as the unilateralism of the Bush administration, either by rejecting Mr. Wolfowitz outright or delaying his appointment.

Instead, leaders have signaled that they are ready to approve him, however grudgingly, when the nomination comes to a vote on Tuesday, the latest sign of a new pragmatism in Europe to repair relations with the United States.

Indeed, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, which currently holds the presidency of the European Union, spoke Wednesday as if the nomination had already been approved.

"We had a constructive and friendly meeting where European ministers were putting all the questions they wanted to put to the incoming president of the World Bank," Mr. Juncker told reporters.

Other European officials seem to have resigned themselves. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, for example, who staunchly opposed the American-led war in Iraq, said last week that Mr. Wolfowitz`s nomination "does not lead to an overflow of enthusiasm in Europe," but he pledged, "His nomination will not fail because of Germany."

On Wednesday, Mr. Schröder`s development aid minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, who also had expressed reservations, said she was encouraged by Mr. Wolfowitz`s presentation, saying, "This is for him a new beginning, and we judge him according on what he said today."

In France, which also opposed the war in Iraq, Foreign Minister Michel Barnier initially told reporters that Mr. Wolfowitz`s nomination would be examined "in the context of the personality of the person you mention and perhaps in view of other candidates."

Now France has decided to accept the nomination, but wants a Frenchman as his deputy, to elevate France`s profile and influence in the World Bank, and to ensure that the Bush administration does not use the bank to promote its own agenda.

France is promoting the idea of a European deputy to Mr. Wolfowitz to sit alongside two other deputies, one from poorer nations and one from developing countries like China. It is floating the name of Jean-Pierre Jouyet, 51, chairman of the Paris Club, an international debt-relief agency.

The European Union is also seeking American support for its candidate to head the World Trade Organization: Pascal Lamy of France, who was Europe`s trade commissioner.

Under a tradition going back to the founding of the World Bank 60 years ago, the United States, the bank`s largest shareholder, puts forward its own candidate to head the institution. Europeans nominate the head of its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund.

Still, suspicion about Mr. Wolfowitz runs deep in Europe, as evidenced by the firestorm of protest of his nomination among political commentators and in much of the European news media.

The nomination proved that "Bush did not give a damn about the reaction," a commentator in the German business daily Handelsblatt wrote. "Many will consider Wolfowitz`s nomination a provocation."

In France, centrist Le Monde last week called the nomination "a new manifestation of America`s arrogance" as well as "indifference or even cynicism towards poor countries." The left-leaning Libération even called on Europe to veto the nomination. In Italy, the business-oriented Il Sole 24 Ore said that if Mr. Wolfowitz became president of the bank, "it will not be easy to `sell` the World Bank as an institution that takes care of the poor in the world." But both Europe and the United States have pledged to heal the political damage caused by the war in Iraq. Blocking the nomination would have been both damaging in terms of trans-Atlantic relations and unlikely to succeed.

Earlier this month, the European Union signaled that it was likely to delay a proposal to lift its arms embargo against China after intense American opposition. In recent weeks, the European Union in general and France in particular have worked in lockstep with the Bush administration to press Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

In policy shifts, the United States, for its part, has agreed to support up to a point the European negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and has left open the door for the militant Shiite group Hezbollah to enter Lebanese politics.

Katrin Bennhold of The International Herald Tribune contributed reporting from Paris for this article, and Graham Bowley, also of The Tribune, contributedfrom Brussels.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |

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Der Behauptung von manchen hochrangigen US-Generäle, die Gewalt im Irak sei zurückgegangen, wird von vielen Beobachtern als falsch zurückgewiesen.
Es sieht manchmal so aus, weil eine unabhängige Berichterstattung wegen der Gefahrenlage nicht möglich ist, und dadurch viele Anschläge nur von einheimischen Quellen berichtet werden und sonst nicht bestätigt werden können.
Weiter ist die Zahl der toten US-Soldaten im März stark gesunken und da diese Zahl die einzige Opferzahl ist, die in den USA registriert wird, wird das auch von der US-Öffentlichkeit geglaubt.
Aber die Zahl der Anschläge ist unverändert hoch. Alles andere ist, wie sooft, Wunschdenken.
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March 31, 2005
General signals decision on Iraq troop pull-out
By FT.COM
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/international/FT200503…

A top US general on Wednesday said the Pentagon could begin large withdrawals of troops from Iraq as long as the level of violence in the country remained low until national elections, scheduled for the end of the year.

Lieutenant General Lance Smith of the US air force, deputy commander of Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the latest senior military commander to signal that the Pentagon is closer to a decision to bring troops home.

Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, has consistently argued that generals "on the ground in Iraq" will decide when they can reduce troop numbers.

"[If] the elections go OK, violence stays down, then we ought to be able to make some recommendations for us to be able to bring our forces home," Lt Gen Smith said at the Pentagon.

But the four-star general cautioned that any deterioration of security, or a sliding of the election timetable, could hamper troop reduction efforts. The US now has about 145,000 military personnel in Iraq. But that number is expected to fall to about 138,000 in coming weeks as soldiers whose departure was delayed because of elections in January begin to leave the country.

Last week General Richard Cody, the army vice-chief of staff, said the number of US forces in Iraq would probably decline by early 2006.

Peter Pace, vice-chairman of the joint chiefs, on Tuesday said top generals were expressing "cautious optimism" about the situation in Iraq.

"There are a lot of things right now that make you hopeful about the way ahead in Iraq," said Gen Pace. "But hope is not a plan."

While the rate of attacks on US troops has declined since the election, the US continues to suffer fatalities. The military has seen nearly 1,700 troop deaths and more than 12,000 casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President George W. Bush has repeatedly insisted that US forces will remain in Iraq until its people are able to provide their own security. Lt Gen Smith said this could happen "in the not-too-distant future" if current trends continued.

The Pentagon says 145,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained a figure that some critics call an exaggeration. In a report released last week the Government Accountability Office, the oversight arm of Congress, concluded the US government agencies "do not report reliable data on the extent to which Iraqi security forces are trained and equipped".

In an interview with National Public Radio on Wednesday, Mr Rumsfeld responded to the GAO conclusions, saying: "We spend a lot of time on this and we know what we`re talking about. What we present is accurate the number [of trained Iraqi security forces is] something over 140,000. That`s just a fact."

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005.

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Das ist ein Hauptgrund für US-Rückzugsgedanken. Soldatenmangel.

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March 31, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
I Spy a Screw-Up
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/opinion/31dowd.html

WASHINGTON

Like the new Woody Allen movie, "Melinda and Melinda," it is possible to view today`s big story on the tremendous intelligence failures before the Iraq war as either comedy or tragedy, depending on how you look at it.

For instance, on the comic side, The Times reported yesterday that administration officials were relieved that the new report by a presidential commission had "found no evidence that political pressure from the White House or Pentagon contributed to the mistaken intelligence."

That`s hilarious.

As necessity is the mother of invention, political pressure was the father of conveniently botched intelligence.

Dick Cheney and the neocons at the Pentagon started with the conclusion they wanted, then massaged and manipulated the intelligence to back up their wishful thinking.

As The New Republic reported, Mr. Cheney lurked at the C.I.A. in the summer of 2002, an intimidating presence for young analysts. And Douglas Feith set up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon as a shadow intelligence agency to manufacture propaganda bolstering the administration`s case.

The Office of Special Plans turned to the con man Ahmad Chalabi to come up with the evidence they needed. The Iraqi National Congress obliged with information that has now been debunked as exaggerated or fabricated. One gem was the hard-drinking relative of a Chalabi aide, a secret source code-named Curveball, who claimed to verify the mobile weapons labs.

Mr. Cheney and his "Gestapo office," as Colin Powell called it, then shoehorned all their meshugas about Saddam`s aluminum tubes, weapons labs, drones and Al Qaeda links into Mr. Powell`s U.N. speech.

The former secretary of state spent four days and three nights at the C.I.A. before making the presentation, trying to vet the material, because he knew that Mr. Cheney, who had an idée fixe about Saddam, was trying to tap into his credibility and use him as a battering ram.

He told Germany`s Stern magazine that he was "furious and angry" that he had been given bum information about Iraq`s arsenal: "Some of the information was wrong. I did not know this at the time."

The vice president and the neocons were in a fever to bypass the C.I.A. and conjure up a case to attack Saddam, even though George Tenet was panting to be of service. When Mr. Tenet put out the new National Intelligence Estimate on Oct. 2, 2002, nine days before the Senate vote on the war resolution and after our troops and aircraft carriers were getting into position for battle, there was one key change: suddenly the agency agreed with Mr. Cheney that Iraq was pursuing the atomic bomb.

Charles Robb, the former senator and governor of Virginia, and Laurence Silberman, a hard-core conservative appeals court judge, headed the commission. Unlike Tom Kean, Judge Silberman held secret meetings; he made sure the unpleasantness wouldn`t come up until Mr. Bush had won re-election.

It is laughable that the report offers its most scorching criticism of the C.I.A. when the C.I.A. was simply doing what the White House and Pentagon wanted. Isn`t that why Mr. Tenet was given the Medal of Freedom? (Freedom from facts.)

The hawks don`t want to learn any lessons here. If they had to do it again, they`d do it the same way. The imaginary weapons and Osama link were just a marketing tool and shiny distraction, something to keep the public from crying while they went to war for reasons unrelated to any nuclear threat.

The 9/11 attacks gave the neocons an opening for their dreams of remaking the Middle East, and they drove the Third Infantry Division through it.

The president planned to announce today that he would put into place many of the commission`s recommendations, including an interagency center on proliferation designed to play down turf battles among intelligence agencies.

As Michael Isikoff and Dan Klaidman reported in Newsweek, in the three and a half years since 9/11, the intelligence agencies still haven`t learned how to share what they know. At the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the Homeland Security guy complained he was frozen out by the F.B.I. and C.I.A.

Like "Melinda and Melinda," the other side of this wacky saga is deadly serious. There are, after all, more than 1,500 dead American soldiers, Al Qaeda terrorists on the loose and real nuclear-bomb programs in Iran and North Korea that we know nothing about. No laughs there.

E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Der Gnadenschuß bei Menschen, oder sind Iraker keine Menschen?

washingtonpost.com
U.S. Soldier Tells Court He Shot Iraqi Out of Mercy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13992-2005Mar…

By Melissa Eddy
Associated Press
Thursday, March 31, 2005; Page A10

WIESBADEN, Germany, March 30 -- A U.S. Army tank company commander told a military court Wednesday that he shot a gravely wounded, unarmed Iraqi man "to put him out of his misery," saying the killing was "honorable."

Taking the stand for the first time at his court-martial, Capt. Rogelio Maynulet, 30, described the events that led him to fire twice on the Iraqi, who he maintained was too seriously injured to survive.

"He was in a state that I didn`t think was justified -- I had to put him out of his misery," Maynulet said. He argued that the killing "was the right thing to do, it was the honorable thing to do."

Prosecutors say Maynulet violated military rules of engagement by shooting an Iraqi who was wounded and unarmed.

Maynulet is being court-martialed on a charge of assault with intent to commit murder in the May 21, 2004, killing near Kufa, south of Baghdad. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. His attorneys have argued that his actions were in line with the Geneva Conventions on the code of war.

Maynulet`s 1st Armored Division tank company had been on patrol near Kufa when it was alerted to a car believed to be carrying a driver for the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr and another militiaman loyal to the Shiite cleric.

The troops chased the vehicle and fired at it, wounding the passenger, who fled and was later apprehended, and the driver. The shooting was filmed by a U.S. drone surveillance aircraft.

Prosecutors grilled Maynulet on why he did not treat the driver, pointing out that he had been trained for medical emergency relief. Maynulet said the company`s medic, Sgt. Thomas Cassady, told him: "He`s gone, there`s nothing we can do." He said he would not question the expertise of his medic.

An Army neurosurgeon, Richard Gullock, testified that it was unclear from the surveillance footage whether the driver was alive at the time of the shooting.

Maynulet appeared relaxed and spoke confidently, recounting the events in great detail.

Questions from the six-member panel -- the equivalent of a civilian jury -- focused on whether Maynulet tried to hide his actions by failing to report the shooting at the end of the day. Maynulet said he discussed the shooting in a debriefing that immediately followed the mission and denied trying to hide the killing.

He further testified that, as company commander, he had more important priorities on the mission than saving the Iraqi, including searching for two escaped passengers and maintaining the safety of his men. He testified that he was reluctant to expend limited first aid resources on a man he had been told would die anyway.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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The Independent
Further signs of Lebanon’s political decay in wake of Hariri killing
Thursday, 31st March 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=624…


Even before the UN Security Council chooses an international commission to investigate the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, Syria’s best friends in the Lebanese security service are beginning to fall off their perches. Given the verdict of the UN’s original fact-finding mission into the killing - it accused Lebanese investigators of "gross negligence, possibly accompanied by criminal actions" - most Lebanese drew one conclusion: about time.

First came the chief judge in the official Lebanese murder enquiry, Michel Abu Arraj, who last week mysteriously announced that he was exhausted, adding that he felt it necessary to resign "because of the atmosphere of scepticism surrounding the investigation." Then came news that General Raymond Azar, the powerful head of Lebanese military intelligence, has decided to take a months "leave of absence" amid the political opposition’s continued demand for his resignation and that of five of his colleagues.

And now General Ali Haj, the head of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, is expected to follow Azarõs example. Haj it was who ordered his men to move the bombed-out remains of Mr Hariri’s convoy from the scene of the crime just before midnight on February 14th, the day of the assassination. In the words of Peter FitzGerald, the deputy Irish Garda commissioner who headed the UN Mission, this decision prevented "any ballistic analysis, explosive analysis and evidence gathering at the scene." General Haj was once a member of Mr Hariri’s security detail - but was redeployed after the former prime minister concluded that he was passing information to the Syrian security authorities in Beirut.

Even President Lahoud, Syria’s most faithful friend in Lebanon, now supports - or says he supports - a full international investigation of the Hariri murder. Thus is the pendulum slowly swinging in the direction of the political opposition.

Or so it seems.

The resignation - for the second time in a month - of Prime Minister Omar Karami is a further sign of Lebanon’s political decay. Unable to find a single opponent of Syria prepared to serve in a coalition government, he refused to lead a cabinet of "one colour" and preferred to step down in ignominy. But without a prime minister, it is doubtful if national elections could be held in May - which would preserve the present Lebanese parliament which is loaded with Syrian supporters.

Hizballah is still refusing to move from its position of support for Syria, which means that tens of thousands of Shia Muslims remain outside the Lebanese opposition. And the three night-time bombs which have exploded in commercial districts of east Beirut are surely not the only ones that have been prepared for the coming weeks. By targeting the eastern, largely Christian suburbs of the city - where opposition to Syria is strongest - there appears to be a plan to provoke the Maronite community against Lebanese Muslims. So far, it has proved fruitless. But if that is the case, so the Lebanese argue, surely the agents provocateurs will next time use car bombs in crowded streets. Mercifully the Sunni Muslims, Druze and Christians had created their anti-Syrian alliance before Hariri’s murder; had they tried to do so in its aftermath, they may well have failed.


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Iraq war is blamed for starvation

Rory Carroll in Baghdad
Thursday March 31, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1448606,00.…

Guardian
Acute malnutrition among Iraqi children aged under five nearly doubled last year because of chaos caused by the US-led occupation, a United Nations expert said yesterday.

Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission`s special expert on the right to food, said more than a quarter of Iraqi children do not have enough to eat and 7.7% are acutely malnourished - a jump from 4% recorded in the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion.

Reporting to the commission`s headquarters in Geneva, the Swiss professor claimed the situation was "a result of the war led by coalition forces".

If confirmed, the estimates would be an indictment of an occupation which was supposed to improve the lives of a population crushed by Saddam Hussein.

Billions of dollars-worth of aid flowed into Iraq from the fall of Saddam Hussein regime`s in April 2003. But the regime`s collapse and widespread violence destroyed jobs and made aid distribution difficult.

Prof Ziegler based some of his analysis on a US study in October 2004 which estimated that up to 100,000 extra Iraqis, mostly women and children, had died since the invasion than would have been expected to before the war.

"Most died as a result of the violence, but many others died as a result of the increasingly difficult living conditions, reflected in increasing child mortality levels," he said.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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The neocon revolution

US unilateralism was a means of breaking the old order. Now it is building new alliances
Martin Jacques
Thursday March 31, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1448651,00.ht…

Guardian
With any new political phenomenon, there is always a tendency to underestimate its novelty and treat it as some kind of short-term aberration. I vividly recall how long it took commentators and analysts, on the right and left, to recognise that Thatcherism was something quite new and here to stay. Similar doubts greeted the Bush administration and the neocon revolution: its novelty would be short-lived, it would not last and it was just not viable. It is always hard to imagine a new kind of world, easier to think of the future as an extension of the past, and difficult to comprehend a paradigm shift and grasp a new kind of logic.

There was speculation last autumn that the second Bush term would be different, that the breach with Europe would be healed as a matter of necessity, that the US could not afford another Iraq, that somehow the new position was unsustainable. Already, however, from last November`s presidential election it was clear that the neocon revolution had wide popular support and serious electoral roots, that it was establishing a new kind of domestic political hegemony. In fact, the right has been setting the political agenda in the US for at least 30 years and that is now true with a vengeance. All the indications suggest that the revolution is continuing apace.

The appointment of John Bolton as the US ambassador to the United Nations and the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank reveal a determination to place the cadres of the neocon revolution in key positions of power and influence and thereby create the conditions for its continuation and expansion. This was heralded almost immediately after the presidential election with the decision to replace Colin Powell, a man of very different political hue, with Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state.

During the first Bush administration, and especially in its conduct of the Iraq war, the neocon revolution was often characterised as unilateralist, but this was always somewhat simplistic. No nation can simply go it alone, certainly not one that seeks to dominate the world. However strong it may be, it is still required to pursue its power and ambitions through a system of alliances. The end of the cold war led to the realisation that the US was now the world`s sole superpower. The period following 9/11 persuaded the Americans that they now had an opportunity to remake the world in their own image, that the alliances that had been necessary in pursuit of the cold war, notably that with Europe, were no longer appropriate, certainly not on the old terms.

The US has similarly renounced, or chosen to ignore, many of the international treaties that it had previously been party to - Kyoto, the international criminal court, even the Geneva conventions - either because it no longer believed in them or because it regarded them as a threat to the exercise of a new kind of American power. But it would be more accurate to see this unilateralism as a phase rather than a permanent new condition, as a means of breaking the old order rather than a long-term strategy for the new.

The Bush administration has displayed a differential calculus. The heart of its strategy has been concerned with the Middle East where it has deployed a unilateralist policy of pre-emptive strikes and regime change as part of a wider attempt to remake the region. The Europeans were disregarded and relegated to the role of bystanders. In East Asia, the Americans have behaved quite differently. North Korea, like Iraq and Iran, was part of the axis of evil, but there has been no attempt at regime change. North Korea`s nuclear weapons, the geographical proximity of Seoul, the opposition of South Korea towards precipitous action, and the role and interest of China, have obliged the Americans to move with caution. Far from unilateralism, they have vested their efforts in the six-party talks, and the hope that China might act as a restraining force on Pyongyang.

In the longer run, China remains the greatest global challenge to the US. But here again the Americans have moved with care and restraint. They sought to enlist China in the war against terror following 9/11, and since then relations between the two have been relatively calm. Meanwhile, the Americans will continue to give tacit support to Taiwan and quietly encourage Japan`s growing nationalism as a bulwark against China and a means of protecting their own role in the region.

It is clear, in this context, that there are three main elements to American unilateralism: Iraq and the Middle East; the Atlantic alliance; and the US`s attitude towards international treaties and law. Although the Americans flagrantly ignored the Europeans over Iraq, and have loosened the bonds that previously existed in a way that undermines the notion of the west as shaped in the crucible of the cold war, they will seek to build a new relationship with Europe, albeit one far less intimate and far more unequal than before. As for Europe, there would appear to be clear limits as to how far it is prepared to go to resist the Americans.

There are two small defining moments in this process. The Europeans may feel decidedly uneasy about Wolfowitz becoming president of the World Bank - with the exception, of course, of Bush`s European lapdog, our prime minister - but they are evidently going to acquiesce. American and European dominance of the institutions of the international economy ensures that the two will continue to cooperate, even if the relationship is likely to be more tense and fractious. The other example is the European Union`s attitude towards the arms embargo with China. Under American pressure, the likely decision to lift it will now be postponed: the ties are still sufficiently strong for Europe not to wish to anger the Americans beyond a certain point. The prospects of a drift towards any form of triangulation in the relationship between the US, Europe and China, even at the edges, are still very distant.

The withdrawal of the US from international treaties does not condemn international law to the dustbin of history. It is evident, however, that the Americans are determined either to render these treaties redundant simply by ignoring them, force them to be renegotiated or perhaps both. In effect, what the Americans are intent on doing is reordering the world system to take account of their newly defined power and interests. Every part of the world is likely to feel the consequences of this geo-political earthquake, but some much more than others.

The restless determination of the Bush administration to reorder global affairs is well-illustrated by a classified document prepared by the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a prelude to a massive review of Pentagon spending. It requires the military to build a far more proactive force focused on changing the world rather than responding to specific conflicts such as the Korean peninsula. It sees the development of very differently trained troops who would be able to intervene on a much more widespread basis. "The idea is that you would have lots of teams operating in lots of places throughout the world," a senior defence official was reported as saying. At the same time, there is an absolute belief that the US must maintain such a large lead in crucial technologies that growing powers - in other words, China - will decide that it is simply too expensive to try to compete. Welcome to the new world order as seen from Washington.

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Da haben die USA falsch gerechnet. Die Inder wollen keine Waffen von den USA.
Dadurch kommen die Europäer ins Geschäft.
Obwohl die Inder noch über die Offerte Washingtons nachdenken, sieht es eher so aus, dass man sich lieber aus anderen Quellen bedient.
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Mar 31, 2005

India turns its back on US arms
By Siddharth Srivastava
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GC31Df03.html

NEW DELHI - The reaction has been quicker than expected. Peeved at the US decision to supply F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, India has made it more than apparent that it is not at all happy and will play hard to get in all defense negotiations with the US. Making India`s irritation clear, Delhi has announced new defense orders to Russia, Germany, Italy, Israel and even Qatar, worth a total of US$746 million.

Making no bones about New Delhi`s annoyance, even as US Ambassador to India David Mulford has tried to placate matters, Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced on Tuesday that the government had cleared the purchase of 12 used Mirage 2000 V fighter aircraft from Qatar and 11 Dornier 228 aircraft from Germany for maritime surveillance, virtually as a gesture set against the US offer to sell PC-3 Orions to India.

India will induct nine offshore patrol vessels for the Indian navy, purchase a C-303 submarine-fired torpedo decoy system from Italy and manufacture eight more in India. It will upgrade its British Sea Harriers, fitting these with the latest air-to-air missiles from Israeli firm Raphael, combat maneuvering flight recorders and digital cockpit voice recorders.

Islamabad rejected criticism from New Delhi on Tuesday. "I am surprised by the Indian reaction," Pakistani Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri said. "This is not at all in discord with the emerging thaw in relations with India."

Last week, the US announced that it would go ahead with the sale to Pakistan of two dozen sophisticated F-16 fighter jets that India had been opposing for a long time. The US go-ahead comes almost 15 years after sanctions were imposed on Pakistan due to fears of the nation turning nuclear, which turned out to be true in 1998.

The turnaround is being seen as a reward to Pakistan for being an ally in the "war against terror", including President General Pervez Musharraf`s role in reigning in the Taliban, the conduct of elections in Afghanistan, as well as support to the US against Iran. Pakistan has expressed extreme happiness over the decision, while India is suitably miffed, although there is a concomitant US offer to India to develop total synergies in defense, including joint production, the offer for more advanced versions of the F-16, as well as civilian nuclear cooperation with India. This also fits in with the Bush administration`s intentions to buttress India`s progress as a power to counter China.

US move boomerangs
Prior to the Indian reaction to order arms from other countries, the US decision was also seen as a win-win situation for Washington. For planners in the administration of US President George W Bush, it was a clear instance of geostrategic diplomacy being cloaked to promote the highly competitive business of arms sales, the potential of an arms race in South Asia set aside, as long as it benefited the US arms industry.

There are reports to suggest that the sale to Pakistan may have saved 5,000 jobs at Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of F-16s, located in Texas, Bush`s home state. "If India`s requirements are beyond any existing fighters, we are prepared to make upgraded F-16s to India`s specifications with complete transfer of technology," Mike Kelly, senior executive of Lockheed Martin, was quoted as saying after the Bush administration cleared US companies (including Boeing) for bidding for contracts with India.

The offer for sales to Pakistan is seen as aimed to bring about the requisite reaction from India, which is looking for a massive upgradation of its aging air force fleet with a very poor safety record.

Counter to the expectations of the defense forces, India raised its annual defense spending for 2005-06 by a modest 7.8 %, which analysts say may not be enough to buy new combat planes and submarines for the world`s fourth-largest military. Nevertheless, there is enough ground to believe that India will go in for a massive acquisition of arms in the near future. India is faced with the urgent requirement to progressively phase out its accident-prone and aging Russian MiG jets. This, combined with the fact that the indigenous light combat aircraft LCA-Tejas will be ready for induction only by 2010, makes the Indian air force keen to acquire 125 multi-role fighters, with transfer of technology, in a deal which could be worth $3 billion to $4 billion.

India is negotiating the purchase of French Mirage 2000-5s, Swedish JAS-39 Gripens or advanced Russian MiG-29s, in addition to an ongoing project to induct the high-end Russian Sukhois.

Enter the US, with the offer to sell to Pakistan and a concomitant offer to India. This placed in front of India a huge arsenal from which to choose for the first time in the history of its relations with the US - India has traditionally relied on Russia, and been hampered by sanctions because of its nuclear weapons testing.

The real intention of the US was for India to fall into its arms.

On Sunday, India said it wanted keep its options open. India would consider buying military equipment from the US, Defense Minister Mukherjee said. "This is the first time we have received an offer from the US. Naturally, when the offer is there, it will have to be actively considered by the government of India, keeping in view the requirements of our armed forces." But in the face of criticism from opposition parties for letting Pakistan get away with its purchase, the mood seems to have changed.

There is more bad news for the United States. While the US has placed all its cards in the open, there are murmurs of protest in the Indian defense and foreign ministries against any long-term arms arrangement with the US. The US is seen as an unreliable arms partner, unlike the history of such ties with the Russians, the French or even Israel. The main fear is of sanctions, which is built into the entire US system of arms sales, and an arena that is within the comfort zone of US diplomatic arm-twisting. The French, for example, stuck with India even post-1998, when India turned nuclear, despite sanctions by the rest of the Western world.

A senior Indian Air Force officer has been quoted as saying, "If they [US] could deny F-16 fighter jets midway through the contract to Pakistan, we cannot expect anything better. It is an impossible task for the Pentagon to ensure legally that the Indian Air Force is assured of the supply of fighters, spares and support for the almost 50 years that the new fighter would be in service."`

As things stand, the likelihood of a full war between India and Pakistan is remote, given the progress of the peace process and the nuclear deterrence that is already in place. India`s conventional military superiority over Pakistan means that the acquisition of the F-16s will make an incremental difference to the balance of power, which in any case becomes redundant in the face of ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear payload. It will require an enormous effort even on the part of Musharraf, despite the regular verbal tirades against India, to reverse the dialogue process that has developed its own momentum. The F-16s will provide a sense of feel-good to Pakistan and Musharraf, who can tom-tom his great achievement in front of extremist elements gunning for him for kowtowing to the US.

Some observers say India should look at the fine print of the US offering. While the US, for strategic reasons, might want to keep Pakistan happy, it is for business, including in such delicate areas as nuclear energy and arms production, that the US wants to engage India, thus moving away from the traditional hyphenation of US-India-Pakistan relations. This is always a much better proposition and the basis of a long-term relationship. But, for now, India is upset.

Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.

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

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Informed Comment
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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, March 31, 2005

Shahristani Denounces ex-Baath Sunnis in Parliament

Child malnutrition has soared in Iraq under the Americans, according to a former Official.

Al-Zaman: Hussein Shahristani, a prominent member of the United Iraqi Alliance, affirmed that his bloc in parliament would work to prevent any former members of the Baath Party from filling positions in the new government. He said that former Baaathists and former members of parliament under Saddam Hussein have gotten into the new parliament via the list of Iyad Allawi, and that they are striving to disrupt the political process and find a way to grab the post of speaker of parliament. He added, "If the candidate is not accepted, the UIA will impose a candidate for speaker." He added, "The candidate must be an elected member of the parliament" and "the number of members [from the Sunni Arab minority] is small. They are either former Baathists or former members of the parliaments formed under the shadow of Saddam`s regime." He affirmed, "We are not appointing persons at this stage, but all of them are on the Iraqiya list. There are a number of Baathists on that list, which is unacceptable to the UIA."

The Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi has nominated Adnan Janabi for the speaker post, but he was rejected by the Shiite religious parties because of his family`s Baath Party connections. Allawi walked out of the parliament meeting on Tuesday as a result. I think he suddenly realized that his project of rehabilitating selected former Baathists as promoters of secularism was in big trouble. The UIA has some 53 percent of the seats in parliament and Shahristani is now making it clear that the Shiite religious parties are simply not going to accept ex-Baathists in high posts.

Mishaan Juburi, another Sunni in parliament, has now put himself forward for the speaker post, accornding to Ash-Sharq al-Awsat.

I may be over-reacting, but there seems to me a threat implicit in Shahristani`s statement that some of the Baathists on Allawi`s list might be denied their seats on parliament. If that was his implication, things could get very ugly.

The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, said Wednesday that Iraq in its current condition "cannot constitute a model for any Arab country" in the field of democracy. He criticized the current negotiations for the formation of a new Iraqi government on the basis of sect and ethnicity.

Guerrillas are still attempting to discrupt the Shiite religious pilgrimage by shooting down the pilgrims in Babil province south of Baghdad.

posted by Juan @ 3/31/2005 06:20:00 AM

Provincial Council Gives Najaf Mayor Prerogative to Appoint Police Chief

Al-Zaman: The governing council of Najaf province charged Najaf mayor As`ad Abu Kalal (Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq or SCIRI) with the responsibility for the police force in the city, so as to resolve the disputes about who should be police chief. The federal Interior Ministry had appointed Col. Hilal Abdullah Rasan as police chief, but his predecessor, Col Ghalib al-Jazaeri, refuses to step down.

Mayor Abu Kalal complained bitterly against the Ministry of Interior for having intervened in local affairs with this appointment. The ministry, he said, "does not know the conditions of what is happening in Najaf."

The Interior Minister is Falah al-Naqib, a Sunn from Samarra whose father had served Saddam until he defected in the late 1970s. This slap at the face of the central government by SCIRI in Najaf may be a calculated rebuff to al-Naqib.

As the gridlock at the federal level continues, we probably can expect to see a lot of decisions taken at the local level rather than nationally. This development would help SCIRI, which holds 8 of the 11 southern provinces.

posted by Juan @[url3/31/2005 06:07:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/provincial-council-gives-najaf-mayor.html[/url]

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Thursday, March 31, 2005
War News for Thursday, March 31, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier, two Iraqi civilians killed in Mosul car bomb attack.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in Baghdad patrol ambush.

Bring ‘em on: One US Marine killed by land mine near Qaim.

Bring ‘em on: Three Romanians, one US citizen taken hostage in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Shiite pilgrims attacked by gunmen near Mahaweel.

Bring ‘em on: Shiite pilgrims attacked by gunmen near Latifiyah.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi soldier killed, 10 wounded in car bomb attack near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: US convoy attacked by car bomb near Abu Ghraib.

Bring ‘em on: Six Iraqis killed in attack on police checkpoint near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Seven Iraqis killed in ambush of US patrol in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi police captain assassinated in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi soldiers killed in car bomb attack near Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: Three Shiite pilgrims killed, 19 wounded by car bomb near Tikrit.

Bring ‘em on: Six Iraqi policemen wounded in car bomb ambush near Basra.

Torture policy. “The Iraqi government`s unprecedented admission that its police tortured and killed three Shi`ite Muslim militiamen while they were in custody has set off angry complaints from newly elected Shi`ite legislators who are engaged in a political battle for control of the police. Shi`ite leaders have beamed gruesome images of the dead men to Iraqi television sets, displaying their bruised, scarred bodies as an argument for radically reshaping the police force, which is crucial to the fight against the country`s bloody insurgency.”

Sunni cleric sounds off. “But in a rare interview, conducted Monday through an interpreter in his office at the mosque, Mr. Dari made clear that he would continue to view the armed resistance as legitimate until the American military offered a clear timetable for its withdrawal - a condition very unlikely to be met. ‘We ask all wise men in the American nation to advise the administration to leave this country,’ he said. ‘It would save much blood and suffering for the Iraqi and American people.’ The courting of Mr. Dari is part of a broad effort to engage the Sunni Arabs, who make up a fifth of Iraq`s population and supplied its ruling class under Mr. Hussein. The Shiite and Kurdish leaders who dominate the new national assembly and are now struggling to form a governing coalition say part of the delay has been caused by negotiations over which ministries should be granted to Sunnis.”

This is progress? “Malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led invasion - to nearly 8% by the end of last year, it says.” Thanks to alert reader Mark.

Tony Blair, you’ve been Google-bombed. (Via Bloggerheads.)

Commentary

Opinion: “The tension between Rumsfeld and the uniformed military has been an open secret in Washington these past four years. It was compounded by the Iraq war, but it began almost from the moment Rumsfeld took over at the Pentagon. The grumbling about his leadership partly reflected the military`s resistance to change and its reluctance to challenge a brilliant but headstrong civilian leader. But in Iraq, Rumsfeld has pushed the services -- especially the Army -- near the breaking point. The military is right that the next chairman of the JCS must be someone who can push back.” The article also contains this revelation: “Critics think Myers sometimes erred in sounding too dutifully supportive, as in comments he made during an April 2004 visit to Iraq. The insurgency had exploded so violently then that there was contingency planning to evacuate the Green Zone.” (Emphasis added.) Thanks to alert reader go long into the day.

Opinion: “In 1944, the GI Bill was viewed as an investment in our future -- and what an investment it proved to be. Eight million veterans tapped educational benefits, and their impact on the colleges and the nation`s economy as they poured into the workforce was phenomenal. The home loan guarantees had a similar impact on the economy and society in general. It makes no sense at all that Congress votes all the money the Defense Department asks for to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but is cheap when it comes to the young men and women who wear the uniform and risk their lives for our country. It is high time for Congress to draft a new GI Bill for this new generation of war veterans who are just as deserving of our support as were their grandfathers and fathers in their day.” Sorry, vets, our Republican Congress is too busy sucking up to crazy right-wing religious loons to worry about upgrading your GI Bill benefits.

Opinion: “Yet, since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the ability of the Iraqis to shape their own political destiny has been compromised by U.S. interventions. While hawking democracy, the Americans have not trusted Iraqis to choose the right leaders or to enact the right laws. Hence, their endless tinkering with the machinery of governance, their unilateral promulgation of 100 laws under the Coalition Provisional Authority, and their imposition of an ‘interim constitution’ that now constrains political life. In recent months, the American press has barely mentioned this ‘interim constitution’ or Transitional Administrative Law, signed in March 2004. Written behind closed doors by American legal experts and handpicked Iraqis, it is this document that has complicated the efforts of elected Iraqi representatives to choose a Presidency Council. The relevant provision requires that the new president and the two deputies must be chosen by two-thirds of the National Assembly.”

Opinion: “When U.S. service members are accused of wrongdoing, they are investigated and, if necessary, court-martialed. That`s not the case with civilians who are generally not covered by the laws of their home countries for crimes committed abroad. The Iraqi legal system could hold them to account, but in practice Baghdad won`t do anything that might lead to an exodus of foreign firms. Dozens of U.S. and British soldiers have been prosecuted for misconduct in Iraq — but not a single contractor. A lack of accountability leads to occurrences such as those described by four former Custer Battles employees who claim that poorly trained Kurds on the firm`s payroll killed innocent motorists. In one incident, a guard supposedly fired his AK-47 into a passenger car to clear a traffic jam. In another, an aggressive driver in a giant pickup truck allegedly pulverized a sedan with children inside. When true (the firm denies any wrongdoing), such incidents only create more insurgent recruits.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Four Mississippi Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.
# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:06 AM
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Latest Fatality: Mar 30, 2005
Military Fatalities: Total: 1709 , US: 1532 , Mar.05: 38

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

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Why World War IV can`t sell
By John Brown
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GD01Aa01.html

In a recent essay [url(Are we in World War IV?)]http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2251[/url] Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch commented quite rightly that "World War IV" has "become a commonplace trope of the imperial right" of the United States. But he didn`t mention one small matter - the rest of the US, not to speak of the outside world, hasn`t bought the neo-cons` efforts to justify President George W Bush`s militaristic adventures abroad with crude "we`re in World War IV" agitprop meant to mobilize Americans in support of the administration`s foreign-policy follies. That`s why, in his second term, Bush - first and foremost a politician concerned about maintaining domestic support - is talking ever less about waging a global war and ever more about democratizing the world.

A neo-con global war
America`s neo-conservatives have long paid lip service to the need for democracy in the Middle East, but their primary emphasis has been on transformation by war, not politics. You`ll remember that, according to America`s right-wing world warriors, we Americans are inextricably engaged in a planetary struggle against fanatic Muslim fundamentalists. There will, they assure us, be temporary setbacks in this total generational conflict, as was the case during World War II and the Cold War (considered World War III by neo-cons), but we can win in the end if we "stay the course" with patriotic fortitude. Above all, we must not be discouraged by the gory details of the real, nasty war in Iraq in which we`re already engaged, despite the loss of blood and treasure involved. Like so many good Soviet citizens expecting perfect communism in the indeterminate future, all we have to do is await the New American Century that will eventually be brought into being by the triumphs of US arms (and neo-con cheerleading).

Since at least September 11, 2001, the neo-cons have rambled on ... and on ... about "World War IV". But no matter how often they`ve tried to beat the phrase into our heads, it hasn`t become part of the US mindset. Peace and honest work, not perpetual war and senseless conflict, still remain our modest ideals - even with (because of?) the tragedy of the Twin Towers. True, right before the presidential election, World War IV surfaced again and again in the media, fed by neo-con propaganda; and even today it appears here and there, though as often in criticism as boosterism. Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo have recently used the phrase to criticize neo-con hysteria in their columns; and in its Winter 2005 issue, the Wilson Quarterly published "World War IV", an important article by Andrew J Bacevich, which turns the neo-cons` argument on its head by suggesting that it was the US that started a new world war - a disastrous struggle for control of Middle Eastern oil reserves - during the administration of president Jimmy Carter. For Bacevich, it appears, the neo-cons` cherished verbal icon should not be a call to arms, but a sad reminder of the hubris of military overreach.

Try it long
For all the absurdity of their arguments, neo-cons are, in many ways, men of ideas. But they do not live on another planet. They know that "World War IV" or even the milder "global war on terrorism" are not the first things ordinary Americans have in their thoughts when they get up in the morning ("Does anyone still remember the war on terror?" asked that master of the zeitgeist, Frank Rich of the New York Times, early in January). This unwillingness among us mere mortals to see the world in terms of a universal death struggle, which neo-con sympathizer Larry Haas, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, believes is caused by "our faith in rationality", upsets some of the Spengler-like neo-cons, most noticeably their cantankerous dean, Norman Podhoretz.

In February in Commentary (a magazine he once edited), Podhoretz offered the world "The war against World War IV", a follow-up to his portentous and historically falsifying September 2004 piece, "World War IV: How it started, what it means, and why we have to win". In his latest piece, stormin` Norman castigates Americans right and left - including "isolationists of the paleo-conservative Right", "Michael Moore and all the other hard leftists holed up in Hollywood, the universities, and in the intellectual community at large", and "liberal internationalists" - for being "at war" with his Rosemary`s baby "World War IV". Somewhat defensively (for a rabid warmonger), he assures us that we, the American people, will, despite the best efforts of the critics, continue to support Mr Bush, who in turn will not fail to uphold the "Bush Doctrine", which reflects, Podhoretz leaves no doubt, his own "brilliant" World War IV ideas (as admiring fellow neo-pundit William Safire described them in a New York Times column last August).

Mr Podhoretz is angry at those who simply cannot accept his crude Hobbesian view of humanity, so he keeps shouting at us, but less virulent neo-cons and their allies, realizing "World War IV" has not caught on, are thinking up new terms to con Americans into the neos` agenda of total war.

Foremost among these is "the long war", evoking - to my mind at least - World War I, "the Great War" as it was known, which did so much to lead to the rise of fascism in Europe. (But how many Americans actually care about World War I?) A Google search reveals that as early as May 2002, in a Cato Policy Analysis, "Building leverage in the long war: Ensuring intelligence community creativity in the fight against terrorism", James W Harris wrote of a "long war" in describing post-September 11 world tensions. In June of last year, John C Wohlstetter, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, proclaimed:

Now George W Bush must rally the nation in the latest fight to the finish between imperfect civilization and perfect barbarism, that of free countries versus mega-death terror from both "WMD states" and groups like al-Qaeda. The Gipper`s [former US president Ronald Reagan] testamentary gift to us is what should be our goal in a long war that strategist Eliot Cohen calls World War IV.

Podhoretz himself mentioned the "long war" in his September Commentary article. "We are only," he noted, "in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war." But the real star of the long-war proponents is Centcom commander General John Abizaid, about whom pro-Iraqi invasion journalist David Ignatius wrote a fawning portrait in the Washington Post in late December. "If there is a modern Imperium Americanum," Ignatius announced, "Abizaid is its field general." Playing the role of intrepid "action" journalist at the forefront of the global battle lines in "Centcom`s turbulent center of operations", Ignatius breathlessly informs his readers that

I traveled this month with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and other areas of his command. Over several days, I heard him discuss his strategy for what he calls the "Long War" to contain Islamic extremism ... Abizaid believes that the Long War is only in its early stages. Victory will be hard to measure, he says, because the enemy won`t wave a white flag and surrender one day ... America`s enemies in this Long War, he argues, are what he calls "Salafist jihadists". That`s his term for the Muslim fundamentalists who use violent tactics to try to re-create what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Mohammed, who is sometimes called the "Salaf".

So now we understand why we`re in a long war: to free ourselves of the salacious Salaf.

If you think it`s not long enough, how about millennium?
Former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey, an early proponent of "World War IV", is now turned on by the "long war" idea as well. In December, in remarks titled "The war for democracy", he said:

Well, let me share a few thoughts with you this morning on what I have come to call the Long War of the 21st Century. I used to call it World War IV, following my friend Eliot Cohen, who called it that in an op-ed right after [September 11, 2001] in the Wall Street Journal. Eliot`s point is that the Cold War was World War III. And this war is going to have more in common with the Cold War than with either World War I or II.

But people hear the phrase World War and they think of Normandy and Iwo Jima and short, intense periods of principally military combat. I think Eliot`s point is the right one, which is that this war will have a strong ideological component and will last some time. So, in order to avoid the association with World Wars I and II, I started calling it the Long War of the 21st Century. Now, why do I think it`s going to be long? First of all, it is with three totalitarian movements coming out of the Middle East.

The three totalitarian movements, Woolsey goes on to say, are "Middle East Fascists"; "the Vilayat Faqih, the Rule of the Clerics in Tehran - Khamenei, Rafsanjani and his colleagues"; and "the Islamists of al-Qaeda`s stripe, underpinned, in many ways, by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia".

With all this war-talk from the neo-cons, it`s always reassuring to hear the voices of those who, if our world warriors had their way, would enthusiastically give up their lives for the "long war". On December 31, reader Robert S Stelzer wrote a letter to the Denver Post in which he said the following regarding Ignatius` paean to Abizaid:

I interpret the article as a propaganda piece to get the American population used to the idea of a long war, and then a military draft. Maybe we need an empire to maintain our standard of living, but if we have democracy we need an informed electorate.

Despite rare dissident voices like Stelzer`s, the reaction of most Americans to the "long war" jingle (as to "World War IV") has in essence been that of a silent majority: nothing. Count on the neo-con bastion the Weekly Standard (in January) to try to whip up those silent Americans with a ratcheted-up attack-the-mortal-enemy battle cry headlined "The Millennium War" by pundit Austin Bay, a colonel, who noted that "the global war on terror is the war`s dirt-stupid name. One might as well declare war on exercise as declare war on terror, for terror is only a tactic used by an enemy ... In September 2001, I suggested that we call this hideous conflict the Millennium War, a nom de guerre that captures both the chronological era and the ideological dimensions of the conflict."

But Austin B`s MW (apologies to the German car maker) has not sold either, being even less repeated in media commentaries than the "long war" itself - which brings us to the Bush administration`s current attitude toward the neo-cons` World War IV branding.

Drop that war! The product no longer sells!
If there`s one thing the sad history of recent years has amply demonstrated, it`s that the Bush White House is profoundly uninterested in ideas (even the superficial ones promulgated by the neo-cons). What concerns Dubya and his entourage is not thought, but power. They pick up and drop "ideas" at the tip of a hat, abandoning them when they no longer suit their narrow interests of the moment. (The ever-changing "justifications" for the war in Iraq are a perfect illustration of this attitude.) The Bushies are short-term and savvy tacticians par excellence, with in essence one long-term plan, rudimentary but focused: Republican - as they interpret Abraham Lincoln`s party - domination of the United States for years to come. White House political adviser Karl Rove`s hero, after all, is William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, who, some argue, was responsible for creating Republican control of US politics for decades.

The current US administration, perhaps more than any other in history, illustrates George Kennan`s observation that "our actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities". Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that the war in Iraq was begun in essence for domestic consumption (as White House chief of staff Andrew H Card Jr suggested to the New York Times in September 2002, when he famously said of Iraq war planning, "From a marketing point of view, you don`t introduce new products in August"). While all the reasons behind this tragic, idiotic war - which turned out far worse than the "mission accomplished" White House ever expected - may never be fully known, it can be said with a strong degree of assurance that it was sold to the US public, at least in part, in order to morph Bush II, not elected by popular vote and low in the polls early in his presidency, into a decisive "commander-in-chief" so that his party would win the upcoming congressional - and then presidential - elections.

The neo-cons - including, in all fairness, those among them honest in their unclear convictions - happened to be around the White House (of course, they made sure they would be) to provide justification for Bush`s military actions after September 11 with their Darwinian, dog-eat-dog, "us vs them" view of the world. And so their "ideas" (made to sound slightly less harsh than World War IV in the phrase "global war on terrorism") were cleared by Rove and other Republican politicos and used for a while by a domestically driven White House to persuade voters that the invasion of Iraq was an absolute necessity for the security of the United States.

But now Americans are feeling increasingly critical of our Iraqi "catastrophic success". "The latest polls show that 53% of Americans feel the war was not worth fighting, 57% say they disapprove of Mr Bush`s handling of Iraq, and 70% think the number of US casualties is an unacceptable price to have paid," reported the Christian Science Monitor, referring to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. To the Pentagon`s great concern, the military is having difficulties recruiting; National Guardsmen are angry about excessively long tours of duty in Iraq; spouses of soldiers complain about their loved ones being away from home for far too much time.

So, as their pro-war manifestos become less and less politically useful to the Bush administration, the neo-cons are getting a disappointing reward for their Bush-lovin`. Far from being asked to formulate policy to the extent that they doubtless would like, they have been relegated to playing in essence representational roles, reminiscent of the one performed by the simple-minded gardener named Chance played by Peter Sellers in the film Being There - at the United Nations (John Bolton) and at the World Bank (Paul Wolfowitz), two institutions that no red-blooded Republican voters will ever care about, except as objects of hatred.

At the same time, and despite disquieting many foreigners by the selection of Bolton and Wolfowitz (widely perceived abroad as undiplomatic unilateralists) to serve in multinational organizations, Bush appears to have recognized the existence of anti-American foreign public opinion, which has been intensely critical of the neo-cons` bellicose views and US unilateral action in Iraq. The selection of spinmeister Karen Hughes, a Bush confidante who happened to be born in Paris (no, not Paris, Texas), as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department suggests that the White House staff has begun (against its gut instincts) to acknowledge what it dismissed in Bush`s first term - the usefulness of "soft power" in dealing with other nations. This may only be from fear of excessively bad news coming from abroad that could lead to lower opinion polls at home and thus threaten current Republican hegemony in the United States, but no matter.

We don`t demolish, we democratize!
Few have actually been conned into the neos` war, whatever ingredient it be flavored with - "IV", "long" or "millennium". Now the White House, far from promulgating neo-con World War IV ideas, has been dropping most references to war as Bush`s second term begins. America`s commander-in-chief, still undergoing an extreme makeover as a man who considers peaceful negotiations at least an option, is being turned into an advocate of the politically oppressed in other countries and so has come up with a new explanation to sell his dysfunctional foreign "policy": global democratization, with a focus on the Middle East.

Bush did mention democratization in his first term, but today it has suddenly become the newest leitmotif for explaining his misadventures abroad. What, he now asks the American people, are we doing overseas? And he responds, we`re not demolishing the world - we`re democratizing it! And thanks to our democratizing so far in the Middle East, including the bombing and invading of Iraq, the Arab world is like Berlin when the Wall came down. (Forget about the fact that these two events took place during different centuries and in very different parts of the world based on the implementation of very different US policies.)

And don`t you forget, Bush tells us, that we`re on a path to reform our Social Security system, far more important than the war in Iraq - though Dubya`s call for personal accounts may, in appeal, prove the World War IV of domestic policy. As for democracy at home, that can wait.

So, after all the Bush administration has done to ruin America`s moral standing and image overseas - "preemptive" military strikes that violate simple morality and the basic rules of war; searching in vain for non-existent weapons of mass destruction; mindlessly rushing to implement "regime change" in a far-off Third World country, an ill-planned effort that could result in the establishment of an anti-Western theocracy harmful to US interests; brutally incarcerating "terrorists" with little, if any, respect for international law; arrogantly bashing "old Europe" just to show off all-American Manichean machismo; and insulting millions abroad by writing off their opinions - Americans are now being told by Dubya and his gang what we`ve really been up to all this time across the oceans: We`re democratizing the Middle East, and with great success thus far!

I don`t believe a word of it.

Here`s what the military newspaper Stars and Stripes wrote in 1919:

Propaganda is nothing but a fancy name for publicity, and who knows the publicity game better than the Yanks? Why, the Germans make no bones about admitting that they learned the trick from us. Now the difference between a Boche and a Yank is just this - that a Boche is someone who believes everything that`s told him and a Yank is some one who disbelieves everything that`s told him.

John Brown, a former US Foreign Service officer who resigned in protest against the invasion of Iraq, is affiliated with Georgetown University. Brown compiles a daily Public Diplomacy Press Review (PDPR) available free by request at [e-mail] . Aside from public diplomacy, PDPR covers items such as anti-Americanism, cultural diplomacy, propaganda, foreign public opinion, and American popular culture abroad. This article first appeared at Tomdispatch and is used by permission.

(Copyright 2005 John Brown)

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March 29, 2005
The Right Way to Promote Arab Reform
By STEVEN A. COOK


From the March/April 2005 issue of [urlForeign Affairs.]http://www.foreignaffairs.org/[/url]

Steven A. Cook is a Next Generation Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

LEARNING HOW TO HELP

Since taking office four years ago, President George W. Bush has often spoken of the need for political reform in the Arab world. Ordinary Arabs, however, have had good reason to be skeptical of his much-discussed "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East." After all, their region has been mired in political stasis for years, thanks in part to U.S. support for many of the Middle East`s dictators. For most of the last five decades, Washington has done little to promote Arab democratization, relying instead on the autocratic leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries to help protect vital U.S. interests in the neighborhood.

This skepticism, however, may no longer be warranted. On the morning of September 11, 2001, U.S. priorities in the Middle East changed. Suddenly, the Bush administration came to see democratization, which it had previously ranked below security and stability in its list of concerns for the Arab world, as the critical means by which to achieve these other goals. Indeed, the toppling of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon fundamentally shifted the underlying assumption of U.S. Middle East policy. Arab authoritarianism could no longer be viewed as a source of stability; instead, it was the primary threat to it. To "drain the swamp" that had incubated Islamist radicals such as Osama bin Laden, it became critical to promote political liberalization, even democratization, in the Middle East, and this goal became a central feature of U.S. national security policy.

Even before this shift, Washington had already begun to try to promote reform in the Middle East--albeit quietly, and never with anything like Bush`s rhetorical zeal or fixation on democracy. The United States had, in recent years, pursued three different approaches toward the Arab world: punishing its enemies with diplomatic isolation, sanctions, and invasion; bolstering civil society; and promoting economic development in friendly states. Assuming that these last two tactics would gently drive political liberalization, the United States funded good-governance programs in Egypt, promoted industrial zones in Jordan, and provided various forms of economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority and, more recently, Yemen.

Unfortunately, none of these policies proved very effective, and the failure of the United States to generate political reform in the Arab world before now should serve as a source of caution. Washington`s poor track record, however, must not dissuade U.S. policymakers from trying again; the cost would simply be too high. Although the process may be difficult and fraught with risk, promoting the rise of liberal democratic political systems in the Arab world is the only way to reduce, over the long run, the odds of another attack on Americans by Middle Eastern terrorists. It is time, therefore, for Washington to refocus on the challenge: How can it best foster an environment in the Middle East that is conducive to reform? And how can it do so without sacrificing its key interests?

To answer these questions, U.S. policymakers need first to consider what exactly hinders Arab political development, and then to think about what will convince Arab leaders to change. As they build a new strategy, one principle should guide U.S. leaders: punitive policies have proven, time and again, to be of limited value or even counterproductive. Washington needs, instead, to adopt an incentive-based approach, one that will lead Arab countries to fundamentally revise their institutions.

ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTIONS

If the United States hopes to craft a more successful pro-democracy strategy for the Middle East, U.S. officials will have to abandon two central tenets of their past and present approach: reliance on civil society and pressure for economic reform, both of which, it has long been thought, contribute to democratization in authoritarian states.

"Civil society" is political science shorthand for private voluntary groups, including nongovernmental organizations dedicated to issues such as human rights and good governance. Within both the scholarly and policy communities, civil society is often seen these days as a leading force for democratization. As such groups proliferate, the argument runs, individuals become more assertive in demanding their political rights. Once these demands reach a certain pitch, authoritarian leaders are forced to make meaningful changes or risk being swept away. The policy implications of this theory are neat and tidy: to encourage liberalization in repressive states, simply encourage the growth of civil society.

This philosophy has, in fact, been the lodestar of U.S. democratization policy toward the Middle East for some time. One of the primary goals of the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), launched by the Bush administration in 2002, is to "strengthen democratic practices and civil society." Throughout the 1990s, in addition to providing much-needed technical and economic assistance to friendly Arab countries, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) pursued programs to encourage the development of civic groups in Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories. Federally funded U.S. organizations such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute also worked hard to do the same.

The U.S. faith in civil society dates from the end of the Cold War, when such groups played a major role in toppling communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, however, there is little evidence to suggest that such groups are likely to play a similar role in the Arab world today. To begin with, although many Arab countries are already awash in civic organizations (according to one study conducted in the late 1990s, Egypt alone boasts some 19,000 of them), these countries remain oppressive. Civil society in Arab countries may provide critical social services, such as medical care, education, and legal representation, but many of the groups involved, such as those affiliated with radical Islamist movements, are decidedly undemocratic. Others have proven too willing to cooperate with local nondemocratic regimes: Egyptian human rights activists, for example, serve on the government-created Egyptian National Council for Human Rights, which has no power to compel the government to change its predatory practices and serves only as window dressing. Likewise, in Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, and other Arab countries, labor unions and business organizations enjoy government patronage in return for collaboration with the state.

Washington`s effort to promote democracy through civil society has run into another problem as well, one related to the United States` dismal image in the Arab world. Put simply, many local activists refuse to work with Americans. Washington`s policies toward the region--from the Iraq war and the war on terrorism to its support for Israel--are so unpopular that Arab activists cannot embrace the United States, or even be seen to cooperate with it, without compromising their credibility within the communities they serve.

Washington`s second major misapprehension about how to spur democracy--through economic development--stems from a confusion of correlation with causation. Economic development and democratization may in fact often go hand in hand, but this does not mean that the former causes the latter. In fact, social science research indicates that, although economic growth is critical to sustaining democracy, it is not enough to create it. Yet Washington acts as though it is: programs run by the Partnership for Progress (an initiative by the G-8 group of highly industrialized countries plus Russia to promote political change in the Middle East), MEPI, and USAID are all predicated on the assumption that economic development produces new entrepreneurs, who inevitably demand greater political openness.

The Middle East, however, has refused to conform to this model. Whenever Arab leaders have reformed their economies--as during Egypt`s much-vaunted infitah (opening) in the late 1970s or Algeria`s version of the same in the 1980s--the result has been economic liberalization without either the institutionalization of market economies or the emergence of democracy. As expected, economic development has given rise to new classes of entrepreneurs. But these business leaders, whose fortunes have remained tied largely to the state, have been easily co-opted by local repressive regimes.

Not only have these two approaches failed to achieve the intended result in the Middle East, so have Washington`s more punitive alternatives. Over the last decade, the United States has subjected Libya, Iran, and, most famously, Iraq to military, economic, and diplomatic sanctions in an effort to contain their rogue governments and, it was hoped, to compel them to alter their behavior. Although one can argue that containment stopped some problems from getting worse and even helped produce positive results in some cases (such as Libya`s move away from radicalism), it cannot be said that punitive measures (short of invasion) actually resulted in any political liberalization. In fact, sanctions have tended to be counterproductive, with Saddam Hussein having been particularly adept at manipulating them to stoke nationalist resentment and rally Iraqis behind his regime.

Of course, the ultimate punitive policy instrument is war, and, as its code name suggests, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was, among other things, intended to bring democracy to Iraq and the greater Middle East. It is far from clear, however, that the war has contributed anything to the drive for democracy in places such as Amman, Cairo, Damascus, or Riyadh. The arrival of U.S. troops in Iraq may alter the behavior of some states on the country`s borders, but this does not mean that the new Iraq will somehow act as a catalyst for political liberalization and democracy in the region. In fact, as security in Iraq continues to deteriorate, many Iraqis are starting to think fondly of the benefits--such as stability and order--that a strongman can provide. With Iraq`s transformation into an ostensibly liberal pluralist state growing ever bloodier, democracy--imported at the tip of an m-16 rifle--is looking less and less appealing to many Arabs.

Punitive measures have been no more successful with U.S. allies in the region. Congress, under the prodding of Representative Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), has recently considered measures such as shifting $325 million of the funds currently given to Egypt for military assistance to economic support. Rather than prompt reform, however, the proposal has caused an uproar in Cairo, with Hosni Mubarak`s government portraying the measure as a cut in U.S. aid designed to weaken Egypt. (The fact that Lantos is a long-time supporter of Israel and did not propose similar cuts to Jerusalem`s aid package did not help.)

INSTITUTIONALIZED

The reason that the promotion of civil society, economic development, and sanctions have not led to political reform in the Arab world is that none of them addresses the real obstacles to change in the region: flawed institutions. Institutions are the organizations, arrangements, laws, decrees, and regulations that constitute the political rules of the game in any given society. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Arab states boast such institutions in spades; the problem is not with their number but with their nature. In the Arab world, these institutions are designed to ensure the authoritarian character of the regimes. Rather than guarantee rights or give citizens a voice, Arab political institutions tend to restrict political participation, limit individual freedom, and vest overwhelming power in the executive branch of government.

So far, all of the discussion about Arab reform seems to have achieved more talk but not much institutional change. Minor modifications have been made, but authoritarian politics prevail throughout the Middle East. Bahrain, for example, kicked off an experiment in political liberalization in 2002. But authorities recently closed the country`s leading human rights organization and jailed its leader (he was eventually released, and his organization reopened, after much political wrangling). Citizens of Qatar, meanwhile, have enjoyed greater political rights since the promulgation of a new constitution in September 2004, but that same constitution also institutionalized the absolute power of the emir and his family.

As such examples suggest, U.S. policymakers have yet to come up with a way to press such countries to liberalize their institutions. And indeed, such change is hard to effect. But it is also critical to the emergence of democratic politics in the Arab world. Washington should therefore focus on coming up with ways to make it easier for democratic politics to emerge. Although this might be easier said than done, with some creative thinking, Washington can figure out how to use its massive financial, military, and diplomatic resources to drive institutional change.

The best way to do so would be to move away from negative pressures and toward more positive, incentive-based policies. In the abstract, such policies involve getting others to do what you want by promising them something valuable in return. In this case, the United States can use the prospect of increased aid or membership in international clubs and organizations as levers to encourage Arab progress toward the establishment of pluralism, the rule of law, power sharing, property rights, and free markets.

To start the ball rolling, the United States should offer Arab states additional money, contingent on their undertaking reform. The advantage of this approach is that nothing is coerced. Countries are not forced to change--they are invited to, in exchange for serious financial rewards.

U.S. relations with Egypt--the second-largest recipient of U.S. economic and military aid--were once based on this principle. In 1978, Washington promised Cairo that if Egypt would make peace and normalize relations with Israel, the United States would underwrite the modernization of Egypt`s armed forces and economy. Egypt complied, and ever since, it has technically upheld its end of the bargain by keeping the peace--albeit a frosty one--with Israel. The United States, however, should demand more for its money. Even as Washington continues to send Cairo billions of dollars annually, Egyptian-Israeli relations have deteriorated precipitously (although they have improved somewhat since the death of Yasir Arafat). And such aid has become institutionalized: the $2.2 billion Egypt gets each year has morphed from an incentive for the Egyptians to maintain good relations with Israel into a vested bureaucratic and legislative interest.

Elsewhere in the Arab world, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, and, more recently, Algeria and Yemen have enjoyed U.S. support without being asked to make any reciprocal commitment to the United States. Some policy experts have argued that Washington cannot afford to put conditions on these gifts: to do so would jeopardize key U.S. priorities in the region, such as access to the Suez Canal, Riyadh`s general cooperation, and Amman`s constructive role in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. But this argument underestimates the importance of the United States to the countries in question. Washington`s Arab friends need it as much as, if not more than, the United States needs them. Could Cairo really afford to deny U.S. warships transit through the Suez Canal?

Precisely because the United States is the predominant foreign power in the Middle East--and because the Arab states have no alternative ally--Washington is well positioned to implement new incentive-based policies. Apart from Egypt, other strong precedents exist to show just how effective such an approach can be. In the 1990s, for example, the United States employed incentives to encourage Ukraine to abandon the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Washington promised Kiev economic aid, investment, joint research and development programs, and a guaranteed share of the space-launch market if the latter would create credible export-control mechanisms for sensitive materials and technologies, cancel its plans to upgrade its missiles, and renege on an agreement to supply Iran`s nuclear program; Ukraine, eager for Western aid, quickly complied.

Perhaps the best example of a successful incentive-based approach is with Turkey, which has long sought to join the European Union. When Turkey petitioned the EU for membership, Brussels responded by setting clear political, economic, legal, and social standards for Ankara to meet first. The huge benefits offered by EU membership created a vast constituency for reform in Turkey. As a result, the Turkish parliament has been able to pass eight reform packages in the last three years. Turkey`s Islamists have come to support the program, which they see as their best chance for securing formal political protections. The Islamists have cleverly recognized that, since the EU demands that its members institutionalize freedom of religion, Turkey, to become a candidate, will have to loosen government control on religious expression and Islamist political participation. Meanwhile, Turkey`s long-dominant military has also signed on to the reform project. Although some of the changes demanded by Brussels will reduce the military`s influence, Turkey`s general staff has realized that it cannot oppose the project without looking like an enemy of modernization--something the inheritors of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk`s legacy cannot afford.

MORE HONEY, LESS VINEGAR

Of course, the United States cannot offer the Arab world anything equivalent to EU membership. Still, it is important for U.S. policymakers to recognize how effective Brussels` approach to Ankara--based almost exclusively on incentives--has been.

The Bush administration has, in fact, already embraced a more-honey-than-vinegar approach to democracy promotion through the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). This initiative, announced in 2003, promises to reward poor countries with increased aid if they meet 16 different standards on issues ranging from good governance, the rule of law, and public education to health care and economic transparency. The MCA has the potential to become a powerful new tool for promoting democracy in the Middle East and beyond. But Washington has yet to emphasize the program or to apply it systematically to countries in the Middle East.

Here again, the Bush administration should draw lessons from the Turkey-EU story. Although Washington cannot offer Arab countries membership in its own exclusive club, the United States does have a number of bilateral and multilateral policy levers it could use. Such a new approach would not require major new financial investment. It would, however, demand a significant amount of political will.

On the bilateral front, Washington should start by reconfiguring its military assistance to Egypt. Given the importance of this largesse, changes in how it is disbursed would put serious pressure on Cairo. At the moment, Egypt gets $1.3 billion from the United States each year for its military. This money comes with no strings attached. To help jump-start reform, Washington should actually up the offer to $2 billion. Of this amount, $1.3 billion, or the current total, would remain free from any conditions. But to get the extra $700 million, Cairo would have to embrace a range of reforms, ensuring, for example, greater transparency, government accountability, and wider political inclusion. This would give Egypt strong incentives to comply--especially since Cairo`s aid package, which has remained constant for 26 years, has actually decreased by more than half when adjusted for inflation; $700 million more per year would go a long way toward rebalancing the figure.

Such a program would offer a number of benefits both to the United States and to Egypt. First, restructuring U.S. military assistance in this manner would safeguard U.S. interests in the region by helping ensure that Egypt`s military becomes technologically advanced and capable. Second, this new way of doing business would give Egyptians a more dignified role in their relationship with the United States: Cairo would be encouraged to undertake reform, but the ultimate choice would be theirs. Moreover, putting subtle pressure on the Egyptian leadership to reform will bolster U.S. credibility with the Egyptian public and help assuage general Arab skepticism toward Washington--which has long talked about political progress in the region while doing painfully little to make it happen.

Reconfiguring the U.S. aid package to Egypt would also reduce the risk of a rift developing between the two countries. Relations between Washington and Cairo have been strained in recent years by the war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Cutting military aid now, as some have suggested--or even transferring military aid into economic assistance--would create a serious backlash in Cairo that could lead to a major break. Washington could ill afford such an event: Egypt can often be a fractious ally, but the pursuit of U.S. interests in the Middle East would become immeasurably more difficult if the Egyptian leadership decided to actively oppose them.

In the multilateral arena, the United States could offer to sponsor Arab participation in clubs such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), NATO`s Partnership for Peace, or a new Community of Democracies--if, that is, Arab states first agreed to conduct serious political liberalization and economic reform. With the WTO, for example, the United States, in concert with its European allies, could require potential Arab members to embrace specific reforms--beyond what the WTO already requires--in return for U.S. and European support for their candidacies. Such reforms might include changes to electoral and political party laws to broaden participation, or penal code reform that would improve human rights by guaranteeing due process and instituting safeguards against torture. Arab leaders might complain that this requirement is unfair: after all, no one put such conditions on China, with its deplorable human rights record, when it joined the WTO. Like it or not, however, Arab leaders would retain the choice of whether to comply or not.

To be realistic, there are limits to what incentive-based policies can achieve. Offering new military aid will be more effective with Egypt and Jordan than with Morocco or Saudi Arabia, for example. Saudi Arabia needs the money much less and has such a critical strategic position that it can better resist pressure from the United States. As for Morocco, it is one of the few Arab states that has a viable alternative to the United States as a patron: Europe.

Consequently, U.S. policymakers interested in pursuing an incentive-based approach with such countries will need to look to other areas where the United States can leverage its influence to encourage political and economic change. In the Saudi case, the answer might be a free trade agreement or a U.S. promise to sponsor Saudi membership in a variety of international organizations.

Caveats aside, the fact remains that incentives are a critical--and critically underused--tool for effecting reform and spurring democratization in the Arab world. Current U.S. policy is based on a mix of defective assumptions: about the role of civil society, about the transformative effect of economic development, and about the efficacy of punitive policies to force change. If it is serious about finally spurring progress in the Middle East, the United States needs to focus more explicitly on political targets and embrace a more positive set of means. An incentive-based approach offers a more coherent, less intrusive, and ultimately more promising strategy toward the Arab world. As the attacks of September 11 showed, the old approach is broken. It`s time for a fix.

Copyright 2002--2005 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.

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Published on Thursday, March 31, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
George Bush`s Limited Definition of "Life"
by Dawn Baldwin
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0331-23.htm

President George W. Bush insists that he`d rather err on the side of "life."

And to prove it, he champions the unborn and the brain-dead.

For the majority of the living, however, he plays very different odds.

When his policies expose hundreds of thousands of children to toxic levels of mercury, risking neurological disorders, disease, and death appears to be an "error" he`s more than willing to make.

When his policies cut the Medicare benefits for millions who have to go without the preventive care, early detection, and medical treatment that would prolong and enhance their lives-"life" wouldn`t appear to be his first concern.

When his policies withhold the information and resources necessary to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancies, he`s chosen to risk the deaths of teenagers, adults, orphaned children, and fetuses worldwide rather than acknowledge sexual activity as a natural, one might even say life-affirming human activity.

When he conspires with his Attorney General to flaunt international law where the treatment of prisoners of war is concerned so that US soldiers who torture and kill them might have defense in court-protecting "life", at least for those civilians declared our enemies, wouldn`t seem to be his worry.

When it comes to killing criminals for whom there is inconclusive evidence of guilt, erring on the side of death is something he`s proven himself quite comfortable with and capable of.

When his policies gut the 30-year-old Clean Water Act, so that it no longer applies to 60% of our rivers, lakes, and streams, and open millions of acres of our national parks and wilderness to logging, mining, and oil drilling, he`s clearly choosing to err on the side of extractive industry profits, regardless what death might follow in their wake.

When his tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans result in the drastic under-funding of programs for the nation`s neediest women and children, including child care, early childhood education, after school activities, supplemental nutrition, Pell grants, and housing-he`s willing to risk the risk the ignorance, malnutrition, unemployment, incarceration and death of the nation`s unfortunates so those who are already privileged may pocket some more cash.

These are the actions of a man more than willing to err, and err profligately and unapologetically, on the side of big money, big industry, big corporations and big American displays of power. Again and again, he has proven himself willing to err on the side of those who would just as soon destroy the government at the expense of those who rely on it for their survival.

So what are we to make of his self-proclaimed devotion to "life?"

Unfertilized eggs in a woman`s ovaries have his fealty.

In every zygote he believes God is present.

But if every zygote is sacred, then why isn`t every human life outside the womb, or even the womb itself, at least as sacred as that initial assemblage of cells?

The President appears to believe that Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead woman with a liquefied cerebral cortex should not be allowed to die. Yet men, women, and children are "allowed to die" in this country every day, on his watch, as a result of poverty, crime, and lack of proper health care.

Special sessions of Congress are not called. Emergency legislation is not written. Judges are not prevailed upon to intervene.

The Pentagon does not keep records of the number of Iraqis civilians we have killed.

One can only conclude that the President must find them somehow lacking in "life" since he was, and is, willing to rain unprovoked violence upon them. Surely if God was as present in Iraqi schoolchildren and shopkeepers as he is in Terri Schiavo and embryos, then two years ago the President would have demanded patience, not called for war.

He would have stood before the world, as the leader of the culture of "life" he claims to be, and insisted that the people of the world unite in finding alternatives to the death and destruction of war. But he didn`t.

He would have stood before the world, as the moral man he claims to be, and insisted that in a world of finite resources, America cannot continue to use so much more than our share. But he didn`t.

Adamant in his willingness to err on the side of "life", he would have proclaimed that the world cannot sustain stealing bread and water from those who hunger and thirst in the service of war. He would have given his solemn vow to work toward humane resolution of conflict, where wholesale violence is the absolute last option. But he didn`t.

So its not unreasonable to conclude that the "life" upon which the President is so confidently willing to err is simply not present in the Middle East-with the exception that proves the rule being Israel.

Nor is this "life" embodied by those Americans who as a result of their race, sex, birth, education, location, occupation, income, health, sexual orientation, age or bad luck, rely on the government for some sort of social, educational, physical, or monetary support. These are not lives he chooses to err on the side of either.

These lives are just speed-bumps, and their wreckage merely collateral damage, on the road to Bush`s Brave New All-American World.

For George W., the "life" he can exploit for political capital-or legal tender-is the only "life" that matters.

Dawn Baldwin ([e-mail]) is a safety and environmental consultant and writer living in Memphis, TN and Bartow, WV.

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Apr 1, 2005

Gun mentality rules in Beirut
By Lucy Ashton
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GD01Ak01.html

BEIRUT - Blank gun licenses are now easy to acquire in Beirut. "The Ministry of Defense is handing them out by the thousand," said a prominent Lebanese businessman. "See, I have one here." A usual gun permit bears the name and photo of the licensee covered with an official stamp. However, this permit has evidently been validated before the picture was added - the ink stamp blurs beneath the little passport photo, not over it. "Many people have completely blank documents. They are easy to obtain, you just need to ask."
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Such permits allow a holder to buy any weapon available, from pistol to submachine-gun. "AKs are most popular," said Joseph, a gun seller. "They are cheap, only US$100." It is also possible to buy guns on the black market. The best range can be found in the Bekaa Valley, particularly in the ancient city of Baalbek, whose streets are now decked with the portraits of Hezbollah martyrs who have died fighting against Israel.

The trade in weapons quickened last week as battered trucks carrying 2,000 Syrian troops drove out of Lebanon, adding to the 4,000 who had already left; 8,000 remain in Lebanon. Still, the prompt removal of Syrian forces and the announcement of caretaker Prime Minister Omar Karami that he cannot form a cabinet are stoking fears of a security vacuum. So what has been a largely peaceful Lebanese society since the end of the civil war in 1990 is rearming - just in case.

The people of this state first identify themselves by nationality, that of Lebanese, then by religion and then by political group. With 17 groups in Lebanon, each with their own leaders and allegiances, political division is inevitable, and there is not too much weight behind any one party.

But if people are forced to identify themselves by religious group - Muslim versus Christian - then the careful threads that have restitched Lebanese society back together since the end of the war will tighten and snap. And this strain is exactly what someone is trying to bring about.

The three bombs that have so far exploded in Christian areas are intended to heighten suspicions between the two religious groups. The bombs are being placed with restraint for now, their locations and timing carefully chosen in commercial areas at night so that casualties are few. They are warnings, but the city is waiting for worse.

Some Lebanese think the bombings are Syrian sour grapes, retaliation for being kicked out of Beirut after the assassination of former premier Rafik Hariri last month. Others believe that the Syrians want to foment trouble to justify their continued control over Beirut. Pro-Syrian Lebanese say it is a Christian group planting the bombs to rally their fractious fellows to a single religious cause. This, they say, is why the bombs are not planted to kill, but explode in almost deserted commercial streets at night. So far the only casualties have been Indians and Sri Lankans who guard the buildings at night.

To cause real chaos would not be hard: the killing of one of the long-established figureheads of one of the Maronite, Shi`ite or Druze factions would be enough. Hariri was a prominent Sunni, but in truth nobody liked him that much - he did not carry the emotions of the Lebanese. He was a respected businessman and politician, though often described as corrupt. But to kill Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, that would be a different matter. All hell would break loose as the Druze are a well-gelled group. For this reason, he is buffered under heavy guard.

Prime Minister Karami`s failure to form a government to oversee elections has added to the uncertainty. He has already stepped down twice in a month: first he was forced to resign after the killing of Hariri, then reappointed by parliament to form a government to unify the anti-Syrian opposition and the Damascus loyalists. Now the opposition has refused to join such a government until Hariri`s assignation is fully investigated, those responsible dismissed and all the Syrian troops and spies have left the country. Pro-Syrian politicians are obviously none too keen on such conditions. No one quite knows how to break this stalemate.

Talking to a top pro-Syrian security official, he said peace was far away, it will not happen before the end of summer. He said democracy could not work in Lebanon, the country was too divided, it needed a single firm hand running Beirut. The city could expect not one or two bombs, he said, but hundreds in the coming months. Whether such a statement came from a genuine concern for the security of Lebanon, or was a veiled threat, was unclear.

Lucy Ashton is a freelance journalist based in Amman, Jordan.

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

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Eine Variante, die ich schon öfter beschrieben habe.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 31. März 2005, 14:40

US-Personalpolitik

Frühjahrsputz in Washington
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,348945,00.html

Von Philipp Wittrock

Kürzlich schickte der amerikanische Präsident mit Bolton und Wolfowitz zwei Hardliner auf wichtige außenpolitische Posten. Was zunächst wie eine Provokation der Uno und Europas wirkte, wird nun ganz anders interpretiert: Ist die Zeit der Neocons in Washington vorbei?

Berlin - Die Neokonservativen sind wieder da, in ihrer ganzen Pracht: "Back in their pomp" titelte das britische Wirtschaftsmagazin "The Economist", als George W. Bush jüngst den ehemaligen Staatssekretär John Bolton für den Posten des amerikanischen Botschafters bei den Vereinten Nationen und wenig später den stellvertretenden Verteidigungsminister Paul Wolfowitz als neuen Chef der Weltbank nominierte. Scheinbar ein Triumph der "Neocons", jenen konservativen Verfechtern eines neuen amerikanischen Internationalismus, die es als ihre Aufgabe ansehen, der Welt Freiheit und Demokratie zu bringen - notfalls mit Gewalt.

Im Rest der Welt hält sich die Freude in Grenzen. Erst Ende Februar hatte sich der amerikanische Präsident auf tagelange Versöhnungsreise durch Europa begeben, hatte im Atomstreit mit Iran die Zeit der Diplomatie ausgerufen, kurz: Die dunklen Wolken am Himmel so manch bilateralen Verhältnisses schienen sich langsam zu verziehen. Da mussten die vermeintlich wieder gewonnenen Freunde Bushs Personalentscheidungen wie einen Schlag ins Gesicht empfinden, wie eine offene Provokation.

Wolfowitz, der "Falke", der Architekt des Irak-Krieges, soll an der Spitze der wichtigsten Entwicklungshilfe-Institution der Welt Hunger und Armut in der Dritten Welt bekämpfen. Für viele Europäer und Entwicklungsländer kaum vorstellbar. Fast schon bizarr mutet die Nominierung Boltons als Uno-Botschafter an. Amerikanische Medien zitierten in den vergangenen Tagen unzählige Aussprüche, in denen der Kandidat in der Vergangenheit offen seine Verachtung für die Organisation und ihre Arbeitsweise kundgetan hatte. Es gilt angesichts der Mehrheitsverhältnisse im Senat dennoch als sicher, dass Bolton sein Amt antreten wird. Auch Wolfowitz` Wahl am heutigen Donnerstag ist nach seinem Beschwichtigungsbesuch bei der Europäischen Union Formsache.

Was aber treibt die Bush-Administration um, wieder Salz in die noch nicht verheilte Wunde in den transatlantischen Beziehungen zu streuen? Ein Mangel an Alternativen wird es nicht gewesen sein. Ist es eine Demonstration amerikanischer Macht? Bush hatte zu Beginn seiner zweiten Amtszeit angekündigt, diese werde weniger von einsamen Entschlüssen, sondern von mehr Kooperation mit der Weltgemeinschaft geprägt sein.

Der Einfluss der "Neocons" schrumpft

Die Personalien Wolfowitz und Bolton könnten eine eigenwillige Interpretation dieses Versprechens sein: Bush besetzt die Schaltstellen internationaler Politik mit seinen härtesten Vertretern. Doch mit der Freude der "Neocons" könnte es schnell vorbei sein.

Die Besetzung zweier wichtiger außenpolitischer Posten mit ihren Anhängern lässt sich zwar als Erfolg sehen. Der Preis dafür ist jedoch hoch, denn ihr Einfluss im Zentrum der Macht, in Washington, schrumpft beträchtlich. Amerikanische Kommentatoren gehen davon aus, dass das Ausscheiden von Wolfowitz den Weg für die neue Außenministerin Condoleezza Rice ebnet, zukünftig die Irak-Politik noch stärker zu kontrollieren.

Hinzu kommt, dass gerade Bolton vermutlich wenig Gelegenheit haben wird, das neokonservative Misstrauen gegenüber internationalen Organisationen zu pflegen und die Uno mit seiner Anti-Haltung zu ärgern. Das Magazin "The New Yorker" sieht in der Tatsache, dass entgegen den Gepflogenheiten nicht der Präsident, sondern Condoleezza Rice die Nominierung Boltons verkündete, ein deutliches Signal an den designierten Uno-Botschafter: Condi ist der Boss. Zuvor hatte sie Bolton bei der Berufung ihres Stellvertreters übergangen, wohl auch, weil sie keine öffentlichen Alleingänge von ihren Untergebenen duldet, wie sie sich Bolton als Staatssekretär von Rices Vorgänger Colin Powell von Zeit zu Zeit leistete.

Rice wird immer stärker

Rice wird Bolton an der kurzen Leine halten, die Versetzung nach New York könnte sich für den Uno-Kritiker schnell als Strafe herausstellen, wenn er gezwungen wird, Kompromissbereitschaft zu zeigen. Boltons Platz als Rices Stellvertreter hat Robert Zoellick eingenommen, ein Mann, der als Pragmatiker und Freund des Multilateralismus gilt.

Condoleezza Rice ist der eigentliche Gewinner des Frühjahrsputzes in der US-Regierung. Sie genießt das uneingeschränkte Vertrauen des Präsidenten und kann ihren Einflussbereich stetig ausbauen. Das "Time Magazine" sieht darin die Rückkehr zu einer "pragmatischeren US-Diplomatie" - und nicht das Comeback der "Neocons". Im Gegenteil: Die Realisten hätten nun im Außen- und im Verteidigungsministerium die Oberhand gegenüber ihren neokonservativen Rivalen gewonnen.

Für Condoleezza Rice könnte der Machtzuwachs noch etwas ganz anderes bedeuten. Schon jetzt sind die Rufe nach einer Präsidentschaftskandidatur 2008 unüberhörbar. Ausgeschlossen hat sie das bisher nicht. Und je stärker sie wird, desto lauter werden die Rufe.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005

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March 31, 2005
Warning to EU on passport deadline
By FT.COM
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT20050331_29…

The chairman of the congressional committee overseeing US immigration laws warned on Thursday that Congress was unlikely to extend an October deadline for the European Union to adopt biometric passports.

The warning, from Republican James Sensenbrenner, raises the possibility that many European travellers to the US could be forced to acquire visas after the October 26 deadline, adding substantially to the time and expense involved in visits to the US.

In a letter to the European Commission, Mr Sensenbrenner said Congress was "unlikely" to respond to the EU`s request for a longer deadline.

"The increased awareness and concern, of both the American public and most members of Congress regarding continued weakness in US border security, will make an additional extension difficult to accomplish," he wrote. "I strongly suggest that the European Commission plan without the expectation that there will be an extension of the deadline."

The visa-waiver scheme, under which travellers from 27 mostly European countries can easily enter the US, has been criticised by some Republicans in Congress as a loophole that could be exploited by terrorists.

In an effort to appease those concerns, the US has insisted that all visa-waiver countries adopt passports with fingerprints or other biometric data incorporated in the documents to help safeguard against stolen passports being used by terrorists to enter the US.

Visa-waiver countries account for about 13m travellers to the US each year, and the State Department lacks the resources to begin issuing visas to those travellers.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005.

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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

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The gates of hell are open in Iraq

The occupation and new US threats could spark neighbouring uprisings
Jawad al-Khalisi
Friday April 1, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1449864,00.ht…

Guardian
The US-British occupation of Iraq is poisoning all political processes in my country and across the Middle East. The elections held under the control of the occupying forces in January were neither free nor fair. Instead of being a step towards solving Iraq`s problems, they have been used to prolong foreign rule over the Iraqi people.

Only when the occupiers withdraw from the country can Iraq take the first secure steps towards peace and stability. Once a strict timetable for withdrawal is set, Iraq`s political forces could freely agree and set in motion a process of genuinely free and fair democratic elections, a permanent constitution, and a programme that meets the demands of all the Iraqi people.

The occupying powers are now following a policy of divide and rule, encouraging sectarian and ethnic divisions and imposing them on all the institutions they have created.

Incidents such as the recent kidnapping of an Italian journalist, released only to be received by a hail of bullets from the US liberators, have fuelled widespread suspicions in Iraq as to who is in fact responsible for many of the terrorist acts - kidnappings, assassinations, and indiscriminate bombing and killing -that are engulfing the whole of Iraq. These have coincided with a cover-up of significant military operations being conducted against the occupation forces across the country.

Not one of the terrorist crimes has been solved and not a single perpetrator put on trial. After each major terrorist crime, the arrest of perpetrators is proclaimed, using names and personalities spread by the US-controlled media. This media effort - which also seeks to bury the news of the destruction of entire towns, brutal night raids, kidnappings, curfews, and the detention and torture of thousands of prisoners - is overseen by the information department of the US forces, who earned the US defence secretary`s special thanks during his visit to Iraq.

These crimes are a taste of the hell created by the US project in the Middle East. And now this hell is beginning to be visited on Lebanon, opening the prospect of endless wars of unimaginable consequences.

Syria is now withdrawing its forces from Lebanon and laying the responsibility of what happens next squarely on the other side. But what will happen next? Will the Lebanese resistance (led by Hizbullah) be disarmed? And if it refuses to surrender its weapons, how will it be disarmed? Will it be by landing new occupation forces in the country?

This was tried in the early 80s and led to the defeat of the US and the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. This could occur again, but on a wider scale across the whole region, which can no longer tolerate this endless US pressure, regarded by the peoples of the area as the implementation of Israeli demands.

Efforts must be directed at resolving the problems of the Palestinian people, who Israel refuses to allow to return to their lands, despite UN resolutions and all precepts of right and justice. The Palestinian problem cannot be resolved with exhibitionist gatherings such as Tony Blair`s recent London conference. The big powers - particularly Britain, which helped create the problem in the first place - have a moral responsibility to resolve it.

In the same way, the Iraq crisis cannot be resolved by patching up a detested occupation with fraudulent elections and sectarian and ethnic caucuses supported by the occupiers. The only solution is the immediate withdrawal of occupation forces - or as a minimum, a strict internationally guaranteed timetable for withdrawal. Talk about freedom and democracy is seen as an endlessly repeated sham by our peoples because these words are being uttered by the very powers that have stood behind the corrupt dictatorial regimes. The US today is still the ally and backer of many such tyrannical regimes in our region and elsewhere.

We do not believe that the aggressive US stance towards Syria and Iran is intended to uphold freedom and democracy either, but to get rid of states that are refusing to go along with US and Israeli plans for the region. Today, Syria is being held to account in Lebanon because it is refusing to back the occupation of Iraq, and Iran is facing threats over its nuclear programme because the US is worried about its role in relation to Iraq and its rejection of the status quo in Palestine.

Public opinion in the occupying countries, such as the US and Britain, needs to understand that the continuation of this unjust and dangerous situation will create the conditions for a new and more general uprising which threatens truly to open the gates of hell in the region and beyond.

Ayatollah Jawad al-Khalisi is secretary general of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress, an alliance of secular and religious organisations covering all religious and ethnic groups in Iraq

[e-mail]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Die Zeitung gehört zur Knight Ridder-Gruppe, einem der größten US-Zeitungskonzern.
Da diese Thema Exit-Poll noch immer in viele Köpfen rumgeistert diesen Hinweis auf auf einer Analyse von 12 Mathematikern.
Die Gruppe nennt sich [urlUSCountVotes]http://uscountvotes.org/[/url] und der Report ist dort zu finden.

Posted on Fri, Apr. 01, 2005

Analysis points to election `corruption`
Group says chance of exit polls being so wrong in `04 vote is one-in-959,000
By Stephen Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/11284237.htm

There`s a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday.

Exit polls in the November election showed Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., winning by 3 percent, but President George W. Bush won the vote count by 2.5 percent.

The explanation for the discrepancy that was offered by the exit polling firm -- that Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polling -- is an ``implausible theory,`` according to the report issued Thursday by US Count Votes, a group that claims it`s made up of about two dozen statisticians.

Twelve -- including a Case Western Reserve University mathematics instructor -- signed the report.

Instead, the data support the idea that ``corruption of the vote count occurred more freely in districts that were overwhelmingly Bush strongholds.``

The report dismisses chance and inaccurate exit polling as the reasons for their discrepancy with the results.

They found that the one hypothesis that can`t be ruled out is inaccurate election results.

``The hypothesis that the voters` intent was not accurately recorded or counted... needs further investigation,`` it said.

The conclusion drew a yawn from Ohio election officials, who repeated that the discrepancy issue was settled when the polling firms Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International disavowed its polls because Kerry voters were more likely to answer exit polls -- the theory Thursday`s report deemed ``implausible.``

Ohio has been at the center of a voter disenfranchisement debate since the election.

``What are you going to do except laugh at it?`` said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who`s responsible for administering Ohio`s elections and is a Republican candidate for governor. ``We`re not particularly interested in (the report`s findings). We wish them luck, but hope they find something more interesting to do.``

The statistical analysis, though, shows that the discrepancy between polls and results was especially high in precincts that voted for Bush -- as high as a 10 percent difference.

The report says if the official explanation -- that Bush voters were more shy about filling out exit polls in precincts with more Kerry voters -- is true, then the precincts with large Bush votes should be more accurate, not less accurate as the data indicate.

The report also called into question new voting machine technologies.

``All voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party, (which) certainly warrants further inquiry,`` the report concludes.

However, LoParo remained unimpressed.

``These (Bush) voters have been much maligned by outside political forces who didn`t like the way they voted,`` he said. ``The weather`s turning nice. There are more interesting things to do than beat a dead horse.``
Stephen Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3523 or [e-mail]



© 2005 Beacon Journal and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.ohio.com

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The Culture of Death
Let us prey, America

by Alan Bisbort - March 31, 2005
ALAN BISBORT COLLAGE
http://hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:10561…

Family values. Compassionate conservative. Get over it. Support the troops. Freedom fries. Shock and awe. Axis of evil. Coalition of the willing. Enduring freedom. Toppling dictators. No child left behind. Faith-based policy. Protecting marriage.

Our language has been so deeply enriched -- and our nation`s collective I.Q. so diminished -- since the Bush Junta staged their coup in 2000, hasn`t it? The Bush Crew are masters at creating comforting slogans to mask the malicious lies and cold-blooded policies that really define their rule.

Now they`ve added another conversation-stopper to the mix: Culture of death.

In case you yourself have been in a coma and missed it, this is the catch-all talking point used during the sad and sordid spectacle that surrounds the last days of Terri Schiavo. Those who would want to honor the wishes of her husband -- or those who simply believe that the government and courts have no business interfering in this family and medical matter -- are said to promote a "culture of death." In the Pot-Calling-the-Kettle-Black Dept., a North Carolina man was arrested last Friday for offering a $250,000 reward for the murder of Schiavo`s husband and $50,000 to kill Judge Greer (a Republican appointee), who ordered the removal of the feeding tube. So much for the "culture of life."

Putting aside all the political posturing and fundamentalist fulminating that Schiavo`s situation has engendered, it`s remarkable that no sensible leader has stepped forward and opened a dialogue about what`s really going on here. Get a grip, America. This is not esoteric stuff. This is the every day pain of being alive. Go down to any hospital emergency room, any intensive care unit, any hospice near you, for crying out loud, and see for yourself.

Is there any American who has not agonized over the final hours of a loved one? And is there anyone who has not lost a loved one who doesn`t thereafter think of that person every single day of their life? And is there anyone who isn`t himself or herself going to one day be lying in a hospice or hospital bed with, if they`re lucky, their loved ones by their side and, if they`re horribly unlucky, Tom DeLay and Jeb Bush and Jerry Falwell and James Dobson and Randall Terry drooling down their feeding tube?

Right. Thought so. These people don`t "love life," they hate the freedoms the rest of us so blithely took for granted before George W. Bush was inserted by the Supreme Court in the nation`s rectum as a compassionate conservative suppository.

Which should send a collective shudder down the spine of all who are growing more nauseated by the day with the Republican Party and the right-wing extremists in whose grips it has fallen. If the GOP continues to pander to this insane agenda, we may all hereafter be denied the freedom to grieve for our loved ones in peace.

But that`s a small price to pay for promoting the "culture of death," just as the loss of our civil liberties was a small price to pay for security.

How can one even respond to such criminal stupidity? It`s like trying to argue with someone whose only rebuttal is, "Why do you hate America?"

My rebuttal, then, is this: It depends on what you mean by "death."

­ 32,000 Americans are killed each year by guns, including 10 more last week in a Columbine-style and Hitler-inspired rampage in Minnesota.

­ 3,487 Americans currently await execution; the U.S. is the only western democracy that uses the death penalty, and is third behind China and Congo in numbers executed.

­ The United States dominates the international arms market, selling 2.5 times more weapons ($150 billion annually) than the second and third highest arms merchants combined.

­ Bechtel, which has in the past hired GOP stalwarts Caspar Weinberger, George Schultz and William Casey, supplied most of the weaponry owned by Saddam Hussein. Today, those weapons are used to kill American troops.

­ Carlyle Group invests in weapons systems and military hardware. Members of the Bush family (including GWBush`s dad) and Osama bin Laden`s family own controlling interests in Carlyle.

­ Lockheed Martin is the largest weapons manufacturer in the world. Its head lobbyist is former RNC chairman, Haley Barbour.

­ One in every two casualties of war are civilians caught in the crossfire.

As I said, it depends on what you mean by "death."

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[urlMenschenrechtsreport]http://english.people.com.cn/200503/03/eng20050303_175406.html[/url] herausgegeben von den Chinesen. Als Revanche für den US-Report über China.

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Published on Friday, April 1, 2005 by Reuters
U.S. Soldier Convicted of Killing Iraqi Walks Free
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=5QIMQ05E…

BERLIN -- A U.S. army tank company commander convicted of shooting dead a wounded Iraqi walked free from court on Friday, although he was dismissed from the army for what he called a "mercy killing."

Army Captain Rogelio Maynulet had faced up to 10 years in jail after a court martial at a U.S. army base in Wiesbaden, Germany, found him guilty of assault with intent to commit voluntary manslaughter.

"He was sentenced with dismissal from the United States Army ... there will be no confinement time," a military spokesman said.

Prosecutors had pressed for conviction on a more serious charge of assault with intent to commit murder, which carries a maximum 20-year jail sentence.

The shooting occurred last May when U.S. troops were pursuing suspected militiamen supporting Shi`ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr near the Iraqi city of Najaf, the court was told.

U.S. soldiers fired on a car, wounding the driver and a passenger. Maynulet said he then shot dead the driver to put him out of his misery.

"He was in a state I didn`t think was dignified. I had to put him out of his misery," Maynulet said in his defense according to U.S. military`s Stars and Stripes magazine.

The jury was shown footage of the shooting filmed by a U.S. surveillance drone.

The mercy killing argument was used by the defense in the cases of two U.S. soldiers who were convicted in December and January of murdering an Iraqi.

The man suffered severe abdominal wounds and burns when U.S. troops attacked a rubbish truck they suspected guerrillas were using.

Staff Sergeant Johnny Horne was sentenced to three years in jail and Staff Sergeant Cardenas Alban to one year over the Iraqi`s death.

Local Iraqis said the men on the truck were innocent rubbish collectors.

© Reuters 2005.

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April 2, 2005
Sunni Clerics Urge Followers to Join Iraq Army and Police
By ROBERT F. WORTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/international/middleeast/0…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 1 - A group of Sunni Arab clerics, including some hard-line figures who fiercely oppose the American presence here, issued a statement on Friday urging their fellow Sunni Arabs to join the Iraqi Army and police.

The edict, signed by 64 imams and religious scholars, was a striking turnaround for the clerics, who have often lashed out in sermons at the fledgling army and police force and branded them collaborators.

Prominently missing from the signers was Harith al-Dari, the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars and one of the most influential Sunni Arab clerics in Iraq, who is said to have close ties to the insurgency.

Still, the directive, which carried the signature of Ahmed Hassan al-Taha, an imam at an important Baghdad mosque who has been a strong critic of the occupation, seemed to represent a significant step.
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From the podium of a Baghdad mosque, Sheik Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samarrai announced an edict in favor of
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Many if not most insurgent attacks in recent months have been aimed at the police and army, which are largely composed of Shiites. The cleric who announced the edict, Sheik Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samarrai, said he hoped and believed that the new directive would undercut those attacks.

But Sheik Abdul Ghafour also made clear that the order was aimed at regaining some control over Iraq`s new security forces, not saving Shiite lives. Sunni Arabs dominated the higher echelons of the military under Saddam Hussein, and many, enraged by the American decision to dissolve Mr. Hussein`s army two years ago, joined the insurgency.

"The new army and police force are empty of good people, and we need to supply them," the edict said. "Because the police and army are a safeguard for the whole nation, not a militia for any special party, we have issued this fatwa calling on our people to join the army and police."

The edict contained a condition seemingly aimed at sweetening the pill for resistant Sunni Arabs: that a new police or army recruit must agree "not to help the occupier against his compatriots."

American and Iraqi officials welcomed the edict as a sign that the Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the January elections, are taking steps toward rejoining the country`s government and politics.

"It is a positive step," said Saad Jawad Qindeel, a member of the Shiite alliance that won the largest bloc of seats in Iraq`s new national assembly in January. "We are hoping the clerics will take an even more definite attitude in preventing terrorism."

Although Sheik Dari of the Association of Muslim Scholars did not sign the edict, Sheik Abdul Ghafour delivered it on Friday at the mosque in western Baghdad that houses the association`s headquarters.

It was not clear whether Sheik Dari or the association were offering some tacit support by providing the venue for the announcement. The leaders of the association, like some of the scholars who signed the edict, are widely believed to have some influence over the armed resistance. But it is impossible to say how much.

In the past, members of the association have often complained about injustices committed by Iraqi soldiers and police officers and by the American military. On Thursday, Sheik Abdul Ghafour invoked those injustices as the main reason for issuing the edict.

"The bad conduct of some army recruits has led the wise men and loyal Iraqis to recognize that they must build up this country and not leave things in the hands of those who have caused such chaos and destruction," he said.

New details emerged Friday about the jailed Jordanian-American who is said to have been a senior aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda`s representative in Iraq. The man was born in Kuwait to Jordanian parents but moved with his family to the United States, where he spent about 20 years, mostly in the Midwest, Pentagon officials said. He moved to the Middle East a few years before the Sept. 11 attacks and was seized late last year at his home in Baghdad, along with weapons and bomb-making materials, the officials said.

Pentagon officials said the man had acted as a liaison with other terrorist groups, moved money and foreign fighters into Iraq and helped in the planning and execution of kidnappings by the Zarqawi network.

Violence continued to roil central and northern Iraq. In Baquba, north of Baghdad, gunmen assassinated a police chief, Col. Hashem Rashid Muhammad, as he arrived at a police station late Thursday night, Iraqi officials said.

In Samarra, an ancient spiral minaret that is one of Iraq`s most celebrated monuments was damaged Friday when insurgents set off an explosion, American military officials said. The top of the 160-foot tower, built in the ninth century when Samarra was the capital of the Abbasid Empire, was blown away in the attack. No one was injured, and the Iraqi police are investigating the incident, said Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo of the United States Army, a military spokeswoman.

East of Samarra, Iraqi police commandos and Interior Ministry officers killed five insurgents and detained two in a fierce gun battle early Friday morning, Sergeant Lombardo said.

In Baghdad, American soldiers opened fire on a car that tried to pass them on the airport road, killing one Iraqi and injuring two, officials at Yarmuk Hospital said. American military officials said they were not aware of the incident.

In Mosul, fliers appeared on Friday warning members of one of the city`s most prominent tribes to stop working with Americans. The fliers were addressed to the tribe by the Zarqawi network. They warned members of the Kashmola tribe to force Duraid al-Kashmola, Mosul`s governor, to leave the city or face retribution against all the tribe`s members.

Talks continued Friday among members of the newly elected national assembly, who plan to meet and try to choose an assembly speaker on Sunday.

Meshaan al-Juburi, a Sunni assembly member, warned Friday that Sunni members would walk out if the Shiite alliance insisted on electing its own Sunni candidate as speaker. But Shiite alliance members have said they have no intention of imposing a speaker on the assembly.

Khalid al-Ansary and Zaineb Obeid contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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[url3.4% Surge Pushes Oil Above $57]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02oil.html?hp&ex=1112504400&en=bca3667299f89e1b&ei=5094&partner=homepage[/url]

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April 2, 2005
Pentagon Redirects Its Research Dollars
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/technology/02darpa.html?hp…
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Leonard Kleinrock of U.C.L.A. declined Darpa money when he learned that his assistants had to be
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SAN FRANCISCO, April 1 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation`s best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.

Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent advances as the Web search technologies that Google and others have introduced.

The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation`s economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America`s lead in computer and communications technologies.
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"I`m worried and depressed," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. "I think there will be great technologies that won`t be there down the road when we need them."

University researchers, usually reluctant to speak out, have started quietly challenging the agency`s new approach. They assert that Darpa has shifted a lot more work in recent years to military contractors, adopted a focus on short-term projects while cutting support for basic research, classified formerly open projects as secret and placed new restrictions on sharing information.

This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million.

The agency cited a number of reasons for the decline: increased reliance on corporate research; a need for more classified projects since 9/11; Congress`s decision to end controversial projects like Total Information Awareness because of privacy fears; and the shift of some basic research to advanced weapons systems development.

In Silicon Valley, executives are also starting to worry about the consequences of Darpa`s stinting on basic research in computer science.

"This has been a phenomenal system for harnessing intellectual horsepower for the country," said David L. Tennenhouse, a former Darpa official who is now director of research for Intel. "We should be careful how we tinker with it."

University scientists assert that the changes go even further than what Darpa has disclosed. As financing has dipped, the remaining research grants come with yet more restrictions, they say, often tightly linked to specific "deliverables" that discourage exploration and serendipitous discoveries.

Many grants also limit the use of graduate students to those who hold American citizenship, a rule that hits hard in computer science, where many researchers are foreign.

The shift at Darpa has been noted not just by those researchers directly involved in computing technologies, but by those in other fields supported by the agency.

"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang Porod, director of the Center for Nano Science and Technology at the University of Notre Dame.

The concerns are highlighted in a report on the state of the nation`s cybersecurity that was released with little fanfare in March by the President`s Information Technology Advisory Committee. Darpa has long focused on long-term basic research projects with time horizons that exceed five years, the report notes, but by last year, very little of Darpa`s financing was being directed toward fundamental research in the field.

"Virtually every aspect of information technology upon which we rely today bears the stamp of federally sponsored university research," said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and co-chairman of the advisory panel. "The federal government is walking away from this role, killing the goose that laid the golden egg."

As a result of the new restrictions, a number of computer scientists said they had chosen not to work with Darpa any longer. Last year, the agency offered to support research by Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who was one of the small group of researchers who developed the Arpanet, the 1960`s predecessor to today`s Internet.

Dr. Kleinrock said that he decided that he was not interested in the project when he learned that the agency was insisting that he employ only graduate assistants with American citizenship.

Darpa officials, who declined repeated requests for interviews, disputed the university researchers. The agency, which responded only in writing to questions, contended that the criticisms leveled by the advisory committee and other researchers were not accurate and that it had always supported a mix of longer- and shorter-term research.

"The key is a focus on high-risk, high-payoff research," Jan Walker, a Darpa spokeswoman, stated in an e-mail message. Given the threat from terrorism and the demands on troops in Iraq, she wrote, Darpa is rightly devoting more attention to "quick reaction" projects that draw on the fruits of earlier science and technology to produce useful prototypes as soon as possible.

The Pentagon shift has put added pressure on the other federal agencies that support basic information technology research.

At the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering of the National Science Foundation, the number of research proposals has soared from 2,000 in 1999 to 6,500 last year. Peter A. Freeman, its director, said that the sharp rise was partly attributable to declines in Pentagon support.
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"Darpa has moved away from direct funding to universities," Mr. Freeman said. "Even when they do directly fund, some of the conditions and constraints seem to be pretty onerous. There is no question that the community doesn`t like what the head of Darpa has been doing, but he has his reasons and his prerogatives."

The transformation of Darpa has been led by Anthony J. Tether, a Stanford-educated electrical engineer who has had a long career moving between executive positions at military contractors and the Pentagon.

Last year, Dr. Tether`s new approach led to a series of cutbacks at a number of computer science departments. Program financing for a Darpa project known as Network Embedded Sensor Technology - intended to develop networks of sensors that could potentially be deployed on battlefields to locate and track enemy tanks and soldiers - has been cut back or ended on as many as five university campuses and shifted instead to traditional military contractors.

"The network has now become as vital as the weapons themselves," Dr. Tether said in an appearance before the advisory committee last year, testifying that secrecy had become more essential for a significant part of the agency`s work.

That has created problems for university researchers. Several scientists have been instructed, for example, to remove previously published results from Web sites. And at U.C.L.A. and Berkeley, Darpa officials tried to classify software research done under a contract that specified that the results would be distributed under so-called open-source licensing terms.

"We were requested to remove all publicly accessible pointers to software developed under the program," said Deborah Estrin, director of embedded network sensing at U.C.L.A. "This is the first time in 15 years that I have no Darpa funding."

At Berkeley, Edward A. Lee, who was recently named chairman of the computer science department, agreed not to publish a final report at Darpa`s request, even though he told officials the data had already become widely available.

Despite the complaints, some pioneering researchers support the changes being driven by Dr. Tether and say they are necessary to prepare the nation for a long battle against elusive enemies.

"There are pressures and demands on Darpa to be relevant," said Robert Kahn, a former Darpa administrator who is now president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va. "People think it should stay the same, but times have changed."

Still, a number of top scientists argue that the Pentagon`s shift in priorities could not have come at a worse time. Most American companies have largely ended basic research and have begun to outsource product research and development extensively even as investments in Asia and Europe are rising quickly.

And many computer scientists dispute Darpa`s reasoning that fighting wars demands a shift away from basic research. During the Vietnam War, they say, Darpa kept its commitment to open-ended computer research, supporting things like a laboratory in the hills behind Stanford University dedicated to the far-out idea of building computing machines to mimic human capabilities.

John McCarthy founded the Stanford artificial research lab in 1964, helping to turn it into a wellspring for some of Silicon Valley`s most important companies, from Xerox Parc to Apple to Intel.

"American leadership in computer science and in applications has benefited more from the longer-term work," Mr. McCarthy said, "than from the deliverables."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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March 31, 2005
Q&A: Delay in Forming Iraqi Government `Dangerous`

From the [urlCouncil on Foreign Relations,]http://www.cfr.org/[/url] March 31, 2005

Larry Diamond, an expert on democratic development who served as an adviser to the U.S.-led occupation government in Baghdad from January to April 2004, says the delay in forming an Iraqi government since the January 30 elections "has now become, almost two months later, agonizing to the point of intolerable, and prolonged to the point of really provoking dangerous drift in the eyes of a growing segment of the population."

"The aspiration for democracy is there; I think it is part of the reaction to the brutality of authoritarian rule," says Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-editor of the Journal of Democracy. "But there is a certain tentative and fragile character to it, and it can be quickly extinguished by inefficacy on the part of the elected democratic government."

Diamond, the author of a forthcoming book on Iraq, "Squandered Victory," was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on March 30, 2005.

Two months after the Iraqi elections, the politicians in Baghdad are still unable to put together a temporary government. Is this a good sign, a sign that democracy is in action, or is it a foreboding of fatal chaos to come?

Well it`s an emerging chaos. I think fatal is much too strong a term. I would say that over the first several weeks, my reaction was that this is basically democracy at work. These are many of the same political players who were on the [Iraqi] Governing Council [the 25-member Iraqi governing body appointed by U.S. occupation authorities and dissolved in June 2004]. They often took a long time and went through agonizing and difficult negotiations to reach agreement, particularly on the Transitional Administrative Law [the nation`s interim constitution, now in effect].

They often seemed to approach the brink of political chaos, and then they came to an agreement. I think what`s different here is that, first of all, there`s no mediating power or overseeing power, as there was during the American occupation [which formally ended June 30, 2004] or during the times when Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy, was on the ground with the experience and the authority to mediate an agreement. And second of all, there`s much more at stake--the whole political governance of the country is hanging in the balance.

But what seemed an inevitable and natural process in the first few weeks, I think, has now become, almost two months later, agonizing to the point of intolerable, and prolonged to the point of really provoking dangerous drift in the eyes of a growing segment of the population. And I think it`s important that the various political actors, particularly the leading political coalitions, which are the United Iraqi Alliance [a Shiite coalition backed by spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani], and the Kurdish alliance [led by the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan], make some decisions and close the deal.

The latest argument seems to be over which Sunni representative should become the speaker of the new national assembly. Why is this such a difficult issue?

I can tell you that one reason why it`s such a difficult issue is that there are only about 16 Sunnis elected to a 275-member assembly, which is only about six percent of the seats, when the Sunnis have more than double that as their share of the population. And many of these Sunnis are not seen as representative of the community. They were chosen by other people--by [Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad] Allawi, and by the Shiites who control the leadership of the United Iraqi Alliance. And so there`s almost nobody to choose from, in terms of a possible suitable candidate for the leadership of the assembly, who would perform the dual role of, first, having the political gravitas or stature to lead the assembly, and second, having sufficient stature among the Sunni Arabs in Iraq that he can, to some extent, be seen as representative of the [Sunni] community. And my understanding is they offered the post to interim President Ghazi al-Yawar, who would at least begin to somewhat fulfill those criteria. When he turned it down, they had a crisis on their hands.

Why do you think he turned it down?

I can only speculate that, having been president, he may have felt it was a come-down, and even an affront, to take the position of, in essence, speaker of the house. If that`s true, I think it was a small-minded and unfortunate decision on his part.

You said there`s no mediator involved. Is the American embassy, as far as you know, keeping out of it?

I think two things have happened that are in the mix here. One is that the United States has taken a decision--it is, I think, a principled decision, and if we`d taken the opposite decision, I think we probably would have been sorely criticized for it--that we`re not going to intervene. We`ve said it`s up to the Iraqis to choose their government, and we`re not going to knock heads together, that`s not our role. And, of course, if we were trying to intervene and pressure people to agree to this or that, then I think the Bush administration would be attacked for trying to impose its will. To some extent, they`re criticized either way. The second thing is that there is no U.S. ambassador on the ground in Iraq right now. Ambassador [John] Negroponte has returned to the United States to prepare for hearings to become the first director of national intelligence, and I think that the American embassy may be somewhat adrift right now.

And there`s no U.N. personage there?

There is a U.N. special representative, the former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, [Mohammed] Ashraf Ghazi. But I think it`s clear that he does not have the kind of stature among different Iraqi political and social forces--[there is insufficient faith] in his ability, either quietly and informally, or publicly and in a more acknowledged role, to induce or search for a common public ground.

Back in January before the elections, you wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times urging that the elections be postponed. Many of the Sunni leaders were urging the same thing, but President Bush and others were pushing hard to hold it on time. Do you still feel it was a mistake not to postpone the elections?

Yes, I do, and I`ll explain why in a minute. But let me say that, by the time the article was published, it may well simply have been too late to affect the decision. The momentum was building for elections, and unless Shiite leaders themselves had embraced this idea [the postponement of elections], I think it`s clear that [holding elections on time] was necessary. I certainly don`t think that we or the United Nations should have arbitrarily made the decision to postpone the elections and alienated one community, namely the larger Shiite community, in order to assuage another, the Sunnis. But I think we should have started earlier to draw in the Sunnis and find a compromise formula that would have postponed the elections, in order to change the electoral system and avoid a Sunni boycott.

I say this for a couple of reasons. No. 1, many people are now recognizing the point that I made in that op-ed, which is that this is a very bad electoral system. There`s no accountability to any geographic constituency, nobody knows who represents them, and there was no guarantee for any geographic community of any particular representation in the parliament.

No. 2, it was predictable that if the election went forward in the way it was going forward, Sunnis were going to be vastly under-represented and were going to feel alienated from the process. That is exactly what`s happened, and that`s one reason why it has been so difficult to form a government. Let me also say that one consequence of the boycott is that the most committed liberal in the country, who is a Sunni, didn`t win a single seat. He came close, and that`s Adnan Pachachi. And if he had been elected to the parliament, he would have been chosen, I think, as the speaker of the national assembly and a lot of this delay might have been avoided.

Do you think that because of the delay, the scenario for the rest of the year--writing a new constitution, holding a referendum to ratify it, and electing a new government--will have to be postponed?

Yes, I believe they will need to exercise the one-time option in the Transitional Administrative Law for a six-month delay in the entire process. I believed this even before this agonizing, protracted negotiation to form a government. Now I think there`s absolutely no question about it. I might add that, you know, when I was advising the process of drafting the interim constitution, I said to my Iraqi colleagues who were writing the document that I don`t think the deadlines in the November 15th agreement are very realistic--the idea, for example, of holding three elections within calendar year 2005. And I urged them to think about some process by which the process could be extended or delayed somewhat if difficulties emerge. And then they realized this really could be a problem, and they came up with this idea of a six-month postponement. So I think it`s a fortunate thing that it`s in there.

But what worries me is, if things don`t move more quickly and if a more organic consensus cannot be generated, even this six-month delay may not be enough time. And then you run into a potential constitutional crisis.

Let`s talk in broader terms now about democracy. Do you get the sense that Iraqis really do want democracy?

Yes, I do. I think they do not have a sophisticated, rounded vision of what democracy is in all its aspects. In particular, I think many Iraqis--not surprisingly, much of the Shiite majority of the country--have a majoritarian view of democracy that is somewhat less appreciative of the concept of minority rights, or the specific provisions that would assure them. But I do think that after what they`ve been through, they want to choose their leaders and be able to replace their leaders in free and fair elections.

And they want the basic protections of a rule of law. What worries me is that, if this transitional period doesn`t go well, some of the public support for democracy may be diminished. The aspiration for democracy is there; I think it is part of the reaction to the brutality of authoritarian rule. But there is a certain tentative and fragile character to it, and it can be quickly extinguished by inefficacy on the part of the elected democratic government.

Within the past few months, we`ve seen street demonstrations lead to change in the Ukrainian government, we`ve had an election in the Palestinian territories, we`ve had the Iraqi elections, and we`ve seen Lebanese protesters take to the streets. Are these just coincidental events, or are they signs of new wave of democracy? How would you describe what`s now going on worldwide?

Well, I`d say several things are going on worldwide. First of all, let`s talk about the Middle East. I think what`s going on in the Middle East is the beginning of a small wave, or contagion, or series of diffusion effects, with rising sentiment for political reform. The call is for real democratic change--not the old, superficial game that Arab leaders have offered their people, whereby they gesture at democratic reform temporarily and somewhat superficially, and then withdraw it after a certain point. I think that the toppling of Saddam`s regime, the effort to install a democratic form of government in Iraq, and, most especially, the free--if not very free--and open--if not very fair--elections in Iraq, on a competitive multi-party basis in which the majority is finally empowered--that example has had a stimulating effect in the Middle East.

No less stimulating, I think, has been the example of the Palestinians choosing a democratically elected president after the death of Yasir Arafat. I think we`re at a point now, for a variety of reasons--one of which is the emphasis rhetorically and in policy terms that President Bush has begun to give to this--that freedom is in the air in the Arab world. We`re at a period of exhaustion with the Arab political model that my colleague at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Daniel Brumberg, has called "tactical reform" on the part of Arab leaders.

People now want real reform. More broadly, I think that what happened in Ukraine is quite comparable, in many respects, to what happened in Serbia and in Georgia, where a rigged election finally prompted the people to say, "Enough. We want real democracy and not the facade of it." Keep in mind that this pattern of superficially democratic governments--which are really electoral, authoritarian governments rigging themselves back into power, and being toppled when their efforts are exposed--began in February 1986 in the Philippines` People Power revolution. The people in the Philippines said, "Enough," took to the streets, and toppled the [Ferdinand] Marcos regime.

Copyright 2005