Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 58)

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May 16, 2005
Staying What Course?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/opinion/16krugman.html?hp

Is there any point, now that November`s election is behind us, in revisiting the history of the Iraq war? Yes: any path out of the quagmire will be blocked by people who call their opponents weak on national security, and portray themselves as tough guys who will keep America safe. So it`s important to understand how the tough guys made America weak.

There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" - actually the minutes of a British prime minister`s meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted.

Here`s a sample: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

(You can read the whole thing at www.downingstreetmemo.com.)

Why did the administration want to invade Iraq, when, as the memo noted, "the case was thin" and Saddam`s "W.M.D. capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran"? Iraq was perceived as a soft target; a quick victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could serve as a demonstration of American military might, one that would shock and awe the world.

But the Iraq war has, instead, demonstrated the limits of American power, and emboldened our potential enemies. Why should Kim Jong Il fear us, when we can`t even secure the road from Baghdad to the airport?

At this point, the echoes of Vietnam are unmistakable. Reports from the recent offensive near the Syrian border sound just like those from a 1960`s search-and-destroy mission, body count and all. Stories filed by reporters actually with the troops suggest that the insurgents, forewarned, mostly melted away, accepting battle only where and when they chose.

Meanwhile, America`s strategic position is steadily deteriorating.

Next year, reports Jane`s Defense Industry, the United States will spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the Pentagon now admits that our military is having severe trouble attracting recruits, and would have difficulty dealing with potential foes - those that, unlike Saddam`s Iraq, might pose a real threat.

In other words, the people who got us into Iraq have done exactly what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real threats.

So what`s the plan?

The people who sold us this war continue to insist that success is just around the corner, and that things would be fine if the media would just stop reporting bad news. But the administration has declared victory in Iraq at least four times. January`s election, it seems, was yet another turning point that wasn`t.

Yet it`s very hard to discuss getting out. Even most of those who vehemently opposed the war say that we have to stay on in Iraq now that we`re there.

In effect, America has been taken hostage. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the terrible scenes that will surely unfold if we leave (even though terrible scenes are unfolding while we`re there). Nobody wants to tell the grieving parents of American soldiers that their children died in vain. And nobody wants to be accused, by an administration always ready to impugn other people`s patriotism, of stabbing the troops in the back.

But the American military isn`t just bogged down in Iraq; it`s deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them? And every year that the war goes on, our military gets weaker.

So we need to get beyond the clichés - please, no more "pottery barn principles" or "staying the course." I`m not advocating an immediate pullout, but we have to tell the Iraqi government that our stay is time-limited, and that it has to find a way to take care of itself. The point is that something has to give. We either need a much bigger army - which means a draft - or we need to find a way out of Iraq.

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* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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WASHINGTON (IWR News Parody) - President Bush today announced today that he will replace Medicare with an alternative health care subscription program for seniors provided by Wal-Mart.

The basic pay-as-you-go service will provide 24 hour access to a magic eight ball that will answer patient questions about health care or who to vote for.
In addition, premium subscribers will also receive placebos, special discounts on cat and dog food, and professional online consultations with accredited Internet doctors from third world places like Borneo, the Philippines and Pakistan.
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Witch Dr. Phil Tonga
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Mr. Bush said that his goal gutting Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security programs would provide America`s with a sense ownership not felt since the age indentured servitude, when it really was every man for himself.

When asked about universal health coverage, Mr. Bush said: "if anyone is dumb enough to want that, he or she should move to one of those goddamn communist countries like Canada or Sweden where they actually care about people.

Because in this country, the GOP is only concerned about pleasing the richest people and corporations!"
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May 16, 2005
Feeling No Pain
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/opinion/16herbert.html?hp

Go, geezers!

Who among the teenyboppers shrieking for the Rolling Stones during their first American tour in June 1964 could have possibly imagined that some of their grandchildren would be shrieking for the Stones with the same levels of delirium in 2005, more than 40 years later?

Mick Jagger`s mug may have the look of a petrified fielder`s mitt, but 25-year-old Laurin Mack of Middleburg, Va., still thinks he`s the sexiest man on the planet. "I realize he`s as old as my dad," she said, "but it`s like a chemical reaction. He was probably born sexy."

When the Stones first came to the states (four months after the Beatles), the Watusi and the monkey were big dances, Barry Goldwater embodied the hopes of the Republican Party, and John Kennedy had been dead less than a year. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were both 17.

"It was the first time we went to Omaha that I really understood how heavy it could get," said Keith Richards in an oral history compiled by the Canadian writer Alan Lysaght. "We were just sitting around drinking whiskey and Coke out of little cups before we went on and the cops walked in and said, `What`s in that cup?` "

Richards replied, "Whiskey, sir." A cop said, "You can`t drink that here; it`s a public place. Throw it down the drain." Richards said, "No."

When he looked up, Richards recalled, a loaded pistol was pointed at his head.

Three of the current Stones were on that tour - Jagger and Richards, who are now 61, and Charlie Watts, who will be 64 in 21/2 weeks. Joking about their ages has proved irresistible. The Daily News came up with titles for new songs they might consider playing on their upcoming tour, including "(I Can`t Get No) Metamucil" and "Let`s Take a Nap Together."

A young Times employee was astonished to learn that Richards is old enough to have been evacuated with his family during the bombing of London by the Nazis in World War II.

You could get a ticket to a Stones concert in 1964 for two or three dollars. They didn`t have a huge hit record and were pretty widely viewed as a rowdy, unkempt imitation of the Beatles. Forget 2005 (and its top ticket price of $453). They seemed unlikely to survive until 1965.

But while no one would have guessed that the Stones were 21st-century bound, the essential ingredients for their longevity were already in place. They were decent musicians and they put on a great show. The main attraction was Jagger`s manic magnetism. Short, skinny and 21, he was a cross between a rooster and a lightning bolt.

The Stones were fun.

The whole key to the Stones was that they were masters of make-believe. They played at being blues musicians. They gleefully marketed themselves as the outrageous, anarchic alternative to the Beatles, when in fact, as Richards noted in the oral history, the Beatles "were the same kind of blokes as us."

Now, in the latest of their incarnations, they are charming, aged delinquents playing their former selves.

The Stones really did love the blues, and they promoted many of the old blues masters. But the Stones` own music was a different story. They took the blues and wrung out the grief and sadness until all that was left in most cases was the fun. (My father would have said they took out all the vitamins.)

When the Stones sang, "It`s too much pain and too much sorrow," they sounded like the happiest guys in the world. "(I Can`t Get No) Satisfaction" sounds like the temporary disappointment of a frat boy on an off night.

While entertaining, those kinds of pieces are a long way from the sound and feel of Robert Johnson singing, "Li`l girl, my life seem so misery," or Muddy Waters begging, "Baby, please don`t go."

The Stones learned enough from the blues to lift their best work above the level of the rock `n` roll mainstream, and the rest was pretty much unadulterated fun. It`s been working for them for more than 40 years.

"You don`t find bands like that anymore," said Brendan Burke, a 22-year-old Stones fan who graduated last year from New York University. Their age, he said, doesn`t bother him at all.

On a hunch, I asked him what he thought of as the age when people started getting old.

"Forty," he said. There was silence on the telephone. Brendan hung in there. "Forty or 45," he said.

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* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Looking for Battle, Marines Find That Foes Have Fled
Hunt for Foreign Insurgents Proves Frustrating but Deadly
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 16, 2005; A10

ARABI, Iraq -- Cpl. Alexander Kalouf snapped an ammunition clip into his M-16 assault rifle and strapped grenades to his chest in the crowded hold of an armored vehicle, bursting into excited snatches of songs with other Marines as they headed into hoped-for battle.

Two seats away, Cpl. Jason Dominguez shouted as he led the fighters in prayer.

"This is your chance to rid the world of these evil bastards," he began, struggling to be heard over the rumble of the Amtrac armored vehicle`s engine and the roar of the exhaust.

"We ask the Lord God to help us and Jesus to protect us," Dominguez, in black sunglasses, camouflage and body armor, yelled hoarsely as huddled Marines clenched their hands and bowed their heads over the muzzles of their rifles.

Dominguez prayed for victory. He tacked on for the close: "We hope you can bring us all back alive and in one piece. Someday, when we`re 50-year-old men, we`ll be sitting together and telling stories about the good times."

The Marines were in the middle of Operation Matador, an assault designed to flush out and capture or kill foreign fighters who had come to Iraq to join the insurgency against the U.S. military and the Iraqi government that it supports. Severing the insurgents` network north of the Euphrates River, commanders said, would cut off the supply of guerrillas, guns and money that was moving from Syria into northwestern Iraq and being passed along for attacks in Baghdad and other cities.

But from the outset, as Marines swept west in what would be a week-long operation, scores of foreign fighters had fled ahead of them, residents of towns farther east told the Marine commanders.

After one battle May 8 that killed at least two Marines, a roadside bomb that claimed six more on Wednesday and days of fruitless hunting for the enemy, the Marines were ready for a fight. The remote village of Arabi, just two miles from the Syrian border, looked to be the place. If the Americans found Arabi in the hands of foreign fighters, said Marine Maj. Steve Lawson, commander of Lima Company in the 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment, "we`ll make it rubble."

On Thursday, as their column of tanks, armored vehicles and Humvees rolled into Arabi, the Marines in the Amtrac joked, checked their weapons repeatedly and sat tensely.

"There`s the mosque!" shouted one of the gunners, craning out the top hatch of the dark green armored vehicle and spotting one of the places where locals said foreign fighters had made a base. The gunners held weapons ready nearby, scanning.

Minutes passed. Poised for the sounds of AK-47 assault rifle fire, bullets clinking on the metal of the armored vehicles and explosions, the Marines heard nothing. They saw no one on deserted streets.

After a half-hour in town, a gunner yelled: "There`s a sheep."

"Shoot it!" another Marine joked.

Down in the hold, Kalouf yawned.
`I Hate This Country!`

The Marines` slow drive west had been punctuated by the booms of controlled blasts destroying roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The booms mixed with the sharper bursts of mortar rounds exploding and the crackle of automatic weapons -- what the Marines called nuisance fire from the south bank of the Euphrates.

Since May 8, when Operation Matador`s scheduled start was accelerated by an unexpected but fierce clash at the riverside town of Ubaydi, the Marines had found no one to fight. But the insurgents left proxies to do the killing for them: meticulously rigged roadside bombs and mines, planted on dirt roads where wheels or tank treads would pass, or along bridges.

Primed for battle, the Marines found only booby traps. Sometimes they found them too late.

On Wednesday, two artillery rounds buried in the road detonated under an Amtrac, blowing a two-foot-wide hole in its armor plating. The explosion set off ammunition inside the vehicle, creating an inferno.

As the Amtrac burned, a 24-year-old Marine in a nearby vehicle grabbed his helmet in both fists and wrenched it. "I hate this country!" he screamed.

Helicopters had just flown out more than a dozen victims from the Amtrac, two of whom would die of their wounds. Four others already lay dead inside the burning hulk. The young Marine slammed his gun mount, sending the machine gun spinning, and knocked over piles of rations and ammunition boxes in the back of his truck, striking out at nothing in frustration.

Hours later, a Marine sniper picked a volunteer for company and headed out on a freelance night mission, hoping to find by stealth the bombers that 1,000 Marines had failed to roust out.
One House at a Time

The mortar shell hit, and the young mother`s face collapsed in fear. She clutched her child, giving up her efforts to reassure the girl by smiling bravely at the house full of armed foreign intruders.

With no Arabic speakers among the Marines, no English spoken among the villagers of Arabi, and Lima Company`s already sparse crew of Iraqi interpreters reduced when one quit in mid-battle at Ubaydi, there was no way to tell her the mortar round was meant for others, the nuisance gunmen across the Euphrates. Heavy-caliber weapons fire burst out, Marines firing at something else.

A towheaded Marine in his early twenties, glaring, his lower lip thrust out by snuff, questioned the landowner on the doorstep of his stone house as chickens and goats rooted for food outside. The Marine spoke pidgin Arabic, demanding where the foreign fighters were, where the bad guys were: "Mujaheddin wayne? Ali Baba wayne?"

The landowner, in the long white robe of Iraqi village men, spread his empty hands wide. "Mako-shi. Mako-shi," he said. Nothing, nothing.

Shrugging, another young Marine gently lifted a toddler out of the doorway, clearing the way for the search to start.

Down the road, a family having a breakfast of flat bread and yogurt on the porch invited a Marine search patrol to share the meal with them. The Marines refused, but gathered round when a woman called their attention to a toddler badly burned by a fall against a heater. Medical Corpsman John Jenkins treated the wound and covered it with gauze.

"Clear!" the Marines inside yelled. Chalking their squad number on the front door to show other Marines the house had already been searched, they moved on.

House-to-house searches are a mainstay of the Marines` work in Iraq. They work their way through towns to look for insurgents, weapons and bombmaking material and to draw fire from anyone who might be looking for a fight. The young Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment, estimated that in their first few months here, they had searched 1,000 houses.

Sometimes, the Marines busted up wooden furniture belonging to poor farm families and threw their polyester blankets and clothes in a jumble on the floor. A handful of the hundreds of Marines involved in Operation Matador walked out of homes with a pillow or blanket to cushion the ride in the Amtrac. Sometimes, Marines agreed at one commandeered house as they drank a rousted family`s tea, they beat up suspicious-looking men if that was what it took to get information that could save lives.

At the end of a day of searches, Marines generally commandeer houses for the night, shooing the families out in case the Americans` presence makes the homes targets for attack.

At one house in Arabi claimed by Lima Company Capt. Bill Brown`s platoon, a frightened teenage girl darted to catch a toddler who had conked his head on the floor. She fell, badly spraining her leg.

Young Marines clustered round the girl, pulling out an Arabic phrase book and calling the corpsman. "Doctor, doctor!" they said, pointing to the corpsman. They pointed to their eyes, slapped their legs and pointed to the girl: The medic wanted to see her leg.

Mother and father strained across the culture gap to keep the well-intentioned young American men from looking at the thigh of their 13-year-old daughter. "Yalla," the father said. Go away. He smiled widely and politely, shoving the Marines out of the room. "Yalla." The family quickly scooted out of the house afterward, leaving it to the young Americans.

The Marines hauled in boxes of plastic-pouched rations and bottled water, and pulled out the family`s blankets, pillows and chairs to place in front of the family`s satellite television. Circled round it, they hung on each word of a BBC report on Malaysia. It was their first word from the outside world in weeks.

Across the street, Marines sprawled in a rare air-conditioned bedroom watching a guest on CBS`s "The Early Show" grate Parmesan onto roasted asparagus.

Marines themselves eat little besides the heavily prepared, starchy, candy-laden Meals Ready to Eat packaged a year or so ago at a plant in Indiana. One young Marine`s recent effort to vary their diet by taking a live turkey, cutting its head off with a shovel and boiling the carcass had turned out badly.

The Marines in the bedroom watched the cooking demonstration to the end. One turned to a friend. "Do you like eggplant?" he asked.

Before dawn Friday, Brown got up and washed the tea glasses used by his Marines. He left them drying on the family`s sideboard. It doesn`t pay to make enemies, Brown said.
An Elusive Quarry

"Where the [expletive] are these guys?" Maj. Kei Braun exclaimed in frustration.

It was noon Friday. The Marines had swept Arabi and found only frightened Iraqi families hiding in their homes. They had found more bombs in the roads, but no enemy to fight.

Marines said many of the foreign fighters fled west into Syria or to Husaybah, a lawless Iraqi border town where foreign fighters and local tribesmen have battled each other this month for control, shooting it out in the streets with AK-47s and mortars, American officials say. But the Marines lack the manpower to go into Husaybah.

So, within sight of Syria, they searched caves in the high, sheer rock escarpment that circles part of Arabi. Seeing a man come out of a cave, look out and go back in, a U.S. helicopter crew shot a Hellfire missile. Commanders came on the radio. Those were ordinary Iraqis hiding inside the caves, the commanders said. Hold off.

"These people here, it`s not their fault," Kalouf, a young combat engineer with a mission to blow things up, said at the house commandeered by Brown`s platoon. "They`re scared for their lives. I used to get mad at them, but now I understand."

The insurgents were the only enemies, but they wouldn`t come out to fight. "Frankly, I`m tired of going around not seeing anything, not knowing anything, and then having Marines, guys I know, get blown up by mines," Kalouf said.

"I`d much rather foreign fighters come out and shoot at us. We can respond to that," Kalouf said, as the Americans got ready to head back across the Euphrates. "We can`t stand all their IEDs and mines, crap like that. Because we can`t do that.``
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Democracy in a world of inequality

The system we are exporting is wilting under under egoism`s rule
Peter Preston
Monday May 16, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1484577,00.ht…

Guardian
Here`s George Bush, playing the crowds from Riga to Tbilisi and waving his "beacon of liberty". It`s a wonderful thing, this democracy. And here`s Tony Blair, counting his 36% and trying to polish a few wan adjectives. It`s a cruel, apathetic thing, this democracy.

We see the birth of freedom - in Bucharest or East Berlin - because it makes great TV. We watch misty-eyed as that statue of Saddam topples for the umpteenth time. And then the years of disillusion kick in. East Germans tell pollsters how they hanker for the past. Iraq grits its teeth as the carnage grows and the magic of the ballot fades.

Who`s to blame? Helmut Kohl, Donald Rumsfeld, Osama bin Laden? In any case, someone`s to blame. Someone let the flame go out. Let`s look round for that somebody and give him a good kicking. Bend over, prime minister. Politicians are to blame because they let us down. We are not to blame because we - the people - are lions for freedom led by deceitful donkeys.

Sometimes, as today, there are variations on this theme. Democracy itself is pure, but its mechanisms arrive soiled by self-interest, a system too crude to bring Labour and Lib Dems together or too bent to keep the Tories in limbo. But it ain`t broke, so fix it by PR or postal voting or a visit from the boundary commissioners. What isn`t said much these days - a forbidden thought much akin to blaspheming in church - is that modern democracy, as a way of governance, has problems we`re mutts not to recognise. Maybe it is broke, and maybe we can`t fix it.

If that`s the question, then it`s the sort of question that John Dunn, professor of political theory at Cambridge, patented long ago. Dunn (as Paul Kennedy says) habitually "asks questions about politics that few other scholars have thought of asking, or dared to ask". His new book, Setting the People Free (Atlantic), is just about as daring as they come.

Take the Greek city state of 2,000 plus years ago and analyse what kind of baby was there at the birth of democracy and why that Athenian flame went out, never truly rekindled until the French and American revolutions. Ask what Robespierre and chums meant by the égalité bit of their slogan. And then consider what happened next.

I won`t try to precis Dunn. It`s a fool`s task. But he sees how revolutions died as "partisans of the order of egoism" took over and champions of "the order of equality" quit the stage. He finds democracy itself assuming a quite different, rampant quality after the second world war as it became synonymous with militant definitions of "freedom" (cf Soviet tyranny). And he wonders what happens next to a formula we`re spreading from state to state, so that it`s the only way we choose to run our future world, a world where the interests of the egoists rule.

Dunn is never dogmatic, just philosophical and disturbing. "The (French) partisans of egoism saw national prosperity as lying in the multiplicity of needs, the ever-growing diversity of material enjoyment, in an immense industry, a limitless commerce - and in the anxious and insatiable cupidity of the citizens." So much for rampant citoyens , even last week. Hail to Blairism, Bushism, Howardism, Osborneism. And to some very real difficulties.

Dunn`s difficulty remains rooted in equality. How do you run a world where every nation, great and small, conforms to the latest definition of democracy, when equality between nations and between their citizens is simply not a realistic part of the equation? Where there are winners and losers by design, one world of permanent inequality? That`s a pretty feeble beacon - and some nasty supplementary questions spin out from behind it.

One is the way that the economic order that goes with democracy renders freedom to choose, to change course profoundly, an illusion. Success (or failure) is handing political power to a central bank. Make Alan Greenspan or Mervyn King monarchs of the market and your vote inevitably loses force, the parts it can influence shrunk to opaque pledges about tax and pleas to nurses to wash their hands.

There is, in short, less to vote about, egoism abetted by forces and capital flows that are bigger than any of us. Why opt for abortion or classroom discipline instead? Because these are little things, cheap things. Globalisation, even in a single democratic world, strips power away. "Parliament is degenerating into a subsidiary of the stock market," says Günter Grass. The German debate, like the French debate, is about despair and incomprehension, not lighting bonfires on Beacon Hill.

That`s a draining effect. And, contrapuntally, the power for global action also drains away. What can democracy do about a planet warming and frizzling towards extinction? It can do nothing at election time, because building nuclear power stations or meeting Kyoto targets is all too difficult (and expensive). It can do nothing between elections, because other countries are in stasis, voting themselves. It will not confront a threat, a demand for concerted action from Beijing to Birmingham, Alabama, until the seas rise, the deltas flood and something (too late) has to be done.

The democracy we primp for global export may divide the spoils among egoists, as in Baghdad. But it doesn`t answer the big questions of survival, equality, peace. It`s a concept barely 60 years old, not a torch blazing irresistibly over millenniums, nor the bill of goods George sold Georgia.

Is it the best we can do? Dunn has no final answer, and neither have I. It`s the best we have done so far. But remember; this is still a beginning, not an end.

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What drives support for this torturer

Oil and gas ensure that the US backs the Uzbek dictator to the hilt
Craig Murray
Monday May 16, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1484631,00.ht…

Guardian
The bodies of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in Uzbekistan are scarcely cold, and already the White House is looking for ways to dismiss them. The White House spokesman Scott McClellan said those shot dead in the city of Andijan included "Islamic terrorists" offering armed resistance. They should, McClellan insists, seek democratic government "through peaceful means, not through violence".

But how? This is not Georgia, Ukraine or even Kyrgyzstan. There, the opposition parties could fight elections. The results were fixed, but the opportunity to propagate their message brought change. In Uzbek elections on December 26, the opposition was not allowed to take part at all.

And there is no media freedom. On Saturday morning, when Andijan had been leading world news bulletins for two days, most people in the capital, Tashkent, still had no idea anything was happening. Nor are demonstrations in the capital tolerated. On December 7 a peaceful picket at the gates of the British embassy was broken up with great violence, its victims including women and children. So how can Uzbeks pursue democracy by "peaceful means"?

Take the 23 businessmen whose trial for "Islamic extremism" sparked recent events. Had the crowd not sprung them from jail, what would have awaited them? The conviction rate in criminal and political trials in Uzbekistan is over 99% - in President Karimov`s torture chambers, everyone confesses.

But the torture by no means ends on conviction. In prison there is torture to make you sign a recantation of faith and declaration of loyalty to the president. And there is torture to make you sign evidence implicating "accomplices". It was at this stage that the infamous boiling to death of Muzafar Avazov and Husnidin Alimov took place in Jaslik prison in 2002. I expect the government will take care that the 23, if not already dead, die in the mopping up.

You may think I exaggerate. Read the 2002 report by Professor Theo van Boven, the UN special rapporteur on torture, in which he denounced torture in Uzbekistan as "widespread and systemic". Human Rights Watch last year produced a book with more than 300 pages of case studies. One of the uses of Uzbek torture is to provide the CIA and MI6 with "intelligence" material linking the Uzbek opposition with Islamist terrorism and al-Qaida. The information is almost entirely bogus, and it was my efforts to stop MI6 using it that led ultimately to my effective dismissal from the Foreign Office.

The information may be untrue, but it is valuable because it feeds into the US agenda. Karimov is very much George Bush`s man in central Asia. There is not a senior member of the US administration who is not on record saying warm words about Karimov. There is not a single word recorded by any of them calling for free elections in Uzbekistan.

And it`s not just words. In 2002, the US gave Uzbekistan over $500m in aid, including $120m in military aid and $80m in security aid. The level has declined - but not nearly as much as official figures seem to show (much is hidden in Pentagon budgets after criticism of the 2002 figure).

The airbase opened by the US at Khanabad is not essential to operations in Afghanistan, its claimed raison d`être. It has a more crucial role as the easternmost of Donald Rumsfeld`s "lily pads" - air bases surrounding the "wider Middle East", by which the Pentagon means the belt of oil and gas fields stretching from the Middle East through the Caucasus and central Asia. A key component of this strategic jigsaw fell into place this spring when US firms were contracted to build a pipeline to bring central Asia`s hydrocarbons out through Afghanistan to the Arabian sea. That strategic interest explains the recent signature of the US-Afghan strategic partnership agreement, as well as Bush`s strong support for Karimov.

So the Uzbek people can keep on dying. They are not worth a lot of cash, so who cares? I travelled to Andijan a year ago to meet the opposition leaders, and kept in touch. I can give you a direct assurance that they are - or in many cases were - in no sense Islamist militants. They died an unwanted embarrassment to US foreign policy. We will doubtless hear some pious hypocrisies from Jack Straw. But when I was seeking funding to support the proto-democrats, the Foreign Office turned me down flat.

The US will fund "human rights" training in Uzbekistan but not help for the democratic opposition, in contrast to its policy elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. When Jon Purnell, the US ambassador, last year attended the opening of a human rights centre in the Ferghana valley, he interrupted a local speaker criticising repression. Political points, Purnell opined, were not allowed.

The western news agenda has moved the dead of Andijan from the "democrat" to the "terrorist" pile. Karimov remains in power. The White House will be happy. That`s enough for No 10.

· Craig Murray was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004

www.craigmurray.co.uk
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Monday, May 16, 2005
War News for Monday, May 16, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Thirty four bodies found in Baghdad, Ramadi and Latifya.

Bring `em on: Two drivers taken hostage in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi journalists and their driver killed in ambush in Mahmudiya.

Bring `em on: Two civilians killed in bomb attack on Iraqi convoy in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Four Iraqi troops killed by mortar attack in Khan Bani Saad.

Bring `em on: Three civilians injured in mortar attack in Baqubah.

Bring `em on: Iraqi policeman and his wife gunned down in Aalgaya.

Bring `em on: Four gunmen killed in failed assassination attempt on Iraqi army general in Baghdad.

Sexing up:

Sir John Scarlett, head of MI6, has been accused of trying `to sex up` a report by the Iraq Survey Group, the body charged with finding weapons of mass destruction after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

In an exclusive interview, Dr Rod Barton, a former senior weapons inspector in Iraq, has revealed extraordinary details of how Scarlett and a top Ministry of Defence official intervened in a report by the ISG early last year.

Barton, who has worked for Australian intelligence for more than 20 years, was a special adviser to the ISG in 2004 as it prepared to report that they had found no WMD or any programmes to build them. Such a report would have been politically damaging in London in the aftermath of the David Kelly affair.
Speaking from Canberra, Barton describes how in January last year he received a visit in Baghdad from Martin Howard, deputy chief of defence intelligence at the MoD. Howard had been criticised for helping to `out` Kelly as the source of Andrew Gilligan`s BBC story alleging Downing Street had `sexed up` the September dossier on Iraq`s WMD.

Barton alleges Howard `spelt out` that Britain`s preferred option was that a proposed 200-page ISG interim report should not be published at that stage. Barton claims the CIA overruled their UK counterparts. He alleges that after this Scarlett, then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, tried to get `nuggets` placed into a shorter report to imply that Saddam did have a WMD programme.

According to Barton, these were based on old evidence that had been investigated and shown to be false. It is understood to include suggestions that Saddam was developing a smallpox weapon and using research to create a nuclear programme.

Barton added: `The US has finally come to terms with the fact they got it dead wrong. The UK is lagging far behind. They still haven`t come to terms with it.`



Rice the Revisionist (or liar?) "This war came to us, not the other way around."

Appearing Sunday in one of Saddam`s former palaces, Rice received loud cheers and applause from U.S. troops and diplomats.

"I want you to keep focused on what you are doing here," Rice told them.

Although the U.S. decision to launch the war in 2003 was condemned in many nations and the original justification -- Saddam`s alleged weapons of mass destruction -- turned out to be based on flawed intelligence, Rice said, "This war came to us, no the other way around."

Referring to the attacks of September 11, 2001, Rice said, "The absence of freedom in the Middle East -- the freedom deficit -- is what produced the ideology of hatred that allowed them to fly airplanes into a building on a fine September day."

The old policies of the United States and "the rest of the free world" allowed "ideologies of hatred" to fester, she said.



What about the new policies Condi? e.g. Flushing Korans down toilets.

Recruitment crisis:

As the death toll of troops mounts in Iraq and Afghanistan, America`s military recruiting figures have plummeted to an all-time low. Thousands of US servicemen and women are now refusing to serve their country. Sergeant Kevin Benderman cannot shake the images from his head. There are bombed villages and desperate people. There are dogs eating corpses thrown into a mass grave. And most unremitting of all, there is the image of a young Iraqi girl, no more than eight or nine, one arm severely burnt and blistered, and the sound of her screams.



Commentary: "The battlefield is a great place for liars"

Iraq is a bloody no man`s land. America has failed to win the war. But has it lost it?

And in Afghanistan, the Taliban rises again for fighting season

"The battlefield is a great place for liars," Stonewall Jackson once said on viewing the aftermath of a battle in the American civil war.

The great general meant that the confusion of battle is such that anybody can claim anything during a war and hope to get away with it. But even by the standards of other conflicts, Iraq has been particularly fertile in lies. Going by the claims of President George Bush, the war should long be over since his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech on 1 May 2003. In fact most of the 1,600 US dead and 12,000 wounded have become casualties in the following two years.

The ferocious resistance encountered last week by the 1,000-strong US marine task force trying to fight its way into villages around the towns of Qaim and Obeidi in western Iraq shows that the war is far from over. So far nine marines have been killed in the week-long campaign, while another US soldier was killed and four wounded in central Iraq on Friday. Meanwhile, a car bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in central Baghdad yesterday, killing at least five Iraqis and injuring 12.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, the leader of one of the Kurdish parties, confidently told a meeting in Brasilia last week that there is war in only three or four out of 18 Iraqi provinces. Back in Baghdad Mr Talabani, an experienced guerrilla leader, has deployed no fewer than 3,000 Kurdish soldiers or peshmerga around his residence in case of attack. One visitor was amused to hear the newly elected President interrupt his own relentlessly upbeat account of government achievements to snap orders to his aides on the correct positioning of troops and heavy weapons around his house.



Commentary:

Could it be that we`ve misclassified the insurgency in Iraq--that it`s an invertebrate, able to absorb bone-crushing blows because it has no bones to crush? It seems to be more like a dandelion, which, when smashed, only spreads more seeds. Seven months after U.S. forces leveled the enemy stronghold, the insurgents are causing as much trouble as ever. The lull in violence that followed the January elections was taken to mean the rebels were in disarray. If so, they`ve regrouped, and Iraq has reverted to chaos. Nearly twice as many Iraqi security personnel died in attacks in March as in January. April was almost as bad. May looks worse still.

The last couple of weeks have been among the bloodiest since the U.S. invasion, with more than 420 people killed. The insurgents have been mounting an average of 70 attacks a day, compared to 30 or 40 in March.

Fallujah was supposed to make a difference, and so is the recent U.S. offensive in western Iraq. But someone forgot to tell the insurgents. American commanders were surprised at the strength and sophistication of the resistance in this latest campaign.

But this war has been full of surprises, none of them pleasant. In April, even before the latest expansion of violence, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency testified, "The insurgency has grown in size and complexity over the last year." Grown in size? We are spawning terrorists faster than we can kill them.

This offensive may illustrate why. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that residents of Qaim were angry at American forces for hitting the town with air strikes and artillery. "They destroyed our city, killed our children, destroyed our houses," one man said.

The insurgents, said New York University law professor Noah Feldman, a former official of the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, "are getting stronger every passing day." Contrary to assumptions in this country, he told Newsday, "there is no evidence whatsoever that they cannot win."



Opinion Poll: Nearly two-thirds say Iraq now not worth it.

Scenes we would like to see.
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Tomgram:
Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2486

In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair`s top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort.

By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum`s rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line.

That the Review is the first publication here to print the document is not only an honorable (and important) act, but a measure of the failure of major American papers to offer attention where it is clearly due. After all, whole government investigations have, in the past, gone in search of "smoking guns." In fact, the Bush administration spent much time searching fruitlessly for its own "smoking gun" of WMD in Iraq -- and this process was considered of front-page importance in our major papers and on the TV news. That a "smoking gun" document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon (except on the political internet, of course), tells us much about our present moment. Should you want to consider the miserable coverage in this country, check out FAIR`s commentary on the matter.

Congressman John Conyers has just sent a letter, signed by eighty-nine Democratic congressional representatives, to the President demanding some answers to the document`s revelations. And articles by good reporters in major papers finally did start to appear late this week -- but those of John Daniszewski at the Los Angeles Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post were typically tucked away on inside pages (meant for political news jockeys), and they had a distinctly just-the-facts-maam, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary feel to them.

But shouldn`t it be a front-page story that, as Danner points out below, all the subsequent arguments we`ve had to endure about the state of, and accuracy of American intelligence on Iraq, were actually beside the point? After all, as the smoking-gun memo makes perfectly clear, the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play. As the secret memo also makes clear, administration officials, and the President himself, had already rolled the dice and placed their bet -- on the existence of WMD in Iraq as an excuse for the war they so desperately wanted. (Their Iraqi exile sources had, of course, assured them that it was so and, as the Brits reported in July 2002, they were already wondering, "For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one [of an invasion].") After all, it seemed so logical. Saddam had used such weapons in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War and against Kurds in Iraq. American troops and UN inspectors had found such weaponry in profusion after our first Gulf War. So why not now as well?

Recently, Ted Rall, considering press response to a more modest smoking-gun incident -- the covered up friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan whose revelation was reported rather reluctantly on the inside pages of papers -- wrote tellingly: "For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposés should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories." Dream on, as we smoking-gunsters like to say.

The least commented upon aspect of the smoking-gun memo has been its military side. It is, in significant part, a military document, reflecting how much serious thinking and planning at the highest levels in the U.S. and Britain had already gone into the question of how to have a war by July 2002. The question of how technically to launch the "military action" -- whether by a "generated start" or a "running start" -- was, for instance, front and center. Also addressed was the mundane but crucial issue (for the Pentagon) of where, around Iraq, to base forces. "The US," reads the memo, "saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either [the generated or running start] option." Diego Garcia is the British-controlled Indian Ocean Island that was already a stationary American "aircraft carrier" and from which, 8 months later, B-2s would fly on Baghdad.

Since Danner -- whose book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror does much to explain the nature of the fix the Bush administration now finds itself in -- covers the British document in great and fascinating detail below, let me just add a final note: To me, perhaps the most telling line in the memo, given what`s happened since, is the observation of Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of M16 (the British CIA equivalent), just back from a U.S. visit, that "[t]here was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." This line not only represented the greatest gamble the Bush administration`s top officials would make, but the hubris with which they approached the taking of Iraq. As true believers in force – nothing impressed them more than the advanced technology of destruction they possessed and its possible applications -- they were already awed by themselves and deeply believed in the shock to come once they hit Iraq hard. As the British smoking-gun memo indicates in that single classic line, they placed their deepest faith in their conviction that, once the invasion was completed successful and Saddam had fallen, everything else in Iraq would simply fall into place as well. Planning for a post-war occupation? What me worry?
Tom

Secret Way to War
By Mark Danner

1.

It was October 16, 2002, and the United States Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq. When George W. Bush came before members of his Cabinet and Congress gathered in the East Room of the White House and addressed the American people, he was in a somber mood befitting a leader speaking frankly to free citizens about the gravest decision their country could make.

The 107th Congress, the President said, had just become "one of the few called by history to authorize military action to defend our country and the cause of peace." But, he hastened to add, no one should assume that war was inevitable. Though "Congress has now authorized the use of force," the President said emphatically, "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary." The President went on:

"Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action. Yet, if Iraq is to avoid military action by the international community, it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world`s demands. It`s the obligation of Iraq."

Iraq, the President said, still had the power to prevent war by "declaring and destroying all its weapons of mass destruction" -- but if Iraq did not declare and destroy those weapons, the President warned, the United States would "go into battle, as a last resort."

It is safe to say that, at the time, it surprised almost no one when the Iraqis answered the President`s demand by repeating their claim that in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, the Iraqis had in fact destroyed these weapons, probably years before George W. Bush`s ultimatum: "the Iraqis" -- in the words of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kaye -- "were telling the truth."

As Americans watch their young men and women fighting in the third year of a bloody counterinsurgency war in Iraq -- a war that has now killed more than 1,600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis -- they are left to ponder "the unanswered question" of what would have happened if the United Nations weapons inspectors had been allowed -- as all the major powers except the United Kingdom had urged they should be -- to complete their work. What would have happened if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to prove, before the U.S. went "into battle," what David Kaye and his colleagues finally proved afterward?

Thanks to a formerly secret memorandum published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, during the run-up to the British elections, we now have a partial answer to that question. The memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair`s senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary" -- that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction -- the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq. Whatever the Iraqis chose to do or not do, the President`s decision to go to war had long since been made.

On July 23, 2002, eight months before American and British forces invaded, senior British officials met with Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss Iraq. The gathering, similar to an American "principals meeting," brought together Geoffrey Hoon, the defense secretary; Jack Straw, the foreign secretary; Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general; John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advises the prime minister; Sir Richard Dearlove, also known as "C," the head of MI6 (the equivalent of the CIA); David Manning, the equivalent of the national security adviser; Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the Defense Staff (or CDS, equivalent to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs); Jonathan Powell, Blair`s chief of staff; Alastair Campbell, director of strategy (Blair`s communications and political adviser); and Sally Morgan, director of government relations.

After John Scarlett began the meeting with a summary of intelligence on Iraq -- notably, that "the regime was tough and based on extreme fear" and that thus the "only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action," "C" offered a report on his visit to Washington, where he had conducted talks with George Tenet, his counterpart at the CIA, and other high officials. This passage is worth quoting in full:

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime`s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

Seen from today`s perspective this short paragraph is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points:

1. By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq.

2. Bush had decided to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD."

3. Already "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

4. Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going "the UN route").

5. Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war.

We have long known, thanks to Bob Woodward and others, that military planning for the Iraq war began as early as November 21, 2001, after the President ordered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to look at "what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to," and that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who headed Central Command, were briefing American senior officials on the progress of military planning during the late spring and summer of 2002; indeed, a few days after the meeting in London leaks about specific plans for a possible Iraq war appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable" -- and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts...around the policy." The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it -- how to "fix," as it were, what Blair will later call "the political context." Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as "C" points out, those on the National Security Council -- the senior security officials of the U.S. government -- "had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime`s record." This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street.

After Admiral Boyce offered a brief discussion of the war plans then on the table and the defense secretary said a word or two about timing -- "the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections" -- Foreign Secretary Jack Straw got to the heart of the matter: not whether or not to invade Iraq but how to justify such an invasion:

"The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss [the timing of the war] with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Given that Saddam was not threatening to attack his neighbors and that his weapons of mass destruction program was less extensive than those of a number of other countries, how does one justify attacking? Foreign Secretary Straw had an idea: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."

The British realized they needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force" because, as the attorney general pointed out, rather dryly, "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action." Which is to say, the simple desire to overthrow the leadership of a given sovereign country does not make it legal to invade that country; on the contrary. And, said the attorney general, of the "three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or [United Nations Security Council] authorization," the first two "could not be the base in this case." In other words, Iraq was not attacking the United States or the United Kingdom, so the leaders could not claim to be acting in self-defense; nor was Iraq`s leadership in the process of committing genocide, so the United States and the United Kingdom could not claim to be invading for humanitarian reasons.[1] This left Security Council authorization as the only conceivable legal justification for war. But how to get it?

At this point in the meeting Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in. He had heard his foreign minister`s suggestion about drafting an ultimatum demanding that Saddam let back in the United Nations inspectors. Such an ultimatum could be politically critical, said Blair -- but only if the Iraqi leader turned it down:

"The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.... If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work."

Here the inspectors were introduced, but as a means to create the missing casus belli. If the UN could be made to agree on an ultimatum that Saddam accept inspectors, and if Saddam then refused to accept them, the Americans and the British would be well on their way to having a legal justification to go to war (the attorney general`s third alternative of UN Security Council authorization).

Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible. War had been decided on; the problem under discussion here was how to make, in the prime minister`s words, "the political context ...right." The "political strategy" -- at the center of which, as with the Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for "it was the regime that was producing the WMD" -- must be strong enough to give "the military plan the space to work." Which is to say, once the allies were victorious the war would justify itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors, especially if refused, could form the political bridge by which the allies could reach their goal: "regime change" through "military action."

But there was a problem: as the foreign secretary pointed out, "on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences." While the British considered legal justification for going to war critical -- they, unlike the Americans, were members of the International Criminal Court -- the Americans did not. Mr. Straw suggested that given "US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum." The defense secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, was more blunt, arguing "that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the U.S. did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush." The key negotiation in view at this point, in other words, was not with Saddam over letting in the United Nations inspectors -- both parties hoped he would refuse to admit them, and thus provide the justification for invading. The key negotiation would be between the Americans, who had shown "resistance" to the idea of involving the United Nations at all, and the British, who were more concerned than their American cousins about having some kind of legal fig leaf for attacking Iraq. Three weeks later, Foreign Secretary Straw arrived in the Hamptons to "discreetly explore the ultimatum" with Secretary of State Powell, perhaps the only senior American official who shared some of the British concerns; as Straw told the secretary, in Bob Woodward`s account, "If you are really thinking about war and you want us Brits to be a player, we cannot be unless you go to the United Nations." [2]

2.

Britain`s strong support for the "UN route" that most American officials so distrusted was critical in helping Powell in the bureaucratic battle over going to the United Nations. As late as August 26, Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and publicly denounced "the UN route." Asserting that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," Cheney advanced the view that going to the United Nations would itself be dangerous:

"A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow `back in the box.`"

Cheney, like other administration "hard-liners," feared "the UN route" not because it might fail but because it might succeed and thereby prevent a war that they were convinced had to be fought.

As Woodward recounts, it would finally take a personal visit by Blair on September 7 to persuade President Bush to go to the United Nations:

"For Blair the immediate question was, Would the United Nations be used? He was keenly aware that in Britain the question was, Does Blair believe in the UN? It was critical domestically for the prime minister to show his own Labour Party, a pacifist party at heart, opposed to war in principle, that he had gone the UN route. Public opinion in the UK favored trying to make international institutions work before resorting to force. Going through the UN would be a large and much-needed plus."[3]

The President now told Blair that he had decided "to go to the UN" and the prime minister, according to Woodward, "was relieved." After the session with Blair, Bush later recounts to Woodward, he walked into a conference room and told the British officials gathered there that "your man has got cojones." ("And of course these Brits don`t know what cojones are," Bush tells Woodward.) Henceforth this particular conference with Blair would be known, Bush declares, as "the cojones meeting."

That September the attempt to sell the war began in earnest, for, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had told the New York Times in an unusually candid moment, "You don`t roll out a new product in August." At the heart of the sales campaign was the United Nations. Thanks in substantial part to Blair`s prodding, George W. Bush would come before the UN General Assembly on September 12 and, after denouncing the Iraqi regime, announce that "we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions." The main phase of public diplomacy -- giving the war a "political context," in Blair`s phrase -- had begun. Though "the UN route" would be styled as an attempt to avoid war, its essence, as the Downing Street memo makes clear, was a strategy to make the war possible, partly by making it politically palatable.

As it turned out, however -- and as Cheney and others had feared -- the "UN route" to war was by no means smooth, or direct. Though Powell managed the considerable feat of securing unanimous approval for Security Council Resolution 1441, winning even Syria`s support, the allies differed on the key question of whether or not the resolution gave United Nations approval for the use of force against Saddam, as the Americans contended, or whether a second resolution would be required, as the majority of the council, and even the British, conceded it would. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, put this position bluntly on November 8, the day Resolution 1441 was passed:

"We heard loud and clear during the negotiations about `automaticity` and `hidden triggers` -- the concerns that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action.... Let me be equally clear.... There is no `automaticity` in this Resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required.... We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities."

Vice President Cheney could have expected no worse. Having decided to travel down "the UN route," the Americans and British would now need a second resolution to gain the necessary approval to attack Iraq. Worse, Saddam frustrated British and American hopes, as articulated by Blair in the July 23 meeting, that he would simply refuse to admit the inspectors and thereby offer the allies an immediate casus belli. Instead, hundreds of inspectors entered Iraq, began to search, and found...nothing. January, which Defence Secretary Hoon had suggested was the "most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin," came and went, and the inspectors went on searching.

On the Security Council, a majority -- led by France, Germany, and Russia -- would push for the inspections to run their course. President Jacques Chirac of France later put this argument succinctly in an interview with CBS and CNN just as the war was about to begin:

"France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we`ve come [to] a dead end, but that isn`t the case."[4]

Where would this "dead end" be found, however, and who would determine that it had been found? Would it be the French, or the Americans? The logical flaw that threatened the administration`s policy now began to become clear. Had the inspectors found weapons, or had they been presented with them by Saddam Hussein, many who had supported the resolution would argue that the inspections regime it established had indeed begun to work -- that by multilateral action the world was succeeding, peacefully, in "disarming Iraq." As long as the inspectors found no weapons, however, many would argue that the inspectors "must be given time to do their work" -- until, in Chirac`s words, they "came to a dead end." However that point might be determined, it is likely that, long before it was reached, the failure to find weapons would have undermined the administration`s central argument for going to war -- "the conjunction," as ‘C` had put it that morning in July, "of terrorism and WMD." And as we now know, the inspectors would never have found weapons of mass destruction.

Vice President Cheney had anticipated this problem, as he had explained frankly to Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, during an October 30 meeting in the White House. Cheney, according to Blix,

"stated the position that inspections, if they do not give results, cannot go on forever, and said the U.S. was `ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament.` A pretty straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that the US was convinced Iraq possessed (though they did not know where), the US would be ready to say that the inspectors were useless and embark on disarmament by other means."[5]

Indeed, the inspectors` failure to find any evidence of weapons came in the wake of a very large effort launched by the administration to put before the world evidence of Saddam`s arsenal, an effort spearheaded by George W. Bush`s speech in Cincinnati on October 7, and followed by a series of increasingly lurid disclosures to the press that reached a crescendo with Colin Powell`s multimedia presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Throughout the fall and winter, the administration had "rolled out the product," in Card`s phrase, with great skill, making use of television, radio, and all the print press to get its message out about the imminent threat of Saddam`s arsenal. ("Think of the press," advised Josef Goebbels, "as a great keyboard on which the government can play.")

As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals -- "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld -- and the inspectors` empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself. The inspectors` failure to find weapons in Iraq was taken to discredit the worth of the inspections, rather than to cast doubt on the administration`s contention that Saddam possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Oddly enough, Saddam`s only effective strategy to prevent war at this point might have been to reveal and yield up some weapons, thus demonstrating to the world that the inspections were working. As we now know, however, he had no weapons to yield up. As Blix remarks, "It occurred to me [on March 7] that the Iraqis would be in greater difficulty if...there truly were no weapons of which they could ‘yield possession.`" The fact that, in Blix`s words, "the UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it" -- that the UN process had been successful --meant, in effect, that the inspectors would be discredited and the United States would go to war.

President Bush would do so, of course, having failed to get the "second resolution" so desired by his friend and ally, Tony Blair. Blair had predicted, that July morning on Downing Street, that the "two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." He seems to have been proved right in this. In the end his political strategy only half worked: the Security Council`s refusal to vote a second resolution approving the use of force left "the UN route" discussed that day incomplete, and Blair found himself forced to follow the United States without the protection of international approval. Had the military plan "worked" -- had the war been short and decisive rather than long, bloody, and inconclusive -- Blair would perhaps have escaped the political damage the war has caused him. A week after the Downing Street memo was published in the Sunday Times, Tony Blair was reelected, but his majority in Parliament was reduced, from 161 to 67. The Iraq war, and the damage it had done to his reputation for probity, was widely believed to have been a principal cause.

In the United States, on the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has attracted little attention. As I write, no American newspaper has published it and few writers have bothered to comment on it. The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures" -- that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration`s political use of intelligence -- which is, after all, the critical issue -- was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned.

In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans` lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall:

"The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] were `in what we call the reality-based community,` which he defined as people who `believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.` I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. `That`s not the way the world really works anymore,` he continued. `We`re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you`re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we`ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that`s how things will sort out. We`re history`s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.`"

Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept -- a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of the New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe. The last century`s most innovative authority on power and truth, Joseph Goebbels, made the same point but rather more directly:

"There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be `the man in the street.` Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology."

I thought of this quotation when I first read the Downing Street memorandum; but I had first looked it up several months earlier, on December 14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly reelected President George W. Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the United States can bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; and General (ret.) Tommy Franks, the commander who had led American forces during the first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, of course, would be known to history as the intelligence director who had failed to detect and prevent the attacks of September 11 and the man who had assured President Bush that the case for Saddam`s possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk." Franks had allowed the looting of Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare for what would come after the taking of Baghdad. ("There was little discussion in Washington," as "C" told the Prime Minister on July 23, "of the aftermath after military action.") Bremer had dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits for the insurgency. One might debate their ultimate responsibility for these grave errors, but it is difficult to argue that these officials merited the highest recognition the country could offer.

Of course truth, as the master propagandist said, is "unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." He of course would have instantly grasped the psychological tactic embodied in that White House ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure Americans that the war the administration launched against Iraq has been a success and was worth fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are still willing to believe this suggests that as time goes on and the gap grows between what Americans see and what they are told, membership in the "reality-based community" may grow along with it. We will see. Still, for those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear

--May 12, 2005

Notes

1. The latter charge might have been given as a reason for intervention in 1988, for example, when the Iraqi regime was carrying out its Anfal campaign against the Kurds; at that time, though, the Reagan administration -- comprising many of the same officials who would later lead the invasion of Iraq -- was supporting Saddam in his war against Iran and kept largely silent. The second major killing campaign of the Saddam regime came in 1991, when Iraqi troops attacked Shiites in the south who had rebelled against the regime in the wake of Saddam`s defeat in the Gulf War; the first Bush administration, despite President George H.W. Bush`s urging Iraqis to "rise up against the dictator, Saddam Hussein," and despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops within miles of the killing, stood by and did nothing. See Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" (Human Rights Watch, January 2004).

2. See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 162.

3. See Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 177–178.

4. See "Chirac Makes His Case on Iraq," an interview with Christiane Amanpour, CBS News, March 16, 2003.

5. See Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (Pantheon, 2004), p. 86.

Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com

This article appears in the June 9th issue of The New York Review of Books

Copyright 2005 Mark Danner


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Europe`s Rules Forcing U.S. Firms to Clean Up
Unwilling to surrender sales, companies struggle to meet the EU`s tough stand on toxics.
By Marla Cone
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-euroreg…

May 16, 2005

At their headquarters in Santa Clara, researchers at Coherent Inc., the world`s largest laser manufacturer, are wrestling with an environmental law that is transforming their entire product line.

Soon, everything produced at the Bay Area company — even the tiniest microchip inside its high-powered lasers that fly on NASA satellites and bleach jeans sold at boutiques — must be free of lead, mercury and four other hazardous substances.

The mandate that has Coherent and other American electronics companies scrambling doesn`t come from lawmakers in Washington, or even Sacramento.

Instead, it was crafted 5,000 miles away, in Brussels, the capital of the European Union.

Europe`s law, governing any product with a battery or a cord, has spawned a multibillion-dollar effort by the electronics industry to wean itself from toxic compounds.

"This is the first time we`ve encountered something like this on such a global scale," said Gerry Barker, a vice president of Coherent, whose lasers are used to create master copies of Hollywood films, test the safety of car tires, imprint expiration dates on soda cans and more.

And the electronics rule is only the beginning.

Already, Europe is setting environmental standards for international commerce, forcing changes in how industries around the world make plastic, electronics, toys, cosmetics and furniture. Now, the EU is on the verge of going further — overhauling how all toxic compounds are regulated. A proposal about to be debated by Europe`s Parliament would require testing thousands of chemicals, cost industries several billion dollars, and could lead to many more compounds and products being pulled off the market.

Years ago, when rivers oozed poisons, eagle chicks were dying from DDT in their eggs and aerosol sprays were eating a hole in the Earth`s ozone layer, the United States was the world`s trailblazer when it came to regulating toxic substances. Regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats controlled the White House, the United States was the acknowledged global pioneer of tough new laws that aimed to safeguard the public from chemicals considered risky.

Today, the United States is no longer the vanguard. Instead, the planet`s most stringent chemical policies, with far-reaching impacts on global trade, are often born in Stockholm and codified in Brussels.

"In the environment, generally, we were the ones who were always out in front," said Kal Raustiala, a professor of international law at UCLA. "Now we have tended to back off while the Europeans have become more aggressive regulators."

Europe has imposed many pioneering and aggressive — some say foolish and extreme — bans meant to protect people from exposure to hundreds of industrial compounds that have been linked to cancer, reproductive harm and other health effects. Recent measures adopted by the European Union have taken aim at chemicals called phthalates, which make nail polishes chip-resistant, and compounds added to foam cushions that slow the spread of fires in furniture.

EU`s Big Market



Many companies, even those based in America, follow the European rules because the EU, with 25 countries and 460 million people, surpasses even the United States as a market. Rather than lose access to it, many companies redesign their products to meet European standards. For example, Revlon, L`Oreal and Estee Lauder have said that all their products meet European directives that control the ingredients of cosmetics. And U.S. computer companies say they are trying to remove lead and other substances banned in the EU from everything they sell.

As the EU emerges as the world`s toughest environmental cop, its policies increasingly are at odds with Washington.

Among the compounds now phased out or restricted in Europe but still used in high volumes in the United States are the pesticides atrazine, lindane and methyl bromide; some phthalates, found in beauty products, plastic toys and other products; and nonylphenol in detergents and plastic packaging. In animal tests, those compounds have altered hormones, caused cancer, triggered neurological changes in fetuses or damaged a newborn`s reproductive development.

The "biggest single difference" between EU and U.S. policy is in the regulation of cosmetics, said Alastair Iles, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley`s Energy and Resources Group. Cosmetics sold in Europe cannot contain about 600 substances that are allowed in U.S. products, including, as of last September, any compound linked to cancer, genetic mutations and reproductive effects.

Driving EU policy is a "better safe than sorry" philosophy called the precautionary principle. Following that guideline, which is codified into EU law, European regulators have taken action against chemicals even when their dangers remain largely uncertain.

Across the Atlantic, by contrast, U.S. regulators are reluctant to move against a product already in use unless a clear danger can be shown. A chemical, they say, is innocent until proven guilty.

Critics say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency`s search for scientific clarity takes so long that the public often goes unprotected. Paralysis by analysis, the critics call it.

U.S. risk assessments can last years, sometimes longer than a decade, and in some cases, the EPA still reaches no conclusions and relies upon industries to act voluntarily. For instance, despite research that showed by 2002 that polybrominated flame retardants were doubling in concentration in Americans` breast milk every few years, the EPA has still not completed its risk review. Meanwhile, the U.S. manufacturer of two of the flame retardants agreed voluntarily to stop making them last year after they were banned in Europe and in California.

In the 1970s and `80s, all the major chemical and pollution laws in the United States had a precautionary slant, said Frank Ackerman, an economist at Tufts University`s Global Development and Environment Institute.

Lengthy reviews of chemicals, which now dominate U.S. policy, began to evolve under President Reagan and grew in the 1990s. Carl Cranor, an environmental philosophy professor at UC Riverside, said that a conservative groundswell in American politics and a backlash by industries set off "an ideological sea change."

Part of the change stems from the much more vocal role of U.S. companies in battling chemical regulations, said Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at Harvard University`s John F. Kennedy School of Government. American attitudes toward averting environmental risks haven`t changed since the 1970s, Jasanoff said. "What has changed is politics and political culture," she said.

EPA`s Limited Role

The Toxic Substances Control Act, adopted by Congress in 1976, grants the EPA authority to restrict industrial chemicals that "present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment." The law, however, also tells EPA to use "the least burdensome" approach to do so and compare the costs and benefits.

A pivotal year for the EPA was 1991, when a federal appeals court nullified its ban on asbestos. The court ruled that the agency, despite 10 years of research, had failed to prove that asbestos posed an unreasonable risk and had not proved that the public would be inadequately protected by steps short of a ban.

Since then, the EPA has not banned or restricted any existing industrial chemical under the toxics law, except in a few instances where manufacturers acted voluntarily. New chemicals entering the market are more easily regulated, and so are pesticides, under a separate law.

Some states, including California, are filling what they see as a void by adopting their own rules. California and Maine banned some polybrominated flame retardants, for example.

Iles said that restricting a chemical under federal law now requires a "very tough burden of proof."

"Americans tend to think that products are safe because they are in the market and must somehow have passed government regulation," he said. "But there is no real regulation. Cosmetics, for example, are almost unregulated."

Since the asbestos rule was thrown out by the court, EPA officials perform more complicated calculations to quantify how much risk an industrial chemical poses, assigning a numeric value, for example, to the odds of contracting cancer or figuring out what dose might harm a fetus or child. They also do more research to predict the costs and the expected benefits to public health.

But making these precise judgments is difficult with today`s industrial compounds. In most cases, the dangers are subtle, not overtly life-threatening.

Studies of laboratory animals suggest that low doses of dozens of chemicals can contribute to learning problems in children, skew sex hormones, suppress immune systems and heighten the risk of cancer. Some chemicals build up in the bodies of humans and wildlife, and spread globally via the air and oceans. But while harm is well-documented in some wild animals and lab tests, the risks to human beings are largely unknown.

In the face of that scientific uncertainty, Europeans say, their precautionary principle is simply common sense. If you smell smoke, you don`t wait until your house is burning down to eliminate the cause, they say. Their standard of evidence for chemicals is similar to the creed of doctors: First, do no harm.

"In the EU, if there is a risk with potentially irreversible impact, we don`t wait until the last piece of information," said Rob Donkers, the EU`s environmental counselor in Washington, D.C.

"You can study things until you turn purple, but we do not work from the concept that you really need to prove a risk 100,000 times," he said. "In the face of potentially very dangerous situations, we start taking temporary risk management measures on the basis of the science that is available."

Europe`s policy is, in part, a reaction to a series of disturbing revelations about dioxins in chicken, mad cow disease, toxic substances in diapers and baby toys, all of which have made many Europeans more averse to taking risks with chemicals.

Under Europe`s rules, "there are chemicals that are going to be taken off the market, and there probably should be," said Joel Tickner, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts` School of Health and the Environment.

Conservative critics and some officials in the Bush administration criticize Europe`s precautionary approach as extreme, vague, protectionist and driven by emotions, not science.

EPA officials would not go on the record comparing their policies with the EU`s. But they asserted that their approach, while different, is also precautionary.

Instead of banning compounds, the EPA teams with industry to ensure there are safe alternatives. In the last five years, 3M Corp. voluntarily eliminated a perfluorinated chemical in Scotchgard that has been found in human blood and animals around the world, and Great Lakes Chemical Corp. ended manufacture of polybrominated flame retardants used in foam furniture. In those cases, EPA officials said, forming partnerships with industry was quicker than trying to impose regulations and facing court challenges as they did with asbestos.

More than any other environmental policy in Europe, the proposal known as REACH, or Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals, worries U.S. officials and industries.

Under REACH, which was approved by the EU`s executive arm and is scheduled to go before the European Parliament this fall, companies would have to register basic scientific data for about 30,000 compounds. More extensive testing would be required of 1,500 compounds that are known to cause cancer or birth defects, to build up in bodies or to persist in the environment, as well as several thousand others used in large volumes. Those chemicals would be subject to bans unless there is proof that they can be used safely or that the benefits outweigh the risks. The testing would cost industries $3.7 billion to $6.8 billion, the EU says.

Some company executives contend that Europe is blocking products that pose little or no danger. In Santa Clara, Barker of Coherent said that the EU`s precautionary approach sounds good in principle but it forces businesses to do things that are "unnecessary and probably very expensive."

In some cases, U.S. officials say, Europeans are using the precautionary principle as an excuse to create trade barriers, such as their bans on hormones in beef and genetically modified corn and other foods.

Not on the Same Page

"There is a protectionist element to this, but it goes beyond Europe trying to protect its own industries or even the health of its public," said Mike Walls, managing director at the American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, the nation`s largest exporter. "It`s a drive to force everyone to conform to their standards — standards that the rest of the world hasn`t weighed in on."

John Graham, an economist and senior official of Bush`s Office of Management and Budget, which reviews new regulations, has called the notion of a universal precautionary principle "a mythical concept, kind of like a unicorn."

"Reasonable people can disagree about what is precautionary and what is dangerous," he said at a 2002 conference.

It is ironic, says Richard Jensen, chairman of the University of Notre Dame`s economics department, that Europeans "who embrace the precautionary principle should have such a high tolerance for risk from smoking and secondhand smoke."

Americans are more fearful of cigarettes, nuclear power and car exhaust — and it shows in their laws. They also pasteurize foods to kill bacteria, while European children grow up drinking and eating raw milk and cheese.

Said UCLA`s Raustiala, "The United States is quite schizophrenic, as are Europeans, about when we decide" to be cautious.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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The deserters: Awol crisis hits the US forces
As the death toll of troops mounts in Iraq and Afghanistan, America`s military recruiting figures have plummeted to an all-time low. Thousands of US servicemen and women are now refusing to serve their country. Andrew Buncombe reports
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

16 May 2005

Sergeant Kevin Benderman cannot shake the images from his head. There are bombed villages and desperate people. There are dogs eating corpses thrown into a mass grave. And most unremitting of all, there is the image of a young Iraqi girl, no more than eight or nine, one arm severely burnt and blistered, and the sound of her screams.

Last January, these memories became too much for this veteran of the war in Iraq. Informed his unit was about to return, he told his commanders he wanted out and applied to be considered a conscientious objector. The Army refused and charged him with desertion. Last week, his case - which carries a penalty of up to seven years` imprisonment - started before a military judge at Fort Stewart in Georgia.

"If I am sincere in what I say and there`s consequences because of my actions, I am prepared to stand up and take it," Sgt Benderman said. "If I have to go to prison because I don`t want to kill anybody, so be it."

The case of Sgt Benderman and those of others like him has focused attention on the thousands of US troops who have gone Awol (Absent Without Leave) since the start of President George Bush`s so-called war on terror. The most recent Pentagon figures suggest there are 5,133 troops missing from duty. Of these 2,376 are sought by the Army, 1,410 by the Navy, 1,297 by the Marines and 50 by the Air Force. Some have been missing for decades.

But campaigners say the true figure could be far higher. Staff who run a volunteer hotline to help desperate soldiers and recruits who want to get out, say the number of calls has increased by 50 per cent since 9/11. Last year alone, the GI Rights Hotline took more than 30,000 calls. At present, the hotline gets 3,000 calls a month and the volunteers say that by the time a soldier or recruit dials the help-line they have almost always made up their mind to get out by one means or another.

"People are calling us because there is a real problem," said Robert Dove, a Quaker who works in the Boston office of the American Friends Service Committee, one of several volunteer groups that have operated the hotline since 1995. "We do not profess to be lawyers or therapists but we do provide both types of support."

The people calling the hotline range from veterans such as Sgt Benderman to recruits such as Jeremiah Adler, an idealistic 18-year-old from Portland, Oregon, who joined the Army believing he could help change its culture. Within days of arriving for his basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he realised he had made a mistake and said the Army simply wanted to turn him into a "ruthless, cold-blooded killer".

Mr Adler begged to be sent home and even pretended to be gay to be discharged. Eventually, he and another recruit fled in the night and rang the hotline, which advised him to turn himself in to avoid court-martial. He will now be given an "other than honourable discharge".

From southern Germany where he is on holiday before starting college in the autumn, Mr Adler told The Independent: "It was obviously a horrible experience but now I`m glad I went through it. I was expecting to meet a whole lot of different types of people; some had noble reasons. I also met a lot of people who [wanted] to kill Arabs." In one letter home to his family, Mr Adler wrote that when he arrived he was horrified by the things he heard other recruits talking about, things that in civilian life would result in someone being treated as an outcast. In another letter he said he could hear other recruits crying at night. "You can hear people trying to make sure no one hears them cry under their covers," he wrote.

Mr Adler now provides advice to other recruits who have decided the military is not for them. "When people contact me I tell them go Awol; it`s the quickest way to get out," he said. "I was told I would be facing 20 years hard labour at Fort Leavenworth [military prison] because that is what the sergeant will tell you. I learnt that was not the case."

Jeremy Hinzman, 26, a reservist with the 82nd Airborne Division who served in Afghan-istan, decided to go Awol after his unit was ordered to Iraq. He took his wife and child and fled to Canada, hoping to be welcomed, as were the 50,000 or so young Americans who sought refuge north of the border to avoid the Vietnam war.

But in March he was refused refugee status by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board. Mr Hinzman, who is appealing the decision, told the hearing: "We were told that we would be going to Iraq to jack up some terrorists. We were told it was a new kind of war, that these were evil people and they had to be dealt with ... We were told to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists ... to foster an attitude of hatred that gets your blood boiling."

Campaigners say recruits who decide they want to leave the military are the most vulnerable to pressure from sergeants and officers who try to force them to stay. Some are told they will go to jail, others are told they will never be able to get a job if they receive a "less than honourable discharge", they say. They also face intense peer pressure and abuse, as they try to get out and after they manage to do so.

Campaigners have also drawn attention to the often scurrilous tactics used by US military recruiters, who for three months have failed to meet their targets for recruits. After several cases where recruiters had illegally covered up recruits` criminal and medical records, threatened one prospect with jail for failing to meet an appointment and provided another with laxatives to help him lose weight and pass a physical, the Pentagon is halting all recruiting on 20 May for a day of retraining.

Senior commanders have said the present recruiting environment - with the war in Iraq having cost the lives of more than 1,600 servicemen and women and the economy able to offer other jobs - is their most difficult. Despite this, the Pentagon insists it is committed to finding recruits in a fair and transparent process. Colonel Joseph Curtin, an Army spokesman, said the retraining day would give recruiters time to "focus on how they can do a very tough mission without violating good order and discipline".

JE McNeil, who heads the Centre for Conscience and War in Washington DC, a Christian group whose members also staff the GI Rights Hotline, said many troops she spoke with had been lied to by recruiters. "I had an 18-year-old who was told he did not have to serve in Iraq. `I was told I`d get a job where I would not be sent`, he told me," said Ms McNeill, a lawyer. "He was recruited to be an military policeman. They are the people they are sending to Iraq. People all the time are told [by recruiters] `I can get you a job where you will not have to go to war`."

Campaigners say that despite pressure on unhappy recruits exerted in the barracks and the insults they will likely face, if a recruit follows the correct legal procedure they can usually get out of the military. One of the biggest hurdles for those who want out is obtaining the correct information on how best to proceed. Usually, the advice to those on the run is to turn themselves in. After 30 days of being Awol a serviceman is considered a deserter, and a warrant is issued for his arrest. At that point, he can be returned to his unit, court-martialled or given jail time or - and this is more often than not the outcome for recruits - they will be given a non-judicial punishment and an less-than-honourable discharge. Volunteers say usually the military is more inclined to let go those who have had the least training and are the least specialised. But an experienced Air Force pilot, for instance, in whom the military has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, could face a much more difficult time in getting out. "The most important thing we do is listen and not lie," Ms McNeil said. "Sometimes I tell people there is nothing they can do. I don`t enjoy saying it but some times that is it."

Kevin Benderman is anything but a raw recruit. He joined the US Army in 1987, served in the Gulf War and received an honourable discharge in 1991. He rejoined in 2000 and served during the invasion of Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division. He says what he saw there left him morally opposed to returning to war applied to be a CO. The military says that on 10 January he failed to show up when his unit was to ship out.

Last week, at Fort Stewart, a military judge started a so-called Article 32 hearing to decide whether there is sufficient evidence for a full court-martial of Sgt Benderman. The proceedings recommence on 26 May. Sgt Benderman`s wife, Monica, who had been heavily involved in organising his defence, said: "A lot of what they are saying about Kevin is not true. He never went Awol and was never a deserter. He is staying strong. I am proud of him. He has had a lot thrown at him over the past three days. If you consider what he has gone through he is doing very well. If people cannot see he is genuine, then they are not looking at him."

The Pentagon says it does not keep records of how many try to desert each year. A spokeswoman, Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke, said the running rally had declined since 9/11 from 8,396 to the present total of 5,133. She added: "The vast majority of those who desert do so because they have committed some criminal act, not for political or conscientious objector purposes."


16 April 2005 19:33

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Speech at conference assails right wing
By Michael D. Sorkin
Of the Post-Dispatch
Sunday, May. 15 2005
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscit…

Bill Moyers denounced on Sunday the right wing and top officials at the White
House, saying they are trying to silence their critics by controlling the news
media.

He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government
"stenographers." And he said the public increasingly is content with just
enough news to confirm its own biases.

Moyers spoke in St. Louis at a conference on media reform. His reports have
appeared on the Public Broadcasting System since the 1970s. He was an aide to
President Lyndon Johnson and is a former newspaper publisher.

Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media
- mean to stay there by punishing journalists "who tell the stories that make
princes and priests uncomfortable."

Moyers described those officials as "obsessed with control" of the media. He
said they are using the government "to threaten and intimidate."

Moyers answered for the first time recent charges that public television in
general and he in particular have become too liberal.

Those charges are from Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, and, in effect, Moyers` boss at the network.

Tomlinson, a Republican, paid an outside consultant $10,000 to keep track of
the political leanings of guests on Moyers` show, "Now." Moyers left the show
last year but is back on public television as host of the series "Wide Angle."

Tomlinson, on the recommendation of administration officials, hired a senior
White House aide to draw up guidelines to review the content of public radio
and television broadcasts, according to a report in The New York Times on May
2.

Tomlinson has denied that he was carrying out a White House mandate.

Tomlinson complained that Moyers` show was consistently critical of Republicans
and the Bush administration. He said there was a "tone deafness" at PBS
headquarters on issues of "tone and balance."

Moyers said he knew his broadcasts have created a backlash in Washington.

"The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the radical right of
the Republican Party," he said.

"That`s because the one thing they loath more than liberals is the truth. And
the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

Moyers` speech was interrupted by standing ovations at the Conference for Media
Reform here over the weekend. More than 2,500 people attended the three-day
conference.

Ernest Wilson III serves with Tomlinson on the board that oversees public
broadcasting. He said PBS outranks the Fox News Channel, CNN and all the
broadcast news networks in a survey that asked whom the public trusts.

"We are, by far, the most `fair and balanced,`" he said, a reference to the
motto of Fox News.

Moyers complained that PBS` "liberal" label is undeserved.

"In contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely
features the voices of establishment critics," he said, alternative voices on
public television are rare and usually drowned out by government and corporate
views.

Moyers said that`s exactly what the right wing wants.

"They want your reporting to validate their belief system, and when it doesn`t
God forbid."

He said he always thought that the American eagle needed both a left wing and a
right wing. "But with two right wings, or two left wings, it`s no longer an
eagle, and it`s going to crash."

Moyers said right wingers had attacked him after he closed a broadcast by
placing a flag in his lapel.

It was the first time that he had worn a flag. He said he put it on to remind
himself that "not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad
what bin Laden did to us."

"The flag has been hijacked and turned into a logo, a trademark of a monopoly
on patriotism," Moyers said.

Moyers had harsh words for reporters who simply recount what officials say,
without scrutinizing what they say and do.

He said New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, among other reporters, had
relied on official but unnamed sources "when she served essentially as the
government`s stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction."

Moyers said he has come to understand that "news is what people want to keep
hidden and everything else is publicity."

He said that kind of reporting has never been tougher to do:

"Without a trace of irony, the powers that be have appropriated the news speak
vernacular of George Orwell`s `1984,` giving us a program, no child will be
left behind, while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged children.

"They give us legislation calling for clear skies and healthy forests" while
"turning over public lands to the energy industry."

He said the public shares the blame:

"An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan
information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly
obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put
up a fight - ask questions and be skeptical."

Moyers compared Tomlinson and other conservatives to Richard Nixon, who he said
was another president who tried to take control of public television.

"I always knew Nixon would be back," Moyers said. "I just didn`t know that this
time he would ask to be chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

Moyers was a last-minute addition to the conference. He finished writing his
hourlong speech 20 minutes before he spoke. His ending was nearly drowned out
by a blaring fire alarm that went off by mistake.

The conference ended Sunday, and some who attended said they were still unsure
what reforming the media means. Others said they were energized to go home and
give it a try.

"It`s true that no one laid out a battle plan," said Mercedes Lynn DeUriarte,
an associate journalism professor from the University of Texas at Austin. "But
everybody left understanding that we`re at a critical point, where we must find
a way to protect a democratic press or risk democracy."

Reporter Michael D. Sorkin

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Nach allem was Newsweek schreibt, hat die Zeitung im Gegensatz zu den Mainstreammedien ihre Behauptung nicht zurückgenommen.
Isikoff`s source, in other words, stands by his report of the incident, but is merely tracing it to other paperwork. What difference does that make? Although Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita angrily denounced the source as no longer credible, in the real world you can`t just get rid of a witness because the person made a minor mistake with regard to a text citation. It is like saying that we can`t be sure someone has really read the Gospels because he said he read about Caiaphas in the Gospel of Mark rather than in the Gospel of John.

Newsweek has, in other words, confirmed that the source did read a US government account of the desecration of the Koran.
Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michiga…


How a Fire Broke Out
The story of a sensitive NEWSWEEK report about alleged abuses at Guantánamo Bay and a surge of deadly unrest in the Islamic world.
By Evan Thomas
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7857407/site/newsweek/page/2/

May 23 issue - By the end of the week, the rioting had spread from Afghanistan throughout much of the Muslim world, from Gaza to Indonesia. Mobs shouting "Protect our Holy Book!" burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces. The violence cost at least 15 lives, injured scores of people and sent a shudder through Washington, where officials worried about the stability of moderate regimes in the region.

The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Brandishing a copy of that week`s NEWSWEEK (dated May 9), Khan read a report that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo prison had placed the Qur`an on toilet seats and even flushed one. "This is what the U.S. is doing," exclaimed Khan, "desecrating the Qur`an." His remarks, as well as the outraged comments of Muslim clerics and Pakistani government officials, were picked up on local radio and played throughout neighboring Afghanistan. Radical Islamic foes of the U.S.-friendly regime of Hamid Karzai quickly exploited local discontent with a poor economy and the continued presence of U.S. forces, and riots began breaking out last week.

Late last week Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita told NEWSWEEK that its original story was wrong. The brief PERISCOPE item ("SouthCom Showdown") had reported on the expected results of an upcoming U.S. Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Gitmo. According to NEWSWEEK, SouthCom investigators found that Gitmo interrogators had flushed a Qur`an down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. While various released detainees have made allegations about Qur`an desecration, the Pentagon has, according to DiRita, found no credible evidence to support them.

How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest? While continuing to report events on the ground, NEWSWEEK interviewed government officials, diplomats and its own staffers, and reconstructed this narrative of events:

At NEWSWEEK, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff`s interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur`an down a toilet. A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but NEWSWEEK National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK PERISCOPE item to a senior Defense official, asking, "Is this accurate or not?" The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the PERISCOPE draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report.

Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees—including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports of Qur`an desecration seemed shocking but not incredible. But to Muslims, defacing the Holy Book is especially heinous. "We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive," says computer teacher Muhammad Archad, interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of last week`s protests took place. "But insulting the Qur`an is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate."

NEWSWEEK was not the first to report allegations of desecrating the Qur`an. As early as last spring and summer, similar reports from released detainees started surfacing in British and Russian news reports, and in the Arab news agency Al-Jazeera; claims by other released detainees have been covered in other media since then. But the NEWSWEEK report arrived at a particularly delicate moment in Afghan politics. Opponents of the Karzai government, including remnants of the deposed Taliban regime, have been looking for ways to exploit public discontent. The Afghan economy is weak, and the government (pressed by the United States) has alienated farmers by trying to eradicate their poppy crops, used to make heroin in the global drug trade. Afghan men are sometimes rounded up during ongoing U.S. military operations, and innocents can sit in jail for months. When they are released, many complain of abuse. President Karzai is still largely respected, but many Afghans regard him as too dependent on and too obsequious to the United States. With Karzai scheduled to come to Washington next week, this is a good time for his enemies to make trouble.

That does not quite explain, however, why the protest and rioting over Qur`an desecration spread throughout the Islamic region. After so many gruesome reports of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the vehemence of feeling around this case came as something of a surprise. Extremist agitators are at least partly to blame, but obviously the reports of Qur`anic desecration touch a particular nerve in the Islamic world. U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, are uneasily watching, and last week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointedly remarked that any desecration of the Qur`an would not be "tolerated" by the United States. (As a legal matter, U.S. citizens are free to deface the Qur`an as an exercise of free speech, just as they are free to burn the American flag or tear up a Bible; but government employees can be punished for violating government rules.)

After the rioting began last week, the Pentagon attempted to determine the veracity of the NEWSWEEK story. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers told reporters that so far no allegations had been proven. He did appear to cryptically refer to two mentions found in the logs of prison guards in Gitmo: a report that a detainee had used pages of the Qur`an to stop up a crude toilet as a form of protest, and a complaint from a detainee that a prison guard had knocked down a Qur`an hanging in a bag in his cell.

On Friday night, Pentagon spokesman DiRita called NEWSWEEK to complain about the original PERISCOPE item. He said, "We pursue all credible allegations" of prisoner abuse, but insisted that the investigators had found none involving Qur`an desecration. DiRita sent NEWSWEEK a copy of rules issued to the guards (after the incidents mentioned by General Myers) to guarantee respect for Islamic worship. On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur`an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report. Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"

In the meantime, as part of his ongoing reporting on the detainee-abuse story, Isikoff had contacted a New York defense lawyer, Marc Falkoff, who is representing 13 Yemeni detainees at Guantánamo. According to Falkoff`s declassified notes, a mass-suicide attempt—when 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves in August 2003—was triggered by a guard`s dropping a Qur`an and stomping on it. One of Falkoff`s clients told him, "Another detainee tried to kill himself after the guard took his Qur`an and threw it in the toilet." A U.S. military spokesman, Army Col. Brad Blackner, dismissed the claims as unbelievable. "If you read the Al Qaeda training manual, they are trained to make allegations against the infidels," he said.

More allegations, credible or not, are sure to come. Bader Zaman Bader, a 35-year-old former editor of a fundamentalist English-language magazine in Peshawar, was released from more than two years` lockup in Guantánamo seven months ago. Arrested by Pakistani security as a suspected Qaeda militant in November 2001, he was handed over to the U.S. military and held at a tent at the Kandahar airfield. One day, Bader claims, as the inmates` latrines were being emptied, a U.S. soldier threw in a Qur`an. After the inmates screamed and protested, a U.S. commander apologized. Bader says he still has nightmares about the incident.

Such stories may spark more trouble. Though decrepit and still run largely by warlords, Afghanistan was not considered by U.S. officials to be a candidate for serious anti-American riots. But Westerners, including those at NEWSWEEK, may underestimate how severely Muslims resent the American presence, especially when it in any way interferes with Islamic religious faith.

With Sami Yousafzai in Peshawar, Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain in Islamabad and Eve Conant and Andrew Horesh in Washington
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7857407/site/newsweek/page/2/

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Second row: Unka Dick, Kinda Sleazy, Wolfie, Tenet, Gonzales?, Poodle, ..., Chalabi, ... Greenspan? Greenspan guilty of war crimes? Karl Rove
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"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay," Newsweek`s editor, Mark Whitaker, said in a one-sentence statement issued by the magazine late this afternoon.

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Es wird mal wieder der Bote geschlagen und der Täter wird als Unschuldslamm hingestellt.

Wenn als einziger von den ganzen Foltervorwürfen die Schändung des Korans(und diese Praxis wird vielen Vorwürfen der Opfer immer wieder angeführt) als nicht zweifelsfrei erwiesen zurückgezogen wird, bleibt noch genügend über, um die ganze Bush-Clique, wenn man die Regeln des Nürnberger Prozesse zu Grunde legen würde, für Jahre hinter Gitter zu stecken.

Es wird in den USA das übliche Prozedere ablaufen, man wird über die Presse diskutieren und deren Fehlverhalten, und dabei werden alle die Verbrechen der US-Regierung gegen die Menschlichkeit wieder in den Archiven verswchwinden.

Und die Presse hilft tapfer mit bei ihrer eigenen Abschaffung, anstelle ihre Freiheit auch mit dem Recht auf Irrtum zu verteidigen, besonders gegenüber einem Regime, was die Lüge als Mittel zum Zweck benutzt.

Die Weltdemokratisatoren haben wieder zugeschlagen.

May 17, 2005
Newsweek Says It Is Retracting Koran Report
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
and NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/politics/17koran.html?hp&e…

After a drumbeat of criticism from the Bush administration and others, Newsweek magazine yesterday went beyond an apology it issued Sunday and retracted an article published May 1 that stated that American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had tried to rattle Muslim detainees by flushing a Koran down a toilet.

The original article was blamed for inciting widespread protests and riots in the Muslim world, where desecration of the Koran is viewed as an incendiary act, and where at least 17 people were killed in the ensuing violence.

"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay," the statement from Newsweek said.

The carefully worded retraction came after the White House said the Newsweek article had damaged the image of the United States abroad. It reflected the severity of consequences that even one sentence in a brief news article can have at a time of intense anti-American sentiment overseas and political polarization, as well as extreme distrust of the mainstream media at home.

Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, said in an interview that the magazine was retracting the part of the article saying sources told Newsweek that a coming military report would say interrogators had flushed a holy book down the toilet to unnerve detainees. As it turned out, Newsweek now says, there was one source. And Mr. Whitaker said that because that source had "backed away" from his original account, the magazine could "no longer stand by" it.

"I did not want to be in the position of splitting hairs," Mr. Whitaker said, "to look like we were being evasive or not fully forthcoming."

The magazine`s retraction was the latest step in a complicated and fast-moving drama that involved a disparate cast of players, including one of the nation`s top investigative news reporters and a cricket star in Pakistan. In the span of a few days, it has added a new dimension to the journalistic debate about anonymous sources as well as new questions about how the United States treats captives from the Muslim world.

In the interview, Mr. Whitaker contrasted his action with that of CBS News when it refused to back down immediately last year from a report that raised questions about President Bush`s National Guard service.

"Clearly it became a problem for CBS because people thought they weren`t acknowledging that they screwed up," Mr. Whitaker said.

He continued: "Unlike CBS, we felt we were being extremely forthcoming by publishing all the details and publishing the Pentagon`s denials and saying we committed an error. But then it seemed that people felt like we weren`t apologizing. In order for people to understand we had made an error, we had to say `retraction` because that`s the word they were looking for."

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said yesterday morning that he found it "puzzling" that Newsweek had not retracted the article. "There is a certain journalistic standard that should be met," he said, "and in this case it was not."

Mr. McClellan and Mr. Whitaker said that no senior White House officials had spoken privately to Newsweek`s management to seek a retraction. After Newsweek retracted the article in the afternoon, Mr. McClellan called it a "good first step."

Mr. McClellan and other administration officials blamed the Newsweek article for setting off the anti-American violence that swept Afghanistan and Pakistan. "The report had real consequences," Mr. McClellan said. "People have lost their lives. Our image abroad has been damaged."

But only a few days earlier, in a briefing on Thursday, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said that the senior commander in Afghanistan believed the protests had stemmed from that country`s reconciliation process.

"He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," General Myers said.

In the interview, Mr. Whitaker expressed frustration at the Pentagon for not informing the magazine of questions about the accuracy of the original account until about 10 days after it was published. He added that the magazine was continuing to report on the underlying accusations of Koran desecration.

An article in the current Newsweek said the original report, written by a veteran investigative reporter, Michael Isikoff, and the magazine`s national security correspondent, John Barry, relied on a "longtime reliable source" who told Mr. Isikoff that a new report on prisoner abuses at Guantánamo would include a mention of a Koran being flushed down a toilet. The magazine said it showed the original article to a Pentagon official who challenged one aspect of the story but not the report about the desecration of the Koran.

Because of other reports about prisoner abuses there, the magazine said, the toilet incident "seemed shocking but not incredible."

In fact, complaints from released inmates that the Koran had been thrown into a toilet go back at least two years.

Among the more detailed accounts of United States soldiers mishandling copies of the Koran were depositions from three Britons who were released from Guantánamo in the summer of 2004. Asif Iqbal, one of the men, who were from Tipton, England, and had been captured in Afghanistan, said that guards "would kick the Koran, throw it in the toilet and generally disrespect it."

Military officials dismissed the complaints as commanders at Guantánamo conducted media tours of the facility during which they emphasized steps taken to demonstrate respect for Islam. Inmates, they noted, were given copies of the Koran along with a cloth surgical mask, which they used as a kind of sling to suspend the book from the wire mesh walls to ensure it did not touch the floor.

The official accounts of Guantánamo began fraying in later months, as the International Committee of the Red Cross charged in a confidential report in November that the procedures at Guantánamo amounted to torture, and F.B.I. memorandums disclosed in December portrayed harsh and abusive treatment by interrogators. The F.B.I. memorandums, disclosed in a lawsuit, did not mention any mishandling of the Koran.

Last month, a former American interrogator confirmed to The New York Times an account given in an interview by a former Kuwaiti detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said that mishandling of the Koran once led to a major hunger strike. The strike ended only after a senior officer expressed regret over the camp`s loudspeaker system, which was simultaneously translated by linguists at the end of each cell block, the former interrogator said.

In that case, the accusations were of copies of the Koran being tossed on the floor in a pile and treated roughly, but there was no assertion that any had been put in the toilet.

Erik Saar, a co-author of the book "Inside the Wire" and an Arabic language translator at Guantánamo from January to June 2003, said in an interview Monday that while he "never saw anything along the lines of a Koran being flushed down a toilet," the issue of how guards and interrogators handled the book was a chronic problem.

"It was one of the things that kept resurfacing because guards had to inspect the cells occasionally for contraband," Mr. Saar said. He said that commanders tried to deal with detainees` sensitivity about the Koran in several ways, including enlisting some of the Muslims working for the military as translators to handle the books during inspections, so that nonbelievers would not touch the books. But that was not always done, he said, and there was no regular policy. The issue "created friction and problems all the time," he said.

The outcry over the Newsweek article apparently began in Pakistan, when Imran Khan, the legendary cricketer turned opposition politician, summoned reporters to a press conference on May 6 to draw attention to it. Once close to the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and a onetime crusader against corruption, Mr. Khan has been vocal in recent years against United States strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Islam is under attack in the name of the war on terror," Mr. Khan, now one of General Musharraf`s most stalwart critics, told reporters. He pressed the Musharraf regime to demand an apology from Washington.

For the next several days, the report dominated the front pages of English and Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan and became the center of debate in the Pakistan Parliament. Predictably, a coalition of Islamist parties seized on the Newsweek report to accuse General Musharraf`s government of colluding with the West against Islam. But the criticism was not limited to the religious right. Legislators from across the political spectrum denounced the reported desecration, and by Friday, May 13, Parliament had passed a unanimous resolution condemning it.

Adnan Rehmat, the country director for Internews, a media training program financed by the United States government, said the article struck a particularly sensitive chord among Pakistanis not only because it implied an act of sacrilege against the holy book but also because it represented yet another act of horror out of Guantánamo Bay. He called it "a reconfirmation of what they`ve suspected, a straight disrespect for the sensitivities of Muslims."

The criticism of General Musharraf, however, did not explode in Pakistan in the way that it could have. As though to clip opposition wings, an official statement from the foreign affairs ministry condemned the reported desecration and called for an inquiry just one day after Mr. Khan`s press conference.

"Last Friday, in mass protests called by the Islamist parties, Pakistanis took to the streets holding aloft `death to America` banners," the statement said. "There were no casualties."

But demonstrations turned violent in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, stone throwers were out on the streets. Along with local government offices, the Pakistani consulate was attacked apparently as a symbol of Pakistani aid for United States intervention in Afghanistan. By Friday, the protests had spread to several other towns in Afghanistan, and by nightfall, 17 people were dead and more than 100 wounded.

That the outcry against the Newsweek report came from two of the Bush administration`s most trusted allies in the Muslim world is not likely to be a coincidence, analysts said.

Both countries, they pointed out, have political forces seeking to undermine their respective United States-allied heads of state: the Taliban against President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the religious right against the self-described moderate, General Musharraf, in Pakistan.

On Monday, after Newsweek`s published clarification, an Afghan presidential spokesman, Jawed Ludin, pressed for a "professional and sensitive approach" to coverage of "potentially sensitive issues."

An article published Monday in Jang, an Urdu-language daily in Pakistan, offered the most biting assessment of the political fallout of the Newsweek report: "Osama must be smiling victoriously in his cave," it declared.

In the interview yesterday, Mr. Whitaker said the magazine did not have a written policy regarding the use of anonymous sources or other reporting procedures but said the incident would prompt the editors to examine its policies.

"We`ll look to see if this can be codified," he said.

He said he would "more aggressively" discourage the use of anonymous sources and would consider rules about having a single source on a sensitive article. But he said he was not prepared to issue a blanket rule against having only one source.

"Sometimes there is only one person, a corporate whistleblower, who is brave enough to come forward," he said, "but your level of confidence has to be in inverse proportion to your number of sources."

Still, damage-control experts said that Newsweek`s handling of the story had created a public relations disaster.

"They tap-danced," said Robert K. Passikoff, president of Brand Keys Inc., a consumer loyalty firm based in New York. "They should have immediately bit the bullet and admitted they were wrong. There was no middle ground here.`"

Dr. Passikoff said that the retraction "seems like too little, too late" because of the nature of the error. "It had such far-reaching effects," he said. "People died because of this story."

Analysts said Newsweek was also damaged by the timing of this event, coming after a spate of high-profile journalistic scandals involving fabrications and plagiarism by reporters at other news organizations, including The New York Times.

"I think that this has the potential to be one of those so-called tipping points," said David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a senior aide to four presidents. Mr. Gergen also works for U.S. News & World Report, a competitor to Newsweek.

"There is a lot of anger, both here and abroad," Mr. Gergen added. "The Muslim world is going to continue to believe that this actually happened and that Newsweek is only issuing a retraction because of the reaction."

He said the magazine was smart to issue the retraction, but that it would not quell the outrage. "If anything, it is mushrooming and becoming uglier by the hour," he said.

Katharine Q. Seelye reported from New York for this article, and Neil A. Lewis from Washington. Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan; Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan;and Somini Sengupta from New Delhi.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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An diesem Ereignis wird sich zeigen, ob die US-Presse noch irgendein Rückgrad hat!

May 17, 2005
The Reporter Who Put Monica on the Map
By CHARLES McGRATH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/politics/17isikoff.html?
Investigative reporters come in a couple of varieties. There are the quiet, scholarly types who troll the archives and pore over documents. And there are the gumshoes, obsessive and indefatigable, who tend to dress like Columbo, never let go of a story and seldom see eye to eye with their editors.

Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who together with John Barry, a national security correspondent for the magazine, wrote a brief article referring to desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantánamo Bay, is a charter member of this second club. He is rumpled, relentless and even abrasive at times.

His article, which was blamed for rioting in Pakistan and Afghanistan in which at least 17 people were killed, has been denounced by the Pentagon for relying on what it says is incorrect information supplied by an anonymous source.

In discussing the article yesterday, Mr. Isikoff, who supplied the source for the article, said: "Whenever something like this happens, you`ve got to take stock and review what you did - how the story was handled. The big point that leaps out is the cultural one. Neither Newsweek nor the Pentagon foresaw that a reference to the desecration of the Koran was going to create the kind of response that it did. The Pentagon saw the item before it ran, and then they didn`t move us off it for 11 days afterward. They were as caught off guard by the furor as we were. We obviously blame ourselves for not understanding the potential ramifications."

Mark Whitaker, the editor of Newsweek, said in an interview yesterday, "Everybody behaved professionally and by the book in this case." Mr. Whitaker said no disciplinary action was being taken against the reporters because they did everything they should have done. "Grounds for discipline would be unethical behavior, fabrication, sloppy reporting or unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of the problem, and none of those things happened in this case."

Mr. Isikoff is, famously, the journalist who discovered the liaison between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and it was his reporting that led to impeachment proceedings against the president.

Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent for Linda R. Tripp, the Pentagon employee who tape-recorded Ms. Lewinsky`s descriptions of her meetings with Mr. Clinton, recalled Mr. Isikoff yesterday: "He just showed up one day at Linda`s office. We don`t know how he got in there." She added: "I found him infuriatingly professional. He crossed all the t`s, dotted all the i`s, double-sourced everything and drove us all crazy. He`s like an old beat reporter - kind of a throwback, for someone his age."

Glenn Simpson, an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is friendly with Mr. Isikoff but has also competed with him for stories, described him succinctly: "Mike will pull your fingernails out over coffee discussing lawn care. He is just a born interrogator."

Seymour M. Hersh, a reporter cut from the same cloth as Mr. Isikoff, said of him: "He`s very smart and very tough. He does that magic thing that`s so obvious but that nobody does: he reads before he writes."

Mr. Isikoff, 53, broke into newspapering with The Washington Star, now defunct, and joined The Washington Post in 1981. While at The Post, he began pursuing the story of Paula Jones and her sexual harassment suit against President Clinton. When The Post was reluctant to print his findings, he became involved in a now legendary newsroom brouhaha with Fred Barbash, then the deputy national editor. Robert Kaiser, the paper`s managing editor, suspended Mr. Isikoff for two weeks.

Mr. Barbash did not return a telephone call yesterday. Mr. Kaiser, whom Mr. Isikoff once called a "pompous snob," said: "Mike Isikoff is a very tough, relentless reporter. There was never any doubt about how he did his work but about what should be done with his work, which is characteristic of investigative reporters - they want to see their stories instantly in print. That`s why there are editors and why they get paid, and there`s nothing wrong with that arrangement."

Mr. Isikoff left The Post and joined Newsweek in 1994. After the Lewinsky story broke, he was a sought-after guest on late-night talk shows, and in 1999 he published a book, "Uncovering Clinton," about his experiences on the sex-scandal beat. Then, as his friend Howard Kurtz, the media reporter at The Post, said yesterday, "He went back to the trenches."

Last month, Mr. Isikoff won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for reporting on the interrogation scandals at Abu Ghraib prison.

"It`s hardly surprising that Mike would write a controversial story based on an anonymous source," Mr. Kurtz added. "Sometimes that is the only way to get at sensitive or classified information. But when you live by unnamed sources, you can also get burned badly when the source is wrong."

Bill Kovach, the founding director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, said: "Here is a reporter who can shake stuff out of deaf and dumb people, but you can`t let it go at that. The material has to be edited and verified and lawyered if necessary." Mr. Kovach added, "As the course of events in this particular event has shown, you can`t play fast and loose with even a one-paragraph item."

Mr. Isikoff, when asked whether he was used to being in the journalistic hot seat, laughed and said: "Well, you don`t get used to being denounced by the White House. You may have experienced it before; that`s not the same thing."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Die Kommission hat in den letzten Tagen den Russen, Franzosen und Briten heftige Vorwürfe gemacht, dass sie fette Geschäfte mit Saddam gemacht haben, aber leider hat man die die Geschäfte der USA Firmen mit Saddam vergessen. Ein Senator hat nun nachgefragt.

washingtonpost.com
Report Says Treasury Missed Iraq Oil Abuses
U.S. Firm Accused of $37 Million in Kickbacks
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 17, 2005; A14

The U.S. Treasury Department failed to adequately monitor U.S. companies that violated U.N. sanctions against Iraq, permitting a Houston-based oil company to avoid scrutiny as it paid Saddam Hussein`s government more than $37 million in illegal kickbacks, according to a report released yesterday by Democrats investigating abuses in the U.N. oil-for-food program.

Bayoil, a Texas firm indicted by a federal grand jury last month for paying millions of dollars in illegal fees to Iraq, received "minimal attention" from Treasury`s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as it managed the import of more than 200 million barrels of Iraqi crude into the United States between 2000 and 2002, according to the report released by Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The report`s release follows allegations in recent days by the subcommittee`s chairman, Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), that the former Iraqi government used its oil wealth to curry favor with senior government officials, politicians and businessmen in Russia, France and Britain. A member of the British Parliament, George Galloway, is scheduled to answer allegations at a hearing of Coleman`s subcommittee today that he supported Hussein`s government in exchange for lucrative oil deals.

Treasury spokeswoman Molly Millerwise said that "OFAC took very seriously its responsibility to effectively and accurately administer and enforce the sanctions against Iraq." The agency has conducted "over 300 investigations and audits" of individuals and corporations that violated sanctions against Iraq, she said.

Catherine M. Recker, a lawyer for Bayoil, declined to comment yesterday.

But Levin said that "we`ve got to look in the mirror at ourselves as well as point fingers at others," Levin said yesterday.

The $64 billion U.N. oil-for-food program was created in December 1996 to offset the economic hardship brought on by U.N. sanctions imposed on Hussein`s government. The program allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. But the Iraqi government siphoned more than $2 billion in illicit proceeds from the program.

Yesterday`s report contains documents that bolster previous allegations that the State Department and the U.S.-led naval force may have assisted efforts by a key ally, Jordan, to smuggle $53 million worth of oil from Iraq in seven supertankers in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

"The United States not only failed to exert an effort to stop the oil tanker shipments, it appears to have facilitated them, despite widespread recognition that the shipments were a blatant violation of U.N. sanctions," the report states.

Levin said the State Department and the Pentagon "have denied" the committee`s requests for information and failed to "provide answers to our questions." Levin and Coleman, meanwhile, are considering issuing a subpoena to compel testimony by a senior U.S. naval officer who was responsible for interdicting oil smugglers in the Persian Gulf. They are also pressing the State Department to allow a U.S. diplomat who allegedly approved one of the oil shipments to testify.

A senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration had offered Levin a classified briefing on the Jordanian trade, but that Levin declined. A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Joe Richard, said he had not seen the report but insisted that "we`re not complicit in illegal smuggling operations."

The report contrasts Treasury`s "failure" to investigate possible violations with vigorous efforts by U.S. diplomats to devise procedures at the United Nations to prevent Iraq from charging illegal fees for buying its oil.

Bayoil is accused of paying kickbacks to Iraq to position itself as a major shipper of Iraqi oil to refineries in the United States and elsewhere. Levin`s staff said that the United Nations first appealed to the United States for information on possible abuses by Bayoil in July 2001, citing the company`s failure to respond to requests for comment. A month later, the State Department wrote to OFAC asking the agency to "contact Bayoil and urge the company [to] respond quickly and completely."

But it would be eight months before OFAC wrote to Bayoil, and the office never shared Bayoil`s written response with the United Nations, according to the report.

"OFAC`s failure to investigate Bayoil, review evidence of possible U.S. company involvement in Iraq`s illegal surcharges, or actively monitor U.S. persons doing business in Iraq represented an abdication of responsibility," the report stated.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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May 17, 2005

THE ROVING EYE
The US and its `special` dictator
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GE17Ag01.html

"I am delighted to be back in Uzbekistan. I`ve just had a long and very interesting and helpful discussion with the president ... Uzbekistan is a key member of the coalition`s global war on terror. And I brought the president the good wishes of President Bush and our appreciation for their stalwart support in the war on terror ... Our relationship is strong and has been growing stronger."
- US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Tashkent, February 2004

Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov`s army, which last Friday opened fire on thousands of unarmed protesters in Andijan, in the Ferghana Valley, has been showered by Washington in the past few years with hundreds of millions of dollars (US$200 million in 2002 alone) - all on behalf of the "war on terror".

So you won`t see the White House, or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, hammering Karimov. You won`t hear many in Washington calling for free elections in Uzbekistan. The former strongmen of color-coded, "revolutionary" Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were monsters who had to be removed for "freedom and democracy" to prevail. So is the dictator of Belarus. Not Karimov. He`s "our" dictator: the Saddam Hussein of Central Asia is George W Bush`s man.

`Either with me or against me`
This is what happened in Andijan. Twenty-three local businessmen - who even resorted to hunger strike - have been on trial since February, accused of "Islamic terrorism". They were part of Akramia, a small Islamic movement whose platform privileges economic success over ideology and religious fundamentalism. Soon after they had set up a construction company - and apparently also a mutual fund - to help local people get a few jobs, the businessmen were arrested.

Washington has listed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) as a terrorist organization. Hizbut Tahrir (HT) - which does not condone armed jihad - may soon follow, as Washington always follows Karimov`s leads. In Uzbekistan, any opposition against the Karimov system is considered terrorism. Karimov blames HT for a series of bombings - which the group vehemently denies - as well as unspecified al-Qaeda-connected organizations (it was the IMU which was responsible for the 1999 bombings in Tashkent). According to Alison Gill of Human Rights Watch in Uzbekistan, Karimov`s security apparatus cracks down heavily on HT, but now Akramia is also a target.

The group was founded in 1992 by a math teacher, Akram Yuldashev, and it`s in fact a splinter group from HT. It`s very popular with relatively educated youngsters in the Ferghana Valley - as it promotes a direct connection between an honest, pious Islamic way of life and economic success. Amplifying the Islamic tradition of zakat, Akramia also insists that part of business profits must be consecrated to help the poor and the needy. Yuldashev has been in jail since 1999. His wife, a defense witness at the trial, vehemently denied that Akramia`s teachings encouraged political subversion: it`s all about economic freedom.

Last Thursday, exasperated protesters close to the 23 businessmen organized a commando raid to release them, taking over the local administration center - with many also demanding for Karimov to go. According to the protesters, had they not acted this way, the 23 would have been condemned, tortured and killed: that`s how it works in the Karimov system. The next day came the bloodbath. Galima Bukharbaeva, on site for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, described a column of armored personnel carriers firing at will - and unprovoked - at the protesters. As many as 500 may have been killed, including women and children, and more than 2,000 wounded. People were angrily protesting against the corruption of the Karimov system, which they blame for their appalling living conditions. Karimov blamed it all on "terrorist groups". The White House copied him almost verbatim.

Seven decades of the Soviet system imprinted their atheist mark on Uzbekistan. This is not an Islamist haven. Talibanization is a deadend (and that`s why the IMU is only a minor sect). The only true national religion is vodka - capable of alleviating even economic distress. Most women in Tashkent use makeup and mini-skirts with thigh-high boots. HT preaches peaceful jihad. The Karimov system`s repression is relentless. All Muslim organizations and even mosques have to be registered. Sheikhs need a work permit issued by the government. If you don`t pray in a state-sanctioned mosque and wear a long beard, traditional turbans or a hijab, you can go to jail.

A throne drenched in blood
When Uzbekistan became an independent republic in 1991 Karimov operated a classic emperor`s new clothes facelift: exit the communist apparatchik, enter the president; exit Marx, Lenin and Stalin, enter Tamerlan. Karimov, stony face and vacant eyes, is the new Tamerlan - without the conquering spirit (Tamerlan built an empire stretching from Egypt to the Great Wall of China).

The legendary, last nomadic ruler of the Central Asian plains used to order pyramids of skulls to be erected after battles to better terrify subdued populations. Karimov relies on proven "counterinsurgency" torture methods with a macabre, creative touch (immersion in boiling water) thrown in. He once declared, on the record, that Islamists should be killed by a bullet in the head - exactly like scores of wounded may have been killed in Andijan by the Uzbek army, according to some witnesses. In 2004, Human Rights Watch released a book with more than 300 pages of case studies in Uzbek torture. One of the key objectives of torture is to give the US "intelligence" connecting the Uzbek opposition - any kind of opposition - to al-Qaeda and "terrorist groups". Once again: the Karimov system regards any kind of opposition as "terrorism".

Everything in Uzbekistan is Soviet/clannish, Karimov-controlled. Practically every square inch in every neighborhood (mahalle ) in Uzbekistan is under surveillance by the so-called "White Beards" - the system`s informants. Karimov`s only weakness is his daughters. Gulnara Karimova, the eldest, practically owns the country - factories, mobile phone companies, travel agencies, the nightclubs where the micro-power elite dances to Russian techno. There may be lots of gas, oil and cotton - but the majority of 26 million Uzbeks subsist with less than a dollar a day. The currency - the som - is virtually worthless: 0.0007 euros. Changing money in Tashkent can become a war operation lasting a full hour.

Rosebud
If Orson Welles could remake Citizen Kane (Citizen Karimov?) Uzbekistan`s Rosebud would be Khanabad. Khanabad embodies a graphic post-Cold War irony. It used to be the biggest Soviet airbase during the 1980s war in Afghanistan. Now it hosts the Americans - ostensively serving to help the "war on terror" in Afghanistan.

The Washington-Tashkent "special relationship" started as early as the mid-1990s, during the Bill Clinton administration. In 1999, Green Berets were actively training Uzbek Special Forces. Khanabad has nothing to do with Afghanistan: Bagram takes care of this. But Khanabad is crucial as one of the key bases surrounding Bush`s Greater Middle East, or to put it in the relevant perspective, the Middle East/Caucasus/Central Asia heavenly arc of oil and gas. It`s on a seven-year lease to the Pentagon, due to expire in late 2008.

So Karimov in Uzbekistan is as essential a piece in the great oil and gas chessboard as Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. Inevitably, there will be more uprisings in the impoverished Ferghana Valley that has reached a boiling point. Karimov again will unleash his American-funded army. The White House will be silent. The Kremlin will be silent (or dub it "green revolution" - by Islamic fundamentalists, as it did with Andijan). Corporate media will be silent: one imagines the furor had Andijan happened in Lebanon when Syrian troops were still in the country. Uzbeks in the Ferghana won`t be valued as people legitimately fighting for freedom and democracy: they will be labeled as terrorists. And Rumsfeld will keep cultivating a "strong relationship" with Karimov`s Rosebud.

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

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US `backed illegal Iraqi oil deals`
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1485649,00.html

Report claims blind eye was turned to sanctions busting by American firms
Julian Borger and Jamie Wilson in Washington
Tuesday May 17, 2005

Guardian
The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation.

A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.

The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua.

In fact, the Senate report found that US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil - more than the rest of the world put together.

"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.

The report is likely to ease pressure from conservative Republicans on Kofi Annan to resign from his post as UN secretary general.

The new findings are also likely to be raised when Mr Galloway appears before the Senate subcommittee on investigations today.

The Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow arrived yesterday in Washington demanding an apology from the Senate for what he called the "schoolboy dossier" passed off as an investigation against him.

"It was full of holes, full of falsehoods and full of value judgments that are apparently only shared here in Washington," he said at Washington Dulles airport.

He told Reuters: "I have no expectation of justice ... I come not as the accused but as the accuser. I am [going] to show just how absurd this report is."

Mr Galloway has denied allegations that he profited from Iraqi oil sales and will come face to face with the committee in what promises to be one of the most highly charged pieces of political theatre seen in Washington for some time.

Yesterday`s report makes two principal allegations against the Bush administration. Firstly, it found the US treasury failed to take action against a Texas oil company, Bayoil, which facilitated payment of "at least $37m in illegal surcharges to the Hussein regime".

The surcharges were a violation of the UN Oil For Food programme, by which Iraq was allowed to sell heavily discounted oil to raise money for food and humanitarian supplies. However, Saddam was allowed to choose which companies were given the highly lucrative oil contracts. Between September 2000 and September 2002 (when the practice was stopped) the regime demanded kickbacks of 10 to 30 US cents a barrel in return for oil allocations.

In its second main finding, the report said the US military and the state department gave a tacit green light for shipments of nearly 8m barrels of oil bought by Jordan, a vital American ally, entirely outside the UN-monitored Oil For Food system. Jordan was permitted to buy some oil directly under strict conditions but these purchases appeared to be under the counter.

The report details a series of efforts by UN monitors to obtain information about Bayoil`s oil shipments in 2001 and 2002, and the lack of help provided by the US treasury.

After repeated requests over eight months from the UN and the US state department, the treasury`s office of foreign as sets control wrote to Bayoil in May 2002, requesting a report on its transactions but did not "request specific information by UN or direct Bayoil to answer the UN`s questions".

Bayoil`s owner, David Chalmers, has been charged over the company`s activities. His lawyer Catherine Recker told the Washington Post: "Bayoil and David Chalmers [said] they have done nothing illegal and will vigorously defend these reckless accusations."

The Jordanian oil purchases were shipped in the weeks before the war, out of the Iraqi port of Khor al-Amaya, which was operating without UN approval or surveillance.

Investigators found correspondence showing that Odin Marine Inc, the US company chartering the seven huge tankers which picked up the oil at Khor al-Amaya, repeatedly sought and received approval from US military and civilian officials that the ships would not be confiscated by US Navy vessels in the Maritime Interdiction Force (MIF) enforcing the embargo.

Odin was reassured by a state department official that the US "was aware of the shipments and has determined not to take action".

The company`s vice president, David Young, told investigators that a US naval officer at MIF told him that he "had no objections" to the shipments. "He said that he was sorry he could not say anything more. I told him I completely understood and did not expect him to say anything more," Mr Young said.

An executive at Odin Maritime confirmed the senate account of the oil shipments as "correct" but declined to comment further.

It was not clear last night whether the Democratic report would be accepted by Republicans on the Senate investigations committee.

The Pentagon declined to comment. The US representative`s office at the UN referred inquiries to the state department, which fail to return calls.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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ROBERT SCHEER
U.S. Is Its Own Worst Enemy in Iraq
Robert Scheer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-schee…

May 17, 2005

So far this month, more than 450 Iraqis and dozens of U.S. troops have been killed by an Iraqi insurgency that, even after two years, shows signs of intensifying. Yet the Bush administration, which originally expected U.S. troops to be greeted as liberators and then promised that elections would fatally undermine the rebel cause, remains clueless as to the composition of this virulent enemy.

"The Mystery of the Insurgency" was the headline on a Sunday New York Times article reporting on the consensus of U.S. guerrilla warfare experts that the insurgents` motives and actions are simply baffling. However, "it clearly makes sense to the people who are doing it," said defense analyst Loren B. Thompson. "And that more than anything else tells us how little we understand the region."

What we do know about the region is that elements from two formerly implacably opposed forces — secular pan-Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism — have come to be unified, at least temporarily, in their hatred of the U.S. occupation of the historical center of the Arab world. That foreboding alliance is a direct consequence of a White House policy based on willful ignorance of history.

To avenge the 9/11 attack by some of the region`s Muslim fanatics, led by Osama bin Laden, President Bush lashed out at the secular regime of Saddam Hussein despite two crucial facts: There was no evidence linking Hussein with Bin Laden, and the two were sworn enemies.

As the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair seven months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bush was obsessed with overthrowing Hussein, and so "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." That`s when the great WMD hoax was launched. But "the case was thin," summarized the notes taken by a British national security aide at the meeting and released earlier this month. "Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Nevertheless, thousands of lives and billions of dollars have been spent deposing a defanged dictatorship that posed no immediate threat to the U.S., creating a terrorist jungle in its place. We can describe the situation in Iraq today as "mission accomplished" only if our goal was to unite fanatical Islamic jihadis with their longtime enemies, the secular nationalist Baathists.

A major irony in this tragedy is that, according to a Washington Post review of Internet postings paying tribute to the suicide-bombing "martyrs" in Iraq, most of the foreign terrorists wreaking mayhem there come from Saudi Arabia, a nation the U.S. protected from Hussein`s army in the Persian Gulf War. Saudi Arabia also was the country of origin of Bin Laden and 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 bombers.

To begin to understand the insurgency, the Bush neocons would have to concede that their adventure in nation-building has turned U.S.-occupied Iraq into a deeply alluring target for anti-American rage among Islamic fundamentalists. This Pandora`s box once opened cannot be shut by shoving a few ex-Baathists into the new Baghdad government, as urged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her photo-op visit last weekend.

By all accounts, the disparate elements of the Iraqi insurgency do agree on one thing: their desire to drive the U.S. military out. Thus, the U.S. presence is the fuel for the conflagration it claims to be stamping out.

Yet instead of accepting that the occupation is the chief recruiting tool for both would-be martyrs and less-suicidal nationalist fighters, there is widespread bipartisan agreement in our government that the heavy-handed U.S. presence is the key to restoring order. Leaders of both parties have bought into the fantasy that the January elections proved that a stable, democratic Iraq that will be friendly to the U.S. is just around the corner.

As usual, they are wrong. Foreign jihadis will keep coming across Iraq`s porous borders in search of a bloody martyrs` heaven, Sunni Iraqis will keep fighting for the wealth and power they believe is their birthright, and Shiite radicals such as cleric Muqtada Sadr, popular with Iraq`s teeming poor, will continue to denounce the U.S. presence, as he did Monday in Najaf.

The answer is to leave the Iraqis to control their own affairs, rather than pretending to govern from half-empty legislative meetings in the locked-down Green Zone in Baghdad. The U.S. is now part of the problem, rather than the solution.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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The U.S. is now part of the problem, rather than the solution.

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Latest Fatality: May 17, 2005

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

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

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Der Report des Guardian über die illegalen Öl-Schiebereien mit Saddam in #28500 zeigt nun, dass der Anteil der USA an diesen Schiebereien bei 52% liegt, also höher als der aller anderen Länder zusammen ist. Ausserdem hat der US-Senat jetzt festgestellt, dass die Bush-Regierung von den Vorgängen wusste.

Was hört man aber seit Jahr und Tag von den amerikanischen Medien und der US-Regierung zu diesem Problem. Die UNO ist schuld. Kofi Annan muss gehen. Wir müssen bei der UNO endlich aufräumen, dazu brauchen wir einen durchsetzungsstarken Mann, wie diesen Bolton.

Ich habe noch auf keinem Fernsehsender Kritik an amerikanischen Firmen oder sogar der Regierung in dieser Frage gehört. Für Bill O`Reilly und seine FOX-News Kollegen und auch für allen anderen cable-news Sendern gehört es zum tagtäglichen Ritual die UNO wegen dieser Geschichte in die Pfanne zu hauen. Dass man in der Frage selbst im Glashaus sitzt, wird totgeschwiegen.

Im US-Fernsehen findet nur Hofberichterstattung statt. Verlesen von Mitteilungen des Weissen Hauses und des Pentagon oder ellenlange Live-Berichterstattungen über den Michael Jackson Prozess oder eine entsprungene und wieder aufgetauchte Frau, die sich als Entführte ausgab, aber letztlich nur kurz vor ihrer Heirat ausgebüchst war.

panem et circenses eben, wie im alten ROM.


B@N
(USA)

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May 17, 2005. 06:12 AM
Righteous flail Newsweek for toilet fumble
Unnamed sources can serve a purpose
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thes…

ANTONIA ZERBISIAS

Every car bomb, every suicide attack, every insurgent ambush that kills any American troops can henceforth be blamed not on the lack of an exit strategy for Iraq, nor on "hillbilly-armoured" Humvees, nor on (remember this?) the 380 tons of explosives that went missing from an Iraqi military facility under U.S. control.

From now on, it`s all Newsweek`s fault. That`s because, in its May 9 issue, the magazine reported in its "Periscopes" column that U.S. military investigators had evidence of the desecration of the Muslim holy book at Guantanamo Bay, where some 500 prisoners of the "War on Terror" are being held.

According to Newsweek, U.S. prison guards broke the rules on the handling of the holy book in their attempts to get prisoners to talk. The piece said their interrogators "had placed (Qur`ans) on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet."

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, this kind of religious desecration is punishable by death.

After some of the documented prison abuses at Iraq`s Abu Ghraib, tales like this could hardly come as a shock.

No wonder that, thanks to the Internet, as well as a May 6 press conference held in Islamabad by cricket superstar Imran Khan, a critic of Pakistan`s U.S. supported President Pervez Musharraf, the news ignited the Muslim world.

Anti-American riots broke out and, although numbers can`t be confirmed, at least 15 people were killed in clashes with police, while scores, perhaps hundreds more, were injured.

Pentagon spokesperson Larry DiRita told CNN that it was all Newsweek`s fault: "People are dying. They are burning American flags. Our forces are in danger."

Media critic Jeff Jarvis (http://www.buzzmachine.com) echoed, "This mistake cost people their lives, put the lives of our soldiers in the Mideast at risk, damaged the American position in the effort to defend itself and spread democracy, and damaged the already tattered reputation of journalism."

Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker apologizes in the current (May 23) issue, admitting the magazine`s unnamed source, ostensibly "a knowledgeable U.S. government" official, later said "he couldn`t be certain" about aspects of the report.

Writes Whitaker, "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst."

That Newsweek screwed up is indisputable. Like 60 Minutes II did last year with its story on U.S. President George W. Bush`s record in the Vietnam War Newsweek apparently rushed to publish a contentious story without making it bulletproof.

Never mind that there have already been several stories alleging religious desecration.

For example, on May 1, the New York Times reported on an interview with a former detainee, presumably no longer suspected of terrorism, who said that Qur`ans "had been tossed into a pile and stepped on."

In 2003, the Washington Post detailed how another prisoner was taunted "by dumping the (Qur`an) in a toilet."

The difference, in those stories, was there were no supposed official sources providing the information.

Frankly, I like this non-denial denial yesterday from another Pentagon spokesperson, who was asked whether he could definitively say a Qur`an was tossed into a toilet.

"You know, I never get into the business of saying never," said Byran Whitman. "What I`m saying is that this allegation that Newsweek made ... about Qur`an desecration is demonstrably false. And there have thus far been no credible allegations of wilful Qur`an desecration."

Anyway, so now there`s a blogswarm all over Newsweek, with commentators suddenly manifesting sympathy for the loss of Muslim lives in a way they rarely have before. (Actually, that`s a charitable interpretation of some of the more hateful comments you`ll find online, comments that blame the Muslim "culture of death.")

Of course, much of this criticism comes from the very same quarters that still have not acknowledged a controversial British foreign policy document published this month. It shows that Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were aiming for "regime change`` a year before the attack on Iraq, and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed" around that.

Also significant is how some critics are saying that reporters should stop relying on unnamed sources for their stories, even though some of the biggest and most important exposés of our time have begun with anonymous tipsters.

From Watergate to Shawinigangate to just about every hyphen-gate, reporters have fought to protect their contacts.

"A lot went wrong here, but one of the most obvious is the use of unnamed sources," writes Don Gillmor at bayosphere.com. "This is a generally shoddy practice. It should generally stop."

Interestingly, many of the biggest critics of the use of anonymous sources were strangely silent when, in the run-up to the attack on Iraq, the New York Times` Judith Miller was citing unnamed persons claiming that Saddam had vast stores of deadly biological and other weapons.

But then, when the stories are favourable to the administration, there`s rarely the kind of media feeding frenzy like there was yesterday over the Newsweek disaster.

Read Antonia Zerbisias` blog at http://www.thestar.com/blogs

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

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The resignation of Scott McClellan (Keith Olbermann)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7873141/#050516b

SECAUCUS -- I smell something - and it ain’t a copy of the Qu’ran sopping wet from being stuck in a toilet in Guantanamo Bay. It’s the ink drying on Scott McClellan’s resignation, and in an only partly imperfect world, it would be drifting out over Washington, and imminently.

Last Thursday, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld’s go-to guy whenever the situation calls for the kind of gravitas the Secretary himself can’t supply,[urltold reporters at the Pentagon that rioting in Afghanistan was related more to the on-going political reconciliation process there,]http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2005/tr20050512-secdef2761.html[/url] than it was to a controversial note buried in the pages of Newsweek claiming that the government was investigating whether or not some nitwit interrogator at Gitmo really had desecrated a Muslim holy book.

But Monday afternoon, while offering himself up to the networks for a series of rare, almost unprecedented sit-down interviews on the White House lawn, Press Secretary McClellan said, in effect, that General Myers, and the head of the after-action report following the disturbances in Jalalabad, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, were dead wrong. The Newsweek story, McClellan said, “has done damage to our image abroad and it has done damage to the credibility of the media and Newsweek in particular. People have lost lives. This report has had serious consequences.”

Whenever I hear Scott McClellan talking about ‘media credibility,’ I strain to remember who it was who admitted Jeff Gannon to the White House press room and called on him all those times.

Whenever I hear this White House talking about ‘doing to damage to our image abroad’ and how ‘people have lost lives,’ I strain to remember who it was who went traipsing into Iraq looking for WMD that will apparently turn up just after the Holy Grail will - and at what human cost.

Newsweek’s version of this story has varied from the others over the last two years - ones in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, and British and Russian news organizations - only in that it quoted a government source who now says he didn’t have firsthand knowledge of whether or not the investigation took place (oops, sorry, shoulda mentioned that, buh-bye). All of its other government connections - the ones past which it ran the story - have gone from saying nothing like ‘don’t print this, it ain’t true’ or ‘don’t print this, it may be true but it’ll start riots,’ to looking slightly confused and symbolically saying ‘Newsweek? Newsweek who?’

Whatever I smell comes from this odd sequence of events: Newsweek gets blasted by the White House, apologizes over the weekend but doesn`t retract its story. Then McClellan offers his Journalism 101 outdoor seminar and blasts the magazine further. Finally, just before 5 PM Monday, the Dan Rather drama replaying itself in its collective corporate mind, Newsweek retracts.

I’m always warning about the logical fallacy - the illusion that just because one event follows another, the latter must have necessarily caused the former. But when I wondered tonight on Countdown if it applied here, Craig Crawford reassured me. “The dots connect.”

The real point, of course, is that you’d have to be pretty dumb to think that making a threat at Gitmo akin to ‘Spill the beans or we’ll kill this Qu’ran’ would have any effect on the prisoners, other than to eventually leak out and inflame anti-American feelings somewhere. Of course, everybody in the prosecution of the so-called ‘war on terror’ has done something dumb, dating back to the President’s worst-possible-word-selection (“crusade”) on September 16, 2001. So why wouldn’t some mid-level interrogator stuck in Cuba think it would be a good idea to desecrate a holy book? Jack Rice, the former CIA special agent and now radio host, said on Countdown that it would be a “knuckleheaded” thing to do, but “plausible.”

One of the most under-publicized analyses of 9/11 concludes that Osama Bin Laden assumed that the attacks on the U.S. would galvanize Islamic anger towards this country, and they`d overthrow their secular governments and woo-hoo we`ve got an international religious war. Obviously it didn`t happen. It didn`t even happen when the West went into Iraq. But if stuff like the Newsweek version of a now two-year old tale about toilets and Qu’rans is enough to set off rioting in the streets of countries whose nationals were not even the supposed recipients of the ‘abuse’, then weren’t those members of the military or the government with whom Newsweek vetted the plausibility of its item, honor-bound to say “you can’t print this”?

Or would somebody rather play politics with this? The way Craig Crawford reconstructed it, this one went similarly to the way the Killian Memos story evolved at the White House. The news organization turns to the administration for a denial. The administration says nothing. The news organization runs the story. The administration jumps on the necks of the news organization with both feet - or has its proxies do it for them.

That’s beyond shameful. It’s treasonous.

It’s also not very smart. While places like the Fox News Channel (which, only today, I finally recognized - it’s the newscast perpetually running on the giant video screens in the movie “1984”) ask how many heads should roll at Newsweek, it forgets in its fervor that both the story and the phony controversy around it are not so cut-and-dried this time.

Firstly, the principal reporter on the Gitmo story was Michael Isikoff - “Spikey” in a different lifetime; Linda Tripp’s favorite journalist, and one of the ten people most responsible (intentionally or otherwise) for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Spikey isn’t just a hero to the Right - the Right owes him.

And larger still, in terms of politics, this isn`t well-defined, is it? I mean Conservatives might parrot McClellan and say ‘Newsweek put this country in a bad light.’ But they could just as easily thump their chests and say ‘See, this is what we do to those prisoners at Gitmo! You guys better watch your asses!’

Ultimately, though, the administration may have effected its biggest mistake over this saga, in making the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs look like a liar or naïf, just to draw a little blood out of Newsweek’s hide. Either way - and also for that tasteless, soul-less conclusion that deaths in Afghanistan should be lain at the magazine’s doorstep - Scott McClellan should resign. The expiration on his carton full of blank-eyed bully-collaborator act passed this afternoon as he sat reeling off those holier-than-thou remarks. Ah, that’s what I smelled.

E-mail: [e-mail]

Watch Keith each weeknight at 8 p.m. ET as he Counts down the best, the worst, and the oddest news stories of the day.

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In den letzten Wochen haben die US-Truppen wieder eine Säuberungsaktion gefahren gegen einige kleinere Städte im irakischsyrischen Grenzgebiet.

Es ist nicht viel über die Kämpfe bekannt geworden, außer dass auf beiden Seiten viele Opfer gab. Genau wie in Falluja haben die normalen Menschen wieder einmal die meisten Opfer bringen müssen.

Wiederum soll das Vorgehen der US-Truppen von großer Brutalität gewesen sein.

Es ist schon seltsam, die Welt regt sich über den einen oder anderen in die Toilette gespülten Koran mehr auf, als über das Morden in einem Land an meist wehrlosen Menschen.

Published on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 by Knight Ridder
Marine-led Campaign Killed Friends and Foes, Iraqi Leaders Say
by Hannah Allam and Mohammed al Dulaimy
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11662321.htm

BAGHDAD, IRAQ -- When foreign fighters poured into villages with jihad on their minds and weapons in their hands, some Iraqi tribesmen in western desert towns fought back.

They set up checkpoints to filter out the foreigners. They burned down suspected insurgent safe houses. They called their fellow tribesmen in Baghdad and other urban areas for backup.

And when they still couldn`t uproot the terrorists streaming in from Syria, tribal leaders said, they took a most unusual step: They asked the Americans for help.

The U.S. military hails last week`s Operation Matador as a success that killed more than 125 insurgents. But local tribesmen said it was a disaster for their communities and has made them leery of ever again assisting American or Iraqi forces.

The battle, which pitted some Iraqi tribes against each other, underscored the complex tribal politics that compound the religious and ethnic tensions plaguing Iraq.

In interviews, influential tribal leaders and many residents of the remote border towns said the 1,000 U.S. troops who swept into their territories in the weeklong campaign that ended over the weekend didn`t distinguish between the Iraqis who supported the United States and the fighters battling it.

"The Americans were bombing whole villages and saying they were only after the foreigners," said Fasal al Goud, a former governor of Anbar province who said he asked U.S. forces for help on behalf of the tribes. "An AK-47 can`t distinguish between a terrorist and a tribesman, so how could a missile or tank?"

Al Goud was the only tribal leader who spoke on the record. Two others reached by phone in western villages expressed similar views, but said they didn`t want their names published because the foreign insurgents were still holding some of their tribesmen hostage.

Long before the American offensive, trouble had been brewing in and around the town of Qaim. Two Iraqi tribes, the Albu Mahal and the Albu Nimr, resented the flood of foreign Islamic extremists who were crossing the border and trying to turn their lands into an insurgent fiefdom.

Like the fighters in the formerly insurgent-controlled city of Fallujah, also in troubled Anbar province, the foreigners brought a puritanical brand of Islam and began intimidating villagers who refused to follow their commands, residents said. The foreign fighters found followers among some members of another large tribe in the area, the Karabla.

Although there were small-scale clashes among the tribes for months, the killing of a popular soldier from the Albu Mahal tribe early this month escalated the violence, according to several accounts of the unrest that preceded Operation Matador.

Sunni Muslim clerics in Baghdad were asked to intervene, but the bloodshed continued: Houses were razed, men from both sides were killed, and the governor of the province was kidnapped with his son.

The Albu Mahal, with the help of the larger Albu Nimr, formed a vigilante group called the Hamza Forces to help keep the foreign fighters at bay. Those forces, which included some men suspected of attacking U.S. troops in the past, began battling the religious radicals known as Salafis, who were allied with Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of the group al-Qaida in Iraq.

"Hamza Forces are mostly from the Albu Mahal and they are said to be from the resistance," said Youssef Lahij, a tribesman and shopkeeper in Qaim. "They`re the ones fighting now against the Salafis."

The Salafis replenished their ranks with a new batch of recruits who crossed over from Syria. Zarqawi`s group, known locally as Tawhid and Jihad, flew its trademark black banners in local villages, antagonizing the residents.

The overwhelmed villagers were at a loss to defeat the better-armed and better-funded foreigners and their allies from the Karabla. With nowhere else to turn, tribal leaders decided to call the Iraqi Defense Ministry.

That`s when al Goud, the former Anbar governor and a sheik of the Albu Nimr, said he called American officials at the Marine base Camp Fallujah to ask for help. Al Goud had met the officials during the siege of Fallujah, he said.

Bruska Nouri Shaways, Iraq`s deputy defense minister, at first couldn`t believe the request for help from the traditionally rebellious province. Shaways, who took several calls from tribal sheiks, said he immediately alerted the U.S military about their willingness to share information on Zarqawi followers.

"They said, `We are citizens of Qaim and we are now being attacked by non-Iraqi people coming from Syria,`" Shaways said. "Until this time, they had never asked the Iraqi or the American forces to help them. It`s a good sign."

The American military already had planned a campaign to cleanse the Qaim area of foreign fighters, according to the military. With the calls from sheiks, it appeared they had the support of prominent local tribes for the offensive.

Tribesmen said they evacuated women and children to outlying camps and stuck around to set up checkpoints and prevent the foreign fighters from escaping to neighboring villages.

Operation Matador began with the Marines sweeping into the Qaim area in armored vehicles, backed up by helicopter gunships. They pummeled suspected insurgent safe houses, flattening parts of the villages and killing armed men. Nine Marines died in combat and 40 were wounded, according to the military.

When the offensive ended, however, angry residents returned to find blocks of destruction. Men who`d stayed behind to help were found dead in shot-up houses. Tribal leaders haven`t counted their dead; several families hadn`t yet returned to the area.

"We ran away because you didn`t know who was fighting who," said Ahmed Mohammed, who works at a hospital north of Qaim. "Americans were fighting. The Albu Mahal were fighting. And Tawhid and Jihad were fighting."

Capt. Jeff Pool, a Marine spokesman in Iraq, confirmed that Iraqi informants contributed to intelligence gathering for Matador but said there was no effort by the U.S. military to incorporate local tribes in its assault plans. He said he couldn`t verify that al Goud or others had contacted Marine officers at Camp Fallujah.

"We have no knowledge of any local efforts" to reach out to the military before the operation, he said in an e-mail response to questions.

Pool also said in his e-mail that American officers were aware of fighting among local forces before the Marines moved in.

"Three days before Operation Matador kicked off, Marines in Qaim observed 57 mortar rounds exchanged between two groups," he wrote. "None of the mortars were directed at the Marines or any other coalition force. We don`t know who was firing at who or why."

Pool and other military spokesmen didn`t respond to questions about whether U.S. troops had tried to contact any of the feuding forces in the area.

Deputy Defense Minister Shaways said it was extremely difficult to distinguish friend from foe in the midst of battle. He called Operation Matador a success, but acknowledged that some tribal leaders were upset by it. He said tribal leaders were expected to travel to Baghdad this week to discuss the aftermath of the campaign.

Still, he said, vigilante justice doesn`t fit into the new Iraq, even when the cause appears just. He said the Defense Ministry would reach out to the embattled tribesmen and attempt to recruit them for Iraq`s nascent security forces.

"We cannot allow anyone who feels he`s not secure to just set up checkpoints and kidnap people," Shaways said. "This is not the Wild West."

Al Dulaimy is a special correspondent. Special correspondent Yasser Salihee contributed to this story.

© 2005 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources

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[urlBericht von Reuters]http://www.reuters.com/news.jhtml[/url]
US `Backed Illegal Iraqi Oil Deals`
May 18, 2005

Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement
By Times Online
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html
George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption


"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let`s be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had `many meetings` with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am `the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil`.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that`s been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That`s somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I`ve never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he`s your prisoner, I believe he`s in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I`m not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where`s the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I`ll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don`t know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

"Whilst I`m on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don`t you think I have a right to know? Don`t you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph`s documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph`s documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

"And yet you`ve allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you`re such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there`s nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It`s a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life`s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.



"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.



If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq`s wealth.



"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq`s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq`s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.



"Have a look at the oil that you didn`t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.



"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."



Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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Published on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 by the Inter Press Service
A Tale of Two Stories
Who is the "Son of a Bitch" the Defense Dept Refers To?
by Jim Lobe
http://www.ips.org/

WASHINGTON -- Here`s a question for international news hounds. Who is the ``son of a bitch`` referred to in this comment by a U.S. Defense Department spokesman?

``People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?``

Is he an unnamed Defense Department source who told Newsweek magazine that he had read a government document detailing an incident where U.S. military personnel at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, allegedly flushed a Koran down a toilet?

After all, that report, which was printed in a small item in last week`s ``Periscope`` section of the magazine, spurred violent protests across the Muslim world, particularly in Afghanistan where at least 15 people were killed and the government of President Hamid Karzai badly shaken just a week before he was due to travel here.

Or is the ``son of a bitch`` U.S. President George W. Bush, whose administration began fixing intelligence at least eight months before invading Iraq in order to make the public believe that Baghdad posed a serious threat to the United States and its allies?

After all, the war and its bloody aftermath have taken a toll of at least 30,000 lives, according to the most conservative estimates, and ongoing conflict continues to kill scores more every week with no end in sight.

Readers of the British press might be inclined to choose the second option based on the sensational leak to the London Times two weeks ago of the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair and his closest advisers during which the head of the intelligence agency MI6, just back from Washington, reported that Bush had decided on war and that ``the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.``

While that was big news in Britain, it was hard to find any trace of it in the U.S. press.

So consumers of U.S. media would choose option number one, because the Koran story has been the nation`s top news story since the magazine published a qualified apology for it Sunday before making a vague retraction Monday.

Indeed, the ``son of a bitch`` statement was made by Pentagon spokesman Lawrence diRita, a Bush loyalist who, like his right-wing backers, has been in high dudgeon over the ``irresponsibility`` of one of the nation`s most influential purveyors of news.

DiRita was responding to the news that an unnamed but ``longtime reliable`` Defense Department source had told Newsweek that he was no longer certain which documents that had crossed his desk had recounted how Guantanamo guards had desecrated the Koran in order to rattle detainees.

The source, a ``senior U.S. government official,`` had originally told Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff that he had read the account in a forthcoming report by the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom) on the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo. Newsweek cited the incident as one of a large number of already-reported abuses -- many confirmed by photos -- designed to humiliate and provoke detainees.

Although former detainees and their lawyers had reported similar toilet-flushing incidents in the past, the brief mention in Newsweek apparently lent the story greater credibility, setting off anti-U.S. protests from North Africa to Indonesia.

DiRita insisted that the SouthCom probe cited in the Newsweek story never looked at charges of Koran desecration and thus, in the words of another spokesman, was ``demonstrably false.`` He did not address the fact that the story had been submitted in advance by Newsweek to another senior Pentagon official who did not object to the controversial allegation.

In the face of the violence, Pentagon outrage, and the source`s admission that he was now unsure about where he had read of the toilet-flushing incident, however, Newsweek expressed regret for the violence and apologized.

Its apology, the latest in a series of media mea culpas that has seen a sharp plunge in the credibility of mainstream press outlets over the past year, according to recent opinion polls, was front-page news in most of the nation`s newspapers Monday, although Newsweek initially declined to retract the story.

``We`re not retracting anything. We don`t know for certain what we got wrong,`` Newsweek`s editor, Mark Whitaker, told the New York Times in an explanation that seemed only to fuel the administration`s righteous indignation.

``The report has had serious consequences,`` White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. ``People have lost their lives. The image of the United States has been damaged abroad.``

Wilting under pressure, Newsweek finally issued a broader, although still somewhat ambiguous, retraction Monday evening. ``Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qumran abuse at Guantanamo Bay,`` said Whitaker, leaving open the possibility that Newsweek`s source had indeed read about the incident in another document.

While the administration claimed vindication over the latest retraction, it has yet to comment on the London Times story, in part because no member of the White House press corps has bothered to ask about it.

So far, in fact, the only request for a reaction has come in the form of a letter sent last week by 89 Democratic lawmakers, another development that has received virtually no press attention.

``If the disclosure is accurate,`` noted the letter authored by Representative John Conyers of the state of Michigan, ``it raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of our own administration.``

Indeed, the minutes of the meeting on which the London Times story was based make it clear not only that Bush had already decided to go to war, but that the main justifications it would use for doing so were bogus.

``The case was thin,`` according to the minutes, which were finally published for the first time in the U.S. Monday by the small-circulation New York Review of Books. ``Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD (weapons of mass destruction) capacity was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.``

Of the U.S. media, only the New York Times and the Knight Ridder wire service reported the news of the Blair minutes before last week, when the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, under pressure from bloggers and media watchdogs, published stories about it, albeit on their inside pages.

``Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,`` the most explosive part of the minutes -- now cited by Bush critics as the ``smoking gun`` memo -- stated. ``But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.``

Even the Washington Post`s ombudsman, Michael Getler, complained about the lack of press interest in the story, saying he was ``amazed`` that it took his paper two weeks to cover and that, given its apparent authenticity and the support it obviously gave to critics` charges that Bush was determined to go to war as of July 2002 and that the intelligence was being ``fixed`` accordingly -- an issue that has still not been forthrightly addressed by any of the commissions chosen by Congress or the Defense Department.

``Are Americans so jaded about the deceptions perpetrated by our own government to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer interested in fresh and damning evidence of those lies?`` asked Joe Conason in Salon.com. ``Or are the editors and producers who oversee the American news industry simply too timid to report that proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?``

After all, there are sometimes lethal consequences to publishing or propagating incorrect or inaccurate information, as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was reflecting Monday afternoon before the final Newsweek retraction.

``People lost their lives. People are dead,`` he said ``People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be careful about what they do.``

If they are not, they become sons of bitches and lose all their credibility, according to Rumsfeld`s spokesman.

Copyright © 2005 IPS-Inter Press Service

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John Nichols: Hersh sees democracy in peril in U.S.
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion//index.php?ntid=40248&ntp…

By John Nichols
May 17, 2005
Seymour Hersh, arguably the greatest journalist of our time and certainly the most necessary, joined me last week at a University of Illinois conference that asked the question: "Can freedom of the press survive media consolidations?"

The Pulitzer-winning journalist reworked the question, asking: "Can freedom of the press survive the Bush presidency?"

No one is sharper in his rebukes of U.S. officials than Hersh, the man who exposed the My Lai massacre, CIA domestic spying, the role of the United States in the 1973 coup in Chile that deposed elected President Salvador Allende, Israel`s nuclear ambitions and, most recently, the failures of the U.S. government in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and the prison torture scandal at Abu Ghraib.

Hersh pulls no punches. "Henry Kissinger," he says, "lies like other people breathe."

Yet, Hersh adds, he wishes the U.S. government had a Kissinger now because then there would be "somebody (in Washington) with a scheme up his sleeve."

The veteran journalist, who has been writing for the New Yorker since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, says the United States today is in "uncharted waters," with leadership that does not begin to understand the world but is playing the games of geopolitics as if it did.

Of President Bush, he says, "This is really a zealot - somebody who believes in what he`s doing and has no information."

Hersh suggests that, unlike Kissinger, who lied but did so from a basis of knowledge, Bush spreads misinformation that the president, himself, actually thinks is true.

The vacuum in which Bush operates sees him gathering information about the war constantly. Hersh has no doubt that the president and his aides knew that acts of torture were being committed by the U.S. in Iraq and elsewhere. "Did they know what was happening? Of course they did," says the journalist, who notes the president follows the war closely, getting daily detailed briefings.

The problem, says Hersh, is that Bush gets information tailored to satisfy his biases and to mirror the warped view of public affairs peddled by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other adherents of the neoconservative line.

Reality gets lost in such a circumstance. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others in the administration continue to push the view that the war is going well. Yet it is not, as the rising death toll in that country illustrates. Indeed, argues Hersh, who knows a great deal about U.S. military adventures gone awry, "This war is going to reverberate in ways that we cannot begin to see. It`s going to be devastating for us all."

Unfortunately, Hersh does not have an easy answer for the current crisis. "I don`t know how we`re going to get out of this," he says. "We`re not going to find leadership in Congress. ... The media, for the most part, is not doing its job."

And that is what has Hersh really worried. The man whose investigative reporting was central to changing the course of the nation during the Vietnam War, the Watergate era and other critical junctures in recent American history says that it is getting harder and harder to break through the wall of entertainment "news" - Michael Jackson`s trial, the "runaway bride" - and get the country focused on critical issues such as whether Americans want Iraqis and others to be tortured in their name.

"We need to do something different," says Hersh, who argues that it is necessary restore a measure of seriousness to mainstream media and to explore new options for alternative media.

The issue at stake is not one of administration, nor even one of war. It is not even the question of whether freedom of the press will survive in an era of media consolidation. It is a question of whether democracy, which the founders believed needed a free flow of information and honest debate, will survive.

"A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both," warned James Madison. "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."

In this time of tragedy in Iraq and farce in so much of our media, Hersh says, "It turns out our democracy is much more fragile than we think. We`re in peril."



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[urlBill Moyers]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Moyers[/url]

Published on Monday, May 16, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Take Public Broadcasting Back
by Bill Moyers
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-34.htm

Closing address
[urlNational Conference on Media Reform]http://www.freepress.net/index.php[/url]
St. Louis, Missouri
May 15, 2005


I can’t imagine better company on this beautiful Sunday morning in St. Louis. You’re church for me today, and there’s no congregation in the country where I would be more likely to find more kindred souls than are gathered here.

There are so many different vocations and callings in this room -- so many different interests and aspirations of people who want to reform the media or produce for the media -- that only a presiding bishop like Bob McChesney with his great ecumenical heart could bring us together for a weekend like this.

What joins us all under Bob’s embracing welcome is our commitment to public media. Pat Aufderheide got it right, I think, in the recent issue of In These Times when she wrote: “This is a moment when public media outlets can make a powerful case for themselves. Public radio, public TV, cable access, public DBS channels, media arts centers, youth media projects, nonprofit Internet news services . . . low-power radio and webcasting are all part of a nearly-invisible feature of today’s media map: the public media sector. They exist not to make a profit, not to push an ideology, not to serve customers, but to create a public—a group of people who can talk productively with those who don’t share their views, and defend the interests of the people who have to live with the consequences of corporate and governmental power.”

She gives examples of the possibilities. “Look at what happened,” she said, “when thousands of people who watched Stanley Nelson’s ‘The Murder of Emmett Till’ on their public television channels joined a postcard campaign that re-opened the murder case after more than half a century. Look at NPR’s courageous coverage of the Iraq war, an expensive endeavor that wins no points from this Administration. Look at Chicago Access Network’s Community Forum, where nonprofits throughout the region can showcase their issues and find volunteers.”

For all our flaws, Pat argues that the public media are a very important resource in a noisy and polluted information environment.

You can also take wings reading Jason Miller’s May 4th article on Z Net about the mainstream media. While it is true that much of it is corrupted by the influence of government and corporate interests, Miller writes, there are still men and women in the mainstream who practice a high degree of journalistic integrity and who do challenge us with their stories and analysis. But the real hope ‘lies within the internet with its two billion or more web sites providing a wealth of information drawn from almost unlimited resources that span the globe. . . If knowledge is power, one`s capacity to increase that power increases exponentially through navigation of the Internet for news and information.”

Surely this is one issue that unites us as we leave here today. The fight to preserve the web from corporate gatekeepers joins media reformers, producers and educators -- and it’s a fight that has only just begun.

I want to tell you about another fight we’re in today. The story I’ve come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I’ve been living it. It’s been in the news this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist -- yours truly -- by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As some of you know, CPB was established almost forty years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous for a gathering like this not to address.

We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead. I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some two thousand years ago -- after the Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar’s surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won’t be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

Jonathan Mermin writes about this in a recent essay in “World Policy Journal.” (You’ll also want to read his book, “Debating War and Peace, Media Coverage of US Intervention in the Post Vietnam Era.”)

Mermin quotes David Ignatius of the Washington Post on why the deep interests of the American public are so poorly served by beltway journalism. The “rules of our game,” says Ignatius, “make it hard for us to tee up an issue...without a news peg.” He offers a case in point: the debacle of America’s occupation of Iraq. “If Senator so and so hasn’t criticized post-war planning for Iraq,” says Ignatius, “then it’s hard for a reporter to write a story about that.”

Mermin also quotes public television’s Jim Lehrer acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn’t news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? Because, says Lehrer, “the word occupation...was never mentioned in the run-up to the war.” Washington talked about the invasion as “a war of liberation, not a war of occupation, so as a consequence, “those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.”

“In other words,” says Jonathan Mermin, “if the government isn’t talking about it, we don’t report it.” He concludes, “[Lehrer’s] somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the calamitous occupation that has followed the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment ideal of a press that is independent of the government.”

Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons -- before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced -- was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact that “It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source.” Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with beltway journalists of American officials denying that such things happened. Judith Miller of The New York Times, among others, relied on the credibility of official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

These “rules of the game” permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” In my documentaries – whether on the Watergate scandals thirty years ago or the Iran Contra conspiracy twenty years ago or Bill Clinton’s fund raising scandals ten years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry’s long and despicable cover up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell’s “1984.” They give us a program vowing “No Child Left Behind” while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” that give us neither. And that’s just for starters.

In Orwell’s “1984”, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, “Don`t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” "Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought,” he said, “will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy – or worse.

I learned about this the hard way. I grew up in the South where the truth about slavery, race, and segregation had been driven from the pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the newsrooms. It took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home and then it took another hundred years for the truth to make us free.

Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with cold war orthodoxy and confident that “might makes right,” we circled the wagons, listened only to each other, and pursued policies the evidence couldn’t carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.

I brought all of this to the task when PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast. They wanted us to make it different from anything else on the air --commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to people who might not otherwise be heard. That wasn’t a hard sell. I had been deeply impressed by studies published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals by a team of researchers led by Vassar College sociologist William Hoynes. Extensive research on the content of public television over a decade found that political discussions on our public affairs programs generally included a limited set of voices that offer a narrow range of perspectives on current issues and events. Instead of far-ranging discussions and debates, the kind that might engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, this research found that public affairs programs on PBS stations were populated by the standard set of elite news sources. Whether government officials and Washington journalists (talking about political strategy) or corporate sources (talking about stock prices or the economy from the investor’s viewpoint), Public television, unfortunately, all too often was offering the same kind of discussions, and a similar brand of insider discourse, that is featured regularly on commercial television.

Who didn’t appear was also revealing. Hoynes and his team found that in contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely featured the voices of anti-establishment critics, “alternative perspectives were rare on public television and were effectively drowned out by the stream of government and corporate views that represented the vast majority of sources on our broadcasts.” The so-called ‘experts’ who got most of the face time came primarily from mainstream news organizations and Washington think tanks rather than diverse interests. Economic news, for example, was almost entirely refracted through the views of business people, investors and business journalists. Voices outside the corporate/Wall Street universe -- nonprofessional workers, labor representatives, consumer advocates and the general public were rarely heard. In sum, these two studies concluded, the economic coverage was so narrow that the views and the activities of most citizens became irrelevant.

All this went against the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I know. I was there. As a young policy assistant to President Johnson, I attended my first meeting to discuss the future of public broadcasting in 1964 in the office of the Commissioner of Education. I know firsthand that the Public Broadcasting Act was meant to provide an alternative to commercial television and to reflect the diversity of the American people.

This, too, was on my mind when we assembled the team for NOW. It was just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We agreed on two priorities. First, we wanted to do our part to keep the conversation of democracy going. That meant talking to a wide range of people across the spectrum -- left, right and center. It meant poets, philosophers, politicians, scientists, sages and scribblers. It meant Isabel AlIende, the novelist, and Amity Shlaes, the columnist for the Financial Times. It meant the former nun and best-selling author Karen Armstrong, and it meant the right-wing evangelical columnist, Cal Thomas. It meant Arundhati Roy from India, Doris Lessing from London, David Suzuki from Canada, and Bernard Henry-Levi from Paris. It also meant two successive editors of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley and Paul Gigot, the editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel and the Los Angeles Weekly’s John Powers. It means liberals like Frank Wu, Ossie Davis and Gregory Nava, and conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Grover Norquist, and Richard Viguerie. It meant Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Wilton Gregory of the Catholic Bishops conference in this country. It meant the conservative Christian activist and lobbyist, Ralph Reed, and the dissident Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. We threw the conversation of democracy open to all comers. Most of those who came responded the same way that Ron Paul, Republican and Libertarian congressman from Texas did when he wrote me after his appearance, “I have received hundreds of positive e-mails from your viewers. I appreciate the format of your program which allows time for a full discussion of ideas… I’m tired of political shows featuring two guests shouting over each other and offering the same arguments… NOW was truly refreshing.”

Hold your applause because that’s not the point of the story.

We had a second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn’t like.

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play who said, “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse when everyone is kept in the dark.”

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian, Richard Reeves, answered a student who asked him to define real news. “Real news,” Reeves responded, “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”

For these reasons and in that spirit we went about reporting on Washington as no one else in broadcasting -- except occasionally “60 Minutes” -- was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice Department’s power of surveillance. We reported on the escalating Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn’t work. We reported on how campaign contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew resources to the comfortable and well-connected while our troops were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armor. We reported on how the Bush administration was shredding the Freedom of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how closed door, back room deals in Washington were costing ordinary workers and tax payers their livelihood and security. We reported on offshore tax havens that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.

And always -- because what people know depends on who owns the press -- we kept coming back to the media business itself -- to how mega media corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the hierarchy of values, how giant radio cartels were silencing critics while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the mega media companies were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever more powerful.

The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a spell when we were the only public affairs broadcast on PBS whose audience was going up instead of down.

Our journalistic peers took notice. The Los Angeles Times said, "NOW’s team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame, pursuing stories few others bother to touch.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer said our segments on the sciences, the arts, politics and the economy were “provocative public television at its best.

The Austin American Statesman called NOW “the perfect antidote to today’s high pitched decibel level - a smart, calm, timely news program.”

Frazier Moore of the Associated Press said we were “hard-edged when appropriate but never Hardball. Don’t expect combat. Civility reigns.”

And the Baton Rouge Advocate said “NOW invites viewers to consider the deeper implication of the daily headlines,” drawing on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

Let me repeat that: NOW draws on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 had been prophetic. Open public television to the American people -- offer diverse interests, ideas and voices … be fearless in your belief in democracy -- and they will come.

Hold your applause – that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is something only a handful of our team, including my wife and partner Judith Davidson Moyers, and I knew at the time -- that the success of NOW’s journalism was creating a backlash in Washington.

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid. Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on NOW: Gigot, Viguerie, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth, and others. No, our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. The problem was that we were getting it right, not right-wing -- telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told.

I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.

My occasional commentaries got to them as well. Although apparently he never watched the broadcast (I guess he couldn’t take the diversity) Senator Trent Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when after the mid-term elections in 2002 I described what was likely to happen now that all three branches of government were about to be controlled by one party dominated by the religious, corporate and political right. Instead of congratulating the winners for their election victory as some network broadcasters had done -- or celebrating their victory as Fox, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, Talk Radio and other partisan Republican journalists had done -- I provided a little independent analysis of what the victory meant. And I did it the old fashioned way: I looked at the record, took the winners at their word, and drew the logical conclusion that they would use power as they always said they would. And I set forth this conclusion in my usual modest Texas way.

Events since then have confirmed the accuracy of what I said, but, to repeat, being right is exactly what the right doesn’t want journalists to be.

Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off “unless Moyers is dealt with.” The Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated. Apparently there was apoplexy in the right wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American flag in my lapel and said – well, here’s exactly what I said.

“I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven`t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart`s affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother`s picture on my lapel to prove her son`s love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

So what`s this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag`s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration`s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao`s little red book on every official`s desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They`re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don`t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash.) I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it`s not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.”

That did it. That – and our continuing reporting on overpricing at Halliburton, chicanery on K-Street, and the heavy, if divinely guided, hand of Tom DeLay.

When Senator Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers,” a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halperin, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the CPB board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation. After all, I’d been there at the time of Richard Nixon’s attempted coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and independent, and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had actually been cancelled. The White House had been so outraged over a documentary called the “Banks and the Poor” that PBS was driven to adopt new guidelines. That didn’t satisfy Nixon, and when public television hired two NBC reporters -- Robert McNeil and Sander Vanocur -- to co-anchor some new broadcasts, it was, for Nixon, the last straw. According to White House memos at the time, he was determined to “get the left wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once -- indeed, yesterday if possible.”

Sound familiar?

Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick Pat Buchanan who in a private memo had castigated Vanocur, MacNeil, Washington Week in Review, Black Journal and Bill Moyers as “unbalanced against the administration.”

It does sound familiar.

I always knew Nixon would be back. I just didn’t know this time he would be the Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming except for Black Journal. They knocked out multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.

But in those days – and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson and his colleagues on the CPB board - there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it. The chairman of CPB was former Republican congressman Thomas Curtis, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would soon face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust, not just public broadcasting. Paradoxically, the very Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill – NPACT - put PBS on the map by rebroadcasting in prime time each day’s Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing.

That was 33 years ago. I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was naïve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done. On Fox News this week he denied that he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But The New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that “on the recommendation of administration officials” Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB’s new ombudsman’s office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of whom once worked for… you guessed it … Kenneth Tomlinson.

I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t. According to a book written about the Reader’s Digest when he was its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other right-wingers -- a pattern he’s now following at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. For Acting President he hired Ken Ferrer from the FCC, who was Michael Powell’s enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferrer’s jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to media monopolies. And, according to Eric Alterman, Ferrer was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. Alterman identifies Ferrer as the FCC staffer who decided to issue a ‘protective order’ designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

It’s not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public television producer is going to say, “Hey, let’s do something on how big media is affecting democracy.”

Call it preventive capitulation.

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson also put up a considerable sum of money, reportedly over five million dollars, for a new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor, and a fine fellow. I had him on NOW several times and even proposed that he become a regular contributor. The conversation of democracy -- remember? All stripes.

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of 400 million dollars.

I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, has no op-ed page where different opinions can compete with its right- wing editorials. The Journal’s PBS broadcast is just as homogenous –right- wingers talking to each other. Why not $5 million to put the editors of The Nation on PBS? Or Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” You balance right-wing talk with left-wing talk.

There’s more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were.

Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of “TV Guide” on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 %.

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Bean, your favorite. Or you could have gone on line where the listings are posted. Hell, you could have called me -- collect -- and I would have told you what was on the broadcast that night.

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay. Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He apparently decided not to share the results with his staff or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it – but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10th op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon’s conservative “Washington Times”, Mr. Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution he did not want to “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned only this week, that’s not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As reported by Jeff Chester’s Center for Digital Democracy of which I am a supporter, there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but not released to the media – not even to PBS and NPR! According to a source who talked to Salon.com, “the first results were too good and [Tomlinson] didn’t believe them. After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling and they thought they’d get worse results.”

But they didn’t.

The data revealed that, in reality, public broadcasting has an 80% favorable rating and that “the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased.”

In fact, more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy news and information than the networks and 55% said PBS was “fair and balanced.”

I repeat: I would like to have given Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt. But this is the man who was running The Voice of America back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What’s more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist -- more than 700 documents -- had been shredded. Among those on the lists of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradley, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

The person who took the fall for the black list was another right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike people’s names.

Let me be clear about this: there is no record, apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don’t know whether he supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals. Or what he thinks of it now.

But I had hoped Bill O’Reilly would have asked him about it when he appeared on The “O’Reilly Factor” this week. He didn’t. Instead, Tomlinson went on attacking me with O’Reilly egging him on, and he went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate despite published reports to the contrary. The only time you could be sure he was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to O’Reilly, “We love your show.”

We love your show.

I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson on Friday and asked him to sit down with me for one hour on PBS and talk about all this. I suggested that he choose the moderator and the guidelines.

There is one other thing in particular I would like to ask him about. In his op-ed essay this week in The Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: “The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from a woman in New York, five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that “After the worst sneak attack in our history, there’s not been a moment to reflect, a moment to let the horror resonate, a moment to feel the pain and regroup as humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family’s world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day.” She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. “He was home with me having coffee. My daughter and grandson, living only five blocks from the Towers, had to be evacuated with masks -- terror all around … my other daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge … my son in high school. But my Charlie took off like a lightening bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. ‘Bring my gear to the plaza,’ he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower…He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved.”

In the FDNY, she continued, chain-of- command rules extend to every captain of every fire house in the city. “If anything happens in the firehouse -- at any time -- even if the Captain isn’t on duty or on vacation -- that Captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7.” So she asked: “Why is this Administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership… Watch everyone pass the blame again in this recent torture case [Abu Ghraib] of Iraqi prisons…..”

She told me that she and her husband had watched my series on “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” together and that now she was a faithful fan of NOW. She wrote: “We need more programs like yours to wake America up…. Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name calling that divide America now….Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda”

Enclosed with the letter was a check made out to “Channel 13 –NOW” for $500.

I keep a copy of that check above my desk to remind me of what journalism is about.

Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors.

I’ll take the widow’s mite any day.

Someone has said recently that the great raucous mob that is democracy is rarely heard and that it’s not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and the capital. There’s too great a chasm between those of us in this business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much as an audience and not enough as citizens. They’re invited to look through the window but too infrequently to come through the door and to participate, to make public broadcasting truly public.

To that end, five public interests groups including Common Cause and Consumers Union will be holding informational sessions around the country to “take public broadcasting back” -- to take it back from threats, from interference, from those who would tell us we can only think what they command us to think.

It’s a worthy goal.

We’re big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it’s political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent and sometimes violent confusion. There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by,” John Steinbeck wrote. “It was called the people.”

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May 18, 2005
Registering New Influence, Iran Sends a Top Aide to Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/international/middleeast/1…

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Iran`s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, left, and Iraq`s prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, at microphone,
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BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 17 - Wasting little time in registering its new influence in Iraq, Iran sent its foreign minister to Baghdad on Tuesday only 48 hours after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice became the first high-level visitor to hold talks with Iraq`s new Shiite-majority government.

The arrival of the Iranian, Kamal Kharrazi, underscored changes in the political landscape that many Iraqis find dizzying: almost 25 years after Iraq and Iran started an eight-year war that left a million people dead, the government in Baghdad is now led by officials with close personal, religious and political ties to Iran`s ruling Shiite ayatollahs.

Iraqi officials who greeted Mr. Kharrazi acknowledged that the timing of his arrival, so soon after Ms. Rice`s 12-hour visit on Sunday, was not chance. "The political message of this visit is very important, notably in its timing," said Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari of Iraq, who at one point broke into fluent Persian, Iran`s principal language, during a news conference with Mr. Kharrazi.

For his part, Mr. Kharrazi appeared eager to put the United States on notice that Iran expects to wield influence in Iraq, especially in the long term, that will match or outstrip the United States`. At one point, standing beside Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq`s new prime minister, Mr. Kharrazi fielded a reporter`s question about the competition for influence in Iraq between Washington and Tehran with a reminder of what he described as the geographical realities.

"Let me add that the party that will leave Iraq is the United States, because it will eventually withdraw," he said in English, referring to the 138,000 American troops here. "But the party that will live with the Iraqis is Iran, because it is a neighbor to Iraq."

Dr. Jaafari and other top Shiite leaders gave Mr. Kharrazi a welcome suffused with references to the ties they formed during years of exile in Iran after fleeing the repression of Saddam Hussein. But there was no escaping the competing reality of America`s power here, or the Iraqi leaders` need to balance affinities with Iran with their acknowledged dependence on American military power to hold back Iraq`s Sunni Arab insurgency.

In his joint appearance with Mr. Kharrazi on the steps of the prime minister`s office, Dr. Jaafari focused his remarks on the new government`s determination not to allow its relations with Iran or the United States to be prejudiced by the hostility between Tehran and Washington.

"We will build relationships between Iraq and other countries according to Iraqi standards and Iraqi national interests," he said. "We would like to see relations between Iran and the United States that are characterized by peace and love, and by a sense of their shared interests. But our relations with every country will be fashioned in a way that is independent of the positive or negative feelings they may have for any other nation."

Mr. Kharrazi arrived in Baghdad by road after crossing from Iran at the Iranian border town of Mehran, 100 miles east of Baghdad, thus avoiding having to use the American military helicopters that are the inescapable form of transport for most high-level visitors to Iraq. But at the prime minister`s compound, security was led by the United States Navy Seals in civilian dress who are Dr. Jaafari`s constant companions.

In other ways, arrangements for the Iranian`s visit demonstrated the differences between the relationships Iraq`s new leaders seem likely to have with the two foreign powers contending for influence here. Ms. Rice, in her brief visit, met only with Iraqi political leaders and American officials and military commanders. Iranian officials said Mr. Kharrazi was expected to remain in Iraq for three days and to travel to the Shiite holy city of Najaf for a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Iranian-born cleric who is the most revered and politically influential of Iraq`s Shiite religious leaders.

In the 25 months since American troops swept Mr. Hussein from power, Ayatollah Sistani has refused to meet with American officials, leaving them to guess exactly what political preferences - or directives, as many Iraqis see them - he hands to the leaders of Shiite religious parties.

Aides to Dr. Jaafari said Mr. Kharrazi would also meet with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iran, or Sciri. It and Dawa are the ranking parties in the new government. Mr. Hakim has taken no government post, but is widely regarded as the most powerful of the Shiite political leaders.

Among many of Iraq`s hard-line Sunni Arab leaders, and still more so among Sunni insurgent groups, the Shiite leaders` ties to Iran are a trigger for hostility and suspicions that trace back far beyond the Iran-Iraq war, to ancient history and the Persian conquest of Mesopotamia.

But Western scholars interviewed by telephone as Mr. Kharrazi began his visit cautioned against seeing the new Iraqi leaders as necessarily pliable in their relations with Iran and against any assumption that Iranian and American interests in Iraq are strongly opposed, at least as long as the Sunni insurgency here continues.

Shaul Bakhash, an Iran scholar at George Mason University in Virginia, said Mr. Kharrazi`s visit showed that Iraq`s leaders were eager to recognize the importance Iran, with its 800-mile border with Iraq, its trading possibilities and its Shiite faith, will have in Iraq`s future.

But he said Iraq`s Shiite leaders would not be pawns of the Iranians. "They are Iraqi nationalists, and now that they`re in power, they`re less dependent on external support than they were as exiled opposition groups," he said.

Other experts said Iran shared the United States` aim of vanquishing the Sunni insurgency in Iraq - a point Mr. Kharrazi alluded to after meeting with Dr. Jaafari, when he said Iran was ready to offer aid to Iraq on matters of security.

Fred Halliday, an international relations scholar at the London School of Economics, said: "Both Iran and the United States want to see Sunni insurrection defeated. Both will suffer if there is civil war in Iraq. The Iranians do not want to see a complete American troop withdrawal now."

Troops Battle Rebels in Mosul

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 17 (AP) - American troops backed by helicopters battled scores of insurgents holed up in two houses in the northern city of Mosul, the military said Tuesday. Mosul`s police commander, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Muhammad Khalaf, said 20 militants were killed when American aircraft destroyed the buildings, but the American military said it was unaware of any casualties.

Three Islamic clerics - a Shiite killed in a drive-by shooting and two Sunnis who had been kidnapped - were found dead in Baghdad, the police said Tuesday, a day after Iraq`s prime minister vowed to use an "iron fist" to end sectarian violence.

The two Sunnis had reportedly been abducted by men in Iraqi Army uniforms, but Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi said the government was not involved. He also said Iraqi troops would no longer be allowed to enter mosques, churches or universities.

An additional 17 Iraqis were killed Tuesday: two officials in separate Baghdad drive-by shootings, six truck drivers delivering supplies to American forces north of the capital, a former member of the Baath Party and his three grown sons, three Mosul policemen, and two soldiers in Baghdad. An American soldier was killed and a second wounded when a roadside bomb struck their patrol near Tikrit, the military said.

Sabrina Tavernise, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Razzaq al-Saedy contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 18, 2005
Blowing Up an Assumption
By ROBERT A. PAPE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/opinion/18pape.html

Chicago

MANY Americans are mystified by the recent rise in the number and the audacity of suicide attacks in Iraq. The lull in violence after January`s successful elections seemed to suggest that the march of democracy was trampling the threat of terrorism. But as electoral politics is taking root, the Iraqi insurgency and suicide terrorism are actually gaining momentum. In the past two weeks, suicide attackers have killed more than 420 Iraqis working with the United States and its allies. There were 20 such incidents in 2003, nearly 50 in 2004, and they are on pace to set a new record this year.
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To make sense of this apparent contradiction, one has to understand the strategic logic of suicide terrorism. Since Muslim terrorists professing religious motives have perpetrated many of the attacks, it might seem obvious that Islamic fundamentalism is the central cause, and thus the wholesale transformation of Muslim societies into secular democracies, even at the barrel of a gun, is the obvious solution. However, the presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading, and it may spur American policies that are likely to worsen the situation.

Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. This includes every episode in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.

The leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more than Hamas (54) or Islamic Jihad (27). Even among Muslims, secular groups like the Kurdistan Workers` Party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al Aksa Martyr Brigades account for more than a third of suicide attacks.

What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause.

Three general patterns in the data support these conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks - 301 of the 315 in the period I studied - took place as part of organized political or military campaigns. Second, democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists; America, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades. Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign - 18 organizations in all - are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination.

Before Israel`s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide terrorist campaign against Israel; indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after this event. Before the Sri Lankan military began moving into the Tamil homelands of the island in 1987, the Tamil Tigers did not use suicide attacks. Before the huge increase in Jewish settlers on the West Bank in the 1980`s, Palestinian groups did not use suicide terrorism.

And, true to form, there had never been a documented suicide attack in Iraq until after the American invasion in 2003. Much is made of the fact that we aren`t sure who the Iraqi suicide attackers are. This is not unusual in the early years of a suicide terrorist campaign. Hezbollah published most of the biographies and last testaments of its "martyrs" only after it abandoned the suicide-attack strategy in 1986, a pattern adopted by the Tamil Tigers as well.

At the moment, our best information indicates that the attackers in Iraq are Sunni Iraqis and foreign fighters, principally from Saudi Arabia. If so, this would mean that the two main sources of suicide terrorists in Iraq are from the Arab countries deemed most vulnerable to transformation by the presence of American combat troops. This is fully consistent with what we now know about the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.

Some have wondered if the rise of suicide terrorism in Iraq is really such a bad thing for American security. Is it not better to have these killers far away in Iraq rather than here in the United States? Alas, history shows otherwise. The presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula after 1990 enabled Al Qaeda to recruit suicide terrorists, who in turn attacked Americans in the region (the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000). The presence of nearly 150,000 American combat troops in Iraq since 2003 can only give suicide terrorism a boost, and the longer this suicide terrorist campaign continues the greater the risk of new attacks in the United States.

Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism. Spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea so long as foreign combat troops remain on the Arabian Peninsula. If not for the world`s interest in Persian Gulf oil, the obvious solution might well be simply to abandon the region altogether. Isolationism, however, is not possible; America needs a new strategy that pursues our vital interest in oil but does not stimulate the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.

BEYOND recognizing the limits of military action and stepping up domestic security efforts, Americans would do well to recall the virtues of our traditional policy of "offshore balancing" in the Persian Gulf. During the 1970`s and 1980`s, the United States managed its interests there without stationing any combat soldiers on the ground, but keeping our forces close enough - either on ships or in bases near the region - to deploy in huge numbers if an emergency. This worked splendidly to defeat Iraq`s aggression against Kuwait in 1990.

THE Bush administration rightly intends to start turning over the responsibility for Iraq`s security to the new government and systematically withdrawing American troops. But large numbers of these soldiers should not simply be sent to Iraq`s neighbors, where they will continue to enrage many in the Arab world. Keeping the peace from a discreet distance seems a better way to secure our interests in the world`s key oil-producing region without provoking more terrorism.

Robert A. Pape, an associate professor of political scienceat the University of Chicago, isthe author of the forthcoming "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Es gibt eins, was Friedman wohl nie begreifen wird, die USA bringt keine Lösung der Probleme in der Region, sonden sie ist ein Teil der Probleme. Es wäre schon ein entscheidender Fortschritt, wenn die USA sich aus der Gegend zurückziehen würde.
Sein Buch THE WORLD IS FLAT,(deutsch: Die Scheibenwelt) by Thomas L. Friedman ist Nr.1 in der Seller Liste.
May 18, 2005
Outrage and Silence
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/opinion/18friedman.html

It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.

That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.

Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.

The Muslim world`s silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq - as well as the only workable strategy going forward.

The challenge we face in Iraq is so steep precisely because the power shift the U.S. and its allies are trying to engineer there is so profound - in both religious and political terms.

Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite`s being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor`s being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are indifferent to their brutalization.

At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their countries. That`s why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually sanitized as "resistance" to occupation.

Salama Na`mat, the Washington bureau chief for the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat, wrote the other day: "What is the responsibility of the [Arab] regimes and the official and semiofficial media in the countries bordering Iraq in legitimizing the operations that murder Iraqis? ... Isn`t their goal to thwart [the emergence of] the newborn democracy in Iraq so that it won`t spread in the region?" (Translation by Memri.)

In identifying the problem, though, Mr. Na`mat also identifies the solution. If you want to stop a wave of suicide bombings, the likes of which we are seeing in Iraq, it takes a village. I am a big believer that the greatest restraint on human behavior is not laws and police, but culture and religious authority. It is what the community, what the village, deems shameful. That is what restrains people. So how do we get the Sunni Arab village to delegitimize suicide bombers?

Inside Iraq, obviously, credible Sunnis have to be brought into the political process and constitution-drafting, as long as they do not have blood on their hands from Saddam`s days. And outside Iraq, the Bush team needs to be forcefully demanding that Saudi Arabia and other key Arab allies use their media, government and religious systems to denounce and delegitimize the despicable murder of Muslims by Muslims in Iraq.

If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and if credible Sunnis were given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop, as happened with the Palestinians. Iraqi Sunnis would pass on the intelligence needed to prevent these attacks, and they would deny the suicide bombers the safe houses they need to succeed.

That is the only way it stops, because we don`t know who is who. It takes the village - and right now the Sunni Arab village needs to be pressured and induced to restrain those among them who are engaging in these suicidal murders of innocents.

The best way to honor the Koran is to live by the values of mercy and compassion that it propagates.

* 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/
Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Has Newsweek Retracted?
Update: Riverbend weighs in with an Iraqi nationalist point of view on the allegations of Koran desecration in US military prisons. She points out that many Iraqis will find them plausible, given that we know that the interrogators have not shown respect for basic human dignity. Occasional US mosque invasions likewise lend credence to the charges, especially to Sunni Iraqis.

It is being yet again alleged that Newsweek has formally retracted the Guantanamo Koran desecration story, under enormous pressure from the White House. But here is what exactly the magazine`s statement said:

"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay," Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said in a statement issued here.`



So far this is the same "retraction" as Sunday`s, which is that they were wrong to source the story of Koran desecration to a forthcoming Southern Command white paper on Guantanamo. It says nothing about whether the Koran desecration occurred, or whether their government source accurately reported seeing a US government text documenting it.

But then there is this:

` As it turned out, Newsweek now says, there was one source. And Whitaker said that because that source had "backed away" from his original account, the magazine could "no longer stand by" it. "I did not want to be in the position of splitting hairs," Whitaker said, "to look like we were being evasive or not fully forthcoming." `



Well, I find this still not fully forthcoming. What account is Whitaker backing away from? That there was Koran desecration? Or that the SouthCom report would mention it?

Jamaat-i Islami leader Qazi Husain Ahmad expressed skepticism Tuesday about the Newsweek clarification issued on Sunday concerning. His skepticism was widely shared. (Even the now generally pro-American al-Arabiya satellite news channel ran a segment in which two analysts both declined to take the Newsweek statements too seriously.

The Political Teen Video Blog links to an interesting overview of the unfolding of the Koran story at MSNBC. Tony Maciulis of Coast to Coast focused on Imran Khan and the blogs that covered the building protests, including this one. He credits Will Femia with much of the research. This was one of the better television reports about an issue in the blogosphere I have seen.

Martin Longman and Susan Hu point out that although it is now often being said in the press that only former detainees at Guantanamo have made the allegation of Koran desecration, there is in fact evidence from interrogators as well. They cite the New York Times for May 17:

"Last month, a former American interrogator confirmed to The New York Times an account given in an interview by a former Kuwaiti detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said that mishandling of the Koran once led to a major hunger strike. The strike ended only after a senior officer expressed regret over the camp`s loudspeaker system, which was simultaneously translated by linguists at the end of each cell block, the former interrogator said. In that case, the accusations were of copies of the Koran being tossed on the floor in a pile and treated roughly, but there was no assertion that any had been put in the toilet."



I don`t think the crowds protesting in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be less outraged by US soldiers stomping on the Koran on the floor. That something was at least occasonally done to religiously humiliate Muslim detainees seems now unassailable.

Personally, I don`t think the Bush White House approach to this whole issue has been politically useful. The Karl Rove technique of just denying things may work in the Red States, but that is because Republicans don`t want to believe their party leader is outright lying to them. When Gen. Richard Myers says that 25,000 pages of reports on US military interrogations have been reviewed and no such Koran desecration incident has been found, he must think Muslims are complete idiots. Why in the world would any interrogator write down, "I desecrated the Koran to break this guy, in direct contravention of US military policy"? Muslim publics begin by assuming that Bush would lie to them, so simple denials won`t defuse their anger, especially ones that depend on clumsy sleight-of-hand like assuming US military intelligence documents its own excesses for the perusal of generals.

Wellstoner at Atrios`s Eschaton discussion has a useful set of clippings. I hope he won`t mind if I mirror it here, since it is hard to find in the original format:


Wellstoner writes

This from a Lexis-Nexis search-

The Denver Post, January 9

HEADLINE: Nightmare of Guantanamo.... U.S. prison camp in Cuba has become legal black hole, reporter says:


"They were punched, slapped, denied sleep, had seen other prisoners sexually humiliated, hooded and forced to watch copies of the Koran being flushed down toilets. Eventually the pressure proved too much - they gave false confessions that the British intelligence service, MI5, later showed to be untrue. Upon their return to the United Kingdom they were released without being charged."


Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), January 3, 2005
HEADLINE: Koran prayer torture claim

LONDON -- A British detainee claims he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay for reciting the Koran when talking was banned.

Moazzam Begg told lawyers he was tortured using the strappado, in which a prisoner is suspended from a bar with handcuffs, Britain`s Observer newspaper said.

Mr Begg alleged he had been shaven several times against his will and a guard had said on one such occasion: "This is the part that really gets to you Muslims isn`t it?""


Financial Times (London, England), Oct 28, 2004
HEADLINE: Four Britons held at Guantanamo sue US government

In August Mr Ahmed, Mr Rasul and Mr Iqbal issued a 115-page dossier accusing the US of abuse, including allegations that they were beaten and had their Korans thrown into toilets.


USA TODAY, October 18, 2004
HEADLINE: Spy case was a `life-altering experience` for airman

Al Halabi says he did not witness any treatment of prisoners that has now been called into question as abusive. But he says he saw things at Guantanamo that disturbed him. He says guards would purposely mishandle the Koran "just to see the detainees` reaction."


Daily News (New York), August 5, 2004
HEADLINE: ABUSED AT GITMO, FREED BRITS CHARGE

"They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it," Asif Iqbal wrote.


The Independent (London), August 5, 2004
HEADLINE: FATHER CALLS FOR SON`S RELEASE AFTER CAMP DELTA TORTURE CLAIMS BEGG DEMANDS SON`S RELEASE AFTER TORTURE CLAIMS AT CAMP DELTA TORTURE

In the report, released in New York, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul - the so-called Tipton Three - said one inmate was threatened after being shown a video in which hooded inmates were forced to sodomise each other. Guards allegedly threw prisoners` Korans into toilets, while others were injected with drugs, it was claimed.


The San Francisco Chronicle, JUNE 20, 2004
HEADLINE: THE FILE: PRISON ABUSE;

Prisoners have been forced to strip naked -- nudity is a violation of Muslim principles; forced to commit actual or simulated sex acts; prevented from sleeping; threatened with dogs; hooded; given electric shocks; beaten with fists, chains, boots and other objects; forced to maintain painful positions for hours; kept in frigid isolation rooms; subjected to loud music, strobe lights and diets of bread and water; urinated on and prevented from praying or reading the Koran.


The Observer, May 16, 2004
HEADLINE: Inside Guantanamo Bay

`THEY HAD already searched me and my cell twice that day, gone through my stuff, touched my Koran, felt my body around my private parts. And now they wanted to do it again, just to provoke me, but I said no, because if you submit to everything you turn into a zombie.


The Guardian (London) - Final Edition, May 14, 2004
HEADLINE: Guantanamo abuse same as Abu Ghraib, say Britons

According to a source, who has interviewed them in secret since their release, they were initially too ashamed to talk about it, and are only now starting to give details. The source said: "They are embarrassed about talking about it because they feel humiliated. We have had an account that their religion was used against them, that a copy of the Koran was brought in front of them and pages torn out."


The Observer, March 14, 2004
HEADLINE: World Exclusive: Inside Guantanamo: How we survived jail hell

As Muslims, they were shocked when in repeated `shakedown` searches of the sleeping tents, copies of the Koran would be trampled on by soldiers and, on one occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket. Throughout their stay at Kandahar the guards carried out head-counts every hour at night to keep the prisoners awake.


The Washington Post, March 26, 2003
HEADLINE: Returning Afghans Talk of Guantanamo; Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment

The men, the largest single group of Afghans to be released after months of detainment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gave varying accounts of how American forces treated them during interrogation and detainment. Some displayed medical records showing extensive care by American military doctors, while others complained that American soldiers insulted Islam by sitting on the Koran or dumping their sacred text into a toilet to taunt them.
Wellstoner | Email | Homepage | 05.17.05 - 11:04 am | #

posted by Juan @ [url5/17/2005 08:15:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/has-newsweek-retracted-update.html[/url]

Guest Editorial: Fisher, "Iraq: Real News from the Battlefield"
An Eyewitness Account from Iraq


IRAQ: REAL NEWS FROM THE BATTLEFIELD

By William Fisher

I long ago stopped believing anything our government told us about Iraq. Now, like millions of other Americans, I have stopped believing what our mainstream media tells us about Iraq. What has become a substitute for a credible and holistic picture of what is really happening in this tortured country is a pair of bookends: at one end, endless images of car bombs exploding, with commentary from journalists who are mostly unable to leave their Baghdad hotels; at the other end, the feelgood press releases from the White House and the Pentagon.

So now I get my news from a few knowledgeable Iraqi and other bloggers and from the emails I receive from trusted friends who work there.

Below is the email I received this week (names and locations have been deleted to protect their safety):


"This new government has proven nothing thus far except its own incompetence. From my exile in (Iraqi city deleted), a distant but well-connected vantage point, two things about this government are noteworthy.

First it is unable to control security. The bickering and backstabbing that went into cabinet selection gave new life to the insurgency, demoralizing the population at large and the security forces in particular. Al-Jaafari, the Prime Minister and the head of the more moderate portion of the Sistani group, promoted for Defense Minister Sunni politicians and former military people who had legitimacy amongst large sections of the Sunni Arab population.

All his nominations were vetoed by the more hard-line Shiites of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The real power in Iraq right now lies with Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the turbaned head of SCIRI and Sistani.

Some Iraqis disagree with me. They would say that SCIRI`s power derives from Iran, and it is that country that is really controlling (or not controlling) the country.

But the important final question is, if the security forces fight, who are they fighting for? A united Iraq, or a derivative of Iran? This is an important point, and it could be one reason that Iraqi forces` performance has deteriorated in recent weeks.

Second, if you cannot keep the country safe, you may as well have a witch-hunt. With Ahmed Chalabi in the lead, that oh so honest and pure politician from Nasariya, the new government has decided to prevent all former ministers from traveling pending investigations into corruption.

All of us know who was corrupt in Allawi`s government -Transport, Defense, Electricity, Interior and others.

But this new government is determined to intimidate and harass all who were associated with Allawi. For example, on Wednesday, eight armored vehicles filled with armed police officers drove up to the home of a former minister (name withheld), with the intent of making an arrest.

The former minister told them emphatically, "get out, you will have to kill me to take me from my home". They backed down, the former minister made some phone calls and the episode ended.

The allegation was that the former minister did not properly nominate ministry staff for international delegations. The allegation could very well be true, but what is all the fuss? I have met the former minister several times and doubt that this person would be capable of deliberate malicious intent, but as a bureaucrat with little experience, I do not doubt that things could have gone awry.

The Baathist purge office has been reactivated, again under the guidance of Chalabi, and this cannot accomplish anything except make the insurgency worse. The average Iraqi does not care about mid-level Baathists, they care about peace, and if peace is contingent upon keeping or hiring a few Baathists with ties to Saddam, that is an acceptable contingency.

The two elements to the witch-hunt, the first against Allawi and the second against Baathists, make for palatable unease on the street (we have to remember that in general people liked Allawi, but they could not vote for him over Sistani). Combine the witch-hunt with suicide bombers and the optimism of the last months is gone.

I am now at my most pessimistic. Never did I think it would get this bad.

Below is yet another desperate email message (in broken English) from one of the NGOs we work with. (Name withheld) was suppose to meet with us yesterday, but there was a bomb in his neighborhood, yet again at a recruitment center, the day before.

hi (recipient withheld).

I want to inform you that an distortion and pumb explosion happent in Hawija today cause to kill many young men from my region and my village and some of them were from my cosion that was made by terrors and I was closer from the event. I want to say you that I am so sad for 100 young men from hawija city whom came to produce themself to thier country by our device. Finally, all (Arabain, Kurdish, Turkmen amd other) cry for this work and declare our sadness in this dark day. our greeting for (name withheld) and other staff in your org.

accept my regards
(name withheld)
Boss of (organization deleted)

I receive these types of messages every two or three days. By now one would think that I could read them with dispassion, that I would not react with tears in my eyes. I cannot. You can read about this bomb in Hawija on CNN, but read these few humble sentences, understand it, and weep.

And yet, we keep going. This week I had my teams from (locations deleted) come for a work planning session. Their commitment to improving the lives of Iraqis is beyond my expectations. We will involve 500 farmers in maize wok this summer and several hundred in Najaf and Diwaniyah in rice. And that is just the start. We have plans for livestock, tomato, cucumber, apples, dates, extension, integrated pest management, and tractor repair (I hope to sign a $9 million contract with the local distributor of (manufacturer’s name deleted) this week). My guys are thrilled that we have plenty of resources for them to use to do just about anything that helps agriculture. Their smiles and optimism in the face of undeniable risks is almost incomprehensible to me, and it helps to restore somewhat my faith in the future of Iraq.

If we could get the politicians to be as committed to development and progress as my guys the country would be in much better shape. But alas, we have Chalabi, the crook, and Al-Jaafari, the weak, a recipe for nothing good.

It would be a good idea to remember this message next time Mssrs. Bush and Rumsfeld tell us how we’re winning this war."



posted by Juan @ [url5/17/2005 02:29:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/guest-editorial-fisher-iraq-real-news.html[/url]

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Wednesday, May 18, 2005

The Dead and the Undead...
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_riverbendblog_a…

She stood in the crowded room as her drove of minions stood around her...…A huddling mass trying to draw closer to her aura of evil. The lights flashed against her fangs as her cruel lips curled into a grimace. It was meant to be a smile but it wouldn`t reach her cold, lifeless eyes… It was a leer- the leer of the undead before a feeding...

The above was not a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer- it was just Condi Rice in Iraq a day ago. At home, we fondly refer to her as The Vampire. She`s such a contrast to Bush- he simply looks stupid. She, on the other hand, looks utterly evil.

The last two weeks have been violent. The number of explosions in Baghdad alone is frightening. There have also been several assassinations- bodies being found here and there. It`s somewhat disturbing to know that corpses are turning up in the most unexpected places. Many people will tell you it`s not wise to eat river fish anymore because they have been nourished on the human remains being dumped into the river. That thought alone has given me more than one sleepless night. It is almost as if Baghdad has turned into a giant graveyard.

The latest corpses were those of some Sunni and Shia clerics- several of them well-known. People are being patient and there is a general consensus that these killings are being done to provoke civil war. Also worrisome is the fact that we are hearing of people being rounded up by security forces (Iraqi) and then being found dead days later- apparently when the new Iraqi government recently decided to reinstate the death penalty, they had something else in mind.

But back to the explosions. One of the larger blasts was in an area called Ma`moun, which is a middle class area located in west Baghdad. It’s a relatively calm residential area with shops that provide the basics and a bit more. It happened in the morning, as the shops were opening up for their daily business and it occurred right in front of a butchers shop. Immediately after, we heard that a man living in a house in front of the blast site was hauled off by the Americans because it was said that after the bomb went off, he sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman.

I didn’t think much about the story- nothing about it stood out: an explosion and a sniper- hardly an anomaly. The interesting news started circulating a couple of days later. People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb. Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away.

The bombs are mysterious. Some of them explode in the midst of National Guard and near American troops or Iraqi Police and others explode near mosques, churches, and shops or in the middle of sougs. One thing that surprises us about the news reports of these bombs is that they are inevitably linked to suicide bombers. The reality is that some of these bombs are not suicide bombs- they are car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs. All we know is that the techniques differ and apparently so do the intentions. Some will tell you they are resistance. Some say Chalabi and his thugs are responsible for a number of them. Others blame Iran and the SCIRI militia Badir.

In any case, they are terrifying. If you`re close enough, the first sound is a that of an earsplitting blast and the sounds that follow are of a rain of glass, shrapnel and other sharp things. Then the wails begin- the shrill mechanical wails of an occasional ambulance combined with the wail of car alarms from neighboring vehicles… and finally the wail of people trying to sort out their dead and dying from the debris.

The day before yesterday, a bomb fell on Mustansiriya University- Khalid of Secrets in Baghdad blogs about it.

We`ve been watching the protests about the Newsweek article with interest. I’m not surprised at the turnout at these protests- the thousands of Muslims angry at the desecration of the Quran. What did surprise me was the collective shock that seems to have struck the Islamic world like a slap in the face. How is this shocking? It`s terrible and disturbing in the extreme- but how is it shocking? After what happened in Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons how is this astonishing? American jailers in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown little respect for human life and dignity- why should they be expected to respect a holy book?

Juan Cole has some good links about the topic.

Now Newsweek have retracted the story- obviously under pressure from the White House. Is it true? Probably… We`ve seen enough blatant disregard and disrespect for Islam in Iraq the last two years to make this story sound very plausible. On a daily basis, mosques are raided, clerics are dragged away with bags over their heads… Several months ago the world witnessed the execution of an unarmed Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque. Is this latest so very surprising?

Detainees coming back after weeks or months in prison talk of being forced to eat pork, not being allowed to pray, being exposed to dogs, having Islam insulted and generally being treated like animals trapped in a small cage. At the end of the day, it`s not about words or holy books or pork or dogs or any of that. It`s about what these things symbolize on a personal level. It is infuriating to see objects that we hold sacred degraded and debased by foreigners who felt the need to travel thousands of kilometers to do this. That`s not to say that all troops disrespect Islam- some of them seem to genuinely want to understand our beliefs. It does seem like the people in charge have decided to make degradation and humiliation a policy.

By doing such things, this war is taken to another level- it is no longer a war against terror or terrorists- it is, quite simply, a war against Islam and even secular Muslims are being forced to take sides.

- posted by river @ 12:05 AM

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US arrests Castro opponent over 1976 bombing of airliner
By David Usborne
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

18 May 2005

The US bowed to international pressure last night by arresting an anti-Castro exile wanted over the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner in which 73 people were killed.

Luis Posada Carriles was taken into custody after he had surfaced publicly in the US for the first time, giving an interview toThe Miami Herald newspaper. His arrest followed a demonstration yesterday in Havana led by Fidel Castro with thousands demanding his extradition.

In the interview, Mr Posada, 77, conceded that he had entered the US several weeks ago overland from Mexico and had travelled by Greyhound bus to Miami to be among underground supporters of the long-running campaign to oust President Castro.

American authorities had said that they did not know of his whereabouts. Last night the US Homeland Security Department said it had 48 hours to determine his immigration status.

Mr Posada presented Washington with a dilemma. President George Bush did not want to offend the many Cuban-Americans for whom Mr Posada remains a hero of the anti-Castro movement. However, he is considered a terrorist by Venezuela and Cuba. Failing to arrest him would have been seen as hypocritical.

Mr Posada was on the payroll of the CIA before the 1976 bombing and was once one of Venezuela`s most senior intelligence officers. After being captured for his alleged role in downing the aircraft he bribed his way out of jail.

He was imprisoned in Panama for allegedly trying to assassinate President Castro in 2000, but was granted a pardon by the Panamanian president.

"I feel that I`ve committed many errors, more than most people," he told the Herald. "But I`ve always believed in rebellion, in the armed struggle. I believe more and more every day that we will triumph against Castro. Victory will be ours."

As for the plane bombing, he said: "Sincerely, I didn`t know anything about it."

In Cuba, the surge of protesters along Havana oceanside`s Malecon boulevard was reminiscent of the protests spurred by President Castro`s successful campaign to bring Elian Gonzalez, the young boy who had floated to Florida on a raft, back to Cuba five years ago. Yesterday, the marchers chanted, "Bush, fascist, capture the terrorist."

Leading off the march in Havana, Mr Castro proclaimed: "Down with terrorism! Down with the lies!"

Speaking to Cuban reporters on Monday, Mr Castro castigated the US over the affair. "This is the empire`s answer," he said, "money to foment destabilisation, money for terrorist acts, money for subversion".

Describing his flight from Panama to the US, Mr Posada said he first entered Guatemala and then travelled overland to Mexico. He was smuggled into the US over the Texas border several weeks ago. He said he was almost caught by US customs officials when they boarded his bus bound for Miami, but he managed to persuade them he was a harmless old man who had forgotten to bring his identity papers.

Once in the US, he was initially anxious about being caught, but that had subsided. "Now I hide a lot less. People have recognised me in the market, at the doctor`s office, mostly older people, " he said.


18 April 2005 12:04

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Galloway and the mother of all invective

Oliver Burkeman on the Respect MP`s Washington performance
Wednesday May 18, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1486431,00.html
Guardian

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Whatever else you made of him, when it came to delivering sustained barrages of political invective, you had to salute his indefatigability.

George Galloway stormed up to Capitol Hill yesterday morning for the confrontation of his career, firing scatter-shot insults at the senators who had accused him of profiting illegally from Iraqi oil sales.

They were "neo-cons" and "Zionists" and a "pro-war lynch mob", he raged, who belonged to a "lickspittle Republican committee" that was engaged in creating "the mother of all smokescreens".

Before the hearing began, the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow even had some scorn left over to bestow generously upon the pro-war writer Christopher Hitchens. "You`re a drink-soaked former-Trotskyist popinjay," Mr Galloway informed him. "Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink," he added later, ignoring Mr Hitchens`s questions and staring intently ahead.

"And you`re a drink-soaked..." Eventually Mr Hitchens gave up. "You`re a real thug, aren`t you?" he hissed, stalking away.

It was a hint of what was to come: not so much political theatre as political bloodsports - and with the senators, at least, it was Mr Galloway who emerged with the flesh between his teeth.

"I know that standards have slipped in Washington in recent years, but for a lawyer, you`re remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," he told Norm Coleman, the Minnesota Republican who chairs the senate investigations committee, after taking his seat at the front of the high-ceilinged hearing room, and swearing an oath to tell the truth.

"I`m here today, but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question."

The culture clash between Mr Galloway`s bruising style and the soporific gentility of senate proceedings could hardly have been more pronounced, and drew audible gasps and laughs of disbelief from the audience. "I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him," Mr Galloway went on. "The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns."

American reporters seemed as fascinated as the British media: at one point yesterday, before it was his turn to speak, Mr Galloway strode from the room, sending journalists of all nationalities rushing after him - only to discover that he was going to the lavatory.

By condemning him in their report without interviewing him, the senators had already given Mr Galloway the upper hand. But not everything was in his favour. For a start, only two senators were present, sabotaging Mr Galloway`s efforts to attack the whole lickspittle lot of them - and one of the two, the Democrat Carl Levin, had spent much of his opening statement attacking the hypocrisy of the US government in allegedly allowing American firms to benefit from Iraqi oil corruption.

Even so, Mr Galloway was in his element, playing the role he relishes the most: the little guy squaring up for a fight with the establishment.

For these purposes, Senator Coleman served symbolically to represent all the evil in the world - the entire Republican party, the conscience of George Bush, the US government and the British government, too: no wonder his weak smile looked so nauseous.

"I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq," Mr Galloway told him. "Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong."

And yet for all his anti-establishment credentials, Mr Galloway is as practised as any of his New Labour enemies at squirming away from awkward questions. Under scrutiny by Senator Levin, he deployed a classic example of the bait-and-switch technique that is the government minister`s best defence in difficult questioning.

But Mr Galloway Goes To Washington had never really been an exercise in clarifying the facts. It was an exercise in giving Norm Coleman, and, by extension, the Bush administration, a black eye - mere days after the bloody nose that the Respect MP took credit for having given Tony Blair. And it went as well as Mr Galloway could have wished.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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L.A. MAYORAL ELECTION
Villaraigosa Landslide
# Voter Discontent Helps Propel Challenger to a Historic Victory
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mayor18may18,0,49979…
By Michael Finnegan and Mark Z. Barabak, Times Staff Writers

Antonio Villaraigosa romped past incumbent James K. Hahn to make history Tuesday, winning election as the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since the city`s pioneer days.


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Hahn , James (i) 183,749 41.34 %
Villaraigosa , Antonio 260,721 58.66 %

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COMMENTARY
Who Needs Ethics When You`ve Got Guidelines?
The new Journalism 101.
By Crispin Sartwell
Crispin Sartwell teaches political philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. Website: eyeofthestorm.blogs.com.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-sartw…

May 18, 2005

To the staff:

Our beloved publication — the Daily Gerbil — has fallen inadvertently into a few minor apparent ethical lapses in recent months. We strongly reject the widespread characterization of our attempts to fix the last presidential election and send the Middle East into a chaos of bloody rioting as "sociopathic." Nevertheless, in order to retain the naive trust of our last few readers, and to try to stop people blogging about us, we are yet again issuing an entirely new set of ethical guidelines for our staff.

1. Pretend not to be a liberal. We cannot emphasize this enough. Pretend not to be a liberal.

2. It`s very hard to say what the notion of "truth" really amounts to, so why worry?

3. Keep in mind that most of us reporters and editors here at the Daily Gerbil went to, like, Columbia and Harvard and stuff. Condescend.

4. There will henceforth be no unsourced stories. All groundless innuendo and vicious slander must be attributed to unnamed officials.

5. Increase basic factual errors. This will help conceal basic interpretive errors.

6. Stories are much more coherent and interesting when you don`t try actually to do any reporting but simply sit in your condo, drinking and typing. The crusty reporters of yesteryear favored cheap scotch. Today`s j-school grad understands that a couple of bottles of decent white wine are the key to responsible yarn-spinning.

7. Information technology makes plagiarism easy. Cut and paste. If you replace a couple of words in each sentence with synonyms, it won`t be Googlable.

8. All articles will now achieve balance by getting a comment on their subject matter (interest rates, for example) from one anarchist and one fascist.

9. Scrupulously maintain the authoritative, magisterial and neutral tone associated with the Gerbil. Imply that only an idiot would question your assertions or even actually notice that they were being made at all. No one wrote this; it grew here overnight from a spore, with the bland spontaneity of a huge, poisonous mushroom.

10. Take a tip from Congress: Avoid at all costs the appearance of a conflict of interest while paddling contentedly in the rejuvenating waters of its reality.

11. Desperately placate anyone who uses the term "lawsuit."

We trust that, until the next meltdown, these steps will reestablish the reputation for the highest apparent standards of apparent journalism that the Daily Gerbil has apparently upheld for all these decades.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Wer hätte sich das träumen lassen, dass die GOP sowas wie Personalausweise einführen würde.

They Really Are Watching You
Ready for your own all-new, sinister ID card, courtesy of Homeland Security? Shudder
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/

Well, now we`ve done it.

Congress just passed it and Dubya has promised to sign it and the Homeland Security Department is giddier than Mel Gibson in a nail factory over it and marketers nationwide are salivating at the groin at the prospect of it, and the next big step toward America becoming an even more delightfully paranoid and draconian Big Brother wonderland has now officially been taken.

It`s called Real ID. It is, in short, a new and genetically mutated type of driver`s license for all Americans, replacing your current license and replacing your Social Security card and replacing your sense of well being and privacy and humanity and part of a new, uniform, deeply sinister, national uniform card system whereby every person living and breathing in these paranoid and tense times shall henceforth be much more traceable and watchable given how we will all soon be required by law to carry this super-deluxe computerized ID card with us at all times, packed as it will be with more personal, digitized info about you than even your mother knows.

Real ID is coming very soon. The legislation was passed with little outcry and zero debate by both House and Senate just last week because lawmakers snuck it into a massive $82 billion military spending bill, and therefore no one was really paying much attention and this is the way you get thorny disturbing culturally demeaning bills to pass without resistance from smart people who should know better.

The new law will, according to the Wired News story linked above, require everyone to hand over not one, not two, but fully four types of documentation to renew their driver`s license, such as a photo ID, a birth certificate, proof that their Social Security number is legit and something that validates their home address, like a phone bill. DMV employees will then have to verify the documents against giant teeming federal databases and store the documents and a digital photo of you in a database. Isn`t that fun? Doesn`t that sound gratifying?

What`s more, the card`s design plan includes multiple openings for the Homeland Security Department to add on whatever features they deem necessary, with or without your knowledge, consent or who the hell cares what you think because we do what we want now please shut the hell up and quit asking questions.

Computer (RFID) microchip? Likely. Digital fingerprint? Sure. Political affiliation? You bet. Web-site-visit log and religious affiliation and recent sperm count and arrest record and drug addictions and medical history and blood type and gender orientation and parent`s/children`s home address and number of personal blog posts calling Dr. Phil a "slug-licking ego-bitch charlatan" and your recent purchase history on shotathome.com? One guess.

Make no mistake: Real ID, in short, takes us one happy step closer to a total surveillance state, where everyone is stamped and everyone is watchable and everyone is traceable and unless you live way, way off the grid out in the increasingly nonexistent hinterlands, you cannot escape the spazzy and twitchy and paranoid eye of Homeland Security.

Remember the scenes in that surprisingly not-awful Tom Cruise flick "Minority Report" with the ubiquitous eye scanners, installed all over the near-future city? And as poor Tommy ran around like a maniac, little scanner machines installed by the gummint would read the eye pattern of every citizen as they walked around and the system could track anyone at any time no matter where they might wander and all the info was dumped into a huge database that was studied and cross-checked and manipulated by the CIA and FBI and Banana Republic?

Real ID feels much like that, only not nearly as cool.

Real ID is, as you might expect, giving civil liberties groups and immigrant-support groups the hives. State governors across the nation are none too happy, either, as implementation of the new law will cost each state hundreds of millions of dollars, but, of course, the bill provides zero federal funds to help. Such is the BushCo way.

This is the funny thing. This is the sad thing. This is the terrifying thing. We have suffered one major debilitating act of terrorism in this nation and we have recoiled so violently, so rabidly, so desperately that we are still more than willing to give up whatever freedoms necessary in a vain and silly attempt to control chaos and plug every hole, when of course the nation is basically one giant hole to begin with.

Of course, any good conspiracy theorist worth his secret underground bootleg Area 51 videos will tell you this sort of citizen-surveillance thing has been going on for years, decades, from spy satellites to GPS to all manner of phone tracking and e-mail snooping and behavior watching and this Real ID thing only takes it a little more public, national, makes it part of the cultural lexicon because we have finally weakened so much we just don`t seem to give a damn what they do to us anymore.

Don`t think it`s all that bad? Think BushCo`s flying monkeys in the CIA and FBI and Homeland Security really have your best interests at heart and are genuinely trying to protect you from scary swarthy furriners who want to sneak into our country and poison our Cheerios and paint our flag orange and cover our wimmin in burlap? Have at it. The GOP would love to have you. Oh, and while you`re at it, enjoy that tiny grain-of-rice-size bar-coded implant RFID microchip the FDA just approved, which they can permanently slip under your skin in about 20 seconds, with nary a peep.

This is what`s happening now. With Real ID (and who knows what else), the government is cracking down and creating a new and improved and far more devious and exploitable system to monitor its citizens because, well, because we let them. Because millions of us have been pummeled so successfully by the fear-mongering Right. Because we have never been so lax, so blinded by warmongering and dread, so numbed to what might become of us.

Ah, but maybe I`m wrong. Maybe this is just rampant paranoia talking and it`s just a silly piece of harmless legislation and Real ID is overall a genuinely good and useful idea that will ultimately make us safer and more secure. You think?

Because hasn`t BushCo proven to be reliable and honest and just reeking with integrity about privacy and security issues so far? Hasn`t the USA Patriot Act been just a wondrous boon to police and CIA and our sense that we are trusted and cared for by our government? Aren`t we all feeling just so much safer with this most secretive, least accountable administration at the helm?

After all, why not trust the government on this? Why not put our faith in the goodly Homeland Security Department? Maybe Real ID really is patriotic and constructive and it will be a smooth and secure and completely inviolable system, one that protects citizens while giving them a new sense of freedom to move about the country with carefree flag-waving ease, safe in the knowledge that their big, snarling gummint is watching over them like a protective mother bear -- as opposed to, say, a female praying mantis, who greedily screws her lover, and then, of course, eats him alive.


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: Ira Chernus on Wielding the Nuclear Option
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2531

The "nuclear option" has entered our vocabulary -- with, even in headlines, those little quote marks encircling it like a radioactive halo of disbelief. They seem to ask: Can we really be here? Can this be the image of choice for politics in the U.S. Senate? And yet on Wednesday, Bill Frist, Senate majority leader, will reportedly bring the names of state Supreme Court justices Priscilla R. Owen of Texas and Janice Rogers Brown of California up for confirmation to the federal appeals court; and so, barring a surprise, we will be launched on the "nuclear option" -- the attempt to blow the filibuster, that political weapon of any minority party, out of the political waters for all time.

A little list of recent headlines gives the flavor of the moment: "Bargaining continues as senators seek to avoid nuclear option" (Ohio News Network); "Lott`s role eyed in `nuclear option` battle" (Knoxville News Sentinel); "Frist says he`s ready to pull trigger on `nuclear option`" (Scripps Howard News Service); "Ready to Blow" (Newsweek); or how about a good old combo headline from the McClatchy Press, "Senate Could See ‘Nuclear Option` Explode This Week" for a piece that begins with the line, "In the political war over President Bush`s judicial nominees, the Senate is at DEFCON 1..." (DEFCON 1 is the highest state of nuclear alert, "maximum force readiness"); or perhaps a Newsday article which flips the imagery switch from atomic war to atomic peace (of the Three Mile Island sort): "Senate on verge of meltdown." That story, in fact, begins with the kind of line that might normally lead off a piece on the North Korean or Iranian nuclear crisis: "By the end of the week, the Senate could go nuclear -- unless a handful of moderates find a way to reach what has so far been an unreachable compromise."

As a matter of fact, our papers are now filled with headlines and articles whose catchwords and phrases seemed to come directly out of the Cold War era of nuclear confrontation: not just the usual "showdowns" galore, but in the case of a Washington Post piece, for instance, that classic word of the Cold War (and Vietnam) years, "escalation" (In the Senate, the Escalation of Rhetoric). Or how about, from columnist Morton Kondracke, "Senators must reach nuclear `stand-down`"? And with nuclear war as the image of choice, "fallout" -- well salted into many articles -- could hardly be far behind.

To extend the metaphor a bit, it seems that we Americans are all about to become "downwinders." (People who were downwind of the aboveground nuclear tests of the 1950s and early 60s received an extra dose of fallout.) For the nuclear option and its attendant imagery is, as Ira Chernus explains below, a more than apt metaphor for the moment -- not least because of the nature of the Senate grab for power by so-called conservatives. (By the way, isn`t there some sort of expiration date on the use of the term "conservative," especially when what`s being considered is radical indeed -- getting rid of a traditional political instrument whose history extends back to the early 1800s?) The wiping out of the filibuster could, in fact, represent the sort of great leap downhill (no slippery slide here) in the direction of a one-party state that many fear. After all, the accruing of unprecedented power to a majority party in the Senate will in reasonably short order lead to unprecedented control over the nation`s judiciary. Just remind me, what`s actually left after that?

And here`s the charming thing, while the nuclear option proceeds along its way in the Senate, blurring the line between what`s left of conventional politics and its total-control cousin, the same kind of blurring has been underway in the actual military world -- or so we were just informed by military analyst William Arkin in this weekend`s Washington Post Outlook section. In a piece entitled, Not Just a Last Resort, Arkin begins:

"Early last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret `Interim Global Strike Alert Order` directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea… In the secret world of military planning, global strike has become the term of art to describe a specific preemptive attack. When military officials refer to global strike, they stress its conventional elements. Surprisingly, however, global strike also includes a nuclear option, which runs counter to traditional U.S. notions about the defensive role of nuclear weapons."

In other words, in both the political and military arenas, the Bush administration is working hard to blur the line between the conventional and the nuclear, so that in each the "nuclear option" can be wielded not just in some imagined future, but in the immediate moment for immediate ends. On the eve of the nuclear-option moment, we have every reason to consider the nature of the metaphor itself, as Ira Chernus does in the piece that follows.
Tom

If You Can`t Beat `Em, Nuke `Em
Wielding the Nuclear Option
By Ira Chernus

Trent Lott and George Lakoff live in very different worlds. But they both understand the power of a good metaphor.

Lott, the canny politician, knows that the public likes complicated policies best when they are reduced to snappy soundbites. The more complex and controversial the policy, the more compelling the word picture has to be. So when the Republicans set out to foist a complex, controversial policy on the American people -- getting Senate confirmation for every federal judge George W. Bush nominates by denying the Democrats the right to filibuster -- Lott came up with snappiest, most vivid soundbite he could find: "the nuclear option."

In recent weeks, Republicans have tried to quash that metaphor. They now realize it`s an embarrassing mistake that does their cause more harm than good. But it`s too late.

As Lakoff has taught us, every metaphor has a life of its own. A good metaphor is not just a random, meaningless turn of phrase. It`s a lens that can show us deeper truths. Once people see the truth, they won`t let the metaphor that revealed it go away. Though Republican PR firms are now spending millions to get us to dub the attack on the filibuster "the constitutional option," their money is wasted. Everyone will still call it "the nuclear option."

And with good reason. No other term captures so perfectly the magnitude of the destruction GOP senators plan to wreak on our governmental system of checks and balances. For two centuries, the right to filibuster has protected the minority from majority efforts to run roughshod over the Senate. If the Republicans get their way, the majority would, for the first time, be able to stop debate and force a vote as soon as they know they have enough votes to win. The minority would lose their only real bargaining chip for forcing compromise.

Trent Lott knew how much was at stake when he named it "the nuclear option." The public knows how much is at stake, too. That`s one reason the metaphor won`t go away.

But there is another. Metaphors show us new truths by bringing pieces of our experience together in unexpected ways, provoking or uncovering previously unsuspected connections. In this case, it`s no coincidence when we hear Republicans talking about a "nuclear option." The literal nuclear option that the Pentagon still keeps at the ready and the metaphorical one being prepared in the Senate have a lot more in common than just words.

Are Judges a More Serious Threat than Al Qaeda?

The people who want to nuke their political opponents are the same ones who gave us Ronald Reagan`s huge nuclear buildup, two decades of massive funding for a Star Wars anti-missile shield, two wars in Iraq, and so many other excesses of militarism. On America`s political right wing, politics and life itself are acts of war. It`s go-for-the-jugular, take-no-prisoners, winner-take-all. Nuclear weapons have always been a consummate symbol of the conservatives` insistence on absolute victory and absolute control.

Of course, the name of the enemy changes from time to time. For most of the nuclear age, it was the "international communist conspiracy." Though the nuclear option was created on the Democrats` watch in the post-Hiroshima world of the 1940s, it was conservative icons like General Douglas MacArthur and Strategic Air Command head Curtis LeMay who were most eager to reach for it. Even the "moderate" Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower secretly claimed that he would use atomic bombs to end the Korean War if the communists didn`t settle on his terms. Yet Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers focused more on "reds" in Washington and Hollywood than in Moscow and Beijing.

A half-century later, the world seen from the far right looks much the same. For many, "the terrorists" have replaced "the communists" as the great global peril. Yet for a sizeable faction of social and religious conservatives, the real danger lurks not in far-away terrorist camps, but right here at home -- in our courtrooms. "Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists," the Rev. Pat Robertson said recently. With all their well-known decisions supporting "secular humanism" over traditional religious values, he claimed, judges "are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together." Even moderately conservative judges can look like part of a vast conspiracy to undermine all the "family values," which seem (though this is surely illusion) to give life stability.

For Robertson and his followers, we`re in a crisis of apocalyptic proportions. According to Christian right guru Donald Wildmon, for instance, if the Senate does not abolish the filibuster, judges will go on "forcing their liberal agenda on every American." Then "we can forget democracy." It`s "a critical moment in the history of our nation," warned Focus on the Family`s James Dobson -- which makes a weapon of apocalyptic magnitude an appropriate way to go, metaphorically speaking.

Rick Scarborough, chair of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, summed up the social conservatives` attack on the filibuster this way: ``It`s about a temporal versus eternal value system." Not surprisingly, such right-wingers want the law interpreted solely in light of their own eternal value system. And they`re perfectly ready to use any means necessary -- even "the nuclear option -- to make it so. Precisely because absolute values are at stake, they have no hesitation about invoking the absolute weapon. They are in no mood to compromise, any more than they would compromise with communists or with the devil. People who disagree with them are not merely wrong, they are evil; and the only way they can imagine dealing with evil is to annihilate it, to nuke it.

Of course, they feel pretty much the same about "terrorists," even though they give judges a somewhat higher targeting priority. The war on terror and the war on secular humanism are, for them, merely two different fronts in an even larger war in which the enemy is any kind of social change that challenges the absolute rule of their traditional moral certainties.

The Neoconservative Option

In war, you take your allies where you can find them. In the current Republican coalition of the willing, the predominantly Protestant Christian right shares a political bed with the Roman Catholic right and a small but powerful group of Republicans, many of whom have deep Jewish roots: the neoconservatives.

Neocons share with the religious right a fear of changing social values. With today`s neocons so focused on global affairs, it`s easy to forget that their movement began as a reaction against the radical domestic trends of the 1960s. It embraced anticommunism (and the literal nuclear option) largely as a way to move the U.S. back toward traditional values on the home front.

"Everything is now permitted," the neocons` godfather, Irving Kristol, once lamented. "The inference is that one has a right to satisfy one`s appetites without delay." And that, he warned, was "a prescription for moral anarchy, which is exactly what we are now experiencing." Robertson, Dobson, and Wildmon could hardly have said it more clearly, or agreed more heartily on the nature of America`s most essential problem.

They would agree just as heartily with the neocons on another point -- that the solution is moral fortitude. What the country needs is a will strong enough to resist the temptation of temporal values and ready to make the necessary sacrifices to live by the eternal verities. In the right-wing world, where absolute good vies constantly with absolute evil and every human will is part of the battlefield, only a total subjugation of evil can create an orderly, virtuous life. That, in turn, requires us to follow the moral dictates of a higher authority, rather than our own personal desires. This is what Lakoff has taught us to call the Stern Father model. It`s the Stern Father who threatens to unleash the nuclear option.

But how can Americans summon up the strength to live by the moral absolutes of our stern fathers? That`s where the partners in the GOP coalition part ways. For the religious right, such strength can come only from the Bible and (most would say) a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. For the neocons, faith is optional. They generally applaud religion as one rich source of traditional moral authority, but they don`t consider it the only one. Tradition (as long as it`s the tradition of "western civilization") can serve just as well. "Our Father, who art in heaven," is sufficient, but not necessary.

However, the neocons still need a stern father. Since they can`t insist that we find him in heaven, they would have us look for him in the city where the literal nuclear option has its home: Washington, DC -- or, to be exact, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as well as across the Potomac at the Pentagon. That makes the neocons even more demanding, if possible, than the Christian right. They`re not content to insist on absolute righteousness in American social behavior. They want absolute American control over the whole world. That`s the only way they can imagine making the planet strong enough to resist the uncertainties of changing temporal values (and changing political rulers).

In the name of their fantasy version of moral stability, the neocons brandish the nuclear option on the international stage, just as they did in the era of Ronald Reagan. They consider nukes the ultimate weapon of intimidation, and they know that intimidation won`t work if you aren`t perfectly willing to carry out your threats. The obliteration of (evil) people is their chosen metaphor for the obliteration of moral evil. It`s how a neocon shows that he (or, very occasionally, she) is strong.

The Coalition of the Frightened

The "nuclear option," then, is the perfect metaphor for a GOP dominated by a coalition of the religious right and the neocons, urged on by and funded by the military-industrial complex. The same Senate Republicans who would pander to the religious right by nuking the filibuster also want to rebuild and expand the nation`s arsenal of nuclear weapons, gear up for a new round of nuclear testing, and free the U.S. from all restrictions on nuclear armament. The "nuclear option" metaphor makes the connections easy to see.

It`s just as easy to see why the Bush administration has been so eager to send John Bolton to the U.N. Bolton is an ardent advocate of arms control -- for other nations. He wants to control, or preferably just stop, the development of nukes in other lands, so that the U.S. can more easily use its nuclear preeminence to control the world. The administration hoped to have Bolton in place at the U.N. in time for the conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that opened in New York at the beginning of May. Though it hasn`t worked out that way, the U.S. delegation is still doing everything it can to impose restrictions on others, while removing the Treaty`s faint hint of a restriction on the U.S. nuclear option.

Although it`s only coincidence that the "nuclear option" showdown in the Senate is coming in the same month as the NPT review, there`s poetic justice in it. It throws a bright spotlight on the links between Republican domestic and foreign policies. The GOP is caught in a fateful web woven from the religious, neocon, and military-corporate right. That web gets its tensile strength from its millions of supporters, who yearn for absolute certainties in an age when they no longer seem possible.

We can go on forever bemoaning the power of these millions and debating whether it is on the rise or the wane. Eventually, though, we have to confront the deep fear that drives them to embrace the nuclear option. They are genuinely frightened by a world that feels like its spinning out of control. Unable to cope with dizzying changes they can`t fully grasp, but which leave so many feeling cheated of a better life, they simply want to annihilate the forces of change. It`s fear of an unpredictable, uncontrollable future that breeds the violence. If you can`t beat `em, they say, then nuke `em.

The fear won`t go away any time soon; nor will the people who express it through all sorts of apocalyptic metaphors, including "the nuclear option." Somehow, those of us who believe in choosing our own moral values have to learn to talk to and live with our compatriots who need universal, absolute values in order to survive. Figuring out that "somehow" may be the great American challenge of the 21st century.

Meanwhile, though, we do have to remove the nuclear option, in all its forms, from those frightened right-wing hands.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, and is currently working on Monsters to Destroy, a book about religion and the war on terror in the Bush administration. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Copyright 2005 Ira Chernus

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May 19, 2005

THE ROVING EYE
`We are a banana republic`
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE19Dj01.html

BANGKOK - With a playful smile, Paul Krugman says China will inevitably become the world`s No 1 economy, depending on the criteria one applies, "by 2020 to 2040". You can`t be too careful when it`s early evening, but the internal clock says it`s early morning US East Coast time, you crave for breakfast, but soon have to address a US$250-a-plate dinner. Krugman adds - to the despair of many a neo-con - that a multipolar world is also inevitable, the poles being the US, the European Union, China and India (not Russia). But China has to watch out for environmental constraints and address its pressing water problem ("they say that the Yellow River never reaches the sea".)

Professor Paul Krugman, currently enjoying the status of being the Mick Jagger of political/economic punditry, is in Bangkok to address a seminar on how Thailand should position itself in the global economy - although he`s also careful to point out he`s no Thailand specialist; he does not even know exactly what "Thaksonomics" means - a reference to Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra`s policies. He says Thailand has not experienced a "searing recovery like Malaysia or even Argentina" and "has not returned to the growth rate of 1996, before the Asian crisis". But "it could be a lot worse". Thaksin would take that as an endorsement.

Krugman, a laid-back, affable personality, forgets about his jet lag when he starts talking to Asia Times Online about the US and the global economy. The facts are known to all: half-a-trillion-dollar deficits, the endless quagmire in Iraq, the weak dollar, loss of industrial competitiveness. If he were Obi wan-Kenobi in this particular galaxy, what would he do to extricate the US from this mess? "No more budget deficits," he says. "We should be running surpluses." Tax increases: "We should be getting 28% of GDP [gross domestic product] in revenue. We are only collecting 17%." And most of all, clean up the foreign-policy mess. Not much of a chance though. "We are a banana republic. For the moment, all of these things are politically impossible."

Krugman sees three reasons forcing the US to leave Iraq: domestic pressure; military problems, caused by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld`s insistence on invading Iraq with a small army; and the fact that the Shi`ites (not the Sunnis) may become more of a problem. "We do not control Iraq, by all means. It`s under the control of militias." He notes that many in America, like the financial elite in Wall Street, for instance, don`t even want to talk about it anymore, pretending the quagmire will vanish by itself.

Unlike scores of independent analysts, Krugman does not think much of a possible switch from petrodollars to petroeuros - already contemplated by Russia and some Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries members: "It`s an overrated issue." He says the US gets only $20 billion out of all those $100 bills floating around the world. "The US is already losing position anyway. The Russian mafia is now using euros. This is not a big deal." He sees a shift toward diversifying reserves as inevitable both in Japan and emerging Asia. And for him, the dollar is not weak enough: "It should go down more, for instance, against the yen." He does not realistically expect a major devaluation of the Chinese yuan - maximum 5%. Krugman admits it`s hard to predict what happens next: "It needs a trigger. But I`m convinced it`s the collapse of the housing market in the US that will trigger the dollar`s decline."

Krugman has never personally met Pascal Lamy - the new director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) - but says he has only heard good things about the former European trade commissioner, whose job until recently was to vigorously defend European farm subsidies, to the chagrin of the developing world. "I don`t blame him for doing his job. I think he`ll be serious at the helm of the WTO. The big players - the US, the EU - respect him. The decisions to be made are politically difficult. But whenever the US applies pressure, something happens." He does not think that the Doha round has failed. "At the end, they will come up with something."

Krugman may be a relatively reluctant warrior in his position as one of the most influential pundits on the planet - courtesy of his widely reprinted New York Times columns. "My life would be much calmer now." But he wouldn`t have been able to live with himself if he hadn`t taken the job. He`s still amazed by the level of vitriol in current American political discourse - "and I`m not talking only about the left, you should see what comes from the right and the extreme right".

Krugman recently relocated to Princeton, New Jersey. He`s a lover of Thai food - something that prompts him to say, "people usually think that globalization means Americanization. But look at Thai food, sushi, Hong Kong movies". Unlike Boston - where he used to live - and New York, "it`s not easy to find a Thai restaurant in the middle of New Jersey". In the interests of globalization, some gentle souls in the "banana republic" might as well supply the professor with a proper Thai meal once in a while.

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

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Der britische MP Galloway, gerade wieder frisch gewählt, ist wegen den Schiebereien mit Erdöl während der Zeit Saddams vor den US-Senat-Aussschuß geladen worden.
Hier seine Rede vor dem Ausschuß mit den Angriffen auf dessen Vorsitzenden Senator Coleman.
Diese Rede sorgte für einige Aufregung. Ich habe auch schon in #28535, #28515, #28500, #28496 Artikel zu dem Thema eingestellt.
Auf der Homepage von der US-Ursprungsseite ist eine angeregte Diskussion über diese Rede im Gange.

Transcript: George Galloway`s speech before Senator Coleman`s committee
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=21159&mode=nest…
Posted on Wednesday, May 18 @ 09:16:01 EDT
By George Galloway

Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. And neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.



Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let`s be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had `many meetings` with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am `the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil`.

Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that`s been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

There were 270 names on that list originally. That`s somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I`ve never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he`s your prisoner, I believe he`s in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

I`m not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where`s the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I`ll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don`t know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

Whilst I`m on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don`t you think I have a right to know? Don`t you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph`s documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph`s documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

And yet you`ve allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you`re such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there`s nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It`s a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life`s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq`s wealth.

Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq`s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq`s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

Have a look at the oil that you didn`t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government.

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DARWIN
WAS WRONG
http://makethemaccountable.com/podvin/more/050517_DarwinWasW…
By David Podvin

Chimpanzees do not select the least intelligent and most hapless of the group to be their leader. They do not passively tolerate his ruining their standard of living and their environment. They do not mindlessly follow him off on a bloody crusade just because he spins fanciful yarns about bananas of mass destruction. Chimps are too smart to fall for such transparent nonsense.
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When a gorilla goes around ignorantly grabbing the breasts of the lady gorillas, he does not subsequently win a special election to become Top Regional Ape, especially when none of the rest can understand what the hell he is trying to say. A gorilla who treats females with contempt incurs the wrath of the community and gets bitten and hit prior to being launched headfirst into a pile of hippo poop, which is exactly as it should be.

Consider the reaction of orangutans when one of them does not notice for several weeks that her mother is dead yet shamelessly condemns the family values of all the orangutans who are single moms. Why, they hoot derisively while displaying naked photographs of her that they have downloaded from the Internet.

And every time an insufferably pompous baboon acts holier-than-thou only to have it discovered that he pays $1200 an hour to be spanked by a whore, the other baboons take his poorly written “Book of Virtues” and cram it up his ass.

Contrast the wise reactions of these primates with the behavior of the Texas Republican Party, which (at least theoretically) is populated by human beings. Lone Star conservatives have called for abolishing the separation between church and state in favor of having a Christian society. They have taken this position because as every person of faith is aware only bible-based parenting can provide the peace of mind that comes with knowing one’s drunken daughter is groveling on all fours while doing “Da Butt Dance”.

The Texas Republicans want to criminalize gay sex, a prohibition that if strictly enforced will make the next National Rifle Association Convention look like a ghost town. They also insist that the law must preclude any child from being left alone with a homosexual. This demand has been interpreted by knowledgeable observers as being a gratuitous slap at Ralph Reed.

The Texas Republicans want to outlaw abortion, and that goes double when the life of the mother is at risk.

The Texas Republicans want to repeal the income tax and replace it with… no federal tax. This change in the code could cause the budget deficit to rise ever so slightly, although the Laffer Curve indicates exactly the opposite.

The Texas Republicans want to eliminate the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the position of Surgeon General; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Energy, Education, Commerce, and Labor, among others. In their places, the right wing Texans propose totally unrestricted access to alcohol and tobacco, automatic weapons for everybody (finally!), the honor system for pharmaceutical and energy conglomerates, low cost housing in the form of discarded refrigerator containers, universal access to faith healers, increased social acceptance of illiteracy, and laissez faire corporate plunder. In other words, the Bush agenda.

The Texas Republicans want to eliminate Social Security. Senior citizens who lack sufficient resources to survive would be provided with a warm hug and a discount coupon from the mortuary of their choice.

The Texas Republicans want to abolish minimum wage laws that inhibit prosperity as they strive to copy the much-ballyhooed “Bangladeshi Economic Miracle”.

The Texas Republicans want to confiscate the Panama Canal and rename it the American Canal. If all goes according to plan, this policy of eminent domain will ultimately expand to include the scenic American Channel and the picturesque American Riviera, not to mention the ancient Great Wall of America.

The Texas Republicans want the United States out of the United Nations and the United Nations out of the United States. How? Well, we got this problem with foreigners, see, and we got sixty-five thousand nuclear warheads just sittin’ around gatherin’ dust…

The Texas Republicans want public schools to teach Creation Science, which for the uninitiated is the academically verified theory that mindlessly parroting superstitious bullshit is the highest form of human intellectual endeavor.

It is hard for liberals to admit mistakes, and never more so than when the admission involves apologizing to religious conservatives. Yet honesty dictates that such an acknowledgement must be made, however belatedly.

Charles Darwin was wrong.

Any theory that contends Texas Republicans evolved from monkeys is implausible, blasphemous, and just plain stupid.

Clearly, it was the other way around.

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"Newsweek had to retract a report about the Koran. The article caused violent anti-U.S. rioting in Muslim countries. And that`s too bad because up until now they really loved us." --Conan O`Brien

Honor the Koran: Flush Bush --Grant Gerver, Shot Off The Press

"With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it`s appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?" – Terry Moran of ABC to Scott McClellan

“The White House said today that the Newsweek report has ‘damaged the US image overseas.’ Believe me, when it comes to damaging the US image overseas, the White House knows what it`s talking about.” -- Jay Leno

Just as the OxyContin kicked in…
LIMBAUGH: They do not understand the threat to Western civilization -- not just America, Western civilization -- posed by militant Islamists, because to Newsweek to Time to ABC to CBS to NBC to The New York Times to The Washington Post, the real threat to America is Christianity. Now, if that doesn`t help you put that in perspective, nothing will. That`s who they think threatens this country. That`s the religion that they really fear -- is Christianity.

“According to a USA Today poll, 90% of people say prayer works very well for them in curing pain. Which is also the Republican health care plan. Keep prayin’!” -- Jay Leno

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Wednesday, May 18, 2005

War News for Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Matt hat wieder zugeschlagen, mehr auf der Seite:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi Interior Ministry Brig. Gen. shot to death and his wife and driver injured in Baghdad attack. Two Iraqis killed and eight wounded, including seven children, in mortar attacks in Mosul. Baquba car bombing aimed at a police convoy injured 14, including 12 police officers. Seven Iraqis injured in a Baghdad bombing aimed at an American convoy. Iraqi Transport Ministry driver shot dead in Sadr City.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi intelligence official and his wife killed and their three children injured in an ambush south of Baghdad. Bodies of three Iraqi civilians believed to have been working as contractors for the US military found in Dujail. Footage released of the execution of two more Iraqi contractors kidnapped from Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Bodies of seven men, blindfolded and shot in the head, found in Amiriyah.

Bring ‘em on: Twenty people killed in clashes between militants and US forces backed by attack helicopters in a neighborhood in Mosul. Former Baath Party member and his three sons abducted and killed in Tunis, a village south of Baghdad.

Progress Report

Quality of life: In the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the country still struggles with high unemployment, inconsistent utility services and widespread poverty, a joint survey from the Iraqi government and United Nations indicates.

Released Thursday, the report from Iraq`s Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation and the U.N. Development Program in Iraq surveyed nearly 22,000 households in the country`s 18 provinces during 2004.

The survey estimated that the minimum number of war-related deaths ranges from 18,000 to 29,000 and is probably higher.

The report said the survey didn`t attempt to count entire families who died and therefore underestimates the total number of people killed.

Children under 18 accounted for 12 percent of the deaths, the report said, while the information on infant mortality and malnutrition shows that "the suffering of children due to war and conflict in Iraq is not limited to those directly wounded or killed by military activities."

Children also are affected by widespread malnutrition. About 43 percent of boys and girls between the ages of 6 months and 5 years suffer from some form of the condition -- chronic, general or acute malnutrition.

Iraq`s unemployment rate was 10.5 percent of a population of 27 million people, the report found. When the figure of workers who had given up looking for a job -- discouraged workers -- was included, the unemployment number increased to 18.4 percent.

According to the survey, 98 percent of Iraqi households are connected to the national electricity grid, but only 15 percent find the supply stable.

As for water availability, the figures were 78 percent (had water) and 66 percent (had problems).

More than a fourth of Iraqis surveyed described themselves as being poor and 96 percent said they receive monthly food rations under the public food system set up through the oil-for-food program.

The median income in Iraq was equivalent to about $255 (366,000 dinars) in 2003 and decreased in the first half of 2004 to about $144 (207,000 dinars).

Medical care: Doctors in Iraq are to be equipped with not only stethoscopes and thermometers but also an automatic rifle under a government directive aimed at halting violent attacks from criminals masquerading as patients.

Instructions from the health ministry encourage GPs and hospital doctors to carry a weapon for their protection alongside more traditional medical tools in what is the latest illustration of the breakdown of law and order in the country. The ministry has also authorised the setting up of its own militia to protect 40 hospitals and medical centres in Baghdad.

In future patients seeking treatment at these sites will first be required to persuade a unit of armed guards - sporting AK-47s and distinct uniforms - that they are genuinely unwell.

As often in Iraq the official authorisation, which follows the murder of at least 25 doctors and the kidnapping of a further 300 in the last two years, has belatedly followed the real situation on the ground where many medics had already taken measures to ensure their safety. Private surgeries in Baghdad already resemble mini-fortresses with iron railings on the windows and reinforced steel doors. A Kalashnikov is an increasingly common sight in a doctor’s treatment room.

Religious freedom: In a gesture calculated to ease tensions with Iraq`s dispossessed Sunni Arab minority, the new Shiite majority government announced Monday that it had ordered the army to stop raiding mosques, arresting clerics and "terrifying worshipers."

The American military command had no immediate comment on the order, which seemed likely to have a significant effect on operations in Sunni Arab areas that had been insurgent strongholds. American policy has been to attack mosques and religious schools only when they are used as firing positions, as occurred frequently, according to American commanders, during the offensive that recaptured Falluja in November.

But Iraqi troops operating under American command have raided scores of mosques in the past 18 months, arresting dozens of clerics and often carrying away large hauls of weapons and ammunition, including bomb-making equipment and antitank rockets. During two uprisings last year led by Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric with a mass following, raids were conducted against Shiite mosques, too, but the main targets have been Sunni.
# posted by matt : 11:02 AM
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Latest Fatality: May 17, 2005
May.05: 40

Iraker: Civilian: 401 Police/Mil: 176 Total: 577
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

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Mr. Galloway (he begins a couple of minutes after two hours) ca. 16 min nach Beginn des Videos.
rtsp://video.webcastcenter.com/srs_g2/govtaff051705.rm?start…

Posted 05/17/2005 @ 11:48pm

Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=2544

Norm Coleman is a fool.

Not an ideological nut case, not a partisan whack, not even a useful idiot -- just a plain old-fashioned, drool-on-his-tie fool.

The Minnesota Republican senator who took Paul Wellstone`s seat after one of the most disreputable campaigns in American political history has been trying over the past year to make a name for himself by blowing the controversy surrounding the United Nations Oil-for-Food program into something more than the chronicle of corporate abuse that it is. The US media, which thrives on official sound bites, was more than willing to lend credence to Coleman`s overblown claims about wrongdoing in the UN program set up in 1996 to permit Iraq -- which was then under strict international sanctions -- to buy food, medicine and humanitarian supplies with the revenues from regulated oil sales. Even as Coleman`s claims became more and more fantastic, he faced few challenges from the cowering Democrats in Congress.

But when Coleman started slandering foreign politicians, he exposed the dramatic vulnerability of his claims that the supposed scandal was much more than a blatant example of US corporations taking advantage of their powerful connections in Washington to undermine official US policy, harm the national interest and profit off the suffering of the poor.

The Senate investigation that Coleman sought regarding the Oil for Food program has already revealed that the Bush Administration failed to crack down on widespread abuse of the Oil for Food program by US energy companies, and that US oil purchases accounted for the majority of the kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein`s regime in return for sales of inexpensive oil. Indeed, the report concludes, "The United States (government) was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions. On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales."

Instead of forcing the President, his aides and the executives of Bayoil, the Texas oil company that the report shows paid "at least $37 million in illegal surcharges to the Hussein regime" -- money that helped the Iraqi dictator solidify his grip on power -- Coleman started to make wild charges about European officials such as British parliamentarian George Galloway.

The problem for Coleman is that Galloway is not a standard-issue American politician -- the kind who has nothing to say and says it poorly. He is a veteran of the rough-and-tumble politics of Glasgow and the equally rough-and-tumble politics of the British Parliament. In other words, Galloway comes from places where voters and politicians do not suffer fools. And anyone who has ever followed British politics knows that George Galloway has beaten every political challenge he has faced -- even those posed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Galloway called Coleman`s bluff and flew to Washington for a remarkable appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. "I am determined now that I am here, to be not the accused but the accuser," Galloway announced as he stood outside the Capitol Tuesday. "These people are involved in the mother of all smokescreens."

The member of Parliament tore through Coleman`s flimsy "evidence," issuing an unequivocal denial that began, "Mr. Chairman, I am not now, nor have I ever been an oil trader, and neither has anyone been on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." He accused Coleman of being "remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice" and pointed out error after error in the report the senator had brandished against him.

For instance, Galloway noted that he had met Saddam twice -- not the "many" times alleged by the report. "As a matter of fact I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times that [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld met him," said the recently re-elected British parliamentarian. "The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns."

For good measure, Galloway used the forum Coleman had foolishly provided to deliver a blistering condemnation of Coleman`s war.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life`s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies," Galloway informed the fool on Capitol Hill.

"I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

"If the world had listened to [UN Secretary General] Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to [French] President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the antiwar movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq`s wealth," argued Galloway.

Then the Brit turned the tables on Coleman and steered the committee`s attention toward "the real Oil for Food scandal."

"Have a look at the fourteen months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first fourteen months when $8.8 billion of Iraq`s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq`s money but the money of the American taxpayer," Galloway said.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn`t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where. Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it. Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

(John Nichols`s new book, Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), was published January 30.

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Levy, author of the book Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, also reminded Washington Pakistan produced al-Qaeda terrorists when it wanted to cadge F-16s from the US, and the fighter planes were also on the top of the list of demands made by Pearl`s kidnappers.

US nets the sixth al-Qaeda No 3
Chidanand Rajghatta
http://astrospeak.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1110441,cu…

[TIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
WASHINGTON: The United States has netted another al-Qaeda No.3, the sixth No.3 to be downed dead or alive in its war on terrorism.

The latest "senior" al-Qaeda operative to fall in the U S cross hairs is Haitham al-Yemeni, who was killed by a CIA Predator plane on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border last week, according to American TV networks, quoting unnamed US officials.

The officials said Al-Yemeni has been tracked for some time in the hope that he would lead them to Osama bin Laden but the drone took him out amid doubts that he may go disappear after the capture last week of the previous No.3, Al Faraj Al Libbi.

Although, no one officially described Al-Yemeni as a No.3, the joke in media circles here is that will be the nomenclature for any al-Qaeda suspect besides Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri, the one-two who have evaded capture for more than three years.

Previous al-Qaeda No.3s who have been captured or killed include, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohammed Atef, Ramzi bin Al-Shibh, and Abu Zubaida. There has been no sign of the al-Qaeda No 1 or 2, or, for that matter, an al-Qaeda No.4 or 5.

Skeptics are also wondering now that Washington has felled Al Libbi and Al Yemeni when it will lower the boom on Al Pakistani, a thinly veiled reference to the Bush administration`s frontman, General Pervez Musharraf, who they say is playing a double-game.

Amid a raging controversy over a cartoon ridiculing Pakistan ...
as an obedient dog how, some analysts are suggesting that Pakistan is using captive al-Qaeda operatives as a bargaining chip.

"It is as if the Pakistani powers-that-be have had, ever since al-Qaeda`s retreat from Afghanistan and their withdrawal into Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, a precise idea of where al-Qaeda could be found. It is as if Pakistan`s formidable intelligence service, the ISI, had not only localised but kept these public enemies of the US under observation, handy for periodic cullin," the French commentator Bernard Henri-Levy wrote in an article that was reprinted from the French in LA Times this weekend.

Levy, author of the book Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, also reminded Washington Pakistan produced al-Qaeda terrorists when it wanted to cadge F-16s from the US, and the fighter planes were also on the top of the list of demands made by Pearl`s kidnappers.

B.Raman, a former Indian intelligence official-turned-commentator, made an even more direct allusion to Pakistan`s patronage of al-Qaeda by writing an open letter in the Asia Times addressed to Osama bin Laden care/of General Pervez Musharraf.

Many American analysts have also questioned the Bush administration`s patronage of Pakistan`s military regime -- saying it is the problem, not the solution to terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

In a recent article titled "It`s Pakistan, Stupid," that is circulating on the Internet and various blogs, the author Paul Sperry reveals that US Homeland Security and border officials are under special instruction to increase scrutiny of Pakistani visitors to the US because they believe some young men have been trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan to carry out attacks in the US.

Pakistanis dismiss commentators such as Bernard-Levi and Sperry as Islamophones and point to repeated testimonials from the Bush administration of its heroic role in the war on terrorism.

Certainly, there is no sign that the US is anywhere close to leaning on Pakistan for its patronage of extremism or its nuclear proliferation, both of which Islamabad claims to have abjured. In fact, with the growing crescendo over reports about the desecration of the Koran by US interrogators, Washington is set to become even more deferential to its faithful ally, which analysts such as Levy and Raman suggest is milking the US for all it is worth.

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Der Antiamerikanismus ist so verfestigt in der islamischen welt, dass da auch kein heruntergespülter Koran was ändert.
Jedes andere US-Fehlverhalten kann dir gleichen Wirkungen haben.

A New Beginning: Strategies for a More Fruitful Dialogue with the Muslim World
Craig Charney

Nicole Yakatan

Council on Foreign Relations, May 16, 2005


http://www.cfr.org/pdf/Anti-American_CSR.pdf

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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

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Das müssen unsere furchtbaren Zwillinge Beckstein und Schily auch sofort haben. Abwarten wer zuerst eine Verschärfung von irgendwas fordert.

May 19, 2005
Plan Would Broaden F.B.I.`s Terror Role
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/politics/19terror.html

WASHINGTON, May 18 - The Bush administration and Senate Republican leaders are pushing a plan that would significantly expand the F.B.I.`s power to demand business records in terror investigations without obtaining approval from a judge, officials said on Wednesday.

The proposal, which is likely to be considered next week in a closed session of the Senate intelligence committee, would allow federal investigators to subpoena records from businesses and other institutions without a judge`s sign-off if they declared that the material was needed as part of a foreign intelligence investigation.

The proposal, part of a broader plan to extend antiterrorism powers under the law known as the USA Patriot Act, was concluded in recent days by Republican leaders on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in consultation with the Bush administration, Congressional officials said.

Administration and Congressional officials who support the idea said the proposal would give the F.B.I. a much-needed tool to track leads in terrorism and espionage investigations that would be quicker and less cumbersome than existing methods. They pointed out that the administrative subpoena power being sought for the F.B.I. in terror cases was already in use in more than 300 other types of crimes, including health care fraud, child exploitation, racketeering and drug trafficking.

"Why not provide that same tool to national security investigators as well?" asked an aide to the intelligence committee who was involved in the proposal, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue will be discussed at a closed meeting scheduled for May 26. "There wasn`t really a whole lot of cogent argument against it."

But word of the proposal on Wednesday generated immediate protests from civil rights advocates, who said that it would give the F.B.I. virtually unchecked authority in terror investigations, and the plan is likely to intensify the growing debate in Congress over the balance between fighting terrorism and protecting privacy rights.

"This is a dramatic expansion of the federal government`s power," said Lisa Graves, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. "It`s really a power grab by the administration for the F.B.I. to secretly demand medical records, tax records, gun purchase records and all sorts of other material if they deem it relevant to an intelligence investigation."

Kevin Madden, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said department officials welcomed the intelligence committee`s efforts "to support provisions that enhance law enforcement`s ability to combat terrorism effectively and are particularly heartened by their support for the USA Patriot Act."

Support for the idea among many Democrats and some Republicans in Congress is uncertain, and the Senate intelligence committee`s plan to push the proposal could set off a struggle with the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee has joint authority for oversight of foreign intelligence surveillance law - which would be expanded under the current proposal - but its members have shown some reluctance to expand the F.B.I.`s counterterrorism powers.

A Judiciary Committee aide said that Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, wanted to study the intelligence committee`s proposal closely to determine if it was warranted. "Being a former prosecutor, he understands what tools are needed for law enforcement, but he also understands that there are serious concerns about ensuring people`s liberties," said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of provoking tensions with the intelligence committee.

With 16 provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of the year, the Bush administration has made the permanent extension of the law one of its top legislation priorities. But critics are seeking to scale back provisions in the law that they say are vulnerable to abuse, and more than 380 governmental bodies, including seven states, have adopted formal resolutions voicing concerns about the broad reach of the law.

One provision of the law that has generated perhaps more criticism than any other is Section 215, derided by critics as the "library records" provision. It allows the F.B.I. to go to a secret intelligence court to demand access to material from businesses and other institutions as part of intelligence investigations.

The Justice Department said in a newly declassified report last month that it had used the power 35 times since late 2003 to gain information on apartment leasing, driver`s licenses, financial records and other data in intelligence investigations. But it stressed that it had not used the authority to date to demand records from libraries or bookstores or to get information related to medical or gun records - all areas of concern to critics.

Democrats and civil liberties advocates said on Wednesday that they were concerned that the F.B.I.`s expanded subpoena power under the intelligence committee`s proposal would render obsolete the limited safeguards under Section 215. While that provision requires the Justice Department to receive the approval of the secret intelligence court before demanding records, the administrative subpoenas under the new proposal would not.

"This all comes down to not wanting an F.B.I. agent to have to go to a prosecutor and then the court to get formal approval for a subpoena," said a Democratic Congressional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the intelligence committee`s proposal is still considered confidential. "This becomes a substitute."

But supporters of the plan said they had built in safeguards.

The F.B.I. could only issue the demands for records with the approval of the director or senior officials down through the rank of a special agent in charge, officials said. In addition, those given subpoenas would not automatically be bound to silence unless the F.B.I. determined that disclosure could threaten national security. The Justice Department would have to report twice a year on its use of the power, and the law would be amended to specify that material must be "relevant" to a foreign intelligence investigation.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Bei Brooks steht unter Berufsbezeichnung: NeoCon.
Das Problem liegt nicht bei Newsweek, sondern bei den Extremisten beider Seiten.

May 19, 2005
Bashing Newsweek
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/opinion/19brooks.html

Maybe it won`t be so bad being cut off from the blogosphere. I look around the Web these days and find that Newsweek`s retracted atrocity story has sent everybody into cloud-cuckoo-land. Every faction up and down the political spectrum has used the magazine`s blunder as a chance to open fire on its favorite targets, turning this into a fevered hunting season for the straw men.

Many of my friends on the right have decided that the Newsweek episode exposes the rotten core of the liberal media. Dennis Prager, who is intelligent 99 percent of the time, writes, "Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths of innocents and for damaging America." Countless conservatives say the folks at Newsweek were quick to believe the atrocity tales because they share the left-wing, post-Vietnam mentality. On his influential blog, Austin Bay writes that the coastal media "presume the worst about the U.S. military - always make that presumption."

Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness. I used to write for Newsweek. I know Mike Isikoff and the editors. And I know about liberals in the media. The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, the left side of the blogosphere has erupted with fury over the possibility that American interrogators might not have flushed a Koran down the toilet. The Nation and leftish Web sites are in a frenzy to prove that the story is probably true even if Newsweek is retracting it.

This, too, is unhinged. Would it be illegal for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven? Could there be a few more liberals willing to admit that prisoners routinely lie about their treatment? (Do we expect them to say their time in captivity wasn`t so bad?)

Then I click my mouse over to the transcripts of administration statements and I can`t believe what I`m seeing. We`re in the middle of an ideological war against people who want to destroy us, and what have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers. They`re attacking Newsweek while bending over backward to show sensitivity to the Afghans who just went on a murderous rampage.

Talk about the bigotry of low expectations.

Maybe we should all focus on what`s important. Newsweek`s little item was seized and exploited by America`s enemies in a way that was characteristically cynical, delusional and fascistic.

The people who seized upon this item, like the radical clerics in Afghanistan, are cynical in the way they manipulate episodes like this to whip up hatred and so magnify their own standing.

At the same time, they believe everything that could be alleged about America - and more. They`ve spent so many years inhabiting a delusional mental landscape filled with conspiracy theories and paranoia that you could drill deep into their minds without ever touching reality.

Finally, they are strategically ruthless. Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, who has spent years reporting on extremists, says they use manufactured spasms of hatred to desensitize their followers. After followers spend a few years living through rabid riots and vicious sermons, killing an American or a Jew or even a fellow Muslim seems no more consequential than killing a mosquito. That`s how suicide bombers are made.

The rioters are the real enemy, not Newsweek and not the American soldiers serving as prison guards. Just to restore some proper perspective, let me quote a snippet from a sermon delivered by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, which ran last weekend on the Palestinian Authority`s official TV station:

"The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world - except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquillity under our rule because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews - even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."

These are the extremists, the real enemy. Let`s keep our eye on the ball.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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[posting]16.653.889 von Joerver am 19.05.05 10:17:43[/posting]Der Antiamerikanismus ist so verfestigt in der islamischen welt, dass da auch kein heruntergespülter Koran was ändert.

Aha. Sieht man sich zuweilen hier im Board um, dann ist Deutschland nach dieser Definition bereits sehr nahe der Mitgliedschaft bei der Arabischen Liga ...

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Abuse Week
Behind Bush`s latest assault on the press.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, May 18, 2005, at 4:27 PM PT
http://slate.msn.com/id/2119055/fr/ifr/nav/ais/

On May 16, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan expressed outrage over Newsweek’s story that a U.S. military report was going to acknowledge that guards at the Guantanamo Bay detention center had tried to put a copy of the Quran down a toilet. "The report had real consequences. People have lost their lives," McClellan said. "Our image abroad has been damaged." The next day, after Newsweek had fully retracted the story, McClellan added that the magazine had a responsibility to "help repair the damage" to our reputation in the Muslim world.

Let`s see. A mistake … lives lost … America`s image abroad damaged. Does any of that sound vaguely familiar? A few instances do spring to mind. Newsweek didn`t have anything to do with them. McClellan`s boss did.

Item: The Bush Administration endorsed poorly sourced and documented reports by Iraqi defectors that Saddam Hussein possessed and was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones. On the basis of this mistake, Bush led the country into a war, which may or may not be justified depending on your point of view but which almost certainly would not have happened otherwise. So far, approximately 1,600 American military personnel, at least [url2,000]http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx[/url] Iraqi police and guardsmen, and upwards of [url20,000]http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/[/url] civilians have died as a direct result. America`s reputation for speaking truthfully and acting in accord with international norms was flushed down the latrine, with very real consequences, including for our effort to contain nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. Unlike the Newsweek story, the administration`s WMD screw-up was not a good-faith error or the result of simple sloppiness and haste. As the recent [urlIntelligence Commission report]http://slate.msn.com/id/2116260/[/url] showed, the findings of the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Energy Department stretched the evidence for Iraqi WMD, which was then misused and oversold by former CIA director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney, among others.

Item: At prisons in Afghanistan, U.S. military personnel employed interrogation techniques that are indistinguishable from torture, including "stress positions," sleep deprivation, intimidation by ferocious dogs, and various forms of humiliation. According to [urlHuman Rights Watch,]http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/12/10/afghan9838.htm[/url] there have been at least six deaths in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, four of which have produced military indictments for murder or manslaughter. In Mother Jones, Slate`s Emily Bazelon [urlwrote]http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/03/03_2005_Bazelon.html[/url] in detail about two of those cases at the Bagram base, where prisoners were evidently beaten or tortured to death. Beyond the prison walls, the open-ended detentions and abuses in Afghanistan served to undermine America`s reputation for fair play, adherence to international standards of legality, and decent treatment of prisoners. These abuses may have contributed as much to the recent anti-American riots in Afghanistan as anything in Newsweek.

Item: American military personnel tortured, sexually humiliated, and apparently caused the [urldeath by torture]http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6988054/[/url] of at least one inmate at Abu Ghraib, managing to make the Iraqi prison even more notorious under our management than it was under Saddam Hussein`s. Mistakes at Abu Ghraib included extensive and offensive sexual humiliation, such as forcing male prisoners to masturbate, parading them around naked in front of women guards, and photographing them in degrading postures. Again, unlike Newsweek`s error, these were in no way "honest" errors at any level. The abuses were the foreseeable consequence, if not the intentional result, of standards and policies promulgated by the Justice Department and the Pentagon, including a ruling that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners held there, and the authorization of specific interrogation techniques. The jihadists who murdered the American civilian Nick Berg said they were doing so in retaliation for Abu Ghraib. The abuses caught on camera there have done incalculable harm to America`s image around the world and handed an enormous propaganda victory to those hostile to the United States.

Item: Here are some things that Scott McClellan does not dispute happening at the Guantanamo detention center: A female interrogator removed some of her clothes and sat in the lap of a detainee who was a devout Muslim; a female interrogator [urlsmeared a detainee`s face with what she told him was menstrual blood]http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/28/60minutes/main691602.shtml[/url] and said the water would be turned off in his cell, so he would be unable to wash; a female interrogator [urlgrabbed a prisoner by his genitals;]http://207.44.245.159/article7427.htm[/url] an interrogator gagged with duct tape a prisoner who wouldn`t stop chanting Quranic verses; commanders requested permission to use water torture on detainees to make them think they were suffocating; interrogators intimidated prisoners with vicious dogs. The scandalous mistreatment at Guantanamo, along with the denial of any legal rights to detainees, has done enormous damage to America`s reputation for respecting human rights and abiding by the rule of law.

None of this is said to excuse a piece of bad journalism by some good journalists. (Disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co., which also owns Newsweek.) But let`s be clear: Newsweek hardly bears sole responsibility for rioting deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which were fomented by anti-American agitators and reflect both a pathological religious fanaticism and anger over many other issues. What`s more, Bush`s flacks are in no position to prosecute this case. When it comes to torturing inmates to death, sexually humiliating prisoners, and otherwise doing our best to outrage the religious sensitivities of devout Muslims, Scott McClellan has nothing to say. But faced with an erroneous charge that an American guard might have insulted a copy of the Quran, he turns livid and demands satisfaction. There`s something of a pot-and-kettle problem here.

But the problem with the Bush administration excoriating Newsweek`s insensitivity to Islam isn`t just hypocrisy. There`s a larger issue of bad faith and an underlying lack of appreciation for the necessary role of a free and independent press. With increasing forcefulness, Bush has tried to undermine the legitimacy of the media, or at least that subculture within it that shows any tendency to challenge him. When the [urlBushies say there ought to be more of a check on the Fourth Estate]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/politics/18koran.html[/url], they aren`t really asking for more care and accuracy on the part of journalists. They`re expressing frustration that they still have to put up with criticism at all.
Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2119055/

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[posting]16.654.651 von PrinzValiumNG am 19.05.05 11:25:20[/posting]Einer neuen Studie zufolge herrscht in islamischen Ländern nicht zuletzt wegen des Irak-Feldzuges ein ausgeprägter Anti-Amerikanismus. Die vom regierungsunabhängigen Rat für Außenpolitik (Council on Foreign Relations) veröffentlichte Studie bezieht sich auf eine Erhebung unter Frauen und Männern mit Hochschulausbildung in drei Staaten: Ägypten, Marokko und Indonesien.

Neben scharfer Kritik an der Irak-Politik der USA äußerten vor allem jüngere Teilnehmer der Umfrage auch Bewunderung für Qaida-Chef Osama Bin Laden. Zudem stellten die Forscher fest, dass viele Muslime die USA und Israel praktisch gleichsetzen. Der Anteil jüdischer Amerikaner an der Gesamtbevölkerung der USA wurde von den Befragten auf bis zu 85 Prozent geschätzt, tatsächlich liegt er bei zwei Prozent.
Aus Spiegel-Online[urlUS-Spezialkorps soll der Welt mehr Demokratie bringen]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,356510,00.html[/url]

Durch diesen Artikel bin ich vorhin auf die Studie des CFR erst aufmerksam geworden.

Ich hoffe, dass in Europa (alt) die USA etwas differenzierter gesehen wird. Ich sehe es selbst so, dass die USA in sich selbst sehr gegensätzlich und deshalb auch so schwer zu begreifen ist. Die gleiche Diskussion wie hier in Europa findet auch in den USA statt nur nicht in den Mainstream-Medien.

Dazu habe ich mich aber schon öfter geäußert.

Ich habe die Studie (noch) nicht gelesen und werde mich dann ggf nicht so holzschnittartig dazu äußern.

CRF ist ein konservatives US-Institut.
Ein Hinweis, ich sehe Postings in meinem Thread manchmal sehr spät, weil ich oftmals erst nach mehreren Artikel aktualisiere.

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Es geht um eine demokratische Tradition der USA. Seit vielen Jahrzenten mußten Richter an den obersten Gerichten mit einer 60% Mehrheit bestätigt werden (Filibuster).
Man wollte damit verhindern, dass zu stark ideologisch geprägte Juristen oberste Richter werden.
Das wurde auch von allen Regierungen akzeptiert.
Nur i.A. stehen die Republikaner unter Druck der christlichen Fundamentalisten und man versucht diese Filibuster-Regelung zu kippen und da diese keinen Verfassungsrang hat, kann man diese Regel mit einfacher Mehrheit kippen.(nuclear Option).
Es geht um Abtreibung, Homa-Ehe, Evolution, Trennung von Kirche und Staat, also um ein anderes Amerika.

washingtonpost.com
Gloves Off As Senators Start Debate On Judges
Fiery Words on Filibusters, But Also Talks on a Deal
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Shailagh Murray and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 19, 2005; A01

The Senate opened a long-awaited debate on whether to ban filibusters of judicial nominees with vividly partisan attacks yesterday, as a small group of moderates worked behind the scenes for a compromise to avert the showdown.

Senators from both parties filled the chamber all day with impassioned speeches about their constitutional duty to give the president "advice and consent" on judicial nominees. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) set the tone with an opening speech that said Democrats want to "kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees." Democrats denounced his remarks.

Even more intense action took place in small groups and closed meetings, as half a dozen GOP centrists, and an equal number of Democrats, tried to close a deal that would defuse the controversy. Aides familiar with the negotiations said they focused on two issues: the fate of seven pending appellate court nominees who were blocked from an up-or-down vote in Bush`s first term and the more difficult issue of agreeing on how Democrats would treat the right to filibuster judicial nominees in coming months, when a Supreme Court vacancy might occur.

The "six and six" proposal, as it is called, would obligate Democratic signatories to forswear backing a filibuster against future judicial nominees except in extraordinary circumstances. In return, the six GOP signers would agree to vote against efforts to ban judicial filibusters, the aides said.

Such an arrangement would effectively end the crisis because Democrats would not have the votes they need to prevent votes on the nominees in question. At the same time, Frist would not have the 51 votes he needs to disallow filibusters of judicial nominations.

It was unclear how the proposed accord would handle the seven pending Bush nominees. Under one scenario, all would receive confirmation votes -- and presumably be seated on various appeals courts -- except Henry W. Saad of Michigan and William G. Myers III of Idaho. Sources said Saad had made too many Democratic enemies, in part by accidentally sending a senator an e-mail that criticized the lawmaker. Myers, aides said, is a lower priority to Republican conservatives determined to secure confirmations for Priscilla Richman Owen of Texas, Janice Rogers Brown of California and William H. Pryor Jr. of Alabama.

Senators participating in the negotiations included Democrats Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and Ken Salazar (Colo.). Republican negotiators included Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), John McCain (Ariz.), Mike DeWine (Ohio), John W. Warner (Va.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). Warner hosted at least one meeting. "It`s 200 years of tradition and precedent -- there are a lot of issues to consider," Snowe told reporters.

The White House is taking the position that it wants no compromise and is insisting on an up-or-down vote on each of its nominees.

Activist groups on the left and right have grown increasingly intent on helping to shape the judiciary in recent years, as rulings on abortion, school prayer and other topics have stirred controversy. Stakes are especially high this year, senators say, as many expect the first Supreme Court vacancy in more than a decade.

The filibuster rarely figured in judicial fights until Bush`s first term, when Democrats used it to keep 10 appellate court nominees from having confirmation votes. Under a filibuster, a determined minority can keep a measure or a nomination from being approved if it can muster 41 votes against. The Republicans want to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees, making it possible to approve judges with 51 votes -- an approach known as the "nuclear option" because of the potential impact on Senate comity.

On the Senate floor yesterday, GOP leaders charged that Democrats have abused the filibuster by using it on several judicial nominations, which they said was not a part of Senate tradition. Democrats responded by saying the filibuster is a hallowed tool that protects minority rights.

"I do not rise for party. I rise for principle," Frist said moments after calling up Owen`s nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. When he spoke of killing nominees, however, Democratic Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) hurried to the floor and admonished Frist to "choose words carefully." He cited the appearance yesterday morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee of U.S. District Judge Joan H. Lefkow, whose husband and mother were recently slain.

Some Republicans are trying to convince Democrats that, even if every pending judge were given an up-or-down vote, it is not a foregone conclusion all seven would be confirmed. "Some of them wouldn`t make it," Graham said. If all Democrats and independent James Jeffords (Vt.) vote against a nominee, six Republicans would have to join them -- or 11 Republicans would have to be absent -- for the nomination to fail in the Senate, where Republicans hold 55 seats.

Other Republican senators simply want to vote on changing the rules on filibustering judicial nominations, because win or lose, the matter would be put to rest. "We need to clear it up," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said. Hatch, along with other conservative GOP senators, does not want to compromise if it means choosing which nominees would be approved and which would be rejected. "I think there will be an uproar on our side if we throw anybody overboard," Hatch said.

In a floor speech, Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) traced the politicization of the confirmation process to 1987, when Democrats took over the Senate and the confirmation rate for Circuit Court nominees fell to 65 percent, from 89 percent earlier in the Reagan administration. President George H.W. Bush`s lower-court nominees took an average of 100 days to confirm, twice the average duration in the Carter administration.

But when Republicans took control of the Senate during the Clinton presidency, "we exacerbated the pattern of delay and blocking nominations," Specter said, by pushing the average duration to 192 days for district court nominees and 262 days for circuit court nominees. Seventy of Clinton`s nominees were blocked through holds or other procedural maneuvers. Then Democrats filibustered 10 of Bush`s nominees, seven of whom have been renominated.

"Against this background of bitter and angry recriminations, with each party serially trumpeting the other party to get even or really to dominate, the Senate now faces dual threats" -- the filibuster and the nuclear option, Specter said. It is a confrontation of "mutually assured destruction," he added.

Staff writers Dan Balz and Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Nuclear Cloud Over The Senate
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By David S. Broder
Post
Thursday, May 19, 2005; A27

The personal stakes in the Senate fight over confirmation of judges could not be higher. President Bush has staked his prestige on a direct challenge to Senate Democrats by renominating for the appeals courts seven judges whose confirmations were blocked in the last Congress by the threat of Democratic filibusters.

The White House has pressed Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to outlaw a repetition of such tactics by lining up 50 votes to sustain a ruling by Vice President Cheney that judicial filibusters are not protected by Senate rules. Were more than five of the 55 Republican senators to desert the president on that issue, it would be a heavy blow to his influence.

Frist, who has made the issue his personal cause, also has much riding on the outcome -- including his claim on support from staunch conservatives when, as expected, he seeks the presidential nomination in three years.

And Minority Leader Harry Reid also has high stakes. In his first months as leader, the Nevadan has compiled a spotty record of verbal gaffes and parliamentary gambles. But if he is able to turn back Bush and Frist on this giant issue, his stature among his fellow Democrats will be vastly enhanced.

But dwarfing all these individual dramas is the question of what the vote means for the Senate as an institution. Two of the main props of the Senate`s identity are at stake. The tradition of unlimited debate, going back to the Senate`s earliest years, has been maintained through the centuries, with the only ceiling being the one set by its cloture rule -- the ability of a supermajority (now 60 votes) to bring debate to a close.

The second prop is the continuity of Senate rules, which carry over automatically from one Congress to the next, unless changed by the prescribed procedure -- which requires 67 votes.

For traditionalists, the Frist effort -- the "nuclear option" -- is an assault on both of these institutional props. That explains why some Republicans with long memories and years of service, such as Indiana`s Richard Lugar, a 28-year veteran, have expressed deep misgivings about the prospect of the nuclear option.

However, they are part of a distinct minority on the Republican side. Only 20 of the 55 GOP senators began their service before the Republicans secured a majority in January 1995. Except for the 18-month hiatus in 2001-02, when a party switch by Vermont`s Jim Jeffords allowed Democrat Tom Daschle to become the majority leader, the other 35 Republicans have never experienced the frustrations of minority status. Nor do they know how important Senate rules have been in protecting the rights of individual senators.

Many of the newer Republican senators moved from the House of Representatives, where there are no permanent rules and where the majority party needs to give minimal consideration to the views of the minority.

That is why you find a sharp generational split among Senate Republicans on the nuclear option. John McCain, class of 1987, and Trent Lott, class of 1989, have been at the center of negotiations with Democrats about a possible compromise. Lugar, who is enough of a party loyalist that in the end he may well vote with Frist, nonetheless has said that he is "opposed to trying to eliminate filibusters, simply because I think they protect minority rights, whether they`re Republicans, Democrats or other people."

In the end, the outcome may rest in the hands of veterans such as Arlen Specter, class of 1981, and John Warner, class of 1979, who have both been trying desperately to avert the showdown.

Not all the "old bulls" agree. Although their Democratic predecessors often filibustered civil rights bills, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran and Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby both told me they are comfortable ending that tactic when it comes to judgeships.

But I was struck by the comment of Utah`s Robert Bennett, class of 1993, a second-generation senator who learned his love of the institution at his father`s knee. Bennett puts much of the blame for the current crisis on the Democrats, for blocking people such as Miguel Estrada, who served with distinction in the Clinton administration Justice Department but nonetheless was filibustered so long that he withdrew as a Bush appeals court nominee.

But Bennett said that, whatever the outcome of this vote, he fears that a sword has been unsheathed that will forever change the way the Senate operates. "Once we [Republicans] try to change the rules with 51 votes, the precedent is on the table," he said. "If Hillary Clinton becomes president with a Democratic Senate and wants to appoint Lani Guinier to the Supreme Court, Harry Reid could make that happen with 51 votes."

That is a thought for Republicans to ponder.

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Cowardice in Journalism Award for Newsweek
Goebbels Award for Condi
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
by Greg Palast
http://www.gregpalast.com/printerfriendly.cfm?artid=428

"It`s appalling that this story got out there," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on her way back from Iraq.

What`s not appalling to Condi is that the US is holding prisoners at Guantanamo under conditions termed "torture" by the Red Cross. What`s not appalling to Condi is that prisoners of the Afghan war are held in violation of international law after that conflict has supposedly ended. What is not appalling to Condi is that prisoner witnesses have reported several instances of the Koran`s desecration.

What is appalling to her is that these things were reported. So to Condi goes to the Joseph Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda Iron Cross.

But I don`t want to leave out our President. His aides report that George Bush is "angry" about the report -- not the desecration of the Koran, but the reporting of it.

And so long as George is angry and Condi appalled, Newsweek knows what to do: swiftly grab its corporate ankles and ask the White House for mercy.

But there was no mercy. Donald Rumsfeld pointed the finger at Newsweek and said, "People lost their lives. People are dead." Maybe Rumsfeld was upset that Newsweek was taking away his job. After all, it`s hard to beat Rummy when it comes to making people dead.

And just for the record: Newsweek, unlike Rumsfeld, did not kill anyone -- nor did its report cause killings. Afghans protested when they heard the Koran desecration story (as Christians have protested crucifix desecrations). The Muslim demonstrators were gunned down by the Afghan military police -- who operate under Rumsfeld`s command.

Our Secretary of Defense, in his darkest Big Brother voice, added a warning for journalists and citizens alike, "People need to be very careful about what they say."

And Newsweek has now promised to be very, very good, and very, very careful not to offend Rumsfeld, appall Condi or anger George.

For their good behavior, I`m giving Newsweek and its owner, the Washington Post, this week`s Yellow Streak Award for Craven Cowardice in Journalism.

As always, the competition is fierce, but Newsweek takes the honors by backing down on Mike Isikoff`s exposé of cruelity, racism and just plain bone-headed incompetence by the US military at the Guantanamo prison camp.

Isikoff cited a reliable source that among the neat little "interrogation" techniques used to break down Muslim prisoners was putting a copy of the Koran into a toilet.

In the old days, Isikoff`s discovery would have led to Congressional investigations of the perpetrators of such official offence. The Koran-flushers would have been flushed from the military, panels would have been impaneled and Isikoff would have collected his Pulitzer.

No more. Instead of nailing the wrong-doers, the Bush Administration went after the guy who reported the crime, Isikoff.

Was there a problem with the story? Certainly. If you want to split hairs, the inside-government source of the Koran desecration story now says he can`t confirm which military report it appeared in. But he saw it in one report and a witness has confirmed that the Koran was defiled.

Of course, there`s an easy way to get at the truth. RELEASE THE REPORTS NOW. Hand them over, Mr. Rumsfeld, and let`s see for ourselves what`s in them.

But Newsweek and the Post are too polite to ask Rumsfeld to make the investigative reports public. Rather, the corporate babysitter for Newsweek, editor Mark Whitaker, said, "Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges and so will we." In other words, we`ll take the Bush Administration`s word that there is no evidence of Koran-dunking in the draft reports on Guantanamo.

It used to be that the Washington Post permitted journalism in its newsrooms. No more. But, frankly, that`s an old story.

Every time I say investigative reporting is dead or barely breathing in the USA, some little smartass will challenge me, "What about Watergate? Huh?" Hey, buddy, the Watergate investigation was 32 years ago -- that means it`s been nearly a third of a century since the Washington Post has printed a big investigative scoop.

The Post today would never run the Watergate story: a hidden source versus official denial. Let`s face it, Bob Woodward, now managing editor at the Post, has gone from "All the President`s Men" to becoming the President`s Man -- "Bush at War." Ugh!

And now the Post company is considering further restrictions on the use of confidential sources -- no more "Deep Throats."

Despite its supposed new concern for hidden sources, let`s note that Newsweek and the Post have no trouble providing, even in the midst of this story, cover for secret Administration sources that are FAVORABLE to Bush. Editor Whitaker`s retraction relies on "Administration officials" whose names he kindly withholds.

In other words, unnamed sources are OK if they defend Bush, unacceptable if they expose the Administration`s mendacity or evil.

A lot of my readers don`t like the Koran-story reporter Mike Isikoff because of his goofy fixation with Monica Lewinsky and Mr. Clinton`s cigar. Have some sympathy for Isikoff: Mike`s one darn good reporter, but as an inmate at the Post/Newsweek facilities, his ability to send out serious communications to the rest of the world are limited.

A few years ago, while I was tracking the influence of the power industry on Washington, Isikoff gave me some hard, hot stuff on Bill Clinton -- not the cheap intern-under-the-desk gossip -- but an FBI report for me to publish in The Guardian in England.

I asked Isikoff why he didn`t put it in Newsweek or in the Post.

He said, when it comes to issues of substance, "No one gives a sh--" -- not the readers, and especially not the editors who assume that their US target audience is small-minded, ignorant and wants to stay that way.

That doesn`t leave a lot of time, money or courage for real reporting. And woe to those who practice real journalism. As with CBS`s retraction of Dan Rather`s report on Bush`s draft-dodging, Newsweek`s diving to the mat on Guantanamo acts as a warning to all journalists who step out of line.

Newsweek has now publicly committed to having its reports vetted by Rumsfeld`s Defense Department before publication. Why not just print Rumsfeld`s press releases and eliminate the middleman, the reporter?

However, not all of us poor scribblers will adhere to this New News Order. In the meantime, however, for my future security and comfort, I`m having myself measured for a custom-made orange suit.

********
Greg Palast was awarded the 2005 George Orwell Prize for Courage in Journalism at the Sundance Film Festival for his investigative reports produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. See those reports for BBC, Harper`s, The Nation and others at www.GregPalast.com

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[urlHero`s welcome for scourge of Senate]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1618041,00.html[/url]
By Helen Rumbleow

GEORGE GALLOWAY returned from Washington last night to a hero’s welcome from supporters in Central London.

More than 1,000 followers packed Friends Meeting House in Euston, stomping their feet and shouting “Respect!”

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Dahr Jamail`s Iraq Dispatches

May 18, 2005
"Democracy" in Iraq
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000243.…

I neither read nor listen to corporate media drivel concerning Iraq...but today I wonder what they could possibly be saying to justify the failed occupation of Iraq on this horrible day. I also wonder how people in America have yet to take the appropriate action necessary in order to force their government to impeach Bush and bring him and his regime to justice for the countless war crimes they have committed in Iraq.

Yesterday Hassan Nuaimi, high ranking member of the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) was found dead in Baghdad. One of his arms was broken and a hole was drilled into the side of his head.

This coming the day after the AMS had accused the Shia led governmnet of state sponsored terrorism by using the Badr Brigades to murder Sunnis.

In response to the murdering of Nuaimi, two Shia clerics were gunned down in Baghdad yesterday.

Harith al-Dhari, head of the AMS, blamed the Shia Badr Brigades for the recent spate of killings of Sunni clerics in the country.

Dhari, making a statement that could be interpreted as an announcement of civil war, said Sunnis would not keep silent over the killings.

"We are heading towards a catastrophe, only God knows when it will end, this is a warning from us," he said angrily.

The Badr Brigades were in exile in Iran during much of Saddam`s rule, and returned to Iraq after the invasion and have been a fully operational militia in Iraq ever since. I have seen their members in full uniform and with heavy weapons in Baghdad during a Shia demonstration last summer. The Badr Brigades was headed for years by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance who won the largest percentage of votes in the January 30 "election."

There has been a low-grade civil war going on for quite some time-but now the veil has been ripped off by the statements made by Dhari.

All Sunni mosques in Iraq will be closed for three days...an ominous symbol of things to come.

Thus, any argument that the US military should remain in Iraq to prevent a civil war can be flushed. Besides, anyone arguing that the US military was there to protect the Iraqi people is either blind, in denial, or knows absolutely nothing about the reality on the ground in occupied Iraq. The US military in Iraq are unable even to protect themselves, let alone civilians.

I conducted an informal interview two days ago with a UN official here in Amman...thus I`ll leave his name out of this...for now. He told me that 95% of the reconstruction funds for rebuilding Iraq have been spent outside of Iraq.

So the argument of staying in Iraq to help rebuild the country-that too could have been flushed long ago. Want to find someone accountable-look to some of the larger contributors to the Bush Administration. We all know their names by now. Check their profit margins as of late while you`re at it.

I watched the news about the aforementioned statements by al-Dahri on Al-Jazeera with one of my close Iraqi friends here. As we watched the large funeral procession with the body of the murdered cleric while al-Dahri made his ferocious statements, I watched her head drop into her hands as she said softly, "This is so horrible what has happened to my country since the Americans came."

And she couldn`t be more correct. For the Bush Administration is guilty under international law for the catastrophe Iraq has become. Under international law it is the primary responsibility of the occupier to safeguard the citizens of the country they occupy.

For the Bush Administration, that means over 100,000 dead Iraqis and counting.

Other news most likely ommitted by most corporate television outlets in the US today?

In Baquba a car bomb detonated near a police convoy which injured 18 people, most of them policemen.

In Kirkuk 7 bodies of Iraqis who worked for a security company were found.

In Baghdad a roadside bomb aimed at a US convoy injured 7 Iraqis.

A Transport Ministry driver was shot dead in Sadr City.

In Beji 2 Iraqi police were killed by a car bomb.

In Mosul mortar attacks killed 2 Iraqis and injured 7 school kids.

So that`s nearly 500 dead Iraqis in a little over two weeks to add to the list of crimes for the Bush Administration, which grows longer with each passing day.

Posted by Dahr_Jamail at May 18, 2005 09:33 PM

©2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.

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Es gibt ein Sprichwort. Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall.
Und in gut einem Jahr werden wieder 1/3 der Senatssitze ausgetauscht.



Hier der Link zur Umfrage, die im Artikel angesprochen wird:
[urlDisengaged Public Leans Against Changing Filibuster Rules ]http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=243

Approval of Bush, GOP Leaders Slips[/url]




NEWS ANALYSIS
Judicial Slugfest Likely to Bruise Lawmakers` Image Further
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-assess1…

May 19, 2005

WASHINGTON — Both political parties have begun the showdown over judicial nominations in a weakened position, facing low approval ratings for their performance in Congress that compound the political risks in the confrontation.

Few strategists expect any of the arguments over the GOP`s bid to thwart Senate filibusters to sway many voters in the 2006 elections. But many analysts believe the conflict could increase and solidify the public antagonism toward Washington surfacing in polls — especially if the dispute, as is likely, deepens Capitol Hill`s partisan acrimony and impedes action on problems more tangible to voters, from gasoline prices to Social Security.

The key political question is whether the public disenchantment will hurt the GOP more, because it holds the majority and seeks the rule change.

"There`s only one word for this, and that is: unpredictable," said Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. "I think there is great risk in taking this up to another level and not finding a way to compromise out of it, and I think there is especially tremendous risk for Republicans."

Both sides step into this fight visibly bruised by recent events.

Since last year`s election, the news in Washington has been dominated by Bush`s drive to restructure Social Security that has generated majority opposition in polls; the congressional intervention in the case of the brain-damaged Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, which provoked a sharp backlash in public opinion surveys; the ethics charges swirling around House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas); and the escalating acrimony over Democratic efforts to block some of Bush`s most controversial judicial appointments through the filibuster.

Rising gasoline prices, resurgent violence in Iraq and a volatile stock market have intensified public anxiety about the nation`s direction.

The result has been gloomy numbers for players across the political spectrum. Bush`s approval rating has been stuck at 50% or lower, below the level of most reelected presidents this early in a second term.

A Pew survey released this week found that 39% of Americans gave positive marks to Democrats in Congress, with 41% disapproving of them. For congressional Republicans, the results were bleaker. Of those polled, 35% said they approved of the GOP`s performance, with 50% disapproving.

Those are some of the weakest numbers the poll has recorded for both parties. The poll was conducted May 11-15 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The Pew survey also found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Congress is bickering more than usual — a percentage approaching the levels seen during the 1995 shutdown of the federal government and the aftermath of President Clinton`s impeachment in 1999.

Such findings fuel Democratic optimism that Republicans will pay the highest price if the collision over judges generates more partisan conflict and fewer legislative achievements through election day 2006.

Democrats believe the confrontation will support their effort to stress a national message that congressional Republicans are abusing their power, governing with excessive partisanship and focusing on divisive, ideological crusades rather than bread-and-butter concerns.

In Pennsylvania, the fight over the filibuster is being used against Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). His leading Democratic challenger in next year`s election, state Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr., said he was criticizing the effort primarily because it would aggravate partisan hostility in Washington.

"I think a lot of people don`t want to see that kind of extremism in Washington," Casey said.

Stanley B. Greenberg, Clinton`s pollster during his first term, believes that this partisanship is moving the GOP majority toward problems similar to those that cost Democrats control of Congress in the 1994 election.

Although Greenberg acknowledged that Democrats would be in a stronger position if their approval ratings were higher, he said the lesson of 1994 was that the majority party suffered most when the public was disillusioned with both sides on Capitol Hill.

"Bottom line: The Republicans hold power, and if the place breaks down into an ugly partisan mess, it`s the Republicans who get thrown out of power," he said. "The country will hold them accountable — just as they held us accountable in 1994."

The differences between today`s environment and the climate in 1994 are significant. Most polls find the overall approval rating for Congress today is about 35%, still higher than the low- to mid-20s marks it received then. And the number of competitive seats — in the House and Senate — is smaller today than in 1994

But in a potentially important similarity, public polling just before the GOP landslide in 1994 showed both parties receiving low marks for their performance in Congress that year, comparable to their weak ratings in the recent Pew survey. And in 1994 only the majority Democrats paid a price, losing 52 House seats and eight in the Senate.

GOP consultant Don Fierce helped engineer the party`s 1994 breakthrough as director of strategic planning at the Republican National Committee. He agrees with Greenberg that Republicans have the most to fear if public disillusionment with Congress hardens.

"When there is a negative attitude toward Congress," he said, "those in power in Congress get hurt the most."

But Fierce, like many other GOP strategists, believe that Republicans still need to force the confrontation over judges, partly to generate excitement from core supporters, particularly conservative Christian activists. "If our base is not active and supportive, then we would be in serious trouble," he said.

Many Republicans think the confrontation also will provide the party an opportunity to stamp Democrats as "obstructionists" — an argument that has cut effectively in the last two elections.

Many strategists say that neither party can be certain who would suffer most if they can`t reach a compromise on judicial nominations — especially if the reverberations from the struggle undermine progress on other issues. "It is problematic on both sides," said veteran GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio.

It may be as if both parties are standing on thin ice and jointly decide to crack it. The puzzle is whether anyone can benefit if everyone sinks.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Left no Bush-Lover behind

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May 20, 2005

Armageddon: Bringing it on
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GE20Aa01.html

"And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon [Har Megiddo]." - Revelation 16:16

KARACHI - A short sentence in an American magazine has managed to do what al-Qaeda has not been able to achieve since September 11, 2001 - inflame large sections of the Muslim world and reignite passions between Islam and the Christian West.

A report in Newsweek that US military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had desecrated the Koran - subsequently retracted - initially set off protests in Afghanistan in which at least 15 people were killed. These protests have escalated and are expected to come to a head on May 27, when Islamic movements in 25 countries, notably Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, will launch mass gatherings.

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A largely disjointed al-Qaeda could not have wished for better, as its underlying ideology is to stoke the fires of a civilizational battle leading to Armageddon - which the Bible sees as the final battle between the forces of good and evil, prophesied to occur at the end of the world when Christ will return to smite his enemies, led by the Antichrist. The same battle is predicted in the Islamic faith.

Newsweek`s retraction comes after much of the damage has already been done, and is anyway perceived as having been made under US pressure. Further, leaders of Muslim groups now say that they have proof from other sources that such incidents did occur.

Pakistan`s News International published a story in its May 17 issue based on an interview with a detainee at Lahore`s Adyala prison. The man had recently been released from Guantanamo Bay and was being held pending final clearance. He claimed that he had personally witnessed several incidents of desecration of the Koran by US soldiers in Guantanamo.

Outrage in Afghanistan
The initial spontaneous reaction in Afghanistan against the report on the desecration of the Koran has now turned into an organized anti-US movement. Together with rising Taliban resistance activity in the east and southeastern border areas, a political movement against the presence of US-led troops in the country is gathering pace.

Soon after demonstrations started in Jalalabad and spread to Kabul, the Islamist but anti-Taliban faction of the Northern Alliance was activated near Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, where former Afghan president Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani held a meeting with representatives of four other groups, including the Ittahad-i-Islami, Afghanistan and members of a group from neighboring Uzbekistan. According to Asia Times Online contacts, the groups agreed to fuel anti-US demonstrations and turn them into a national movement against the US presence in the country.

There was a swift reaction in ethnic Tajik-dominated Badakshan, where 300 clerics issued a religious ruling against the US, and across the country mosques echoed with anti-US rhetoric, from Kandahar to the Panjshir Valley during last Friday`s sermons. US forces arrested a few clerics, but this only added salt to the wounds.

Political upheavals in the Central Asian republics of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan could open the way in these countries for increased civil liberties and a voice for once-repressed forces in the country, especially Islamic ones. Similarly, the crackdown in Uzbekistan could have the same effect by heightening the voices of opposition.

Whether they be the forces of Akramia, Hizbut Tehrir or the traditional Central Asian brand of the Sufi school of Naqhbania, they are all staunchly pro-Islamic. And given geographical and cultural ties, this renewed Islamic fervor could easily spread to the ethnic Tajik and Uzbek regions of Afghanistan, where Islamic movements have been weakening over the past 10 years due to the Pashtun Taliban rule in Kabul. The ethnic Pashtun belt of Afghanistan and Pakistan is already under heavy Taliban influence.

Al-Qaeda`s vision
In a recent interview with the Financial Times of London, Pakistan`s President General Pervez Musharraf claimed that al-Qaeda was now a destroyed entity. However, the reality is different. The destruction of al-Qaeda, or its survival, is beside the point. Al-Qaeda`s success will be judged by its ability to have brought about not only a politically motivated anti-US backlash among Muslims across the world, but at the same time to create the grounds for its recognition among Muslim academics.

Ideologically speaking, at the time of September 11, it was impossible for any Muslim academic to praise al-Qaeda or justify its modus operandi in the context of Islamic teachings. However, over the past three-and-a-half years, much has changed. The US has disbanded several Muslim world-wide charity organizations; put pressure on countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Kuwait to change their social dynamics; attacked Afghanistan and Iraq; rolled back Pakistan`s nuclear program; and laid siege to Iran.

In this atmosphere, Muslim academics in countries as diverse as Yemen, Malaysia and Morocco, and many others, have approved of al-Qaeda at a minimum as Muqadamul Jaish - a front-line force whose existence is a guarantee for the survival of all other forces behind it. The concept of Muqadamul Jaish gained prominence toward the end of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, and has gathered increasing acceptance since.

`The end is nigh ...`
The Muslim media from Egypt to Pakistan consistently paint al-Qaeda, the US-led "war on terror", the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and events such as those in Uzbekistan in the perspective of the "End of Time" and Har Megiddo.

In Islam, before the return of Jesus (Isa), the Mehdi (restorer of the faith), will appear at the end of time to restore justice on earth and establish universal Islam. The Mehdi will be preceded by al-Dajjal, a Muslim anti-god, who will be defeated and will try to flee from the valley of Har Megiddo, which is in the Jezreel valley, in the north of Israel. Due to its strategic location, it has seen many battles. In 1918, there was a decisive battle between the British and the Ottomans, and General Alenby won the title "Lord of Megiddo". The same area now serves as an Israeli airbase.

In Muslim legend, "Khorasan" is from where an army will emerge to support Muslims in the Middle East. Their battle will end with victory in Palestine and the revival of Khilafah (caliphate). For the past few decades, Muslim academics have described Khorasan as the Central Asian states, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"End of Time" programs are sold in CDs and DVDs across the Muslim world, which romanticize the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Hizbut Tehrir and add to their popularity.

Al-Qaeda is working to turn the story of Megiddo and the End of Time into reality. And the president of the United States, George W Bush, believes Armageddon is at hand: "The evil one is among us," he said in 2002, in a clear reference to the Antichrist. To quote Michael Ortiz Hill, "[T]he Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in human history has located American foreign policy within a Biblical narrative that leads inexorably towards the plains of Megiddo ..."

Syed Saleem Shahzad, Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at [e-mail]

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

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Latest Fatality: May 17, 2005
May.05: 41

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

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

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As early as 2002, Red Cross told U.S. of Koran incidents at Gitmo
Posted on Thursday, May 19 @ 10:13:38 EDT
This article has been read 545 times. By Cam Simpson and Mark Silva, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-050519030…

WASHINGTON -- The International Committee of the Red Cross documented what it called credible information about U.S. personnel disrespecting or mishandling Korans at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and pointed it out to the Pentagon in confidential reports during 2002 and early 2003, an ICRC spokesman said Wednesday.

Representatives of the ICRC, who have played a key role in investigating abuse allegations at the facility in Cuba and other U.S. military prisons, never witnessed such incidents firsthand during on-site visits, said Simon Schorno, an ICRC spokesman in Washington.

But ICRC delegates, who have been granted access to the secretive camp since January 2002, gathered and corroborated enough similar, independent reports from detainees to raise the issue multiple times with Guantanamo commanders and with Pentagon officials, Schorno said in an interview Wednesday.

Following the ICRC`s reports, the Defense Department command in Guantanamo issued almost three pages of detailed, written guidelines for treatment of Korans. Schorno said ICRC representatives did not receive any other complaints or document similar incidents following the issuance of the guidelines on Jan. 19, 2003.

The issue of how Korans are handled by American personnel guarding Muslim detainees moved into the spotlight after protests in Muslim nations, including deadly riots in Afghanistan, that followed a now-retracted report in Newsweek magazine. That story said U.S. investigators had confirmed that interrogators had flushed a Koran down a toilet.

The Koran is Islam`s holiest book, and mistreating it is seen as an offense against God.

Following the firestorm over the report and the riots, the ICRC declined Wednesday to discuss what kind of alleged incidents were involved, how many there were or how often it reported them to American officials prior to the release of the 2003 Koran guidelines.

"We don`t want to comment specifically on specific instances of desecration, only on the general level of how the Koran was disrespected," Schorno said.

Schorno did say, however, that there were "multiple" instances involved and that the ICRC made confidential reports about such incidents "multiple" times to Guantanamo and Pentagon officials.

In addition to the retracted Newsweek story, senior Bush administration officials have repeatedly downplayed other reports regarding alleged abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo, largely dismissing them because they came from current or former detainees.

Pentagon confirms reports

Asked about the ICRC`s confidential reports Wednesday night, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, confirmed their existence but sought to downplay the seriousness of their content. He said they were forwarded "on rare occasions" and called them "detainee allegations which they [the ICRC] could not corroborate."

But that is not how Schorno, the ICRC spokesman, portrayed the reports.

"All information we received were corroborated allegations," he said, adding, "We certainly corroborated mentions of the events by detainees themselves."

`Not just one person`

Schorno also said: "Obviously, it is not just one person telling us something happened and we just fire up. We take it very seriously, and very carefully, and document everything in our confidential reports."

It was not clear whether the ICRC`s corroboration went beyond statements made independently by detainees.

The organization has said that it insists on speaking "in total privacy to each and every detainee held" when its delegates and translators visit military detention facilities.

Still, Whitman said there was nothing in the ICRC reports that approximated the information published in the story retracted by Newsweek.

"The representations that were made to the United States military at Guantanamo by the ICRC are consistent with the types of things we have found in various [U.S. military] log entries about handling Korans, such as the accidental dropping of a Koran," he said.

Senior administration officials also have been pointing to the Jan. 19, 2003, guidelines this week as proof of the military`s sensitivity about Muslim religious issues, but they did not note that the ICRC had confidentially reported specific concerns before the guidelines were issued.

The procedures outlined in the memorandum, which is entitled "Inspecting/Handling Detainee Korans Standard Operating Procedure," are exacting. Among other things, they mandate that chaplains or Muslim interpreters should inspect all Korans, and that military police should not touch the holy books.

The guidelines also specify that Korans should not be "placed in offensive areas such as the floor, near the toilet or sink, near the feet, or dirty/wet areas," according to a copy.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan suggested Tuesday that the guidelines should be broadly reported in the wake of the retracted Newsweek story.

"The military put in place policies and procedures to make sure that the Koran was handled, or is handled, with the utmost care and respect," he said.

U.S. credited for response

The ICRC gave U.S. officials credit for taking corrective action at Guantanamo by issuing the guidelines, with Schorno saying Wednesday, "We brought it up to the attention of the authorities, and it was followed through."

He also said, "The memo doesn`t mention the ICRC, but we know that our comments are taken seriously."

Still, Schorno did not say the guidelines were issued specifically in response to the ICRC`s reports. Schorno`s remarks Wednesday represented a departure from the ICRC`s customary policy of confidentiality with the governments it deals with in an effort to maintain their trust and the organization`s neutrality.

A senior State Department official, speaking only on the condition that he not be named, said Wednesday the issuance of the guidelines followed the ICRC`s reports and that they were "a credit to the fact that we investigate and correct practices and problems."

Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman, said he was not aware of "any specific precipitating event that caused the command to codify those in a written policy."

Whitman also said, "The ICRC works very closely with us to help us identify concerns with respect to detainees on a variety of issues, to include religious issues. But I can`t make any direct correlation there" between ICRC concerns on the Koran and the issuance of the 2003 guidelines.

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

Reprinted from The Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/
chi-0505190306may19,1,278199.story

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Published on Thursday, May 19, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The United States of Infantilization
by Gary Corseri
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0519-27.htm

This is how it felt 30 years ago:

Saigon had fallen and Nixon was out.

We weren’t so much pleased about the ultimate Viet Cong and North Vietnamese triumph over the South (and our troops), as we were glad to be purged of the whole sordid affair.

And it did feel like an affair gone horribly wrong: the fatal attraction of Wilsonian messianism trying to make the world “safe for democracy” one more time. The weapons-of-mass-destruction issue of the day was “falling dominoes.” If South Vietnam fell, then Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia—the whole panoply of the world, piece by piece, must fall to monolithic Communism.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. To get us into full-scale crusade-mode, Johnson had lied about the Tonkin Gulf Incident, the same way George W. Bush and Tony Blair would lie about Saddam’s ties to Al-Qaeda, 9/11 and imminent threats of nuclear destruction. Nixon kept the lie going and his C.R.E.E.P. (Committee to Re-Elect the President) staged an inept burglary at the Democratic Headquarters of the Watergate Complex in D.C.—one more attempt to subvert the electoral process. CREEPS’s “plumbers” justified the break-in in terms of National Security; it has been a catchall phrase to justify incompetence, illicit wars, racist repression and ideological smut-peddling for quite a long time now.

But those were heady days. A Cultural Revolution of students, teachers, working people, women’s-libbers, artists, journalists, professors, housewives, blacks, gays, Hispanics, Old Left and just plain folks had mobilized and organized their disparate, not-always convergent, energies to unseat Tricky Dicky—the faithful servant of the ideological Right who’d done his misconstrued duty for God and Country. (Dicky assured us he had a plan for “peace with honor,” but you wouldn’t want to buy a used car from him, nor a used-up rationale for war, either.) Spewing Spiro, our alliterative and dismissive Veep (“nattering nabobs of negativism” was my favorite Agnewism) toppled of his own loopy mendacities and the stumbling, self-confessed mediocrity Gerald Ford—“I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln”-- was brought in to heal our nation’s rifts. To seal the deal, to re-play the end of Reconstruction almost 100 years earlier, the nation brought in the toothy, smiling Jimmy Carter and his bibulous brother Billy to show that we were really re-united, one smiling, happy (if folksily dysfunctional) family again, north and south, ready to put behind us all that nasty business in that faraway little yellow country. (But just to keep the myth alive, John Wayne made a movie about it; in one memorable scene of his “Green Berets,” the Duke has the sun setting in the East—precisely the kind of foolishness that had lost the war.)

The 70’s ended with the “Me Generation” screwing its brains out, toking and smoking its way to Nirvana, and, not incidentally, getting into the touchy-feelyness of Tim Leary, Yoga, Zen, the Beats, LSD, and whatever else came down down down the mystical highway. We were “On the Road,” and swelling and wallowing in our liberation-- “California-Dreaming,” and out to reinvent ourselves, our country, our world. “If it feels good, do it,” we cried, without a thought of consequence, one eye closed to history, the other closed to the future.

One of my gods was Dylan Thomas. It seemed no one had captured the exuberance of youth so well as he had in “Fern Hill”:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes …
And, no one had sounded the nascent note of warning better:
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means …
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways …

We were the privileged sons and daughters of generations who had struggled before us. (Let us have celebrations, John Adams had declared, to mark our Day of Independence. Fireworks and parades….) And celebrate we did, as our forefathers had: Thomas Paine’s vision of democracy and universal kinship transmuted into Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson’s compromise with empire and slavery, and Monroe’s Doctrine of expansionism, and we who had stopped the war in Asia settled down and got serious, married, had kids, got mortgages, traded tie-dyed T-shirts for Reaganomics’ suits.

The Draft had pulled us together, and when there was no longer the threat of it, no longer the danger to our personal right to materially enrich ourselves and pamper our mates and offspring, we forgot Hesse and Kerouac, Ginsberg and London, Janis and Steinbeck, Levertov and Lennon … and, like some alien creatures to ourselves, slunk into our sloughs of despond to continue the business of empire-building. A diamond-clad, gap-toothed Madonna sang the anthem of the 80’s: “We are living in the material world.”

We were like those creatures in the movie about Dr. Oliver Sachs—the ones who wake from aphasia, thanks to a miracle drug, discover the dazzling world--nature, people and ideas. Then, as the affects of the drug fade, they fall back into dreamless, waking sleep.

We hadn’t learned our lessons well—or we’d learned the wrong lessons. We didn’t know that revolution is a lifelong journey with numerous pitfalls; and, like the little fox of the I-Ching, just when we reached the furthest bank and felt ourselves safest, when we let down our guards, we were most likely to fall back in the river of forgetfulness.

We did not study and we did not remember. We crammed before exams and got by with “Gentleman C’s” just like the Impostor-in-Chief now in the White House (named for the little white lies cranked out of it daily; or for the Brobdignaggian whitewashing that constantly metamorphosing). The first mass generation to enjoy the opportunities of a college education was also the first TV-generation to be cobbled from childhood with ADD-afflicting ads. Our teachers were always competing with the narcosis-inducing Idiot Box of easy answers and instant gratification. Schools necessary and sufficient to produce Cold War-winning scientists and engineers, were deliberately undermined in terms of raising social consciousness. It was astonishing that we’d ever pulled together, because the whole point of our schools was to pull us apart: to fragment knowledge among specialists; to destroy social cohesion with cutthroat competitiveness; to inculcate authoritarianism and the accepted “facts” and “principles,” while denigrating the twin spirits of inquiry and challenge that are the hallmarks of true democracy. The coin of the realm was cunning self-advancement; community be damned!

“I saw the best minds of my generation,” Ginsberg had written in Howl, “starving, hysterical, naked.” It was the struggle for wholeness, personhood and community that Ginsberg elicited. But now our best minds genuflect before the billionaire powers of a vainglorious fool like Donald Trump, or pull the strings of our puppet Boy-Emperor who shucks and aws his way through dismantling the social structure that has kept us intact as a people.

“Mankind cannot take too much reality,” Elliot wrote, and we see it proven true each day, as a disenfranchised electorate wields SUV’s around traffic-clogged, polluted interstates to slog its way home to the latest fix/installment of Reality TV.

We are infantilized. The snake-charming despots who rule America—who endeavor to rule the world—have succeeded in maintaining us in a state of suspended animation—not quite adult, not quite human. They can lie us into war and tell us they love freedom (like George W., the cowardly draft-dodging warmonger). They can torture in our name for the sake of our oil supplies and their profits. Cynical Congressmen and Supreme Court Justices collude in the fabrications, shake their heads, blame the U.N. A Murdoch-fearing, kowtowing media pimp the lies and bury the information that replenishes democracy. Freedom without wisdom is a tree without roots. Intent to impose our brand of “freedom” abroad, we allow it to wither in the home of the brave.

Electoral politics cannot succeed in this kind of climate, where a sleeping, narcotized public is deluged with mis- and disinformation.

Our Constitution defines treason as the levying of war against our nation. With its policy of preemptive wars, this Administration is guilty of instigating wars against our nation. Every other nation must now seek to defend itself against our PNAC - (Project for a New American Century) professed hegemonic machinations. This Administration is guilty of treason and must be brought to heel. For the sake of global security and our nation’s survival and integrity.

Back in ’75 there were attorneys like William Kunstler who could make the case for impeachment and prosecution for treason better than I have here. We still had a Democratic Party with vestiges of the spirit and integrity that had stood up to Capitalist bosses, steeling itself with the Progressive message of solidarity and equality. The country was not held hostage to the crusading fanaticism of religious zealots and jingoists. Our writers sang “the body electric” of the human family and did not first and foremost advocate for personal grants in the name of the identity-politics of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation. There were moments when we all came together and sang the possibilities of a glowing, new dawn.

What will it take to waken from slumber; to cast off the shackles of infantilization; to rise above the cheap sentimentalism of pseudo-patriotism; to reclaim the vision of Paine; to do our duty to ourselves, our progeny, our planet?

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Gary Steven Corseri’s dramas have been published, and broadcast over PBS-Atlanta; his prose and poems have appeared at CommonDreams, The New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook, Sky, Georgia Review, CounterPunch, AxisOfLogic, DissidentVoice and elsewhere. He has published two poetry collections and two novels, edited the Manifestations anthology, taught in public schools and prisons in the U.S., and at universities in the U.S. and Japan. He can be contacted at [e-mail]

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Military waste under fire
$1 trillion missing -- Bush plan targets Pentagon accounting
- Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/…

The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn`t account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes.

The Pentagon`s unenviable reputation for waste will top the congressional agenda this week, when the House and Senate are expected to begin floor debate on a Bush administration proposal to make sweeping changes in how the Pentagon spends money, manages contracts and treats civilian employees.

The Bush proposal, called the Defense Transformation for the 21st Century Act, arrives at a time when the nonpartisan General Accounting Office has raised the volume of its perennial complaints about the financial woes at Defense, which recently failed its seventh audit in as many years.

"Overhauling DOD`s financial management operations represent a challenge that goes far beyond financial accounting to the very fiber of (its) . . . business operations and culture," GAO chief David Walker told lawmakers in March.

WHAT HAPPENED TO $1 TRILLION?

Though Defense has long been notorious for waste, recent government reports suggest the Pentagon`s money management woes have reached astronomical proportions. A study by the Defense Department`s inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn`t properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S.

Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.

And before the Iraq war, when military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet "for pennies on the dollar," a GAO official said.

Given these glaring gaps in the management of a Pentagon budget that is approaching $400 billion, the coming debate is shaping up as a bid to gain the high ground in the battle against waste, fraud and abuse.

"We are overhauling our financial management system precisely because people like David Walker are rightly critical of it," said Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon`s chief financial officer and prime architect of the Defense Department`s self-styled fiscal transformation.

Among the provisions in the 207-page plan, the department is asking Congress to allow Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to replace the civil service system governing 700,000 nonmilitary employees with a new system to be detailed later.

The plan would also eliminate or phase out more than a hundred reports that now tell Congress, for instance, which Defense contractors support the Arab boycott of Israel and when U.S. special forces train foreign soldiers, as well as many studies of program costs.

The administration`s proposal, which would also give Rumsfeld greater authority to move money between accounts and exempt Defense from certain environmental statutes, prompted influential House Democrats to write Speaker Dennis Hastert last week complaining that the proposals would "increase the level of waste, fraud, and abuse . . . by vastly reducing (Defense) accountability."

"The Congress has increased defense spending from $300 billion to $400 billion over three years at the same time that the Pentagon has failed to address financial problems that dwarf those of Enron," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, one of the letter`s signatories.

Saying critics of the bill "were arguing for more paperwork," Hastert spokesman John Feehery said his boss would support the Bush reforms on the House floor. "The purpose is to streamline the Pentagon to become a less bureaucratic and more efficient organization . . . while also making it more accountable," Feehery said.

PROCESS WILL TAKE MONTHS

The debate will center around the defense authorization bill, the policy- setting prelude to the defense appropriations measure that comes up later in the session. With the House and Senate considering different versions of the transformation proposals, it will be months before each passes its own bill and reconciles any differences.

But few on Capitol Hill would deny that, when it comes to fiscal management,

Defense is long overdue for "transformation."

In congressional testimony Rumsfeld himself has said "the financial reporting systems of the Pentagon are in disarray . . . they`re not capable of providing the kinds of financial management information that any large organization would have."

GAO reports detail not only the woeful state of Defense fiscal controls, but the cost of failed attempts to fix them.

For instance, in June 2002 the GAO reviewed the history of a proposed Corporate Information Management system, or CIM. The initiative began in 1989 as an attempt to unify more than 2,000 overlapping systems then being used for billing, inventory, personnel and similar functions. But after "spending about $20 billion, the CIM initiative was eventually abandoned," the GAO said.

Gregory Kutz, director of GAO`s financial management division and co-author of that report, likened Defense to a dysfunctional corporation, with the Pentagon cast as a holding company exercising only weak fiscal control over its subsidiaries -- the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Today, DOD has about 2,200 overlapping financial systems, Kutz said, and just running them costs taxpayers $18 billion a year.

"The (Pentagon`s) inability to even complete an audit shows just how far they have to go," he said.

Kutz contrasted the department`s loose inventory controls to state-of-the- art systems at private corporations.

"I`ve been to Wal-Mart," Kutz said. "They were able to tell me how many tubes of toothpaste were in Fairfax, Va., at that given moment. And DOD can`t find its chem-bio suits."

CRITICS CALLED UNPATRIOTIC

Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Governmental Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., said waste has become ingrained in the Defense budget because opposition to defense spending is portrayed as unpatriotic, and legislators are often more concerned about winning Pentagon pork than controlling defense waste.

"You have a black hole at the Pentagon for money and a blind Congress," Brian said.

But things may be changing.

GAO`s Kutz said Rumsfeld has "showed a commitment" to cutting waste and asked Pentagon officials to save 5 percent of the defense budget, which would mean a $20 billion savings.

Legislators are also calling attention to Defense waste. "Balancing the military`s books is not as exciting as designing or purchasing the next generation of airplanes, tanks, or ships, but it is just as important," Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., said last week. In a hearing last month about cost overruns, Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., of the House Committee on Government Reform said: "I`ve always considered myself to be a pro-military type person, but that doesn`t mean I just want to sit back and watch the Pentagon waste billions and billions of dollars."

But while Capitol Hill sees the need, and possibly has the will to reform the Pentagon, the devil remains in the details, and the administration aroused Democratic suspicions when it dropped its 207-page transformation bill on lawmakers on April 10 -- leaving scant time to scrutinize proposals that touch many aspects of the biggest department in government.

"We have as much problem with the process as with the substance," said said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., who co-signed Waxman`s letter calling the transformation bill "an effort by the Department to substantially reduce congressional oversight and public accountability."

Defense`s Zakheim counters that the reform proposals would "remove the barnacles of past practices (and provide) DOD with modern day management while preserving congressional oversight and prerogatives."

But Waxman, a critic of the administration`s handling of Iraqi reconstruction contracts, called the proposals "a military wish list" to take advantage of "the wartime feeling."

"Secretary Rumsfeld is hoping to march through Congress like he marched through Iraq," Waxman said.

E-mail Tom Abate at [e-mail].

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©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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U.S. Offensive Causes Humanitarian Crisis, Nets Few Rebels
by Chris Shumway (bio)
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/1826

While information about last week’s counter-insurgency campaign in Western Iraq proves elusive, hospitals cite civilian deaths; thousands remain homeless as locals and some US troops challenge claims of success.

May 19 - US military commanders were quick to declare victory after a massive, weeklong offensive that involved air and ground attacks against villages in Western Iraq, saying that marines had "neutralized" an important haven for insurgents in the region.

But local residents, doctors and relief agencies described something more akin to a humanitarian disaster, saying the campaign killed dozens of people, displaced thousands more -- leaving many without adequate food, shelter or water -- and flattened scores of buildings.

Dr. Hamid Al-Alousi, director of the main hospital in Al-Qa`im, the largest town in the region, told reporters that the fighting between US forces and suspected rebels had killed more than 42 Iraqis and wounded another 80. He also said it was impossible to differentiate between civilians and fighters.

The Al-Qa`im hospital was so badly damaged in the fighting that Al-Alousi said doctors have been treating the wounded in makeshift facilities set up in private homes.

Due to a lack of medical supplies, Al-Alousi told IRIN News that doctors had to perform more than eleven amputations without the use of anesthetics.

According to IRIN, the United Nations humanitarian news service, the village of Romanna, located about one mile west of Al-Qa`im, was particularly hard hit. A school and a mosque were destroyed; gunfire and artillery shells damaged dozens of homes, IRIN reports.

"My house was totally destroyed during the attack, and I want to know who will pay for it," Salua Rawi, a resident of Romanna, told IRIN. "The US and insurgents just know how to fight but don`t look at the mess they are causing in our country."

US military commanders said the week-long offensive, called "Operation Matador," involved some 1,000 marines and Army personnel on the ground, supported by Navy and Marine Corps fighter jets and attack helicopters. It was reportedly the largest military offensive in Iraq since US forces attacked and largely destroyed Fallujah last November. No Iraqi forces participated in the campaign, the Washington Post reported.

Commanders told reporters that US occupation forces were targeting other groups of foreign fighters they say had entered Iraq through Syria and taken up arms with insurgents and radical Islamic militants led by reputed Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

Many residents said US forces struck civilian neighborhoods, rather than insurgent bases, forcing people to flee their homes.

Um Mazin, a resident of Karabilah, told the Associated Press last week that US artillery shells hit her house. "We ran away from the American bombings," Mazin said. "The Americans do not hit the gunmen, they hit the houses of civilians."

After the attack, Mazin said she quickly fled her village with four other women and 21 children, joining dozens of other refugees in an impromptu tent village set up along a desert highway. There, they experienced fierce sandstorms and struggled to survive without adequate food and other supplies.

"We did not take enough food, water, medicine or clothes... and we are tired of the sandstorms," Mazin said. "No one can go back now, and we do not know what happened to our husbands."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed Monday that fighting in and around the city of Al-Qa`im caused hundreds of women, children and elderly persons to flee their homes. Many have yet to return to their villages, stating they are too afraid.

"We are happy that the offensive has ended but we are afraid to return to the town in case fighting erupts again, and we don`t want to takes chances," Muhammad Warda told IRIN. Warda said he has been living in the desert south of Al-Qa`im for the past week.

According to the Italian Consortium of Solidarity, a non-governmental aid agency setting up relief efforts in Western Iraq, the events displaced 8,000 people, and 6,000 are presently homeless in the region.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society puts the number of displaced families in and around Al-Qa`im at 1,000, according to the BBC. Many of them reportedly fled to schools and mosques in nearby towns, or into the desert where they lack shelter and other basic needs.

Adel Izzedine, a resident of Al-Qa`im who spoke to the AP last week at the peak of fighting, said he left on foot with his wife and three children. Izzedine said they walked six miles through farm fields to reach a village where the family found transportation to Rawa, located 43 miles east of the fighting.

"There are gunmen in the city, but there are also a lot of innocent civilians," Izzedine said. "We are living the same misery that Fallujah lived some time ago."

The ICRC says it is now providing 135,000 liters of fresh water per day to hundreds of displaced families in the area.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society also began trucking in aid to Al-Qa`im last week. It says it has distributed food and non-food items to some 200 families in the village of Rawa, 250 families in Ana and 500 families in Akachat.

The US military claims that marines killed an estimated 125 insurgents during the week-long campaign, which spanned villages along the Euphrates River to very near the Syrian border. Nine US marines died and 40 more suffered wounds, according to commanders.

US claims - like those of Iraqi officials - could not be verified. The military did not indicate how it had determined the number of rebels killed, and news reports early in the offensive presented casualty estimates that conflicted with official reports.

Two days into the fighting, for example, commanders in Baghdad boasted that marines had killed 100 insurgents, but a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, who was embedded with the combat unit, quoted field commanders saying troops had killed only "a couple of dozen" suspected insurgents. An officer also said he thought "hundreds" of rebels were in the region, but "how many hundreds is tough to tell."

According to a report by Knight Ridder, some local tribal leaders said that when US forces attacked, they failed to distinguish between Islamic militants and local residents who oppose them.

"The Americans were bombing whole villages and saying they were only after foreigners," Fasal Al-Goud, a tribal leader, told the news service. Al-Goud said he asked US forces and Iraqi government officials to help local tribal militia groups battle the foreign militants, whose presence he said many locals resented.

Tribesmen reportedly told Knight Ridder that they had evacuated many women and children and set up checkpoints around their villages before US forces arrived. The men claimed they were trying to prevent militants from escaping to outlying areas and neighboring villages.

But when the offensive began, according to tribal leaders, US forces attacked both friends and foes. Residents who returned to their villages after the fighting said they found widespread destruction and the bodies of local militia fighters who had stayed behind to help the marines, Knight Ridder reported.

Captain Jeffrey Pool, a Marine Corps spokesperson in Iraq, acknowledged that informants in the area had provided intelligence about the activities of foreign militants before the offensive began. But he told Knight Ridder that US forces had not made arrangements for local tribesman to help with the operation.

Early in the offensive, marines encountered unexpectedly intense, organized resistance from insurgents in the town of Ubaydi, located about twelve miles east of the Syrian border, according to the Chicago Tribune. After calling in air strikes, ground forces engaged in fierce door-to-door fighting, the Tribune reported, after which they hit the town with artillery fire.

Colonel Stephen Davis, commander of a Marine Corps combat team, referred to the air assault portion of the campaign one of the offensive`s success stories, according to the Washington Post. By most reports, the air strikes flattened numerous houses and other civilian structures.

But despite Col. Davis` assessment, as well as official statements claiming massive casualties, some marines admitted that the offensive failed to net the hundreds of foreign fighters they said they were hunting.

Marine commanders told the Post that after entering several towns, they could not find any militants. They speculated that the opposing fighters had retreated to towns closer to the Syrian border, such as Husaybah, or fled into Syrian territory.

"That was the frustrating piece: coming up here for a fight and not finding anyone," Major Steve Lawson told the Post.

A man from Husaybah, identified as Abu Abdullah, told the AP that his town "witnessed heavy fighting, but despite that [American troops] were not able to enter it."

Other residents of Husaybah reported there were never any foreign militants in their town, only Iraqis defending their country against US forces.

According to the Post, a group of marines conducting house-to-house searches left some Iraqi homes carrying pillows and blankets they had commandeered, while others admitted they had beaten Iraqi men to get information about insurgents during previous searches.

© 2005 The NewStandard.

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May 20, 2005
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates` Deaths
By TIM GOLDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse…

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar`s face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators` behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

The story of Mr. Dilawar`s brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army`s criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.

In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.

In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.

The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military`s response to the deaths.

Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002, including some details of the two men`s deaths, have been previously reported, American officials have characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated. And many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well treated.

"What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that there were people who clearly violated anyone`s standard for humane treatment," said the Pentagon`s chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We`re finding some cases that were not close calls."

Yet the Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with virtual impunity. Prisoners considered important or troublesome were also handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for long periods, an action Army prosecutors recently classified as criminal assault.

Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file suggests. Senior officers frequently toured the detention center, and several of them acknowledged seeing prisoners chained up for punishment or to deprive them of sleep. Shortly before the two deaths, observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross specifically complained to the military authorities at Bagram about the shackling of prisoners in "fixed positions," documents show.

Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar`s death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army`s criminal inquiry moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.

Last October, the Army`s Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also cited for probable criminal responsibility in the Habibullah case.

So far, only the seven soldiers have been charged, including four last week. No one has been convicted in either death. Two Army interrogators were also reprimanded, a military spokesman said. Most of those who could still face legal action have denied wrongdoing, either in statements to investigators or in comments to a reporter.

"The whole situation is unfair," Sgt. Selena M. Salcedo, a former Bagram interrogator who was charged with assaulting Mr. Dilawar, dereliction of duty and lying to investigators, said in a telephone interview. "It`s all going to come out when everything is said and done."

With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."

The Interrogators

In the summer of 2002, the military detention center at Bagram, about 40 miles north of Kabul, stood as a hulking reminder of the Americans` improvised hold over Afghanistan.

Built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop for the operations base they established after their intervention in the country in 1979, the building had survived the ensuing wars as a battered relic - a long, squat, concrete block with rusted metal sheets where the windows had once been.

Retrofitted with five large wire pens and a half dozen plywood isolation cells, the building became the Bagram Collection Point, a clearinghouse for prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The B.C.P., as soldiers called it, typically held between 40 and 80 detainees while they were interrogated and screened for possible shipment to the Pentagon`s longer-term detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The new interrogation unit that arrived in July 2002 had been improvised as well. Captain Wood, then a 32-year-old lieutenant, came with 13 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg, N.C.; six Arabic-speaking reservists were added from the Utah National Guard.

Part of the new group, which was consolidated under Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was made up of counterintelligence specialists with no background in interrogation. Only two of the soldiers had ever questioned actual prisoners.

What specialized training the unit received came on the job, in sessions with two interrogators who had worked in the prison for a few months. "There was nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation" like the one at Bagram, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Staff Sgt. Steven W. Loring, later told investigators.

Nor were the rules of engagement very clear. The platoon had the standard interrogations guide, Army Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners "humanely," and when possible, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush`s final determination in February 2002 that the Conventions did not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they "could deviate slightly from the rules," said one of the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.

"There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists," Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.

The deviations included the use of "safety positions" or "stress positions" that would make the detainees uncomfortable but not necessarily hurt them - kneeling on the ground, for instance, or sitting in a "chair" position against the wall. The new platoon was also trained in sleep deprivation, which the previous unit had generally limited to 24 hours or less, insisting that the interrogator remain awake with the prisoner to avoid pushing the limits of humane treatment.

But as the 519th interrogators settled into their jobs, they set their own procedures for sleep deprivation. They decided on 32 to 36 hours as the optimal time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated the practice of staying up themselves, one former interrogator, Eric LaHammer, said in an interview.

The interrogators worked from a menu of basic tactics to gain a prisoner`s cooperation, from the "friendly" approach, to good cop-bad cop routines, to the threat of long-term imprisonment. But some less-experienced interrogators came to rely on the method known in the military as "Fear Up Harsh," or what one soldier referred to as "the screaming technique."

Sergeant Loring, then 27, tried with limited success to wean those interrogators off that approach, which typically involved yelling and throwing chairs. Mr. Leahy said the sergeant "put the brakes on when certain approaches got out of hand." But he could also be dismissive of tactics he considered too soft, several soldiers told investigators, and gave some of the most aggressive interrogators wide latitude. (Efforts to locate Mr. Loring, who has left the military, were unsuccessful.)

"We sometimes developed a rapport with detainees, and Sergeant Loring would sit us down and remind us that these were evil people and talk about 9/11 and they weren`t our friends and could not be trusted," Mr. Leahy said.

Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, a tall, bearded interrogator sometimes called "Monster" -he had the nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other soldiers said - was often chosen to intimidate new detainees. Specialist Corsetti, they said, would glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a holding room. (A military police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for similar effect, documents show.)

"The other interrogators would use his reputation," said one interrogator, Specialist Eric H. Barclais. "They would tell the detainee, `If you don`t cooperate, we`ll have to get Monster, and he won`t be as nice.` " Another soldier told investigators that Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to Specialist Corsetti, then 23, as "the King of Torture."

A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army investigators last June at Guantánamo said Specialist Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner`s face and threatened to rape him, excerpts from the man`s statement show.

Last fall, the investigators cited probable cause to charge Specialist Corsetti with assault, maltreatment of a prisoner and indecent acts in the incident; he has not been charged. At Abu Ghraib, he was also one of three members of the 519th who were fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning, another interrogator said. A spokesman at Fort Bragg said Specialist Corsetti would not comment.

In late August of 2002, the Bagram interrogators were joined by a new military police unit that was assigned to guard the detainees. The soldiers, mostly reservists from the 377th Military Police Company based in Cincinnati and Bloomington, Ind., were similarly unprepared for their mission, members of the unit said.

The company received basic lessons in handling prisoners at Fort Dix, N.J., and some police and corrections officers in its ranks provided further training. That instruction included an overview of "pressure-point control tactics" and notably the "common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee.

The M.P.`s said they were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army doctrine. Nor did most of them hear one of the former police officers tell a fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because they would "tear up" a prisoner`s legs.

But once in Afghanistan, members of the 377th found that the usual rules did not seem to apply. The peroneal strike quickly became a basic weapon of the M.P. arsenal. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg," former Sgt. Thomas V. Curtis told the investigators.

A few weeks into the company`s tour, Specialist Jeremy M. Callaway overheard another guard boasting about having beaten a detainee who had spit on him. Specialist Callaway also told investigators that other soldiers had congratulated the guard "for not taking any" from a detainee.

One captain nicknamed members of the Third Platoon "the Testosterone Gang." Several were devout bodybuilders. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, a group of the soldiers decorated their tent with a Confederate flag, one soldier said.

Some of the same M.P.`s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway told investigators. They also nicknamed him "Timmy," after a disabled child in the animated television series "South Park." One of the guards who beat the prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist Callaway said.

Eventually, the man was sent home.

The Defiant Detainee

The detainee known as Person Under Control No. 412 was a portly, well-groomed Afghan named Habibullah. Some American officials identified him as "Mullah" Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander from the southern Afghan province of Oruzgan.

He stood out from the scraggly guerrillas and villagers whom the Bagram interrogators typically saw. "He had a piercing gaze and was very confident," the provost marshal in charge of the M.P.`s, Maj. Bobby R. Atwell, recalled.

Documents from the investigation suggest that Mr. Habibullah was captured by an Afghan warlord on Nov. 28, 2002, and delivered to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives two days later. His well-being at that point is a matter of dispute. The doctor who examined him on arrival at Bagram reported him in good health. But the intelligence operations chief, Lt. Col. John W. Loffert Jr., later told Army investigators, "He was already in bad condition when he arrived."

What is clear is that Mr. Habibullah was identified at Bagram as an important prisoner and an unusually sharp-tongued and insubordinate one.

One of the 377th`s Third Platoon sergeants, Alan J. Driver Jr., told investigators that Mr. Habibullah rose up after a rectal examination and kneed him in the groin. The guard said he grabbed the prisoner by the head and yelled in his face. Mr. Habibullah then "became combative," Sergeant Driver said, and had to be subdued by three guards and led away in an armlock.

He was then confined in one of the 9-foot by 7-foot isolation cells, which the M.P. commander, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, later described as a standard procedure. "There was a policy that detainees were hooded, shackled and isolated for at least the first 24 hours, sometimes 72 hours of captivity," he told investigators.

While the guards kept some prisoners awake by yelling or poking at them or banging on their cell doors, Mr. Habibullah was shackled by the wrists to the wire ceiling over his cell, soldiers said.

On his second day, Dec. 1, the prisoner was "uncooperative" again, this time with Specialist Willie V. Brand. The guard, who has since been charged with assault and other crimes, told investigators he had delivered three peroneal strikes in response. The next day, Specialist Brand said, he had to knee the prisoner again. Other blows followed.

A lawyer for Specialist Brand, John P. Galligan, said there was no criminal intent by his client to hurt any detainee. "At the time, my client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility."

The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been almost exclusively physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.`s were assigned no interpreters of their own. Instead, they borrowed from the interrogators when they could and relied on prisoners who spoke even a little English to translate for them.

When the detainees were beaten or kicked for "noncompliance," one of the interpreters, Ali M. Baryalai said, it was often "because they have no idea what the M.P. is saying."

By the morning of Dec. 2, witnesses told the investigators, Mr. Habibullah was coughing and complaining of chest pains. He limped into the interrogation room in shackles, his right leg stiff and his right foot swollen. The lead interrogator, Sergeant Leahy, let him sit on the floor because he could not bend his knees and sit in a chair.

The interpreter who was on hand, Ebrahim Baerde, said the interrogators had kept their distance that day "because he was spitting up a lot of phlegm."

"They were laughing and making fun of him, saying it was `gross` or `nasty,` " Mr. Baerde said.

Though battered, Mr. Habibullah was unbowed.

"Once they asked him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life in handcuffs," Mr. Baerde said. "His response was, `Yes, don`t they look good on me?` "

By Dec. 3, Mr. Habibullah`s reputation for defiance seemed to make him an open target. One M.P. said he had given him five peroneal strikes for being "noncompliant and combative." Another gave him three or four more for being "combative and noncompliant." Some guards later asserted that he had been hurt trying to escape.

When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Mr. Habibullah on Dec. 3, he was in one of the isolation cells, tethered to the ceiling by two sets of handcuffs and a chain around his waist. His body was slumped forward, held up by the chains.

Sergeant Boland told the investigators he had entered the cell with two other guards, Specialists Anthony M. Morden and Brian E. Cammack. (All three have been charged with assault and other crimes.) One of them pulled off the prisoner`s black hood. His head was slumped to one side, his tongue sticking out. Specialist Cammack said he had put some bread on Mr. Habibullah`s tongue. Another soldier put an apple in the prisoner`s hand; it fell to the floor.

When Specialist Cammack turned back toward the prisoner, he said in one statement, Mr. Habibullah`s spit hit his chest. Later, Specialist Cammack acknowledged, "I`m not sure if he spit at me." But at the time, he exploded, yelling, "Don`t ever spit on me again!" and kneeing the prisoner sharply in the thigh, "maybe a couple" of times. Mr. Habibullah`s limp body swayed back and forth in the chains.

When Sergeant Boland returned to the cell some 20 minutes later, he said, Mr. Habibullah was not moving and had no pulse. Finally, the prisoner was unchained and laid out on the floor of his cell.

The guard who Specialist Cammack said had counseled him back in New Jersey about the dangers of peroneal strikes found him in the room where Mr. Habibullah lay, his body already cold.

"Specialist Cammack appeared very distraught," Specialist William Bohl told an investigator. The soldier "was running about the room hysterically."

An M.P. was sent to wake one of the medics.

"What are you getting me for?" the medic, Specialist Robert S. Melone, responded, telling him to call an ambulance instead.

When another medic finally arrived, he found Mr. Habibullah on the floor, his arms outstretched, his eyes and mouth open.

"It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared," the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, recalled.

Not all of the guards were indifferent, their statements show. But if Mr. Habibullah`s death shocked some of them, it did not lead to major changes in the detention center`s operation.

Military police guards were assigned to be present during interrogations to help prevent mistreatment. The provost marshal, Major Atwell, told investigators he had already instructed the commander of the M.P. company, Captain Beiring, to stop chaining prisoners to the ceiling. Others said they never received such an order.

Senior officers later told investigators that they had been unaware of any serious abuses at the B.C.P. But the first sergeant of the 377th, Betty J. Jones, told investigators that the use of standing restraints, sleep deprivation and peroneal strikes was readily apparent.

"Everyone that is anyone went through the facility at one time or another," she said.

Major Atwell said the death "did not cause an enormous amount of concern `cause it appeared natural."

In fact, Mr. Habibullah`s autopsy, completed on Dec. 8, showed bruises or abrasions on his chest, arms and head. There were deep contusions on his calves, knees and thighs. His left calf was marked by what appeared to have been the sole of a boot.

His death was attributed to a blood clot, probably caused by the severe injuries to his legs, which traveled to his heart and blocked the blood flow to his lungs.

The Shy Detainee

On Dec. 5, one day after Mr. Habibullah died, Mr. Dilawar arrived at Bagram.

Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.

Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.

"He was a shy man, a very simple man," his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.

On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar`s mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.

At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.

Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from one of Mr. Dilawar`s passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar`s family said the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at all.)

The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.

Mr. Dilawar`s three passengers were eventually flown to Guantánamo and held for more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at Guantánamo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and humiliating rectal exams.

"They did lots and lots of bad things to me," said Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker from Khost. "I was shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head against the desk."

For Mr. Dilawar, his fellow prisoners said, the most difficult thing seemed to be the black cloth hood that was pulled over his head. "He could not breathe," said a man called Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr. Dilawar`s passengers.

Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones.

When one of the First Platoon M.P.`s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar`s cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.

"He screamed out, `Allah! Allah! Allah!` and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny."

Other Third Platoon M.P.`s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out `Allah,` " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague about which M.P.`s had delivered the blows. His estimate was never confirmed, but other guards eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly.

Many M.P.`s would eventually deny that they had any idea of Mr. Dilawar`s injuries, explaining that they never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of Mr. Dilawar`s orange prison suit fell down again and again while he was shackled.

"I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down while he was in standing restraints," the soldier told investigators. "Over a certain time period, I noticed it was the size of a fist."

As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out more loudly to be released. But even the interpreters had trouble understanding his Pashto dialect; the annoyed guards heard only noise.

"He had constantly been screaming, `Release me; I don`t want to be here,` and things like that," said the one linguist who could decipher his distress, Abdul Ahad Wardak.

The Interrogation

On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth interrogation. It quickly turned hostile.

The 21-year-old lead interrogator, Specialist Glendale C. Walls II, later contended that Mr. Dilawar was evasive. "Some holes came up, and we wanted him to answer us truthfully," he said. The other interrogator, Sergeant Salcedo, complained that the prisoner was smiling, not answering questions, and refusing to stay kneeling on the ground or sitting against the wall.

The interpreter who was present, Ahmad Ahmadzai, recalled the encounter differently to investigators.

The interrogators, Mr. Ahmadzai said, accused Mr. Dilawar of launching the rockets that had hit the American base. He denied that. While kneeling on the ground, he was unable to hold his cuffed hands above his head as instructed, prompting Sergeant Salcedo to slap them back up whenever they began to drop.

"Selena berated him for being weak and questioned him about being a man, which was very insulting because of his heritage," Mr. Ahmadzai said.

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair position against the wall because of his battered legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt and repeatedly shoved him back against the wall.

"This went on for 10 or 15 minutes," the interpreter said. "He was so tired he couldn`t get up."

"They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on his bare foot with her boot and grabbed him by his beard and pulled him towards her," he went on. "Once Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas, with her right foot. She was standing some distance from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.

"About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were actually questioning him, after that it was pushing, shoving, kicking and shouting at him," Mr. Ahmadzai said. "There was no interrogation going on."

The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo instructing the M.P.`s to keep Mr. Dilawar chained to the ceiling until the next shift came on.

The next morning, Mr. Dilawar began yelling again. At around noon, the M.P.`s called over another of the interpreters, Mr. Baerde, to try to quiet Mr. Dilawar down.

"I told him, `Look, please, if you want to be able to sit down and be released from shackles, you just need to be quiet for one more hour."

"He told me that if he was in shackles another hour, he would die," Mr. Baerde said.

Half an hour later, Mr. Baerde returned to the cell. Mr. Dilawar`s hands hung limply from the cuffs, and his head, covered by the black hood, slumped forward.

"He wanted me to get a doctor, and said that he needed `a shot,` " Mr. Baerde recalled. "He said that he didn`t feel good. He said that his legs were hurting."

Mr. Baerde translated Mr. Dilawar`s plea to one of the guards. The soldier took the prisoner`s hand and pressed down on his fingernails to check his circulation.

"He`s O.K.," Mr. Baerde quoted the M.P. as saying. "He`s just trying to get out of his restraints."

By the time Mr. Dilawar was brought in for his final interrogation in the first hours of the next day, Dec. 10, he appeared exhausted and was babbling that his wife had died. He also told the interrogators that he had been beaten by the guards.

"But we didn`t pursue that," said Mr. Baryalai, the interpreter.

Specialist Walls was again the lead interrogator. But his more aggressive partner, Specialist Claus, quickly took over, Mr. Baryalai said.

"Josh had a rule that the detainee had to look at him, not me," the interpreter told investigators. "He gave him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table, slamming his chest into the table front."

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to kneel, the interpreter said, the interrogators pulled him to his feet and pushed him against the wall. Told to assume a stress position, the prisoner leaned his head against the wall and began to fall asleep.

"It looked to me like Dilawar was trying to cooperate, but he couldn`t physically perform the tasks," Mr. Baryalai said.

Finally, Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and "shook him harshly," the interpreter said, telling him that if he failed to cooperate, he would be shipped to a prison in the United States, where he would be "treated like a woman, by the other men" and face the wrath of criminals who "would be very angry with anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks." (Specialist Walls was charged last week with assault, maltreatment and failure to obey a lawful order; Specialist Claus was charged with assault, maltreatment and lying to investigators. Each man declined to comment.)

A third military intelligence specialist who spoke some Pashto, Staff Sgt. W. Christopher Yonushonis, had questioned Mr. Dilawar earlier and had arranged with Specialist Claus to take over when he was done. Instead, the sergeant arrived at the interrogation room to find a large puddle of water on the floor, a wet spot on Mr. Dilawar`s shirt and Specialist Claus standing behind the detainee, twisting up the back of the hood that covered the prisoner`s head.

"I had the impression that Josh was actually holding the detainee upright by pulling on the hood," he said. "I was furious at this point because I had seen Josh tighten the hood of another detainee the week before. This behavior seemed completely gratuitous and unrelated to intelligence collection."

"What the hell happened with that water?" Sergeant Yonushonis said he had demanded.

"We had to make sure he stayed hydrated," he said Specialist Claus had responded.

The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the incident. Mr. Dilawar, however, was already dead.

The Post-Mortem

The findings of Mr. Dilawar`s autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." Similar injuries contributed to Mr. Habibullah`s death.

One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man`s legs "had basically been pulpified."

"I`ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus," added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.

After the second death, several of the 519th Battalion`s interrogators were temporarily removed from their posts. A medic was assigned to the detention center to work night shifts. On orders from the Bagram intelligence chief, interrogators were prohibited from any physical contact with the detainees. Chaining prisoners to any fixed object was also banned, and the use of stress positions was curtailed.

In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said.

The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar`s taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no threat" to American forces.

They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar`s parents, who begged them to explain what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves to recount the details.

"I told them he had a bed," said Mr. Parkhudin. "I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem."

In late August of last year, shortly before the Army completed its inquiry into the deaths, Sergeant Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his own initiative to see an agent of the Criminal Investigation Command. Until then, he had never been interviewed.

"I expected to be contacted at some point by investigators in this case," he said. "I was living a few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had been one of the last to see this detainee alive."

Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee`s last interrogation. "I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said.

He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, "most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."

Ruhallah Khapalwak, Carlotta Gall and David Rohde contributed reporting for this article, and Alain Delaqueriere assisted with research.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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[urlInside Baghdad`s Morgue]http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/05/17/international/20050518_BODIES_FEATURE.html[/url]

May 20, 2005
End of the Line for Families of Baghdad`s Missing: The City Morgue
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/middleeast/2…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 19 - A small window in the city morgue is the last hope for people looking for their dead. Holding photographs of the missing, they peer through it to a computer screen where a worker flashes pictures of all the bodies no one has claimed. In Baghdad these days it can be a lengthy process.

As the pace and intensity of the violence here increases, it is growing ever more difficult to match the missing with the dead. Car bombs explode, creating circles of chaos and mutilated bodies that often take days to sort out. Kidnappings punch holes in families for months.

Bodies, old and new, turn up daily. On Sunday alone, the authorities in Baghdad and three other cities found 46. Some of those found that day were buried in a Baghdad garbage dump. Others were discovered on a poultry farm south of here. Their tied hands and broken bodies are their most distinguishing features.
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So people go to the window for answers.

"Every day people come to me," said Ahmed Ali, an Interior Ministry worker who displays the photographs. "I listen to their stories. People are in pain. They say: `We know he`s dead. We just want to bury him.` "

Bodies have surfaced almost without stop since the American invasion two years ago. First came the exhumation of mass graves from the time of Saddam Hussein. Those killings were often carried out in secret, and relatives were eager to finally find the bodies and some peace.

Since then the numbers of bodies have risen and fallen on the waves of violence that have rolled through the country. One crest was reached in January, before national elections, when 111 unidentified bodies were taken to the morgue, workers said. Only about half were claimed.

The violence is cresting again, with more than 400 Iraqis killed since late April.

"When they kill someone they just throw them away in deserted places," said Dr. Ibtihaj al-Aloosi, 60, a gynecologist who survived a five-day kidnapping in December. "The family has to go here and there to find them. This is very scary."

Car bombings bring out the most frantic searchers. Kasim Rafaat Ali, 42, a shop owner, lost a brother in a suicide bombing last Thursday. His brother was buying cellphone accessories for his shop when the bomb went off.

When the police called Mr. Ali that afternoon, he had a sickening feeling. They had found his brother`s cellphone on the street and had dialed the entry marked "home."

Mr. Ali went to three hospitals and twice to a police station. He saw his brother`s body at one of the main emergency hospitals but did not recognize him because his face was so badly burned.

"It was like I was blind," Mr. Ali said, leaning against a door frame at a hospital morgue, crying softly. "I saw him but I didn`t know him." The next morning he was still searching.

It was at the main city morgue that the family found him. His wife identified him by the eye-shaped birthmark just beneath his heart.

Unclaimed bodies collect at a rate of about 70 a month in Baghdad, far higher than before the American-led military campaign, but less than in the bloodiest years of Mr. Hussein`s rule, when the state did most of the killing, said Dr. Abdul Razaq al-Obeidi, a doctor at the morgue.

Some bodies are eventually found by their families, but most languish in the morgue. They are given numbers and, after two months, buried in unmarked graves in two Baghdad cemeteries. Last Thursday workers were preparing to bury 25 bodies.

The oldest cases are often the saddest, with families spending months looking for loved ones they know are dead. Rashid Khasheel arrived by taxi one morning recently from his home on a dangerous road to the city of Baquba to look for his 16-year-old daughter, Iman, who disappeared in February while she was out getting water. The only trace of her, Mr. Khasheel said, was her head scarf and her slippers.

Standing in the morning heat, leaning on a cane, he watched gruesome pictures click by with digital precision. The bodies often bear marks of torture, like tied hands and feet and mutilation, Mr. Ali said. Mr. Khasheel found no match, and hobbled away to look for a taxi back home.

The unknown bodies keep coming. When a backhoe digging in a trash-strewn field in northeastern Baghdad was fired on this month, the police investigated and dug up the bodies of 14 men who had been killed. Twelve of them had been killed recently, and some appeared to have been tortured. Sunni Arab leaders said they were Sunnis.

Last month about 50 bodies were found floating in the Tigris south of Baghdad. Their identities were in dispute, with Shiites saying they had been victims of mass kidnappings. At one point, political leaders said the report of the discovery was false.

But at the morgue, Mr. Ali knew something had happened.

"Everyone was flowing here asking about their sons" after the report of the find near the town of Madaen, he said. "It wasn`t a line - it was a crowd," he said, adding that he was glad for the grate on his window.

Last Thursday morning, before the bombing that day, there was no crowd. Relatives came in a steady trickle. Each had a story. Asya Khaadi said a quiet prayer while watching the pictures for an image of her son, 25, who was taken from his mechanic`s shop in February.

"He was so young - such a pity," she said to herself as she watched the pictures. "Once we had Saddam. Now this."

Some are never claimed, even after they are identified. A worker at the Kindi Hospital morgue, a makeshift room at the edge of the premises that has no refrigeration, said the body of a man killed in a suicide bombing outside an Iraqi Army base in early May had still not been claimed. The man was identified as Muhi Hassan Muhammad, 46.

"People are looking for bodies, and we have bodies that no one is looking for," said the morgue worker, who declined to give his name because hospital rules, more strictly enforced in recent days since the violence has spiked, forbid workers to speak without authorization.

Ms. Khaadi turned away from the window. In a peasant dialect she told how her son had come to her in a dream. He asked her why she had not found him. "If they gave me money, as big as Baghdad itself, it wouldn`t be worth a hair on his body," she said, and walked away.

Layla Isitfan and Zaineb Obeid contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 20, 2005
The Chinese Connection
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/opinion/20krugman.html

Stories about the new Treasury report condemning China`s currency policy probably had most readers going, "Huh?" Frankly, this is an issue that confuses professional economists, too. But let me try to explain what`s going on.

Over the last few years China, for its own reasons, has acted as an enabler both of U.S. fiscal irresponsibility and of a return to Nasdaq-style speculative mania, this time in the housing market. Now the U.S. government is finally admitting that there`s a problem - but it`s asserting that the problem is China`s, not ours.

And there`s no sign that anyone in the administration has faced up to an unpleasant reality: the U.S. economy has become dependent on low-interest loans from China and other foreign governments, and it`s likely to have major problems when those loans are no longer forthcoming.

Here`s how the U.S.-China economic relationship currently works:

Money is pouring into China, both because of its rapidly rising trade surplus and because of investments by Western and Japanese companies. Normally, this inflow of funds would be self-correcting: both China`s trade surplus and the foreign investment pouring in would push up the value of the yuan, China`s currency, making China`s exports less competitive and shrinking its trade surplus.

But the Chinese government, unwilling to let that happen, has kept the yuan down by shipping the incoming funds right back out again, buying huge quantities of dollar assets - about $200 billion worth in 2004, and possibly as much as $300 billion worth this year. This is economically perverse: China, a poor country where capital is still scarce by Western standards, is lending vast sums at low interest rates to the United States.

Yet the U.S. has become dependent on this perverse behavior. Dollar purchases by China and other foreign governments have temporarily insulated the U.S. economy from the effects of huge budget deficits. This money flowing in from abroad has kept U.S. interest rates low despite the enormous government borrowing required to cover the budget deficit.

Low interest rates, in turn, have been crucial to America`s housing boom. And soaring house prices don`t just create construction jobs; they also support consumer spending because many homeowners have converted rising house values into cash by refinancing their mortgages.

So why is the U.S. government complaining? The Treasury report says nothing at all about how China`s currency policy affects the United States - all it offers on the domestic side is the usual sycophantic praise for administration policy. Instead, it focuses on the disadvantages of Chinese policy for the Chinese themselves. Since when is that a major U.S. concern?

In reality, of course, the administration doesn`t care about the Chinese economy. It`s complaining about the yuan because of political pressure from U.S. manufacturers, which are angry about those Chinese trade surpluses. So it`s all politics. And that`s the problem: when policy decisions are made on purely political grounds, nobody thinks through their real-world consequences.

Here`s what I think will happen if and when China changes its currency policy, and those cheap loans are no longer available. U.S. interest rates will rise; the housing bubble will probably burst; construction employment and consumer spending will both fall; falling home prices may lead to a wave of bankruptcies. And we`ll suddenly wonder why anyone thought financing the budget deficit was easy.

In other words, we`ve developed an addiction to Chinese dollar purchases, and will suffer painful withdrawal symptoms when they come to an end.

I`m not saying we should try to maintain the status quo. Addictions must be broken, and the sooner the better. After all, one of these days China will stop buying dollars of its own accord. And the housing bubble will eventually burst whatever we do. Besides, in the long run, ending our dependence on foreign dollar purchases will give us a healthier economy. In particular, a rise in the yuan and other Asian currencies will eventually make U.S. manufacturing, which has lost three million jobs since 2000, more competitive.

But the negative effects of a change in Chinese currency policy will probably be immediate, while the positive effects may take years to materialize. And as far as I can tell, nobody in a position of power is thinking about how we`ll deal with the consequences if China actually gives in to U.S. demands, and lets the yuan rise.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times 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/

Friday, May 20, 2005

23 Die In Iraq Violence
Shiite Cleric Assassinated

Guerrilla attacks killed 23 persons in Iraq on Thursday, including one US serviceman. One bomb blew up near a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, and an important Shiite cleric was killed.

Al-Sabah says that when Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi met with Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf on Thursday, he insisted that "There is no evidence that Iran is supporting terrorism." He said Iran would be happy to help restore security in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the LA Times reports that the Americans have decided to get more involved in mediating Iraqi decision-making, in an attempt to reverse the deadly drift and political gridlock that has gripped the country. It seems obvious, as well, that left to themselves the Shiites and Kurds who won the Jan. 30 elections are perfectly happy to cut the Sunni Arabs out of the deal, and to risk prolonging and deepening the Sunni guerrilla war.

Taking a cue from Hannah Allam and Muhammad al-Dulaimi of Knight Ridder, Fred Kaplan of Slate considers whether a US military campaign like the recent one at Qaim does more political harm than good. He concludes that the US is alienating the very people eager to cooperate with it by using its massive firepower with too little discrimination. The Project on Defense Alternatives argues that US occupation of Iraq is producing a vicious circle, whereby US military action is actually provoking an ever growing guerrilla war.


The Wahington Post reports that the body of Shaikh Muhammad Allaf, a Shiite cleric, was pulled from a car at the bottom of the Tigris, for all the world like the victim of a Mafia hit. Allaf was a clerical representative of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim, a close associate of Ali Sistani. identified Allaf (not Allaq) as a lieutenant of Sistani himself.] Al-Hakim issued a statement condemning the assassination through his son, Muhammad Husain. The Post adds,


` A statement from the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq`s most influential Shiite cleric, said insurgents were focusing on religious figures because they are easy prey. "The government is capable of protecting itself, so the insurgents are after soft targets," Sistani`s statement said. `



Several aides to Sistani himself have been assassinated in the past few months, and a huge bomb was found and dismantled near Sistani`s own home recently.

Sistani also condemned the government of Yemen for waging "a kind of war" against the Zaidi Shiites in that country.

Abbas Kadhim argues that what Iraq needs is legal and judicial reform.

Al-Sabah: In Saudi Arabia, prominent cleric Safar al-Hawali, who has supported the "holy war" by Sunnis in Iraq, denied that he had called upon Saudis to participate in it. He issued a statement that such participation by Saudis would be illegitimate.

Mansoor Moaddel reveals in the Daily Star the results of his opinion polling in Iraq last year. A sociologist at Eastern Michigan University who has been working with the University of Michigan`s Institute for Social Research, Moaddel is highly qualified to do scientific polling.

Some of the findings he reports:

To the question, "Is Iraq better off without Saddam Hussein?" the `yes` answers broke down this way:

Sunnis: only 23 percent said "yes."
Shiites: 87 percent said "yes."
Kurds: 95 percent said "yes."

On the question of whether a university education is more important for boys than for girls:

Sunnis: 44 percent disagreed, favoring equality for girls.
Shiites: 50 percent disagreed, favoring equality for girls.
Kurds: 78 percent disagreed, insisting the girls be educated equally.

In other words, the Sunni Arabs in Iraq are nearly twice as patriarchal in their attitudes as Kurds.

The third question is the most important: "Is life in Iraq unpredictable and dangerous?"

Sunnis: 77 percent said "yes."
Shiites: 41 percent said "yes."
Kurds: 17 percent said "yes."

Moaddel argues that when people feel that their lives are not in their control, they are more likely to mount violent political campaigns in response:


"This disparity in attitudes toward the future could determine what eventually happens in Iraq. Widespread political violence in both Iran and Latin America in the 1960 and 1970 demonstrated a connection between popular feelings of powerlessness and the growth of urban guerilla movements. Leaders of these groups often defended terrorism by insisting that violence was the only means of bringing hope to demoralized people. This argument, long discredited, resonates in the actions of the Iraqi insurgents and their fanatical allies."



He argues that the Sunni Arabs have to be brought into the political process to forestall this development.

posted by Juan @ [url5/20/2005 06:36:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/23-die-in-iraq-violence-shiite-cleric.html[/url]

Best of the Web

Scientists in South Korea, unhampered by the tradition of anti-intellectualism that still bedevils the United States, have made a major breakthrough in stem cell research. They took eggs from volunteers, snipped out the nuclei, and inserted nuclei from the skin of eleven patients sick with various disorders. They then jump-started cell division, and the resulting cells were as though they came from the 11 patients. Ideally this process could be used to grow organs and regenerate brain and nerve cells, so as to cure a variety of diseases, including Alzheimer`s.

The US Congress may actually do the right thing and loosen restrictions on Federal stem cell research. But the bill is opposed by rightwing Christian congressmen who have the odd idea that their religion teaches that "life begins at conception."

The problem is that no religious scriptures teach any such thing. No one even knew about conception (i.e. the fertilization of eggs by spermatazoa) until recently. If you think about it, the discovery had to come after the invention of the microscope. When the Bible and the New Testament were written, and for centuries after among church fathers and authorities, life was thought to begin with the "quickening" (i.e. when the mother could feel the baby move). A blastocyte is not a human being and it is not a person. It is a blastocyte. It may or may not develop into a human being. Large numbers of fertilized eggs never get attached to the uterine wall and just get flushed down the toilet. Shall we hold a funeral for each of them? The poor deluded fundamentalists who know about this even think they will meet brothers and sisters in heaven that they never knew about. And on such irrational and frankly stupid bases (who told them they were going to heaven?), they want to forbid us to cure Alzheimers, and want to force raped women to give birth to the babies of their rapists. It makes a person want to tear hair out, thinking about it.

International Criminal Court and Bush? Billmon has photoshopped it. It isn`t likely to happen, but his photo is amusing.

Top ten myths about the Senate filibuster.

Galloway vs. Coleman: That`s going to leave a mark.

posted by Juan @ [url5/20/2005 06:09:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/best-of-web-scientists-in-south-korea.html[/url]
Thursday, May 19, 2005

Oil Official Killed
Jarba`s Home Attacked, 8 Dead

Ahmad Seif of Reuters reports that An Oil Ministry official, "Ali Hameed, was shot outside his home as he left for work, police said."

He adds that guerrillas in Mosul attacked the home of Fawwaz al-Jarba, killing 8 persons before US troops backed by helicopters came to his rescue. Al-Jarba is from the same Shamar tribe as Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir, but he ran for parliament on the United Iraqi Alliance list, which is dominated by religious Shiites and was endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Al-Jarba was rejected by other Sunnis in parliament for any high government post that might be taken to represent Sunni interests. I.e. they now see him as a quisling. The attack on his home is another sign of growing Sunni-Shiite tensions, such that even Sunnis associating closely with the Shiite-dominated government are being targeted.

Seif adds,

"In Baghdad, a university professor was shot dead, an Iraqi soldier was killed in a suicide bombing, and four others were kidnapped. A roadside bomb also killed an American soldier in the capital, the U.S. military said . . . Four bodies were found on Thursday, this time just south of Saddam Hussein`s home town of Tikrit. Police said they had been shot."



The bodies near Tikrit were presumably those of Sunnis?

posted by Juan @ [url5/19/2005 02:36:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/best-of-web-scientists-in-south-korea.html[/url]

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[urlThe Religious Right`s Golden Rule]http://www.internetweekly.org/2005/05/cartoon_santorums_golden_rule.html[/url]

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Saudi Arabia, Off The Hook
The 9/11 terrorists were mostly Saudi. Suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi. And we`re allies?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 20, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/20…

I am no foreign-policy expert. I am no virtuoso of nuanced and wicked international relations. I know not of intricate deal making and smarm sucking and backstabbing and glad handing and the Bushes raking in millions from clandestine oil deals with the Saudi kingdom. Ahem.

But this much I do know. This much is sickeningly, painfully obvious. We are, apparently, bombing the wrong country. Or rather, countries.

Iraq, as anyone paying even the scantest attention now knows, had zero to do with 9/11. Saddam and Osama? Hated each other. Iraq hiding massive Costco-size warehouses of WMDs, big nasty biotoxins and nuclear warheads and giant boxes of bitchin` Red Devil firecrackers? A nasty joke, told by Bush, at Americans` expense.

So what we are left with is a relatively obvious question, and it has an obvious answer, and it`s almost silly to bring it up because it`s just sort of sad and so deeply ironic and ridiculous you can`t even fully process it lest you begin to tear out your hair and scream obscenities at the wall, and anytime any image of Dubya appears anywhere in your purview your colon clenches and your blood boils and you can only think of gutting Karl Rove with a rusty pocketknife.

The obvious question is, if we are the Great Liberator, the great Crammer Down of Democratic Values, if we care so deeply about making `Murka safer and granting the hot breath of stale freedom to the oppressed citizens of foreign nations whose leaders are abusing and oppressing and murdering them at will, why do we not bomb the living hell out of Saudi Arabia and call it a war?

Oh, I know. That`s just silly talk. That`s just blaspheming. I don`t actually mean it. But it certainly is a red-faced demon on obviousness, and it must be asked.

Do we need justification? Sanctimonious moral authority? More pseudo-Christian rationalization, besides the fact that we`ve known since a month after 9/11 that the vast majority of the WTC terrorists were Saudi? We`ve got plenty.

Did you know that Saudi Arabia treats its women one barely noticeable notch above that of the brutal Taliban? Saudi women cannot vote. They are not allowed to drive. They cannot be admitted to a hospital or examined by a doctor or travel abroad or leave the house without the express permission and/or company of an immediate male family member, and of course they must, at all times, be covered from head to toe in black sackcloth and if they dare venture outside or break the fashion code in any way they could very well be arrested and jailed indefinitely and beaten and even killed, no questions asked.

Political prisoners in Saudi Arabia are regularly tortured. Journalists are regularly arrested and persecuted and beaten for being too outspoken against the deeply repressed and closed kingdom. Human rights groups have been appalled by the oppressive and dictatorial Saudi society for years, perhaps no more so than following 9/11, when scrutiny was at an all-time high due to the obvious Saudi kingdom`s connections to al Qaeda and terrorism.

Oh yes, we know the kingdom pays millions to terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, to keep them from attacking their vulnerable oil fields, while at the same time investing billions -- that`s billions -- into the U.S. economy. Hell, a major Saudi delegation just passed through S.F. this past week, as part of a national tour, trying to ease terrorist tensions and drum up even more investment interest, despite their nation`s brutal, antihumanitarian regime. Isn`t that sweet?

We know of Prince Bandar`s close personal friendship with Dubya and who can forget that lovely scene in "Fahrenheit 9/11" where Dubya is giving Bandar a hot-oil back rub just after Bandar slipped a giant body bag full of gold bars and fried Texas pork rinds and a giant stack of Exxon baseball hats into Dubya`s luggage? Exactly.

It`s almost quaint, in a soul-crushing sort of way, how we know that Iraq is not our enemy. Or Afghanistan, for that matter. It is almost comical, really, how easily it could be argued that if we had an enemy, the single most problematic nation in the world right now, it might very well be Saudi Arabia, with their stranglehold on the world`s oil and their hot breeding ground for Islamic extremists, those everyday people so beaten down and so inflamed into violent action by oppression and by Bush`s vicious warmongering since 9/11 that they`re willing to strap explosives to their chests and walk into a crowded market and push the button.

What, don`t believe it? The Washington Post points it all out, right here, all about how a huge number of suicide bombers in Iraq are turning out to be mostly Saudi, and how both 9/11 and BushCo`s negligent and insidious actions in the increasingly volatile Middle East have created the most incredible hotbed for new and crude terrorists since Osama started a summer camp.

Ah, but it doesn`t really matter. Of course we won`t bomb Saudi Arabia. And of course I promote no such vicious and violent, hate-filled, Dick Cheney-grade agenda. Of course we won`t dare to apply the same bogus justification for insidious war against Iraq (that is, it`s now all about humanitarian reasons, ha ha snicker) to a deeply corrupt and dangerous "ally," one that provides us so much oil and raw cash it makes Dubya giggle and squeal, one that invests so many billions in American real estate and business it makes Bill Gates cry. The Saudi kingdom is, after all, just insidiously vital to the American economy.

And for such vitality, we happily ignore that they perpetuate more atrocities on their own citizens -- especially the beaten and decimated women -- than anyone since the Taliban, or Saddam, or Kim Jong Il. We happily ignore that their "kingdom" is one of the most corrupt and oppressive in the world. We happily turn away from how, more than any other nation, Saudi Arabia is providing the world with more extremist martyrs willing to blow themselves up for Allah, just to make their outrage heard.

And can we forget how the Saudis are deeply and happily involved with the Carlyle Group, a nasty clan of military-lovin` fear-suckin` venture capitalists overseen by none other that bastion of WASP mafia love, George Bush Sr.? Always a nice, bitter footnote.

Oh, I know. I don`t really understand foreign policy. I don`t really comprehend all the nuances and the power plays and the true color of the political sleaze involved. Neither, of course, do you. We are not supposed to understand. We are not supposed to look. We are told it is all just fabulously complicated and slippery and by the way we have no right to judge nasty oppressive Saudi culture. Which is, you know, true enough.

So let`s not judge. Let`s just sit up straight and face the facts and spit it out. Let`s just admit, once and for all, with zero prevarication and zero BS and zero BushCo squinting into the camera trying to look intelligent and articulate when he`s the most devastatingly small-minded leader since ever, let`s just say it is so straightforward and unvarnished that even the red states can understand.

Here it is: Bush could give a cold goddamn for all those tens of thousands of innocent dead Iraqis. This administration doesn`t care a whit for all the dead U.S. soldiers. Every move our nation now makes under the BushCo regime has just about nothing to do with securing our borders and protecting us from "terror" and ensuring our place in the gilded pantheon of humanitarian nations that just want to spread peace and prosperity for all peoples everywhere. What a gag.

We don`t give a crap for Iraqi freedom. We don`t care a whit for Afghan poverty or the huge increase in opium production or how that drug money is fueling the resurgence of the Taliban. This administration couldn`t give a thin dime for beaten Saudi women or oppressed Chinese dissidents or North Korean freedom fighters or the slaughtered masses in Darfur or Rwanda or anywhere else. This administration, in short, perhaps more than any in the past 100 years, cares nothing for human rights.

America now cares about one thing: empire. The rush to neoconservative power. And the perpetuation of fear as a means to securing that power for many years to come.

Obviously, we will never criticize Saudi Arabia. BushCo will never endanger our power, oil, empire. We have, as a nation, moved beyond hypocrisy, beyond savage irony. We are well into the pathological. And, given our sad, unfortunate leadership, it seems we can hope for little better.


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.

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Latest Fatality: May 20, 2005
May.05: 46



Iraker: Civilian: 427 Police/Mil: 180 Total: 607
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

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Tomgram: Dahr Jamail on Living in Two Worlds
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2619

Dahr Jamail, an independent reporter from Alaska, covered our occupation of Iraq for much of 2004 and the beginning of 2005 before coming home early this year. As a "unilateral," he was a distinctly atypical figure in Baghdad. Unlike reporters for major papers, wire services, and the TV news, he lacked the guards, vehicles, elaborate home base, tech support, fixers, and all the other appurtenances of an American journalist in the ever more dangerous Iraqi capital, a city now so filled with violence and explosions that the young blogger Riverbend recently wrote: "It is almost as if Baghdad has turned into a giant graveyard." Unlike most American reporters, however, Jamail (gambling his life) refused to let himself be trapped in his hotel and so his reporting was of the (rare) outside-the-Green-Zone variety. With his Iraqi translator and friend, he regularly interviewed ordinary Iraqis rather than officials of various sorts.

Like many war veterans -- military or journalistic -- Jamail, who wrote on occupied Iraq for Tomdispatch while there, found the experience of coming home unsettling indeed. He recently returned to the Middle East and, as he was departing, wrote the following on his experiences in "the Homeland."
Tom

Coming Home
An Iraq Correspondent Living in Two Worlds
By Dahr Jamail

It isn`t an accident that, after 11 weeks, only as I`m leaving again, do I find myself able to write about what it was like to come home -- back to the United States after my latest several month stint in Iraq. Only now, with the U.S. growing ever smaller in my rearview mirror, with the strange distance that closeness to Iraq brings, do I find the needed space in which the words begin to flow.

For these last three months, I`ve been bound up inside, living two lives -- my body walking the streets of my home country; my heart and mind so often still wandering war-ravaged Iraq.

Even now, on a train from Philadelphia to New York on my way to catch a plane overseas, my urge is to call Iraq; to call, to be exact, my interpreter and friend, Abu Talat in Baghdad. The papers this morning reported at least four car bombs detonating in the capital; so, to say I was concerned for him would be something of an understatement.

The connection wasn`t perfect. But when he heard my voice, still so far away, he shouted with his usual mirth, "How are you my friend?" I might as well be in another universe -- the faultless irreconcilability of my world and his; everything, in fact, tied into this phone call, this friendship, our backgrounds… across these thousands of miles.

I breathe deeply before saying a bit too softly, "I just wanted to know that you`re all right, habibi."

The direct translation for "habibi" in Arabic is "my dear." It is used among close friends to express affection and deep trust.

It`s no fun having a beloved friend in a war zone. I`m all too aware now of what it must be like for loved ones and family members to have those close to them far away and in constant danger… It`s no way to live. Having spent so many months in Iraq myself, I finally have a taste of what my own loved ones have been living with.

While bloody Iraq stories are just part of the news salad here for most Americans -- along with living and dead Popes, Michael Jackson, missing wives-to-be, and the various doings of our President -- I remained glued to the horrifying tales streaming out of Baghdad and environs. I emailed Abu Talat and other friends constantly to check on their safety in that chaotic, dangerous land I`d stopped being any part of.

Trying to live life here with some of my heart and most of my mind in Iraq, which is endlessly in flames, has felt distinctly schizophrenic. It`s often seemed as if I were looking at my country through the wrong end of a telescope even as I walked down the streets of its well functioning cities, padded through a coffee shop where everyone was laughing, relaxed, or calmly computing away, or sat for hours in a room that possessed that miracle of all miracles -- uninterrupted electricity.

I ask Abu Talat if the most recent car bombs were close to his home. "There have been 10 car bombs in Baghdad today, habibi, at least 30 people killed with over 70 wounded. Iraqis are suffering so much nowadays. It`s becoming unbearable, even for those of us who have known so much suffering for so long."

This time I find, to my amazement, that I`m wiping back the tears and forcing back the crazy desire I`ve been unable to dodge all these months to return to Baghdad. Right now. This second. That old pull to plunge back into the fire, despite the obvious risk. To be with my close friend, in solidarity, in a place that, absurdly enough, seems more real to me now that this one somehow doesn`t. To be there on the front lines of empire, able to see, without blinking, without all the trimmings, the true face my country shows the world.

"Please stay safe habibi, and I will see you soon," I tell him as my train approaches New York where I am to catch my flight.

"Insh`Allah -- God willing -- I will stay safe and will see you soon, habibi. Insh`Allah," he replies.

Then he quickly tells me there`s gunfire nearby. He has to go. I wait for him to hang up first. It`s a kind of ritual. Only then do I push the button on my phone, set it down, and leave Iraq once again for this country of mine where I`ve never quite landed.

Just beyond the train window, trees and houses race past as we speed along. I watch the peaceful American countryside zip by, knowing Abu Talat, having just dropped his wife and children off at her father`s for safety, is trying to make his way home through streets filled with fighting and criminal gangs, the constant threat of more car bombs in the night, and a military cordon around his neighborhood. He is concerned that his home will be looted if he isn`t there, and feels it`s worth the risk to return to his neighborhood to guard his belongings, even though the area has been sealed off by American soldiers.

I`ll check in with him again later…obsessively… to see if he`s in one piece at the other end of the invisible phone line that still seems to connect us, along with all my other friends there. Of course, it`s just a regular day for him in Baghdad, and another irregular, out-of-body experience back here, where, with every long-distance chat, the duality in me seems to grow more extreme.

Questions of Identity

Coming home from the war in Iraq, I find another kind of duality. It seems to me that the war I`ve left is going on at home on many fronts -- and yet most people seem almost blissfully unaware of it.

I was in Juneau, Alaska, when the Senate voted to take another step toward opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. So another, allied kind of war continues on the beautiful, precious land of my home state. I wonder how many of the proponents of drilling are aware that the oil drawn from ANWR won`t even be used domestically, but will be sold to Japan. I wonder how many Americans, whatever their positions, know this.

For 10 weeks now, I`ve traveled along each coast, giving Iraq War presentations, most of the time to large crowds hungry for information. It`s been heartening to see so many people so concerned, as well as angry, about what`s being done in their name -- and with their tax money.

Upon returning from a presentation in Vancouver, Canada, I wait for a U.S. border agent to scan my passport. I watch him languidly flicking through my many pages of Jordanian/Iraqi/ Lebanese/Egyptian visas, staring at the Arabic script and stamps.

"What were you doing in the Middle East," he asks. I feel a little spurt of anger and glance up at the signs all across this border station informing non-US citizens that they will have their photos taken upon entry and then place their index fingers on a scanner -- solely for our safety and security, of course. I have that natural human urge to tell him it`s none of his damned business where I`ve been; after all, the United States is, at least in theory, a free country. Instead, of course, I simply say, "I`m a journalist."

He looks at me, hands me my passport, and I come home yet again. As for the anger, it quickly dissipates. Such a small moment amid so many larger catastrophes. Besides, he`s just doing his job.

Not too long after, I get an email from a friend in Baghdad who`s just spoken with a friend of his, a teacher in Fallujah. She crossed another kind of "border" there, also guarded by Americans -- a border around her own city. She had to undergo a retinal scan mandated by the Americans and had all ten fingers printed in order to obtain the necessary identification badge which, unfortunately, she then lost while shopping in a Baghdad market. When she tried to return to Fallujah without it, Iraqi National Guard soldiers wouldn`t let her back in.

"She told them she`d lost her ID in Baghdad at the market, that she wants to go home, that they have to let her in, but they refused," my friend wrote. "A neighbor of hers inside Fallujah was there and told them she was his neighbor, but they refused. She called her husband with her neighbors` mobile and he came to the checkpoint with her papers, showing that she is his wife and he lives in Fallujah but they still refused to let her in."

She was crying, my colleague said, as she related her woes to him. She had lost 9 relatives during the American assault on the city in November, 2004. Then he wrote: "I want you to tell your friends and your audience about this. Please ask them what would happen if they were prevented from getting inside their city although the people inside knew they were a teacher who had to get to their school?"

My friend also wanted me to ask what Americans would do if our country were invaded and the only ID that was worth anything was that given by the invading forces -- even though you had several of your regular forms of identification with you?

Being a Raving Lunatic and Other Confusions of War

Of course, most Americans back in this strange land know nothing about such doings in Iraq, thanks to the ongoing efforts of the Bush administration and its faithful loudspeaker, the corporate media, which has done such a fantastic job of whitewashing the degrading situation in Iraq: Fallujah begins to resemble a concentration camp; the death toll of innocent Iraqis continues to escalate; the Iraqi resistance and foreign terrorist groups are now focusing heavily on the new Iraqi government and the new Iraqi security forces; the American troops continue their aggressive operations -- and all that comes through here in this still peaceful-seeming land are flickering images of car-bomb carnage.

In 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, American troops massacred over 400 innocent civilians by far the majority of whom were women, children, and the elderly. In Fallujah during the November siege of the city, according to Iraqi medical personnel, well over 1,000 innocent civilians (the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly) were slaughtered. Over one thousand innocent civilians, people who, under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power is required by law to protect, died in what was essentially a Vietnam-style "free-fire zone."

In Conditions of Atrocity written for the Nation magazine, Robert Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and well-known expert on humans in extreme moments, cited both My Lai and the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib as examples of what he called "atrocity-producing situations… so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities. In Vietnam that structure included ‘free-fire zones` (areas in which soldiers were encouraged to fire at virtually anyone); ‘body counts` (with a breakdown in the distinction between combatants and civilians, and competition among commanders for the best statistics); and the emotional state of US soldiers as they struggled with angry grief over buddies killed by invisible adversaries and with a desperate need to identify some ‘enemy.`"

Sound familiar?

"This kind of atrocity-producing situation," Lifton added, "…surely occurs in some degree in all wars, including World War II, our last ‘good war.` But a counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, is particularly prone to sustained atrocity -- all the more so when it becomes an occupation."

As my thoughts are being calmed by the blur of trees and houses out the train window, I`m suddenly brought back with a jolt -- as has happened over and over in these few weeks -- to Iraq-in-America. Another passenger seats himself next to me, reads the paper, and then turns -- I suppose simply because I`m there -- and asks, "Did you see Bush`s press conference yesterday?"

I tell him I hadn`t.

"This damned guy! When are people going to wake up to his bullshit?"

I assure him I have no idea -- and that`s true. I`ve been wondering just the same thing ever since I came home. But he doesn`t need much from me. As if he`d been reading my mind, he quickly lets loose with this: "I`m a Vietnam Vet. My son just got back from Iraq. He was in Fallujah in November. It`s all bad, man. My son, he`s like me, he won`t talk to many people about what happened over there…but he told me."

He looks me in the eye intently and then points to the side of his head -- that familiar kid`s gesture for insanity -- and continues, "Now my son has problems upstairs. He told me they don`t have a plan, they don`t have a solution, they`re just trying to contain things over there."

He rattles on, angrily, and I nod while I glance out the window from time to time, letting his information settle in on top of what Abu Talat has just told me. I finally indicate to him that I understand, because I`m a journalist who has spent a fair amount of time in Iraq recently.

But he`s not in need of encouragement. "Bush is a draft dodger and a deserter," he continues. "He and all his cronies are thieves and should be in jail! If I keep talking about this I`m going to lose it. Have a good trip."

He gets up and walks away. I take a deep breath. This isn`t the first time I`ve had folks unload on me about Iraq. I guess it`s in the air. I`ve had similar encounters with Iraq veterans from both our Gulf wars while traveling, as well as with civilians. Every encounter -- the ones where no one mentions Iraq as well as the ones where it comes up -- has its bruising aspects. I`ve had to go back to some of my family members and make amends for an outburst just after I returned. Feeling the desperation of the situation there and overwhelmed by the urge to bring Iraq home to people who truly have no idea what`s happening tends to put one in an awkward situation where it`s not too hard to come off as a raving lunatic.

Is There Anyone in the World…?

At least in these weeks, I`ve begun to understand what war veterans who have seen the bodies -- as I have -- get to deal with on returning home. Now that I`ve had a little time to get my head on straight, to process some of the atrocities I saw, and to take a little breath, I find myself, against my better judgment and everything I swore I wouldn`t do, heading back to the Middle East; back to chronicle more of what`s happening there. I keep wondering how long it can go on; how long so many people in my home country will continue to ignore it, to be complicit, whether they know it or not, in our brutal occupation -- so long after it was proven beyond a shadow of a shadow of a doubt that this war was illegal and based on nothing but lies. I can`t help wondering as well how long they will be complicit as their tax dollars continue to be spent on a war machine that is eating their children and loved ones, along with innocent Iraqis; complicit as social programs and benefits, civil rights and liberties are stripped from them -- a little more with each passing day.

Even a debate among anti-war groups about whether the United States should withdraw immediately or propose a phased withdrawal on a timetable was capable of sending me off the rails. All I could think was: Silly debate. As though either view of how "we" should proceed mattered, as though their opinions carry the slightest weight with the no-timetable Bush administration.

I kept wondering why the streets here weren`t filled with people every single day…

A couple of days ago, I forwarded an email to Abu Talat that had been sent to me by a man who attended one of my presentations. He had thanked me for telling and showing them the truth…the photos, the footage, the stories of Iraqis and of U.S. soldiers. He had written asking me to tell my Iraqi friends how horrified he was by what our country was doing in Iraq, that he was doing whatever he could to stop the occupation.

Abu Talat wrote back to him directly -- the longest email I`d ever seen him send -- and forwarded a copy to me. Here`s what he said in his eloquent, though hardly perfect English:

"Thank you Americans (those who believe that American troops are destroying Iraq). Those who believe that facts cannot be hidden with chicken mesh. Who believe they have no right to put ideas in the minds of people of a civilized country, a country in which civilization began before the United States existed. Those people who know that democracy is not given, it is obtained. Who know that Iraqis are people who have to live just like any nation. Who believe that we are no different in the ability of our minds because God made us all so you cannot force us to have the ideas of others unless we accept it after we are fully contented. Those people of the world who raise their voices against colonialism, control, force, the invading of other countries… I thank them, I encourage them, and I ask God to save them.

"Other people of the world who are not on these ethics, who don`t implement those ideas, I call them to look around themselves, to awaken themselves, to put themselves in our position. To face what we face, to remember that they don`t accept in any way to be insulted, nor to be threatened or killed like what is happening in my country by the invaders. I ask God to spare any difficulty from their country rather than being invaded.

"…Is there anyone in the world who can accept to be killed? Or detained for no reason? Is there any of you who can accept to be put in the situation we are facing, to see their houses crashed or demolished, ended, to see your people treated with no respect, to have guns aimed at them wherever they go, to live without electricity when you used to have it, to see roads closed… whether they will live until tomorrow under a normal life, these are, my friends, just a few things to be told.

"So please tell your friends and people to raise their voices to pull the troops out from invaded Iraq. Seeking that God helps Iraqis to bare the situation done by the troops of the invaders."

From the window of my plane, I watch the lights of New York fade -- and the internal duality quickly begins to fade with the glowing lights of the colossal city. Somewhat to my surprise, it encourages me to know I`m now moving ever closer to the place where so much of my heart turns out still to be. Unsure whether or not I`ll actually go into Iraq, at least I will be nearer to it, and to Abu Talat and my other friends who live the brutality of life there every day. At least I`m on my way back to a place where I feel I can do something…even if sometimes that only means providing moral support for habibis. At least I`m on my way back to a place where few can help but be aware of what is truly happening. At least I`m on my way, ever closer to occupied, inflamed Iraq.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Alaska who has spent 8 months reporting inside occupied Iraq. He writes regularly for the Sunday Herald, Inter Press Service and the Ester Republic among other outlets. He is a special correspondent for Flashpoints radio and appears on Democracy Now!, Air America, Radio South Africa, Radio Hong Kong and numerous other stations around the globe. He has recently returned to the Middle East to continue his reporting on the occupation of Iraq. Dahr Jamail`s latest pieces from the region can be read at his website.

Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail


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May 21, 2005

THE ROVING EYE
The US`s gift to al-Qaeda
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GE21Ak04.html

Al-Qaeda and all the other components of the Salafi-jihadi (or Islamist) front are on the verge of scoring a major double blow. Unlike September 11, now their fight not only is being recognized by top Islamic scholars as legitimate, but they have also managed to capitalize on major blunders in the "war on terror" to strengthen the anti-imperialist, anti-US impulse among global, moderate Muslims. How did that happen?

At the time of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri made two crucial mistakes. First, because of their isolation, they didn`t notice that most Afghans had had enough of the Taliban. The Pashtun did not support the Taliban because they would be the vanguard of a worldwide jihad against the US (it was never the Taliban`s intention), rather, the Pashtuns gave their support over more mundane topics, such as maintaining law and order and keeping Pashtun supremacy.

Second, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri overestimated the reaction of the Arab street. They didn`t understand that the average Arab living in the Middle East - or in Western Europe - may indeed express a lot of grievances toward US foreign policy, but this did not translate into solid, political mobilization. If it ever happened, political activity would be set off by events in Palestine and Iraq - Arab, and not Islamic, problems. Thus, sensationally plunging Boeings-turned-into-missiles into the heart of the American power elite did not show the Promised Land to the alienated masses.

The "war on terror" - the American response to al-Qaeda - was a meaningless metaphor in the first place because al-Qaeda essentially poses a security problem. It is not a strategic threat. At least it was not until its recent mutation - after Guantanamo, the invasion of Iraq and the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Jihad or not jihad
The new geopolitical configuration represents a tremendous victory for al-Qaeda and the Islamist camp. Especially because they are not Salafis. Salafism was conceived by Jalaluddin al-Afghani in the late 19th century as a reform movement capable of equipping Islam to fight Western colonialism. But to put it bluntly, al-Afghani had very little in common with Mullah Omar, the Taliban emir, he was a political activist, not a theologian.

The Salafis were the embryo of the Muslim Brotherhood and the contemporary Islamists, al-Qaeda among them. Al-Afghani is considered a "founding father". But if Salafism was originally an instrument to fight Western domination, it soon ceased to be a global political project to modernize the Muslim world. Salafism today is an ultra-conservative program to purify Islam from cultural influences - Muslim as well as Western.

That`s where Salafis intersect with the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabis, the Taliban and the Hizbut Tehrir are Salafis. Al-Qaeda, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, the Jaish-e-Muhammad and Sipha-e-Sahaba in Pakistan - the constellation usually described as "Islamist" - go one step further: they are Salafi-jihadis, considering jihad to be a personal, religious duty of every Muslim.

For Salafis there`s essentially nothing to be learned from the West. "Moderate" Salafis at least concede that non-belligerent infidels - ie most of the world`s population - should be well treated. The main difference between Salafis and Salafi-jihadist is that Salafis totally reject the concept of Islamic ideology, as well as any Western conceptual category (political parties, constitution, revolution, social justice). This means that Salafis don`t even recognize political struggle as a means to establishing an Islamic state. For them, the soul of each individual Muslim takes precedence over politics: this is a consequence of the fact that Western ("infidel") domination happened because of the loss of true Islamic faith. Salafi-jihadis for their part are much more politicized - even though their political agenda is fuzzy at best.

Sayyid Qutb - the Egyptian intellectual mentor of al-Zawahiri, killed by the Nasser government in 1966 - almost managed to bridge the gap between Salafis and Salafi-jihadis. As Adam Curtis masterfully demonstrated in his three-part BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares - which had its world premiere as a feature film this past weekend at the Cannes Film Festival - Qutb is to al-Qaeda what Leo Strauss is to the American neo-conservatives. Qutb encouraged political action, but at the same time had a profoundly pessimistic view of the modern world, combined with venomous contempt of all things Western - the reason for his appeal among Salafis.

The crucial "jihad or not jihad" dilemma is a political decision. It`s impossible to accuse Salafis - like the neo-conservatives do - of defending a theology of violence per se. When an Islamic religious leader favors jihad, it`s always a political decision, even though it`s always framed as religious dictum. In 2001, both the highly-respected Sheik Yousef al-Qardawi - host of an extremely popular show on al-Jazeera - and the new grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz ibn Muhammad al-Sheikh, issued fatwas (decrees) condemning September 11 as un-Islamic, clearly at odds with al-Qaeda`s interpretation of jihad. On the other hand it`s possible to find many mainstream Salafis who are opposed to Qutb - for religious reasons - but favor jihad and al-Qaeda (as a legitimate means of defending Islam against the West).

The revolutionary vanguard
The main challenge for the Salafi-jihadist (or Islamists) has always been how to "convert" modernized, well-educated Muslims - from the wealthy Kuwaiti, Saudi, Jordanian middle classes to the dilapidated suburbs of London and Marseilles - to what is essentially a political struggle.

So it`s important to re-examine the role of Abdullah Azzam, the Muslim Brotherhood Palestinian carrying a Jordanian passport who founded the Maktab al-Khidamat (the Office of Services) in Peshawar in the early 1980s - the embryo of what would become known as al-Qaeda.

Crucially, Azzam was neither a Salafi nor a Wahhabi. He thought at the time that the only winning jihad strategy was to fight for the liberation of the entire Islamic ummah (community). The anti-Soviet Afghan jihad was at hand (the 1980s) and it would be the perfect model. Afghanistan for Azzam was essentially a training ground for the revolutionary vanguard which would lead the ummah in a war of resistance against the West. Azzam was never interested in creating an Islamic state in Afghanistan. Also crucially, he never targeted civilians, and never even thought of conducting a terrorist bombing. Al-Qaeda`s harsher and more lethal tactics had nothing to do with Azzam: the transformation was operated by Osama and al-Zawahiri - blessed by their powerful Saudi and Pakistani sponsors/protectors.

After al-Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, it adapted extremely fast. It`s fair to say that now in many ways it is reverting to some of Azzam`s conceptualization. It stopped behaving as a sect (it never had a political branch, a student branch or a press office, apart from the sporadic bin Laden or al-Zawahiri videos). It abandoned any pretence of finding a new training ground: the actual "Talibanistan" in the Pakistani Northwest Frontier Province might be a candidate - but it`s infested with Pakistani troops and US intelligence.

Mounting American and European Islamophobia, and in many cases successful police action, made it extremely hard for the Salafi-jihadist to touch Muslims living in the West: they subsist in almost total isolation and alienation. The answer was franchising - but importantly the spreading of the Salafi-jihadist ideological message. Experts at a clandestine European Union terrorist monitoring cell in Brussels tell Asia Times Online that they fear extreme left movements in many European Union countries may be getting closer and closer to the Islamists. The war in Iraq has already led Salafi-jihadists to forge a close relationship with former Ba`athists.

The enemy within
When bin Laden and al-Zawahiri called for a worldwide jihad they failed. Movements of national liberation in Islam - like in Palestine and Chechnya - were the biggest losers. All over Islam there was heated discussion over al-Qaeda`s strategy - if there was any. Should everyone revert to purveying dawah (propaganda, political proselytism) instead of jihad?

But now Islamic scholars from Morocco to Malaysia are finally legitimizing al-Qaeda as a Muqadamul Jaish - a revolutionary vanguard. This Western concept was unheard of in Islam - well, at least until the symbolically-charged spring of 2003, when Baghdad was "liberated" by President George W Bush`s Christian armies.

As much as al-Qaeda is a Western concoction - once again, the concept of revolutionary vanguard simply does not exist in Islam - its internationalism is now merging with the only other global protest movement: the anti-globalization, anti-American imperialism brigade. Al-Qaeda and the Islamist front nevertheless still face a daunting task: if they want more Western allies, they have to abdicate from their Islamic platform. And if they want more allies in the Muslim world, they have to be much less radical. Even though al-Qaeda is configured as an heir to the extreme left and pro-Third World radical movements of the 1970s, al-Qaeda`s latest success is undoubtedly in the Muslim world.

Al-Qaeda`s only strategic goal is trapping the US, but Washington helped al-Qaeda by trapping itself in Iraq, and in still another, dangerous form of hubris, Bush`s Greater Middle East. Al-Qaeda`s dream of mobilizing the ummah by way of jihad may have taken a backseat role, but who needs it when you have reports of Korans flushed down the toilet? The Newsweek controversy reveals to the fullest extent how al-Qaeda may be reaching its goal of politicizing the masses through other means. No wonder the White House, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all reacted furiously - blaming the (media) messenger to obscure the evident message (Islamophobia).

Al-Qaeda now also benefits from counter-propaganda. For example, this past weekend, al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers - supposed to be the denomination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi`s group (if he is not just a cipher) - accused the Pentagon of fabricating the sectarian violence in Iraq. The document lists "dirty methods [the Americans] use for targeting jihad", like "attacking homes with mortar rounds to later put the blame on the mujahideen for such mindless attacks", or "setting up IEDs [improvised explosive devices] on the side of the road near a school or a hospital and then the American savior comes in shining armor to dismantle the device, witnessed by the people in the area as a hero risking himself for Muslims".

As for the non-stop car bombings, the document says that "some [Americans] conceal a bomb in the trunk of a car while they search it in a check point and then detonate it at a distance in the right place and time, or they target certain cars by helicopter gunships so it would look like there was a person [bomber] who detonated a car bomb".

Whether any of these claims are verifiable or true is beside the point. The point is that they are written and widely broadcast in Arabic, and they stick. Muslims, especially in the Sunni Arab world, but also all over Islam, tend to believe them in increasing numbers, considering the moral swamp the US put itself in after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the virtual leveling of Fallujah.

So if al-Qaeda is winning Muslim hearts and minds, the Bush administration has only itself to blame. Considering all the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric and a "war on terror" bound to last indefinitely, as Vice President Dick Cheney himself said on the record, it may have been the original intent anyway.

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

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»Die Vereinigten Staaten«, so Henry Kissinger, »sind wahrscheinlich das einzige Land, in dem ›Realist‹ ein Schimpfwort ist.«

21/2005

Von Moralisten und Missionaren
http://www.zeit.de/2005/21/Antwort_S_3

Der US-Präsident will die Welt mit Freiheit überziehen - Europa exportiert sie mit großem Erfolg

Von Michael Naumann

In der vergangenen Ausgabe schrieb Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff: »Der deutschen Außenpolitik fehlt das Bekenntnis zur Freiheit. Amerika ist da entschlossener.« Auf ihn antwortet Michael Naumann

Anti-Terrorismus hieß nach dem 11. September 2001 das Leitmotiv der ersten Amtszeit von George W. Bush. Die Fanale »Freiheit« und »Demokratie« begleiten inzwischen die auswärtigen Auftritte des amerikanischen Präsidenten: Er scheint – zumindest rhetorisch – übergegangen zu sein zur Erforschung von sozialen und politischen Ursachen weltweiter Gewaltprotuberanzen im Schatten autokratischer, tyrannischer oder diktatorischer Regime. Nicht wenige von ihnen sind traditionelle Verbündete der USA, wie einst Saddam Husseins Irak und wie immer noch Hussein Mubaraks Ägypten oder die Hydra der 5000 saudi-arabischen Prinzen. Dass hinter dem Idealismus seiner republikanischen Hochglanz-Ansprachen in Riga oder Tbilissi Anfang dieses Monats die realpolitischen Interessen Amerikas in Bedeutungslosigkeit absinken werden, ist unwahrscheinlich. Und dennoch werden in den Reden des US-Präsidenten innen- und außenpolitische Motive sichtbar, die zumindest in Europa Aufmerksamkeit verdienen. Der moralische, idealistische Führungsanspruch der Großmacht ist ungebrochen. Aus ihm werden neue Herausforderungen an die pragmatisch-realpolitischen Europäer erwachsen.

»Freiheit ist die Zukunft der Menschheit« oder: »Die Freiheit jedes Einzelnen zählt… Wir werden nicht die Fehler vergangener Generationen wiederholen, Tyrannei hinzunehmen und Freiheit im Namen von Sicherheit zu opfern«: George W. Bushs Prachtrhetorik hat ihre Wurzeln im revolutionären 18. Jahrhundert, im freiheitsgetränkten Selbstverständnis der amerikanischen Gründungsväter. Die hatten allerdings nicht fremde Kontinente im Sinn, sondern ihren eigenen. Kein amerikanischer Präsident nach John F. Kennedy, auch nicht Ronald Reagan, hat ähnlich idealistisch eingestimmte, brillante Ghostwriter beschäftigt wie jener Mann, der noch vor nicht allzu langer Zeit Amerikas politische Mission als »Kreuzzug« gegen die »Achse des Bösen« charakterisiert hatte – garniert mit der allgemeinen Drohung, dass die Vereinigten Staaten niemals zulassen würden, dass eine andere Nation ihre militärische Vorherrschaft »einholen würde«, bei Strafe eines Präventivkriegs. Davon ist zurzeit nicht mehr die Rede. Als strategische Option bleibt sie allerdings erhalten. Auch wenn die Beschleunigung der iranischen Atomforschung mitsamt ihrem ungewissen Ausgang einer nuklearen Bewaffnung ein unmittelbares Resultat des Irak-Kriegs ist, bleibt jene Drohung auf dem Tisch.

Gleichzeitig aber befindet sich George W. Bush mitten in der Re-Interpretation dieses Krieges. Der sei, sagt er heute, von Anfang an ein Freiheitsprojekt für alle Iraker, wenn nicht gar für die ganze Nahost-Region gewesen. Das Wort irakische »Massenvernichtungswaffen« kommt nicht mehr vor. Es gab sie nicht. Anders gesagt: Fortan sind die Iraker selbst für die Zukunft ihres ruinierten Landes verantwortlich.

Moralische Geschichtsinterpretation wird schnell zum Revisionismus

Während der terroristische, ethnisch-religiöse Bürgerkrieg in dem Land die vergeblichen Warnungen angeblich abgebrühter Nahostexperten und scheinbar zynisch-realpolitischer Alteuropäer bestätigt, unterlegt der Präsident inzwischen der ungebrochenen amerikanischen Machtprojektion die kulturellen Versprechungen von liberty oder freedom. Und wer wollte bestreiten, dass die selbst evidenten Ideale der Demokratie das beste politische Exportgut der europäisch-amerikanischen Aufklärung sind? Die Frage ist nur, mit welchen Transportmitteln und aus welchem Anlass sie in die Länder der Tyrannen, Diktatoren und autoritären Regime gelangen. Die tarnfarbenen Vehikel der U.S. Army und der freizügige Einsatz von Splitterbomben scheinen nicht das ideale Instrument zu sein – ebenso wenig, wie Bushs immer wieder zitiertes Beispiel der militärischen Befreiung Deutschlands und der Welt vom Naziregime als Paradigma zukünftiger Nahostpolitik taugt. Als Condoleezza Rice die ersten Anschläge irakischer Terroristen auf amerikanische Soldaten mit dem »Werwolf«-Phantom der besiegten Deutschen verglich, dürften sich auch amerikanische Weltkriegs-Historiker die Augen gerieben haben.

Den Ausgang des Zweiten Weltkriegs (und nicht etwa die teuren Lehren des Vietnam-Kriegs) betonte George W. Bush in seinen Reden in Riga und Tbilissi. Als gälte es, sein eigenes Idol, Winston Churchill, posthum in die Schranken zu weisen, erklärte er die Teilung Europas im Jalta-Abkommen zum moralisch defekten Nachfolger des Ribbentrop-Molotow-Pakts – als hätte es eine realistische Möglichkeit der westlichen Alliierten gegeben, dem sowjetischen Expansionsdrang kurz nach Kriegsende in Ost- und Südosteuropa einen militärischen Riegel vorzuschieben, wie sich das Hitlers Generalität noch im April 1945 erträumte. Doch jede moralisch inspirierte Geschichtsinterpretation wird zum riskanten Revisionismus, wenn sie als zukünftige Richtschnur eines hochbewaffneten Entscheidungsträgers auftritt. George W. Bushs Idealismus mag unanfechtbar sein wie die Wahrheit universaler Menschenrechte, doch wo er sich militärisch verbündet mit Amerikas unübersehbaren Sicherheits- und Machtinteressen, wird er zur politischen und ideellen Herausforderung für die atlantischen Verbündeten. Wie halten sie es mit der »Freiheit«?

Freiheit ist ansteckend, Folter ist es nicht

Die idealistische Umdeutung seiner ersten Amtszeit gilt nicht nur einer innenpolitisch aufgefrischten Legitimation der US-Intervention im Irak; sie kommt vielmehr aus dem Herzen des missionarisch gestimmten, republikanischen Konservatismus. In ihm existieren legitime Großmachtinteressen Seite an Seite mit den Freiheits-Idealen der Amerikanischen Revolution. Dass diese Ideale jahrzehntelang im mittel- und südamerikanischen Vorhof oder auf der arabischen Halbinsel, in Indonesien, den Philippinen oder in Pakistan den geopolitischen amerikanischen Interessen, aber auch den üblen Machenschaften von Big Business und CIA unterlagen, stimmt ebenso wie die Tatsache, dass spätestens seit Jimmy Carters menschenrechtsorientierter Außenpolitik die Chancen für demokratischen Wandel in aller Welt stiegen. Die Überlegenheit des kapitalistischen Systems verbreitete sich im Gleichschritt mit dem globalen Siegeszug der medialen Massenkommunikation. Der American Way of Life war und bleibt attraktiver als die Heilsversprechen nationalistischer, religiöser oder marxistischer Ideologien.

George W. Bushs Hinweis darauf, dass der »Siegeszug der Freiheit« die »große Geschichte unserer Zeit« ist, lässt sich durchaus belegen. Inzwischen gibt es 120 demokratisch gewählte Regierungen auf der Welt – vor dreißig Jahren waren es nur 40. Auffallend ist indes, dass der usbekische Despot Islam Karimow immer auf amerikanische Unterstützung hoffen konnte – bis zu diesem Tag. Daran wird sich nicht viel ändern: In Usbekistan stehen Truppen aus Nato-Ländern. Im Namen der Freiheit? Nicht jede Wahl ist ein Zeugnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit oder amerikanischer Vorbildfunktion, und nicht jeder folgt die Freiheit der Bürger auf dem Fuße. Doch die Wahlen in Afghanistan, Irak und Palästina, die »Revolutionen« in der Ukraine und in Georgien, die teilweise demokratisch inspirierten Unruhen und Reformbewegungen in Iran, im Libanon, in Ägypten, Saudi-Arabien, in Algerien und anderswo sind nicht nur sozialen Notlagen oder mittelständischen Emanzipationskräften geschuldet, sondern auch den kulturellen Folgen der Globalisierung – mitsamt ihren medialen Vernetzungen. Freiheit wirkt ansteckend. Niemand sollte das besser wissen als die Bürger des wiedervereinigten Deutschlands.

Doch mit jenen kulturellen und kommunikativen Vernetzungen der Globalisierung einher geht nicht nur das mediale Bild eines anderen Amerikas und seiner sexuell obsessiven MTV-Kultur, das nicht nur auf muslimische Betrachter schockierend wirkt. Verbreitung findet auch das andere Image einer Nation mit der zweithöchsten Gefängnispopulation der Welt – und eines Präsidenten, der während seiner Amtszeit als texanischer Gouverneur Todesurteile wie auf dem Fließband unterzeichnete. Dass er immer noch des Terrorismus verdächtigte Gefangene zum Folterverhör in Diktaturen »exportieren« lässt (von den rechtsfreien Zonen in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib und Bagram ganz zu schweigen), ist weiterhin unfassbar. Solange diese Flecken auf dem Ansehen amerikanischer Demokratie haften, wird die Freiheitsrhetorik von George W. Bush hohl klingen – zumindest bei jenen, die nicht an die eindrucksvollen Beispiele amerikanischer demokratischer Selbstkorrektur glauben. Als George W. Bush den Export von Freiheit in seiner zweiten präsidialen Antrittsrede vorstellte, mögen manche Realisten in den Staatskanzleien auf Europas Festland mit den Schultern gezuckt haben. Dass dem Menschen Freiheit gebührt, wussten sie. Nur ist ihr Freiheitsbegriff zugleich ein Staatsbegriff – eng verknüpft mit der völkerrechtlichen Idee nationaler Souveränität. Deren teilweiser Verlust in der supranationalen Organisation einer Europäischen Union geht einher mit einer kontinentumspannenden Expansion harmonisierter Rechtsstaatlichkeit: Das ist der Kern der europäischen Verfassungsdebatte. Rechtsstaatlichkeit ist die Voraussetzung aller individuellen Freiheit, aber auch des freien Handels und zwischenstaatlichen Verkehrs. Auch die Vertragsskeptiker müssen zugeben: Noch nie gab es ein freieres Europa als heute – frei von Kriegsangst, frei von nationalistischen oder ideologischen Ressentiments ethnischer oder gar rassischer Überlegenheit, zusammengehalten von allgemein akzeptierten Werten der Demokratie: sozialer Gerechtigkeit, politischer Koalitions- und Meinungsfreiheit, Gleichheit vor dem Gesetz – und dem Glauben an die Segnungen der Marktwirtschaft.

Was Europa indes fehlt, ist genau jenes machtgeschützte demokratische, nationalstaatliche und freiheitliche Sendungsbewusstsein, das – in wechselnden Amplituden – die Außenpolitik der Vereinigten Staaten prägt. Stattdessen, so sehen es Amerikas neokonservative Wortführer, sei die »Alte Welt« den Gefahren eines verteidigungsunwilligen realpolitischen Zynismus ausgesetzt. Doch wenn das stimmen sollte, dann gewiss nicht, weil einem senilen Europa die Ideale fehlten, sondern weil seine blutige Geschichte andere Lehren bereithält als diejenigen Amerikas.

Der Glaube europäischer Nationen an religiöse oder moralisch-politische Überlegenheit ist nach Jahrhunderten tribalistischen und diplomatischen Irrsinns untergegangen. Europa behauptet sich als pragmatischer Interessenverbund, zusammengehalten von Wohlstands- und Sicherheits-Erfahrungen der letzten fünfzig Jahre. Sein keineswegs verlorener Idealismus bewährt sich in der Bereitschaft der Union, die beträchtlichen Kosten der Erweiterung zu tragen. Sie gehen auf Kosten der Bürger, vulgo der Steuerzahler: Gerade in den Tagen der europäischen Verfassungsplebiszite und -abstimmungen ist es die Aufgabe der Politiker, ihnen zu erklären, dass es um ihre eigene Zukunft in Frieden und Freiheit geht. Wer in den Staatenbund eintreten will, muss seine Verfassung den demokratischen Normen der Gemeinschaft anpassen. Europa exportiert nicht nur Wohlstand, sondern auch Freiheit. Es ist kein realpolitisch erkalteter Kontinent, gefangen in wohlfahrtsstaatlichem Egoismus, ohne Verständnis für die universalen Ideale der Demokratie und Menschenwürde – und ihre Herausforderungen an seine Außenpolitik. Im Gegenteil: Sein entwicklungspolitisches und ökologisches Engagement in aller Welt übertrifft das amerikanische um ein Mehrfaches.

Dass der europäische Kontinent mitten im historischen Umbruch keine gemeinsame Außenpolitik im Gleichschritt mit den Vereinigten Staaten betreibt, liegt natürlich nicht im Interesse Washingtons. Die heftige Reaktion der Bush-Regierung auf Frankreichs und Deutschlands Kriegsabstinenz im Irak ist ein Beleg dafür. Doch was als Bruch der atlantischen Allianz interpretiert wird, könnte genauso gut als Beweis für George W. Bushs Glauben an den Siegeszug demokratischer Freiheit verstanden werden. Die Entscheidung der rot-grünen Regierung im Jahr 2002, einen Wahlkampf zu führen, der die überwältigende Abneigung der Deutschen gegen einen Waffengang im Irak aufgriff – ohne zugleich die irreale französische Vision einer strategischen europäischen Contrebalance zu übernehmen –, war nicht Ausdruck eines angeblichen »Antiamerikanismus«, sondern politisch legitim in einem Land, dessen Wehrpflichtarmee in Afghanistan und im Kosovo mit der fünfzigjährigen Tradition militärischer Abstinenz gerade gebrochen hatte.

Die »Wertegemeinschaft« ist nicht zerbrochen

Zur Freiheit demokratischer, souveräner Führung gehört die Fähigkeit von Regierungschefs, die finanzielle und sicherheitspolitische, aber auch die »mentale« Leistungskraft des eigenen Landes in Krisensituationen vernünftig einzuschätzen – von den völkerrechtlichen Bedenken gegen einen Krieg ohne UN-Sanktion ganz abgesehen. Wenn Wahlkämpfe in Demokratien nichts anderes sind als das intensivierte politische Selbstgespräch einer Gesellschaft, dann ist Amerikas (aber auch Angela Merkels) Vorwurf an Gerhard Schröder, die Irak-Kriegs-Frage im Wahljahr 2002 zum eigenen Vorteil ausgebeutet zu haben, nichts anderes als ein autoritärer Reflex. Auch verschlägt der Vorwurf an den Bundeskanzler nicht, als Handelsreisender in Russland oder China keine ostentative »Freiheits«-Positionen angesichts der menschenrechtlichen Repressionen in diesen Ländern einzunehmen. Schaufensterreden bewirken erfahrungsgemäß weniger als die langfristigen demokratischen Folgewirkungen wirtschaftlicher Konversionen verschiedener politischer Systeme. Sie brauchen Zeit, aber sie sind nicht das Ergebnis rhetorischer Pflichtübungen, sondern höchstens von vertragsgestützter Diplomatie.

Die viel beschworene atlantische »Wertegemeinschaft« ist am Irak-Krieg nicht zerbrochen. Dass sie auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks verschieden interpretiert wird, kennzeichnet keineswegs eine unaufhaltsame politische Entfremdung beider Kontinente. In Wirklichkeit symbolisiert die – unbestreitbare – Krise im Dialog der Allianz das alte Problem vernunftgeleiteter Realpolitik: Wo liegen ihre ethischen Grenzen, wo verrät sie die Ideale der Demokratie? Die Antworten kann keine gewählte Regierung an eine hegemoniale Führungsmacht delegieren; sie muss sie selbst bei Gefahr ihrer Abwahl finden – das verlangt demokratischen Realismus.

»Die Vereinigten Staaten«, so Henry Kissinger, »sind wahrscheinlich das einzige Land, in dem ›Realist‹ ein Schimpfwort ist.« Es ist allerdings auch das Land, das seine politischen Visionäre mit vierjähriger Regelmäßigkeit auf den Boden der Tatsachen zurückführt. Darin gleicht es dem »Alten Europa« (Rumsfeld), das seine eigenen Ideale noch längst nicht vergessen hat – ebenso wenig wie die Erinnerung an jenes Amerika, das sie 1945 unter hohen Opfern in die Alte Welt reimportiert hat.

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"Voters in Los Angeles elected a new mayor -- Antonio Villaraigosa. Voters admitted they only voted for Villaraigosa because they want to hear Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounce it." -- Conan O`Brien

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Über diese Spam Aktion wurde auch im Zusammenhang mit Viren berichtet.

Friday, May 20, 2005
Note to Readers, Friday, May 20, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Earlier this week I found my email in-box stuffed with notices of undeliverable emails. However, I didn`t send any of those emails.

I also received a tremendous amount of email responses, mostly written in German. I also received a few emails from “Today in Iraq” readers complaining that they had received spam from my email account. The spam sent out under my email address mostly concerned German history and contained links to German media sources.

Worried that my email account had been hacked, I consulted the experts - my fellow moderators at the Bartcop forum.

I received the following reply from Von Rex, one of the other Bartcop moderators and an expert on cyber-matters. It is a very succinct answer explaining a complex topic. I’m posting Von Rex’s reply here (including his good-natured jibe at Fud, another moderator and technical guru) as a public service for readers:

Spambots Explained

It`s not being sent from your account, and there`s nothing you can do about it except explain this to anyone irate that responds to "your" spam.

See, the problem here is that anyone can send an email with any value at all for the "from" field. Closer examination will reveal that the email isn`t legit as the sending servers won`t be correct, but of course hardly anyone does this.

So with spam like yours, what`s happening is that someone with your address in their address book as been infected and the spam program is sending out random emails based on their address book. For example if I was infected it might search through my address book and find Fud`s address. Then the spambot might configure a message selling penis enlargers and send it out from my account but with Fud`s name in the sender fields. If this pisses someone off and they reply to the spam, Fud would get the reply even though his machine has not been compromised.

In the end there`s nothing you can do. This is a problem with the basic protocol of email. Eventually someone will have to make an email version two and push it to become a standard. Bill Gates is pushing for such a thing right now.

This is also a reason why you shouldn`t retaliate against spam emails. You`ll probably hit an innocent target.

To check your system of malware, you need some kind of detection/cleaning program. The best free ones are Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware. I`ve always used Spybot but I`ve heard they`re starting to lag with their updates a bit, so I`m not sure which one to recommend right now. Either will be good though.

I also run a small app called "Hijack This!" once in a while. It`s not as user friendly but it will detect certain especially nasty malware, though those kind usually require you to screw around manually to get rid of them.

As far as prevention, there`s two things to keep in mind. The first is don`t use Outlook Express or Internet Explorer. Especially Internet Explorer. Use Firefox as your browser instead. Not only is it far more secure, it`s also a better browser.

The second thing to keep in mind is don`t run executable content from an untrusted source. Don`t run .exe files or scripts that get passed around in email or downloaded from kazaa or untrusted web sites. Be familiar with file extensions. Some are safe, like .mpg or .jpg. Others are dangerous, like .vbs, .bat, .exe and so on. Turn on the viewing of extensions if you have a default windows install which extensions turned off. If in doubt about any file, don`t run it.



Melic, another moderator, thoughtfully provided a link to an MSNBC article further explaining the mysterious German email infestation:

Technology correspondent
MSNBC
Updated: 2:56 p.m. ET May 16, 2005

Some e-mail inboxes filled up with German-language spam over the weekend, as the well-traveled Sober virus was apparently turned into a propaganda machine by its author.

Sober has infected millions of computers around the globe since it first launched in 2003, and it`s gone through nearly 20 variations. But this weekend`s version was different — it wasn`t designed to spread itself, or to infect other computers with toxic e-mail messages.

It was designed to simply get a point across.

Some time during the weekend, thousands of Sober-infected machines under the control of the virus writer were instructed to download a new version of the program, called Sober-Q, according to antivirus firm MessageLabs.

The new version turned infected computers into spam machines. The infected computers were then told to send out hundreds of messages, mostly in German, linking to Web pages containing information on conservative German political issues. Many of the e-mails actually linked to legitimate news stories, at Web sites like Der Spiegel Online.

But the worm isn`t spreading, and only previously infected computers were at risk of infection, experts said.

"It is a one-time political message," said McAfee`s Vincent Gullotto, vice president of the firm`s virus research lab.

There are 72 variations of the spam. Some are in English, with crass messages, containing subject lines such as "The Whore Lived Like a German."

But others are obviously laced with politics. Some of the messages bemoan the bombing of Dresden by Allied armies in 1945. The e-mail may be timed to the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, celebrated last week.

Other messages contain arguments against allowing Turkey into the European Union. One message in English links to a story about the politically sensitive topic of alleged Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, "Armenian Genocide Plagues Ankara 90 Years On." A public apology has been proposed as a condition of Turkey`s EU membership.

This technique for sending spam was very effective, spam experts say, because the messages were sent by innocent-looking computers. Most the the messages breezed through spam filters.

"Almost all of the spam e-mails have been sent from otherwise clean IP addresses and will have gone largely undetected by spam filters," said Stephen White, head of anti-spam technical operations at MessageLabs. "It would seem that the virus author has stored up networks of infected machines around the world, holding them on standby to deploy at specific times."

The virus is not considered dangerous, said McAfee`s Gullotto. Very few infections have been reported. But it is generating a lot of spam, he said, with some customers receiving hundreds of messages.

Symantec Corp`s Alfred Huger estimated that Sober-Q had generated "tens of millions" of spam messages. Each infected machines is probably capable of sending out 10,000 spams per hour, he said.

"To spread a signifcant amount of spam you don`t need too many (infected computers)," he said.

This is not the first time a virus has contained a political message, but it is one of the most effective in recent memory, Gullotto said.

"It is generating a lot of spam," he said. "With the success of it, you would expect it to be used again."


So if you’re getting spam from [e-mail], it’s not coming from my machine.

Thanks for reading,

YD

Rant of the Day, Friday, May 20, 2005

A long, revealing and depressing article, drawn from an Army criminal investigation report, describing intelligence “interrogations” in Afghanistan. As one Afghan interpreter notes, these are not intelligence interrogations, but simply gratuitous prisoner abuse.

As a former counterintelligence officer I want to know why 21-year old enlisted men and junior NCOs are conducting interrogations without direct officer supervision - and I‘m not talking about the poorly-trained-but-ambitious Military Intelligence lieutenants and bright-eyed MI captains. Where are the counterintelligence and interrogation Warrant Officers who approve interrogation plans, read interrogation reports, train and supervise enlisted soldiers?

This report is a disgrace to my country and a dishonor to the uniform dear to my heart. It’s why I didn’t post today. I’m too fucking angry.

YD
# posted by yankeedoodle : 12:16 PM
Comments (2) | Trackback (0)

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[urlGive war a chance!]http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com/shockwave/warachance.htm[/url]

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May 21, 2005
Guantánamo Comes to Define U.S. to Muslims
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and SALMAN MASOOD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/international/asia/21gitmo…

NEW DELHI, May 20 - In one of Pakistan`s most exclusive private schools for boys, the annual play this year was "Guantánamo," a docudrama based on testimonies of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, the United States naval base in Cuba.

The cast was made up of students between 16 and 18 years old, each playing the role of a prisoner being held on suspicion of terrorism. To deepen their understanding of their characters, the boys pored through articles in Pakistani newspapers, studied the international press and surfed Web sites, including one that described itself as a nonsectarian Islamic human rights portal and is called cageprisoners.com.

It didn`t matter that the boys at the Lahore Grammar School, an elite academy that has sent many of its graduates to study in American universities, lived in a world quite removed from that known by most prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The more they explored, the more the play resonated, the director of the school`s production, Omair Rana, recalled Friday in a telephone interview. The detainees were Muslim, many were Pakistani and one had been arrested in Islamabad, the country`s capital.

"It was something we all could relate to," Mr. Rana said of "Guantánamo," a play created "from spoken evidence" by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, a Briton and a South African, that was staged in London and in New York last year. "All that seemed very relevant, very nearby - in fact, too close for comfort."

Accounts of abuses at the actual American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, including Newsweek magazine`s now-retracted article on the desecration of the Koran, ricochet around the world, instilling ideas about American power and justice, and sowing distrust of the United States. Even more than the written accounts are the images that flash on television screens throughout the Muslim world: caged men, in orange prison jumpsuits, on their knees. On Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, two satellite networks, images of the prisoners appear in station promos.

For many Muslims, Guantánamo stands as a confirmation of the low regard in which they believe the United States holds them. For many non-Muslims, regardless of their feelings toward the United States, it has emerged as a symbol of American hypocrisy.

"The cages, the orange suits, the shackles - it`s as if they`re dealing with something that`s like a germ they don`t want to touch," said Daoud Kuttab, director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah, in the West Bank. "That`s the nastiness of it."

The Bush administration`s response to the Newsweek article - a general condemnation of prison abuses, coupled with an attack on the magazine - apparently did little to allay the concerns of many Muslims. Then on Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a report detailing the many complaints from detainees at Guantánamo about desecrations of the Koran between early 2002 and mid-2003.

In India, a secular country by law whose people and government are growing increasingly close to the United States, a cartoon appeared in Midday, an afternoon tabloid, on Friday showing a panic-stricken Uncle Sam flushing copies of Newsweek magazine down a toilet.

To the cartoonist, Hemant Morparia, it appeared as though the Bush administration`s answer to the problem was to bury the truth.

"People suspect American intentions," Mr. Morparia, a Mumbai-based radiologist who doubles as a cartoonist, said. "It has nothing to do with being Muslim."

From Mumbai, India, to Amman, Jordan, to London, Guantánamo is a continuing subject for discussion, from television talk shows to sermons to everyday conversations. In countries like Afghanistan, Britain and Pakistan, released detainees often return home and relate their experiences on television news programs. Accusations of egregious abuse sometimes prompt violence, as in last week`s demonstrations in Afghanistan.

Guantánamo provides rhetorical fodder for politicians seeking to bring down United States-allied rulers in their own countries, and it offers a ready rallying point against American dominance, even in countries whose own police and military have been known for severe violations of human rights.

"Even illiterate people pronounce it in a perfect manner, which surprises me a bit, quite frankly," said Irfan Siddiqui, a columnist for Pakistan`s popular Urdu-language daily, Nawa-i-Waqt. "But it shows the significance this issue has attained."

In Europe, accusations of abuse at Guantánamo, as much as the war in Iraq, have become a symbol of what many see as America`s dangerous drift away from the ideals that made it a moral beacon in the post-World War II era. There is a persistent and uneasy sense that the United States fundamentally changed after September 11, and not for the better.

"The simple truth is that America`s leaders have constructed at Guantánamo Bay a legal monster," the French daily, Le Monde, said in a January editorial.

The United States opened the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the eastern end of Cuba, two years ago as a detention center for suspected terrorists from the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It houses about 680 prisoners, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also some from Britain.

On many Arab streets, there was as much conspiracy seen in the retraction of the Newsweek story as in the story itself.

"People already expect the U.S. to deny it, because it already has no credibility in the region," said Mustafa al-Ani, director of the Security and Terrorism Studies Program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "So the initial story will have an impact, and the response simply will not."

Or as a Jordanian pharmacist, Farouk Shoubaki, said of the original report, "It is something the Americans would do."

As Mr. Shoubaki`s remark reflects, Guantánamo offers disconcerting testimony that for many Muslims, the America they used to admire has sunk to the level of their own repressive governments.

Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, said the Guantánamo accusations were seen in his country as "further proof" of hypocrisy and anti-Islamic sentiment in the government of the United States. To many, he said, it was taken "as evidence of how America and the West makes the war against terrorism synonymous with the war against Islam."

"Everyone is focused on the desecration of the Koran and attempts to hurt the feelings of Muslims," he said. "The tenor of the debate is acquiring `civilizational` dimensions."

Afghans, who have the largest number of citizens held at Guantánamo, with as many as 300 at its height, share the general dislike of the prison, but are generally practical and philosophical about it. They say they are used to people being thrown into prison, being tortured there and even dying.

But public anger has grown at the reports of sexual abuse and desecration of the Koran. Even a former Afghan commander, Abdul Khaliq, who said he was happy to see captured Taliban members sent to Guantánamo, is now upset by the stories of sexual abuse and insults to Islam reportedly perpetrated there.

"The Americans were good people before," said Mr. Khaliq, who now works on a road construction project. "Definitely, people are changing their minds towards the Americans."

In a country like Pakistan, the issue is especially vivid because Guantánamo prisoners who have been released are often interviewed by a local news organizations.

As far back as November 2003, a television talk show, modeled after "The O`Reilly Factor," featured an interview with Mohammad Sagheer, the first Pakistani to be released from Guantánamo. And as recently as Friday, an Urdu-language television talk show taped interviews with two ex-prisoners who said they witnessed the desecration of the Koran there.

The latest issue of Newsline, a Karachi-based magazine, featured a story titled, "Back from Camp," which chronicled the story of a former prisoner, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, a poet who pleaded for the Americans to return his writing.

"These are issues that sink into people`s minds," said Samina Ahmed, the Pakistani representative of the Brussels-based research and advocacy organization, International Crisis Group. "Their religion is being demeaned in the context of the war on terror. That`s an issue the U.S. is going to have to address."

In Britain, Guantánamo has entered the political lexicon along with Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad as an emblem of American injustice and abuse. During the London marathon in April this year, David Nicholl, a neurologist, ran the race in an orange jumpsuit to protest the detention of five former British residents at Guantánamo.

"We are all against terrorism but we are not obliged to close our eyes to the excesses of our allies," Chris Mullin, a former British Foreign Office minister told Parliament on Wednesday.

In India, one human rights advocate who routinely takes the Indian military to task for its alleged abuses against insurgents in Kashmir and the northeast, said the United States stance on things like torture and interrogation of suspects at Guantánamo signaled what he called "a human rights disaster" for everyone.

On Friday afternoon in an Islamabad bookshop, Maheen Asif, 33, leafed through a women`s magazine, and paused for only a moment when asked for her impression of Guantánamo Bay.

"Torture," she said, as her daughters, 8 and 5, scampered through the stalls. "The first word that comes to my mind is `torture` - a place where Americans lock up and torture Muslims in the name of terrorism."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Craig S. Smith and Ariane Bernard in Paris; Alan Cowell in London; Hassan Fattah in Amman, Jordan; Carlotta Gall in Kabul, Afghanistan; Salman Masood in Islamabad, Pakistan; and Somini Sengupta in New Delhi.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 21, 2005
Prison Images Raise Issues for World Media
By FELICIA R. LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/international/middleeast/2…

A front-page photograph of Saddam Hussein in his underwear in an Iraqi prison greeted readers of The New York Post and The Sun in London yesterday, coming to The Sun from an American military source seeking to weaken the Iraqi insurgency, The Post reported.
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The photo of Mr. Hussein in briefs and the story of how the tabloid newspapers obtained the images quickly became television news, and print journalists as well struggled with how they would handle the provocative report.

Some news organizations saw the photos` existence, the reaction they provoked and the investigation into their origin as a legitimate subject, regardless of taste issues. In addition to the briefs photo, the two newspapers showed Mr. Hussein strolling, sleeping and doing laundry behind bars.

"We want to look at the story and weigh the news value of it," said Dean Baquet, managing editor of The Los Angeles Times. "But we don`t see any ethical reason not to run it. This is clearly a story.

"The treatment of prisoners has been a big issue, and Saddam is the most significant prisoner of all," Mr. Baquet said. "And it would be odd to write such a story and not show the picture."

The New York Times also decided to use the photograph.

Christa Robinson, a spokeswoman for CNN, said the network used an uncropped photograph of Mr. Hussein in his briefs, but not until CNN executives confirmed that the photographs were authentic. Then the photograph from The Sun was shown in the context of the United States military`s investigation into who had taken the photographs and how The Sun received them, Ms. Robinson said.

At ABC, Jeffrey Schneider, a vice president of ABC News, said "World News Tonight" would show a photograph and do a related report. "These are images that have blanketed the world," he said.

"There are two questions the story will approach," Mr. Schneider said. "How does it happen that the photographs are taken and disseminated? What`s the impact of photos like this on how America is viewed in the rest of the world? Will it have an impact on the troops?"

Fox News initially decided not to broadcast the photographs because it could not confirm their authenticity, said John Moody, senior vice president of the Fox News Channel. "That decision had to be modified once the Pentagon began issuing its statements," he said.

The European Pressphoto Agency, which has thousands of subscribers around the world, took a photograph of someone reading The Sun, clearly showing the photograph of Mr. Hussein in his briefs. But the agency decided not to release the photograph because a German newspaper, Bild Zeitung, issued a media advisory stating that it had purchased exclusive rights to the photo from The Sun, said Gary Kemper, director of the agency`s North American office.

Editors at newspapers in London said they were not running the photos in any form because of the copyright claim by The Sun and its parent, company, News International. They said they had been advised by their legal departments that the photos could not be published even under the fair use terms that allow news organizations to reproduce some copyrighted materials.

"We are not reproducing the pictures," said Graham Tibbetts, the night news editor at The Daily Telegraph. "We are running a short story on the reaction."

Ben Sisario contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 21, 2005
Darth Vader`s Family Values
By JOHN TIERNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/opinion/21tierney.html

Wherever you are, Adam Smith, call your agent. Darth Vader is stealing your best stuff.

The new installment of "Star Wars" has set off the usual dreary red-blue squabble, with liberals using the film to attack Republicans, and some conservatives calling for a boycott. But - and I know this is hard to believe for a movie with characters named General Grievous and Count Dooku - there`s actually a serious bipartisan lesson about the dark side of politics.

If you can sit through the endless light-saber duels and robotic dialogue, you finally see what turned Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. He set out to become a Jedi knight who will use the Force for good, but he`s traumatized, first by the murder of his mother, then by a vision that his wife will die in childbirth.

His fears are manipulated by Chancellor Palpatine, the leader of the Senate (who`s being compared to Senator Bill Frist in Moveon.org commercials). When this oily politician extols the power of the dark side of the Force, Anakin at first protests that those who use it think "only of themselves," whereas the Jedi are "selfless" and "only care about others."

He says he could never betray the Jedi because they`re his family, but then the chancellor puts the family question in perspective: "Learn to know the dark side of the Force, Anakin, and you will be able to save your wife from certain death." Anakin promptly recognizes the limits of altruism, just as Adam Smith did in the 18th century.

Smith knew that some people professed love for all humanity, but he realized that a man`s love for "the members of his own family" is "more precise and determinate, than it can be with the greater part of other people." Hence his famous warning not to rely on the kindness of strangers outside your family: if you want bread, it`s better to count on the baker`s self-interest rather than his generosity.

This has never been a popular bit of advice because selfishness is not admired in human societies any more than among Jedi knights. We know it exists, but it feels wrong. We are born with an instinct for altruism because we evolved in clans of hunter-gatherers who would not have survived if they hadn`t helped one another through hard times.

The result is an enduring political paradox: we no longer live in clans small enough for altruism to be practical, but we still respond to politicians who promise to make us all part of one big selfless community. We want everyone to be bound together with a shared set of values, a yearning that Daniel Klein, an economist, dubs the People`s Romance in the summer issue of The Independent Review.

The People`s Romance is his explanation for why so many Americans have come to love bigger government over the past century. Their specific objectives in Washington differed - liberals stressed charity and social programs for all, while conservatives promoted patriotism and spending on national security - but they both expanded the government in their quest for a national sense of shared purpose.

The result, though, has not been one happy community because America is not a clan with shared values. It is a huge group of strangers with leaders who are hardly altruists - they have their own families and needs. Tocqueville recognized the inherent problem with the People`s Romance when he described citizens` contradictory impulses to be free while also wanting a government that is "unitary, protective and all-powerful."

People try to resolve this contradiction, Tocqueville wrote, by telling themselves that democracy makes them masters of politicians, but they soon find that the Force is not with them, especially if they`re in the minority. Republicans used to rail helplessly at Democrats for taxing them for destructive social programs and curtailing their economic liberties; now Democrats complain about the money squandered on the Iraq war and the threat to civil liberties from the Patriot Act.

For those Democrats, the signature line in this "Star Wars" is the one spoken after the chancellor, citing security threats, consolidates his power by declaring that the republic must become an empire. Senator Padmé listens to her colleagues cheer and says, "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."

She`s disgusted with them, but their enthusiasm is understandable. The chancellor has tapped into their primal desire to unite in one great clan with a shared purpose. They`re in the throes of the People`s Romance.

For further reading:

[url“The People’s Romance: Why People Love Government (As Much As They Do)”]http://swopec.hhs.se/ratioi/abs/ratioi0031.htm[/url] by Daniel Klein, Santa Clara University (working paper).

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley (Penguin Books, 295 pp., 1998).

The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith.

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 21, 2005
Taking Luck Seriously
By MATT MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/opinion/21miller.html

Test your political philosophy with one simple question: which matters most in determining where people end up in life?

You`ve got two choices. The first is "luck" - by which I mean the pre-birth lottery, that inherited package of wealth, health, genes, looks, brains, talents and family. "Luck" is all those gifts or curses for which we can neither take credit nor be blamed.

Choice No. 2 is individual effort, hard work and personal character.

Obviously this is a false choice; every life is a blend of both. We`re born with certain endowments, and make the most of them (or don`t) based on personal traits. But if you had to say which one matters most in shaping where people end up, how many of you would join me in answering "luck"?

In a poll I commissioned a few years ago, people who call themselves liberals or Democrats overwhelmingly said luck; most conservatives or Republicans said individual effort.

But if you`re hoping to shake up today`s gridlocked politics, what`s interesting is that independent voters - now the nation`s biggest bloc - viewed luck the way Democrats do.

Luck isn`t a bad proxy for what the current Times series labels "class." It`s a theme U.S. politics conspicuously avoids. Yet if we approached it right - if we took luck seriously - we`d be on the way to the commonsense consensus needed to make progress on our fixable injustices.

What should luck`s influence mean for public policy? Conservatives, worried that an honest admission of luck`s role would sanction economy-killing egalitarianism, always end up playing down luck. Liberals, while deeply concerned with luck, have often been unwilling to ease the burden of bad luck in ways that preserve the best of capitalist innovation and the virtues of individual responsibility.

Try too hard to wipe out the inequities spawned by luck, and you banish luck`s societal benefits and go down the road of communism. But harness a healthy awe for luck, and you expand the bounds of empathy in ways that make a living wage for poor workers and great schools for poor children national imperatives. What we`re led to is the public agenda missing today, built around passionate commitments - by both liberals and conservatives - to (1) equal opportunity and (2) a minimally decent life, achieved in ways that harness market forces for public purposes.

Don`t take my word for it. The surprising truth is that conservative icon Milton Friedman and liberal philosopher John Rawls agree that luck`s ubiquity compels these commitments. Friedman once told me his concern for luck`s reach had inspired his call for a decent minimum for the unlucky. He fathered what became the earned-income tax credit, which delivers $35 billion a year in wage subsidies to the working poor. Rawls, apostle of the just society, cheered this.

Friedman added that there is no principled way to decide what the decent minimum should be; it`s a political question that depends on what taxes we`re willing to pay. Rawls basically said "make it good" - but not so generous that taxes hurt growth.

But this debate isn`t being framed explicitly today by either side.

So the conservative view of the decent minimum comes to this: "You`re lucky to be in America; you`re lucky to have a job; you`re lucky to have the emergency room." A better idea would be "basic health coverage and $9 to $10 an hour, without putting the full burden of this on employers." Turns out we can have such a society for a penny on the national dollar (1% of G.D.P.), and still leave government smaller (21% of G.D.P.) than it was under President Ronald Reagan.

Can`t we shake hands and call it a deal?

The anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist won`t debate what luck means for policy; he says luck is irrelevant (though he seems like a lucky guy).

By contrast, most Hollywood stars don`t gripe about taxes the way many wealthy Americans do. My theory is that these supertalents are more sensitive to the portion of their wealth that`s attributable to luck. Yes, there`s hard work and persistence and making your own breaks, but the voice, the presence, the body (well, minus certain modern upgrades) clearly come from God.

As polling shows, average Americans agree luck is central. And religious conservatives say that responding to luck`s dominion is a way to honor the divine mystery that put us here. With a little luck, that means Democrats may find they can make America more just while grounding their agenda in values that can win.

E-mail: [e-mail]; Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of "The 2 Percent Solution."
Maureen Dowd is on book leave.

* 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/
Saturday, May 21, 2005

Sadrists Clash with Police in Nasiriyah
Baghdad Sunni Mosque Protest
Ramadi Demonstrations against Koran Desecration

Thousands of protesters rallied in Iraq on Friday denouncing the continued US military presence in the country. Many of the demonstrators in the south were followers of nationalist Shiite young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and they were protesting the desecration of the Koran by the United States military.

Some three thousand demonstrators also came out in Sunni Ramadi to protest reports that US military interrogators had desecrated the Koran, according to Waleed Ibrahim of Reuters. He quotes one of the activists at Ramadi: "‘Political solutions are over and military solutions will start. We will die rather than accept the desecration of our Holy Book and the detention of our women,’’ said Samir al-Dulaimi, head of the Muslim Clerics Association in Anbar province, during the protest."

In Najaf, Kufa and Nasiriyah, followers of Muqtada had painted US and Israeli flags on the ground in the way to mosques, so that worshippers trampled on them as they headed to worship. After prayers at the Kufa mosque, crowds chanted, "Down, down, with Israel; down, down with the USA!" In Najaf, there was a demonstration (either the same one or another, separate rally) against Kuwait for broadcasting last Monday a clip of Lebanese songstress Nancy Ajram singing and dancing before a backdrop that included the image of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

In Nasiriyah, the demonstrations took an ugly turn when Sadr militiamen clashed with local police, leaving four policemen, four civilians, and nine Sadr supporters wounded. Al-Zaman says that one of their motivations was to protest the US desecration of the Koran. AP neglects this detail, but explains:


In Nasiriyah, about 320km south-east of Baghdad, al-Sadr supporters clashed with guards at the headquarters of Dhi Qar provincial Governor Aziz Abed Alwan. The fighting broke out before noon as about 2 000 members of al-Sadr`s al-Mehdi Army marched toward the cleric`s local office, which is near the governor`s headquarters. Armed men guarding the headquarters shot toward the crowd in an apparent bid to disperse it, prompting retaliatory fire from al-Sadr supporters -- injuring four police officers and four civilians. Another nine al-Sadr supporters were injured, said Sheik al-Khafaji, an official at al-Sadr`s Nasiriyah office.



Al-Zaman said that the number of those injured in the Sadrist clash, including 4 policemen, was much higher, putting it at 89. It said the figure of "9" quoted above referred only to Mahdi Army militiamen.

In Baghdad`s Kazimiyah quarter, national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie was the target of assassination by car bomb. He escaped, but the bomb killed two civilians and wounded 3.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Shiite), called for calm and self-restraint in the face of provocations to sectarian violence. (al-Zaman).

Sunni clerics in Baghdad called in their Friday prayers sermons for a three-day closure of mosques to protest what they call the targeting of Sunnis for kidnapping and assassination. A leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, Harith al-Dhari, charged on Wednesday that the Shiite militia, the Badr Corps, was behind the incidents. Badr`s leader denied the accusation.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Sunni cleric, Shaykh Abdul Ghafur al-Samarra`i of the Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad said in his sermon that the mosque closings were "a first step" and "a peaceful protest," but warned that further steps would be taken if attacks on Sunnis persisted. He said that it was an especially dangerous situation when persons who represented themselves as belonging to an official government agency commit atrocities. (Sunnis have claimed that the now Shiite-dominated Ministry of the Interior is behind the attacks). He said he was nevertheless calling for calm and self-restraint.

At the Abu Hanifa Mosque, the capital`s second largest, in Adhamiyah, Shaikh Mu`ayyad al-Adhami announced in his sermon that his mosque, too, would close for three days. He also said, "Today Iraq has become, after its occupation, a slaughterhouse for freedom, a butcher shop of the innocent, and a catalogue of score-settling."

Yasser Salihee of Knight Ridder reports on the struggle of some Sunnis to keep their mosques in the face of Shiite claims on them. Many Sunni mosques in the south have been usurped by Shiites, especiall by Sadrists.

Several US servicemen were killed on Friday, at least 4 in separate incidents, and several more in a military truck that was struck by a car bomb, but no details had been released at the time of this writing.

posted by Juan @ [url5/21/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/sadrists-clash-with-police-in.html[/url]
Friday, May 20, 2005

Why Jacoby is Wrong

Jeff Jacoby argues that there is something peculiar about the reaction of Muslims to the allegations that the Koran was disrespected at Guantanamo prison by US military interrogators.

Jacoby`s position is pure bigotry. We have to be clear about this. Anti-muslimism is a form of racial prejudice no different from any other. If Jacoby said, "What is wrong with those people of African descent, that they are so violent all the time when nobody else is?" he`d probably be fired. It is not all right for him to do the same thing to Muslims. While Muslims are a religious group, in the contemporary United States they most often are racialized. It comes to the same thing.

Jacoby mentions that 17 persons were killed in disturbances in Afghanistan over this issue. But here`s what is wrong with his argument to begin with. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Most Muslims were not upset by the news or took no action about it. Pakistani politician and ex-cricketer Imran Khan couldn`t get out more than a couple hundred people in Lahore, Pakistan, for a peaceful demonstration. Nobody much cared. Even in Afghanistan, go back and read the reports. A lot of the people killed were not killed by rioters. They were demonstrators shot by local Afghan police, police who may have been over-reacting in some cases, and who had been installed in power by the United States. For this, you blame the Muslim religion per se and the whole Muslim world?

Jacoby gives several incidents which he said might have provoked Catholic, Jewish or Buddhist crowds to violence but did not.

Jacoby is so wrong that I hardly know where to begin. All religions produce fanatics at the same rate. It is a constant.

The problem is only in the way that the American press writes about religious fanaticism, and in what the journalists notice.

For instance, those gentle Buddhist monks of Mandalay are perfectly capable of rioting, arson, and killing innocent people over a stone thrown into a monastery, as happened in Burma in October of 2002. Poor minority Muslims were beaten up and killed because of alleged disrespect to the sacred monastery:


"Earlier, in mid-October, religious unrest broke out in Kyauk-se, a town in central Burma, which is located not far away from Mandalay. The unrest spread to the city of Mandalay and then to the capital Rangoon. Burma’s junta confirmed that there had been sporadic clashes between people professing different faiths and slapped a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the areas where the religious unrest was rampant.

According to reports, the religious unrest broke out with a minor dispute, as someone threw a stone into a Buddhist monastery compound and it sparked the anger of the Buddhist monks, who mistakenly believed that the occupants of a nearby mosque were responsible for the alleged stone throw.

Subsequently, number of Muslims were attacked and injured in the religious riot that ensued, while others fearing for their lives sought shelter in the homes of the neighbouring Buddhist families.

According to local populace, many Buddhist monks in Mandalay rushed to Kyauk-se, caused tension thus sparking riots and arson, which left a dozen people dead, including a pregnant woman."



As for Judaism, please. Thousands of Palestinians have lost their homes, been harassed, oppressed, and killed by fanatical Jewish extremists in the West Bank and Gaza. When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin tried to make peace, the Jewish far right killed him. When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced he would withdraw from Gaza, 80,000 Jewish extremists demonstrated, and some threatened to kill Sharon because he was violating their sacred principles. The former chief rabbi of Israel even blamed the tsunami on world support for the withdrawal from Gaza. When Arab Israelis demonstrated against Israeli policies in the West Bank, there was "Jewish intifada" against them, with riots, demonstrations, and neighborhood invasions. The Jewish right gets a pass in the US press for these crimes. Google Gedud Ha`Ivry or Gush Emunim.

As for Christianity, we`ve seen the Christian identity movement blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, we`ve seen abortion doctors shot down in cold blood, we`ve seen decades of religious violence in places like Northern Ireland. Has he ever read Ian Paisely?

What world does Jacoby live in? It is a world where it is all right to generalize about a large group of people. Again, there is a word for that. Bigotry.

posted by Juan @ [url5/20/2005 02:54:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/why-jacoby-is-wrong-jeff-jacoby-argues.html[/url]

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Saturday, May 21, 2005
Commentary of the Day, Saturday, May 21, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Opinion:

George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America’s reputation. It is likely to stay destroyed, because at this point the only way to restore America’s reputation would be to impeach and convict President Bush for intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States.

America can redeem itself only by holding Bush accountable.

As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, they have a blind eye for President Bush’s far more serious lies. Bush’s lies have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, injured and maimed tens of thousands more, devastated a country, destroyed America’s reputation, caused 1 billion Muslims to hate America, ruined our alliances with Europe, created a police state at home, and squandered $300 billion dollars and counting.



Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, and senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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War News for Saturday, May 21, 2005

Bring `em on: Thousands of Shia protest against the American occupation in Najaf.

Bring `em on: Al Sadr supporters clash with guards at the headquarters of Dhi Qar provincial governor in Nasiryah.

Bring `em on: Seven killed in insugency attack on the home of Sunni politician in Mosul. In another press report of this incident: An Iraqi lawmaker said 10 of his private guards were killed here on Thursday during a 1-1/2 hour-long battle with insurgents and Apache helicopter-backed U.S. forces, who he accused of killing several of his aides.

Bring `em on: Two US soldiers killed Thursday in gun attack on convoy in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed Friday while on "combat logistic patrol" in Taji.

Bring `em on: Senior Iraqi oil ministry official gunned down in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Iraqi university professor gunned down in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi journalists executed last Sunday whilst travelling to Kerbala.

Bring `em on: Iraqi police officer and his father shot dead in Samarra.

Bring `em on: US soldier killed by IED explosion whilst travelling on an escort mission in Mahmudiyah.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi soldiers killed and five injured in car bomb attack on a military convoy in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Civilian killed by roadside bomb in Latifya.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi policmen killed by roadside bomb in Baqubah.

Bring `em on: US soldier killed in indirect fire attack in FOB Ramadi.

Who would have guessed it? There was a spending blitz in June 2004:

Bill Keller knew that rebuilding Iraq`s shattered telecommunications network meant throwing money into a black hole.

As the clock ticked down to the end of the U.S. occupation last June, reconstruction projects were hopelessly mired in delays, and financial controls at the Iraqi Communications Ministry appeared non-existent. Yet instead of putting the brakes on spending, top U.S. officials urged that contracts be accelerated, Keller said.

"We were squandering the money we were entrusted to handle," said Keller, at the time was a deputy adviser to the Communications Ministry. "We were a blind mouse with money."

This apparent indifference toward accountability when it came to spending Iraqi money was common among U.S. officials last year as they rushed to sign contracts in the waning days of U.S. control of Iraq, according to interviews and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

In recent audits and interviews, June 2004 has emerged as a month when money and accountability were thrown out the door. The United States played the role of frenzied shopper, leaving the Iraqis to pay the bill. More than 1,000 contracts were issued by U.S. officials in June, about double the usual number. Auditors disclosed this month that several U.S. officials are under investigation for possible embezzlement during the June spending blitz.

"There were lots of examples of bad management because of the chaos around the turnover," said Ginger Cruz, chief of staff for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, who oversees U.S. spending in Iraq. "There was a greater opportunity for fraud."



More on the UN oil for food $cam:

In mid-February 2003, just weeks from the onset of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, oil tankers began loading Iraqi crude at the Iraqi port of Khor al-Amaya. The Bush administration-approved sanction-busting oil shipments involved a Jordanian company named Millenium, owned by the Shaheen Business Investment Group and a Connecticut-based shipbroker called Odin Marine, Inc. Oil tankers were permitted to off load their oil at the UAE port of Fujairah for reshipment on larger tankers without any interference from the U.S. Navy-led Maritime Interdiction Force (MIF), set up to enforce the sanctions. Giangrandi`s company, Italtech, was involved in a number of the shipments as a U.N. contract holder (lifter).

When Iraq`s Oil Minister expressed his suspicion that the oil shipments would never get by the U.S. Navy defenses, a mysterious high-ranking visitor told him the Iraqi oil was "for the sake of the people who work for the defense of the United States. It will pass through safely." When the unknown visitor later asked for additional oil shipments from Khor al-Amaya he assured the minister that "you will never hear about this in the press any more. The U.S. forces will make them be quiet."

Millennium chartered seven ships through Odin. Shipping communications obtained by the committee proved that the tankers traveled with the full knowledge and acquiescence of the Maritime Interdiction Force, then under the command of a U.S. naval officer, Commander Harry French. The MIF permitted all the ships loading oil from Khor al-Amaya to leave the Gulf without interference. Odin became concerned about the legality of the shipments and eventually contacted U.S. State Department official Amy Schedlebauer. Two hours after Odin`s general counsel contacted Schedlebauer, she responded in an e-mail: `AWARE OF THE SHIPMENTS AND HAS DETERMINED NOT TO TAKE ACTION."

Coleman and Levin wrote a February 8, 2005, letter to Rumsfeld asking about the operations of the Maritime Interdiction Force in the Gulf prior to the war. A similar letter was sent to the State Department inquiring about the illegal Khor al-Amaya oil shipments. To date, the committee has not received an answer from either Rumfeld or Rice.

Minority report documents indicate that one of the largest recipients of Bayoil Iraqi oil shipments was Enron, the bankrupt company that served as a virtual slush fund for the political campaigns of George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

At the same time Enron Chairman Kenneth ("Kenny Boy") Lay was involved in Vice President Dick Cheney`s Energy Task Force secret dealings and when he was stuffing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of George W. Bush and Cheney`s political campaign, he also managed to illegally stick $206, 757 into the pockets of Saddam Hussein and his cohorts.

The Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal also involves one of the Bush children—Dorothy "Doro" Bush Koch, sister of George W. Bush and married to Bobby Koch, reportedly a cousin in the oil industry Koch family, the owner of Koch Industries, which is also one of Bush`s largest political donors. The minority committee report indicates that Koch Industries was also a major recipient of illegal Iraqi oil and a huge source of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein.

The total sum in kickbacks from George W. Bush`s cousin-in-laws to Saddam`s bank accounts: $1,294,620.

George Galloway was correct when he called the Coleman Committee the "mother of all smoke screens." Major political contributors and friends of Bush not only paid illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein but personally profited from sanctions-busting with Iraq. Those involved in the scheme included individuals who date back to the Reagan/Bush 41 "cluster bombs and biological and chemical weapons-for-oil" scandal of the 1980s. Galloway is correct when he stated that there is enough evidence on Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair and their neocon advisers to park them in prison cells in The Hague for an awfully long time.



Tip of the iceberg?

McMillion`s booty included about 30 automatic rifles, six rocket-propelled grenade launchers and dozens of magazines, scopes and sights. There also were several dummy land mines and grenades, 1,183 Iraqi army berets, more than 600 pairs of socks and eight full uniforms. Other items included a statue looted from an Iraqi museum.

The judge found McMillion guilty of violating an order against taking, retaining, storing and transporting war trophies for nonofficial purposes.



Bloggerheads say what needs to be said of the Saddam underpants saga:

By sheer coincidence, these photos were published on the very same day as...

BBC - US report reveals Afghan abuses: Fresh details have emerged of abuse of prisoners by US troops in Afghanistan. The deaths of two inmates and alleged abuse of others is detailed by the New York Times citing a 2,000-page document leaked from a US army investigation. The report says some prisoners were chained to ceilings, and that a female interrogator stepped on a man`s neck and kicked another in the genitals. The White House said the abuses were being investigated and those responsible would be held to account.


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The unknown unknowns of the Abu Ghraib scandal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1489115,00.ht…

Seymour Hersh: The 10 inquiries into prisoner abuse have let Bush and Co off the hook
Seymour Hersh
Saturday May 21, 2005

Guardian
It`s been over a year since I published a series of articles in the New Yorker outlining the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There have been at least 10 official military investigations since then - none of which has challenged the official Bush administration line that there was no high-level policy condoning or overlooking such abuse. The buck always stops with the handful of enlisted army reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company whose images fill the iconic Abu Ghraib photos with their inappropriate smiles and sadistic posing of the prisoners.

It`s a dreary pattern. The reports and the subsequent Senate proceedings are sometimes criticised on editorial pages. There are calls for a truly independent investigation by the Senate or House. Then, as months pass with no official action, the issue withers away, until the next set of revelations revives it.

There is much more to be learned. What do I know? A few things stand out. I know of the continuing practice of American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to interrogation centres in south-east Asia and elsewhere. I know of the young special forces officer whose subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them emailed explicit photos back home. The officer testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos depicted, but they - and everybody in the command - understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups.

What else do I know? I know that the decision was made inside the Pentagon in the first weeks of the Afghanistan war - which seemed "won" by December 2001 - to indefinitely detain scores of prisoners who were accumulating daily at American staging posts throughout the country. At the time, according to a memo, in my possession, addressed to Donald Rumsfeld, there were "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody". I could not learn if some or all of them have been released, or if some are still being held.

A Pentagon spokesman, when asked to comment, said that he had no information to substantiate the number in the document, and that there were currently about 100 juveniles being held in Iraq and Afghanistan; he did not address detainees held elsewhere. He said they received some special care, but added "age is not a determining factor in detention ... As with all the detainees, their release is contingent upon the determination that they are not a threat and that they are of no further intelligence value. Unfortunately, we have found that ... age does not necessarily diminish threat potential."

The 10 official inquiries into Abu Ghraib are asking the wrong questions, at least in terms of apportioning ultimate responsibility for the treatment of prisoners. The question that never gets adequately answered is this: what did the president do after being told about Abu Ghraib? It is here that chronology becomes very important.

The US-led coalition forces swept to seeming immediate success in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and by early April Baghdad had been taken. Over the next few months, however, the resistance grew in scope, persistence and skill. In August 2003 it became more aggressive. At this point there was a decision to get tough with the thousands of prisoners in Iraq, many of whom had been seized in random raids or at roadside checkpoints. Major General Geoffrey D Miller, an army artillery officer who, as commander at Guantánamo, had got tough with the prisoners there, visited Baghdad to tutor the troops - to "Gitmo-ise" the Iraqi system.

By the beginning of October 2003 the reservists on the night shift at Abu Ghraib had begun their abuse of prisoners. They were aware that some of America`s elite special forces units were also at work at the prison. Those highly trained military men had been authorised by the Pentagon`s senior leadership to act far outside the normal rules of engagement. There was no secret about the interrogation practices used throughout that autumn and early winter, and few objections. In fact representatives of one of the Pentagon`s private contractors at Abu Ghraib, who were involved in prisoner interrogation, were told that Condoleezza Rice, then the president`s national security adviser, had praised their efforts. It`s not clear why she would do so - there is still no evidence that the American intelligence community has accumulated any significant information about the operations of the resistance, who continue to strike US soldiers and Iraqis. The night shift`s activities at Abu Ghraib came to an end on January 13 2004, when specialist Joseph M Darby, one of the 372nd reservists, provided army police authorities with a disk full of explicit images. By then, these horrors had been taking place for nearly four months.

Three days later the army began an investigation. But it is what was not done that is significant. There is no evidence that President Bush, upon learning of the devastating conduct at Abu Ghraib, asked any hard questions of Rumsfeld and his own aides in the White House; no evidence that they took any significant steps, upon learning in mid-January of the abuses, to review and modify the military`s policy toward prisoners. I was told by a high-level former intelligence official that within days of the first reports the judicial system was programmed to begin prosecuting the enlisted men and women in the photos and to go no further up the chain of command.

In late April, after the CBS and New Yorker reports, a series of news conferences and press briefings emphasised the White House`s dismay over the conduct of a few misguided soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the president`s repeated opposition to torture. Miller was introduced anew to the American press corps in Baghdad and it was explained that the general had been assigned to clean up the prison system and instil respect for the Geneva conventions.

Despite Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo - not to mention Iraq and the failure of intelligence - and the various roles they played in what went wrong, Rumsfeld kept his job; Rice was promoted to secretary of state; Alberto Gonzales, who commissioned the memos justifying torture, became attorney general; deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz was nominated to the presidency of the World Bank; and Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defence for intelligence and one of those most directly involved in the policies on prisoners, was still one of Rumsfeld`s closest confidants. President Bush, asked about accountability, told the Washington Post before his second inauguration that the American people had supplied all the accountability needed - by re-electing him. Only seven enlisted men and women have been charged or pleaded guilty to offences relating to Abu Ghraib. No officer is facing criminal proceedings.

Such action, or inaction, has special significance for me. In my years of reporting, since covering My Lai in 1969, I have come to know the human costs of such events - and to believe that soldiers who participate can become victims as well.

Amid my frenetic reporting for the New Yorker on Abu Ghraib, I was telephoned by a middle-aged woman. She told me that a family member, a young woman, was among those members of the 320th Military Police Battalion, to which the 372nd was attached, who had returned to the US in March. She came back a different person - distraught, angry and wanting nothing to do with her immediate family. At some point afterward, the older woman remembered that she had lent the reservist a portable computer with a DVD player to take to Iraq; on it she discovered an extensive series of images of a naked Iraqi prisoner flinching in fear before two snarling dogs. One of the images was published in the New Yorker and then all over the world.

The war, the older woman told me, was not the war for democracy and freedom that she thought her young family member had been sent to fight. Others must know, she said. There was one other thing she wanted to share with me. Since returning from Iraq, the young woman had been getting large black tattoos all over her body. She seemed intent on changing her skin.

· Extracted from The Chain of Command, published in paperback by Penguin Press (£7.99)
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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The Independent
A typically Lebanese story of betrayal at the hands of so-called civilised nations
Saturday, 21st May 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=640…


Many believe the name Martyrs’ Square refers to the victims of the 15-year civil war. Not so

In Beirut last week, they announced the winners of a competition to redevelop Martyrs’ Square, which had once been Lebanon’s civil war front line and on the edge of which the tomb of the murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri now stands.

There were two remarkable things about this event. The first was the brilliant decision by the redevelopment firm Solidere - in which Hariri held 10 per cent of the shares - to announce the results not in one of Beirut’s swank hotels but in a war-ruined shopping centre and cinema complex that still lies next to the square.

The great cone-shaped wreckage - known as the "egg" to Beirutis - was washed out, shored up and carpeted so that when we arrived to hear the winners, we had to walk between walls torn up by so many bullets that they looked like Irish lace. Amid the literal ruins of war, we were invited to contemplate a new future.

The second extraordinary development was the winning design by two Greek companies. Their plans called for the sea - at present a quarter of a mile away beyond a landfill - to be brought, via tunnels and bridges, right up to the archaeological remains at the edge of the square. Thus would the Mediterranean be returned to the Roman city of Berytus where it originally lapped, washing steadily past the ancient Ottoman tower which once guarded Beirut port. The old world would come to the rescue of the new.

But history cannot be "rescued", and even today many Lebanese - preparing for national elections in a few days’ time which will once again emphasise the respective Christian and Muslim religion of the voters - believe the name Martyrs’ Square refers to the victims of the country’s 15-year civil war.

Not so. In 1773, the Russians stormed into Beirut to humiliate the Ottomans and placed a massive portrait of Catherine the Great on the city gates. All who entered were forced to bow before the picture or, at the least, dismount from their horses. And the biggest naval gun aboard their offshore fleet was then set down in the middle of the city square. So for almost a century and a half, it became the Place du Canon.

But under Ottoman rule in 1915 and 1916, the square acquired a grim new history as a place of gallows. The story is dark enough - and laced with enough foreign betrayal to make it truly Lebanese. Prior to the First World War, 33 Arabs in what is now Lebanon and was then Syria had appealed to the French consul in Beirut to help them to gain independence from the Turks - or at least offer French protection.

The letters - from both Muslims and Christians, one from a Palestinian and another from a senior officer in the Ottoman army - were written in secret and duly reached the consul. But when France broke off relations with the Sublime Porte on the outbreak of war, the diplomat - rather than pack those subversive letters off to his new residence in Egypt - hid them in the abandoned consulate.

And so it came to pass that the local French-language interpreter at the consulate, imprisoned in Damascus, sought to gain his freedom with Ahmed Jemal Pasha, commander of the Turkish Fourth Army in Syria, by betraying to him the exact location where the consul had hidden the documents. Ottoman security agents then broke into the consulate - which was supposed to be under the protection of the still-neutral United States - and found the incriminating letters. Jemal Pasha’s fury was now directed against these treacherous letter writers with Saddam-like fury.

They were dragged from their homes, taken to the hill town of Aley, brutally tortured and sentenced to be hanged by a drum-head military court. And hanged they duly were, only a few feet from the spot where the sea will now wash up to the square and scarcely 50 metres from the tomb where Rafiq Hariri now lies. A priest was hanged in his robes. The Ottoman officer went to his death in full military uniform.

And three days after the last batch of Lebanese patriots were hanged in 1916, François Georges Picot signed his infamous secret agreement with Sir Mark Sykes to divide up the Middle East, taking Syria for France - and Palestine for the Brits - which would ensure that the French government rather than an independent Lebanese government took over Lebanon.

Now here’s the rub. Not only had every leading Lebanese patriot been liquidated just before the Sykes-Picot agreement. But the French diplomat who had shamefully left those fatal letters behind in his consulate in Beirut was - wait for it - the very same François Georges Picot.

His reaction to the hangings remains unknown, but the condemned men at least let the world know what they thought about their fate. Unusually for the Turks, they allowed the men to speak briefly from the scaffold and their words were printed in a book published in Cairo in 1922 which, 60 years later, I discovered in an Egyptian antiquarian bookshop.

With the rope round his neck, Abdul-Karim al-Khalil - his surviving Muslim family is well known in modern-day Lebanon - cursed the Turks and asked "the civilised nations of the world for our independence and freedom. O paradise of my country, carry our feelings of brotherly love to every Lebanese, to every Syrian, to every Arab, tell them of our tragic end and tell them: ’For your freedom we have lived and for your independence we are dying!’".

Then he kicked away the step ladder to the gallows, effectively hanging himself.

For a quarter of an hour, two brothers, Mohamed and Mahmoud Mahmessani, stood on the gallows, Mohamed holding Mahmoud in his arms, all the while trying to comfort him. He asked the executioner that they should be hanged at the same moment and his wish was granted. Joseph Bishara Hani, a Christian, cried out that "I have lived a blameless life and I die without fear". Then the hangman kicked the ladder from beneath Hani’s feet. All were dumped in a mass grave on the beach.

But the records show that the sectarian tensions between pro-French Christians and Arab nationalists which boiled over in the 1975-90 civil war were present even then; before the executions, most of the Muslims shouted a blessing to their "fellow Arabs" while most of the Christians shouted "Vive la France!".

When the Emir Feisel heard of their deaths in Damascus, he leapt to his feet and shouted: "Arabs! Death will now be a pleasure for us." Sound familiar? Let the waters of the Mediterranean now wash into the square where their gallows stood.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Gestern berichtet die NYTimes über diese Foltervorwürfe siehe #28591.
Diese Vorgänge sind schon so alltäglich, dass fast niemand sich mehr darüber aufregt, sondern manche noch immer die US-Führung verteidigen, sie würde diese nichts anderes wollen als Freiheit und Demokratie in der Welt zu verbreiten.
Aber es passt nicht zusammen, auf der einen Seite Folter und Mißachtung jeglicher internationaler Rechte und auf der anderen Seite die Rhetorik über Freedom, Liberty und Democracy.
Man nennt sowas Scheinheiligkeit und Bigoterie.
Vom Spiegel:[urlKarsai fordert von Bush hartes Vorgehen]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,357004,00.html[/url]


Afghan prisoners were `tortured to death` by American guards
By Justin Huggler, Asia Correspondent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=640…

21 May 2005

Shocking and detailed accounts have emerged of how two Afghan prisoners were tortured to death by American interrogators and prison guards at Bagram air base, outside Kabul.

A 2,000-page report on an internal investigation by the US military leaked to The New York Times and published yesterday provides exhaustive detail on how the two were kept chained in excruciating positions and kicked to death.

The harrowing stories of the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar told in the report could prove as damaging to the US as the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

The report reveals that Dilawar, a taxi driver, died despite the fact that most of the interrogators were convinced he was innocent.

There will be fears of an explosive reaction in Afghanistan. The New York Times report comes a week after at least 15 people were killed in protests in Afghanistan triggered by a Newsweek report which said US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down a lavatory. Newsweek has since retracted the report, saying it was based on a flawed source.

But The New York Times story will not go away so easily for the Bush administration. Its source is the findings of the US military`s own investigation. It also comes at a dangerous time in Afghanistan, with violence increasing and signs that the Taliban may be resurgent.

The leaked report contains graphic details of a culture of abuse at Bagram, where detainees are held while the US military decides whether to send them to Guantanamo. In sworn statements, US soldiers tell of a woman interrogator with a taste for humiliation who stepped on the neck of one detainee and kicked another in the genitals.

They also tell of Specialist Damien Corsetti, an interrogator called "Monster" - he had the word tattooed in Italian across his chest - who one sergeant praised as the "king of torture". One Saudi detainee testified that Spc Corsetti held his penis against his face and threatened to rape him.

The report includes the names of all the US soldiers involved. It details the cases of the two Afghan men who died in US custody. The first, Habibullah, was captured in November 2002. He was locked in an isolation cell with his hands shackled to the wire ceiling over his head. The report describes how he was literally kicked to death over several days.

The guards found him "uncooperative", and he was given multiple "peroneal strikes" - a disabling blow to the leg just above the knee. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg," former Sgt Thomas Curtis told investigators.

A lawyer for one of the guards who kneed Habibullah in this fashion told US investigators: "My client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility."

When Habibullah started coughing up phlegm and complaining of chest pains, the guards laughed at him. Eventually his dead body was found hanging from the handcuffs that still chained him to the ceiling. A post-mortem examination found that he was probably killed by a blood clot, caused by the leg injuries, which travelled to his heart and blocked the blood supply to his lungs.

Dilawar, a taxi driver, was detained in December 2002 as he drove past a US base that had earlier come under rocket attack. Passengers he had picked up were carrying suspicious items.

Spc Corey Jones, an interrogator, told investigators that Dilawar spat in his face. He responded with a couple of knee strikes.

"He screamed out, `Allah! Allah! Allah!` and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his God," Spc Jones said. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny." The report says it became a running joke and prison guards kicked Dilawar just to hear him scream "Allah". "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes," he said.

During an interrogation, the severely injured Dilawar begged a translator to get him a doctor. The translator says he told the interrogators, but one replied: "He`s OK. He`s just trying to get out of his restraints."

An autopsy found that Dilawar died of heart failure caused by "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities". The coroner, Lieutenant-Colonel Elizabeth Rouse, told a pre-trial hearing that his legs "had basically been pulpified ... I`ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus."

Seven US soldiers face criminal charges.


21 April 2005 17:41

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Patriarch denounces U.S. evangelicals in Iraq
19 May 2005 17:46:49 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L19124772.htm

PARIS, May 19 (Reuters) - The head of Iraq`s largest Christian community denounced American evangelical missionaries in his country on Thursday for what he said were attempts to convert poor Muslims by flashing money and smart cars.

Patriarch Emmanuel Delly, head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, told journalists that many Protestant activists had come to Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and set up what he called "boutiques" to attract converts.

Many Muslim countries consider Christian missionaries as part of a Western campaign against Islam and punish both the preacher and the apostate Muslim severely. Violent Iraqi groups killed at least five evangelical missionaries last year.

At least 20 Iraqis were killed in bombings of Christian churches last year as unknown attackers stepped up pressure on non-Muslims there. Christian minorities in Muslim countries usually keep a low profile and do not evangelise.

Delly said Iraq did not need missionaries as its Christian churches dated back long before Protestantism. As for trying to convert Muslims, he said: "You can`t even talk about that here."

Christians make up 3 percent of Iraq`s 26 million mostly Muslim population, the largest group being the 600,000 Chaldeans who are Eastern rite Catholics linked to the Vatican.

Saying the evangelicals were not real missionaries, Delly said they attracted poor youths with displays of money and taking them "out riding in cars to have fun".

"Then they take photos and send them here, to Germany, to the United States and say `look how many Muslims have become Christian`," he said.

The patriarch declined to say if the missionaries were a challenge for his church or if U.S. authorities supported them.

EVANGELICAL "BOUTIQUES" IN BAGHDAD

The idea of converting Muslims has gained some support among U.S. evangelicals since the September 11 attacks, but foreigners who evangelise in Islamic countries must keep very low profiles.

Some were active in Iraq in the first year after Saddam Hussein`s overthrow, but deteriorating security since then probably means many have left, Baghdad residents say.

"There may be between 100 and 200 there now," said Todd Johnson, an expert on world Christianity at the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Seminary near Boston, Massachusetts.

"They`re mostly aid workers, I don`t think there is much regular evangelising," he told Reuters.

Four U.S. Baptist missionaries were killed in Iraq in March 2004 and seven South Korean Presbyterians were briefly kidnapped the following month. That June, Islamic militants beheaded a South Korean truck driver who was an evangelical Christian. Delly had no overall figures for these missions but said he knew of 14 evangelical houses, which he called "boutiques", in one central Baghdad neighbourhood alone. "I don`t know where their money comes from," he added.

The patriarch, who vigorously opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and met French President Jacques Chirac -- who also opposed it -- on Wednesday, declined to comment on Washington`s policy there or whether he had contacts with U.S. authorities.

"Frankly, I try to avoid meeting them as much as possible," he said. "They are the occupiers. The occupied don`t want to be occupied. That`s human nature."

Delly, 77, ranks as an archbishop in the Catholic Church and is tipped as a possible future cardinal. Eastern rite prelates traditionally do not accept such honours but three -- a Copt, a Assyrian and a Maronite -- are now "princes of the Church."

AlertNet news is provided by



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Galloway tongue-lashes Coleman; committee documents show Bush political friends and family paid Oil-for-Food kickbacks to Saddam Hussein
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/052105Madsen/05…

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer


May 21, 2005—British Member of Parliament George Galloway presented the U.S. Senate with the best tongue lashing since U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch excoriated Senator Joseph McCarthy over his witch hunt directed at one of Welch`s law firm associates who had been a member of the Lawyer`s Guild: "You`ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

The May 17 testimony by Galloway, the newly-elected Respect Party member for East London`s Bethnal Green and Bow constituency, was in response to a report issued by Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman`s Permanent Select Subcommittee on Investigations that charged Galloway with personally profiting from Iraq`s United Nations Oil-for-Food program.

For Galloway, it was déjà vu. He had already successfully fended off charges that he accepted oil money from Saddam Hussein and successfully sued the neoconservative-owned Daily Telegraph for libel. Articles in the Telegraph and Christian Science Monitor citing documents from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry implicating Galloway in the Oil-for-Food scandal were later determined to be forgeries.

Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. occupation authorities in Iraq invited Telegraph reporters into the bombed out remains of Iraqi intelligence headquarters. Among the documents "found" by the paper`s reporters were those that "revealed" that Galloway had solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from Iraq, funds skimmed from the Oil-for-Food program.

Coleman`s committee resurrected the spurious charges against Galloway in its report. Mark L. Greenblatt, the counsel for the committee, relied on new suspicious documents said to have been obtained from the Iraqi Oil Ministry, now run by convicted bank embezzler and disinformation source Ahmad Chalabi. In addition, former Saddam officials Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Foreign Minister, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, and an unnamed "senior official" of the regime, who are all incarcerated in U.S. military prisons awaiting trials that could lead to the death penalty, were all cited by Coleman`s committee as supporting the documents used to charge Galloway and his humanitarian charity, Mariam`s Appeal, with accepting oil proceeds from Iraq. Coleman stated that the ex-Iraqi officials were not looking for leniency in describing Iraq`s oil deals with foreign officials. However, Coleman failed to state that the chief Iraqi prosecutor for the upcoming trials is Salem Chalabi, the nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, whose oil ministry was reported by the committee to have produced the questionable documents. Salem is also a law partner of Marc Zell, the East Jerusalem-based former law partner of outgoing Pentagon official Douglas Feith, whose former aide, Lawrence A. Franklin, has been indicted for passing classified information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—a major funder of Coleman`s political campaigns and multiple trips to Israel—and Israeli embassy officials.

Poorly reproduced copies produced by the committee indicated that a Jordanian businessman and philanthropist named Fawaz Zuraiqat was the middleman for the oil transactions. Zuraiqat, who did business in Iraq during Saddam`s regime, became the chairman of Mariam`s Appeal after Galloway stepped down.

During the testimony, Greenblatt testified that the unnamed official was asked, "Did Iraq grant oil allocations to Galloway?" The counsel said the official tersely responded with, "Yes." Greenblatt also testified that the senior unnamed official confirmed "a document" used as proof against Galloway was authentic. Coleman asked Greenblatt how he knew the documents in question were genuine. Greenblatt responded that they "corroborate with other documents." Galloway later pointed out in his testimony that other documents from the same time period as those produced by the committee were proven to be forgeries.

The committee`s documents allegedly obtained from the Iraqi Oil Ministry contain references to an oil company called Aredio Petroleum Company. One document contains the words "Fawaz Zuraiqat–Mariam`s Appeal" in parentheses after "Aredio Petroleum Company." Galloway testified that he had never heard of Aredio Petroleum before the Senate hearing.

Galloway and observers at a press conference noted that the committee not only translated the Oil Ministry documents and prepared a manipulated version to serve as report exhibits but also covered the poorly-copied Arabic versions with the manipulated English copies, making it impossible to read in their entirety the original Arabic text.

Carl Levin, who once was also accused by neoconservatives of accepting Oil-for-Food money from Saddam Hussein`s government, concentrated on the role of Bayoil, a Houston-based company, in evading Iraqi sanctions and profiting from the Oil-for-Food program.

One "beneficiary list"—supposedly found in the archives of the Iraqi Oil Ministry and translated by the shadowy Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Washington, DC-based group with links to Israel`s Likud Party—contained the name Shaker Al-Khafajji, an Iraqi-American businessman who was reported to have given $400,000 to former UN weapons inspector and war critic Scott Ritter to produce a documentary. According to the alleged oil ministry documents, Al-Khafajji was said to have received a 10.5 million barrel oil allocation from Iraq. That same list contained the name of George Galloway, who was listed as a recipient or co-recipient of 19 million barrels of Iraqi oil. Galloway`s Mariam`s Appeal contributor and later chairman Fawaz Zureikat (the spelling used in the MEMRI documents), was said to have received 6 million barrels. The list was also published in Baghdad by a new independent newspaper named Al Mada,

When pressed by Coleman if he knew that Mariam`s Appeal, named for an Iraqi girl who was battling cancer, had received money from Saddam through Zuraiqat, Galloway said that the Jordanian businessman was the charity`s third largest donor (375,000 British pounds) after United Arab Emirates President Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahayan and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Galloway said Zuraiqat made introductions on behalf of Mariam`s Appeal in Baghdad and that he was not aware of all of Zuraiqat`s business dealings. Galloway said that Coleman likely "didn`t know what business his AIPAC donators were involved in." Galloway drew the committee`s attention to the fact that British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith ordered the British Charity Commission to investigate Mariam`s Appeal and found "no problem" after "every penny in and out" were scrutinized. He said the audit found no donations from Aredio Petroleum as alleged in the committee documents. Galloway said Zuraiqat never gave him any money from "an oil deal, a cake deal, or a bread deal."

The charges brought by Coleman`s committee largely rehashed the original accusations contained in the MEMRI-laundered documents. Those same MEMRI documents contained the names of French Senator and former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who was also cited in the Coleman Committee documents. Other recipients named in the MEMRI-tainted documents included the very same Russian political parties and leaders mentioned in the Coleman Committee report, including Vladimir Zhironovsky`s Russian Liberal Democratic Party. Even an adviser to anti-war Pope John Paul II, French priest Father Jean-Marie Benjamin, was implicated in the MEMRI documents. Benjamin was accused of accepting 4.5 million barrels of oil because he arranged a meeting between Tariq Aziz, an Iraqi Christian, and the pope. Benjamin is secretary general of the Assisi-based Beato Angelica Foundation and once served as a special events official for UNICEF where he collaborated with the late actors Peter Ustinov and Audrey Hepburn.

In addition to anti-Iraq war political parties, politicians, and businessmen in France, Russia, Britain, Indonesia, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Serbia, Canada, Lebanon, Palestine, Brazil, Egypt, India, South Africa, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Netherlands, China, Vietnam, Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, Pakistan, Chad, Myanmar, Belarus, Austria, and Ukraine, U.S. politicians who opposed the Iraqi war were also implicated because they supposedly (according to the neocon spin machine of newspapers and websites) accepted campaign contributions from Al-Khafajji. Among Al-Khafajji`s recipients were Michigan Democrats Carl Levin, David Bonior, and John Conyers, as well as Bill Clinton and Al Gore`s 1996 presidential campaign. The neocons claimed that all five Democratic leaders were involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal by association with Al-Khafajji`s political donations.

According to the Calgary Sun, Canadian Arthur Milholland, the CEO of Calgary-based Oilexco (which allegedly received 9.6 million barrels of oil from Saddam), directly implicated MEMRI in the forgeries of the documents used by the Telegraph and Al Mada (also cited by the Coleman committee). He told the paper, MEMRI "has some motives." Leith Shbeilat, chairman of the anti-corruption committee of the Jordanian Parliament was alleged to have received 15.5 million barrels of oil from Saddam. It is noteworthy that Shbeilat heads a committee that has jurisdiction over calls to have current Iraqi Oil Minister Ahmad Chalabi extradited to Jordan to serve a long prison sentence for his conviction for embezzling $300 million from the collapsed Petra Bank of Jordan, the third largest bank in the country.

Galloway testified that Coleman, a lawyer, had been "cavalier with justice" in his investigation and accusations. Galloway also noted several errors in the committee documents and report. He said he met with Saddam twice—in 1994 and August 2002—and that did not constitute "many meetings" as stated in the Republican majority report. Galloway said he met with Saddam as many times as Donald Rumsfeld. However, Galloway said while that he met with Saddam to avert war, Rumsfeld met with Saddam "to sell him guns and give him maps."

When Coleman accused Galloway of being an outspoken supporter of Saddam`s regime, Galloway responded by emphasizing that he condemned Saddam in outspoken terms and provided the committee with a dossier containing Hansard parliamentary records of those denunciations. Galloway said he had a better record of opposition to Saddam than Coleman or "any other member of the American or British governments."

Galloway also criticized Coleman for quoting an unnamed source without finding out if the allegations were true. He asked Coleman, "Who is this senior former official? Don`t I or the committee or the public have a right to know?" In a dramatic moment, Galloway thundered, "You have nothing on me, senator, other than my name on lists from your puppet government in Iraq." Galloway added, "Knowing how you treat prisoners, I`m not sure how much credibility can be placed on the statements of prisoners." He said, "Iraq never paid a cent to me or to Mariam`s Appeal."

Galloway said that one of the Coleman committee`s most serious mistakes was stating that its alleged newly discovered documents covered a different period of time than the Daily Telegraph 2001 documents. He pointed out that the Telegraph documents covered 2001 and that they dated identically to the documents in the committee`s report. Galloway stated that the Christian Science Monitor published documents from 1992 and 1993 alleging that Galloway accepted Iraqi oil money but that these were unmasked as forgeries. Although the 1992 and 1993 documents were said to deal with the Oil-for-Food program, Galloway emphasized that the program did not exist then. However, Galloway said that neocon websites and papers were "all cock-a-hoot over the documents," later proven to be forgeries.

Galloway said the case for war was "a pack of lies" and that the Coleman committee hearings was the "mother of all smoke screens" to divert attention away from the real Oil-for-Food scandal. He said that Halliburton had stolen Iraq`s money and that $8 billion of Iraq`s wealth had been stolen since the war. In addition, Galloway pointed out that $800 million in cash was given out in Iraq by U.S. military commanders. Galloway told the committee that the "real sanctions busters were your own companies and politicians."

Galloway was correct in criticizing the Coleman committee for not concentrating on U.S. violations of Iraqi sanctions and pay-offs to Saddam in the Oil-for-Food program. The U.S. oil companies involved in the sanctions busting have long-standing connections to the Bush family and their largest corporate benefactors.

The Democratic minority report stated, "From 2000 to 2002, Bayoil (USA), Inc., and its affiliates, operating out of Houston, Texas, became one of the largest importers of Iraqi oil into the United States." The report also states, "Samir Vincent, an Iraq-born American, obtained Iraqi oil allocations through his company Phoenix International LLC (McLean, Virginia), and sold them to Chevron Products Company, a division of Chevron USA, Inc."

Federal authorities later indicted Vincent for his role in the oil-for-food scheme. Vincent pleaded guilty. Vincent was a close confidante of 1996 Republican Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who had opposed the Iraqi sanctions. Newsweek magazine reported that in October 2004, the FBI interviewed Kemp about his relationship with Vincent.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat on the board of Chevron before she joined the Bush White House as National Security Adviser. The company named one of its oil supertankers the SS Condoleezza Rice.

Bayoil is incorporated in the Bahamas with affiliates in Switzerland and Luxembourg. A Chilean-Italian named Augusto Giangrandi, a resident of Florida, served as chairman of Bayoil. Although Bayoil principals David Chalmers, Jr., Briton John Irving, and Ludmil Dionissiev, a Bulgarian citizen and permanent resident of Houston, were indicted, Giangrandi was not touched.

Giangrandi has a history that goes back to the Iran-Iraq war when Donald Rumsfeld was helping to arm Saddam and when the Reagan-Bush administration was violating UN arms sanctions imposed against both warring parties. During the war, Iraq bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cluster bombs and other weapons from Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean arms manufacturer who was close to Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. In 1983, Cardoen hired Giangrandi, then a resident of Florida, to ship zirconium from the United States to Iraq. Zirconium is used in the manufacture of cluster bombs. Giangrandi falsely stated in his expert license application that the zirconium would be used for mining explosives in Chile. Giangrandi also owned Cosmos of Livorno, Italy, the manufacturer of mini-submarines and served as president of Swisstech, Cardoen`s marketing unit.

According to a 1995 deposition by Howard Teicher, a Reagan National Security Council official, Cardoen was working for the CIA to illegally ship military hardware to Saddam. Giangrandi`s operation was part of a much larger criminal conspiracy involving agricultural loans guaranteed by the Department of Agriculture`s Commodity Credit Corporation and funded by Italy`s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). The failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) (also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International) had connections to both BNL and Ahmad Chalabi`s Petra Bank. In 1992, The Wall Street Journal reported that George W. Bush and Jeb Bush had been named as potential witnesses in the class action lawsuit brought about the clients of BCCI who had been defrauded in the bank`s collapse. During the time, George W. was involved in various failed oil companies in Houston and Jeb, operating from a base in Miami, was involved in suspicious real estate deals.

There was another Florida connection to the illegal arms shipments to Iraq. Iraqi arms dealer Ishan Barbouti worked with Iran-contra felon Richard Secord to secretly ship large amounts of cyanide from Product Ingredient Technologies, a food-flavoring factory in Florida, to Iraq for use in Saddam`s nerve gas production during the 1980s. All of these transactions involving Bayoil`s Giangrandi, Cardoen, Secord, and Barbouti, were known to President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker.

Between 1990 and 1991, three journalists who were investigating various aspects of Cardoen`s secretive arms trading activities were found dead in suspicious circumstances. They were freelance writer Danny Casolaro, found dead from wrist slashes in a bathtub in a Martinsburg, West Virginia, hotel; Lawrence Ng, a stringer for the Financial Times, found shot to death in the bathtub of his apartment in Guatemala City; and Jonathan Moyle, a British aviation journalist found hanging in the closet of his hotel room in Santiago, Chile. Moyle had uncovered details of Cardoen`s role in the Bush 41 deal to illegally ship weapons to Iraq.

Under the Oil-for-Food program, the Saddam regime was charging a hefty surcharge per barrel of oil—money that went directly into the bank accounts of Saddam and his closest officials. According to the Democratic minority report, while French company TotalFinaElf objected to paying the surcharge, American companies like ExxonMobil and Texaco began to acquire Iraqi oil through third parties that were paying the surcharge. These third parties included Bayoil.

In mid-February 2003, just weeks from the onset of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, oil tankers began loading Iraqi crude at the Iraqi port of Khor al-Amaya. The Bush administration-approved sanction-busting oil shipments involved a Jordanian company named Millenium, owned by the Shaheen Business Investment Group and a Connecticut-based shipbroker called Odin Marine, Inc. Oil tankers were permitted to off load their oil at the UAE port of Fujairah for reshipment on larger tankers without any interference from the U.S. Navy-led Maritime Interdiction Force (MIF), set up to enforce the sanctions. Giangrandi`s company, Italtech, was involved in a number of the shipments as a U.N. contract holder (lifter).

When Iraq`s Oil Minister expressed his suspicion that the oil shipments would never get by the U.S. Navy defenses, a mysterious high-ranking visitor told him the Iraqi oil was "for the sake of the people who work for the defense of the United States. It will pass through safely." When the unknown visitor later asked for additional oil shipments from Khor al-Amaya he assured the minister that "you will never hear about this in the press any more. The U.S. forces will make them be quiet."

Millennium chartered seven ships through Odin. Shipping communications obtained by the committee proved that the tankers traveled with the full knowledge and acquiescence of the Maritime Interdiction Force, then under the command of a U.S. naval officer, Commander Harry French. The MIF permitted all the ships loading oil from Khor al-Amaya to leave the Gulf without interference. Odin became concerned about the legality of the shipments and eventually contacted U.S. State Department official Amy Schedlebauer. Two hours after Odin`s general counsel contacted Schedlebauer, she responded in an e-mail: `AWARE OF THE SHIPMENTS AND HAS DETERMINED NOT TO TAKE ACTION."

Coleman and Levin wrote a February 8, 2005, letter to Rumsfeld asking about the operations of the Maritime Interdiction Force in the Gulf prior to the war. A similar letter was sent to the State Department inquiring about the illegal Khor al-Amaya oil shipments. To date, the committee has not received an answer from either Rumfeld or Rice.

Minority report documents indicate that one of the largest recipients of Bayoil Iraqi oil shipments was Enron, the bankrupt company that served as a virtual slush fund for the political campaigns of George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The following describe the shipments to Enron:

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At the same time Enron Chairman Kenneth ("Kenny Boy") Lay was involved in Vice President Dick Cheney`s Energy Task Force secret dealings and when he was stuffing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of George W. Bush and Cheney`s political campaign, he also managed to illegally stick $206, 757 into the pockets of Saddam Hussein and his cohorts.

The Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal also involves one of the Bush children—Dorothy "Doro" Bush Koch, sister of George W. Bush and married to Bobby Koch, reportedly a cousin in the oil industry Koch family, the owner of Koch Industries, which is also one of Bush`s largest political donors. The minority committee report indicates that Koch Industries was also a major recipient of illegal Iraqi oil and a huge source of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein:

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The total sum in kickbacks from George W. Bush`s cousin-in-laws to Saddam`s bank accounts: $1,294,620.

George Galloway was correct when he called the Coleman Committee the "mother of all smoke screens." Major political contributors and friends of Bush not only paid illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein but personally profited from sanctions-busting with Iraq. Those involved in the scheme included individuals who date back to the Reagan/Bush 41 "cluster bombs and biological and chemical weapons-for-oil" scandal of the 1980s. Galloway is correct when he stated that there is enough evidence on Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair and their neocon advisers to park them in prison cells in The Hague for an awfully long time.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based journalist and nationally distributed columnist.



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May 22, 2005

China, the World`s Capital
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/opinion/22kristof.html?hp
KAIFENG, China

As this millennium dawns, New York City is the most important city in the world, the unofficial capital of planet Earth. But before we New Yorkers become too full of ourselves, it might be worthwhile to glance at dilapidated Kaifeng in central China.
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Kaifeng, an ancient city along the mud-clogged Yellow River, was by far the most important place in the world in 1000. And if you`ve never heard of it, that`s a useful warning for Americans - as the Chinese headline above puts it, in a language of the future that many more Americans should start learning, "glory is as ephemeral as smoke and clouds."

As the world`s only superpower, America may look today as if global domination is an entitlement. But if you look back at the sweep of history, it`s striking how fleeting supremacy is, particularly for individual cities.

My vote for most important city in the world in the period leading up to 2000 B.C. would be Ur, Iraq. In 1500 B.C., perhaps Thebes, Egypt. There was no dominant player in 1000 B.C., though one could make a case for Sidon, Lebanon. In 500 B.C., it would be Persepolis, Persia; in the year 1, Rome; around A.D. 500, maybe Changan, China; in 1000, Kaifeng, China; in 1500, probably Florence, Italy; in 2000, New York City; and in 2500, probably none of the above.

Today Kaifeng is grimy and poor, not even the provincial capital and so minor it lacks even an airport. Its sad state only underscores how fortunes change. In the 11th century, when it was the capital of Song Dynasty China, its population was more than one million. In contrast, London`s population then was about 15,000.

An ancient 17-foot painted scroll, now in the Palace Museum in Beijing, shows the bustle and prosperity of ancient Kaifeng. Hundreds of pedestrians jostle each other on the streets, camels carry merchandise in from the Silk Road, and teahouses and restaurants do a thriving business.

Kaifeng`s stature attracted people from all over the world, including hundreds of Jews. Even today, there are some people in Kaifeng who look like other Chinese but who consider themselves Jewish and do not eat pork.

As I roamed the Kaifeng area, asking local people why such an international center had sunk so low, I encountered plenty of envy of New York. One man said he was arranging to be smuggled into the U.S. illegally, by paying a gang $25,000, but many local people insisted that China is on course to bounce back and recover its historic role as world leader.

"China is booming now," said Wang Ruina, a young peasant woman on the outskirts of town. "Give us a few decades and we`ll catch up with the U.S., even pass it."

She`s right. The U.S. has had the biggest economy in the world for more than a century, but most projections show that China will surpass us in about 15 years, as measured by purchasing power parity.

So what can New York learn from a city like Kaifeng?

One lesson is the importance of sustaining a technological edge and sound economic policies. Ancient China flourished partly because of pro-growth, pro-trade policies and technological innovations like curved iron plows, printing and paper money. But then China came to scorn trade and commerce, and per capita income stagnated for 600 years.

A second lesson is the danger of hubris, for China concluded it had nothing to learn from the rest of the world - and that was the beginning of the end.

I worry about the U.S. in both regards. Our economic management is so lax that we can`t confront farm subsidies or long-term budget deficits. Our technology is strong, but American public schools are second-rate in math and science. And Americans` lack of interest in the world contrasts with the restlessness, drive and determination that are again pushing China to the forefront.

Beside the Yellow River I met a 70-year-old peasant named Hao Wang, who had never gone to a day of school. He couldn`t even write his name - and yet his progeny were different.

"Two of my grandsons are now in university," he boasted, and then he started talking about the computer in his home.

Thinking of Kaifeng should stimulate us to struggle to improve our high-tech edge, educational strengths and pro-growth policies. For if we rest on our laurels, even a city as great as New York may end up as Kaifeng-on-the-Hudson.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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[colbgcolor=#ffffff]May 22, 2005
It`s All Newsweek`s Fault
By FRANK RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/opinion/22rich.html?hp

IN the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Fareed Zakaria wrote a 6,791-word cover story for Newsweek titled "Why Do They Hate Us?" Think how much effort he could have saved if he`d waited a few years. As we learned last week, the question of why they hate us can now be answered in just one word: Newsweek.

"Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care," said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek - and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran - that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder.

That`s how absurdly over-the-top the assault on Newsweek has been. The administration has been so successful at bullying the news media in order to cover up its own fictions and failings in Iraq that it now believes it can get away with pinning some 17 deaths on an errant single sentence in a 10-sentence Periscope item that few noticed until days after its publication. Coming just as the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is "worth fighting" and only 42 percent think it`s going well, this smells like desperation. In its war on the press, this hubristic administration may finally have crossed a bridge too far.

Let`s stipulate flatly that Newsweek made a serious error. For the sake of argument, let`s even posit that the many other similar accounts of Koran desecration (with and without toilets) by American interrogators over the past two years are fantasy - even though they`ve been given credence by the International Committee of the Red Cross and have turned up repeatedly in legal depositions by torture victims and in newspapers as various as The Denver Post and The Financial Times. Let`s also ignore the May 1 New York Times report that a former American interrogator at Guantánamo has corroborated a detainee`s account of guards tossing Korans into a pile and stepping on them, thereby prompting a hunger strike. Why don`t we just go all the way and erase those photographs of female guards sexually humiliating Muslims (among other heinous crimes) at Abu Ghraib?

Even with all that evidence off the table, there is still an overwhelming record, much of it in government documents, that American interrogators have abused Muslim detainees with methods specifically chosen to hit their religious hot buttons. A Defense Department memo of October 2002 (published in full in Mark Danner`s book "Torture and Truth") authorized such Muslim-baiting practices as depriving prisoners of "published religious items or materials" and forcing the removal of beards and clothing. A cable signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez called for interrogators to "exploit Arab fear of dogs." (Muslims view them as unclean.) Even a weak-kneed government investigation of prison abuses (and deaths) in Iraq and Afghanistan issued in March by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III of the Navy authenticated two cases in which female interrogators "touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees` religious beliefs."

About the Newsweek matter Donald Rumsfeld had a moral to bequeath the land. "People need to be careful what they say," he said, channeling Ari Fleischer, and added, "just as people need to be careful what they do." How true. If one of his right-hand men, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, hadn`t been barnstorming American churches making internationally publicized pronouncements that his own Christian God is "a real god" and Islam`s god is "an idol," maybe anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, at record highs even before the Newsweek incident, would have been a shade less lethal. If higher-ups had been called to account for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, maybe Newsweek might have had as little traction in the Arab world as The Onion.

Then again, even the administration`s touchy-feely proactive outreach to Muslims in the Middle East is baloney: Karen Hughes, appointed with great fanfare by the president in March as our latest under secretary of state for public diplomacy (the third since 9/11), runs a shop with no Muslims at the top - or would, if she were there. As The Washington Post reported, she doesn`t intend to assume her duties until the fall and the paperwork for her confirmation has yet to be sent to the Senate. Why rush? It`s not as if there`s a war on.

Given this context, the administration`s attempt to pass the entire buck to Newsweek for our ill odor among Muslims, including those Muslims who abhor jihadists committing murder, is laughable. Yet there`s something weirdly self-incriminating about the language it uses to do it. Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman whose previous boss, Colin Powell, delivered a fictional recitation of Saddam Hussein`s weapon capabilities before the United Nations Security Council, said it`s "shocking" that Newsweek used "facts that have not been substantiated." Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, attacked Newsweek for hiding "behind anonymous sources," yet it was an anonymous source, an Iraqi defector known as Curveball, who fed the fictions that Mr. Powell spouted to gin up America for war. Psychological displacement of this magnitude might give even Freud pause.

The only thing more ridiculous is the spectacle of the White House`s various knee-jerk flacks on cable news shoutfests and in the blogosphere characterizing Newsweek as representative of a supposedly anti-American, military-hating "mainstream media." It wasn`t long ago that the magazine and the co-author of the Periscope item, Michael Isikoff, were being cheered by the same crowd for their pursuit of Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey.

As for the supposed antimilitary agenda of the so-called mainstream media, the right should look first at itself. In its eagerness to parrot the administration line, it`s as ready to sell out the military as any clichéd leftist. For starters, it thought nothing of dismissing the judgment of Gen. Carl Eichenberry, our top commander in Afghanistan, who, according to Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the riots were "not at all tied to the article in the magazine."

The right`s rage at Newsweek is all too reminiscent of the contempt it heaped on Specialist Thomas Wilson, the soldier who dared to ask Mr. Rumsfeld at a town hall meeting in Kuwait in December about the shortage of armored vehicles. Mr. Wilson was guilty of "near-insubordination," said Rush Limbaugh; the embedded reporter who helped him frame his question was reviled by bloggers as a traitor. Yet Mr. Wilson`s question was legitimate, and Mr. Rumsfeld`s answer (that the shortage was only "a matter of production and capability") was a lie. As USA Today reported in March, the Pentagon has known for nearly two years that it didn`t have enough armored Humvees but let the problem fester until that insubordinate questioner gave the defense secretary no choice but to act.

It`s also because of incompetent Pentagon planning that other troops may now be victims of weapons looted from Saddam`s munitions depots after the fall of Baghdad. Yet when The New York Times reported one such looting incident, in Al Qaqaa, before the election, the administration and many in the blogosphere reflexively branded the story fraudulent. But the story was true. It was later corroborated not only by United States Army reservists and national guardsmen who spoke to The Los Angeles Times but also by Iraq`s own deputy minister of industry, who told The New York Times two months ago that Al Qaqaa was only one of many such weapon caches hijacked on America`s undermanned post-invasion watch.

IT is terrible that Newsweek was wrong, though it`s worth noting, as John Donvan of ABC News did, that the Defense Department`s claim that its story was "demonstrably" false is also an overreach. Almost nothing that happens in the sealed prison at Guantánamo is as demonstrable as, say, Saddam`s underwear. But if something good can come out of something bad, the administration`s overkill of Newsweek may focus greater public attention on just how much it is using press-bashing to deflect attention from the fictions spun by its own propaganda machine.

Just since the election, we`ve witnessed the unmasking of Armstrong Williams and Jeff Gannon. We`ve learned - thanks to Newsweek`s parent publication, The Washington Post - that the Pentagon went so far as to deliberately hide the circumstances of Pat Tillman`s friendly-fire death from his own family for weeks, lest the truth mar the P.R. advantages to be reaped from his memorial service. Even as Scott McClellan instructs Newsweek on just what stories it should write to atone for its sins, a professional propagandist sits as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: Kenneth Tomlinson, who also runs the board supervising Voice of America and other government-run media outlets. He`s been hard at work meddling in the journalism on NPR and PBS.

This steady drip of subterfuge and news manipulation increasingly tells a more compelling story than the old news that Newsweek so egregiously botched.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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[urlWhen fed to rats it affected their kidneys and blood counts. So what might it do to humans?]http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=640402[/url]
[urlHow the technology works, and what it promises]http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=640400[/url]

Revealed: health fears over secret study into GM food
Rats fed GM corn due for sale in Britain developed abnormalities in blood and kidneys
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story…

22 May 2005

Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food.

The Independent on Sunday can today reveal details of secret research carried out by Monsanto, the GM food giant, which shows that rats fed the modified corn had smaller kidneys and variations in the composition of their blood.

According to the confidential 1,139-page report, these health problems were absent from another batch of rodents fed non-GM food as part of the research project.

The disclosures come as European countries, including Britain, prepare to vote on whether the GM-modified corn should go on sale to the public. A vote last week by the European Union failed to secure agreement over whether the product should be sold here, after Britain and nine other countries voted in favour.

However, the disclosure of the health effects on the Monsanto rats has intensified the row over whether the corn is safe to eat without further research. Doctors said the changes in the blood of the rodents could indicate that the rat`s immune system had been damaged or that a disorder such as a tumour had grown and the system was mobilising to fight it.

Dr Vyvyan Howard, a senior lecturer on human anatomy and cell biology at Liverpool University, called for the publication of the full study, saying the summary gave "prima facie cause for concern".

Dr Michael Antoniu, an expert in molecular genetics at Guy`s Hospital Medical School, described the findings as "very worrying from a medical point of view", adding: "I have been amazed at the number of significant differences they found [in the rat experiment]."

Although Monsanto last night dismissed the abnormalities in rats as meaningless and due to chance, reflecting normal variations between rats, a senior British government source said ministers were so worried by the findings that they had called for further information.

Environmentalists will see the findings as vindication of British research seven years ago, which suggested that rats that ate GM potatoes suffered damage to their health. That research, which was roundly denounced by ministers and the British scientific establishment, was halted and Dr Arpad Pusztai, the scientist behind the controversial findings, was forced into retirement amid a huge row over the claim.

Dr Pusztai reported a "huge list of significant differences" between rats fed GM and conventional corn, saying the results strongly indicate that eating significant amounts of it can damage health. The new study is into a corn, codenamed MON 863, which has been modified by Monsanto to protect itself against corn rootworm, which the company describes as "one of the most pernicious pests affecting maize crops around the world".

Now, however, any decision to allow the corn to be marketed in the UK will cause widespread alarm. The full details of the rat research are included in the main report, which Monsanto refuses to release on the grounds that "it contains confidential business information which could be of commercial use to our competitors".

A Monsanto spokesman said yesterday: "If any such well-known anti-biotech critics had doubts about the credibility of these studies they should have raised them with the regulators. After all, MON 863 isn`t new, having been approved to be as safe as conventional maize by nine other global authorities since 2003."


22 April 2005 10:55


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Während Newsweek [urlA Letter to Our Readers]http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7937042/site/newsweek/[/url]zu Kreuze kriecht, legt LATimes noch einmal richtig nach in den Berichten über die Schändungen des Korans durch US-Soldaten und Wachpersonal.
Der Spiegel hat es auch schon mitgekriegt Heiliges Buch als Hundefraß

Dozens Have Alleged Koran`s Mishandling
Complaints by inmates in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba emerged early. In 2003, the Pentagon set a sensitivity policy after trouble at Guantanamo.
By Richard A. Serrano and John Daniszewski
Times Staff Writers
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-koran22m…

May 22, 2005

WASHINGTON — Senior Bush administration officials reacted with outrage to a Newsweek report that U.S. interrogators had desecrated the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility, and the magazine retracted the story last week. But allegations of disrespectful treatment of Islam`s holy book are far from rare.

An examination of hearing transcripts, court records and government documents, as well as interviews with former detainees, their lawyers, civil liberties groups and U.S. military personnel, reveals dozens of accusations involving the Koran, not only at Guantanamo, but also at American-run detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Pentagon is conducting an internal investigation of reported abuses at the naval base in Cuba, led by Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt. The administration has refused to say what the inquiry, still weeks from completion, has found so far.

But two years ago, amid allegations of desecration and hunger strikes by inmates, the Army instituted elaborate procedures for sensitive treatment of the Koran at the prison camp. Once the new procedures were in place, complaints there stopped, said the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors conditions in prisons and detention facilities.

The allegations, both at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, contain detailed descriptions of what Muslim prisoners said was mishandling of the Koran — sometimes in a deliberately provocative manner.

In one instance, an Iraqi detainee alleged that a soldier had a guard dog carry a copy of the Koran in its mouth. In another, guards at Guantanamo were said to have scrawled obscenities inside Korans.

Other prisoners said Korans were kicked across floors, stomped on and thrown against walls. One said a soldier urinated on his copy, and others said guards ridiculed the religious text, declaring that Allah`s words would not save detainees.

Some of the alleged incidents appear to have been inadvertent or to have resulted from U.S. personnel`s lack of understanding about how sensitive Muslim detainees might be to mishandling of the Koran. In several cases, for instance, copies were allegedly knocked about during scuffles with prisoners who refused to leave their cells.

In other cases, the allegations seemed to describe instances of deliberate disrespect.

"They tore it and threw it on the floor," former detainee Mohammed Mazouz said of guards at Guantanamo Bay. "They urinated on it. They walked on top of the Koran. They used the Koran like a carpet."

"We told them not to do it. We begged. And then they did it some more," said Mazouz, a Moroccan who was seized in Pakistan soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Recently released, he described the alleged incidents in a telephone interview from his home in Marrakech.

Ahmad Naji Abid Ali Dulaymi, who was held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for 10 months, singled out a soldier or noncommissioned officer known to detainees only as "Fox." He said prisoners were forced to sit naked, were licked by dogs, and were soaked in cold water and then forced to sit in front of a powerful air-conditioner.

"But frankly," he said, "the worst insult and humiliation they were doing to us, especially for the religious ones among us, is when they, especially Fox, tore up holy books of Koran and threw them away into the trash or into dirty water.

"Almost every day, Fox used to take a brand new Koran, and tear off the plastic cover in front of us and then throw it away into the trash container."

The hunger strikes erupted in 2002 at Guantanamo when word swept the camp that Korans were being desecrated. In response, the Defense Department`s Southern Command, which oversees the prison, issued four pages of guidelines instructing soldiers in the proper way of "inspecting and handling" Korans.

In essence, the books are generally to be handled only by Muslim chaplains working for the military, and guards were instructed not to touch the Koran unless absolutely necessary.

Muslims revere the Koran as the word of God and have rules for handling it. It is always kept in a high place with nothing on top of it. A ritual ablution is required before touching a copy, which must be held above the waist. Some Muslims hold that nonbelievers must not touch the holy book.

At that time, the Red Cross was fielding similar complaints from prisoners, and with the January 2003 written policy the problems seemed to cease.

"The ICRC believes the U.S. authorities did take corrective measures," said Simon Schorno, a spokesman in Washington.

Other sensitivity training is continuing. At Ft. Lewis in Washington state, guards and other soldiers headed to Guantanamo Bay and other facilities go through classes and exercises to increase awareness of Arab and Muslim customs, said Lt. Col. Warren Perry. Much of the training deals specifically with the Koran.

"Don`t step on it, don`t bump it, don`t disrespect it," he said.

When handling a Koran can`t be avoided, Perry said, soldiers are taught "to wash hands or put on sterile gloves before you touch."

But several military officials suggested it was ridiculous to think guards and interrogators would bother to desecrate the Koran in an environment as dangerous as a military prison.

"There were scuffles, there were problems, the prisoners were not happy," recalled Army Lt. Col. Raymond A. Tetreault, a Catholic priest and chaplain at Guantanamo Bay during 2002.

He said prisoners sometimes physically resisted when being removed from cells and belongings such as the Koran would be inadvertently knocked around. Other times the books had to be opened and inspected by guards to make sure weapons or other contraband were not hidden inside, he said.

"The guards were trying to do their job, and the detainees were not happy being there," Tetreault said.

Acknowledging that detainees continue to raise allegations of Koran mistreatment, the chaplain said, "Well, it`s human nature to embellish a little bit."

Some reports on alleged Koran desecration have suggested it was sometimes a tactic to get prisoners to talk, but four interrogators interviewed by The Times said they never saw intentional mishandling of the Koran, or even its use as a prop during an interrogation.

"We never took the Koran into an interrogation or used it in any way against them," said Paul Holton, a chief warrant officer with the Army National Guard in Utah who questioned high-level Iraqi military officers after the U.S.-led invasion.

"It was just understood that that was off-limits." It was also considered counterproductive, he said.

"We figured it was going to bring about additional anger and hatred toward us," Holton said. "With certain fanatical and religious types, you don`t want to inflame them and give them further reason to dislike us, even in an interrogation. They just become more firm, more staunch and more resistant."

An interrogator who served at Guantanamo Bay said he received no formal sensitivity training, and that there were miscues that offended Muslims.

When Korans were delivered to the prison, he said, guards issuing the holy books "would put them on the floor and a lot of the devout Muslims went nuts right away."

Later, guards allowed detainees to cradle their Korans in surgical masks hung from the mesh walls of their cells. The soldiers called them "Koran hammocks."

The recent furor began after Newsweek magazine reported in its May 9 issue that Schmidt and his investigators "have confirmed" several infractions, including an incident where a Koran was flushed down a toilet.

The news item was blamed for a series of protests overseas. At least 14 people died in rioting in Afghanistan and protests were held in several other countries.

On May 15, Newsweek acknowledged that there were errors in the story, saying its source had backed away from an assertion that military investigators had concluded that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet. The next day the magazine retracted the story. "Based on what we know now," said Editor Mark Whitaker, "we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay."

Newsweek also apologized and expressed regret about the violence. But the anger in the Muslim world — and in the White House — has not dissipated.

On Friday, about 500 British Muslims prayed and chanted anti-U.S. slogans like "Desecrate today, die tomorrow," in front of the U.S. Embassy in London.

Martin Mubanga, a Zambian who was detained at Guantanamo Bay, participated in the rally. In an interview with The Times, he said two guards made him kneel and held his wrists in locked positions while others searched his cell. His Koran was thrown to the floor; "I saw it in the corner of my eye," he said.

As the protests continued over the last two weeks, Bush administration officials sought not only to denounce Newsweek, but also to state that the Pentagon did not deem the allegations credible. At the Pentagon, chief spokesman Lawrence Di Rita repeatedly dismissed them as untruths.

"We anticipate, and have seen, in fact, all manner of statements made by detainees," he said, "many of whom as members of Al Qaeda were trained to allege abuse and torture and all manner of other things."

The allegations have come in many forums.

Five former prisoners have told The Times of Koran desecration. Jamal Harith, a British Muslim, said interrogators at Guantanamo often kicked or knocked his Koran around. He said guards once deliberately targeted his holy book while hosing down his cell.

"Everybody was upset, but when you are in Cuba you learn to accept," Harith said after his return to Britain. "You accept it as the norm when you are in there."

Other accounts from former detainees have been posted on the Internet. Tarek Dergoul, another British Muslim who was held at Guantanamo Bay, recalled soldiers insulting Islam.

"They used to read the English translation of the Koran with their feet up, mocking, for example saying, `There are more questions in it than answers,` " he said.

Other times, Dergoul said, they "ripped up" Korans. When some soldiers were rotating out of Cuba they would write obscenities in the Korans.

And some allegations are contained in lawsuits, such as one filed against Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by seven men held in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the plaintiffs is Arkan M. Ali, who was held by U.S. authorities in Iraq for nearly a year, part of that time at Abu Ghraib.

Ali listed 11 incidents of torture and abuse. He said he was twice beaten unconscious during interrogations. He said his arm was stabbed and sliced, his forearm shocked and burned. He said he was locked for several days in a wooden coffin-like box, sometimes naked except for a hood over his head.

But it is his 11th and final allegation that in today`s clamor over the Koran that stands out. Ali said U.S. soldiers repeatedly desecrated the Koran in front of him and other prisoners, "including having a military dog pick up the Koran in its mouth."

Serrano reported from Washington and Daniszewski from London. Staff writers Nicole Gaouette, John Hendren, Mark Mazzetti and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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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, May 22, 2005

Muqtada Tries to Mediate Between Sunnis and Badr

Three Sunni Arab organizations arranged a meeting of 1,000 Sunni notables on Saturday, in an attempt to form an umbrella group with greater political clout.

The LA Time reports that,

` Meanwhile, a tribal leader from Madaen told the gathering that if security conditions didn`t improve in his region, "We will raise arms and nothing will stand in the way of jihad." `



The Washington Post says that the convention passed a resolution that condemned terror but did recognize the legitimacy of attacking "the occupier." Adnan Dulaim, head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board, argued for Sunni participation in the civil political process. He is also the activist behind the 3-day mosque strike that began after Friday prayers.

The convention called for the resignation of Bayan Jabr, the minister of the interior. Jabr has long been a prominent member of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of two main parties that won the January 30 election. Many Sunnis suspect the Interior Ministry secret police of being behind the kidnapping and killing of Sunni clerics and worshippers. The secret police in turn are suspected of being members of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of SCIRI.

Jabr angrily refused to step down, saying that only members of parliament had the right to ask for a minister`s resignation. He pointed out that many of the Sunni leaders at the convention had boycotted the election, depriving themselves of a voice in the new government. Al-Hayat says that Jabr also said that he would cooperate "with the devil" to end terrorism in Iraq. He said that plans to reinstitute the death penalty are going forward. He said the Ministry cooperates with all sorts of organizations, but only with regard to "information." He said a new plan would be put forward to deal with the deterioration in security.

On Saturday morning, a squadron 20 vehicles of the Interior Ministry`s Wolf Brigade secret police was passing by Baiji, north of Baghdad, when guerrillas opened fire on it, killing at least 3 (al-Hayat says 8 died).

al-Hayat: The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) declined to consider an initiative launched by young Shiite nationalist leader Muqatada al-Sadr to promote a reconciliation between the Association of Muslim Scholars (a hard line Sunni group) and the Badr Organization, the Shiite paramilitary of SCIRI. Al-Hayat says that Sadr, along with Sunni leader Hareth al-Dhari of the AMS and the four grand ayatollahs in Najaf (including Sistani) agreed to issue a call for Iraqis to avoid civil strife.

Saad Qandil, the vice president of the political office in SCIRI, said that the Badr Organization has shown no interest in having Muqtada al-Sadr as a mediator, because his position is "not balanced," pointing to Sadr`s tilt toward al-Dhari. Sadr had been planning a series of visits to the two organizations in hopes of bringing them together.

At the Sunni convention in Baghdad, the Mosul delegation denounced al-Dhari for seeking a confrontation with the new government. (Al-Dhari`s accusations against the Badr Corps and the Ministry of the Interior are explosive and many believe they could lead to an intensification of Iraq`s unconventional civil war.

posted by Juan @ [url5/22/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/muqtada-tries-to-mediate-between.html[/url]
Saturday, May 21, 2005

US Public Confidence on Iraq Plummeting

A new Harris Interactive poll shows that US public confidence in the Iraq venture is falling rapidly.

Question: How confident are you that U.S. policies in Iraq will be successful?

May 2005

Confident: 25%
Not confident: 54%
Not sure: 20%


Mar. 2005

Confident: 30%
Not confident: 49%
Not sure: 21%


Thinking about everything that has happened, do you think that taking military action against Iraq was the right or wrong thing to do?


May 2005

Right thing: 39%
Wrong thing: 48%
Not Sure: 13%


March 2005

Right thing: 41%
Wrong thing: 45%
Not sure: 15%

posted by Juan @ [url5/21/2005 02:46:00]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/us-public-confidence-on-iraq.html[/url]

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Sunday, May 22, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Sunday, May 22, 2005

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis shot dead on the southern outskirts of Baghdad after they acted suspiciously. Bodies of three civilians shot dead found in Latifiyah.

Bring ‘em on: Eight members of an elite Interior Ministry force known as the Wolf Brigade killed in ambush of their 20 vehicle convoy in downtown Beiji. Two US Apache helicopters responded and opened fire on targets near the ambush site. Seventeen people wounded in a gunfight between al-Sadr supporters and guards protecting a local provincial governor`s office in Nasiriyah.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi civilian killed and another wounded in bombing near Oyoun, west of Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Twelve Interior Ministry commandoes killed in a series of clashes in and around Samarra. Police station bombed in Tikrit. Six civilians injured in mortar attack in western Baghdad. One civilian killed in roadside bombing in Azab. Two policemen wounded by suicide car bomb in Tikrit.

Bring ‘em on: Director general of the Iraq Trade Ministry and his driver shot to death in western Baghdad.

A bit of good news for a change: The Three Romanian reporters and their translator, held in Iraq since March 28, were safely released on Sunday and are currently under the control of Romanian authorities, said a Romanian presidency statement.

"They are well and safe and they`ll be brought home as soon as possible," the statement said.

Shiites and Sunnis

Mosques closed: Sunni mosques in Baghdad have been closed to worshippers as part of a three-day protest against a recent series of killings of Sunni Muslims.

Traditional calls to prayer came with an additional request that the faithful say their prayers wherever they were.

The action comes at a time of growing tension between the Sunni community and Iraq`s Shia majority.

Sunni clerics have accused a Shia militia known as the Badr brigades of involvement in the killings.

New Sunni alliance: A thousand Sunnis assembled in the Iraqi capital Saturday and formed an alliance of religious, political and tribal groups to push for a stronger role in the country`s Shiite-dominated power structure.

With sectarian tension and violence on the rise, the new organization immediately called for the resignation of the interior minister, a Shiite whose office, it said, had a role in killing several Sunni clerics.

Bayan Jabr, the minister, denied allegations government involvement in the killings and said he would not step down.

Legitimate right: More than 1,000 Sunni Arab clerics, political leaders and tribal heads ended their two-year boycott of politics in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq on Saturday, uniting in a Sunni bloc that they said would help draft the country`s new constitution and compete in elections.

Formation of the group comes during escalating violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that has raised the threat of sectarian war. The bloc represents moderate and hard-line members of the Association of Muslim Scholars, the Iraqi Islamic Party and other main groups of the disgruntled Sunni minority toppled from dominance when U.S.-led troops routed Hussein in April 2003.

In a statement adopted at the meeting, the Sunni leaders called for "liberating`` Iraq from U.S.-led forces "by all legal means.`` The statement condemned "all terrorist acts that target civilians, no matter the reason,`` but said, "resisting the occupier is a legitimate right.``

Speakers accused the Shiite-dominated security forces of raiding mosques, killings and committing other violence against the Sunni minority.

"I swear to God, if the government or someone does not take care of this and solve our problem, then we will all fight them. No one will stop us, and no one will blame us,`` Lateef Migual Dulaymi, a tribal leader from the southeast, told delegates as he detailed allegations of harassment, drawing cries of approval.

They’ll have to kill us all: At a humble, green-domed mosque in the heart of Baghdad, a grizzled preacher named Sheik Ahmed Yassin was standing his ground. Gunmen had killed five of his followers and kidnapped two of his sons. Threats had thinned his congregation, and the worshipers who still came rushed to their cars after prayers to avoid becoming the latest victims.

To Yassin, every drop of blood is worth the fight to keep his sanctuary in the hands of Sunni Muslims, who built it 25 years ago, and away from the rival Shiite sect.

"They`ll have to kill us all before they take this mosque," Yassin vowed last week.

The battle over the Hassan bin Ali Mosque is perhaps the bloodiest in a two-year power struggle that has turned Iraq`s holiest places into sectarian battlegrounds. Shiites have seized up to 40 Sunni mosques since Saddam Hussein`s regime fell, according to Shiite and Sunni clerics. While Sunnis view the campaign as a land grab, Shiites say they`re reclaiming plots that Saddam stole from Shiite landowners.

Hopeful step: It`s a step toward easing tensions between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq.

Aides of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr met today with a key Sunni group, amid a wave of sectarian violence.

At least 550 people have been killed since the new Shiite-dominated government was announced late last month.

Al-Sadr said in a television interview aired today that the talks are aimed at settling the feud between the association and the Badr Brigades. More talks are expected in the future.

"Reconstruction"

Still too early: Washington is far behind in plans to pump $21 billion into Iraq`s reconstruction, bogged down by an insurgency that has killed hundreds of contractors and diverted funds to security, a U.S. official said on Saturday.

"There is a long way to go. We recognize a lot of work needs to be done," said William Taylor, the U.S. official overseeing American rebuilding work in Iraq.

He told reporters it was still too early to predict when Iraqis will enjoy adequate electricity and other essential services -- more than two years after the U.S.-led invasion.

Almost 300: In another measure of the difficulties besetting the American effort here, United States officials who met with reporters on Saturday for an update on the $21 billion American-financed reconstruction said that 295 contractors working on American projects had been killed in attacks since the rebuilding began two years ago. Most of the deaths came in the past year, and 19 were in the last month.

I’ll bet it’s more than 16%: Too much money earmarked for rebuilding Iraq is being diverted to tackle security demands, the US official in charge of post-war reconstruction says.

William Taylor, who heads the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, said rebuilding the country was a costly and dangerous business.

"Because of the increase in insurgent activity, contractors have had to include better site protection, hardened vehicles for personnel transportation and trained security teams," he said, adding this accounted for up to 16% of all project costs.

"Even oil companies, which usually go to dangerous places, are waiting," he said.

A glass of sewage: When Mahmud Abdullah turns on his tap, the same stench that envelops his small and nameless Baghdad street fills the air even more strongly.

"This is what my family drinks every day: sewage water," he said.

"The pipes are old so drinking water and sewage are mixing. Sometimes the water smells so much ... Nobody deserves to drink this," said Mahmud, 53, who has white stubble on his face and wears a grimy dishdasha robe.

In his neighbourhood, a sprawling Shiite slum of two million called Sadr City, some unpaved streets are completely cut by pools of dark green sewage baking in the 40-degree Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) heat.

According to a report released a few days ago by the United Nations Development Programme, lack of a decent water supply and sanitation are among the main hardships endured by Iraq`s 27-million-strong population.

Close to 40 percent of Iraqis have an unreliable supply of drinking water and almost the same percentage live in areas where sewage can be seen in the streets, the survey said.

But no fear, we can still get stuff built when we have to: U.S. military commanders have prepared plans to consolidate U.S. troops in Iraq into four large air bases as they look ahead to giving up more than 100 other bases now occupied by international forces, officers said.

Several officers involved in drafting the consolidation plan said it entailed the construction of longer-lasting buildings at the sites, including barracks and office structures made of concrete block instead of the metal trailers and tin-sheathed buildings that have become the norm at bigger U.S. bases in Iraq. The new, sturdier buildings will give the bases a more permanent character, the officers acknowledged.

The consolidation plan appears to reflect a judgment by U.S. military commanders that American forces are likely to be in Iraq for some years, even after their numbers begin to decline, and that they probably will continue to face danger. The new buildings are being designed to withstand direct mortar strikes, according to a senior military engineer.

Iraqi Security Forces

Series of successes: Iraq`s new interior minister expressed confidence Saturday that his security forces will defeat a foreign-backed insurgency, citing a series of successes amid the recent relentless wave of violence.

Bayan Jabr said in the three weeks since he took over the post, over 250 insurgents have been captured and more than 200 killed. Insurgent violence since the government was approved on April 28 has killed more than 520 people.

"We are fighting international terrorism supported by all the forces of darkness, therefore our battle is a war of justice against injustice and, God willing, justice will end victorious," said Jabr, a Shiite Muslim.

Wolf Brigade: Abul Waleed rifled through a pile of papers, considering the latest accusations against the elite brigade of Iraqi police commandos he leads from a dusty fortress.

The complaints against the Wolf Brigade were the usual: excessive force, renegade patrols, kidnapping, murder.

The charges came from Iraq`s most powerful Sunni Muslim leaders, and Abul Waleed clearly relished reading them. It`s precisely this take-no-prisoners reputation that`s made his Wolf Brigade the most feared and revered of all of Iraq`s nascent security forces.

"The Muslim Scholars Association? They`re infidels," Abul Waleed said, tossing his detractors` complaints into the wastebasket. "The Islamic Party? Humph. More like the Fascist Party."

Interpreters: It`s one of the most dangerous civilian jobs in one of the world`s most dangerous countries: translating Arabic for the U.S. military in Iraq.

One by one, seldom noticed in the daily mayhem, dozens of interpreters have been killed -- mostly Iraqis but 12 Americans, too. They account for 40 percent of the 300-plus death claims filed by private contractors with the U.S. Labor Department.

Riding in bomb-blasted Humvees, tagging along on foot patrols in Fallujah or dashing into buildings behind Marines, translators are dying on the job, but also facing danger at home: hunted by insurgents who call them pro-American collaborators.

"If the insurgents catch us, they will cut off our heads because the imams say we are spies," said Mustafa Fahmi, 24, an Iraqi interpreter with Titan Corp., the biggest employer of linguists in Iraq.

"I`ve been threatened like 15 times, but I won`t quit. A neighbor saw me driving and said, `I am going to kill you.`"

That fate befell Luqman Mohammed Kurdi Hussein, a Titan linguist and Iraqi Kurd captured by insurgents in October. A video of the 41-year-old`s beheading was posted on the Internet.

Foreign Affairs

Syria: The United States said Syria must stop supporting the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and meddling in Iraq, as Washington kept up diplomatic pressure on Damascus.

"Our prime role, having a united front (with Europe), is to insist that the Syrians apply (UN Security Council Resolution) 1559," US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick told reporters.

"If Syria wants good ties with the United States, it can`t be supporting Hezbollah and undermining the situation in Iraq," Zoellick said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting here.

Mehr auf der Seite!

Casualty Reports

Local story: Hughes Springs, TX, soldier killed in Al Asad.

Local story: Two Louisiana National Guardsmen, one from Shreveport and one from Bossier City, killed by sniper fire in Baghdad.

Local story: Orwell, OH, soldier killed near Abu Ghraib.

Local story: Brookfield, CT, Marine killed in Iraq to be interred in Arlington National Cemetery.

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Latest Fatality: May 20, 2005

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

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

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May 21 / 22, 2005
Nights in White House Satin
The Comings and Goings of Jeff Gannon
http://counterpunch.org/leupp05212005.html

By GARY LEUPP

Why aren`t we hearing more about the "Jeff Gannon" (James Guckert) affair? Back in February, always the optimist I wrote, "Perhaps we are on the edge of a major scandal here," and inquiring minds have indeed dug up more dirt.

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Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) got on the case, using the Freedom of Information Act to precisely chronicle, on the basis of Secret Service records, the bogus reporter and real-life prostitute`s White House entries and exits. From the Secret Service material, Raw Story researcher Muriel Kane produced this listing; I`ve put the more interesting material in bold font:

2/25/03 11:46 - 1:25 (briefing 12:26-1:03)
2/26 9:56 - 2:17 (unusually long) (briefing 1:25-1:53)
2/27 11:49 - 1:34 (no briefing)
2/28 11:20 - 1:26 (briefing 12:35-1:10)

3/3/03 9:51 - 1:32 (unusually long) (briefing 12:21-1:00)
3/4 11:48 - 1:45 (briefing 12:46-1:20)
3/5 11:56 - 1:57 (briefing 12:21-1:00)
3/6 11:58 - 12:42 (no briefing)
3/6 9:11 pm exit - no entry (Bush press conference, 8 pm)
3/7 3:22 pm exit -- no entry (briefing 2:20-3:00)
3/10 12:47 - 3:11 (briefing 1:23-2:10)
3/11 12:25 - 1:47 (briefing at 12:38 - no end time given)
3/12 12:55 - 2:40 (briefing 1:20-1:59)
3/13 12:12 - 1:55 (briefing 12:40-1:19)
3/14 12:02 - 1:49 (briefing 12:35-1:06)
3/17 12:01 - 1:30 (no briefing)
3/18 12:09 - 1:31 (briefing 12:21-1:05)
3/19 9:38 - 3:27 (unusually long) (12:15-12:59) (Bush speech, 10 pm)
3/20 12:19 - 1:38 (briefing 12:32-1:15)
3/21 10:52 - 12:31 (briefing 2:31-3:12 ­ doesn`t match)
3/24 1:02 - 2:43 (briefing 1:00-1:44)
3/25 1:45 - 3:30 (briefing 2:30-3:15)
3/28 12:34 - 3:51 (unusually long) (briefing 12:35-1:15)

NIGHTS IN WHITE SATIN LYRICS Nights in white satin, Never reaching the end, Letters I’ve written, Never meaning to send. Beauty I’d always missed With these eyes before, Just what the truth is I can’t say anymore. ’cause I love you, Yes, I love you, Oh, how, I love you. Gazing at people, Some hand in hand, Just what I’m going thru They can understand. Some try to tell me Thoughts they cannot defend, Just what you want to be You will be in the end, And I love you, Yes, I love you, Oh, how, I love you. Oh, how, I love you. Nights in white satin, Never reaching the end, Letters I’ve written, Never meaning to send. Beauty I’d always missed With these eyes before, Just what the truth is I can’t say anymore. ’cause I love you, Yes, I love you, Oh, how, I love you. Oh, how, I love you. ’cause I love you, Yes, I love you, Oh, how, I love you. Oh, how, I love you.

4/4/03 12:18 - 1:31 (12:20-12:59)
4/9 1:48 - 3:48 (2:32-3:20)
4/10 12:14 - 2:00 (12:20-1:03)
4/11 12:24 - 1:52 (12:15-12:45) (arrives late)
4/14 12:34 - 1:46 (12:30-1:15) (arrives late)
4/21 3:33 - 4:19 (no briefing)
4/22 11:36 - 1:37 (12:30-1:14)
4/23 12:16 - 2:26 (1:17-1:55)
4/25 11:21 - 1:25 (12:19-1:00)
4/28 3:01 - 4:40 (11:08-11:23 ­ doesn`t match)
4/29 11:25 - 1:10 (12:23-12:58)
4/30 11:37 - 3:14 (unusually long) (12:32-1:19)

5/6/03 11:27 - 12:56 (11:50-12:30)
5/7 11:53 - 1:29 (12:30-1:10)
5/8 1:09 - 7:10 (unusually long) (1:45-2:26)
5/9 9:49 - 11:38 (no briefing)
5/14 12:02 - 1:47 (12:35-1:15)
5/14 5:15 pm - 6:56 pm (second evening visit)
5/15 12:27 - 2:25 (1:08-1:47)
5/16 12:05 - 1:40 (12:35-1:19)
5/20 12:27 - 2:04 (12:55-1:34)
5/27 11:56 - 1:31 (12:23-1:05)
5/28 11:50 - 12:53 (12:05-12:44)
5/28 3:26 - 4:53 (second visit)
5/29 11:42 - 1:43 (12:20-1:00)

6/10/03 12:13 - 1:19 (12:33-1:12)
6/17 12:29 - 1:41 (12:32-1:11)
6/18 12:16 - 1:42 (12:50-1:34)
6/22 3:32 - 4:49 (no briefing)
6/23 1:41 - 2:21 (no briefing)
6/25 12:16 - 1:01 (12:30-12:55)
6/26 11:32 - 12:35 (11:45-12:24)

7/1/03 11:25 - 1:42 (12:50-1:26)
7/2 11:50 - 1:20 (12:35-1:12)
7/3 3:04 - 4:16 (Condi Rice briefing, 3:40-4:10)
7/14 11:33 - 1:32 (Ari`s goodbye party) (12:03-12:56)
7/15 12:15 (no exit) (12:38-1:23)
7/16 12:26 - 2:05 (12:50-1:20)
7/17 4:43 - 6:13 (12:36-1:17 ­ doesn`t match)
7/22 12:23 - 1:53 (12:58-1:35)
7/23 12:21 - 2:23 (1:17-2:07)
7/25 2:08 - 3:30 (2:39-3:15)
7/27 3:08 - 5:24 (no briefing)
7/28 12:53 - 2:04 (briefing 10:12-10:23 ­ doesn`t match)
7/30 12:13 - 12:45 (no briefing) (Bush press conference earlier than that)

8/1/03 12:18 (no exit) (12:24-12:54)
8/1 12:39 - 1:20 (two sets of times if put together seem to match the briefing)

9/2/03 12:37 (A4 HC Entry Lane, no exit) (12:42-1:23)
9/3 12:10 - 1:18 (12:30-1:10)
9/10 12:17 - 1:32 (12:49-1:23)
9/16 12:23 - 1:59 (1:00-1:39)
9/17 12:12 - 1:55 (1:00-1:41)
9/22 1:54 - 3:06 (no briefing) (Bush meets with Iraqis, remarks end 4:35)
9/25 12:49 - 1:53 (12:48-1:35)
9/26 12:09 - 2:24 (12:36-1:15)
9/29 12:09 - 1:10 (12:18-1:03)

10/1/03 11:51 - 1:37 (12:44-1:30)
10/2 11:52 (no exit) (12:47-1:26)
10/6 12:58, 6:10 (no exit; checks in twice but doesn`t check out)
10/7 12:46 - 2:03 (12:58-1:46)
10/8 12:10 - 1:27 (12:16-12:42)
10/14 12:22 (no exit) (12:40-1:14)
10/27 12:32 - 1:33 (12:39-1:15)
10/28 10:54 - 12:22 (Bush press conference 11:15-12:03)
10/29 12:20 - 1:08 (12:20-12:57)

11/6/03 12:09 - 1:09 (12:35-1:04)
11/12 12:09 - 1:58 (1:10-1:47)
11/14 12:54 - 2:07 (1:36-2:00)
11/21 5:25 - 6:49 (no briefing)
11/24 8:49 - 9:43 (no briefing)

12/2/03 2:08 - 3:29 (no briefing)
12/3 12:03 - 1:11 (12:32-1:06)
12/7 3:25 (no exit - entry via A4 HC Entry Lane) (no briefing)
12/9 12:33 - 1:45 (12:55-1:21)
12/10 12:05 - 1:23 (12:35-1:15)
12/12 11:51 - 1:35 (12:15-12:52)
12/15 10:45 - 12:42 (Bush press conference 11:15-12:03)
12/18 12:44 - 2:28 (2:05-2:43)
12/19 12:21 - 12:56 (B4 Entry Lane 2) (12:30-12:50)
12/19 1:36 - 2:13 (second visit)
12/22 12:15 - 1:23 (12:28-1:01)

1/14/04 12:30 - 1:33 (12:41-1:15)
1/16 12:08 - 12:48 (12:11-12:44)
1/23 11:52 - 1:12 (12:33-1:06)
1/28 11:53 - 1:26 (12:50-1:20)
1/30 12:30 - 1:23 (12:37-1:09)

2/2/04 12:32 - 1:35 (12:48-1:28)
2/3 12:44 - 1:55 (12:54-1:20)
2/4 11:50 - 1:38 (12:56-1:36)
2/6 11:58 - 1:44 (Bush announcement 1:32-37)
2/10 11:50 - 1:55 (12:53-1:38)
2/11 11:57 - 1:09 (12:30-1:02)
2/13 12:07 - 1:08 (12:30-1:02)
2/18 12:04 - 1:29 (12:36-1:08)
2/19 12:05 - 1:30 (12:37-1:14)
2/20 12:32 - 1:29 (12:33-1:03)
2/23 12:55 - 1:17 (12:43-1:10) (arrives late)
2/24 12:06 - 1:52 (1:00-1:36)
2/27 1:55 - 3:39 (2:18-2:48)

3/1/04 12:50 - 2:04 (1:20-2:00)
3/2 12:29 - 1:23 (12:46-1:14)
3/9 12:40 - 1:49 (1:03-1:37)
3/12 12:54 - 1:00 (unusually short) (no briefing)
3/16 12:43 - 1:52 (1:10-1:46)
3/17 12:18 - 1:56 (1:26-1:50)
3/22 12:03 - 2:10 (1:24-2:04)
3/23 12:03 - 1:34 (12:47-1:10)
3/24 12:17 - 2:03 (1:10-2:02)
3/30 exit only, 12:04 (no briefing)
3/30 4:22 - 4:55 (no briefing)

4/1/04 12:42 - 1:57 (1:25-1:53)
4/13 9:42 - 10:29 (no briefing) (Bush speaks to reporters on the WH lawn)
4/13 6:59 pm - 9:49 pm (Bush press conference)
4/16 10:51 - 3:08 (2:41-3:09) (Bush/Blair press conference)
4/21 12:14 - 1:00 (12:31-1:00)
4/27 12:10 (no exit, entry via A4 HC Entry Lane instead of Entry Lane 2) (12:27- 12:59)
4/28 12:26 - 1:47 (1:20-1:47)
4/29 11:10 no exit (well before briefing) (Bush and Cheney testify to 9/11 commission)
4/29 2:15 - 2:57 (2:23-2:56)
4/30 1:24 - 2:47 (2:22-2:45)

5/5/04 12:02 - 2:25 (1:38-2:16) (arrives unusually early)
5/6 12:01 - 3:35 (12:20-12:54) (stays unusually late)
5/10 1:22 - 2:50 (2:02-2:33)
5/12 11:56 - 1:03 (12:34-12:55)
5/24 no entry, exit logged twice, 2:04:43 and 2:04:51 (1:14-1:46)
5/26 12:09 - 1:51 (1:15-1:51)
5/28 2:17 - no exit (3:02-3:34)

6/1/04 9:20 - 12:03 (Condi Rice briefing, 9:45)
6/3 9:02 - 10:32 (no briefing)
6/14 10:02 - 11:45 (no briefing)
6/15 11:03 - no exit (2:25-2:52) (there well before briefing)
6/15 5:19 - 6:38 (B4 Exit Lane instead of usual A4 Exit Reader) (after briefing)
(Bush and Karzai in Press Availability)
6/16 2:50 - 4:34 (no briefing)
6/17 11:57 - 1:25 (12:47-1:20)
6/21 9:27 - 10:03 (no briefing)
6/22 12:13 - 5:04 (unusually long) (Al Gonzales briefing, 3:12-4:55)
6/24 1:27 - 2:13 (Condi Rice briefing, 1:51-2:03)
6/30 12:21 - 1:55 (1:15-1:55)

7/1/04 12:22 - 1:36 (1:01-1:37)
7/2 9:43 - 11:53 (no briefing)
7/6 12:15 - 12:58 (12:33-12:48)
7/8 1:07 - 2:21 (1:53-2:22)
7/15 12:48 - 1:48 (12:54-1:23)
7/19 1:04 - 2:24 (1:52-2:22)
7/21 12:22 - 2:02 (1:10-1:40)
7/22 10:11 - 10:47 (no briefing)
7/29 6:03 - 6:21 (no briefing)

8/2/04 10:59 - 1:47 (1:02-1:39) (there 2 hours early)
8/9 12:07 - 1:03 (12:31-12:59)
8/17 11:06 - 12:31 (no briefing)
8/27 9:10 - 9:37 (no briefing)

9/10/04 11:19 - 12:55 (no briefing)
9/15 12:17 - 1:56 (1:11-1:45)
9/22 11:57 - 12:34 (no briefing)
9/23 11:19 - 1:14 (Bush press conference with Allawi)

11/2/04 1:31 - 2:20 (no briefing) (Election Day)
11/4 9:16 - 12:11 (Bush press conference 11:17-11:57)
11/8 11:50 - 1:08 (12:20-12:52)
11/10 12:35 - 12:58 (12:26-12:45) (arrives late)
11/12 10:57 -- no exit (Bush press conference with Blair)
11/16 12:26 - 1:51 (12:20-1:32) (arrives late)
11/17 12:07 - 2:14 (12:38-1:10)
11/29 12:23 - 1:49 (12:56-1:32)

12/6/04 12:37 - 1:59 (1:03-1:36)
12/8 12:07 - 1:41 (1:05-1:39)
12/10 12:32 - 1:51 (1:06-1:32)
12/13 12:18 - 1:36 (12:50-1:18)
12/14 12:46 - 1:53 (12:48-1:23)
12/17 12:16 - 1:48 (12:47-1:14)
12/20 10:05 - 11:49 (Bush press conference, 10:32-11:25)
12/21 12:00 - 2:04 (12:35-1:10)
12/22 12:04 - 1:08 (no briefing)
12/23 12:31 - 1:26 (no briefing)

1/18/05 12:05 - 1:36 (12:28-12:57)
1/19 12:26 - 1:38 (12:48-1:19)
1/25 12:19 - 1:04 (12:23-12:53)
1/26 9:54 - 10:56 (Bush press conference, 10:00-10:47)
1/31 12:27 - 1:24 (12:45-1:16)

2/1/05 12:11 no exit (12:18-12:47)
2/7 12:10 - 3:00 (1:45-1:06)



Uri Dowbenko has also been investigating this record.

Okay, maybe there`s no scandal here. Lots of people, mostly tourists, visit the White House. But it does seem odd that Gannon was there at least 32 times on days when there were no briefings, or returned later in the day to the presidential mansion after a briefing. Seems he`d spend about an hour or hour and a half in the White House on these occasions. Or he`d be there for an hour or hour and a half before or after the briefings. I suppose that it could be shown he was there to consult with someone about what sort of questions he might raise in the next briefing, that could produce a small scandal. But the media hasn`t really taken on the president`s manipulation of reporters to date and protested and exposed it effectively.

The records also show days when Gannon checked in but never properly checked out, beginning in July 2003 or five months after he started his White House journalistic activities. This doesn`t necessarily cry out "Scandal!" since lots of people have slept over at the Bush White House. But usually they`re big fundraisers or family members. For someone like Gannon to be there, apparently sleeping over, on twelve different nights seems curious. Surely he had his own lodgings nearby. But after all, in his "reporter" capacity he was a friend of the administration and like Jacko says, friends often let friends sleep over. Dowbenko indicates that the president was in his house on all these occasions, but I imagine Laura and the Secret Service people were there too. Of course it is a big house, room for everybody and a degree of privacy even in these terror-haunted, well-monitored times.

Three months ago I wrote that "the blogs are abuzz with speculation. Did the guy sleep his way into the White House? That`s a merely amusing issue. More seriously: Why was he so involved in the effort to discredit South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle? How`d the `journalist` know hours in advance about the attack on Iraq? How did he get access to the Plame memo?" That was before the Secret Service record came out. I was thinking that maybe some Bush staffer had helped the guy get a job. I certainly didn`t think at the time that what some are hinting at now was remotely possible. Not because an outwardly born-again Christian family-values man, married with kids, can`t have a complicated sexuality. But no, I never imagined those two together; that would just be too rich. Yet should what these bloggers are suggesting turn out to be true, the political situation would change overnight. What would the gay-hating fundamentalists have to say then?

You know how some people pick out Bible quotations out of context and claim they`re prophecy. Well, the one that might occur to some under such circumstances could be "How have the mighty fallen!" That`s what David exclaims in grief at the deaths of King Saul and his son Jonathan, of whom by the way David says, "thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." (2 Samuel 1:25-26). Not that that`s relevant here.

The quasi-official, deferential, intimidated press hasn`t asked many questions about Gannon`s greased entry---often via a less well-used back entrance---into the White House. This might reflect the fact that Gannon has a wide circle of connections that could include real journalists who may have reasons not to embarrass or provoke him. But for real journalists who have no reason to fear, I`d suggest they ask not him but the president, gingerly, dispassionately, showing no inclination to embarrass anybody questions like these:

Why was this gentleman in the White House at all hours, so many times, during days there were no briefings or news conferences?

Can you confirm that he stayed overnight on 12 occasions between July 15, 2003 and February 1, 2005?

Were you, Mr. President, aware of his presence in your home on these occasions?

Were you aware of Mr. Guckert`s background before it came out in the Boston Globe?

Mr. President, you`ve said you believe homosexuality is a sin. Hypothetically, if it were to be discovered that Mr. Guckert had homosexual sex in the White House, how would you feel about that?

Presumably the surveillance cameras and observations of Secret Service personnel would establish precisely where Mr. Guckert was during his visits. Have you yourself made inquiries to ascertain whether or not the prostitute may have been involved in any activities you yourself find sinful during the 20 or so overnight visits?

Since Mr. Guckert was exposed as a fake journalist last February, has the White House had any discussions with him concerning his activities in the residence, or any personal documents he might have describing them?

I think it`d be unreasonable to ask a sitting president, even one who had lied to the public repeatedly, whether he`d ever personally had sex with a particular person. That sort of thing should be private, even if Republicans didn`t think so back in 1998 when they sought to humiliate Clinton concerning some perfectly consensual Oval Office oral sex. But the above questions are all perfectly valid, reasonable ones to ask at a genuine news conference. Please somebody, do it.

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U.S. Soldier Instructed Iraqi Detainee to Dig Own Grave, According to New Army Documents

Links über die Seite:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article8914.htm


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: [e-mail]

Documents Indicate Soldiers Used Religious Icons to Degrade Muslim Detainees, ACLU Says
Documents Indicating That Religious Icons Were Used to Degrade Detainees (pdf)
• Sworn statement of civilian interrogator stepping on Koran to disorient detainee
• Sworn statement of civilian interrogator on using "Pride and Ego Down" technique
• Army memo detailing use of "Star of David" to taunt Iraqi detainee
• Detainee claimed soldiers ordered military dog to pick up the Koran in its mouth
• Detainee claims soldiers threw the Koran on the floor and stepped on it

Posted 05/20/05 "ACLU" - - NEW YORK -- New documents released by the Department of Defense reveal more cases of abuse including mock executions and use of a religious symbol to taunt detainees, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

"While the White House blames Newsweek magazine for damaging America`s reputation in the Muslim world, the Army`s own investigations show systemic abuse and humiliation of Muslim men by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "If we are to truly repair America`s standing, the Bush Administration must first hold accountable high-ranking officials who allow the continuing abuse and torture of detainees."

Almost 2,000 pages of Army documents were released Tuesday in response to a federal court order that directed the Defense Department and other government agencies to comply with a request under the Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

The latest documents include medical records and several hundred pages relating to Army investigations into abuse of Iraqi and Afghan detainees and civilians by U.S. forces. One investigation into abuses at Rifles Base in Ramadi, Iraq details an incident in July 2003 in which an Army captain took an Iraqi welder into the desert, told him to dig his own grave, verbally threatened to kill him and had other soldiers stage a shooting of the man.

In a separate incident uncovered in the Rifles Base investigation, the driver and passenger of an Iraqi fire truck were detained for failing to turn off the truck`s headlights. Multiple soldiers reported that a captain kicked the detainees, threatened to kill them, and held a pistol to the head of one of the detainees, even though the detainees did not offer resistance of any kind. The detainees were released later that evening.

One document released indicates that a soldier at an internment facility in Iraq "wrongfully display[ed] the symbolic of the `Star of David,`" threatened a detainee, and was "very disrespectful in gestures, which in turn insulted the Arabs that were present at the time." This latest document supports detainees` accounts that American soldiers routinely used religious symbols to degrade and humiliate them. In a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Human Rights First against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one Iraqi detainee charged that soldiers taunted him by having a military dog pick up the Koran in its mouth. Another Iraqi detainee claimed that soldiers threw the Koran on the floor and stepped on it. In addition, in a set of documents released by the FBI in response to the ACLU`s FOIA in December, a Guantánamo detainee alleged that a guard told him he beat him because the guard was a Christian and the detainee was a Muslim.

"The government`s own documents describe literally hundreds of instances in which prisoners have been abused by U.S. military and intelligence personnel," said ACLU Staff Attorney Jameel Jaffer. "In light of what the documents show, it is simply astounding that senior military and civilian officials still have not been held accountable."

Additional records released this week include:

* An Army document dated December 30, 2003 stating that three Army personnel received administrative punishments -- rather than criminal sanctions -- for abuse of Iraqi detainees. A Master Sergeant was found guilty of knocking an Iraqi detainee to the ground, repeatedly kicking him in the groin, abdomen and head, and encouraging her subordinates to do the same. A Staff Sergeant was found guilty of holding a detainee`s legs apart while other soldiers kicked him in the groin, abdomen and head. A third soldier was found guilty of violently twisting a detainee`s previously injured arm and causing him to scream in pain.
* A July 15, 2004 information paper on an incident involving two Iraqi men detained in Samarra. The men were driven to a bridge, where a platoon leader instructed three soldiers to push the detainees into the river. One of the Iraqi men could not swim and drowned. The other survived and reported the incident to different U.S. soldiers. The body was recovered by the family 12 days later and buried. One soldier indicated to investigators that the chain of command had instructed the soldiers not to cooperate with the investigation and to deny that they pushed the men into the river.
* A May 3, 2004 information paper describing the deaths of two Afghan detainees at Bagram, Afghanistan. One man died from an embolism that the medical examiner "attributed to blows that he received combined with immobility due to restraint." The other died from aggravation or a coronary artery condition "brought on by complications that arose from blows that he received from the stress from being restrained in a standing position." None of the soldiers had been formally charged as of the writing of this report.

To date, more than 35,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU`s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia.

The documents released this week are online at: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/051805/.

Details about the Rumsfeld lawsuit are online at www.aclu.org/rumsfeld.

The FOIA lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Jaffer, Amrit Singh, and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur N. Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Co

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May 23, 2005
America Wants Security
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/opinion/23krugman.html?hp

It was a carefully staged Norman Rockwell scene. The street was lined with American flags; a high school band played "God Bless America."

Then, under the watchful gaze of Wal-Mart`s chief operating officer, Maryland`s governor vetoed a bill that would have obliged large businesses to spend more on employee health care.

The news here isn`t that some politicians wrap their deference to corporate interests in the flag. The news, instead, is that Maryland`s State Legislature passed a pro-worker bill in the first place. In fact, the bill passed by a veto-proof majority in the Maryland Senate, and fell just short of that margin in the House.

After November`s election, the victors claimed a mandate to unravel the welfare state. But the national election was about who would best defend us from gay married terrorists. At the state level, where elections were fought on bread-and-butter issues, voters sent a message that they wanted a stronger, not weaker, social safety net.

I`m not just talking about the shift in partisan alignment, in which Democrats made modest gains in state legislatures, and achieved a few startling successes. I`m also talking about specific issues, like the lopsided votes in both Florida and Nevada for constitutional amendments raising the minimum wage.

Since the election, high-profile right-wing initiatives, at both the federal and state level, have run into a stone wall of public disapproval. President Bush`s privatization road show seems increasingly pathetic. In California, the conservative agenda of Arnold Schwarzenegger, including an attempt to partially privatize state pensions, has led to demonstrations by nurses, teachers, police officers and firefighters - and to a crash in his approval ratings.

There`s a very good reason voters, when given a chance to make a clear choice, increasingly support a stronger, not a weaker, social safety net: they need that net more than ever. Over the past 25 years the lives of working Americans have become ever less secure. Jobs come without health insurance; 401(k)`s vanish; corporations default on their pension obligations; workers lose their jobs more often, and unemployment lasts much longer than it used to.

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed what the pollsters called an "angry electorate." By huge margins, voters think that politicians are paying too little attention to their concerns, especially health care, jobs and gas prices.

At the state level, many, though by no means all, politicians are responding to those concerns. The push to raise the minimum wage is a useful political barometer: seven states have raised the minimum in just the last two years.

True, there are limits on what state governments can do: they fear that if they do too much for workers, they`ll drive business and jobs away. I`d argue that the fear is often exaggerated. For example, Wal-Mart may avoid states that force it to provide health insurance, but given the hidden subsidies the company receives - one way or another, taxpayers end up paying a lot for uninsured workers - this may not be such a bad thing. Still, any major strengthening of the safety net will have to come at the federal level.

Why, then, is Washington so out of touch?

At a gala dinner in his honor, Tom DeLay cited his party`s recent achievements: "bankruptcy reform, class-action reform, energy, border security, repealing the death tax." All of these measures are either irrelevant to or actively hostile to the economic security of working Americans.

Yet as Mr. DeLay boasted, many Democratic members of Congress also voted in support of these measures. In so doing, they undermined their party`s ability to claim that it stands for something different.

So where will change come from?

Everyone loves historical analogies. Here`s my thought: maybe 2004 was 1928. During the 1920`s, the national government followed doctrinaire conservative policies, but reformist policies that presaged the New Deal were already bubbling up in the states, especially in New York.

In 1928 Al Smith, the governor of New York, was defeated in an ugly presidential campaign in which Protestant preachers warned their flocks that a vote for the Catholic Smith was a vote for the devil. But four years later F.D.R. took office, and the New Deal began.

Of course, the coming of the New Deal was hastened by a severe national depression. Strange to say, we may be working on that, too.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 23, 2005
The Rumsfeld Stain
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/opinion/23herbert.html

How does Donald Rumsfeld survive as defense secretary?

Much of what has happened to the military on his watch has been catastrophic. In Iraq, more than 1,600 American troops have died and many thousands have been maimed in a war that Mr. Rumsfeld mishandled from the beginning and still has no idea how to win. The generals are telling us now that the U.S. is likely to be bogged down in Iraq for years, and there are whispers circulating about the possibility of "defeat."

Potential recruits are staying away from the armed forces in droves. Most Americans want no part of the administration`s hapless venture in Iraq. A woman in Connecticut with two college-age sons said to me recently: "My boys should die in Baghdad? For what?"

Parents from coast to coast are going out of their way to dissuade their children from joining the military. Recruiters, desperate and in many cases emotionally distraught after repeatedly missing their monthly goals, began abandoning admission standards and signing up individuals who were physically, mentally or morally unfit for service.

The abuses became so widespread that the Army suspended recruiting on Friday so recruiters could spend the day being retrained in the legal and ethical standards they are supposed to maintain. The Army is going through its toughest year for recruiting since the nation went to an all-volunteer military in 1973.

The military spent decades rebuilding its reputation and regaining the respect of the vast majority of the American people after the debacle in Vietnam. Under Mr. Rumsfeld, that hard-won achievement is being reversed. He invaded Iraq with too few troops, and too many of them were poorly trained and inadequately equipped. The stories about American troops dying on the battlefield because of a lack of protective armor have now been widely told.

The insurgency in Iraq appeared to take Mr. Rumsfeld completely by surprise. He expected to win the war in a walk. Or, perhaps, a strut.

Now the military is in a fix. Many of the troops have served multiple tours in Iraq and are weary. The insurgency remains strong, and the Iraq military has proved to be a disappointing ally.

A senior American officer, quoted last week in The Times, said that while he still believed the effort in Iraq would succeed, it could take "many years."

As if all this were not enough, there is also the grotesque and deeply shameful issue that will always be a part of Mr. Rumsfeld`s legacy - the manner in which American troops have treated prisoners under their control in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is no longer any doubt that large numbers of troops responsible for guarding and interrogating detainees somehow loosed their moorings to humanity, and began behaving as sadists, perverts and criminals.

The catalog of confirmed atrocities is huge. Consider just one paragraph from a long and horrifying story on Friday by Tim Golden of The Times about the torture and brutal deaths of two Afghan inmates at the hands of U.S. troops:

"In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning."

These were among the milder abuses to come to light. The continuum of bad behavior that has been a hallmark of the so-called war on terror extends from this kind of activity to incidents of extreme torture and death.

Neither the troops nor the American public signed on for a war in Iraq that would last many years. And I can`t believe there are many Americans who wanted their military sullied by the wanton behavior of the torture crowd.

The troops who do their jobs honestly and diligently, and who fight bravely when they have to, have been betrayed by leaders who encouraged abusive behavior and allowed atrocities to flourish.

Mr. Rumsfeld has driven the military into a ruinous quagmire, and there is no evidence at all that he`s capable of finding a serviceable route out.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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GRAND RAPIDS (IWR News Parody) - Calvin College today released the results of President Bush`s intelligence tests that he took last weekend after his commencement speech. The results clearly show that Mr. Bush is at best a feeble minded half-wit or numbskull.

"We knew we were dealing with a classic simpleton when Mr. Bush failed to insert a single peg into a matching hole during the Wallin Pegboard test," said Dr. Frank Galton.
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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/
Monday, May 23, 2005

14 Killed
Sadr Tries to Mediate between Sunnis, Shiites

At least 14 persons were killed in Iraq on Sunday in separate incidents. There was a car bomb in Tikrit, which wounded US and Iraqi soldiers. The director general of the Ministry of Trade, Ali Musa Salman, was shot down in Baghdad. There were firefights at Qaim and Mahmudiyah and Yusufiyah.

Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist, sent a delegation to Shaikh Hareth al-Dhari of the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars on Sunday in an attempt to mediate between them and the Badr paramilitary of the (Shiite) Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Sadrist, Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, also met with Sunni cleric Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi.

posted by Juan @ [url5/23/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/14-killed-sadr-tries-to-mediate.html[/url]

Is it George`s Fault?
Laura Bush Heckled at Wailing Wall over Pollard Affair
And at Temple Mount by Palestinians

I was alarmed at the tenor of the reporting about First Lady Laura Bush`s close brush with both Israeli and Palestinian protesters, at the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock respectively. Suzanne Malveaux, who was with her, clearly sounded shaken from the experience. Things could have been much worse.

I blame her husband George for putting her in this danger. There have been demonstrations and counter-demonstrations at the Jerusalem holy sites for weeks, because of charges by Palestinians that a far rightwing Zionist group planned to demolish the Dome of the Rock. On another level, George W. Bush was the one who said, at his National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001, that he intended to just "unleash Sharon", to allow all kinds of trouble between Israel and Palestine, and let conflict "clarify" things. His unconcern with the Israel/Palestine issue, which is key to US global security because of the strong feelings in the Muslim World about Israel`s colonization of the West Bank, contrasts deeply with the strenuous efforts made by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to resolve the conflict. By January of 2001, the two sides were extremely close to an agreement. Instead of pressuring incoming rightwing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to continue to negotiate, Bush "unleashed" him. Sharon predictably ran riot, mounting a campaign of murder and assassination against his Palestinian enemies (Sharon was actually once caught on mike planning out such a murder). At one point Sharon had a US-made F-16 fire a missile into a civilian apartment building to get at a Hamas official, killing 15 innocent people, including a little baby. John Bolton, by the way, tampered with the US government memo on the missile strike so as to shield Sharon from criticism.

After Laura Bush visited the Wailing Wall,


` Dozens of protesters stood nearby, shouting, "Free [convicted spy Jonathan] Pollard now" . . . The first lady was mobbed by protesters and local reporters, and Secret Service agents and Israeli police had to physically hold back the crowd as she approached the wall. `



The First Lady simply should not have been put in that kind of situation, where far-right Zionist fanatics had such physical access to her. The outcome could have been much worse-- remember what happened to Israeli Prime Minsiter Yitzhak Rabin.

As for their demand that Jonathan Pollard be freed from US prison, where he is serving a life sentence for delivering mountains of classified information to Israel (and thence to the Soviet Union), it is monstrous. Pollard inflicted incalculable damage on the United States and is one of its most dastardly traitors. High-ranking US officers with an intimate knowledge of the case told Seymour Hersh that there is no doubt that documents he provided to the Israelis ended up in the hands of the Soviets. This happened either because Israeli intelligence peddled them to Moscow or because Israeli intelligence itself was penetrated by the KGB. By sending highly classified material out of the United States (for tens of thousands of dollars in a private account), Pollard initiated its transfer to Moscow as surely as if he had just dropped it off at the Soviet embassy. Pollard should never be released, and anyone who demands his release is no friend of the United States. Giving the signal that it is all right to spy intensively on the United States would be the worst possible move in these parlous times.

This is more especially true since the pro-Israel lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is under FBI investigation for the passing of classified documents to Israeli embassy official Naor Gilon by two high-level AIPAC officials (recently fired). (Gilon, rumored to be Mossad or Israeli intelligence, is still at his cover post in Washington!) AIPAC should be made to register as an agent of a foreign power, at the very least. Like other unopposed or wealthy and focused single-interest organizations (the Cuban-American community with regard to policy toward Havana e.g., or the oil lobby that has its eyes on Alaska), AIPAC virtually sets policy for Congress in its area of interest. AIPAC is fabled for targeting any US congressmen or women who criticize Israel for un-election, and for generally succeeding. (It may not be as formidable as its reputation, but its reputation makes senators and representatives unwilling to take it on). That its officials are simultaneously spying for Israel is extremely scary. In this context, the demand that Pollard be freed functions as a demand that organizations like AIPAC be held harmless from spying on the United States of America for a foreign government.

It is George W. Bush who has encouraged the Israeli far right, by "unleashing Sharon" and letting the rightwingers know that Washington will support them no matter what. That is how they came to have the chutzpah to try to mob the First Lady. These are people that every US citizen is involuntarily taxed hundreds of dollars a year to support, and this is our thanks? We are spied on and then denounced for jailing the spy? And our First Lady is nearly mobbed?

At the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest shrine in Islam, "40 or 50" angry protesters came toward her, but the US Secret Service whisked her away. CNN says, ` As she left the mosque, one heckler yelled, "How dare you come in here?" and "Why do you hassle our Muslims?" `

Ironically, Laura Bush has been much more sympathetic to hurt feelings on the Muslim world about abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere than has her husband.

Mrs. Bush said the Newsweek report compounded anti-American sentiment stemming from the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. She said that abuse was "not any sort of typical thing from the United States." "We`ve had terrible happenings that have really, really hurt our image of the United States," she said. "And people in the United States are sick about it."



George W. Bush`s policies have pushed approval ratings for the United States in the Muslim world on down to practically zero. It wasn`t always like this. In 1999, 75 percent of Indonesians (the most populous Muslim country) had a favorable view of the US. On Sunday, 7,000 Indonesians protested at the US embassy against reports of Koran desecration by US military interrogators. The International Committee of the Red Cross says that it repeatedly presented to the US military what it felt were "credible" reports of Koran desecration. Passions were further inflamed Friday by a New York Times report on the way US military interrogators at Bagram in Afghanistan tortured two detainees to death. (The Indonesian protest was in part with reference to Bagram.)

It is George W. Bush who has set up the New Gulags, attempting to create political and legal enclaves which are completely beyond the law, where the "quaint" Geneva Conventions do not apply, where detainees do not get to see a lawyer, where they are not owed a speedy trial or basic human dignity, where they can essentially be tortured with impunity. Only low-ranking military personnel are being prosecuted for the abuses, but they were certainly authorized in at least a general way by the tone set in the White House.

We all now live in one world, on one globe. The Arab-Israeli conflict or the struggle within Islam between progressive and reactionary forces affects us all. Therefore, Bush`s policies toward both affect us all. Laura Bush got a small taste of how much they affect us on Sunday.

posted by Juan @ [url5/23/2005 06:12:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/is-it-georges-fault-laura-bush-heckled.html[/url]

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Saddam handed blame for Iraq`s eight-year war with Iran
Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=640…

21 May 2005
Saddam handed blame for Iraq`s eight-year war with Iran
Seventeen years after the eight-year conflict that killed one and a half million young men, it turns out that Iran won the war. Throughout that biblical struggle between Saddam Hussein`s invading Iraqi forces - egged on by the United States - and the Iranian Revolution`s desperate and suicidal attempts to defend its country, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini insisted that the world must acknowledge that Saddam was the aggressor. And now Iraq itself has at last done so.

Its new Shia-led government - thank you America, here, of course - has happily admitted that, yes, Iraq was the aggressor, Saddam was to blame. Iraqis were the bad guys, Iranians the good guys. It was a war of mirrors.

Throughout the 1980-88 war, in which Saddam used poison gas on a large scale for the first time since the First World War, we supported Saddam. We supplied him with guns, aerial pictures, gas - principally the Germans, but also the Americans - all paid for by that famous Gulf democracy and friend of the United States, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I remember how, at the start of the war, Saddam called his aggression the "Whirlwind War".

It was going to pulverise the newly born, naive, expansionist Islamic Republic - which is why we supported Saddam - and blast Khomeini from power, perhaps even reinstalling the dying Shah on his throne.

The Iranians, with a strict sense of reality, called it the "Imposed War", which is what it was. They pleaded with the United Nations to condemn Saddam.

What they got were calls for restraint, the same kind that the State Department uses in other "sensitive" areas where key US allies are at risk: Israel/Palestine and Uzbekistan.

That the chief aggressor of all - Saddam Hussein Tikriti - is now treated with truly Arab scorn and mirth is only part of the irony. For him to be pictured on the front page of The Sun in his Y-fronts is surely less degrading than for his erstwhile people to be piled up naked on the floor of the Abu Ghraib prison by Americans or forced to wear women`s underwear or bitten by dogs or just plain gunned down at checkpoints by US troops or torn to pieces by suicide bombers.

To use the mumbo-jumbo of psychobabble, the Iraqis have "moved on". They don`t need "closure". They don`t, most of them, care whether Saddam lives or dies. They want electricity, security, a real state. And they still haven`t got it.

It`s typical of us - the Westerners - to believe that Saddam is still our real enemy, at a moment when Iraq can produce an endless supply of suicide bombers and an army - probably the original Iraqi army of Saddam - to assault US and British soldiers.

Yes, Saddam was to blame. He was the reason we illegally invaded Iraq. Wasn`t he?

It gets so tiresome now. Weapons of mass destruction. Links to 11 September 2001. Forty-five minute warnings. Maybe not. But now we can say what we`ve never said before: we illegally invaded Iraq because - this will soon be the new leitmotif - Saddam illegally invaded Iran. Could it get better than that?

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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May 24, 2005

PART 10: Nazism and the German economic miracle
By Henry C K Liu
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE24Dj01.html

[url(Click here for previous parts)]http://atimes.com/atimes/others/world-order.html[/url]

The term "social market economy" was coined by one of German chancellor Ludwig Erhard`s close associates, economist Alfred Mueller-Armack, who served as secretary of state at the Economics Ministry in Bonn from 1958-63. Mueller-Armack defined social market economy as combining market freedom with social equity, with a vigilant regulatory regime to create an equitable framework for free market processes. The success of the social market economy made the Federal Republic of Germany the dominant component in the European Union. Focusing on the social aspect, Erhard himself shied away from praising free markets. He felt that social rules of the market-economy game must be adhered to as a precondition in order to prevent unbridled pursuit of profit from gaining the upper hand.

Erhard`s concept of a socially responsive regulated market economy was based on a fusion of the Bismarck legacy of social welfare and US New Deal ideology of demand management through full employment, price control, state subsidies, anti-trust regulations, state control of monetary stability, etc. It was aided by the infusion of foreign capital through the Marshall Plan. It proved to be effective for rapid and strong recovery of the West German economy via guaranteed access to the huge US market during the Cold War, culminating in the postwar economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder).

Yet Erhard`s program bore a close resemblance to the early economic strategy of the Third Reich. The main difference was that while the Third Reich`s program was one of economic nationalism, the Erhard program was subservient to US geopolitical interests in the context of the Cold War. By relying on US capital and US markets, chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Erhard accepted the delay of German independence from US domination for more than half a century. In contrast, Nazi economic policy aimed at the reconstruction of the German economy without the need for foreign capital, as a program for total and immediate national independence.

Hitler`s economic miracle
The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began. In fact, German economic recovery preceded and later enabled German rearmament, in contrast to the US economy, where constitutional roadblocks placed by the US Supreme Court on the New Deal delayed economic recovery until US entry to World War II put the US market economy on a war footing. While this observation is not an endorsement for Nazi philosophy, the effectiveness of German economic policy in this period, some of which had been started during the last phase of the Weimar Republic, is undeniable.

There were major differences between the German situation in 1933 and that in 1945. Not having been a battlefield in World War I, Germany in 1933 was not physically in ruins, as it was in 1945. What lay in ruins was its political and economic institutions. But in 1933, Germany not only did not have the benefit of the Marshall Plan, it was saddled with ruinous war reparations and an inoperative credit rating. What Germany had in 1933 was full sovereignty through which the Third Reich was able to adopt policies of economic nationalism to full effectiveness. In 1945, Germany was deprived of sovereign power and national policies had to be adjusted to comply with US and Soviet geopolitical intentions. Economically, the dependence on foreign investments and credit forced West Germany into an export economy at the mercy of its main market: the United States.

After two and a half decades of economic reform toward neo-liberal market economy, China is still unable to accomplish in economic reconstruction what Nazi Germany managed in four years after coming to power, ie, full employment with a vibrant economy financed with sovereign credit without the need to export, which would challenge that of Britain, the then superpower. This is because China made the mistake of relying on foreign investment instead of using its own sovereign credit. The penalty for China is that it has to export the resultant wealth to pay for the foreign capital it did not need in the first place. The result after more than two decades is that while China has become a creditor to the US to the tune of nearing China`s own gross domestic product (GDP), it continues to have to beg the US for investment capital.

The period between World Wars I and II, like no other period in modern European economic history, saw the success of centrally planned economies in Germany and the Soviet Union, two major states. The United States as the dominant victor of World War II was determined to perpetuate its hegemony by suppressing national planning everywhere to prevent the emergence of economic nationalism and socialism. It promoted global market capitalism and neo-liberal free trade to keep all other economies subservient to the US economy. It is the economic basis of the Pax Americana.

Stalin`s New Economic Policy
In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin`s planned economy had followed the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921-28. NEP was in essence a mixed market economy; the main part of the market was in state possession (banks, industries, foreign trade, etc), while the peripheral part was owned by collective or private entrepreneurs. NEP, while successful, did not give the Soviet economy sufficient growth in the capital-goods sectors (ie coal, steel and electricity, transportation, heavy industry, etc), nor did it provide adequate food for the urban population even as the middle peasantry managed to feed itself. To overcome such structural obstacles and to combat general economic backwardness inherited from centuries of Czarist rule, Stalin introduced central planning as a strategy of national survival.

Starting from 1928, the Soviet economy was put under a system of planning whereby all modes of production were socialized and foreign trade was de-emphasized in favor of an autarkic system of domestic demand and supply. The irony was that Soviet central planning adopted much of its effective techniques from successful US experience. It was a system of planning focused solely on unit end-results while externalizing social costs. The key distinction was that the Soviets rejected and bypassed the corporate structure and replaced shareholders with state ownership. Stalin brought about "revolution from above". Its main features were: strengthening of political dictatorship in the name of the proletariat (equivalent to enhancing management authority in the US in the name of shareholders), collectivizing kulak peasants (equivalent to agri-business development in the US), emergency measure authority (equivalent to government bailouts and regulations in the US), introduction of a five-year plan structure (adopted from US corporate strategic planning) and rapid expansion of urban labor force (equivalent to urbanization in the US), and tight state control over agriculture (equivalent to farm subsidy programs in the US), heavy industry (equivalent to defense contracts in the US) and finance (equivalent to central banking in the US). Between 1934 and 1936 the Soviet economy achieved a spectacular economic growth rate that continued despite political purges of Trotskyites between 1936 and 1938. Economic growth was unfortunately interrupted by war in 1941. German invasion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not independent of apprehension of continued Soviet economic success.

Propaganda works. It worked in the USSR, in Nazi Germany, in imperial Japan and in the capitalist US, each to instill in the general public an acceptance of its system as being the suitable one if not the best, despite visible shortcomings. It helped achieve optimal effectiveness and stability in the overall economy in all these countries.

Nazi Germany provided another example of successful inter-war economic planning. One of the main differences between the Nazi and the Soviet economic systems was that the Nazis` was a mixed economy with strict state control while the Soviets` was a state-owned economy. Furthermore, being heavily influenced by the ideas of Walter Rathenau (1867-1922), German economic planners did not seek to build anew with revolutionary zeal as the Russians did, but rather to reform, molding the existing form of decentralized capitalism into a more effective centralized system with massive combines to support national aims.

The Rathenau factor
Rathenau, German industrialist, social theorist, and statesman, was the son of Emil Rathenau (1838-1915), founder of the gigantic German public utilities company Allgemeine Elektrizitaetsgesellschaft (AEG). He directed the distribution of raw materials in World War I and became minister of reconstruction (1921) and later foreign minister (1922) of the Weimar Republic. He represented Germany at the Cannes and Genoa reparations conferences and negotiated the Treaty of Rapallo in which Germany accorded the USSR de jure recognition, the first such recognition extended to the new Soviet government. The two signatories mutually canceled all prewar and war debts and renounced war claims. Particularly advantageous to Germany was the inclusion of a most-favored-nation clause and of extensive free-trade agreements. The treaty enabled the German army, through secret agreements, to produce and perfect in the USSR weapons forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. A Jew, Rathenau was assassinated in 1922 by anti-Semitic nationalist fanatics who opposed his attempts to fulfill war-reparation obligations to the Western victors. A strong nationalist who played an important role in Germany`s war efforts in World War I, Rathenau was also a strong proponent of postwar international cooperation and his diplomatic initiatives played a key role in breaking Germany`s postwar diplomatic isolation.

In his writings, Rathenau criticized free-market capitalism and argued that technological change and industrialization were pushing civilization toward a stage of high mechanization, in which the human soul would be under threat. In an attempt to find an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism that did not involve state socialism and Marxism, Rathenau proposed a decentralized, democratic social order, in which the workers would have more control over production and the state would exert more control over the economy. His translated works include In Days to Come (1921) and The New Society (1921). Despite his great contribution to the German economy, Rathenau epitomized the living target of Adolf Hitler`s accusation of internationalist Jewish treachery that betrayed the German nation. Hitler`s rejection of the loyal nationalist support of the German Jews played an undeniable role in his own defeat. Jewish contribution to the flowering of German economy, culture and civilization had been the strongest in any European nation. Nazi persecution of the Jews was a strategic error more fundamental than the Nazi invasion of the USSR. The emigration of German Jews to the West, particularly to the US, played a critical role in the defeat of Germany in World War II. It is a lesson that the Arab nation in general, and Palestinians in particular, have yet to learn.

The economic power of full employment
From the very outset of his rule, Hitler, whose main short-term goal was the economic revival of Germany with the help of German nationalist bankers and industrialists, won popular support of the nation. Hitler adopted an aggressive full-employment campaign. Between January 1933 and July 1935 the number of employed Germans rose by a half, from 11.7 million to 16.9 million. More than 5 million new jobs paying living wages were created. Unemployment was banished from the German economy and the entire nation was productively engaged in reconstruction. Inflation was brought under control by wage freeze and price control. Besides this, taking into account the lessons learned during 1914-18, Hitler aimed at creating an economy that would be independent from foreign capital and supply, and be well protected from another blockade and economic war. For Germans, all of the above was proof that Hitler was the one who had not only brought Germany out of economic depression but would take it directly to prosperity with new pride. German popular trust in the Fuehrer rose dramatically.

In September 1936, British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas had been credited as behind US president Franklin Roosevelt`s New Deal, prepared a preface for the German translation of his book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Addressing a readership of German economists, Keynes wrote: "The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than ... under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that [justify] the fact that I call my theory a general theory. Although I have, after all, worked it out with a view to the conditions prevailing in the Anglo-Saxon countries where a large degree of laissez-faire still prevails, nevertheless it remains applicable to situations in which state management is more pronounced." Keynes clearly understood that the greater the degree of state control over any economy, the easier it would be for the government to manage the levers of monetary and fiscal policy to manipulate macroeconomic aggregates of total output, total employment, and the general price and wage levels for purposes of moving the overall economy into directions more to the economic-policy analyst`s liking.

The radical Spartacists in Germany regrouped themselves as the Communist Party in 1920. They continued their opposition to the liberal government of the Weimar Republic. From 1923-29, the Communists always obtained about 10% of the seats in the Reichstag. Unlike elitist Italian Fascism, Nazism had a high regard for the German peasant. Unlike Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, while imposing sweeping government control over all aspects of the economy, was not a corporate state.

In four short years, Hitler`s Germany was able to turn a Germany ravaged by defeat in war and left in a state national malaise by the liberal policies of the Weimar Republic, with a bankrupt economy weighted down by heavy foreign war debt and the total unavailability of new foreign capital, into the strongest economy and military power in Europe. How did Germany do it? The centerpiece was Germany`s Work Creation Program of 1933-36, which preceded its rearmament program. Neo-liberal economists everywhere seven decades later have yet to acknowledge that employment is all that counts and living wages are the key to national prosperity. Any economic policy that does not lead to full employment is self-deceivingly counterproductive, and any policy that permits international wage arbitrage is treasonous. German economic policies between 1930 and 1932 were brutally deflationary, which showed total indifference to high unemployment, and in 1933 Hitler was elected chancellor out of the socio-economic chaos.

The financing of Nazi economic-recovery programs drew upon sovereign credit creation techniques already experimented prior to Hitler`s appointment as chancellor. What changed after 1933 was the government`s willingness to create massive short-term sovereign credit and the its firm commitment to retire in full the debt created by that credit. Short-term sovereign credit was important to change the general climate of distrust on government credit. The quick rollover of short-term government notes created popular trust within months in German sovereign credit domestically.

Hitler told German industrialists in May 1933 that economic recovery required action by both the state and the private sector. The government`s role was limited to encouraging private-sector investment, mainly through tax incentives. He expressed willingness to provide substantial public funding only for highway projects, not for industry. Investment was unlikely if consumers had no money to spend or were afraid because of job insecurity to spend money to buy products produced, and Hitler understood that workers needed decent income to become healthy consumers. Thus full employment was the kick-start point of the economic cycle. To combat traditional German fear of the social consequences of appearing better off than their neighbors, Nazi propaganda would psychologically stimulate the economy by developing a lust for life among consumers.

Hitler stressed on May 31, 1933, that the Reich budget must be balanced. A balanced budget meant reducing expenditures on social programs, because Hitler intended to reduce business taxes to promote needed private investment. To avoid reducing social programs, a large work program without deficit spending had to be financed outside of the Reich budget. Hitler resorted to "pre-financing" (Vorfinanzierung) by means of "work-creation bills" (Arbeitsbeschaffungswechseln), a classic response of using monetary measures to deal with a fiscal dilemma.

Under the scheme of "pre-financing" with work-creation bills, the Reich Finance Ministry distributed these WCBs (three months, renewable up to five years) to participating credit institutions and public agencies. Contractors and suppliers who required cash to participate in work-creation projects drew bills against the agency ordering the work or the appropriate credit institutions. These credit institutions then accepted (assumed liability for payment of) the bills, which, now treated as commercial paper, could rediscount the bills at the Reichsbank (central bank). The entire process of drawing, accepting and discounting WCBs provided the cash necessary to pay the contractors and suppliers. The experience of successful rollover every three months quickly established credit worthiness. The Reich Treasury undertook to redeem these bills, one-fifth of the total every year, between 1934 and 1938, as the economy and tax receipts recovered. As security for the bills, the Reich Treasury deposited with the credit institutions a corresponding amount of tax vouchers (Steuergutscheine) or other securities. As the Treasury redeemed WCBs, the tax vouchers were to be returned to the Treasury. Hitler increased the money supply in the German economy by creating special money for employment.

In the US Banking Panic of 1907, J P Morgan (1837-1913) did in essence the same thing. He strong-armed US banks to agree to settle accounts among themselves with clearinghouse certificates he issued rather than cash and thus illegally increased the money supply without involving the government, and ended up owning a much larger share of the financial sector paid for with his own paper, ironically with the gratitude of the government. The difference was that the economic benefit went to Morgan personally rather than to the nation as in Nazi Germany and the private money was used to save the banks rather than to save the unemployed.

Nazi economic experts understood that sovereign credit creation for purposes of job creation posed no inflationary threat and that it would be a far more responsible policy than the conservative approach of tax increases and welfare cuts to balance government budgets. The idiotic policy of monetary restraint and social-spending reduction to balance government budgets in order to pay foreign debts is still being advocated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in debtor nations around the world - except for the United States, the world`s largest debtor nation, which uses dollar hegemony as an escape hatch or, more to the point, escape hedge. Redeeming WCBs did burden the 1934-39 Reich budget, but the decline in Reich expenditure for welfare support and other tax subsidies as a result of full employment recovery more than offset the redemption payments. The surplus was then used to reduce public debt and taxes further.

There were legal, political and institutional restrictions unique to Germany on the scope of the Reichsbank that virtually dictated resources to WCBs as a way of putting 6 million unemployed Germans back to work. But the principle of WCBs can be applied to the US or China or any other country today to combat unacceptably high levels of unemployment. Alas, this common-sense approach is faced with firm opposition rationalized by obscure theories of inflation in most countries. The real reason is that the banking sector can reap excess profit by treating high unemployment as an externality in the economy that translates high unemployment and low wages directly into corporate profits. The profit from high unemployment is kept in private hands, while the cost of high unemployment is socialized as government expenditure.

In 1933, Hitler sought to reassure Germany`s business leadership that Nazi rule was consistent with the preservation of the free-market system, because he needed the support of the industrialists. He could buy that support by keeping wages down during the recovery, but any rigorous effort to curb prices and profits would alienate the business community and slow down economic recovery. Instead, Hitler sought to restore profitability to German business through reduced unit cost achieved by increasing output and sales volume, rather than through a general increase in prices (Mengenkonjunktur, niche Preiskonjunktur - output boom, not price boom). Adoption of "performance wage" (Leistungslohn - payment on a price-rate basis) increased labor productivity, thereby driving costs down and profit up. Some upward price movements were permitted to adjust price relationships between agricultural and manufactured products and between goods with elastic and inelastic demands, also to prevent price wars and below-cost dumping. These principles of "output boom, not price boom" and "performance wage" could also work in combating inflation today in many economies generally and China specifically.

Hitler saved the German farmers from their heavy debt burden through relief programs and through subsidized farm prices. The stable farm income came at the expenses of the middlemen institutions, but Hitler sustained popular support by the provision of living income to consumers. Had Nazi Germany been a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), this option would have been foreclosed to it. Hitler sought price stability only in sectors critical to the national economy and to the ultimate goal of rearmament. Germany had no overall price policy until the 1936 Four Year Plan, which concentrated economic authority in the hands of Hermann Goering for war production and put an end to regulated free-market policies.

Business managers generally make investment and employment decisions based on their judgment of the prospect for new orders. The difference between German economic recovery under Hitler and US economic stagnation under Roosevelt in the 1930s was the degree of uncertainty for new orders for goods. Hitler made it clear that after 1936, a major rearmament program would make heavy demand on German durable-goods and capital-goods industries without the need to export. With that assurance, German industry could plan expansion with confidence. Roosevelt was unable to provide such "confidence" to industry and had to rely on anemic market forces until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The Marshall Plan: A Trojan horse for monetary conquest
The Marshall Plan grew out of the Truman Doctrine, proclaimed in 1947, stressing the moralistic duty of the United States to combat communist regimes worldwide. The Marshall Plan spent US$13 billion (out of a 1947 GDP of $244 billion or 5.4%, or $632 billion in 2004 dollars) to help Europe recover economically from World War II to keep it from communism. The money actually did not all come out of the US government`s budget, but out of US sovereign credit. The most significant aspect of the Marshall Plan was the US government guarantee to US investors in Europe to exchange their profits denominated in weak European currencies back into dollars at guaranteed fixed rates, backed by gold at $35 an ounce.

The Marshall Plan helped establish the US dollar as the world`s reserved currency at fixed exchange rates established by the IMF, which had been created by the Bretton Woods Conference. The Marshall Plan enabled international trade to resume and laid the foundation for dollar hegemony for more than half a century even after the dollar was taken off gold by president Richard Nixon in 1971. While the Marshall Plan did help the German economy recover, it was not entirely a selfless gift from the victor to the vanquished. It was more a Trojan horse for monetary conquest. It condemned Germany`s economy to the status of a dependent satellite of the US economy from which it has yet to free itself fully.

The Marshall Plan lent Europe the equivalent of $632 billion in 2004 dollars. Japan`s foreign-exchange reserves alone were $830 billion at the end of September 2004. In other words, Japan was lending more to the United States in 2004 than the Marshall Plan lent to Europe in 1947. And Japan did not get any benefits, because the loan is denominated in dollars that the US can print at will, and dollars are useless in Japan unless reconverted to yen, which because of dollar hegemony Japan is not in a position to do without reducing the yen money supply, causing the Japanese economy to contract and the yen exchange rate to rise, thus hurting Japanese export competitiveness.

West Germany`s postwar economy functioned well for several decades, and became one of Europe`s strongest. Much of its success was due to the German tradition of strong social welfare that dated back to the days of Otto von Bismarck a century earlier, and the system of co-determination, which gave workers in factories a voice about their management and provided West German industries a long period of labor peace. The economics of the Cold War also gave Germany guaranteed markets in the US. The export-oriented economy received another boost with the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) by the Treaty of Rome in March 1957. West Germany was one of the EEC`s founding members. Since the end of the Cold War, this economic order has been under threat from neo-liberal globalization that first attacked the developing economies in Latin America and then the world over.

Sovereignty, finance capitalism and democracy
Jean Bodin (1530-96), the first thinker in the West to develop the modern theory of sovereignty, held that in every society there must be one power with the legitimate authority to give law to all others. The Edict of Nantes issued by Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot (French Calvinist) chief, who reigned as Henry IV in 1598, was a sovereign edict that laid the foundation of French royal absolutism of the sovereign state. The Edict protected a Huguenot minority, composed mostly of members of the aristocracy, against popular opposition from the Catholic peasants with the support of the papacy. Henry IV was a member of the politiques who believed that no religious doctrine was important enough to justify ever-lasting war. He abjured the Calvinist faith in 1593 and subjected himself to papal absolution, supposedly remarking that Paris was well worth a Mass. He wanted to rebuild France from a war-torn economy caused by religious strife into a prosperous nation, with "a chicken in every pot" for every French family, a phrase borrowed by Roosevelt two and a half centuries later to describe the goal of his New Deal.

The Edict to protect the Protestant aristocrats led to the assassination of the converted Catholic king by a Catholic fanatic in 1610. The widowed queen, Marie de Medici, a devout Catholic and scion of the celebrated banking family of Florence, handed control of France to Cardinal Richelieu, who undertook a secular policy to enhance the economic interest of the state with mercantilist measures, by allowing the aristocracy to engage in maritime trade without loss of noble status, and by making it possible for merchants to become nobles through payments to the royal exchequer. This provided a political union of the aristocracy and the bourgeois elite that held the nation together until the French Revolution of 1789.

In 1627, the Duke of Rohan led a Huguenot rebellion from La Rochelle with English military support. Richelieu suppressed the rebellion ruthlessly and modified the Edict of Nantes with the Peace of Alais in 1629, by allowing the Huguenots to keep their religion but stripping them of their instruments of political power: their fortified cities, their Protestant armies and all their military and territorial autonomy and rights. Calvinism has been identified by social historians as the driving force behind modern capitalism.

The Age of New Monarchy in Europe laid the foundation for the age of sovereign nation-states by placing royal authority to institute a fairer social contract above feudal rights, a development that began in the High Middle Ages. The new monarchs presented the institution of monarchy as a progressive guarantor of law and order and promoted hereditary monarchy as the legitimate means of transferring public power. Monarchism was supported by the urban bourgeoisie, as it had long been victimized by the private wars and marauding excesses of the feudal lords. The bourgeoisie was willing to pay taxes directly to the king in return for peace and royal protection from aristocratic abuse. Its members were willing to let parliament, the stronghold of the aristocracy, be dominated by the king who was expected to be a populist. The direct collection of popular taxes by the king, bypassing the feudal lords, gave the king the necessary resources to maintain a standing army to keep the feudal lords in check. These new monarchs revived Roman law, which favored the state and incorporated the will and welfare of the people in their own persons. Direct payment of taxes to the sovereign also ensured that future wars were fought to protect or enhance national interests, rather than at the personal pleasure of the king. The new monarchs ruled by the mandate of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, just as communist governments ruled centuries later with the mandate of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was by protecting the people against abuses from aristocratic special interests that the king protected himself, a principle that escaped Louise XVI of France to his own sorrow.

Today, as the institution of democracy is supplanted by control by the moneyed class, democracy will lose its popular mandate. What the US needs is not to spread democracy around the world, but to restore economic democracy at home. Similarly, when the Chinese Communist Party permits neo-liberal market fundamentalism to distant itself from its revolutionary mission of protecting the peasant masses from market abuse, it will lose its mandate as the legitimate defender of the dictatorship of the proletariat. What China needs is not political reform to accommodate capitalistic democracy, but a restoration of its revolutionary ideological line in its political institutions and a renewal of populist commitment on the part of its leadership. Political reform driven by flawed ideology is institutional suicide.

The new monarchies in Europe, by breaking down feudal tariff barriers within the kingdom, contributed to the rise of the commercial revolution and the development of extended cross-border markets. In the rise of capitalism, the needs of a new military not dependent on the aristocracy had been of critical importance. The standing national armies of the new monarchs required sudden expenditures in times of war that the traditional feudal dues and normal flow of tax revenue could not meet. Private bankers emerged to finance wars by lending money to the kings secured by the right to collect taxes in the future from conquered lands. The medieval prohibition of interest as usury, denounced as the sin of avarice and forbidden by canon laws, faded in practice even as it continued to be upheld by all religions. Luther denounced "Fruggerism" in reference to the bankers of the Holy Roman Empire. Even Calvinism only gradually made allowances on the issue of interest.

The new monarchies, caught between fixed income and mounting expenses, were forced to devalue their money by diluting its gold content. They began to borrow from private banks to deal with recurring monetary crises. These monetary crises led to constitutional crises that produced absolute monarchies in Europe and the triumph of bourgeois parliamentarianism in England. The need to find new conquered lands to repay sovereign indebtedness gave birth to imperialism and colonialism, which the Atlantic Charter centuries later categorically rejected in the third of its eight points of "common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world". The third point stated that "they [the US and Britain, and later the United Nations members] respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them".

German rearmament to defend neo-imperialism
Notwithstanding the high-sounding rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 provided a propaganda opening for the US to impress on its submissive Western allies in the United Nations that international communism was a clear and present danger to residual Western imperialism and colonialism in the Third World. Under president Harry Truman, the US began to abandon its wartime anti-colonialist posture and to solicit the help of European imperialists, particularly the British and French, to support its global war on communism.

Colonel Harry G Summers Jr, US Army (retired), in an article in Military History magazine titled "The Korean War: A fresh perspective", pointed out that during a post-Cold War Pentagon briefing in 1974, General Vernon Walters, then deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), revealed what amounted to the unpredictability of US policy intentions on Korea: "If a Soviet KGB spy had broken into the Pentagon or the State Department on June 25, 1950, and gained access to our most secret files, he would have found the US had no interest at all in Korea. But the one place he couldn`t break into was the mind of Harry Truman, and two days later America went to war over Korea."

Truman, unprepared for global leadership, insecure and paranoid, fell under the spell of Winston Churchill, who, borrowing from Lenin, equated anti-imperialism with anti-capitalism. Churchill aimed at using the Cold War as a device to save European imperialism by offering the fruits of neo-imperialism to the US in the name of democracy. In taking the United States to war in Korea, Truman, in addition to placing the US firmly on the side of imperialists, made two critical decisions that would shape future US military actions.

First, he decided to fight the war under the auspices of the United Nations, a pattern followed by president Lyndon B Johnson in the Vietnam War in 1964, president George H W Bush in the Gulf War in 1991, by president Bill Clinton in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999, and by President George W Bush in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003. Second, for the first time in US military history, Truman decided to take the nation to war without first asking Congress for a declaration of war. Using the UN Security Council resolution as his authority, he said the conflict in Korea was not a war but a "police action". With the Soviet Union then boycotting the Security Council, the United States was able to gain approval of UN resolutions labeling the North Korean invasion a "breach of the peace" and urging all members to aid South Korea, notwithstanding that both North and South Korea had been aiming for unification by force for several years.

Another consequence of the Korean War was damage to the image of the UN as a neutral world body. Secretary general Trygve Lie was forced to resign over Soviet complaints of the way he manipulated Security Council procedures to comply with US dictates.

Colonel Summers pointed out that, in reality, UN involvement was a facade for unilateral US action to protect its vital interests in northeast Asia. The UN Command was just another name for General Douglas MacArthur`s US Far East Command in Tokyo. At its peak strength in July 1953, the UN Command stood at 932,539 ground troops. Republic of Korea (ROK) army and marine forces accounted for 590,911 of that force, and US Army and Marine Corps forces for another 302,483. By comparison, other UN ground forces totaled 39,145 men, 24,085 of whom were provided by British Commonwealth Forces (Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and 5,455 of whom came from Turkey. The troop composition was similar to that of the "coalition of the willing" in the 2003 Iraq war. While the UN facade was detrimental to the prestige of the UN, Truman`s decision not to seek a declaration of war set a dangerous precedent in the erosion of the constitutional power of the US Congress.

Claiming that their war-making authority rested in their power as commanders-in-chief, both Johnson and Nixon refused to ask Congress for approval to wage war in Vietnam, a major factor in undermining popular support for that conflict. In the entire history of the United States, only seven wars had been declared by Congress, with World War II the last declared war. Ten other wars were not declared: the Florida Seminole Wars, 1817-58; the Civil War, 1861-65; the Korean War, 1950-53; the Vietnam War, 1964-72; the first Gulf War, 1991; the war on drugs, 1980s to the present; the Kosovo war, 1999; the "war on terror", 2001 to the present; Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), 2001; and the second Gulf war (Iraq), 2003. Instead of formal war declarations, the US Congress has issued authorizations of force. Such authorizations have included the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 that officially initiated US participation in the Vietnam War, and the "use-of-force" resolution that started the 2003 Iraq war. Questions remain as to the legality of these authorizations of force.

Ironically, the Federal Republic of Germany, whose own empire had been partitioned out of existence since the end of World War I, was pushed to contribute financially to its own defense against Soviet threat so that its less prosperous but victorious imperialist allies, Britain and France, could spend their hard-pressed resources to defend their crumbling empires outside of Europe in the name of democracy.

For West Germany, five years after having lost the most devastating of all wars, this meant forming a new army, a step unthinkable for many Germans who had just gone through de-Nazification and demilitarization indoctrination during Allied occupation. But the worldwide "Korean War boom" of 1950 came at exactly the right moment for an export-addicted Germany eager to capture new overseas markets. As West Germany prospered from profits garnered from new wars to defend imperialism in Asia, the US was in a position to push Germany into rearmament, despite the fact that German rearmament was anathema not only to German citizens, but also to all their apprehensive neighbors, especially France. As the Korean War continued, however, opposition to rearmament lessened within West Germany, and China`s entry into the war caused Gaullist France, which was apprehensive of the liberating impact of Asian communism on its crumbling empire in Southeast Asia, to revise its negative posture toward German rearmament, as long as the new German war machine was oriented toward the east. Instead of the tradition Franco-Russian alliance against a powerful Germany, the French began to see benefits in using the Germans to deter Soviet intentions to march toward Paris. It was a classic balance-of-power move. Germany, deprived of sovereign authority, was at the mercy of superpower global conflict.

To contain a newly armed Germany, French officials proposed the creation of the European Defense Community (EDC) under the aegis of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but with strengthened European control, with a European Army to run in parallel with the European Steel and Coal Community that France and Germany had formed earlier. Within the EDC context was the need to rearm West Germany to counter the Soviet Union`s overwhelming superiority in military manpower. Adenauer quickly agreed to join the EDC because he saw membership as likely to enhance the eventual full restoration of German sovereignty. The treaties establishing the EDC were signed in May 1952 in Bonn by the Western Allies and West Germany. Britain refused to be part of it, seeing its armed forces as being more important to NATO, the Commonwealth and the special relationship with the US than to Europe.

Arguments arose over who would have ultimate control over the army - would it be the EDC or would it be the national governments? The whole idea eventually fell apart, although West Germany was welcomed into NATO and the West European Union (WEU) was created. Although the German Bundestag ratified the treaties, the EDC was ultimately blocked by the French National Assembly, because it opposed putting French troops under foreign command. The French veto meant that Adenauer`s attempt to regain German sovereignty through disguised militarism had failed and a new formula was needed to allay French fears of a strong Germany.

The failed negotiations surrounding the planned rearmament of West Germany through the creation of the EDC nevertheless provoked a Soviet countermeasure. After a second East German proposal for talks on a possible unification of the two German states failed because of West Germany`s demands for free elections in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Soviet Union put forth a new proposal to its wartime Western Allies in March 1952. The Soviet Union would agree to German unification if the Oder-Neisse border were recognized as final and if a unified Germany were to remain neutral. If the proposal were accepted, Allied troops would leave Germany within one year, and a united neutral Germany would obtain its full sovereignty.

The offer, directed to the Western Allies rather than Germany, which, deprived of sovereignty, had no authority to negotiate its own fate, nevertheless aroused lively public discussion in West Germany about the country`s political future. Adenauer was afraid that neutrality would mean Germany`s exclusion from US-dominated Western Europe and that without US support, he and his conservative Christian Democrats might not stay in power, in view of the traditional strength of the Social Democrats or, worse, the communists. Encouraged by the United States, Adenauer demanded free elections in all of Germany as a precondition for negotiations, a demand he knew was unacceptable to both the Soviets and East Germany, as Western-style elections would be financed by money from the US to ensure the defeat of communist and socialist candidates, repeating the postwar political sham in both West Germany and Japan. The Soviet Union declined and abandoned its proposal. Adenauer was harshly criticized by the opposition for not having seized this opportunity for unification. By allying itself with the US, West Germany sacrificed its unification with East Germany for half a century. A divided Germany provided a balance-of-power arrangement between the two superpowers all through the Cold War.

Adenauer`s decision to turn down the Soviet proposal left Germany divided for the then foreseeable future. West Germany was then expected to remain firmly anchored in the Western defense community. Yet doubt remained in Washington on whether Germans would kill other Germans to protect US interests in Europe.

After plans for the EDC failed because of the French veto, negotiations were successfully concluded on the Treaties of Paris in May 1954, which ended the Occupation Statute and made West Germany a member of the Western European Union and of NATO. NATO was the vehicle to camouflage US geopolitical interests in Europe with a common goal among the Western Allies against Soviet communism. On May 5, 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany declared its sovereignty as a state and, as a new member of NATO, undertook to contribute to the organization`s defense effort by building up its own armed forces, the Bundeswehr. German rearmament was to be camouflaged under the NATO umbrella. West German soldiers could now be counted on to fight East German soldiers to protect Western Europe against communism. Militarism was the price the United States extracted for granting Germany a facade of independent sovereignty, but not yet full independence of foreign or security policy, as NATO continued to be dominated by the US, with its mission framed by US geopolitical interests.

The buildup of the Bundeswehr met considerable popular opposition within West Germany. To avoid isolating the army from the country`s civilian and political life, as was the case historically up to the fall of the Weimar Republic, laws were passed that guaranteed civilian control over the armed forces and gave the individual soldier a new social status. Members of the conscription army were to be "citizens in uniform" and were encouraged to take an active part in democratic politics, in contrast to the Junker tradition of a warrior class. This was done to inject a measure of consideration of German domestic politics into US-dominated NATO decision-making.

By 1955, the Soviet Union had abandoned efforts to secure a neutralized united Germany. After the Four Power Conference in Geneva in July that year, Adenauer accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, seeking to open new lines of communication with the East without compromising West German commitments to the West. On the other side, Moscow wanted to exploit German apprehension of being in the front line of hostility to create a voice of caution within NATO. In Moscow in September, Adenauer arranged for the release of 10,000 German war prisoners in the Soviet Union. In addition, without having recognized the division of Germany or the Oder-Neisse line as permanent, West German negotiators also established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union recognized the German Democratic Republic as a sovereign state in 1954, and the two communist countries established diplomatic relations. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had not, however, recognized the GDR. And to dissuade other countries from recognizing East Germany, Adenauer`s foreign policy adviser, Walter Hallstein, proposed that the FRG break diplomatic relations with any country that recognized the GDR. Anti-communism was the convenient decoy from targeting the rise of neo-fascism in a society that had won a permissive reprieve from its US conqueror`s de-Nazification program. As the brilliant German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder showed in many of his films, postwar Germany turned out to be very much what it would have been like if the Nazis had won the war.

The Hallstein proposal was based on the West German claim that as a democratic state, it should be accepted as the only legitimate representative of the German people. By contrast, East Germany claimed to be the legitimate state of the German people because it was a dictatorship of the proletariat. Democracy was used as a justification for legitimacy in the West. Israel would learn from the former persecutor of its people to use democracy to bargain for US acceptance of its legitimacy in an Arab region, using anti-communism as currency to secure US support, by purging the left totally from Israeli domestic politics. The Hallstein Doctrine was adopted as a principle of West German foreign policy in September 1955 and remained in effect until the late 1960s when the idea of two German states became a reality, and Germany remained divided until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

Unfortunately, whereas militarism under market capitalism stimulated economic expansion by providing profit to private enterprise, it operated to drain prosperity under communism, which could not find a vehicle to recycle financial energy consumed by the arms race. Militarism then was co-opted by finance capitalism as an effective weapon against communism, which was an economic system that could only be operative in peace. The reason war has not ended even after the global war on communism has ended with the dissolution of the USSR is because militarism and capitalism have a mutual dependency. The end of the Cold War, while marking the failure of peaceful communism, marked the triumph of capitalistic militarism.

Traditionally, European integration and trans-Atlantic relations have been the two key components of postwar German foreign policy. German trans-Atlantic relations are a euphemism for German acceptance of US dominance. Both components were strategic necessities for the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II, and at the same time paved the way for West Germany to rejoin the European community of nations. Since then, the US had been Germany`s protector ally both in and outside Europe. This relationship remained after German unification.

Today, while the US and Germany continue to share similar views on a range of global issues such as terrorism, WMD (weapons of mass destruction) proliferation and regional conflicts, there is increasing divergence on what constitute proper policy responses to these new threats and challenges. Germany subscribes to multilateralism as a fundamental component of its foreign policy in a multipolar world. Differences on issues such as Iraq, Iran, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and the Ottawa Convention have surfaced between the US and Germany as the latter regains more of its full sovereignty and as its domestic politics turns centrist as opposed to US unilateralism. Strategically, German relations with China and Russia are evolving along lines more independent from US policies.

During the Cold War, trans-Atlantic relations in the West were dominated by the need to defend the US and Western Europe jointly against the Soviet threat. This was also the reason for US forces to remain in Europe via NATO. With the end of the Cold War in 1989, the threat posed by the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union disappeared overnight. Since then, trans-Atlantic relations have faced new challenges devoid of a common thread.

Having contained domestic terrorism on its own soil, Germany, like many other nations, is being pressured by the United States to join in the "global war on terrorism" as a replacement of the threat from global communism. International terrorism, which also put a new dimension on the problem of WMD proliferation, created a demand from the US for German military projection beyond German borders, along with regional conflicts that allegedly had supra-regional destabilizing effects, eg the Balkans, the Middle East, Congo, Afghanistan, India-Pakistan. This definition of supra-regional stability can involve Germany in distant conflicts around the globe, since no regional conflict can remain isolated in an interconnected global security network. The process of greater European integration has spilled beyond historical European borders into the Crimea and the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Yet domestic threats from international terrorism can be intensified by a country`s military involvement beyond its borders, as demonstrated by the terrorist bombing of trains in Spain in response to deployment of Spanish troops in Iraq.

As early as 1990, the European Union and the United States agreed in the Transatlantic Declaration to establish a closely meshed network of twice-yearly summit consultations. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, showed that security policy and trans-Atlantic cooperation have not been removed with the end of East-West conflict. Yet the nature of the cooperation has undergone a fundamental change: comprehensive security implies that internal and external security threats are interconnected. There is also a historical legacy that set German relations with Islamic nations apart from the Anglo-US legacy. Competition for the hearts and minds of Islamic peoples had been a focus of the contest between Germany and the Western Allies in the two World Wars.

With the US drifting toward a policy of relying on its super-power to impose a global geopolitical, economic and financial architecture to its liking, a critical divergence has emerged between the US and its NATO allies over the need for conflict prevention and the most effective paths of conflict resolution. US responses to terrorism threats, as manifested in its invasion and occupation of Iraq, if not Afghanistan, have created policy rifts between the EU and the US.

With the end of the Soviet threat to Western Europe, US planners began to ask whether the United States would always have to deploy troops and equipment to sort out Europe`s problems. Consequently, the US was looking to Western Europe to take more responsibility for its own defense and security. It has also become harder for US policymakers to justify spending considerable amounts of money on overseas deployments. Equally, the US remains hesitant over overseas deployments because of experiences and lessons from the Vietnam War. Despite being the main contributor to Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf during 1991, the later debacle of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia only reinforced US objections to its their ground forces in international hotspots.

For the United States, modern warfare or military operations have to be conducted with minimum risk to US lives. When the US refused to deploy peacekeepers to UN operations in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during 1992-95, or make the ground-force option available during Operation Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999, many Western European governments wondered whether the United States could always be counted on if military intervention were needed in an international crisis. Many were now asking the same questions as the French had asked years before: Why should an economically and politically powerful Western Europe not take more responsibility for its own security, especially as there was no longer the threat from the USSR and the Warsaw Pact?

As a result, Western Europe had begun to develop a European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI) since the early 1990s. In 1993, the EU decided to embody parts of the Petersberg Tasks into the Treaty on the European Union. This gave the WEU, Western Europe`s own security apparatus within NATO, a clear defined role in humanitarian and conventional operations. The WEU was strengthened. Among other changes, this included the appointment of a secretary general and a planning cell that were responsible for assessing and planning for operations as they arose. The number of troops available to it was also increased. If necessary, the WEU could call on other NATO units such as the UK/Netherlands Landing Force. It also had its own rapid-response unit, EUROFOR, which was made up of troops from France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It was envisaged that the WEU would act independently or as part of a UN force in humanitarian operations in which the US would not want to become involved. In other operations, it would act as part of NATO. Both the US and Western Europe believed that the proposals would strengthen NATO by providing better cooperation and coordination, a problem NATO had suffered from in multinational operations.

In 1999, however, the EU decided to revise the WEU plans. It decided to adopt the crisis-management and conflict-prevention elements itself. The WEU would remain as an organization but would mostly concentrate on being a contribution to NATO during a conventional war. At the European Council`s Cologne Summit in June 1999, the EU launched the Common European Security and Defense Policy (CESDP). A later summit at Helsinki built on Cologne and defined new EU structures to undertake the crisis-management role. Both summits also proposed an EU Rapid Reaction Force that would draw mostly on the member states` commitments that had already been made to the WEU after the Petersberg Tasks - the force levels being agreed at the Military Capabilities Conference in November 2000.

The EU force is not a European Army in the sense of a standing army. It follows a similar character to NATO`s Allied Command Europe (ACE) Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) in which certain elements of member states` armed forces are earmarked for rapid deployment if the need arises. Only one part of the force could be considered a standing army. In 1987, France and Germany decided to create a Security and Defense Council (SDC) that would allow for better coordination on joint Franco-German operations as part of the WEU and later NATO. In 1991, both countries decided to back up the SDC with a joint Franco-German brigade directly responsible to the EU and the WEU (and NATO from 1993) - this became known as the Eurocorps. Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg then went on to join, allowing the WEU to call on a sizable force for immediate deployment. With its headquarters in Strasbourg, the Eurocorps has since deployed to Bosnia and Kosovo and is likely to feature in the new EU force.

Germany goes its own way
The EU created the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) to ensure independent control of its security policy. The United States views the ESDP as an attempt to replace NATO by creating a security and defense system free of US dominance if not involvement. Changing its Cold War role of an economic giant and a geopolitical pigmy, drawing on the lesson of Iraq, Germany, the dominant component in the EU, has taken on the task of trying to prevent a military confrontation between the US and Iran. The European initiative, led by Germany, France and an ambiguously European Britain, proposes to give Iran substantial economic benefits in exchange for Iranian commitment to cease efforts to become a nuclear power. This initiative has received little support either from Iranian domestic politics or from the US. Washington views the European initiative with skeptical contempt. US hawks want "regime change" and/or a "surgical strike" against Iranian nuclear facilities. The EU views both options as ineffective, based on what has transpired in Iraq, since Iranian nuclear facilities are both dispersed and hardened, and since the US faces a severe shortage of troops because of its aggressive foreign policy, a problem that NATO is not at all keen to help resolve with its own troops.

German officials point out that their country`s Iran initiative is a breakthrough, since for the first time in recent memory the leading European powers are united and proactive, as well as independent from Washington, on a major issue that threatens peace. There is sober concern about Iran playing off the US against Europe. German officials see their role as demonstrating that there are diplomatic alternatives to a repeat of US Iraq policy in Iran. If the EU approach to Iran should break down, the EU, being still economically dependent on the US, would have no choice but to join the United States in economic sanctions against Iran. Diplomatically, the EU would still be in a position to dissuade the Bush administration from pursuing a military option or seeking Security Council action that Russia and China could be expected to oppose.

Since the end of World War II, nothing major has happened on the world stage, good or bad, unless the United States has orchestrated it. The only two notable exceptions are chancellor Willy Brandt`s efforts more than two decades ago to engage the Soviet Union and East Germany, and British and French diplomatic efforts that helped produce the deal to trade an end of Libyan terrorism for an end to economic and diplomatic sanctions.

Washington at first reacted negatively to both of these initiatives. European involvement in world affairs beyond continental borders has been welcomed by Washington only when Europe served as a docile junior partner to US geopolitical designs. On Iraq, most of Europe refused to accept this subservient role. The Iraq war is immensely unpopular in Europe, similarly to other regions around the globe, even in Britain, which has happily accepted the role of geopolitical water boy for US foreign policy since the end of World War II. German domestic politics does not give Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder an option to support the Bush administration`s Iraq policy. The blatant ineptitude of recent US foreign policy, particularly in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, has provided a window of opportunity for European independent activism in world affairs.

The re-election of Schroeder as chancellor of Germany with the help of the Green Party in September 2002 symbolized the end of an era in close, albeit unequal, postwar relations between the US and Germany. Schroeder held on to power after his SPD (Sozial-demokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Social Democrat Party), ran an intensely anti-US campaign based upon opposition to US policy on Iraq. The SPD was tied with the conservative, pro-US CDU-CSU (Christian Democrats), each getting 38.5% of the votes in an election in which 80% of eligible voters took part. But with the support of the Green Party`s 8.6% vote, Schroeder defeated Edmond Stoiber, the CDU candidate, by fewer than 9,000 votes over the conservative coalition, giving the SPD-Green coalition 306 seats in the 603-seat parliament. The generally conservative German press referred to the winning coalition derogatorily as the Red-Green Coalition. The German Greens are a party of ecology and used to be a pacifist party until their chairman, Joschka Fischer, won a battle between the realists and the fundamentalists and got the party to back German troops going into Kosovo.

The re-election of Schroeder has been tremendously damaging to the carefully nurtured five-decade-old US-German alliance. After Schroeder`s victory, a curt statement from the White House did not congratulate him, or even mention him by name. It was a marked contrast to a statement congratulating French President Jacques Chirac, with whom Washington also has serious diplomatic problems, on his May re-election. The White House also declined to arrange a personal telephone call between Schroeder and Bush. In the view of the US, Schroeder and key members of his cabinet played to anti-US sentiment in Germany over foreign-policy issues during the final weeks of the campaign beyond election politics to the point of personal attacks on the US president.

Politically, the Bush administration at the time leading up to the Iraq invasion wanted Germany to join its international coalition to support its disastrous policy on Iraq, with diplomatic backing at the UN, and to grant the "coalition of the willing" complete access to German airspace and allow the US and Britain full use of their bases on German soil for offensive operations against Iraq. The White House also wanted Germany to support more fully Washington`s "war on terrorism", especially with regard to the extradition of terrorist suspects on German soil, even those with German citizenship, and the release of crucial evidence that could be used to help convict them in US courts. It also wanted Germany to increase defense spending, which had fallen to just 1.5% of its GDP, and to pay for costs associated with increased terrorism security at US bases in Germany. The US has warned that if the German government continues to hinder US policy toward Iraq and elsewhere, such as Iran and in the UN, Washington may conclude that Berlin is reneging on its defense-treaty obligations, which would have serious political consequences, beyond being labeled the "old Europe". US support for German membership in the UN Security Council hangs in the balance.

With the creation of NATO in April 1949, the US and Germany formally became military allies. It was a turning point for both. For the first time in its history, the United States had signed on to a permanent alliance that linked it to Europe`s defense; and for Germany, as for Italy, membership in NATO signaled a new acceptance internationally, an important political legitimacy for

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May 24, 2005

The price of Asian conflict
By Chietigj Bajpaee
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/GE24Dk01.html

HONG KONG - The Asian way of resolving conflicts - sweeping disputes or areas of disagreement under the carpet and focusing on developing economic relations - has failed. This is proven by a series of long-standing disputes that have exploded in recent weeks, including a maritime territorial dispute in the Sulawesi Sea between Malaysia and Indonesia, a dispute between South Korea and Japan over the Tokdo/Takeshima islets, and growing tensions between China and Japan over Japan`s republishing of a controversial textbook and over potentially energy-rich territory in the East China Sea. The escalation of these disputes has highlighted the urgent need for Asian states to reform their multilateral conflict and dispute resolution mechanisms.

While growing trade and economic interdependence between states increases the cost of conflict, it does not deter it. The recent protests in China against Japan`s bid for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council, which included attacks on Japanese shops and a boycotting of Japanese brands, has highlighted this. In fact, growing cross-border exchanges reinforce differences and a sense of national identity, while economic prosperity restores national pride and confidence to address past injustices.

Across the region numerous territorial disputes lie dormant, awaiting only the manipulation by politicians to stoke nationalist passions or the discovery of natural resources to reawaken them. The fact that oil prices are rising and the majority of Asian states are significant energy importers has also placed pressure on Asian states to look for energy resources closer to home, and in some cases in disputed territories.

Long-standing disputes are also undermining confidence-building measures and preventing cooperation in addressing shared security threats, such as international terrorism, piracy in the Strait of Malacca, through which a third of the world`s trade and half of the world`s oil supplies transit, as well as less conventional security threats such as AIDS, SARS, bird flu and tsunamis.

Finally, Asia`s climate of suspicion and distrust, coupled with its code of conduct based on non-intervention and non-confrontation, has allowed a number of internal instabilities to escalate into regional and international security crises.

For example, instabilities in Myanmar`s military regime through its suppression of ethnic groups and the democratic process are fueling tensions within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) over the question of Yangon`s chairmanship next year. Similarly, the insurgencies in India`s northeast, commonly referred to as the "Seven Sisters", have the potential to combine with the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, the insurgencies in Myanmar and rising Islamic fundamentalist sentiment in Bangladesh to create a "failed region" in Asia.

Frictions between China and Taiwan and on the Korean peninsula, while rooted in internal conflicts, have regional and global ramifications. In Central Asia, the Ferghana Valley has become a focal point for instability fueled by poverty, dictatorial regimes, growing Islamist sentiments, and "great power" competition over energy resources. This was evinced recently with a wave of protests in Kyrgyzstan, resulting in the ousting of president Askar Akayev, followed by the repression of opposition protests in neighboring Uzbekistan by President Islam Karimov.

Asia`s multilateral and bilateral security bodies are proving to be deficient in addressing these disputes. Most of the current security arrangements are only temporary stop-gap measures. The irony is that while North America and Europe represent relative "islands" of peace, with few internal security threats, they possess a number of well-developed multilateral security forums, think-tanks and consultancies that continuously investigate global and regional threats to internal stability. On the other hand, in Asia, where there exist states with significant defense budgets and a high concentration of inter-state disputes and internal instabilities, multilateral security bodies are sorely lacking, or lack maturity. This discrepancy is understandable, given the legacy of the Cold War division of Asia and the fact that most Asian nation-states have only come into being in the last half century and have a still developing sense of identity. However, Asian states cannot afford to be complacent any longer, given the growing economic interdependence of the region.

Nationalism and natural resources
Most inter-state tensions in Asia combine tangible disputes over natural resources with intangible disputes over historical animosities and jingoistic passions. In East Asia, Japan has been a focal point for these disputes as a result of its World War II legacy. For example, while China has become Japan`s largest trading partner, this economic progress could be unraveled by political and military confrontation and energy competition.

Most recently, protests not seen since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 have taken place across more than a dozen cities in China, resulting in attacks on Japanese people, shops and brands. The protests were set off by opposition to Japan`s bid to gain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi`s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine that honors war dead, including 14 class A war criminals, and Japan`s republication of a history textbook that allegedly understates the brutality of Japan during its invasion of Asia, including the issues of "comfort" women and the Nanjing massacre.

These tensions only add to a string of recent Sino-Japanese frictions, which include football hooliganism at the Japan-China finals of the Asian Cup tournament in August 2004, and former Taiwanese president Lee Teng Hui`s visit to Japan at the end of 2004. Japan has also decided to cut its overseas development assistance to China in the presence of China`s improving standard of living, high growth levels and confrontational relations with Japan. The sporadic discovery of chemical weapons left over by the Japanese army on Chinese soil and reports of biological tests on Chinese civilians, such as those of the infamous Unit 731, have also fueled Sino-Japanese tensions.

These tensions culminated with Japan identifying China as a potential security threat in its National Defense Program Outline released in December 2004, and the US and Japan issuing a security statement that designated the Sino-Taiwan dispute as a "common strategic objective" in February.

These tensions are likely to be further inflamed by both states` quest for energy security, as both are net oil importers. A territorial dispute between China and Japan in the East China Sea, which both sides claim as their exclusive economic zone, is being fueled by reports of vast supplies of oil and gas in the area. The disputed territory includes the Diaoyu or Senkaku islands and the Chunxiao gas field. Japan regards the median line as its border, while China claims jurisdiction over the entire continental shelf. Although the Chunxiao gas field is on the Chinese side of the median line, Japan claims that China may be siphoning energy resources on the Japanese side. China has been drilling in the area since 2003 and the Japanese government gave the green light for oil and gas exploration in the disputed waters in mid-April.
This competition took the form of a military confrontation following the incursion of a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine into Japanese waters off Okinawa in November 2004. The intrusion was followed by a two-day chase across the East China Sea. While China offered a swift apology for the incursion, this was soon followed by the intrusion of a Chinese research vessel into Japanese waters near Okinotori in December. The vessel is believed to have been surveying the seabed for oil and gas drilling purposes. This was the 34th maritime research exercise by Chinese vessels within Japan`s economic zone in 2004, up from eight in 2003, with China not giving prior notification in 21 of the 34 cases.

A similar pattern of relations can be seen between Japan and South Korea, with economic cooperation coexisting with political and military confrontation. Relations between South Korea and Japan have shown considerable improvement in recent years, with both states co-hosting the soccer World Cup in 2002 and growing cultural exchanges through tourism and the popularity of South Korean soap operas in Japan and Japanese pop music in South Korea. Being the 40th anniversary of the 1965 normalization treaty, 2005 was designated the "friendship year" between South Korea and Japan.

Nevertheless, tensions have recently resurfaced over a territorial dispute in the Sea of Japan, which South Korea refers to as the East Sea, over the Takeshima islets, as known in Japan, and Tokdo, as known in South Korea. While the islets, which are currently occupied by South Korea, are of little value, the seas around them are rich fishing grounds and possibly possess natural gas and mineral deposits.

Emotions in South Korea flared when a Japanese prefecture declared February 22 Takeshima Day. Flag-burning and protests against Japan have since become commonplace across South Korea, as well as attacks on Japanese government websites. The South Korean military has also increased patrols and allowed civilian tours of the disputed territory. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has also demanded that Japan apologize and offer compensation for World War II atrocities, although Japan claims that it has fulfilled its obligations under the 1965 normalization treaty.

Japan`s relations with Russia have also been strained, as both states have not signed a formal peace treaty ending the hostilities of World War II due to a territorial dispute over the Southern Kuriles, or Northern Territories. Tensions have been further fueled by Koizumi`s sail around the disputed territories in September 2004. These actions are undermining cooperation in the energy sphere. Russia had recently given the go-ahead to construct an oil pipeline from Taishet to the pacific port of Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan over a route favored by China, to Daqing in northeast Heilongjiang province. However, Russian-Japanese frictions have delayed construction and forced Russia to consider building a branch of the pipeline to China.

Another inter-state dispute that has flared in recent weeks is between Malaysia and Indonesia. Malaysia-Indonesia relations were already tense as a result of Malaysia`s harsh crackdown on a million illegal workers, 450,000 of whom were Indonesians, following the end of a four-month amnesty. The situation was aggravated by Indonesia`s subsequent slow processing of travel documents for Indonesians wishing to return to Malaysia, which created labor shortages in Malaysia. Tensions were further fueled by a territorial dispute in the Sulawesi Sea, set off on February 16 when Malaysia`s state-owned oil company Petronas awarded oil exploration rights to Shell in two blocks of an offshore oil field where Indonesia had awarded rights to Unocal last year.

A war of words ensued, with racist slurs and Sukarno-era anti-Malaysian slogans accompanied by protests, attacks on Malaysian websites and the deployment of military aircraft and naval vessels to the disputed region. This culminated in the collision of a Malaysian patrol boat with an Indonesian navy ship in April when Malaysian vessels attempted to approach a lighthouse being built by Indonesia on the Unarang reef.

While not an active dispute, the long-standing maritime territorial dispute in the South China Sea over the Spratly and Paracel islands may also be reignited by the potentially rich supply of energy resources in the disputed region. The 130 small islands making up the Paracel islands, which have been occupied by China since 1974, are also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan. The 400 islands of the Spratly chain have partial claims by the Philippines, Brunei and Indonesia, and are fully claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan and China. Five states have permanent military garrisons on the atolls, in addition to surveillance facilities under the guise of "bird-watching" towers, weather huts and tourist facilities.

Most recently, China commenced joint pre-exploration studies with the Philippines in the South China Sea, which have been openly opposed by Vietnam. China, meanwhile, has protested over PetroVietnam welcoming international bids for drilling and exploration activities in the disputed waters and Vietnam starting commercial flights and tours of the disputed territory. Both states have engaged in sporadic clashes on at least four occasions, the most violent of which took place in 1988, in which the Chinese sank three Vietnamese naval vessels, killing 76 sailors.

Sino-Vietnamese tensions have recently taken a back seat to the burgeoning trade relationship between both states, with China now becoming Vietnam`s third largest trading partner. A hotline was also established between both states in August 2004 as part of a commitment to resolve land and sea border disputes by peaceful means. However, as China expands its naval power projection capabilities and becomes increasingly desperate to access the potential energy resources in the region, conflict may once again overtake cooperation.

A series of smaller scale disputes also continue to plague the region, such as between Malaysia and Singapore over the Johor causeway, the price of Malaysian water for Singapore, rival claims for the rocky islet of Batu Puteh or Pedra Branca, which is currently held by Singapore, Singapore`s use of Malaysian airspace, Malaysia`s railway land in Singapore and the bitter legacy of Singapore`s separation from Malaysia in 1965. Thailand and Myanmar also have frictional relations, with the latter accusing the former of supporting insurgent groups with help from the US. Most recently, Myanmar`s ruling junta accused the US and Thailand of supporting the May 7 triple bombing in Yangon that killed 19 people.

In some cases, territorial disputes are rooted in historical memory, such as the Sino-Korean dispute over the ancient kingdom of Koguryo. Other disputes are recent, such as that between Australia and East Timor over the energy-rich Timor Sea, with the former claiming the entire continental shelf as part of its exclusive economic zone, while the latter regards the median line as its boundary. Australia has been pumping oil out of the disputed territory since 1999 and has withdrawn from sections of the International Court of Justice relevant to maritime boundary disputes. The issue of terrorism is also adding an additional dimension to inter-state tensions, as seen with recent frictions between Thailand and Malaysia over the increasing violence in Thailand`s south and between Indonesia and its neighbors, with the latter accusing the former of spawning terrorism in the region.

Diverting attention from internal problems
In many cases these inter-state instabilities emanate from internal instabilities. Many disputes are constructed or inflated to deflect attention from domestic problems. For example, as the Japanese government has had limited success in restarting the Japanese economy, it has diverted attention to international issues with attempts to resolve territorial disputes and grant Japan a more active role on the world stage. Koizumi`s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, his sail around the disputed Southern Kurils/Northern Territories, and deployment of Japan`s Self Defense Forces to Iraq are all part of this process, as are attempts to gain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and possibly amend Japan`s pacifist constitution with respect to Article 9, which renounces war.

Meanwhile, in South Korea growing anti-Japanese sentiment has been used by the government to target the opposition Grand National Party, with investigations into wartime collaborators. In China, protests against Japan come at the same time as growing protests against the Chinese government over corruption and unemployment. With the Chinese Communist Party losing its communist credentials, as the economy increasingly resembles a capitalist market, it has put more emphasis on its Chinese credentials by addressing past injustices against the Chinese people.

The dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia also flared at the same time as the Indonesian government decided to cut fuel subsidies in the presence of rising oil prices, which raised domestic fuel prices by 30%.

New leaders, such as Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi and Chinese President Hu Jintao, may also reignite inter-state disputes to demonstrate their patriotic credentials. For example, China`s new anti-secession law targeting Taiwan could be used by Hu to solidify his support base and appease the hawks and hardliners within the Communist Party.

Finally, many of Asia`s inter-state conflicts are rooted in the weak national identities of the region. In Asia, statehood has often been achieved or imposed by former colonial rulers before national identity has been forged, resulting in situations where the only binding factor in a country is its common external enemy. This increases the likelihood of inter-state disagreements and frictions escalating into full-scale conflict.

Irrelevant conflict resolution mechanisms
Current dispute resolution mechanisms have proven themselves deficient in addressing recent inter-state disputes, let alone resolving more active disputes such as the nuclear flashpoints between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, between China and Taiwan, and on the Korean peninsula. While Asia has a number of multilateral security bodies, most are still in their infancy when it comes to addressing active conflicts and security crises.

The plethora of regional bodies, such as the Asia Cooperation Dialogue, the East Asia Summit, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Asia-Africa Dialogue, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia are usually sidelined when addressing inter-state disputes. In most cases, if a dispute were to escalate into full-scale conflict, short of external involvement such as referring the dispute to the UN Security Council, no regional solution exists.

The code of conduct for these organizations, based on the principles of non-interference and state sovereignty, has also allowed for wealthy and stable states to coexist with poverty-stricken and conflict-ridden states and led to the escalation of internal instabilities into regional crises.

Furthermore, emphasis on non-confrontation and face-saving has sidelined regional bodies from addressing regional crises. For example, the "Bandung Spirit", the "ASEAN Way", the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and China`s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence basically emphasize the need to avoid conflict at all costs, even it means avoiding discussion of the issues.

For example, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which was first introduced between China and India in 1954, did not prevent the two states from going to war in 1962 and having adversarial relations ever since.

The "ASEAN Way" has not prevented states in Southeast Asia from making harsh statements against each other and engaging in occasional skirmishes. Even today, the "hands-off" code of conduct of the numerous security bodies of the region has prevented their involvement in addressing internal security problems that are fast escalating into regional crises. These include the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, the Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand, Islamic terrorism in the southern Philippines from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf, and instabilities in Indonesia from the Jemmah Islamiah terrorist movement and the Aceh and Papau separatist movements.

Finally, the climate of distrust created by long-standing inter-state disputes prevents cooperation on shared security threats such as international terrorism and piracy, energy security, epidemics such as bird flu and SARS, and developing a tsunami detection system to prevent a repeat of Boxing Day 2004. These disputes are also hindering attempts at regional integration. For example, Japan`s tense relations with its neighbors are delaying plans for an ASEAN+3 Free Trade Area.

At this rate, Asia`s multilateral security bodies could soon join the list of previously irrelevant and failed security bodies, such as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, which was envisioned by the US as Asia`s version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and which dissolved in 1977, and the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA), which was ASEAN`s predecessor.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the Cold War did not end in Asia. Few of Asia`s communist regimes collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union. Vietnam, China and North Korea still retain their communist credentials, although all three have developed capitalist characteristics to varying degrees. Even states that claim to have shed their communist shackles maintain many of their communist-era institutions, as seen in Central Asia. Thus the Cold War climate of distrust is still very much present in Asia, as evinced by talk of a US-Japanese-Indian containment of China. This culture of mistrust in the region increases the potential for long-standing internal and inter-state disputes and conflicts to escalate into full-blown regional and international crises and undermines the utility of regional bodies to address these crises.

Conclusion
It is widely believed that through developing relations in economic and cultural arenas that the security arena will somehow become irrelevant, or disappear. However, the popularity of Japanese pop music in South Korea or South Korean soap operas in Japan has not prevented the escalation of tensions between both states over the Tokdo/Takeshima islets.

Nor has the fact that China is now Japan`s largest trading partner prevented protests against Japan`s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, or deterred football hooliganism at the Asian Cup final between the two states.

To be sure, economic interdependence and cultural exchanges are important, as can be seen by growing Taiwanese investment in China having a restraining influence on the separatist tendencies of the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan. Increasing transport linkages and cricket and Bollywood diplomacy have also reignited a sense of shared history and culture between India and Pakistan.

However, these processes can only go so far. Rapprochement in the security arena must proceed in tandem with improving relations in the economic and cultural arenas for the sense of goodwill to be solidified. Economic, political and security cooperation are not mutually exclusive, but rather mutually reinforcing.

Chietigj Bajpaee is a researcher for Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong-based public-policy think-tank. He has been a researcher for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies and a risk analyst for a New York-based risk management company. He has a graduate degree in international relations from the London School of Economics and an undergraduate degree in economics and government from Wesleyan and Oxford Universities. His areas of interest include energy security and political, economic and security developments in the Asia Pacific region. The views expressed here are his own. He can be contacted at [e-mail]

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

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Latest Fatality: May 22, 2005
May.05: 52


Iraker: Civilian: 444 Police/Mil: 195 Total: 639

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

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
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Monday, May 23, 2005

War News for Monday, May 23, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers injured in three separate suicide bombing attacks in Samarra. One US soldier killed, two US soldiers and two Iraqi policemen wounded in suicide car bombing in Tikrit. Top aide to al-Jaafari’s cabinet and his driver killed in central Baghdad. One US soldier killed in a vehicle accident near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Five people killed and 18 wounded in suicide truck bombing in Tuz Khurmatu.

Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers killed in two insurgent attacks in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: More than 150 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq in the past year. About one third have been killed. See article for a list of names and nationalities.

Bring ‘em on: At least three people killed and more than 70 injured in car bombing outside a Baghdad restaurant. One policeman killed by gunmen in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood. Iraqi general who directed the National Security Ministry’s operations room assassinated with his driver in Baghdad’s Mansour district. Two Iraqis were killed in the Samarra suicide bombings reported in the first entry above, and in addition, 23 people, including women and children, were injured. Almost 300 suspected militants have been detained in a joint US/Iraqi operation in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi Maj. Gen. escaped assassination when two roadside bombs exploded by his convoy between Kirkuk and Hawija. No other injuries reported. Five civilians wounded by mortar rounds apparently aimed at a police special forces base in Baghdad’s Alam neighborhood. Joint Polish and Iraqi forces detain 184 suspected militants in Suwayrah.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi soldiers killed and one wounded in a mortar attack at a joint army/police base in Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: Two people killed and two injured when a mortar round landed on a house in Kirkuk.

New offensive: Seven Iraqi battalions backed by U.S. forces launched an offensive in the capital on Sunday in an effort to stanch the violence that has killed more than 550 people in less than a month, targeting insurgents who have attacked the dangerous road to Baghdad`s airport and Abu Ghraib prison.

The U.S. military said the offensive in the west of the capital had been set in motion to root out insurgents, especially those who have staged bloody assaults on the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison and the notoriously dangerous road from downtown to the airport.

Without providing numbers of troops, U.S. officials said four battalions of Iraqi soldiers and three battalions of police launched the offensive with the support of an unspecified number of American military personnel, although a total of about 2,500 personnel were believed involved.


Sophisticated and lethal: Iraq`s insurgents are conducting increasingly sophisticated and lethal attacks on the private security companies that are crucial to the nation`s reconstruction and the eventual departure of U.S. troops, contractors and U.S. officials say.

These contractors and officials point to the surprising level of planning and brutality involved in a May 8 attack on the British security company Hart Security Ltd., which provides protection to convoys, homes and individuals in Iraq.

Twelve out of 18 Iraqi and international guards were killed in the attack, in which insurgents ambushed a convoy escorting cargo for the U.S. forces from Baghdad to a base in al-Asat, about 90 miles west of the city.

Once resistance from the security team ended, the attackers moved in to finish off the wounded, then piled several of the bodies on top of a bomb so they could not be removed without setting off an explosion, sources said.

The terrorists taped the event, presumably to develop a training and recruiting tool and to study to refine their techniques. The six-minute video is available on the Internet with a claim of responsibility from the terrorist group Ansar al-Sunnah Army.

Retaliation: Signs of sectarian warfare are everywhere in Iraq these days: clerics assassinated outside mosques, dozens of execution victims in ditches and car bombers inflicting heavy casualties on the country`s Shia Muslim majority.

Nearly four months after Iraq`s election, when millions of Iraqis defied insurgent threats by voting for a new parliament, sectarian violence now threatens to drag Iraq into civil war. Most victims so far have been Shias targeted by Sunni insurgents. But the recent discoveries throughout Iraq of more than 50 bodies -- men from both sects, apparently abducted and executed -- highlight a new problem: a wave of retaliatory killings between Sunnis and Shias.

For more than a year, insurgents have targeted Shia mosques, neighborhoods and religious ceremonies across Iraq. They also have relentlessly attacked the Shia-dominated police and army. While there is no exact death toll, several thousand Shias are believed to have been killed by insurgent bombings and other attacks.

Iraq`s most revered Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has urged his followers not to retaliate against Sunnis. But as attacks on Shia civilians mount, Shia militias and vigilantes appear to be fighting back with tit-for-tat killings.

"We are at a moment of extreme danger," said Hazem Shammari, a political science professor at Baghdad University. "There is a level of sectarian tension that is unrivaled in Iraq`s modern history."

Hopefully this will go somewhere: One day after a large group of anti-American Sunni leaders pledged to enter the political process, a rebel Shiite cleric who led uprisings against the American military suggested Sunday that he would forgo military efforts and work to ease rising sectarian tensions throughout Iraq.

The cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, led bloody revolts against American forces last year and was accused of murdering a rival Shiite cleric the year before. Many American officials view him as untrustworthy and continue to fear that he has been lying low so he can bring his militia back in force.

In an interview Sunday night with the Arabiya satellite news channel, Mr. Sadr declared that he now wanted to solve problems "politically, socially and peacefully."


New Testament Tank

Chicanery, Fraud And Profiteering

The Justice Department takes an unexpected position: To its accusers, the security company Custer Battles exemplifies corporate profiteering in postinvasion Iraq, when officials were pumping out hastily written contracts for everything from air conditioners to armed guards.

In a lawsuit now in federal court, two former associates of the company say it bilked the American-led coalition out of millions, turning in hugely inflated invoices from phantom supplier companies among other misdeeds. If successful, the suit, brought under the False Claims Act, could recover triple damages for the government and handsome rewards for the whistle-blowers.

Custer Battles has denied wrongdoing and the accusation remains to be proved. But before a trial can proceed at all - before any company can be sued for fraud in the chaos of occupied Iraq - a federal judge in Virginia must issue another, more basic ruling that is now anxiously awaited by the company, its accusers and the Justice Department.

Lawyers for Custer Battles argue that the False Claims Act - the prime legal tool against contractor fraud - does not apply because the company signed contracts with the Coalition Provisional Authority, not the American government, and was mainly paid with Iraqi money seized or managed by the United States, rather than with money appropriated by Congress.

Lawyers for the whistle-blowers and the Justice Department argue that the law does apply. All sides agree that the case will set a precedent and that the stakes are high, and not only for Custer Battles.

"This is an important case because there are a lot of companies over there with poorly constructed contracts and little oversight," said Steven L. Schooner, an expert on procurement at the George Washington University Law School. "The potential for chicanery is great and the potential universe of whistle-blowers is mind-boggling."

Renditions, Doublespeak And Murder

Renditions: The CIA Gulfstream V jet touched down at a small airport west of here just before 9 p.m. on a subfreezing night in December 2001. A half-dozen agents wearing hoods that covered their faces stepped down from the aircraft and hurried across the tarmac to take custody of two prisoners, suspected Islamic radicals from Egypt.

Inside an airport police station, Swedish officers watched as the CIA operatives pulled out scissors and rapidly sliced off the prisoners` clothes, including their underwear, according to newly released Swedish government documents and eyewitness statements. They probed inside the men`s mouths and ears and examined their hair before dressing the pair in sweat suits and draping hoods over their heads. The suspects were then marched in chains to the plane, where they were strapped to mattresses on the floor in the back of the cabin.

So began an operation the CIA calls an "extraordinary rendition," the forcible and highly secret transfer of terrorism suspects to their home countries or other nations where they can be interrogated with fewer legal protections.

The practice has generated increasing criticism from civil liberties groups; in Sweden a parliamentary investigator who conducted a 10-month probe into the case recently concluded that the CIA operatives violated Swedish law by subjecting the prisoners to "degrading and inhuman treatment" and by exercising police powers on Swedish soil.

"Should Swedish officers have taken those measures, I would have prosecuted them without hesitation for the misuse of public power and probably would have asked for a prison sentence," the investigator, Mats Melin, said in an interview.

Doublespeak: For shock and awe, there`s nothing to beat an American government spokesperson discussing humanitarian action and revealing both double standards and a failure to grasp the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence.

Like precision bombing that does "collateral damage" to their own troops, the officials making these pronouncements often miss the point, whether it’s the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) urging NGOs to promote their American funding in high-risk war zones or the latest State Department verdict on Uzbekistan.

After the Uzbek regime of President Islam Karimov mowed down perhaps hundreds of its citizens following a politically-inspired jailbreak, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher carefully urged restraint by both sides.

He added: "We urge the government … to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other humanitarian organisations full access to the region so we can get the facts, so that they can help take care of people that may need their help."

Leaving aside whether humanitarian agencies are there to "get the facts" for America, the U.S. stance on ICRC access to those in need in Uzbekistan is directly at odds with its blocking of ICRC and Iraqi Red Crescent Society access to the Falluja enclave in Iraq during a 2004 siege.

That siege that mocked almost every aspect of the Geneva Conventions that make up international humanitarian law.

Murder: The highly-decorated commanding officer of a regiment at the centre of allegations of brutality in Iraq is being investigated as part of a murder inquiry, Government sources confirmed yesterday.

Col Jorge Mendonca, who received the Distinguished Service Order for his command of the Queen`s Lancashire Regiment (QLR) in Iraq in 2003, is one of a number of soldiers against whom charges are being considered.

Baha Mousa, 26, a hotel receptionist in Basra, was arrested in a raid on his workplace in September 2003. Eight others arrested with him allege that he died of injuries received in the QLR`s barracks and claim they were severely beaten on the same night.

The investigation will focus on allegations that at least one of the regiment`s officers was aware of the nature of the prisoners` interrogation.



US Military Affairs

Eye-opener: Army Capts. Dave Fulton and Geoff Heiple spent 12 months dodging roadside bombs and rounding up insurgents along Baghdad`s "highway of death" — the six miles of pavement linking downtown Baghdad to the capital city`s airport. Two weeks after returning stateside to Ft. Hood, they ventured to a spartan conference room at the local Howard Johnson to find out about changing careers.

Lured by a headhunting firm that places young military officers in private-sector jobs, the pair, both 26, expected anonymity in the crowded room.

Instead, as Fulton and Heiple sipped Budweisers pulled from Styrofoam coolers next to the door, they spotted nearly a dozen familiar faces from their cavalry battalion, which had just ended a yearlong combat tour in Iraq.

The shocks of recognition came as they exchanged quick, awkward glances with others from their unit, each man clearly surprised to see someone else considering a life outside the military.

"This is a real eye-opener," said Fulton, a West Point graduate who saw a handful of cadets from his class. "It seems like everyone in the room is either from my squad or from my class."

More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks spawned an era of unprecedented strain on the all-volunteer military, it is scenes like this that keep the Army`s senior generals awake at night. With thousands of soldiers currently on their second combat deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan and some preparing for their third this fall, evidence is mounting that an exodus of young Army officers may be looming on the horizon.

Letter to the editor: The May 15 article “Women fight policies on road to combat roles” (Europe edition; “Women fighting policies on road to combat roles,” Mideast edition) was thought-provoking. Having served in the Army 13 years — as an enlisted soldier, a noncommissioned officer and an officer — and after serving 15 months as an artilleryman in Iraq, I believe I can rebut these proposals, which betray our female soldiers.

Current conflicts aren’t conventional and they aren’t linear. We are fighting on an asymmetrical battlefield where units must be co-located to accomplish the mission. Arguments attempting to use “geography of the battlefield” to keep females from a theoretical “front line” are not valid.

Those who attempt to prevent females from serving their nation in combat should recognize that we have a volunteer Army. Women raise their hands voluntarily to support and defend the Constitution, and they are willing to fight to protect others. Isn’t it ironic that we are willing to fight for the rights of women in other countries, while some in our nation’s capital suggest women don’t have the right to contribute to that fight?

Newsweek

Nothing new: Senior Bush administration officials reacted with outrage to a Newsweek report that U.S. interrogators had desecrated the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility, and the magazine retracted the story last week. But allegations of disrespectful treatment of Islam`s holy book are far from rare.

An examination of hearing transcripts, court records and government documents, as well as interviews with former detainees, their lawyers, civil liberties groups and U.S. military personnel, reveals dozens of accusations involving the Koran, not only at Guantanamo, but also at American-run detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The allegations, both at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, contain detailed descriptions of what Muslim prisoners said was mishandling of the Koran — sometimes in a deliberately provocative manner.

In one instance, an Iraqi detainee alleged that a soldier had a guard dog carry a copy of the Koran in its mouth. In another, guards at Guantanamo were said to have scrawled obscenities inside Korans.

Other prisoners said Korans were kicked across floors, stomped on and thrown against walls. One said a soldier urinated on his copy, and others said guards ridiculed the religious text, declaring that Allah`s words would not save detainees.

Some of the alleged incidents appear to have been inadvertent or to have resulted from U.S. personnel`s lack of understanding about how sensitive Muslim detainees might be to mishandling of the Koran. In several cases, for instance, copies were allegedly knocked about during scuffles with prisoners who refused to leave their cells.

In other cases, the allegations seemed to describe instances of deliberate disrespect.

My thoughts exactly: Newsweek`s editor-in-chief, Richard Smith, engages today in yet another public mea culpa over the Koran desecration story: "Trust is hard won and easily lost," he writes anxiously, "and to our readers, we pledge to earn their renewed confidence." And make no mistake: procedures will be changed to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

This is like watching Darkness at Noon in real life. Newsweek made a small error in a 300-word blurb a couple of weeks ago, and since then the right-wing media hate machine, like a jackal sensing a rare opportunity for blood, has somehow managed to convince them they bear responsibility for riots in Afghanistan that were staged by extremists who obviously used the Newsweek article as nothing more than pretext.

This is really pissing me off. For the record, let`s recap what we`ve learned over the past year or so:

Pictures from Abu Ghraib showed naked prisoners being stacked like cordwood and mocked by female guards — and there`s worse stuff in Pentagon files that Congress has decided not to allow out of its locked vaults. There have been confirmed reports from Guantanamo of beatings, shacklings, and lighted cigarettes being stuck in prisoners` ears. 36 prisoners have died during interrogations. The Red Cross wrote detailed reports documenting abusive conduct in Iraq and was laughed off. The officers reponsible for overseeing abusive interrogations weren`t punished, they were lauded for their work and transferred to other prisons. Hardened FBI agents wrote emails expressing their disgust at what they had seen. Innocent men have been tortured to death in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The White House counsel wrote memoranda justifying torture as an inherent right of the president. Rendition of suspects to other countries that have long histories of torturing prisoners is routine. Reports of Koran desecration have been circulating for a long time,

Needless to say, this isn`t exhaustive. In the light of this, Newsweek`s offense, which was pretty minor to begin with, is about the equivalent of jaywalking across a busy city street.

Newsweek and the rest of the media need to get up off their knees and start fighting back. They`ve done enough apologizing.

Even Kathleen Parker doesn’t buy it: Even the most liberal-bashing, war-mongering, beef-eating American surely struggled to keep a straight face as the Bush administration expressed moral indignation about a Newsweek story that went belly-up on account of ... bad intelligence.

If anyone on God`s green earth should understand that sometimes information is flawed, that one would be President George W. Bush, whose arguments in favor of invading Iraq proved to be similarly false.

I can`t ignore the absurdity of the White House`s new role as institutional victim. My eyes have rolled so many times, my sockets are sore.

Commentary

Editorial: At present, there are only two Sunni Arabs among the 55 members of the committee the government has chosen to draw up a constitution. A principal challenge facing the drafters will be to create a structure unified enough to hold the disparate communities of Iraq together in a single national identity, yet loose enough to protect the Kurdish minority from the Arab majority -- and moderate or secular Muslims from partisans of Islamic law, or shariah. If Sunni Arabs sense they are being excluded from drafting such a rule book for the new Iraq, they are unlikely to support those Sunni tribal leaders and political figures who have signaled a readiness to participate in the legislative elections scheduled for December.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made this point during her trip to Iraq last Sunday, but she and the Bush administration should be careful how they preach their gospel of inclusiveness. Too many US officials have for too long treated their Iraqi interlocutors with misplaced condescension, earning a reputation for arrogance even among Iraqis happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein`s despotic regime. Now that Iraqis have elected an interim government and are suffering most of the casualties from car bombings, ambushes, and kidnappings, American envoys with little knowledge of Iraqi complexities will meet heavy resistance if they dictate policy choices in the manner of imperial proconsuls.

Opinion: How does Donald Rumsfeld survive as defense secretary?

Much of what has happened to the military on his watch has been catastrophic. In Iraq, more than 1,600 American troops have died and many thousands have been maimed in a war that Mr. Rumsfeld mishandled from the beginning and still has no idea how to win. The generals are telling us now that the U.S. is likely to be bogged down in Iraq for years, and there are whispers circulating about the possibility of "defeat."

The military spent decades rebuilding its reputation and regaining the respect of the vast majority of the American people after the debacle in Vietnam. Under Mr. Rumsfeld, that hard-won achievement is being reversed. He invaded Iraq with too few troops, and too many of them were poorly trained and inadequately equipped. The stories about American troops dying on the battlefield because of a lack of protective armor have now been widely told.

The insurgency in Iraq appeared to take Mr. Rumsfeld completely by surprise. He expected to win the war in a walk. Or, perhaps, a strut.

Now the military is in a fix. Many of the troops have served multiple tours in Iraq and are weary. The insurgency remains strong, and the Iraq military has proved to be a disappointing ally.

A senior American officer, quoted last week in The Times, said that while he still believed the effort in Iraq would succeed, it could take "many years."

As if all this were not enough, there is also the grotesque and deeply shameful issue that will always be a part of Mr. Rumsfeld`s legacy - the manner in which American troops have treated prisoners under their control in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is no longer any doubt that large numbers of troops responsible for guarding and interrogating detainees somehow loosed their moorings to humanity, and began behaving as sadists, perverts and criminals.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Obetz, OH, soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Tampa, FL, soldier killed in Ramadi
# posted by matt : 9:24 AM
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Tomgram: How Not to Count in Iraq

The Return of the Body Count
Or the Metrics of Losing
By Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2709

On March 19th, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discussed the "metrics" of measuring success in Iraq with Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio`s "Morning Edition." Here is part of that interview:

"NPR: I want to start, Mr. Secretary, with something you said recently. You were at a meeting with troops, taking questions from troops. You talked about measuring progress in Iraq. Metrics as you called them, that were important to you. And you said what you measure improves. How are some ways that you are measuring progress in defeating insurgents in Iraq?

"RUMSFELD: Well, we`ve got literally dozens of ways we do it. We have a room here, the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.

"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area. And what we`re seeing, for example, and one metric is presented graphically and it shows that we had spiked up during the sovereignty pass to the Iraqi people and spiked up again during the election, and are now back down to the pre-sovereignty levels which are considerably lower… [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we`ve captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba`athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way…. No one number is determinative, and the answer is no. We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression. It`s impressionistic more than determinative."

The Generals Predict, Wax Optimistic, Declare Victory in Sight, Grow Anxious, Gripe, Mutter, Complain about Iraqis, Speculate, Worry, Grouse, and Refuse to Be Identified

On May 9, New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt wrote a (way) inside-the-paper Iraq update, Rebels Said to Have Pool of Bomb-Rigged Cars, filled with quotes from a dozen unnamed "senior" American military officers as well as unnamed intelligence officials. A relatively short piece, it was long on speculation and generally upbeat prediction, and so typical of that moment, only two-weeks old and now, seemingly, long gone. The car bombings in Baghdad were just then spiking, causing carnage, and yet "these officers" suggested that this was "possibly a last-ditch effort," that such attacks were aimed at "bolstering insurgent moral that flagged after the Jan. 30 elections." Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas III, the senior military intelligence officer in Iraq (and a rare named source in the piece), commented, "When he cranks up the propaganda campaign it means we`ve probably hurt him."

"One senior officer" called the violence "a predictable `attempt by the enemy to show that they are still a factor, still relevant and still capable,`" and complained that the bombings "grabbed the headlines [and] drowned out the good news." Another officer, "a general with extensive command experience in Iraq," wondered whether the attacks were "an indicator of insurgent desperation"? The article noted that, despite the recent car bomb assaults, attacks "against allied forces" stood at only half those before the January 30 elections and, after registering some caveats about the situation, ended with this anodyne but somewhat upbeat prediction, "Top commanders said they expected spikes and lulls in the violence through at least early next year."

The Times was hardly alone in this. On April 26, for instance, Bloomberg news service quoted Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers claiming that, despite an upsurge in attacks, we were "winning" the war and that the "quality and impact of those attacks is uneven, indicating an overall weakening of insurgents as Iraqi security forces improve." He also said, "There is no shadow of doubt in my mind, that by the end of the year, we would have achieved a lot, and probably the back of the insurgency has already been broken." That improvement, he predicted, would "speed the timetable for reducing U.S. Army soldiers and Marines in Iraq."

Such articles and predictions were perhaps the last gasp not of the insurgency but of a drumbeat of positive spin put on the Iraqi situation by top military men (who certainly knew better) and Bush administration officials -- all of it aimed at bolstering support on the home front. This spike in positive speculation followed a series of March and April reports in which named and unnamed military officers spoke optimistically of the possibility of reducing American forces in Iraq significantly in 2006. For instance, Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, on returning from an inspection tour of Iraq claimed somewhat vaguely that troop levels would "probably decline in early 2006," and under a cloak of anonymity "senior military officials" rushed to add that "American troop levels could drop to around 105,000 by early next year from 150,000 now."

In this the Bush administration was backed up by allies. In mid-April, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw chimed in, predicting steady withdrawals starting in 2006, and on May 1, Iraq`s national security advisor predicted a large-scale pull-out by the middle of next year.

Admittedly, such relatively modest predictions -- Straw, after all, was suggesting a five-year scheme of withdrawal -- always arrived with qualifiers just in case the spike in violence then beginning should prove to be less than a last gasp. Still, it`s hard to believe that only a few weeks have passed. Admittedly, in official Washington, some familiar notes are still being sounded. For instance, according to our Baghdad embassy`s website, "The increased lethality of insurgent attacks in Iraq is a reaction to progress in the political sphere in that country, Stephen Hadley, national security adviser to President Bush, said May 15… The transition to the new Iraqi government has not slowed the effort of the Iraqi security forces, Hadley said, as the training and equipping program moves forward and the security forces are conducting field operations." Similarly, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "asserted that Iraqi forces are ‘making progress`… citing the protection of election sites last January 30 without coalition assistance. She added that they now engage in joint operations with U.S. forces as well as ‘operations on their own.`"

But the Secretary of State`s recent rushed and anxious trip to Iraq spoke volumes -– and they weren`t upbeat. More important, a mere ten days after Schmitt`s New York Times piece appeared, U.S. commanders -- "five high-ranking officers speaking separately at the Pentagon and in Baghdad, and through an e-mail exchange from Baghdad" -- were painting quite a different picture (anonymously, of course) for Schmitt in Washington and his colleague in Baghdad John Burns (Generals Offer a Sober Outlook on Iraqi War). They were suddenly presenting "a sobering new assessment" in a "mood of anxiety." They were now intent on "inject[ing]… their own note of realism into public debate." For many Iraqis, they pointed out, public services were worse this year than last; the 21 car bombings in Baghdad in the first months of 2005 almost matched the 25 in all of 2004; there had been "disappointing progress" in the creation of "cohesive" police units; the build-up of Iraqi forces "has been more disappointing than previously acknowledged"; there had been no Iraqi troops to support a recent much-ballyhooed Marine operation near the Syrian border around which there was now an "air of disappointment" (see below for more); a major "drawdown" of American troops in Iraq might not just be over the horizon but "years" away; and the American effort in Iraq could actually "fail," as could Iraq itself, which might then "go back into civil war and chaos."

In all of this, with the modest exception of some comments on an American capability to "disrupt" a "resilient" insurgency, there was not a leavening note of "good news." A remarkable litany of woe and potential disaster, the piece bore next to no relation to public statements in Washington or Baghdad over the early months of 2005; it did, however, represent a more reasonable assessment of the Bush administration`s Iraqi disaster, which active duty military officers had, until then, largely kept to themselves and their associates. (As Martin Sieff of UPI commented, U.S. generals have recently "openly acknowledged [to Congress] what Pentagon planners have quietly known for at least a year: The United States will have to maintain current troop levels, or close to them, in Iraq for years to come.")

The Times piece included a curious explanation for why such an assessment should be offered only anonymously:

"By insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad were following a Pentagon policy requiring American commanders in Baghdad to put ‘an Iraqi face` on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the ones talking to reporters, not Americans. That policy has been questioned recently by senior Americans in Iraq, who say Iraqi commanders have failed to step forward, leaving a news vacuum that has allowed the insurgents` successful attacks, not their failures, to dominate news coverage."

In this single paragraph lie many of the unsettling conundrums of America`s Iraqi adventure. Through much of last year, that strange phrase, "putting an Iraqi face" on the war, policy, sovereignty, or anything else, was popular among American officials in Baghdad and Washington and could often be found in press reports. This was a rare reappearance for it and, folded into a complaint about Iraqi unwillingness to provide such a face, caught something of the crisis of the moment. After all, as an image, to put a "face" on anything means to put a mask of a face over something already present, which was (and largely remains) American power in Iraq.

When George Galloway, the antiwar British parliamentarian, recently arrived in Washington to defend himself before Congress and called the new Iraqi regime in Baghdad a "puppet government," it undoubtedly seemed an outrageous and distasteful label to many Americans and all of official Washington; but when our officials and military men speak of putting an "Iraqi face" on things, it strikes us as good and sensible policy and we wonder why the Iraqis continually let us down on this.

The stunning thing is that tin-eared officials using the phrase can`t hear what this must sound like to Iraqis. Do we really believe them to be that stupid? Insensate? Unable to imagine whose actual face (and rather imposing body) is to remain behind that Iraqi face being plastered on? About a year ago, in a somewhat more hopeful period, Washington officials were using a different, but no less insulting image. Donald Rumsfeld was not alone, for instance, in claiming in a speech to American troops that "the end was almost in sight. Getting Iraq straightened out, he said, was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: ‘They`re learning, and you`re running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you`re just barely touching it. You can`t know when you`re running down the street how many steps you`re going to have to take. We can`t know that, but we`re off to a good start.`" Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz similarly spoke of taking the "training wheels" off the bike, while ensuring that the Iraqi kid didn`t fall off on the first pedal around the block; as, in May 2004, did the President who claimed, while rallying congressional Republicans around his Iraq policy, that Iraqis were now ready to "take the training wheels off" by assuming some political power.

As with the Iraqi "face," so that infantilizing image of a parent teaching a child to bike caught something of the American dilemma in Iraq and the American attitude toward it: Of course, American officials want the child not to fall and the Iraqi mask to stay in place. Our military men naturally want their Iraqi counterparts to "step forward," right out front where they can be seen, and engage the press rather than having American commanders do it for them. It`s such a better "message" to send to the world. But we also want the Iraqis to ride that bike as we instruct them to and Iraqi military men to say more or less what we have in mind. We want a nice infantilized government in Baghdad, but what we don`t want is to give up basic decision-making, at a military, intelligence, or economic level. We want them to take over… but on our terms. (Any colonial administrator of an earlier era would recognize both the imagery and the problems that come with it.)

When the Iraqis "fail" to do so, our commanders grow frustrated and begin to complain bitterly; while frustrated Washington officials, as Paul Richter and Ashraf Khalil make clear in a recent Los Angeles Times piece (U.S. Moves to Reassert Itself in Iraq Affairs), can`t resist stepping in to pressure the Iraqis, while also emphasizing what they should not do. ("Although Iraqis are making the choices, the officials said, Washington has ‘red lines` that its partners must not cross.") And, of course, none of this encourages Iraqis to put that "face" on an American occupation.

It`s a dance of frustration which can be felt in a very specific way in the Schmitt and Burns article. As it happens, the Iraqi defense minister had just announced a new government policy banning military raids on mosques -- and he had clearly acted without consulting American military commanders who were caught off guard and disturbed by the new policy. As the Times reporters write:

"Another problem cited by the senior officer in Baghdad was the new government`s ban on raids on mosques, announced on Monday, which the American officer said he expected to be revised after high-level discussions on Wednesday between American commanders and Iraqi officials. The officer said the ban appeared to have been announced by the new defense minister, Sadoun al-Dulaimi, without wider government approval, and would be replaced by a ‘more moderate` policy… [That more "moderate" policy,] the American officer implied, would allow Iraqi forces, backed by Americans, to raid mosques when they are used as insurgent strongholds."

With the above in mind, here`s my nominee for quote of the week from Iraq (with a small bow to the military paper, Stars and Stripes):

"The reconstituted Iraqi army took another step Sunday toward leading stabilization efforts in its own country, opening its first national headquarters since the U.S.-led invasion. The Iraqi Ground Forces Headquarters was inaugurated by a `small group of Iraqi and Coalition dignitaries` at an undisclosed location in Baghdad, according to Multi-National Force-Iraq officials Monday…

"`We are celebrating today a historical event and the rebuilding of the Iraqi army. Having the headquarters of our ground forces here is an indication of the Iraqi army controlling its own destiny,` Iraqi Ground Forces commander Gen. Abdul Qadir Jassim said, according to the statement."

The problem, of course, is with that "here." Try to imagine the announcement-shoe on the other foot. Consider a sentence like: "The American Military Headquarters was inaugurated at an undisclosed location in Washington, according to officials Monday." This is headquarters, folks. These are the people whom the Bush administration has slated to take over from us so we can "go home." Call it the Iraqi Pentagon, but the ceremony at an undisclosed "here" might as well have taken place on the moon. A small group? No wonder. Imagine what it says about the country that the address of Iraqi military headquarters remains a secret.

Body Counts and Other Metrics of a War of Frustration

Numbers, "metrics," ways of measuring success are now multiplying in Iraq. This in itself is a measure of frustration. Victory seldom needs metrics. Okay, maybe once upon a time, quantifiable loot and slaves mattered; more recently, the metric of victory was territory conquered -- and when American troops reached Baghdad and the Bush administration thought its war a raging success, no metrics were necessary.

Our iconic metric of war, which also proved a measure of a losing war, was, of course, the body count which we associate with Vietnam. The body count was, however, an invention of the later years of the Korean War, a way of measuring "success" once the two sides had settled into the bloodiest of stalemates and the taking of significant territory -- in fact, the wild movements of armies up and down the Korean peninsula -- had become a thing of the past. In a sense, the body count, aka "the meat-grinder," was from its inception both a measure of nothing and a measure of frustration.

It reappeared quite early in the Vietnam War for reasons allied to those that called it up in Korea. We were involved in a struggle with guerrillas for whom the holding of territory was not the crucial matter, while our North Vietnamese enemy was bomb-able but not open to invasion (given the larger Cold War context). The body count became a shorthand way of measuring success in a war in which the taking of territory was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the enemy hard to tell from the general population, and our own in-country allies weak and largely unable to strengthen themselves. The body count was, as in Korea, also part of a secondary struggle -- for international "credibility" and for support at home. Those dead bodies, announced daily by the military to increasingly dubious reporters in Saigon, were the most public face of American "success" in those years. When the dead bodies and success began ever more visibly to part ways and, in the terminology of the times, a "credibility gap" opened gapingly between the metrics and reality, the body count became a symbol not just of a war of frustration, but of defeat itself. It came, post-My Lai, to look both false and barbaric. Whose bodies were those anyway?

In our new world of conflict, where our leaders had imbibed all the "lessons" of Vietnam, Centcom`s Gen. Tommy Franks, then commander of our Afghan War (now on the board of Outback Steakhouse, which donated shrimp and steak dinners to our troops in Afghanistan), declared that "we don`t do body counts." He was not talking about Iraq, but the principle was later extended to that country where we were obdurate in our unwillingness to count enemy dead (or keep any public tally whatsoever of the Iraqi civilian dead).

The message was clear: We had learned our lessons. We had kicked the Vietnam habit. We were now into victory. Similarly, there would be no more body bags -- the other side of the Vietnam "body count" -- coming home in full view for the TV cameras to photograph. This would be the ultimate, the final anti-Vietnam experience.

All of us should have been warned, of course. When you create an anti-anything, you are almost invariably preparing the ground -- should the slightest obstacle arise -- to summon its opposite. And the preparations for the kind of war we were to fight in Iraq, or rather the kind of war we were going to present to the American public and the world, were essentially anti-Vietnam rites of an elaborate sort created by people who just couldn`t get that ancient defeat out of their brains.

Not surprisingly then, when the war being fought rather quickly deviated from expectations (and public pronouncements) of success, when our leaders, civilian and military, found themselves mired in (as it was quickly dubbed in Vietnam shorthand) the Q-word, and frustration rose and polling figures on the home front started to erode, the "metrics" began to return. It was inevitable. Administration officials began counting furiously, initially for themselves and in private as they tried to sort out an insurgency that they never expected. Later, of course, they couldn`t resist citing the figures -- the useful ones anyway. It turned out that they were counting like mad despite themselves and before they knew it, it was déjà vu all over again for all of us.

Probably the first public "metrics" of frustration to return were estimates of how many Iraqi troops and police we had trained and were supposedly fielding. Impressive figures were often batted about. In the presidential debates, for instance, George Bush claimed: "We`ve got 100,000 [Iraqi troops and police] trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year." Soon, the much-repeated figure became 140,000 troops and police. By March 2005, Donald Rumsfeld was using a total of 142,000.

The problem was that on the ground our Iraqis were proving unimpressive. Most of them either wouldn`t or couldn`t fight. Whole police departments fled. Iraqi soldiers (with the exception of some Kurdish forces) were considered unreliable by our troops. New Iraqi recruits deserted in quantity. A number of them turned out to be ghost recruits (on whom Iraqi commanders drew salaries). Some, it became clear, had infiltrated from the other side. Soon enough those enormous figures began to look absurd, first and foremost to the men in the field.

Think of this, then, as a Tomdispatch rule of war (American-style): In place of genuine victory or actual success, metrics multiply. So the next time you see the word "metrics" or a new set of figures being publicly kicked around to prove our "success" in Iraq, just assume that further problems (and yet more frustration) have arisen.

In the case of those "trained" Iraqi military men, as things went from bad to worse, the metrics meant to measure training success did indeed multiply. As a Washington Post piece (A Report Card on Iraqi Troops) indicated just recently, now that ten-men "transition" teams of American advisors have been assigned to Iraqi troops in the field (à la Vietnam), a whole new system of measurement has come into existence, the Transition Readiness Assessment. Just now being tested out in the field, it`s meant to determine the quality, not just quantity, of "our" Iraqis on the ground. As in Vietnam, the TRA has a plenitude of categories of "readiness" (or the lack thereof) -- six in all -- and has already been transformed into a set of nifty, color-coded visuals with, as it turns out, lots of "red squares."

According to reporter Bradley Graham, the initial TRA found the following:

"Of 81 Iraqi army battalions assessed, only three were rated green, able to conduct operations independently. Of 26 larger brigade headquarters formed so far, only one earned such a rating, according to officers familiar with the confidential assessment."

As happened with similar systems of measurement in Vietnam, the new ratings system is already being scammed by Iraqi commanders eager to rate their forces even lower than may be justified in order to get ever more U.S. military aid flowing in to their units.

Behind such measures lies a frustration that would have been deeply familiar to American military men in Vietnam: How come it`s going to take us years, if ever, to get our forces up and fighting effectively, when the other side, without those ten-man advisory teams or special American training or much of anything else (except vast stores of munitions and weaponry left over from Saddam Hussein`s day) are already fighting and dying with determination? Even when it comes to foreign jihadis, why are theirs ready to die for nothing, while ours -- the thousands of hired guns, known as "security contractors," we`ve imported into the country from all over the globe -- cost a bloody fortune?

Another early metric that began to be cited by the administration should be labeled the "attack count." There`s now clearly a modest-sized industry employed in sorting out their attacks -- on American troops, on Iraqi forces, on the police (including assassinations and the like, as Donald Rumsfeld indicated in the interview that began this piece). There are, it seems, cumulative totals, comparative totals over time, and totals by province. Whenever the cumulative attack totals sink, as after the January 30 election, the administration trundles out its figures and begins to crow. When they rise, you get those "last gasp" explanations. Over time, while meant to broadcast success, or at least offer a modicum of "good news," such figures only lead those broadcasting them deeper into the mire because they promise a pay-off that never seems to come (or come for long anyway). The rise in numbers of trained soldiers, the dips in attack numbers never lead to lasting success -- that is, to the waning of the largely Sunni insurgency.

And now, that dreaded no-no of the Vietnam era, the body count, has returned as well. Actually, it`s been on the road back for quite a while. Over the last year, there have been increasingly frequent reports in the media in which the U.S. military offered specific figures for dead enemy. These may have begun more systematically with announcements of specific numbers of "terrorists" killed in air strikes on sites supposedly being used by the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the months leading up to the November assault on Falluja.

Since then, reports from Iraq offering specific numbers of insurgent or terrorist dead bodies as signs of success have been on the rise. This somewhat haphazard trend burst into something like full bloom with the recent U.S. Marine operation in Western Iraq.

The Body Count and Operation Matador

Early in May, about the time all those military statements about last gasps were emerging and just as Baghdad seemed to be turning into a sea of car-bomb explosions, the U.S. military in Iraq launched Operation Matador, a highly publicized sweep -- 1,000 Marines backed by significant air power – of areas near the Syrian border previously considered "sanctuaries" for foreign fighters entering the country. Soon after the operation began (not particularly well for the Marines who were bloodied by unexpectedly well-armed jihadists on their way to the sweep`s launch point), the first body count emerged and was promptly headlined in the American press and highlighted on the television news. As the New York Times put it in a Vietnam-era-style headline: "100 Rebels Killed in U.S. Offensive in Western Iraq"; or, as Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder wrote, "At least 100 suspected insurgents have been killed."

The number itself should have been a signal to the American press. It was such a suspiciously round number, while American casualties were being detailed far more specifically. As Christopher Dickey of Newsweek on-line commented in a rare piece on the return of the Vietnam-era body count: "But of course that`s just a guesstimate, while the toll on the Americans and their Iraqi allies is all too concrete." In fact, nothing in Operation Matador seemed to go as expected. Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post was embedded with the troops and she reported that they quickly discovered their enemy had "had plenty of warning that the Marines were coming." Generally, they were missing from the "ghost villages" the Marines entered. As Knickmeyer put it (again in a sentence that could have come directly out of the Vietnam War), "Primed for battle, the Marines found only booby traps. Sometimes they found them too late."

Solomon Moore of the Los Angeles Times, also along on Matador, offered similar Vietnam-style quotes in a piece aptly titled, An Unseen Enemy:

"`We took constant mortar fire from over here. Anybody who comes over that bridge gets lit up,` said 3rd Platoon commander Lt. Joseph Clemmey, 26, of Worcester, Mass. ‘This was supposed to be the mission from God, and so far we`ve been out here and we haven`t seen nothing. This was the climactic moment we were all waiting for, and no one is here…` ‘We`re fighting an invisible enemy,` said Sgt. Jeffrey Swartzentruber of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. ‘They`re like the … CIA.`"

According to Knickmeyer, the Marine operation had all the ear-marks of a disastrous anti-"hearts and minds" campaign. House-to-house searches resulted in the "bust[ing] up wooden furniture belonging to poor farm families and [the throwing of] their polyester blankets and clothes in a jumble on the floor"; they "beat up suspicious-looking men if that was what it took to get information that could save lives" (despite a lack of interpreters, one of whom in Knickmeyer`s unit quit part-way through the operation); they ousted families from their homes at night to bivouac in them themselves. They were, in short, "the recruiting sergeants of the resistance" in the phrase of British journalist Patrick Cockburn.

And where they did meet opposition, as in the town of Qaim, the results were no less expectable or disastrous. The U.S. military is badly overstretched in Iraq and the modest 1,000 man Marine force was hardly large enough for its task -- unless you assumed, as the military surely did, that significant parts of its job would be done by helicopters and planes once resistance of any sort was met. As it happened, while the offensive was already in its planning stages, local tribal leaders who couldn`t deal with the armed foreign fighters in their villages actually called on the Americans for help. This could have proved an extraordinary development.

However, according to Hannah Allam and Mohammed al Dulaimy of Knight Ridder (Marine-Led Campaign Killed Friends and Foes, Iraqi Leaders Say), not only was there "no effort by the U.S. military to incorporate local tribes in its assault plans," but despite limited Marine numbers, no Iraqi troops were along on the operation either. Not surprisingly then, when the Marines hit resistant villages or towns, air and fire power was loosed and the results were indiscriminate.

Here, for instance, is an AP report on one area:

"Flattened homes, bullet-pocked walls and two charred personnel carriers at the entrance to the Sunni Arab village stood as testimony to the violent upheaval. One of the walls of the local mosque had collapsed, and dozens of buildings were damaged by shells and machine-gun fire. A gaping crater in the bridge linking Rommana and Husaybah reduced traffic to a crawl across the Euphrates River."

The Knight Ridder report offered this striking quote:

"`The Americans were bombing whole villages and saying they were only after the foreigners,` said Fasal al Goud, a former governor of Anbar province who said he asked U.S. forces for help on behalf of the tribes. ‘An AK-47 can`t distinguish between a terrorist and a tribesman, so how could a missile or tank?`"

In the end, as in Vietnam, the Marines held no territory, but simply termed the operation a "success," offering a final body count of 125 dead insurgents. As a last touch from another era, according to the AP report, "U.S. forces extended a conciliatory hand Sunday, dropping leaflets from a helicopter promising a better future. ‘Prosperity will prevail in Rommana and Husaybah,` one of them read. ‘We thank residents for their calls on the local number which helped us capture armed groups,` read another."

According to Allam and al Dulaimy:

"The U.S. military hails last week`s Operation Matador as a success that killed more than 125 insurgents. But local tribesmen said it was a disaster for their communities and has made them leery of ever again assisting American or Iraqi forces… In interviews, influential tribal leaders and many residents of the remote border towns said the 1,000 U.S. troops who swept into their territories in the weeklong campaign that ended over the weekend didn`t distinguish between the Iraqis who supported the United States and the fighters battling it."

Measure, then, metrics against reality -- that body count of 125, which represents the metrics of victory for the Americans, and the reality on the ground, as the Knight Ridder people reported it: "When the offensive ended… angry residents returned to find blocks of destruction. Men who`d stayed behind to help were found dead in shot-up houses."

This is the essence of a war of frustration where such operations are bound to fuel further disasters. Among Americans, they are no less bound, sooner or later, to bring into question the credibility of the metrics themselves and so of an administration for which credibility or image is no small matter. They are also bound to bring to mind Vietnam -- and not only among American military men in Iraq who have already indicated their private disappointment over Operation Matador.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times made the point in an eloquent column, War in Iraq: Staying What Course?: "Reports from the recent offensive near the Syrian border," he wrote, "sound just like those from a 1960`s search-and-destroy mission, body count and all."

Counter-counts or the Metrics of Disaster

As it happens, the administration`s "good news" metrics aren`t the only ones available and no one knows this better than our military leaders. They can count, after all. In fact, how could they help but do the math late into any night, given what they know: There are about 140,000 overstretched American troops in Iraq, maybe another 9,000 Brits, and ever-vanishing numbers of "coalition" forces. (The Poles and Japanese, among others who haven`t yet withdrawn, are talking about doing so when the UN "mandate" ends in December.) The Iraqi forces are -- a small number of units excepted -- essentially not in the field (though private Shiite and Kurdish militias, not under American command, exist in significant numbers). According to our generals, American troops are now likely to remain in Iraq at present force levels for years to come.

On the other hand, every possible figure for the restocking of the American military -- rates of recruitment for the Army and Marines, numbers of soldiers and specialists signing up for new tours of duty, recruitment rates for the National Guard and Reserves -- has been significantly on the wane. Only AWOL and desertion rates may be on the rise.

In this context, there is a factor not being counted into the public metrics of the war -- one that goes a long way to explain how the present situation can continue.

As we all know, from time to time, "civilians" or "private security contractors" are reported to have died in Iraq (most horrifically when 4 employees of Blackwater Security Consulting were ambushed in their SUV, murdered, and mutilated in Fallujah in March 2004). These days, when a convoy of private-security SUVs is ambushed in Baghdad or a helicopter transporting some "civilians" is shot down, it makes the news. But unlike with the official military death count -- the ever-updated number of soldiers the Pentagon reports as dead in Iraq -- the deaths of private security contractors generally are neither recorded, nor tallied, though a partial list of 237 such "fatalities" can be found at the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count site. Deadly attacks on such "civilians," as long as they are out of the spotlight and away from the cameras, evidently regularly go unreported.

In Iraq, the numbers of "private security contractors" -- always referred to politely as such in the American press, never as "mercenaries" or "hired guns" -- is unknown. There can be no question, however, that they make up by far the second largest contingent of "coalition" fighting forces in Iraq, well ahead of the British. Estimates of the number of foreign hired guns in Iraq usually fall in the 15,000-20,000 range, with possibly tens of thousands of Iraqi hired guns thrown in as well.

According to Agence France-Presse, 60 foreign firms, with exotic names like Blackwater and Custer Battles, as well as 40 Iraqi firms, are in the mercenary business there. But as with their casualty figures, so their force numbers exist in a murky world beyond all public math.

Almost completely unregulated -- "In one of the last decrees issued by the defunct CPA, pro-consul Paul Bremer granted immunity from prosecution for private security contractors working with the Americans and US-backed Iraqi government" -- they constitute the paramilitary "wild West" of American Iraq. They not only symbolize the process of privatizing the Pentagon that has proceeded apace under Donald Rumsfeld, but are a massive hidden expense for the American taxpayer as well as a competitive force when it comes to the reenlistment of battle-skilled American soldiers. (The salaries they offer are perhaps four times as high comparable ones in the military.) They are in many ways the hidden force that allows our Iraq War to continue on its present catastrophic course. Without such manpower, now increasingly unavailable to the Pentagon through direct recruitment methods, an "overstretched military" would have a different meaning.

Our jihadis are generally ignored in our media, though on occasion an article comes out about them. Their crusading desire, according to the Washington Post`s Ann Scott Tyson, is driven by money, "a lust for life on the edge," and "a self-styled altruism." As she describes them, "Sporting blue jeans, wraparound sunglasses and big tattoos, they look the part of gun-slinging cowboys."

Back in the Cold War era, when you spoke of the "war in the shadows," you were referring to the secret, armed, global intelligence struggle between the CIA and their Russian counterparts. Now, the war in the shadows -- in Iraq at least -- is the war of the mercenaries. They are the metric that makes it all add up and they remain below the radar screen.

What Can Be Counted On

Numbers are a tricky thing. Counts of various sorts can themselves be interpreted various ways. Numbers, even when accurate, can lead to quite different conclusions. Sometimes you need a sharp interpretive brain just to grasp the nature of the figures coming your way. Sometimes you need just such a brain to step past the numbers. Considering the recent Baghdad car bombings, Juan Cole, who may have the best interpretive brain around on the subject of Iraq, offered this succinct summary of the American position in that country at his Informed Comment website:

"Few commentators, when they mention such news [of car bombs targeting convoys in Baghdad], point out the obvious. The United States military does not control Baghdad. It doesn`t control the major roads leading out of the capital. It does not control the downtown area except possibly the heavily barricaded "green zone." It does not control the capital. The guerrillas strike at will, even at Iraqi notables who can afford American security guards (many of them e.g. ex-Navy Seals). If the US military does not control the capital of a country it conquered, then it controls nothing of importance. Ipso facto, Iraq is a failed state."

Based on recent comments seeping anonymously out of the military high command in Baghdad and into the press, it seems that most of our commanders don`t disagree. As Christopher Dickey of Newsweek put the matter recently:

"If there`s good news, it`s that while the Pentagon may obscure this grim reality in public presentations, it doesn`t seem to be kidding itself, as it did in Vietnam. An accidentally declassified Pentagon report about a killing on the road to Baghdad airport at the beginning of March shows quite clearly how much worse the overall situation is than the Bush administration would like us, or even its allies in the Coalition forces, to believe. `The U.S. considers all of Iraq a combat zone,` says the report, which was wrapped up at the end of April, three months after the elections that were supposed to have turned the tide in this conflict."

Here is where the Vietnam analogy ends up in the dust. In Vietnam, the United States was fighting a mobilized rural populace in a full-scale, nationwide war for national independence that was already years old by the time the first American troops arrived. It was led by a single party, back by a highly militarized half-state to its north with a well-respected and charismatic leader, in turn backed by the resources of China and Russia. In Iraq, the Bush administration and the American military are fighting a partial war in a near non-state, mainly in one part of an increasingly riven country, against an insurgency without a charismatic leader, a single party, or significant backing from other states elsewhere -- and yet, so far, the stateless results do look eerily similar to those in Vietnam. The frustration over "our Iraqis" is only going to rise, as will frustration over our inability to destroy the insurgency of "their Iraqis" -- and as this process intensifies, and the administration feels yet more pressure at home over its Iraqi adventure, look for the public metrics to multiply and grow ever more problematic. There`s only one word for it: Incredible.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute`s Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt


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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
The inside story of one of history`s greatest business scandals, in which top executives of America`s 7th largest company walked away with over one billion dollars while investors and employees lost everything.
Genres: Documentary

http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&cf=info&id=1808626884

Ist auf jeden Fall auf den 16. Platz geklettert.

Auch `The Downfall` ist noch in den Charts. 14 Woche mit fast 5,5 Mio $ auf Platz 36. Das beste war ein Platz um die 15 bei jetzt 84 Theatern.
In England ist der Film der erfolgreichste deutsche Film.

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May 24, 2005
A Modest Victory for Bush, but More Tests Lie Ahead
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/24/politics/24assess.html

WASHINGTON, May 23 - President Bush won enough from the bipartisan compromise on judicial nominees on Monday night to claim a limited victory, but he now faces a series of additional tests of his political authority, with the stakes extending to the fate of his second-term agenda.

On the plus side for Mr. Bush, the bipartisan agreement among 14 centrist senators expressly called for up-or-down votes on three of his nominees to federal appeals court seats, all but ensuring their confirmations, though it left in limbo the fate of two more.

By explicitly exempting from the agreement two additional judges opposed by Democrats, it did not meet Mr. Bush`s oft-stated demand that all his nominees get a vote, and it did not foreclose the possibility that Democrats could block an eventual nominee to the Supreme Court, a matter of intense concern to the White House. The split-the-baby outcome, moreover, did little to resolve a rolling series of challenges to Mr. Bush that in coming days and weeks could do much to set the tone for his second four years in office.

On Tuesday, the House is to vote on a bill that would defy Mr. Bush and lift restrictions on federal financing of stem-cell research, legislation that stands a good chance of passing.

In the days and weeks that follow, Congress will confront a proposed trade agreement with Central America, the confirmation of Mr. Bush`s embattled choice as to be ambassador to the United Nations, an effort to rein in government spending and the first legislative steps toward overhauling Social Security - all topics on which Mr. Bush faces excruciatingly close votes in Congress, where Democrats are generally united against him and his own party is splintering around the edges.

Although the deal on judges announced by the 14 senators fell well short of the principle set out by Mr. Bush that all nominees get a vote on the Senate floor, the White House said it viewed the development as positive. Mr. Bush has always tried to create an atmosphere within the White House that takes the day-to-day bumps in stride and focuses on winning in the long run.

But Monday evening`s partial victory was hardly a display of overwhelming political strength. Beyond the judicial nominations, administration officials and their outside advisers recognize that the convergence of so many high-stakes issues in such a short period will shape public perceptions of Mr. Bush`s power at a time when his approval ratings are already lackluster and his signature domestic initiative, remaking Social Security, is in trouble.

To some degree, the confluence of disparate issues is coincidence. But in another way it is the logical consequence of Mr. Bush`s decision to expend his political capital, as he put it immediately after his re-election, to push through initiatives that he suggested voters had endorsed by putting him back in the White House.

From his push to add investment accounts to Social Security to his nomination of John R. Bolton to be the United States envoy to the United Nations to his opposition to pork barrel spending in the Senate`s highway construction bill, Mr. Bush has been assertive and even provocative in probing the limits of his own power.

In recognition of the stakes, Mr. Bush has been stepping up his courtship of Congress members, holding nine meetings over the last month in the Cabinet Room and the White House residence, with two more meetings scheduled this week. Vice President Dick Cheney has been taking a more active role in dealing with Congress on domestic issues. The White House message machine has been relentlessly seeking to put the onus on Congress not to block Mr. Bush`s initiatives, in effect putting the responsibility on Democrats to move toward Mr. Bush rather than the other way around, and pre-emptively casting them as obstructionist.

"This is a critical period," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "The American people expect Washington to act and work to find solutions to our most pressing priorities."

Should Mr. Bush follow up his partial victory on the judicial nominees with progress on the other issues that are tied up before the House and Senate, he would no doubt be strengthened when it comes to a possible Supreme Court nomination this summer and for other topics working their way through the pipeline, including his energy bill and his stalled immigration initiative.

Among those in Washington who think Mr. Bush has bitten off more than even a Republican Congress can digest, his situation is analogous to what happened to President Bill Clinton in 1993, when he faced messy battles on Capitol Hill over his economic, trade and health care initiatives, and to Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995, when he ran into the limits of support for a Republican reshaping of government.

"It was an overreach in both cases, and in both cases their reputations suffered as a result of lack of success," said Stephen Wayne, a presidential scholar at Georgetown University. "I see Bush`s situation as kind of parallel."

But when faced with tight legislative situations in the past, Mr. Bush has shown an ability to win narrowly, or to win ugly, or occasionally, as when faced in his first term with certain defeat over his opposition to creating a new homeland security department, to capitulate and brazenly claim an opponent`s idea as his own.

So no one is counting him out now, in any of the specific battles he faces, or in the overall situation. In some ways, he is winning simply by showing his conservative base that he will fight on principle, no matter the political cost, a trait that has also tended to buttress his standing among voters generally.

White House officials say that in fact Mr. Bush has gotten off to a fast start in his second term, signing legislation to tighten the bankruptcy code and rein in class action lawsuits, getting Congress to adopt a budget blueprint that largely hews to his proposals and setting the stage for action on the other big issues.

"It`s important for us to keep the focus on the progress that`s been made and the significant victories that may have been overshadowed by some of the drama," said Nicolle Devenish, the White House communications director. "It`s important for us to reassure the American public that we`re making important progress on Social Security reform and energy legislation."

Among more moderate Republicans there is some concern that Mr. Bush has so harnessed his presidency to ideological issues that he has lost touch with the issues of most concern to Americans right now, like high gasoline prices.

"The only reason he`s still up there in the 40`s is that the Democrats are really brain dead and have nothing positive to put on the table," said one veteran Republican who has close ties to the White House, referring to approval ratings in polls that are at or near Mr. Bush`s low points.

"What you see is that he`s increasingly turning overseas to demonstrate leadership because he`s having so much trouble in the molasses of the Beltway," said the Republican, who insisted on anonymity because he did not want to be quoted criticizing the president.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 24, 2005
Syria Ending Cooperation With U.S., Envoy Says
By DOUGLAS JEHL and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/24/politics/24syria.html

WASHINGTON, May 23 - Syria has halted military and intelligence cooperation with the United States, its ambassador to Washington said in an interview, in a sign of growing strains between the two nations over the insurgency in Iraq.

The ambassador, Imad Moustapha, said in the interview on Friday at the Syrian Embassy here that his country had, in the last 10 days, "severed all links" with the United States military and Central Intelligence Agency because of what he called unjust American allegations. The Bush administration has complained bitterly that Syria is not doing enough to halt the flow of men and money to the insurgency in Iraq.

Mr. Moustapha said he believed that the Bush administration had decided "to escalate the situation with Syria" despite steps the Syrians have taken against the insurgents in Iraq, and despite the withdrawal in recent weeks of Syrian troops from Lebanon, in response to international demands.

He said American complaints had been renewed since February, when a half-brother of Saddam Hussein, who was once the widely feared head of Iraq`s two most powerful security agencies, was handed over to the Iraqi authorities after being captured in Syria along with several lieutenants. The renewal of complaints caused Syria to abandon the idea of providing further help, he said.

"We thought, why should we continue to cooperate?" he said.

Bush administration officials said Syria`s stance has prompted intense debate at high levels in the administration about new steps that might be taken against the Syrian government. The officials said the options included possible military, diplomatic or economic action. But senior Pentagon and military officials cautioned Monday that if any military action was eventually ordered, it was likely to be limited to insurgent movements along the border.

"There`s a lot of discussion about what to do about Syria and what a problem it is," said the administration official, who works for a government agency that has been involved in the debate.

Relations between Syria and the United States have been souring for months, and some Bush administration officials said Syria`s level of cooperation had been dwindling even before the latest move.

Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, said there have been occasional low-level military-to-military communications along the border. He said the Defense Department had received no official notification of a change in that status, nor that the status of American military attachés in Damascus had been altered.

The American officials declined to provide an on-the-record response to Mr. Moustapha`s statements on halting intelligence cooperation, citing the delicacy of the issue.

American intelligence officials have said Syria has provided important assistance in the campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks. In recent months, senior Pentagon officials and military officers say, cooperation between the two nations has included low-level communications across the border between captains and field-grade officers of the American-led alliance and their Syrian counterparts.

One senior military officer said those communications had been helpful in mitigating a number of "cross-border firings" of artillery that have occurred between Syrian forces and the American-led military in Iraq. Any further scaling back of cooperation there or between Syria and the C.I.A. could have a tangible impact, officials said.

American military officers in Baghdad and intelligence analysts in Washington say militant cells inside Iraq draw on "unlimited money" from an underground financial network run by former Baath Party leaders and relatives of Mr. Hussein, many of whom they say found safe haven to live and operate in Syria.

Those officials say Damascus has done very little in its banking system to stop the financing, nor has it seized former Iraqi Baathists identified by the United States as organizing and financing the insurgency.

In presenting Syria`s case, Mr. Moustapha said his government had done all it could to respond to American complaints, including taking steps to build barriers and add to border patrols.

He declined to comment on any role Syria might have played in the capture of Mr. Hussein`s half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, No. 36 on the American list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis. But the ambassador said Syria had jailed some 1,200 foreign fighters who sought to enter Iraq from Syria, and had returned scores of others to their home countries.

On the day of the interview with Mr. Moustapha, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Syria was "allowing its territory to be used to organize terrorist attacks against innocent Iraqis."

A senior American military officer acknowledged that "the Syrian government has in some cases been helpful" in building border berms and otherwise taking action against people involved in providing support to the insurgency. But the officer added: "Our sense is that they protest a bit too much and that they are capable of doing more. We expect them to do more."

The United States ambassador to Damascus, Margaret Scobey, has been in Washington for several months, having been recalled for consultations after the assassination in Lebanon on Feb. 14 of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister.

Syrian Pullout Verified

UNITED NATIONS, May 23 (AP) - A United Nations team has verified the pullout of all Syrian troops and intelligence officials from Lebanon, Secretary General Kofi Annan announced Monday.

"We have verified all the withdrawal, including the border area," he told reporters.

The Security Council adopted a resolution last Sept. 2 calling on Syria to withdraw completely from Lebanon. But it was the international pressure after the Hariri assassination that led the Syrians to leave.

Syria`s last soldier in Lebanon crossed the border on April 26, ending a 29-year military presence that was the key to Damascus`s control of Lebanon.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 24, 2005
Cowboys and Indians
By NIALL FERGUSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/24/opinion/24ferguson.html?pa…

London

I think that this could still fail." Those words - uttered by a senior American officer in Baghdad last week - probably gave opponents of the war in Iraq, particularly those clamoring for a hasty exit, a bit of a kick. They should be careful what they wish for.

For history strongly suggests that a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster. "If we let go of the insurgency," said another of the officers quoted anonymously last week, "then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos."

As many of the war`s opponents seem to have forgotten, civil war and chaos tend to break out when American military interventions have been aborted. Think not only of Vietnam and Cambodia, but also of Lebanon in 1983 and Haiti in 1996. To talk glibly of "finding a way out of Iraq," as if it were just a matter of hailing a cab and heading for the Baghdad airport, is to underestimate the danger of a bloody internecine conflict among Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites.

Instead of throwing up our hands in an irresponsible fit of despair, we need to learn not just from past disasters but also from historical victories over insurgencies. Indeed, of all the attempts in the past century by irregular indigenous forces to expel regular foreign forces, around a third have failed.

In 1917 British forces invaded Mesopotamia, got to Baghdad, overthrew its Ottoman rulers and sought - in the words of the general who led them, Sir Stanley Maude - to be its people`s "liberators." The British presence in Iraq was legitimized by international law (it was designated a League of Nations mandate) and by a modicum of democracy (a referendum was held among local sheiks to confirm the creation of a British-style constitutional monarchy). Despite all this, in 1920 there was a full-scale insurgency against the continuing British military presence.

Some may object that warfare today is a very different matter from warfare 85 years ago. Yet the striking thing about the events of 1920 is how very like the events of our own time they were. The reality of what is sometimes called "asymmetric warfare" is how very symmetrical it really is: an insurgency is about leveling the military playing field, and exploiting the advantages of local knowledge to stage hit-and-run attacks against the occupiers, as well as anybody thought to be collaborating with them.

Indeed, if there is asymmetry it lies in the advantages enjoyed by the insurgents. The cost of training and equipping an American soldier is high; by contrast, life is tragically cheap among the young men of Baghdad and Falluja. Even if the insurgents lose 10 men for every 1 they kill, they are still winning, not least because the American side takes its losses so much harder.

How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons stand out.

The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had enough men. In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements.

Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000). The trouble is that the population of Iraq was just over three million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24 million. Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at most, 23 to 1. Today it is around 174 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, about one million American troops would be needed.

The United States also faces two other problems that the United Kingdom did not 85 years ago. The British were able to be ruthless: they used air raids and punitive expeditions to inflict harsh collective punishments on villages that supported the insurgents. The United States has not been above brutal methods on occasion in Iraq, yet humiliation and torture of prisoners have not yielded any significant benefits compared with what it has cost the country`s reputation.

The Americans` other problem has to do with timing and expectations. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that American forces should aim to work to a "10-30-30" timetable: 10 days should suffice to topple a rogue regime, 30 days to establish order in its wake, and 30 more days to prepare for the next military undertaking. I am all in favor of a 10-30-30 timetable - provided the measurement is years, not days. For it may well take around 10 years to establish order in Iraq, 30 more to establish the rule of law, and quite possibly another 30 to create a stable democracy.

Those American officers who say that it could take years to succeed in Iraq are therefore right. But the Bush administration has just three and a half years left. Is it credible that American troops will still be in Iraq for even another four years after that?

The insurgents don`t think so. They know that American democracy puts time on their side. Once again, the contrast with the British experience is instructive. Although Iraq was formally granted its independence in 1932, there was still some form of British presence in the country until the late 1950`s.

So, if we acknowledge that the United States simply does not have the luxury of time that the British enjoyed and cannot be similarly ruthless, can it at least increase the manpower at its disposal in Iraq?

The official answer from Washington is that Iraqi security forces will soon be ready to play an effective role in policing. Few who have seen those forces on the ground find this strategy realistic. Some fear that the training that Iraqi soldiers are receiving may prove useful only when they fight one another in an Iraqi civil war.

What, then, of America`s own resources? Almost no one (least of all the Pentagon) wants to go back to the draft. So could today`s all-volunteer force somehow be expanded to double (at least) the troops available? That too seems unlikely. Indeed, the current system is already showing alarming signs of stress and strain as more and more is asked of the "weekend warriors" of the reserves and National Guard, who account for roughly two-fifths of the force in Iraq. In December, the Army National Guard acknowledged that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the preceding two months. Many members of the Individual Ready Reserve have been contesting the Army`s right to call them up.

How did the British address the manpower problem in 1920? By bringing in soldiers from India who accounted for more than 87 percent of troops in the counter-insurgency campaign. Perhaps, then, the greatest problem faced by the Anglophone empire of our own time is very simple: the United Kingdom had the Indian Army; the United States does not. Indeed, by a rich irony, the only significant auxiliary forces available to the Pentagon today are none other than ... the British Army. But those troops are far too few to be analogous to the Sikhs, Mahrattas and Baluchis who fought so effectively in 1920.

No one should wish for an overhasty American withdrawal from Iraq. It would be the prelude to a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence, with inevitable spillovers into and interventions from neighboring countries. Rather, it is time to acknowledge just how thinly stretched American forces in Iraq are and to address the problem: whether by finding new allies (send Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi?); radically expanding the accelerated citizenship program for immigrants who join the army; or lowering the (historically high) educational requirements demanded by military recruiters.

YES, as that anonymous officer said, the Bush administration`s policy in Iraq could indeed still fail. But too few American liberals seem to grasp how high the price will be if it does. That is a point, unfortunately, that also eludes most of this country`s allies. Does it also elude the secretary of defense? If "10-30-30" are the numbers that concern him, I begin to fear that it does. The numbers that matter right now are 174 to 1. That is not only the ratio of Iraqis to American troops. It is starting to look alarmingly like the odds against American success.

Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard and a senior fellowthe Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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At least 8,000 treasures looted from Iraq museum still untraced
By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?st…

24 May 2005

Evidence of how quickly and irretrievably a country can be stripped of its cultural heritage came with the Iraq war in 2003.

The latest figures, presented to the art crime conference yesterday by John Curtis of the British Museum, suggested that half of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced.

About 4,000 of the objects taken from the museum had been recovered in Iraq. But illustrating the international demand for such antiquities, Dr Curtis said around 1,000 had been confiscated in the US, 500 pieces had been impounded in France, 250 in Switzerland and 200 or so in Jordan.

Other artefacts have been retrieved from surrounding countries such as Syria, Kuwait, Iran and Turkey. None of these objects has yet been sent back to Iraq.

Other items had been destroyed or stolen from enormously important archaeological sites such as those at Nimrud and Babylon. "Some of them resemble minefields there are so many holes," Dr Curtis said.

Random checks on Western soldiers leaving the area had found some in illegal possession of ancient artefacts.

But he said: "I don`t think large numbers of antiquities from these sites have been passing through London. I`m not aware of large amounts being in the salerooms in London."

The full extent of the damage has been impossible to gauge so far because of the deteriorating security situation.

The director of the Iraq National Museum has been forced to seal his storerooms because it is currently too dangerous for his staff to start work on an inventory of the material that has been returned.

An international mission planned under the auspices of Unesco, the United Nations` cultural organisation, with advice from experts at the British Museum, has been unable to start work for similar reasons.

The delays all make it more likely that material will continue to be lost from the country`s archaeological sites, some of which have been permanently damaged by war.

Two years ago, the BBC documentary-maker and historian Dan Cruickshank suggested that museum staff had been involved in, or permitted, the looting . But Dr Curtis said he thought staff had nothing to do with the thefts. There was confusion, he said, because museum staff had emptied cases of transportable goods and hidden them in secret storerooms before war broke out.

A spokesman for the London market said everyone in Britain was acutely aware of the dangers of buying goods from Iraq and there were very strong deterrents. The Cultural Objects (Offences) Act of 2003 meant anyone trading in illicit objects facedup to seven years in jail.


24 April 2005 10:56


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Nicht ganz mein Thema, aber interessant. Es gibt einige Artikel über D in der GB Presse.

Germany and France are struggling with a new world

Britain is coping better with the transition to a US and Asian-led economy
Martin Kettle
Tuesday May 24, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1490687,00.ht…

Guardian
To spend a few days in Germany is not just to visit another country but, increasingly for a Briton, to visit a different kind of country. In Berlin last week, what stood out was how attractively stable modern Germany still is. Here were the material prosperity, the reliable services and the well-maintained environment that most people want from life. Lack of excitement - and 5 million people out of work - almost seems a small price to pay for such a good common life, especially after the kind of 20th century Germany had.

The contrast with Britain is unmissable. Here, the reality of economic dynamism is all around us, sometimes for good, as in our high levels of employment, but also sometimes for ill, as in our high levels of stress and insecurity. Our private affluence is high, our public goods and spaces are improving, but they do not match those of Germany. Our public life is far less restrained than theirs. If Tony Blair wants to find that elusive culture of respect, all he needs to do is go to Berlin.

For a long time many on the progressive left looked to Germany as the kind of country that they wished Britain could become - industrious, civilised and moderate. To its regulars, the British-German Königswinter conference, which I attended last week, was a place where senior British public figures came to learn from the achievements of their German counterparts - to learn how a modern social democratic party worked, how a dynamic economy could be married to a generous welfare state, and how a strong national identity could meld seamlessly with the European project.

Now, the boot is on the other foot. Now it is the Germans who arrive at Königswinter aware that they have not got it as right as they once assumed. In the old days it was the Germans who had the economic miracle and who wore the badge of modernity. Now, in a more haphazard way, it is the British. Germans talk anxiously about being in denial about the price they are increasingly paying for their apparently stable good society.

The devastating defeat of Gerhard Schröder`s Social Democrats in the weekend elections in North Rhine-Westphalia blows the whistle on Germany`s attempt to balance economic energy and social cohesion in the old way. This was truly a milestone event - akin in its way to Britain`s winter of discontent a quarter of a century ago. A bugle blew in the Ruhr on Sunday, sounding the last post for the postwar German model.

Germany seems to me to have fallen victim to something that was captured by its most famous poet in his most celebrated work. In part one of Goethe`s Faust, the central character`s pact with the devil allows him to have energy, life and youth unless he becomes so entranced by the passing moment that he wishes that things will never change. When Faust stumbles unthinkingly into that wish, his world and his life are forfeit to Mephistopheles.

What went wrong for Germany was not reunification, though Helmut Kohl did not make it easy for his country with the generous terms on which it was achieved. If nothing else in the world had changed, it would probably have been possible to bring 16 million east Germans and their broken society eventually into the heart of west German society and its economy.

What went wrong for Germany was also what went wrong for Europe. It was not East Germany alone that collapsed in 1989. It was communism more generally, and not just in eastern Europe but across the world, above all in Russia and China. Once these countries, with their billions of skilled but largely impoverished inhabitants, began to become market economies, the writing was on the wall for high-cost welfare settlements in the developed world. And rightly so. The prospect that hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indian people will enjoy double or treble the prosperity that their parents knew is the single most wonderful possibility in the modern world.

There was nothing wrong with the postwar settlement for the Europeans who benefited from it, especially for those who had survived the terrible years of 1914-45. But it was only sustainable as long as the millions who languished under communism were unable to get their share of the prosperity, security and freedom that western Europe enjoyed. Once communism collapsed, the privileges and protections that were essential to the western settlement began to be unsustainable economically and, in an important way, morally too.

This is the world we all now inhabit. It is a world in which Britain, because of the premature destruction of its own post-1945 settlement, is better equipped to make the transition to the market-economy-dominated 21st century than the older nations of the European Union. Now it is the turn of Germany, struggling to reform but highly educated and highly skilled - the key assets for any developed economy in this changing global economy - to go through its own version of that painful transition.

The great challenge for our part of the world is to make the transition from the national and European protectionism of the 20th century to achieve competitiveness in the Asian and American-dominated global economy of the 21st, while at the same time negotiating as well as possible the social and communal disruptions that will inevitably accompany the process. No nation will succeed by opting out. All the European nations have to make the best job they can of it. Some, such as Italy and France, have hardly begun to try. Others, such as Germany, are making progress. Britain, by a combination of luck and judgment, is further along the path than most.

This is the context in which to judge not just the comparison between Germany and Britain but also the EU constitution. If the constitution can facilitate this process of transition then it is worth supporting. If it is seen as a weapon to block transition, it is worthless and may even hasten the break-up of the EU. In that sense, it is not so important whether France or the Netherlands votes yes or no on the constitution next week as whether they trigger an effort to create a protectionist European core group. That would be a fatal miscalculation, for themselves above all.

And this too is the context in which to judge Tony Blair and his famous search for a legacy. History`s judgment on Blair will not, I suspect, turn on whether he wins this or that referendum, or whether he proves that a modern market economy can also deliver high-quality public services, important though these things are. It will turn on whether, in 20 or 50 years time, his government is seen to have done its part to steer the nation through the hugely demanding change from a world dominated by European wealth and power to a world dominated by their American and increasingly their Asian equivalents.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Noch eine Ergänzung zum voherigen Posting, auch aus dem Guardian:
North-Rhine Westphalia is Germany`s economic powerhouse: as a separate country, it would be the world`s 13th largest economy.

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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 CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Insurgents Flourish in Iraq`s Wild West
The center of the rebel movement has shifted to Al Anbar province, near the border with Syria. But the U.S. has been moving its forces away.
By Mark Mazzetti and Solomon Moore
Times Staff Writers
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-mila…

May 24, 2005

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military`s plan to pacify Iraq has run into trouble in a place where it urgently needs to succeed.

U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad agree that Al Anbar province — the vast desert badlands stretching west from the cities of Fallouja and Ramadi to the lawless region abutting the Syrian border — remains the epicenter of the country`s deadly insurgency.

Yet U.S. troops and military officials in the embattled province said in recent interviews that they have neither enough combat power nor enough Iraqi military support to mount an effective counterinsurgency against an increasingly sophisticated enemy.

"You can`t get all the Marines and train them on a single objective, because usually the objective is bigger than you are," said Maj. Mark Lister, a senior Marine air officer in Al Anbar province. "Basically, we`ve got all the toys, but not enough boys."

The Pentagon has made training Iraqi troops its top priority since Iraq`s national election in late January. But in Al Anbar province, that objective is overshadowed by the more basic mission of trying to keep much of the region out of insurgent hands.

Just three battalions of Marines are stationed in the western part of the province, down from four a few months ago. Marine officials in western Al Anbar say that each of those battalions is smaller by one company than last year, meaning there are approximately 2,100 Marines there now, compared with about 3,600 last year.

Some U.S. military officers in Al Anbar province say that commanders in Baghdad and the Pentagon have denied their repeated requests for more troops.

"[Commanders] can`t use the word, but we`re withdrawing," said one U.S. military official in Al Anbar province, who asked not to be identified because it is the Pentagon that usually speaks publicly about troop levels. "Slowly, that`s what we`re doing."

Such reductions are especially problematic because U.S. commanders have determined that it is the western part of the province to which the insurgency`s "center of resistance" has shifted. The insurgency`s base of operations was once the eastern corridor between Fallouja and Ramadi. Now, Pentagon officials say, it is in villages and cities closer to the Syrian border.

Commanders also believe the insurgency is now made up of a larger percentage of foreign jihadists than the U.S. military previously believed, an indication that there are not enough U.S. and Iraqi troops to patrol miles of desert border.

Some Pentagon officials and experts in counterinsurgency warfare say the troop shortage has hamstrung the U.S. military`s ability to effectively fight Iraqi insurgents.

This was evident during this month`s Operation Matador, the U.S. offensive near the Syrian border designed to stem the flow of foreign fighters and their weapons into Iraq. For seven days, Marines rumbled through desert villages and fought pitched battles against a surprisingly well-coordinated enemy.

On the first day of the operation, insurgents appeared to be willing to stand their ground and fight the Marines, but U.S. military officials now believe that may have been a tactic to delay U.S. troops from crossing into the Ramana region north of the Euphrates River. This delay, officials said, could have given many of the insurgents time to escape into Syria.

"It`s an extremely frustrating fight," said Maj. Steve White, operations director for the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment. "Fighting these guys is like picking up water. You`re going to lose some every time."

A military news release declared the mission a success, saying that U.S. troops had killed more than 125 insurgents. Nine Marines were killed and 40 were wounded during the operation.

Yet as soon as the operation concluded, the Marines crossed back over the Euphrates River and left no U.S. or Iraqi government presence in the region — generally considered a major mistake in counterinsurgency warfare.

"It`s classically the wrong thing to do," said Kalev Sepp, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who last fall was a counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. general in Iraq. "Sending 1,000 men north of the Euphrates does what? Sometimes these things can be counterproductive, because you just end up shooting things up and then leaving the area."

Military officials in Iraq and Washington said there was little reason to expect that insurgent fighters would not return to the villages.

"The right thing to do would have been to sweep the area with U.S. troops, and hold it with Iraqi troops," said a military official and counterinsurgency expert at the Pentagon who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not an official Pentagon spokesman.

Yet, there were no Iraqi troops to leave in the area. Just one platoon of Iraqi troops is stationed in the far west Al Anbar province, garrisoned at a phosphate plant in the town of Qaim. But those troops were on leave during the week of Operation Matador, taking their paychecks home to their families.

Lt. Col. Christopher Starling, operations officer for the 2nd Marine Regimental Combat Team, said the slow pace at which Iraqi troops were being trained in Al Anbar province meant that the province could be among the last areas in Iraq to put a substantial number of trained Iraqi troops in the field.

The shortage of Iraqi troops in Al Anbar is due largely to a deadly intimidation campaign by insurgents. Iraqi trainees and recruits have been killed en masse in shootings and suicide bombings. Consequently, U.S. and Iraqi commanders have been forced to rely largely on Shiite troops to patrol the Sunni-dominated province.

Iraqi troops could be particularly effective in helping U.S. troops gain a better understanding of the tribal divisions in Al Anbar province. Some U.S. commanders in Al Anbar have expressed frustration that they have not capitalized on recent armed conflicts between insurgent groups.

Earlier this year, Marines began receiving intelligence about insurgent groups and clans in the area who were fighting foreign militants in towns along the Syrian border.

In the days before Operation Matador, Marines posted on the outskirts of Husaybah reported a series of cross-town mortar attacks by opposing insurgent factions.

Al Anbar province "is a region that is in turmoil and, in some regards, in conflict with itself," said Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, who twice since the war in Iraq began has been the top U.S. commander in Al Anbar and who now is director of operations for the Pentagon`s Joint Staff.

U.S. commanders believe they are in a Catch-22: Defeating the insurgency depends on flooding towns and cities with hundreds of reconstruction projects. Yet the persistent insurgent attacks against U.S. troops and civilians, especially in Al Anbar province, prevent reconstruction projects from getting started.

"There are areas where there is relatively little reconstruction because of insurgent activity. You go out to Al Anbar province, for example. It`s pretty grim out there in terms of what has been done versus what could be done," Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, said last week.

U.S. and Iraqi military leaders view Al Anbar province as the insurgency`s supply line. Insurgents freely cross the long, unguarded border with Syria and have taken over a string of small villages along the Euphrates River to stage guerrilla attacks in cities to the east like Ramadi, Mosul and Baghdad.

U.S. military officers in Al Anbar province say that Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi has been sighted in towns that U.S. forces have not visited for as many as six months.

As a spate of deadly car bombings continues throughout Iraq, U.S. officials now believe it is the foreign jihadists — who military officials believe are more likely than former Saddam Hussein loyalists to carry out suicide attacks — who pose the most significant threat to the stability of the new Iraqi government.

"I really want to believe that we are making great progress right now," said the counterinsurgency expert at the Pentagon. "What`s killing us right now, literally and figuratively, is the foreign fighters. We just need to catch a few breaks."

At the same time, the official said he expected it would take years to finish the job.

"If we can win this thing in six years, we`re setting new land speed records," he said.

During Operation Matador, U.S. troops were surprised to find a large insurgent presence in towns south of the Euphrates in western Al Anbar, such as Ubaydi, where the heaviest fighting of the operation took place.

That the Marines were unaware that there were so many insurgents in that city after having dispatched numerous civil affairs missions there indicates the complexity of the region as well as the military`s limited knowledge of the area.

"We`re here and they`re there," said Maj. Todd Waldemar, head of civil affairs for the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit stationed at the Haditha Dam in Al Anbar. "We kind of walk around in a security bubble, so to speak, that makes it kind of hard for us to figure out exactly what`s going on."

*

Mazzetti reported from Washington and Moore from Al Anbar province.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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O`Reilly ist ein Vorbild für alle, deren Wertesystem nachhaltig gestört ist. Und wenn daran glaubt, was er sagt, ist das kein Zeichen von Intelligenz.

EDITORIAL
Perhaps O`Reilly Is Wrong
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-newsw…
May 24, 2005

In a May 17 radio broadcast, telephilosopher Bill O`Reilly fantasized unpleasantly that terrorists might "grab" the Los Angeles Times editorial and opinion editor "out of his little house and … cut his head off." O`Reilly went on, "And maybe when the blade sinks in, he`ll go, `Perhaps O`Reilly was right.` "

What popped O`Reilly`s cork was an editorial one week ago on the Newsweek controversy. The magazine reported, apparently without good evidence, that American guards at the Guantanamo prison for terrorism "detainees" had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. This reportedly led to riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan in which 14 people were killed.

Contrary to the impression you might get by following the story in the U.S. media, the riots were not about the journalists` use of anonymous sources. They were about perceived American contempt for the faith, the culture and ultimately the lives of Muslim Arabs and other dark-skinned people in distant lands.

It is legitimately maddening to Americans that people whom we have liberated from tyranny or the nearby threat of it, at a vast cost in American lives and dollars, should be so spectacularly ungrateful, and should misunderstand us so completely. Why don`t they love us? It doesn`t seem worthy of decapitation to suggest that ghastly stories (not all fabricated by Newsweek) about abuse of prisoners don`t help. Or that American preaching about liberal democratic values might be enhanced by practicing them. For instance, by letting the Gitmo detainees (some totally innocent) have lawyers.

But to O`Reilly, "That`s like saying, `Well, if we`re nicer to the people who want to KILL US, then the other people who want to KILL US will like us more.` "

Where did The Times` editorial page get the idea that winning the war on terrorism depends on persuading societies that breed terrorists that they should like us and adopt our values? Actually, this is not some wooly left-wing notion concocted over a joint during a lesbian wedding reception in Santa Monica. It is the cornerstone of the George Bush presidency, according to Bush himself.

In his State of the Union address in January, for instance, Bush said, "In the long term, the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America…."

O`Reilly should be careful. Any further decapitation fantasies could get him in serious trouble with the Secret Service.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Wie vorhin in den Nachrichten gemeldet wurden, sind 2 zusätzliche Kandidaten, darunter auch Mostafa Moin vom Wächterrat zu den Wahlen zugelassen worden.

May 25, 2005

THE ROVING EYE
Theocracy meets democracy in Iran
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GE25Ak03.html

The Iranian reformist newspaper Mardomsalari nailed it: "These June 17 [presidential] elections are the most important since the beginning of the Islamic republic in 1979. Iranians have the choice of handing victory to former president Ali Akbar Heshemi Rafsanjani, vote for a reformist candidate to pursue the reforms, or allow conservative radicals to take power in all branches of government."

The Iranian election campaign started this week amid major turmoil after the unelected, conservative Guardians Council rejected all but six out of more than 1,000 presidential hopefuls.

The Guardians Council, composed of six ayatollahs and six lawyers, was conceived by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - leader of the Islamic revolution - to supposedly represent the best interests of Iranian public opinion and the constitution. This past weekend the council vetoed all but one reformist candidate, as well as 89 women candidates. The official reason: "Non-respect of Islamic values." The six candidates approved included the favorite, Rafsanjani, a centrist; mild reformer Mehdi Karrubi, a former parliamentary spokesman; and four conservatives (a former chief of police, a former commander of the Guardians of the Revolution, the mayor of Tehran and a former head of the national radio and TV network).

The reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front, whose main candidate was vetoed, immediately threatened to boycott the election. The Guardians Council did the same thing in early 2004, disqualifying more than 2,000 candidates from legislative elections. A widespread election boycott led to conservative control of the majlis (parliament). Voting participation in the February 2004 elections was only 50.57% - the lowest in the country`s history.

This week, though, came a bomb - or the system trying to save itself. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sent a decree to Guardians Council leader Ayatollah Ahmad Janati asking him to review the decision to disqualify popular reformist Mostafa Moin, a former higher education minister, and Vice President Mohsen Mehralizadeh. Moin is in the center of the furor. He is the leading candidate of the reformists, running for the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the largest pro-reform political party, led by Mohammad Reza Khatami, the younger brother of outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, who is barred from serving a third term. The Supreme Leader and the conservative ayatollahs around him sensed they might be defeated by a powerful weapon: absenteeism. Americans may consider a president chosen by roughly half the electorate as a legitimate one. Not the Iranians.

Polarization
The importance of these elections cannot be overstated. They mix with the outcome of the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the so-called EU-3, the foreign ministers of European Union members France, Britain and Germany; Washington`s impatience to drag Iran`s regime to the United Nations Security Council so it can be slapped with sanctions; and insistent rumors of an Israeli air strike against Iran`s nuclear facilities. Rafsanjani is in favor of an "accommodation" with the US, but he is no favorite with Washington`s hawks.

Among the candidates, accepted or rejected, Moin is the only one in favor of continued suspension of uranium enrichment by Iran, so a political/economic agreement can be reached with the EU-3. Iran`s top negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, and the EU-3 ministers are back at the negotiating table for emergency talks this Tuesday in Brussels and this Wednesday in Geneva. If the talks fail, Tehran has warned it will restart uranium reprocessing - which it is entitled to anyway in terms of its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty rights.

Although Rafsanjani departs with an early lead, polls in Tehran suggest none of the candidates will get more than 50% of the vote, and thus preclude a run-off between the top two. Departing president Khatami, the man who coined the "dialogue among civilizations", tried everything in his two consecutive four-year terms to reform the system. But he was ultimately defeated: his two crucial bills to increase presidential powers were repelled by the conservatives.

Safa Haeri of the Paris-based Iranian Press Service (and contributor to Asia Times Online) confirms that "except for personal interference by Khamenei in favor of a certain candidate, namely Ali Larijani, now the leader`s personal representative at the Supreme Council for National Security, Rafsanjani, the chairman of the influential and powerful Expediency Council, is likely to reoccupy the seat he held from 1989 to 1997, if not in the first round, but certainly in the second tour of balloting". As chairman of the Expediency Council, Rafsanjani is already the de facto No 2 in Iran. The council was established by Khomeini in 1988 to mediate between parliament and the Guardians Council. Above it there`s only Supreme Leader Khamenei.

As far as the elections are concerned, polarization is the name of the game. The online opposition paper IranEmrooz, edited by Iranian exiles in Germany, denounces "Islamists trying to legitimate their presence by ... ritual elections that are everything but democratic". Another newspaper close to the reformists says that "in a democratic system, it makes no sense that the Guardians Council may disqualify this or that candidate". On the other side of the fence, government spokesman Abdullah Ramezanzadeh recently said that "thanks to the Imam [Khomeini], Iran could progress economically and become independent from foreign powers". Jomhouri Islami, a newspaper close to the clerics, insists that to vote "is a religious obligation". Independent newspaper Shargh gets closer to the mark than anyone: "The government must not prepare itself for a sweeping conservative victory, but most of all for massive abstention." It`s fair to argue that the ayatollahs gave post-Shah Iran two major assets - education for all and elections. All Iranians have been to school, so they are able to judge things for themselves, much more than under the Shah. As for elections, the ayatollahs had to notice that they were not able to have a democracy by remote control. Khatami`s first victory in 1997 led to a double-headed structure of power: theocracy meets democracy.

Khatami`s reforms may have ultimately failed - critics say the system is anti-democratic and impervious to any improvement - but Iranians at the same time discovered the power of absenteeism. Today, the majority of the population - young, less than 25 years old, and having lived all their lives under the ayatollahs - wants total separation of Shi`ite religion and the state. Moreover, in this last quarter of a century, Iran has lost half of its gross national product, due not only to the endless Iran-Iraq war that raged for nearly a decade in the 1980s, but to the predominance of a bureaucracy preventing the flourishing of foreign trade.

Iranian society is arguably the most dynamic, the most advanced and the most critical in the Muslim world - light years ahead of the youth in the Arab world or in Pakistan, for instance. There is a cultural revolution going on in Iran - against theocracy. The die is cast, and if reformers like Moin are not in the ballot, these elections could yet represent the triumph of civil disobedience.

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

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Die USA bereiten den Bürgerkrieg im Irak vor. In den Sunni-Regionen sollen die Shiiten und Kurden die Aufständigen bekämpfen, in den Shiitischen Gebieten sollen Sunnite dafür eingesetzt werden.

May 25, 2005

US fights Iraq fire with street fighters
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GE25Ak01.html

KARACHI - With the Iraqi resistance showing no signs of wavering and extending its roots deep into the population, the US has realized that to counter this threat it must change its approach.

Asia Times Online has learned that the US, instead of training up a regular professional Iraqi army, will create what in effect will be armed militias, acting under US central command, to take the militias of the resistance on at their own game.

The Iraqi resistance against the presence of foreign forces in the country has had many faces. Initially, the ousted Ba`ath Party`s security committee, members of the Iraqi military and para-military forces were the main drivers.

Later, after many of the top brass were arrested and others were forced to flee, many to Syria - including Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (there are doubts that the former No 2 in Saddam Hussein`s regime died while in Syria) - the resistance lost its central command. Various Islamic groups filled the vacuum, and they have dominated the resistance ever since.

In the meantime, various groups, including former communists, members of the Ba`ath Party and even those who were against the Saddam regime, organized themselves in different European countries. These groups played an important role in adding a political face to the resistance: they sent representatives to various Arab countries and finally succeeded in coordinating their activities with those in the field in Iraq.

Recent meetings of the so-called Higher Committee for National Forces (a grouping of Iraqi resistance bodies) and the 16th Arab National Congress held in Algiers played a pivotal role in building consensus among various Iraqi communist, Islamic, Ba`athist and nationalist groups on several issues, such as the right of Iraqis to defend themselves against foreign aggression and imperialism, and the right of Iraq to demand a political process untainted by occupation and which reflects the uninhibited will of the Iraqi people for a pluralistic and democratic Iraq.

The groups also condemned the continued occupation of Iraq and the establishment of any permanent US bases in the country, the privatization of the Iraqi economy and foreign corporations` unrestricted access to Iraq`s resources.

On this common ground, the central command of the resistance reorganized its activities, a key to which was merging mohallah-level (street-level) Islamic groups scattered in their hundreds across Iraq to work toward a common goal - defeating the occupation. In turn, these militias would co-opt common folk into their struggle, so that, literally, the streets would be alive with resistance.

Aware of this development, the US has accepted that no conventional military force can cope with such a resistance, and therefore similar mohallah-level combat forces are needed.

According to Asia Times Online contacts, these US-backed militias will comprise three main segments - former Kurdish peshmerga (paramilitaries), former members of the Badr Brigade and those former members of the Ba`ath Party and the Iraqi army who were part of the Saddam regime but who have now thrown in their lot with the new Iraqi government.

All three segments have already been equipped with low- and medium-level weapons purchased from various countries, including Pakistan. Military analysts believe the US military in Iraq will use the Kurd and Shi`ite militias to quell the resistance in central and northern Iraq, while in the south the former Ba`athists and old-guard Iraqi soldiers will be used against anti-US Shi`ite groups.

To date, the Iraqi army has only been supplied with small arms - air and armored forces are still in the hands of the US Army - and there is no indication that the US will hand over any of this, or high-tech equipment, to the Iraqis.

Iraq`s future now seems to be in the hands of militias, under the command of the US on the one side and militias under the command of the resistance on the other; reminiscent of wartime Lebanon and Vietnam.

Syed Saleem Shahzad, Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at [e-mail]

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

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Latest Fatality: May 24, 2005
May.05: 55


Iraker: Civilian: 501 Police/Mil: 197 Total: 698

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

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

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When Neo-Cons and Theo-Cons Meet at Armageddon
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052305Y.shtml

Monday 23 May 2005

Will future historians portray George W. Bush as the heroic leader of a new world empire and reborn Christian nation? Or, will they treat him as one of America`s worst presidents ever ?

It all depends on who wins and who loses.

As Winston Churchill cautioned, history is written by the victors, and the current battles have only just begun, whether in Iraq, Iran, or at home. But, even in the early rounds, it would be shortsighted and self-defeating to give Mr. Bush too much credit - or blame - for the direction our country is taking.

With or without his hand at the helm, two areas of concern - religion and oil - now drive our nation`s destiny, and how Americans resolve them will determine who writes the history of our times.

Terrorism falls somewhere down the list, though Mr. Bush, the Congressional GOP, and too many Democrats have handled faith-based and oil-related issues in ways that greatly help Osama bin Laden and his allies.

According to published intelligence leaks, in 2001 we faced only a few thousand terrorists. Today, no one knows how many thousands more suicidal bombers the war in Iraq has helped to recruit. Far worse, terrorists are winning the political support of several hundred million Muslims who do not want "Crusader Christians" to dominate their countries, disrespect their cultures, or control their oil.

Now in TO`s feature column, "The Religious Right - Saints or Subversives?" shows how America is going through a massive Christian revival, and how right-wing religious activists now dominate the GOP.

Former Republican Senator John Danforth, an Episcopalian Minister, eloquently protested the takeover of his party by these theological conservatives, even as current Senate Republicans pack our federal courts with reactionary, "pro-Christian" judges.

Nor will the theo-cons stop with a few judicial victories. Long before Mr. Bush first spoke of his "higher father," they began their campaign to turn America into what they called "a Christian nation." Long after Mr. Bush steps down, they will remain a continuing threat to the Constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state - and to the religious freedom of us all.

Self-righteous and self-serving, the theo-cons have told us where they are heading and how they plan to get there. Whether fighting to force biblical Creationism into public schools or to stop gay marriage and "partial-birth abortions," they will use every supposedly single-issue struggle to subvert the Constitution and impose whatever they think their Bible tells them - and the rest of us - to do.

Islam has its politicized Ayatollahs and Taliban. As Americans, we face their evil twin - our own Christian Nationalists, who threaten our freedom at home while moving heaven and earth to turn a fight against terrorists into Armageddon.

Stopping these hell-bent Christian Nationalists will not be easy. But for freedom-loving Americans to win, the Democratic Party needs to join with Republican moderates to make a clear, uncompromising defense of Constitutional principles.

"Congress shall make no law with respect to the establishment of religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof" means precisely what the authors of the First Amendment meant it to say. No state church. A clear separation of God and government. And - as the Constitution`s chief author James Madison insisted in his native Virginia – no taxpayer funding for faith-based programs.

Pandering to voters with unprincipled half-measures will only diminish American freedom, including the religious and political freedom of those faith-based groups whose unwary leaders are now jumping onto the government gravy train. As true conservatives know better than many of my liberal friends, no government anywhere offers free rides or free gravy.

Beating the Christian Nationalists on the domestic front is also the surest way to weaken their impact on foreign policy and stop them from pushing the United States into an all-out religious Crusade against Islam.

Controlling the World`s Energy

In his indispensable study Blood and Oil, Professor Michael Klare shows how the desire to control petroleum reserves in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf has shaped American policy ever since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Klare also shows how the thirst for oil and natural gas now motivates our global misadventures from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea to Sudan and Venezuela.

Decades before Mr. Bush showed the slightest interest in the wider world, neo-conservatives like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz were honing this imperial energy policy, which goes far beyond securing enough oil for Americans to burn.

Control of global reserves - and the ability to reward or punish rivals who need the oil and natural gas - is for the neo-cons a primary lever to enhance American power over other nations.

To be fair, they did not invent the idea, parts of which reach back at least as far as earlier empire-builders like Teddy Roosevelt, Admiral Alfred Mahan, and their British counterpart, Lord Curzon. The idea of using oil as a lever later shaped America`s conflict with Japan in the run-up to World War II. Even more, it shaped the way Washington kept the Japanese in check after the war.

Perle learned the geo-political uses of oil as a top staff aide to Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, one of the country`s leading energy strategists. The eager young aide worked with Jackson all during the 1970s, when American policy-makers were considering a wide range of responses to OPEC`s new power and the oil crisis it created.

Wolfowitz got his education as as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense during the creation of the Carter Doctrine, which President Jimmy Carter announced in his 1980 State of the Union message. Opening the door to much that has followed, this unilateral edict declared Persian Gulf oil reserves off-limits to domination by any of America`s current or potential rivals.

In their many years of pushing Washington to invade Iraq, the neo-cons consistently emphasized the strategic importance of controlling as much of the world`s energy supplies as possible. Nowhere did they make this clearer than in the 18 February 1992 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance. Its principal authors were Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney`s chief of staff.

Leaked to the press at the time, the classified draft was widely quoted in the New York Times and other newspapers. What Wolfowitz and Libby wrote back then directly addresses two of today`s most pressing questions: Why did the Bush administration invade Iraq? And, why do so few of our foreign policy leaders - Democrats as well as Republicans - now refuse even to consider pulling out our troops and military bases.

Wolfowitz and Libby explained how America would use its political and military muscle to prevent the emergence of any rival super-power, whether Russia, China, or our Western European allies. The United States, said the authors, "must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

To do this, they said, the US "must sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order."

The key mechanism was to provide a steady supply of oil and natural gas, but a supply with America`s hand on the stopcock. "In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region`s oil."

Wolfowitz and Libby wrote the draft just after the first Gulf War, and horrified the elder Bush with their candor. He was especially embarrassed since the leak came before the Pentagon could "scrub" the language and wrap its meaning in euphemism for wider dissemination. The younger Bush and his administration seem to prefer the blunter language.

In their 1992 draft, Wolfowitz and Libby signal the geo-political thinking that led the neo-cons to urge invading Iraq long before 9/11. They explain why Washington is now building as many as 14 permanent military bases there. And they suggest why so few of our foreign policy leaders - whether neo-cons or tough-talking, "muscular" Democrats - will ever give up the Iraqi bases without a fight.

The military infrastructure now in Iraq is there to help protect and expand American control of oil and natural gas throughout the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and now Central Asia as well. And, as most Democratic or Republican policy-makers see it, this expanding control deters other countries from challenging America`s status as "the world`s only remaining super-power."

What, then, of the terrorists?

Osama bin Laden has to be laughing all the way to his latest hidey-hole. When he started his current jihad, he talked mostly of driving the Americans out of his native Saudi Arabia and overthrowing the Saudi royal family. Now, in the eyes of growing numbers of Muslims in a widening arc from the Southern Philippines to Africa, he is defending both radical Islam and most of the world`s oil and natural gas. He has become a modern-day Sala el-Din and an Islamist Leon Trotsky. For a revolutionary, even one as reactionary as bin Laden, it doesn`t get any better than this.

Not so for the United States. Spurred on by super-power addicts seeking to control the world through energy reserves and Christian fanatics eager to please their God, Mr. Bush and the GOP rushed us headlong into a bear-trap. To whatever degree bin Laden meant to provoke such a massive over-reaction, his terror tactics worked. He and his allies now use America`s heavy-handed military presence in Iraq and beyond to move us toward a "Clash of Civilizations" that could tear the world apart.

And how does America`s loyal opposition respond?

Seeing us stuck in Iraq, Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean felt forced to urge us to get stuck in even deeper. "Now that we`re there, we`re there and we can`t get out," he said in a recent speech. "I hope the President is incredibly successful with his policy now."

Given his independence from foreign policy-makers in both parties, Dr. Dean might have no idea of the blank check he has written to those who see control of oil as the key to world power. But, as he will learn, Iraq is only the beginning of an oil-soaked Armageddon that now threatens Iran, and has shown growing disruptions from Saudi Arabia to Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and nuclear-armed Pakistan, our supposed ally.

To get us out of this morass will not be easy. Take that as given. But we have no chance at all unless grassroots activists organize to turn Dr. Dean and the Democratic Party against keeping any American troops or bases in Iraq.

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Tuesday, May 24, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Bring ‘em on: At least 15 civilians killed and at least 20 wounded, at least 8 critically, in double car bomb attack on a tribal gathering at a Sheik’s home in Tal Afar. The gathering was a celebration of the Sheik’s survival of an assassination attempt several days ago. (Note: This South African news story puts the death toll from this attack at 35 with 25 wounded.) At least two people killed and 22 injured, including 11 children, in bombing of Shiite mosque in Mahmudiya. More casualties may be trapped in the rubble.

Bring ‘em on: Six people killed, four wounded in car bombing near a junior high school for girls in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: At least two Iraqis killed and at least eight wounded in car bomb explosion targeting a police patrol in central Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: At least 20 Iraqis holding key government, political or religious posts have been assassinated since the government was formed April 28. The article lists the dead.

Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers killed in car bombing in central Baghdad. Four bodyguards critically wounded in attack on female Shiite legislator’s convoy. Two civilians killed in machine gun attack on the Tal Afar home of the Sheik whose residence was the target of the double car bombing in the first entry above. Street battles are reported raging in Tal Afar and an Iraqi Colonel stated that the city was under terrorist control.

Bring ‘em on: Bradley fighting vehicle destroyed by a bomb in Ramadi. Three US soldiers injured, none severely.

Bring ‘em on: Four US soldiers killed in bombing in Haswa. All were assigned to the 155th Brigade Combat Team, Second Marine Expeditionary Force.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed when gunmen shot him from a passing car. Location appears to be central Baghdad and the incident may have occurred in the aftermath of the bombing that killed three US soldiers listed above.

"Squeeze Play": Thousands of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers poured through Baghdad on Monday, detaining suspected insurgents in house-to-house searches and finding $6 million in $100 bills, the preferred currency for paying insurgent hit men and bomb-makers. (Too bad they didn’t find that 8.8 billion the CPA lost…)

At least 285 suspected insurgents had been detained since Sunday. Bystanders were also apparently caught up in the dragnet, however.

Some Iraqis said that while Operation Squeeze Play took some insurgents off the streets, it angered moderate Iraqis while giving insurgents a friendlier environment in which to carry out attacks.

Raad Mutlek, a Sunni Muslim, was sitting in a candy shop in Baghdad`s Abu Ghraib neighborhood Monday. He was filling in for the shop`s owner, his cousin, who was detained the day before.

"They came here and detained people randomly," Mutlek said. "The families of the innocent people who have been detained will seek revenge."

Not enough boys: The U.S. military`s plan to pacify Iraq has run into trouble in a place where it urgently needs to succeed.

U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad agree that Al Anbar province — the vast desert badlands stretching west from the cities of Fallouja and Ramadi to the lawless region abutting the Syrian border — remains the epicenter of the country`s deadly insurgency.

Yet U.S. troops and military officials in the embattled province said in recent interviews that they have neither enough combat power nor enough Iraqi military support to mount an effective counterinsurgency against an increasingly sophisticated enemy.

"You can`t get all the Marines and train them on a single objective, because usually the objective is bigger than you are," said Maj. Mark Lister, a senior Marine air officer in Al Anbar province. "Basically, we`ve got all the toys, but not enough boys."

Just three battalions of Marines are stationed in the western part of the province, down from four a few months ago. Marine officials in western Al Anbar say that each of those battalions is smaller by one company than last year, meaning there are approximately 2,100 Marines there now, compared with about 3,600 last year.

(This article is well worth reading in its entirety. It clarifies the nature of the conflict the US is waging in this part of Iraq and gives an excellent summation of why the recent Operation Matador was a strategic failure.)


Triangle of death: They have lived side by side for generations, but the small farming communities south of Baghdad are being split apart by a vicious sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias that many Iraqis fear could be a step on the path to civil war.

As politicians in Baghdad struggle to bring the communities back from the brink, fresh accounts are emerging from the fertile area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of the capital of the latest cycle of violence.

The Shias can rightly claim to have taken the brunt of the sectarian violence, which began last year with bombing attacks in packed mosques during one of their main religious festivals. In recent weeks scores of Shia bodies have been discovered near the town of Madaen, in the so-called “Triangle of Death” south of Baghdad. Over the past six months thousands of Shias are thought to have fled the area.

Until recently the Shias did not respond to the provocation, appearing to heed their religious authorities, who said that retaliation could plunge the country into civil war and jeopardise their political victory in January’s elections.

Now Sunnis say that restraint has ended. Last week around 50 bodies of murdered Shias and Sunnis, including 15 Sunni Arabs with links to the Muslim Scholars’ Board, were dumped in Baghdad. They included the body of Sheikh Hassan al-Neimi, a Sunni cleric who had been arrested by men in police uniforms.

Kirkuk: For generations, this oil-rich city was Iraq’s melting pot, where the country’s diverse ethnic and religious groups lived in relative peace.

Today, Kirkuk’s ethnic balance is precarious, threatened both by insurgents wanting to stoke civil war and by Kurds and other long-oppressed groups thirsting for justice and power in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

"It’s a potential flash point," says Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto, commander of U.S. troops in the area stretching from just north of Baghdad to Kirkuk. "But it has to get resolved by the Iraqis. What the heck can we do? We stay out of it."

If Iraq’s new government can pull off a reconciliation here, this city of 850,000 could become a model for ethnic harmony in a country with a history of deep sectarian rivalries. If not, this is where Iraq’s experiment with democracy could start unraveling.

Susceptible to corruption and intimidation: According to the Pentagon, Iraqi forces -- police, army, border patrol and an independent oil-security force -- now total more than 150,000 men and women. Over the past several months, Pentagon officials have maintained that the Iraqi forces are steadily improving and growing in numbers -- and the top brass has talked up the prospect of drawing down U.S. troops in significant numbers by this summer, after handing off much of the responsibility for securing the country to the Iraqis.

But the last month`s eruption of insurgent violence has underscored the weaknesses of the nascent security forces and cast into doubt Pentagon plans to bring U.S. troops home. U.S. generals themselves warned late last week that America`s involvement in Iraq "could still fail."

Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American officer in the Middle East, pointed in particular to the Iraqi police forces, who he said lack ``sophistication, chain of command, [and] cohesion of leadership," and are susceptible to corruption and intimidation. ``I don`t know how much I would say time-wise they`re behind, but they are behind,`` he said, according to the Associated Press.

Some outside military experts -- as well as numerous U.S. soldiers who`ve worked side by side with the Iraqis, and with whom I patrolled in Iraq between January and May of this year -- don`t foresee handing over responsibility to the Iraqis anytime soon.

"I would not expect to see a significant draw-down [of U.S. troops] prior to 2007, absent a significant falloff in the insurgency, which is not a prospect at the moment," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org in Washington. "Restoring Iraq to military self-sufficiency will require at least a decade," he says. "For that reason alone, Iraq will remain an American protectorate well into the next decade."

Cat eaters: The warriors of Iraq`s new army excel at wearing balaclavas, eating raw cat and driving into battle at hair-raising speeds.

The troops on the front line of the campaign to crush the country`s insurgency roared into action on the fringes of the "Sunni Triangle" recently in a convoy of pick-up trucks. The vehicles` speedometers rarely dipped below 80mph.

"We go fast, they not hit us. No need to be worried. Iraqi soldiers are very brave," boasted Capt Haidar, although not brave enough himself to give anything other than his first name. "I am special forces," he said. "To finish training we must catch a wild rabbit or cat with our hands, kill it with our hands and then eat it raw. I have eaten five cats. See how strong is the Iraqi soldier."

Catching, skinning and eating small mammals are the least of the skills that the captain and the men under his command must master if, as the United States army hopes, they are to assume the main burden of the struggle against the insurgents by the end of this year.

The US military plans, slowly but inexorably, to disappear into its fortified bases, emerging only when needed to provide assistance.

Landing more and more work on the Iraqis will require intensive training and many more unlikely partnerships such as the one between Capt Haidar and his commander, a veteran of Saddam Hussein`s army.

It also puts Iraq`s 57,000 soldiers even more at risk from revenge attacks by insurgents and their accomplices.

Goodbye forever: Evidence of how quickly and irretrievably a country can be stripped of its cultural heritage came with the Iraq war in 2003.

The latest figures, presented to the art crime conference yesterday by John Curtis of the British Museum, suggested that half of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced.

About 4,000 of the objects taken from the museum had been recovered in Iraq. But illustrating the international demand for such antiquities, Dr Curtis said around 1,000 had been confiscated in the US, 500 pieces had been impounded in France, 250 in Switzerland and 200 or so in Jordan.

Other artefacts have been retrieved from surrounding countries such as Syria, Kuwait, Iran and Turkey. None of these objects has yet been sent back to Iraq.

Other items had been destroyed or stolen from enormously important archaeological sites such as those at Nimrud and Babylon. "Some of them resemble minefields there are so many holes," Dr Curtis said.

But the schools! We never mention the schools!: Since they arrived in January, many of the 3,000 National Guard troops from Texas have been instrumental in monitoring the reconstruction of elementary and intermediate schools throughout southern Iraq.

"Every one of those kids greet us with smiles," Bentley said. "It`s very rewarding to see that."

Hundreds of schoolhouses have been damaged by the war. Thousands of school children have been left with few school supplies.

The mission of helping rebuild the Iraqi school system is drawing help from relatives and friends of the troops back in Texas, where dozens of backpacks and school supplies have been collected and shipped to southern Iraq.

The troops have had to start from scratch. Dirt floors are common in many schoolhouses. Straw roofs cover several schools, providing little protection from the elements. Students are packed in classrooms with no chalkboards or desks.

But working with the Iraqi Ministry of Education and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the soldiers have helped oversee the construction of two primary schools in villages near the Tallil Air Base. One was in Alzebn and the other in Al Kenanah.

Today in Syria

Growing strains: Syria has halted military and intelligence cooperation with the United States, its ambassador to Washington said in an interview, in a sign of growing strains between the two nations over the insurgency in Iraq.

The ambassador, Imad Moustapha, said in the interview on Friday at the Syrian Embassy here that his country had, in the last 10 days, "severed all links" with the United States military and Central Intelligence Agency because of what he called unjust American allegations. The Bush administration has complained bitterly that Syria is not doing enough to halt the flow of men and money to the insurgency in Iraq.

Mr. Moustapha said he believed that the Bush administration had decided "to escalate the situation with Syria" despite steps the Syrians have taken against the insurgents in Iraq, and despite the withdrawal in recent weeks of Syrian troops from Lebanon, in response to international demands.

He said American complaints had been renewed since February, when a half-brother of Saddam Hussein, who was once the widely feared head of Iraq`s two most powerful security agencies, was handed over to the Iraqi authorities after being captured in Syria along with several lieutenants. The renewal of complaints caused Syria to abandon the idea of providing further help, he said.

"We thought, why should we continue to cooperate?" he said.

A step away: U.S. sanctions against Syria are a step away from military action, a U.S. congressman said at the World Economic Forum in Jordan. "Sanctions are one step below a military confrontation, and sanctions are preferable to military confrontation, frankly," said U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut, during a panel discussion.

When a Syrian lawyer complained to Shays that the U.S. uses "only the stick" with Syria, Shays responded bluntly that the U.S. has "huge problems" with Damascus.

These problems center on the accusation that Syria is aiding the insurgency in Iraq, an increasingly prominent issue after nine marines died earlier this month in an offensive along the Syrian border.

Further stoking the flames, the U.S. said last week that lieutenants of Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi held a secret meeting in Syria last month, which Al-Qaeda denies.

US Military News

TBI: Among surviving soldiers wounded in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) appears to account for a larger proportion of casualties than it has in other recent U.S. wars. According to the Joint Theater Trauma Registry, compiled by the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, 22 percent of the wounded soldiers from these conflicts who have passed through the military`s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany had injuries to the head, face, or neck. This percentage can serve as a rough estimate of the fraction who have TBI, according to Deborah L. Warden, a neurologist and psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who is the national director of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC). Warden said the true proportion is probably higher, since some cases of closed brain injury are not diagnosed promptly.

In the Vietnam War, by contrast, 12 to 14 percent of all combat casualties had a brain injury, and an additional 2 to 4 percent had a brain injury plus a lethal wound to the chest or abdomen, according to Ronald Bellamy, former editor of the Textbooks of Military Medicine, published by the Office of the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army. Bellamy said that because mortality from brain injuries among U.S. combatants in Vietnam was 75 percent or greater, soldiers with brain injuries made up only a small fraction of the casualties treated in hospitals.

Kevlar body armor and helmets are one reason for the high proportion of TBIs among soldiers wounded in the current conflicts. By effectively shielding the wearer from bullets and shrapnel, the protective gear has improved overall survival rates, and Kevlar helmets have reduced the frequency of penetrating head injuries. However, the helmets cannot completely protect the face, head, and neck, nor do they prevent the kind of closed brain injuries often produced by blasts. As insurgents continue to attack U.S. troops in Iraq, most brain injuries are being caused by IEDs, and closed brain injuries outnumber penetrating ones among patients seen at Walter Reed, where more than 450 patients with TBI were treated between January 2003 and February 2005. All admitted patients who have been exposed to a blast are routinely evaluated for brain injury; 59 percent of them have been given a diagnosis of TBI, according to Warden. Of these injuries, 56 percent are considered moderate or severe, and 44 percent are mild.

Deserter: In March 2004, the Army had 318,533 soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. That same year, it also had a smaller number on its books: 2,479 deserters.


American Media

Instrument of war: The media, in the modern era, are indisputably an instrument of war. This is because winning modern wars is as much dependent on carrying domestic and international public opinion as it is on defeating the enemy on the battlefield. And it remains true regardless of the aspirations of many journalists to give an impartial and balanced assessment of conflict.

The experience of the US military in the post-Cold War world demonstrates that victory on the battlefield is seldom as simple as defeating the enemy by force of arms. From Somalia and Haiti through Kosovo and Afghanistan, success has been defined in political, rather than military, terms.

Today’s military commanders stand to gain more than ever before from controlling the media and shaping their output. The laws and conventions of war, however, do not adequately reflect the critical role that the media play in shaping the political outcome of conflicts. International humanitarian law requires that media members are afforded the rights of civilians; the question is whether this is sustainable when the exigencies of warfighting suggest that controlling the media is essential.

Bad PR: It was a damaging week for American public relations in the Arab world.

What started with deadly riots over allegations that US interrogators flushed the Koran ended with leaked photos of Saddam Hussein in his underwear.

To The New York Post, which first published the pictures on Friday along with its sister publication The Sun of Britain, the photographs were a chance to emphasis Mr. Hussein`s crimes and indulge in public humiliation of the former strongman. The Sun and The Post say a US military source gave them the pictures.

But for the most of the Arab press the pictures are being treated as a small piece in an overall pattern of alleged American violations of prisoners` rights. And as confirmation, to many, of US contempt for Arabs and Islam.

Cowards: A Washington Post article exposing the specific details of several pre-war doubts by Bush Administration aides and anlaysts in the lead-up to war ran on page A1 in the early Saturday editions of WaPo`s Sunday paper. By Sunday morning, however, the story had its headlined softened and was subsequently buried on page A26.

The story, by WaPo staff writer Walter Pincus, details the doubts of the administration`s own intelligence analysts concerning WMD, Munitions Plants and Saddam Hussein`s Unmanned Aerial Vehicles program, all of which were widely trumpeted as justifications for going to war by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and others within the administration during the build-up to the War on Iraq.

Pincus` Page 1 item, which originally ran in Saturday afternoon editions of the Sunday paper and on the front page of the WaPo website was headlined "More Evidence of Bush Aide`s Doubts on Iraq -- Analysts Questioned Most Intelligence".

By Sunday, however, the article had been pushed back to page 26 with the softer headline, "Prewar Findings Worried Analysts".


Commentary

Opinion: President Bush said the other day that the world should see his administration`s handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as a model of transparency and accountability. He said those responsible were being systematically punished, regardless of rank. It made for a nice Oval Office photo-op on a Friday morning. Unfortunately, none of it is true.

The administration has provided nothing remotely like a full and honest accounting of the extent of the abuses at American prison camps in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It has withheld internal reports and stonewalled external inquiries, while clinging to the fiction that the abuse was confined to isolated acts, like the sadistic behavior of one night crew in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib. The administration has prevented any serious investigation of policy makers at the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon by orchestrating official probes so that none could come even close to the central question of how the prison policies were formulated and how they led to the abuses.

Comment: Many Americans who are shocked by the war in Iraq take comfort in viewing it as a mistake, an aberration or a special case rather than as part of a larger strategy. I have to say that nothing in the official documents and policy statements of this administration supports this view. On the contrary, the National Defense Strategy begins "America is a nation at war" and describes the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and against terrorism as components of a long-term offensive global war. The purpose of this war is alluded to only in terms of mystifications like "freedom, democracy and economic opportunity," and analysis of root causes or actual goals is scrupulously avoided. There is no mention of the conflict between U.S. interests and the aspirations of other peoples that lies at the heart of the U.S. foreign policy crisis, nor of its economic or historical roots in past U.S. policy. And, even though one could easily mistake a map of U.S. military deployments and declared "threats" for a map of the world`s oil fields, the words "oil" and "petroleum" do not appear in these documents.

The gamble this administration has taken in Iraq pales by comparison to the long-term one that they are taking by staking the future of our country on the illegitimate exercise of military power to secure the Earth`s dwindling resources in the 21st century. This policy requires not just waging and winning serial wars of aggression, but somehow doing so without triggering escalating disruptions in the supply and distribution of the commodities we are fighting over. This war-weary world is only too familiar with this type of international behavior and the United States has previously led efforts to establish a "permanent structure of peace," as President Roosevelt called it, based on international treaties and institutions, collective security and a fundamental commitment to peace.

The current illegitimate policy is intertwined with our government`s huge investment in military power and its rejection of alternatives to the use of that power as the final arbiter of international problems. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and I would add that you and your hammer become a real danger to everyone, including yourself.

Commendation

Local story: Renton, WA, soldier who suffered traumatic brain injury in a roadside bombing in Fallujah a year ago has recovered sufficiently to receive his Purple Heart.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Omro, WI, Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Massillon, OH, soldier killed in Mosul.

Local story: Jackson Township, OH, Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Three graduates of Hamilton High School, Hamilton, OH, who were killed in Iraq will be remembered at a ceremony at the High School.


Many thanks to alert reader go long into the day who provided many of today`s links.

# posted by matt : 8:43 AM

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The Independent Institute

The Harvest of Messianic Foreign Policy: Anti-U.S. Radical Islam
May 23, 2005
Ivan Eland
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1514

An interventionist U.S. foreign policy, fueled by the Bush administration’s messianic zeal to make the world more democratic, has contributed to a dramatic rise in radical political Islam around the world. In fact, the current administration’s campaign is even more ambitious than Woodrow Wilson’s naïve policy of “making the world safe for democracy.” Provided that the Bush administration is actually sincere about its rhetoric (which is questionable given its mild criticism of despotic allies, such as the governments of Egypt and Uzbekistan, which have recently cracked down on dissidents or simply shot them en masse), both the Wilson and Bush policies derive from a virulent strain of American “exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is special among the nations of the world.

Some evangelical Christians (during Wilson’s time and now), seem to think that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation” and that the world would be better off if more foreign governments resembled the U.S. government. This idea goes far beyond the proven empirical fact that most of the U.S. population are self-described Christians. Questioning orthodox views of American history, many such evangelicals believe that the nation’s founders imbued the new government as a theocracy with Christian principles.

In fact, some of the nation’s key founders were not really Christian, but Deists, and the U.S. Constitution does not mention the word “God”—on purpose. For example, Thomas Jefferson had bitter disputes with the organized church and was a vociferous advocate of the separation of church and state. Jefferson, James Madison, and other founders correctly believed that state involvement in religion corrupts both government and faith. More important, if the government does not endorse or support any one religion or denomination, citizens can freely practice any form of faith without fear of government suppression or oppression.

Unfortunately, the messianic zeal of some evangelical Christians to convert others began being misdirected to infuse official U.S. foreign policy beginning in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War at the turn of the last century. President William McKinley wanted to use armed force to convert Filipinos to “Christianity”—even though most of them were already Catholics. Today, the idea that Americans are the “chosen people” who need to use force to make others more like themselves has morphed into the more secularly appealing notion of spreading U.S.-style democracy around the Middle East and the world. Instead of “saving” foreign peoples with “fire and brimstone” religion, the U.S. government is now “saving” them with democracy.

Even many liberals, not realizing the “evangelical” roots of Wilsonianism, have embraced the idealistic policy. This bi-partisan consensus on spreading democracy at gunpoint would have mortified the nation’s founders. First, almost all of the founders—including even Alexander Hamilton, an advocate of government activism—believed that meddling in other countries’ business through wars and military interventions would ultimately destroy our own unique experiment with liberty here at home. Second, the founders were more concerned, correctly, about individual rights and liberty and would view the modern focus on the majoritarian rule of pure democracy as tyrannical and hence dangerous to those liberties.

Democracy alone does not guarantee individual liberties. Ironically, any legitimate election in Egypt or Saudi Arabia—as urged by the Bush administration—could very well elect undemocratic fundamentalist Islamic parties that could usurp individual liberties by instituting strict Islamic law. But then perhaps this would be only an Islamic version of the ultimate vision that some misguided evangelical Christians have for religion in American governance.

It is the interventionist U.S. foreign policy that has contributed to the rise of radical political Islam in the first place. Despite its idealistic and messianic Wilsonian rhetoric throughout the years, the U.S. government has routinely propped up despots in the Islamic world that were perceived as friendly to U.S. interests. The only dissent allowed by these local autocrats was in the mosques. Thus, radical Islamists gained public legitimacy in these countries as the only force opposing the corrupt U.S.-backed regimes. Thus, the United States now faces anti-U.S. radical Islamic movements around the world that spawn terrorists. In 1978, one such anti-U.S. movement got control of the levers of power in Iran and created a theocratic Islamic state. In the 1990s, another, the Taliban, got control of the Afghan government and harbored terrorists that successfully conducted the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history on September 11, 2001—both examples of the blowback from messianic U.S. foreign policy.

The United States has made a great error in conducting a messianic, albeit often hypocritical, campaign to convert the world to “democratic” government using an interventionist foreign policy. Instead, U.S. policy makers should spend more time defending liberty at home from al Qaeda and other real threats and becoming a peaceful refuge of human rights for the world to emulate—the kind of American exceptionalism that the founders originally intended.
Ivan Eland is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute, Director of the Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty, and author of the books The Empire Has No Clothes, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

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Latest Fatality: May 24, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 1825 , US: 1645 , May.05: 61


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

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Dahr Jamail`s Iraq Dispatches

May 22, 2005
Daily Life in Baghdad, from Afar
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000248.…

20-22 May 2005

It’s coming apart at the seams now in Iraq. We saw on the news today that members of the Mehdi Army in the south, the militia of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, exchanged gunfire with members of the ING (Iraqi National Guard) who in the south are primarily, if not entirely composed of members of the Badr Army, also a Shia group. So now we have Shia fighting Shia.

Meanwhile in Baghdad, things are just as bad. Abu Talat, my friend and interpreter, was speaking with his family who live in the al-Adhamiya district of the capital city. Just across the Tigris River from Adhamiya, which is predominantly Sunni, is the predominantly Shia Khadamiyah neighborhood.

A car bomb detonated inside Khadamiyah which killed at least one ING, so people in that area began firing guns across the Tigris into Adhamiyah. According to two sources in Adhamiyah, they confirmed there was heavy damage to several houses-broken windows, bullet pockmarked walls, etc. When people inside Adhamiyah began returning fire, a US warplane bombed a small mosque on the Adhamiyah side of the Tigris, for yet unknown reasons.

Abu Talat was talking via IM with his wife as she nearly fainted because bombs and gunfire were so near their home.

“What can I do,” Abu Talat asked me from a nearby computer at an internet café, “My family is in great danger and what can I do to help them?”

I stared at him dumbly…there was no response.

I helped find phone numbers of friends and other family members of his around Baghdad to try to go check on his family. He called them five times, constantly monitoring their situation while he was crying. Between calls he set the phone down to hold his head in his hands.

Abu Talat later spoke with his sister, who informed him that Iraqi soldiers were raiding houses in her neighborhood and detaining men of “fighting age,” which if we go by the US military definition of such when they do home raids, means men roughly between the ages of 15-50 years.

“They almost took my nephew,” Abu Talat told me in frustration, “But thanks to his father telling them that his son is a doctor and never leaves the home nowadays, they let him be.”

Abu Talat had his two young sons go with his wife over to a relatives home so they would not be detained. Although one of his sons, Ahmed, is merely 14 years old. Ahmed is a soft-spoken, gentle boy who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

When I was in Baghdad in February, one day we were taking tea in the home of Abu Talat. Ahmed came out and began shining the shoes of his father.

“You don’t need to do this in front of Dahr,” said Abu Talat to his youngest son.

“You are my father, and I am your son,” replied Ahmed, “I wish to shine your shoes. Dahr understands that this is what a son does for his father.”

Abu Talat beamed and held up his hands with a huge smile on his face.

My friend Aisha who is here, also an Iraqi, has a friend who lives in Adhamiyah.

“He just left the day before this all happened to bring his sick son to Amman for cancer treatment,” she tells me while we sit under palm trees and a nearly full moon later that evening while having dinner with her mother.

Her friend believes his son has DU poisoning.

“He learned that one of the rooms of his home was destroyed by a missile shot from an American helicopter,” she added while shaking her head.

Things quieted down in Baghdad after the events of the 20th, as well as the next day, relatively.

However, today Abu Talat came over to me in a panic and asked for Ahmed’s mobile number.

“He’s just been shot at,” he tells me as I feel the panic with my friend and begin finding the number of his son.

Ahmed was walking down the street when two men demanded his ring and his mobile. When Ahmed started yelling “Thieves, Thieves,” they kicked him to the groun and shot their pistols over his head. At gunpoint, the two men commenced to loot him.

Abu Talat received the information from his oldest son, then called home to find that his youngest son was home crying, but alright.

“He has his exams tomorrow and now he is sleeping,” Abu Talat explains with tears in his eyes, “He is alright but terribly shaken.”

This is the life in Baghdad today. This is the life of having a dear friend whose family is living in peril and his attempts to remain in contact with them from Amman. This is one family in a city of 5.5 million Iraqis, struggling to survive the brutal, chaotic, lawlessness caused by the Anglo-American occupation that has destroyed their country.

Posted by Dahr_Jamail at May 22, 2005 12:14 PM

©2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.

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Tomgram: Graduation Day with Howard Zinn
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2728


It`s a beautiful day in May. The sun is streaming down; the birds are on their migration paths north; the first day lilies are just breaking into bloom -- and students are gathering for their graduation ceremonies on an afternoon when everything seems just right in a world where so much seems so wrong. These are the students who began their college lives within weeks, possibly days, even hours of that moment when, on September 11, 2001, the first hijacked plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. Certainly they -- above all classes of recent times -- have the right to peer into a murky future and wonder, with a certain trepidation, what`s in store for them. Through no fault of their own, they have earned the right to discouragement, even perhaps despair.

And yet, as our commencement speaker steps to the podium, that sun is shining brightly enough to imagine the world begun anew -- and don`t we all, these students at the end of their college careers and the rest of us, don`t we all have the right to graduate, all those of us who, whatever our ages, come from the class of 9/11?

So all of you, settle into your chairs, take off your hats, feel the comforting heat of that sun beating down, and consider the words of Howard Zinn as he urges the students of Spelman College, not to be discouraged, not to despair, but to enter the world with their heads held high, imagining what each of them might do for him or herself -- and for the rest of us.
Tom

Against Discouragement
By Howard Zinn

[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day -- the students graduating today. It`s a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is at war -- still another war, war after war -- and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this country, and homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.

But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must not be discouraged.

I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in office, was looking the other way while black people were beaten and killed and denied the opportunity to vote. So black people in the South decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do -- enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said: The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That`s when democracy came alive.

I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was bombing the villages of Vietnam -- bombing schools and hospitals and killing ordinary people in huge numbers -- it looked hopeless to try to stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to end.

The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies. I know you have practical things to do -- to get jobs and get married and have children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.

Remember Tolstoy`s story, "The Death of Ivan Illych." A man on his deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that he must write against war and militarism.

My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself -- whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.

Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border into the United States. This was horrifying to me -- the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call "civilization," we have carved up what we claim is one world into two hundred artificially created entities we call "nations" and are ready to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to those in power, deadly for those out of power.

Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But if you know some history you know that`s not true. If you know some history, you know we massacred Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico, sent armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge numbers of people, and we did not bring them democracy or liberty. We did not go into Vietnam to bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop the drug trade; we did not invade Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims were the aims of all the other empires of world history -- more profit for corporations, more power for politicians.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the black poets especially are less enthralled with the virtues of American "liberty" and "democracy," their people having enjoyed so little of it. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:

You really haven`t been a virgin for so long.
It`s ludicrous to keep up the pretext…

You`ve slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you`ve taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows…

Being one of the world`s big vampires,
Why don`t you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a "good war," but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.

My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought up in a world without war. It we want a world in which the people of all countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are considered as our children, then war -- in which children are always the greatest casualties -- cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.

I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from 1956 to 1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those years have remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and our two children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white people would ask: How is it to be living in the black community? It was hard to explain. But we knew this -- that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as if we were in alien territory, and when we came back to the Spelman campus, we felt that we were at home.

Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the most educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned from me. Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson. I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point -- that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us -- of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality -- are human beings and should cherish one another.

I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can read all about that in Harry Lefever`s book Undaunted by the Fight. One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was my student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested in the Atlanta sit-ins, came to our house on campus to show us a petition she was about to put on the bulletin board of her dormitory. The heading on the petition epitomized the transformation taking place at Spelman College. Marian had written on top of the petition: "Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please Sign Below."

My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you. There are wonderful people, black and white, who are models. I don`t mean African- Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work for peace and justice.

Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer`s family in Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first published poems, she wrote:

It is true--
I`ve always loved
the daring
ones
Like the black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to
swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.

I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break down barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you can -- you don`t have to do something heroic, just something, to join with millions of others who will just do something, because all of those somethings, at certain points in history, come together, and make the world better.

That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn`t do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn`t do what black people wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap for the sun -- you may not reach it, but at least you will get off the ground.

By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap. My hope for you is a good life.

Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just published Voices of a People`s History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of the international best-selling A People`s History of the United States.

Copyright 2005 Howard Zinn


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Diese `Home prices bubble` wird als Gefahr für die US-Wirtschaft angesehen!

May 25, 2005
Steep Rise in Prices for Homes Adds to Worry About a Bubble
By DAVID LEONHARDT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/business/25home.html?

Home prices rose more quickly over the last year than at any point since 1980, a national group of Realtors reported yesterday, raising new questions about whether some local housing markets may be turning into bubbles destined to burst.

With mortgage rates still low and job growth accelerating, the real estate market is defying yet another round of predictions that it was on the verge of cooling. The number of homes sold also jumped in April, after having been flat for almost a year.

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Nationwide, the median price for sales of existing homes, which does not factor in newly built ones, rose to $206,000 last month, up 15.1 percent over the last year and breaking the $200,000 level for the first time, the National Association of Realtors said. Adjusted for inflation, the median price - the point at which half cost more and half cost less - has increased more than a third since 2000.

"We`ve had robust markets before," said Maurice J. Veissi, the president of a real estate agency in Miami, who has been a broker for 30 years. "But this one is so much broader and deeper."

Even before this surge, housing prices had risen more steeply over the last 10 years than during any such period since World War II. A growing number of economists worry that real estate is to this decade what technology stocks were to the 1990`s, with many people assuming that home values will rise forever.

Over all, home prices have never fallen by a significant amount, and Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said on Friday that a national drop in price remained unlikely. But they have sometimes fallen sharply in certain locations, including New York and Los Angeles, and Mr. Greenspan, in his strongest warning to date, stated that some metropolitan areas were clearly showing signs of "froth."

Having been sanguine about real estate in recent years, Mr. Greenspan began to change his tone in March, when he cited some analysts` concern that the housing market might "implode."

Prices continue to rise most rapidly in the places where they are already highest, including Florida, the Boston-Washington corridor and along the West Coast. In the late 1980`s, a typical house in San Diego cost about as much as two typical houses in Syracuse, according to the Realtors` association; today, someone could buy six Syracuse houses for the price of one in San Diego.

Prices have jumped most sharply over the last year in the West - up 21 percent in April from a year earlier, compared with an increase of 14 percent in the calendar year 2004. Price increases also accelerated in the Midwest, to almost 13 percent, while they remained roughly similar in the Northeast at 16 percent, and the South, where they are up about 8 percent compared with a year earlier.

In a separate report, the Census Bureau said Tuesday that the percentage of homes worth at least a million dollars had almost doubled from 2000 to 2003. California had the highest share of million-dollar homes in 2003, with more than 4 percent valued above that amount. It was followed by Connecticut; Washington, D.C.; Massachusetts; and New York, where an estimated 2.1 percent of the homes were valued at more than $1 million. Nationally, 1 percent are worth more than that.
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"There`s clearly speculative excess going on," said Joshua Shapiro, the chief United States economist at MFR Inc., an economic research group in New York. "A lot of people view real estate as a can`t lose."

Until the April surge, the overall housing market had seemed to have reached a plateau. Economists, even some working for real estate lobbying groups, predicted that sales would decline a little in 2005 and prices would rise more modestly.

But even as the Fed has steadily lifted its benchmark short-term interest rate, mortgage rates have remained low. The average interest rate for a 30-year fixed loan is now 5.71 percent, down from 6.30 percent a year ago, according to Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage buyer.

Mortgage rates are closely tied to the market for long-term government bonds, which are benefiting from purchases by foreign governments, particularly in Asia, that continue to buy Treasury bonds, as well as from investors looking for a haven from risky corporate securities.

As the economy has gained strength this year, the still low rates and creative financing arrangements appear to have wooed a new group of homebuyers into the market. Some are trading up to larger houses, while others are buying a vacation homes or putting money into real estate simply as an investment.

"Mortgage rates are doing this," said David A. Lereah, chief economist of the Realtors` association. "They`re near historic lows."

The number of existing homes that changed hands in April increased 4.5 percent, the biggest monthly gain since early 2004. Sales of condominiums, particularly popular among real estate speculators, rose faster than sales of free-standing homes. Condo prices rose faster, too.

To economists worried about a bubble, the growing gap between house prices and almost everything else - rents, incomes, population growth - is the surest sign of trouble. A typical apartment, for example, costs less to rent than it did five years ago, taking inflation into account, according to the National Real Estate Index, which is published by Global Real Analytics, a research company based in San Francisco.

The last time that house prices increased more than 15 percent over a 12-month period was in 1980, according to the Realtors` group. But overall inflation was also high at the time, helping to drive home values higher as well. Inflation has been modest in recent years.

Mr. Shapiro of MFR said that even a moderate rise in mortgage rates now had the potential to cause a price decline in some expensive markets. A rate increase would change the calculation for people buying residential real estate as an investment, he said, and could make other buyers realize that the recent price jumps could not continue.

But other economists predict that powerful demographic forces will keep prices increasing in most of the country. Many baby boomers are buying second homes, and their children - like many immigrants who have arrived in the last generation - are destined, in this view, to buy their first, continuing to stoke demand.

Construction companies have also avoided the kind of overbuilding that plagued some regions during the real estate downturn of the early 1990`s. Fewer than 2.5 million homes remained on the market in April, equal to only about four months` worth of home sales, and that is near a record low.

"Obviously, there are some local bubbles," said Mr. Lereah, of the Realtors` group, who called last month`s price increase unsustainable. "But I tend to think that with most of the bubbles, the air will come out slowly, rather than popping."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 24, 2005
Pentagon report to portray China as emerging rival
By FT.COM
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT20050524_16…

The Pentagon is preparing to release a report on the Chinese military that warns the US that it should take more seriously the possibility that China might emerge as a strategic rival to the US, according to a senior government official.

The report has generated controversy in the Bush administration because of earlier drafts that concerned National Security Council officials by painting what they saw as an overly antagonistic picture of China, according to two people with knowledge of the report.

There were also concerns that the report could complicate US efforts to work with China to encourage North Korea to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear programme.

Late on Tuesday a senior government official said the controversy did not concern content but only its "presentation".

He said it was important to emphasise that the report presented a "range of outcomes" that could materialise along with China`s economic growth.

President George W. Bush came to office in 2001 calling China a "strategic competitor" rather than a "strategic partner", the term favoured by the Clinton administration.

But US-China relations have improved markedly since the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the US as China has co-operated in the US "war on terror".

Two sources said the report would mention "assassin`s mace" strategies a term employed during China`s warring-states period that referred to secret weapons and strategies used to deceive and defeat enemies quickly which the People`s Liberation Army could be developing for use against Taiwan.

The report is expected to emphasise "known unknowns" including the lack of US knowledge about the actual size of theChinese defence budget and its future military strategy.

The language is an attempt to emphasise that the US should not acceptat face value China`sstatements that it intendsto emerge as a peaceful power.

One source defended the original report, saying the Pentagon was simply responding to congressional pressure. He said Duncan Hunter, the chairman of the House armed services committee, and China hawks on the Senate armed services committee were concerned that previous reports had been too soft in assessing China`s future strategies.

In recent months, senior US officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and Porter Goss, the Central Intelligence Agency director, have voiced concerns about the rapidly expanding Chinese military.

The administration has also criticised China`s new anti-secession law, which compels the military to attack Taiwan if it appears to be moving towards independence.

* © Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005.

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May 25, 2005
C.E.O.`s, M.I.A.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/opinion/25friedman.html

After six weeks of being a foreign correspondent traveling around America, the biggest question I have come home with is not "What`s the matter with Kansas?" but rather, "What`s the matter with big business?"

America faces a huge set of challenges if it is going to retain its competitive edge. As a nation, we have a mounting education deficit, energy deficit, budget deficit, health care deficit and ambition deficit. The administration is in denial on this, and Congress is off on Mars. And yet, when I look around for the group that has both the power and interest in seeing America remain globally focused and competitive - America`s business leaders - they seem to be missing in action. I am not worried about the rise of the cultural conservatives. I am worried about the disappearance of an internationalist, pro-American business elite.

Is there any company in America that should be more involved in lobbying for some form of national health coverage than General Motors, which is being strangled by its health care costs? Is there any group of companies that should have been picketing the White House more than our high-tech firms, after the Bush team cut the National Science Foundation budget by $100 million in 2005 and in 2006 has proposed shrinking the Department of Energy science programs and basic and applied research in the Department of Defense - key sources of innovation?

Is there any constituency that should be clamoring for a sane energy policy more than U.S. industry? Is there any group that should be mobilizing voters to lobby Congress to pass the Caribbean Free Trade Agreement and complete the Doha round more than U.S. multinationals? Should anyone be more concerned about the fiscally reckless deficits we are leaving our children than Wall Street?

Yet, with a few admirable exceptions, American business has not gotten out front on these issues. In part, this is because boardrooms tend to be culturally Republican - both uncomfortable and a little afraid to challenge this administration. In part, this is because of the post-Enron keep-your-head-down effect. And in part, this is because in today`s flatter world, many key U.S. companies now make most of their profits abroad and can increasingly recruit the best talent in the world today without ever hiring another American.

So with business with its head in the clouds, labor with its head in the sand, the administration focused on terrorism and Congress catering to people who think "intelligent design" is something done by God and not by Intel, it`s not surprising that "we don`t have a strategy for making America competitive in the 21st century - a century of three billion new capitalists," as Clyde Prestowitz put it. He is the author of a smart new book about the rise of China and India, called, appropriately, "Three Billion New Capitalists."

If we don`t get our act together, this will affect not just our economy, but also our power. America has just completed the most sweeping transformation of its national security establishment since 1947. "Unfortunately, the entire restructuring has been oriented toward combating one threat - terrorism," said David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment scholar who has just published a timely and important new book, "Running the World," about the U.S. National Security Council.

"This is dramatically different from what was done in the wake of World War II, when, in addition to creating the N.S.C., Department of Defense, Air Force and C.I.A., we also created the U.N., I.M.F., World Bank, conducted the Marshall Plan, rebuilt Japan and recognized that domestic growth was the most important wellspring of our national security."

That domestic strength made us both feared and attractive. Remember: America won the cold war not just with containment, but, even more important, with attraction - attraction for the society we were building.

"Undercutting that attraction with fiscal irresponsibility, inattentiveness to the engines of competitiveness on which future jobs will depend, cavalier treatment of the values that make the American way of life more appealing, closing our borders to the world - and thus both losing our edge and our understanding of that world - or focusing exclusively on enemies or the failings of the international community," added Mr. Rothkopf, "is both self-defeating and runs counter to every lesson of how we won the cold war."

But who will tell the people? If not the situation room, it better be the boardroom - otherwise the costs to our country will exceed anything that can measured on a balance sheet.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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The pipeline that will change the world
It is 42 inches wide, 1,090 miles long and is intended to save the West from relying on Middle Eastern oil. Nothing has been allowed to stand in its way - and it finally opens today
By Daniel Howden and Philip Thornton
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=641…

25 May 2005

The first drops of crude will snake their way along a pipeline that traverses some of the most unstable and war-ravaged countries on earth. This is the oil flow that was meant to save the West, and this morning the taps were turned on.

Only 42 inches wide, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan was supposed to alter global oil markets forever. The 1,000-mile project has transformed the geopolitics of the Caucasus and its impact is now being felt in the vastness of central Asia.

Output is supposed to reach one million barrels a day - more than 1 per cent of world production - from an underground reserve that could hold as many as 220 billion barrels.

Its architects and investors claimed the pipeline would shore up energy supplies in the US and Europe for 50 years, protecting our gas-guzzling way of life and easing our reliance on the House of Saud.

The goal of the ambitious project, which makes its tortuous way from the Caspian in Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, is to ease the reliance of the West on the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) and bring cheaper fuel to our filling stations. The pipe threads its way through the region in a seemingly modest private corridor only 50 yards wide but nothing has been allowed to stand in its way. From forests to labour laws and endangered species to democracy protesters: all have given way to the costliest and most significant pipeline ever built.

The project, known as BTC, has driven a wedge between the US and Russia, triggered political unrest in the countries it passes through and their neighbours and sparked concern at extensive damage to the environment.

Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, concern at the West`s dependence on Persian Gulf oil has intensified. For Washington, the opening is a cause for celebration. "We view this as a significant step forward in the energy security of that region," said Samuel Bodman, the American energy secretary, who stood next to the three heads of state at today`s ceremony.

With him at the pumping station controls was the president of the tiny former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. The BTC has allowed Ilham Aliev to become a firm friend of the West while overseeing a government condemned for human rights abuses and sitting at the head of an administration placed 140 out of 146 in Transparency International`s global corruption index.

The politics of the pipeline have also changed the face of Georgia, where the battle for control with Russia saw immense US influence deployed in support of the so-called "Rose Revolution". The popular protest ushered the American-educated Mikhail Saakashvili into power two years ago. Washington`s new ties with Tbilisi were amply demonstrated when George Bush became the first US president to visit the country earlier this month.

In the long-term US ally Turkey, where the pipeline crucially delivers its oil direct to the Mediterranean - bypassing the tanker-clogged Bosphorus straits, it is no accident that it does so right next to the American airbase at Incirlik.

When big oil companies turned their attentions to the potential Caspian energy reserves released from behind the collapsing walls of the Soviet Union, the region was billed as the "new Middle East". If only the reserves could be securely transported from the landlocked sea to the Mediterranean, the West would be gifted a vital alternative to the volatile Persian Gulf and the region would be freed from the iron grip of Russia, which had previously monopolised the export routes of their former Soviet satellites.

Once the Soviet empire fell, the Caspian found itself surrounded by five nation states - Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan.

The region`s supply of cheap oil and key position on the historic border between the West and the East meant that countries quickly moved into position like pieces on a chessboard.

Three rival plans were drawn up - a northern route through Russia, a southern alternative through Iran and the central option through the Caucasus to the Mediterranean.

The winner could be in little doubt: the middle road was the only one which guaranteed Washington and its corporate allies a corridor of control.

The US Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was then chief executive of oil services giant Halliburton, was among the first to be swept away in the excitement.

"I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian," he said in 1998.

Now, more than a decade and $4bn (£2.2bn) later, almost three quarters of which came from bank loans which were underwritten by government agencies and £320m in taxpayers` money, the pipeline is open. But this chapter of what Rudyard Kipling called the "Great Game" - the secret battle to dominate central Asia - has only reached the end of its first phase.

The fanfare at the British oil giant BP`s gleaming new terminal at Sangachal in Azerbaijan may yet prove to be premature.

Stripped of the American hype of the 1990s, the crude that began a very modest flow this morning is the first instalment of a reserve many analysts are now convinced is actually only 32 billion barrels - equivalent to that of a small Gulf player such as Qatar.

The game now moves to the transCaspian pipeline and to the immense plains of Turkmenistan and the political cauldron of Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and beyond.


25 April 2005 10:57


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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The ultimate postmodern spectacle
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1491420,00.ht…

Michael Jackson and his trial hold a mirror to modern western civilisation and its blurring of fact and fiction
Terry Eagleton
Wednesday May 25, 2005

Guardian
Celebrity trials, like those of OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson, are sometimes loosely called postmodern, meaning that they are media spectaculars thronged with characters who are only doubtfully real. But they are also postmodern in a more interesting sense. Courtrooms, like novels, blur the distinction between fact and fiction. They are self-enclosed spheres in which what matters is not so much what actually took place in the real world, but how it gets presented to the jury. The jury judge not on the facts, but between rival versions of them. Since postmodernists believe that there are no facts in any case, just interpretations, law courts neatly exemplify their view of the world.

Another thing which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction is Michael Jackson himself. There is a double unreality about staging the fiction of a criminal trial around a figure who has been assembled by cosmetic surgeons. Jackson`s freakish body represents the struggle of fantasy against reality, the pyrrhic victory of culture over biology. Quite a few young people are not even aware that he is black. If postmodern theory won`t acknowledge that there is any such thing as raw nature, neither will this decaying infant.

It is hardly surprising that he has expressed a wish to live forever, given that death is the final victory of nature over culture. If the US sanitises death, it is because mortality is incompatible with capitalism. Capital accumulation goes on forever, in love with a dream of infinity. The myth of eternal progress is just a horizontalised form of heaven. Socialism, by contrast, is not about reaching for the stars but returning us to earth. It is about building a politics on a recognition of human frailty and finitude. As such, it is a politics which embraces the reality of failure, suffering and death, as opposed to one for which the word "can`t" is almost as intolerable as the word "communist".

If Michael Jackson is a symbol of western civilisation, it is less because of his materialism than because of his immaterialism. Behind the endless accumulation of expensive garbage lies a Faustian spirit which no object could ever satisfy.

Like Jackson`s cosmetic surgeons, postmodernism believes in the infinite plasticity of the material world. Reality, like Jackson`s over-chiselled nose, is just meaningless matter for you to carve as you choose. Just as Jackson has bleached his skin, so postmodernism bleaches the world of inherent meaning. This means that there is nothing to stop you creating whatever you fancy; but for the same reason your creations are bound to be drained of value. For what is the point of imposing your will on a meaningless reality? The individual is now a self-fashioning creature, whose supreme achievement is to treat himself as a work of art.

Ethics turns into aesthetics. And just as there are no constraints on the individual self, so there are no natural limits to promoting freedom and democracy across the globe. What looks like a generous-hearted tolerance - you can be whatever you like - thus conceals an imperial will. The tattoo parlour and George Bush`s foreign policy may seem light years distant, but both assume that the world is pliable stuff on which to stamp your will. Both are forms of narcissism for which the idea of reality putting up some resistance to your predatory designs on it, whether in the form of the Iraqi opposition or a visit from the local district attorney, is an intolerable affront.

Postmodern culture rejects the charge that it is superficial. You can only have surfaces if you also have depths to contrast them with, and depths went out with DH Lawrence. Nowadays, appearance and reality are one, so that what you see is what you get. But if reality seems to have dwindled to an image of itself, we are all the more sorely tempted to peer behind it. This is the case with Jackson`s Neverland. Is it really the kitschy, two-dimensional paradise it appears to be, or is there some sinisterly unspeakable truth lurking beneath it? Is it a spectacle or a screen?

If courtrooms are quintessentially postmodern, it is because they lay bare the relations between truth and power, which for postmodernism come to much the same thing. Truth for them, as for the ancient Sophists, is really a question of who can practise the most persuasive rhetoric. In front of a jury, he with the smoothest tongue is likely to triumph. On this view, all truth is partisan: the judge`s summing up is simply an interpretation of interpretations. What determines what is true for you is your interests, which in turn are determined by gender, class, ethnicity and the like. The Simpson trial gave a new twist to the claim that truth is black and white: whether you thought the defendant guilty or innocent depended to a large extent on your skin colour. But the other interests in question are financial ones. Just as the scientist with the fattest research grant is most likely to produce results, so truth in the Simpson and Jackson trials is a commodity to be knocked down to whoever has the deepest pockets. In this sense, a good deal of postmodern theory can be illustrated by a single time-worn phrase: get yourself a good lawyer.

· Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Der Kampf um die nächste Präsidentschaft hat in der GOP schon begonnen, einmal die religiös fundamentalistische Gruppe um Senator Frist und dann auf der anderen Seite die moderate Seite um Senator McCain, der die alten republikanischen Werte der Staatsferne vertritt.


washingtonpost.com
For GOP, Deeper Fissures and a Looming Power Struggle
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 25, 2005; A11

The fallout from the Senate compromise that averted a showdown over judicial filibusters fell most heavily on the Republican Party yesterday, signaling intraparty warfare that is likely to shape the battle for the party`s 2008 presidential nomination and further strain the unity the GOP has enjoyed under President Bush.

Monday`s surprise deal left two of the party`s most prominent potential 2008 candidates, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), on opposite sides of an ideological and strategic divide that is likely to widen as the party begins in earnest to hunt for a successor to Bush. Perhaps mindful of the power of social and religious conservatives, other GOP senators with presidential aspirations, including George Allen (Va.) and Chuck Hagel (Neb.), condemned the deal.

The compromise forged by 14 Democratic and Republican senators represented a rare, if temporary, rebuff to religious and social conservatives. Their condemnations, whether from James Dobson`s Focus on the Family, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh or conservative bloggers, were quick and strong. Dobson labeled it a "complete bailout and betrayal," and Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women for America, branded the GOP negotiators "seven dwarves" who had given Democrats the right to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee.

Outside analysts took a more measured view of the terms of the agreement that blocked for now the use of the "nuclear option" to bar judicial filibusters; they contended that social and religious conservatives may have done better than they are willing to acknowledge, including the likely approval of three of Bush`s most controversial appellate court nominees. The agreement, they said, may look much better to the right in a month or two.

"If they think more incrementally and realistically about what can be achieved, they managed to get a lot of the people [judicial nominees] they wanted without blowing up the United States Senate and without slowing down other elements of the president`s agenda," said James L. Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University.

But leading voices among social conservatives sharply disagreed. "It`s a rebuff of both the president, Senator Frist and the socially conservative base of the party by a handful of senators," said Gary L. Bauer, a former presidential candidate and president of American Values. "The heart of the Republican Party is as unhappy as I can recall."

That unhappiness stems in part from the huge investment that conservative groups put into the fight to kill the use of the filibuster in judicial nominations. Much of the energy came from religious conservatives, and Frist even appeared in a telecast last month sponsored such groups that was designed to drum up support for up-or-down votes for all judicial nominees.

But Frist`s inability or unwillingness to strike a deal with Harry M. Reid (Nev.), the Senate Democratic leader, empowered McCain and his allies to seize control of the debate. The body language of the two GOP senators -- McCain ebullient in announcing the deal, and Frist taut and drawn in interpreting it moments later on the Senate floor -- spoke volumes about the immediate reading of who won and who lost.

That could change as the two-page agreement is played out on the Senate floor and more of Bush`s nominees win confirmation. Frist drew no direct criticism from social conservatives, and he could claim a measure of credit if Bush succeeds in placing more conservatives on the appellate courts and on the Supreme Court.

By leaving open the option for Democrats in the Gang of 14 to filibuster future nominations and for Republicans in the group to support the nuclear option, the agreement may only heighten the stakes over any Supreme Court vacancies.

McCain is at odds with the bulk of his party by challenging the religious right, as he did in his 2000 presidential campaign. His presidential aspirations depend more than ever on mobilizing and attracting independents and moderate Republicans. Others interested in running in 2008 will battle for religious and social conservatives` support.

The biggest surprise in that group was Hagel, who was quoted a month ago in the Omaha World-Herald as saying that although judicial nominees deserve a Senate vote, protection of minority rights in the Senate is important as well. "I would hope that these differences can be resolved without eroding the protection of minority rights in this institution," he said then. Yesterday, he criticized the agreement for not assuring up-or-down votes.

As Republicans squabbled loudly, Democrats, led by Reid, tried to put up a united front in support of the agreement. But with three of Bush`s long-delayed nominees ticketed for approval under the compromise, cracks began to show within the Democratic ranks as well.

The Congressional Black Caucus blasted the agreement as "more of a capitulation than a compromise" for allowing those votes. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) said it would encourage the White House "to send more nominees who lack the judicial temperament or record to serve in these lifetime positions."

Some Democrats privately fretted that others in their party had been too quick to claim victory, and even the party chairman, Howard Dean, questioned whether the compromise is good for Democrats. "We don`t know if this is a victory in the long run or not," he said on CNN`s "Inside Politics."

That could leave Democrats in a different posture a few months from now, depending on what happens when Bush is presented with a Supreme Court vacancy. But for now, the compromise struck on Monday night has done more to highlight the coming power struggle within the Republican Party.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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John McCain hat sich auch schon vor 5 Jahren für die Präsidentschaft beworben gegen Bush.
Damals wurde gegen ihn eine ähnliche Kampagne gefahren wie bei Kerry wegen seiner Vietnam Zeit von den gleichen texanischen Bush-Verbündeten.

washingtonpost.com
The Senate`s Real Leader
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…
By David S. Broder
Post
Wednesday, May 25, 2005; A27

The Monday night agreement to avert a showdown vote over judicial filibusters not only spared the Senate from a potentially ruinous clash, but also certified John McCain as the real leader of that body.

In contrast to Majority Leader Bill Frist, who was unable to negotiate a compromise with Minority Leader Harry Reid or hold his Republicans in line to clear the way for all of President Bush`s nominees to be confirmed, McCain looks like the man who achieved his objectives.

If -- as many expect -- McCain and Frist find themselves rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, the gap in their performance will be remembered.

To be sure, McCain was only one of 14 senators -- seven from each party -- who forged an agreement to clear three of the roadblocked circuit court nominees at once, shelve two others, and reserve the option of future filibusters only for "exceptional circumstances." And the deal forged in McCain`s office probably would not have been possible without the support of such Senate elders as Republican John Warner and Democrat Robert Byrd.

But no one else in the negotiating group has McCain`s national stature, and no one else is a likely presidential contender three years from now. So, while such would-be candidates as George Allen of Virginia and Sam Brownback of Kansas lined up behind Frist, McCain took the harder road and helped organize the bipartisan effort that averted the looming crisis.

He did that knowing he would incur the wrath of the conservative activists who want no barriers placed before their favorites for possible vacancies on the Supreme Court. But contrary to myth, the heroes of the far right rarely win presidential nominations -- as witness the fate of Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson, among others.

Until now McCain has been noted mainly for the battles he has fought -- with sporadic success -- for campaign finance reform and against pork-barrel spending. Those fights have endeared him to special constituencies while antagonizing many of his colleagues. This week he placed himself at the nexus of a debate central to the institutional life of the Senate. This was an ad hoc coalition, forged around one question, but the cadre of supporters he found in both parties is large enough -- if it remains cohesive -- to be a shaping force on many other legislative issues.

The success of the "Gang of 14" was a rare and welcome triumph over the antagonisms that have been so deeply rooted in the political generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, when the nation was torn by conflicts over civil rights, women`s rights, abortion and, most of all, Vietnam.

Three of McCain`s collaborators -- Warner, Byrd and Dan Inouye of Hawaii -- are of the World War II generation, a time of national consensus. Six of them are between 42 and 52, which means they were 16 or younger at the height of the anti-Vietnam protests. They are forerunners of a generation that may provide greater harmony in our politics as its members move into positions of leadership.

Only four of the negotiators -- Republicans Olympia Snowe and Mike DeWine, and Democrats Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson -- were of an age to have been swept up in the turmoil of Vietnam while in their twenties.

McCain himself served in Vietnam and endured 5 1/2 years of captivity and torture in a Hanoi prison camp. But unlike many others who fought in that war or protested against it, such as John Kerry, McCain has always insisted that Vietnam was not the defining experience of his life. Long before he undertook this act of reconciliation within the Senate, he had made peace in his own life with the antiwar protesters of his generation.

Twenty years ago McCain accepted apologies from an activist named David Ifshin when they met at a Washington forum. They formed a friendship. Ifshin, who had gone to Hanoi in 1970 and made an antiwar radio broadcast that was piped into McCain`s prison, later became a close friend of and campaign counsel to President Bill Clinton.

When Ifshin died of cancer in 1996, McCain delivered a eulogy at the funeral, saying of Ifshin, "He always felt passionate about his country. He always tried to do justice to others. . . . I learned about courage from David, learned to look for virtue and I learned the futility of looking back in anger."

Those lessons served McCain, the Senate and the country well this week.

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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, May 25, 2005

Sometimes You are Just Screwed

Readers occasionally write me complaining that I do not offer any solutions to the problems in Iraq. Let me just step back from the daily train wreck news from the region to complain back that there aren`t any short-term, easy solutions to the problems in Iraq.

The US military cannot defeat the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement any time soon for so many reasons that they cannot all be listed.

The guerrillas have widespread popular support in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, an area with some 4 million persons. Its cities and deserts offer plenty of cover for an unconventional war. Guerrilla movements can succeed if more than 40 percent of the local population supports them. While the guerrillas are a small proportion of Iraqis, they are very popular in the Sunni Arab areas. If you look at it as a regional war, they probably have 80 percent support in their region.

The guerrillas are mainly Iraqi Sunnis with an intelligence or military background, who know where secret weapons depots are containing some 250,000 tons of missing munitions, and who know how to use military strategy and tactics to good effect. They are well-funded and can easily get further funding from Gulf millionnaires any time they like.

The Iraqi guerrillas are given tactical support by foreign jihadi fighters. There are probably only a few hundred of them, but they are disproportionately willing to undertake very dangerous attacks, and to volunteer as suicide bombers.

There are simply too few US troops to fight the guerrillas. There are only about 70,000 US fighting troops in Iraq, they don`t have that much person-power superiority over the guerrillas. There are only 10,000 US troops for all of Anbar province, a center of the guerrilla movement with a population of 820,000. A high Iraqi official estimated that there are 40,000 active guerrillas and another 80,000 close supporters of them. The only real explanation for the successes of the guerrillas is that the US military has been consistently underestimating their numbers and abilities. There is no prospect of increasing the number of US troops in Iraq.

The guerillas have enormous advantages, of knowing the local clans and terrain and urban quarters, of knowing Arabic, and of being local Muslims who are sympathetic figures for other Muslims. American audiences often forget that the US troops in Iraq are mostly clueless about what is going on around them, and do not have the knowledge base or skills to conduct effective counter-insurgency. Moreover, as foreign, largely Christian occupiers of an Arab, Muslim, country, they are widely disliked and mistrusted outside Kurdistan.

US military tactics, of replying to attacks with massive force, have alienated ever more Sunni Arabs as time has gone on. Fallujah was initially quiet, until the Marines fired on a local demonstration against the stationing of US troops at a school (parents worried about their children being harmed if there was an attack). Mosul was held up as a model region under Gen. Petraeus, but exploded into long-term instability in reaction to the November Fallujah campaign. The Americans have lost effective control everywhere in the Sunni Arab areas. Even a West Baghdad quarter like Adhamiyah is essentially a Baath republic. Fallujah is a shadow of its former self, with 2/3s of its buildings damaged and half its population still refugeees, and is kept from becoming a guerrilla base again only by draconian methods by US troops that make it "the world`s largest gated community." The London Times reports that the city`s trade is still paralyzed.

So far the new pro-American Iraqi troops have not distinguished themselves against the guerrillas, and it will probably be at least 3-5 years before they can begin doing so, if ever. Insofar as the new army is disproportionately Shiite and Kurdish, it may simply never have the resources to penetrate the Sunni Arab center-north effectively. There is every reason to believe that the new Iraqi military is heavily infiltrated with sympathizers of the guerrillas.

The guerrilla tactic of fomenting civil war among Iraq`s ethnic communities, which met resistance for the first two years, is now bearing fruit. There is increasing evidence of Shiite murders of Sunni clerics and worshippers, and of Sunni attacks on Shiites, beyond the artificial efforts of the guerrillas themselves. Civil war and turbulence benefit the guerrillas, who gain cover for violent attacks, and who can offer themselves to the Iraqis as the only force capable of keeping order. AP reports an Iraqi official saying today that there is a civil war going on in the northern city of Telafar between Sunnis and Shiites. I doubt US television news is even mentioning it.

The political process in Iraq has been a huge disaster for the country. The Americans emphasized ethnicity in their appointments and set a precedent for ethnic politics that has deepened over time. The Shiite religious parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, won the January 30 elections. These are the parties least acceptable to the Sunni Arab heartland. The Sunni Arabs are largely absent in parliament, only have one important cabinet post, and only have two members in the 55-member constitutional drafting committee. Deep debaathification has led to thousands of Sunnis being fired from their jobs for simply having belonged to the Baath Party, regardless of whether they had ever done anything wrong. They so far have no reason to hope for a fair shake in the new Iraq. Political despair and the rise of Shiite death squads that target Sunnis are driving them into the arms of the guerrillas.

The quality of leadership in Washington is extremely bad. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and outgoing Department of Defense officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, have turned in an astonishingly poor performance in Iraq. Their attempt to demonstrate US military might has turned into a showcase for US weakness in the face of Islamic and nationalist guerrillas, giving heart to al-Qaeda and other unconventional enemies of the United States.

If the US drew down its troop strength in Iraq too rapidly, the guerrillas would simply kill the new political class and stabilizing figures such as Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Although US forces have arguably done more harm than good in many Sunni Arab areas, they have prevented set-piece battles from being staged by ethnic militias, and they have prevented a number of attempted assassinations.

In an ideal world, the United States would relinquish Iraq to a United Nations military command, and the world would pony up the troops needed to establish order in the country in return for Iraqi good will in post-war contract bids. But that is not going to happen for many reasons. George W. Bush is a stubborn man and Iraq is his project, and he is not going to give up on it. And, by now the rest of the world knows what would await its troops in Iraq, and political leaders are not so stupid as to send their troops into a meat grinder.

Therefore, I conclude that the United States is stuck in Iraq for the medium term, and perhaps for the long term. The guerrilla war is likely to go on a decade to 15 years. Given the basic facts, of capable, trained and numerous guerrillas, public support for them from Sunnis, access to funding and munitions, increasing civil turmoil, and a relatively small and culturally poorly equipped US military force opposing them, led by a poorly informed and strategically clueless commander-in-chief who has made himself internationally unpopular, there is no near-term solution.

In the long run, say 15 years, the Iraqi Sunnis will probably do as the Lebanese Maronites did, and finally admit that they just cannot remain in control of the country and will have to compromise. That is, if there is still an Iraq at that point.

posted by Juan @ [url5/25/2005 06:33:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/sometimes-you-are-just-screwed-readers.html[/url]

14 US Troops Dead in 3 Days
Civil War in Telafar

The Associated Press reports that a car bomb in Baghdad killed 3 US troops, and a drive-by shooting killed a fourth on Tuesday. The deaths brought the three-day total of US military fatalities to 14.

Guerrillas detonated a bomb near a girls` school in Baghdad, killing 6 persons but apparently no students.

Paul Garwood also reports that


"In the northern city of Tal Afar, there were reports that militants were in control and that Shiites and Sunnis were fighting in the streets, a day after two car bombs killed at least 20 people. Police Capt. Ahmed Hashem Taki said Tal Afar was experiencing "civil war." Journalists were blocked from entering the city of 200,000."



Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that a police official in Telafar reported immense loss of life in the violent clashes. The Sunni jihadis are said to have taken over the major hospital. They are being resisted by armed Shiite Turkmen townspeople.

The Turkmen Bloc issued an appeal to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and other major political figures, saying that Telafar is ablaze with the flames of the radical anti-Shiite (takfiri) forces that have infiltrated from beyond the border. They added that the city "is a prisoner in the hands of terror." They complained, "Its citizens are exposed to being slaughtered every day." Member of parliament Muhammad Taqi al-Mawla, who belongs to the Turkmen Bloc, called on the government to intervene quickly to save the city. He said that in the current conditions, no child could go to school and no employee could reach the workplace.

This report sent chills down my spine. Major urban Sunni-Shiite violence is likely to spill over to other parts of the country.

Nancy Yousef of Knight Ridder reports on rapidly advancing plans to unite three of Iraq`s southern provinces (Basra, Dhiqar and Maysan) into one super-province with a distinctly Shiite cast. This move comes in part in response to Kurdish plans to create a Kurdish super-province of Kurdistan. In part, it is an attempt to restrain the power of the central government vis a vis the provinces, since a large province is in a better bargaining position with Baghdad than a small one. Reorganizing Iraq into a small number of ethnically based provinces, however, could lay the groundwork for the eventual break-up of the state.

Al-Hayat says that Hussein Shahristani, deputy speaker of parliament, announced that the constitution drafting committee of the Iraqi parliament will be headed by Shiite hard liner Humam Hamoudi, a major proponent of imposing Islamic law on the once-secular country. The Daily Star points out that Hamoudi is a Shiite cleric, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and an aide to the party`s leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Parliamentarians are still seeking ways of increasing the Sunni representation on the constitution-drafting committee, which at the moment stands at a pitiful 2 out of 55. MP Abdul Hadi al-Hakim (United Iraqi Alliance) suggested that each provincial council select some delegates to be added to the committee. (This would not actually help balance things very much).

The speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Hajem al-Hasani, said Tuesday that the Iraqi constitution "will fail in establishing security in the country unless the Sunni rebels and other groups not now participating are granted an effective political role, not just an advisory one." He compared Iraq to an "unstable nuclear reactor" and said, "the upcoming political stages will decide if we are heading toward stability." He added, "The Resistance must form a political wing, as happens everywhere in the world." He said that no one can "wipe out the Sunnis completely."

I had to rub my eyes. The speaker of the Iraqi parliament is calling for inclusion of the guerrillas in the constitution-writing process, and asking them to form a political wing so that they can be so included. The gap between the 17 Sunni parliamentarians and their Shiite and Kurdish colleagues (who make up the rest of the 273) is truly vast.

posted by Juan @ [url5/25/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/14-us-troops-dead-in-3-days-civil-war.html[/url]

Zarqawi Wounded?

The news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may have been wounded, reported at a jihadi web site, dominated US television news on Tuesday.

I`m not sure why. A report on a web site cannot be verified. Al-Zarqawi`s group may be trying to throw the United States off his trail. Or the report could be a black psy-ops operation of Donald Rumsfeld.

Nor is it new news. There have been rumors for some time that the US military surrounded Ramadi and its hospital to get at Zarqawi, who was wounded, but that he managed to slip away.

If Zarqawi did die, what difference would it make? He is responsible for only a fraction of the violence in Iraq, and has lots of jihadi lieutenants who would gladly take his place.

So, we cannot know if it is true. If it is true it is old news. And it wouldn`t matter much to the situation in Iraq. I`d file that under "not a story."

posted by Juan @ [url5/25/2005 06:09:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/zarqawi-wounded-news-that-abu-musab-al.html[/url]

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Man sollte froh sein, dass manche Dinge zu Ende sind. Für mich war `Star Wars` nach dem ersten Prequel zu Ende, bei dem ich in einem kalifornischen Kino Ende Mai 99 nach kurzer Zeit eingeschlafen bin und durch lautes Schnarchen den weiteren Verlauf der Vorführung gestört habe.

May The Force Please Go Away
13 reasons to be hugely grateful that "Star Wars," the king of adolescent space epics, is finally over
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

Can we just say it? Can we admit it now? Is it finally time?

Here goes: Thank the great Sith Lord above that the massive computer-driven marketing hellbeast that is the overblown "Star Wars" epic is finally over.

There I said it. Can we agree? Because the truth is, this most bloated of megamovie franchises hasn`t been a certifiable cultural phenom, something to get truly excited about, for over 25 years. Admit it now, get it over with, move on to pretty happy things like puppies and porn and sunshine.

Look, I`m sorry, but I don`t care how many gazillions the last three flicks have made at the box office from ubergeeks too old to get "Harry Potter" and too emotionally immature to graduate to real movies. Episodes I-III are mostly one thing and one thing only: huge exercises in CGI acrobatics, manic video games writ large, numbly awful movies full of fine actors reduced to stiff mannequins in bad monk robes and uncomfortable headpieces delivering stone-cold line readings seemingly written by that slightly twitchy tin-eared dweeb who sat next you in fifth-grade algebra, sweatingly.

It`s all just a little -- how to put this carefully -- it`s all just a little embarrassing.

Here, then, are 13 reasons to celebrate the end of the cute, overblown SW monster. Reasons for normal people to get back to caring about decent movies with subtle dialogue and true character development and nuanced plot lines not revolving around a monochromatic good/evil dialectic executed by barely emotive cartoon characters who have somehow been brainwashed into thinking they`re making art. Admit these now, get it over with, move on to happy things like wine and sex and pleasures that have absolutely zero to do with whooshing lightsabers. OK?

1) Begone, Star Wars ubergeeks. Begone, terrifically strange and tragically lonely fan boys who camp out, weeks and months in advance, for SW tickets, even at the wrong theater. Drink the Kool-Aid if you must, boys. Your 15 minutes are way, way up. Never has a culture wished so deeply for a group of people to get deep into online porn and pop more Ritalin and stay the hell home.

2) Unfortunately, now the media coverage of such geeks will simply switch over to sad psychochristian fanatics who are already lining up for Mel Gibson`s "Passion of the Christ" sequel, "Dead Things I Pulverize with a Cuisinart and Then Smear All Over My Hairy Catholic Chest."

3) Poor Ewan McGregor. Poor Natalie Portman. Poor Liam Neeson. Fabulous actors so completely drained of nuance and character you are left wishing Obi Wan would shoot heroin and dive into a toilet and have a deformed religious experience, and that Neeson might veer off and start asking Princess Amidala what her favorite sexual position is and how many orgasms she has in a month and what she really thinks about when she sees Vader`s throbbing red lightsaber.

4) Farewell, the odd and recurring hype that claims, every few years, that George Lucas might, in fact, be one of the truly great, visionary directors of all time. He isn`t. Not by a long shot.

5) Darth Vader choking a giant red M&M candy. Darth Vader staring down that creepy Burger King mascot thing. Darth Vader hawking cell phones and Energizer batteries and floor cleaner and breakfast cereal and who the hell knows what else. Good riddance, odious sea of SW product tie-ins. Like the goddamn franchise needs more cash? Like seeing Darth Vader hawking tampons and aspirin and Darth Vader-branded bunion pads is in any way necessary? Please.

6) Let`s just say it outright: Harrison Ford carried the first three movies, period. Carrie Fisher was amusing enough, the droids were cute and infinitely annoying, James Earl Jones` Vader voice work was nearly a character unto itself. But no one topped Ford at delivering a cynical line or expressing incredulity or offering up that famous "Who, me?" look that would later come to such wondrous fruition with Indiana Jones. "Star Wars" without Ford`s dry humor and bewildered mug is like a cheesy pinball machine without the ball: all bells and whistles, few genuine pleasures.

7) Two words: Jim Henson. Next to Ford, Henson`s astonishing Creature Shop gave the first movies brilliantly wacky life, silly and tangible and honest. The last three flicks are just painful reminders of how much he, and his entire Muppet universe, are missed in this world, and how much computers have drained many movies of their soul.

8) Did I mention Chewbacca? Did I mention that maddening commercial where Chewbacca is in the booth recording sounds for the new series of "Star Wars" cell phone ring tones and oh my freaking God let`s just imagine that for a moment, the pale little sexually denuded dude sitting next to you in the café who gets a call on his Nokia and when it rings it sounds like that weird famous Chewbacca howl, and you turn and look at him and wonder what he might look like if he exploded into a million bloody little geek-boy pieces like, right now.

9) Enough with the dissecting of SW plot lines. Enough with the seeking of deep mythological parallels. Despite all those blogs and articles insisting SW is some sort of modern iteration of "Crime and Punishment" crossed with "Dr. Spock`s Guide to Parenting," there is little of true intellectual substance to speak of in any of the SW flicks, and say what you will about old-time `60s radical Lucas` commendable desire to criticize current rabid right-wing ideology via his simple good/evil allegories, the overarching plot of SW is so basic and the execution so orthodox, you might as well be watching "The Bad News Bears," stoned. It`s true.

10) The late, great master of myth Joseph Campbell loved the first three "Star Wars" movies. He saw in them a wonderful modern-day example of his favorite allegory and recurring cultural theme, the hero`s journey. Joseph Campbell is dead now. Even he was ready to move the hell on.

11) This is from the recent Rolling Stone interview with Lucas, with Lucas examining a plot thread: "Is Anakin a product of a super-Sith who influenced the midichlorians to create him, or is he simply created by the midichlorians to bring forth prophecy, or was he created by the Force through the midichlorians? It`s left up to the audience to decide." Note to George: You are 61 years old. Stop speaking like this before you hemorrhage something. And see item No. 10, above.

12) Raise your hand if you love the concept of prequels. Ten years of crappy CGI and 10 years of lumpy stiff acting and 28 years of waiting and you watch "Sith" where only the last 30 minutes really finds any sort of cinematic footing, and after all that screaming and all the cheeseball animation and all the slaughtered Jedis and the stilted, lifeless dialogue and heavy Vader wheezing and Yoda`s irritating speech impediment, where do we finally end up at the end of Episode III? That`s right: 1977. And who the hell wants to be back there?

13) I`ll happily admit that the first three films were breathtakingly rich allegories for their time, landmark filmmaking, funny and quirky and cutting edge and cute fun for the kids, full of wry characters and state-of-the-art special effects saddled to a rather generic, by-the-numbers hero`s journey sprinkled with the occasional subreference to Buddhism or the fine art of egolessness.

But.

But it must be stated and cannot be repeated enough and we have to admit it once and for all: The "Star Wars" films, each and every one of them and it feels like there are about 127 of them now, they remain, always and forever, movies for anxious, easily stupefied 10-ear-old boys.

There I said it. Can we all just go outside now?
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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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The Mr. Smith Fallacy
Was screening Frank Capra`s classic the true nuclear option?
By Timothy Noah
http://slate.msn.com/id/2119460/fr/ifr/nav/ais/

Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005, at 2:10 PM PT

In the absence of any other logical explanation, I conclude that what nudged the Senate back from the brink of a "nuclear option"—the majority-driven rule change disallowing the use of filibusters against judicial nominees—was the prospect that both Democrats and Republicans would screen Frank Capra`s 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, last night in the Capitol.

As I`ve explained before, I believe that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist should have taken his "nuclear option" one step further and eliminated the filibuster not only for judicial nominees but for legislation, too. This isn`t because I favor the appointment of judges hostile to a woman`s right to choose abortion; I don`t. Rather, it`s because I believe the filibuster is an inherently reactionary tool that, over the long term, has impeded and will continue to impede activist liberal government by imposing a 60-vote supermajority requirement on virtually every bill that comes before Congress. People would have an easier time grasping this if it weren`t for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

In Mr. Smith, the idealistic Sen. Jefferson Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, uses the filibuster to block legislation to build the Willet Creek Dam, the true purpose of which, we are told, is to line the pockets of political bosses. That sounds like a plausibly liberal goal today, when environmentalists routinely argue that dams destroy delicate ecosystems. And it seemed so during the last week of October 1972, when I, age 14, attended a screening of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at Pomona College with my older brother Peter. Capra was there to answer questions from the audience afterward, and Peter`s hand was the first one up. "Mr. Capra," asked my brother, "can I assume, based on what we just saw, that this Tuesday you`ll cast your vote for George McGovern?" Capra looked balefully at his shaggy-haired, bearded interlocutor, whose political views, he knew, were shared by nearly everyone else in the audience. Then he mumbled, "Uh … no."

Capra idealized the common man, but he was nobody`s idea of a liberal. And back when Mr. Smith was released—a mere six years after the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority—liberals were not the dam-haters they are today. New Dealers considered the building of federally funded dams vital to maintaining struggling family farms and to bringing electricity to the homes of the rural poor. Seen in its historic context, then, the fictional bill that the fictional Mr. Smith blocks is what today would be called "progressive legislation." It therefore fits right in with the sort of bills that filibusters have nearly always been deployed against in real life. Thanks to the filibuster, President Roosevelt was never able to pass anti-lynching legislation. More recently, the filibuster kept the Clinton administration from overhauling a century-old mining law that makes it impossible for taxpayers to block environmentally harmful giveaways to companies mining federal land. Today, the filibuster guarantees that the United States won`t pass legislation extending health insurance to all its citizens. And saving it is a great liberal cause?

Another fallacy inherent in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the notion that the modern-era filibuster has anything to do with what Sen. Robert Byrd (citing Mr. Smith in a March 1 floor speech) grandly calls "the deliberative process." As Byrd well knows, contemporary practice eliminates the speechifying part of the filibuster altogether; these days, whenever a filibuster is threatened, the Senate majority will typically calculate whether it has the 60 votes necessary to cut off debate, and if it doesn`t, it won`t bother to bring the legislation in question to a floor vote at all. (Byrd, I should note, filibustered—the old-fashioned way—14 hours against passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That`s the law that banned discrimination in public facilities! So forgive me if his views on the subject don`t command my full attention.)

It`s ironic that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has become an argument-stopping sacred cow in Washington, because when the film premiered in 1939 at Washington`s DAR Constitution Hall, it got an overwhelmingly hostile reception. Here`s how Capra remembered it in his 1971 autobiography, The Name Above the Title:

By the time Mr. Smith sputtered to the end music, about one-third of Washington`s finest had left. Of those who remained, some applauded, some laughed, but most pressed grimly for the doors. … [At the reception afterward,] I took the worst shellacking of my professional life. Shifts of hopping-mad Washington press correspondents belittled, berated, scorned, vilified, and ripped me open from stem to stern as a villainous Hollywood traducer.

In an interview with Richard L. Strout of the Christian Science Monitor, Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, a Democrat (he would later be Harry Truman`s vice president), changed the subject from the debate over entering the war in Europe to Capra`s film. Barkley called Mr. Smith as grotesque as anything I have ever seen. … At one point, the picture shows the senators walking out on Mr. Smith as a body when he is attacked by a corrupt member. The very idea of the Senate walking out at the behest of that old crook! It was so grotesque it was funny. It showed the Senate made up of crooks, led by crooks, listening to a crook. … It was so vicious an idea that it was a source of disgust and hilarity to every member of Congress who saw it. … I did not hear a single senator praise it. I speak for the whole body.

A fascinating index of how our politics have changed since 1939 is that back when Mr. Smith came out, it didn`t occur to members of the Senate—or even the press!—to identify with the film`s authority-defying protagonist. Today, it would never occur to a senator—even a member of the Senate leadership—to identify with anyone else. Maybe that explains why the filibuster is proving so hard to kill.
Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2119460/

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May 26, 2005

THE ROVING EYE
Pipelineistan`s biggest game begins
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GE26Ag01.html

History may judge it as one of the capital moves of the 21st century`s New Great Game: May 25, the day high-quality Caspian light crude started flowing through the Caucasus toward the Mediterranean in Turkey. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) - conceived by the US as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf - is finally in business.

This is what Pipelineistan is all about: a supreme law unto itself - untouchable by national sovereignty, serious environmental concerns (expressed both in the Caucasus and in Europe), labor legislation, protests against the World Bank, not to mention mountains 2,700 meters high and 1,500 small rivers. BTC took 10 years of hard work and at least US$4 billion - $3 billion of which is in bank loans. BTC is not merely a pipeline: it is a sovereign state.

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This BTC state slices Azerbaijan in half from east to west, then slices Georgia in half almost from east to west, before taking a dip south, bypassing secessionist Ajaria and slicing Turkish Anatolia diagonally from the northeast toward the south. The founding stone is at British Petroleum`s (BP`s) gleaming terminal at Sangachal, half an hour along the Caspian south of Baku. The state is 44 meters wide, snaking 1,767 kilometers across three countries, two of those (Azerbaijan and Georgia) extremely volatile, and the other (Turkey) faces potential trouble from dispossessed Kurds.

The pipeline itself is only 126 centimeters wide, a dizzying steel serpent of no less than 150,000 segments made in Japan, finished in Malaysia and delivered by ship to the Georgian port of Batumi, capital of the separatist micro-republic of Adjaria - which is virtually uncontrolled by Tbilisi.

To understand the scope and ambition of BTC, one must visit Villa Petrolea, the Baku headquarters of BP. The BTC`s major shareholders are BP (30.1%) and the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR (25%), followed by Unocal (US, 8.9%), Statoil (Norway, 8.71%), Turkish Petroleum (6.53%), ENI (Italy, 5%), TotalFinaElf (France, 5%), Itochu (Japan, 3.4%), ConocoPhillips (US, 2.5%), Inpex (Japan, 2.5%) and Delta Hess (a joint venture of Saudi Delta Oil with American Amerada, 2.36%).

BP has invested at least $15 billion in the country (exploration, exploitation, pipeline construction). According to Baku`s street wisdom, the man who really rules Azerbaijan is David Woodward, BP`s chairman, known as "the viceroy", a walking oil atlas with more than three decades working for the company from Scotland to Abu Dhabi and from Alaska to Siberia. Woodward and BP mercilessly spin that BTC is the cleanest and safest pipeline ever built. Georgian peasants and English non-governmental organizations beg to differ.

Dynasty, Caucasus-style
BTC would be impossible without the usual, strategically positioned US-supported dictator - in this case old, ruthless Caucasus hand Heydar Aliyev, who died in December 2003. A dynastic dictatorship is even better, since his son Ilham became the successor in fraudulent elections in October 2003. It also helped that Ilham, a former playboy, happened to be the head of the state oil company, SOCAR. Azerbaijan was never about "liberty and democracy" or color-coded revolutions in the style of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Just last Saturday in Baku, Azeri police beat up and arrested more than 100 opposition protesters demanding "Freedom!" and "Free elections!" This is a regime that according to Transparency International ranks 140th out of 146 in the global corruption index. From Washington`s point of view, the Aliyev dynasty in Azerbaijan performs the same role as Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan: they are "our" dictators.

Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey were all desperate to finish BTC on time. Turkey owes a fortune to the International Monetary Fund. Georgia survives thanks largely to American handouts. Azerbaijan at least set up a state oil fund to use oil revenues to the benefit of future generations. But very few Azeris believe in the corporate myth that BTC will enrich them. Real life can be found less than a kilometer from downtown Baku: huge families crammed in Soviet-style communal apartments with scarce water and electricity. Azerbaijan could easily be pinned down as a land of rickety Ladas and Volgas crisscrossed by an armada of white BP 4x4s with satellite dishes on top - which allow the headquarters either in London or Baku to immediately locate all "troops" anywhere in the volatile Caucasus. The only other flourishing industry in the Caucasus, apart from oil, is kidnapping. Not to mention Kristina, the top belly-dancer at the Karavanserai, the favorite restaurant of the oil oligarchy, who is in a class by herself.

In Georgia the obstacles were more complex than in Azerbaijan. Thus the "Rose Revolution" of late 2003, getting rid of Edward Shevardnadze to the benefit of young, photogenic, American-educated and American-aligned Mikhail Saakashvili. The small matter of defending BTC from attacks of alleged al-Qaeda-related Chechens holed up in the Georgian mountains remains. But at least protection at the end of BTC in Ceyhan in Turkey is guaranteed: it`s not a coincidence that the pipeline ends right next door to the massive American airbase at Incirlik.

Game not over
In terms of no-holds-barred power politics and oil geopolitics, BTC is the real deal - a key component in the US`s overall strategy of wrestling the Caucasus and Central Asia away from Russia - and bypassing Iranian oil and gas routes. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev, for instance, has just announced that Kazakh crude will also flow through the BTC before 2010. He even proposed to add Aktau - the Kazakh Caspian oil Mecca - to a new acronym (ABTC?). It`s interesting to remember that BP always denied that it needs Kazakh oil to fill its pipeline.

Everything related to BTC spells tremendous ambition. It will take a few months to fill the pipeline - and for the supertankers at Ceyhan to be loaded with Caspian crude, thus bypassing the highly congested Bosphorus. BTC is projected to reach 1 million barrels a day - roughly 1.2% of global production. Compare it with the 500,000 barrels of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which moves crude from Baku to the Russian port of Novorossiysk.

BTC makes little sense in economic terms. Oil experts know that the most cost-effective routes from the Caspian would be south through Iran or north through Russia. But BTC is a designer masterpiece of power politics - from the point of view of Washington and its corporate allies. US Vice President Dick Cheney, already in his previous incarnation as Halliburton chief, has always been a huge cheerleader for the "strategically significant" BTC. The verdict is open on whether this massive investment will be worth it. Instead of the dreams of a new Kuwait, the Caspian may hold only 32 billion barrels of oil - not much more than the reserves of Qatar, a small Gulf producer. The Caspian in fact may hold less than 10% of the total, known Middle East reserves.

Anyway, what really matters is positioning in the New Great Game. The Caucasus, the Caspian and Central Asia are up for grabs. European customers for Azeri (and Kazakh) oil and gas might rely on BTC for some of their supply. But the Russian counterpunch will come: President Vladimir Putin will not cease to seduce the European Union with loads of Russian, Caspian oil - plus strong protection - in return for loads of European Union investment. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

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

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May 26, 2005

The real problems with $50 oil
By Henry C K Liu
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE26Dj02.html

After oil prices peaked above US$58 a barrel in early April, and stayed around their current $50 range, the White House announced that it wanted oil to go back down to $25 a barrel. There is a common misconception in life that if only things could go back to the ways they were in the good old days, life would be good again like in the good old days. Unfortunately, good old days never return as good old days because what makes the old days good is often just bad memory. The problem with market capitalism is that while markets can go up and markets can go down, they never end up in the same spot. The term "business cycle" is a misnomer because the end of the cycle is a very different place from the beginning of a cycle. A more accurate term would be "business spiral", either up or down or simply sideways.

Oil is a good example whereby this market truism can be observed. When oil rises above $50 a barrel and stays there for an extended period, the resultant changes in the economy become normalized facts. These changes go way beyond fluctuations in the price of oil to produce a very different economy. Below are 10 new economic facts created by $50 oil.

Fact 1: Oil-related transactions involving the same material quantity involve greater cash flow, with each barrel of oil generating $50 instead of $25. The United States now consumes about 20 million barrels of oil each day, about 25% of world consumption of 84 million barrels. At $50 a barrel, the aggregate oil bill for the US comes to $1 billion a day, $365 billion a year, about 3% of 2004 US gross domestic product (GDP). About 60% of US consumption is imported at a cost of $600 million a day, or $219 billion a year. Oil and gas import is the single largest component in the US trade deficit, not imports from Japan or China.

As oil prices rise, consumers pay more for heating oil and gasoline, airlines pay more for jet fuel, utility companies pay more for oil, petrochemical companies pay more for raw material, and the whole economy pays more for electricity. Now those extra payments do not disappear into a black hole in the universe. They go into someone`s pocket as revenue and translate into profits for some businesses and losses for others. In other words, higher energy prices do not take money out of the economy, they merely shift profit allocation from one business sector to another. More than $200 billion a year goes to foreign oil producers who then must recycle their oil dollars back into US Treasury bonds or other dollar assets, as part of the rules of the game of dollar hegemony. The simple fact is that a rise in monetary value of assets adds to the monetary wealth of the economy.

Fact 2: Since energy is a basic commodity and oil is the predominant energy source, high energy cost translates into a high cost of living, which can also result in a higher standard of living if income can keep up. High energy cost translates into reduced consumption in other sectors unless higher income can be generated from the increased cash flow. Unfortunately, in the modern market economy, higher income for the general public often means working longer hours, since pay raises typically have a long time lag behind price increases. Working longer hours does not translate into productivity increases, but it does increase income. Those who cannot find overtime work will look for a second or third job, or put a hitherto non-working spouse back in the labor market. This generally lowers the standard of living, with less time for rest and leisure and for family and social life.

With higher prices, companies will hire more workers, since with wages remaining stagnant and the cost of worker benefits declining while company cash flow increases, adding employees will not hurt profitability and will enhance prospects for growth. Those who get paid by fixed commission on transaction volume are the winners. They see their income rise as the monetary value of the transaction rises. This ranges from sales agents and gas-station operators to real-estate brokers, investment bankers, mortgage brokers, credit-card issuers, etc. This translates into higher aggregate revenue for the economy and explains why corporate profit is up even when consumer discretionary spending slows. It also explains why employment can be up while the unemployment rate remains constant, because the new work goes mostly to those already employed or those newly entering the job market, but not to the chronically unemployed, who remain unemployed. A steady unemployment rate in an expanding labor pool means that unemployment is growing at the same rate as new employment. An unemployment rate of 5.2% - the US rate in April - is within the structural range (4-6%) of what neo-classical economists call a non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), thus presenting no inflation threat.

Fact 3: As cash flow increases for the same amount of material activities, the GDP rises while the economy stagnates. Companies are buying and selling the same amount or maybe even less, but at a higher price and profit margin and with slightly more employees at lower pay per unit of revenue. US prices for existing homes have been rising more than 30% annually for almost a decade, adding significantly to GDP growth. As the oil price rose within a decade from about $10 a barrel to $50, a fivefold increase, those who owned oil reserves saw their asset value increase also fivefold. Those who did not own oil reserves protected themselves with hedges in the rapidly expanding structured finance world. Since GDP is a generally accepted measure of economic health, the US economy then is judged to be growing at a very acceptable rate while running in place. People eat less beef and put the meat money into the gas tanks of their cars to pollute the air, shifting cancer risks from their colons to their lungs.

Fact 4: With asset value ballooning from the impact of a sharp rise in energy prices, which in turn leads the entire commodity price chain in an upward spiral, the economy can carry more debt without increasing its debt-to-equity ratio, giving much-needed substance to the debt bubble that had been in danger of bursting before oil prices began to rise. Since the monetary value of assets tends to rise in tandem over time, the net effect is a de facto depreciation of money, misidentified as growth.

Fact 5: High oil prices threaten the economic viability of some commercial sectors, such as airlines and motor vehicles. US airlines United and Delta recently won court approval to dump their pension obligations in a bankruptcy proceeding. A need to bolster pension costs, underfunded by $5.3 billion, over the next three years would worsen Delta`s cash flow problems. Delta faces $3.1 billion in pension costs between 2006 and 2008. A bill under consideration by the US Senate would stretch out employee pension payments over 25 years, and could ease the airline`s liabilities.

United Airlines sought and received approval of its plan to have the government`s pension insurer take over its defined-benefit plans, resulting in the largest-ever US pension default. United workers will lose about a quarter of their total pensions if their accounts are shifted to the government-run Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp (PBGC). United`s effort to dump its pensions is being watched closely by the rest of the airline industry, where record high fuel costs, the lowest fares since the early 1990s and stiff deregulated competition have caused network carriers to lose billions of dollars. Delta lost over $1 billion in the first quarter of 2005. A successful move by United to get out from under its pension obligations, following a similar step taken successfully by US Airways Group Inc in February, cleared the way for similar actions elsewhere in the industry and the economy. American Airlines, the largest US carrier and a unit of AMR Corp, has said it will keep its pension plans but is concerned about No 2 United gaining a financial advantage with the elimination of its pension obligations. Pension arbitrage is producing the same destructive effect on labor as cross-border wage arbitrage.

Detroit, namely Ford and General Motors, with their most profitable models being the gas-guzzling trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that can take more than $100 to fill their tanks, are going down the same route with their pension obligations. General Motors Acceptance Corp (GMAC), a huge $300 billion credit-finance company, is facing financial problems created by the falling dollar, rising interest rates, and falling auto sales. GMAC debt, at about $260 billion, has fallen to junk status. GM`s pension fund is underfunded by $17 billion, at only 80% of its obligations. The prospect of a private pension collapse is more pressing than the accounting crisis in Social Security. As Ford and GM fall into financial stress, their extended network of parts and material suppliers is also falling into insolvency.

The result is that the PBGC will fail financially as more companies default on their pension obligations, the same away the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) did during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. On September 2, Labor Day 1974, the landmark Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) became law in the US, with the government insuring pensions for millions of workers. Since then, PBGC has paid more than $8 billion in benefits to retirees under private-sector-defined benefit pension plans in the agency`s care.

PBGC already administers the retirement benefits of almost 500,000 workers and retirees who were covered by about 2,700 terminated pension plans. Nearly half of them worked in five major industries: primary metals; airlines; industrial machinery; motor vehicles and parts; and rubber and plastics. PBGC insures more than 44,000 private-sector pension plans covering some 42 million workers, about one in every three US workers. Before PBGC was created, many workers labored without assurance of receiving the pensions they earned. In those not-so-good old days, there were instances where thousands of people lost all retirement benefits when their companies failed and could not keep pension commitments. Because of PBGC, this can no longer happen. When business failures occur and companies can no longer support their defined benefit pensions, PBGC will pay worker benefits as ERISA provides. But with entire industries going down the drain, PBGC, an insurance enterprise operating on the actuary principle of occasional unit default within healthy industries, cannot shoulder the cost of industrywide defaults without a federal bailout. Fifty-dollar oil will accelerate this crisis in government pension insurance.

Fact 6: Industrial plastics, the materials most in demand in modern manufacturing, more than steel or cement, are all derived from oil. Higher prices of industrial plastics will mean lower wages for workers who assemble them into products. But even steel and cement require energy to produce and their prices will also go up along with oil prices. While low Asian wages are keeping global inflation in check through cross-border wage arbitrage, rising energy prices are the unrelenting factor behind global inflation that no interest-rate policy from any central bank can contain. Ironically, from a central bank`s perspective, a commodity-price-pushed asset appreciation, which central banks do not define as inflation, is the best cure for a debt bubble that the central banks themselves created.

Fact 7: War-making is a gluttonous oil consumer. With high oil prices, America`s wars will carry a higher price, which will either lead to a higher federal budget deficit, or lower social spending, or both. This translates into rising dollar interest rates, which is structurally recessionary for the globalized economy. But while war is relentlessly inflationary, war spending is an economic stimulant, at least as long as collateral damage from war occurs only on foreign soil. War profits are always good for business, and the need for soldiers reduces unemployment. Fighting for oil faces little popular opposition at home, even though for the United States the need for oil is not a credible justification for war. The fact of the matter is that the US already controls most of the world`s oil without war, by virtue of oil being denominated in dollars that the US can print at will with little penalty.

Fact 8: There is a supply/demand myth that if oil prices rise, they will attract more exploration for new oil, which will bring prices back down in time. This was true in the good old days when oil in the ground stayed a dormant financial asset. But now, as explained by Facts 3 and 4 above, in a debt bubble, oil in the ground can be more valuable than oil above ground because it can serve as a monetizable asset through asset-backed securities (ABS) in the wild, wild world of structured finance (derivatives). So while there is incentive to find more oil to enlarge the asset base, there is little incentive to pump it out of the ground merely to keep prices low.

Gasoline prices also will not come down, not because there is a shortage of crude oil, but because there is a shortage of refinery capacity. The refinery deficiency is created by the appearance of gas-guzzlers that Detroit pushed on the consuming public when gasoline was cheaper than bottled water, at less than a $1 a US gallon (26.5 cents a liter). Refineries are among the most capital-intensive investments, with nightmarish regulatory hurdles. Refineries need to be located where the demand for gasoline is, but families that own three cars do not want to live near a refinery. Thus there is no incentive to expand refinery capacity to bring gasoline prices down because the return on new investment will need high gasoline prices to pay for it. After all, the market is not a charity organization for the promotion of human welfare. It is a place where investors try to get the highest price for products to repay their investment with highest profit. It is not the nature of the market to reduce the price of output from investment so that consumers can drive gas-guzzling SUVs that burn most of their fuel sitting in traffic jams on freeways.

Fact 9: According to the US Geological Survey, the Middle East has only half to one-third of known world oil reserves. There is a large supply of oil elsewhere in the world that would be available at higher but still economically viable prices. The idea that only the Middle East has the key to the world`s energy future is flawed and is geopolitically hazardous.

The United States has large proven oil reserves that get larger with rising oil prices. Proven reserves of oil are generally taken to be those quantities that geological and engineering information indicates with reasonable certainty can be recovered in the future from known reservoirs under existing economic and geological conditions. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the US had 21.8 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves as of January 1, 2001, twelfth-highest in the world. These reserves are concentrated overwhelmingly (more than 80%) in four states - Texas (25%, including the state`s reserves in the Gulf of Mexico), Alaska (24%), California (21%), and Louisiana (14%, including the state`s reserves in the Gulf of Mexico).

US proven oil reserves had declined by about 20% since 1990, with the largest single-year decline (1.6 billion barrels) occurring in 1991. But this was due mostly to the falling price of oil, which shrank proven reserves by definition. At $50 a barrel, the reserve numbers can expand greatly. The reason the US imports oil is that importing is cheaper and cleaner than extracting domestic oil. At a certain price level, the US may find it more economic to develop domestic oil instead of importing. The idea of achieving oil independence as a strategy for cheap oil is unworthy of serious discussion.

And then there are "unconventional" petroleum reserves that include heavy oils, which can be pumped and refined just like conventional petroleum except that they are thicker and have more sulfur and heavy-metal contamination, necessitating more extensive and costly refining. Venezuela`s Orinoco heavy-oil belt is the best-known example of this kind of unconventional reserves, currently estimated to be 1.2 trillion barrels. Tar sands can be recovered via surface mining or in-situ collection techniques. This is more expensive than lifting conventional petroleum but not prohibitively so. Canada`s Athabasca Tar Sands are the best-known example of this kind of unconventional reserves, currently estimated to be 1.8 trillion barrels. Oil shale requires extensive processing and consumes large amounts of water. Still, unconventional reserves far exceed the current supply of conventional oil.

The economics of petroleum are as important as geology in coming up with reserve estimates since a proven reserve is one that can be developed economically. If the Mideast and the Persian Gulf implode geopolitically and oil from this region stops flowing, the US will be the main beneficiary of $50 oil, or even $100 oil, as would Britain with its North Sea oil and countries such as Norway and Indonesia. But the big winner will be Russia. For China, it would be a wash, because China imports energy not for domestic consumption, but to fuel its growing export machine, and can pass on the added cost to foreign buyers. In fact, the likelihood of the US bartering below-market Texas crude for low-cost Chinese manufactured goods is very real possibility in the future. Similar bilateral arrangements between China-Russia, China-Venezuela and China-Indonesia are also good prospects.

Fact 10: Fifty-dollar oil will buy the US debt bubble a little more time, albeit bubbles never last forever. But in a democracy, the White House is under pressure from a misinformed public to bring the oil price back down to $25, not realizing that the price for cheap oil can be the bursting of the debt bubble. Despite all the grandstand warnings about the need to reduce the US trade deficit, a case can be made that the United States cannot drastically reduce its trade deficit without paying the price of a sharp recession that could trigger a global depression.

The economics of oil
Since the discovery of petroleum, its economics has never been about cutting a square deal for the consumer, corporate or individual, let alone the little guys or the working poor. It has to do with squeezing the most financial value out of this black gold.

John D Rockefeller consolidated the US oil industry into a monopoly by eliminating chaotic competition to keep the price high, not to push prices down. Neo-classical economics views higher prices of consumables as inflation, but asset appreciation is viewed as growth, not inflation. Since oil is both an asset and a consumable commodity, neo-classical economics presents a dilemma for oil economics. The size of oil reserves is exponentially greater than the annual flow of oil to the market. What is even more fundamental is that as the flow of oil to the market is reduced, the price of oil goes up, enlarging proven reserves by definition. Thus while a rise in the market price of oil adds to inflation, the corresponding rise of the asset value and size of oil reserves create a wealth effect that more than neutralizes the inflationary impact of market oil prices. The world should not care about an added percentage point in inflation if the world`s assets would appreciate 17% as a result, except that when oil is not owned equally among the world`s population, a conflict emerges between consumers and producers.

In fact, on an aggregate basis, cheap oil can have a deflationary impact on the economy by reducing the wealth effect. For the US economy, since the United States is a major possessor of oil assets, both on- and offshore, high oil prices are in the national interest. What we have is not an inflation problem in rising oil prices, but a pricing problem that distributes unevenly the benefits and pains of price adjustment among oil owners and oil consumers, both domestically and internationally.

On March 12, 1999, St Louis Federal Reserve Bank president William Poole said in a speech that the growth of the US money supply, which was then at more than 8% when inflation was below 2% annually, was "a source of concern" because it outpaced the rate of inflation. The M2 money supply had been growing at an 8.6% annual rate for the previous 52 weeks to keep the economy from stalling before the 2000 election. The US Federal Reserve was also watching the rate of inflation, held down mostly by low oil prices.

The rises and falls of OPEC
Failure by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut production at its meeting in November 1998 prompted prices to collapse to a 12-year low of $10.35 a barrel in New York the following month. A combination of excess production, rising inventories and poor demand for winter heating fuels pushed prices down. In March 1999, oil prices climbed 17%, going higher as oil-producing countries, unified by low prices, succeed in cutting output. Oil prices began making a sharp recovery in the late winter of 1999, rising from the low teens at the beginning of the year to more than $22 a barrel by the early autumn, and crossed $30 a barrel in mid-February 2000. A major cause was production cuts settled upon in March 1999 by OPEC and other major oil-exporting nations. Poole warned that "we cannot continue to rely on the decline of oil prices at the pace of the last couple of years". He said investors who had pushed bond yields to their highest level in six months were correct in assuming the Fed`s next move would be to increase interest rates. The Fed Open Market Committee (FOMC), when it met on February 2, 1999, had left the Fed Funds rate (FFR) target at 4.75%. Poole voted in 1998 for the FOMC to cut the FFR target three times between September and November to 4.75% when oil was at $12.

Today, with oil at around $48, the FFR target is 3% effective since May 3. Annualized growth rate for M2 in April 2005 (relative to April 2004) was 4.139%, a fall by more than half of the 1999 growth rate of 8.6%. If the Fed is really concerned with fighting inflation, $48 oil and a 3% FFR target simply do not mix, even with a lowered money-supply growth rate. There is strong evidence that instead of worrying about inflation, the Fed is really more worried about the debt bubble, which stealth inflation through asset appreciation can help to deflate with less or no pain.

In July 1993, when the US economy had been growing for more than two years from M2 growth of over 6%, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan remarked in congressional testimony that "if the historical relationships between M2 and nominal income had remained intact, the behavior of M2 in recent years would have been consistent with an economy in severe contraction". With the M2 growth rate down to 1.44% in July 1993, Greenspan said, "The historical relationships between money and income, and between money and the price level, have largely broken down, depriving the aggregates of much of their usefulness as guides to policy. At least for the time being, M2 has been downgraded as a reliable indicator of financial conditions in the economy, and no single variable has yet been identified to take its place."

M2, adjusted for changes in the price level, remains a component of the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, which some market analysts use to forecast economic recessions and recoveries. A positive correlation between money-supply growth and economic growth exists only on inflation-adjusted M2 growth, and only if the new money goes into new investment rather than as debt to support speculation on rising asset prices. Sustainable economic expansions are based on real production, not on speculative debt.
In 2004, longer-term interest rates actually declined from their June high of 4.82% to 4.20% at year-end even as short-term rates rose and the money supply grew at a 5.67% annual rate. This reflected a credit market unconcerned with long-term inflation despite a sinking US dollar and oil prices rising above $50 a barrel. The reason is that $50 oil raised asset value at a faster pace than price inflation of commodities.

In March 2000, OPEC punctured the Greenspan easy-money bubble by reversing the fall of oil prices. The FOMC was forced to respond to the change in the rate of inflation, no longer being held down by declines in oil prices. Because the easy money stimulated only speculation that did not produce any real growth, the easy-money bubble of 2000 evolved into the current debt-driven asset bubble. The smart money realized in 2000 that the market`s march toward $50 oil was on. And in 2005, $50 oil appears to be giving Greenspan`s debt-driven asset bubble a second life, most of which ended in the real-estate sector. If oil should fall back to $25 a barrel, the debt-driven asset bubble will pop with a bang.

Oil is not included in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime because it is not a commodity that can be produced at will by any nation, regardless of efficiency. Oil producers are members of a natural monopoly devoid of open competition. Yet OPEC is a cartel. As such, it will eventually conflict with the competition policy thrust of the WTO. Under WTO rules, oil-producing nations cannot be charged with price-fixing if they intervene to affect market prices. OPEC, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the WTO are among the most visible international economic organizations. The WTO regime imposes draconian free-market rules on trade except for oil and currencies, while OPEC blatantly practices intergovernmental manipulation of oil prices and the IMF acts as the world`s policeman in defense of dollar hegemony. Neo-liberal economists do not see OPEC and the IMF as trade-restricting monopolies, arguing that their separate domains of oil and currencies are not part of the concern of the WTO regime. Concerted government intervention against market forces in the price of oil and currencies are tolerated in the name of needing to correct market failures. The fact of the matter is that the term "market" is a misnomer for oil and currency transactions. These commodities change hands not in a market, but in an allotment schema arranged from a central control point in a neo-feudal regime.

A major key to understanding the operation of OPEC is the internal battle for market share within OPEC by its members, causing aggregate OPEC production to be higher than what serves even the cartel`s overall interest. Discontinuities in the production of Iraq and Iran were caused by the Iraq-Iran conflicts between 1980 and 1988. A second discontinuity in 1990 was caused by Iraq`s invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War. A third discontinuity occurred when the US invaded Iraq in 2003. A fourth discontinuity is pending over Iran`s march toward nuclear-power status. As a major oil producer, Iran needs nuclear power for civilian use as much as coal-producing Newcastle needs oil. Obviously, other agendas are at work. OPEC was formed in 1960 with five founding members: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. By the end of 1971, six other nations had joined the group: Qatar, Indonesia, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and Nigeria. Of these, only Venezuela is non-Islamic. OPEC emerged as an effective cartel only after the Arab oil embargo that started on October 19, 1973, and ended on March 18, 1974. During that period, the price for benchmark Saudi Light increased from $2.59 in September 1973 to $11.65 six months later in March 1974. Since then, OPEC has been setting bottom benchmark prices for its various kinds of crude oil in the world market.

The oil price dipped below $10 after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. By 1984, the effects of seven years of high prices had taken its toll on demand in the form of more energy-efficient homes and industrial processes, and in substantial increases in automobile fuel efficiency, not to mention new competitive use of coal. At the same time, crude-oil production was increasing throughout the world, stimulated by higher prices. During this period, OPEC total production stayed relatively constant, around 30 million barrels per day. However, OPEC`s market share was decreased from more than 50% in 1974 to 47% in 1979. The loss of market share was caused by non-OPEC production increases in the rest of the world. Higher crude prices caused by OPEC production sacrifices had made exploration more profitable for everyone, not just OPEC, and many non-OPEC producers around the world rushed to take advantage of it.

The rapid oil-price increases since 1980 served to accelerate consumer moves toward energy efficiency. In the US, conservation was also helped by tax incentives and new regulations. Sharp increases in non-OPEC production fueled by high oil prices were compounded by the deregulation of domestic crude-oil prices in the US.

Global demand for oil had peaked by 1979 and it became clear that the only way for OPEC to maintain prices was to reduce production further. OPEC reduced its total production by a third during the first half of the 1980s. As a result, the cartel`s share in world oil production dropped below 30%. Non-OPEC producers got a big lift from higher prices, larger market shares, and an expanded definition of proven reserves.

Looking at OPEC members` production share within the organization and not their share of total world production, one could clearly see Saudi Arabia acting as swing producer for OPEC during the first half of the 1980s in the cartel`s attempt to shore up declining prices. By 1986, the Saudis got tired of playing this role as other OPEC member countries were cheating on their quotas at Saudi expense. In response, Saudi Arabia rapidly increased production, causing a major price collapse. It created an oil boom in oil-consuming economies and a recession in oil-producing economies. But since the oil-producing economies were the consumers of the manufactured products made by the oil-consuming economies, recession in oil-producing economies caused a worldwide recession, as reflected in the 1987 crash in the US stock markets.

It took almost three years for oil prices to recover. The lower prices did have a long-term beneficial effect for OPEC. They encouraged increased consumption and halted production increases in much of the rest of the world, causing among other things the oil depression in Texas. By the end of the decade of the 1980s, prices finally stabilized. Throughout the late `80s, however, when oil prices plummeted, bankrupt oil drillers dragged Texas banks under, causing the entire oil-dominated Texas economy to go into convulsion. Today, in a globalized debt market, if a major borrower goes bust in Texas, it would only affect dispersed small units of commercial asset-backed security bonds of unbundled risks held in countless money managers` portfolios all over the world. The effect would be so diffused that no one would even notice. Securitization of debt now stands at more than $4 trillion globally, up from $375 billion in 1985.

OPEC, or any other cartel, faces a problem of optimization in its attempts to control prices. The problem is to determine the level of production that meets its collective goals of highest prices with the biggest volume over the longest sustainable period. For OPEC, this means maintaining production levels that ensure the highest oil prices possible without encouraging competitive production outside OPEC or significant conservation measures on the part of consumers everywhere.

The Saddam Hussein factor
In January 1990, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had 24% and 9% of OPEC`s total production. Iraq and Iran had 13% and 12% respectively. Iraq was involved at this time in a territorial dispute with Kuwait. Negotiations between the two Arab countries failed to produce any solution. In a meeting on July 25, 1990, between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and US ambassador April Glaspie, Saddam was assured that the US would not become involved in the Arab-to-Arab political dispute. It was a major factor in Iraq`s decision to reincorporate Kuwait by force. A week later, on August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait, giving it control of 22% of OPEC production.

The United States, belatedly realizing that political consolidation of Arab oil was against its long-standing policy of divide and rule, reversed itself on the basis of defending the principle of state sovereignty, and became the major force in restoring Kuwait`s questionable sovereignty and de facto oil ownership early in 1991. At this point, the US-engineered embargo prevented the export of Iraqi oil, and Kuwait`s oilfields had been destroyed by war. Iraq and Kuwait had virtually no production and the slack was taken up by other OPEC members, primarily Saudi Arabia. In February 1991, Saudi Arabia`s production accounted for more than 35% of OPEC output. The Saudis had increased production sufficiently to compensate for the loss of Kuwait`s production as well as some of that of Iraq. The Saudis were forced by US pressure to pay for the cost of the Gulf War and by Arab pressure to provide financial aid to defeated Iraq under the table, all from the windfall revenue. Not much was changed in the oil economics of the region except in the political accounting.

By December 1998, Saudi Arabia`s global market share was 29.7%, Kuwait`s 7.4%, Iran`s 13.0%, Iraq`s 8.4% and Venezuela`s 11.0%. Saudi Arabia had the greatest increase in market share compared with the pre-Gulf War period, although it had fallen back from its 35% postwar peak, as Kuwait and Iraq recovered. Venezuela was third, after Iran. In addition, the Saudis have always had the largest volume of production. At most times, the Saudis produce at least twice as much as the second-largest OPEC producer. Those who follow OPEC will recall that, especially in the 1980s, many of the negotiations over production quotas included discussions of what was equitable for the member countries. Among the factors considered were population, per capita income and the economic dependence upon crude-oil exports and, last but not least, economic threats to political stability.

By the end of the 1980s, most of the issues about the sharing of the total OPEC production pie had been resolved. But all of the explicit and implicit agreements in place at that time were disrupted by Iraq`s invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War. After the war, OPEC tried to move back toward the pre-Gulf War agreements on splitting up the production pie and return to the old method of doing business. Some consideration was given to the economic needs of OPEC members as well as non-OPEC members with emerging economies, such as Mexico.

The Hugo Chavez factor
Venezuela was a case in point. The country was on its economic knees or worse, victimized by neo-liberal policies of accepting foreign debt secured by oil exports and driven to the ground by IMF conditionality rescues. Despite the fact that Venezuela had increased its share of OPEC production significantly over the previous decade, OPEC declined to demand that Venezuela give up its gains. OPEC agreed on another cutback in production to boost prices in 1997 without requiring Venezuela to share proportionately in that cut. Yet Venezuela continued to view oil prices as too low to meet its needs in servicing foreign debt. OPEC was bending backward in vain to avoid pushing Venezuela into a left-leaning revolution. There was a lot of pressure from the US on Saudi Arabia to shoulder a disproportionate share of the cuts after 1997.

Under US pressure, OPEC tolerance changed after Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 with 56% of the vote, and re-elected in 2000 under the new constitution with 59% of the vote. In November 2000, the National Assembly granted Chavez the right to rule by decree for one year, and in November 2001, he made a set of 49 decrees, including fundamental reforms in oil and agrarian policy. In December 2001, the nation`s largest business organizations and the right-dominated Petroleum Workers Union organized a general strike. In 2002, the US-backed opposition forces staged an unsuccessful coup that was foiled by a massive popular uprising, with support from the rank-and-file members of the military. Chavez was restored to the presidency after 48 hours. A recall referendum, certified by the Organization of American States and the Carter Center, failed by giving Chavez a 58% majority.

Chavez` popularity in Venezuela and throughout Latin America, where two-thirds of the South American continent have elected leftist presidencies, has grown. As oil prices soared in the wake of the second Iraq war and from booming Chinese demand, oil-rich Venezuela gained financial power to refuse predatory loans and aid from the United States, in its struggle to distance itself from US domination. Washington`s influence in Caracas evaporated, as Chavez accused the administration of US President George W Bush of having staged the failed 2002 coup. A 35-year military agreement between the US and Venezuela was unilaterally annulled by Venezuela on April 24 this year.

Supply and demand
Current oil-price levels are a reflection of a fleeting inventory problem rather than a long-term pricing issue. There is of course no, and has never has been, a problem with the natural supply of oil. The world will still be awash with oil even after petroleum is rendered obsolete by new energy technology. When US president Bill Clinton threatened to release US strategic reserves in the 1990s, OPEC signaled its decision to increase production immediately more than once, not because of market fundamentals, but as political gestures. Many economists think that $35 oil in the long run is good for the global economy. At any rate, oil is no longer a critical factor for the US economy, which is increasingly less dependent on oil for growth. GE announced in February 2000 a new turbine that would be 60% more efficient than current models in generating electricity for the same energy input. The news did not help GE stock prices.

There was solid evidence that the 1970s recycling of petrodollars, which mostly ended up in the dollar assets in the United States anyway, contributed to US inflation as much as the higher retail price of gasoline. It in essence siphoned off additional global funds to purchase higher-priced oil for investment in US real estate, which was the only sector the then unsophisticated Arab money managers thought they knew enough about to handle. By the 1990s, they were more sophisticated. Some had expected that a new injection of petrodollars would sustain the collapsing "new economy" equity market of the `90s. It did not work because, even at $35, oil was still behind its pre-1973 price relative to the peak Nasdaq in June 1999, the equivalent of which would bring $120 oil.

The drop in oil prices after 1997 was mostly a cyclical effect of the drastic reduction of demand from the Asian financial crisis, which impacted the whole world. There was zero pressure even in the US to raise oil prices at that time, because of the effect they had on keeping easy-money inflation low. Even oil companies were not really upset by this temporary condition because, until oil prices dropped below $7 per barrel, it was not a big deal since that was the offshore production cost in the North Sea. The wellhead cost on land was less than $4 per barrel, plus market-induced leasehold costs. North Sea oil was higher because of fixed offshore drilling investments. In 1998, oil could stay at anywhere above $7 for quite a few years without doing any lasting harm to the US or Europe. It was widely expected to go back up to $35 by the end of 2000, and a lot of people would get rich in the process. OPEC was touting the line of argument that high prices would stimulate new exploration to get the non-OPEC consumers to accept costlier oil. In the long run, less new exploration would be good for OPEC. Before 1973, the whole world was happy with $3 oil. As for the US, cheap oil kept inflation (as measured by the Fed) low, the dollar high and dollar interest rates low. These benefits outweighed the oil-sector problems created by a collapse in oil prices. In oil, no one has told the truth for more than 80 years, or since its discovery.

There were all kinds of reasons that US president George H W Bush pushed Iraq out of Kuwait, Clinton bombed Iraq, and Bush Jr invaded and occupied it, but oil prices were very low on the list and terrorism was not even on the list. If Iraqi oil re-enters the world market, other OPEC members will reduce the production quota, so the real impact on prices will be minimum. Most market analysts have estimated the price movement at less that $1 under such development. So at the post-1997 price of $10-plus per barrel, only the profit margin was reduced and some idiotic oil brokers in Chicago holding high futures contracts, and some high-rolling investors in oil rigs in Texas, got wiped out, including a future occupant of the White House. But the good news for the oil industry was that it gave a big boost to oil-company mergers to consolidate the sector and reserves and downsize employment, which in better times the US government would have never approved for antitrust reasons.

As Asia recovered from the 1997 financial crisis, lifted mostly by China, the oil industry found itself in the position to command $50 oil in the next cycle, and enjoyed the inflated value of its global reserves, which it had bought up at low cost a decade ago. The low prices of the past decade had also put OPEC countries, predominantly Islamic, in their places, including the bonus of Indonesia and Russia, which had to live exclusively on oil exports (not really living, because all of the reduced revenue went to service foreign debts assumed in better times). With globalization, the US, the center, has been enjoying the rotting of the outer limbs of the global economy since the end of the Cold War, but it has yet to realize gangrene kills the whole organism.

Iraq was not an oil problem as far as Washington was concerned. In fact, low oil prices worked against Saddam in the black market. Saddam has been portrayed by the US as one of its worst enemies. But he has not always worn and will not always wear that honor, given the unpredictability of Iran. The terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, put a new dimension on the problem of Iraq. The reason the US failed to kill Saddam was not incompetence or Christian mercy, but the fact that Saddam might not have been the worst alternative. He was just a bad boy who misbehaved. What Washington wanted was for Saddam to be its bad boy. Saddam is far from totally finished politically. The world has seen stranger things than the political rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein. He has a major advantage over Bush Jr, as he did over Clinton and Bush Sr. Saddam has a focused purpose whereas Clinton, the Bushes, and US policy are all driven by complex incentives that are at times contradictory. The political economy of oil is no intellectual tea party. There is no price economics in oil. It`s all politics of the dirtiest kind.

The problem with cheap oil
It is often overlooked that the United States is a major oil producer. In fact, before the discovery of oil in the Middle East in the 1930s, the US was the world`s biggest exporter of oil. "Oil for the lamps of China" was a slogan of the Standard Oil monopoly. It is not clear that cheap oil is in the United States` national interest. Cheap oil distorts the US economy in unconstructive ways. In recent years of cheap oil, advances in conservation have all been abandoned. Until this year, US consumers were buying eight-cylinder SUVs that deliver only eight miles per gallon (29 liters per 100 kilometers), as well as air-conditioned convertibles. Even with $2 (53 cents per liter) gasoline, commuters face only a $500 annual increase in their gas bills. Vehicle prices have risen faster than gasoline prices in recent decades. Of course, the rest of the world outside the US has been operating on $4 (more than $1 per liter) gasoline for a long time.

It is an economic axiom that excessively low commodity pricing breeds abuse of that commodity. This truth can be observed in water, air, petrochemicals and energy. It holds true even for labor and capital. Higher labor cost drives productivity growth. Greenspan`s favorite homely is: "Bad loans are made in good times."

OPEC had been permitted to assume an effective cartel role only at the pleasure of the United States. The existence of OPEC serves several convenient US geopolitical purposes. It deflects political opposition to the international oil regime from the US toward a mostly Arab/Islamic organization, yet the health of OPEC is inseparably tied to the health of the energy corporations of the West that control all the downstream operations. OPEC is an example of how economic nationalism can be co-opted into Western-dominated neo-imperialist globalization.

Excessively high oil prices are of course as detrimental to an economy as excessively low oil prices. The last downturn in crude-oil prices had immediate impacts on the exploration segment of the industry. Coincident with that was a decline in sales and manufacture of oil and gas equipment. Another segment of the industry that felt the pressure of the price decline was oil and gas services.

According to James Williams of WTRG Economics, oil prices behave much as any other commodity, with wide price swings in times of shortage or oversupply. US domestic oil prices were heavily regulated through production or price control throughout much of the 20th century. In the post-World War II era, oil prices averaged $19.27 per barrel in 1996 dollars. Through the same period, the median price for crude oil was $15.27 in 1996 prices. That meant that only half of the time from 1947 to 1997 did oil prices exceed $15.26 per barrel. Prices only exceeded $22 per barrel in response to war or conflict in the Middle East. In 1972, $3.50 oil translated to $11.50 in 1996 dollars and $16.29 in 2005 dollars.

The long-term view is much the same. Since 1869, US crude-oil prices adjusted for inflation have averaged $18.63 per barrel in 1996 dollars. Fifty percent of the time, prices were below $14.91. Using long-term history as a guide, those in the upstream segment of the crude-oil industry structured their business to be able to operate profitably below $15 per barrel half the time.

Pre-embargo crude-oil prices ranged between $2.50 and $3 from 1948 through the end of the 1960s. The price of oil rose from $2.50 in 1948 to about $3 in 1957. When viewed in 1996 dollars, an entirely different story emerges. In 1996 dollars, crude-oil prices fluctuated between $14 and $16 during the same period. The apparent price increases were just keeping up with inflation. From 1958 to 1970, prices were stable at about $3 per barrel, but in real terms the price of crude oil declined from above $15 to below $12 per barrel in 1996 dollars. The decline in the price of crude when adjusted for inflation was exacerbated in 1971 and 1972 by the weakness of the US dollar.

Member nations had experienced a decline in the real value of their oil since the foundation of OPEC. Throughout the post-World War II period, exporting countries found increasing demand for their crude oil was rewarded by a 40% decline in the purchasing power in the price of a barrel of crude until March 1971, when the balance of power shifted. That month, the Texas Railroad Commission set pro ration at 100% for the first time. This meant that Texas producers were no longer limited in the amount of oil that they could produce. More important, it meant that the power to control crude-oil prices shifted from the US cartel (Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana) to OPEC.

In 1972, the price of crude oil was about $3 and by the end of 1974 had quadrupled to $12. The Yom Kippur War started on October 5, 1973. The US and many other Western countries gave strong support to Israel. To punish such support, Arab oil-exporting nations imposed an embargo on the nations supporting Israel. Arab nations curtailed production by 5 million barrels per day. About 1mbpd was made up by increased production of non-Arab/Islamic producer countries. The net loss of 4mbpd extended through March 1974 and represented 7% of Western world production. Any doubt that the ability to control crude-oil prices had passed from the US to OPEC was removed during the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The extreme sensitivity of prices to supply shortages became all too apparent, though obviously unsustainable over the long term. Prices increased 400% in six short months. The abrupt jump, not the high price itself, caused destabilizing damage to the US and other Western economies.

From 1974 to 1978, crude-oil prices increased at a moderate pace from $12 per barrel to $14, mostly due to adjustments in demand moderated by increases in alternative sources of supply. When adjusted for inflation, prices were constant over this period of time. War between Iran and Iraq led to another round of increases in 1980. The Iranian revolution resulted in the loss of 2-2.5mbpd between November 1978 and June 1979. Starting in 1980, Iraq`s crude-oil production fell 2.7mbpd and Iran`s by 600,000 barrels per day during the Iran-Iraq War. The combination of these two events resulted in crude-oil prices more than doubling from $14 in 1978 to $35 per barrel in 1981.

The rapid increase in crude prices in this period would have been much less were it not for US energy policy. The US imposed price controls on domestically produced oil in an attempt to lessen the impact of the 1973-74 price increase. The obvious result of the price controls was that US consumers of crude oil paid 48% more for imports than domestic production, while US producers received less. In the short term, the recession induced by the 1973-74 price rise was made less painful by oil price control. However, in the absence of price controls, US exploration and production would certainly have been significantly greater, counterbalancing the economic decline. The higher prices faced by consumers would have resulted in still lower rates of consumption: automobiles would have had higher fuel efficiency sooner, homes and commercial buildings would have been better insulated and improvements in industrial energy efficiency would have been greater than they were during this period, thus cushioning the recession. As a consequence, the US would have been less dependent on imports in 1979-80 and the price increase in response to Iranian and Iraqi supply interruptions would have been significantly less.

OPEC has seldom been effective as a cartel. During the 1979-80 period of rapidly increasing prices, Saudi Arabia`s oil minister, Ahmed Yamani, repeatedly warned other members of OPEC that high prices would lead to a reduction in demand. For example, Armand Hammer`s Occidental Oil joint venture with the Chinese Ministry of Coal to export coal-derivative fuel based on $50 oil was bound to head toward financial disaster. The coal project in China failed by 1986 as oil prices fell.

The rapid price increases caused several reactions among consumers: better insulation in new homes, increased insulation in many older homes, more energy efficiency in industrial processes, and automobiles with lower fuel consumption, all with various forms of government subsidies or tax relief. These factors along with a global recession caused a reduction in demand that led to further falling crude prices. Unfortunately for OPEC, while the global recession was temporary, nobody rushed to remove insulation from their homes or to replace energy-efficient plants and equipment when the economy recovered. Much of the consumer reaction to the oil-price increase of the end of the decade was permanent and would not respond to lower prices with increased demand for oil.

From 1982 to 1985, OPEC attempted to set production quotas low enough to stabilize prices. These attempts met with repeated failure as various members of OPEC continued to produce beyond their quotas. During most of this period, Saudi Arabia acted as the swing producer cutting its production to stem the free-falling prices, as it intends to do now to halt the rise in price. In August 1985, the Saudis, tired of this role, linked their oil prices to the spot market for crude and by early 1986, increased production from 2mbpd to 5mbpd. Crude-oil prices plummeted below $10 per barrel by mid-year. China had a new minister of coal that same year.

A December 1986 OPEC price accord set to target $18 per barrel was already breaking down by the following month. Prices remained weak. The price of crude oil spiked in 1990 with the uncertainty associated with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War. Within hours of the first air strike against Iraq in January 1991, the White House announced that president Bush Sr was authorizing a drawdown of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), and the International Energy Agency (IEA) activated the plan on January 17. After the oil crisis of 1973-74, the IEA was created as a cooperative grouping of most of the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, committed to responding swiftly and effectively in future oil emergencies and to reducing their dependence on oil.

Crude prices plummeted by nearly $10 a barrel in the next-day trading, falling below $20 for the first time since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The price drop was attributed to optimistic reports about the allied forces` crippling of Iraqi air power and the diminished likelihood, despite the outbreak of war, of further jeopardy to world oil supply; the IEA plan and the SPR drawdown did not appear to be needed to help settle markets, and there was some criticism of it. Nonetheless, more than 30 million barrels of SPR oil was put out to bid, and 17.3 million barrels were sold and delivered in early 1991. But after the war, crude oil prices entered a steady decline until 1994, when inflation-adjusted prices attained their lowest level since 1973. The price cycle then turned up. With a strong economy in the US and a booming economy in Asia, increased demand led a steady price recovery well into 1997. This came to a rapid end as the impact of the 1997 financial crisis in Asia was underestimated by OPEC, being advised by the IMF. That December, OPEC increased its quotas by 10% to 27.5mbpd, but the rapid growth in Asian economies had come to a halt and reversed direction by half.

The rotary rig count is the average number of drilling rigs actively exploring for oil and gas. Drilling an oil or gas well is a high-risk, capital-intensive investment bet in the expectation of returns from the production of crude oil or natural gas in an uncertain market. Rig count is one of the primary measures of the health of the exploration segment of the oil and gas industry. In a very real sense, it is a measure of the oil and gas industry`s confidence in its own future. At the end of the Arab oil embargo in 1974, rig count was below 1500. It rose steadily with regulated rise of crude-oil prices to more than 2000 in 1979. From 1978 to the beginning of 1981 domestic US crude-oil prices exploded from a combination of the rapid growth in world energy prices and deregulation of domestic prices. Forecasts of crude prices in excess of $100 per barrel fueled a drilling frenzy. By 1982, the number of rotary rigs running had more than doubled.

The peak in drilling occurred more than a year after oil prices had entered a steep decline that continued until the 1986 price collapse. The one-year lag between crude prices and rig count disappeared in the price collapse. For the next few years, towns in the oil patch were characterized by bankruptcies, bank failures and high unemployment. Investors as far-flung as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore and London went under with it. Several trends were established in the wake of the collapse in crude prices. The lag of more than a year for drilling to respond to crude prices is now reduced to a matter of months. Like any other industry that goes through hard times, the oil business emerged smarter and much leaner. Industry participants, bankers and investors were far more aware of the risk of price movements. Companies long familiar with accessing geologic risk added price risk to their decision criteria. Financial hedging came into play in the construction of risk-management models.

Increased use of three-dimensional seismic data reduced drilling risk. Directional and horizontal drilling led to improved production in many reservoirs. Financial instruments were used to limit exposure to price movements. Increased use of floods to improve production in existing wells became common. Rig count is certainly a good measure of activity, but it is not a measure of success. After a well is drilled, it is classified either as an oil well, a natural gas well or a dry hole. The percentage of wells completed as oil or gas wells is frequently used as a measure of success, often referred to as the success rate.

Immediately after World War II, 35% of the wells drilled were dry wells. This percentage increased to about 43% by the end of the 1960s. It declined steadily during the 1970s to reach 30% at the end of the decade. This was followed by a plateau or modest increase through most of the 1980s. Beginning in 1990 shortly after the harsh lessons of the price collapse, non-completion rates decreased dramatically to 23%. These rates are closely watched by investors. Since the percentage completion rates are much lower for the more risky exploratory wells, a shift in emphasis away from development would be expected to result in lower overall completion rates. This, however, was not the case. An examination of completion rates for development and exploratory wells shows the same general pattern. The decline in dry holes was price-related. The higher the price, the fewer dry holes.

Some would argue that the periods of decline in successful drillings were a result of the fact that every year there is less oil to find. If the industry does not develop better technology and expertise every year, oil and gas completion rates should naturally decline. However, this does not explain the periods of increase. The increase of the 1970s was more related to price than technology. When a well is drilled, the fact that oil or gas is found does not mean that the well will be completed as a producing well. The determining factor is price economics (even though oil prices are fundamentally set politically). If the well can produce enough oil or gas at anticipated prices to cover the cost of completion and the ongoing production costs, it will be put into production. Otherwise, it is an economic dry hole even if crude oil or natural gas is found. The conclusion is that if real prices are increasing, we can expect a higher percentage of successful wells. Conversely if prices are declining, the opposite is true. Thus higher prices increase supply, regardless of natural conditions and technology.

The success-rate increases of the 1990s, however, could not be explained by higher prices alone. These increases were clearly also the result of improved technology. The increased use of and improvements in 3-D seismic data analysis combined with horizontal and directional drilling. Most dramatic was the improvement in the percentage of exploratory wells completed. In the 1990s completion rates have soared from 25% to 45%.

Worked-over rig count is a measure of the industry`s investment in the maintenance of oil and gas wells. The Baker-Hughes worked-over rig count includes rigs involved in pulling production tubing from a well that is 1,500 feet (457 meters) or more in depth. Worked-over rig count is another measure of the health of the oil and gas industry. Most work-overs are associated with oil wells. Worked-over rigs are used to pull tubing for repair or replacement of rods, pumps and tubular goods that are subject to wear and corrosion. A low level of worked-over activity is particularly worrisome because it is indicative of deferred maintenance. When operators are in a weak cash position, work-overs are delayed as long as possible. Worked-over activity impacts manufacturers of tubing, rods and pumps. Service companies coating pipe and other tubular goods are heavily affected. This of course leads to lower supply down the road and higher prices. Higher prices reverse the process, which ends up with lower prices later. Fifty-dollar oil will keep the oil sector expanding for some time.

OPEC and the independents
A critical November 1998 OPEC meeting failed to reverse the decline in oil prices. OPEC in 1997 had an earlier failure when it approved a 10% quota increase at a time when the Asian economies were entering a prolonged slump after the financial crisis. As a result, OPEC, until the recent hike in oil prices that began around 2000, experienced the lowest prices for crude oil after adjusting for inflation since the pre-embargo days of 1972.

Market share and price are recurring themes at OPEC meetings. The problem is that you cannot have both for long. To increase market share, OPEC must increase production sufficiently to drive prices down to the point that it is not economical for non-OPEC producers to maintain current production rates. Unfortunately for OPEC, the full realization of the impact of lower prices on non-OPEC producers can be effectuated only over a period of several years. The effect of lower prices is greatest in countries and areas with the highest exploration and production costs. Onshore production in areas with high lifting cost is usually the first to show reduction in activity. Because of long-term decisions involved, offshore producers often take longer to react to lower prices.

The term "independent" in the oil business generally applies to a producer of oil or gas that does not also own downstream facilities such as refineries, gasoline or diesel distribution, or retail gas stations. A 1998 survey of 24 of the larger US oil companies indicated that on the average it cost $4.48 to "find" a barrel of oil and $4.12 to produce it. That means there will be no profit for this group below $8.60 per barrel for new oil and no positive cash flow from operations below $4.12 per barrel.

Of course industrial averages are quite different from specific reality for any one company. Average production costs are just that - averages. Many oilfields have much higher costs - in some cases, as much as four times the average. Many small independent producers were going under financially prior to the rise in oil prices. Independents had reduced their workforce by 20% and shut down 50% of their production. Any further reduction in production would cause significant damage to the reservoirs. One company reported that it reduced lifting cost to $8 per barrel, but is only receiving an average of $6.80 per barrel.

Traders watch crude prices through the NYMEX (New York Mercantile Exchange) or IPE (International Petroleum Exchange) windows, but neither the NYMEX price nor the IPE price is the price that producers receive. The NYMEX is not only the largest physical-commodity exchange in the world but one of the most innovative and dynamic. The exchange`s energy and metals markets provide a wide spectrum of risk-management and trading tools, with more than 130,000 total energy options contracts traded daily.

London-based IPE is Europe`s leading energy futures and options exchange, providing a highly regulated marketplace where industry participants can use futures and options to minimize their price exposure in the physical energy market. More than $8 billion daily in underlying value is traded on the IPE. The price that a producer receives is heavily influenced by location and quality, and in almost all cases the price is significantly less than the prices quoted on the various exchanges. On December 29, 1998, IPE February Brent closed at $10.61 and NYMEX February light crude closed at $11.70. On the same date, one of the major crude-oil marketers was offering to purchase crude for as little as half that amount. June 2005 futures were trading at $46.80 and November 2005 futures were trading at $51.17 on Monday this week.

The impact of low prices on the industry is significant. By October 1999, employment in oil and gas extraction was down 7.2% from 1997. Over the same period overall US employment was up 2.3%. That was an employment-rate gap of almost 10%. When the data came in for the rest of the year the rate gap widened even more. It would be even more extreme if the statistics could isolate oil extraction from natural-gas extraction. In many companies gas had been subsidizing oil, and gas was not doing all that well. The different campaign positions taken by the

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Latest Fatality: May 24, 2005

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

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

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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
War News for Wednesday, May 25, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Turkish businessman kidnapped in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Iraqi police chief gunned down in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Two killed and eleven injured in suicide bomb attack on police patrol in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Iraqi-American businessman kidnapped on May 17 feared dead.

Bring `em on: Iraqi army captain gunned down in Khalis.

Bring `em on: Roadside bomb kills traffic policemen and wounds ten in Dahuk.

Bring `em on: Iraqi colonel in the Facility Protection service gunned down in Mosul.

Bring `em on: US soldier injured by roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Gulag of our time:

Amnesty International branded the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay a human rights failure on Wednesday, releasing a 308-page report that offers stinging criticism of the United States and its detention centers around the world.

“Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time.” Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said as the London-based group launched its annual report.

Amnesty International called for the Guantanamo camp to be closed down.

The annual report accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections and has instead created a new lexicon for abuse and torture.

“Attempts to dilute the absolute ban on torture through new policies and quasi-management speak, such as ’environmental manipulation, stress positions and sensory manipulation,’ was one of the most damaging assaults on global values.”


Operation Market Garden:

"Right now there`s a larger threat than should be in Haditha, and we`re here to tell them that they`re not welcome," said Lt. Col. Lionel Urquhart, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, which is part of the operation.

The assault, called Operation New Market, focused on this city of about 90,000 people, where the US military says insurgents have been using increasingly sophisticated tactics.

Earlier this month insurgents launched a multistage attack from a Haditha hospital, killing four US troops in an ambush that included a suicide car bomber, a roadside bomb, and gunfire from fortified positions in the hospital, which was partially destroyed in the attack.
According to initial reports, three insurgents were killed during fierce gun battles that broke out after US forces entered this town before dawn, Marine Capt. Christopher Toland told an Associated Press reporter embedded with US forces.


Cholera:

Cholera is spreading in Baghdad’s impoverished al-Amil quarter where overcrowding and contaminated water are leading to fears of an epidemic. City officials blame insurgent attacks on infrastructure for the outbreak in southwest Baghdad.

Children have so far been the worse affected, with one doctor at a Baghdad hospital saying he is now seeing young cholera patients on a daily basis.

Nadia Shawkat was in line at the Central Children’s Hospital waiting for a doctor to treat her daughter.

“My only baby girl has cholera, and the reason is water pollution, as the physician confirmed,” she said.

To prevent a further outbreak, Imad Hassoon, a pediatrician at the Central Children’s Hospital, has been advising parents to keep their children off the streets.

But in this poor and crowded area of southwestern Baghdad, children like four year old Allawi continue to play around stagnant pools of dirty water, despite the danger.

“We don’t care about this dirt and water any more because we`ve got used to it,” he said.


Two can play the al-Zarqawi Game:

An al-Qaida-linked group in Iraq says in a website statement that its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been wounded and urges Muslims to pray for him.

The statement, which purportedly was from the group`s media coordinator, Abu Maysarah al-Iraqi, did not say how or when al-Zarqawi was injured.

In Baghdad, US army Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Boylan, spokesman for US forces in Iraq said: "We have no information on whether he`s wounded or what the state of his health is. He`s still our number one target to be captured or killed and until that happens, the hunt is still on."

He also said that such reports had been heard frequently before and were almost impossible to verify.


The break-up of Iraq:

As Iraq begins writing its new constitution, leaders in the country`s southern regions are pushing aggressively to unite their three provinces into an oil-rich, semi-autonomous state, a plan that some worry could solidify Iraq`s sectarian tensions, create fights over oil revenues and eventually split the nation.

In the southern Shiite Muslim city of Basra, where the provincial government launched the campaign, signs on the streets encourage residents to support the plan. Local leaders have held several conferences to map out their proposed state and regional government.

Muhammed Musbih al Waely, the governor of Basra province, said Shiites suffered under the last centralized government, Saddam Hussein`s, and that they wanted to control the development of their region.

"The next few months are going to witness a big change in the region," al Waely said.

Al Waely`s proposal would unite the contiguous southeast Shiite-dominated provinces of Maysan, Basra and Dhiqar into a single state. Basra, the country`s second-largest city and the principal port city, would be the new regional government`s capital.

Aziz Kadhim Alwan, the governor of Dhiqar - whose provincial capital is Nasiriyah - said he was on board.

The region is rich with resources and trade opportunities. Dhiqar could expand its trading business through Basra`s port; Maysan could expand the other two provinces` trade with Iran. Basra would be a more powerful city, with more oil, agriculture, trade and tourism under its control.


Oil exports suspended:

Iraq has suspended oil exports to the Turkish port of Ceyhan because of a production shortage in the northern fields of Kirkuk, an Iraqi official said Tuesday. The northern pipeline and facilities regularly are sabotaged by insurgents.

In the south, Iraq`s oil output has fallen by nearly 190,000 barrels a day since Monday because of technical problems, said the Oil Ministry official, who asked not to be named for security reasons.

``There has been no pumping from Kirkuk to Ceyhan since Saturday and the pipeline won`t be pumping until probably Thursday,`` the official told Dow Jones Newswires, adding that there was not enough crude to pump.


Opinion and Commentary

The Metrics of Losing:

Numbers, "metrics", ways of measuring success are now multiplying in Iraq. This in itself is a measure of frustration. Victory seldom needs metrics. Okay, maybe once upon a time, quantifiable loot and slaves mattered; more recently, the metric of victory was territory conquered - and when American troops reached Baghdad and the Bush administration thought its war a raging success, no metrics were necessary.

Our iconic metric of war, which also proved a measure of a losing war, was, of course, the body count, which we associate with Vietnam. The body count was, however, an invention of the later years of the Korean War, a way of measuring "success" once the two sides had settled into the bloodiest of stalemates and the taking of significant territory - in fact, the wild movements of armies up and down the Korean peninsula - had become a thing of the past. In a sense, the body count, aka "the meat-grinder", was from its inception both a measure of nothing and a measure of frustration.

It reappeared quite early in the Vietnam War for reasons allied to those that called it up in Korea. We were involved in a struggle with guerrillas for whom the holding of territory was not the crucial matter, while our North Vietnamese enemy was bomb-able but not open to invasion (given the larger Cold War context). The body count became a shorthand way of measuring success in a war in which the taking of territory was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the enemy hard to tell from the general population, and our own in-country allies weak and largely unable to strengthen themselves. The body count was, as in Korea, also part of a secondary struggle - for international "credibility" and for support at home. Those dead bodies, announced daily by the military to increasingly dubious reporters in Saigon, were the most public face of American "success" in those years. When the dead bodies and success began ever more visibly to part ways and, in the terminology of the times, a "credibility gap" opened gapingly between the metrics and reality, the body count became a symbol not just of a war of frustration, but of defeat itself. It came, post-My Lai, to look both false and barbaric. Whose bodies were those anyway?

In our new world of conflict, where our leaders had imbibed all the "lessons" of Vietnam, Centcom`s General Tommy Franks, then commander of our Afghan War (now on the board of Outback Steakhouse, which donated shrimp and steak dinners to our troops in Afghanistan), declared that "we don`t do body counts". He was not talking about Iraq, but the principle was later extended to that country where we were obdurate in our unwillingness to count enemy dead (or keep any public tally whatsoever of the Iraqi civilian dead).


Insurgency increasing their capabilities:

Edward B. Atkeson, a senior fellow at the Rand Institute of Land Warfare, believes it is the inability of U.S. authorities to produce an Iraqi security force capable of taking over complete control of Iraq that continues to place American troops in the firing line.

"Whenever you take a larger part in the security operations you have to be prepared to take a larger part of the casualties," Atkeson, a former U.S. military intelligence chief in Europe, said from Alexandria, Va.

Charles Heyman, a senior defense analyst with Jane`s Consultancy Group in Britain, said the rate of attacks against American forces are the same as any time during the conflict - but the key difference is the increasing capabilities of the insurgents.

"We would have hoped that the insurgency would have decreased in line with the ability of the Iraqi security forces to hold the ring and become more capable," Heyman said. "But it doesn`t appear to be panning out that way with the insurgents increasing in their abilities to kill, attack and strike when and where they want."


Sometimes you are just screwed, writes Juan Cole; well worth reading in full:

In an ideal world, the United States would relinquish Iraq to a United Nations military command, and the world would pony up the troops needed to establish order in the country in return for Iraqi good will in post-war contract bids. But that is not going to happen for many reasons. George W. Bush is a stubborn man and Iraq is his project, and he is not going to give up on it. And, by now the rest of the world knows what would await its troops in Iraq, and political leaders are not so stupid as to send their troops into a meat grinder.

Therefore, I conclude that the United States is stuck in Iraq for the medium term, and perhaps for the long term. The guerrilla war is likely to go on a decade to 15 years. Given the basic facts, of capable, trained and numerous guerrillas, public support for them from Sunnis, access to funding and munitions, increasing civil turmoil, and a relatively small and culturally poorly equipped US military force opposing them, led by a poorly informed and strategically clueless commander-in-chief who has made himself internationally unpopular, there is no near-term solution.

In the long run, say 15 years, the Iraqi Sunnis will probably do as the Lebanese Maronites did, and finally admit that they just cannot remain in control of the country and will have to compromise. That is, if there is still an Iraq at that point.


Try Five Years:

It could take at least five years before Iraqi forces are strong enough to impose law and order on the country, the International Institute of Strategic Studies warned yesterday.
The thinktank`s report said that Iraq had become a valuable recruiting ground for al-Qaida, and Iraqi forces were nowhere near close to matching the insurgency.

John Chipman, IISS director, said the Iraqi security forces faced a "huge task" and the continuing ability of the insurgents to inflict mass casualties "must cast doubt on US plans to redeploy American troops and eventually reduce their numbers".

Insurgents have killed 600 Iraqis since the new government was formed. The IISS report said: "Best estimates suggest that it will take up to five years to create anything close to an effective indigenous force able to impose and guarantee order across the country."

The report said that, on balance, US policy over the past year had been effective in emboldening regional players in the Middle East and the Gulf to rally against rogue states.

But it warned that the inspirational effect of the intervention in Iraq on Islamist terrorism was "the proverbial elephant in the living room. From al-Qaida`s point of view, [President] Bush`s Iraq policies have arguably produced a confluence of propitious circumstances: a strategically bogged down America, hated by much of the Islamic world, and regarded warily even by its allies".

Iraq "could serve as a valuable proving ground for `blooding` foreign jihadists, and could conceivably form the basis of a second generation of capable al-Qaida leaders ... and middle-management players", the report said.


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This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050606&s=sargent
Brand Hillary

by GREG SARGENT

[from the June 6, 2005 issue]

Not long ago, Senator Hillary Clinton went on a 2006 re-election campaign swing through the North Country, that vast expanse of upstate New York that stretches from Albany to the Canadian border. With its mix of family farms and grubby towns struggling with disappearing manufacturing jobs, the region feels less like the Northeast than like the industrial and agricultural Midwest. In other words, it`s not a bad place to gauge how Clinton might play in swing-state America.

It`s a question that of late has obsessed the pundits, who frequently, and often quite mindlessly, hold up the most obscure of the Senator`s utterances or policies--even ones that echo positions she`s held for years--as proof that she`s readying herself for a 2008 presidential run. The political classes tend to offer us two tidy Hillary narratives to choose from. The first (courtesy of Dick Morris and company) is that Clinton has given herself a moderate makeover designed to mask the fact that she`s really a haughty left-wing elitist, in order to appeal to moderate Republicans and culturally conservative, blue-collar Democrats who are deserting their party. The opposing narrative line (courtesy of her supporters) is that Clinton, a devout Methodist, has revealed her true self as a senator; she`s always been more moderate than is generally thought, and, as Anna Quindlen wrote recently in Newsweek, "people are finally seeing past the stereotypes and fabrications."

Yet if you watch Clinton on one of her upstate swings, as I did earlier this spring, it becomes clear that neither story line gets it right. What`s really happening is that Clinton, a surprisingly agile and ideologically complex politician, is slowly crafting a politics that in some ways is new, and above all is uniquely her own.

Clinton`s evolving approach--call it Brand Hillary--is sincerely rooted in her not-easily-categorized worldview, but it`s also a calculated response to today`s political realities. In effect, she`s taking her husband`s small-issue centrism--its trademark combination of big but often hollow gestures toward the center, pragmatic economic populism and incremental liberal policy gains--and remaking it in her own image, updating it for post-9/11 America with an intense interest in military issues.

At the same time, she`s also experimenting with an increasingly national message about smart government and GOP extremism and testing new, unthreatening ways of revisiting her most politically disastrous issue: healthcare. In one setting after another, she offered the same impromptu-seeming refrain: "You may remember that when my husband was President, I tried to do something about healthcare. Well, I still have the scars to show for it. But I haven`t given up." That`s a line worthy of the man Hillary married--you can picture Bill sitting at the kitchen table in Chappaqua, repeating the line and chuckling, "That`s good. That`s really good."

Bill Clinton`s political success, of course, sometimes came at great cost to liberal Democrats, and Hillary`s brand of politics, too, poses a tough dilemma for liberals and progressives. It asks them to swallow their discomfort with her tactically shrewd but sometimes morally questionable maneuvers on big issues like war and abortion. In exchange they get less visible victories for progressivism, as well as the pleasure of seeing the former First Lady--the figure most loathed by the right in at least a generation--succeed at a time when Democrats are desperate to figure out how to get that winning feeling again.

For liberals it remains to be seen whether this transaction will prove to be a good deal. Yet for some Democrats the trade is indeed worth it, as you could easily see during one of Clinton`s first stops on her upstate swing, a speech to Democrats at a re-election fundraiser north of Albany. The event was closed to the press, and the Senator shed her typically demure, bipartisan approach and launched a sharp attack on the GOP. Yet she knew her audience--these were hardly red-meat-craving Democratic activist types. They were rural, moderate Democrats--small-town schoolteachers, librarians, general-store owners. So Clinton`s assault was spirited, but even-tempered and larded with patriotic language.

"We`re seeing the slow and steady erosion of what made America great in the twentieth century," Clinton told her audience in an even tone. "When I got to the Senate I asked myself, What`s going on here? At first I thought the President just wanted to undo everything my husband had done." Clinton waited a beat, then added, "And I did take that personally."

The audience laughed. "But then I thought, Wait a minute. It`s not just about turning the clock back on the 1990s.... They want to turn the clock back on most of the twentieth century. They want to turn the clock all the way back beyond Franklin Roosevelt. Back beyond Teddy Roosevelt. That`s why they`re trying to undo Social Security. Make no mistake about it.

"What I see happening in Washington," Clinton continued, "is a concerted effort by the Administration and the leadership in Congress to really create absolute power. They want to control the judiciary so they can have all three branches of government. I really don`t care what party you are--that`s not in the American tradition.... Right now young men and women are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting for the America we revere. And that is a country where nobody has all the answers--and nobody should have all the power.... We all need to stand up for what made America great--what created a wonderful set of values that we revere, that we exported and tried to really inculcate in people around the world!"

Wild applause rolled over Clinton now, although it was unclear whether the crowd had appreciated the political subtleties of what they`d witnessed. She had offered a critique of the GOP sharp enough for any progressive--even as she`d given an approving nod to American exceptionalism and a paean to US troops defending our "values" abroad. She`d stoked the partisan passions of her audience--even as she`d sounded an above-partisanship note of concern about the state of the Republic. Indeed, she`d managed to pull off what many Democrats struggle to do these days: She`d weaved her criticisms into a larger narrative about America`s past and future, criticizing the GOP leadership without sounding as if she wanted America to fail--when she said she was "worried" about America, you believed her.

Not long after that speech, Clinton appeared at a dramatically different event, a speech to a roomful of around 300 farmers. These were hard-bitten people who were fully prepared to believe that the Senator from Chappaqua is who her caricaturists say she is. When Clinton strode into that room, she was an entirely different Hillary from the one who`d addressed Democrats only hours earlier. Anyone accustomed to seeing Clinton on TV--where she sometimes seems stiff and insincere--would have been flabbergasted by her sudden transformation. She instantly, and effortlessly, became Homespun Hillary. Her vowels grew flatter, more rural-sounding. "Little" became "li`l." "Get" became "git." Entire pronouns vanished, as in: "Heard there are some places in California selling gas for three dollars a gall`n." She poked fun at city folk. Speaking about how farmers could make money supplying the specialty produce that New York restaurants need, she mimicked a demand made to her by city restaurateurs: "We need all those little funny things you don`t know what they are when they put `em on your plate."

The crowd seemed especially impressed with her command of their pocketbook issues. She talked about fuel prices, protecting farmers from foreign competition, the Senate`s neglect of New York agriculture in favor of Western agribusiness. She touted an initiative she`d spearheaded making it easier for local businesspeople to sell products via the Internet: "Fella made fly-fishing rods and lures--all of a sudd`n found there were people in Norway who wanted to buy th`m!"

By the end, you could feel it: Her audience had been won over. Her listeners filed out, murmuring approval of what they`d heard. As Robert Madison, a Republican and owner of a small local dairy farm with his three sons, put it: "Real down-to-earth person. Knows what she wants to do for the farmer."

To Clinton`s friends and advisers, scenes like the above--in which she effortlessly wins over people who, we`re told, are supposed to hate her--boost their contention that the real Hillary is ideologically complex and surprisingly down-to-earth. They describe her as genuinely moderate on cultural and national security issues (hence her comfort evoking American values before a Democratic audience), say she has a voracious appetite for policy reminiscent of her husband (hence her mastery of farming arcana) and describe her common-sense economic populism as born of her Illinois upbringing (hence her ability to speak to the economic concerns of farmers).

"People have gained a more complete view of Hillary in the Senate than they had when she was in the White House," says Mandy Grunwald, a close Hillary adviser. "People are getting past the cartoon version of her and seeing that she`s culturally moderate and sensitive to rural and small-town America. That mix has always been a part of her."

Of course, to Clinton`s critics, particularly on the right, the same scenes just as easily demonstrate the opposite: that her Senate career has been merely a warm-up exercise for 2008. The paeans to American values, the small-town banter, the talk of our troops abroad--it`s all a cynical effort to make people forget the Hillary who proposed a big-government takeover of healthcare and banned Bill`s cigars from the White House. The right`s game plan here is pretty obvious: If she has "moved to the middle," then she must be, as Dick Morris wrote recently, "a liberal who pretends moderation when she has to."

To critics on the left, however, the real Hillary is far from reliably liberal--and to them, that`s the problem. Someone of her stature might have moved the national dialogue to the left on many fronts. Indeed, many progressives wholeheartedly backed her 2000 Senate run, expecting her to carry the banner for liberal causes in, say, the manner of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy. But they`ve been disappointed. Clinton has studiously avoided becoming the ideological warrior on big issues many supporters hoped for. "She certainly hasn`t been a liberal trumpet like Kennedy, even though she`s the Senator from New York and has all the freedom she needs," says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America`s Future. "Kennedy has been a leading opponent of the GOP`s militarism. He`s called for large investments in education, Medicare for all. Hillary hasn`t been out front on any of those issues."

What`s more, there`s some truth to the claim that various of Clinton`s recent public statements and policy positions have come at a real cost to progressivism, much the way her husband`s "triangulation" damaged the left in the 1990s. Her justification for voting in support of the Iraq War sounded like a cross between her husband`s verbal parsing and John Kerry`s maddening rhetorical contortions: "Bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely and, therefore, war less likely." The vote seemed to many a huge missed opportunity. A senator from New York, the prime target on September 11, voting against the war might have given a helpful boost to the global antiwar movement, which at the time was mobilizing against America`s invasion of Iraq.

More recently, Clinton`s flirtation with conservative Senator Rick Santorum--they jointly requested federal funds for research on how electronic media affect children--made liberals uneasy because it stank of pandering to so-called "values" voters. But the Santorum dalliance amounted to more than a mere difference of opinion with traditional liberals. It gave bipartisan cover not just to Hillary but to Santorum as well--legitimizing one of the Senate`s ultraconservative standard-bearers. That undercuts broader Democratic efforts to win on various fronts by painting the GOP as captive of the hard right.

Finally, Clinton`s January speech seeking "common ground" with prolifers on reducing pregnancies seemed intended to distance her from beleaguered prochoice leaders. She might, for instance, have looked for ways to deliver her message with new NARAL president Nancy Keenan, who`s been sounding a similar message. Instead, Clinton`s speech enables the right to paint prochoice groups as pro-abortion.

Yet for all that, there`s no denying that Clinton has been extraordinarily successful, at least politically. Her approval rating in New York is nudging 70 percent. Many Republicans are on record as offering high praise. Consider that both Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki have punted on challenging her in 2006, even though dethroning Hillary would provide untold national attention and possibly be a springboard to the presidency in 2008.

What accounts for her success? Partly it can be chalked up to the fact that Hillary Clinton turned out to be a really, really good politician. Yet one could also argue that her success flows from the unique brand of politics that she has been practicing. To describe her approach as "triangulating" or "moving right" misses the point. For all the consternation on the left about Clinton, her approach depends less than her husband`s did on using the left as a foil. Instead it relies on two fundamental ingredients: She projects pragmatism on economic issues, and she signals ideological flexibility on social issues. This latter tactic is not, as is often argued, about appeasing the cultural right. It`s about appealing to moderates in both parties.

Take the Santorum press conference. You can endlessly debate whether popular entertainment hurts kids, or whether government should fix the problem. Yet if there`s one thing most middle-of-the-road parents can agree on, it`s that they are worried about how pop culture affects their children. By appearing with a right-wing Republican loathed by liberal Dems, she`s essentially telling moderate Republicans, "parenting should transcend ideology, so this Democrat will stand with anyone if it might help kids." Yes, it legitimizes Santorum. But it also helps to defuse an undeniably potent right-wing strategy: the effort to paint Dems as antifamily.

Or take the abortion speech. You could argue that while it might have been discomfiting to prochoice groups, it`s actually a smart tactical response to the right`s increasingly successful strategy of painting prochoicers as ideological extremists. Polls consistently show that majorities favor legalized abortion. But decades of conservative attacks have fooled voters into believing that prochoice groups are to the left of public opinion. The speech wasn`t really about abortion policy; it was about what to do before conception to reduce pregnancies, and while Clinton stressed teen abstinence, her main focus was on encouraging birth control, a stance objectionable only to the hard right.

The political beauty of this, as NewDonkey.com`s Ed Kilgore has observed, is that it makes a subtle play for Republican moderates by forcing right-wing ideologues to reveal themselves as the true extremists, as foes of the common-sense goal of lowering rates of unwanted pregnancies. "When Democrats speak this way about abortion," says one senior Hillary adviser, "it drives a wedge between sensible Republicans, who want to reduce the amount of abortions, and the right-wing crazies, whose main goal is to stop people from having sex."

Her approach on economic issues is, at bottom, quite similar. By all accounts, Clinton has devoted a great deal of energy to dealing with the sluggish upstate economy. But here again it`s worth noting the political subtleties of her approach. Her solutions tend to be less about correcting inequalities of wealth or class and more about finding ways that government can make the economy work better for everyone, CEOs and low-level employees alike. This difference is most visible in healthcare. Whereas her 1993 plan called for massive government intervention and pitted employee against employer, today she is careful to talk about the nation`s disastrously screwed-up healthcare system as one that`s afflicting not just the uninsured but also large employers paying huge premiums. As she likes telling upstate audiences, "GM has become a healthcare company that makes cars." It`s not surprising, then, that her onetime nemesis, Newt Gingrich, suddenly finds himself in sympathy with her ideas on healthcare issues.

To the extent that her pragmatic economic approach in turn provides cover for progressive advances, Hillary has torn a page from the Book of Bill. President Clinton recognized that if you could persuade voters that you weren`t ideologically rigid, that you were merely interested in government that works, you could get Republican moderates to listen--and getting them to listen is the key--to a Democrat talk about federal spending and fiscal responsibility. The paradox is that the tactic allowed Clinton a freer hand to pursue incremental liberal policy gains. As Joe Klein details in The Natural, President Clinton may have sold out on welfare reform and NAFTA, but those decisions gave him elbow room to expand spending on lower-profile liberal programs, from Head Start to Americorps.

To be sure, such advances did little to allay the disappointment many progressives felt when Bill Clinton lurched to the center on economic issues after winning office in 1992 on an aggressively populist platform. Hillary, too, has in some ways followed a similarly cautious approach. She isn`t seriously grappling with big-picture economic issues such as growing corporate power and weakening union strength, or articulating a grand economic vision that would help liberalism make a big comeback. And yet, for all the talk about her "moderate makeover," analysts say that Hillary is staking out surprisingly progressive positions on some key economic issues. One example: Hillary voted against the biggest trade bill of the new millennium--the Trade Act of 2002, which many criticized as an effort to dramatically weaken Congress`s ability to help craft national trade policy--even though Bill sought a similar version of this "fast track" legislation as President. "Bill Clinton had no genuine long-term progressive economic vision--a lot of it was smoke and mirrors," says Chris Slevin, the deputy director of Public Citizen`s global trade division. "But now that it`s clear that the Clinton free-trade experiment has not delivered on its promises of more jobs in the United States and of progress in Mexico, Hillary has no choice but to take a more thoughtful, progressive approach to trade than her husband ever did."

In other areas too, the "new moderate" Senator Clinton has compiled quite a liberal voting record. If you don`t believe it, just ask the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action. In 2004, ADA says, the Senator earned a "liberal quotient" of 95 percent (compare that to, say, John Edwards at 60 percent, or the Democratic senators as a whole, at 85 percent).

What about Clinton`s biggest lapse--her Iraq vote? For some antiwar progressives, no doubt, it will be a deal-breaker. And, of course, they are unlikely to be comforted by the fact that she really thought she was doing the right thing, as people who are close to her insist she did. Yet to focus on that one vote, again, misses the larger goal of Clinton`s politics. As she recognizes, the Democratic Party`s problem on national security far transcends the Iraq vote. Decades of assaults on Dems from the right (helped along by international fiascoes presided over by Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter) have succeeded in persuading Americans that Dems are fundamentally uncomfortable with the application of American "hard" power abroad. As Clinton well knows, this is not something that can be corrected by merely donning a pair of plastic hawk`s wings. It`s a perception problem that will take a long time--and a lot of hard work--to reverse. So she`s methodically built up a comfort level--and comfort is the key--with national security issues, joining the Armed Services Committee and spending countless hours mastering military arcana. This approach is far more involved and politically shrewd than just talking tough on the Sunday chat shows. It`s not off-putting to the Democratic base, which loathes Joe Lieberman-style militaristic posturing. And it comes across as genuine, because it`s rooted in Clinton`s strategy of emphasizing smart, pragmatic government over ideology.

Of course, sitting on Armed Services is hardly a substitute for articulating a sweeping foreign policy vision that can compete with GOP militarism. But it may be a necessary first step. Polls indicate that there`s rising disquiet with the direction of Bush`s foreign policies. At the same time, Americans appear consistently more comfortable entrusting foreign policy to the GOP. What that suggests is that perhaps the real problem Dems have on national security is not just the quality of their ideas but that moderates simply won`t listen to them. That in turn suggests that one key to reversing Democratic decline in the foreign policy arena is to do what Bill Clinton managed to accomplish on various domestic issues: Get moderates to open their ears. Which is, arguably, the larger context of Hillary`s Iraq vote. "Putting aside whether her vote was a mistake, which I think it was, she voted what she believed to be right," says John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress and President Clinton`s former chief of staff. "The larger end result may be that the middle of the country sees a senator with a tough nose who is not afraid to use force."

For months Democrats--and some outside the party--have been saying that Hillary can`t win in 2008. You`ve heard the arguments: She starts out with 40 percent against her. She will energize GOP turnout--not to mention fundraising--like nobody else. Sure, Republicans have decided they like the real Hillary. But as Michelle Cottle wrote in The New Republic, "the bulk of the electorate, all those folks who won`t tune into the race until after Labor Day `08, will be voting on Hillary the icon."

That all may turn out to be true. What`s more, the retail politics Clinton has mastered may be lost on the gargantuan stage of a presidential race. And the right`s ability to dominate the news cycle these days may guarantee that Hillary`s skills remain beside the point--her enduring First Lady image could trump her actual politics and persona. "You just have to accept the fact that with any Clinton, the media is going to be difficult," Grunwald says. "You don`t ask why. You just deal."

Of course, any speculation about 2008 might take into account the small detail of who her opponent turns out to be, not to mention what the climate of the electorate is three years hence. But whatever the scenario in 2008, she has put together at least the beginnings of a winning political formula right now. Her version of Clinton centrism has been less about doing what Bill needed to do to survive in the White House--pit center against left--and more about doing what she needed to do to survive in the Senate--pit pragmatism and hard work against ideology. In essence, she`s triangulating against herself: She`s revealing the common-sense-solution-embracing Hillary, in contrast to the left-wing ideologue her caricaturists gave us. It helps that Hillary, while extraordinarily shrewd and calculating, also really is hard-working, hard-headed and culturally moderate. In the end, the irony is that her effort is working not just because it`s smart politics but also because it`s largely genuine.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether Clinton will be good for progressives or for the party as a whole. In the short term, though, she can certainly help the party--if nothing else, she`s at least beginning to develop a Democratic alternative that could constitute one path to political success. "Hillary may not be an iconic liberal, but she fights for the people liberals care about--women, children, veterans, people without healthcare," Podesta says. "Best of all, she`s tough, and she knows how to win."

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[urlAmnesty A-Z summary of key countries: Pdf]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/25_05_05_amnesty.pdf[/url]

Governments betraying human rights says Amnesty International Annual Report [url]http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news/press/16121.html[/url]

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May 26, 2005
With the Gloves Off
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/opinion/26herbert.html?

A photo of President Bush gingerly holding a month-old baby was on the front page of yesterday`s New York Times. Mr. Bush is in the habit of telling us how precious he thinks life is, all life.

The story was about legislation concerning embryonic stem cell research, and it included a comment from Tom DeLay urging Americans to reject "the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others."

Ahh, pretty words. Now I wonder when Mr. Bush and Mr. DeLay will find the time to address - or rather, to denounce - the depraved ways in which the United States has dealt with so many of the thousands of people (many of them completely innocent) who have been swept up in the so-called war on terror.

People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or in some cases simply made to "disappear" in an all-American version of a practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships. All of this has been done, of course, in the name of freedom.

The government would prefer to keep these matters secret, but we`re living in a digital age of near-instantaneous communication. Evidence of atrocities tend to emerge sooner rather than later, frequently illustrated with color photos or videos.

A recent report from Physicians for Human Rights is the first to comprehensively examine the use of psychological torture by Americans against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The employment of psychological torture, the report says, was a direct result of decisions developed by civilian and military leaders to "take the gloves off" during interrogations and "break" prisoners through the use of techniques like "sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, the use of military working dogs to instill fear, cultural and sexual humiliation, mock executions, and the threat of violence or death toward detainees or their loved ones."

"Although the evidence is far from complete," the report says, "what is known warrants the inference that psychological torture was central to the interrogation process and reinforced through conditions of confinement."

In other words, this insidious and deeply inhumane practice was not the work of a few bad apples. As we have seen from many other investigations, the abuses flowed inexorably from policies promulgated at the highest levels of government.

Warfare, when absolutely unavoidable, is one thing. But it`s a little difficult to understand how these kinds of profoundly dehumanizing practices - not to mention the physical torture we`ve heard so much about - could be enthusiastically embraced by a government headed by men who think all life is sacred. Either I`m missing something, or President Bush, Tom DeLay and their ilk are fashioning whole new zones of hypocrisy for Americans to inhabit.

There`s nothing benign about psychological torture. The personality of the victim can disintegrate entirely. Common effects include memory impairment, nightmares, hallucinations, acute stress disorder and severe depression with vegetative symptoms. The damage can last for many years.

Torturing prisoners, rather than making the U.S. safer, puts us all in greater danger. The abuses of detainees at places like Guantánamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have come to define the United States in the minds of many Muslims and others around the world. And the world has caught on that large percentages of the people swept up and incarcerated as terrorists by the U.S. were in fact innocent of wrongdoing and had no connection to terrorism at all.

Bitterness against the U.S. has increased exponentially since the initial disclosures about the abuse of detainees. What`s the upside of policies that demean the U.S. in the eyes of the world while at the same time making us less rather than more secure?

The government, like an addict in denial, will not even admit that we have a problem.

"We`re in this Orwellian situation," said Leonard Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, "where the statements by the administration, by the president, are unequivocal: that the United States does not participate in, or condone, torture. And yet it has engaged in legal interpretations and interrogation policies that undermine that absolutist stance."

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Bush`s war comes home
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1492198,00.ht…

His dream of dominating every government institution in tatters, the US president is already plotting his revenge
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 26, 2005

Guardian
President Bush`s drive for absolute power has momentarily stalled. In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of government. By crushing the traditions of the Senate he would pack the courts, especially the supreme court, with lockstep ideologues. Sheer force would prevail. But just as his blitzkrieg reached the outskirts of his objective, he was struck by a mutiny. Within the span of 24 hours he lost control not only of the Senate but temporarily of the House of Representatives, which was supposed to be regimented by unquestioned loyalty. Now he prepares to launch a counterattack - against the dissident elements of his own party.

Bush`s wonder weapon for total victory was a device called the "nuclear option". Once it was triggered, it would obliterate a 200-year-old tradition of the Senate. The threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate of his appointments to the federal bench would set the doomsday sequence in motion. The Senate Republican majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, would call for a change in the rule, and a simple majority would vote to abolish the filibuster. Bush`s nominees would sail through.

Unlike the House, the Senate was constructed by the constitutional framers as an unrepresentative body, with each state, regardless of population, allotted two senators. Currently, the Republicans have 55 senators who represent only 45% of the country. The Senate creates its own rules, and the filibuster can only be stopped by a super-majority of 60 votes. Historically, it was used by southern senators to block civil rights legislation. In the first two years of the Clinton presidency, the Republicans deployed 48 filibusters, more than in the entire previous history of the Senate, to make the new Democratic chief executive appear feckless. The strategy was instrumental in the Republican capture of the Congress in 1994. By depriving the Democrats of the filibuster, Bush intended to transform the Senate into his rubber stamp.

For many senators the fate of the filibuster was only superficially about an arcane rule change. And shameless hypocrisy was the least of the problem. (Frist, like most Republicans in favour of the nuclear option, had enthusiastically filibustered against Clinton`s court nominees, 65 of which were blocked from 1995-2000.) If Bush succeeded he would have effectively removed the Senate`s "advice and consent" on executive appointments, drastically reducing its power.

Over the weekend, two elders, Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, and Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, pored over the federalist papers, written by the constitutional framers, to refresh their thinking about the inviolability of the Senate. On Monday, seven Republicans and seven Democrats signed a pact that preserved the filibuster under "extraordinary" circumstances and allowed several of Bush`s appointments to be voted on.

The mutiny is broader than is apparent. More than the seven Republican signatories supported the accord, but they let the others take a public stance without revealing themselves. Bush`s radicalism offended their conservatism. Eisenhower would be their preferred model for a Republican president. These Republican senators are the equivalent of the Republicans on the supreme court, Sandra Day O`Connor and Anthony Kennedy, who are conservative but operate without ideology, and hold the balance against the aggressive rightwing justices.

The day after Bush was frustrated by Republicans in the Senate, 50 Republicans in the House deserted him on the issue of stem cell research. His policy limiting scientific work is a sop to the religious right that views the stem cell question as an extension of abortion. Debate in the House was marshalled by Republican majority leader Tom DeLay, who argued that Bush`s policy must be supported because "Jesus of Nazareth" began life as an embryo. Bush promised to veto the stem cell bill passed with massive Republican defections, the irony of his opposition to the filibuster unmentioned.

The compromise pact in the Senate on the filibuster hardly postpones the coming storms. The White House intends to push judicial nominees that the Democrats are almost certain to filibuster. With the elimination of the nuclear option, the filibuster may also be used against Bush`s supreme court appointments. Evangelical religious right leaders denounce Republican senators as sell-outs. One of the most influential, James Dobson, has cursed one of the silent compromise supporters, Senator Trent Lott, the former Republican majority leader from Mississippi, as a Judas, and Lott has called Dobson "quite unChristian".

Meanwhile, the conflict has focused attention on the Republican presidential succession of 2008, pitting Bill Frist - positioning himself as the darling of the right - against cantankerous John McCain, one of the Republican magnificent seven. Within the party, metal is scraping on metal. But the more the resistance, the more Bush presses forward. His unilateralism abroad has been brought home, with a vengeance, to his partisan wars.

In federalist paper number 69 (perhaps re-read by Byrd and Warner), Alexander Hamilton concludes his examination of the differences between the "qualified" powers of the US presidency and the "absolute" powers of the king of Great Britain: "The one has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction; the other is the supreme head and governor of the national church! What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other? The same that ought to be given to those who tell us that a government, the whole power of which would be in the hands of the elective and periodical servants of the people, is an aristocracy, a monarchy, and a despotism."

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars

[e-mail]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers 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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Das wären einige Idiotien, die man einer neuen CDU-Regierung mit sehr viel Kosten andrehen könnte.
Soll auch wirken gegen Aliens (außerirdische, nicht mexicanische).

Tomgram: Jonathan Schell on Crossing Nuclear Thresholds
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2837

Call it Star Wars, parts VII-XXII; but last week, just as Revenge of the Sith was opening galaxy-wide -- multiplexes on Tatooine alone were expected to pull in billions -- reporter Tim Weiner revealed on the front page of the New York Times that a new presidential directive will soon essentially green-light the future U.S. militarization of space. (When, in December 2001, the administration withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which forbade the weaponization of space, it opened the way for exactly the kind of Pentagon R&D that now threatens to come to mutant fruition in the heavens.) Just three days before Weiner`s piece appeared, military analyst William Arkin reported in the Washington Post that "(e)arly last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret `Interim Global Strike Alert Order,`" preparing the way for devastating attacks against hostile powers developing weapons of mass destruction, air strikes that could be carried out more or less on demand anywhere on the planet and, if so desired, included a "nuclear option."

These two actions don`t represent separate worlds of planning. One of the imagined future weapons for Rumsfeld`s "global strike" force, for instance, turns out to be a CAV (Common Aero Vehicle) which, from space, could theoretically hit any target on Earth with a massive dose of conventional munitions on half an hour`s notice. Of this weapon, the Washington Post`s Walter Pincus wrote, "The first-generation CAV, expected to be ready by 2010, will have ‘an incredible capability to provide the warfighter with a global reach capability against high payoff targets,` Gen. Lance W. Lord, commander of Air Force Space Command, told the House Armed Services Committee… The system could, Lord said, ‘deliver a conventional payload precisely on target within minutes of a valid command and control release order.`"

Such "global strike" space weaponry, while not (yet) nuclearized, would not be far off in impact. For instance, according to Weiner, one such weapon, Hypervelocity Rod Bundles (nicknamed "Rods from God"), aims "to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon." In this way, the boundaries between the previously almost unusable nuclear option and more conventional war-fighting options are slowly -- and quite consciously -- being blurred by the Bush administration.

Let`s put a label on these developments: Proliferation. In space as on Earth, the Bush strategists have an almost primal urge to cross strategic and weapons barriers and thresholds of all sorts, and head into uncharted territory; or, as an old TV space opera used to put it, "boldly to go where no man has gone before." (On Star Trek, though, the voyages of the USS Enterprise were, at least theoretically, peaceful in nature, and the announcement of the next destination didn`t automatically end with an explosion.)

Perhaps there`s another label that might capture even better the administration`s primal global urge -- in this case, a label much beloved by the Air Force Space Command, those "Guardians of the High Frontier" (as they so flatteringly like to call themselves): "dominance" or "space superiority." ("Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," [Space Command`s General Lord] told an Air Force conference in September. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.") In the old Army Air Corps anthem, airmen sang of taking off "into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sun"; now I suppose it should be "the wild, black yonder."

There has been much on-line controversy lately about whether the new Star Wars movie is an attack on the Bush administration. One thing can certainly be said: Where Star Wars went long ago, Bush administration fantasies are now heading. After all, what is a CAV, but a little "Death Star," that terrible, planet-destroying instrument of the on-screen Evil Empire. As Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information pointed out in a recent article, "[O]rbiting `death stars` to attack ground targets are being considered. Pete Teets, the former acting secretary of the U.S. Air Force has said: `We haven`t reached the point of strafing and bombing from space - nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities.`"

In fact, "thinking" turns out to be something of a euphemism, given that the first tests of parts of the CAV program are to be carried out later this year. Of course, the Bush high-frontiersmen and the high-frontiersmen of the military-industrial complex (into which so many space-based tax dollars are already flowing) are just dying to test new generations of threshold-busting weapons (can`t wait!). And yet, most of these bizarre weapons are technologically daunting and deficit-bustingly expensive. As Weiner points out: "Richard Garwin, widely regarded as a dean of American weapons science, and three colleagues wrote in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum, the professional journal of electric engineering, that `a space-based laser would cost $100 million per target, compared with $600,000 for a Tomahawk missile.`"

In addition, based on past history, such futuristic dream-weaponry is likely to be about as successful as our $100 billion (so far) Star Wars anti-missile system which has proved incapable of intercepting anything smaller than the Queen Mary or faster than a tractor; and -- irony of ironies -- the decision to test, and then try to deploy, such systems is likely not only to start a space arms race, but to make us all (and the satellites we now depend on for so much) far more vulnerable than at present. According to Demetri Sevastopulo of the British Financial Times, the Russian answer to the news in the New York Times piece was instantaneous and grim: "Russia would consider using force if necessary to respond if the US put a combat weapon into space, according to a senior Russian official."

Space domination -- meaning war-fighting in space -- is a form of Earthly madness. But the path of proliferation, once started down has its own mad logic. Bush`s top officials have been stuck on global dominance since they took power. Dominance has just turned out to be a little harder to come by on Earth than advertised… but, ah, space… All those boys who grew up on sci-fi movies and moon shots, now have their moment. And a boy can always dream, can`t he?

The only problem is that Bush`s dreamers, having swallowed their inside-the-beltway global-power fantasies whole, turn out to play the dominance game like the global klutzes they are. Admittedly, they`ve been in their Darth Vader outfits breathing hard for quite a while -- every day another threat (and if John Bolton makes it to the UN, change that to a threat a second) -- but they seem to lack the power effectively to demand a pizza delivery for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

None of this makes what they`re doing any less dangerous. As Jonathan Schell points out below (in his latest "Letter from Ground Zero" in the new issue of the Nation magazine), the new "global strike" plans revealed by Arkin represent part of a revolution in what passes for nuclear policy-making in this country.

So, proliferation planet? Sure, that`s on the way. Now, though, we`re intent on proliferating in the heavens as on Earth. Think of it as a package deal.
Tom

A Revolution in American Nuclear Policy
By Jonathan Schell

A metaphorical "nuclear option" -- the cutoff of debate in the Senate on judicial nominees -- has just been defused, but a literal nuclear option, called "global strike," has been created in its place. In a shocking innovation in American nuclear policy, recently disclosed in the Washington Post by military analyst William Arkin, the administration has created and placed on continuous high alert a force whereby the President can launch a pinpoint strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with a few hours` notice. The senatorial "nuclear option" was covered extensively, but somehow this actual nuclear option -- a "full-spectrum" capability (in the words of the presidential order) with "precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations)" -- was almost entirely ignored.

The order to enable the force, Arkin writes, was given by George W. Bush in January 2003. In July 2004, Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated to Adm. James Ellis Jr., then-commander of Stratcom, "the President charged you to ‘be ready to strike at any moment`s notice in any dark corner of the world` [and] that`s exactly what you`ve done." And last fall, Lieut. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, stated, "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes."

These actions make operational a revolution in US nuclear policy. It was foreshadowed by the Nuclear Posture Review Report of 2002, also widely ignored, which announced nuclear targeting of, among others, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. The review also recommended new facilities for the manufacture of nuclear bombs and the study of an array of new delivery vehicles, including a new ICBM in 2020, a new submarine-launched ballistic missile in 2029, and a new heavy bomber in 2040. The review, in turn, grew out of Bush`s broader new military strategy of pre-emptive war, articulated in the 2002 White House document, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which states, "We cannot let our enemies strike first." The extraordinary ambition of the Bush policy is suggested by a comment made in a Senate hearing in April by Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who explained that the Defense Secretary wanted "bunker buster" nuclear bombs because "it is unwise for there to be anything that`s beyond the reach of US power."

The incorporation of nuclear weapons into the global strike option, casting a new shadow of nuclear danger over the entire planet, raises fundamental questions. Perhaps the most important is why the United States, which now possesses the strongest conventional military forces in the world, feels the need to add to them a new global nuclear threat. The mystery deepens when you reflect that nothing could be more calculated to goad other nations into nuclear proliferation. Could it be that the United States, now routinely called the greatest empire since Rome, simply feels the need to assert its dominance in the nuclear sphere?

History suggests a different explanation. In the past, reliance on nuclear arms has in fact varied inversely with reliance on conventional arms. In the very first weeks of the nuclear age, when the American public was demanding demobilization of US forces in Europe after World War II, the U.S. monopoly on the bomb gave it the confidence to adopt a bold stance in postwar negotiations with the Soviet Union over Europe. The practice of offsetting conventional weakness with nuclear strength was soon embodied in the policy of "first use" of nuclear weapons, which has remained in effect to this day. The threat of first use under the auspices of the global strike option is indeed the latest incarnation of a policy born at that time.

This compensatory role for nuclear weapons emerged in a new context when, after the protracted, unpopular conventional war in Korea, President Eisenhower adopted the doctrine of nuclear "massive retaliation," intended to prevent limited Communist challenges from ever arising. And it was in reaction to the imbalance between local "peripheral" threats and the world-menacing "massive" nuclear threats designed to contain them that, in the Kennedy years, the pendulum swung back in the direction of conventional arms and a theory of "limited war" to go with them. Meanwhile, nuclear arms were officially assigned the more restricted role of deterring attacks by other nuclear weapons -- the posture of "mutual assured destruction."

Today, though the Cold War is over, the riddle of the relationship between nuclear and conventional force still vexes official minds. Once again, the United States has assigned itself global ambitions. (Then it was containing Communism, now it is stopping "terrorism" and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.) Once again, the United States is fighting a limited war -- the war in Iraq -- and other limited wars are under discussion (against Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc.). And once again, nuclear arms appear to offer an all too tempting alternative. Arkin comments that a prime virtue of the global strike option in the eyes of the Pentagon is that it requires no "boots on the ground." And Everett Dolman, a professor at the Air Force School at Maxwell Air Force Base, recently commented to the San Francisco Chronicle that without space weaponry, "we`d face a Vietnam-style buildup if we wanted to remain a force in the world."

For just as in the 1950s, the boots on the ground are running low. The global New Rome turns out to have exhausted its conventional power holding down just one country, Iraq. But the 2000s are not the 1950s. Eisenhower`s overall goal was mainly defensive. He wanted no war, nuclear or conventional, and never came close to ordering a nuclear strike. By contrast, Bush`s policy of preventive war is inherently activist and aggressive: The global strike option is not only for deterrence; it is for use.

A clash between the triumphal rhetoric of global domination and the sordid reality of failure in practice lies ahead. The Senate, on the brink of its metaphorical Armageddon, backed down. Would the President, facing defeat of his policies somewhere in the world, do likewise? Or might he actually reach for his nuclear option?

Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute`s Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books.

Copyright 2005 Jonathan Schell

This article will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Nation Magazine.


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[urlI Can See Your House From Here
Google`s close-up satellite photo maps are way creepy, but in a very cool way]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/04/08/notes040805.DTL[/url]
Habe Anfang April von der neuen Errungenschaft berichtet. Siehe #27633
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=719+Scott+Street,SF,+Ca,+94117…
http://maps.google.com/maps


Schöner spionieren mit Google

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Latest Fatality: May 25, 2005
May.05: 66


Iraker: Civilian: 515 Police/Mil: 204 Total: 719
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

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Der Wahlkampf hat begonnen.

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Price dollars in oil, not oil in dollars
By Chris Cook
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE27Dj01.html

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

A very strong case has been made by William Engdahl (the author of A Century of War - Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order) that the three principal goals of US foreign policy in the last 100 years have been energy security, energy security and energy security.

But it is becoming clear that the Iraq war - while aimed at reducing US reliance upon Saudi oil - may have unintended consequences in terms of changing the dynamics of the oil market generally and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in particular. When it is considered that the US, with 5% of the global population consumes 25% of global energy supplies, we see the sheer impossibility for China or India to begin to approach US levels of consumption within the existing global political and financial market settlement that has been maintained since Bretton Woods in 1944. But what is the alternative?

The pricing of oil
There has been a growing realization on the part of major oil producers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia that oil is not priced in dollars but rather dollars are priced in oil. The reality underpinning this epiphany is the fact that oil has "value", or "money`s worth" - in exchange for commodities, goods and services - whereas the financial object we are accustomed to think of as the "dollar" is merely a "claim over value", or IOU issued by the US Federal Reserve Bank.

If we look at the current structure of the global energy market, we are conditioned to think that the "big bad wolf" is a "cartel" of OPEC members. However, the fact of the matter is that while there has indeed been a cartel extracting extraordinary profits from energy markets in recent years, this has consisted of intermediary investment banks and energy traders, who control the global market platform on which oil is traded and benchmark prices are set. In other words, the derivative tail has been wagging the oil market dog.

This is set to get worse, to the extent that a major trading disaster is only a matter of time - possibly as soon as this winter, if Goldman Sachs` prognosis of a "super-spikes" to $100/barrel oil is realized. The reason for this is the fact that investment banks and oil companies have themselves now lost control of the price-setting process to a wall of hedge fund money under the control of star traders attracted by rewards beyond the dreams of avarice - as opposed to the pittance they were receiving with their former employers.

Hedge funds - as the Long Term Capital Management meltdown showed us in 1998 - are almost entirely unregulated, since there is no regulatory body with access to data in relation to their transactions (particularly "off-exchange") or with the capability to take enforcement action over the offshore entities typically used by hedge funds.

Due to the lack of transparency in "off-exchange" trading, oil producers and consumers do not even know that they are losing - a phenomenon which J K Galbraith memorably described as the "bezzle". However, while oil producers and consumers have now woken up to the bezzle, the problem they have is what to do about it. It has long been clear that a Middle Eastern benchmark oil price is a key part of the solution, and the creation and domination of such a benchmark has been the Holy Grail for the International Petroleum Exchange and New York Mercantile Exchange for some 15 years.

Whatever the benchmark and market mechanism, there are two functions which are generic to all markets: money, capital, commodities, energy, whatever. First, there is a requirement for a legally binding contract - "transaction registration"; second, there is the function of transfer of title against payment. Together these are thought of as "clearing and settlement". These two functions constitute a natural monopoly and should therefore only take place in the context of an "enterprise model" (legal and financial structure) which is neutral both in terms of participation and absence of outside investors.

The requirement is therefore for an "Energy Clearing Union" comprising all market participant constituencies - whether producers, consumers or intermediaries - constituted as an "International Energy Trade Association" ("IETA") and served by a consortium of providers of services such as communications, technology, risk management and so on. Such an IETA would not only have access to trading data both on and off-exchange but would also be in a position to impose standards of probity and market behavior with the threat of sanctions such as suspension - temporary or permanent - of the right to register transactions.

Bilateral transactions between IETA members would be subject to mutual guarantee, backed by suitable deposit or margin arrangements and/or a default fund. A risk management partner - rather than a central counterparty "Clearing House" - would manage the system and the risk. The outcome is a "Clearing Union" or "Guarantee Society", as recently adopted by the Scottish Liberal Democrats as part of their policy to stimulate small and medium-size enterprises. Such a Clearing Union would be operated by a neutral consortium of service providers within a true partnership arrangement, with funding provided by the stakeholders themselves without recourse to outside investors. The Clearing Union concept is not a new idea within the oil market - at least one OPEC member has been advocating an OPEC Clearing Bank and associated investment institution for almost 20 years.

A rational energy policy
It was instructive to hear the response at an industry event last June of both a panel of senior energy traders and their audience when asked for an assessment of the likely success of emissions trading. "Slim to zero" was the consensus of both, and even more telling was the analogy from the floor: "If you want to keep a donkey healthy you don`t take care of what comes out of it, you take care of what goes in."

We do not have to look beyond the structure of the limited liability company to realize what the problem is with emissions trading. It is not necessary to make any ethical or moral judgment with respect to "the Corporation", merely to observe that the managers of GasCo Inc or Oilco Plc are likely to be held to account by their shareholders if they fail to minimize costs and maximize shareholder value.

A levy on non-renewable energy would affect the costs of global intermediaries in a way that they would find more difficult to pass on and is therefore not in the interest of investors. This "externalization" of costs is the reason why the more canny oil companies and conglomerates have been assiduously promoting and lobbying for the emissions trading concept. The embarrassing fact is that if emissions trading could actually work, energy intermediaries would not support it.

# An "Energy Clearing Union", on the other hand, while not necessarily in the interests of investors is certainly in the interests of the planet. In particular, it could form the cornerstone of a rational global energy policy as an alternative to fundamentally unworkable emissions trading schemes. Since all energy transactions would be registered, it would be easy to apply a suitable levy that could then form the basis of an "Energy Investment Fund" that would fund investment in: Existing and future non-renewable infrastructure, to ensure the most efficient possible utilization of these finite resources
# Renewable energy
# Energy-efficient and eco-friendly housing and infrastructure

IETA would increase the oil price with a levy of (say) $20/barrel above the market clearing level, and with the excess, acquire and develop the capital assets of all existing oil intermediaries while utilizing their expertise as development partners with incentives made up of a share in any gains in energy efficiency for which they are responsible.

A money based upon value
While an "Energy Clearing Union" provides the means for a rational energy policy, it still treats the symptom rather than the disease. In order to address the real problem, we need to re-examine the monetary unit itself. It is possible to conceive of a global "petro-dollar" - based upon a set amount of energy - which would be capable of fulfilling a role as a genuine alternative to the dollar as a global means of exchange.

J M Keynes put forward at Bretton Woods 60 years ago an "International Clearing Union" coupled with a new monetary unit he called the "Bancor". Unfortunately, what we got is a "central bank-centric" monetary system configured around the World Bank/IMF and the Bank of International Settlements where the monetary units we use are essentially debts created by central banks and issued into circulation by banks as loans.

We take for granted that we need banks to create credit but perhaps do not realize that this bank-created credit constitutes the bulk of our money supply. The effect of a monetary unit created as a debt is that - to take the UK as an example - more than 97% of all money in circulation has come into existence through the creation of loans (two-thirds of them in respect of mortgage loans secured against property) by "credit institutions" such as banks and building societies.

However, when credit institutions create money through a loan, they do not create the money necessary to repay the interest on that loan. So the simple and inexorable mathematics of compound interest on the loans backing our money drives the unsustainable imperative for economic growth at the heart of our malaise. We also take for granted that banks are entitled to charge interest on the credit they create.

A new website, www.zopa.com, which links would-be borrowers together with would-be lenders essentially on a peer-to-peer basis, does for banks what Napster did for the music industry - it dis-intermediates them. But the Guarantee Society or Clearing Union goes further than this: credit is granted bilaterally and interest-free, and the only costs to the system user are the administration/accounting costs and a share of any defaults. Furthermore, there is no reason why transactions in a "Clearing Union" need be settled in central bank-issued money, since users may quite simply agree that they will accept "money`s worth" in (say) energy or commodities instead by reference to a value unit.

While banks, credit unions or ratings agencies may be the managers of the system and credit creation in this model, banks would no longer be able to charge us for their use of our credit. Some commentators, notably Susan George and George Monbiot, are advocates of an "International Clearing Union" as a solution. However, while an "International Clearing Union" is undoubtedly capable of being part of the solution, it is also necessary to address the nature of the monetary unit itself so that we may achieve a global monetary unit based upon "value" - such as an absolute amount of energy - rather than its antithesis - the Fed-issued Dollar.

An International Energy Clearing Union could provide a platform both for a new and rational energy policy and - in conjunction with new energy investment institutions - for a global monetary system based upon value rather than the US dollar. This would literally "reverse the polarity" of money to base it upon value, rather than upon a claim over value created by a bank out of thin air.

The existing system is approaching a crisis point, and a new alternative is emerging. A revolution is approaching - albeit a silent one - and when it is over we will wonder how it could ever have been otherwise.

A former director of the International Petroleum Exchange, Chris Cook is now a strategic market consultant, entrepreneur and commentator. Reprinted with permission from www.energybulletin.net.

(Copyright Chris Cook 2005)

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

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Thursday, May 26, 2005
War News for Thursday, May 26, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Four Iraqis, including a translator working for the US military, gunned down in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Senior civil servant in Iraqi Ministry of Industry & Minerals assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Deputy Dean of Baghdad`s Mustansiriya University and three of his bodyguards gunned down in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Iraqi politician found dead with throat cut in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three detainees escape from Abu Ghraib prison.

Bring `em on: US Marine killed in Operation New Market in Haditha.

Bring `em on: One month old and one year old Iraqis killed in fighting in Tal Afar.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed and nineteen injured in car bomb attack in Baghdad.

American soldier killed in traffic accident in Al Touz.

Operation Thunder:

Iraq`s Defence Ministry has announced a huge crackdown on terrorism in the capital Baghdad.

More than 40,000 Iraqi troops are to be deployed in the capital to hunt down insurgents.

Sadoun al Dulaimi said the force would include troops from the interior and defence ministries.

Operation Thunder would be by far the largest anti-insurgent effort carried out in Baghdad by Iraqi security forces.

"We will divide Baghdad into seven main areas," al Dulaimi told a news conference.

"The number of the forces who will take part in the operation will be more than 40,000."


Playing the al-Zarqawi game:

Iraq`s interior and defense ministers said Thursday that they have information that Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been wounded.

"We have information in the Ministry of Interior that al-Zarqawi was wounded, but we don`t know how seriously," Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said during a news conference. "We are not sure whether he is dead or not but we are sure that he is injured."

Meanwhile: Al-Qaeda`s Iraq branch said it has named Abu Hafs al-Qarni as its acting chief, according to an Internet statement posted on an Islamist website whose authenticity could not be verified.

Google Search: "Abu Hafs al-Qarni"


Women`s Rights:

Under Saddam’s dictatorship, Iraqi women were among the most free in the Middle East. They enjoyed many rights equal to those of men: rights to education, employment, divorce in civil courts and custody over children were endorsed by the ruling Ba’ath regime although some of the legal rights were routinely violated.

It is now more than a year since the end of the war aimed at bringing liberation to the Iraqi people but rather than an improvement in their quality of life, women have been victims of widespread violence.

The Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq has informally surveyed Baghdad, and now knows of 400 women who were raped in the city between April and August last year. A lack of security and proper policing in post-Saddam Iraq has been blamed for the growing rates of crime against women. It is claimed that women can no longer go out alone to work or attend school or university without being accompanied by an armed male relative.



Opinion and Commentary

Misinterpeting Lulls:

The specialists, including one with extensive experience in Iraq, suggested that Washington misinterpreted a lull in attacks after January`s national elections as a sign that the Iraqi insurgency was dying out or relaxing its effort to force a foreign military retreat.

Instead, the experts said, the insurgents have shown patience as they regrouped, devised new strategies and repeatedly demonstrated an ability to thwart U.S.-led efforts to stabilize Iraq. The persistent campaign of attacks has demoralized the population while proving the insurgents can withstand repeated military offensives designed to defang them.

Events in Iraq this week showed the effectiveness of the insurgents` campaign. A car bomb exploded Tuesday outside a girls` school in Baghdad, killing six people, while eight U.S. troops were killed in separate attacks. A total of 14 Americans have been reported killed since Sunday, while about 60 Iraqis have died in shootings, car bombings and suicide attacks launched by the insurgents around the country.

"The fact that the U.S. Army managed to prevent insurgent plans from halting the elections, and the fact that such a large percentage of the Iraqi population defied the violence to vote, shook the confidence of the various groups deploying violence for political aim," said John Shipman, director of the independent International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

But the three-month gap between the elections of formation of a new government "gave the insurgency the strategic and political space to regroup and strike back," he added.

In spite of "risking their lives" to vote for a better future, Iraqis have not been impressed by the new government. Its inaction "has also demobilized the Iraqi population and encouraged a return to the alienation and cynicism that (previously) marked popular attitudes," Shipman said.


Special Report

US Arms transfer since September 11, 2001:

"Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush’s pledge to ‘end tyranny in our world’ than the United States’ role as the world’s leading arms exporting nation, " said Frida Berrigan, the report’s co-author. "Although arms sales are often justified on the basis of their purported benefits, from securing access to overseas military facilities to rewarding coalition partners, these alleged benefits often come at a high price."

As in the case of recent decisions to provide new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan while pledging comparable high tech military hardware to its rival India, U.S. arms sometimes go to both sides in long brewing conflicts. And the tens of millions of U.S. arms transfers to Uzbekistan exemplify the negative consequences of arming repressive regimes.

Among the key findings of this report are the following:

In 2003, the last year for which full information is available, the United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts. From Angola, Chad and Ethiopia, to Colombia, Pakistan, Israel and the Philippines, transfers through the two largest U.S. arms sales programs (Foreign Military Sales and Commercial Sales) to these conflict nations totaled nearly $1 billion in 2003.

In 2003, more than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13 of 25) were defined as undemocratic by the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report: in the sense that "citizens do not have the right to change their own government." These 13 nations received over $2.7 billion in U.S. arms transfers in 2003, with the top recipients including Saudi Arabia ($1.1 billion), Egypt ($1.0 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), the United Arab Emirates ($110 million) and Uzbekistan ($33 million).

When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003 -- a full 80% -- were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.


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Published on Thursday, May 26, 2005 by Working for Change
Irony Overflowing
Oil might be drying up, but Washington`s greasy as ever
by Molly Ivins
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=19115

I often complain about the excess of irony in our national life, but this week, if you`re not begoshed by the irony surplus, you haven`t been paying attention. If we could just figure out a way to get energy out of the stuff, we`d be set for life.

Liberals for the filibuster; conservatives against it -- hilarious. Pentagon loses track of more than $1 trillion, and the Army can`t find 56 airplanes, 32 tanks and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. Not to mention Osama bin Laden. And more:

Right-wing Republicans fight to make the world safe from "judicial activists" by appointing Priscilla Owen -- the biggest, baddest, worstest judicial activist Texas ever produced -- to the federal bench.

Owen is so notorious for reading her own opinions into the law, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then her colleague on the Texas Supreme Court, described her opinion in a parental consent case as "an unconscionable act of judicial activism." (For further irony, see Gonzales` subsequent attempts to deny that he was describing Owen.)

Each Owen aficionado here in Texas has his or her own favorite Owen ruling, but I always liked the one about the boy rendered quadriplegic by a defective safety belt, who died waiting for the dilatory Owen to figure out if a lower court decision that the manufacturer owed him enough money for his care was constitutional in Texas. Hey, sometimes it takes more than a year. But she`s very pro-life.

In Texas, we elect our Supreme Court, which handles only civil matters. The pattern in Owen`s decisions is to favor those corporations and law firms that contributed to her campaigns for office. One little gem involved Enron: Owen wrote the decision that allowed the company to escape paying $200,000 in school taxes.

In her 1994 campaign, Owen got $8,600 from Enron and $31,550 from Vinson and Elkins, the Houston law firm that represented Enron. Enron and V-E showed up in her court two years later, trying to get out of paying school property taxes. Not only did Owen not recuse herself -- get this -- she wrote the opinion that allowed Enron to choose its own method for property tax assessment, and lo, it cut its own assessed property value by millions of dollars.

Another fave: claiming, on behalf of a contributor, that property owners have a right to pollute the water supply. Moral: Judicial activism, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

The George Galloway hearing (OK, so it was last week). In addition to being the funniest biter-bit performance in years (if you missed it, the transcript and the video are floating around on the Internet), it was yet another victory for the Brits over the Americans when it comes to spoken English. Holy cow, what a display of pyrotechnic mastery of language. The American senators were left with so much egg on their faces they looked like a bad day at a Tyson chicken plant.

As one of those slow-spoken Americans often out-tap-danced on panels by the nimble-tongued Brits, I defensively assert they don`t really think faster and better than we do -- they just talk faster and better.

Galloway, a member of the British Parliament, simply danced rings around the clumsy Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, and the others. The hearing bore an uncanny resemblance to the scene in Leonardo DiCaprio`s popular bio-pic about Howard Hughes, "The Aviator," in which the deteriorating Hughes triumphs over a low-rent, witch-hunt committee.

In case you missed the flap, Galloway is a way-left Brit M.P. who actually did defend Saddam Hussein before the war, which may or may not have been based on his position that the pre-war boycott of Iraq did nothing to topple Hussein, but was a humanitarian nightmare for Iraqis.

In fact, the boycott, as has long been documented, did kill tens of thousands of Iraqis, in particular babies and small children. An insane policy. The United Nations` effort to mitigate it was the Oil for Food Program, and Galloway was accused of being a beneficiary of the corruption of that program, via a charitable foundation he had set up.

He has won two libel suits over the accusation, against the Christian Science Monitor and the London Telegraph. The Monitor, by mishap, used crudely forged documents, later discredited, to go after him. Now, British libel law is, frankly, hideous. How its press continues to function in such a lively fashion under that load of legal crap is a mystery to me: The burden of proof there is on the defendant.

Beyond the specifics of those cases, Galloway is generally in bad smell in Britain. This may or may not be attributable to his political enemies, but it is certainly attributable to more journalists than the neo-neo-con Christopher Hitchens, who described Galloway in London`s The Independent as "a thug and a demagogue, the type of working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it who is too used to the expense accounts, the cars and the hotels -- all the cigars and backslapping." (Only a Brit could have written that sentence.)

So here is the irony of ironies. Into our midst comes this one Brit, who deservedly or not carries with him the whiff of bad reputation, to confront our Puritan-pure, sea-green, incorruptible politicians (Heh? Our guys never carry water for their campaign contributors, do they?), and in 20 minutes, he told more truth about our policy and our war in Iraq than any of our politicians have in years.

Reduced to this: George Galloway as truth-teller.

Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let the Dogs In?

© 2005 Working Assets

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Rückzugsgefechte!

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 27. Mai 2005, 06:59

Guantanamo
Pentagon räumt falsche Koran-Behandlung ein
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,357754,00.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,357754,00.html


Nach wiederholten Dementis haben die USA eingeräumt, dass im US-Lager Guantanamo der Koran nicht korrekt behandelt wurde - zumindest in fünf von 13 untersuchten Fällen. Es gebe aber keine glaubwürdigen Belege, dass das Heilige Buch der Muslime die Toilette herunter gespült worden sei.

Washington - Fünf von insgesamt 13 näher untersuchte Vorfällen könnten "allgemein als falsche Behandlung (des Korans) definiert werden", sagte Brigadegeneral Jay Hood, der Kommandeur des Gefängnisses, gestern Abend auf einer Pressekonferenz im US-Verteidigungsministerium in Washington. In drei Fällen habe offenbar Absicht dahinter gesteckt, zwei seien eher unbeabsichtigt gewesen. In vier Fällen seien Aufseher die Urheber gewesen, im fünften Fall sei es einer der Vernehmungsbeamten gewesen. Worin diese unkorrekte Handlungen bestanden, wollte Hood nicht sagen. Die Ermittlungen dauern an. Teils habe ein Wachsoldat im US-Gefangenenlager Guantanamo in Kuba den Koran jedoch nur "versehentlich berührt", teils das Buch "gar nicht angerührt", habe die Untersuchung ergeben. Das Pentagon habe 31.000 Schriftstücke durchgesehen, um den Vorwürfen nachzugehen.

Die Veröffentlichung eines Zwischenstands der Ergebnisse ist ungewöhnlich und Ausdruck der Bemühungen des Pentagons, die Empörung in der muslimischen Welt über berichtete Vorfälle von Koran-Schändungen einzudämmen. Ein Gefangener, der angeblich bereits im Jahr 2002 einem FBI-Beamten von der Schändung des Buches in der Toilette berichtet hatte, habe bei einer erneuten Vernehmung am 14. Mai erklärt, er habe nur von derartigen Vorfällen gehört, sei selbst aber nie direkter Zeuge gewesen, erklärte Hood weiter.

Der Sprecher des Pentagon, Lawrence di Rita, erklärte auf der gemeinsamen Pressekonferenz mit Hood, es sei nun klar, dass jede unkorrekte Behandlung von Koran-Ausgaben lediglich aus Versehen geschehen sei. Zugleich werde durch die Ermittlungen deutlich, dass der Glauben der muslimischen Gefangenen in Guantanamo geachtet werde.

Das amerikanische Nachrichtenmagazin "Newsweek" hatte am 9. Mai unter Berufung auf einen nicht namentlich genannten US-Beamten berichtet, einer regierungsinternen Untersuchung zufolge hätten Aufseher im Gefangenenlager Guantanamo Ausgaben des Korans in Toiletten ausgelegt, in einem Fall sei sogar ein Exemplar im Klo hinuntergespült worden. Der Bericht löste in islamischen Ländern Massenproteste aus, in deren Verlauf mindestens 15 Menschen ums Leben kamen. Eine Woche nach Erscheinen zog "Newsweek" den Artikel zurück. Zur Begründung hieß es, der Informant sei sich seiner Sache nicht mehr sicher.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005

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May 27, 2005
Inquiry by U.S. Finds 5 Cases of Koran Harm
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/politics/27koran.html?hp&e…

WASHINGTON, May 26 - An American military inquiry has uncovered five instances in which guards or interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba mishandled the Koran, but found "no credible evidence" to substantiate claims that it was ever flushed down a toilet, the chief of the investigation said on Thursday.

All but one of the five incidents appear to have taken place before January 2003. In three cases, the mishandling of the Koran appears to have been deliberate, and in two it was accidental or unintentional, the commander said, adding that four cases involved guards, and one an interrogator. Two service members have been punished for their conduct, one recently.

In announcing preliminary findings of his investigation, which began about two weeks ago, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commander of the Guantánamo Joint Task Force, said the Koran mishandling did not occur as part of any effort to demoralize or intimidate detainees for interrogation.

But General Hood declined to give further details until he had completed the investigation, which was started after Newsweek magazine published an article asserting that a separate investigation by the military was expected to find that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the detention center. The article, which the magazine subsequently retracted, prompted violence in the Muslim world that claimed at least 17 lives.

"I`d like you to know that we have found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay ever flushed a Koran down a toilet," General Hood said in a Pentagon news briefing.

He said that his investigators conducted a new interview with one detainee who had been quoted in F.B.I. documents that were released Wednesday as having said under interrogation in 2002 that guards flushed a Koran down a toilet.

In the new interview, conducted on May 14 as part of General Hood`s investigation, the detainee said he was not a witness to any Koran abuse.

General Hood said his investigators asked the detainee whether he personally had seen any incidents of Koran abuse, "and he allowed as how he hadn`t, but he had heard guards - that guards at some other point in time had done this."

The general said he could offer no explanation for any contradiction between the detainee`s statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 2002 and the interview conducted by his team on May 14.

Investigators never asked the detainee specifically about a Koran flushed down a toilet, General Hood said, nor did they mention his previous statements under interrogation, "but he was asked about defiling, desecration, mistreatment of the Koran."

It was not clear whether the military had also reinterviewed other inmates who are known, through the interrogation reports that were released on Wednesday, to have reported other instances of mishandling the Koran. General Hood did not say how many people, or whom, his team has questioned.

The five instances in which the Koran was mishandled, General Hood said, were among 13 cases investigated in the past two weeks.

"None of these five incidents was a result of a failure to follow standard operating procedures in place at the time the incident occurred," General Hood said.

But he added that in the initial months after the Guantánamo prison was set up, and until early 2003, there were not explicit, written rules about the Koran. And he said one incident concerned the breaking of another, unspecified rule, rather than the prison`s standard operating procedures.

The investigation also explored six more accusations of Koran abuse involving guards. In each of those instances, General Hood said, the guard "either accidentally touched the Koran, touched it within the scope of his duties, or did not actually touch the Koran at all."

Military policy acknowledges that some Muslims view a non-Muslim touching the Koran as a desecration.

In two other instances of the 13 that were investigated, interrogators either touched a Koran or stood over the Islamic holy book during an interrogation, General Hood said.

Neither instance is being termed Koran mishandling: One involved placing two Korans on a television, General Hood said, and in the second the Koran was not touched, and the perceived insult was unintentional.

"We`ve also identified 15 incidents where detainees mishandled or inappropriately treated the Koran, one of which was, of course, the specific example of a detainee who ripped pages out of their own Koran," the general added.

He appeared to be referring to a report cited repeatedly by Pentagon officials, including Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that a detainee had torn pages out of a Koran and used them to stop up a toilet, perhaps in protest of his treatment.

The abuse of detainees, especially at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, has embarrassed the military and the Bush administration and created a political challenge as they defend the campaign against global terrorism against accusations that it is anti-Islam.

"We`re in an environment where people react to impressions," Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, said at the news conference Thursday about Guantánamo.

"And so what we`re trying to make sure people understand is that the impression they ought to have is that the guards, the interrogators, the command down there have been extraordinarily cautious, and yet there have been instances where inadvertent mishandling has occurred or other types of mishandling," Mr. Di Rita added.

General Hood`s inquiry is expected to be completed in advance of a wider investigation into contentions of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo. That broader report could be even more critical of the military because it is based on statements from F.B.I. agents - not detainees, whose credibility can be challenged - who say they observed abusive and possibly illegal treatment of detainees.

"I want to assure you that we are committed to respecting the cultural dignity of the Koran and the detainees` practice of faith," General Hood said. "Every effort has been made to provide religious articles associated with the Islamic faith, accommodate prayers and religious periods, and provide culturally acceptable meals and practices."

For the inquiry into Koran abuse, investigators reviewed three years` worth of records and 31,000 documents, both electronic files and on paper, the general said.

General Hood said he was confident that "guidance to the guard force for handling the Koran is adequate" at Guantánamo - at least the procedures for handling the Koran ordered in January 2003.

But he acknowledged "that there was a significant period of time at the very beginning of operations in Guantánamo, in which there were not written guidelines" governing how to handle a Koran.

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 27, 2005
Democrats Force Senate to Delay a Vote on Bolton
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/politics/27bolton.html?hp&…

WASHINGTON, May 26 - Democrats forced the Senate on Thursday evening to postpone a vote on John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, demanding that the White House first hand over classified information about Mr. Bolton`s conduct that it has refused for weeks to provide.

The move put off until at least June 7, when the Senate returns from its Memorial Day break, any decision on Mr. Bolton`s nomination, and it set Democrats and Republicans in the Senate at odds once again just three days after they reached a compromise intended to avert filibusters on judicial nominations. Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, described himself as "very, very disappointed" by what Senator Harry Reid, the top Democrat, conceded was the "first filibuster of the year."

With Republicans holding a solid majority in the Senate, Mr. Bolton still appeared poised to win confirmation if his nomination is put to an up or down vote. But a Republican-led effort to end debate on Mr. Bolton tallied only a 56-to-42 majority, leaving Republicans 4 votes short of the 60 necessary to bring Mr. Bolton`s nomination to a final roll call.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat who has led the fight against Mr. Bolton, said Democrats would agree to a floor vote on Mr. Bolton when the Senate returned from its recess. But Mr. Biden said Democrats would insist that the Bush administration first provide information the Senate has sought concerning a battle Mr. Bolton waged in the summer of 2003 over intelligence assessments on Syria, and the names of Americans given to Mr. Bolton by the National Security Agency as having been mentioned in intercepted communications.

The showdown on the Senate floor guaranteed more chapters to come in the political battle that has raged since Mr. Bolton was nominated by President Bush more than 11 weeks ago. The struggle has been the sharpest in years over a nomination to a major foreign policy post, and it has been by far the most fractious fight over an American envoy to the United Nations.

The White House expressed immediate dismay at the Senate`s delay in the final vote over Mr. Bolton`s nomination.

"Just 72 hours after all the good will and bipartisanship, it`s disappointing to see the Democratic leadership resort back to such a partisan approach," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. Asked about the Democratic demands for additional documents, Mr. McClellan said, "They have all the information they need."

The vote, at 6:15 p.m. on Thursday, came at the end of 15 hours of speeches on the Senate floor that reflected bitter divisions between the parties. But with only one Republican, George R. Voinovich of Ohio, openly expressing opposition to Mr. Bolton, Mr. Biden ultimately portrayed the vote on whether to end debate not as a referendum on Mr. Bolton, but as a test of the Senate`s willingness to "stand up for itself" in insisting on access to the information.

Mr. McClellan indicated that the White House was not considering a recess appointment of Mr. Bolton at this point because the Republican leadership in the Senate would try again to bring the nomination to a vote when the Senate returned.

Three Democrats - Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana - joined 53 Republicans in seeking to bring Mr. Bolton`s nomination to a vote; 40 Democrats and one independent voted no on the motion to invoke cloture, as the Senate calls a bid to limit debate under its rules. Knowing that his side had lost, Senator Frist then cast his vote with the minority, bringing their total to 42. The move was a tactical gesture intended to allow him to call for another vote later. Mr. Voinovich sided with other Republicans in seeking to bring the matter to a vote, but also took the unusual step of returning to the Senate floor for a second day to echo in emotional terms a message he had first delivered on Wednesday about the potential damage to the American image around the world if Mr. Bolton were sent to the United Nations.

"When was the last time so many individuals have emerged from an administration to send warning signs to the U.S. Congress about an individual?" Mr. Voinovich asked, in a reference to former colleagues of Mr. Bolton who have voiced strong public opposition to him. Mr. Voinovich added, "We owe it to the United States, our children and our grandchildren, to heed this warning, and to ask our president, `Please, Mr. President, find a better candidate to send to the United Nations.` "

A spokeswoman for Mr. Voinovich, Marcie Ridgway, said Mr. Voinovich regarded Mr. Bolton as an obstacle to a promise the senator had made to his own children and grandchildren, in deciding to seek re-election to the Senate last year.

Throughout the prolonged confirmation battle, Mr. Bush and his aides have stood fast in defending Mr. Bolton against opponents who have charged, in particular, that he acted improperly in his treatment of subordinates and in seeking to shape intelligence estimates on Cuba, Syria and other issues to reflect his own views. But the White House has dismissed those claims as exaggerated, and has argued that Mr. Bolton`s blunt manner will serve him well at the United Nations.

Among Mr. Bolton`s supporters, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, was among those who urged the Senate to cast aside the Democratic objections and vote on Thursday in favor of the nomination. "Elections have consequences," Mr. McCain said.

Among the critics, Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, warned that Mr. Bolton`s confirmation would "send a dreadful, dreadful signal about our credibility to the world."

In addition, Mr. Dodd joined Mr. Biden in urging the Senate to stand firm in insisting that the administration provide it with the information on Syria and the intercepted communications that Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have sought unsuccessfully for more than a month.

"Aside from how you feel about Mr. Bolton, yes or no," Mr. Dodd said, "it`s important, I think, for this institution to stand up for its rights."

The State Department has said that providing the information about the debate on Syria would have a "chilling effect" on future internal debates within the government. As for the intercepted communications, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, briefed the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate intelligence committee two weeks ago about the reports from the National Security Agency about which Mr. Bolton had used his power as an under secretary of state to obtain additional highly classified information.

But General Hayden refused, on privacy grounds, to provide those senators with the names of 19 Americans mentioned in those reports, although Mr. Bolton had been able to obtain the names. Mr. Biden said that position was unacceptable, and reflected a mistrust of the Senate.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Dodd had insisted that their effort to prevent a final vote on Mr. Bolton on Thursday would not amount to a filibuster, on the ground that they would be willing to back down from their position if the administration provided the documents. But after the vote, Mr. Frist mocked that position, suggesting that the success of 42 senators in preventing a confirmation vote on Mr. Bolton "looks like a filibuster, sounds like a filibuster" and even "quacks like a filibuster."

Mr. Reid did not quarrel with that assessment, but added, "How can we work together when information is not supplied?"

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 27, 2005
Many Iraqis See Sectarian Roots in New Killings
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/international/middleeast/2…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 26 - No one knows who tortured and killed Hassan al-Nuaimi, a Sunni Arab cleric whose body was found in an empty lot here last week, with a hole drilled in his head and both eyes missing. But the various theories have a distinctly sectarian tinge.

The Shiite police chief investigating the death said he suspected Sunni Arab extremists who have driven much of the insurgency in Iraq, much of it aimed at Shiites. The Sunni family mourning the cleric pointed the finger at the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia. But with Mr. Nuaimi buried, the truth, as so often with killings in Iraq, seems to be lost in rumor and allegations.

The only sure thing is that Mr. Nuaimi and another Sunni man who helped write sermons were killed within 12 hours of their disappearance from a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad.

Their deaths, amid violence that has taken more than 550 lives across Iraq this month, renewed concern that the bloodshed may be shifting ever more toward crudely sectarian killings.

Hard-line Sunni leaders have pressed the case. "The killing in Iraq now is according to religious identity," said Sheik Abdel Nasir al-Janabi, a religious Sunni and a hard-line member of the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni political group that claims to have ties to the insurgency. "Now you`re killed because you`re a Sunni Arab."

Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq`s most powerful Shiite cleric, have responded to such talk with calls for calm and renewed appeals to Shiites that they place their trust in Iraq`s fledgling democracy, not revenge killings.

But the urgency of the Shiite leaders` appeals reflects a deepening fear that the welter of allegations about Shiite death squads going after Sunni Arabs, true or false, may create a new reality, prompting still more sectarian killings and pushing the country ever closer to the brink of civil war.

"We are drifting into a sectarian society," said Ghassan al-Atiyya, a secular Shiite and the director of the Iraqi Foundation for Development and Democracy, a Baghdad research institute. "The Americans, instead of strengthening liberal and secular, they are now hostage of Sciri," he said, referring to a religious Shiite political group, "and Kurds."

"They let the genie out of the bottle," Mr. Atiyya said.

Iraq`s Shiite majority were the main victims of Saddam Hussein`s repression and have been among the principal targets of the insurgents. On Monday insurgents killed at least 33 Shiites in three car bomb attacks in Iraq, and on Thursday two members of Shiite political parties were assassinated.

For the past year Shiites have been attacked at mosques, weddings, funerals and crowded marketplaces. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most ruthless insurgent leader, has urged still more killing, calling Shiites "apostates" and usurpers of the Sunni Arab primacy in Iraq that ended with the overthrow of Mr. Hussein. On Wednesday his group boasted of killing Shiites in the northern city of Tal Afar.

But when Iraq got its first-ever Shiite majority government three weeks ago, the transition was accompanied by a new wave of terror that included attacks on Sunni Arab leaders, including clerics, and even fruit and vegetable sellers. Sunni leaders have blamed Shiite militias that they say work behind the scenes with official army and police forces, a charge that Shiites deny.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari suggested Thursday that there might be some truth in Sunni allegations of Shiite death squads. "I am alarmed," Dr. Jaafari said. "We will act very strongly against those who take the law into their own hands."

Sunni leaders have accused Shiite-led security forces of raiding mosques, arresting more than 300 Sunni clerics and worshipers, and killing several of them, including Mr. Nuaimi. His family has said he was taken from his home by men wearing Iraqi security force uniforms.

On Monday the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni political group, condemned several sets of killings that it said had been carried out by government forces.

Sheik Khalaf al-Aliyan, a member of the National Dialogue Council, a coalition of Sunni political leaders, said he had evidence that Shiite political parties had drawn up a list of 4,000 Sunnis they intended to assassinate, a charge that Shiite leaders have dismissed as preposterous.

"We are approaching the red line," said Saleh Mutlak, a moderate member of the council, which has also urged Sunni participation in the political process.

Most Iraqis, whether Shiite or Sunni, Arab or Kurd, Muslim or Christian, have held tightly to a legend about the Iraqi past. Iraqis, they say, have never defined themselves primarily by religion or ethnic origin but have submerged themselves in a common identity as Iraqis. Even now, reporters who ask people which community they belong to tend to get a common answer. "I am Iraqi," men and women will say, or, with equal insistence, "I am a Muslim."

Even so, in the last two years a strengthened sense of religious and ethnic identity began to course through Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish communities, which had endured the most repression under Mr. Hussein. Moderate Sunnis worry that the newfound identity combined with Shiites` and Kurds` new positions of power may deepen sectarian rifts.

"I came back to Iraq with the assumption that these religious and sectarian tendencies were not that strong," said Adnan Pachachi, 81, a Sunni statesman and former foreign minister, who returned from exile in 2003 and became one of the most trusted advisers of the American occupation authorities. "But in times of trouble people tend to go toward religion, and the religious parties make use of that very skillfully."

The shift in power has been a major irritant. Shiites, for years a downtrodden underclass, took power in elections in January and now control Iraq`s government, Parliament and much of its police and security forces. Sunni Arabs, who ran Iraq from the time of the Ottoman Empire, are chafing under that rule but have little leverage after boycotting the elections.

That has left Sunni Arabs with a bitterness that leaves them more open to hard-liners` appeals.

"There`s a sense of alienation and embitterment among Sunnis," said Hassan al-Bazzaz, an international relations professor at Baghdad University and director of a center that studies public opinion. "Maybe that`s why a lot of them are ready to share suspicions about what`s happening."

A sampling of opinions at Friday Prayer at Baghdad`s main hard-line Sunni mosque, called the Mother of All Battles, showed sharp Sunni Arab anger at Shiites, while Shiites near Al Mohsen Mosque in Sadr City, a Shiite district, expressed little or no anger.

For Sunnis, perhaps the strongest symbol of Shiite bullying is the Shiite militia called the Badr Brigade. The group was formed in the 1980`s in Iran as a fighting force of Iraqi Shiites opposed to Mr. Hussein. Many of its members returned after the American invasion. The group was ordered to disband but still exists informally, with a former member now running the Interior Ministry.

Saad Qindeel, the head of the political bureau of the party affiliated with the group, said it had put down its weapons and become a civil organization. But an American official and Iraqi officials say the group is used to gather intelligence.

There was evidence of that in at least one set of arrests two weeks ago, when according to a Shiite commander of an army commando unit called the Wolf Brigade, Badr intelligence pointed out three Palestinians and an Iraqi who they said had carried out a suicide bombing in Baghdad.

"They are very active," Mr. Pachachi said of the Badr Brigade. "This is the fear that many Sunnis have, that the Badr Brigade will be using the great advantage of being in the government to strengthen their position and try to defeat their opponents."

And small signs of sectarian strife have surfaced in Baghdad neighborhoods.

In a mysterious incident earlier this month, a Shiite student at the Baghdad University College of Pharmacy was killed after arguing with a Sunni dean over a rally he wanted to hold to celebrate the new government. Protests ensued, and the college was closed for several days.

A rash of five or six arrests of Sunni businessmen in the last two weeks has raised concerns among wealthy Sunnis that a campaign is being waged against them. "Anybody who is Sunni and has money is a target," said one member of the Iraqi Bankers Association, who declined to give his name out of fear that he would be arrested. "This is a witch hunt."

Shiite leaders, now in power, have called for restraint despite the killings of Shiites. Even Moktada alSadr, a notoriously rebellious cleric who led an uprising against Americans last summer, offered himself as a mediator on Sunday night.

At the funeral of a Shiite cleric who was gunned down in his car last week, the words of Abdel Karim al-Jazaery, a close friend of the cleric, were typical.

"The point is to make Muslims two parts, to divide the good people, Sunni and Shiite," Mr. Jazaery said of the killers. "God willing, they won`t succeed."

Outside the funeral tent, members of the Wolf Brigade stood guard.

John F. Burns contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 27, 2005
Just Shut It Down
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/opinion/27friedman.html

London

Shut it down. Just shut it down.

I am talking about the war-on-terrorism P.O.W. camp at Guantánamo Bay. Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the Gitmo prison open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down.

If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantánamo has become for America`s standing abroad, don`t read the Arab press. Don`t read the Pakistani press. Don`t read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press.

It is all a variation on the theme of a May 8 article in The Observer of London that begins, "An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in the first high-profile whistle-blowing account to emerge from inside the top-secret base." Google the words "Guantánamo Bay and Australia" and what comes up is an Australian ABC radio report that begins: "New claims have emerged that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are being tortured by their American captors, and the claims say that Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib are among the victims."

Just another day of the world talking about Guantánamo Bay.

Why care? It`s not because I am queasy about the war on terrorism. It is because I want to win the war on terrorism. And it is now obvious from reports in my own paper and others that the abuse at Guantánamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks? This is not just deeply immoral, it is strategically dangerous.

I can explain it best by analogy. For several years now I have argued that Israel needed to get out of the West Bank and Gaza, and behind a wall, as fast as possible. Not because the Palestinians are right and Israel wrong. It`s because Israel today is surrounded by three large trends. The first is a huge population explosion happening all across the Arab world. The second is an explosion of the worst interpersonal violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the history of the conflict, which has only recently been defused by a cease-fire. And the third is an explosion of Arabic language multimedia outlets - from the Internet to Al Jazeera.

What was happening around Israel at the height of the intifada was that the Arab multimedia explosion was taking the images of that intifada explosion and feeding them to the Arab population explosion, melding in the minds of a new generation of Arabs and Muslims that their enemies were J.I.A. - "Jews, Israel and America." That is an enormously toxic trend, and I hope Israel`s withdrawal from Gaza will help deprive it of oxygen.

I believe the stories emerging from Guantánamo are having a similar toxic effect on us - inflaming sentiments against the U.S. all over the world and providing recruitment energy on the Internet for those who would do us ill.

Husain Haqqani, a thoughtful Pakistani scholar now teaching at Boston University, remarked to me: "When people like myself say American values must be emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantánamo Bay thrown in our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back home say to us: `That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing with the America of imprisonment without trial.` "

Guantánamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty. If we have a case to be made against any of the 500 or so inmates still in Guantánamo, then it is high time we put them on trial, convict as many possible (which will not be easy because of bungled interrogations) and then simply let the rest go home or to a third country. Sure, a few may come back to haunt us. But at least they won`t be able to take advantage of Guantánamo as an engine of recruitment to enlist thousands more. I would rather have a few more bad guys roaming the world than a whole new generation.

"This is not about being for or against the war," said Michael Posner, the executive director of Human Rights First, which is closely following this issue. "It is about doing it right. If we are going to transform the Middle East, we have to be law-abiding and uphold the values we want them to embrace - otherwise it is not going to work."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 27, 2005
Running Out of Bubbles
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/opinion/27krugman.html

Remember the stock market bubble? With everything that`s happened since 2000, it feels like ancient history. But a few pessimists, notably Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, argue that we have not yet paid the price for our past excesses.

I`ve never fully accepted that view. But looking at the housing market, I`m starting to reconsider.

In July 2001, Paul McCulley, an economist at Pimco, the giant bond fund, predicted that the Federal Reserve would simply replace one bubble with another. "There is room," he wrote, "for the Fed to create a bubble in housing prices, if necessary, to sustain American hedonism. And I think the Fed has the will to do so, even though political correctness would demand that Mr. Greenspan deny any such thing."

As Mr. McCulley predicted, interest rate cuts led to soaring home prices, which led in turn not just to a construction boom but to high consumer spending, because homeowners used mortgage refinancing to go deeper into debt. All of this created jobs to make up for those lost when the stock bubble burst.

Now the question is what can replace the housing bubble.

Nobody thought the economy could rely forever on home buying and refinancing. But the hope was that by the time the housing boom petered out, it would no longer be needed.

But although the housing boom has lasted longer than anyone could have imagined, the economy would still be in big trouble if it came to an end. That is, if the hectic pace of home construction were to cool, and consumers were to stop borrowing against their houses, the economy would slow down sharply. If housing prices actually started falling, we`d be looking at a very nasty scene, in which both construction and consumer spending would plunge, pushing the economy right back into recession.

That`s why it`s so ominous to see signs that America`s housing market, like the stock market at the end of the last decade, is approaching the final, feverish stages of a speculative bubble.

Some analysts still insist that housing prices aren`t out of line. But someone will always come up with reasons why seemingly absurd asset prices make sense. Remember "Dow 36,000"? Robert Shiller, who argued against such rationalizations and correctly called the stock bubble in his book "Irrational Exuberance," has added an ominous analysis of the housing market to the new edition, and says the housing bubble "may be the biggest bubble in U.S. history"

In parts of the country there`s a speculative fever among people who shouldn`t be speculators that seems all too familiar from past bubbles - the shoeshine boys with stock tips in the 1920`s, the beer-and-pizza joints showing CNBC, not ESPN, on their TV sets in the 1990`s.

Even Alan Greenspan now admits that we have "characteristics of bubbles" in the housing market, but only "in certain areas." And it`s true that the craziest scenes are concentrated in a few regions, like coastal Florida and California.

But these aren`t tiny regions; they`re big and wealthy, so that the national housing market as a whole looks pretty bubbly. Many home purchases are speculative; the National Association of Realtors estimates that 23 percent of the homes sold last year were bought for investment, not to live in. According to Business Week, 31 percent of new mortgages are interest only, a sign that people are stretching to their financial limits.

The important point to remember is that the bursting of the stock market bubble hurt lots of people - not just those who bought stocks near their peak. By the summer of 2003, private-sector employment was three million below its 2001 peak. And the job losses would have been much worse if the stock bubble hadn`t been quickly replaced with a housing bubble.

So what happens if the housing bubble bursts? It will be the same thing all over again, unless the Fed can find something to take its place. And it`s hard to imagine what that might be. After all, the Fed`s ability to manage the economy mainly comes from its ability to create booms and busts in the housing market. If housing enters a post-bubble slump, what`s left?

Mr. Roach believes that the Fed`s apparent success after 2001 was an illusion, that it simply piled up trouble for the future. I hope he`s wrong. But the Fed does seem to be running out of bubbles.

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The Independent
Protesters beaten as Egypt votes on electoral reform
Thursday, 26th May 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=641…


Egyptian plain-clothes police beat up demonstrators in central Cairo - in some cases groping women protesters - as Egyptians voted over constitutional changes that would theoretically allow more than one candidate to stand for president.

But yesterday’s street protests, brutally suppressed by the security services, were held to condemn the referendum on the changes, which will insist that anyone wanting to stand against President Hosni Mubarak must have the support of 250 MPs and local councils, all dominated by Mr Mubarak’s own National Democratic Party (NDP), before being permitted to participate in the elections. So much for democracy in Egypt.

President George Bush has claimed that the electoral changes are part of a tide of democracy spreading across the Middle East and his wife Laura, visiting Egypt this week, went along with the official Mubarak line. The President’s changes in the constitution were "bold and wise," she said, adding that political reform should happen slowly. But slow is not the word for it. If 51 per cent of Egypt’s 32.5 million registered voters support the changes in the referendum - which, of course, they will - then Mr Mubarak, we are to believe, may not be alone in standing for presidential election. Yet who will be nominated to oppose him when the NDP calls the shots?

Yesterday’s disgraceful scenes in Cairo, however, showed only too clearly what the government thinks of democracy - either the Bush or the Mubarak version. The policeattacked opposition demonstrators in front of tourists and journalists or stood aside to let pro-Mubarak mobs assault the protesters, watching from the side of the street as Egyptian citizens assaulted Egyptian citizens. Members of the opposition Kifaya movement - it means "Enough!" in English - sought protection from the Cairo police but a senior officer ordered his men to withdraw and leave the protesters to their fate.

When a woman tried to leave the temporary refuge of the press syndicate building in Cairo, she was punched and beaten with batons by pro-Mubarak party men who also tore her clothes. Screaming and vomiting, she collapsed in the street, according to a journalist witness from the Associated Press. Again, the police looked on without interfering. Some plain-clothes police beat, abused and sexually groped women demonstrators.

Only a day earlier, police arrested 17 people from opposition groups, adding to the sense of outrage felt by those Egyptians who regard the referendum as a sham. "The regime is still following the dictatorial and repressive methods towards the Egyptian people and opposition," Mohamed Habib, the deputy leader of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood said. Gameela Ismail, a spokesman for the Ghad "Tomorrow" Party - she is the wife of the party’s leader, Ayman Noor - condemned Laura Bush for her support for Mubarak. "What she said is really frustrating for most opposition forces in Egypt," she said. "She seems not to know enough about Egypt. I’m really amazed."

The Kifaya Party’s spokesman, Abdul Hamid Qandil, reported that two of his members were hurt. "This is the first time this sort of beating and humiliation has taken place here in Cairo," he said, pointing out that it was a common practice outside Cairo where there were no reporters or television cameras. In the countryside - in areas such as the city of Sohag - many voters said they would suffer "penalties" if they did not vote. In al-Arish on the coast, government-appointed school directors ordered their staff to vote; buses carried government employees into Cairo to participate - and to vote for the "changes".

Mr Mubarak has been in power since President Sadat’s assassination in 1981, re-elected every six years in single candidate referendums. Government newspapers and television have given little publicity to possible opposition candidates, who will inevitably be turned down by the MPs and councils whose support they must have. Some Egyptians believe - despite his denials - that Mr Mubarak wants his son Gamal to succeed him in six years’ time; in which case, of course, the NDP would support his candidacy and he could - mirabile dictu - beat his father in the polls.

By continuing Egypt’s state of emergency, Mubarak has effectively neutered the opposition, thus forcing Egyptians to meet in mosques - and strengthening the hands of the theocrats. Like so many other Arab dictators, he has then been able to frighten the Americans into believing that the only alternative to his rule might be an Islamic republic.

President since 1981

The great survivor of Middle Eastern politics, Hosni Mubarak is not only Egypt’s longest-serving President, he has lived through no fewer than six assassination attempts.

Now he is trying to convince the world he is no longer a dictator but a freely elected leader overseeing democratic reform. However, no one expects reform to bring an end to the career of Egypt’s most durable leader since Muhammad Ali in the 19th century.

Mr Mubarak came to power in 1981 when Anwar Sadat was murdered. He quickly cemented his place at the top, winning uncontested re-election in 1987, a feat he repeated in 1993 and 1999.

Born in 1928 into an upper-middle class family, his education came in the military. He played a key role in the war against Israel in 1974.

He has two sons with his wife Suzanne, who is part Welsh. Although Mr Mubarak denies it, his younger, Gamal, is seen as a possible successor.


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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America`s broken nuclear promises endanger us all

Bush has done his utmost to frustrate talks on the non-proliferation treaty
Robin Cook
Friday May 27, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1493347,00.ht…

Guardian
Not a day goes by without a member of team Bush lecturing us on the threat from weapons of mass destruction and assuring us of the absolute primacy they give to halting proliferation. How odd then that the review conference on the non-proliferation treaty will break up this evening, barring an 11th-hour miracle, with no agreed conclusions. And how strange that no delegation should have worked harder to frustrate agreement on what needs to be done than the representatives of George Bush.

The tragedy is that, for all its faults, the non-proliferation treaty has hitherto been the best barrier put up by the international community against the spread of nuclear weapons. With the support of all but a handful of nations, the treaty provided a robust declaration that the development of nuclear weapons is taboo. That peer-group pressure has since resulted in more countries abandoning nuclear weapons than acquiring them.

South Africa disowned and dismantled its nuclear weapons after the collapse of the apartheid regime. New states to emerge from the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, renounced the nuclear systems they inherited on their territory. Argentina and Brazil dropped the nuclear capability they were developing after negotiating a non-nuclear pact between themselves. Even Iraq turned out to have abandoned its nuclear weapons programme, although in that particular case the success of the non-proliferation regime was more of an embarrassment to George Bush.

Previous review conferences, which come round every five years, have been used as an important opportunity to regenerate support for the treaty. Not this time. The full weight of Washington diplomacy was focused on preventing any reference in the agenda to the commitments the Clinton administration gave to the last review conference. As a result, the first two weeks of negotiation were taken up with arguing over the agenda, leaving barely one week for substantive talks. Robert McNamara, the former US defence secretary and no peacenik, has observed that if the people of the world knew "they would not tolerate what`s going on in the NPT conference".

Observance of the non-proliferation treaty rested on a bargain between those states without nuclear weapons, who agreed to renounce any ambition to acquire them, and the nuclear-weapon powers, who undertook in return to proceed in good faith to disarmament. It suits the Bush administration now to present the purpose of the treaty as halting proliferation, but its original intention was the much broader ambition of a nuclear-weapon-free world. The acrimonious exchanges inside the present review conference reflect the frustration of the vast majority of states, who believe they have kept their side of the deal by not developing nuclear weapons but have seen no sign that the privileged elite with nuclear weapons have any intention of giving them up.

It was to bridge the growing gulf between the two sides that the British delegation, led by Peter Hain, at the last review conference in 2000 helped broker agreement to 13 specific steps that the nuclear-weapon powers could take towards disarming themselves. Labour scores reasonably well against those benchmarks. Britain has taken out of service all non-strategic nuclear weapons and as a result has disarmed 70% of its total nuclear explosive power. It has also halted production of weapons-grade material and placed all fissile material not actually in warheads under international safeguards. This positive progress will be comprehensively reversed if Tony Blair does proceed as threatened to authorise construction of a new weapons system to replace Trident, but until then Britain has a good story to tell.

Not that it gets heard in the negotiating chambers, where it is obscured by our close identification with the Bush administration and our willingness in the review conference to lobby for understanding of their position. Their position is simply stated: obligations under the non-proliferation treaty are mandatory on other nations and voluntary on the US. Even while the review conference was sitting, the White House asked Congress for funds to research a bunker-busting nuclear bomb, although to develop new nuclear weapons, especially ones designed not to deter but to wage war, is to travel in the opposite direction to the undertakings the US gave to the last review conference.

The rationale for the bunker-buster is revealing. Its objective is to penetrate and destroy deeply buried arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. Perversely, the current regime in Washington does not perceive its development of nuclear weapons as an obstacle to multilateral agreement on proliferation but as the unilateral means of stopping proliferation. Whatever may be said for this muscular approach to proliferation, there is for sure no prospect of negotiating an agreed text with the rest of the world legitimating it.

Any progress within the non-proliferation treaty is therefore likely to be on hold until George Bush is replaced by a president willing to return to multilateral diplomacy. This is worrying as there are other pressing problems that should not be left waiting.

One of the design flaws of the treaty dates from its negotiation in the pre-Chernobyl era of rosy optimism about nuclear energy. As a result it turned on a deal in which the nuclear powers undertook to transfer peaceful nuclear know-how in return for other nations forswearing the military applications of nuclear technology. At the time many of us warned that it was inconsistent to enshrine the spread of nuclear energy in a treaty trying to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

It therefore is no surprise that we now have a crisis over the advanced nuclear ambitions of Iran. One of the weaknesses in the west`s negotiating position is that there is nothing in the non-proliferation treaty to prohibit Iran from acquiring a declared nuclear energy programme, although it seems implausible that the country has any urgent need for one, as it practically floats on a lake of oil.

The desirable solution is for an addition to the treaty banning countries without nuclear weapons from developing a closed fuel cycle for nuclear energy, which would stop them acquiring the fissile material for bombs. But this would deepen the present asymmetry between the nuclear powers and everyone else, and is only going to be negotiable if there is some evidence that we are serious about disarmament.

If the review conference breaks up in failure to agree, I suspect there will be some in Washington celebrating tonight, perhaps not in anything as foreign as French champagne but in the Napa Valley imitation. Within their own narrow terms they will have succeeded. They will have stopped another multilateral agreement and will have escaped criticism for not fulfilling their commitments under the last one. But in the process they will have weakened the non-proliferation regime and made the world a more dangerous place. The next time they lecture us on their worries about weapons of mass destruction, they do not deserve to be taken seriously.

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Friday, May 27, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Note to Readers

Evidently, Friendly Fire and I can`t keep our schedules straight because we both prepared today`s news post. It`s probably my fault since Friendly and Matt have been kindly covering for me for the last week.

Scroll down to read Friendly`s news summary. I`ve eliminated redundancies from my summary.

Thanks,

YD

War News for Friday, May 27, 2004, Extra Edition

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

Bring `em on: Five Iraqis killed, 15 wounded in bomb attack on police patrol in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi civilians, two US soldiers wounded by roadside bomb in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: US troops and insurgents clash in Fallujah.

"Insurgents in Iraq attached explosives to a dog and tried to blow up a military convoy near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk."

Knucklehead. "Retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Krohn got himself in trouble with his superiors as a Pentagon civilian public affairs official during the first three and one-half years of the Bush administration by telling the truth. He is still at it in private life. He says not to blame the military recruiters for the current recruiting `scandal.` Blame the war. "Army recruiting is in a death spiral, through no fault of the Army," Krohn told me. Always defending uniformed personnel, he resents hard-pressed recruiters being attacked for offering unauthorized benefits to make quotas. In a recent e-mail sent to friends (mostly retired military), Krohn complained that the `Army is having to compensate for a problem of national scope…` In contrast, Krohn is a lifelong Republican who actively supported George W. Bush`s presidential candidacy in 2000. He specified in his e-mail that `I`m not now blaming` President Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the situation. `We have a problem that transcends politics,` Krohn added." What a fucking moron. I bet this "lifelong Republican" was one of those clowns howling for Les Aspin`s resignation after the Battle of Mogadishu. But a truly incompetent defense secretary "transcends politics." IOKIYAR.

Rummy`s Army. "Last year, Army lieutenants and captains left the service at an annual rate of 8.7% — the highest since 2001. Pentagon officials say they expect the attrition rate to improve slightly this year. Yet interviews with several dozen military officers revealed an undercurrent of discontent within the Army`s young officer corps that the Pentagon`s statistics do not yet capture. Young captains in the Army are looking ahead to repeated combat tours, years away from their families and a global war that their commanders tell them could last for decades. Like other college grads in their mid-20s, they are making decisions about what to do with their lives. And many officers, who until recently had planned to pursue careers in the military, are deciding that it`s a future they can`t sign up for. The officers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan just wrapped up a year of grueling counterinsurgency operations — a type of combat the U.S. largely avoided after its struggle in Vietnam and that many in the Pentagon believe is the new face of war. They were in Iraq during last spring`s uprisings in Fallouja and Najaf, June`s transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government and block-to-block fighting during the retaking of Fallouja in November. These officers have, in most cases, more counterinsurgency experience than any of their superiors. And they are the people the Army most fears losing."

The good news from Iraq that the media fails to notice: "So, to summarize the good electricity news: Due to lack of maintenance, electricity production fell from 9000 MW in 1991 to 4400 MW before the war. Since then, there have been many announcements of improved generating capacity and production has fallen further to 3560 MW." Courtesy of Brad De Long.

Wounded. "The number of service members wounded in Iraq has surged past 12,000, half of them injured so badly that they cannot return to duty. Many of the most critical cases end up here at the National Naval Medical Center, established in the early days of World War II. On the worst nights at the Bethesda hospital complex, ambulances and casualty buses deliver up to 100 wounded Marines and sailors from Iraq. Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, more than 1,700 have arrived, most of them young and suffering from the devastating damage inflicted on human tissue by explosives, bullets and shrapnel. Some, like Bryan Trusty, stay only a few weeks. Others, like Eddie Ryan, stay longer. The soldiers are surrounded by attentive nurses and skilled surgeons, and by loved ones who cling to hope and share an ordeal that can be both traumatic and uplifting, their lives in turmoil and forever altered. If not for Eddie`s tattoos, Angela Ryan would not have recognized her son after she and her husband flew to see him at a military hospital in Germany. His face and body were grotesquely swollen. Before he was wounded, Eddie was lean and fit, 6 feet tall and 195 pounds. He had ballooned to 250 pounds because of severe swelling and fluid accumulation caused by injuries."

"A Fayette County (Pennsylvania) veteran blinded in Iraq said he is finally getting help and having to deal with the reality of his injuries. And he`s looking forward to starting his new life in a new home being built for him…Ross, a former combat engineer with the 82nd Airborne Division, was wounded on May 18, 2003, while disposing of munitions near Baghdad. He was carrying a mine in a sand-filled shovel to a disposal pit when it exploded. The accident left him with no sight and a prosthetic leg. Since returning home, he`s had several run-ins with the law, and said the pressure just got to him. But Ross said he still had dreams of moving out of his trailer home and into a new home and now that`s becoming a reality. The Massachusetts-based group Homes For Our Troops is building a handicap-accessible home for Ross."

Class warfare. "Given the deteriorating security in Iraq, it had been obvious for months that the Guard unit - E Troop, Second Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment - would be called up. Still, the deployment was tough on the soldiers and their families. The National Guard, as many have noted, is not a cross-section of America. Since the draft was abandoned in 1973, the Guard has drawn overwhelmingly from the working class, like the Army itself. The incomes of members of E Troop cluster around the Tennessee median income, about $38,000. Few are well-to-do, the kinds of people who often joined the Guard to avoid going to Vietnam. Few are among the very poor, who often manned the front lines in that war." Watch the slide show accompanying this short article, read the comments from these Guardsmen and their families, and then ask yourself, "Where the hell are those two sperm-burping Bush brats?"

Commentary

Analysis:

The Northeast Intelligence Network also gave its own English translation of the Arabic statement, which is annexed below. A careful reading of the translation shows, firstly, there is no reference to Zarqawi by name. It merely talks of a "sheikh", which has been presumed to be a reference to Zarqawi. Why can`t it be a reference to Osama bin Laden, who is also referred to by his followers as a sheikh. The statement, according to this translation, does not say that the sheikh is injured, so pray for him. It says should the sheikh be injured, pray for him. Why should the information section put out a statement that all Muslims should pray if their sheikh is injured? This is inexplicable unless the poster has no personal information on Zarqawi and had made his posting on the basis of the reports discussed above which speculate about the possibility of Zarqawi having been injured.

Where are we after reading and analyzing all these reports and comments on them by various analysts? Nowhere. We are as much in a state of confusion as we have always been since the US-led coalition invaded and occupied Iraq. All that one knows for certain is:
More than two years after the occupation, the Arab Sunni resistance to the US-led occupation shows no signs of abating.

There has been an unending flow of volunteers - from Iraq as well as outside - for the resistance movement, with many of them volunteering themselves for suicide missions.

Iraqis - many of them from deposed president Saddam Hussein`s Ba`ath Party and armed forces - and Saudis, recruited by al-Qaeda, spearhead the resistance movement.

The Iraqi resistance has shown remarkable coordination, even if it has been operating separately.

There is a common brain behind all the anti-American operations in Iraq.

The Americans project Zarqawi`s as that common brain, but their evidence in this regard is far from conclusive. The Americans, with their penchant for demonization and dramatization, have made Zarqawi appear as the source of most of what has been happening in Iraq, just as, post-September 11, they had made bin Laden appear as the source of most of the anti-Western jihadi terrorism taking place in the Islamic world.


Analysis:

Asia Times Online has learned that the US, instead of training up a regular professional Iraqi army, will create what in effect will be armed militias, acting under US central command, to take the militias of the resistance on at their own game.

Recent meetings of the so-called Higher Committee for National Forces (a grouping of Iraqi resistance bodies) and the 16th Arab National Congress held in Algiers played a pivotal role in building consensus among various Iraqi communist, Islamic, Ba`athist and nationalist groups on several issues, such as the right of Iraqis to defend themselves against foreign aggression and imperialism, and the right of Iraq to demand a political process untainted by occupation and which reflects the uninhibited will of the Iraqi people for a pluralistic and democratic Iraq.

The groups also condemned the continued occupation of Iraq and the establishment of any permanent US bases in the country, the privatization of the Iraqi economy and foreign corporations` unrestricted access to Iraq`s resources.

On this common ground, the central command of the resistance reorganized its activities, a key to which was merging mohallah-level (street-level) Islamic groups scattered in their hundreds across Iraq to work toward a common goal - defeating the occupation. In turn, these militias would co-opt common folk into their struggle, so that, literally, the streets would be alive with resistance.

Aware of this development, the US has accepted that no conventional military force can cope with such a resistance, and therefore similar mohallah-level combat forces are needed. According to Asia Times Online contacts, these US-backed militias will comprise three main segments - former Kurdish peshmerga (paramilitaries), former members of the Badr Brigade and those former members of the Ba`ath Party and the Iraqi army who were part of the Saddam regime but who have now thrown in their lot with the new Iraqi government.


Opinion:

In fact, Sinclair has hopped on the "tribute" bandwagon this time around, and has even changed its story about why it yanked the program last year — not unlike the way the administration changed its story about why we launched the war.

In a statement posted Tuesday on its Website, Sinclair said it "applauds Nightline for paying tribute to those service men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by reading their names on Memorial Day."

And why is it such a noble undertaking in 2005 when it was such a scandalously unpatriotic act in 2004?

Well, Sinclair now says, "Unlike Nightline`s reading of the names last year, which coincided with the start of the May ratings sweeps, we feel that this year`s Memorial Day selection is the appropriate setting to remember those who have sacrificed their lives to keep all Americans safe and free."

What? Sinclair last year blocked a tribute to those who had "sacrificed their lives" because it was "May ratings sweeps"? In other words, to protect the few pennies it might have lost in advertising dollars by yielding two hours of airtime to honor the dead? It`s not only a new excuse, but a repugnant one.



Casualty Reports

Local story: Michigan soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee Guasrdsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Kentucky Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Four Iowa Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Utah airman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Florida soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier wounded in Iraq.
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War News for Friday, May 27, 2005

Bring `em on: Two US airmen killed after their helicopter came under small arms fire and subsequently crashed near Baqubah.

Bring `em on: Fears grow that a Jordanian and two Iraqi drivers that were recently kidnapped have been executed.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi civilians killed when US forces opened fire on their minibus in southern Baghdad.

Three hundred Filipino workers have gone on strike in Camp Cooke in Taji. I wonder what Michelle Magalanglagalalallan will say.

Martial Law?

In Baghdad, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told a small group of Western reporters that next week`s planned crackdown, dubbed Operation Lightning, was designed "to restore the initiative to the government." Insurgents have killed more than 620 people since his government was announced on April 28.

"We will establish, with God`s help, an impenetrable blockade surrounding Baghdad like a bracelet surrounds a wrist," Defense Minister Saadoun al-Duleimi said.

Iraqi authorities did not say how long the crackdown would last, and it was uncertain if the Iraq security services are capable of mounting a sustained operation. Except for a few elite units, most police officers are believed to have joined up for the higher pay the job provides -- at $300 per month their salaries are triple the average wage.


Waiting for Peace

Another Bushism for the collection: Click here to listen:

"See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."


More Pictures from Abu Ghraib:

A federal judge has told the US government it will have to release additional pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq`s Abu Ghraib prison, civil rights lawyers said. Judge Alvin Hellerstein, stated that the public has a right to see the pictures and told the government yesterday he will sign an order requiring it to release them to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the lawyers said.

The judge made the decision after he and government attorneys privately viewed a sampling of nine pictures resulting from an Army probe into abuse and torture at the prison. The pictures were given to the Army by a military policeman assigned there.

ACLU lawyer Megan Lewis told the judge she believes the government has pictures of abuse beyond the Abu Ghraib images that sparked outrage around the world after they were leaked to the media last year.


Koran Desecration:

India - Shops, schools and banks were shut on Friday in Indian-administered Kashmir in protest at reports of desecrations of the Quran at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, witnesses said.

The one-day strike in India’s only Muslim-majority state was called by hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani and backed by the revolt-hit region’s leading women’s separatist group, Dukhtaran-e-Milat or Daughters of Faith.

The protest closed down shops, schools, banks as well as most government and private offices in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir.


Opinion and Commentary

Divide and Conquer:

The motive of some other bombing attacks is less clear. Faced with a population that wants the U.S. force to leave their country, Washington stands to gain from what is often vaguely reported in the U.S. mass media as “sectarian violence.”

The big-business media is aiding and abetting imperialist efforts to drive a wedge between Sunnis and Shias. Although some dispute these figures, they say the Sunnis make up some 20 percent of the population and that they held greater political power in the Ba’athist government; thus the U.S. media treats them as the “bad guys.”

On May 22 Associated Press writer Paul Garwood wrote, “The Sunni fall from grace is regarded by many as a key source of Iraq’s raging insurgency, which claimed more victims Sunday, including Trade Ministry official Ali Moussa and his driver.”

What’s missing? No mention of the im per ialist occupation fueling the resistance.

This AP report’s approach is just the visible tip of the iceberg of Washington’s attempts to pit Sunnis and Shias and Kurds against each other. It’s an effort to keep the entire population divided in order to steal Iraq’s natural wealth and defeat the fight against the occupation.

But the insurgency is so tenacious and so strong that even some of the brass hats themselves are, well, down.

Many years and many more troops are the best that even the most optimistic of the “unnamed” officials are willing to venture it would take to “stabilize” Iraq. By stable, they mean winning enough class peace to plunder Iraq’s vast resources.

But the insurgency has claimed the lives of an estimated hundreds of mercenaries and contractors working for the Pentagon. As a result, a big chunk of those billions of dollars earmarked to build the infrastructure—necessary, for example, to funnel out Iraq’s vast oil reserves—is being channeled instead into military “security.”

For the people of Iraq, after enduring two years of life under occupation, most of the 27-million-strong population is still without adequate electricity, sewage disposal, clean water or other essential services.

Conditions like these, and the military boot heel of the occupation, drive the Iraqi people’s determination to resist the occupation.


What is really costs:

As we begin a long Memorial Day weekend, the least we can do is finally, even at this late date, be honest about how difficult and costly the war in Iraq is going to be for the men and women fighting and dying for us there.

Niall Ferguson gave us a measure of that reality this week in a New York Times op-ed piece. Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard, argued that to defeat the insurgency in Iraq and establish a modicum of stability there would take one million U.S. soldiers and possibly 30 to 60 years. That contrasts to the 138,000 soldiers there now and a prevailing belief that we will start to draw down troops next year - before the midterm elections.

Ferguson bases his estimates partly on the British experience in Iraq after World War I. The British, he says, put down an insurgency with a troop to population ratio of 1 to 23. The ratio there today is 1 to 174. He points out that the overwhelming number of British troops came from India, a type of manpower resource Washington doesn`t have. And Ferguson says that many liberals in the United States don`t grasp how high a price the United States will pay, in terms of its own security, if the mission fails and Iraq falls into civil war and chaos.

Even if you believe that Ferguson`s estimates of manpower and time are high, the overall point is sobering: There has been and continues to be a tragic mismatch between the Bush administration`s reach and its grasp. The administration grossly underestimated what it would take to make Iraq whole after the invasion. In fact, there were reports this week from a top meeting of U.S. military officials that the plan to start withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq next year is premature given the deteriorating military situation.


The Resilient Liar:

For several years now, a favorite slogan of anti-war protestors has been, quite simply, two words: "Bush Lies." But George W. Bush`s reputation as a straight-talking president has proved remarkably resilient. Faced with the failure to find even a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, this president has floated above charges of cooking intelligence like a cork on a stormy ocean.

But now it`s time to demand accountability from the president. The recently obtained top-secret memo recording a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his closest ministers and aides shows that, by July 2002, Bush knew that the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was weak but had decided to go to war anyway. So far, the president`s aides have made sure that none of the war protestors` claims would stick to their man. But as the toll of death and injury continues to mount in Iraq, this new evidence that the "case was thin" for war may prove more difficult to evade.


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Latest Fatality: May 26, 2005
May.05: 69

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

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

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Da mir das Bild so gut gefällt, hier mal einen Artikel aus D aus der Zeit!
[urlAuflösung folgt]http://www.zeit.de/2005/22/01___leit_1_text Von Giovanni di Lorenzo[/url]

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GROUP SEEKS BAN OF TWENTIETH CENTURY FROM KANSAS SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1139&srch=

Last Century ‘Just a Theory,’ Activists Say

A political action group in the state of Kansas is applying pressure on the Kansas State Board of Education to ban any and all references to the twentieth century from school textbooks, a spokesman for the group confirmed today.

The move to ban the twentieth century came up in a series of contentious school board hearings this week as the group loudly complained that the state’s current textbooks are rife with references to the controversial century, which they say may or may not have happened.

“These textbooks state unequivocally that the twentieth century occurred, as if that were a proven historic fact,” said Gordon Lavalier, the group’s leader and spokesman. “The simple truth is, the twentieth century is and has always been nothing but a theory.”

If the group gets its way, starting in the fall of 2005 Kansas students would be taught from newly reconstituted history books that end in the year 1899.

Among students at Kansas City’s John F. Kennedy High School, which the group has demanded be renamed William Jennings Bryan High School, reaction to the ban on the twentieth century was mixed.

“If the twentieth century didn’t happen, does that mean I have to give up my iPod?” asked junior Carolynn Bevins, 17.

But sophomore Zach Golloway, 16, was more upbeat about the news: “If it means that we have to learn a hundred less years of history, that would rule!”

Elsewhere, actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes denied that their romantic relationship was a publicity stunt after a trailer for their wedding appeared in over 3,000 theaters.

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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, May 28, 2005

Military Analysts Who Lived in Aluminum Fairy Land Rewarded

Two Army analysts who mistakenly claimed that aluminum tubing bought by Iraq was for centrifuges to enrich uranium received job performance awards during the past 3 years. When the specifications of the tubing were finally shown to the International Atomic Energy Commission in March of 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei was able to falsify the allegation within 24 hours, issuing a statement that tubing with those specifications could not be used for uranium enrichment. If Elbaradei could see the falsehood of the claims almost immediately, it is not plausible that US analysts could not.

Every American should go back and read thoroughly the transcripts of the reports to the UN of Mohamed Elbaradei in February and March of 2003.

On March 7, 2003, he said:

"Based on available evidence, the IAEA team has concluded that Iraq efforts to import these aluminum tubes were not likely to have been related to the manufacture of centrifuge, and moreover that it was highly unlikely that Iraq could have achieved the considerable redesign needed to use them in a revived centrifuge program . . .

The IAEA was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the government of Niger and to compare the form, format, contents and signature of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation.

Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded with the concurrence of outside experts that these documents which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded. However, we will continue to follow up any additional evidence if it emerges relevant to efforts by Iraq to illicitly import nuclear materials."



Compare that to what the Bush administration was telling people in the same period, and it is clear. Elbaradei was living in the real world. The US government and the US press and the US punditocracy was living in a fantasy land.

posted by Juan @ [url5/28/2005 06:34:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/military-analysts-who-lived-in.html[/url]

Muqtada: All Factions Must Participate in Constitution-Making

The Herald Sun reports that late on Friday, ` "A suicide bomber blew up his vehicle near a police patrol, killing seven people, including three policemen and wounding 24 civilians," Lieutenant Mahmud al-Azzawi said. `

Guerrillas assassinated a major Sunni Arab tribal leader, Shaikh Sabhan Khalaf al-Juburi (al-Jibouri), 52, on Friday in Kirkuk, according to AP. Al-Juburi, though he was a Sunni Arab, had good relations with the Kurds, unlike many Sunni Arabs in the northern, disputed oil city of Kirkuk.

Al-Hayat: In Baghdad, the Sunni cleric Shaikh Mahmud al-Sumad`i, member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, stressed that Iraqis should give their loyalty to the country, not to their sect.

In Najaf, Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) said in his Friday prayers sermon that the same (Sunni) groups that had blown up Shiite mosques and Christian churches and Shiite crowds was now making wild accusations against the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of SCIRI. Such false accusations, he said, were one new technique of terrorism. The other new form of terrorism that he saw had occurred recently in the northern city of Telafar, where individuals were butchered by Sunni jihadis for having identification on them showing that they were Shiites. Telafar, a city of 200,000 in the north not far from the Syrian border, is largely Turkmen, and most of its Turkmen are Shiites.

Al-Qubanji was essentially accusing the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars of being in league with terrorists, and branding its leader, Hareth al-Dhari, a terrorist.

Al-Zaman:

Attacks continued in several Iraq cities.

Muqtada al-Sadr called Friday for the participation of all Iraqis in the drafting of a constitution, and asked that no faction be excluded. His aide, Shaikh Hazim al-A`raji, read out Muqtada`s sermon at the Kufa mosque: "We want the permanent constitution to be drafted in a way that guarantees justice to all sections of the people , so that no segment is wronged . . . We demand that all be included in the writing of the constitution." Earlier Muqtada had been quoted as saying that his group would not participate in the drafting of the new constitution as long as there was a US military occupation, and that anyway the Koran was his constitution.

Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahru`l-Ulum said that the constitution drafting committee would meet within the next 24 hours. He spoke after he had met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. (The Bahru`l-`Ulum family is traditionally a clerical one with close ties to the grand ayatollahs in Najaf). Informed sources said that the Sunni representation on the 55-person committee in parliament would be raised beyond the present 2 delegates.

Armed guerrillas fled the city of Telafar in the north after they had been surrounded by Iraqi police and the noose was tightening. They scattered in nearby villages.

Iraq said it needed $10 billion immediately from donor nations in the international community for urgent reconstruction projects and fighting unemployment.

Three Iraqi policemen were killed Friday in Mosul in one incident. In another, a policeman was killed and four were wounded by a roadside bomb that was followed by the spraying of machine gun fire, in Mosul`s Basinjar quarter.

In Dulu`iyyah a truck driver working for the Americans was killed by a roadside bomb.

The corpse of a policeman was discovered in the Qadisiyah quarter of Samarra.

Iraq was forced to halt petroleum exports through the northern Ceyhan pipeline because of sabotage.

posted by Juan @ [url5/28/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/muqtada-all-factions-must-participate.html[/url]
Friday, May 27, 2005

US Helicopter Shot Down, 2 Soldiers Dead
PM Jaafari launches a Campaign around Baghdad

Guerrillas shot down a US helicopter near Baqubah on Thursday, killing two US soldiers.

Stephen Kamarow explains the reservations many Iraqis have about what strikes them as an indecisive leadership style in Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari.

His Minister of Defense, Saadoun Dulaimi, and his Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, announced Thursday that they intended to deploy 40,000 troops and police around Baghdad in what they called "Operation Lightning" in a bid to stop the deadly campaign of suicide bombings launched so effectively by the guerrillas since the naming of the new government.

Reuters reports that Humam Hamoudi, the chair of the constitution drafting committee in parliament, is attempting to find ways of expanding Sunni representation on that body beyond the two current members of parliament (out of 55 total). He says that the Sunnis may hold elections for the positions.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the situation in Iraq`s universities, where as many as 100 professors have been assassinated and the poor security environment has slowed progress in restoring Iraq`s higher education establishments.

Syria revealed on Thursday that it had arrested 1200 persons who were trying to pass through its territory on the way to iraq. Syria has been annoyed at US claims it is not doing enought to stop infiltration of radical Muslim militants from Syria into Iraq. Syria has been arresting such persons all along, but is now making the fact public as part of its tiff with Washington. The Bush administration appears to believe that it can get cooperation from the Syrian government at the same time that it is openly dedicated to overthrowing it. That time has passed.

Guerrillas attempted to deploy a dog with a bomb belt against a convoy of Iraq troops, but the only victim was the unfortunate animal.

Kevin Zeese analyzes the Congressional debate on May 25 on setting a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq, introduced by Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA). The motion lost 300 to 128 with 5 not voting.

posted by Juan @ [url5/27/2005 06:20:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/us-helicopter-shot-down-2-soldiers.html[/url]

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washingtonpost.com
Analysts Behind Iraq Intelligence Were Rewarded
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 28, 2005; A01

Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq -- the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets -- have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said.

The civilian analysts, former military men considered experts on foreign and U.S. weaponry, work at the Army`s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), one of three U.S. agencies singled out for particular criticism by President Bush`s commission that investigated U.S. intelligence.

The Army analysts concluded that it was highly unlikely that the tubes were for use in Iraq`s rocket arsenal, a finding that bolstered a CIA contention that they were destined for nuclear centrifuges, which was in turn cited by the Bush administration as proof that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq`s nuclear weapons program.

The problem, according to the commission, which cited the two analysts` work, is that they did not seek or obtain information available from the Energy Department and elsewhere showing that the tubes were indeed the type used for years as rocket-motor cases by Iraq`s military. The panel said the finding represented a "serious lapse in analytic tradecraft" because the center`s personnel "could and should have conducted a more exhaustive examination of the question."

Pentagon spokesmen said the awards for the analysts were to recognize their overall contributions on the job over the course of each year. But some current and former officials, including those who called attention to the awards, said the episode shows how the administration has failed to hold people accountable for mistakes on prewar intelligence.

Despite sharp critiques from the president`s commission and the Senate intelligence committee, no major reprimand or penalty has been announced publicly in connection with the intelligence failures, though investigations are still underway at the CIA. George J. Tenet resigned as CIA director but was later awarded the Medal of Freedom by Bush.

The president`s commission urged the Bush administration to consider taking action against the agencies, and perhaps the individuals, responsible for the most serious errors in assessing Iraq`s weapons program.

Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste, who was a member of the Sept. 11 commission and whose government experience goes back to service as a Watergate prosecutor, said it is important for the administration to hold the intelligence community accountable for mistakes.

"It matters whether it was carelessness or tailoring [of intelligence], whether it was based on perceived wants of an administration or overt requests . . . It is time now to demonstrate the need for the integrity of the process," Ben-Veniste said.

In its report, the commission, chaired by former appellate judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), said "reform requires more than changing the community`s systems: it also requires accountability."

One step, the commission said, could be for the new director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, to "hold accountable the organizations that contributed to the flawed assessments of Iraq`s WMD program."

With regard to the NGIC and two other agencies that committed errors -- the Defense Humint Service, which specializes in "human intelligence," and the CIA`s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, or WINPAC -- the commission said Negroponte should give "serious consideration to whether each of these organizations should be reconstituted, substantially reorganized or made subject to detailed oversight."

Negroponte`s office declined to comment for this article.

The NGIC assessment of the aluminum tubes was described by the president`s intelligence commission as a "gross failure." The agency was "completely wrong," said the panel, when it judged in September 2002 that the tubes Iraq was purchasing were "highly unlikely" to be used for rocket-motor cases because of their "material and tolerances."

The commission found that aluminum tubes with similar tolerances were used in a previous Iraqi rocket, called the Nasser 81, and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had published details about that system in 1996, as had the U.S. Department of Energy in 2001. The commission`s report said "the two primary NGIC rocket analysts said they did not know the dimensions" of the older Nasser 81 rocket and were unaware of the IAEA and Energy Department reports. The report did not name the analysts, but officials confirmed that the panel was referring to George Norris and Robert Campos.

Contacted by telephone, Norris said that any questions would have to be answered by his superiors. A request for comment made by The Washington Post to Campos would get the same response, Norris said.

In a written statement, the Pentagon, speaking for the NGIC, confirmed that Norris and Campos had received awards, and it said that they were based "on their overall annual performance -- not on a single contribution -- and supervisors were encouraged to reward individuals on the basis of their annual contributions." The awards were given as part of a government-wide incentive program to recognize high-performing employees with cash or time off. An internal NGIC newsletter listed Norris and Campos as among those who received performance awards, lump-sum cash payments, in fiscal 2002, 2003 and 2004.

The Pentagon statement also said that the NGIC "has recognized errors in analytical judgment occurred and individuals involved with this situation have taken a specific lead within the organization to understand, address, and instruct lessons learned." The statement said that the Silberman-Robb commission report "had provided valuable input to our human intelligence reform efforts which were initiated in January 2004" as part of the Pentagon proposal to remodel the Defense Department`s overall intelligence.

The commission faulted the Defense Humint Service for failing to withdraw reports that were based on input from "Curveball," an Iraqi exile working with the German intelligence service. Curveball provided questionable information -- later disproved -- about Iraq`s alleged mobile facilities that could produce biological weapons. The Defense unit, the panel said, resisted the notion that "it had any real responsibility to vet his veracity."

The CIA`s WINPAC also came in for specific criticisms. WINPAC "was at the heart of many of the errors . . . from the mobile BW [biological warfare] case to the aluminum tubes," the commission reported, saying it feared "a culture of enforced consensus has infected WINPAC as an organization."

The CIA, the panel said, contributed to misjudgments about the aluminum tubes. The commission found that some U.S. intelligence analysts believed the Iraqis had re-engineered an Italian rocket called the Medusa, which also used the type of aluminum tubes that Iraq was seeking. But neither the Pentagon agencies nor the CIA -- the most vociferous proponents of the idea that the tubes were destined for nuclear use -- obtained the specifications for the Italian-made Medusa until well after the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003.

Seven months earlier, a CIA officer had suggested that the CIA track down data on Medusa, but CIA officials took no action on that idea "on the basis that such information was not needed because CIA judged the tubes to be destined for use in centrifuges," the commission wrote.

A senior CIA official said that the incident raised by the commission had been investigated and that it was found that the Medusa suggestion "did not get within the agency where it should have gotten." As a result, this official said, "We are putting more eyes on such subjects and the systematic sharing of such information is more extensive now."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Am Montag ist Memorial Day.

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We are not instruments of US power

Claims that NGOs are agents of destabilisation are irresponsible
Martin Woollacott
Saturday May 28, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1494352,00.ht…

Guardian
In the game of claim and blame that has followed political changes in the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, there have been some silly and even dangerous assertions. The changes have been lauded by Bush supporters as unambiguously democratic, and as direct consequences of the president`s determination to spread freedom round the world. Governments that have lost power, those who fear they may do so, and their allies, such as Russia, plus a few critics in the west, see no freedom, merely the installation of pro-western regimes. And where the Americans claim only influence, they see a calculated process of subversion.

These arguments, on both sides, grossly simplify an often surprising series of events with complicated local causes. They take us back to an outmoded chessboard view of geopolitics. But where this gets dangerous is when particular groups are blamed for their part in the overthrow or attempted overthrow of governments. Nowhere is this more unfair than when non-governmental organisations are assigned roles in this supposed drama.

Media development groups such as the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), on the board of which I have served for some years, especially attract suspicion because of the evident fact that even an intermittently independent press can sometimes help to undermine an oppressive government. These organisations get most of their funds from western governments and provide assistance to local journalists critical of their own governments, and those governments then sometimes fall. Ergo, the argument runs, they are as much in the business of regime change as the Bush administration and are, wittingly or unwittingly, instruments of American power.

This nonsense finds its fullest expression in coverage such as that in a recent Moscow News piece on Uzbekistan which, under the subheading Quiet Americans, noted that reporters with connections to IWPR mysteriously appeared wherever there was trouble and suggested that IWPR had "provoked the people to take to the streets". The writer did not explain where good reporters are supposed to go, if not to places where important events are taking place, nor how IWPR`s handful of overworked contributors could start rebellions in provincial towns. These IWPR contributors, after all, are themselves local journalists trying to exercise the right to free expression.

Such a story might be expected in the Moscow News, no longer the independent paper it used to be. But it is saddening to see references in a recent article on these pages by John Laughland also hinting at a shadowy role. It bears repeating that allegations have consequences. Those who work for IWPR and similar organisations are put at risk, and the work that IWPR does is put at risk.

It is true that all NGOs, except those exclusively concerned with succour and relief, are about change. It is also true that, somewhere on the outer rim of their vision, this may include change of regime, not as an aim but as a consequence. Digging wells, teaching birth-control techniques, starting weaving classes, helping refugees or developing a training programme for journalists - all are political acts, and in certain circumstances can be part of the chemistry leading to a change of government. They can also be, of course, part of the chemistry leading to a strengthening of a particular government.

It would be ludicrous to say that the people who first set up IWPR as an organisation to help independent media survive in what had been Yugoslavia were totally neutral about the regimes in power there at that time. And now that IWPR is operating in a range of countries, it would be misleading to say that IWPR`s programme in Iraq, for instance, might not, if successful, help in a small way toward establishing a more stable government there. But the fate of regimes and governments should not be the direct concern of NGOs. Those who warn of such slippage toward the overtly political are right - but wrong when they claim it has happened when it has not.

If NGOs are not tools of western governments in the direct sense, are they nevertheless becoming so indirectly? The growth of NGOs in the 80s and 90s came about in part because governments wanted to privatise and delegate certain functions. David Rieff showed in his book A Bed for the Night how this enabled them both to avoid intervention, as in Rwanda and Bosnia, and to endorse it, as in Kosovo and Iraq. As Rieff said, the "space between the great powers` interest and humanitarian enterprise" shrank. Although things have changed somewhat since then, to deny that government funding decisions affect what most NGOs do would be stupid.

But NGO fundraising is a diverse, mobile and indeed chaotic activity. An array of NGOs, very different in their origins, cultures and purposes, faces an equally large and equally mixed array of governments, foundations, benefactors and publics in a complex process of bargaining and bidding. Among governments the United States and among philanthropists George Soros have especial weight. They certainly exercise more influence than other actors - but they are a very long way indeed from determining what NGOs do and do not do.

Fashions among donors come and go, often just a product of the way in which new news displaces old news, so that yesterday`s worthy cause becomes today`s ho-hum. Sometimes the shifts reflect analysis, well grounded or otherwise, of the effectiveness of particular activities. And there are politically driven realignments. But there is canniness on both sides. Every NGO knows how to dress up the programmes it really cares about in whatever is the vocabulary of the moment so as to preserve them without much change.

The growth of NGOs over the last 20 years has been, on balance, a gain for the world. Their attitude to governments that have promoted them when it suited and disowned them when it didn`t veers back and forth. Governments certainly do wish to use them. But NGOs` commitment to their own aims - in the case of IWPR to providing the skills and resources that will help people determine their own fate - remains solid. To discern in the complex world of NGO-government relations a pattern in which NGOs, or some of them, act as the arms of a Washington-directed destabilisation programme is not only intellectually wrong but, in a situation where the life and liberty of brave people can so easily be threatened, almost criminally irresponsible.

[e-mail]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Hier 2 Artikel aus dem Independent über Kalifornien, SF und die Küste Richtung Norden bis Eureka!
[urlWhere are the flower children?]http://travel.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=641866&host=2&dir=25[/url]
[urlThe Redwood stage is heading on over the hills]http://travel.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=635056&host=2&dir=25[/url]

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CBS poll: Bush increasingly out of touch with the American public
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/25/politics/main69780…

[urlClick here to see the complete questions and responses to this CBS News poll]http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/CBSNews_polls/gwb.pdf[/url]


Posted on Friday, May 27 @ 10:01:56 EDT
In a troubling sign for the president, those who have heard a lot about his Social Security plan are the most likely to say it`s a bad idea.

By Joel Roberts, CBS News

(CBS) Four months into his second term, President Bush is increasingly viewed as being out of touch with the American people, according to a CBS News poll.

Six in ten Americans say the president does not share their priorities, while just 34 percent say he does - the lowest numbers for Mr. Bush since the eve of his first inauguration. If there`s any solace for Mr. Bush, it`s that even fewer people, just 20 percent, say Congress shares their priorities.

Overall, slightly more Americans (48 percent) disapprove of the job the president is doing than approve (46 percent).

While Mr. Bush continues to push hard for his Social Security plan, and has recently spoken out on issues like stem cell research and the fight over judicial nominees, the public is far more concerned with the war in Iraq and the economy.

Asked to name the most important problem facing the country, 19 percent of those polled cited the economy, 19 percent the war in Iraq, 7 percent terrorism and 5 percent Social Security.



Although he`s spent months on the road campaigning for Social Security reform, Mr. Bush still gets only a 26 percent approval rating for his handling of the issue and the public remains skeptical about his signature plan for private Social Security accounts.

In a troubling sign for the president, those who have heard a lot about his Social Security plan are the most likely to say it`s a bad idea.

Although a slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, now say the economy is in good shape, Mr. Bush`s approval rating on the economy is just 38 percent - a slight increase since last month.

Approval of the president`s handling of Iraq remained virtually unchanged at 38 percent. But after another violent month, a majority of Americans, 57 percent, again say things there are going badly for the U.S. in Iraq; 41 percent say things are going well.

Mr. Bush`s strongest area remains the campaign against terrorism, where his approval rating rose to 58 percent.

Overall, Americans are pessimistic about the direction of the country with 60 percent saying the U.S. is on the wrong track and 34 percent saying it`s on the right track.

It`s been more than two years since a majority of Americans said the country was heading in the right direction. The last time that happened was March 2003, at the onset of the war in Iraq.

This poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 1150 adults, interviewed by telephone May 20-24, 2005. The error due to sampling could be plus or minus three percentage points for results based on all adults. Error for subgroups is higher.

Click here to see the complete questions and responses to this CBS News poll.

(c)MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc.

From CBS News:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/
05/25/politics/main697806.shtml

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Latest Fatality: May 26, 2005
May.05: 72


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

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

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Civil war casts a sinister shadow on Lebanon`s election
Michel Aoun has extended his persona to Alexander the Great. This is messianism gone mad
Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=641…

The Independent

28 May 2005

Oh for the glorious days of the Lebanese opposition, when Christians and Muslims marched in Beirut together to demand the truth about Rafiq Hariri`s murder and the withdrawal of the Syrian army and free elections. The UN is still investigating the assassination, the Syrians have left, but the elections are turning out to be as sectarian and as mean as they always were. They start tomorrow and will demonstrate just how divided the Lebanese are in their new "unity".

True, the Syrians won`t be watching. And, despite constituency boundaries gerrymandered by Syria`s Lebanese friends in 2000 - President George Bush`s demand that they be held "on time" meant that there was no opportunity of making them fairer - the "opposition" will probably control the new parliament. But just how they are then going to defenestrate President Emile Lahoud - one of the last symbols of "Syrianism" in the country - remains unclear.

Back in February and March, it all seemed so simple. Christian Maronite leaders, the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, Bahia Hariri - sister of the murdered ex-prime minister - and Rafiq Hariri`s son Saad - who is heading the ticket in his father`s name - stood together in Martyr`s Square to insist on Lebanese democracy. But then old General Michel Aoun returned from his 15-year exile in Paris and growled that he intended to "save" Lebanon. No more sectarianism, he shouted. No more corruption, we must have national values. It sounded good - until you realised that he held the official opposition in about as much contempt as he did the Syrians.

Aoun it was who fought a useless "war of liberation" against the Syrians in 1989 and 1990 which left 3,500 civilians dead. "All`s fair in love and war," was his reaction when asked in Paris if he had their souls on his conscience. When he came back to Lebanon, the Maronite ex-army commander who once thought he was the Lebanese prime minister did just about everything a parliamentary candidate could do to spread dissension.

Arriving at Beirut airport, his first words were in true character. To a Lebanese journalist, he shouted: "Shut up." He went to pray at Hariri`s grave and then proceeded to put it about that it was not Hariri - whom the Syrians believe inspired the UN resolution which demanded their military withdrawal - who had forced the retreat. It was Aoun, who had supported America`s anti-Syrian legislation and who had sat beside Daniel Pipes in Washington when it was being drafted.

Many Lebanese believe the Syrians murdered Hariri, and Jumblatt certainly feared that the Syrians would murder him too after Hariri`s death. But Aoun announced last week that Hariri and Jumblatt were as bad as Rustum Ghazaleh, the former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon - because both had co-operated with the Syrians in the past. This was preposterous, but it helped to ensure that the right-wing Christians would give their vote to Aoun`s men rather than the Hariri-Jumblatt coalition. During his hopeless war with the Syrians, Aoun was in the habit of comparing himself to Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle - and once, by extension, to Jesus Christ. Last week, he further extended his persona to compare himself to Alexander the Great. This was messianism gone mad.

Lebanon votes under a complex list system, which approximates to proportional representation but produces a 128-seat parliament which must be divided 64-64 between Muslims and Christians, even though Muslims now far outnumber all the Christian sects. Aoun`s complaint was that the gerrymandering of boundaries meant that at least 15 Christian MPs would have to be elected in Muslim areas, men who might be expected to follow Syria`s wishes in the assembly. Besides, so many candidates have now stood down that 15 men have already won their seats uncontested; nine of Hariri`s 19-member list of candidates are among them, including Hariri`s son.

The Hariri-Jumblatt coalition have allied themselves in Beirut with the pro-Syrian Shia Hizbollah party and militia. Ironically, Aoun has allied himself with several pro-Syrians - he is standing in the old Christian heartland of the Metn district.

And of course, the civil war casts its sinister shadow over this election. In the ferocious battles of 1983, Aoun`s army and Jumblatt`s militia fought each other in the hills above Beirut - along the very line which now marks the constituency boundaries between Aoun`s and Jumblatt`s list candidates. In the old frontline town of Dour Cheir this week, pro-Phalangist Christians returning to the Bekaa valley after unveiling a statue of old Pierre Gemayel - who founded the Phalange after being inspired by the 1936 Nazi Olympics - threw bottles from the windows of their buses as they circled the square in the town whose Syrian National Socialist Party headquarters are in one of the main streets. Lebanese troops fired in the air to prevent pitched battles and a ricocheting bullet killed a man.

The election results are predictable. Saad Hariri will dominate the opposition in parliament, Jumblatt will dominate the Druze members and the Christians are, as usual, divided. And a fair number of pro-Syrian members - Nabih Berri, for example, the Shia speaker of parliament - will get their seats back. Hizbollah will control the south. But it will be a Byzantine task to winkle Syria`s last man out of his lonely presidential palace.

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On Way to Baghdad Airport, One Eye on the Road and One on the Insurgents
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By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/international/middleeast/2…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 28 - Iraqis call it Death Street. To American soldiers, it is "I.E.D. Alley," after the improvised explosive devices - bombs - that are lethally common on the 10 miles of expressway and city streets that make up Baghdad`s airport road.

Suicide bombers in cars packed with explosives lurk at on-ramps, waiting for American convoys or other targets.

Insurgents in cars with darkened windows mingle in traffic, then lower windows for bursts of machine-gun fire. Disguised as members of a road crew, they bury daisy-chained artillery shells beneath the roadway, then trigger them with garage-door openers and cellphones.

But it took Italy`s fury over the shooting of one of the country`s top intelligence agents earlier this year for the American military command to acknowledge publicly that driving the airport road is a form of Russian roulette. "Route Irish is commonly referred to as `the deadliest road in Iraq` by journalists, soldiers and commanders," the command declared recently, in a report that underscored the stresses affecting the American platoon that fired on the Italian agent`s car.

Route Irish is the military code name for the expressway arcing eastward from what was once Saddam International Airport, flanked by mainly Sunni Arab neighborhoods like Amariya, Hamra, Jihad and Qaddisiya that were strongholds of support for Saddam Hussein. Like neighborhoods across the Tigris River from Mr. Hussein`s seat of power in the Republican Palace, these suburbs - some little more than slums, others thick with palm-shaded mansions - were populated with Hussein loyalists by design. Ever alert to potential assassins, the dictator, a Sunni Arab, built Sunni suburbs at strategic points around the city to shield him from attack.

When American troops captured Baghdad, these districts became insurgent hide-outs. And from this grew one of the war`s grim ironies. Two years ago last month, the airport road was the last leg of the invasion route for American tanks, which set out from their first Baghdad foothold, the airport, to seize the Republican Palace. Now, the palace compound, renamed the Green Zone, is home to the American Embassy and the new Iraqi government, and the airport road has become a totem of how embattled America`s presence in Iraq has become.

The insurgency has proved to be alarmingly dynamic, with shifting tactics that have earned American commanders` respect, as well as contempt for the rebels` seeming indifference to the fate of the civilians, who have been their most numerous victims. But one constant has been the vulnerability of the airport road, a journey so loathed, particularly by foreigners, that it has become their personal bellwether for the state of the war. Most of those killed on the road have been Iraqis, innocents caught up in attacks aimed at foreigners. But at least 10 Westerners have been killed since mid-April, including Marla Ruzicka, a 28-year-old volunteer from Lakeport, Calif., who had lobbied Congress for American aid to Iraqi and Afghan casualties of American military strikes. On April 16, a suicide bomber careering from an on-ramp detonated amid traffic bottled up behind a Humvee convoy, incinerating Ms. Ruzicka`s car and killing four people, including two Iraqis.

Four days later, three other foreigners died in a machine-gun attack a mile closer to the airport. A survivor of that incident, James Yeager, a security contractor who was previously an undercover narcotics detective in Camden, Tenn., said in an account posted on the Internet that his security convoy was halted half a mile east of the airport by an American military unit dealing with the aftermath of a roadside bomb.

Mr. Yeager said he noticed a parked car that appeared to be an insurgent lookout - with an Iraqi inside talking on a cellphone - on a neighborhood road parallel to the expressway. In minutes, a white sport utility vehicle with tinted windows drove down the side road, made a U-turn, then lowered its windows. A volley of machine-gun fire killed three contractors, an American, a Canadian and an Australian. The S.U.V. fled.

"I wanted to kill the terrorists, but nobody had told me the direction, description or distance," Mr. Yeager said.

So feared has the route become that an American security company announced earlier this year that it would run an armored-car taxi service to the airport from the Sheraton hotel on the Tigris`s east bank. The cost, one way, per person: $2,390, probably the world`s most expensive airport cab ride.

But whether the road is traveled in a patrolling Humvee, an armored car or an Iraqi family car or taxi, arriving safely is an occasion for celebration, and a sense that luck - or benign providence - has prevailed.

"As soon as I leave the terminal, or set out for the airport from the city, I begin reciting verses from the Koran to calm myself," said Mahmud al-Dulaymi, a 52-year-old airport maintenance worker who moonlights as a cabdriver on his days off. "I have no way of knowing when my turn as a victim will come, but as a Muslim I believe that I have a destiny, so I trust in God, and leave everything to him."

In the past year, American and British diplomats and visiting V.I.P.`s have been barred from using the road, and are flown to and from the airport on helicopter gunships, a 10-minute roof-skimming journey to the Green Zone. On a visit in February, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton noted that she had driven along the road on a previous journey, in December 2003, and cited the change as a measure of how much security in Iraq had deteriorated.

Iraqi drivers, especially those working for foreigners, prefer to race down the six-lane expressway, veering away from on-ramps and keeping to the right lane to avoid bombs buried in the median. Some weave as they approach overpasses, to foil insurgents who might drop explosives from above. But just as often, the journey is an intimidating crawl lasting up to an hour, as traffic backs up behind American convoys - or the chaos caused by the frequent attacks.

Some American convoys carry red-lettered signs in Arabic and English warning drivers to stay back "100 meters" or face "deadly force." Procedures require turret-gunners to show a clenched fist to approaching drivers, throw water bottles or spikes, and fire warning shots before aiming at drivers. But often enough that it has become a point of anger across Baghdad, gunners have opened fire only to kill and injure Iraqis uninvolved in the insurgency, who were simply unfamiliar with the American procedures or too impatient to stay back.

American commanders have kept casualty tolls secret, apparently concerned for morale among American troops and other users of the road.

Before releasing the report on the investigation into the death of Nicola Calipari, a major general in the Italian military intelligence service, senior commanders often said the hazards on the road were exaggerated compared with other high-risk war zones across Iraq. "I don`t notice anything out of the ordinary on Route Irish," Brig. Gen. Mark E. O`Neill, assistant commander of the Third Infantry Division, responsible for Baghdad, said days before the Calipari report appeared.

In the published report, the numbers of attacks on the road were blacked out. But with a few computer keystrokes, reporters recovered censored portions outlining the anxieties among American soldiers on March 4 when they fired on a Toyota sedan carrying Mr. Calipari and Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian journalist rescued minutes earlier from a month as an insurgent hostage. It said that there had been 17 suicide car bomb attacks elsewhere in Iraq in the week before the Calipari shooting, and that these had been passed to all American units in the form of "BOLO" - "Be on the Lookout" - messages.

The report said there had been 135 attacks on the road in the four months up to early March, including 15 suicide car bombs, 19 roadside bombs, and 14 attacks with rocket-propelled grenades. But even these figures may understate the threat. One report this year by a Western security company said airport road attacks had included 14 suicide car bombs in November and December last year alone, double the incidence cited by the Calipari report.

"The enemy is very skillful at inconspicuously packing large amounts of explosives into a vehicle," the report said. "When moving, these VBIED`s are practically impossible to identify until it is too late." VBIED`s - soldiers say vee-bids - is the American command`s acronym for vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.

In this high-stakes challenge that driving the road has become, home is a monument known as the Winged Man. The statue commemorates Abbas Ibn Firnas, an astronomer in Moorish Spain, who is said by legend to have built a primitive flying machine in A.D. 875 with which he made a gliding descent from a hillside outside Cordoba. His statue`s spreading wings mark the point at which Baghdad-bound travelers bid farewell to the secured airport area, or airport-bound ones reach its safety.

One recent traveler, Ahmed Hashim, a 27-year-old Kurdish engineer, reached the Winged Man with relief. "When I`m on the airport road, I feel that there`s only a hair`s breadth between myself and eternity," he said.

Among American soldiers, assignment to airport road patrols is deeply unpopular. Some soldiers take care not to "battle lock" Humvee doors, a procedure similar to dead-bolting that makes the doors more secure but also slower to open. Many, like Iraqis, set out with prayers. But still, they agonize.

"The ones you worry about are the ones who don`t get out of your way," said Staff Sgt. Daniel Staniewicz of Orlando, Fla., who commanded one recent Third Infantry patrol, speaking of Iraqi-driven vehicles. "There are so many vee-bids," he said.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 29, 2005
U.S. Set to Test Missile Defenses Aboard Airlines
By ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/national/29missiles.html?h…

In an airplane hangar north of Fort Worth, technicians are preparing to mount a fire-hydrant-shaped device onto the belly of an American Airlines Boeing 767. It is an effort that could soon turn into a more than $10 billion project to install a high-tech missile defense system on the nation`s commercial planes.

The Boeing 767 - the same type of plane that terrorists flew into the World Trade Center - is one of three planes that, by the end of this year, will be used to test the infrared laser-based systems designed to find and disable shoulder-fired missiles. The missiles have long been popular among terrorists and rebel groups in war zones around the world; the concern now is that they could become a domestic threat.

The tests are being financed by the Department of Homeland Security, which has been directed by Congress to move rapidly to take technology designed for military aircraft and adapt it so it can protect the nation`s 6,800 commercial jets. It has so far invested $120 million in the testing effort, which is expected to last through next year.

Yet even before the tests begin, some members of Congress, and several prominent aviation and terrorism experts, are questioning whether the rush to deploy this expensive new antiterrorism system makes sense.

Homeland Security officials have repeatedly cautioned that no credible evidence exists of a planned missile attack in the United States. But there is near unanimity among national security experts and lawmakers that because of the relatively low price and small size of the missiles, as well as the large number available on the black market, they represent a legitimate domestic threat.

The concern is not just for the lives that would be lost in the shoot-down of a single plane, proponents say. It is for the enormous economic consequences that would result if the public were to lose confidence in flying.

"We are long overdue for a passenger aircraft to be taken down by a shoulder-launched missile," said Representative John L. Mica, Republican of Florida, who is pushing for the systems to be installed. "We have been extremely, extremely lucky."

But a significant contingent of domestic security experts say the administration`s focus on these missiles may be misdirected. They cite the broad range of ways that terrorists might strike next and point to studies showing that shoulder-fired missiles - the most popular of which are American-made Stingers and Soviet-made SA-7`s - present less of a threat at airports than do truck bombs or luggage bombs.

"People have probably assumed that these kinds of weapons would work with much greater certainty," said K. Jack Riley, the director of the public safety and justice program at the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization that has studied threats from shoulder-mounted missiles. "This is not as big a threat as people might think."

Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems are competing to build the devices, which rely on plane-mounted sensors that detect heat-seeking missiles and then automatically fire infrared lasers to jam or confuse the missiles` guidance systems. The defense would be used for about a 50-mile area around airports, while planes land or take off.

The American Airlines Boeing 767 and two jets owned by Northwest Airlines and FedEx will be tested to determine whether they remain as airworthy with the new technology aboard and to figure out if, in simulated attacks, the defense system is reliable. For now, no passengers will be aboard.

Shoulder-fired missiles were introduced by the Americans and the Soviets in the 1960`s to protect ground forces. A recent Congressional study found that more than 350,000 existed in government arsenals worldwide. But they also are a favorite of rebel groups and terrorists. At about six feet long and 50 pounds, they are easy to transport, and older models can cost only a few hundred dollars.

Calls for putting the defense systems on commercial planes took on new urgency in 2002. That year, two missiles were fired at a Boeing 757 in Kenya that had been chartered by an Israeli airline. Both missed.

And in November 2004, an Airbus A300 cargo plane flown by DHL was struck by a missile on takeoff from the Baghdad airport. The plane lost hydraulic power but was able to land.

"This is one of the greatest dangers we face in the air," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who has helped lead the push in the Senate for the deployment of missile defense systems.

Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems have briefed members of Congress, urging them to invest in the systems, and Northrop has commissioned a poll in an effort to demonstrate public support for the program. One Northrop briefing featured photographs of men in long, loose robes taking a missile launcher out of a car and firing a round into the air.

As the tests proceed, Homeland Security officials are looking for ways to lower the price tag. It has been estimated that it could cost $10 billion to install the systems on all commercial jets and as much as $40 billion over the next two decades, once maintenance and operational costs are added in. By comparison, the entire budget proposed for aviation security in the United States is $4.7 billion for the coming fiscal year.

Homeland Security has asked BAE and Northrop Grumman to design systems that would cost no more than $1 million per plane, rather than the roughly $1.6 million some industry experts had expected. And the devices must work without need of repair for 3,000 hours, instead of the 300 hours required for military jets, according to specifications set by Homeland Security.

But even if the contractors can lower the costs, airline industry representatives and some terrorism experts say the price is hard to defend.

The Air Line Pilots Association, Boeing and the Air Transport Association of America are urging that more emphasis be placed on alternative defenses, like controlling areas around airports, limiting the international supply of missiles and making less expensive changes that would allow an airplane to fly even if its hydraulic system was lost.

"The cost versus the benefit here does not play out," said Jim Proulx, a spokesman for Boeing. The presumption is that the government would pay to install the systems on existing planes, but the airlines would assume the ongoing maintenance and fuel costs, which could exceed $1 million a year per plane.

In a recent study by Rand, which examined security threats at Los Angeles International Airport, a shoulder-mounted missile was characterized as a "lesser threat" in terms of potential deaths than a truck bomb or a luggage bomb. In fact, the study suggested that the threat posed by a shoulder-fired missile was not much greater than that of a sniper who might fire a .50-caliber rifle at a plane from outside the airport.

A separate study, financed by Homeland Security in 2004, said that the infrared systems would be useless or only marginally effective against several types of shoulder-mounted missiles.

Part of the reason for the relatively low ranking of missiles among threats is that large passenger airliners are designed to fly after the loss of an engine, even if that engine explodes, industry experts said.

Even before the current tests are complete, the Bush administration and Congress are moving to set aside $110 million for the next phase. Mr. Schumer and Mr. Mica also want to require that the devices be installed immediately on certain new commercial jets.

And others, including Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York, and Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, want Congress to set aside $10 billion to install the systems on existing planes, perhaps first on the 1,000 aircraft that make up the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which transports troops in times of war. The cost could be great, they said, but most likely smaller than the damage to the economy that would result from a single shoot-down.

"We have been warned over and over again by the people who know," Ms. Boxer said, referring to classified briefings by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. "It is a race against time."

Yet Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican who is chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said the missile defense program was being driven too much by politics and lobbyists.

"This is not the result of considered analysis of potential threats, terrorist capabilities or intentions," Mr. Cox said. "It should be."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 29, 2005
The China Scapegoat
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/opinion/29kristof.html?hp

Beijing

The most important diplomatic relationship in the world is between the U.S. and China. It`s souring and could get much worse.

Alas, the U.S. is mostly to blame for this. And the biggest culprit of all is the demagoguery of some Democrats in Congress.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be angry with China`s leaders, but its trade success and exchange rate policy are not among them. The country that is distorting global capital flows and destabilizing the world economy is not China but the U.S. American fiscal recklessness is a genuine international problem, while blaming Chinese for making shoes efficiently amounts to a protectionist assault on the global trade system.

In fact, China`s pegged exchange rate has brought stability to Asia, and the Chinese boom has tugged Japan out of recession and increased prosperity worldwide. In recent years, China has supplied almost one-third of the growth in the global economy (measured by purchasing power), compared with the 13 percent that came from the U.S.

Moreover, the U.S. has a history of offering Asia economic advice that proves awful. U.S. pressure helped produce Japan`s disastrous bubble economy and aggravated the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. So when American officials urge an adjustment in the yuan exchange rate, the Chinese should keep a hand on their wallets.

Over the last five years, President Bush has done an excellent job in managing relations with China - it`s one of his very few successes in foreign policy - but lately he has engaged in protectionism. This month he reimposed quotas on certain Chinese textiles, and the Treasury warned China that it had better adjust its exchange rate or else.

Mr. Bush abandoned his principles because he was under attack from Democrats waving the bloody shirt of lost jobs. Sure, China`s cheap yuan has cost us manufacturing jobs - but it has also led to a flood of Chinese capital to America, keeping interest rates low. If we blame China for lost American jobs in making shirts, we should credit it for new American jobs in banking and construction.

Americans are also unfair in accusing China of not stopping North Korea`s nuclear program. The reality is that the North Koreans don`t listen to the Chinese about anything, and many on each side look down on the other. Privately, some Chinese dismiss the North Koreans as "Gaoli bangzi" or Korean hillbillies. And fortified by a bit of liquor, North Koreans denounce Chinese as unscrupulous, money-grubbing traitors. Whenever I meet North Koreans, I tell them that the Chinese government doesn`t like me - and my status soars.

China has been pushing hard in the last two years for a negotiated solution to the North Korean crisis, and it at least has a coherent policy on North Korea. That`s more than you can say for the Bush administration.

One of the biggest risks for U.S.-China relations is the - very outside - chance that President Bush will order a military strike on the North Korean nuclear complex at Yongbyon. Most experts say that the resulting radiation leakage would probably not harm nearby countries, and in any case South Korea and Japan would be more at risk than China. But any hint that radiation had reached the Chinese coast would provoke anti-American fury across China.

There`s a third big danger for U.S.-China relations, and this one is Beijing`s fault: China`s schools teach hatred of Japan, resulting in last month`s street demonstrations in which Chinese protesters screamed slogans such as "Japanese must die."

The next act in the drama will unfold at sea. Japanese ships may start exploring disputed waters for oil and gas in the late summer or fall, perhaps with military escorts. China`s leaders will then be under tremendous popular pressure to send China`s own military vessels to block what Chinese will see as an armed Japanese incursion. And then Japan will ask the U.S. for help under the U.S.-Japan security treaty. ...

In the past, President Jiang Zemin protected the U.S.-Chinese relationship. But many Chinese scorned him as "qin Mei," or soft on the U.S. The new president, Hu Jintao, seems much less likely to go out on a limb to preserve good relations with the U.S.

So it`s time for Americans to take a deep breath. Poisonous trade disputes with China will only aggravate the risks ahead, strengthen the hard- liners in Beijing and leave ordinary Chinese feeling that Americans are turning into China-bashers. Sadly, they`ll have a point.

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* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 29, 2005
Ground Zero Is So Over
By FRANK RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/opinion/29rich.html?hp

IN its not-so-brief and thoroughly unhappy life, ground zero has been a site for many things: tragedy and grief, political campaigns and protests, battling architects and warring cultural institutions, TV commercials and souvenir hustlers. Perhaps it was inevitable we`d end up at pure unadulterated farce.

That`s where we are as of this Memorial Day weekend. A 1,776-foot Freedom Tower with no tenants - and no prospect of tenants - has been abruptly sent back to the drawing board after the Marx Brothers-like officials presiding over the chaos acknowledged troubling security concerns about truck bombs. But truck bombs may be the least of the demons scaring away prospective occupants. The simple question that no one could answer the day after 9/11 remains unanswered today: What sane person would want to work in a skyscraper destined to be the most tempting target for aerial assault in the Western world? As if to accentuate this obvious, if frequently suppressed, psychological bottom line, news of the Freedom Tower`s latest delay was followed like clockwork by a Cessna`s easy penetration of supposedly secure air space near the White House, prompting panicky evacuation scenes out of the 50`s horror classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

And so ground zero remains a pit, a hole, a void. As The New York Post has noticed, more time has passed since George Pataki first unveiled the "final design" of the Freedom Tower than it took to build the Empire State Building. For New Yorkers this saga is a raucous political narrative whose cast of characters includes a rapacious real-estate developer, a seriously irritating architect with even more irritating designer eyeglasses, a governor with self-delusional presidential ambitions and a mayor obsessed with bringing New York the only target that may rival the Freedom Tower as terrorist bait, the Olympics.

But there is another, national narrative here, too. Bothered as New Yorkers may be by what Charles Schumer has termed the "culture of inertia" surrounding ground zero, that stagnation may accurately reflect most of America`s view about the war on terror that began with the slaughter of more than 2,700 at the World Trade Center almost four years ago. Though the vacant site is a poor memorial for those who died there, it`s an all too apt symbol for a war on which the country is turning its back.
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This is a dramatic change from just a year ago. In the heat of election season, the Bush-Cheney campaign set off a melee by broadcasting ads that featured the shell of the World Trade Center and shrouded remains being borne away by firefighters. Ground zero was hallowed ground, and the outcry against its political exploitation was so fierce that the ensuing Republican National Convention went nowhere near the site that had made New York its cynical choice of venue in the first place. Instead, the prospect of terror and the hot-button-pushing invocations of 9/11 were shoveled into the oratory at Madison Square Garden, where Rudolph Giuliani had a star turn. All the post-election talk of "moral values" notwithstanding, the terrorism card proved the decisive factor in the defeat of John Kerry, a character whose genius for equivocating on just about any issue rendered him a pantywaist against an opponent who had stood with a bullhorn in the smoky wreckage and had promised to round up the bad guys "dead or alive."

But once the election was over, ground zero was tossed aside like a fading mistress. The only time it has figured in national public discourse since was when the president nominated Bernard Kerik director of homeland security. The most damaging of the subsequent allegations against this 9/11 hero - that he had used an apartment for rescue workers overlooking the site as a hot-sheets motel for an extramarital tryst - didn`t just end his government career; it effectively downsized ground zero from sacred ground into crude comic fodder for late-night comics. The fallen cultural status of the site in the months since is epitomized by the recent news conference at which Donald Trump thought nothing of showcasing his own stunt plan for ground zero (building replicas of the twin towers, only a story higher) as a promotional tie-in to the season finale of his reality show, "The Apprentice." Though there was some outrage among the 9/11 families, everyone else either giggled or shrugged (and "The Apprentice" was still eviscerated by "CSI").

Such lassitude about the day that was supposed to change everything is visible everywhere. Tom Ridge, now retired as homeland security czar, recently went on "The Daily Show" and joined in the yuks about the color-coded alerts. (He also told USA Today this month that orange alerts were sometimes ordered by the administration - as election year approached, anyway - on flimsy grounds and over his objections.) In February, the Office of Management and Budget found that "only four of the 33 homeland security programs it examined were `effective,` " according to The Washington Post. The prospect of nuclear terrorism remains minimally addressed; instead we must take heart from Kiefer Sutherland`s ability to thwart a nuclear missile hurling toward Los Angeles in the season finale of "24." The penetration of the capital`s most restricted air space by that errant Cessna - though deemed a "red alert" - was considered such a nonurgent event by the Secret Service that it didn`t bother to tell the president, bicycling in Maryland, until after the coast was clear.

But what has most separated America from the old exigencies of 9/11 - and therefore from the fate of ground zero - is, at long last, the decoupling of the war on terror from the war on Iraq. The myth fostered by the administration that Saddam Hussein conspired in the 9/11 attacks is finally dead and so, apparently, is the parallel myth that Iraqis were among that day`s hijackers. Our initial, post-9/11 war against Al Qaeda - the swift and decisive victory over the Taliban - is now seen as both a discrete event and ancient history (as is the hope of nailing Osama bin Laden dead or alive); Afghanistan itself has fallen off the American radar screen except as a site for burgeoning poppy production and the deaths of detainees in American custody. In its place stands only the war in Iraq, which is increasingly seen as an add-on to the war provoked by 9/11 and whose unpopularity grows by the day.

Take a look at any recent poll you choose - NBC/Wall Street Journal, Harris, CNN/Gallup/USA Today - and you find comparable figures of rising majority disapproval of the war. Or ignore the polls and look at those voting with their feet: the Army has missed its recruiting goals three months in a row, and the Marines every month since January, despite reports of scandalous ethical violations including the forging of high-school diplomas and the hoodwinking of the mentally ill by unscrupulous recruiters. Speaking bitterly about the Army`s strenuous effort to cover up his son`s death by friendly fire, Pat Tillman`s father crystallized the crisis in an interview with The Washington Post last week: "They realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about this death got out. They blew up their poster boy."

THE cost of the war is rapidly becoming the routine stuff of mainstream popular culture. July 27 will bring the debut of "Over There," a powerful new weekly TV drama by Steven Bochco ("NYPD Blue") and Chris Gerolmo ("Mississippi Burning") that takes no political stand on the war but dramatizes the ripped torsos, broken homefront lives and unknown expiration date of our Iraq adventure in the unsparing detail that has often been absent from network news. The show is being presented not by some liberal cabal but by the rising cable network that "Nip/Tuck" built - FX - a franchise of Rupert Murdoch. On June 21 FX is also bringing back Denis Leary`s jaundiced look at post-9/11 firefighters, "Rescue Me." In the first new episode, the hero throws a bag of "twin-tower cookies" back at the vendor selling them, heaving in anger that those who died that fateful morning have been usurped by kitsch.

Tomorrow, Memorial Day itself, will bring another "Nightline" reading of the names of the fallen: the more than 900 Americans who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since Ted Koppel`s previous recitation. When he read 721 names in April 2004, Mr. Koppel was labeled a traitor by the right for daring to call attention to the casualties, and some affiliates even refused to broadcast the show. This time the prospect of a televised roll call of the dead has caused little notice at all. Like the latest setbacks at ground zero, it is a troubling but increasingly distant event to those Americans who, unlike the families and neighbors of the fallen, can and have turned the page.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Die NYTimes veröffentlicht seit einigen Wochen eine Serie über die Klassenstruktur der USA. Es ist schon erstaunlich, dass in Europa der amerikanische Traum vom Schuhputzer zum Millionär einfacher zu verwirklichen ist als in den USA, Ausnahme GB, wenn man den Grafiken trauen kann.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS…
Macromedia Flash Player Grafiken kann ich nicht kopieren. Ist das möglich, wäre für Nachhilfe dankbar.

A Closer Look at Income Mobility

By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: May 14, 2005

Mobility -- the movement of families up and down the economic ladder -- is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. Economists sometimes study mobility by examining what percentage of families move to a different section of the income spectrum over time. Some families do move up and down the income spectrum, but it does not seem to be happening quite as often as it used to.
[urlGO TO INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC >>]http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_03.html[/url]

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[url]http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html[/url]

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Fairy Tales:

The Observer Profile: Abu Musab Zarqawi Public enemy

He`s the terrorist mastermind with a $25m bounty on his head. Last week rumours swept Iraq that he had been gravely wounded. But no one`s really sure where he is, or even who he is
Paul Harris
Sunday May 29, 2005
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1494860,…

Observer
He is an American nightmare, an Islamic mass killer who haunts the national psyche. He has masterminded a bombing campaign in Iraq that has cost hundreds of innocent lives. He has a $25 million bounty on his head and is blamed for terrorist atrocities that span the globe. He is Abu Musab Zarqawi.

No single name emerging from the war on terror, perhaps not even Osama bin Laden himself, now dominates the headlines as much as Zarqawi. Certainly not in the past week. Accounts are confused, but it seems Zarqawi has been injured in Iraq. Perhaps he is even dead. Rumours have been flying across the internet and front pages. There have been hospital sightings, stories of a dying leader being smuggled across the border and the beginnings of a fight for a successor. No one knows what is true. Zarqawi has been pronounced dead before and always come back to the fight. Perhaps this time it will be different. Perhaps not (the latest rumours have him alive and back in control).

Only two things are certain. First, the one-time street thug from a Jordanian slum town is now America`s number one target. Second, if he dies, the Iraqi insurgency will carry on without him. For Zarqawi did not create the war in Iraq. Rather, Iraq`s war gave him his chance. Zarqawi`s story is of a man who seized an opportunity to practise mayhem, honing his dreadful talent on the killing fields of the Sunni Triangle.

Zarqawi was put up by America as a terrorist bogeyman long before he had the profile to justify it. Much of the world first heard his name in Colin Powell`s speech to the UN when he was used to link al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi was held up as key to making the case for America`s invasion of Iraq. Ever since, in his own blood-stained way, he has been making the case against.

Yet Zarqawi remains a shadowy figure. Even his name is not real. His nom de guerre is simply a homage to his home town of Zarqa, a poor town about half-an-hour`s drive from Amman. His real name is the more wordy Ahmad Fadeel Nazal Khalayleh. He was born in 1966, possibly on 20 October, to a father who was a retired Jordanian army officer. Their house was a two-storey concrete construction overlooking the chimneys of a city dubbed Jordan`s Detroit for its car industry (and its crime). Like so much of Zarqawi`s life, a close examination sees certainty evaporate. No wonder US Marines scouring Fallujah or Ramadi cannot find him. Many of his fellow Islamists see him as a ghost-like figure, always eluding the net. In trying to piece together his life, they sometimes seem to have a point.

When Powell first described Zarqawi, he said he was of Palestinian origin. It is a mistake often repeated. But those trying to explain Zarqawi`s blood lust by using the Palestinian tragedy are scouring the wrong ground. In fact his family belong to the Beni Hassan tribe of Bedouin, a long-established Jordanian group that is usually loyal to Jordan`s ruling monarch.

Nothing in his childhood hinted at what he was going to become. His father died in 1984, leaving the large family to struggle on a meagre army pension. Zarqawi quickly became a tearaway. He spent his time scrapping and playing football in Zarqa`s dusty streets and surprised no one by dropping out of school aged 17.

He drifted into casual crime as an enforcer and general-purpose thug. At some time, he was imprisoned for sexual assault. On the streets, he learnt the art of violence. It was a lesson he learnt well and used to dramatic effect when he hacked off the head of American engineer Nick Berg in the first terrorist `snuff video` to emerge from Iraq.

Indeed, much of his violence has a street crime feel to it. It is brutal, direct, unflinching and unthinking. Not for Zarqawi the press interviews with Westerners that bin Laden once gave. Not for Zarqawi the pampered Saudi childhood. Not for Zarqawi the meandering meditations on Islamic theory as a justification for murder. If Zarqawi and his network are eclipsing bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as some terrorist experts believe, then it is a form of terrorism that betrays its roots in Zarqa`s brutish underworld, not some austere Arabian seminary.

Zarqawi`s criminal career exposed him to Jordan`s Palestinian refugee camps. Wallowing in crime, the camps also suffered from a different affliction: radical Islam. At some stage, Zarqawi the thug began to change into Zarqawi the militant. It was an unexpected transformation. Even his family were surprised when, after marrying a maternal cousin, he suddenly moved to Afghanistan in 1989. Zarqawi hoped to fight the Russians, but he was too late - they were leaving. Instead, he ended up as a reporter of an Islamist newsletter, interviewing veterans of the war and listening to tales of Jihadist glory.

While working in Peshawar, Zarqawi met Mohammed Maqdisi, a Jordanian preacher of the radical Salafist sect. Zarqawi`s militancy began to evolve. Like everything Zarqawi did, whether violence or belief, he took it to extremes. He returned with Maqdisi to Jordan and they spoke out against the government and hoarded arms. Soon, they were in jail, with Zarqawi catching a 15-year sentence.

But prison, as is so often the case, honed Zarqawi`s beliefs. He and Maqdisi became the focal point of Islamic inmates. Zarqawi fashioned blankets over his iron bunk bed to create a sort of `cave` where he would read the Koran endlessly. He forbade other prisoners to read anything else. He had his un-Islamic tattoos removed (shedding the last reminders of his old street life).

He meted out violent punishments to those who disobeyed him. `Either you were with them [Zarqawi and Maqdisi] or you were an enemy. There was no grey area,` recalled Youssef Rababa`a, who spent three years in the same jail.

Zarqawi`s story should have ended behind bars. But, in a sweeping amnesty in 1999, he was released. It was a catastrophic mistake. Some associates have described him wanting to buy a truck and open a vegetable stall but being prevented from doing so by the attentions of Jordan`s security forces. More likely, he simply carried on his radical activities. Either way (after apparently helping to plot an attack on a Western hotel in Amman), Zarqawi fled to Afghanistan and took his mother, believing the mountain air would be good for her leukemia.

He entered the network of terror camps set up by bin Laden and hosted by the Taliban, but Zarqawi did not join al-Qaeda. Instead, he used their contacts and money to set up his own camp, near Herat, and his own organisation called Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War). The group specialised in smuggling Islamic militants. That experience would prove vital in allowing Zarqawi to recruit foreign fighters into Iraq after Saddam`s fall. It would allow him to assume a role as their leader, bringing them over, giving them support, sending them on suicide missions. It would give him a chance to lead his own war after missing out in Afghanistan.

That chance came in Iraq. `Iraq gave him a tremendous platform,` said Matthew Levitt, director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East policy. But Zarqawi`s arrival in Iraq was by accident, not design. As the Americans overthrew the Taliban, Zarqawi fled to Iran. American pressure soon forced him to move again. He ended up in the mountains of northern Iraq with a group of Kurdish Islamic guerrillas called Ansar Islam. Hostile to both Saddam and the West, the small band of fighters had been largely ignored by the world.

Because they were Islamic militants based in Iraq, even though not in an area controlled by Baghdad, and linked, however tangentially, to bin Laden, the Americans felt more confident about trusting unsubstantiated material from dubious sources that alleged a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Powell used it to the full, pushing Zarqawi as a terrorist supremo and claiming he was developing chemical weapons at the Ansar camp. We know now there was no such link and that the chemical weapons programme was amateurish.

From that time on, he was a huge figure in the subsequent invasion and insurgency. He stoked the chaos of the war to bring Iraq and America to where they are now, trapped in a cycle of violence. His seemingly never-ending supply of suicide bombers wreaks havoc. The flow of militants his network smuggles in has never dried up. Often, the targets are simply Shias, whom Zarqawi`s unbendingly blind faith views as apostates and traitors.

He uses all his street fighting tricks to stay ahead of the game. He is rumoured never to sleep for long in the same place; he uses a cell-phone once before throwing it away; he rarely sees his family.

He and his network have now been linked to many terrorist atrocities across the world, including the train attacks in Madrid and the assasination of American diplomat Laurence Foley. Some accusations are probably true, others not. Zarqawi has become a catch-all villain for many aspects of the war on terror, especially as the hunt for him intensifies and the search for bin Laden wanes.

What is in little doubt is his dreadful legacy: the ongoing war. When his mother died this year, a family friend told reporters her last desire was that her son would perish in battle and not be captured by Americans. If Zarqawi is indeed dead, then she now has her wish.

But Zarqawi will have his, too. `When he dies, the situation in Iraq will most likely remain the same,` said Levitt. The problem for the Americans (and for the world) is that his masterpiece of terror in Iraq has been all too successful. It will live long after him. The bombs will not stop.

Abu Musab Zarqawi

DoB:
20 October 1966 (probably) in Zarqa, Jordan (probably)

Real name:
Fadeel Nazal Khalayeh

Education:
On the streets of Zarqa, in Palestinian refugee camps, and in prison

Job:
Leader of Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War)
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 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/

Sunday, May 29, 2005

43 Iraqis Dead in 2 Days
Shiite Pilgrims Massacred
Killings in Sinjar, Hilla


Wire services report that the unconventional sectarian civil war in Iraq continued on Saturday. Guerrillas in Qaim executed 10 Shiite pilgrims originally from Diwaniyah returning from Syria. The shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad and the sister of martyred Imam Husain, is located near Damascus and likely the pilgrims had been up to visit it. If there is anything calculated to provoke Sunni-Shiite civil war, it is the murder of people who just came back from a religious pilgrimage to a sacred Shiite site.

In addition, two suicide bombers killed at least five Iraqis and wounded dozens more when they set off their payloads at a join US/Iraqi army base near the northern town of Sinjar close to the Syrian border.

Guerrillas killed four Iraqi soldiers and wounded a fifth when they shot up the car carrying them near Hilla, a Shiite city south of Baghdad.

It was announced by Iraqi authorities only on Saturday that there had been bombings in Tikrit and killings in Babil province south of Baghdad on Sunday that left a dozen or so dead.

The Scotsman reports that "A roadside bomb blast targeting a US convoy in Mosul killed three Iraqi civilians, including a 10-year-old boy."

It also reports that the Association of Muslim Scholars (Sunni) and the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI, Shiite) have reached an initial agreement to back off their earlier confrontation witon one another and to "serve the nation." The agreement came about through the mediateion of Muqtada al-Sadr and his aides, Shiite nationalists who are probably on friendlier terms with the hard line Sunnis than they are with the Badr Corps, their rival. Another meeting of the two sides is planned.

About 1,000 US and Iraqi troops continued their find and destroy operation against guerrillas in Haditha in western Iraq.

Tidbits from the Iraqi press via BBC World Monitoring for May 28:


"Dar al-Salam on 26 May publishes on page 2 a 250-word report on the statement issued by the University Professors Association condemning the US "occupation" forces for violating the Al-Anbar University campus. . .

Al-Zaman publishes on the front page a 220-word report citing the newspaper`s reporter as saying yesterday, 27 May, that Iraqi security forces backed by multinational forces are imposing a tight siege around Buhriz district in the Diyala Governorate, in a search for specific individuals. Al-Zaman publishes on page 3 a 150-word report citing police sources in Al-Diwaniyah confirming the arrest of a gang involved in forging official documents . . .

Al-Ufuq carries on page 4 a 200-word report stating that the Education Ministry has reinstated 88 teachers in the Karbala Education Directorate. [These were Shiites fired by Saddam for not being loyal Baathists.] . . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 6 a 600-word article commenting on the fatwas being issued by religious authorities in Iraq and urging the Iraqi public to listen to their conscience and not only to these fatwas."

posted by Juan @ [url5/29/2005 06:25:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/43-iraqis-dead-in-2-days-shiite.html[/url]

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Sunday, May 29, 2005
War News for Sunday, May 29, 2003

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Two suicide bomb attacks kill five and injure forty five outside a US base in Sinjar.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqis killed in IED attack targeting US troops in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Ten pilgrims found murdered near the Syrian border.

Bring `em on: Moderate Sunni leader gunned down in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: US Marine killed by roadside bomb in Haqlaniyah.

Bring `em on: Two killed and nine wounded in suicide bomb attack near Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Japanese hostage confirmed dead.

Giving Iraq Back

"We want to hand it over to them. But when it comes down to it, the (Iraqi police) we`re hiring are all bad," said Army Sgt. Nicholas Radde, 21, of LaCrosse, Wis., as his soldiers took a break in the parking lot of an abandoned storage area.

Despite two interim Iraqi governments, a national election and the graduation of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, U.S. troops remain the ultimate security force in most of Iraq, more than two years after the U.S.-led invasion.

Earlier this month, when U.S. Marines led a major assault against insurgents near the Syrian border and lost nine troops, the Iraqi forces played a secondary role.

As the elected Iraqi government tries to coax a wary Sunni Arab population into joining the new political system, American soldiers continue to raid homes, patrol neighborhoods and hurriedly train Iraqi soldiers -- the faster the better if they are to get home soon.

But a resilient Sunni-led insurgency has effectively stalled progress, killing thousands of Iraqis.


Journalism in the USA

From Chicken Yoghurt:

Hersh is firm in his assertion that the war in Iraq has never ended despite the ostentatious proclamation by Bush from the deck of an aircraft carrier. He said the term "insurgency" used to describe those fighting coalition troops is a misnomer because the coalition is still fighting the same people they were engaging before the fall of Baghdad. In April 2003, Hersh says, around 6000 military commanders and soldiers, Baathist bureaucrats and other leaders of the regime (including those who ran the public utilities and oil infractructure) simply disappeared from Baghdad over a short period of days. It`s these same commanders and soldiers that are still fighting now. Jihadists have come to the country but the bedrock of the "insurgency" remains Republican Guard units and the like. Hersh also maintains that Iraq is already in a state of civil war and has been for some months, it`s merely that a timid American press is afraid to use the term.

Bogeyman of the moment Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a useful figleaf to the Iraqi commanders leading the insurgency, said Hersh. In adopting the tactic of killing civilians in an attempt to turn the population against the occupation, the former Baathists find Zarqawi`s status as terrorist-in-chief deflects the blame away from them and gives succour to their hope of reassuming control of the country again some time in the future. Their thinking is that the civilian population being told by the coalition to blame Zarqawi for Baathist atrocities will make their task easier.


760 Iraqis Dead in May 2005 for what?

"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.


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Latest Fatality: May 29, 2005

Iraker: Civilian: 566 Police/Mil: 223 Total: 789

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

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

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There`s Democracy, and There`s an Oil Pipeline
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Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, left, and leaders from Central Asia and the Caucasus after leaving
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By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/weekinreview/29sanger.html
WASHINGTON — Samuel Bodman, the new secretary of energy, led the United States delegation to Azerbaijan last week to celebrate a huge moment in America`s effort to diversify its sources of oil: The opening of a pipeline that will carry Caspian oil to the West, on a route that avoids Russia and Iran.

Mr. Bodman delivered a message from President Bush: "As Azerbaijan deepens its democratic and market economic reforms, this pipeline can help generate balanced economic growth, and provide a foundation for a prosperous and just society that advances the cause of freedom."

Just a few days earlier, the Azerbaijani police beat pro-democracy demonstrators with truncheons when opposition parties, yelling "free elections," defied the government`s ban on protests against President Ilham Aliyev. Mr. Aliyev is one of President Bush`s allies in the war on terror, even though he won a highly suspect election to succeed his father, a former Soviet strongman.

Every week, the White House seems to find itself in a balancing act between promoting democracy, on one hand, and supporting friends in combustible but strategically important parts of the world. In recent days, the issue has been how hard to press for an international inquiry into the massacre of civilians in Uzbekistan this month; or how to press Egypt`s president, Hosni Mubarak, into facing real challengers in his country`s coming election; or how to challenge the resurgence of central control in Russia and China while gaining their cooperation to stop nuclear proliferation.

It all has shades of the cold war. From 1946 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, American presidents embraced - sometimes unhappily, sometimes enthusiastically - dictators from Latin America to the Philippines to South Korea in the name of stopping Communism.

Now, even brutal leaders have discovered that if they cooperate in the war on terror Washington is unlikely to squeeze them too hard, or at least too publicly, on other issues. Pakistan has led in this strategy. When President Pervez Musharraf decided late last year not to relinquish his military posts, as he had once promised to do, no one from the White House denounced him.

The president and his aides have never said it would be easy to reconcile Mr. Bush`s clarion call for democratic change worldwide with reality on the ground. But at least one past member of the administration says they have made a basic mistake.

"Look, I was part of the incubation of this policy," said Richard N. Haass, who was head of policy planning in the State Department from 2001 to 2003, referring to the decision to make democracy a major theme of the Bush presidency. "But I don`t think you can make it the controlling issue. The administration has set itself up for inconsistency." In fact, Mr. Bush has started to talk about the need for patience as Americans wait for democracy to take hold elsewhere. His wife, Laura, took up the theme this month on a trip to the Middle East. Asked about the difficulties of mounting any real challenge to President Mubarak in Egypt, she said, "To act like you can just go from here to there overnight is naïve." Full democracy, she said, is "not easy and we know that it`s, in many cases, not even possible."

Mrs. Bush went further in that comment than most White House policy makers will, at least in public.

But Stephen R. Sestanovich, who served as the Clinton administration`s specialist on the former Soviet republics in the 1990`s, said it is becoming clear that not all revolutions are what Americans would like them to be.

"Georgia and Ukraine were good examples of the model working as we think it should: Popular outrage, the right result," he said. "But Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan show you something different, the prospect of sheer chaos." In the first, President Askar Akayev fled, leaving competing groups to fight each other. In the second, Mr. Sestanovich said, President Islam Karimov is dealing with "the complete lack of popular confidence" after his troops shot hundreds of civilians after an armed uprising that he said was the work of Islamic terrorists - his favorite choice of culprits.

Russia distanced itself from Mr. Karimov, and he seemed unlikely to win another invitation to the White House, which he visited after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he may not need the American welcome. Last week in Beijing, the Chinese gave him a 21-gun salute and praise for his steadfastness against "the three forces of extremism, terrorism and separatism." By the time Mr. Karimov headed home, he had a deal for a $600 million joint venture in oil.

That, in short, is the new Great Game Americans find themselves playing in Central Asia: Competing with the Chinese for oil supplies; with the Russians for influence in their backyard; and all the while talking about spreading democracy.

Paul Goble, an expert on the former Soviet Union who used to work for the State Department, summarized the conundrum in the region this way: "As soon as you get rid of the ex-Communist thugs, you will get Muslim governments there."

That is one reason Mr. Bush takes every chance to highlight the success stories, even at the risk of offending Russia.

Mr. Bush`s aides describe him as deeply engaged in the strategy, down to choosing exactly where he would go on his five-nation trip earlier this month. On that trip, the president spoke from the square in Tbilisi where Georgians staged demonstrations that ousted a leader in 2003. The warning he was sending to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia about centralizing power in the Kremlin was clear, if never explicitly stated.

But Mr. Goble remembers how thinly democracy was consolidated in the region after the Berlin Wall fell, despite American wishes. "Our tendency is to declare victory and move on," he said. "It doesn`t work that way."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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May 29, 2005
Karl`s New Manifesto
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/opinion/29brooks.html?inca…

I was in the library reading room when suddenly a strange specter of a man appeared above me. He was a ragged fellow with a bushy beard, dressed in the clothes of another century. He clutched news clippings on class in America, and atop the pile was a manifesto in his own hand. He was gone in an instant, but Karl`s manifesto on modern America remained. This is what it said:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.

The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable portion of them can get in.

The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy - seizing for itself most of the income gains of the past decades - and then ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of its class.

The educated class has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and reduced it to a mere factory for the production of little meritocrats. Members of the educated elites are more and more likely to marry each other, which the experts call assortative mating, but which is really a ceaseless effort to refortify class solidarity and magnify social isolation. Children are turned into workaholic knowledge workers - trained, tutored, tested and prepped to strengthen class dominance.

The educated elites are the first elites in all of history to work longer hours per year than the exploited masses, so voracious is their greed for second homes. They congregate in exclusive communities walled in by the invisible fence of real estate prices, then congratulate themselves for sending their children to public schools. They parade their enlightened racial attitudes by supporting immigration policies that guarantee inexpensive lawn care. They send their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of privilege for the children of the professional class, where they are given the social and other skills to extend class hegemony.

The information society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left.

Periodically members of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The Yale-educated scion of the Bush family may face the Yale-educated scion of the Winthrop family. They divide into Republicans and Democrats and argue over everything except the source of their power: the intellectual stratification of society achieved through the means of education.

More than the Roman emperors, more than the industrial robber barons, the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down.

In 1960 there were not big structural differences between rich and poor families. In 1960, three-quarters of poor families were headed by married couples. Now only a third are. While the rates of single parenting have barely changed for the educated elite, family structures have disintegrated for the oppressed masses.

Poor children are less likely to live with both biological parents, hence, less likely to graduate from high school, get a job and be in a position to challenge the hegemony of the privileged class. Family inequality produces income inequality from generation to generation.

Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win!

I don`t agree with everything in Karl`s manifesto, because I don`t believe in incessant class struggle, but you have to admit, he makes some good points.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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May 30, 2005
Iraqi Offensive Met by Wave of New Violence From Insurgents
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/international/middleeast/3…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 29 - The largest Iraqi-led counterinsurgency operation since the downfall of Saddam Hussein set off a violent backlash on Sunday across Baghdad. At least 20 people were killed in the capital, 14 of them in a battle lasting several hours when insurgents initiated sustained attacks on several police stations and an army barracks.

The violence, including at least four suicide car bombings, was a bloody start to an operation that Iraq`s new Shiite-majority government had presented as a new get-tough policy toward Sunni Arab insurgents, first in Baghdad and then countrywide. The government has said it will commit 40,000 uniformed Iraqis to the Baghdad operation in an effort to crush insurgents who reacted to the government`s swearing-in four weeks ago with one of the war`s biggest rebel surges.

The Baghdad toll was part of another day of bloodshed across Iraq. In total, at least 34 people were killed, including a British soldier caught by a roadside bombing near the town of Kahla that broke a protracted period of calm in the Shiite-dominated south.

A statement from the Second Marine Expeditionary Force said a marine was killed Saturday when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb near Haqlaniya, about 90 miles northwest of Baghdad.

At least initially, the crackdown in Baghdad appeared to have been met by a stiff, coordinated response that brought the toll to about 700 from the intensified rebel attacks this month. The heaviest battle raged across the districts of Abu Ghraib, Amariya and Khudra on the capital`s western edge.

In the space of 30 minutes in midafternoon, the insurgents answered attempts by government forces to cordon off the districts with a sequence of attacks. They appeared to catch Iraqi forces by surprise, and prompted commanders to call for backup from American troops garrisoned nearby. Iraqi witnesses said Apache attack helicopters with loaded missile racks swooped overhead as the insurgent attacks flared into protracted gun battles below.

Even before the fighting on Sunday, the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari appeared to have opened a new and potentially hazardous chapter in the war. Announcing the crackdown last week, government officials said the operation would move Iraqi troops "from the defensive to the offensive" in the war, and show Iraqis that the leaders they elected in January were capable of providing the security that just about every opinion poll in recent months has shown is their highest priority.

But the operation met with skepticism even before it started.

For one thing, few believed the government could commit the 40,000 soldiers and paramilitary police officers it had promised, since the American command`s latest official count of the number in Baghdad Province, reaching deep into the countryside beyond the capital itself, totaled only slightly more than 30,000. Many Iraqis said they suspected that the government was overstating its abilities in the hope of stemming rising popular anger in the face of the new insurgent offensive.

There has been another fear, one rooted in the country`s shifting political landscape. Essentially, the operation begun Sunday involves a government led by two religious parties with strong ties to Iran, commanding new American-trained army and paramilitary police forces that are heavily Shiite, taking on an insurgency that is almost entirely Sunni Arab.

The potential for a further sharpening of sectarian tensions has been unavoidable, despite assurances by Dr. Jaafari that the Shiite leaders intend to govern in a way that draws Iraq`s religious and ethnic communities together.

The concern appeared to be at least partly born out on Sunday, as truckloads of Iraqi soldiers and police officers in camouflage fanned out across the city, setting up checkpoints and moving in force through neighborhoods long known as insurgent strongholds, raiding homes and carrying away suspects.

One man in Amariya telephoned The New York Times to say that people in his neighborhood believed that the sweeps were inspired and led by the Badr Organization, a shadowy militia group founded in Iran that is an offshoot of one of the two governing Shiite religious parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The belief is a potentially explosive one among Sunni Arabs, especially hard-liners who remember the Badr group for its role fighting alongside Iran in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980`s. In interviews, some of these hard-liners have said they view the new government as an Iranian implant, open to the influence of the ayatollahs in Tehran. American officials here say that persuading Sunni Arabs that this is not so is crucial to building a democracy and avoiding a slide into civil war.

The reactions in Amariya suggested that even moderate Sunni Arabs were wavering in the face of the new government`s sweeps. The man who telephoned The New York Times, a former officer who had fought in the war against Iran, said that he voted in January`s elections, defying a Sunni Arab boycott, and that he had called a government hot line to report insurgent activities in his area. But on Sunday, he said his feelings were with the insurgents. "The general attitude out here is that all this tension is caused by the Badr Organization and Iran," the man said.

The rebel attacks included a suicide car bombing at an Iraqi-manned checkpoint in Abu Ghraib, the district best known for the prison that holds many of the 14,000 insurgency suspects held in American custody across Iraq. Another suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi paramilitary police patrol in a residential district of Amariya, east of the sprawling Camp Victory complex that serves as the American military headquarters in Iraq. Gunmen also attacked a police station in Khudra, a neighborhood adjoining Amariya, according to Interior Ministry officials.

The most daring assault appeared to have been a sustained attack on the detention center run by the Interior Ministry`s major crimes unit in Amariya, where suspected insurgents are held before being moved to Abu Ghraib. The ministry said the assault there involved at least 50 insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machine guns. According to an unconfirmed account by an Amariya resident who was reached by telephone, insurgent bands roaming the district after the battle claimed to have captured weapons from the detention center`s armory.

An official at the Interior Ministry`s operations center said 14 people had been killed in the Amariya fighting alone, including 3 insurgents, 4 policemen and 7 civilians.

Other victims of insurgent attacks in the capital on Sunday included two security guards killed when a suicide bomber tried to ram a Volkswagen sedan through the gates of the heavily fortified Oil Ministry complex in eastern Baghdad, and two policemen killed in a drive-by shooting in the Dora district in southwestern Baghdad, a notorious insurgent stronghold. Two more policemen died in a suicide bombing at dusk in the Zeiouniya district of eastern Baghdad.

Elsewhere, nine policemen were killed in an insurgent ambush near the town of Yusufiya in a restive Sunni Arab area about 10 miles south of Baghdad, according to an Iraqi doctor at a hospital nearby. A car bombing at Madaen, about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, killed two police commandos, according to a police commander in the town. A police commander in the northern city of Tuz Khurmato, about 60 miles south of Kirkuk, said a suicide car bomber there killed two civilians after detonating his vehicle near the local headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a partner in the new government in Baghdad.

Sabrina Tavernise and Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting for this article.

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Ich hatte zum Gerrymandering in einem anderen Thread schon mal was geschrieben:
In den USA hat man auch einen Namen für diese Willkür Wahlkreise zuzuschneiden.
Gerrymander, nach einem Gouverneur Elbridge Gerry aus dem 19.Jahrhunfert und dem Salamander.
Das letzte Schauspiel in Bezug von Gerrymandering lief in Texas in 2003 ab.
Da seit einiger Zeit die GOP in Texas die Mehrheit hatte, hat man durch den Zuschnitt der Wahlkreise versucht diese Mehrheit zu sichern.
Da die Demokraten dagegen waren, hatten sie während einer Sitzungsperiode des Senats, der Senat tagt nur zu bestimmten Zeiten im Jahr für wenige Wochen, einfach den Senat beschlußunfähig gemacht, in dem sie sich in einen Nachbarstaat abgesetzt haben.
Die Republikaner versuchten ihre Kollegen mit dem FBI zurückzuholen, was aber vom FBI abgelehnt wurde.
Bei der nächsten Session versuchten die Demokraten das gleiche Spiel nochmals, aber irgendwie gelang es dann den Republikanern dann doch ihre Reform durchzusetzen.
Es war 2003 ein Aufreger in den Zeitungen.
[urlTexas lawmakers end Oklahoma exile]http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-05-15-texas-lawmakers_x.htm[/url]
Übrigens hat man in D auch das gleiche gemacht in Berlin. um die PDS ihre Direktmandate zu verhindern.
Hier noch ein Wahlkreis in Texas, der nach dem System bearbeitet wurde.
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Es sind beide Parteien gleich, wenn sie die Möglichkeiten haben.
Hier die Karten der Kongressdistrikte:
http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/congress.html


May 30, 2005
Ending the Gerrymander Wars
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/opinion/30mon1.html

Congressional redistricting has become a blood sport. Texas kicked off a new era in 2003 when it redrew its lines for a second time after the 2000 census to give the Republicans five more seats. Now, there could be similar midcensus redistricting in several other states. In these partisan machinations, voters are the losers. The new lines eliminate contested elections, and contribute to the bitterly divisive atmosphere in Washington. A new bill in Congress calls for national standards for drawing Congressional districts. It would vastly improve the functioning of our ailing democracy.

Gerrymandering has always been part of American politics, but it has reached disturbing new lows. Party operatives now use powerful computers to draw lines that guarantee their party as many seats as possible. The longstanding tradition that Congressional districts are redrawn only once every 10 years was obliterated in Texas in 2003, when Tom DeLay pushed through a partisan "re-redistricting." Democrats are now talking about doing the same thing in states they control, such as Illinois, New Mexico and Louisiana.

Partisan redistricting puts the interests of political parties ahead of the voters. The parties want districts they know they can win, and they have done a good job of creating them. In the last election, there were only a handful of competitive Congressional races; most races were decided by landslides.

The voters, however, are best served by competitive districts in which candidates need to work to win their votes. The decline of swing districts is having a corrosive effect on Congress, which is more than ever made up of members from the extremes of both parties, who do not need to appeal to voters in the middle for re-election.

Redistricting reform is difficult to achieve at the state level. Most state legislatures have a vested interest in the status quo. And in these partisan times, a party that controls a state government is likely to oppose any redistricting that gives Congressional seats to the other side. National standards are needed that would require every state to draw Congressional districts in a way that put the voters` interests first.

Representative John Tanner, a Tennessee Democrat, introduced a bill last week that would do just that. His bill would create nonpartisan redistricting commissions in every state. The commissions would be prohibited from taking the voters` party affiliations or voting history into account when drawing lines. Instead, the bill would emphasize continuity of counties, municipalities and neighborhoods. The bill would also limit Congressional redistricting to once every 10 years.

It is no surprise that the bill`s sponsor, Mr. Tanner, is a moderate Democrat from Tennessee. Southern Democrats, Northern Republicans and moderates from both parties and all regions are the ones being pushed out of Congress by partisan redistricting, and re-redistricting.

Drawing less partisan lines would reinvigorate the center in American politics, and make House members pay more attention to their constituents and less to their party leaders. That is why Mr. Tanner`s bill is likely to have a hard time in today`s Congress. It is also why it is important for everyone who wants to improve American politics to support it.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Es hat sich angekündigt, die GOP und Bush haben in den letzten Monaten überzogen, und das ist wohl auch für die oft unkritischen US-Bürger zu viel.
Aber das ist eine Momentaufnahme.

Poll majority say they`d be likely to vote for Clinton
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20050527/a_hillar…

By Susan Page
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — For the first time, a majority of Americans say they are likely to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton if she runs for president in 2008, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday.

The survey shows that the New York senator and former first lady has broadened her support nationwide over the past two years, though she still provokes powerful feelings from those who oppose her.

Clinton commands as much strong support — but more strong opposition — as George W. Bush did in a Newsweek poll in November 1998, two years before the 2000 election. She is in a slightly stronger position than then-vice president Al Gore, the eventual 2000 Democratic nominee, was in 1998.

“Over time, Clinton fatigue has dissipated … and people are looking back on the Clinton years more favorably,” says Andrew Kohut, director of the non-partisan Pew Research Center. In a Pew poll released this month, Kohut called former president Bill Clinton and the senator “comeback kids” because of their rising ratings.

“This may also reflect that she has been recasting her image as a more moderate person,” he says.

Spokesmen for Sen. Clinton declined to discuss the survey. “She`s just focused on working and doing her job for New York,” says Anne Lewis, a veteran Democratic operative working at Hillpac, Clinton`s political action committee.

Clinton has been leading the field of Democratic presidential contenders for the 2008 election, still more than three years away. She is running for a second Senate term next year and has dodged questions about whether she`ll make a White House bid.

In the poll, 29% were “very likely” to vote for Clinton for president if she runs in 2008; 24% were “somewhat likely.” Seven percent were “not very likely” and 39% were “not at all likely” to vote for her.

Her strong support has risen by 8 percentage points, and her strong opposition has dropped by 5 points since the same question was asked in June 2003.

In the new survey, more than seven in 10 Americans said they would be likely to vote for an unspecified woman for president in 2008 if she were running. One in five said they wouldn`t be likely to vote for her.

Karen White, political director of the liberal group Emily`s List, says the findings underscore growing acceptance of women as candidates, even for president. “People realize that women reach across party lines and are problem-solvers, and they want to see more of that in public life,” she says.

No woman has been nominated for national office by one of the two major parties since Geraldine Ferraro was Walter Mondale`s running mate in 1984.

Voters under 30 were by far the most likely to say they would support a woman for president. More than half of them said they were “very likely” to vote for a woman, compared with less than one-third of those 50 and older.

Among those who were very or somewhat likely to vote for Clinton for president, there were:

•A big gender gap. Six of 10 women but 45% of men were likely to support her.

•Significant differences by age. Two of three voters under 30 were likely to support her, compared with fewer than half of those 50 and older.

•Strongest support from those with the lowest income. Sixty-three percent of those with annual household incomes of $20,000 or less were likely to support her, compared with 49% of those with incomes of $75,000 or higher.

•Big swings by ideology. An overwhelming 80% of liberals were likely to support her, compared with 58% of moderates and 33% of conservatives.

Among those surveyed, 54% called Clinton a liberal, 30% a moderate and 9% a conservative.




Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20050527/a_hillary…

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May 30, 2005
America, a Symbol of . . .
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/opinion/30herbert.html

This Memorial Day is not a good one for the country that was once the world`s most brilliant beacon of freedom and justice.

State Department officials know better than anyone that the image of the United States has deteriorated around the world. The U.S. is now widely viewed as a brutal, bullying nation that countenances torture and operates hideous prison camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in other parts of the world - camps where inmates have been horribly abused, gruesomely humiliated and even killed.

The huge and bitter protests of Muslims against the United States last week were touched off by reports that the Koran had been handled disrespectfully by interrogators at Guantánamo. But the anger and rage among Muslims and others had been building for a long time, fueled by indisputable evidence of the atrocious treatment of detainees, terror suspects, wounded prisoners and completely innocent civilians in America`s so-called war against terror.

Amnesty International noted last week in its annual report on human rights around the world that more than 500 detainees continue to be held "without charge or trial" at Guantánamo. Locking people up without explaining why, and without giving them a chance to prove their innocence, seems a peculiar way to advance the cause of freedom in the world.

It`s now known that many of the individuals swept up and confined at Guantánamo and elsewhere were innocent. The administration says it has evidence it could use to prove the guilt of detainees currently at Guantánamo, but much of the evidence is secret and therefore cannot be revealed.

This is where the war on terror meets Never-Never Land.

President Bush`s close confidante, Karen Hughes, has been chosen to lead a high-profile State Department effort to repair America`s image. The Bush crowd apparently thinks this is a perception problem, as opposed to a potentially catastrophic crisis that will not be eased without substantive policy changes.

This is much more than an image problem. The very idea of what it means to be American is at stake. The United States is a country that as a matter of policy (and in the name of freedom) "renders" people to regimes that specialize in the art of torture.

"How," asked Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, "can our State Department denounce countries for engaging in torture while the C.I.A. secretly transfers detainees to the very same countries for interrogation?"

Ms. Hughes said in March that she would do her best "to stand for what President Bush called the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity." Someone should tell her that there`s not a lot of human dignity in the venues where torture is inflicted.

The U.S. would regain some of its own lost dignity if a truly independent commission were established to thoroughly investigate the interrogation and detention operations associated with the war on terror and the war in Iraq. A real investigation would be traumatic because it would expose behavior most Americans would never want associated with their country. But in the long run it would be extremely beneficial.

William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in an interview last week that it`s important to keep in mind how policies formulated at the highest levels of government led inexorably to the abusive treatment of prisoners.

"The critical point is the deliberateness of this policy," he said. "The president gave the green light. The secretary of defense issued the rules. The Justice Department provided the rationale. And the C.I.A. tried to cover it up."

In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, most of the world was ready to stand with the U.S. in a legitimate fight against terrorists. But the Bush administration, in its lust for war with Iraq and its willingness to jettison every semblance of due process while employing scandalously inhumane practices against detainees, blew that opportunity.

In much of the world, the image of the U.S. under Mr. Bush has morphed from an idealized champion of liberty to a heavily armed thug in camouflage fatigues. America is increasingly being seen as a dangerously arrogant military power that is due for a comeuppance. It will take a lot more than Karen Hughes to turn that around.

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* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Die Angst vor der Ungewissheit der Zukunft und dem Nichtbegreifen von Zusammenhängen führt in den Ländern zu unterschiedlichen Resultaten.

In den USA hat es dazu geführt, dass man sich zurückgezogen hat auf das Festhalten von angeblichen christlichen Werten und Spiritualität.

Und durch Europa wabert so eine Art dumpfer Nationalismus vermischt mit Nostalgie und Angst vor allem Fremden und Veränderungen, weil das Neue, was kommt, nur Unangenehmes im Gepäck zu haben scheint.

Daher ist die Sehnsucht nach der Strickjacke von Kohl erklärlich und der Wunsch nach dem kleinen, naiven Mädchens aus dem Osten verständlich.

Der gestrige Bericht in der Faz erklärt sehr schön die Entwicklung von Merkel und auch die Verbindung der meisten Deutschen mit ihr und ihre fast apolitische Sicht der Dinge.

Die auch vor der schönen neuen Welt stand und diese nicht verstand.

Aus dem Artikel:
Merkel hatte sogar die Möglichkeit in den Westen zu reisen und dort hatte sie in Berlin eine Erkenntnis, es war so, daß das in Ost und West die gleiche Stadt ist, die Art der Bauten, die Hinterhöfe, nur bunter angemalt und mit anderen Autos davor dazu kam ein bestimmendes Erlebnis aber dann sah ich in West-Berlin noch Türkinnen das ihr weiteres Leben wohl tief geprägt hat.

Denn zum Schluß habe ich mir die Frage gestellt, ob man es als allein reisende Frau im Westen wagen kann, alleine in einem Hotel zu schlafen.
http://www.faz.net/s/RubFC06D389EE76479E9E76425072B196C3/Doc…

Irgendwie spricht daraus eine seltsame politische Unbefangenheit und auch eine politische Beliebigkeit und auf der anderen Seite die Angst vor dem Fremden.

Diese Unsicherheit vor Veränderungen entspricht auch dem Denken vieler Menschen nicht nur in D.

Die Frage stellt sich nur in welchem Jahrhundert wir dann landen werden, wenn man Nerkels Kritiklosigkeit gegenüber der augenblicklichen US-Regierung und deren christlichen Werten betrachtet.

washingtonpost.com
Chirac`s Failure To Lead

By David Ignatius
Post
Monday, May 30, 2005; A21

BRUSSELS -- France`s stunning rejection Sunday of a new European constitution was, most of all, a noisy protest against the disruptive, leveling force of economic globalization. You could see that in television images of the "no" voters as the result was announced -- burly arms raised in the air, fists cocked -- as if by rejecting a set of technical amendments to European rules they could hold back a threatening future.

And you could see the result on the faces of the losers -- glum establishment politicians being interviewed after the vote, trying to put a brave spin on a devastating defeat. For this no vote had been opposed by nearly all the luminaries of the French political class in both the socialist and conservative parties.

It was a no that resonated on many levels: a rejection of the document and the wider Europe it came to symbolize, a rejection of a market-driven way of life that`s taken for granted in America, and above all a rejection of President Jacques Chirac, who tried to trick and cajole France into embracing the realities of the global economy, rather than forthrightly explaining them.

Fear of the future is always a powerful political force, and one that often has unfortunate consequences. And it`s hard in this case to see much positive coming out of the French no. Europe will go on as before, but European politicians will be tempted to waste even more time soft-pedaling the fact of global competition rather than helping their people adapt and change.

Chirac will be a chief victim of Sunday`s vote, and he richly deserves the scorn that will be shoveled his way. His mistake was far larger than what commentators were citing Sunday night: his decision to put the constitution to a vote even though that wasn`t technically necessary. Chirac`s real failure was his inability over two terms as president to level with the French people about the changes that are needed to protect the way of life they cherish. He played games with economic reform -- tiptoeing up to the edge and then pulling back at any sign of public displeasure.

Living in France for four years, I came to appreciate what a wonderful country it is, with a quality of life that is truly the envy of the world. Not surprisingly, it is also an intensely conservative country, for all its reputation for liberality. Whatever their class, age or political orientation, French people want to conserve what they`ve got. They want to maintain inflexible management and labor unions, six-week vacations, a 35-hour workweek -- and also to be a growing, dynamic, entrepreneurial economy. Chirac never had the guts to tell the French they couldn`t have it both ways. He never explained that rigid labor rules had led to a high unemployment rate, currently 10.2 percent.

The French could use a Bill Clinton, whose most powerful theme as president was his 1996 campaign slogan of building "a bridge to the 21st century." Clinton assured American workers that he felt their pain about outsourcing and global competition -- and so would provide the training and other help for people to find jobs in the new economy. He never pretended that workers could opt out of competition. Chirac was never able to sound that positive theme in his "yes" campaign.

The most interesting potential successor to Chirac is the ambitious man for all seasons, Nicolas Sarkozy. In his comments Sunday night, the conservative party leader was at least being realistic -- insisting that with the constitutional referendum, the era of French immobilism must end. He was quoted in this week`s Economist voicing this inescapable truth: "The best social model is the one that gives work to everybody. It is not, therefore, our own."

French are suspicious of "Anglo-Saxon" ideas, but they would do well this morning to consider the case of Britain and Europe. The British held back from the original European Economic Community in the 1950s because they saw joining this larger Europe as a symbol of their own failure and weakness. But they came around and applied for membership -- whereupon French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed their application in 1963. Still, the British kept coming, over bitter opposition from their own conservatives, left and right, because they knew that embracing Europe was the only way forward. They finally found a balance between a European common market and their own political and cultural identity.

The French people are right to worry about the future. With their current economic structure, they`ll never make it. Saying no to Chirac is understandable, but to prosper in the 21st century, the French will soon need to say yes to a politician who tells it straight, and helps them build their own bridge to the future.

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washingtonpost.com
What Wolfowitz Faces
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Sebastian Mallaby
Post
Monday, May 30, 2005; A21

Ten years ago, Jim Wolfensohn networked his way into the presidency of the World Bank, a job he had once described as "a unique position . . . from which you can influence whole segments of the world." Pretty soon, he was raging around like a stung bull, frustrated at the World Bank`s bureaucracy and maddened by the lack of clarity on how it should fight poverty.

Now Paul Wolfowitz may face a similar experience. He takes over this development powerhouse on June 1, believing that he is leaving behind a big job at the Pentagon and taking on an even bigger one. But over the past couple of months, as he has prepared to assume the reins, he has confronted the bank`s formidable culture. Taking over this multilateral institution is a bit like showing up at elementary school halfway through third grade. Everyone already has a gang of friends and a newcomer is often dissed -- even if the newcomer is the principal.

The day after Wolfowitz`s nomination was confirmed, a satirical staff magazine "reported" that a moving crew had arrived at World Bank headquarters to deliver his personal items, "including a 1768 map of Iraq (with hundreds of red Xs denoting `WMDs,` hundreds of black Xs denoting `Oil Well$,` and one blue X denoting `decent sushi restaurant`) . . . a fully armed AH-64A/D Apache helicopter, a "red phone" with a direct line to Karl Rove, an RQ-4A Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle . . ."

Probably 90 percent of the bank`s staff opposes the Iraq war, and a similar proportion regard President Bush as a dumb cowboy. Two of the three aides whom Wolfowitz is bringing to the bank share his association with Iraq, which does not impress the banksters. One is Robin Cleveland, an assertive official who put together Bush`s Iraq spending bills; she has summoned bank vice presidents over to her office for meetings, but some veeps have refused to make the journey. Only last week, Wolfowitz discovered that the bank`s top bosses had decreed a major shuffle of the management chart without so much as asking what he thought about it.

Wolfowitz ordered that that shuffle be put on hold, but mostly he has charmed his way past all these prickles. He`s disarmed people by eating lunch in the staff cafeteria (the bank has a separate dining room for managers, and yet a third one for the president); he has given out his personal e-address in get-to-know-you staff meetings and stressed his respect for the World Bank`s professionalism. To allay fears that he`s hung up on democratizing the Middle East, he`s planned an early trip to Africa. In meetings he`s spent more time listening than talking -- a contrast with the messianic style of the outgoing Wolfensohn.

But Wolfowitz faces problems that go deeper than the bank`s culture. The whole development business is befuddled by the unknowability of answers to some fundamental questions. What, beyond obvious things such as macroeconomic sanity and a focus on exports, is the key ingredient of poverty-reducing growth? A new World Bank report on lessons from the 1990s wrestles with this question and concludes that generalized answers are elusive. Some countries have implemented just about all the standard prescriptions of the "Washington consensus" and yet failed to grow; others have nibbled selectively from that menu and yet have grown dramatically. Unlike, say, 15 years ago, the bank`s economists have few easy certainties to offer. The keys to growth are difficult to divine, because they vary from country to country.

Similarly, what to conclude from another recent report, this one from the bank`s independent evaluation unit? This study shows that health, education and other projects in a given country may all be rated "successful," yet poverty in that same country may show no sign of falling. One response to this finding is that the bank should stop kidding itself that a few model projects mean anything if a country isn`t headed the right way and that it should stop lending to governments that aren`t competent enough to lead a broad battle against poverty. But another plausible view is that well-designed projects impart valuable development lessons, sowing the seeds of growth that may take off when a better government materializes. This fight between a broad "country perspective" and a narrower project perspective has raged within the bank for 25 years. Resolving it is probably impossible.

So what is possible? Wolfowitz will have to accept it that clear measures of the World Bank`s effectiveness will remain elusive -- assessing its contribution to global poverty reduction is like assessing the contribution of McKinsey or Goldman Sachs to the overall productivity of the U.S. economy. But Wolfowitz should trust that the bank`s staff is, on average, better and more professional than the staff of most public-sector bodies and that his role is to create the space for these people to work effectively.

Too often, the bank`s professionals are distracted from the real business of helping poor countries by external annoyances -- rich countries that insist on second-guessing projects through the bank`s absurdly time-consuming board, activist groups that want to use the bank to advance single-issue campaigns against dams or oil or logging. If Wolfowitz can hold these critics at bay, the bank`s professionals will have the best shot possible at crafting wise development solutions -- project by project and country by country.

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The real Star Wars: Bush revives missile defence plan
The saga of America`s ambition to put weapons in space has been as protracted as George Lucas`s film franchise. Now George Bush has a new plan - at a stellar cost of $58bn. Rupert Cornwell reports
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

30 May 2005

At the Uptown theatre on Connecticut Avenue, the last great movie palace in Washington DC, there is hardly a spare seat in the house for showings of The Revenge of the Sith, the latest instalment of the fictional Star Wars. But as George Lucas`s epic draws to an end, in the real world, the so-called "star wars" is only getting going.

It started as a dream of Ronald Reagan, the Strategic Defence Initiative he presented to a disbelieving world on 23 March 1983, a Cold War vision of a space-based shield that might protect the US from an attack by Soviet long-range ballistic missiles. Critics nicknamed it star wars and said it could never work. A decade later, with the Soviet Union consigned to history, Bill Clinton attempted to do the same to SDI.

Within the next few weeks, however, George Bush, a champion of missile defence from the start of his presidency, is expected to sign a national security directive moving the US a big step closer to putting weapons in space. Not so, insists the Air Force Space Command, the prime mover behind the initiative. The goal, a spokeswoman insists, is "free access in space, not weapons in space". But the evidence suggests otherwise.

In the early 1990s, the Clinton administration cancelled every Pentagon programme that smacked of an offensive use of space. And in its anxiety to preserve the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, the historic cornerstone of arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, and later Russia, it also put SDI on the slowest of back-burners.

Today, however, the ABM treaty has gone, 11 September has turned national security into a paranoia, while North Korea is reportedly close to developing a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to hit Alaska. The largely pacifist Clinton policy of 1996 is about to be replaced by a far more forceful doctrine, designed to prevent what Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, once called "a space Pearl Harbour".

Space is already put to military use - and not only by the US - with satellites that gather data, speed communications, and conduct electronic eavesdropping. But these are not weapons in the accepted sense of the word; their purpose, it can be argued, is defensive and non-violent. Whether they are realistic or pure Strangelovian fantasy, the ideas now being kicked around by the Pentagon are a different matter altogether.

Killer satellites, which the US has been developing and that would disrupt or destroy in space an enemy`s satellites are just the start. There is the CAV, the Common Aero Vehicle, a hypersonic craft launched in mid-air and swooping from space to hit targets up to 3,000 miles away with conventional weapons.

Another mooted weapon is the Hyper-Velocity Rod Bundle, nick-named "rods from God," consisting of tungsten bars weighing 100kg or more, deployed from a permanently orbiting platform and able to hit terrestrial targets, including buried targets, at 120 miles a minute, 7,200 mph, with the force of a small nuclear weapon.

A third weapon under study is a space-based laser, code-named Eagle, that employs space-based relay mirrors to direct the rays against ground targets. A fourth programme would use intense radio waves aimed from space to disable enemy communications systems. Welcome to the age of the so called "death star". Not quite George Lucas, but near enough.

Yesterday`s New York Times reported the Bush administration is also working on plans for American civilian planes to shoot down missiles that threaten them. The paper said that technicians were adapting three Boeing 767s with a device that would find and disable shoulder-fired missiles.

The best guess is that the Pentagon has already spent $22bn (£13bn) on space weapons research - although no one can be sure since much of it is financed out of a classified black budget. Some specific programmes are said to have been cancelled. Equally likely, they may merely have been renamed.

A more pertinent question is why all the focus on space weapons, given the meagre results of two decades of work on missile defence. Since 1983, the US has spent $92bn, and over the next six years plans to invest $58bn more, to develop a downscaled version of the space shield which was envisioned by Ronald Reagan.

But there is no guarantee even this will work. The first eight interceptor missiles have been installed at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Hopes of declaring the system operational by the end of 2004 were dashed by failed launches in December and February.

Canada, meanwhile, has infuriated Washington by saying "thanks but no-thanks" to a US offer to participate. Analysts say the ultimate cost is certain to exceed $150bn.

But since 11 September, the US has been on a military spending binge. Just last week, Congress approved overall Pentagon spending, including on Iraq, of $491bn for fiscal 2006 - more than the combined defence budgets of the 15 next largest military powers. But in the open ended "war on terror", nothing is ever enough.

Far from souring the administration on missile defence, the earthly problems in Alaska and California have propelled US planners to switch their focus to space, even though an effective space-based system could cost up to $1,000bn - at a time when US counter-terrorism officials admit that the real threat is not a nuclear attack from the heavens, with missiles fired by a rogue state, but by a device brought into the country in a suitcase or cargo container.

In its space capability, as in every military field, the US is far ahead of any competitor. But as General Lance Lord, the head of Space Command, warned in September 2004, the US could be challenged by ground-based lasers, micro- satellites or disruption. "You don`t need a peer competitor to compete in space. We may not have seen anybody today, maybe not tomorrow, but perhaps the day after that. I don`t want it to be like 1957, when this nation woke up after sputnik was launched and said, "Oh my goodness, we`re behind."

Such is today`s neurosis. The mind set is the linear successor of the imagined but non-existent missile gap with the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

It is also an expression of the Bush doctrine justifying pre-emptive (or rather, preventive) wars, to stop a rival from threatening the United States or challenging it in military might. "We must establish and maintain space superiority," General Lord told Congress this year. "Simply put, it`s the American way of fighting." And, critics say, it is the American way of making much of the rest of the world resent, dislike, and fear it.

They compare US behaviour over space to its approach to the spread of nuclear weapons - and point to the latest review conference of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to illustrate the diplomatic consequences. The 180-country gathering in New York earlier this month failed, not least because of perceived US hypocrisy. Do as we say, not as we do, was the message from Washington as it excoriated Iran over its suspected nuclear ambitions, while refusing to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty, and openly examining a new type of weapon , the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, (RNEP) to attack underground targets.

A go-ahead by Mr Bush for space weapons would be interpreted in exactly the same way. Yet Washington seems oblivious, or uncaring of the consequences.

As with the RNEP (which, experts say, would have to be a massively contaminating weapon to be effective) the military gains of bringing arms to space are small and the diplomatic downside huge. US officials say the new weapons could hit anywhere on earth in 90 minutes. Had the US been in a position to launch a weapon from space, they argue, instead of a cruise missile from a distant ship, the August 1998 strike against Osama bin Laden might have been a direct hit instead of a near miss.

But that ignores the cost, the military risks and the damage to international relations. Richard Garwin, a top US electronic weapons scientist, has estimated that a laser strike from space would cost $100m per target, compared with $600,000 for a Tomahawk cruise missile.

Theresa Hitchens, the vice-president of the Centre for Defence Information, warns that a space arms race could increase the risk of war - what if an American satellite breaks down, the Chinese are wrongly held responsible, and one of their satellites is destroyed in retaliation? And why the rush, she argues, given that the status quo overwhelmingly favours America. Just possibly, General Lord may be right: one distant day, space superiority may be the only thing standing between the US and Armageddon.

Right now, however, it controls 95 per cent of the world`s military satellites and accounts for two-thirds of the commercial space industry.

And more fundamentally still, nobody owns space, not even the US, for all its current dominance of the technology. The only international treaty in the field is a 1967 agreement, ratified by 91 countries, that bans the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in outer space.

So why not celebrate the 22nd anniversary of the Reagan dream and draw up a new treaty banning all weapons from space, making sure that the fictional star wars can never come true? As the fate of the ABM treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto agreement, the nuclear test ban treaty make clear, Washington hasn`t got much time for treaties right now.

But things change fast. The US might have no rival now, but a major offensive foray into space sooner or later would almost certainly draw Russia, India or a fast-developing China into a space arms race. "No other nation on earth is going to accept the US developing something they see as the death star," Ms Hitchens says. "It`s not going to happen. People are going to find ways to target it, and it going to create a huge problem."


30 April 2005 12:49


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Der Artikel ist keine US-Propaganda!

Chávez leads the way

In using oil wealth to help the poor, Venezuela`s leader is an example to Latin America
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1495260,00.ht…
Richard Gott in Caracas
Monday May 30, 2005

Guardian
A muddy path leads off the airport motorway into one of the small impoverished villages that perch on the hills above Caracas, a permanent reminder of the immense gulf between rich and poor that characterises oil-rich Venezuela. Only 20 minutes from the heart of the capital city a tiny community of 500 families lives in makeshift dwellings with tin roofs and rough breeze-block walls. They have water and electricity and television, but not much else. The old school buildings have collapsed into ruin, and no children have received lessons over the past two years.

Two Cuban doctors are established in a temporary surgery here on the main track. They point out that preventative medicine is difficult to practise in a zone where the old clay sewer pipes are cracked and useless, leaving the effluent to flow unchecked down the hillside. The older inhabitants have been here for years; they first came from the country to take root on these steep hillsides in the 1960s. Many are morose and despairing, unable to imagine that their lives could ever change.

Others are more motivated and upbeat, and have enrolled in the ranks of the Bolivarian revolution of President Hugo Chávez. They expect great things from this government, and are mobilised to demand that official attention be focused on their village. If their petition to the mayor to repair their school and sewer pipes does not get answered soon, they will descend from their mountain eyrie to block the motorway, as they once did before during the attempted coup d`état of April 2002.

Hundreds of similar shanty towns surround Caracas, and many have already begun to turn the corner. In some places, the doctors brought in from Cuba are working in newly built premises, providing eye treatment and dentistry as well as medicines. Nearly 20,000 doctors are now spread around this country of 25 million people. New supermarkets have sprung up where food, much of it home-produced, is available at subsidised prices. Classrooms have been built where school dropouts are corralled back into study. Yet it is good to start with the difficulties faced by the motorway village, since its plight serves to emphasise how long and difficult is the road ahead. "Making poverty history" in Venezuela is not a simple matter of making money available; it involves a revolutionary process of destroying ancient institutions that stand in the way of progress, and creating new ones responsive to popular demands.

Something amazing has been taking place in Latin America in recent years that deserves wider attention than the continent has been accustomed to attract. The chrysalis of the Venezuelan revolution led by Chávez, often attacked and derided as the incoherent vision of an authoritarian leader, has finally emerged as a resplendent butterfly whose image and example will radiate for decades to come.

Most of the reports about this revolution over the past six years, at home and abroad, have been uniquely hostile, heavily influenced by politicians and journalists associated with the opposition. It is as if news of the French or the Russian revolutions had been supplied solely by the courtiers of the king and the tsar. These criticisms have been echoed by senior US figures, from the president downwards, creating a negative framework within which the revolution has inevitably been viewed. At best, Chávez is seen as outdated and populist. At worst, he is considered a military dictator in the making.

Yet the wheel of history rolls on, and the atmosphere in Venezuela has changed dramatically since last year when Chávez won yet another overwhelming victory at the polls. The once triumphalist opposition has retired bruised to its tent, wounded perhaps mortally by the outcome of the referendum on Chávez`s presidency that it called for and then resoundingly lost. The viciously hostile media has calmed down, and those who don`t like Chávez have abandoned their hopes of his immediate overthrow. No one is any doubt that he will win next year`s presidential election.

The Chávez government, for its part, has forged ahead with various spectacular social projects, assisted by the huge jump in oil prices, from $10 to $50 a barrel over the past six years. Instead of gushing into the coffers of the already wealthy, the oil pipelines have been picked up and directed into the shanty towns, funding health, education and cheap food. Foreign leaders from Spain and Brazil, Chile and Cuba, have come on pilgrimage to Caracas to establish links with the man now perceived as the leader of new emerging forces in Latin America, with popularity ratings to match. This extensive external support has stymied the plans of the US government to rally the countries of Latin America against Venezuela. They are not listening, and Washington is left without a policy.

Chávez himself, a youthful former army colonel of 51, is now perceived in Latin America as the most unusual and original political figure to have emerged since Fidel Castro broke on to the scene nearly 50 years ago. With huge charm and charisma, he has an infinite capacity to relate to the poor and marginal population of the continent. A largely self-educated intellectual, the ideology of his Bolivarian revolution is based on the writings and actions of a handful of exemplary figures from the 19th century, most notably Simón Bolívar, the man who liberated most of South America from Spanish rule. Chávez offers a cultural as well as a political alternative to the prevailing US-inspired model that dominates Latin America.

So, what does his Bolivarian revolution consist of? He is friendly with Castro - indeed, they are close allies - yet he is no out-of-fashion state socialist. Capitalism is alive and well in Venezuela - and secure. There have been no illegal land seizures, no nationalisations of private companies. Chávez seeks to curb the excesses of what he terms "savage neo-liberalism", and he wants the state to play an intelligent and enabling role in the economy, but he has no desire to crush small businesses, as has happened in Cuba. International oil companies have fallen over themselves to provide fresh investment, even after the government increased the royalties that they have to pay. Venezuela remains a golden goose that cannot be ignored.

What is undoubtedly old fashioned about Chávez is his ability to talk about race and class, subjects once fashionable that have long been taboo, and to discuss them in the context of poverty. In much of Latin America, particularly in the countries of the Andes, the long-suppressed native peoples have begun to organise and make political demands for the first time since the 18th century, and Chávez is the first president in the continent to have picked up their banner and made it his own.

For the past six years the government has moved ahead at a glacial rate, balked at every turn by the opposition forces ranged against it. Now, as the revolution gathers speed, attention will be directed towards dissension and arguments within the government`s ranks, and to the ever-present question of delivery. In the absence of powerful state institutions, with the collapse of the old political parties and the survival of a weak, incompetent and unmotivated bureaucracy, Chávez has mobilised the military from which he springs to provide the backbone to his revolutionary reorganisation of the country. Its success in bringing adequate services to the shanty towns in town and country will depend upon the survival of his government. If it fails, the people will come out to block the motorway and demand something different, and yet more radical.

· Richard Gott`s book Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution will be published by Verso in June

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World watch
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1495254,00.ht…

Ian Black
Monday May 30, 2005

Guardian
If people happen to have been discussing constitutions anywhere in the world recently, it`s a fair bet they were talking about the EU, not Iraq. Yet what is happening in Baghdad probably matters much more than any knife-edge referendums in Paris or The Hague.

Iraqis, facing an insurgency that has killed 600 people this month, have to do what the French, Dutch and other Europeans - looking beyond the nation state to something new - no longer have to worry about: build a working democracy from scratch now that the Ba`athist system of Arab socialism, freedom and unity has gone the way of all tyrannies.

It really doesn`t matter what you think of George Bush, Tony Blair, or their case for war. This - along with an awful lot of other things - has to be done if the occupation is to end and the country is to come out of it in reasonable shape.

But US neocons willing a new Middle East to emerge from the rubble make it sound far too easy, fantasising about a Philadelphia-on-the-Tigris, where the founding fathers of free Iraq will be moved by the vision of 1787 to overcome their differences and strike grand bargains as they look, misty-eyed, to some shining city on a hill.

Words like "democratic", "pluralistic" and "inclusive", bandied about by an anxious Condoleezza Rice, ring hollow behind the heavily guarded walls of the Green Zone in Baghdad while mass unemployment, power shortages, sectarian incitement and suicide bombings continue outside.

Momentum was lost after the January 30 elections in haggling over a government dominated by Shia Muslims and Kurds, and it will be hard to meet the August 15 deadline for completing the constitution. Opting for a six-month delay is possible, but more uncertainty might help keep violence going.

Process is vital, since writing a constitution is the only non-violent opportunity to build a workable compromise. Last week, a 55-strong parliamentary drafting committee was expanded, at US urging, to become a 101-member commission. It will permit greater representation for the Sunni minority, which lost most with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, largely boycotted the elections and forms the backbone of the insurgency.

But since the Sunnis still cannot be represented beyond their roughly 17% proportion of the population, the trick will be finding other ways to draw them in and compensate them for their loss of power as members of the Ba`ath party, military and security apparatuses.

Other people`s experience may help, and there are great hopes of the UN`s man, the highly regarded South African lawyer Fink Haysom. Haysom, an adviser to Nelson Mandela, is an expert on constitutional reform, conflict resolution and good governance. Iraq needs all those - and more. Civic education and public participation will be important too.

Yet the exercise is so fraught that it could end up undermining the current system and its de facto understandings about Kurdish independence and relations between Islam and the state. Sheikh Hummam Hammoudi, the Shia cleric chairing the drafting body, wants Islam to be "the principal source for all legislation". And his committee has rejected the idea that the transitional administrative law (TAL), the interim constitution, can serve as the basis for the new one because it is an American document.

Under the TAL, if two-thirds of voters in three or more of the country`s 18 provinces reject the draft, parliament must be dissolved and new elections held - meaning angry Sunnis have an automatic veto if they are not satisfied.

The constitution is the centrepiece of the US and British exit strategy, so the stakes could hardly be higher. But it is, sadly, not a subject where the Iraqis can expect much useful advice from Europeans - though perhaps Valéry Giscard d`Estaing, author of the troubled EU document, might lend a hand.

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Monday, May 30, 2005
War News for Monday, May 30, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: British soldier killed by IED and four injured in al-Amarah.

Bring `em on: Twenty five sacked ex commandos queuing for back pay killed and one hundred injured in twin suicide bomb attack in Hilla.

Bring `em on: Iraqi police general critically injured after attempted assassination in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Leader of largest Sunni political party, considered a moderate, arrested along with his three sons and four guards in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi police sergeants working for the Iraqi Cabinet gunned down in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Fifty insurgents launched a sustained attack on Sunday on the detention center run by the Interior Ministry`s major crimes unit in Amariya, according to an unconfirmed account by an Amariya resident who was reached by telephone, insurgent bands roaming the district after the battle claimed to have captured weapons from the detention center`s armory.

Bring `em on: Five suicide bombs in six hours kill twenty members of Iraqi security forces in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Oil infrastructure attacked on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Bring `em on: South Korean base comes under fire in Irbil.

War Crimes: It emerged yesterday that up to 11 members of the Queen`s Lancashire Regiment could be charged under war crimes legislation enacted in 2001 after the establishment of the international criminal court. The soldiers would face trial in the UK under the ICC act.

Averting Civil War: Iraq`s religious leaders are intensifying efforts to heal the rifts between the country`s Sunnis and Shias amid a spate of sectarian killings that has raised fears of civil war. A weekend meeting between senior figures from the Sunni Association of Muslim Clerics and the Shia Badr Brigades - the militia of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the biggest Shia party - sought to ease tensions caused by the killing of at least 14 Sunni clerics in the past month.

Doctors Leaving: In the past year, about 10 percent of Baghdad`s total force of 32,000 registered doctors, both Sunnis and Shiites, have been driven from their jobs, according to the Iraqi Medical Association, which licenses practitioners. The exodus has accelerated in recent months, said Akif Khalil al-Alousi, a pathologist at Kindi Teaching Hospital and a senior member of the association. The vast majority of those fleeing, he said, are the most senior doctors.

The Interior Ministry has already responded to the threats: It simplified gun license procedures for doctors. They can get licensed weapons faster than other Iraqis.

Dr. Omar al-Kubaisy, one of the doctors who stopped going to work at the cardiac hospital after he was threatened, kept going to work at his own clinic, watched over by his 23-year-old son Ali, who stood guard with a large and always visible semi-automatic gun. But last week, Kubaisy, one of Iraq`s top cardiologists, left for France.

Emergencies are nonstop. Civilian deaths have jumped five-fold since the new government took power late last month. One physician estimated that about 250 Iraqi doctors had been kidnapped over the past two years. The simple quest for money which fuels the country`s serious, widespread kidnapping industry appears to be the biggest motivation.

Opinion and Commentary

Operation Lightning: Is Iraq another Honduras?

In the interview above Carafano states that there`s little chance that this will round up real terrorists, because they were given plenty of notice and have probably already taken off for part or parts unknown. So what is the real purpose of Operation Lightning? Perhaps it is a continuation of a tactic used by John Negroponte in Honduras, i.e., use "elite" militias within the larger indigenous force to terrorize the locals and round up, imprison, interrogate and maybe "disappear" alleged bad guys without a search warrant approved by a judge or the benefits of a lawyer to argue the case.

Ah, but who cares? It`s not as if the other guys bleed or feel anything but hate, right?

For all intents and purposes, due to the bungling at the beginning of the occupation, every Iraqi has become the "enemy" and young Americans, who went to Iraq believing that they were the good guys fighting the people who attacked us on 9-11, find themselves in an intolerable situation. They now know that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. There were no WMDs. The Iraqi Army turned out to be a ragtag paper tiger. And the "enemy" fights the same kind of war we would fight if someone invaded our country. (I refer you to the movies "Red Dawn" and "V".) Recent studies show that 15-17% of returnees need psychiatric help for a variety of post-traumatic stress disorders.


Operation Lightening: Starting a Civil War?

If this Baghdad offensive is launched, it will result in an escalation of U.S. war crimes and outrage against the U.S. and the new Iraqi "government."

Obviously, the Americans are unwilling to take the casualties of house-to-house searches. That job falls to the Iraqi troops who are being set against their own people.

If insurgents remain and fight, U.S. airpower will be used to pulverize the buildings, and "collateral damage" will be high.

If insurgents leave and cause mayhem elsewhere, large numbers of innocent Iraqis will be detained as suspected insurgents. After all, you can`t conduct such a large operation without results.

As most households have guns, which are required for protection as there is no law and order, "males of military age" will be detained from these armed households as suspected insurgents.

The detentions of thousands more Iraqis will result in more torture and abuses. Consequently, the ranks of the active insurgency will grow.

Neocon court historians of empire, such as Niall Ferguson, claim that the U.S. cannot withdraw from Iraq because the result would be a civil war and bloodbath. However, a bloodbath is what has been going on since the ill-fated "cakewalk" invasion. Moreover, the planned Baghdad offensive is itself the beginning of a civil war. The 50,000 troops represent a Shi`ite government. These troops will be hunting Sunnis. There is no better way to start a civil war.

As George W. Bush has made clear many times, he is incapable of admitting a mistake. The inability to admit a mistake makes rational behavior impossible. In place of thought, the Bush administration relies on coercion and violence. Nevertheless, Congress does not have to be a doormat for a war criminal. It can put a halt to Bush`s madness.

The solution is not to reduce Iraq to rubble. The U.S. can end the bloodshed by exiting Iraq. A solution is for Iraq to organize as a republic of three largely autonomous states or provinces - Shi`ite, Sunni, and Kurd - along the lines of the original American republic. The politicians within each province will be too busy fighting one another for power to become militarily involved with those in other provinces.

Baghdad Matters:

If people happen to have been discussing constitutions anywhere in the world recently, it`s a fair bet they were talking about the EU, not Iraq. Yet what is happening in Baghdad probably matters much more than any knife-edge referendums in Paris or The Hague.
Iraqis, facing an insurgency that has killed 600 people this month, have to do what the French, Dutch and other Europeans - looking beyond the nation state to something new - no longer have to worry about: build a working democracy from scratch now that the Ba`athist system of Arab socialism, freedom and unity has gone the way of all tyrannies.

It really doesn`t matter what you think of George Bush, Tony Blair, or their case for war. This - along with an awful lot of other things - has to be done if the occupation is to end and the country is to come out of it in reasonable shape.

But US neocons willing a new Middle East to emerge from the rubble make it sound far too easy, fantasising about a Philadelphia-on-the-Tigris, where the founding fathers of free Iraq will be moved by the vision of 1787 to overcome their differences and strike grand bargains as they look, misty-eyed, to some shining city on a hill.

Words like "democratic", "pluralistic" and "inclusive", bandied about by an anxious Condoleezza Rice, ring hollow behind the heavily guarded walls of the Green Zone in Baghdad while mass unemployment, power shortages, sectarian incitement and suicide bombings continue outside.

Momentum was lost after the January 30 elections in haggling over a government dominated by Shia Muslims and Kurds, and it will be hard to meet the August 15 deadline for completing the constitution. Opting for a six-month delay is possible, but more uncertainty might help keep violence going.

Process is vital, since writing a constitution is the only non-violent opportunity to build a workable compromise. Last week, a 55-strong parliamentary drafting committee was expanded, at US urging, to become a 101-member commission. It will permit greater representation for the Sunni minority, which lost most with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, largely boycotted the elections and forms the backbone of the insurgency.


And the Winner is?

Iran!

That`s at least one surprising answer to the question of who is coming out on top in the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Everything has gone very well for the Iranians," says Juan Cole, a professor specializing in Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan, a view echoed by many others who study the region.

"They had two major geopolitical enemies on the region. One was the Taliban and the other was Saddam Hussein," Cole says. "So from their point of view, the United States has very helpfully removed their major problems.

"And not only has it removed those major problems, it has installed regimes that have strong traditional alliances with the Iranians," he says.

It can certainly be assumed that it was not the intention of the Bush administration when it embarked on these military adventures to aid a member of the so-called "axis of evil." Bush put Iran on that axis, along with Saddam Hussein`s Iraq and North Korea.

But that`s the way it has worked out.

"It`s a very odd outcome," says Shibley Telhami, professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park. "I don`t think the administration ever thought we would be where we are today."

Where we are is not only were Iran`s enemies vanquished by the U.S.-led forces, but the government now in power in Baghdad has longstanding ties to Iran, turning those former enemies into potentially strong allies.

"Iraq was the major competitor with Iran in the Persian Gulf," Telhami says. "The intentional strategy of the United States for decades was to maintain that balance of power, not to allow one of them to dominate, to use one against the other.

"What you have now is Iraq really disappearing as a strategic player in the gulf for the foreseeable future," he says. "It will not be able to threaten anyone militarily. And that leaves Iran as the sole power in the gulf, except for the American military presence."


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THE NATION
Top General Rebuts Abuse Claims
Myers defends handling of foreign detainees, calling Guantanamo Bay a model facility.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-gitm…

By Mary Curtius
Times Staff Writer

May 30, 2005

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday strongly defended the military`s treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, calling the prison, which has been harshly criticized by human rights organizations and others, a "model facility."

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers rejected criticism leveled last week by Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, in its annual report on abuses across the globe.

Amnesty called Guantanamo`s prison camp "the gulag of our time" and urged the Bush administration to shut down the facility, which was opened after the Sept. 11attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Since those attacks, the U.S. has taken 68,000 suspects into custody, Myers said, and has held them in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. He said the military had investigated 325 cases of alleged abuse and found 100 of them to have merit.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," the general said 100 "individuals" had been court-martialed or had administrative action taken against them as a result of abuse allegations.

Myers called Amnesty`s likening of U.S. treatment of Guantanamo prisoners to the former Soviet government`s abuse of inmates in the gulag "absolutely irresponsible."

The general said the military spent $2.5 million annually to ensure that the meals served to Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo were "proper, Muslim-approved food." He also said the military had distributed 1,300 copies of the Koran, Islam`s holy book, in 13 languages to detainees.

Myers repeated the Pentagon`s assertion that an ongoing military investigation had found five cases in which "perhaps the Koran was handled in an inappropriate way" by prison guards or interrogators at Guantanamo. Military investigators reported Thursday that they had found "no credible evidence" to support a detainee`s claim that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the prison.



Noting that the International Committee of the Red Cross "has been at Guantanamo since Day 1," Myers insisted that "it is a model facility."

The ICRC, however, has in the past also criticized conditions at the prison at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where the United States is detaining about 540 prisoners from 40 nations who are suspected of involvement in terrorism. Some prisoners have been held for as many as three years without legal representation.

Myers said that rather than focus on occasional instances of abuse, "the question that needs to be debated" is "how do you handle people who aren`t part of a nation-state effort, that are picked up on the battlefield, that if you release them or let them go back to their home countries they would run right around and try to slit our throats, our children`s throats?"

The war on terrorism is "a different kind of struggle, a different kind of war," Myers said. "We struggle with how to handle [prisoners]. But we`ve always handled them humanely and with the dignity that they should be accorded."

In another interview Sunday, on CBS` "Face the Nation," Myers rejected criticism by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who said that 100 prisoners had died in U.S. custody since the start of the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.

"This is not systemic," Myers said. "It is not the policy of this government, obviously. None of us would sign up with that. We want to treat people humanely."

Myers said some of those who had perished in custody "died from natural causes. Some have died because of maltreatment." He said each case that was brought up was investigated.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said Sunday that he had asked the administration whether the uniform rules for treatment of prisoners of war, recently adopted by the Defense Department, applied to all agencies of government — including intelligence services.

"I didn`t get an answer yet," McCain said on CNN`s "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer."

McCain said the question of detainee treatment was damaging U.S. credibility abroad.

"Those of us who have traveled in the region cannot overstate the impact that Abu Ghraib and other things that have happened have damaged the image of the United States of America in the Middle East," he said, referring to the prison abuse scandal that erupted last year when photographs showing Iraqis being mistreated at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad were released.

McCain said that he and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) were interested in holding hearings on how the U.S. handled prisoners.

"I think Congress has a responsibility in a mature fashion to … make sure that we`re exercising our proper oversight responsibilities," McCain said.



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Sunday, May 29, 2005

Shia Leaders...
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
In Baghdad there`s talk of the latest "Operation Lightning". It hasn`t yet been implemented in our area but we`ve been hearing about it. So far all we`ve seen are a few additional checkpoints and a disappearing mobile network. Baghdad is actually split into two large regions- Karkh (west Baghdad) and Rasafa (east Baghdad) with the Tigris River separating them. Karkh, according to this plan, is going to be split into 15 smaller areas or sub-districts and Rasafa into 7 sub-districts. There are also going to be 675 checkpoints and all of the entrances to Baghdad are going to be guarded.

We are a little puzzled why Karkh should be split into 15 sub-districts and Rasafa only seven. Karkh is actually smaller in area than Rasafa and less populated. On the other hand, Karkh contains the Green Zone- so that could be a reason. People are also anxious about the 675 check points. It`s difficult enough right now getting around Baghdad, more check points are going to make things trickier. The plan includes 40,000 Iraqi security forces and that is making people a little bit uneasy. Iraqi National Guard are not pleasant or upstanding citizens- to have thousands of them scattered about Baghdad stopping cars and possibly harassing civilians is worrying. We`re also very worried about the possibility of raids on homes.

Someone (thank you N.C.) emailed me Thomas L. Friedman`s article in the New York Times 10 days ago about Quran desecration titled "Outrage and Silence".

In the article he talks about how people in the Muslim world went out and demonstrated against Quran desecration but are silent about the deaths of hundreds of Iraqis in the last few weeks due to bombings and suicide attacks.

In one paragraph he says,

"Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia."

First of all- it`s not only Kurds or Shia who are dying due to car bombs. When a car detonates in the middle of a soug or near a mosque, it does not seek out only Shia or Kurdish people amongst the multitude. Bombs do not discriminate between the young and the old, male and female or ethnicities and religious sects- no matter what your government tells you about how smart they are. Furthermore, they are going off everywhere-… not just in Shia or Kurdish provinces. They seem to be everywhere lately.

One thing I found particularly amusing about the article- and outrageous all at once-was in the following paragraph:

"Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite`s being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor`s being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and they are indifferent to their brutalization."

Now, it is always amusing to see a Jewish American journalist speak in the name of Sunni Arabs. When Sunni Arabs, at this point, hesitate to speak in a representative way about other Sunni Arabs, it is nice to know Thomas L. Friedman feels he can sum up the feelings of the "Sunni Arab world" in so many words. His arrogance is exceptional.

It is outrageous because for many people, this isn`t about Sunnis and Shia or Arabs and Kurds. It`s about an occupation and about people feeling that they do not have real representation. We have a government that needs to hide behind kilometers of barbed wire and meters and meters of concrete- and it`s not because they are Shia or Kurdish or Sunni Arab- it`s because they blatantly supported, and continue to support, an occupation that has led to death and chaos.

The paragraph is contemptible because the idea of a "Shia leader" is not an utterly foreign one to Iraqis or other Arabs, no matter how novel Friedman tries to make it seem. How dare he compare it to having a black governor in Alabama in the 1920s? In 1958, after the July 14 Revolution which ended the Iraqi monarchy, the head of the Iraqi Sovereignty Council (which was equivalent to the position of president) was Mohammed Najib Al-Rubayi- a Shia from Kut. From 1958 - 1963, Abdul Karim Qassim, a Shia also from Kut in the south, was the Prime Minister of Iraq (i.e. the same position Jaffari is filling now). After Abdul Karim Qassim, in 1963, came yet another Shia by the name of Naji Talib as prime minster. Even during the last regime, there were two Shia prime ministers filling the position for several years- Sadoun Humadi and Mohammed Al-Zubaidi.

In other words, Sunni Arabs are not horrified at having a Shia leader (though we are very worried about the current Puppets` pro-Iran tendencies). Friedman seems to conveniently forget that while the New Iraq`s president was a polygamous Arab Sunni- Ghazi Al-Yawir- the attacks were just as violent. Were it simply a matter of Sunnis vs. Shia or Arabs vs. Kurds, then Sunni Arabs would have turned out in droves to elect "Al Baqara al dhahika" ("the cow that laughs" or La Vache Qui Rit- it`s an Iraqi joke) as Al-Yawir is known amongst Iraqis.

This sentence,

"Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and they are indifferent to their brutalization."

...Is just stupid. Friedman is referring to Sunni extremists without actually saying that. But he doesn`t add that some Shia extremists also feel the same way about Sunnis. I`m sure in the "Christian World" there are certain Catholics who feel that way about Protestants, etc. Iraqis have intermarried and mixed as Sunnis and Shia for centuries. Many of the larger Iraqi tribes are a complex and intricate weave of Sunnis and Shia. We donÂ’t sit around pointing fingers at each other and trying to prove who is a Muslim and who isn`t and who deserves compassion and who deserves brutalization.

Friedman says,

"If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and if credible Sunnis are given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop"

The Arab world`s spiritual and media leaders have their hands tied right now. Friedman better hope Islamic spiritual leaders don`t get involved in this mess because the first thing they`d have to do is remind the Islamic world that according to the Quran, the Islamic world may not be under the guardianship or command of non-Muslims- and that wouldn`t reflect nicely on an American occupation of Iraq.

Friedman wonders why thousands upon thousands protested against the desecration of the Quran and why they do not demonstrate against terrorism in Iraq. The civilian bombings in Iraq are being done by certain extremists, fanatics or militias. What happened in Guantanamo with the Quran and what happens in places like Abu Ghraib is being done systematically by an army- an army that is fighting a war- a war being funded by the American people. That is what makes it outrageous to the Muslim world.

In other words, what happens in Iraq is terrorism, while what happens to Iraqis and Afghanis and people of other nationalities under American or British custody is simply "counter-insurgency" and "policy". It makes me naseous to think of how outraged the whole world was when those American POW were shown on Iraqi television at the beginning of the war- clean, safe and respectfully spoken to. Even we were upset with the incident and wondered why they had to be paraded in front of the world like that. We actually had the decency to feel sorry for them.

Friedman focuses on the Sunni Arab world in his article but he fails to mention that the biggest demonstrations were not in the Arab world- they happened in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan. He also fails to mention that in Iraq, the largest demonstration against the desecration of the Quran was actually organized, and attended by, Shia.

Luckily for Iraqis, and in spite of Thomas Friedman, the majority of Sunnis and Shia just want to live in peace as Muslims- not as Sunnis and Shia.

- posted by river @ 3:43 PM

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Do The People Of Iraq Have A Right To Resist U.S. Occupation?
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article8968.htm

Jack Smith

05/29/05 - - Do the people of Iraq have the right to defend themselves against violent foreign invasion and occupation by any means at their disposal against an aggressive and rapacious enemy enjoying overwhelming military superiority?

This is a right Americans unquestionably would invoke were their country invaded and occupied by a foreign power. They would take whatever measures were necessary to defeat the enemy and force it to withdraw.

The United States government supports this position and recognizes its validity in relation to all other nations invaded by foreign aggressors--except when it is Washington that initiates or supports the invasion of another sovereign state. By White House whim, the subject state loses its right to self-defense.

In Iraq, for example, President George W. Bush, who launched the unjust and unlawful invasion over two years ago, is appalled by the suggestion that the Iraqis have a right to fight back. The entire opinion-forming mass media echoes this arrogant perspective. Bush defines resistance to U.S. aggression in Iraq as an act of "terrorism," and not a legitimate struggle to reclaim national sovereignty from the brutal occupation.

Bush declares that the 140,000 American occupation troops must remain to "defend Iraqi democracy" against the resistance. Aside from the obvious fact that the Quisling government of a subjugated country under foreign military control cannot qualify as a democracy, Bush disregards the fact that the raison d¹être of the resistance is predicated on the presence of occupation forces he refuses to withdraw.

The American antiwar movement is disunited on the important question of whether or not to support the right of the Iraqi people to resist U.S. aggression as best they can, including by force of arms. No group that supports the resistance puts this view forward as a basis for working with other peace groups. It is as a statement of political principle, not a unity demand.

Within the broad political spectrum of the peace movement, many local and national peace groups either oppose supporting Iraqi¹s right to resist the occupation or refuse to take a public position. Most of these groups entertain moderate or liberal agendas. A number of left groups, however, are certainly included.

One of the two principal peace coalitions in the United States, United for Peace and Justice, does not put forward the view that the Iraqi people have a right to resistance U.S. aggression or address the question at its rallies, according to its leadership, because some groups in UPJ "strongly oppose" that view.

The other national coalition, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), takes the following position, in response to our query May 27:

"We support the right of self-determination in the struggle against imperialist domination, and believe the Iraqi people have the right to resist occupation by any means chosen. The right to resist occupation is a concept enshrined in international law. . . . This is not a matter of political or ideological affinity. Nor is it an issue of the tactics of war --al of which are ugly. It boils down to this simple equation: On the one side are all the forces fighting a war against colonialism and occupation, and on the other side are the colonialists, neo-colonialists and their Iraqi agents. In that struggle we take an unambiguous position opposing the colonizers. To do otherwise would be to put entirely secondary issues --ideology, war tactics, etc. --at the forefront, while ignoring the core issue of colonialism in Iraq and elsewhere. Moreover, since we are a U.S. antiwar movement, and it is our country that has invaded Iraq, we are obligated to be crystal clear on this issue."

This writer is in agreement with that position, as was the case in the 1960s, well before ANSWER came along, when sectors of the antiwar movement vociferously objected to supporting the struggle, or at least supporting the right to struggle, of the National Liberation Front to free southern Vietnam from an even more treacherous American intervention.

We will discuss the various views circulating in the peace movement and on the left, but first let¹s examine the importance, composition, and methodologies of the Iraqi resistance.

It is crucial to understand that were it not for the Iraqi resistance, the U.S. would have won a swift victory in Iraq and quickly implemented the Bush administration¹s neoconservative plan to extend American hegemony throughout the entire Middle East under the guise of "promoting democracy." Had Iraq simply surrendered, this example of the Pentagon¹s invincibility would have demoralized the entire region. It certainly would have tempted the White House to barge into "rogue" Syria and Iran to replace their governments with regimes subordinate not only to Washington but to the requirements of corporate globalization and transnational capital, which, after all, is what ³democratization² is all about.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even had a simple formula for obtaining this objective. Conservative Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, who supports the notion that an explicit American empire would be good for the world, wrote in the New York Times May 24 that Rumsfeld was guided by a theoretical blueprint for conquest called the "10-30-30 timetable: 10 days should suffice to topple a rogue regime, 30 days to establish order in its wake, and 30 more days to prepare for the next military undertaking."

The resistance, thus, has erected two great obstacles in the path of President Bush¹s drive to control the vast petroleum reserves that have transformed barren deserts into the most strategically important region of the world today. First, the myth of invincibility has been shattered by a small irregular urban guerrilla force, Rumsfeld¹s plans for conquest have gone up in smoke, and the Bush administration has evidently curbed some of its more unsavory ambitions.

Second, the unexpected difficulties the resistance has created for Washington¹s occupation force, spplemented by the existence of a large U.S. antiwar movement ,have been the main reason why a majority of the American people feel that the Iraq war has not been worth the cost of U.S. lives and dollars. This sentiment may undermine Bush for the rest of his term in office unless the resistance is broken quickly, which is now the Bush administration¹s highest priority.

The nature of the fight back itself has been grossly distorted by the mass media at the behest of the White House. It is important in this regard to recognize three things: 1. The resistance is composed of political as well as armed elements. 2. The masses of Iraqis oppose the occupation and want U.S. troops to get out. 3. The resistance enjoys support from the people of Iraq, despite U.S. efforts to neutralize various constituencies through pressure, manipulation, grandiose promises, threats and bribery. How else could an armed urban guerrilla force function in heavily occupied territory without the support of the people?

The forces of resistance are diverse, decentralized and led by many different factions, including reactionary fundamentalists. There are no discernable left socialists or communists in the leadership, largely because the left has been suppressed for decades. Elements in the resistance range from patriotic secular nationalists to secular Ba¹athists, to Sunni and Shia religious fundamentalists, to pan-Islamic foreign jihadists, to tribal-based groups with militias and so on. This is partially a reflection of the religious and ethnic differences of an historic nature which the foreign invader has taken pains to exacerbate under the old colonial rule of divide and conquer.

Many of these groups use different tactics, armed or political, to weaken the enemy. Their activities are often not coordinated, and the actions of one are not necessarily the practices of another. But together they comprise an effective fighting opposition to Bush of Baghdad and his Iraqi minions seeking power in a government controlled by history¹s sixth (or is it seventh?) empire to call Mesopotamia its own caliphate < this time ruled from Christendom-on-Potomac.

The resistance war is largely being fought with small arms and homemade bombs. There are no countries who would dare supply more powerful weapons for fear of instant retaliation from the United States. Arrayed against these forces is an occupying power possessing the greatest arsenal of weapons, tanks, planes, communications equipment and surveillance devices in human history. Aside from street patrols, supply convoys, campaigns to round-up anti-U.S. suspects and occasional large-scale attacks, American forces are protected in military bases that are extremely difficult to penetrate. There are no hiding places for combatants, such as forests and mountains, forcing them to fight almost exclusively in heavily populated cities, towns and along certain highways.

These subjective and objective conditions determine the composition of the resistance and the means deployed to oust the invader. This is why the car bomb and suicide bombers are deployed in the towns and cities. They are the most powerful weapons the guerrillas have, and they can be transported in daylight. The targets are police stations, military checkpoints, passing U.S. patrols and officials who cooperate with the occupation authorities. The nature of car bombings in such tight quarters results in civilians casualties, but they are rarely if ever the primary target. Some of the attacks that seem directed only at civilians may well reflect sectarian religious provocations, not necessarily associated with the resistance.

Why do many antiwar groups and sectors of the left withhold support from the Iraqi resistance, or even the right to resistance? Clearly, this reluctance strengthens Bush¹s contention that the resistance is composed of nothing but unworthy terrorists intent upon crushing Iraq¹s nascent ³democracy,² the latest justification for keeping the army of occupation in Iraq indefinitely.

The pacifists are in a different situation than the rest of the movement on this question. They in principle oppose both defensive as well as offensive violence, and many would support nonviolent resistance to the American occupation, not that there appears to be any. At issue are those larger sectors of the movement which do not oppose violence in principal and who would utilize violence to ward off an attack on America or other countries, but who will not extend that right to Iraq, the very country their government is oppressing.

In our view, there are two reasons the liberal sector of the peace movement in particular tends to withhold support from the insurgency. First there is the political factor, as demonstrated in last year¹s presidential elections where the candidate virtually all liberals supported was committed to winning a victory in Iraq. John Kerry¹s pro-war stance continues to reverberate, manifesting itself in a variety of subtle ways.

Some antiwar friends have told me that they hesitate to call for immediate withdrawal "because we are in so deep it would cause chaos if we pulled out now." For others, who frequently proclaim they "support the troops," it`s must difficult to suggest the resistance has a right to kill those troops in defense of national sovereignty. Others are beset by the possibility that the Iraqi people might be better off today than under the previous regime which Bush deposed, despite the war, occupation, 100,000 deaths, deepening chaos and the prospect of civil war.

The second reason seems be a desire for respectability coupled with the fear that appearing to support the resistance will cause the right-wing to label individuals and the movement "unpatriotic" and "disloyal." These are serious charges, but today¹s dreadful political environment is not comparable to periods of repression in the past, such as when they were leveled in the red-hunting 1950s or a few years after World War I. In any event, the right-wing already claims the entire movement is composed of traitors, communists, flag burners, and Bush haters. That¹s just every day rightist rhetoric.

The political left is also divided on the question. Many left groups, peace organizations with an anti-imperialist perspective, socialists and those further to the left explicitly support the right of Iraq to engage in a guerrilla war to defeat aggression.

But some others on the left express various qualms, mostly about the composition and the tactics of some elements in the resistance. Several sources said they were uncomfortable because "there are Ba¹athist elements active in the struggle and we don¹t want to see the return of forces favorable to Saddam Hussein," as though the question of who will ultimately govern Iraq is for the American left to decide. Others hold back because "Sunni Wahabbists" are part of the diverse fight-back effort. And of course the supposed presence of al-Qaeda operatives, although very small in number, is another reason. Additional arguments are critical of guerrilla tactics.

Another sector of the left and antiwar movement is simply resorting to political expediency and perhaps a soupçon of opportunism, modifying its views in order to attract "mainstream" elements to its banner and if that means not backing the right to resistance (or for that matter, not calling for an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories), so be it. Others see the resistance as constituting an obstacle to the creation of an improbable progressive coalition of forces in Iraq who are essentially passive toward the occupation in order to contest for influence, or at least be invited to table where the powerful dine. Some are supporters of the course followed by the Iraqi Communist Party (which opposes the resistance, seeks a place at the aforementioned table, and is willing to work with the occupation).

In a recent conversation in New York following the 2005 Left Forum this writer was confronted by several people of social-democratic and left disposition (who strongly supported immediate withdrawal) after indicating that it was correct to back the right to resistance. "Do you support car-bombings that kill innocent civilians, too? I was asked by one. "Do you think it¹s okay that they behead and kidnap people?" said another. "Do you want the Ba¹athists to put in another Saddam?" queried a third. "Why not give the middle forces in Iraq a chance to work things out without the background noise of guerrilla war continually disrupting any chance of dialogue?" intoned a fourth. And lastly, "Doesn¹t your position lead to civil war?"

My reply, in effect, was a follows:

It is not up to the peace movement and the left in the United States to dictate the terms by which a subject people is allowed to manifest opposition to the violent invasion and occupation of their own country by our government. The Iraqi people, like all people throughout the world, are entitled to wage their struggle against foreign invaders by any means at their disposal.

Given that the Iraqi people suffered a dozen years of killer sanctions and frequent bombings by U.S. and British warplanes, followed by a "shock-and-awe" invasion and a recklessly repressive and racist occupation that has deprived many of them of reasonable living conditions, their means are quite limited. Their entire society is under intense surveillance and there is no freedom for its people. They cannot fight a conventional war. They do not have an armed forces to defend their rights. The task of the army of the unemployed, who are being trained by the Pentagon to be members of the "Iraqi Army," is to suppress the struggle for national liberation on behalf of the invader. So they use the means and tactics at their command.

Does that mean one must therefore support some of the excesses of the resistance? No. It means we recognize that in any struggle of this nature excesses take place, although they are simply not comparable to the "excesses" involved in George Bush¹s attack on Iraq. If we are so concerned about excesses, the task is not to haughtily distance ourselves from the resistance but to intensify our campaign to remove the root cause of the resistance, which is the continuing occupation and domination of a sovereign country. At this stage, and I hope I¹m wrong, the U.S. has caused such a catastrophic disintegration of a complex and ancient society that it will take a long time with many hardships before things settle down, even if the U.S. is kicked out.²

Listen to what our conservative ally, former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, had to say about this several months ago when he argued it was in Washington¹s interest to withdraw: ³The battle for Iraq`s sovereign future is a battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. As things stand, it appears that victory will go to the side most in tune with the reality of the Iraqi society of today: the leaders of the anti-U.S. resistance. . . . ³

If the U.S. continues its present course, he suggests, ³We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq that will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon. The calculus is quite simple: the sooner we bring our forces home, the weaker this movement will be. And, of course, the obverse is true: the longer we stay, the stronger and more enduring this byproduct of Bush`s elective war on Iraq will be. There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning but rather of mitigating defeat.²

Whether sectors of our movement support the right to resistance or not, the fact remains that this major setback for the Bush administration would not have come pass without the extraordinary uprising that developed in the aftermath of Rumsfeld¹s "10 day² war and 30-day restoration of order." When the first signs of a fightback occurred, Bush smirked, "Bring `em on!" Well, as an antiwar activist who of course would prefer a resistance movement with a different political leadership, I`m just glad they exercised their right to resist, or to "come on", as Bush taunted.

Without that fightback by the Iraqi resistance, a triumphant Bush by now might be dancing a jig in Damascus or Teheran, or wherever else his neoconservative inclinations and tanks were prepared to lead him.

Jack Smith: [e-mail]

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C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights

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A Casa 235 about to take off from Ruzyne Airport in Prague on a flight to Afghanistan operated by the
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/national/31planes.html?hp&…
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams and written by Mr. Shane.

SMITHFIELD, N.C. - The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero`s pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.

When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.

Aero Contractors` planes dropped C.I.A. paramilitary officers into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi, Pakistan, right after the United States Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day before an American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last year, according to flight data and other records.

While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency`s secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency`s Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.

Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.

An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.

The civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other governments. But the cover can fail, as when two Austrian fighter jets were scrambled on Jan. 21, 2003, to intercept a C.I.A. Hercules transport plane, equipped with military communications, on its way from Germany to Azerbaijan.

"When the C.I.A. is given a task, it`s usually because national policy makers don`t want `U.S. government` written all over it," said Jim Glerum, a retired C.I.A. officer who spent 18 years with the agency`s Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If you`re flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company."

Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency`s practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency`s flights in the last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes` movements.

Inquiries From Abroad

The authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the C.I.A.`s alleged role in the seizure of suspects in those countries who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation. According to Dr. Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.

Dr. Nolte examined the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who American officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec. 31, 2003, and held for three weeks. Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan.

The episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on C.I.A. flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Mr. Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the C.I.A.-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Mr. Masri`s passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.

Mr. Masri was later released by order of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients` identities. "We`ve been doing business with the government for a long time, and one of the reasons is, we don`t talk about it," said Robert W. Blowers, Aero`s assistant manager.

A Varied Fleet

But records filed with the Federal Aviation Administration provide a detailed, if incomplete, portrait of the agency`s aviation wing.

The fleet includes a World War II-era DC-3 and a sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, as well as workhorse Hercules transport planes and Spanish-built aircraft that can drop into tight airstrips. The flagship is the Boeing Business Jet, based on the 737 model, which Aero flies from Kinston, N.C., because the runway at Johnston County is too short for it.

Most of the shell companies that are the planes` nominal owners hold permits to land at American military bases worldwide, a clue to their global mission. Flight records show that at least 11 of the aircraft have landed at Camp Peary, the Virginia base where the C.I.A. operates its training facility, known as "the Farm." Several planes have also made regular trips to Guantánamo.

But the facility that turns up most often in records of the 26 planes is little Johnston County Airport, which mainly serves private pilots and a few local corporations. At one end of the 5,500-foot runway are the modest airport offices, a flight school and fuel tanks. At the other end are the hangars and offices of Aero Contractors, down a tree-lined driveway named for Charlie Day, an airplane mechanic who earned a reputation as an engine magician working on secret operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.

"To tell you the truth, I don`t know what they do," said Ray Blackmon, the airport manager, noting that Aero has its own mechanics and fuel tanks, keeping nosey outsiders away. But he called the Aero workers "good neighbors," always ready to lend a tool.

Son of Air America

Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated air "proprietary," as agency-controlled companies are called.

Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by corporate records.

"Jim is one of the great untold stories of heroic work for the U.S. government," said Bill Leary, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia who has written about the C.I.A.`s air operations. Mr. Rhyne had a prosthetic leg - he had lost one leg to enemy antiaircraft fire in Laos - that was blamed for his death in a 2001 crash while testing a friend`s new plane at Johnston County Airport.

Mr. Rhyne had chosen the rural airfield in part because it was handy to Fort Bragg and many Special Forces veterans, and in part because it had no tower from which Aero`s operations could be spied on, a former pilot said.

"Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and come out in the middle of the night with another," said the former pilot. He asked not to be identified because when he was hired, after responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the C.I.A., he signed a secrecy agreement.

While flying for Aero in the 1980`s and 1990`s, the pilot said, he ferried King Hussein, Jordan`s late ruler, around the United States; kept American-backed rebels like Jonas Savimbi of Angola supplied with guns and food; hopped across the jungles of Colombia to fight the drug trade; and retrieved shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and other weapons from former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

Ferrying Terrorism Suspects

Aero`s planes were sent to Fort Bragg to pick up Special Forces operatives for practice runs in the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina, dropping supplies or attempting emergency "exfiltrations" of agents, often at night, the former pilot said. He described flying with $50,000 in cash strapped to his legs to buy fuel and working under pseudonyms that changed from job to job.

He does not recall anyone using the word "rendition." "We used to call them `snatches,` " he said, recalling half a dozen cases. Sometimes the goal was to take a suspect from one country to another. At other times, the C.I.A. team rescued allies, including five men believed to have been marked by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, for assassination.

Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.`s air operations. Aero`s staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004, according to Dun and Bradstreet.

Despite the difficulty of determining the purpose of any single flight or who was aboard, the pattern of flights that coincide with known events is striking.

When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of Dec. 13, 2003, a Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from Dulles Airport in Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day by the Boeing Business Jet, also flying from Washington.

Flights on this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were the first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad since the beginning of the war.

Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.

A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri`s deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.

Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.

Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.

The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gambia.

Most recently, flight records show the Boeing Business Jet traveling from Sudan to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on April 17, and returning to Sudan on April 22. The trip coincides with a visit of the Sudanese intelligence chief to Washington that was reported April 30 by The Los Angeles Times.

Mysterious Companies

As the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation Administration`s online registry.

So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations.

On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers` offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee.

No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon, in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as 1949.

Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such name on more than one company was "bad tradecraft: you shouldn`t allow an element of one entity to lead to others."

He said one method used in setting up past C.I.A. proprietaries was to ask real people to volunteer to serve as officers or directors. "It was very, very easy to find patriotic Americans who were willing to help," he said.

Such an approach may have been used with Aero Contractors. William J. Rogers, 84, of Maine, said he was asked to serve on the Aero board in the 1980`s because he was a former Navy pilot and past national commander of the American Legion. He knew the company did government work, but not much more, he said. "We used to meet once or twice a year," he said.

Aero`s president, according to corporate records, is Norman Richardson, a North Carolina businessman who once ran a truck stop restaurant called Stormin` Norman`s. Asked about his role with Aero, Mr. Richardson said only: "Most of the work we do is for the government. It`s on the basis that we can`t say anything about it."

Secrecy Is Difficult

Aero`s much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976 just as the United States Senate`s Church Committee issued a mixed report on the value of the C.I.A.`s use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned whether the nation would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment appears prescient.

When one C.I.A. official told the committee that a new air proprietary should be created only if "we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is C.I.A.," Lawrence R. Houston, then agency`s general counsel, objected.

In the aviation industry, said Mr. Houston, who died in 1995, "everybody knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions."

He concluded: "I don`t think you can do a real cover operation."

Ford Fessenden contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Bush`s Political Capital Spent, Voices in Both Parties Suggest
Poll Numbers Sag as Setbacks Mount at Home and Abroad
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 31, 2005; A02

Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of "political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.

In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.

With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy.

The series of setbacks on the domestic front could signal that the president has weakened leverage over his party, a situation that could embolden the opposition, according to analysts and politicians from both sides. Bush faces the potential of a summer of discontent when his capacity to muscle political Washington into following his lead seems to have diminished and few easy victories appear on the horizon.

"He has really burned up whatever mandate he had from that last election," said Leon E. Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff during President Bill Clinton`s second term. "You can`t slam-dunk issues in Washington. You can`t just say, `This is what I want done` and by mandate get it done. It`s a lesson everybody has to learn, and sometimes you learn it the hard way."

Through more than four years in the White House, the signature of Bush`s leadership has been that he does not panic in the face of bad poll numbers. Yet many Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the lobbyist corridor of K Street worry about a season of drift and complain that the White House has not listened to their concerns. In recent meetings, House Republicans have discussed putting more pressure on the White House to move beyond Social Security and talk up different issues, such as health care and tax reform, according to Republican officials who asked not to be named to avoid angering Bush`s team.

"There is a growing sense of frustration with the president and the White House, quite frankly," said an influential Republican member of Congress. "The term I hear most often is `tin ear,` " especially when it comes to pushing Social Security so aggressively at a time when the public is worried more about jobs and gasoline prices. "We could not have a worse message at a worse time."

Many experienced Washington hands believe that Bush has the opportunity to reestablish his clout if he focuses his efforts. "Every president goes through patches like this," Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, said in an interview. "[President Ronald] Reagan had a difficult patch in August `81, but he came back and was strongly successful. Clinton, if you`ll remember, in June or July of `95 looked like he couldn`t get anything done and then won reelection. These things come and go."

To get back on track, Gingrich said, Bush should pare down his Social Security plan to its central element, personal investment accounts funded by payroll taxes. "I don`t think he can get complex reform through," Gingrich said. "It`s too hard with the AARP opposing you and all of the Democrats lined up against it."

Bush has had a hard time persuading Congress to go along with his agenda, in part because surveys show that much of the public has soured on him and his priorities. In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, taken last month, 47 percent of Americans approved of Bush`s performance, tying the lowest marks he ever received in that survey, back in mid-2004, when Democrats were airing tens of millions of dollars` worth of campaign attack ads.

Similarly, just 31 percent approved of his handling of Social Security, an all-time low in the Post-ABC poll, while only 40 percent gave him good marks for his stewardship of the economy and 42 percent for his management of Iraq, both ratings close to the lowest ever recorded in those areas. Other surveys have recorded similar findings, with Bush`s approval rating as low as 43 percent.

Such weakness has unleashed the first mutterings of those dreaded second-term words, "lame duck," however premature it might be with 3 1/2 years left in his tenure. "The Democrats are doing everything they can to make this president a lame duck," Republican consultant Ed Rollins complained on Fox News on Friday. William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, wrote recently about "the impression -- and the reality -- of disarray" in urging Bush to wage a strong fight for the nomination of John R. Bolton as U.N. ambassador.

"He`s not a lame duck yet, but there are rumblings," said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian. Dallek said Bush`s recent travails remind him of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who overreached in his second term by trying to pack the Supreme Court, a move that backfired. "Second terms are treacherous, and presidents enter into a minefield where they really must shepherd their credibility and political capital," he said.

Bush started off his second term with a string of important victories, pushing through measures to make it harder to file class-action lawsuits against big corporations and to wipe out debts by filing for personal bankruptcy. Congress passed its first budget resolution in years, largely along the lines of Bush`s proposals, and gave him nearly everything he asked for in an $82 billion supplemental appropriations bill to pay for war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House rejects talk of drift by pointing to such victories. Asked at a briefing last week about the possible "onset of lame-duck status around here," White House press secretary Scott McClellan ticked off a list of accomplishments.

"This Congress has been in place for just over four months now, and we have made significant progress," he said. Addressing the troubled Social Security plan, he added: "Sometimes the legislative process isn`t going to move as fast as we would all like, particularly on an issue that was this difficult."

Another senior White House official, who asked to remain anonymous to offer a franker assessment, acknowledged the perception problem. "I will admit it`s a challenge to shine the light on the progress," the official said. "The victories have been overshadowed by partisan drama."

Nowhere was there more drama than in the Senate last week, when 14 senators from both parties forged a deal without White House approval that would allow some, but not all, of Bush`s stalled judicial nominees to receive floor votes. The deal on judges was followed quickly by a vote to shut down a filibuster on Bolton`s nomination, a vote that Bush and the GOP lost.

The House also rejected Bush by passing a measure easing his restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, with 50 Republicans joining most Democrats despite the threat of a presidential veto. The Senate has also advanced a more expensive highway bill than Bush has deemed acceptable, while his efforts to win passage for a Central American trade pact and an immigration guest worker program are stalled.

Overseas, violence in Iraq has killed about 700 civilians and at least 63 U.S. troops this month, frustrating efforts to stabilize the situation after January`s successful parliamentary elections. The governments of two U.S. allies resorted to crackdowns on opponents. In Uzbekistan, government forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing hundreds, while in Egypt, pro-government gangs beat up protesters after a visit by Laura Bush.

In some ways, allies said, Bush has run into resistance because he swings for the fences, taking on especially hard issues. By making Social Security the centerpiece of his domestic blueprint, he guaranteed a tough legislative campaign. But it has begun to take its toll on the rest of his agenda as well. The White House had hoped to be far enough along with Social Security by summer to launch his second top priority, overhaul of the tax code. That is likely to be delayed until next year.

Bush`s chief strategist, Karl Rove, is said by colleagues to remain optimistic that Congress will deliver Social Security legislation that includes personal accounts. But other aides privately are beginning to talk about whether they could accept a deal that does not include the accounts.

John D. Podesta, a top Clinton aide who runs the Center for American Progress, a research institute that promotes ideas that counter conservative policies, said Bush made the mistake of trying to turn a successful election strategy of catering to his base into a governing philosophy that excludes Democrats.

"What surprises me is that they seem to be unable to adjust particularly to the circumstances," Podesta said. "They promoted their Social Security case. It bombed. I would have thought they would have tried to change the subject or tried a different strategy. `You`re with us or against us` works well when you`re fighting al Qaeda, but it doesn`t with Social Security, and they don`t seem to have another play in the book."

Kenneth M. Duberstein, who was White House chief of staff during Reagan`s second term, said after the congressional recess Bush needs "to seize the momentum" on energy legislation, the Central American free trade pact, spending bills and a Social Security solvency plan.

"After all, the president is always in the driver`s seat, as all presidents are, and he cannot be distracted by speed bumps and detours along the way," Duberstein said. "The president needs to define victories in ways that he can achieve them."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Hilton the Huckster
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Richard Cohen
Post
Tuesday, May 31, 2005; A17

Arthur Aufderheide is something relatively new under the sun -- a paleopatholgist. His specialty, a recent issue of the New Yorker tells us, is the dissection of mummies to study ancient diseases. I, too, have an odd specialty. It is the study of contemporary culture by carefully noting the number of citations in the computer database LexisNexis. For instance, I am here to tell you that when I searched in the category of major newspapers, John Bolton, the president`s choice for U.N. ambassador, got 110 hits for the past week. In the same category, Paris Hilton got 158. As a LexisNexisologist I can only conclude that America has lost its mind.

Nonetheless, this triumph of the trivial is well worth studying. Anyone who watches any of the morning television shows, for instance, knows that celebrity has pushed out news. I think that even the start of a pretty big war would be the second item on the "Today" show if somehow an interview with Brad Pitt could be arranged. He is, as Ms. Hilton might say, hot, hot.

Of course, no one is hotter than Hilton herself. She has a fetching vapidity that, outside of a goldfish bowl, is unique -- the same wide-eyed stare, that same liquid grace, that same utter indifference to being a spectacle. She is buoyed by our celebrity-obsessed culture, which in itself is just an adjunct of the need to sell. The shows that feature the comings and goings of the famous -- the riveting saga of Brad and Angelina -- are merely trying in their own way to aggregate an audience so that they can sell products through commercials. The creation of celebrities -- of national brands -- is an essential part of that process. Marx would say that they are being exploited. Yes, but the Gulfstream jet takes the edges off it.

Once, I thought Hilton herself had been exploited. This was after the famous video of her having sex with her boyfriend hit the Internet. Before then she was a peripherally famous hotel heiress, a habitue of clubs where the almost-shaved and the almost-dressed look totally bored. She had potential, our Paris did, but her problem was that she utterly lacked talent. Without it, there was no infrastructure from which to hang the gauze of celebrity. You can be famous for being famous for a while, but ultimately you have to be famous for something. It`s a rule.

This is where I clearly misjudged Hilton -- and, I might add, my fellow Americans. I felt sorry for her. Her jerk boyfriend had exploited her most personal moments. I even wrote that she had effectively been "burglarized," that she had "lost control of who she is." I could go on with such stupid quotes, but you get the picture. It is of a man expressing the sentiments of his generation, the lost one, the one that would have considered the airing of a private sex tape a fit reason to stay in the fruit cellar long past canning season.

But what I did not realize is that you cannot lose control of who you are if who you are is nothing more than what`s in the media. You cannot have your privacy burglarized if you grow up in the age of digital cameras and there is no privacy -- no expectation of it, no need for it. You cannot be exposed. Everyone has sex, after all. So what is revealed? Nothing. Think about it. It`s hot.

You could say that there is nothing new about Paris Hilton -- she`s just the latest person who`s famous for being famous. Not so. She is really the first crossover porn star. The late Linda Lovelace thought she would be the first, but it was not to be. Paris Hilton, though, has pulled it off. It helps that she`s rich. It helps that she`s well dressed. It helps that her great-grandfather owned the Waldorf-Astoria, among other hotels. It helps that she is sort of classy. Whatever the case, she is just the sort of woman who can pull off the commercial she`s done for the Carl`s Jr. hamburger chain, which has been denounced as pornography. Actually, it`s more camp than porn.

In the future some LexisNexisologist will come across the Paris Hilton phenomenon and try to figure out what it says about America. In doing so, he will -- as I have done -- learn about Carl`s Jr. and its scrumptious-looking hamburgers and therefore appreciate Paris Hilton`s true talent. Like her ancestor the hotel magnate, she is what America has always valued, a salesman. As with any of them, it`s a smile, a shoeshine and, nowadays, anything else it takes -- but the product is always her.

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The Independent
Son of murdered Hariri heads for poll win
Monday, 30th May 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=642…


The man who may well be Lebanon’s new prime minister had slept seven hours in the previous 72 and spoke in a monotone, but he was near to tears when he referred to his murdered father.

Outside, a crowd of voters roared their support for the son of Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated on 14 February. Saad Hariri walked wearily to the balcony to wave at them. "I can’t even believe this is happening; I’m still in disbelief that my father is not here," he said. "I don’t lie to myself. Everyone is going to vote for my father today."

He is probably right. Hariri the father looks balefully down from the street posters, his son’s photograph below, but it is the father’s image that dominates Beirut. "Ma’ak," (We are with you) it says on one.

"Haqiqa" (the truth) is plastered on thousands of walls, an aspiration of most Lebanese as well as Saad Hariri’s Future Movement party. The truth about who murdered Rafik is what it demands; and with a UN team now gathering in Lebanon to discover the facts about the elder Hariri’s death, there are rumours that even the pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, could face an indictment.

Saad Hariri speaks English better than his assassinated father - he was educated at Georgetown - and will lead the largest coalition in the new Lebanese parliament, for whose MPs voters went to the polls yesterday in the first free elections in Lebanon for 30 years.

When he talks, he does so with an undertow of anger at the sacrifice inflicted on his family.

"The security police state in Lebanon has crumbled and this election will make it hopefully more difficult for a police state to re-establish itself."

But was he sure of that? Couldn’t the long hand that killed his father reach out for Saad Hariri too?

"Look," he says. "I feel safe. I don’t worry about it. My father had a great belief in God and we all do in the family, so for us in the family it has been a huge loss. But I’m not worried."

He shrugs with a mixture of tiredness and fatalism. President Lahoud should "think of his status" - which sounds like a suggestion that he should resign - once the elections are over.

Saad Hariri was a good deal milder with Syria’s other allies, the Hizbollah guerrilla movement.

"It may be an international demand [that they should be disarmed]," he said, "but it’s not a Lebanese demand. Our policy is to stand with Hizbollah and to open discussions with them on a Lebanese table with Lebanese give-and-take. Hizbollah has its constituency - 450,000 to 500,000 people - and this is a party that exists, that has popularity, that is here to stay. We have security problems on the Israeli border and we have land that is still occupied."

His demands are familiar: democracy, freedom, administrative reforms independent judges, a system in which "politicians and security officials stop meddling with the justice department".

When I ask for his thoughts on General Michel Aoun, the Christian ex-army chief of staff who returned from French exile believing that he would lead the opposition and smeared both Saad Hariri and his fellow opposition leader Walid Jumblatt as "worse that Rustum Ghazale" (the former Syrian head of military intelligence in Lebanon), there comes a darker narrative. "Ah, ’General de Gaulle’," he says softly. "General Aoun has good intentions for the country. We didn’t have any problems with his political programme ... but the general has a problem with our allies [the Druze].

"For me, I will not let down those who stayed with me, who were suppressed for 15 years. How could one say to those people - ’thank you, but there is someone better than you [to be allied with]?’"

And the comparison to Ghazale? "I think the general sometimes says things he doesn’t mean ... but if he meant this, he has a serious problem with us. I was going to meet him at my father’s grave, but when he came to the airport, he said some unpleasant things.

"He said my father’s death ’expedited’ the Syrian withdrawal. Even if he believes these things, he shouldn’t say them."

The reality, needless to say, is that it was the public reaction to the murder that forced the Syrian retreat, not Aoun’s bellowings from exile. So how does Saad Hariri handle the rallies, the crowds? "Every rally is breathtaking and affects me emotionally. I find it hard to see myself present there, and not my father ... I must work hard for Beirut and Lebanon over the next four years because if I relax and rest, the people will punish me. My father always worked in politics because this was the only way he could help Lebanon."

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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The Independent
Son of murdered Hariri heads for poll win
Monday, 30th May 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=642…


The man who may well be Lebanon’s new prime minister had slept seven hours in the previous 72 and spoke in a monotone, but he was near to tears when he referred to his murdered father.

Outside, a crowd of voters roared their support for the son of Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated on 14 February. Saad Hariri walked wearily to the balcony to wave at them. "I can’t even believe this is happening; I’m still in disbelief that my father is not here," he said. "I don’t lie to myself. Everyone is going to vote for my father today."

He is probably right. Hariri the father looks balefully down from the street posters, his son’s photograph below, but it is the father’s image that dominates Beirut. "Ma’ak," (We are with you) it says on one.

"Haqiqa" (the truth) is plastered on thousands of walls, an aspiration of most Lebanese as well as Saad Hariri’s Future Movement party. The truth about who murdered Rafik is what it demands; and with a UN team now gathering in Lebanon to discover the facts about the elder Hariri’s death, there are rumours that even the pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, could face an indictment.

Saad Hariri speaks English better than his assassinated father - he was educated at Georgetown - and will lead the largest coalition in the new Lebanese parliament, for whose MPs voters went to the polls yesterday in the first free elections in Lebanon for 30 years.

When he talks, he does so with an undertow of anger at the sacrifice inflicted on his family.

"The security police state in Lebanon has crumbled and this election will make it hopefully more difficult for a police state to re-establish itself."

But was he sure of that? Couldn’t the long hand that killed his father reach out for Saad Hariri too?

"Look," he says. "I feel safe. I don’t worry about it. My father had a great belief in God and we all do in the family, so for us in the family it has been a huge loss. But I’m not worried."

He shrugs with a mixture of tiredness and fatalism. President Lahoud should "think of his status" - which sounds like a suggestion that he should resign - once the elections are over.

Saad Hariri was a good deal milder with Syria’s other allies, the Hizbollah guerrilla movement.

"It may be an international demand [that they should be disarmed]," he said, "but it’s not a Lebanese demand. Our policy is to stand with Hizbollah and to open discussions with them on a Lebanese table with Lebanese give-and-take. Hizbollah has its constituency - 450,000 to 500,000 people - and this is a party that exists, that has popularity, that is here to stay. We have security problems on the Israeli border and we have land that is still occupied."

His demands are familiar: democracy, freedom, administrative reforms independent judges, a system in which "politicians and security officials stop meddling with the justice department".

When I ask for his thoughts on General Michel Aoun, the Christian ex-army chief of staff who returned from French exile believing that he would lead the opposition and smeared both Saad Hariri and his fellow opposition leader Walid Jumblatt as "worse that Rustum Ghazale" (the former Syrian head of military intelligence in Lebanon), there comes a darker narrative. "Ah, ’General de Gaulle’," he says softly. "General Aoun has good intentions for the country. We didn’t have any problems with his political programme ... but the general has a problem with our allies [the Druze].

"For me, I will not let down those who stayed with me, who were suppressed for 15 years. How could one say to those people - ’thank you, but there is someone better than you [to be allied with]?’"

And the comparison to Ghazale? "I think the general sometimes says things he doesn’t mean ... but if he meant this, he has a serious problem with us. I was going to meet him at my father’s grave, but when he came to the airport, he said some unpleasant things.

"He said my father’s death ’expedited’ the Syrian withdrawal. Even if he believes these things, he shouldn’t say them."

The reality, needless to say, is that it was the public reaction to the murder that forced the Syrian retreat, not Aoun’s bellowings from exile. So how does Saad Hariri handle the rallies, the crowds? "Every rally is breathtaking and affects me emotionally. I find it hard to see myself present there, and not my father ... I must work hard for Beirut and Lebanon over the next four years because if I relax and rest, the people will punish me. My father always worked in politics because this was the only way he could help Lebanon."

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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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, May 31, 2005

31 Dead, 108 Wounded in Hillah Blasts
Basra Insecure

Suicide bombers in the Shiite city of Hillah about an hour`s drive south of Baghdad killed at least 31 persons and wounded 108 on Monday. Al-Zaman says one bomber targeted recruits to the Iraqi security forces standing in line for a medical examination. Another hit recently fired security men who had been let go and who were demonstrating because they said they were still owed back pay. It should be remembered that these bombs inevitably kill a lot of civilian by-standers.

On Sunday night, one Iraqi soldier was killed and 4 were wounded in Baiji north of Baghdad in a bombing directed at a joint US/ Iraqi patrol in the west of the city. In the eastern part of the city of Balad, another Iraqi soldier was killed by a mortar strike. Two bodies of drivers were discovered at Sahliyah, who had been kidnapped by guerrillas last week. Guerrillas killed Col. Ahmad Salih al-Barzinji Sunday night after he had been kidnapped in Kirkuk.

In Irbil, guerrillas subjected the South Korean contingent to mortar fire for the first time, but did not appear to hit anything of value. On Sunday, the US military sweep of Hadithah in western Iraq came to an end.

An Iraqi army force detained (al-Zaman says "kidnapped") the Sunni cleric Shaikh Nawfal Kadhim al-Juburi, the prayer leader at the al-Salam mosque in Nahrawan in southeast Baghdad along with 35 worshippers in a dawn raid on the mosque. The raid was forcefully condemned by the Sunni Pious Endowments Board.

Al-Hayat Muhsin Abdul Hamid, a former president of Iraq under the American Coalition Provisional Authority and the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party who was mistakenly arrested by the US military and then released, said late Monday that he considered the arrest to have been "deliberate." Party spokesmen said that the arrest was a piece of American "stupidity" aimed at alienating the Sunni Arabs from political participation. Meanwhile, the other major religious group among the Sunnis, the Association of Muslim Scholars, condemned the arrest as proof that the elected Iraqi government "is not sovereign over the country" and said that Abdul Hamid`s detention "underlined the power of the Occupier." They added, "no Iraqi is safe under the shadow of presence" of the occupying forces. An AMS spokesman said that the government`s acceptance of this situation had multiplied the opportunities for the occupiers to intervene in Iraqi affairs. The AMS called for a united Iraqi front that would stop the occupying forces in their tracks. Adnan al-Dulaimi, another Sunni spokesman, said that there is a hidden hand plotting to marginalize the Sunni Arabs.

Abdul Hamid said he still did not know why he had been taken into custody along with his sons. He said, "American troops invaded my home at 4 am. They handcuffed me and led me to an unknown place, then transported me by helicopter to yet another location, where I was interrogated all day long about various matters." The US military apologized to Abdul Hamid for the inconvenience.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list that dominates parliament, complained recently that the guerrillas blowing up things in Iraq are just prolonging the US military presence in Iraq. He also complained that the US is stopping Iraq from buying heavy weaponry (I had been wondering where the new Iraqi tank corps was. There is a small one, but it is rudimentary). I conclude that al-Hakim is eager to get rid of the Americans, and feels frustrated that he cannot proceed with it until the Sunni Arab rejectionists stop their war and until he can find a way to get tanks and heavy artillery for his own forces so as to reduce dependence on the US.

Al-Hakim also leads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which was formed in 1982 in Tehran under the sponsorship of Ayatollah Khomeini and which had its HQ in Iran until 2003. It is therefore no surprise that Iran and Iraq are now moving steadily toward better and better relations, including plans for a rail link from Khorramshahr to Basra and another from Kermanshah to Diyalah province. Iran and Iraq will do a billion dollars worth of trade this year, but the number is likely to mushroom in coming years, especially if the security situation allows Shiite pilgrims to come to Najaf and Karbala. Iran expects trade barriers to be removed, and has expressed willingness to sell Iraq electricity.

Rory Carroll of the Guardian reports from Basra on the views of its police chief, who had been appointed by Iyad Allawi:

General Hassan al-Sade said half of his 13,750-strong force was secretly working for political parties in Iraq`s second city and that some officers were involved in ambushes. Other officers were politically neutral but had no interest in policing and did not follow his orders, he told the Guardian. "I trust 25% of my force, no more." The claim jarred with Basra`s reputation as an oasis of stability and security and underlined the burgeoning influence of Shia militias in southern Iraq. "The militias are the real power in Basra and they are made up of criminals and bad people," said the general.



It gradually becomes apparent, though, that al-Sade`s jaundiced view of the situation in Basra is that of an ex-Baathist nervous about the rising influence of the Sadrists and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who are replacing Allawi`s ex-Baathists with their own men in the police force.

Carroll would have done his readers a favor to have mentioned who won the provincial elections in Basra on January 30. Of 41 seats, 20 went to the Shiite Islamists of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Another 16 or so went to the Virtue Party or Fadilah, which follows the late ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Carroll, it seems to me, is likely confusing Fadilah with the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. In fact, they follow Muhammad al-Yaqubi, a more low-key rival of Muqtada`s who studied with Muqtada`s father. Fadilah controls Basra city hall because it put together a coalition that gave it 21 seats, so it can outvote SCIRI. The two victors of the democratic elections, in any case, are now appointing the police, which are obviously loyal to the parties rather than to an ex-Baathist police chief installed by the widely disliked ex-Baathist and old time CIA asset Iyad Allawi.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports Tuesday that the Ministry of Interior has established a fifth branch of its special forces, called the Panther Brigade, in Basra. The ministry is now controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and some Sunni leaders have claimed that its special forces are tools of Shiite dominance over Sunnis. Al-Sade may also worry about being outflanked by this Federal force, which has a special charge of fighting terrorism and protecting Federal property.

So I come away not knowing if al-Sade is accurately reporting a crime problem in Basra or is just expressing the sour grapes of an ex-Baathist whose prime minister lost the election in a crushing defeat, and who seems a little unlikely to survive in his post because of the current Iraqi spoils system.

"Yoshihiko Motoyama: Lawless private militaries milking Iraq conflict" explains the private paramilitaries operating in Iraq.

Now the senior Iraqi physicians are fleeing the country. More good news.

This article on unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV`s and their military usefulness in Iraq begs the question of why, if they are so great, there are still all those bombings.

Reuters profiles the neighborhood watch program in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. It is a great idea and has had some success there, but it probably cannot be done in the Sunni Arab areas where it is most needed, for two reasons. 1) People are too afraid and intimidated to call in, for fear of reprisals and 2) a large number of people approve of the Iraqi guerrillas, to whom they refer as the "resistance."

posted by Juan @ [url5/31/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/31-dead-108-wounded-in-hillah-blasts.html[/url]

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Es wird auf beiden Seiten sehr viel über freien Handel gesprochen und besonders die USA, die sich selbst als Hort des Freihandels bezeichnet, hat in den letzten Jahren viele Restriktionen eingeführt.

May 31, 2005
U.S., EU to Clash Over Airplane Subsidies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-EU-Plane-Figh…

Filed at 3:29 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States and Europe, both bruised from a number of high-profile trade battles in recent years, are now preparing for what could be one of the biggest fights yet over government subsidies to commercial airline manufacturers.

The Bush administration announced late Monday that it planned to bring a case before the World Trade Organization charging the 25-nation European Union with providing illegal subsidies to Airbus, the major competitor to U.S.-based Boeing Co.

The action, which followed an offer from the EU on Friday to resolve the dispute, is likely to trigger a competing trade case by the EU accusing the U.S. government of illegally subsidizing Boeing.

In Brussels, Claude Veron-Reville, spokeswoman for EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, called the U.S. decision ``a disappointing move by the United States given the proposals for a negotiated solution the EU side made on Friday.``

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson called the U.S. action ``highly regrettable`` and said, ``The WTO has better things to do than referee this grudge fight between Airbus and Boeing.``

In announcing the administration decision, U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman said the administration felt it had to act because of preparations being made by EU member nations to commit $1.7 billion to Airbus for developing a new airplane.

``The EU`s insistence on moving forward with new launch aid is forcing our hand,`` Portman said in a statement.

The U.S. side is concerned about the potential subsidies that could be provided to Airbus for development of the A350 which is seen as a direct competitor to Boeing`s new 787 Dreamliner in the market for mid-size, long-distance jets.

Mandelson on Friday provided Portman with a new EU proposal that would have had both sides make similar reductions in subsidies. But U.S. officials viewed the offer as a step back from an earlier goal to eliminate all subsidies.

``We still believe that a bilateral negotiated solution is possible, but the negotiations won`t succeed unless the EU recommits to ending subsidies,`` Portman said in his statement.

In January, both sides had agreed to put WTO cases they had filed against each other in the fall on hold in an effort to seek a negotiated settlement during a 90-day period.

However, those talks went nowhere. U.S. officials accused the EU of not negotiating in good faith, while Mandelson said the Bush administration had no room to reach a negotiated settlement because of heavy political lobbying by Boeing.

Boeing spokesman Russ Young said Monday that the company strongly supported the trade representative`s decision but still hoped for a settlement.

``We agree with the USTR that a negotiated settlement is preferable and hope serious U.S./EU discussions will continue as litigation proceeds,`` he said.

It is not unusual for both sides in a WTO case to keep seeking a settlement outside of the WTO dispute process, which will take months to conclude.

In a joint statement issued Monday, both Portman and Mandelson pledged to keep the airplane subsidy fight from spilling over into other trade issues. The effort to complete the Doha Round of global trade talks will require close cooperation between the United States and the EU.

``We remain united in our determination that this dispute shall not affect our cooperation on wider bilateral and multilateral trade issues,`` the two men said. ``We have worked well together so far and intend to continue to do so.``

Airbus was established in 1970 as a European consortium of French, German and later Spanish and British companies. In 2001 Airbus formally became a single integrated company, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. and BAE Systems of Britain.

The fight over aircraft subsidies is just the latest in a string of trade battles between the United States and the European Union.

The United States won fights with the EU over an EU ban on U.S. beef containing growth hormones and another case involving U.S.-based banana companies.

But America has also lost high-profile cases involving steel tariffs and a U.S. export subsidy ruled illegal that was finally eliminated by Congress last fall in a sweeping rewrite of U.S. corporate taxes.

------

Associated Press Writer Constant Brand in Brussels contributed to this report.

* Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

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Latest Fatality: May 31, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 1848, US: 1663, May.05: 84


Iraker: Civilian: 599 Police/Mil: 231 Total: 830
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

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Bei diesen Berechnungen der Mehrheitsverhältnisse wirkt sich aus, dass das US-Wahlsystem auf den Ergebnissen der einzelnen Staaten beruht.

Jeder Staat egal wie groß er ist stellt 2 Senatoren, auch bei den House-Senatoren hat jeder Staat ein Mindestanzahl von Senatoren das gleiche gilt auch für die Wahlmänner bei der Präsidentenwahl.

Die kleinen ländlichen Staaten, die überwiegend republikanisch wählen, habe das gleiche Gewicht wie die bevölkerungsreichen Staaten, wie z.B. New York und Kalifornien.

Dadurch ist der demokratische Grundsatz, dass jede Stimme gleich zählt, nicht gegeben und es kommt zu einem Übergewicht der ländlichen Staaten.

Math Doesn`t Add Up for a Democrat-Run Senate
The party needs to win seats in Bush territory for any realistic chance to retake the chamber.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-sena…

By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer

May 31, 2005

WASHINGTON — Growing Republican dominance of Senate seats in states where George W. Bush has run best looms as the principal obstacle for Democrats hoping to retake the chamber in 2006 or beyond.

With the recent struggle over judicial nominations underscoring the stakes, the battle for Senate control could attract unprecedented levels of money and energy next year.

Democrats are optimistic about their chances of ousting GOP senators in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. But the Democrats are unlikely to regain a Senate majority — in 2006 or soon thereafter — unless they can reverse the GOP consolidation of Senate seats in states that have supported Bush.

Since 2000, both parties have gained Senate seats in the states they typically carry in presidential campaigns. But this political partitioning provides a clear advantage for Republicans because so many more states backed Bush in his bids for the presidency.

If Democrats only gain in their part of the map, "it`s like saying, `We`re going to win more home games but never worry about road games,` " said Matthew Dowd, a political advisor to the Republican National Committee and senior strategist for Bush`s reelection campaign. "They could have a great home record but never win a majority."

Republicans control 55 Senate seats and Democrats 44, with Vermont independent James M. Jeffords holding the final spot. In next year`s midterm election, Republicans will defend 15 seats and Democrats 17. And Vermont voters will choose a successor to Jeffords, who is retiring.

As the parties approach these contests, the political divide familiar from presidential campaigns figures ever more prominently in their calculations.

Twenty-nine states voted for Bush in 2000 and in 2004. Republicans now hold 44 of the 58 Senate seats in those so-called red states. That`s a much higher percentage of in-party Senate seats than Presidents Reagan and Clinton were able to claim in states they carried twice.

More important, on the strength of those states alone, the GOP is on the brink of a majority in the 100-member Senate.

Democrats are just as strong in the states that voted for Kerry and Gore. But there are only 18 of those so-called blue states; Democrats hold 28 of those 36 Senate seats.

Republicans also hold four of the Senate seats in the three states that switched parties from 2000 to 2004 — New Mexico, New Hampshire and Iowa.

This distribution makes it virtually impossible for Democrats to regain a majority simply by defeating GOP senators from blue states, such as their two top targets for 2006 — Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania and Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island.

Whatever happens in those races, the Democrats` ability to win Republican-held Senate seats next year in red states such as Montana, Tennessee and Missouri — and to defend their seats in red states such as Nebraska, Florida and North Dakota — may reveal more about their long-term prospects of regaining a Senate majority.

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin noted that in the last two elections, Democrats have come close to taking the White House, even though they`ve lost more states than they`ve won. That`s because the high-population states they did win — such as New York and California — have large numbers of electoral college votes. But, regardless of population, each state has two Senate seats, so Democrats must compete on a broader map to realistically contend for a Senate majority.

"You can cobble together a viable electoral college strategy with a minority of states, but you simply can`t cobble together a Senate majority that way," Garin said.

As recently as the 1980s, it was common for states to split their ballots in presidential and Senate contests.

But the sharpening partisan edge of modern politics has made it tougher for senators to survive — in effect, behind enemy lines — in states that consistently prefer the other party in presidential campaigns.

The result has been a decline in the Southern Democrats, who bucked the region`s growing preference for GOP presidential candidates, and in the Northeastern Republicans, who overcame their area`s Democratic tide in national campaigns.

Forty-four states supported Ronald Reagan for president in 1980 and 1984. But partly because of lingering Democratic strength in the South, Republicans after 1984 controlled only 48 of the 88 Senate seats in those states, about 55%.

The trend toward consolidation gained momentum in the 1990s. Bill Clinton won 29 states twice. After his second victory, Democrats held 35 of the 58 Senate seats in those states, or 60%.

In the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004, Republicans gained a net of six Senate seats in the red states that Bush carried twice. Democrats added four Senate seats in the blue states that twice voted against Bush; Republicans lost another blue-state Senate seat when Jeffords quit the GOP in 2001.

Republicans now hold 76% of the red-state Senate seats; Democrats 78% of the blue-state Senate seats.

This division has reshaped the political landscape most profoundly in the South. Under Bush, the GOP has won the last nine open Southern Senate seats, including five seats vacated by retiring Democrats in 2004. In all, Republicans now control 18 of the 22 Senate seats in the 11 states of the old Confederacy, compared to just 10 of those seats after Reagan`s 1984 landslide.

One of the losing 2004 Southern Democratic Senate candidates, who asked not to be identified while criticizing his party, said today`s highly partisan atmosphere had undermined strategies that once let the region`s Democrats survive even as GOP presidential candidates carried their states.

In that era, the former candidate noted, Southern Democrats won by emphasizing independence and willingness to work across party lines. But today, the candidate said, many Southerners seem deeply reluctant to help Democrats regain Senate control and strengthen their hand against Bush.

"They were very worried about the Democrats having a majority," the candidate said.

Democratic strategists acknowledge that such partisan attitudes represent a huge problem for them in the Deep South. But they believe that in other red states, Senate races may turn more on local factors.

Democrats are most optimistic about contesting Republican-held seats in Tennessee, where Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. is the likely Democratic nominee for the seat being vacated by retiring Majority Leader Bill Frist; in Montana, where Democratic State Auditor John Morrison has begun raising money to challenge Republican Conrad Burns around economic themes; and possibly in Missouri, where Democratic polls have shown some vulnerability for first-term Republican Jim Talent.

But Democrats also must defend five incumbents seeking reelection in red states, with Florida`s Bill Nelson, Nebraska`s Ben Nelson and North Dakota`s Kent Conrad facing potentially difficult races in states Bush carried handily.

In all these races, Republicans are likely to portray the Democrats as obstructionists whose election would empower liberals to block Bush`s agenda.

Against such attacks, the Democratic candidates must walk a tightrope, motivating their base with criticism of the GOP agenda while defending themselves against the Republican charges by promising to work across party lines.

In Montana, for instance, Morrison is opposing Bush`s plan to carve out private investment accounts from Social Security, but also presenting himself as a common-sense, bipartisan problem-solver.

"Most of the worthwhile public policy gets done somewhere in the center," Morrison said.

In Pennsylvania, the Democratic success in recruiting socially conservative State Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr., the son of the former governor, to challenge Santorum has made that race the early choice as the marquee Senate contest for 2006.

But the fate of red-state Democrats like Morrison should offer a better measure of whether the party can topple the Republican majority pressing its advantages so forcefully.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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ROBERT SCHEER
A Cover-Up as Shameful as Tillman`s Death
Robert Scheer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-schee…

May 31, 2005

Once again it has taken grieving relatives to point out that the Bush administration will exploit even a heroic death for its own partisan purposes.

As with the widows of Sept. 11 who demanded that our obfuscating leaders investigate what went wrong on that terrible day, or the wounded Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who resisted efforts to make her into some kind of Rambo figure, so relatives of late NFL star Pat Tillman are demanding to know why their celebrated war hero son`s death in 2004 was exploited for public relations purposes by the U.S. military and the administration.

"They blew up their poster boy," Tillman`s father, Patrick, a San Jose lawyer, told the Washington Post last week. He joined his former wife to demand accountability for the latest military cover-up to happen on Commander in Chief Bush`s watch. High-ranking Army officials, he said, told "outright lies."

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

A devastating series of investigations and Post stories has shown that the Army`s command structure was eager to cover up the embarrassing truth: that Pat Tillman, who turned down a $3.6-million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army Rangers after 9/11, was accidentally killed by his fellow Rangers while on patrol in Afghanistan a year ago.

Last spring, after months of increasingly damaging reports exposing the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and cover-up, the administration found some public relations relief in the sad, patriotic tale of a man who spurned fame and fortune to make "the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror," in the words of a White House spokesman at the time. A nationally televised memorial service and a Silver Star commendation cemented Tillman`s place as the nation`s first war hero since the story of Lynch`s capture and phony details of her rescue were foisted on the public in 2003.

Now, thanks to the reporting of the Post and the fury of Tillman`s parents, we know that the military`s top commanders were covering up the truth to protect their image, and that of the Bush administration`s costly and deadly "nation-building" exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although "soldiers on the scene said they were immediately sure Tillman was killed by a barrage of American bullets," according to the Post, and "a new Army report on the death shows that top Army officials, including the theater commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, were told that Tillman`s death was fratricide days before the service," Army officials decided not to inform Tillman`s family or the public until weeks after the memorial. And even then, they provided no details and answered no questions, saying only that friendly fire "probably" killed Tillman.

"The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic," Tillman`s mother, Mary, told the Post. "The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."

The soldiers on the ground said they burned Tillman`s bullet-riddled uniform and body armor, the Post reported, because they considered them a biohazard, and because, as one said, "we knew at the time, based on taking the pictures and walking around it, it was a fratricide…. so we weren`t thinking about proof or anything."

So, given all this, why has nobody high in the Army chain of command, such as Abizaid, been held accountable for this cover-up?

Did President Bush know about it? If not, why not? After all, this was the most prominent soldier to die since Bush took office four years earlier, a prize recruit for his controversial spate of foreign invasions.

In any case, the White House has refrained from making any public apologies for the cover-up. Indeed, Mary Tillman said she was particularly offended that even after the facts were known, Bush exploited her son`s death with a message played before an Arizona Cardinal game last fall before the election.

"Maybe lying`s not a big deal anymore," Patrick Tillman said. "Pat`s dead, and this isn`t going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has."

For the Tillmans, as with Pfc. Lynch and the 9/11 widows, the path to true patriotism means confronting your government when it lies.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Tomgram: Mark Danner, What Are You Going to Do with That?
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2949


For the Class of September 11th, which, I`m afraid, is all of us, there probably can`t be too much graduation advice. A week ago, I offered Against Discouragement, the commencement address Howard Zinn gave at Spelman College, as my way of graduating the rest of us. But -- a sign of the tough times we find ourselves in -- I can`t resist bringing up more graduation artillery and offering a second barrage of observation and advice, this time from Mark Danner, who in mid-May addressed graduating English students at Berkeley.

As Danner reminds us, we inhabit a strange land, one in which worldly revelation -- revelation after revelation of the scandals, follies, and crimes of Bush administration officials -- has lead nowhere in particular. You know that we`re in a startling moment when Amnesty International issues its annual report and its Secretary General, Irene Khan, refers to Guantánamo as "the gulag of our times." ("The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyperpower, sets the tone for governmental behavior worldwide. When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity," said Khan. She then added: "The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law… Guantánamo evokes memories of Soviet repression… To say in a 21st-century democracy that torture is acceptable is to push us back to medieval ages."

The New York Times in a mini-teaser-headline tucked into its front page charmingly summed up Amnesty`s fierce report this way: "U.S. Chided on Rights." (The actual piece, deep inside the first section of the paper, was more appropriately headlined, U.S. ‘Thumbs Its Nose` At Rights, Amnesty Says.) On its editorial page, the Washington Post promptly bemoaned the very use of the word "gulag": "It`s always sad when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse…."

Is it any less startling that, as editor of the Progressive magazine Matthew Rothschild recently pointed out (Stripping Rumsfeld and Bush of Impunity), the politically moderate Executive Director of Amnesty USA, William Schulz, is now essentially calling for other countries to indict and try our leaders? "And if [the U.S. refuses to investigate its wrongdoings seriously]…, then indeed, we are calling upon foreign governments to take on their responsibility and to investigate the apparent architects of torture," Schulz said.

As Rothschild summed it up, Schulz called

"on officials in other countries to apprehend Bush and Rumsfeld and other high-ranking members of the administration who have played a part in the torture scandal. Foreign governments should ‘uphold their obligations under international law by investigating U.S. officials implicated in the development or implementation of interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment...`

"Inquiries to the embassies of Belgium, Chile, France, Germany, South Africa, and Venezuela, as well as to the government of Canada, while met with some amusement, did not reveal any inclination to heed Amnesty`s call. Schulz is not deterred. Acknowledging that the possibility of a foreign government seizing Rumsfeld or Bush might not be ‘an immediate reality,` Schulz takes the long view: ‘Let`s keep in mind, there are no statutes of limitations here.`"

This certainly represents a response to the frustration of knowing -- in a sense -- next to everything, and yet having nothing happen; of having, in fact, those who committed the worst blunders, had the most terrible ideas, or let the most demons loose on our world receive honors, promotions, awards, and commendations.

Danner, whose most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (a must for any library, which, given the subject, is in itself a sad thing to say), approaches this sense of frustration in his own original way. "What Are You Going to Do with That?" -- his graduation speech -- will appear in the June 23rd issue of the New York Review of Books (on sale this week). That magazine`s editors have been kind enough to let me distribute the speech on-line. Apt as its title is, it might also have been called something like: "On Reading and Thinking (in a World Where Listening and Looking Often, Unfortunately, Mean Believing)."

So go ahead, graduate one more time. I swear that it will be the last commencement Tomdispatch will attend for a while. Tom

What Are You Going to Do with That?
By Mark Danner

The following is based on the commencement address given to the graduating students of the Department of English of the University of California at Berkeley in the Hearst Greek Theatre, May 15, 2005.

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked for a title. I dillied and dallied, begged for more time, and of course the deadline passed. The title I really wanted to suggest was the response that all of you have learned to expect when asked your major: What are you going to do with that? To be an English major is to live not only by questioning, but by being questioned. It is to live with a question mark placed squarely on your forehead. It is to live, at least some of the time, in a state of "existential dread." To be a humanist, that is, means not only to see clearly the surface of things and to see beyond those surfaces, but to place oneself in opposition, however subtle, an opposition that society seldom lets you forget: What are you going to do with that?

To the recent graduate, American society -- in all its vulgar, grotesque power -- reverberates with that question. It comes from friends, from relatives, and perhaps even from the odd parent here and there. For the son or daughter who becomes an English major puts a finger squarely on the great parental paradox: you raise your children to make their own decisions, you want your children to make their own decisions -- and then one day, by heaven, they make their own decisions. And now parents are doomed to confront daily the condescending sympathy of your friends -- their children, of course, are economics majors or engineering majors or pre-meds -- and to confront your own dread about the futures of your children.

It`s not easy to be an English major these days, or any student of the humanities. It requires a certain kind of determination, and a refusal -- an annoying refusal, for some of our friends and families, and for a good many employers -- to make decisions, or at least to make the kind of "practical decisions" that much of society demands of us. It represents a determination, that is, not only to do certain things -- to read certain books and learn certain poems, to acquire or refine a certain cast of mind -- but not to do other things: principally, not to decide, right now, quickly, how you will earn your living; which is to say, not to decide how you will justify your existence. For in the view of a large part of American society, the existential question is at the bottom an economic one: Who are you and what is your economic justification for being?

English majors, and other determined humanists, distinguish themselves not only by reading Shakespeare or Chaucer or Joyce or Woolf or Zora Neale Hurston but by refusing, in the face of overwhelming pressure, to answer that question. Whether they acknowledge it or not -- whether they know it or not -- and whatever they eventually decide to do with "that," they see developing the moral imagination as more important than securing economic self-justification.

Such an attitude has never been particularly popular in this country. It became downright suspect after September 11, 2001 -- and you of course are the Class of September 11, having arrived here only days before those attacks and the changed world they ushered in. Which means that, whether you know it or not, by declaring yourselves as questioners, as humanists, you already have gone some way in defining yourselves, for good or ill, as outsiders.

I must confess it: I, too, was an English major...for nineteen days. This was back in the Berkeley of the East, at Harvard College, and I was a refugee from philosophy -- too much logic and math in that for me, too practical -- and I tarried in English just long enough to sit in on one tutorial (on Keats`s "To Autumn"), before I fled into my own major, one I conceived and designed myself, called, with even greater practical attention to the future, "Modern Literature and Aesthetics."

Which meant of course that almost exactly twenty-five years ago today I was sitting where you are now, hanging on by a very thin thread. Shortly thereafter I found myself lying on my back in a small apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reading the New York Times and the New York Review -- very thoroughly: essentially spending all day, every day, lying on my back, reading, living on graduation-present money and subsisting on deliveries of fried rice from the Hong Kong restaurant (which happened to be two doors away -- though I felt I was unable to spare the time to leave the apartment, or the bed, to pick it up). The Chinese food deliveryman looked at me dispassionately and then, as one month stretched into two, a bit knowingly. If I knew then what I know now I would say I was depressed. At the time, however, I was under the impression that I was resting.

Eventually I became a writer, which is not a way to vanquish existential dread but a way to live with it and even to earn a modest living from it. Perhaps some of you will follow that path; but whatever you decide to "do with that," remember: whether you know it yet or not, you have doomed yourselves by learning how to read, learning how to question, learning how to doubt. And this is a most difficult time -- the most difficult I remember -- to have those skills. Once you have them, however, they are not easy to discard. Finding yourself forced to see the gulf between what you are told about the world, whether it`s your government doing the telling, or your boss, or even your family or friends, and what you yourself can`t help but understand about that world -- this is not always a welcome kind of vision to have. It can be burdensome and awkward and it won`t always make you happy.

I think I became a writer in part because I found that yawning difference between what I was told and what I could see to be inescapable. I started by writing about wars and massacres and violence. The State Department, as I learned from a foreign service officer in Haiti, has a technical term for the countries I mostly write about: the TFC beat. TFC -- in official State Department parlance -- stands for "Totally Fucked-up Countries." After two decades of this, of Salvador and Haiti and Bosnia and Iraq, my mother -- who already had to cope with the anxiety of a son acquiring a very expensive education in "Modern Literature and Aesthetics" -- still asks periodically: Can`t you go someplace nice for a change?

When I was sitting where you are sitting now the issue was Central America and in particular the war in El Salvador. America, in the backwash of defeat in Vietnam, was trying to protect its allies to the south -- to protect regimes under assault by leftist insurgencies -- and it was doing so by supporting a government in El Salvador that was fighting the war by massacring its own people. I wrote about one of those events in my first book, The Massacre at El Mozote, which told of the murder of a thousand or so civilians by a new, elite battalion of the Salvadoran army -- a battalion that the Americans had trained. A thousand innocent civilians dead in a few hours, by machete and by M-16.

Looking back at that story now -- and at many of the other stories I have covered over the years, from Central America to Iraq -- I see now that in part I was trying to find a kind of moral clarity: a place, if you will, where that gulf that I spoke about, between what we see and what is said, didn`t exist. Where better to find that place than in the world where massacres and killings and torture happen, in the place, that is, where we find evil. What could be clearer than that kind of evil?

But I discovered it was not clear at all. Chat with a Salvadoran general about the massacre of a thousand people that he ordered and he will tell you that it was military necessity, that those people had put themselves in harm`s way by supporting the guerrillas, and that "such things happen in war." Speak to the young conscript who wielded the machete and he will tell you that he hated what he had to do, that he has nightmares about it still, but that he was following orders and that if he had refused he would have been killed. Talk to the State Department official who helped deny that the massacre took place and he will tell you that there was no definitive proof and, in any case, that he did it to protect and promote the vital interests of the United States. None of them is lying. I found that if you search for evil, once you leave the corpses behind you will have great difficulty finding the needed grimacing face.

Let me give you another example. It`s from 1994, during an unseasonably warm February day in a crowded market in the besieged city of Sarajevo. I was with a television crew -- I was writing a documentary on the war in Bosnia for Peter Jennings at ABC News -- but our schedule had slipped, as it always does, and we had not yet arrived at the crowded marketplace when a mortar shell landed. When we arrived with our cameras a few moments later, we found a dark swamp of blood and broken bodies and, staggering about in it, the bereaved, shrieking and wailing amid a sickening stench of cordite. Two men, standing in rubber boots knee-deep in a thick black lake, had already begun to toss body parts into the back of a truck. Slipping about on the wet pavement, I tried my best to count the bodies and the parts of them, but the job was impossible: fifty? sixty? When all the painstaking matching had been done, sixty-eight had died there.

As it happened, I had a lunch date with their killer the following day. The leader of the Serbs, surrounded in his mountain villa by a handful of good-looking bodyguards, had little interest in the numbers of dead. We were eating stew. "Did you check their ears?" he asked. I`m sorry? "They had ice in their ears." I paused at this and worked on my stew. He meant, I realized, that the bodies were corpses from the morgue that had been planted, that the entire scene had been trumped up by Bosnian intelligence agents. He was a psychiatrist, this man, and it seemed to me, after a few minutes of discussion, that he had gone far to convince himself of the truth of this claim. I was writing a profile of him and he of course did not want to talk about bodies or death. He preferred to speak of his vision for the nation. [1]

For me, the problem in depicting this man was simple: the level of his crimes dwarfed the interest of his character. His motivations were paltry, in no way commensurate with the pain he had caused. It is often a problem with evil and that is why, in my experience, talking with mass murderers is invariably a disappointment. Great acts of evil so rarely call forth powerful character that the relation between the two seems nearly random. Put another way, that relation is not defined by melodrama, as popular fiction would have it. To understand this mass murderer, you need Dostoevsky, or Conrad. [2]

Let me move closer to our own time, because you are the Class of September 11, and we do not lack for examples. Never in my experience has frank mendacity so dominated our public life. This has to do less with ideology itself, I think, than the fact that our country was attacked and that --from the Palmer Raids after World War I, to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, to the McCarthyite witch-hunts during the Fifties -- America tends to respond to such attacks, or the threat of them, in predictably paranoid ways. Notably, by "rounding up the usual suspects" and by dividing the world, dramatically and hysterically, into a good part and an evil part. September 11 was no exception to this: indeed, in its wake -- coterminous with your time here -- we have seen this American tendency in its purest form.

One welcome distinction between the times we live in and those other periods I have mentioned is the relative frankness of our government officials -- I should call it unprecedented frankness -- in explaining how they conceive the relationship of power and truth. Our officials believe that power can determine truth, as an unnamed senior adviser to the President explained to a reporter last fall:

"We`re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you`re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we`ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that`s how things will sort out. [3]

The reporter, the adviser said, was a member of what he called "the reality-based community," destined to "judiciously study" the reality the administration was creating. Now it is important that we realize -- and by "we" I mean all of us members of the "reality-based community" -- that our leaders of the moment really do believe this, as anyone knows who has spent much time studying September 11 and the Iraq war and the various scandals that have sprung from those events – the "weapons of mass destruction" scandal and the Abu Ghraib scandal, to name only two.

What is interesting about both of those is that the heart of the scandal, the wrongdoing, is right out in front of us. Virtually nothing of great importance remains to be revealed. Ever since Watergate we`ve had a fairly established narrative of scandal. First you have revelation: the press, usually with the help of various leakers within the government, reveals the wrongdoing. Then you have investigation, when the government -- the courts, or Congress, or, as with Watergate, both -- constructs a painstaking narrative of what exactly happened: an official story, one that society -- that the community -- can agree on. Then you have expiation, when the judges hand down sentences, the evildoers are punished, and the society returns to a state of grace.

What distinguishes our time -- the time of September 11 -- is the end of this narrative of scandal. With the scandals over weapons of mass destruction and Abu Ghraib, we are stuck at step one. We have had the revelation; we know about the wrongdoing. Just recently, in the Downing Street memo, we had an account of a high-level discussion in Britain, nearly eight months before the Iraq war, in which the head of British intelligence flatly tells the prime minister – the intelligence officer has just returned from Washington -- that not only has the President of the United States decided that "military action was...inevitable" but that -- in the words of the British intelligence chief -- "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." This memo has been public for weeks. [4]

So we have had the revelations; we know what happened. What we don`t have is any clear admission of -- or adjudication of -- guilt, such as a serious congressional or judicial investigation would give us, or any punishment. Those high officials responsible are still in office. Indeed, not only have they received no punishment; many have been promoted. And we -- you and I, members all of the reality-based community -- we are left to see, to be forced to see. And this, for all of us, is a corrupting, a maddening, but also an inescapable burden.

Let me give you a last example. The example is in the form of a little play: a reality-based playlet that comes to us from the current center of American comedy. I mean the Pentagon press briefing room, where the real true-life comedies are performed. The time is a number of weeks ago. The dramatis personae are Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (and soon to be promoted) General Peter Pace of the Marine Corps; and of course, playing the Fool, a lowly and hapless reporter.

The reporter`s question begins with an involved but perfectly well-sourced discussion of Abu Ghraib and the fact that all the reports suggest that something systematic -- something ordered by higher-ups -- was going on there. He mentions the Sanchez memo, recently released, in which the commanding general in Iraq at the time, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, approved twelve interrogation techniques that, as the reporter says, "far exceed limits established by the Army`s own field manual." These include prolonged stress positions, sensory deprivation (or "hooding"), the use of dogs "to induce stress," and so on; the reporter also mentions extraordinary "rendition" (better known as kidnapping, in which people are snatched off the streets by U.S. intelligence agents and brought to third countries like Syria and Egypt to be tortured). Here`s his question, and the officials` answer:

Hapless Reporter: And I wonder if you would just respond to the suggestion that there is a systematic problem rather than the kinds of individual abuses we`ve heard of before.

Secretary Rumsfeld: I don`t believe there`s been a single one of the investigations that have been conducted, which has got to be six, seven, eight or nine --

General Pace: Ten major reviews and 300 individual investigations of one kind or another.

Secretary Rumsfeld: And have you seen one that characterized it as systematic or systemic?

General Pace: No, sir.

Rumsfeld: I haven`t either.

Hapless Reporter: What about-?

Rumsfeld: Question?

[Laughter] [5]

And, as the other reporters laughed, Secretary Rumsfeld did indeed ignore the attempt to follow up, and went on to the next question.

But what did the hapless reporter want to say? All we have is his truncated attempt at a question: "What about-?" We will never know, of course. Perhaps he wanted to read from the very first Abu Ghraib report, directed by US Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who wrote in his conclusion

"that between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility, numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted.... This systemic and illegal abuse was intentionally perpetrated.... [Emphasis added.] [6]

Or perhaps this from the Red Cross report, which is the only contemporaneous account of what was going on at Abu Ghraib, recorded by witnesses at the time:

"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information or other forms of co-operation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an "intelligence value." [Emphasis added.] [7]

(I should note here, by the way, that the military itself estimated that between 85 and 90 percent of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib had "no intelligence value.")

Between that little dramatic exchange --

Rumsfeld: And have you seen one that characterized it as systematic or systemic?

General Pace: No, sir.

Rumsfeld: I haven`t either --

-- and the truth, there is a vast gulf of lies. For these reports do use the words "systematic" and "systemic" -- they are there, in black and white -- and though the reports have great shortcomings, the truth is that they tell us basic facts about Abu Ghraib: first, that the torture and abuse was systematic; that it was ordered by higher-ups, and not carried out by "a few bad apples," as the administration has maintained; that responsibility for it can be traced -- in documents that have been made public -- to the very top ranks of the administration, to decisions made by officials in the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense and, ultimately, the White House. The significance of what we know about Abu Ghraib, and about what went on -- and, most important, what is almost certainly still going on -- not only in Iraq but at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and other military and intelligence bases, some secret, some not, around the world -- is clear: that after September 11, shortly after you all came to Berkeley, our government decided to change this country from a nation that officially does not torture to one, officially, that does.

What is interesting about this fact is not that it is hidden but that it is revealed. We know this -- or rather those who are willing to read know it. Those who can see the gulf between what officials say and what the facts are. And we, as I have said, remain fairly few. Secretary Rumsfeld can say what he said at that nationally televised news conference because no one is willing to read the reports. We are divided, then, between those of us willing to listen, and believe, and those of us determined to read, and think, and find out. And you, English majors of the Class of 2005, you have taken the fateful first step in numbering yourselves, perhaps irredeemably, in the second category. You have taken a step along the road to being Empiricists of the Word.

Now we have come full circle -- all the way back to the question: What are you going to do with that? I cannot answer that question. Indeed, I still have not answered it for myself. But I can show you what you can do with "that," by quoting a poem. It is by a friend of mine who died almost a year ago, after a full and glorious life, at the age of ninety-three. Czeslaw Milosz was a legend in Berkeley, of course, a Nobel Prize winner -- and he saw as much injustice in his life as any man. He endured Nazism and Stalinism and then came to Berkeley to live and write for four decades in a beautiful house high on Grizzly Peak.

Let me read you one of his poems: it is a simple poem, a song, as he calls it, but in all its beauty and simplicity it bears closely on the subject of this talk.

A SONG ON THE END
OF THE WORLD

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in
the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels` trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he`s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his
tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

"There will be no other end of the world." I should add that there are two words at the end of the poem, a place and a date. Czeslaw wrote that poem in Warsaw in 1944. Can we think of a better place to put the end of the world? Perhaps Hiroshima 1945? Or Berlin 1945? Or even perhaps downtown New York in September 2001?

When Czeslaw Milosz wrote his poem in Warsaw, in 1944, there were those, as now, who saw the end of the world and those who did not. And now, as then, truth does matter. Integrity -- much rarer than talent or brilliance -- does matter. In that beautiful poem, written by a man -- a poet, an artist -- trying to survive at the end of the world, the white-haired old man binding his tomatoes is like yourselves. He may not have been a prophet but he could see. Members of the Class of September 11, whatever you decide "to do with that" -- whether you are writers or professors or journalists, or nurses or lawyers or executives -- I hope you will think of that man and his tomatoes, and keep your faith with him. I hope you will remember that man, and your own questioning spirit. Will you keep your place beside him?

Notes

1. See my "Bosnia: The Turning Point," the New York Review, February 5, 1998.

2. See my essay, "The Erotic Pull of the Strange," Zoetrope All-Story, Summer 2003.

3. See Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," the New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.

4. See my essay, "The Secret Way to War," the New York Review, June 9, 2005.

5. See Defense Department Briefing, March 29, 2005.

6. Major General Antonio M. Taguba, "Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade" ("The Taguba Report"); collected in my Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York Review Books, 2004).

7. See "Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation," February 2004; collected in Torture and Truth.

Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com

This article appears in the June 23th issue of The New York Review of Books

Copyright 2005 Mark Danner


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Published on Tuesday, May 31, 2005 by the Inter Press Service
Fewer and Fewer Latinos Willing to Die in Iraq
by Diego Cevallos
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0531-03.htm

MEXICO CITY - A total of 215 Latino soldiers serving in the U.S. army have already died in Iraq, but according to anti-war activists, this bad news comes with a silver lining: an ever smaller number of young people of Latin American descent are enlisting in the armed forces.

”I`m glad that the army is no longer able to recruit as many soldiers, and that more people are raising their voices against this criminal invasion,” said Camilo Mejía, a Nicaraguan-born former staff sergeant in the U.S. army who refused to return to his unit in Iraq after spending five months stationed there in 2003.

While Mejía declared himself a conscientious objector, the United States deemed him a deserter, and sentenced him to nine months in prison.

Last year, 9,477 foreign-born residents of the United States signed up for the U.S. armed forces - 2,352 fewer than in 2003, according to official statistics from the George W. Bush administration.

”There are so many people dying in this senseless, criminal war that going to jail to oppose it or refusing to join the army are not very big sacrifices when you compare them to all the innocent people killed in the war,” Mejía told IPS.

”I didn`t want to die in a war that isn`t mine, a war that is unjust and immoral. That`s why I turned myself in to my superiors,” declared the soldier-turned-activist, the son of Nicaraguan singer-songwriter Carlos Mejía Godoy, whose music served as the ”soundtrack” to the 1979 leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

Since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq in March 2003, a total of 1,653 soldiers from the United States have died there. Almost 15 percent of these casualties were of Latin American birth or descent, according to figures gathered by the Guerrero Azteca (Aztec Warrior) Project, a U.S.-based group that is demanding the return of the soldiers sent to the Middle East.

The proportion of Latino soldiers who have died in Iraq, most of whom were privates, is higher than the proportion of Latinos in the U.S. armed forces as a whole, which stands at 9.2 percent.

To join the U.S. army, it is sufficient to be a legal resident of the United States, and not necessarily a citizen. In fact, non-citizens are encouraged to sign up by the Bush administration`s promises to speed up the citizenship process and grant scholarships to those who enlist.

Monday was Memorial Day in the United States, a day for paying tribute to the soldiers who have lost their lives in war.

In his Memorial Day address, President Bush stated that ”Another generation is fighting a new war against an enemy that threatens the peace and stability of the world, and thanks to their efforts, freedom is on the march.”

”Freedom - real freedom, not the one sold by Mr. Bush - obliges us to say that the invasion of Iraq is a colossal deception, and the best thing to do is to get out of there,” Mexican-American activist Fernando Suárez, the founder of Aztec Warrior, told IPS.

”More and more Latinos are dying in Iraq, and we weep for these deaths, because they are absurd, but thanks to the anti-war movement, and the prolongation of the occupation, there has been a major drop in willingness to join in the invasion, and that is good news,” he stressed.

Suárez, whose son Jesús joined the U.S. army and died in Iraq at the start of the occupation, maintained that the ”irrational war” in the Middle East is ”crumbling under the weight of its own immorality.”

He spoke with IPS by telephone from a public school in California, where he was giving a presentation against the occupation. Mejía was also interviewed by telephone, but from his home in the southern state of Georgia.

Both are legal residents of the United States, and both are devoting themselves to traveling around the country to voice their opposition to the war and demand that the U.S. soldiers in Iraq be sent home.

”Because I have seen the war, because I have seen what the army is doing, I feel I have the responsibility and the moral obligation to raise awareness, so that people will know what is really going on and will try to stop this war,” said Mejía.

”I have received a lot of letters from the families of fallen soldiers who were against the war but who went over anyway, because they were afraid, or because they didn`t feel strong enough to stand up to their superiors and say that they didn`t want to take part,” he recounted.

”They died while doing something that was against their principles, and that is very sad. But I tell their families to support the soldiers who are still over there and don`t want to be in the war. I tell them to tell those soldiers not to be afraid, because going to jail for desertion is nothing when you are following your conscience,” he added.

Mejía, like Suárez`s son and hundreds of other young people of Latin American descent, were drawn to enlist in the U.S. army by the promises of assistance and scholarships.

”At the time (1995), I was looking for somewhere to put down roots, because I had lived in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba and the United States, and I wanted to be a part of something,” said the former staff sergeant , who is now a member of the non-governmental organization Iraq Veterans Against the War.

But ”going to war wasn`t what I was looking for, and I was very critical of the invasion,” he said.

”I went to Iraq, and being there raised my consciousness to the point where I was able to speak out and say that this is a criminal war. And the price I paid was a court martial and nine months in jail,” he added.

According to Mejía, who was locked up on a military base in the United States until February, dozens of Latino soldiers do not want to be in Iraq, but they stay because they are afraid of going to jail and being branded deserters.

Nevertheless, he concluded, ”That occupation is going to end, since more and more soldiers will dare to speak out, because they can`t fool us anymore.”

© Copyright 2005 IPS - Inter Press Service

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Das ist an sich nichts Neues, dass die Gefangenen, als sogenannte Al Kaida Kämpfer oder Taliban ohne Grund an die USA übergeben wurden. Es wurde schon immer behauptet, dass willkürlich in den Dörfern irgendwelche Personen eingesammelt wurden, und diese dann als Terroristen an die USA übergeben wurden.
Nur dass die USA dafür auch noch gut bezahlt haben, ist für mich neu.

Published on Tuesday, May 31, 2005 by the Associated Press
AP: Gitmo Detainees Say They Were Sold
http://www.ap.org/

They fed them well. The Pakistani tribesmen slaughtered a sheep in honor of their guests, Arabs and Chinese Muslims famished from fleeing U.S. bombing in the Afghan mountains. But their hosts had ulterior motives: to sell them to the Americans, said the men who are now prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Bounties ranged from $3,000 to $25,000, the detainees testified during military tribunals, according to transcripts the U.S. government gave The Associated Press to comply with a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

A former CIA intelligence officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Laden told AP the accounts sounded legitimate because U.S. allies regularly got money to help catch Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. Gary Schroen said he took a suitcase of $3 million in cash into Afghanistan himself to help supply and win over warlords to fight for U.S. Special Forces.

"It wouldn`t surprise me if we paid rewards," said Schroen, who retired after 32 years in the CIA soon after the fall of Kabul in late 2001. He recently published the book "First In: An Insider`s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan."

Schroen said Afghan warlords like Gen. Rashid Dostum were among those who received bundles of notes. "It may be that we were giving rewards to people like Dostum because his guys were capturing a lot of Taliban and al-Qaida," he said.

Pakistan has handed hundreds of suspects to the Americans, but Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told the AP, "No one has taken any money."

The U.S. departments of Defense, Justice and State and the Central Intelligence Agency also said they were unaware of bounty payments being made for random prisoners.

The U.S. Rewards for Justice program pays only for information that leads to the capture of suspected terrorists identified by name, said Steve Pike, a State Department spokesman. Some $57 million has been paid under the program, according to its web site.

It offers rewards up to $25 million for information leading to the capture of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But a wide variety of detainees at the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged they were sold into capture. Their names and other identifying information were blacked out in the transcripts from the tribunals, which were held to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as enemy combatants.

One detainee who said he was an Afghan refugee in Pakistan accused the country`s intelligence service of trumping up evidence against him to get bounty money from the U.S.

"When I was in jail, they said I needed to pay them money and if I didn`t pay them, they`d make up wrong accusations about me and sell me to the Americans and I`d definitely go to Cuba," he told the tribunal. "After that I was held for two months and 20 days in their detention, so they could make wrong accusations about me and my (censored), so they could sell us to you."

Another prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for "a briefcase full of money" then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo.

"It`s obvious. They knew Americans were looking for Arabs, so they captured Arabs and sold them — just like someone catches a fish and sells it," he said. The detainee said he was seized by "mafia" operatives somewhere in Europe and sold to Americans because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — an Arab in a foreign country.

A detainee who said he was a Saudi businessman claimed, "The Pakistani police sold me for money to the Americans."

"This was part of a roundup of all foreigners and Arabs in that area," of Pakistan near the Afghan border, he said, telling the tribunal he went to Pakistan in November 2001 to help Afghan refugees.

The military-appointed representative for one detainee — who said he was a Taliban fighter — said the prisoner told him he and his fellow fighters "were tricked into surrendering to Rashid Dostum`s forces. Their agreement was that they would give up their arms and return home. But Dostum`s forces sold them for money to the U.S."

Several detainees who appeared to be ethnic Chinese Muslims — known as Uighurs — described being betrayed by Pakistani tribesmen along with about 100 Arabs.

They said they went to Afghanistan for military training to fight for independence from China. When U.S. warplanes started bombing near their camp, they fled into the mountains near Tora Bora and hid for weeks, starving.

One detainee said they finally followed a group of Arabs, apparently fighters, being guided by an Afghan to the Pakistani border.

"We crossed into Pakistan and there were tribal people there, and they took us to their houses and they killed a sheep and cooked the meat and we ate," he said.

That night, they were taken to a mosque, where about 100 Arabs also sheltered. After being fed bread and tea, they were told to leave in groups of 10, taken to a truck, and driven to a Pakistani prison. From there, they were handed to Americans and flown to Guantanamo.

"When we went to Pakistan the local people treated us like brothers and gave us good food and meat," said another detainee. But soon, he said, they were in prison in Pakistan where "we heard they sold us to the Pakistani authorities for $5,000 per person."

There have been reports of Arabs being sold to the Americans after the U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan, but the testimonies offer the most detail from prisoners themselves.

In March 2002, the AP reported that Afghan intelligence offered rewards for the capture of al-Qaida fighters — the day after a five-hour meeting with U.S. Special Forces. Intelligence officers refused to say if the two events were linked and if the United States was paying the offered reward of 150 million Afghanis, then equivalent to $4,000 a head.

That day, leaflets and loudspeaker announcements promised "the big prize" to those who turned in al-Qaida fighters.

Said one leaflet: "You can receive millions of dollars. ... This is enough to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life — pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people."

Helicopters broadcast similar announcements over the Afghan mountains, enticing people to "Hand over the Arabs and feed your families for a lifetime," said Najeeb al-Nauimi, a former Qatar justice minister and leader of a group of Arab lawyers representing nearly 100 detainees.

Al-Nauimi said a consortium of wealthy Arabs, including Saudis, told him they also bought back fellow citizens who had been captured by Pakistanis.

Khalid al-Odha, who started a group fighting to free 12 Kuwaiti detainees, said his imprisoned son, Fawzi, wrote him a letter from Guantanamo Bay about Kuwaitis being sold to the Americans in Afghanistan.

One Kuwaiti who was released, 26-year-old Nasser al-Mutairi, told al-Odha that interrogators said Dostum`s forces sold them to the Pakistanis for $5,000 each, and the Pakistanis in turn sold them to the Americans.

"I also heard that Saudis were sold to the Saudi government by the Pakistanis," al-Odha said. "If I had known that, I would have gone and bought my son back."

EDITOR`S NOTE: Chief of Caribbean Services Michelle Faul has covered the prison at Guantanamo Bay since it opened in January 2002. Associated Press writers Paisley Dodds in London and Matthew Pennington in Islamabad, Pakistan contributed to this report.

On the Net:
State Department`s Rewards for Justice program, http://www.rewardsforjustice.net

© Copyright 2005 Associated Press

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RALPH NADER AND KEVIN ZEESE
The `I` word
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

By Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese | May 31, 2005

THE IMPEACHMENT of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, should be part of mainstream political discourse.

Minutes from a summer 2002 meeting involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair reveal that the Bush administration was ``fixing" the intelligence to justify invading Iraq. US intelligence used to justify the war demonstrates repeatedly the truth of the meeting minutes -- evidence was thin and needed fixing.

President Clinton was impeached for perjury about his sexual relationships. Comparing Clinton`s misbehavior to a destructive and costly war occupation launched in March 2003 under false pretenses in violation of domestic and international law certainly merits introduction of an impeachment resolution.

Eighty-nine members of Congress have asked the president whether intelligence was manipulated to lead the United States to war. The letter points to British meeting minutes that raise ``troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war." Those minutes describe the case for war as ``thin" and Saddam as ``nonthreatening to his neighbors," and ``Britain and America had to create conditions to justify a war." Finally, military action was ``seen as inevitable . . . But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Indeed, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, nor any imminent threat to the United States:

The International Atomic Energy Agency Iraq inspection team reported in 1998, ``there were no indications of Iraq having achieved its program goals of producing a nuclear weapon; nor were there any indications that there remained in Iraq any physical capability for production of amounts of weapon-usable material." A 2003 update by the IAEA reached the same conclusions.

The CIA told the White House in February 2001: ``We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has . . . reconstitute[d] its weapons of mass destruction programs."

Colin Powell said in February 2001 that Saddam Hussein ``has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

The CIA told the White House in two Fall 2002 memos not to make claims of Iraq uranium purchases. CIA Director George Tenet personally called top national security officials imploring them not to use that claim as proof of an Iraq nuclear threat.

Regarding unmanned bombers highlighted by Bush, the Air Force`s National Air and Space Intelligence Center concluded they could not carry weapons spray devices. The Defense Intelligence Agency told the president in June 2002 that the unmanned aerial bombers were unproven. Further, there was no reliable information showing Iraq was producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether it had established chemical agent production facilities.

When discussing WMD the CIA used words like ``might" and ``could." The case was always circumstantial with equivocations, unlike the president and vice president, e.g., Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002: ``Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

The State Department in 2003 said: ``The activities we have detected do not . . . add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing . . . an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."

The National Intelligence Estimate issued in October 2002 said ``We have no specific intelligence information that Saddam`s regime has directed attacks against US territory."

The UN, IAEA, the State and Energy departments, the Air Force`s National Air and Space Intelligence Center, US inspectors, and even the CIA concluded there was no basis for the Bush-Cheney public assertions. Yet, President Bush told the public in September 2002 that Iraq ``could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given." And, just before the invasion, President Bush said: ``Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

The president and vice president have artfully dodged the central question: ``Did the administration mislead us into war by manipulating and misstating intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to Al Qaeda, suppressing contrary intelligence, and deliberately exaggerating the danger a contained, weakened Iraq posed to the United States and its neighbors?"

If this is answered affirmatively Bush and Cheney have committed ``high crimes and misdemeanors." It is time for Congress to investigate the illegal Iraq war as we move toward the third year of the endless quagmire that many security experts believe jeopardizes US safety by recruiting and training more terrorists. A Resolution of Impeachment would be a first step. Based on the mountains of fabrications, deceptions, and lies, it is time to debate the ``I" word.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate. Kevin Zeese is director of DemocracyRising.US.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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JAMES CARROLL
America`s mess, not Bush`s
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

By James Carroll | May 31, 2005

MUCH AS Democrats and liberals hate to admit it, the Bush disaster did not begin with him. That he swatted aside the structures of international law as a mode of responding to Osama bin Laden was prepared for by Washington`s habit, begun in the Reagan years, of dismissing international courts, ignoring treaties, and refusing to meet obligations to the United Nations and other transnational bodies.

The International Criminal Court, just coming into existence as America`s war on terrorism was mobilized, fulfilled the impulse to replace revenge with adjudication. Completing the Nuremberg legacy, this new court would have been the perfect arena in which to make world historic cases against Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, but George W. Bush, in one of his first acts as president, had ``unsigned" the ICC treaty.

This momentous act of political destruction had been prepared for, though, by Bill Clinton, who, despite signing the treaty, had never argued for it. Both presidents were protective of the US military because the Pentagon regarded itself as a ready target of ICC prosecution, a fear that seemed paranoid until revelations both that American soldiers routinely abused prisoners in Iraq and high Pentagon officials unilaterally rejected norms set by the Geneva Convention. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were epiphanies of a new Pentagon lawlessness, but it was rooted in several decades` worth of dismissal of international law.

Ironically, US military initiatives, including the invasion of Iraq, were justified with the language of human rights, as if the promotion of elections and the liberation of females defined the heart of Washington`s agenda. This fulfilled a trend that began when liberals and neo-conservatives found common ground in the Clinton-era ideal of ``humanitarian intervention," as if every war in history hadn`t been justified by its perpetrator as humanitarian.

The measure of the humanitarian character of interventions, of course, is taken by what happens on the ground in the countries at issue. In Afghanistan and Iraq, new levels of sectarianism, ethnic conflict, warlordism, drug trafficking, and radical Islamism are all evident in the broader context of destroyed infrastructure, widespread malnourishment, obliterated civil society.

Bush administration officials crow that girls in Afghanistan and Iraq can at last attend schools as equals, without acknowledging that, with rare exceptions in heavily protected enclaves in both countries, there are no schools for anyone to attend. The two countries had been human rights nightmares before Bush`s wars, but the wars themselves -- destroying cities and villages to save them -- hardly represent improvements in the lives of ordinary people. Even under the best of outcomes -- if, say, civil war can be avoided -- Afghanistan and Iraq will be decades in recovering from America`s self-proclaimed good intentions.

Bush`s ``humanitarian" doctrine of ``preventive war" was officially promulgated in the National Security Strategy of 2002. ``This country must go on the offense," Bush said, ``and stay on the offense." Many commentators regarded this move as a break with a tradition that had emphasized ``defense," even to the name of the US war ministry.

In public discussion, war had always been treated as the last resort, but now it would be a first response to threat. Bush had his ``doctrine," and it was the doctrine of ``preventive war." Yet arguments for preventive war had defined the culture of the Pentagon since immediately after World War II. Over the years, not even the Soviet nuclear arsenal inhibited many senior military officials from making them. Always, presidents pushed such arguments to back burners, but they were never off the stove. Under Bush, a long-simmering impulse had come to a boil.

The deeper origins of the current crisis are revealed in other ways. The compelling, but rarely admitted purpose of shoring up American control of supplies of oil and natural gas is expressly reflected in the job histories of Bush`s policy team, but the explicit claim of economic hegemony over the Persian Gulf region, with the threat of military force to back it up, had begun with the ``doctrine" of Jimmy Carter. The stated focus of America`s Mideast war is on the threat of terrorism, yet the overriding strategic issue remains oil supply. That reflects the old thirst, the old policy.

Democrats and liberals blame George W. Bush for the American mess, but it is worse than that. In sum, the immoral and futile war in Iraq, increasingly disapproved in polls but steadily unopposed by politicians, belongs not just to our feckless president, but to the nation.

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

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Da viele Gesetze in den USA zeitlich limitiert sind (eine gute Idee), muß auch der Patriot Act in diesem Jahr erneuert oder verändert werden und dann neu beschloßen werden, sonst verfällt das Gesetz.

June 1, 2005
Patriot Act Redux, and in the Dark
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/01/opinion/01wed1.html

The Patriot Act was passed in haste, in the angst-filled days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with some lawmakers candidly admitting they never read the details. That was one of the reasons key sections included expiration dates, so calmer heads of the future would have an opportunity to fix mistakes. Now that opportunity is here, and far from removing obvious threats to civil liberties in the law, the White House and eager Senate Republicans seem bent on making it worse.

Citizens who want to keep an eye on the process will have no easy task. The most crucial debates of the Senate Intelligence Committee are being kept closed to the public.

This is a terrible idea that gives credence to the worst fears of opponents of Patriot Act I. When the committee resumes its work next week, its leaders should rethink their policy and open their deliberations to the light of day. Accommodations can be made for legitimate security concerns without keeping such a bedrock issue under wraps.

One of the most common complaints about the Patriot Act is that rather than addressing the real but narrow problems with existing law, it was a wish list of powers law enforcement officials had yearned for over the years that Congress had rightly resisted conferring. Now the Bush administration and its Senate allies have come up with another: a proposal to let F.B.I. agents write their own "administrative subpoenas," without the need to consult prosecutors or judges, in demand of all manner of records, from business to medical and tax data. There is no serious evidence that agents have been hamstrung by the lack of such wide authority.

Freeing agents from getting a judge`s sign-off is an invitation to overreaching and abuse, as is a proposal to let the F.B.I. ignore postal law restraints when antiterrorism agents choose to monitor someone`s letter envelopes and package covers.

Parts of the existing Patriot Act are reasonable law enforcement measures, but other sections should be repealed. Chief among these is the so-called library provision that lets the government seize entire databases at libraries, hospitals and other institutions when just one person is under investigation. Another part of the law makes it a crime for record holders to let the public know when a government data sweep has occurred.

Legitimate complaints that the existing law is overbearing have been heard from hundreds of state and local officials and from civil liberty and libertarian groups. Rather than addressing these flaws, Senate Republicans seem to be planning to compound them, under cover of closed hearings.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Dazu auch aus USA Today:
[urlWolfowitz: Combat stymies Iraq rebuilding]http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-06-01-wolfowitz-bank_x.htm[/url]

washingtonpost.com
All Eyes on Wolfowitz as He Ascends at World Bank
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 1, 2005; D01

As Paul D. Wolfowitz officially takes over as president of the World Bank today, he is presenting himself as a leader who will bring gradual shifts in policy to the giant anti-poverty institution, rather than tumultuous regime change.

But not everyone is so sure that he means it.

In the two months since the former U.S. deputy defense secretary was approved by the bank`s board for the job, he has strived mightily to dispel fears that he intends to use the bank`s $20 billion in annual loans to advance the Bush administration`s foreign policy agenda.

Meeting with bank staffers, board members and outsiders, he has repeatedly stressed his commitment to the bank`s core mission of alleviating poverty. And he has said he wants to listen to the advice of the world`s leading development experts on how best to tackle the problems bedeviling poor countries.

Wolfowitz was in his customary low-key mode yesterday in a meeting with a group of reporters. He heaped fresh praise on the outgoing president, James D. Wolfensohn, citing Wolfensohn`s emphasis on helping women and fighting corruption during his 10-year tenure at the bank`s helm. Asked about the worry that his close association with President Bush and the war in Iraq will undercut the bank`s credibility as an impartial dispenser of economic advice, he replied that he would overcome such concerns with actions.

"I think they judge you by how you come across and how you deliver," he said, adding that he has "encountered surprisingly little" skepticism among bank staff and developing country officials about his ability to distance himself from Bush. "I`ve encountered more, `Gee, you could help us obtain access to the White House and Congress.` "

He made it clear that he wants to continue, and probably accelerate, the bank`s recent shift toward lending more for infrastructure projects -- such as roads, bridges, and power plants. Those sorts of projects, which were the bank`s traditional focus for much of the first few decades after its founding in 1944, were de-emphasized during the 1990s in favor of education, health and other "social sector" projects. But under Wolfensohn, they have started to stage a comeback, despite criticism from environmental activists.

"Infrastructure . . . has fallen too far out of fashion," Wolfowitz said. "Development is not just pouring concrete, but it does require concrete and water and electricity." He described lifting countries out of poverty as a "holistic process," adding, "No one`s really sure what does work."

Some people take him at his word when he says he has no intention of turning the bank upside down. Still, "there`s a lot of anxiety here," said one veteran bank economist. "We`re all waiting with bated breath. I`m constantly asked, what is he going to do, and the only answer anyone can honestly give these days is, we haven`t a clue." (Like other bank staffers interviewed for this story, she spoke on condition of anonymity because of concern about offending her new boss.)

Indeed, some of Wolfowitz`s conservative boosters hope, and believe, that he comes to the job with the aim of implementing a far-reaching set of reforms.

Among them is Allan Meltzer, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who headed a congressionally appointed commission that in 2000 recommended a number of sweeping changes in the way the World Bank helps poor nations. The proposals included giving poor countries outright grants, rather than no-interest loans, and sharply reducing bank lending for "middle-income" nations such as China and Mexico that can borrow on private markets. (The Bush administration has already prodded the bank to use grants much more than in the past.)

Meltzer said he thinks Bush chose Wolfowitz because he wants to revamp foreign aid in a major way, "and I think Paul will try to do that." He said he has not spoken to Wolfowitz directly since his selection as bank president, but added: "Let me say, it`s in his interest to put on a charm show in the bank. But we`ll see what happens when heads begin to roll -- if they do."

In his meeting with reporters yesterday, Wolfowitz skirted a question about grants vs. loans, saying he favors balance between the two. He was more emphatic in rejecting the idea of halting lending to middle-income countries. "They still seem interested in borrowing from the bank," he said, and he described the revenue the bank earns on such loans as "clearly a benefit to the bank, and therefore to poorer countries."

Bank staffers who have participated in the meetings with Wolfowitz said that if he is coming with a secret agenda, he has done a masterly job of disguising it. "He is reaching out and asking people to tell him what he needs to know," said a senior economist. "He`s behaving like, `I`m the new kid on the block; this is a complex and big place.` He`s even been seen eating lunch in the cafeteria -- people were just shocked and amazed, to see him just get his tray and sit down at a table." But this economist said of Wolfowitz, "He`s not giving away a lot" about his own views.

Another top official, recounting a couple of meetings between Wolfowitz and some of the bank`s vice presidents, said: "People walked away saying, `This is a person we can work with, a smart guy. Let`s see if the actions match the words, but he`s a serious, thoughtful guy.` "

Still, rumors are widespread at the bank that Wolfowitz has started to make his presence felt even before taking over. A reorganization plan has been frozen, as have appointments to positions just below the level of vice president, out of concern that the moves are not in keeping with the new chief`s plans, according to bank sources.

One reason for trepidation among staffers is the realization that, in general, their politics do not mesh with Wolfowitz`s.

At a farewell party for Wolfensohn in the bank`s atrium, which Wolfowitz attended, a video showing tributes to the outgoing president drew enthusiastic cheers when Bill Clinton and Al Gore spoke. But when the face of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared on the screen, one attendee said, "you practically could have heard a pin drop."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Divided We Stand
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05…

By Harold Meyerson
Post
Wednesday, June 1, 2005; A19

Well, at least the French aren`t mortally afraid of the Germans anymore.

At one level, French voters` decisive rejection of the European Union`s constitution shows that the first phase of the project of European unification -- the binding of Germany to France and its other neighbors through a series of ever-stronger links -- has succeeded to the point where it`s no longer an issue. It was the French (in particular Jean Monnet) who conceived this project in the waning days of World War II. And now it`s the French, freed from all fear of an aggressive German neighbor, who have brought any further moves toward unification a halt. If the polls are right, the Dutch are likely to join them today.

The rejection of a more unified Europe is understandable, but from the standpoint of superpower politics and global social models, it`s regrettable.

Whatever the divisions between the United States and Europe, two democratic superpowers are better than one -- not least because Europe, at its best, espouses values of equality and fraternity in which we in the States are frequently deficient.

It`s fashionable these days for American commentators to chastise Europe (at least, continental Europe) as an economic basket case, so bogged down by regulations that its two largest economies, the German and the French, suffer from double-digit unemployment. In fact, in an era of globalization dominated by finance, neither the U.S. nor the European economies have struck a happy or sustainable balance between security and dynamism: We offer our citizens too little of the first; they offer theirs too little of the second. We extol our model but still covet the universal health insurance that Europe enjoys. We take pride in our job creation, but the wages of blue-collar Americans have slipped well beneath those of their Western European counterparts.

We are strong where they are weak and weak where they are strong -- not that you`d know this from the tone of economic and even moral superiority that many American commentators strike when commending the U.S. economic model to our European friends. I don`t have any statistical data to back me up, but my hunch is that the authors of such pieces aren`t among the 45 million Americans compelled to go without health insurance.

Yet, while Europe still remains a bastion -- an embattled bastion -- of social democracy, it was not just the nationalist right and farmers but also the old social democratic base, blue-collar workers in particular, who torpedoed the constitution on Sunday. Rightly or wrongly, they believed the new Europe would afford them fewer protections than the old France. Had they been asked to ratify such a document a decade ago, when the union had not yet been expanded to include the much poorer nations of Eastern Europe, the vote might have gone the other way. But with unemployment high, and with the specter of border-crossing, low-wage Polish plumbers haunting the French working class, the constitution was probably doomed from the start.

This constellation of forces -- the right-wing nationalists and the blue-collar proles -- shouldn`t be all that unfamiliar to Americans, either. Does anyone really think that Americans would ratify treaties such as NAFTA if they were put to a popular vote? In America, our divisions over free trade mirror the divisions within Europe over unification. Both these internationalizing projects are the babies of business and political elites that haven`t engendered much trust on these issues among their own peoples.

I don`t mean to equate the two projec ts substantively. European unification aims to create a supranational order with at least some social democratic rules of the game, while the American free-trade order chiefly protects the interests of property and neglects those of labor and the environment. But both projects have been imposed from on high with a minimum of popular participation. Both projects have been inviting a backlash for some time now. And just as the drive for a more unified Europe stumbled on Sunday, so the U.S. creation of more free-trade accords is hitting a wall in Congress as the administration scrambles to find the votes to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Twelve years after passage of NAFTA, congressional Democrats seem finally to have realized that trade accords absent labor standards undermine all they stand for domestically, while rural Republicans are hearing from some powerful agricultural interests that CAFTA would threaten their profits.

We may not be France -- heaven forfend! -- but this looks suspiciously like the worker-farmer coalition that turned down European unification. George W. Bush, call Jacques Chirac. The two of you may have more in common than you ever dreamed.

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Laura ist auf jeden Fall klüger als ihr Mann.

Hillary and Laura setto take battle of dynasties back to White House
By David Usborne in New York
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

01 June 2005

For fans lamenting the long-ago fading away of the old soap opera Dynasty, there may be some consolation on the horizon. It comes not from the world of entertainment but from politics, and this show would rather be called "Dynasties - Bush versus Clinton".

Both families already have some claim to the dynasty moniker. President George Bush took up residence in the White House eight years after his father. The man between was Bill Clinton. His wife, Hillary, went on to become a Senator for New York.

But this particular drama may have more episodes to run. It is not just that speculation is at fever pitch that Hillary will try to secure a second term in the Senate next year and will almost certainly then run for the presidency in 2008. There is also this: what about a third President Bush? Or, to be more precise, what about President Laura Bush?

The gossip about Hillary is far from ludicrous. Unlike when she ran in New York in 2000, she is keeping options open for 2008. Meanwhile, a CNN-USA Today poll issued last week showed a majoritysaying they would vote for her if she makes a run for the White House.

The Laura stories are a bit harder to take seriously. It is true, though, that recent weeks have seen her taking an unusually high profile - wowing the audience at a White House press dinner with well-aimed jokes and representing her husband on a tour last month of the Middle East. We also know that the first lady is popular with voters, although very few of them.

That, apparently, is not beyond the imagination of everyone. Thus it was that a few nights ago Lynne Cheney, the wife of the Vice-President, made a surprising remark in an interview with CNN`s Larry King. "You know, people are thinking of Mrs Clinton running for president. I think Mrs Bush ought to run for president," she said. "If we want to have a Bush dynasty, let`s get Laura Bush."


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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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, June 01, 2005

The Iraqization of Afghanistan

A suicide bomber walked into the Abd al-Rabb Mosque in the southwestern city of Qandahar, Afghanistan, at 9 am Wednesday morning and detonated his payload, killing nearly 30 and wounding dozens. The mosque was holding a commemoration for a slain cleric, killed last week, who opposed the Taliban.

The bombing comes against the backdrop of a Taliban spring offensive. Taliban forces launched three attacks on US troops on Monday and took casualties. On Sunday, they clashed with the Afghanistan government troops. Each side claims to have killed 9 of the other, but independent sources quoted by Reuters support the Taliban claim that 9 government troops died in the encounter.

On Monday, a roadside bomb targetting a Nato convoy in Kabul instead killed 7 Afghans.

The reports out of Afghanistan are extremely worrying. It seems clear that the Taliban have learned from observing events in Iraq, and are developing a similar strategy of targetted bombings to destabilize the country and force US troops out.

In switching his attention from Afghanistan to Iraq so abruptly in November, 2001, Bush opened a second front. Second fronts are always problematic, and sometimes they are fatal.

Stephen Biddle`s essay on the "Grand Strategy" of the Bush Administration is well worth downloading in pdf and reading carefully. Biddle`s language is stately and analysis cogent. But if we wanted to do a blogging-style "shorter Biddle", it would be: "Bush hasn`t said who the enemy is or how we could get at him without shooting ourselves in the foot big time."

posted by Juan @ [url6/1/2005 06:35:00 AM]6/1/2005 06:35:00 AM[/url]

The Good Israelis

Revered Israeli news anchor Haim Yavin has made a five-part documentary on the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967, concluding that it has harmed Israel. He says, "Since 1967, we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people." He adds,


"My intention was to get the personal feelings of the settlers, of the Palestinians . . . It has strengthened my former opinion that we have to come to terms with the Palestinians; they are not all terrorists . . . Some of my friends on the left hate the settlers. I don`t hate them, I appreciate them. I even like them, but I say in the documentary that I think they are wrong and they are endangering us."



The Guardian summarizes some of his findings: ` Some settlers tell Yavin that the Palestinians must be given a deadline to leave the occupied territories or be forced out. "Otherwise we should just bomb and kill them," says one woman. `

This fascist point of view is privately shared by many of the strident Zionist organizations that are so influential with the press and the US Congress in the United States. David Steinmann of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs has stridently denounced anyone who supported the Oslo peace accords. JINSA in turn has been important in politically forming Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and Bush`s nominee as UN ambassador, John Bolton. If you want to know what is behind Campus Watch, the Middle East Forum, the David Project, Frontpagemag and other shadowy organizations that have mobilized to attack US academic specialists in the Middle East that don`t toe the Settler line, this is it.

Most Israelis are not racists and a majority consistently tells pollsters that they would gladly exchange land for peace. Unfortunately, this admirable majority has been sidelined by the Likud coalition, which contains far right elements dedicated to further ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Note some important things about the Yavin story. It would not have aired except that there was some channel going off the air that agreed to put it on. Yavin blames Hamas terrorism for the intractability of the problems at this moment. While terrorism is always to be condemned and Hamas ideology is racist and intolerant, the aggressive settling of Palestinian land, the displacement of Palestinians, the rendering of their lives hell with a network of checkpoints and expropriations, contributed mightily to the turn of traditionally secular, peaceful Palestinians to religious violence and extremism.

And, the whole article is framed only with regard to Israel. The fact is that Americans are put in danger by the Israeli Settlers and their persecution of Palestinians, since their actions spread hatred for the US throughout the Muslim world of 1.3 billion persons. The US has never taken any practical steps to stop or roll back Israeli land theft on a grand scale.

As The Guardian notes, the Israelis have just announced that they are going to destroy nearly 100 Palestinian dwellings. This comes a couple months after they announced they were going to build 3500 new dwellings on Palestinian land. What other government in the world is behaving this way with its neighbors?

As could be predicted, the reaction of the Israeli Right to Yavin`s documentary was to demand that he be fired. Cultists always want to intimidate people into silence. If they can`t do that, they want to make them careful what they say. If they can`t do that, they try to deprive them of a place to say it. If they can`t do that, they demand that the person be fired. If that doesn`t work, they smear the person with all sorts of falsehoods in hopes of discrediting the critic with the media and the thinking public. All cults use the same methods. Because they insist on being the only voice heard on the issues of importance to them, and they are completely ruthless and single-minded in accomplishing this goal of effective censorship.

Yavin is obviously a brave and a good man, and worthy of our admiration and support.

posted by Juan @ [url6/1/2005 06:27:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/good-israelis-revered-israeli-news.html[/url]

9 Dead in Crashes
Jaafari Pledges not to Contravene Islamic Law

A bomb wounded three on the road to the airport from Baghdad. The bombers had been gunning for a US military convoy. In Fallujah, a bomb destroyed a car. (-LBC)

Al-Hayat: The body of the governor of Anbar province, Nawaf Raja al-Mahallawi was discovered. He had been killed on Sunday during fighting between American forces and guerrillas. The same fighting had led to the deaths of 4 Arab guerrillas who had been holding him for the past few weeks. Reuters quotes a report suggesting that the fighting caused concrete in the building to collapse on him. Reading between the lines, it seems to me likely that al-Mahallawi was killed as the result of US military action against his captors, though it is not clear if they knew they were dealing with his kidnappers. That pro-American governors of provinces are still being kidnapped and killed at will suggests that President Bush may have been exaggerating slightly when he recently said that everything is going fine in Iraq.

Four US servicemen and an Iraqi officer, and four Italians died in two separate air crashes in Iraq on Tuesday. The Americans died in a plane crash, the Italians in a helicopter crash.

Wire services report, "Near Baquba, north of Baghdad, two Iraqi soldiers were killed and six wounded in an attack on their convoy, an Iraqi army officer said."

al-Hayat, ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari outlined his legislative agenda to parliament on Tuesday. He pledged to cling to "Islamic principles" in crafting legislation. He also committed his government to building a non-sectarian, non-political military so as to gradually reduce the period of time it would be necessary for the multinational forces to remain in Iraq. He called for the melding of militias into the regular Iraqi military. He said a committee had been formed in parliament to follow the drafting of a constitution and stressed the importance of the participation of the Sunni Arabs in the political process.

He said, "The political program of the transitional government aims at building a democratic, federal and pluralist Iraq in the framework of respect for human rights and respect for public freedoms." He said the government would work to "eliminate religious and political discrimination . . . and to respect the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people, taking into account that Islam is the religion of the state, such that no laws will be drafted that contravene its essential verities." He said that the government would work for the "separation of powers, the preservation of the unity of Iraqi territory, and the resolution of the problems the former regime left behind with the countries of the world."

Jaafari said he would only go to Iran for a visit when several outstanding issues had been resolved. (Tehran has already announced his visit for June). "Water and petroleum constitute one of the subjects of mutual importance, and we support anything that benefits the two countries." Jaafari had also made a visit to Syria conditional on the resolution of several outstanding issues, among them border security. Jaafari pledged money for greater security, but made os many unfunded promises that he clearly cannot fulfill them.

Guy Dinmore of the Financial Times notes the upbeat rhetoric about Iraq from administration officials but adds

` In the more sombre assessment of others in the administration, however, the US has long lost its grip on Iraq`s political process. "We are losing control," said one veteran Arabist in the administration who requested anonymity. He described the US embassy in Baghdad, without an ambassador for about six months, as "out of the loop" and not involved in significant decisions taken by the new transitional government dominated by the Shia Arab majority. Geoff Porter, analyst with the Eurasia Group consultancy, said US interests had been "stymied on most fronts", with US officials frustrated with, and ignorant of, Iraq`s fractious politics. "There is an air of resignation, with people throwing up their hands that this will be a long-term process." `



Saudi Arabia is worried about radicals from the kingdom who slipped into Iraq to fight the Americans, coming back to Saudi Arabia to destabilize it.

Michael Hill of the Baltimore Sun explores with unusual depth and perceptiveness the ways in which the Bush administration`s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have benefitted Iran above all. He makes the important point that Iran is now the major regional power in the oil-rich Gulf region, and has strong allies in Kabul and Baghdad.

From the Iraqi Press via BBC World Monitoring for May 30:


"Al-Sabah al-Jadid publishes on page 2 an 80-word report on a recent meeting held by Muqtada al-Sadr with Civil Affairs Minister Ala Habib Kazim al-Safi to discuss the role of civic institutions in the political process, the need to denounce sectarianism, and the procedures of "eliminating corruption." . . .

Al-Sabah al-Jadid publishes on page 8 a 400-word article calling for "evacuating" Mujahidin-e Khalq Organization from Iraq because it is a "terrorist organization that has committed atrocious crimes against Iraqis and had supported Saddam Husayn`s regime." The article cites fatwas issued by a number of Shiite religious authorities "illegalizing the support to or transaction with this organization." It also cites dissolved Governing Council`s decree on 9 December 2003 that stipulated the evacuation of this organization from Iraq . . .


Al-Mashriq publishes on the front page a 300-word report saying that the first dispute between President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja`fari has been made public, after the latter issued a decision to immediately release all Iranian detainees from Iraqi prisons irrespective of the charges they were facing . . .

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 28 May publishes on page 2 a 100-word report stating that occupation forces invaded the city of Hadithah and killed Shaykh Isma`il Abdallah al-A`araji, member of the Association of Muslim Scholars . . .

Al-Adalah carries on page 3 a 100-word report citing Al-Najaf Deputy Governor Abd-al-Husayn Abtan saying that the multinational forces have supplied Al-Najaf Police with 27 vehicles equipped with up-to-date equipment and arms. . .



For May 29:


"Al-Zaman publishes on page 2 a 240-word report citing the commander of the multinational forces in Karbala Governorate confirming that his forces have presented an official apology to the families of four victims who had been accidentally killed in the last two months . . .

Al-Manarah publishes on page 3 a 160-word report citing a spokesman for Basra Advisory Council as saying that the council has decided to dissolve four commando brigades in the governorate comprising approximately 4,000 officers. . .

Al-Mu`tamar publishes on the front page a 150-word report citing an important official in Al-Ramadi denying that an agreement between the US forces and Al-Ramadi tribes had been reached, but confirming that a meeting was held between them to lift the siege imposed on the city and open the roads. . . .

Al-Zaman publishes on page 5 a 500-word column by Rabah al-Ja`far, an Iraqi writer, strongly criticizing US forces for defiling the Al-Quds Mosque in Al-Ramadi and hundreds more throughout Iraq. The writer also criticizes the Iraqi officials who justify the misconduct of US forces and allege that mosques are being used by insurgents . . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 4 a 500-word report quoting Baghdad Mayor Ala al-Tamimi confirming that Baghdad Municipality has cancelled the contracts signed with cleaning companies, adding that it will start cleaning Baghdad streets directly through its departments.

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 4 a 700-word report saying that the severe shortage in drinking water is still a major concern, adding that the drinking water in some areas in Baghdad are polluted and have a bad smell. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 4 a 100-word report saying that Al-Kut people have staged a peaceful demonstration demanding the Wasit Governorate Council to combat sectarianism, provide basic services and job opportunities to the people of the governorate. . . .

posted by Juan @ [url6/1/2005 06:25:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/9-dead-in-crashes-jaafari-pledges-not.html[/url]

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WASHINGTON (IWR News Parody) - President Bush denied at his press conference today that he is the worst president of all times.

"Come on, Nixon was almost impeached? Or what about that [urlTeapot Dome]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal president or was that in England? Anyway, there had to be some jerk who was lousier than I am, right?

Just because when you type in [url`worst president`]http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLB,GGLB:1969-53,GGLB:en&q=worst+president at Google my name comes up on the top the list don`t prove a goddamn thing!

Besides, Karl tells that`s the work of all those liberal [urllumberjacks, loggers,]http://www.bartcop.com/worst_president_ever_sm.jpg clogs. You know what the hell I mean.

Like that [urlAmeriablog,]http://americablog.blogspot.com/ who turned in my buddy Jeff Gannon, or that damn [urlBuzzFlash,]http://www.buzzflash.com/ who started all that damn [urlCodpiece]http://www.internetweekly.org/photo_cartoons/cartoon_bush_codpiece_story.html nonsense," said a clearly frustrated Mr. Bush.[/url][/url][/url][/url][/url][/url]
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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
U.S. Toll in May Highest Since January
From Reuters
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-toll…

June 1, 2005

WASHINGTON — The monthly death toll for American troops in Iraq rose in May to the highest level since January, and the U.S. military said Tuesday that insurgents had doubled their number of daily attacks since April.

At least 77 U.S. troops were killed in May, the military said. That is the highest monthly toll since 107 American troops were killed in January.

It was the second straight monthly increase. In March, 36 U.S. troops died, one of the lowest monthly tolls of the war.

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said insurgents were staging about 70 attacks a day nationwide.

"There was a period of time right after the [Jan. 30] election until the beginning of April or middle of April that we actually saw them dip into the low 30s," he said of the daily attacks.

The latest Pentagon figures list 1,658 U.S. military deaths since the war began in March 2003, with 12,630 more wounded in combat.

Insurgents have aggressively targeted Iraqi security forces and civilians as well. Boylan said more than 600 Iraqis had been killed or wounded in May.

Several factors were responsible for the higher number of U.S. deaths last month, he said.

May was a record month for car bombings, Boylan said, and U.S. forces suffered losses in several offensives, including in the western towns of Haditha and Qaim.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
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Die Zahlen für Mai:

Latest Fatality: May 31, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 1850 , US: 1665, May.05: 86

Iraker: Civilian: 573 Police/Mil: 270 Total: 843
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

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The health care system`s prescription for saving the country`s sickest babies isn`t working. Newborns are more likely to die in the U.S. than in almost any other industrialized nation. San Francisco`s rate of infant deaths is the lowest among U.S. cities, but in the Bay Area`s disadvantaged neighborhoods babies die as often as those in much poorer countries. New science suggests the problem may have been misdiagnosed.

[urlTOO YOUNG TO DIE
Infant Deaths]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/10/03/MNINFANTMOMAP.DTL[/url]
Babies born in the United States are twice as likely to die as those of Sweden, Iceland, Japan, Spain or even the Czech Republic. And, within this country, some babies -- depending on their race and where they live -- start out with heavy odds against them.
Die gesamte Serie: http://www.sfgate.com/infantmortality/

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Jun 2, 2005

Jailhouse rock
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Stung by Amnesty International`s condemnation of US detention facilities in Iraq and elsewhere overseas, the administration of President George W Bush is reacting with indignation and even suggestions that terrorists are using the world`s largest human-rights organization.

The latest denunciation came from Bush himself during a White House press conference on Tuesday. "I`m aware of the Amnesty International report, and it`s absurd. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," he said, and added that Washington had "investigated every single complaint against [sic] the detainees."
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"It seemed like [Amnesty] based some of their decisions on the word and allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people [who] had been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic] - that means not tell the truth," Bush went on. "And so it was an absurd report. It just is."

At issue is an Amnesty report released last Thursday that assailed US detention practices. Since its release, a succession of top US administration officials and their right-wing backers in the major media has denounced the London-based group in what appears increasingly like an orchestrated effort to discredit independent human-rights critics. A similar campaign appeared to target Newsweek magazine earlier this month.

"It looks like a campaign," Human Rights Watch (HRW) advocacy chief Reed Brody said on Tuesday. "There`s been a real drumbeat since Amnesty published the report. It seems like there`s an attempt to silence critics."

Bush`s reaction on Tuesday largely mirrored that of Vice President Dick Cheney in an interview taped on Friday and broadcast Sunday evening by CNN.

"For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don`t take them seriously," the vice president said in response to Amnesty`s report.

"Frankly, I was offended by it. I think the fact of the matter is, the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world."

As to allegations of mistreatment of detainees, Cheney argued, "if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated".

Other senior officials have also weighed in. Like Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the Amnesty report "absurd", while chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, said it was "absolutely irresponsible" and insisted that the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a "model facility" where prisoners have been treated "humanely".

Amnesty`s secretary general, Irene Khan, made the specific allegation against which the administration has unleashed its fury. She referred to the overseas network of US detention facilities established by Washington in Iraq and elsewhere as part of what it calls its "global war on terror", as "the gulag of our times", a reference to the system of prison and labor camps run during the Stalinist period of the former Soviet Union.

While the Washington Post, normally a defender of independent human-rights groups, objected to her characterization as counter-productive, the Wall Street Journal`s neo-conservative editorial staff jumped on it as "one more sign of the moral degradation of Amnesty International".

The Journal, which often reflects the views of influential hardline policymakers such as Cheney, called Amnesty a "highly politicized pressure group" whose latest accusations "amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda".

Anticipating the vice president`s CNN`s remarks, the Journal, which also has campaigned against the International Committee of the Red Cross for criticizing Washington`s treatment of detainees, added that "a human-rights group that can`t distinguish between Stalin`s death camps and detention centers for terrorists who kill civilians can`t be taken seriously".

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, two lawyers who often reflect the views of other members of the right-wing nationalist Federalist Society and who hold senior legal positions in the administration, soon joined the Journal.

In an article published by the National Review Online titled "Amnesty Unbelievable", the two men charged that the organization`s critical report "says much more about the nature of Amnesty International - and the agenda of similar left-wing non-governmental organizations [NGOs] - than it does about the human-rights record of the United States".

Like the Journal, Casey and Rivkin said they were incensed at the suggestion by the head of Amnesty`s US section, William Schulz, that Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and other senior US officials who had a role in authorizing abusive interrogation practices should be prosecuted in foreign jurisdictions for violations of the Geneva and torture conventions committed against detainees if the administration continued to reject calls by human rights` and lawyers` groups for an independent investigation.

In their view, Amnesty, "is trapped in a 20th-century mindset where the greatest threat to individual life and liberty stemmed from the actions of sovereign governments. That is simply no longer the case". NGOs, they added, "simply do not consider that the defense of the American population, and the vindication of each individual`s right to live without the threat or actuality of terrorist attack, is their problem - and it is time they did".

Amnesty, however, has stood its ground. "At Guantanamo, the US has operated an isolated prison camp in which people are confined arbitrarily, held virtually incommunicado, without charge, trial or access to due process. Not a single Guantanamo detainee has had the legality of their detention reviewed by a court," despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that provided grounds to do so.

"Guantanamo is only the visible part of the story. Evidence continues to mount that the US operates a network of detention centers where people are held in secret or outside any proper legal framework - from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond," Amnesty added, noting that Bush had failed to respond to these "longstanding concerns".

"It is worth also worth noting," stressed Schulz, "that this administration never finds it `absurd` when we criticize Cuba or China, or when we condemned the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein."

Bush`s and Cheney`s insistence that the detainees themselves concocted the reported abuses also drew criticism.

"You really don`t have to look further than the Pentagon`s own reports," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "There`s ample substantiation of serious abuses," she said, adding that the administration`s "ostrich approach" was dangerous. "The problems are there, and they`re going to continue to pose a risk to US lives and policy until they`re dealt with."

HRW`s Brody echoed that view. "What is sad is that this effort at damage control may work in the US," he said, "but unless the administration addresses the real issues of concern - torture, rendition, disappearances, systematic humiliation of Muslim prisoners - then the US image in the world will continue to erode."

(Inter Press Service)

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Jun 2, 2005

The Wild West of American intelligence
By Roman Kupchinsky
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF02Ak02.html

The information revolution has spawned a global industry of private intelligence services, and some members of the US Congress have recently asked whether their activities should be regulated. There is good reason for this - according to Corporate Watch, 50% of the US$40 billion given annually to the 15 intelligence agencies in the United States is now spent on private contractors.
The rapidly growing private intelligence and security industry has become a multibillion-dollar business. It can be roughly divided into two sectors:
# That which deals with security threats and provide intelligence and security in combat-related operations
# That which provides companies with vital intelligence needed to expand business and avoid unnecessary pitfalls in an emerging marketplace. These companies also collect data on private citizens, which is often sold to companies wishing to market their products or to those in the business of guarding airports and other vital national infrastructure from terrorist attacks.

Threat to privacy
Some members of the US Congress are worried that the unregulated spread of private intelligence agencies could constitute a threat to privacy rights enjoyed by US citizens.

In a statement dated February 22, 2003, US Senator Patrick Leahy (a Democrat from Vermont) cautioned his colleagues that the case of ChoicePoint Inc - a private, US-based company that inadvertently sold 145,000 personal and financial records of Americans to con men posing as legitimate businessmen - is an indication that "new technologies, new private-public domestic security partnerships, and the rapid rise of giant information brokers ... have all combined to produce powerful new threats to privacy".

According a Washington Post report on January 20 this year, ChoicePoint has contracts with the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to provide public records online. The paper noted: "ChoicePoint and other private companies increasingly occupy a special place in homeland security and crime-fighting efforts, in part because they can compile information and use it in ways government officials sometimes cannot because of privacy and information laws."

Leahy has pointed out that databases of giant information companies contain billions of records on individuals "that include sensitive information such as financial, travel, medical, and insurance data".

"Very little is known about the integrity and handling of this information, and there are insufficient rules and oversight to protect public privacy," Leahy said.

Private spies
Immune from parliamentary oversight committees and many restrictions governing their activities, private security and intelligence services are being hired by intelligence agencies for myriad tasks. Often run by prominent former spies, these privately owned companies present themselves as an alternative source of information gathering and offer other special services.

The US State Department lists 29 private companies doing business in Iraq. Among them are:
# AKE Limited, based out of the United Kingdom and described on the State Department`s website as a company that offers "hostile regions` training, twice-weekly Iraq security briefings, private intelligence, and security reports".
# Meyer & Associates from Texas, which offers, "Security consulting and problem resolution ... intelligence; transportation ... threat assessment; kidnap negotiations; investigations; reporting; analysis; liaison with government, diplomatic, military, local and guerilla leaders."
# Overseas Security & Strategic Information Inc/Safenet, based in Atlanta, Georgia, provides "threat and intelligence reporting" and claims that its approach "is responsive, personalized, and cost-effective".

These and other companies working in Iraq have US government contracts to provide intelligence reports, man security posts for government facilities in the country, debrief prisoners, serve as translators in jails, and guard oil pipelines from sabotage. Many employees of these companies have been killed by Iraqi insurgents or terrorist attacks.

Athena
One such private intelligence company is Athena, a subsidiary of the Israeli-based Merkhav Group. Athena, which has offices in the United States, Greece and Israel, is headed by ex-Mossad head Shabtai Shavit. His former subordinate, Yossi Maiman, is the head of Merkhav and is considered by many to be one of the most influential men in Israel - and Turkmenistan.

Athena promotes its services in a brochure available on the Internet titled "Intelligence From Open Sources" that says, "Intelligence is no longer reserved solely for government and state organizations. Today`s terror attacks have brought about an awareness of the need for advanced information. Public and private organizations can now perform a self-assessment of their vulnerability and the security risks posed by terrorism."

Athena is very clear in its understanding of the world of intelligence: "Intelligence, until the end of the [19]80s, was a subject dealt with by governments and nations. It brought with it connotations of military and state security issues. Companies and private people dealt with information - not with intelligence. During the 1990s, more and more corporations developed the concept of business and industrial intelligence as a competitive tool."

While companies such as Athena claim to gather information only from open sources, there is always the danger of these companies straying beyond such self-imposed restrictions and gaining access to non-public, confidential sources in order to satisfy clients. How such sources are tapped can become a delicate matter, and in certain circumstances privacy laws could be violated.

The question facing lawmakers is what to do if any of these private intelligence services become "rogue elephants" and - inadvertently or not - sell their information to criminals or terrorists.

As reported in Asia Times Online The metrics of losing on May 25:

In Iraq, the numbers of "private security contractors" - always referred to politely as such in the American press, never as "mercenaries" or "hired guns" - is unknown. There can be no question, however, that they make up by far the second-largest contingent of "coalition" fighting forces in Iraq, well ahead of the British. Estimates of the number of foreign hired guns in Iraq usually fall in the 15,000-20,000 range, with possibly tens of thousands of Iraqi hired guns thrown in as well. According to Agence France-Presse, 60 foreign firms, with exotic names like Blackwater and Custer Battles, as well as 40 Iraqi firms, are in the mercenary business there. But as with their casualty figures, so their force numbers exist in a murky world beyond all public math. Almost completely unregulated - in one of the last decrees issued by the defunct Coalition Provisional Authority, pro-consul L Paul Bremer granted immunity from prosecution for private security contractors working with the Americans and US-backed Iraqi government - they constitute the paramilitary "Wild West" of American Iraq.

Copyright (c) 2005, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036

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Published on Wednesday, June 1, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
What European Crisis?
by John Buell
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0601-33.htm

If you read the business press--from the Wall Street Journal to The Economist (London)-- you might conclude that Western Europe is on the verge of collapse. Such rhetoric has only been stoked by France’s recent rejection of the new European constitution. France is now being harshly criticized for standing in the way of needed continental reforms to labor market and business regulations. New York Times columnist David Brooks even invokes Europe’s purported crisis as proof that US Social Security must be privatized. Europe, with more taxes and regulations, supposedly can’t generate the growth needed to sustain its increasingly elderly citizens. Yet this conventional perspective may reflect ideological enthusiasm more than economic history on both sides of the pond.

The business press argues that Germany, the Scandinavian nations, and France suffer from “overly regulated” labor markets and high taxes. They are cursed with dangerous levels of unemployment. The Washington Post charges that Europe is in a “productivity slump.” One problem with this analysis is that worker productivity is defined not as output per worker but as output per working hour. Economist Dean Baker reminds us that in terms of output per working hour, European productivity has continued to increase at the rate of 1.0-2.0 percent annually over the last six years. He adds that: “The growth in output per hour has not always translated into output per worker, since workers have taken a large portion of the gains of higher productivity growth in the form of shorter work weeks…. Work weeks of 35-37 hours are standard as is five to six weeks a year of paid vacation.” Some European nations now enjoy higher absolute rates of worker productivity that the US.

Western Europe’s unemployment “crisis” is also partially an artifact of different definitions of unemployment. The US counts part-time employees seeking full-time employment as employed and excludes so called discouraged workers from the labor market. If the US definition of unemployment were used, the former West Germany’s current unemployment stands only slightly higher than ours. So is this is some looming disaster we need to fear? Unemployment is slightly higher than our own, but workers retire earlier, enjoy more time off, and are often more productive while working.

Even with respect to the admittedly vexing problem of unemployment, conservatives have a conveniently a-historical take. The European economy became more sluggish as the European Union expanded and adopted trade regulation principles closer to US norms. Expanded business investment in and worker emigration from Eastern Europe, where worker protections are slight, has put downward pressure on wages. In addition, the European Central Bank has pursued consistently high interest, pro banker policies. Many French citizens voted against the new constitution not because they were anti-Europe but because they feared that the new constitution would write these corporate norms into fundamental law.

In addition, as University of Texas economist James Galbraith points out, much US job growth has other sources than deregulation and low taxes. There are vital areas where the US government intervenes in markets more than most European nations do. Along with massive expenditures for the military, Galbraith identifies a “soft Keynesianism” of direct and indirect support for university education and housing. Housing is subsidized not only through tax write offs but also through federal guarantees of mortgage markets. Tax write offs for gifts to higher education along with state and federal expenditures give the US a higher education sector that constitutes about twice as much of our GNP as in Europe. In addition, Galbraith reminds us that our much-lamented pensions for the elderly have not only served to reduce poverty but also sustain effective demand.

Even in the face of growing competition from low wage workforces both within the EU and the US and Asia, some European nations remain remarkably well off and competitive. Guardian columnist George Monbiot points out that even by the favorite business press criteria, Sweden is one of the world’s most successful nations. Its per capita GNP and trade balance far surpass its more deregulated and lower tax competitor, Great Britain.

Advocates of the so called US model also fail to recognize that taxes can buy goods that businesses need to thrive. Swedish taxes are higher. Though redistribution can go too far, some redistribution is needed to sustain effective consumer demand. In addition, taxes fund health care, which US workers and businesses fund themselves—far less efficiently—thereby rendering US manufacturing less competitive. Stronger Swedish unions have kept wages high, thereby fostering worker morale and encouraging more technological innovation and productivity gains.

Both sides of the Atlantic should learn from each other. Galbratih suggests that Europe could stimulate both more consumer demand and greater productivity by subsidizing university education in its less developed eastern nations and by promoting a continent wide pension system. (Contrary to Brooks, the lack of pensions in Eastern Europe may be a greater problem than their generosity.) The United Sates needs to consider the role that healthy unions and universal health care, have played in increasing long run productivity. But a trans-Atlantic business press mesmerized by a model the US itself has never fully practiced is unlikely to consider these options.

John Buell ([e-mail]) is a columnist for the Bangor Daily News.

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DERRICK Z. JACKSON
The last throes of truth in Iraq
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | June 1, 2005

THE WHITE HOUSE is searching for weapons of mass deletion.

On CNN`s ``Larry King Live" on Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said of the violence in Iraq, ``I think they`re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

This is after May became the deadliest month for US forces since the January elections, with 76 US military casualties.

At a press conference on Tuesday, President Bush was asked about the US casualties and the deaths of 760 Iraqis since the new Iraqi government was named April 28. A reporter asked Bush, ``Do you think that the insurgency is gaining strength and becoming more lethal?"

Bush responded, ``I think the Iraqi people dealt the insurgents a serious blow when they, when we had the elections."

Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers was asked on ABC`s ``Good Morning America" about the deaths. ``Myers said, `Well, first of all, the number of incidents is actually down 25 percent since the highs of last November, during the election period. So, overall, numbers of incidents are down. Lethality, as you mentioned, is up. . . . I think what`s causing it is a realization that Iraq is marching inevitably toward democracy."

Do not even think of bringing up Amnesty International. The human rights group published its annual report last week, a report in which the organization`s secretary general, Irene Khan, said, ``The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law."

To that, Bush cried, ``Absurd." Cheney said, ``I was offended." Myers said, ``absolutely irresponsible."

All that is missing is a banner behind them saying, ``Misinformation Accomplished."

Bush, Cheney, and Myers are saying all these things as their invasion of Iraq is closing in on a dubious milestone. The number of soldiers who died in the invasion and occupation, 858, is about to be passed by the number killed after the United States handed over sovereignty to hand-picked Iraqi leaders. The latter number just crossed the 800 mark.

Soon, the number of US soldiers who have died in the ``free" Iraq will surpass the number who died dismantling the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The two-deaths-a-day average suffered by the US-led forces is the same as during the period from when Bush stood under the banner ``Mission Accomplished" until the handover. The number of Iraqi police and guardsmen who have been killed is 880 this year alone, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. At the current pace, this year`s deaths will easily outstrip the prior 1,300.

Yet Bush says, ``I`m pleased with the progress." If the Iraqi people have already dealt the insurgency a serious blow, as Bush claims, or if it is in the final throes, as Cheney claims, one shudders to consider what Iraq will look like if they are wrong.

On the Amnesty International flap, conservative commentators and The Washington Post editorial page have slammed Amnesty`s rhetoric as way over the top, saying it is a cheap shot to compare US prisons in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and in other parts of Iraq and Afghanistan to the horrors of Stalin. Amnesty definitely overdid it on the surface, but there was one thing the Bush administration of course did not mention in its rush to trample Amnesty`s name.

When our State Department released in March its own massive annual report of human rights abuses around the world, it was quick to criticize other nations for human rights abuses. The State Department often quotes Amnesty International on other nations` abuses. But there was no self-criticism of our prisoner treatment in the so-called war on terror.

The reason is quite ironic. A year ago, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Kozak said, ``The reason we don`t do a report on ourselves is the same reason you wouldn`t write investigative reports about your own finances or something; it wouldn`t have any credibility. Somebody else needs to do that. It`s not that we`re against being scrutinized, and indeed we are scrutinized by many other organizations: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International."

With new allegations of Guantanamo prisoner treatment by the Associated Press, the questions continue about American moral authority. If the chaos continues, what could the Bush adminsitration possibly say next?

Derrick Z. Jackson`s e-mail address is [e-mail].
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 1, 2005
1:31 PM
CONTACT: Amnesty International
AIUSA Press Office: 202-544-0200 x 302

Amnesty International`s Response to Rumsfeld
Statement of Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA
http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0601-25.htm

WASHINGTON--June 1--Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration ignored or dismissed Amnesty International`s reports on the abuse of detainees for years, and senior officials continue to ignore the very real plight of men detained without charge or trial. Amnesty International first communicated its concerns at the treatment of prisoners to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in January 2002 and continued to raise these concerns at the highest levels as allegations of abuse mounted from Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq. The response was to bar AI`s human rights investigators from visiting US detention facilities, in contrast to countries as diverse as Libya and Sudan, where governments have accepted the value of independent monitoring.

Twenty years ago, Amnesty International was criticizing Saddam Hussein`s human rights abuses at the same time Donald Rumsfeld was courting him. In 2003 Rumsfeld apparently trusted our credibility on violations by Iraq, but now that we are criticizing the US he has lost his faith again. [see quotes below]

The deliberate policy of this administration is to detain individuals without charge or trial in prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base and other locations, where their treatment has not conformed to international standards. Donald Rumsfeld personally approved a December 2002 memorandum that permitted such unlawful interrogation techniques as stress positions, prolonged isolation, stripping, and the use of dogs at Guantanamo Bay, and he should be held accountable, as should all those responsible for torture, no matter how senior.

There has yet to be a full independent investigation, and the content of some of the government`s own reports into human rights violations in these prisons remain classified and unseen. If this administration is committed to transparency, it should immediately open the network of detention centers operated by the US around the world to scrutiny by independent human rights groups. It is also worth noting that this administration eagerly cites Amnesty International research when we criticize Cuba and extensively quoted our criticism of the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the run up to the war.

Rumsfeld quotes (compiled by thinkprogress.org at http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=979 )

On March 27, 2003, Rumsfeld said:

We know that it`s a repressive regime?Anyone who has read Amnesty International or any of the human rights organizations about how the regime of Saddam Hussein treats his people?

The next day, Rumsfeld cited his "careful reading" of Amnesty:

I seems to me a careful reading of Amnesty International or the record of Saddam Hussein, having used chemical weapons on his own people as well as his neighbors, and the viciousness of that regime, which is well known and documented by human rights organizations, ought not to be surprised

And on April 1, 2003, Rumsfeld said once again:

If you read the various human rights groups and Amnesty International`s description of what they know has gone on, it`s not a happy picture.

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A British government memo that critics say proves the Bush administration manipulated evidence about weapons of mass destruction in order to carry out a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein has received little attention in the mainstream media, frustrating opponents of the Iraq war.

Dieses Memo ist nun in den USA angekommen, denn Fox News bericht darüber. Einen Monat nach der Veröffentlichung durch die London Times.(Auch Murdoch)

[urlDowning Street Memo Mostly Ignored in US]http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,158228,00.html[/url]

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June 2, 2005
War From the Top Down
By JAMES S. CORUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/opinion/02corum.html?

Oxford, England

MOST Americans, including many of those making military decisions in Washington, have been surprised by the intensity of the Iraqi insurgency since the January elections. How, despite their failure to coalesce into a united front and their lack of a coherent political program, have the armed factions shown such staying power? History suggests an answer and, more important, provides a model for putting the insurgency down.

Once started, rebellions develop their own internal logic and momentum. People who take up arms are normally reluctant to put them down again, even if the chance of ultimate success is minimal. The unsuccessful communist insurgency in Malaya after World War II lasted 12 years. The Huk insurgency in the Philippines lasted a decade. The rebellion in El Salvador that began in 1980 continued for 12 years. In many cases, the rebel cadres simply fought until attrition made them irrelevant.

Another common element was that the rebels flourished in an environment of disorder. Many insurgencies erupted in the messy aftermath of the world wars as factions took advantage of postwar power vacuums. Likewise, when Saddam Hussein`s regime fell, there were too few American and allied troops to establish control; this gave Iraqi factions a perfect opportunity to arm and scramble for power. In the aftermath, the American military has lurched from one quick fix to another. At first we tolerated factional militias - until they threatened the Coalition Authority. Then we recruited large numbers of police officers and briefly trained them. They performed as well as poorly trained forces usually do: badly.
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Our current goal - to bring enough stability to the country that we can bring the American troops home - depends on our giving the Iraqis enough expertise to win their own war. Again, history provides clues. When the Malayan insurgency broke out in 1948, Britain initially brought in 40,000 army troops and rushed to expand the colony`s police and security forces. From 1948 to 1951 the police force was quadrupled to 40,000 men and more than 100,000 "home guard" auxiliaries were recruited.

Sheer numbers had an effect, but over time, the hastily trained police and security units were inefficient, and in 1951 senior British commanders reported that they had stalled against the rebels.

So in 1952 Britain sent out a new high commissioner, Gen. Gerald Templer, and a new police commander, Sir Arthur Young, formerly head of the Metropolitan Police in London, who realized that the Malayan police had plenty of manpower but lacked competent leaders at every level. Young began a long-term training program that emphasized developing highly professional commanders and noncommissioned officers.

Dozens of capable men were sent to the United Kingdom for a yearlong police academy course. Hundreds of junior officers were sent to new police and military schools in Malaya run by the British. Templer, paradoxically, slowed the expansion of the Malayan Army until cadets and junior officers with the highest potential could be sent to schools in the United Kingdom. Yes, this caused short-term manpower problems, but the strategy paid off. By late 1953, the police department`s effectiveness had noticeably improved and again the government was winning the war.

The situation in Iraq today is similar to what faced Templer when he arrived in Malaya. After the fall of Baghdad, American officials had little understanding of just how politicized and corrupt the Iraqi police and military forces had been under Saddam Hussein. Most dictatorships favor party loyalty over merit; this is why third-world armies look impressive on parade on Revolution Day but fail on the battlefield. Officers under Saddam Hussein were well educated, but those who had performed well in the long war with Iran were seen as a threat and were purged or mysteriously died. So while the Pentagon was correct in assuming that there were plenty of officers who were not Saddam Hussein loyalists and who would be willing to serve a new government, it overestimated their skills.

The character of these men should not have been a surprise: the NATO militaries spent most of the 1990`s rebuilding the old Warsaw Pact armies. Retraining the officers from Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic into Western-style forces was a long, expensive and difficult task. For example, the German Army had to set up a three-year program to re-educate 14,000 officers and noncommissioned officers from the East German Army; even now, according to people I know in the German Army, you can still pick out those who had been trained under the Communist system by their lack of initiative and unwillingness to assume responsibility.

I know from my own experience that training the Iraqis will be an equally arduous venture. Early last year I went to Iraq with a small team of American officers to advise the Iraqi military on officer training. One of my colleagues had spent years working with those Eastern European soldiers, and said the similarities were striking. Even to me, it quickly became obvious that many of the Iraqi officers were looking for no more than a well-paid sinecure and eventual pension.

Still, there were some men who clearly wanted to help build a better Iraq, at great risk to themselves. And while they seemed smart and willing, they lacked even basic professional training. We decided that the best way to help them would be the Templer model: sending dozens of the best men to the United States for training. On their return, these men could not only take command of military units but, equally important, could become the teaching staff for the new Iraqi military schools.

This is merely common sense, but at the time it was at odds with the overwhelming desire at the Pentagon to reduce the American troop commitment. As one American Army colonel in Iraq told me, "We`ll train the Iraqi Army after the insurgency."

So for the past year and a half, the Pentagon has relied largely on private contractors to provide training. Iraqi officers have been given short courses inside Iraq and a handful of mid-ranking officers have been sent to other Persian Gulf countries for brief staff courses. The results have been predictable: the insurgency is stronger than ever.

In January a few thousand American troops were assigned to directly advise Iraqi military forces; many of them, frustrated with the Iraqi officers` lack of initiative, have virtually taken over leading Iraqi companies. This may help, but only by spending an extended time abroad in a professional environment can Iraqi officers truly understand the principles of leadership that make Western armies effective on the battlefield while remaining servants of democratic states. Unfortunately, by the end of last year there were only two Iraqi officers at the 20-week Infantry Officers` Advanced Course at Fort Benning in Georgia and only one Iraqi officer was sent to the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas last year.

Following the Malaya strategy, I would suggest sending hundreds of Iraqi officers to the United States over the next three to four years while leaving American troop strength at its current level (most of the Iraqis speak enough English for the course work). Several hundred senior officers at a time would go for a full year to the military staff colleges where we instruct our majors and colonels. An additional 200 to 300 mid-ranking officers could attend our six-month advanced courses for officers. In addition, hundreds of police officers should be sent to yearlong courses at American police academies.

The cost would probably not please the Pentagon - based on what we now charge other countries that send officers to our staff colleges, it could reach $100 million a year. But this is pretty small change compared with the price of some of high-tech weapons (and our Anglophone allies, Britain and Australia, could bring Iraqis to their own institutions).

Counterinsurgency is not rocket science - which is unfortunate because America would be good at it if it were. A successful counterinsurgency strategy requires a return to military basics, especially well-trained officers. Unless we provide Iraq with good leadership, our plan to spread democracy, which looked so close to victory two years ago, will end in defeat.

James S. Corum, a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Reserve, is a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 2, 2005
Truth and Deceit
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/opinion/02herbert.html

When he accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1968, Richard Nixon said, "Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth - to see it as it is, and tell it like it is - to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth."

We`ve now learned, thanks to Vanity Fair, that a former top F.B.I. official, W. Mark Felt, was the legendary confidential source Deep Throat. I can`t think of a better time to resurrect the Watergate saga.

The trauma of Watergate, which brought down a president who seemed pathologically compelled to deceive, came toward the end of that extended exercise in governmental folly and deceit, Vietnam. Taken together, these two disasters, both of which shook the nation, provided a case study in how citizens should view their government: with extreme skepticism.

Trust, said Ronald Reagan, but verify.

Now, with George W. Bush in charge, the nation is mired in yet another tragic period marked by incompetence, duplicity, bad faith and outright lies coming once again from the very top of the government. Just last month we had the disclosure of a previously secret British government memorandum that offered further confirmation that the American public and the world were spoon-fed bogus information by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

President Bush, as we know, wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action. With that in mind, the memo damningly explained, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

That`s the kind of deceit that was in play as American men and women were suiting up and marching off to combat at the president`s command. Mr. Bush wanted war, and he got it. Many thousands have died as a result.

Even in Afghanistan, where the U.S. had legitimate reasons for going to war, the lies have been legion. Pat Tillman, for example, was a popular N.F.L. player who, in a burst of patriotism after Sept. 11, gave up a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army Rangers. He was sent first to Iraq, and then to Afghanistan, where he was shot to death by members of his own unit who mistook him for the enemy.

Instead of disclosing that Corporal Tillman had died tragically in a friendly fire incident, the Army spun a phony tale of heroism for his family and the nation. According to the Army, Corporal Tillman had been killed by enemy fire as he stormed a hill. Soldiers who knew the truth were ordered to keep quiet about the matter. Corporal Tillman`s family was not told how he really died until after a nationally televised memorial service that recruiters viewed as a public relations bonanza.

Mary Tillman, Corporal Tillman`s mother, told The Washington Post:

"The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."

At a press conference on Tuesday, President Bush, speaking about detainees who had complained of being abused, said they were "people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble - that means not tell the truth." Mr. Bush meant, of course, to say dissemble, which really means to deliberately mislead or conceal. Nevertheless, he knew what he was talking about. The president may have stumbled over the pronunciation, but he`s proved time and again that he`s a skillful practitioner of the art.

The lessons of Watergate and Vietnam are that the checks and balances embedded in the national government by the founding fathers (and which the Bush administration is trying mightily to destroy) are absolutely crucial if American-style democracy is to survive, and that a truly free and unfettered press (which the Bush administration is trying mightily to intimidate) is as important now as it`s ever been.

There you have it in a nutshell. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, drunk with power and insufficiently restrained, took the nation on hair-raising journeys that were as unnecessary as they were destructive. Now, in the first years of the 21st century, George W. Bush is doing the same.

Congress and an aggressive press ultimately played crucial roles in bringing the truth about Vietnam and Watergate to light.

A similar challenge exists today. We`ll see how it plays out.

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/
Thursday, June 02, 2005

9 Dead in Tuz Khurmatu Bombing
Deputy Governor of Diyala Assassinated in Baqubah
Poisoned Watermelons

Iraq looked more and more like a macabre horror film on Wednesday, as the Iraqi military announced that someone distributed poisoned watermelon to its troops at a Mosul checkpoint, killing one and making 12 others ill. This according to Deutsche Press Agentur via ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Likewise, 3 children were blown to smithereens in a mortar strike while playing in their yard. Guerrillas launched a rash of a a carbombings Thursday morning. At Baqubah at least 4 are dead, including the deputy governor of Diyala Province. In the city of Tuz Khurmatu a bomb killed 9 Iraqis and wounded 28. In Kirkuk, a carbombing killed two and wounded several others.

On Wednesday , AP reports, a suicide bomber detonated his payload at the main checkpoint for Baghdad International Airport around 9 am on Wednesday, leaving 15 Iraqis wounded and black smoke rising into the sky.

A mortar strike in southern Baghdad killed three children and their uncle. Guerrillas killed two policemen in west Baghdad in a drive-by shooting.

Carol J. Williams of the LA Times argues that the suicide bombings in Iraq are on a scale unprecedented in world history. She writes, "U.S. officials and Iraqi analysts say the insurgents` resources are increasing on several fronts: money to buy cars and explosives, expertise in wiring car and human bombs, and intelligence leaks that help the insurgents target U.S. and Iraqi forces." There is no shortage of volunteers for the fatal missions. There is some evidence of Iraqis undertaking suicide missions, as well as the foreign jihadis, and she cites such an anecdote.

The British military in southern Iraq is making plans to withdraw to bases and ultimately to depart the country. They hope to turn security over to Iraqi police and other security forces. The Financial Times is too genteel to say so, but for all practical purposes most security in southern Iraq has for some time been provided by the Badr Corps, the Dawa Party paramilitary, and the Sadrists of various stripes--i.e. by religious party militias. The British have long since acquiesced in this situation, and their just-announced plans simply underline that acquiescence. Given that they have had on the order of 10,000 troops in southern Iraq, and that the southern port city of Basra alone has a population of 1.3 million, they could hardly do otherwise.

Reuters reports that a recent spate of assassinations in Kirkuk are raising ethnic tensions in that powderkeg of a city. The article says that leaders from all three of the city`s major ethnic groups, Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, have recently been assassinated:


An Arab tribal leader, Nayif al-Jubouri, was killed outside his home on Friday night . . . Jubouri`s family blamed the death on fellow Sunni Arabs because of his friendly ties to rival Kurdish parties. But Mohammed Khalil, the spokesman of an Arab bloc in the local council, said the killing may have been carried out by a militia linked to one of Iraq`s main Shi`ite parties. He said the Badr organisation . . . were opposed to Jubouri because he had ties with the People`s Mujahideen [Mojahedin-i Khalq or MEK], a group that wants to overthrow Iran`s government. The Badr organisation is linked to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq . . .

posted by Juan @ [url6/2/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/9-dead-in-tuz-khurmatu-bombing-deputy.html[/url]

Warring Visions of Iraqi Federalism
"Sumer" Rises in South

Al-Hayat says that its sources in Iraq describe an ongoing dispute between the Kurds, who want an Iraqi federalism that gives "states` rights" only to Kurdistan but not to other provinces, and the Shiites, who want a federalism that would apply geographically throughout the country. The Shiites want to create a southern super-province to serve as a counter weight to Kurdistan. Shiite leaders are planning a congress that can establish the instrumentalities for creating the region of "Sumer" in the south, which will consist of 3 consolidated provinces.

This information came in part from Abdul Karim Mahud al-Muhammadawi, the Marsh Arab leader and head of the Marsh Arab Hizbullah Party. Maysan, Dhi Qar and Basra provinces will form one subregion. Likewise, Wasit, Diwaniyah and Samawah will join into a region, as will Karbala, Najaf and Hillah. Apparently "Sumer" is the planned name for all three (i.e. for 9 provinces as Iraq is presently constituted). He maintained that the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shiite religious parties that dominates parliament, will work to implement this vision of general geographical federalism-- as long as there are guarantees that it will not threaten the unity of Iraq.

He said that there are also consultations behind closed doors by parliamentarians on the issue of whether a special federal court is needed to resolve disputes between these super-provinces and between them and the central government in Baghdad. He said there was general agreement in the UIA and between it and the Kurds that the reorganization of the southern provinces would proceed. He said that the plan had not been officially endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf, but that it had been passed by him, and there was an unofficial go-ahead. Al-Muhammadawi said that the plan was also popular among some MPs from the Iraqiyah list of Iyad Allawi. Al-Muhammadawi himself says he does not support the idea of Shiite super-provinces.

The plan is opposed by Iyad al-Samarra`i of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, who said that the IIP is willing to recognize a Kurdistan but that otherwise the present provincial boundaries should be kept. He said that if the Kurds and Shiites did go ahead with their schemes for large federal regions, the Sunni Arabs would be forces to consider creating one for themselves, as well.

The Shiites` use of "Sumer" as the name of the southern confederation is a reference to the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia, based in the south near the Gulf, who had writing as early as 3500. It is always a bad sign when people revive ancient place names, since it points to a romantic nationalism, the most virulent, false and ugly kind. (The people of southern Iraq didn`t even know about Sumer two centuries ago-- modern archeologists recovered that part of history. It was perhaps the one success of Saddam`s educational system that he instilled a craze for ancient Iraqi civilization in the students, as part of his nationalist agenda).

posted by Juan @ [url6/2/2005 06:25:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/warring-visions-of-iraqi-federalism.html[/url]

Women`s Demonstration in Egypt

Women demonstrated in Cairo on Wednesday as part of a general protest by journalists and other oppositionists. They maintain that they were manhandled by Egyptian security forces during a demonstration last week during a popular referendum. The question in the referendum was whether other parties should be able to field candidates to compete with Hosni Mubarak in presidential elections. (In any case, only parties approved by parliament, controlled by Mubarak`s party, will be allowed to field presidential candidates. They will exclude the Muslim Brotherhood, the major opposition group in the country). The narrowness of the referendum and the likelihood that it will leave the system unchanged provoked the original demosntrations.

The protesters alleged that female journalists and protesters were groped and handled inappropriately, even stripped of clothing, by security forces last week. They are demanding that the Interior Minister resign.

In conservative Egypt, charges of groping women are extremely serious, and the opposition is milking the issue for all it is worth. The protest cleverly combines the symbol of the new middle class (modern female journalists and protesters) and a potent symbol for the Muslim religious groups-- the sanctity of Egyptian women.

posted by Juan @ [url6/2/2005 06:18:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/womens-demonstration-in-egypt-women.html[/url]
Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Fallujah Film

[urlThe Italian magazine Diario has posted]http://www.diario.it/?page=wl05060100#italiano[/url] to its web site a film of Fallujah made by Iraqis (apparently by Iraqi government workers sent in to help with clean-up) in early January of 2005, at a time when the international press was excluded from the city.

Note that the links to the video are in the photograph of the truck. The possible playing options are given as follows:

56k RP (Real Player)
56 k WMP (Windows Media Player)
ADSL RP (fast cable connection)
ADSL WMP
Mp3

The video shows a good deal of the damage to the city (2/3s of buildings damaged) and has some graphic shots of the dead. At one point the health workers excavate a shallow grave with a body bag. They look inside and say "Atfal"-- "children." Someone had had to bury them hastily.

posted by Juan @ [url6/1/2005 12:45:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/fallujah-film-italian-magazine-diario.html[/url]

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Thwarted by a surge of democracy

Under cover of unification, free market liberals hijacked Europe
Serge Halimi
Thursday June 2, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1497143,00.ht…

Guardian
There is one tiny problem with most of the analysis of last Sunday`s vote in France. Those who probe the motivations of the large majority who voted no (54.87%) forget to remind us that they, overwhelmingly, voted yes.

For more than six months, all the leading commentators in the media heaped praise on the constitutional project. France`s two biggest media owners (and weapons manufacturers) endorsed the yes side: Serge Dassault, a conservative senator, did so in an editorial in one of his many magazines; Arnaud Lagardère spoke to a pro-yes rally, cheered by Nicolas Sarkozy and most of the cabinet.

Most commentators have observed that Jacques Chirac has been stung by this defeat, but the rout of France`s mainstream media is even more impressive. From the rightwing television channel TF1 to the "leftwing" weekly le Nouvel Observateur, and including le Monde, Libération, the business press, the major radio stations, even women`s and sports publications - they all warned and railed, they all censored and twisted. Yet, their propaganda was blunted by an unexpected surge of democracy. Thousands of well-attended meetings discussed the constitutional treaty. And, bit by bit, the sense of inevitability that it would be easily ratified by a mildly interested electorate was torn apart.

Indeed the outrage about media bias became a leading issue of the campaign - not least because it encapsulated so many of the things that this referendum came to be about: representation, the elite and class.

The problem is obvious on the political side. Last February more than 90% of French deputies had backed the constitution; it garnered the support of only 45% of the voters. The gap is no less obvious when it comes to informing the people: the leading journalists, who often live in Paris, an increasingly bourgeois city, seem to write and speak for the affluent. And the rich did vote yes by a healthy margin, just like 66% of the Parisians.

But elsewhere it was quite another story: whereas 74% of the voters earning more than €4,500 a month backed the constitutional project, 66% of the voters earning less than €1,500 a month voted against. In ultra-wealthy Neuilly (a Paris suburb where many industrial and media tycoons reside, and whose mayor is the presidential hopeful Sarkozy) 82.5% voted yes. Mining cities of northern France and the poorest districts of Marseille were equally lopsided: 84% of Avion (Nord-Pas-de Calais) and 78% of Marseille`s 15th district voted no.

Granted, Chirac has lost. Yet it should not take long for the Socialists to wonder how well a party of the left is doing when 80% of the workers and the unemployed, 60% of the young and a large proportion of its own voters desert its official position on such an important issue.

Four years ago Pierre Moscovici, then the French minister for European affairs, wrote in the Financial Times that Tony Blair`s triumph was "excellent news for the left and for Europe. For the left, it shows that a good leader, good results and a good programme can win elections. From that point of view, Mr Blair is an admirable example to other social democrats." Yet a few months after Lionel Jospin had been inspired by this "admirable example" he was humiliated in France`s presidential election and sidelined by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The cause? A gulf between the Socialist party and its working-class constituency, who rarely read the English business press.

The party did not learn its lesson. By backing a constitution enshrining free-market liberalism, it again made the wrong choice and lost.

Business leaders and the wealthy journalists who write for them may bewail this: the French regularly reject Anglo-Saxon-style capitalism, and the left electorate does not want the "third way". Every new election makes this clear. Yet nothing seems to change. Chirac was first elected president 10 years ago because he had denounced a "social divide". Today it is greater than ever. In the meantime, a series of free-market reforms has hit pensions, education and industry. Unemployment has kept on rising and poverty has spread.

Some politicians - and the employers` federation - had hoped to use the constitution`s obsession with markets (the word appears 88 times) and competition (29 times) as a legal wedge against France`s "social model".

"Why am I pro-European?" said Sarkozy a few weeks ago. "Because I think it is a powerful lever to force France to modernise and reform. If France has twice as much unemployment as other countries it is not because we are too liberal, it is because we have the 35-hour week." But France is not yet safe for liberalism. Sarkozy`s line of argument triggered such a backlash that the Socialists - but also Chirac - swore that he had misunderstood it all. "The constitution is a child of 1789," Chirac argued.

But by voting no, many French people have understood that their choice was the truly European one - that, contrary to what they were told, the constitutional treaty was not the tool that could end Europe`s free-market drift. In the last 20 years, the project dreamed up by the European commission and most governing coalitions of the member states has appeared obsessed only with economic reform, an ever-expanding free-market zone, the dismantling of the welfare state, lower corporate taxes and business-friendly legislation - such as a proposal to liberalise Europe`s market for service industries.

France`s landslide rejection of the treaty is likely to embolden many of the progressive forces of the EU, bringing about the rethinking of a once-worthy ideal that gradually became distorted into a single market and a military junior partner for the US. Such a reappraisal bears no resemblance to the "federation of fear" that European commission president José Manuel Barroso saw unfolding after Sunday`s vote.

All along, "Europe" has been an elite process with shallow roots. In France, a large turnout (70%) has tackled the constitutional project with seriousness and passion. Many politicians in Paris and Brussels probably regret this surge of democracy and will look for ways to pressure the French to hold another vote. But it is unlikely that an informed electorate will change its mind now that it has understood the links between the social devastation at home and the neoliberal policies that spread under the cover of European unification.

· Serge Halimi writes for le Monde diplomatique (www.mondediplo.com) and is the author of Le Grand Bond en Arrière: Comment l`ordre libéral s`est imposé au monde (The Great Leap Backward: How the liberal order was imposed on the world)

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Latest Fatality: Jun 01, 2005
Jun.05: 3

Iraker: Civilian: 42 Police/Mil: 9 Total: 51
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

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Tomgram: It’s a Pentagon World and Welcome to It
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3025

Bases, Bases Everywhere
Pentagon Planning in Iraq, 2003-2005
By Tom Engelhardt

The last few weeks have been base-heavy ones in the news. The Pentagon`s provisional Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) list, the first in a decade, was published to domestic screams of pain. It represents, according to the Washington Post, "a sweeping plan to close or reduce forces at 62 major bases and nearly 800 minor facilities" in the United States. The military is to be reorganized at home around huge, multi-force "hub bases" from which the Pentagon, in the fashion of a corporate conglomerate, hopes to "reap economies of scale." This was front page news for days as politicians and communities from Connecticut (the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in Groton) and New Jersey (Fort Monmouth) to South Dakota (Ellsworth Air Force Base) cried bloody murder over the potential loss of jobs and threatened to fight to the death to prevent their specific base or set of bases (but not anyone else`s) from closing -- after all, those workers had been the most productive and patriotic around. These closings -- and their potentially devastating after-effects on communities -- were a reminder (though seldom dealt with that way in the media) of just how deeply the Pentagon has dug itself into the infrastructure of our nation. With over 6,000 military bases in the U.S., we are in some ways a vast military camp.

But while politicians screamed locally, Donald Rumsfeld`s Pentagon never thinks less than globally; and, if you throw in the militarization of space, sometimes even the global has proven too small a framework for its presiding officials. For them, the BRAC plans are just one piece of a larger puzzle that involves the projection of American power into the distant lands that most concern us. After all, as Chalmers Johnson has calculated in his book, The Sorrows of Empire, our global Baseworld already consists of at least 700 military and intelligence bases; possibly -- depending on how you count them up -- many more. Under Rumsfeld`s organizational eye, such bases have been pushed ever further into the previously off-limits "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union (where we now probably have more bases than the Russians do) and ever deeper into the Middle Eastern and Caspian oil heartlands of the planet.

The Bush administration`s fierce focus on and interest in reconfigured, stripped down, ever more forward systems of bases and an ever more powerfully poised military "footprint" stands in inverse proportion to press coverage of it. To the present occupants of the Pentagon, bases are the equivalent of imperial America`s lifeblood and yet basing policy abroad has, in recent years, been of next to no interest to the mainstream media.

Strategic Ally

Just in recent weeks, however, starting with the uproar over the economic pain BRAC will impose (along with the economic gain for those "hubs"), bases have returned to public consciousness in at least a modest way. This month, for instance, the Overseas Basing Commission released a report to the President and Congress on the "reconfiguration of the American military overseas basing structure in the post-Cold War and post-September 11 era." The report created a minor flap by criticizing the Pentagon for its overly ambitious global redeployment plans at a time when "ervice budgets are not robust enough to execute the repositioning of forces, build the facilities necessary to accommodate the forces, [and] build the expanding facilities at new locations…"

In other words, the global ambitions of the Pentagon -- and the soaring budgets that go with those ambitions -- are beyond our means (not that that means much to the Bush administration). The report`s criticism evidently irritated Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and so the report, already posted at a government website, was promptly taken down after the Defense Department claimed it contained classified information, especially "a reference to ongoing negotiations over U.S. bases in Bulgaria and Romania." (As it happened, the Federation of American Scientists had posted the report at its own site, where it remains available to all, according to Secrecy News.)

Perhaps in part because of BRAC and the Commission report, numerous bits and pieces of Pentagon basing plans -- even for normally invisible Romania and Bulgaria -- could be spied in (or at the edge of) the news. For instance, last week our man in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, came calling on Washington, amid some grim disputes between "friends." On the eve of his departure, reacting to a New York Times` article about a U.S. Army report on the torture, abuse, and murder of Afghan prisoners in American hands, he essentially demanded that the Bush administration turn over Afghan prisoners, both in-country and in Guantánamo, to his government, and give it greater say in U.S. military operations in his country. For anyone who has followed the Bush administration, these are not just policy no-no`s but matters verging on faith-based obsession. Having with dogged determination bucked the International Criminal Court, an institution backed by powerful allies, Bush officials were not about to stand for such demands from a near non-nation we had "liberated" and then stocked with military bases, holding areas, detention camps, and prisons of every sort.

Not long after Karzai made this demand, "an American official alarmed at the slow pace of poppy eradication" leaked to the New York Times a cable written from our Kabul embassy to Secretary of State Rice on May 13 indicating that his weak leadership -- previously he had only been lauded by administration officials -- was responsible for Afghanistan`s rise to preeminence as the model drug-lord-state of the planet. ("Although President Karzai has been well aware of the difficulty in trying to implement an effective ground [poppy] eradication program, he has been unwilling to assert strong leadership, even in his own province of Kandahar.") And then, of course, State Department officials publicly came to his defense. On arrival in the U.S., he found himself refuting this charge rather than on the offensive demanding the rectification of American wrongs in his country.

At a White House welcoming ceremony, our President promptly publicly denied Karzai the Afghan prisoners and any further control over American military actions in his country. As in Iraq, the Bush administration`s working definition of "sovereignty" for others is: Stay out of our way. ("As I explained to [President Karzai], that our policy is one where we want the people to be sent home [from Guantánamo], but, two, we`ve got to make sure the facilities are there -- facilities where these people can be housed and fed and guarded.") But the Afghan president was granted something so much more valuable -- this was, after all, the essence of his trek to the U.S. -- a "strategic partnership" with the United States which he "requested." (The actual language: "Afghanistan proposed that the United States join in a strategic partnership and establish close cooperation.") Great idea, Hamid! And quite an original one.

Of course, the term is ours, not Karzai`s, and we already have such "partnerships" with numerous nations including Japan, Germany, and Greece. But Afghanistan is none of the above. The "partners" in this relationship are the country that likes to think of itself as the planet`s "sole superpower" -- its global "sheriff," the "new Rome," the new imperial "Britain" (Britain itself now being a distinctly junior partner providing a few of the "native" troops so necessary for our Iraqi adventure) -- and the country that, in the UN`s Human Development Report 2004, was ranked the sixth worst off on Earth, perched just above five absolute basket-case nations in sub-Saharan Africa. This is the equivalent of declaring a business partnership between a Rockefeller and the local beggar.

In the somewhat vague, four-page Joint Declaration of the United States-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership issued by the two partners while Karzai was in Washington, along with the usual verbiage about spreading democracy and promoting human -- perhaps a typo for "inhuman" -- rights in Afghanistan and throughout the Central Asian region, there were these brief lines:

"It is understood that in order to achieve the objectives contained herein, U.S. military forces operating in Afghanistan will continue to have access to Bagram Air Base and its facilities, and facilities at other locations as may be mutually determined and that the U.S. and Coalition forces are to continue to have the freedom of action required to conduct appropriate military operations based on consultations and pre-agreed procedures."

The Afghans may get no prisoners and not an extra inch of control over U.S. military movements -- note that "continue to have the freedom of action required… based on… pre-agreed procedures" -- but they do get to give, which is such an ennobling feeling. What they are offering up is that "access" to Bagram Air Base "and facilities at other locations." (The language is charming. You would think that the Americans were at the gates of the old Soviet air base waiting to be let in, not that it was already fully occupied and a major American military facility.) Nothing "permanent," of course, especially since Afghan students in recent protests over mistreated Korans at Guantánamo were also complaining about American bases in their country; and no future treaties, since Karzai might have a tough time with parliament over that one. Afghans tend to be irrationally touchy, not to say mean-spirited, on national sovereignty issues. (Think of the Soviet occupation.) Just a simple, honestly offered "request" and a "joint declaration" -- somebody must have been smoking one -- that quietly extends our rights to base troops in Afghanistan until some undefined moment beyond the end of time.

Spanning the World

Base news has been trickling in from the ‘stans of Central Asia -- formerly SSRs of the old Soviet Union -- as well. After the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, for instance, we rushed an official into the country -- no, not the Secretary of State to celebrate the spread of democracy, but our globe-trotting Secretary of Defense, who hustled into that otherwise obscure land just to make sure that Ganci Air Base (named not for some Kyrgyzstani hero, but for Peter Ganci, the New York City fire chief killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks) in the capital of Bishkek was still ours to use (as it is).

In the Uzbekistan of grim, authoritarian Islam Karimov, our ally in the war on terror (who received his third visit from Rumsfeld in 2004), the Bush administration, we`re told, is wrestling with a most difficult problem in the wake of a government massacre of demonstrators: bases versus values (John Hall, "U.S. wrestles with bases vs. values in Uzbekistan," Richmond Times-dispatch, May 29). After all, while the White House values the spread of democracy, the Pentagon considers Camp Stronghold Freedom, the former Soviet base we now occupy there -- "The air-conditioned tents at the base… are laid out on a grid, along streets named for the thoroughfares of New York: Fifth Avenue, Long Island Expressway, Wall Street." -- to be valuable indeed. And then there`s that handy matter of stowing away prisoners. Uzbekistan is one of the places where the U.S. has reportedly been practicing "extraordinary rendition" -- the kidnapping of terrorist subjects and the dispatching of them to countries happy to torture them for us. Here`s a guess: whether Karimov (to whom the Chinese leadership gave a giant smooch last week) remains in office or not, in the modern "Great Game" in Central Asia expect us to remain in the aptly named Camp Stronghold Freedom. (I`d like to see someone try to pry us out.)

In Africa this last week, there was news too. The Bush administration was promising to pour ever more "soldiers and money into its anti-terrorism campaign [there], including in Algeria and chaotic Nigeria, both oil-rich nations where radical Islam has a following." ("Oil-rich" is the key phrase in that sentence, in case you missed it.) "The new campaign," writes Edward Harris of AP, "will target nine north and west African nations and seek to bolster regional cooperation." American officials, calling for a "budgetary increase" for anti-terror military aid to the area, are now evidently comparing the vast "ungoverned" desert expanses of the Sahara "to Afghanistan during Taliban rule, when Osama bin Laden`s al-Qaida terror group thrived." Talk about ambition. Quick, someone report them to the Overseas Basing Commission before anything else happens!

While the Pentagon is planning to shut-down bases all over the U.S., it`s like a shopaholic. It just can`t help itself abroad. Rumors of future base openings are multiplying fast -- base workers from Connecticut, New Jersey, and South Dakota take note for future travel planning -- in the impoverished former Warsaw Pact lands of Southeastern Europe, which are also conveniently nearer to the oil heartlands of the planet than our old Cold War bases in places like Germany. UPI, for instance, reported last week that the Pentagon was eyeing bases on Romania`s scenic Black Sea coast and that the Romanians (whose plans for a world class, Disney-style Dracula theme park seem to have fallen through) were eager to be of well-paid service in the war on terror. Then a Romanian general confirmed that base negotiations were indeed well along: "General Valeriu Nicut, head of the strategic planning division for the Romanian general staff, said on Wednesday after an international military conference on security issues that the U.S. would set up two military bases in Romania within one year." He was promptly demoted for his efforts. (Perhaps it was as a result of Rumsfeld`s pique.) No one on either side is denying, however, that base negotiations are underway.

Meanwhile in neighboring Bulgaria, the Defense minister was claiming that the U.S. would soon occupy three bases in that land and the Deputy Defense Minister, chairing the talks none of us knew were going on between the two countries, "told journalists that Washington is also interested in placing storehouses," assumedly to be filled with pre-positioned military supplies, there too. Earlier in the year, the U.S. head of NATO forces had spoken of the possibility of our occupying five bases in Bulgaria -- and all of them (so far) are hanging onto their jobs.

To the Southeast, there were yet more basing rumors in a volatile area where, last week, a massive 1,700 kilometer-long pipeline bringing Caspian oil from Baku in the former SSR of Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in Turkey via the former SSR of Georgia, was officially opened for business. The pipeline, as Pepe Escobar of Asia Times pointed out, is little short of a "sovereign state"; its route, carefully constructed to cut both Russia and Iran out of the Caspian oil loop, ends "right next door to the massive American airbase at Incirlik" in Turkey. The presidents of all three countries attended the opening ceremonies in Baku, while an Azerbaijan newspaper reported that the "U.S. and Azerbaijani governments on April 12 agreed on the deployment of U.S. military bases… Under the agreement, the U.S. forces will be deployed in Kurdamir, Nasosnaya and Guyullah. Various types of aircraft will be deployed at all the three bases, which have runways modernized for U.S. military needs." The report was promptly denied by the Azerbaijani defense ministry, which under the circumstances probably means little.

In neighboring Georgia, our goals have been somewhat more modest. With U.S. military trainers already in and out of the country to help bring Georgian forces up to speed in the war on terror, and -- thanks to the Rose Revolution -- a friendly government in place (the salaries of whose top officials are now "supplemented" by a fund set up by George Soros), a push had been on to rid the country of its last two Russian military bases. This week an agreement to vacate them by 2008 was announced.

Bases in Iraq: 2003-2005

And mind you, all of the above was just the minor basing news of the week. The biggest news had to do with Iraq. Bradley Graham of the Washington Post published a rare piece in our press on American bases in that country (Commanders Plan Eventual Consolidation of U.S. Bases in Iraq). As a start, he revealed that, at the moment, the "coalition" has a staggering 106 bases in the country, none with less than 500 troops on hand, and that figure doesn`t even include "four detention facilities and several convoy support centers for servicing the long daily truck runs from Kuwait into Iraq."

With just over 160,000 coalition troops on hand in Iraq that would mean an average of about 1,600 to a base. Of course, some of these bases also house Iraqi troops, various Iraqis needed by U.S. forces -- translators, for instance, who, when living outside such bases, are being killed off by insurgents at what seems to be a ferocious rate -- and some of the hordes of contractors "reconstructing" the country, including the thousands and thousands of hired guns who have flooded in and are constantly at risk. Some American bases like Camp Anaconda, spread over 15 square miles near Balad (with two swimming pools, a first-run movie theater, and a fitness gym) or Camp Victory at the Baghdad International Airport, are vast Vietnam-style encampments, elaborate enough to be "permanent" indeed.

It is, by the way, a mystery of compelling proportions that American journalists, more or less trapped in their hotels when it comes to reporting on Iraqi Iraq (given the dangers of the situation), have seemed no less trapped when it comes to reporting on important aspects of American Iraq. We know, for instance, that even a year and a half ago the American base construction program was already in "the several billion dollar range," and such bases had long been at the heart of Bush administration dreams for the region; yet since April 2003 there have been only a few very partial descriptions of American bases in Iraq in the press -- and those are largely to be found in non-mainstream places or on-line.

Given what`s generally available to be read (or seen on the TV news), there is simply no way most Americans could grasp just how deeply we have been digging into Iraq. Take, for instance, this description of Camp Victory offered by Joshua Hammer in a Mother Jones magazine piece:

"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."

There has not, to my knowledge, been a single descriptive article in a major American paper during our two-year occupation of Iraq that has focused on any one of the American bases in that country and I don`t believe that the American public has any idea -- I certainly didn`t -- that there were at least 106 of them; or, for that matter, that some of them already have such a permanent feel to them; that they are, in essence, facts-on-the-ground long before any negotiations about them might begin with a "sovereign" Iraqi government.

In any case, Graham reports that, according to the latest Pentagon plans, we would focus our Iraqi bases -- once called "enduring camps," now referred to as "contingency operating bases" (but never, never use the word "permanent") -- into four "hubs" ("BRAC for Iraq"), none too close to major population centers -- "the four are Tallil in the south, Al Asad in the west, Balad in the center and either Irbil or Qayyarah in the north."

"Several officers involved in drafting the consolidation plan said it entailed the construction of longer-lasting facilities at the sites, including barracks and office structures made of concrete block instead of the metal trailers and tin-sheathed buildings that have become the norm at bigger U.S. bases in Iraq.

"The new, sturdier buildings will give the bases a more permanent character, the officers acknowledged. But they said the consolidation plan was not meant to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq… The new buildings are being designed to withstand direct mortar strikes, according to a senior military engineer."

This plan is being presented -- hilariously enough -- as part of a "withdrawal" strategy. It seems we are (over what will have to be interminable years) planning to turn the other 100 or so bases over to the Iraqi military (itself a bit of a problematic concept). For this, of course, "no timetable exists." Once the massive bulk of bases are let go, only those 4 (or -- see below -- possibly 5) bases will remain to be dealt with; and, in that distant future, while maintaining "access" to our former Iraqi strongholds, we will withdraw to our bases in Kuwait from which we will practice what one colonel interviewed by Graham termed "strategic overwatch." (Given the intensifying insurgency in Iraq, this seems like nothing short of a Pentagon pipe dream.)

The future of a fifth base, the Camp Victory complex, headquarters of the U.S. military in Iraq, remains "unresolved." After all, who wouldn`t want to keep a massive complex on the edge of the Iraqi capital, though the military has proven incapable thus far of securing even the road that runs from Camp Victory (and Baghdad International Airport) into downtown Baghdad and the Green Zone. Today, it is the "deadliest road in Iraq," perhaps the most dangerous stretch of highway on the planet, which of course says something symbolic about the limits of the Pentagon`s plans to garrison the globe.

Naturally, these four (or five) bases aren`t "permanent," even if they are about to be built up to withstand anything short of an atomic blast and have the distinct look of permanency. The problem is, as Maj. Noelle Briand, who heads a basing working group on the U.S. command staff, commented to Graham, "Four is as far as we`ve gone down in our planning."

The word "permanent" cannot be spoken in part because all of the above decisions have undoubtedly been taken without significant consultation with the supposedly sovereign government of Iraq with whom the Pentagon is undoubtedly just dying to have one of those strategic partnerships as well as a "status of forces agreement" or SOFA. The SOFA is considered a future necessity since it would essentially give American troops extraterritoriality in Iraq, protecting them from prosecution for crimes committed and offering them impunity in terms of actions taken. No Iraqi government, however, could at present negotiate such an agreement without losing its last shred of popularity.

Still, congratulations to Graham for giving us an important, if somewhat encoded, version of the Bush administration`s latest basing plans for Iraq. But here`s the catch, these "latest" Pentagon plans look suspiciously like some rather well-worn plans, now over two years old. Unfortunately, our media has just about no institutional memory. As it happens, though, I remember -- and what I remember specifically is a New York Times front-page piece, Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq, by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt that was published on April 19, 2003, just as the Bush administration`s Iraq War seemed to be successfully winding down. Since next to nothing else of significance on the subject was written until Graham`s piece came out last week, it remains a remarkable document as well as a fine piece of reporting. It began:

"The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say.

"American military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north."

Let`s just stop there and consider for a moment. In April 2003, the Pentagon was looking for long-term "access" to four bases; at the end of May 2005, it`s revealed that the Pentagon is looking for long-term "access" to… four bases. After two years and billions of dollars worth of base construction, the general distribution of these bases remains relatively unchanged. In fact, the base chosen for the Shiite South at Tallil remains the same. One of the four bases mentioned in the Times` account of 2003, at Baghdad International Airport, now Camp Victory, is the "unresolved" fifth base in the Post`s 2005 account; in the West, H-1 has been replaced by Al Asad in the same general area; in the Kurdish North, Bashur (2003) has been replaced by either Qayyarah or Irbil, approximately 50 kilometers to the south; and Balad, north of Baghdad, is assumedly the non-urban version of the 2003 Airport choice. In other words, between 2003 and 2005, the numbers and the general placement of these planned bases seems to have remained more or less the same.

"In Afghanistan, and in Iraq," Shanker and Schmitt wrote, "the American military will do all it can to minimize the size of its deployed forces, and there will probably never be an announcement of permanent stationing of troops. Not permanent basing, but permanent access is all that is required, officials say." This was, of course, at a moment when Bush administration neocons expected to draw down American forces rapidly in a grateful, liberated land.

Shanker and Schmitt then put the prospective Iraqi bases into a larger global context, mentioning in particular access to bases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, and Bulgaria, and adding:

"[T]here has been a concerted diplomatic and military effort to win permission for United States forces to operate from the formerly Communist nations of Eastern Europe, across the Mediterranean, throughout the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and across Central Asia, from the periphery of Russia to Pakistan`s ports on the Indian Ocean. It is a swath of Western influence not seen for generations."

Three days after the Shanker/Schmitt report was front-paged, Donald Rumsfeld strongly denied it was so at a Pentagon news conference reported in the Washington Post (U.S. Won`t Seek Bases in Iraq, Rumsfeld Says) by Bradley Graham. His piece began:

"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday the United States is unlikely to seek any permanent or `long-term` bases in Iraq because U.S. basing arrangements with other countries in the region are sufficient… ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting,` Rumsfeld said… ‘The likelihood of it seems to me to be so low that it does not surprise me that it`s never been discussed in my presence -- to my knowledge.`"

And, for the next two years, that was largely that. The Times hasn`t seriously revisited the story since, despite the fact that their original front-page piece was groundbreaking. You would think it a subject worth returning to. After all, despite everything that`s happened between May 2003 ("Mission Accomplished!") and the present disastrous moment in Iraq, the Pentagon is still planning on those four bases. Coincidence? Who knows, but might it not be worth at least a blip on the inside pages somewhere?

An Empire of Bases

As the Overseas Basing Commission indicated in their recent report, such global basing plans are nothing if not wildly ambitious and sure to be wildly expensive (especially for a military bogged down in fighting a fierce but not exactly superpower-sized enemy in one part of a single Middle Eastern country). When we take the bits and pieces of the global-base puzzle that have sprung up like weeds between the cracks in recent weeks and try to put them together into a map of the Pentagon`s globe, it looks rather like the one described by Shanker and Schmitt in 2003.

Begin with those prospective bases in Romania and Bulgaria (and while you`re at it, toss in the ones already in existence in the former Yugoslavia); make your way southeastwards past "Pipelineistan," keeping your eye out for our Turkish bases and those possible future ones in Azerbaijan; take in the 4 or 5 bases we`d like to hang onto in the embattled Iraqi heartland of the Middle East (not to speak of the ones we already control in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and elsewhere in the region); take a quick glance at "oil-rich" North Africa for a second, imagining what might someday be nailed down there; then hop over base-less Axis of Evil power Iran and land at Bagram Air Base (don`t worry, you have "access") or any of the other unnamed ones in Afghanistan where we now have a long-term foothold; don`t forget the nearby Pakistani air bases that Gen. Pervez Musharraf has given us access to (or Diego Garcia, that British "aircraft carrier" island in the Indian Ocean that`s all ours); add in our new Central Asian facilities; plot it all out on a map and what you have is a great infertile crescent of American military garrisons extending from the old Soviet-controlled lands of Eastern Europe to the old Soviet SSRs of Central Asia, reaching from Russia`s eastern border right up to the border of China. This is, of course, a map that more or less coincides with the Middle Eastern and Caspian oil heartlands of the planet.

Put in historical terms, in the last decade-plus, as the pace of our foreign wars has picked up, we`ve left behind, after each of them, a new set of bases like the droppings of some giant beast marking the scene with its scent. Bases were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates after our first Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and those former Central Asian SSRs after the Afghan war of 2001; and into Iraq after the invasion of 2003. War in Iraq, in turn, has spawned at least 106 bases of various sizes and shapes; while a low-level but ongoing guerilla conflict in Afghanistan has produced a plethora of fire bases, outposts, air bases, and detention centers of every sort. It`s a matter of bases and prisons where there is opposition. Just bases where there isn`t. This, it seems, is now the American way in the world.

Most Americans, knowing next to nothing about our global bases or the Pentagon`s basing policies, would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that ours is an empire of bases. In fact, our particular version of military empire is perhaps unique: all "gunboats," no colonies. Nothing has been of more concern to the Pentagon-centered Bush administration abroad than bases, or of less concern to our media at home. Despite two years of catastrophic setbacks, the ambitions of the Bush White House and the Pentagon evidently remain remarkably unchanged and wildly ambitious -- and, I suspect, the rule of inverse media interest still holds.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute`s Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

[Special research thanks go to Nick Turse.]

Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt



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Suicide Attacks Rising Rapidly
Increasingly, the bombers are Iraqis instead of foreign infiltrators. Civilians and police, not GIs, are the prime targets.
By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-bombers…
June 2, 2005

BAGHDAD — Suicide bombings have surged to become the Iraqi insurgency`s weapon of choice, with a staggering 90 attacks accounting for most of last month`s 750 deaths at the militants` hands.

Suicide attacks outpaced car bombings almost 2-to-1 in May, according to figures compiled by the U.S. military, The Times and other media outlets. In April, there were 69 suicide attacks, more than in the entire year preceding the June 28, 2004, hand-over of sovereignty.

The frequency of suicide bombings here is unprecedented, exceeding that of Palestinian attacks against Israel and of other militant insurgencies, such as the Chechen rebellion in Russia. Baghdad saw five suicide bombings in a six-hour span Sunday.

Early today, three suicide bombers killed at least 16 Iraqis in blasts north of Baghdad.

The first, around 8 a.m., ripped through a restaurant in Tuz Khurmatu where the Kurdish deputy prime minister, Rosh Shawais, was having breakfast. He was unharmed but a bodyguard was among the nine killed.

In Baqubah, another blast killed the deputy head of the Diyala province governing council, Hussein Alwan Timimi, and four others.

In Kirkuk, a bomber plowed his car into a U.S. consulate convoy. Two Iraqis died and 12 were hurt, a witness said.

With U.S.-led forces now better protected with concrete blast walls and rings of concertina wire and sandbags, militants have taken to targeting Iraqi police and civilians in their bid to convince Iraqis that their new leaders can`t protect them. And increasingly, Iraqis are believed to be carrying out some of the suicide attacks.

U.S. officials and Iraqi analysts say the insurgents` resources are increasing on several fronts: money to buy vehicles and explosives, expertise in wiring car and human bombs and intelligence leaks that help them target U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Suicide attacks are on the rise because the explosive devices "are simple to construct and easy to operate, thus making suicide bombers difficult to detect," said Navy Cmdr. Fred Gaghan, in charge of the Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell in Iraq that studies bomb scenes for clues to insurgent tactics.

"They are viewed by terrorists as a successful means with which to kill or injure coalition, Iraqi security forces and innocent Iraqi citizens," Gaghan said.

"At this time, there is nothing to indicate that the availability of volunteers is on the decline," he said, noting the media coverage and videos of suicide bombings posted on the Internet that are said to fuel extremist recruitment.

Saad Obeidi, a retired Iraqi major general and security expert, suggested that President Bush had invited Islamic extremists to bring their fight against America here.

"One aim of the U.S. military once it invaded Iraq was to lure all insurgents and terrorists from all over the world to confront them here," he said.

The first suicide bombings of the insurgency were attributed to foreign infiltrators, mostly Palestinians, Yemenis, Syrians and Saudis. But Obeidi believes that has changed.

"The Iraqi way of thinking in the past totally rejected that someone would kill himself," Obeidi said. "But once they realized how powerful this weapon is and saw its effectiveness, Iraqis started getting involved in suicide operations."

Some U.S. officials agree.

"There`s a kind of axiom out there that says Iraqis aren`t suicide bombers," Gen. George W. Casey, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad this year. "I`m not sure that`s the case. I believe there are Iraqi Islamic extremists … that are very capable of getting into cars and blowing themselves up."

Other U.S. officials say they still believe that foreign fighters are responsible for most of the suicide attacks, which have increasingly targeted Iraqis.

"There is no evidence this is being done by Iraqis," said U.S. Maj. Gen. John DeFreitas III, intelligence chief for the multinational mission that has about 150,000 troops in Iraq. "In every case we`ve seen, the driver has been a foreigner."

Coalition officials acknowledge, however, that the numbers show an Iraqi-dominated insurgency. Fewer than 5% of those killed or captured were foreigners, one official noted. He also described the influx from abroad as making up a "very, very small part" of the estimated 12,000 to 20,000 insurgents.

A recent attack in the city of Baqubah points to an Iraqi role in suicide bombings.

On May 15, Imad Shakir, a police major, was inspecting his security unit outside the Baqubah courthouse when he saw an unfamiliar young man in an ill-fitting police uniform approaching.

As the unit`s officers asked the purported first lieutenant for identification, Shakir became suspicious and leaped to seize him. But the impostor detonated his explosives vest, lumpy beneath his blue clothing, killing Shakir and three bystanders.

What set the Baqubah bombing apart from the few others in which survivors got a glimpse of the attacker was that the killer was recognizably Iraqi, said the Diyala province police officer in charge of the investigation.

"The injured people assured us that the suicide attacker was Iraqi. They could tell by the way he talked and from his appearance," said the officer, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

Obeidi, the retired Iraqi general, sees the rise in suicide bombings as recognition among Iraqi extremists that such attacks are an effective weapon against the superior numbers and arms of the coalition forces.

Insurgents "are choosing this method to create a balance against superpower might," he said. "The use of such methods is linked with some spiritual or religious motives. The aim is to die in the name of religion and become a martyr and go to paradise."

Maj. Gen. Munem Said Abdulqadir, head of the Iraqi police force explosive ordnance demolition team in Baghdad, faulted the now-disbanded U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority for barring even mid-level figures of Saddam Hussein`s regime from the new security order.

He said he feared there were thousands of technically savvy and disaffected Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, vulnerable to recruitment as suicide bombers.

"Jobless people are very easy targets," he said of the Iraqis being drawn into bomb-making and suicide missions. "Find them jobs, and most will give up."

A few would-be suicide bombers survived their attacks or were arrested after their explosives failed to detonate, and Iraqi police have mined those rare intelligence opportunities.

Early this year, Iraqi TV showed footage of a confession from a burned and bandaged Saudi bomber, Ahmed Abdullah Abdul-Rahman Alshai. An Iraqi bomb-maker arrested in January, Sami Mohammed Ali Said Jaaf, reportedly told interrogators that he had a role in orchestrating bombings in Baghdad, including the Aug. 19, 2003, blast at the U.N. mission that killed 22 people.

But insights to the suicide bombers have been few.

"Often with suicide bombers, there`s not enough left of them to be identified," one senior U.S. military official said. With rare exceptions, the perpetrators wage their final battle in anonymity, traveling to their targets without identity papers to deprive police of any intelligence in the event of their capture.

But some techniques have come to light. The police officer investigating the Baqubah case reported a recent innovation: suicide car bombers cruising the streets with their payloads in search of targets. Witnesses at several car bombings last month told police the drivers appeared to have made last-minute decisions about what to strike.

Other attacks appeared to have taken much more planning.

"They are trying to penetrate defensive measures by conducting more complex attacks, double suicide attacks or suicide attacks combined with other weapons such as small-arms fire or mortar attacks," said Gaghan, the Navy officer.

In Hillah, south of Baghdad, where two suicide bombers killed dozens at a demonstration Monday, the second bomber followed the fleeing crowd.

At the scene of another recent bombing, police found a foot duct-taped to the car`s accelerator and hands fastened to the steering wheel.

Such restriction, perhaps the result of coercion, would hinder the effectiveness of a suicide strike because the driver would have no control over the detonation, Gaghan noted. Other analysts speculated that the measure wasn`t evidence of forced participation but was taken to ensure that the vehicle reached its target even if the driver was shot while approaching.

But those privy to the bombing investigations say that drivers are sometimes duped into deadly bombings.

"Some who drive car bombs don`t know they are going to blow up. They are told to take a car to a certain location and that they will receive further information afterward," said Kamil Abdulmajeed, chief judge for the 2nd Iraqi Central Criminal Court. "When they arrive, the car is suddenly detonated by remote control."

In the bomb-rattled capital, authorities have advised residents to be vigilant for signs of bombers: cars traveling at high speed with a young male driver as the sole occupant, a low-riding chassis, trunks heavily loaded or tilted. At a May 21 defense strategy session with coalition forces, an Iraqi general said cars had been spotted with religious writing on the side to identify them to other suicide drivers. He did not elaborate, according to a U.S. military report on the session.

The suicide bomber`s vehicle of choice has also been consistent. White Volkswagen Passats made in Brazil, which proliferated in the capital during Hussein`s regime because he gave them as presents to the families of those killed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, were used in at least half a dozen blasts that rattled Baghdad last week.

*

Times staff writers Louise Roug and Jeffrey Fleishman and special correspondents in Kirkuk and Baqubah contributed to this report.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Warning
Video contains images depicting the reality and horror of war and should be viewed by a mature audience.
“Falluja-The day After”

“Falluja-The day After” shows the total devastation of the Iraqi town, the corpses of the victims, the mass graves, the exhumation of many corpses by local rescue teams in order to try to recognize some of the victims. The last corpse shown in this video belongs to a 14 year old girl.

The video lasts 18 minutes and 20 seconds. Posted 06/02/05
Das Video hat eine bessere Qualität.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article9010.htm

[urlClick here for windows media 56k low band]http://informationclearinghouse.info/video1/falluja_video_lit.wmv[/url]

This video has been recorded in Falluja in early Janury, 2005, when the city was reopened to civilians after the American attack of November 8th, 2004 (“Operation Al-Fajr”, i. e. “the dawn”).

It’s an important document since the city was closed to reporters at that moment. This video was handed over to the Italian weekly magazine Diario by the Studies Center of Human Rights and Democracy of Falluja.

See also

Copyright: Diario

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Jamail, der bis Anfang des Jahres aus Baghdad berichtet hat, traut sich auch nicht mehr dahin und berichtet seit Anfag Mai aus Amman.

Jun 3, 2005
The failed siege of Fallujah
By Dahr Jamail
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF03Ak01.html

AMMAN, Jordan - After two devastating sieges of Fallujah in April and November of 2004, which left thousands of Iraqis dead and hundreds of thousands without homes, the aftermath of the US attempt to rid the city of resistance fighters in an effort to improve security in the country continues to plague the residents of Fallujah, and Iraq as a whole.

Simmering anger grows with time among Fallujans who, after having most of their city destroyed by the US military onslaught, have seen promises of rebuilding by both the US military and Iraqi government remain mostly unfulfilled.

"There are daily war crimes being committed in Fallujah, even now," said Mohammed Abdulla, the executive director of the Study Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Fallujah (SCHRDF). His organization works within the destruction of Fallujah, trying to monitor the plight of residents, bring them reconstruction aid, and document the war crimes and illegal weapons that were used during the November siege.

"Now we have none of the rebuilding which was promised, which people need so desperately in order to get their lives back in order," said Abdulla during a recent interview with Asia Times Online in Amman.

Doctors working inside the city continue to complain of US and Iraqi security forces impeding their medical care. Along with the continuance of strict US military checkpoints, residents in the city say the treatment they receive from both the US military and Iraqi security forces operating inside Fallujah is both degrading and humiliating. This treatment is also being perceived by most as intentional.

"The checkpoints are too obstructive," said Dr Amer Ani, who volunteers at Fallujah General Hospital. "Fighting has resumed inside the city, because in the last two weeks there have been man-to-man clashes in different districts of the city. This has caused ambulances to have difficulty entering and exiting the city, especially the main hospital.

"I work in the refugee camp on the border, and because of the checkpoint on the outskirts of the city, no patients from that camp can enter the city," said Ani. "Thus, they are forced to go to another clinic 14 kilometers from them, whereas the closest treatment in the city is less than one kilometer from them."

Ani went on to add that the main hospital and several primary health clinics in the city need rebuilding, but the building materials are being prevented from entering by US forces.

Dr Riyad al-Obeidy, who works in Ramadi, is also currently volunteering inside Fallujah. "Previously, the Ministry of Health was delivering aid into the city, but now this is prohibited, for unknown reasons," he said. "Thus, now there are shortages of external fixators, surgical sets for operations, and trauma equipment. There is really a humanitarian health problem. People are living as refugees inside their city, living in tents - so we have lack of clean water and hygiene, so there is rampant spreading of typhoid. With summer coming, this will all get worse."

Promises made prior to the siege by the Iraqi government and US military to assist in reconstruction of the city appear to have fallen flat.

According to SCHRDF`s Abdulla, "There is some reconstruction, but this is only being done by Fallujans and because the government of Iraq is only helping just a little."

That point was also made by Dr Abrahim Aziz (last name changed to protect identity), who works as a volunteer inside Fallujah. "There is a little rebuilding happening now, electric wires are being replaced," he said during a phone interview from Fallujah. "But the hospitals and clinics have only been painted and the holes in the walls closed up."

Dr Fawzi, an engineer who owns a cement factory in Fallujah, said the southern districts of Fallujah remain closed, and only 10% of the buildings and homes destroyed have been rebuilt by residents themselves. Fawzi was involved in negotiating compensation for residents of the city, and presented a figure of US$600 million to the US military, who agreed to pay the amount. But the Iraqi government did not agree.

"We went to Baghdad but the [then-premier Iyad] Allawi office told us we could have only $100 million, and they couldn`t promise anything because everything would change with the elections [of January]," said Fawzi. "We disputed this amount, and the government said they would give us 20% of the $600 million, which we refused because this was not enough. At this meeting were Americans, military and civilian both, and members of the Iraqi government."

Dr Aziz said that only 10% of the promised compensation had been paid out to date, and added that the health situation was "horrible, we are now having cholera outbreaks".

Recent drinking water tests performed by SCHRDF found that there was no potable water available inside Fallujah. "Everybody knows this, and this is why we are making announcements for people to boil their water for 10 minutes," said Abdulla.

According to him, two-thirds of the city lacks electricity because so many electrical wires were cut, and any reconstruction occurring at the moment is only being carried out by the residents of Fallujah, with no outside help. "There is little financial aid coming from the government, if any at all."

Dr al-Obeidy said the same. "There are some payouts being made, but it is a small amount. But then recently the Iraqi government stopped all the compensation payments. So now the people are very angry about this, especially because the Americans promised to give each family $500, but there is nothing until now," he said. "So if a house is completely destroyed, how can $500 be enough? It cannot."

While it is estimated that 80% of the residents of Fallujah have returned home, roughly 60% of the houses and buildings inside the city sustained enough damage to make them inhabitable. Most people continue to live in tents, or amid the rubble of their homes. Curfews remain in the city, with residents not allowed on the streets past 9pm, and entire districts remain without power.

Abu Nawaf, a 42-year-old businessman who lives near the Jolan quarter of the city, said in a recent phone interview from Fallujah, "There is no rebuilding happening here at all and the Americans and Iraqi National Guard [ING] are patrolling all the time, even the side streets."

Abdulla commented on the volatile situation: "There is no law in the streets, and there was a case of an ING killing an Iraqi policeman and people asked for an inquiry." He added: "Americans were inside with the ING who are peshmerga [members of the Kurdish militia]. The ING inside now are all peshmerga and Badr forces [Shi`ite militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution] who are doing the same humiliations and bad treatment that the Americans are doing."

The SCHRDF has reported that US soldiers currently occupy seven primary schools in the city, causing children to study in tents.

Meanwhile, Nawaf continues to look for his three brothers who remain missing. The US military painted on his home that three bodies were found there, but Nawaf has been unable to locate them and insists they remain missing.

Recent clashes and roadside bombs in Fallujah have greatly impeded any return to normalcy within the city, along with ongoing complaints from residents of harassment and poor treatment from the security forces. Thus reconstruction, as important as it is for the city, remains in the background for residents who continue to testify of alleged war crimes during the most recent siege, as well as seething resentment over the destruction and lack of rebuilding in their city.

"There are plenty of women in Fallujah who have testified they were raped by American soldiers," said Abdulla. "They are nearby the secondary school for girls inside Fallujah. When people came back to Fallujah the first time they found so many girls who were totally naked and they had been killed."

As Nawaf`s situation shows, the number of missing people remains one of the larger concerns. "We don`t have a total number of people killed because so many people are missing ... this makes it impossible for now to get an accurate count of the dead," said Abdulla.

Another Iraqi doctor who is a member of an Iraqi medical team that also investigates human-rights issues, reported that his group estimates that 60,000 Iraqis are in detention facilities throughout Iraq. During the interview in Amman, he said the US military had only registered the names of 17,000 detainees; they are being held without charges and their whereabouts unknown, even to their families. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the doctor said, "Of course this only pushes people more towards the resistance, because people are eventually left desperate enough to begin fighting the Americans. People can only take so much."

Dr Fawzi, who is also reporting to the SCHRDF, expressed concern about the number of people missing from Fallujah. "For deaths, we counted over 750 at first," he commented. "There are so many missing people and it is so difficult to have the figures of dead and detained, even though we know so many more were killed. People are afraid to admit their son might be detained because the Americans might arrest or retaliate against the rest of the family."

Thus, the suffering of the residents of Fallujah continues as fighting simmers once again within the devastated city and the drastic heat of summer approaches.

"The Americans have committed a very big massacre to the people of Fallujah. The crime of Fallujah is the greatest crime ever," Abdulla said sternly. "This will remain as a black spot in American history forever. Whatever the American people will do, even if they get rid of those liars who are in their government, they will need a long time for people to forget what they have done in Iraq and in Fallujah in order for us to deal with them as a civilized people who have humanity."

Abdulla, like residents of the city, wondered why the US military will not let unembedded media into Fallujah. "Why have they not let the media inside Fallujah," he asked. "If America says she is right, then why did she stop two UN investigators from getting inside Fallujah?"

With the initial justification for the siege of Fallujah being that the military operation was conducted in order to bring security and stability for the elections of January 30, it is clear that this goal was not obtained. Scores of Iraqis died on that day alone, and the situation throughout Iraq has only continued to deteriorate since.

More recently, since the latest interim government in Iraq was sworn in in April, well over 750 Iraqis have been killed in violence that continues to spread throughout the war-torn country.

Thus, rather than improving security and stability in Fallujah and Iraq, the siege of Fallujah has accomplished nothing more than devastating the city and spreading the Iraqi resistance into other cities, such as Qaim, Beji, Baquba, Mosul, Ramadi, Latifiya and many areas of Baghdad.

It could easily be argued now that the siege of Fallujah accomplished the exact opposite of its stated goals - rather than bringing increased security and stability, it has inflamed tempers, deepened sectarian rifts and spurred the Iraqi resistance into levels of attack rarely seen prior to the siege.

Abdulla paints a dismal picture with his final comments on the situation in Fallujah: "The mood is that people will never forget what was done to them and their city. I don`t think we`ll see the end of this. People will never forget to have their revenge on the American troops, but they would like to prepare themselves for another attack. This is what the Fallujan negotiators had warned the Americans of. Lack of security, which is ongoing in Iraq now, is one these results."

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has reported from inside occupied Iraq for eight months. He is currently reporting from 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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Heute morgen hat [urlDavid Brooks]http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/BROOKS-BIO.html[/url] von der NYTimes eine Kolumne über den Wahlausgang in Frankreich veröffentlicht und sich in dieser Kolumne auch über die Gründe geäußert.
M.E. ist da viel Polemik dabei. Brooks ist Neocon usw.
Darüber ist eine lebhafte Diskussion entstanden. Jeder Kolumne in der Times ist ein Chat Room angeschlossen.
Hier der Link zu den Beiträgen ab heute morgen:

http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums…

Dann auch noch der Artikel:
June 2, 2005
Fear and Rejection
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/opinion/02brooks.html

Forgive me for making a blunt and obvious point, but events in Western Europe are slowly discrediting large swaths of American liberalism.

Most of the policy ideas advocated by American liberals have already been enacted in Europe: generous welfare measures, ample labor protections, highly progressive tax rates, single-payer health care systems, zoning restrictions to limit big retailers, and cradle-to-grave middle-class subsidies supporting everything from child care to pension security. And yet far from thriving, continental Europe has endured a lost decade of relative decline.

Western Europeans seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence. Election results, whether in North Rhine-Westphalia or across France and the Netherlands, reveal electorates who have lost faith in their leaders, who are anxious about declining quality of life, who feel extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign competition - from the Chinese, the Americans, the Turks, even the Polish plumbers.

Anybody who has lived in Europe knows how delicious European life can be. But it is not the absolute standard of living that determines a people`s morale, but the momentum. It is happier to live in a poor country that is moving forward - where expectations are high - than it is to live in an affluent country that is looking back.

Right now, Europeans seem to look to the future with more fear than hope. As Anatole Kaletsky noted in The Times of London, in continental Europe "unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 percent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 percent only once in those 14 years."

The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it`s sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas. There is little prospect of robust growth returning any time soon.

Once it was plausible to argue that the European quality of life made up for the economic underperformance, but those arguments look more and more strained, in part because demographic trends make even the current conditions unsustainable. Europe`s population is aging and shrinking. By 2040, the European median age will be around 50. Nearly a third of the population will be over 65. Public spending on retirees will have to grow by a third, sending Europe into a vicious spiral of higher taxes and less growth.

This is the context for the French "no" vote on the E.U. constitution. This is the psychology of stagnation that shaped voter perceptions. It wasn`t mostly the constitution itself voters were rejecting. Polls reveal they were articulating a broader malaise. The highest "no" votes came from the most vulnerable, from workers and the industrial north. The "no" campaign united the fearful right, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, with the fearful left, led by the Communists.

Influenced by anxiety about the future, every faction across the political spectrum found something to feel menaced by. For the Socialist left, it was the threat of economic liberalization. For parts of the right, it was the threat of Turkey. For populists, it was the condescension of the Brussels elite. For others, it was the prospect of a centralized European superstate. Many of these fears were mutually exclusive. The only commonality was fear itself, the desire to hang on to what they have in the face of change and tumult all around.

The core fact is that the European model is foundering under the fact that billions of people are willing to work harder than the Europeans are. Europeans clearly love their way of life, but don`t know how to sustain it.

Over the last few decades, American liberals have lauded the German model or the Swedish model or the European model. But these models are not flexible enough for the modern world. They encourage people to cling fiercely to entitlements their nation cannot afford. And far from breeding a confident, progressive outlook, they breed a reactionary fear of the future that comes in left- and right-wing varieties - a defensiveness, a tendency to lash out ferociously at anybody who proposes fundamental reform or at any group, like immigrants, that alters the fabric of life.

This is the chief problem with the welfare state, which has nothing to do with the success or efficiency of any individual program. The liberal project of the postwar era has bred a stultifying conservatism, a fear of dynamic flexibility, a greater concern for guarding what exists than for creating what doesn`t.

That`s a truth that applies just as much on this side of the pond.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 3, 2005
The State of Iraq: An Update
By ADRIANA LINS de ALBUQUERQUE, MICHAEL O’HANLON and AMY UNIKEWICZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/opinion/03chart.html?

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains a complex mix of tragedy and hope. To give a sense of the ebb and flow, this chart shows data for three key months: May 2003 (the first full month after the fall of Baghdad), June 2004 (the last month before the Coalition Authority gave way to the interim Iraqi government) and May 2005.

Many Iraqis today are wealthier than they were before the invasion, with more bustle in the streets and a new stock market that is trading billions of shares a month; yet by other measures, like electricity availability and the unemployment rate, Iraq`s economy appears weaker than it was during the Baathist reign.

Much has been made, rightly, of the intensification of the insurgency. Last month`s toll on United States troops was well above the average for the last two years, and was the deadliest yet for Iraqi security forces. Still, Iraqis are providing authorities with far more tips on insurgent activities than even a few months ago. And most people remain optimistic about the future. Even Sunni Arabs, who provide the largest pool of recruits for the insurgency, seem slightly more hopeful than a year ago. This optimism is welcome, because with security conditions poor and the economy a mixed bag, the fledgling political process has increasingly become Iraq`s main good news - and main hope.

Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Michael O`Hanlon are, respectively, a research analyst and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Amy Unikewicz is a graphic designer in South Norwalk, Conn.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times 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/
Friday, June 03, 2005

12,000 Dead in Iraqi Guerrilla War
Rate of Killing Same as Under Saddam

The final toll for Iraqis killed in guerrilla violence or the USG/Iraqi government response to it on Thursday grew to 39. In addition to the early-morning incidents reported here this morning, there were several further attacks around the country. In Baghdad, "men in three speeding cars sprayed gunfire into a crowded market in the northern neighborhood of Hurriyah, killing nine people . . ." In Mosul, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle killed 7 and wounded 10. In Mahmudiyah south of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed 3 persons.

2 US servicemen were killed by guerrilla action in western Iraq.

The Iraqi government claims to be deploying 40,000 troops and police to clear some Baghdad neighborhoods of guerrillas, and to have killed 28 and arrested some 700 guerrillas or guerrilla sympthizers. (For the issue of body counts in Iraq, see Tom Engelhardt`s cogent discussion.

Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post reports the allegation by Bayan Jabr, the Iraqi Minister of the Interior, that 12,000 Iraqis have died in the guerrilla war during the past 18 months. A member of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), he maintained that most of the victims have been Shiites and rather defensively said that no Sunni mosques had been destroyed. He was referring to the bombings at Shiite mosques by Sunni guerrillas. But many innocent Sunnis have suffered in the guerrilla war (including virtually the entire civilian population of Fallujah), and he was unwise to downplay that, making himself sound partisan and sectarian.

[The figure of 12,000 killed in guerrilla violence in the past 18 months is much lower than the estimates arrived at by Iraq Body Count, which gives between about 22,000 and 25,000 for the two years since Saddam fell, and Jabr`s figure is therefore suspicious. In fact the real number of those killed in the guerrilla war is likely to be twice Body Count`s estimates.)

AP has more of Jabr`s interview: "`The number of Shiite clerics killed is several folds (higher than) the number of Sunni clerics (killed),`` Jabr said without giving figures. "

The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars on Thursday accused the Iraqi army of having killed Shaikh Imad Asim al-Hamdani, the Friday prayers leader and preacher at the Ahl al-Bait Mosque in Latifiyah 35 km south of Baghdad. They said that American "occupation forces" also arrested Shaikh Faisal Husain al-Isawi, the head of the AMS library in Amiriyah near Fallujah. (- Al-Sharq al-Awsat/ DPA).

The Washington Post did not refer to the findings of Knight Ridder for last summer that US troops were responsible for twice as many Iraqi deaths as the guerrillas themselves over a four-month period.

The 12,000 figure over 18 months would equal about 8000 deaths a year or 22 per day. As noted, this number is actually probably a gross underestimate.

Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, when questioned about the Iraq war that he helped spearhead, asked, "Would you really prefer to have Saddam Hussein in power?"

But the reason for not having Saddam in power was that he had killed so many people. If not having him means that 8,000 people a year have to die, then what? And what if the number of people dying in Iraq is even higher? What if it is not 8,000 a year, as Jabr maintains, but more like 50,000? Jabr`s figures are only for casualties of guerrilla actions. What about all the Iraqis who have died as a result of US bombing raids on civilian quarters of cities? What about all the murders that occur as part of political reprisals?

The Baath Party was in power for about 35 years. If it had killed 8000 civilians per year, that would be 280,000 persons. That is about what is alleged, though it is probably an exaggeration. (The deaths in the Iran-Iraq war cannot all be laid at Saddam`s feet, since he began suing for peace in 1982, but was rebuffed by Khomeini, who insisted on dragging the war out until 1988 in hopes of taking Baghdad and putting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in power there. Likewise, Mr. Rumsfeld`s offer of support to Saddam and greenlighting of the use of chemical weapons prolonged the war).

In other words, Bayan Jabr`s figures suggest that in US-dominated Iraq, people are dying so far at about the same rate as they did under Baath rule. But Saddam`s killing sprees were largely over with by the late 1990s, so the rate of death in Iraq now is enormously greater than it was in, say, 2001.

Wolfowitz should give up on the propaganda technique of just demonizing his opponents and then asking how anyone could want them in power. The real question is, are Iraqis better off under US auspices? So far, the answer with regard to the death rate is a resounding "No!"

As for the rest, let`s look at Niko Kyriako`s summary of the results of a scientific household survey done by the United Nations in Iraq.



"In a country where almost half the population of 27.1 million people is less than 18 years old, some of the most startling findings relate to youth. Nearly one-fourth of Iraqi children aged between six months and five years are chronically malnourished, meaning they have stunted growth, the report says. Among all Iraqi children, more than one in 10, suffer from general malnutrition, meaning they have a low weight for their age. Another eight percent have acute malnourishment, or low weight for their height.

"In some areas of the country, acute malnourishment reaches 17 percent and stunting reaches 26 percent, the report says. Both infant and child mortality rates appear to have been steadily increasing over the past 15 years. At present, 32 babies out of every 1,000 born alive die before reaching their first birthday.

"In addition, 37 percent of young men with secondary or higher education are unemployed and just 83 percent of boys and 79 percent of school-age girls are enrolled in primary school.

"The infant mortality and malnutrition findings make clear that “the suffering of children due to war and conflict in Iraq is not limited to those directly wounded or killed by military activities,” the report says. For example, researchers found that diarrhea killed two out of every 10 children before the 1991 U.S.-led Gulf War against Saddam Hussein and four in 10 after the war.

"Homes also took a major hit from the latest war, the study says. Military damage from U.S. air power or artillery fire to dwellings in the north of the country averages 25 percent of all rural households and in provinces such as Sulaimaniya, 49 percent of all rural homes were damaged."



I don`t think there is anything much to celebrate in this picture of Iraq. Many of its current problems, though by no means all, are the direct fault of Mr. Wolfowitz. That we "got Saddam" won`t feed Iraq`s children or repair the holes in the roofs of Iraqi homes.

posted by Juan @ [url6/3/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/12000-dead-in-iraqi-guerrilla-war-rate.html[/url]

Oil Workers Mobilize
Iran Poised to Help with Reconstruction

Greg Muttit of the Guardian reports that the Iraqi oil workers` union is gearing up to fight any attempt to privatize the Iraqi oil industry. Since it can shut down oil production at will, it is a fight the union is likely to win.

The watermelon poisoner has been caught.

"Iraq`s Ambassador to Iran, Mohammad Majid al-Sheikh, said that Iran is the most qualified country among neighboring states for reconstructing Iraq."

Iraqi forces in the holy city of Karbala discovered 300 missiles.

Tidbits from the Iraqi Press via BBC World Monitor for 1 June:


"Al-Ufuq publishes on page 3 a 100-word report stating that Hadi al-Amiri, National Assembly member and chairman of the Badr Organization, has met Muqtada al-Sadr to discuss the participation of all Iraqi factions in drafting the constitution. The report adds that the citizens of Al-Abbasiyah district have staged a demonstration in front of the Al-Najaf Advisory Council to protest the dissolution of the local Advisory Council in their district . . .

Al-Adalah carries on page 3 a 1,500-word interview with National Assembly member Dr Amal Kashif al-Ghita discussing a proposal she presented to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on "guaranteeing women`s rights" in the new Iraqi constitution . . .

Ishraqat al-Sadr runs on page 1 a 50-word report stating that Muqtada al-Sadr in his meetings with Iraqi officials has said that the United States has come to Iraq only to "fight Islam," and that there will be no security unless the "occupation forces" withdraw from Iraq. Ishraqat al-Sadr publishes on page 1 a 100-word report citing National Assembly member Fattah al-Shaykh saying that if the US Government does not "apologize" to him for "attacking him," he will "retaliate" . . .

Ishraqat al-Sadr runs on page 1 a 100-word report citing a statement issued by a number of National Assembly members and the Al-Sadr Office`s Tribal Congregation demanding the withdrawal of the "occupation forces" from the Al-Sadr City . . .

Al-Ufuq publishes on the front page a 100-word follow-up report citing a statement issued a few days ago by the Human Rights Association in Babil Governorate confirming the arrest of the Iranian consular in the governorate. The report says that he was released after two days in detention.

Al-Ufuq publishes on page 3 a 170-word report citing Karbala Advisory Council announcing the completion of administrative work for the formation of a new commando brigade in the governorate to be led by Colonel Abbas Abid Zayd . . .

Al-Mu`tamar runs on page 2 a 50-word report stating that Al-Muqdadiyah Municipality Director in Diyala Rahim Rudan was released on 31 May, a week after his kidnap. The report adds that his relatives had paid a ransom of $30,000 . . .

Al-Furat publishes on the front page a 100-word report citing a security report saying that unidentified gunmen have kidnapped the traffic department`s bank director in Tikrit . . .

Al-Zaman publishes on page 2 a 200-word report citing Iraq`s Ambassador to Egypt Safiyah al-Suhayl announcing the formation of the Iraqi Women`s Supreme Commission that comprises over 100 women`s organizations . . .

Al-Mu`tamar carries on page 2 a 75-word report stating that Deputy Prime Minister Dr Ahmad al-Chalabi, who is also the chairman of the Power Council, visited oil establishments in Kirkuk. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 4 a 120-word report saying that Iraq and Iran have agreed to complete the technical details in order to expedite the $10 million Iranian grant to Iraq . . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 4 a 500-word report quoting an Iraqi academic as saying that nine million Iraqis are below the poverty line. . .

Ishraqat al-Sadr carries on page 8 a 1,600-word unattributed article discussing Muqtada al-Sadr`s involvement in politics. The article says that Al-Sadr is the mouthpiece for the poor and persecuted, adding that he works towards "liberating" Iraq. . .

posted by Juan @ [url6/3/2005 06:15:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/oil-workers-mobilize-iran-poised-to.html[/url]

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The Independent
Syria’s troops have gone. So who killed Samir, Lebanon’s fearless journalist?
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=643…
Friday, 3rd June 2005, by Robert Fisk

The bloody hand has reached out to Lebanon once more, striking down one of its most prominent journalists and one of the most vociferous and bravest critics of the Syrian regime.

Samir Kassir was the best known columnist on An Nahar, a valued member of the opposition, newly married and - like so many of us in Beirut - living on the happy assumption that with Syria’s troops and intelligence officers withdrawn from Lebanon, he had nothing to fear.

So who murdered Samir Kassir?

"He always left home at 10.30am and I saw him walking across the street," a female neighbour told me yesterday. "He always left home at the same time. He opened the door of his car, sat inside and started the engine. Then the car blew up."

Close inspection of Mr Kassir’s Alfa-Romeo, registration number 165670, showed clearly the blast came from beneath the driver’s seat. It tore open the roof, blasted out the driver’s door, smashed the steering column and hurled Mr Kassir on to the passenger seat. The ignition seems to have detonated the bomb.

This was a shock that no one in Beirut expected - except, of course, the assassins. Germany’s top detective, Detlev Mehlis, is already here with his team to investigate the murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri in February. We all thought that Lebanon’s assassins were in their rabbit holes, fearful of arrest.

But no, they are still on operational duty, still in killing mode. Nassib Lahoud, the opposition MP and friend of Kassir - he may be the next Lebanese president - was in tears when I spoke to him beside Mr Kassir’s wrecked car. He talked about "criminal hands", about the "intelligence apparatus" who he blamed for the assassination. The only word he didn’t use was "Syria".

So who murdered Samir Kassir?

Just before he resigned this year, the pro-Syrian head of Lebanon’s General Security Service, Jamil Sayed, hysterically offered to arrest himself if he was blamed for Hariri’s murder. Mr Kassir had written a brutal article the next day, pointing out that it was good to see those who had threatened journalists and who had censored journalists now showing their own fear of justice. Rustum Ghazaleh, who was head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, screamed abuse at the journalist.

So who murdered Samir Kassir?

In 2001, after a series of articles excoriating the Syrians and pro-Syrian Lebanese intelligence operatives, airport security confiscated his passport on his return from Amman, claiming they wanted to "verify the conditions upon which it was obtained".

Mr Kassir was of Palestinian origin but had travelled on his legally-issued Lebanese passport on 14 recent occasions. In 2001, he complained he was under surveillance and his neighbours claimed they were interrogated by intelligence officers.

So who murdered Samir Kassir?

Nassib Lahoud, who was last night attending a meeting of opposition leaders in Beirut - among them was the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, who was a close friend of Mr Kassir - had no doubts about the reasons for the murder. "Criminal hands did not target Samir because he was a brilliant journalist," he said. "They did not target Samir because he was a brilliant intellectual. They have targeted Samir for being one of the leaders of Lebanon’s spring, because he was part and parcel of the opposition. So the battle with the intelligence apparatus is not over. This assassination is meant to tell us that Lebanon’s march towards democracy should not be an easy ride."

Mr Kassir, who had two children from a previous marriage, had only recently married Giselle Khoury, a journalist on the Arabiya satellite channel. "Why don’t they leave us alone now?" one of their young neighbours asked me yesterday. "Why must they go on using this methodology of murder? We have to stop this. Are they trying to drive all the young people out of Lebanon?"

This week, An Nahar picked up a story that had been running in its rival paper, Mr Hariri’s daily Al-Mustaqbal, and named three prominent Syrian intelligence officers who it claimed had - in defiance of UN Security Council resolution 1559 - returned to Lebanon to interfere in elections.

Identifying Syria’s spooks is not a healthy thing to do. Their names were given as: Brigadier General Mohamed Khallouf - who was the senior Syrian intelligence officer in Beirut until last April - Nabil Hishmeh and Khalil Zogheib, who used to run Syria’s secret services in Tripoli. Syria denied the men were here. Mr Kassir’s last column - on Friday last week - was an attack on the Syrian Baath party, headlined "Mistake after mistake".

So who murdered Samir Kassir?

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[columbus]

Dear Joerver,

I have gerade time, cause the Dax bewegt sich not richtig.
Seit two years postest Du vollkommen alone in your thread. Not einer speaks with you. That is very traurig. Perhaps it liegt daran, that you alleweil speaks in english? Oder no one interessieren ellenlong Texte?

I vermute, that you could be Millionär if you this Time-Aufwand with working (Arbeit) gespendet hättest. But was make I me Sorgen. Perhaps you ar allready a Millionär?

Kopf high - in the next 29000 threads the one oder andere will give you answers.

Schöne Firedays
columbus

[Joerver]

[posting]16.789.289 von columbus am 03.06.05 12:22:10[/posting]Ein Land zu entdecken, dass müßtest du wissen, dauert sehr lange.
Aber es macht auch Spaß!

[Joerver]

NEWS ANALYSIS
He`s Not Walking Like a Lame Duck
By Janet Hook
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-duck3ju…

June 3, 2005

WASHINGTON — When President Bush first latched onto mountain biking as his favored form of exercise, he plowed over rough terrain with a distinctive technique: Even when he pedaled uphill, he refused to shift to a lower gear.

That is an apt metaphor for the way Bush is making his way through the second term of his presidency: No matter how steep the climb to his goals — to revamp Social Security, to win confirmation for his choice for United Nations ambassador, to bring stability to Iraq — Bush is pushing on, as if heedless of the enormous obstacles he faces in Congress, around the country and across the globe.

Bush`s doggedness is one of many assets he has retained in his second term, and he has needed it of late as his top priorities have run into heavy weather in Congress. Democratic critics see Bush`s recent troubles as evidence that he has become a lame duck who has lost leverage with lawmakers.

But many analysts — including foes of the White House — say it is premature to write off a president who holds a formidable array of political and institutional tools — and who is determined to use them.

"I don`t think he is a lame duck," said Nelson Polsby, a political scientist at UC Berkeley and a Bush critic. "A lame duck is harmless, someone who people disregard because they think he can`t be harmful. He still has plenty of potentiality to make trouble."

Bush`s ability to influence U.S. foreign policy remains largely unchallenged. He is poised to leave a decisive imprint on the Supreme Court. Among Republicans, he is even more popular than was the icon of American conservatism, Ronald Reagan, at this point in his second term.

And despite tensions with the Republican-led Congress, Bush still enjoys a deep reservoir of goodwill among fellow Republicans for having led the party to strong congressional gains in the 2002 and 2004 elections.

"That`s an incredibly powerful base to be standing on to negotiate and work with Congress," said GOP pollster Bill McInturff. Still, he said, "does it mean this is the happiest time in his presidency? No."

Against that backdrop, Bush`s news conference this week was dominated by questions about the multiple setbacks he has faced recently: the upswing of insurgent violence in Iraq; the lack of action on his Social Security initiative; new obstacles to Senate confirmation of his pick to be U.N. ambassador, John R. Bolton; and House approval of a bill that would loosen his restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, legislation Bush had threatened to veto.

Bush responded with characteristic bravado.

"I don`t worry about anything here in Washington, D.C.," he said. "I feel comfortable in my role as the president, and my role as the president is to push for reform."

Democrats, meanwhile, said Bush`s defensive posture during the news conference was evidence of his waning political clout even within his party. "Lame Duck: If it quacks like a Bush … " was the headline of a statement from the Democratic National Committee. It asserted: "President Bush is fighting a losing battle to avoid becoming a political lame duck."

Bush`s effort in Tuesday`s meeting to reassert himself with reporters was reminiscent of a mid-1995 news conference in which President Clinton, weathering the political storm that followed the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, made an extraordinary point of insisting he had not been rendered irrelevant.

"The president is relevant," Clinton said. "The Constitution gives me relevance."

Indeed, it was after that seeming low point of Clinton`s presidency that he racked some of his biggest accomplishments — welfare reform, a balanced budget and more.

Bush may likewise recover from his recent rough patch to accomplish ambitious things, and his trademark stubbornness could help him in that regard. But some critics say the president`s biggest political problem is not that his agenda has proved so hard to achieve, but that his agenda is too far removed from the kitchen-table concerns of voters worried about the economy, high gas prices and healthcare.

Bush`s persistence through this difficult period "illustrates one of his strengths: his ability to ride out mood swings," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank. "But he has to come to grips with the fact that he faces a relevance gap."

Many of the assets Bush brings to his second term distinguish him from other two-term presidents. Unlike President Reagan`s broad-brush "Morning in America" campaign for reelection in 1984, for example, Bush ran in 2004 on a specific agenda of new issues, notably overhauling Social Security and the tax code. Some Bush allies say his recent troubles in Congress are a measure of how ambitious his aims are, not how much leverage he has lost.

"You have a president who, unlike previous second-term presidents, ran on a very specific agenda different from what he had tried to do in his first term," said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee. "You have a president who wants to do very big things in a second term."

At the same time, Bush has the invaluable asset — enjoyed by no second-term GOP president since Calvin Coolidge — of having Congress controlled by his own party. The Republican majority spares Bush the kinds of opposition-led investigations that dogged the second terms of Reagan and Clinton.

Bush`s continuing sway over Republicans, even when their political interests conflict, was in evidence in the debate over Bolton`s nomination. Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) — a maverick up for reelection in 2006, who had threatened to vote against Bolton — ended up voting for him, even though political analysts said that vote would be politically risky for him in his overwhelmingly Democratic state. The Senate has not yet taken final action on the Bolton nomination.

But Bush is facing an immutable fact of second-term life: Republicans in Congress will be on the ballot in 2006 and 2008, and Bush will not. That has made Republicans on Capitol Hill much more wary of the political risks entailed in acting on such sensitive issues as Social Security and immigration law.

"No question it`s a tension — a tension you`re beginning to see quietly and appropriately over the last 60 days on these issues," said pollster McInturff.

Social Security, in fact, is one of the issues that have prompted questions about whether Bush has lost clout. Despite the months he has spent promoting his plan to overhaul the program, public opinion is not mobilizing behind his proposal, and there is no consensus on Capitol Hill.

But Bush insists he is not deterred. "This is just the beginning of a difficult debate," Bush said at his Tuesday news conference.

Bush suffered a highly visible loss when the House disregarded his veto threat and passed legislation to expand federal support for stem cell research. But his allies quickly cast that defeat as a victory: The vote showed there was not enough opposition to Bush to override his veto.

"The votes to sustain his veto are plentiful," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy. "If Congress wanted to send a message, that was certainly an opportunity."

Public approval of Bush`s handling of domestic policy has sagged, but polls find continuing confidence in his leadership on combating terrorism. His singular role in foreign affairs has been underscored of late by a parade of foreign dignitaries visiting the White House and his administration`s continuing efforts to promote democracy abroad. Though violence in Iraq has persisted, bipartisan congressional majorities gave Bush almost everything he wanted to finance U.S. operations there.

And even if Bush`s legislative agenda founders in his second term, he will have a chance to make an impact on domestic policy for decades to come: A vacancy, and maybe more than one, is expected on the Supreme Court.

Times staff writer Edwin Chen contributed to this report.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Friday, June 03, 2005
War News for Friday, June 3, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Shi`ite cleric assassinated in Basra.

Bring `em on: Ten Iraqis killed, 12 wounded by car bomb near Balad.

Casualties. "Violence in the course of the 18-month-long insurgency has claimed the lives of 12,000 Iraqis, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said Thursday, giving the first official count for the largest category of victims of bombings, ambushes and other increasingly deadly attacks."

Teetering. "To prevent the breakdown of Iraq`s troubled transition and a potential civil war, Iraq`s new government appealed to the Bush administration yesterday to take a much more assertive role, particularly on four key political and military issues, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials. In talks with Vice President Cheney yesterday and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari requested greater U.S. and coalition help in crafting a new constitution. The deadline is now less than three months away, but deliberations have been slowed as Iraq still works on the composition of a constitutional committee."

"Living" in Baghdad. "So now 18 of members of the extended family are crammed into five rooms with dirty water, backed-up sewers and sporadic electricity. But the biggest hardship is feeling like prisoners of the unrelenting violence. On Baghdad television, a pool of blood and shattered car -- yet another bombing -- dominates the news. The Hassans don`t dare go out at night, except Subeih, who has to. The $130 a month he earns as a night watchman supports much of the family. Three months ago a mortar killed 12 of Subeih’s co-workers. `I was just covered in glass,` says Subeih."

Fallujah. "After two devastating sieges of Fallujah in April and November of 2004, which left thousands of Iraqis dead and hundreds of thousands without homes, the aftermath of the US attempt to rid the city of resistance fighters in an effort to improve security in the country continues to plague the residents of Fallujah, and Iraq as a whole. Simmering anger grows with time among Fallujans who, after having most of their city destroyed by the US military onslaught, have seen promises of rebuilding by both the US military and Iraqi government remain mostly unfulfilled."

Assistance center. "The most common request is to help find a detained person, like Lateef`s husband. The center receives up to 100 requests a day, a worker at the center said, but can only help find people in American prisons. Staffers check a list of detainees they receive weekly from the American prisons. The list is in English, so the staff must translate the names, which isn`t easy. Some people are listed under family names; others by their tribes. And there can be several spellings for a name. Staffers have no way of knowing if Iraqi forces are holding someone. Lateef walked into the center and up to the desk. She first had to prove that she was related to the man she was looking for. She then gave a worker her husband`s name: Ali Abdul Razaq Abdul Hameed. The worker went through the list. He found nothing. Lateef, frustrated, began to cry. Perhaps an Iraqi prison is holding him, the worker said. Be patient, he told her, maybe he`ll be on the list that comes in next week. None of his ideas placated Lateef, who said she wanted a better government in place so she could go to a judge, not an American, to find out why he was detained. `I know my husband. He is not a terrorist,` she said. `If he was a bad person, I wouldn`t come here.`"

Rummy`s Army.

U.S. Army officers in the deserts of northwest Iraq, near the Syrian border, say they don`t have enough troops to hold the ground they take from insurgents in this transit point for weapons, money and foreign fighters.

From October to the end of April, there were about 400 soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division patrolling the northwest region, which covers about 10,000 square miles.

"Resources are everything in combat ... there`s no way 400 people can cover that much ground," said Maj. John Wilwerding, of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is responsible for the northwest tract that includes Tal Afar.

"Because there weren`t enough troops on the ground ... the (insurgency) was able to get a toehold," said Wilwerding, 37, of Chaska, Minn.

During the past two months, Army commanders, trying to pacify the area, have had to move in some 4,000 Iraqi soldiers; about 2,000 more are on the way. About 3,500 troops from the 3rd ACR took control of the area this month, but officers said they were still understaffed for the mission.

"There`s simply not enough forces here," said a high-ranking U.S. Army officer with knowledge of the 3rd ACR. "There are not enough to do anything right; everybody`s got their finger in a dike." The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concern that he`d be reprimanded for questioning American military policy in Iraq.

The Army has no difficulty in launching large-scale operations to catch fighters, the officer said. "But when we`re done, what comes next?"



Two more NCOs charged with Abu Ghraib abuse. "The sergeants had told Army investigators in sworn statements after the abuse was made public in January 2004 that they had received permission to use dogs from Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of military intelligence at the prison. . But military officials ruled in May that he would not be subject to criminal charges."

Commentary

Analysis: "What the health of the Republic requires, in other words, may not be a new crop of leakers and whistleblowers, or a fresh young generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins -- or even a more independent, aggressive media. What it may need is a new population (or half of a population, anyway), one that hasn`t been stupified or brainwashed into blind submission, that won`t look upon sadistic corruption and call it patriotism, and that will refuse to trade the Bill of Rights for a plastic Jesus and a wholly false sense of security."

Analysis: In the three years since 9-11, the Administration has yet to arrive at a clear definition of the enemy or the aim in the War on Terrorism; to date, American policy has combined ambitious public statements with ambiguity on critical particulars. Heretofore, the costs of pursuing such ambitious but ill-defined goals have been high but tolerable. The ongoing insurgency in Iraq, however, is increasing the costs of grand strategic ambiguity to the point where fundamental choices can no longer be deferred. There are two broad alternatives for resolving these ambiguities and creating a coherent and logically sufficient grand strategy: rollback and containment. Rollback would retain the ambitious goals implicit in today’s declaratory policy and accept the cost and near-term risk inherent in pursuing them. Containment would settle for more modest goals in exchange for lower costs and lower near-term risks. Neither alternative dominates the other on analytical grounds – both involve serious costs as well as benefits. Most important, the choice between them turns on a series of basic value judgments on the acceptability of risk, the relationship between near-term and long-term risk, and the ultimate degree of security the Nation should seek." Synopsis of this War College monograph in PDF format. Thanks, Anonymous.

Note to Readers

I wanted to thank Anonymous and all other alert readers who post links in Comments.

YD
# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:35 AM
Comment (1) | Trackback (0)

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Bush, The Spoiled Man-Child
What causes the fall of empires? Why, stubborn leaders who speak like toddlers and never admit mistakes
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 3, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

Know what real men do? They admit their mistakes. Know what real people do in times of great stress and strife and economic downturn? They seek help, understand they don`t know all the answers, realize they might not`ve been asking the right questions in the first place.

Know what great leaders, great nations, do at times of war and fracture and massive bludgeoning debt? All of the above, all the time, with great intelligence and humility and grace and awareness and shared humanity. Or they die.

But not BushCo. This is the hilarious thing. This is the appalling thing, still. How can this man remain so blindly, staggeringly resolute? How can he be so appallingly ignorant of fact, of truth, of evidence, of deep thought? In short, what the hell is wrong with George W. Bush?

Here it is, another bumbling, barely articulate press conference by Dubya, one of the few he ever gives because he clearly hates the things and is deeply troubled by them, hates reporters who ask complicated questions and hates people who dare doubt his simple mind-set, his effectiveness, his policies, his lopsided myopic one-way black/white good/evil worldview.

Bush hates press conferences because he can`t speak extemporaneously and can`t form a complete sentence without mashing up the language like a 5-year-old on Ritalin and can`t express a nuanced multifaceted idea to save his life and somewhere deep down in his bowels, he knows it, and he knows we know it, and it makes him mumble and stutter and secretly pray every moment to his angry righteous God he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, like sittin` on the back porch in Texas eatin` ribs and dreamin` `bout baseball. Ahhh, there now. That`s better.

But here he is, instead, stuck like a pinned bug in the Rose Garden, struggling to answer questions from the press about his low approval rating, his ultraviolent and botched war in Iraq, the huge bipartisan lack of support for his plan to gut Social Security, his inane assault on stem-cell research when the rest of the planet clearly supports it, how he has burned through any political capital he might`ve earned from the last election by being so utterly ineffectual and inept -- except, of course, when it comes to rigging the nation`s courts and loading them with ultra-right-wing misogynist homophobes.

Go ahead, read the Q&A press conference, linked above. It`s sort of staggering. It`s also very impressive, in a soul-stabbing, nauseating way. Bush is, to be sure and in a word, unyielding. Determined. Immovable. Also, deeply confused. Myopic as hell. Frighteningly narrow minded. Weirdly random. Childish in a way that would make any good parent seriously question whether it might be time to get their child some intense psychological help.

Unlike you or me or any human anywhere who happens to be in possession of humility or subtlety of mind, Bush, to this day, admits zero mistakes. He refuses help, rejects suggestions that everything is not dandy and swell. He is confounded by questions that dare suggest he might be somewhat inept, or failing. And he absolutely insists that America exists in some sort of bizarre utopian vacuum, isolated and virtuous and towering like a mad hobbled king over our enemies and allies alike.

He is, in other words, our downfall.

Iraq? Going smoothly, Bush says, happy with the progress there, despite huge surges in insurgent violence and endless uptick of the U.S. death toll and the utter wasteland we`ve made of that poor, shredded nation.

Iran, North Korea and Egypt? Just dandy. No serious problems at all. Gotta talk more with that "North Korean" guy though, sort out the "nukuler" problem. Sneering thug John Bolton for U.N. ambassador? You betcha, still on track, a good man, despite what everybody -- and I do mean everybody -- says.

Overhaul Social Security, despite an enormous lack of support from Dems and Repubs and the vast majority of the American people? "Just a matter of time," Bush mutters, completely blinded to the fact that it`s an enormous mistake. His deeply hypocritical stance on stem-cell research that kowtows to the deeply ignorant Christian Right? No real answer there. Doesn`t compute. Just shrug that sucker right off.

Notice, when you read: There is no eloquent, deeply felt defense of ideas. There is no intellectual breakdown of opinion, no multifaceted explanation, no passionate clarification. And there is certainly no reference to outside ideas, a confession that we might need help, input, wisdom from our neighbors, from science, from the wise and the experienced.

It`s a fact we`ve known all along but that keeps hammering at us like a drunk gorilla hammers at a dead mouse: Bush is able to speak only at one level, to one level. The level of a child. The level of a simpleton. The level of a sweet, bumbling, small-town mayor, addressing a PTA meeting, everyone in soft plaids and everyone drinking light beer and everyone wondering about just what the heck to do about the rusty swing sets and the busted stoplight.

Bush is, of course, not talking to you or me when he speaks at press conferences, or at his staged, prescreened, sycophant-rich "town hall" meetings, so full of plain, everyday folk hand selected for their blind love of Shrub and lack of ability to ask hard questions (read this transcript of a recent town hall on Social Security, and come away stupefied at the man`s shocking ability to appear just exactly as uneducated as his questioners).

He is not speaking to conservative Democrats or moderate Republicans. He`s not speaking to highly educated people who harbor a sincere curiosity about and tenuous understanding of the complexities of the world.

Bush is, of course, speaking to children. He is speaking to babies. It is a decidedly shallow and hollow and oddly deflated type of language that offers not a single nutritious or substantive thought to the political or cultural dialogue, other than to expand his staggering collection of embarrassing Bushisms.

It`s all merely a crayon drawing, an intellectual wading pool, a big messy cartoon world populated by manly white good guys and fanged dark evil guys and we are good and They are evil and that`s all there is to it so please stop asking weird tricky polysyllabic questions.

Maybe this is appropriate. Maybe this is as it should be. After all, we are, by and large, a nation that refuses to grow up, refuses to take responsibility for our gluttony and its global effects, refuses to see the world as it is now, a mad tangle of interconnected humanity, a global marketplace, a hodgepodge of variegated religions all stemming from the same source and that therefore all require a nimble and nuanced and deeply intelligent leadership to navigate. Qualities that our current leadership has, well, not at all.

The U.S. still behaves, when all is said and done, like a scared monkey, clinging desperately to a shiny spoon despite the trap closing in all around us, refusing to let go of this old, silly, faux-cowboy mentality of boom boom kill kill God is your daddy now sit down and shut up.

Bush embodies this. He is the very emblem of this childish, polarizing, sclerotic worldview. He literally cannot speak with any complexity, depth, resonance. He cannot function in a world of deep intellect, nuance, mature perspective. He is incapable of asking for help. He is unable to admit mistakes or discuss shortcomings or expand his mind-set to include the new and the possible.

What causes the downfall of empires? What causes the implosion of leadership, the slide of great nations into the deep muck of recession and war and mediocrity and numb irrelevance? That`s easy. Stagnation. Refusal to change. Refusal to adapt, to progress. Refusal to grow the hell up, to take responsibility for our shortcomings and failures, as well as our successes.

Indeed, George W. Bush would make a great small-town mayor, somewhere deep in a dusty, forgotten part of Texas. His brand of personable, aww-shucks, none-too-bright simpleton talk is perfect for small town. It really is.

But for a major world power caught in the throes of a desperate need to change and grow and evolve, he is, of course, absolute death.


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.

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SPEAKING FREELY
The dollar: Time for a change
by David Champeau
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GF04Dj01.html
The US dollar has experienced many changes since its inception. During the first session of the new Congress, on April 2, 1792, the Act Establishing the US Mint was passed, which defined the dollar. Section 9 of the Act stated: "Dollars or Units - each to be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, and to contain three hundred and seventy-one grains and four-sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or four hundred and sixteen grains of standard silver." This act also defined the eagle, half eagle, quarter eagle, half dollar, quarter dollar, dime, half dime and cent. The ratio between the value of gold and silver was defined as 15:1, which undervalued gold because other countries, such as France, had established a ratio of 15.5:1.

This is where our story begins: the dollar equals a certain amount of silver. During the early years of the 19th century, Congress enacted various laws with regard to legal tender. Most of these laws pertained to accepting foreign gold and silver coins as legal tender.

In June, 1834, 42 years after the dollar was defined, the Congress changed the ratio of gold to silver by reducing the amount of gold in the Eagles, setting a new ratio of 15.98:1, thus undervaluing gold. The reason for this was that speculators were withdrawing gold from circulation due to its undervaluation against silver. President Andrew Jackson wanted large denomination gold coins to take the place of bank notes and bills issued by the United States Bank, the second attempt at a central bank in America, which he had just shut down. Even with this act of Congress, the silver dollar still remained the unit of account.

In 1849, Congress changed the laws again and this time introduced the gold dollar. "There shall be from time to time struck and coined at the mint of the United States and branches thereof - conformably in all respects to law, and conformably in all respects to the standard for gold coins now established by law - coins of gold of the following denominations and value; viz, double eagles, each to be of the value of twenty dollars or units, and gold dollars, each to be of the value of one dollar or unit." Thus, the US then had two "dollars" in circulation, one of gold, and one of silver.

On February 21, 1853, another act of Congress reduced the weight of the fractional silver coins and also, for the first time, limited the legal tender quality of all silver coins. "The silver coins issued in conformity with the above section shall be legal tender in the payments of debts for all sums not exceeding five dollars." At the time of the passage of this act, the bullion in the silver dollar was more valuable as a commodity than the bullion in the gold dollar, consequently the silver dollars were withdrawn from circulation and sold as bullion in the European markets at a profit. To remedy this, Congress reduced the weight of the fractional silver coins, and limited their legal tender debt-paying power, but left the coinage of the silver dollar free and unlimited.

The next big change in the dollar occurred on February 12, 1873, with the Coinage Act of 1873. This act demonetized silver and, for the first time, made the gold dollar the unit of account. An amendment to this act, passed in 1874, created a "trade" dollar. The 1874 law specified that the new silver coins (dollar, half dollar, quarter dollar and dime) were to have limited legal tender in this country not exceeding five dollars, merely to provide the fiction that silver coins were circulating. In addition, depositors of bullion had to pay a fee of 0.5% to have their silver made into "trade dollars"; this was to discourage dumping the coins in this country.

The government made strenuous efforts to see to it that these new coins were readily accepted in the Far East, especially China. Japan and India were secondary targets and strong attempts were made in those two countries also. Diplomatic and consular officials were given "marching orders" to do everything in their power to put the "trade dollar" into active Far Eastern use. Thus for the second time in US history, we have two "dollars", one of gold for domestic circulation and the other of silver for external circulation.

Thus far the major changes in the dollar have occurred in 1792, 1834, 1849 and 1873. The intervals of these changes follow a pattern of roughly 20-40 years apart, roughly the duration of one-two generations. Another 20 years later, in 1890, we saw the attempt to remonetize silver with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. This attempt failed after less than three years, when the act was repealed in 1893.

The next major change came in 1913 with the creating of the Federal Reserve System. Forty years after the demonetization of silver, the next step was the demonetization of gold, and the replacement of all notes circulating in the US (such as National Bank Notes, Silver Certificates, US Notes and Gold Certificates) with Federal Reserve Notes.

One part of the Federal Reserve Act pertaining to gold reads as such: "SEC. I6. Federal reserve notes, to be issued at the discretion of the Federal Reserve Board for the purpose of making advances to Federal reserve banks through the Federal reserve agents as hereinafter set forth and for no other purpose, are hereby authorized. The said notes shall be obligations of the United States and shall be receivable by all national and member banks and Federal reserve banks and for all taxes, customs, and other public dues. They shall be redeemed in gold on demand at the Treasury Department of the United States, in the city of Washington ... or in gold or lawful money at any Federal reserve bank." In other words, Federal Reserve Notes are redeemable for gold.

Fast-forward 20 years to 1933. The stock market crash leads to the Great Depression. Newly elected president Franklin Roosevelt declares a four-day bank holiday, issues the Gold Confiscation Act and devalues the dollar by 41% from $20.67 an ounce to $35 an ounce, thus ending 96 years of the dollar`s value being fixed relative to gold. We now have another instance of a "two-tiered" dollar: one dollar, not redeemable for gold, for domestic use and another dollar, still redeemable for gold, for foreign use.

Fast-forward 20 years again to the mid-1950s. The world is rebuilding from World War II, the US is the dominant country, and Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are all working as part of the international financial system. Gradually the amount of US dollars outside the United States increased enormously, both as a result of the Marshall Plan and because the US, which had become the main consuming market of the world after peace was reestablished in Europe, paid for imports in dollars (sound familiar?). As a result, enormous sums of US dollars came to be held by foreign banks outside the United States. Some foreign countries, including the Soviet Union, also had deposits in US dollars in American banks, granted by certificates.

During the Cold War period, especially after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Soviet Union feared that its deposits in North American banks would be frozen as retaliation. A British bank offered the Soviets the possibility of receiving its US dollar reserves as deposits outside the US. The British bank would then deposit that money in the US banks. So there would be no chance of confiscation because it belonged to the British bank, and not to the Soviets. This operation was considered the first to create the so-called Eurodollars. Another new type of dollar.

Fast-forward 20 years to the early 1970s. The US has mounting trade deficits and is bleeding gold. On August 15, 1971, president Richard Nixon closed the "Gold Window", removing the last formal link between gold and the dollar. The result was inevitable. In February 1973, the world`s currencies "floated". By the end of 1974, gold had soared from $35 to $195 an ounce. It was also in 1973 that the world saw another new version of the dollar come to market, the "petrodollar," defined as dollars accepted by oil-producing countries and forcing the world on a dollars-for-oil standard.

From 1873, we have seen changes in the dollar in 1913, 1933, 1956 and 1971-1974, each change coming roughly 20 years apart. Silver and gold have been relegated to the sidelines. Credit-based, floating currencies make global exchange possible. We have three "versions" of the dollar in the world: US domestic dollars, eurodollars and petrodollars. We could also say that the "Asian" or "Japan" dollar was created during this time. The Japanese held $12 billion in long-term US securities in 1978, and now hold $700 billion.

The next change if the cycle were to hold should have occurred in the 1990s. With China`s rise accelerating in the 1990s, China began to accumulate massive US dollar reserves. China held no long-term US securities in 1989, $18 billion in 1994 and now holds over $200 billion, second only to Japan, according to the US Treasury.

What`s next?
With the euro-zone countries holding over $200 billion in US securities and Asia with $1 trillion or more, the stage is now set for another change in the dollar. If the 20/40-year cycle follows its past pattern, the next change will occur sometime around 2011-2016 and it will be a big one since it will be on the 40-year cycle. We have already seen three instances where the US has had a "two-tiered" dollar, where, in two of those instances, the domestic dollar was not the same as the dollar outside the US.

The 2011-2016 time frame makes sense not just from the cycle standpoint but also from a demographic standpoint. By 2015, the baby boom generation will be well into the belly of the retirement bell curve. We know that the US government has something of the order of $50 trillion in unfunded obligations in order to make good on the promises made to the baby boomers. This $50 trillion dwarfs what foreigners are currently holding. If we spread this over 20 years, the US will need roughly $2.5 trillion a year, the equivalent of this year`s federal budget. Something has to give.

Of course the US is not alone in this predicament. The Europeans and Japanese have the same problem and the Chinese will have a similar problem a little further down the road, (although the European social welfare system is much larger and more entrenched than the Asian one). Thus the US will not be able to do whatever it is that it will have to do in isolation. Globalization, combined with the aging populations of the industrialized world, will lead us into uncharted waters. All of the industrialized world will have to experience some type of drastic change.

How all of this resolves itself I do not know. I do know that it is criminal to do what we are doing to successive generations by burdening them with this massive debt (which of course, cannot be paid). Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, stated: "Then I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully, and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence."

These words of wisdom have been forgotten by many. The debts and unfunded promises are piled sky high. This time a simple two-tiered dollar may not solve the problem.

Change is in the air. A big change.

David Champeau runs a [urlblog.]http://samuraitrader.blogspot.com/[/url]

(Copyright 2005 David Champeau.)

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Jun 4, 2005

Engaging talk
By Jim Lobe
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF04Ak01.html

WASHINGTON - Hawks in the administration of President George W Bush may think they are tough, but their dreams of "regime change" in Iran and North Korea are increasingly deluded, not to say dangerous, according to their hard-edged realist rivals, who have become increasingly outspoken in recent weeks.

Their latest broadside comes in the form of an article by Richard Haass, president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, in the forthcoming edition of the journal Foreign Affairs titled "The Limits of Regime Change".

Haass, who served under Bush in a top State Department position, also has just published a new book, The Opportunity: America`s Moment to Alter History`s Course, one of the central themes of which is that the hawks have over-estimated Washington`s ability to change the world.

The release of Haass` article and book follow the publication of a column last week by arch-realist Brent Scowcroft in the Wall Street Journal which argues that the hawks` rejection of bilateral talks with North Korea in the hopes that the government there will collapse are "irresponsible".

Yet another realist, former Foreign Affairs editor Fareed Zakaria, made much the same argument in a recent Newsweek column that assailed the White House for what he called a four-year "stalemate" within the administration between hawks who "want to push for regime change" in North Korea and "pragmatists" who "want to end the North`s nuclear program".

Common to all three authors is the conviction that the US is not all-powerful; that it must coordinate its policy with other great powers to achieve its ends; that creative diplomacy can be far more constructive than military action; and that, despite the tough rhetoric of administration hawks, US policy toward Iran and North Korea, both members of Bush`s "axis of evil", effectively is adrift.

The realist offensive comes amid a growing sense that the intra-administration fights between hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney and realists led by then-secretary of state Colin Powell have continued unabated nearly six months into Bush`s second term, albeit more recently without Powell and fewer leaks from unhappy State Department and intelligence officers who generally lined up with the realists.

While Washington has persisted in its refusal to directly engage either Iran or North Korea, it has provided nominal, if skeptical, support to negotiations between the so-called EU-3 - Germany, Britain and France - and Iran on Teheran`s nuclear program, while also stating that a military option of one kind or another remains on the table if an agreement is not reached.

Washington also has continued to insist that Pyongyang return to the six-party talks - which also involve China, Japan, South Korea and Russia - to discuss a possible agreement for dismantling its nuclear program.

But the administration has rejected entreaties by China and South Korea, in particular, to put on the table what it might be prepared to offer if North Korea were to strike such a deal. In recent weeks, Washington also has sent 17 Stealth warplanes to South Korea as part of a series of steps to increase pressure on the North and signal the other parties that its patience is running out.

Haass, who as head of the influential Policy Planning Office in the State Department during the first two years of the Bush administration, was a top adviser to Powell, argues in his Foreign Affairs article that the hawks` pursuit of regime change is flawed on many counts.

He concedes that regime change appears superficially attractive because it "is less distasteful than diplomacy and less dangerous than living with new nuclear states".

"There is only one problem," he adds. "It is highly unlikely to have the desired effect soon enough."

Haass dismisses the notion that Washington is prepared to invade either country simply due to the "enormous" expense involved, the ability of Pyongyang`s conventional military power to inflict destruction on South Korea and US forces stationed there, and the size and large population of Iran that would make "any occupation costly, miserable and futile".

In addition, "regime replacement", often is far more difficult and expensive than the initial regime ouster, as Washington`s experience in Iraq has demonstrated, according to Haass.

As for the option of carrying out a military attack on Pyongyang`s or Tehran`s nuclear sites, as urged by some hardline circles outside the administration, Haass warns that, given the state of US intelligence on the two countries` nuclear programs, this is likely to be limited in its effectiveness and would almost certainly prove strategically counterproductive.

In the first place, Washington is unlikely to face a demonstrable imminent threat from either country that would justify pre-emptive action. Any preventive attack on North Korea would be opposed by Washington`s six-party partners because of the dangers posed by war on the Korean Peninsula, according to Haass.

While a preventive attack on Iranian targets could set back its nuclear program by months or years, he argues, Teheran could respond in any number of ways, from "unleashing terrorism" and promoting instability in Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, to triggering oil price increases that "could trigger a global economic crisis".

Instead, Haass urges what he terms a "containment" policy similar to that pursued by Washington during the Cold War which, he notes, had as a "second, subordinate goal" incremental regime change or "regime evolution". Such a policy, he says, "tends to be indirect and gradual and to involve the use of foreign policy tools other than military force".

"A foreign policy that chooses to integrate, not isolate, despotic regimes can be the Trojan horse that moderates their behavior in the short run and their nature in the long run," Haass writes.

Critical to this strategy is Washington`s willingness to offer clear incentives, "including economic assistance, security assurances and greater political standing", to both countries if they satisfied US and international concerns regarding their nuclear programs. It also would spell out clear penalties, including military attack "in the most dire circumstances", if they failed to cooperate, notes Haass.

Washington also should work with its negotiating partners to devise packages for both countries that lay out similar carrots and sticks on which all parties would commit themselves, he adds.

He admits it is quite possible this strategy will not work, and that one or both countries will use the time to build up their nuclear capabilities either overtly or covertly. The option then is to accept their de facto nuclear status similar to that currently accepted for Israel, India and Pakistan.

Given the stakes that would be involved, particularly the likelihood that the two countries` neighbors would try to follow suit, Washington, according to Haass, should declare publicly that any government that uses or threatens to use weapons of mass destruction or knowingly transfers them to third parties "opens itself up to the strongest reprisals, including attack and removal from power". At the same time, he adds, the US should try to persuade all other major powers to sign on to such a policy.

(Inter Press Service)

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Wenn man bedenkt, dass der Council on Foreign Relations der wichtigste Think Tank nicht nur für die USA ist, kann die Erkenntnis dessen Vorsitzenden das Ende der Neocon-Spinner bedeuten.
Es sieht wieder so aus, dass eine realistische Betrachtung der Weltpolitik in den USA zur Geltung kommt und to choose a president who might be more flexible, to use a euphemism? wird zwar nicht möglich sein, denn man muß mit dem Präsidenten leben, den man hat.
We`ve got this president for nearly four more years. I don`t think it is a question of choosing a new president, and I want to be clear that there is nothing soft about what I am suggesting. I`m still talking about United States leadership, but I am talking about the kind of leadership that encourages "followership."
Es wurde schon oft vermutet, dass der Abgang der Neocons aus dem Pentagon, auch den Abgang ihrer Ideen seien könnte.


[urlThe Opportunity First Chapter]http://www.cfr.org/pdf/Opportunity_Haass.pdf[/url]
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Haass: U.S. `Squandering` Chances for Worldwide Cooperation
May 31, 2005
Q&A: Richard Haass on U.S. Foreign Policy
http://www.cfr.org/publication.php?id=8140

Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, says he is concerned the United States, for a decade or more, has squandered "an unprecedented historic opportunity to organize the world to deal with the challenges of globalization." Haass, who before taking up his position at the Council led the State Department`s Policy Planning staff in President George W. Bush`s first term, says Americans "simply can`t run the world by ourselves. We don`t have the resources." Haass develops this theme in his new book, The Opportunity: America`s Moment to Alter History`s Course.

"Here we are at the start of the 21st century," he says, "the threat of a great-power war is remote, the United States has all these resources at its command, the rest of the world is not actively blocking American power. To the contrary, they are prepared on occasion to work with us. And I don`t see us translating this moment into something that will endure. To the contrary, I see us potentially frittering it away. History will judge us harshly if we allow this to happen."

Haass was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor of cfr.org, on May 24, 2005.

In the concluding chapter of The Opportunity, you say there is both an opportunity and a necessity for the United States to get other nations involved in a kind of global integration. How does this begin?

The reason there is an opportunity and a necessity is because of the United States` strength and the fact that what the United States is trying to do in the world is, or ought to be, acceptable to others. The reason it is a necessity is that, for all of our strength, we can`t deal with the challenges of this world by ourselves. Put another way, we need the help and participation of others if we are going to succeed.

We should not wait for the next crisis, but rather sit down and consult now with the other major powers--China, Japan, Europe, India, Russia, and, to some extent also, the Brazils, the South Africas, the Nigerias, and the Indonesias of the world. We need to talk with them about the rules of the road, about what we should be trying to do to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, what we can do to delegitimize and stop terrorism, how to prevent new genocides, how to fashion the basis of a new international trade agreement, and what should be put in place after the Kyoto climate-change agreement expires in 2012. Essentially, we need talks about the basic rules of the world, what to do to encourage countries to sign on to them, and what to do if and when certain governments violate them. We need to apply them in the effort to bring about a more integrated world that can cope with today`s challenges and threats.

Reading your book, I thought about the end of World War II, when the allies got together to structure the post-war period and establish international institutions. There was a feeling then that there would be a new world created. Of course, that mood soon disintegrated into the Cold War.

I think there is some similarity to that period. Then, as now, we had just come out of a major war. Then, as now, the United States stood apart from all the other countries in strength. The difference is that then, we quickly found ourselves in a Cold War. Now we don`t have that, which is one of the real opportunities of this period. But there is the complication that we now live in a globalized world, so the problems of this era are not caused by a rival superpower so much as by the intrinsic problems of globalization--proliferation, terrorism, drugs, et al. We are clearly going to need new rules and new arrangements. I am not sure we are going to need as many new institutions. We don`t need to reinvent the United Nations or NATO or the IMF [International Monetary Fund] or the World Bank, but we may very well need to adapt them.

To give you one example: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, one of the building blocks of the previous era, is clearly inadequate. Under the treaty, countries can legally enrich uranium and hold on to it. This is obsolete. We now need a new arrangement whereby countries have access to fuel for nuclear power but don`t have control of it. That would bar them from diverting it to nuclear weapons.

This administration has clearly not shared your interest in reaching out to other nations. Does your approach require new thinking among the American electorate to choose a president who might be more flexible, to use a euphemism?

We`ve got this president for nearly four more years. I don`t think it is a question of choosing a new president, and I want to be clear that there is nothing soft about what I am suggesting. I`m still talking about United States leadership, but I am talking about the kind of leadership that encourages "followership."

We simply can`t run the world by ourselves. We don`t have the resources. Today`s problems cannot be solved by any one country, so what I am hoping is that this administration adapts. I believe that this administration is on an unsustainable course. I simply do not believe we can sustain a policy of guns, butter, and lower taxes. And I don`t believe that you can sustain as a matter of national security this degree of American unilateralism and this degree of emphasis on the military tool.

Indeed, we are up against the limits of our resources now. We simply don`t have the options we`d like to have, say, in dealing with the North Korean and Iranian nuclear challenges. So, in one way or the other, this administration is going to have no choice but to adjust.

There is a paradox, of course, that the administration, while stressing unilateralism, has avoided direct talks with either North Korea or Iran. A number of experts think that such talks might have some impact. You were in the State Department. Why did the administration avoid talking to North Korea and Iran?

The principal obstacle to the administration`s doing more diplomatically, to negotiate with either North Korea or Iran, was the view held by many in the administration that these regimes were vulnerable, and that the United States ought to do nothing that in any way would prop up or perpetuate them.

Essentially, many in the administration were hoping that these regimes would fall, and the problems posed by them, particularly the proliferation problems, would go away. I thought then that this was more wishful thinking than a strategy. I think the same is true now. We are already living in a world where we have a North Korean nuclear capability. It is only a matter of time before we are likely to find ourselves with an Iranian nuclear capability. To me, this argues for a serious attempt at diplomacy, rather than continued drift.

On Iran, the administration shifted its approach at the beginning of this term and supported the British-French-German talks with Tehran. All the parties seem to agree that, if Iran refuses to stop its nuclear program, Iran will be taken to the Security Council. I don`t know what would happen there.

Neither do I. To me, it is more important to get a consensus on sanctions, whether in the Security Council or not. I don`t think we are quite there with Iran in terms of the policy. A successful policy will require three things: clear articulation of what Iran must do; incentives in the form of explicit assurances to Iran of the benefits that would accrue to it if it meets these requirements; and the clear articulation of the penalties or sanctions that would come its way if it doesn`t.

I don`t believe the United States and the other major nations of the world have reached a consensus on either the whole range of incentives or sanctions. So rather than leaving it vague and people talking about "going to the Security Council," I believe that the United States needs to be much more explicit now, as do the Europeans, the Russians, and the Chinese, about the incentives and disincentives that should be offered to Iran.

It will be tough to get U.N. sanctions, because China badly wants Iran`s oil.

It will be tough. That`s why it highlights the kinds of problems we face in the world. We need to generate much greater consensus among the major powers. The United States simply doesn`t have the resources, for example, to use military force against Iran. I simply don`t see attractive military options. Plus, I see all sorts of ways that the Iranians could push back, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, and even in Saudi Arabia, as well as with their own oil output: The Iranians could trigger much higher oil prices. All of this leads me in the direction of diplomacy, not because I am 100 percent confident it will work, but simply because it is the least bad option.

You have a strong chapter on Iraq in the book. For me, one question that is still unanswered is why the administration was so driven to get into war.

Quite frankly, I can`t answer it, not because I won`t, but because I can`t. I myself have trouble understanding it. As you know from reading the book, I argue that I believe the war in Iraq was ill-advised. It`s not that there were no benefits. Yes, it is good that Saddam Hussein is gone. It`s simply that my balance sheet so far suggests that the direct and indirect costs are greater than the direct and indirect benefits. What I can`t answer is why others were so confident before the war that the balance sheet would be so tilted in the direction of benefits. Clearly, the only answer I could come up with was that they expected the benefits to be much greater--not simply a democratic Iraq, but a democratic wave that would spill over to the rest of the region. In the process, you would also get rid of all the weapons of mass destruction that people thought were there.

They obviously thought as well that the costs of doing this would be minimal, so their calculations were that this was something that would be wonderful to achieve and easy to achieve. Obviously, they were wrong on both counts. I was more skeptical on both scores.

There was one other feature. After 9/11, a lot of people were looking for ways to send a signal that the geopolitical momentum had not moved against the United States. For them, ousting the regime in Iraq was something the United States could achieve that would send a powerful signal to the Iranians, to the North Koreans, and others. A lot of my former colleagues saw this as another indirect benefit of the Iraq war, but I was skeptical.

You seem frustrated in the book that none of the last three presidents did what you thought they should have done on the world scene.

If I am right, there is an unprecedented historic opportunity to organize the world to deal with the challenges of globalization. If I am right, this opportunity won`t last forever. What worries me is that the last two or even three presidents didn`t do enough. What worries me in particular is that in recent years we have done things that have threatened the economic base of American power. We are potentially ending up in an unfortunate position where we alienate much of the world so we can`t get them to work with us against these problems, while we threaten our own strength through our fiscal deficits, our current-account deficit, our energy dependency, and the gradual decline of American competitiveness.

That is what led me to write this book, a heartfelt sense that we are squandering one of history`s great moments. Here we are at the start of the 21st century. The threat of a great-power war is remote, the United States has all these resources at its command, the rest of the world is not actively blocking American power. To the contrary, they are prepared on occasion to work with us. And I don`t see us translating this moment into something that will endure. To the contrary, I see us potentially frittering it away. History will judge us harshly if we allow this to happen.

Do you think things would be better if Senator John Kerry had won the 2004 presidential election?

I don`t know. I would simply say that Senator Kerry would have inherited the same world, the same "in box" that President Bush inherited in January 2005. That "in box," I would suggest, was a far less attractive or advantageous "in box" than the one President Bush inherited four years earlier, or Bill Clinton inherited four years before that. The trends are not good. We have been squandering our possibilities, not only since the Berlin Wall came down, but also our post-9/11 possibilities, when the rest of the world was so willing to work with us. To be fair, we have made progress in some areas. The world has integrated itself very well in the area of counterterrorism. We have made some real progress. My concern is that we haven`t made similar progress in other areas.

* Copyright 2005

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[urlPOOM!]http://www.gotused.com/42/games/poom[/url] (Waxy)
This is a clever little game to test your reflexes. Hint: keep an eye on the shadow of the ball.

http://www.gotused.com/42/games/poom/

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NETWORKS ASK JACKSON’S JUDGE FOR NEW TRIAL
http://www.borowitzreport.com/default.asp

Current Proceedings ‘Not Long Enough,’ News Outlets Argue

On the eve of closing arguments in the Michael Jackson child-molestation trial, a coalition of the major all-news networks has asked the judge in the case for a new trial, claiming that the current legal proceedings were “not long enough.”

A spokesperson for the networks, Peter Fendell, held a press conference on Thursday to state the cable news outlets’ position that the current trial had given “short shrift” to the key issues in the case.

“Unless there is another, longer trial, preferably one that lasts until May sweeps in 2007, justice will not be served,” Mr. Fendell said.

He said that a longer trial would allow more time to focus on the lurid sexual details of the case, which he said had been “glossed over.”

He added that, in addition to being “too quick and cursory,” the current Jackson trial was marred by the insufficient number and quality of celebrity witnesses.

“Instead of Jay Leno, George Lopez and Macaulay Culkin, in a new trial we would like to see Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Johnny Depp,” he said.

In response to the networks’ request, the judge in the case, Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville, issued a terse response: “If the networks think Michael Jackson is getting another trial, they must be on crack,” adding, “They might as well ask for O.J. Simpson to have another trial.”

“We’ll settle for that,” Mr. Fendell replied.

Elsewhere, a Florida man today sued the makers of Viagra for causing him to go blind, claiming that he has been having sex with the wrong person for the past two years.

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Advocates see veterans of war on terror joining the ranks of the homeless
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=2947…

By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Thursday, June 2, 2005

WASHINGTON — Advocates for the homeless already are seeing veterans from the war on terror living on the street, and say the government must do more to ease their transition from military to civilian life.

Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, said about 70 homeless veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan contacted her group’s facilities in 2004, and another 125 homeless veterans from those conflicts last year petitioned the Department of Veterans Affairs for assistance.

“It’s not a big wave, but it’s an indicator that we still haven’t done our job,” she said. “I think that our nation would be very embarrassed if they knew that.”

The group, founded in 1990, is a national network of charitable organizations designed to provide resources and aid for homeless veterans.

Veterans Affairs officials estimate that about 250,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, and another 250,000 experience homelessness at some point.

Boone said the reasons behind the veterans’ housing problems are varied: Some have emotional and mental issues from their combat experience, some have trouble finding work after leaving the military, some have health care bills which result in financial distress.

George Basher, director of the New York State Department of Veterans Affairs, said he believes guardsmen and reservists are particularly at risk because they often bypass resources like the Transition Assistance Program when they return home.

“Those are the ones most likely to have private health insurance, so they’re likely to show up at an HMO looking for treatment and not a VA hospital,” he said. “There’s no central place for treatment.”

Still, Pete Dougherty, coordinator for the Veterans’ Affairs Department`s homeless programs, said veterans today have more options — outpatient facilities, counselors, job training programs — than the troops returning from the Vietnam War.

“Most of the folks we’re seeing now are worried about losing their homes and think they won’t be able to afford to stay in them,” he said. “Before, the vets were out there but were unseen and unnoticed. Now we can reach out and make a difference sooner.”

But Boone added that most veterans don’t seek help for mental and emotional problems for years after their return from combat, meaning the problem of homelessness among war on terror veterans will likely grow.

“We’re still going to have homeless veterans because we haven’t tackled how to deal with the separation issue,” she said.


© 2003 Stars and Stripes.

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Informed Comment
Juan Cole

Friday, June 03, 2005

Sufi Gathering Targeted, 10 Dead

[urlAndrew Marshall of Reuters reports,]http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=8692191[/url]

"A suicide bomber blew himself up at a gathering of Sufi Muslims north of Baghdad, killing 10 people in the latest attack by Iraqi insurgents on religious sects they disapprove of, officials said on Friday. The bomber detonated his explosives on Thursday evening in a house near the town of Balad as Sufis gathered for a religious ceremony, Interior Ministry officials said. Sufis follow a form of Islamic mysticism that stresses the need for a personal experience of God. Some conservative Muslims consider them emotional or even heretical."



We`d need more context to understand what is going on here. Unlike most of the Arab world outside Morocco, Iraq still has an important set of [urlSufi movements]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi_Order[/url] that include the Qadiris and the Naqshbandis. They are important both in the Kurdish north and among the Sunni Arabs. The shrine of [urlAbdu`l-Qadir Jilani in Baghdad]http://www.al-baz.com/shaikhabdalqadir/[/url] is a major pilgrimage site. Sufis meet to chant Quran and other verses, often with a lot of emotion. The Mevlevi Sufis of Turkey also dance and whirl. Sufism is a spiritual discipline, involving repetition of sacred verses, moderate self-denial, high moral standards, and allegiance to a spiritual master (Shaikh or pir). They often seek union of the soul with God and believe that all reality is One (i.e. they skirt close to if they do not outright embrace a kind of pantheism). They believe that the pir`s gravesite is full of blessings, and they attend at shrines to pray to God for favors. Sufis marry and have children, so they are not monks. They are trying to be in the world but not of the world.

Sufism is opposed by the [urlWahhabi strain of Islam]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism[/url] that dominates Saudi Arabia, and by those elements of theSalafi (revivalist) movement in Sunnism that are influenced by Wahhabi ideas. They oppose the idea of shrines, of blessings emanating from the spiritual master or pir, of chanting non-Quranic verses, and of holding Sufi ideas, which they code as pantheistic.

My guess is that this Sufi order in Balad had thrown in with the new Iraqi government somehow, refusing to join in the jihad against it and against the Americans. Sufis are typically more peaceful and less rigid than Salafis or Wahhabis, though there are militantly anti-Western Sufi leaders, as well. (The Sufis of Fallujah are said to have joined in the guerrilla war, and it is rumored that Baathist official Izzat al-Duri networked with Sufis.) Salafis often start out not much liking Sufis, so they would be especially outraged by what they saw as Sufi traitors to the guerrilla movement.

posted by Juan @ [url6/3/2005 01:25:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/sufi-gathering-targeted-10-dead-andrew.html[/url]

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Gut fand ich eine Bemerkung im Vergleich zu Wal Mart.
Der alte Ford sagte, seine Arbeiter sollten soviel verdienen, dass sie auch die Autos kaufen können, die sie herstellten. Heute verdienen die Arbeiter bei Wal Mart so wenig, dass sie nur noch da einkaufen können.

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June 4, 2005
Rights Group Defends Chastising of U.S.
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/international/europe/04amn…

LONDON, June 3 - An official of Amnesty International said Friday that the term gulag in its annual report to describe the United States prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was chosen deliberately, and she shrugged off harsh criticism of the report by the Bush administration.

The official, Kate Gilmore, the group`s executive deputy secretary general, said the administration`s response was "typical of a government on the defensive," and she drew parallels to the reactions of the former Soviet Union, Libya and Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, when those governments were accused of human rights abuses.

The report, released May 25, placed the United States at the heart of its list of human rights offenders, citing indefinite detentions of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and secret renditions of prisoners to countries that practice torture. But it is the use of the word gulag, a reference to the complex of labor camps where Stalin sent thousands of dissidents, that has drawn the most attention.

President Bush called the report "absurd" several times, and said it was the product of people who "hate America." Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN that he was "offended" by the use of the term and that he did not take the organization "seriously." And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called the comparison "reprehensible."

Amnesty has fired right back, pointing out that the administration often cites its reports when that suits its purposes. "If our reports are so `absurd,` why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war?" wrote William F. Schultz, executive director of the group`s United States branch, in a letter to the editor being published Saturday in The New York Times. "Why does it welcome our criticisms of Cuba, China and North Korea? And why does it cite our research in its own annual human rights reports?"

In a telephone interview on Friday, Ms. Gilmore, the second-ranking official in Amnesty, said "gulag" was not meant as a literal description of Guantánamo but was emblematic of the sense of injustice and lack of due process surrounding the prison.

"The issue of the gulag is about policies and practices," she said. "You put people beyond the reach of law, you locate them in facilities where families can`t access them, you deny them access to legal representation, you attempt to prevent judicial review."

She added, "This creates the likelihood that the people who are there have nothing to do with criminal conduct or that it is a breach of the Geneva Convention."

In its 308-page human rights report, Amnesty International pointed to an "impunity and accountability deficit," and called on Congress to conduct "a full and independent investigation of the use of torture and other human rights abuses by U.S. officials" as a starting point in "restoring confidence that true justice has no double standards."

Long used to biting criticism, the group said this was the first time one of its reports had drawn the public wrath of the United States president and vice president, its secretary of defense, its secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ms. Gilmore said the response was telling. "When we see a government at this level engaging in rhetorical attacks and avoiding dealing with the details or the facts," she said, "we interpret that as being a sign that we are starting to have an impact."

Ms. Gilmore said Amnesty International has been working on terrorism-related human rights violations for more than two years. It was a natural progression and a predictable course of action, she said, to place the United States, a defender of democracy and human rights, at the forefront of the annual report of human rights violations.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the F.B.I. and United States courts have criticized the detention policies at Guantánamo Bay, she said. In addition, Ms. Gilmore said, the detention policy has been expanded to apply to jails in countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The creation of an archipelago of detention centers, she said, was another factor in the choice of the term gulag.

There has been no internal discussion about the wisdom of having used the term and certainly no sense of regret, Ms. Gilmore said, although the group has found the unrelenting focus on the word, and not the contents of the report, irritating. "On the other hand," she added, "we`re getting more airing of our message than we would have otherwise."

So far, Washington`s reaction has galvanized support for Amnesty International, she said. In the past week, the United States branch of the group has reported an increase in memberships, donations and volunteers.

The fact that the United States was prominent on the list came as little surprise internationally, she said.

"I think it`s a dangerous game the U.S. administration is playing, to attack civil society in this manner," Ms. Gilmore said. "Civil society is essential to a robust democratic society. For the Bush administration to think that it`s a legitimate political strategy to attack a nongovernmental organization of Amnesty`s standing signals a ruthlessness that is deeply troubling."

While the substance of the report was defended by human rights organizations and others, several said Amnesty International had erred in using the word gulag, if only because it allowed the Bush administration to change the conversation.

"I think it was a rather serious misjudgment to use the term gulag," said Sir Nigel Rodley, a professor of law at the University of Essex and chairman of the Human Rights Center there. "The basic criticism of some of the problems are very real and it has given the administration the opportunity to divert from the substance of the concern."

Sir Nigel, who said that having been Amnesty International`s legal adviser from 1973 to 1990 he represents the old guard, also said that the organization should have avoided using an inflammatory term that did not precisely apply. He also said the "lapse" lent credence to a growing chorus of concerns that Amnesty, which was founded in 1961 to lobby for political prisoners and has since expanded into the areas of poverty, domestic violence and AIDS, had overextended itself and lost focus.

Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch in New York, said he thought the Bush administration had taken cover behind semantics. "We`re concerned that the debate over the label is obscuring the real issue," he said. "That the United States is locking people up without due process possibly for the rest of their lives."


* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Die USA auf dem Weg Demokratie in der Welt zu verbreiten.

washingtonpost.com
Crackdown Muddies U.S.-Uzbek Relations
Washington in Talks on Long-Term Use of Base
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Ann Scott Tyson and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 4, 2005; A01

The United States is negotiating long-term use of a major military base in Uzbekistan to expand the global reach of American forces, despite a brutal government crackdown on protests there last month, Bush administration officials said.

The talks have gone on behind the scenes for several months but have become more awkward for the administration since last month`s unrest, which produced the heaviest bloodshed since the Central Asian country left the Soviet Union in 1991. Human rights advocates argue that a new pact would undermine the administration`s goal of spreading democracy in the Islamic world.

The U.S. military has relied heavily on Uzbekistan since 2001 in operations in Afghanistan, but on a temporary basis. U.S. Special Operations Forces, intelligence and reconnaissance missions, and air logistics flights all use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airfield in southeastern Uzbekistan, according to an official report on U.S. basing.

Now, as the Pentagon carries out a repositioning of U.S. forces overseas, the Bush administration finds itself pursuing the strategic and geopolitical benefits of the Uzbekistan base even as it expresses deep concern about the country`s political repression and worries about the risk of American troops caught in widening civil unrest.

"Access to this airfield is undeniably critical in supporting our combat operations" as well as humanitarian deliveries, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, who said the United States has paid $15 million to Uzbek authorities for use of the airfield since 2001.

"When you look at the totality of what Uzbekistan has been doing, they`ve been a very valuable partner and ally in the global war on terror," he said. Asked about the talks on long-range use of the base in Uzbekistan, Whitman said he "wouldn`t want to characterize any of our discussions with other governments." But he added: "Clearly, our continued engagement we feel is pretty important."

Yet senior State Department and Pentagon officials said last month`s killings of protesters by security forces has led to a high-level review of the military relationship and raised questions about whether, in the long run, "Uzbekistan is the right place for us to be," a senior State Department official said. "No one wants our troops in the middle of someone else`s civil conflict or issues," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the negotiations.

U.S. officials are concerned that U.S.-trained military units might have participated in the Uzbekistan government`s suppression of unrest in Andijan on May 13. U.S. senators including Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and human rights advocates say they are pressing the administration to investigate that possibility -- and to stop any talks on military basing until Uzbekistan agrees to an international probe of the killings. Uzbek security forces opened fire on crowds in Andijan that included anti-government demonstrators, Islamic militants and prisoners freed in a jail break.

Pentagon and State Department officials said yesterday that they do not know which Uzbek units were involved in the incidents. The U.S. military has trained some Uzbek special forces and border guard units.

An investigation would most likely show that Uzbekistan authorities "used a level of force that was completely unjustified and they killed many innocent civilians," said Sen. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.). Sununu, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsay O. Graham (R-S.C.) visited Uzbekistan this week but were denied meetings with the government. Based on reports of U.S. Embassy officials there who gathered eyewitness accounts, Sununu believes between 500 to 1,000 people were killed in the unrest and that Uzbekistan Special Forces and regular security forces were involved.

The senators said U.S. military and other relations with Uzbekistan -- including the use of the K2 base -- must be reevaluated in light of Andijan, which Graham called a "massacre."

"Efforts to bring about democracy have hit a wall and are going backwards," he said. "We have a military interest in maintaining our base in that country," but also in "restricting our relations with brutal governments," said McCain, saying the Uzbeks "must understand" that the Andijan events "come with real consequences."

"I would not be comfortable making a long-term commitment" on use of the air base, said Sununu, urging the Pentagon to consider other options -- such as bases in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, in case the United States decides to or is forced to leave.

Officials said it is highly likely that the United States will continue to suspend funds for military purchases and training for Uzbekistan this year, as it did last year, because the State Department could not certify the country was making substantial progress in human rights.

"Before Andijan it was complicated. After Andijan it`s become very, very touchy," said a second senior State Department official, who spoke only anonymously because of the sensitivity of the issue. Still, compensation for the airfield would continue, and possibly grow substantially if agreement is reached on long-term use, which could involve building up the base`s infrastructure.

For now, the talks between administration and Uzbek officials have not intensified to the level of formal diplomatic negotiations. Officials who describe them said the talks may slow because the Uzbekistan government has limited ties following the unrest. "Uzbekistan is retreating into a hard shell," said another senior State Department official. "Talks will go on for some time." In recent weeks, Uzbekistan has restricted U.S. night and cargo flights in and out of the base, U.S. officials said.

Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the administration has expanded military aid, cooperation and arms sales to other nations, including some that have been cited by the State Department for poor human rights records.

Senior State Department and Pentagon officials defend stepped-up military cooperation with such countries as necessary for combating terrorism and as a form of engagement that gives the United States the leverage it needs to achieve its goal of fostering democratic change.

Kazakhstan, for example, a vast state stretching from China to the Caspian Sea, grants the United States military airfield access and overflight rights, and is being eyed by the Pentagon for joint military training.

Last month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice exercised a waiver to allow continued military aid to Kazakhstan on national security grounds despite what the State Department acknowledged were "numerous steps backward" on human rights, State Department spokeswoman Julie M. Reside said.

She said U.S. military aid "enhances democracy" and so Washington will stay "fully engaged" despite what she outlined as Kazakhstan`s many recent regressions -- shutting down newspapers and opposition parties and considering laws that would "paralyze" U.S.-funded nongovernmental groups.

Overall, U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF), which provides grants for the purchase of U.S. defense equipment, services and training, has grown by a third since 2001 -- from $3.5 billion to $4.6 billion in 2004, according to State Department figures. Similarly, the United States substantially boosted the training of foreign militaries, with International Military Education and Training (IMET) funds increasing from $57 million in 2001 to more than $90 million in 2004.

While officials say the bulk of FMF grants continue to go to Israel and Egypt, many countries that began receiving such aid anew or for the first time starting in 2001, including Uzbekistan and Pakistan, previously were barred from such military aid because of human rights abuses, nuclear testing, or other problems, according to a report critical of the U.S. military transfers released this week by the World Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in New York that focuses on arms control.

Critics in Congress and arms-control advocates say the military aid and cooperation are bolstering regimes that oppress citizens and undercutting President Bush`s January inaugural pledge to "support democratic movements . . . with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

The administration pays "little more than lip service when it comes to countries where abuses by the security forces are routine," said Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Senate subcommittee that oversees U.S. military aid. "Our laws that condition assistance to countries like Uzbekistan, Indonesia and Nepal are not always applied as they should be," said Leahy.

But others argue that the United States has a greater chance to influence those countries by building military relationships. In the 1990s, the United States limited military cooperation by imposing "symbolic sanctions with dozens of countries," said Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr., who oversaw military assistance programs as assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs from 2001 until earlier this year.

"In the 1990s," Bloomfield said, "you were basically building an electric fence around the United States, and that did not work. We need to engage and engage heavily."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Mo Mowlam: We need a new generation of leaders in Europe
This is a time for modest reflection, not a time for covert and overt battles between Britain and France
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?stor…

04 June 2005

Despite the shock of the results of the French and Dutch referenda on the European constitution, I believe that this might have been the wake-up call that Europe needed. Firstly it shocked the political establishment that has been taking the people for granted for too long in running an undemocratic Europe. Secondly I hope we will now have the debate about Europe that is essential for people to see its centrality to their lives.

It is very unusual in political debate that issues of geopolitics are discussed, but now is the moment that we should. There are far more important issues to look at than whether the effect of this referendum will be Tony Blair going sooner or later, for we are now reaching a point in history where we can see clearly a post-Cold War world and the true impact of globalisation.

It is becoming increasingly clear that we are going to see a shift in the economic power balance throughout the world. China and India are emerging as significant economic players. They both have an educated middle class and they both have access to vast amounts of cheap labour.

The United States has already clearly identified a major threat to its interests and that is oil. It is quite obvious, whatever the denials, that the US was in no small measure motivated by the vast oil reserves of Iraq when it invaded that unfortunate country.But it can also be seen in other US foreign policy positions.

Their presence in Uzbekistan, under the cover of the "war on terror", puts them close to the vast hydrocarbon resources of Central Asia. Hence their tolerance of the brutal dictator there, President Karimov.

This aggressive posturing by the United States obviously has implications with regard to how Russia will behave, under its increasingly centralising President Putin. It is also a warning to China that the United States is determined to look after its economic needs, and is prepared to back up those needs militarily if necessary.

Against this backdrop, Europe suddenly decides to put itself into crisis by failing to agree on a new constitution. We need to move quickly to resolve our differences so that Europe can act as one in a world of an increasing number of power blocs which could threaten our national interests.

It is no longer good enough to go along with the old Nato thinking that if we stick closely to the US it will look after us. It is quite clear that with the collapse of communism this kind of thinking is no longer relevant. America has different interests to Europe; their government serves different people who have a different view of the world. Europeans have got to realise that we all hang together if we are going to protect our interests in an increasingly complex and dangerous world, where both the economic and political climates are going to become more difficult.

But a great deal of responsibility for trying to achieve this lies with our political elites which have got to sort out the mess of the crashing constitution. One of the first lessons they should learn is that Europe has got to be more democratic. The meddling bureaucracy of the seemingly unaccountable European Commission has done a huge amount of damage to the EU in the eyes of many people.

People are suspicious of its motives, and with its lack of transparency it can allow any number of different interpretations of their motives. I think this was clearly demonstrated in the different reactions to the constitution, where the French felt it was too Anglo Saxon, and we thought it was too French.

Europe also desperately needs a mechanism with which it can agree on foreign policy; this is more important than any other aspect of its functions. The unedifying squabbling that we saw in the run-up to the Iraq war should never again repeat itself. We need to find a way to resolve our differences before we get on a public world stage. Otherwise it will always be possible for other countries to divide and rule.

There is an awful lot at stake as Europe seeks to resolve the problems thrown up by the collapse of the constitution. I fear, however, that we are not making a good start; the sudden Franco-German summit is not encouraging as it shows that both these countries will probably try to have more of a past which has been rejected, and not look to a new beginning.

But No 10 seems to have learnt very little as it tries to spin that the referenda results are showing that is going our way in Europe. This is a time for modest reflection all round, as we try to tease a solution during the British EU presidency, not a time for covert and overt battles to break out between Britain and France.

What is also unfortunate is that three of the key players, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, are all weakened leaders in their own countries. It is a time for self-confident leaders who have the support of their people, because the resolution of this problem is going to require all the people of Europe to have to face up to some unpalatable truths.

The writer was Northern Ireland Secretary and a member of the Cabinet, 1997-2001


5 May 2005 12:07


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Eine Gesellschaft gehalten in Boxes zum kaufen, fressen und scheißen. Nur die Resteverwertung fehlt noch.

Little exercise, little fresh food. Now the US government is forced to act on obesity

Special unit sent into West Virginia as weight-related health problems soar

Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday June 4, 2005
The Guardian
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West Virginia is used to indignity. Its Appalachian hills are a byword for poverty and its people derided as hillbillies.

Now insult has been added to injury in what will be seen as an unwelcome first in the history of the United States.

A team of federal "disease detectives", normally sent to combat outbreaks of infectious bugs, has been dispatched to the state to chart its frightening obesity epidemic. Epidemiologists from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) have never before been deployed in this fashion, and it reflects the growing anxiety about the threat obesity poses to the health of the nation as a whole.

Over two-thirds of American adults are overweight and 30% are obese, as are 15% of the country`s children. The incidence of diabetes and high blood pressure is widespread and rising.

The figures for West Virginia are even worse. A quarter of the state`s children are obese. There are no available clinical statistics for the state population as a whole. On the basis of what West Virginians told researchers about 27% are obese (with a body mass index of over 30), but the actual figure is thought to be nearer 35%. The prevalence of obesity has nearly doubled since 1990.

The result is that 10% of the population suffer from diabetes, 33% have high blood pressure and 28% report doing no physical activity over the course of a month.

"We are the highest in the country for several things. For hypertension we`re number one, we`re number four for diabetes and three for obesity," said John Law, a spokesman for the West Virginia department of health and human services. "We determined we have a lot of people dying and we have a lot of health costs as a result of obesity, so we wanted the CDC to come in and look at this as they might look at an infectious disease."

The health "Swat" team has just spent three weeks taking their clipboards and scales around West Virginian schools, offices and restaurants in an attempt to understand why so many of the state`s people, particularly its children, are getting so fat so very fast.

The disease detectives looked to see if there were any pavements along the roads for pedestrians, whether employees were encouraged to take any exercise, and whether bottled water was on offer alongside the sweet fizzy drinks in automatic dispensers in schools. People were asked whether they "were offered at least one or two appealing fruits and vegetables every day," and "would you replace regular sour cream with low-fat sour cream?"

"This is a team of public health professionals from CDC that are dispatched for West Nile virus and for meningitis. But this is the first time we`ve dispatched a team of disease detectives around the problem of obesity and it was a recognition in one of our states that their obesity problem was very large," said Donna Stroup, a CDC doctor in charge of health promotion.

However, the CDC`s director Julie Gerberding, insisted that the inquiry had not been imposed on West Virginia, the butt of so many jokes through the ages.

"CDC doesn`t send people into the states. We get invited, and we are just delighted that the health officials in West Virginia appropriately recognised that they had a serious problem with obesity in their state, and they really wanted to do more than just describe it," Dr Gerberding said.

The CDC produced an obesity map of America, confirming that the problem was worst between the coasts. That would not come as a surprise to anyone who has travelled through the American "heartland" where most restaurants are fast-food outlets, and fresh fruit and vegetables can sometimes be hard to find.

The figures also make clear that there is still a strong link between obesity and poverty, despite a recent study suggesting wealthy Americans are catching up fast. The three most obese states - Alabama, Mississippi and West Virginia - are also the poorest.

West Virginia is third from bottom of the league when it comes to child poverty, with 27% of its children living below the bread line. It has the highest death rate in the nation, is second among 50 states for cancer deaths, and second for smoking. High unemployment and heavy reliance on coal mining are undoubtedly other factors behind the low life expectancy.

The deployment of the medical version of a Swat team has helped dramatise the scale of the crisis, but some health statisticians were sceptical over whether the results of the West Virginia survey would teach the world anything new about obesity and its dangers.

"You`re not going to find anything we don`t already know. We`ll find out that there aren`t any sidewalks and there is lousy food in schools," said Daniel McGee, a statistician at Florida State University. "I don`t think much will come of it. There is no comparison group, from somewhere where there are sidewalks and good food, maybe because they couldn`t find one."

CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant denied that the survey was a waste of federal money and time. "This is not about discovering the obvious," he said. "It is not about finding out why people are fat, but it will be used to guide the state`s future planning in helping the community towards good health and nutrition."

Faced with dramatically rising rates of "adult-onset" diabetes and other obesity-related diseases among young West Virginians, the state`s Public Employees Insurance Agency has taken unorthodox measures, using video games in an attempt to get sedentary children moving.

Eighty-five West Virginian children have been recruited for a study in the impact of a Japanese game called Dance Dance Revolution, which involves dancing on a metal mat in time to on-screen directions.

Initial results suggest the game could be effective for some children, but health experts argue that only a fundamental change in diet and lifestyle is likely to make a serious impact on the fat epidemic in West Virginia.

A growing epidemic

· Obesity is rising throughout the world and affects at least 300 million people.

· In the US the percentage of young overweight people has more than tripled since 1980. Some 16% of children and teens are considered overweight with childhood obesity growing at the rate of 20% a year. Some 30% of adults, more than 60 million people, are obese - one in three women and more than one in four men

· In the UK, two-thirds of adults are overweight. Of these, 22% of men and 23% of women are obese (at least 13kg-19kg overweight), putting their health at risk. The level of obesity has tripled in the past 20 years

· Obesity is rising among British children. In the past 10 years it has doubled in six-year-olds (to 8.5%) and trebled among 15-year-olds (to 15%)

· Obesity is responsible for $100bn (£55bn) in medical costs and 300,000 deaths annually, according to the American Obesity Association

· Throughout the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 4.5kg (10lb). The extra weight meant airlines burnt 350m more gallons of fuel in 2000, costing an extra £157m.

· In 2004 24 states took steps toward phasing out soda and junk food in schools, following 20 states that already had such bans

· Americans eat 200 calories more food energy per day than they did 10 years ago. On any given day, 30% of American children aged four to 19 eat fast food. Overall, 7% of the US population visits McDonald`s each day, and 20%-25% eat in some kind of fast-food restaurant
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A study in emasculation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1498950,00.ht…

In the US media, a mission to explain has been replaced by a mission to avoid
Henry Porter
Saturday June 4, 2005

Guardian
Our name for him was Wig. And for two years only a handful of people at Vanity Fair`s office in New York knew what or who Wig was. It turned out to be another code name for Deep Throat, wittily, or perhaps tastelessly, given to Mark Felt by Bob Woodward during the Watergate investigations - undoubtedly the highest moment of journalistic inquiry ever on either side of the Atlantic.

Woodward was gracious when he learned that Vanity Fair had scooped him with his own story, as indeed was Carl Bernstein when editor Graydon Carter called his friend to make a slightly rueful apology on Wednesday morning. Actually it`s a testament to Woodward and Bernstein`s integrity that Vanity Fair was able to capture the unicorn and reveal the identity of this mythic creature. This was a serious secret that still has the power to stir considerable passions in America, as we saw in the reaction of Pat Buchanan, who instantly branded Felt a traitor. Woodward and Bernstein, together with the former Post editor Ben Bradlee, held true to the cardinal rule of journalism of never revealing a source. In a time of such looseness and compromise, this kind of rigid probity almost seems old-fashioned.

In many other ways, recalling Watergate this week emphasises how times have changed, and I am afraid present values in the US media are not shown in an especially good light. Since 9/11, when the heroic fortitude of America was at its most visible, the Bush administration has gradually contrived to cast all criticism and investigation into its activities as unpatriotic and an obstruction to its jihad against Islamist terrorism. Few cross the line in the White House, where a wary and unforgiving regime - not unlike that run by Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman for Richard Nixon - ensures that leaks are very rare indeed. Much the same atmosphere of fear and obedience obtains in the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld and at the justice department, though less so at the state department and CIA.

Broadcasters have largely accepted that attacks on the White House can only harm America`s interests, and when they don`t they are bamboozled and vilified by the shrill voices of the right.

I visit the States three or four times a year, and watching the television news in hotel rooms in the last three years has been like witnessing a time-lapse study of emasculation. It`s not just the unbearable lightness of purpose in most news shows; it`s the sense that everyone is rather too mindful of the backstairs influence of the White House in companies such as Viacom and News Corporation that own the TV news. The anchorman Dan Rather, for example, was eased out by Viacom - CBS`s owner - after he wrongly made allegations about the president`s time in the Texas Air National Guard. It was not a mistake that required his head on a platter.

The result of this climate of fear and caution is that few Americans have any idea of the circumstances in which 1,600 of their countrymen have lost their lives in Iraq, the hideous injuries suffered by both Iraqi and American victims of suicide bombers, or even the profound responsibility that lies with Rumsfeld for mishandling practically every facet of the occupation. The mission to explain has been replaced by the mission to avoid. If today there was a whistleblower as well-placed, heroically brave and strategic as Mark Felt, one wonders whether he would now find the outlet that Felt did at the Washington Post between 1972 and 1974.

The Post`s sister publication Newsweek has just had its nose rubbed in the dirt by the administration after what is still, I believe, a questionable scandal involving an item alleging that the Qur`an had been flushed down the toilet at Guantánamo. Questionable because Newsweek`s erroneous report, which was based on an official source, palls in comparison to the illegality of the detention at Guantánamo and the outsourcing of torture by the administration all over the Middle East. And yet Bush`s spokesman Scott McClellan insisted that the humbled magazine should go further than mere apology by speaking out about the "values that the United States stands for ... the values that we hold so dearly".

What is so worrying about the Newsweek story was the cowed reaction of the press. In some cases they scrambled to pay obeisance to the White House`s tough line, quite forgetting that the kerfuffle distracted from the worsening situation in Iraq in which scores of lives are lost every day. Marty Peretz, the owner of the New Republic, took space in his own publication to attack the Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, who by the way was once the hero of conservatives for his hounding of Bill Clinton.

`The Newsweek delinquency," he wrote, "broaches still another lesson that journalists will have to face, however reluctantly: that confidential sources - especially `reliable` confidential sources, which may mean eager sources who are too willing to tell because they have their own personal agendas to serve - can be untrustworthy. The Newsweek scandal deserves to exacerbate the debate in the general culture about the legitimacy of anonymous sources that is now burgeoning in American journalism."

This is one of the most knuckleheaded utterances ever made by a proprietor of current affairs magazine. It is plain that, despite all his wealth and shrewdness, Peretz does not possess an elementary understanding of the sacred duty of the press, which, however dishonoured and ignored, is to watch government and make it answerable when the processes of democracy are corrupted by politics and the self-interest of politicians.

The motivated source that he describes perfectly delineates Deep Throat`s position during Watergate. Felt probably did have an agenda influenced by the fact that Nixon had made Patrick Gray head of the FBI when Felt was clearly the better and more experienced candidate. That would have ruled Felt out as a source under a Peretz editorship, even though Felt was primarily motivated by a deep revulsion at what was going on around him. He knew that all investigations into the Watergate break-in and the activities of the Committee to Re-elect the President (Creep) were being fed back to the White House by Nixon`s man, Pat Gray. The CIA was also providing Felt`s investigators with false leads at Nixon`s behest.

As Felt remarked to Woodward long before Watergate, the Nixon White House was "corrupt" and "sinister". Eventually the Watergate cover-up compelled him to the lonely and dangerous role of Deep Throat, but one cannot imagine that this was something Felt - a career G-man who admired J Edgar Hoover - wanted for himself.

We must remember that these were dark days. Nixon fought and won an election during the Watergate scandal and, had it not been for the persistence of the Post and the wary guidance provided by Deep Throat, he might well have survived to serve a full second term. Had Peretz been editor of the Post at the time, all that criminality and corruption might well have gone unpunished.

It is good that Deep Throat has at last come in from the cold at a time when his country needs many more men and women like him. Let us hope the media are still willing and able to help a great American hero like Mark Felt.

· Henry Porter is the London editor of Vanity Fair. His novel about the fall of the Berlin wall, Brandenburg, is published by Orion on June 22.

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23/2005
ZEIT.DE

Gedämpfte Schadenfreude
Wie Washington auf Frankreichs »non« reagiert
http://www.zeit.de/2005/23/USA

Von Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff
Washington

Am Sonntagnachmittag, man sitzt im Freien beim Grillen, geben plötzlich die Mobiltelefone Alarm. Wer das Pech hat, den Tag mit Führungskräften aus dem Weißen Haus zu verbringen, wird nicht mehr viel von ihnen haben. Dass die Franzosen den EU-Verfassungsvertrag abgelehnt haben, erreicht die Spitzenbeamten per Telefonkette. Jetzt ziehen sie sich diskret vom Grill zurück. Stattdessen heizen sie die Wortschmiede an. Heraus kommt dies: Die amerikanische Regierung sei für ein einiges und starkes Europa. Wie die Europäer das erreichen wollten, sei ihre Sache. Zu Deutsch: Man will sich raushalten.

Ganz so einfach ist es natürlich nicht. Die Regierung Bush hatte sich weit vorgewagt. Außenministerin Condoleezza Rice signalisierte noch kürzlich Unterstützung für die Verfassung – ganz im Sinne des neuen Pragmatismus, mit dem man der EU neuerdings begegnet. Vorbei die Zeit, da das Team Bush die Europäer in Gute und Böse, Neue und Alte sortierte. Vorbei die Zeit, da die Sorge vor dem selbsterklärten »Gegengewicht« Distanz schuf. Die Regierung Bush bewegt sich auf Europa zu – und entfernt sich zugleich von den eigenen Unterstützern.

Von Leuten wie David Frum beispielsweise, der für Bush Reden im Weißen Haus schrieb, als Erfinder des Worts von der »Achse des Bösen« gilt und nun, ohne Amt, seiner Schadenfreude freien Lauf lässt. Er schreibt: »George Bush: wiedergewählt. Tony Blair: wiedergewählt. John Howard: wiedergewählt. Währenddessen erleiden die beiden wichtigsten Opponenten der angloamerikanischen Antiterror-Allianz, Jacques Chirac und Gerhard Schröder, die schlimmste Demütigung der jüngeren europäischen Geschichte. Wer kann da noch behaupten, dass es keine Gerechtigkeit gibt auf dieser Welt?« Nach Frums Ansicht haben Schröder und Chirac die Regierung Bush zum Sündenbock gemacht, um die Beschäftigung mit den Problemen der eigenen Länder zu vermeiden. Jetzt zahlten beide »den Preis für Zynismus und Feigheit«.

In Neocon-Kreisen wird aus dem französischen non gegen den Verfassungsvertrag ein Moment der Hoffnung auf ein »starkes, proamerikanisches, freiheitsliebendes, marktwirtschaftliches, freihändlerisches, sozial und moralisch erneuertes Europa«. So stellt es sich jedenfalls Bill Kristol vor, einer der Regierungsvordenker. Viel mehr als ein persönlicher Traum dürfte es nicht sein.

In Wahrheit müssten sich Amerikaner beim Blick auf die Gründe für das französische Votum »mit Applaus zurückhalten«, meint Philip Gordon von der liberalen Brookings Institution. Das Wahlergebnis stürze nicht nur Europa in die Krise, es sei auch ein Rückschlag für die Vereinigten Staaten. Während sich die Bush-Regierung ein starkes, einiges, global Verantwortung übernehmendes Europa wünsche, bewirke das Votum das Gegenteil. Es sei ein Sieg der »antiamerikanischen, antikapitalistischen und antiglobalisierenden Kräfte«. Die Folge sei wahrscheinlich Lähmung. Wenn Europa sich jahrelang nach innen wende, müsse Amerika in der Welt sogar noch mehr Verantwortung übernehmen. Wer also bloß die »Franzosen scheitern sehen« wolle, meint Gordon, solle »lieber vorsichtig sein, was er sich wünscht«.

Einen Premierminister Dominique de Villepin haben sich selbst frankophile Amerikaner nicht gewünscht. Wie niemand sonst gilt dieser Mann in Washington als Gesicht europäischer Selbstgefälligkeit. Seine Gedichte über französische Größe haben ihren Weg in amerikanische Zeitungen gefunden und sind unvergessen. Genauso wie de Villepins Auftritt im UN-Sicherheitsrat, als er vor dem Irak-Krieg Außenminister Colin Powell schulmeisterte. Gut möglich, dass nun selbst den größten Frankreichverächtern die Verfassung lieber gewesen wäre als dieser Premier.

So vielstimmig der Washingtoner Chor sein mag, eins verbindet alle Sänger: der Respekt vor dem Souverän und die Verwunderung über die ersten Kommentare aus Europa. Dass europäische Eliten nach einer Methode suchen, das Wahlergebnis stilvoll zu umgehen, verwundert alle. Die Chicago Sun-Times kommentiert, was sie als europäische Krankheit sieht: »Du hast das Recht zu wählen, aber nur wenn du wählst, was deine Herrscher dir empfehlen. Wenn du es nicht tust, keine Sorge!, werden wir dich behandeln wie einen Erstklässler und die Frage so lange stellen, bis du die richtige Antwort gibst.«

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Tomgram: Nick Turse on the Rummy Watch
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3077

In my non-Tomdispatch life as a book editor, I used to have a modest dream. Every season, editors like me send the galleys of books they`re publishing off, en masse, to likely blurbees, who will, if all goes well, reach for their thesauruses, gather their adjectives into serried ranks, and say the best things possible about the book at hand, soon to be born into such a tumultuously noisy world. That blurb, when it comes in, had better include (your choice): "illuminating… much-needed… superb… a must-read… riveting… a bracing antidote to… informative and compelling… analytically rigorous, historically sensitive, and enormously helpful… a stimulating and revelatory work" -- and that`s just from the blurbs on the back of a single book that happens to be sitting by my computer.

But imagine, as I used to, sending the same galleys out to people guaranteed to hate the book. How "bracing" and "illuminating" -- and what a selling point -- it might be to pepper a back cover with the opposite of the norm: "Frankly, I was offended by it… peddling lies… absurd… absolutely irresponsible… one more sign of moral degradation… amount to pro-al-Qaeda propaganda." Oh, sorry, that`s not just a dream, there`s a lucky publication in our world that`s already gotten those comments -- and from a stellar cast of anti-blurbees! I`m speaking, of course, about Amnesty International`s recently published annual report, which took out after U.S. global detention practices -- and the accompanying comments of Amnesty`s General Secretary Irene Khan (who labeled our prison in Guantánamo, "the gulag of our times") as well as those of Amnesty USA`s Executive Director William Schulz, who called for other countries to investigate and indict our leaders.

Amnesty has in recent days been the object of a full-scale, administration-wide verbal assault. The blurbs above, all gathered by the intrepid Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, come from: Dick Cheney (the first two); Condoleezza Rice (but she wasn`t alone: At a news conference, "the president used the word `absurd` four times in the course of a 10-sentence response when asked his reaction to a highly critical report by Amnesty International…"); Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers (who also referred to Guantánamo as a "model facility"); and for the final two gems of antipathy, the Wall Street Journal ("which often reflects the views of influential hardline policymakers such as Cheney").

The President and Vice President, in fact, stopped hardly short of declaring Amnesty a terrorist organization. But then that`s their verbal style, which can be summed up as: Reality, to hell with it! Or: You can have reality, we`ve got the jails!

From Amnesty`s point of view, who could ask for better publicity? From the point of view of the rest of the world, these blurbs are like gold, confirming the accuracy of the Amnesty report. (After all, people only scream when it hurts.)

Of course, even in such moments of fabulous (as in some grim fable) departures from the world as it is, one often finds a glimmer of truth -- the odd verbal stumble or Freudian slip sometimes telling us more than whole interviews. The President, for instance, offered this little gem in his attack on the Amnesty report at his recent news conference:

"In terms of the detainees, we`ve had thousands of people detained. We`ve investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is."

Ah, those detainees trained to "disassemble" who knows what in some verbal chop shop back in Afghanistan. And ah, our President, "disassembling" his own speech that way and then pausing, that glimmer of recognition flickering on his face, and offering a definition for the word he hadn`t quite been able to say, dissembling… "not tell the truth." (Actually, my dictionary says: "To disguise the real nature of; hide with a specious appearance or semblance.") A reader recently wrote in to suggest that the President`s stumbles of this sort seemed to be signals for his lies -- a little like Pinocchio`s lengthening nose.

I assume, by the way, that the FBI agents at Guantánamo who emailed home to their superiors scenes they had personally viewed of the nightmarish treatment of prisoners had, by then, been thoroughly brainwashed by those well-drilled, cleverly disassembling "detainees" (who only looked helpless and tortured). How could the President not be right when the detainees told such obviously "absurd" stories of mistreatment? How about that yarn in which women interrogators smeared menstrual blood on them? Absolutely irresponsible! Oh wait, it turns out to have been true…

But perhaps the letting-the-truth-slip-out award of the week should go to Vice President Cheney for his CNN interview with Larry King:

CHENEY: …For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don`t take them seriously.

KING: They specifically said, though, it was Guantánamo. They compared it to a gulag.

D. CHENEY: Not true. Guantánamo`s been operated, I think, in a very sane and sound fashion by the U.S. military. Remember who`s down there. These are people that were picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan and other places in the global war on terror. These are individuals who have been actively involved as the enemy, if you will, trying to kill Americans. That we need to have a place where we can keep them. In a sense, when you`re at war, you keep prisoners of war until the war is over with.

That use of "prisoners of war" was picked up by an eagle-eyed Tomdispatch reader who sent it my way. Now here`s the interesting thing: This administration has insisted that the prisoners in Guantánamo fall into a category of their own creation. On this they have been adamant: The detainees are "unlawful combatants," not "prisoners of war." Although most of them were captured during our war in Afghanistan, they don`t, according to the President and his followers, fall under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, not being "prisoners of war." But of course the -- that word again -- absurdity of this has long been self-evident, even, it seems, to the Vice President; and, by the way, to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, always leading the verbal way, who in an interview with Bill O`Reilly last December said of the organization Human Rights Watch: "That they`ve decided on their own that it is tantamount to quote, torture, and of course that`s a hot button word. It`s tantamount to torture to keep somebody without telling them what, how long they`re going to stay in jail. Well, every war, prisoners of war were kept in, without charges, without lawyers, until the war was over."

It`s good to see that the Veep and the Secretary of Defense both now recognize, however inadvertently, that a prisoner of war by any other name is still a prisoner of war; brave slips of the tongue, when you think about it, since that recognition might open them up somewhere, sometime, to criminal charges.

There`s much to be said about the language of most of the top officials of this administration, including the President, but none have quite the flair for -- dare I use the word and give the Bush administration its dream blurb? -- the absurd of our Secretary of Defense. He gives several new twists to that old World War II warning phrase, "Loose lips sink ships." For that reason, while crediting George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and the rest of the gang for their inspired verbal high jinks, Tomdispatch, always eager to give credit where it`s most truly due, has established a periodic Rummy Watch run by Nick Turse and supported by a full-time team of interns whose lives are now devoted to nothing but monitoring the endless yak of Donald Rumsfeld, also known as the mouth that never sleeps. Tom

Rummy Rules
Rummy Watch II
By Nick Turse

When we last left our hero, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, I sarcastically conjectured that poor Rummy had been "dropped from the loop" at the Pentagon. Reviewing situation after situation in which he pleaded ignorance -- he hadn`t been able to view the Abu Ghraib photos until they were in the media, never received critical Pentagon reports, and missed major news stories about crucial defense issues that were already public property -- I posited (tongue firmly in cheek) that underlings at the Department of Defense were apparently keeping materials from the SECDEF and so leaving him to twist in the wind at press events as well as in front of congressional panels.

Since then, I`ve kept on the case and have found our man in the Pentagon remarkably consistent in his inconsistency. Rummy has continued to evade tough questions, avoid straight answers, feign ignorance, claim not to have seen already public Pentagon reports, distort reality, denigrate the press, and rewrite history with little challenge from any corner. Like a mafia don or perhaps that other the Donald -- who`s obsessed with a different type of empire -- and as the ruler of the most powerful single sector of our government, Donald Rumsfeld creates his own realities and makes his own rules to suit his own tastes, whims, and dreams. Quite simply, he lives by Rummy Rules – a shifting, ill-defined coda based on double-talk and double-standards where fictions become facts and Rummy reigns supreme.

For example, at a March 10, 2005 joint press event with French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, Rumsfeld was asked about a high-profile review of Pentagon global detention operations and interrogation techniques authored by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church:

Q Mr. Secretary, the Church Report obviously is out… And your overall reaction to the report as you`ve seen it?

SEC. RUMSFELD: I have not read the report, and I think I`ll leave it there. And I have been quite busy this morning, and I wasn`t able to see any of the testimony. So I`m afraid I`ll just have to –

Q Mr. Secretary –

SEC. RUMSFELD: We`ll make this the last question.

Later that day, Rumsfeld appeared before the House Armed Services Committee where he was no less evasive with Republican Congressman and Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter of California, who got into it with the know-nothing SECDEF, even adopting Rummy`s trademark "folks," as they argued about an undefined topic:

CONGRESSMAN HUNTER: Did you get the question?

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: I did get the question. My problem is that number one, it`s not something I`ve read, it`s not something I`ve been briefed on… I`m afraid I`ve responded as fully as I`m currently capable of doing. Thank you very much, folks.

CONGRESSMAN HUNTER: I appreciate it, folks.

Obviously, not even a feed-the-beast militarist like Hunter can avoid Rummy`s pique when the SECDEF`s rules are violated.

As the nation`s stand-up non-sequitur-in-chief, the Pentagon head has just finished a great month in the spotlight -- from his attack on Amnesty International`s recent comment that the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba "has become the gulag of our times" ("reprehensible" and "outlandish") to his unbridled jingoism and curious definition of "liberation" ("[N]o force in the world has done more to liberate people that they have never met than the men and women of the United States military…"), he`s managed to exceed the wildest dreams of his detractors.

In fact, Rummy has rolled over them, verbally speaking, like an Abrams tank, but if there were one moment in the last two months when he exceeded by an Iraqi mile the high standards for the form that he himself created, it was his appearance on ABC News` "This Week" with George Stephanopolous.

After a gracious greeting, Stephanopolous called attention to an ABC News poll that showed 53% of Americans felt the war in Iraq was not "worth fighting." Only 28% felt the war had made the U.S. stronger in the world, he added, while 41% believed it had weakened the country. Then he asked Rumsfeld, "What do you say to those Americans?" Essentially ignoring the question, Rumsfeld promptly replied, "Well, I haven`t seen the poll. I`ve seen polls that say very much the opposite of that." He, of course, didn`t mention what polls those were -- though it`s conceivable they were taken by the White House in an alternate universe. Stephanopolous next drew attention to a Washington Post story about sagging U.S. military manpower and quoted General Richard Cody, the vice-chairman of the Army, as saying that the sad state of affairs keeps him awake at night. "Does it keep you up at night, as well?" Stephanopolous asked the SECDEF.

"No. It doesn`t keep me up at night," answered Rummy, who, in high style, launched into a confusing response in which he admitted that just a couple of years into what look to be exceedingly long occupations, the U.S. has already deployed 40% of its National Guard and Reserve forces in Iraq and Afghanistan -- a fact that might indeed have left a lesser Pentagon-head sleepless -- and he even managed to turn some of those soldiers under his command into inanimate objects. ("…[W]e`ve only used in Iraq and Afghanistan something like 40% of the Guard and Reserve. It`s not like everything`s been used up.")

Letting him off the hook, Stephanopolous then turned to a report in the Washington Post that the U.S. had again misled its allies, telling them that North Korea was selling nuclear materials to Libya, when, in fact, "according to U.S. intelligence… it was [U.S. ally in the war on terror] Pakistan that was buying the materials from North Korea and selling it to Libya." Put on the spot, Rummy fell back on one of his classic defenses, claiming that he -- in fact, the whole Pentagon -- had been out of the loop:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: ...The Post goes on to say, "Pakistan`s role as both the buyer and the seller was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington`s partner in the hunt for al Qaeda leaders." Is that true?

SEC. RUMSFELD: I have no idea. I`ve never heard anything like that and it wouldn`t be the Department of Defense that would be involved anyway. It would be intelligence agencies.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: But this is something you`d be aware of --

SEC. RUMSFELD: I`m not…

SEC. RUMSFELD: I know nothing about the front-page Washington Post article.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you know anything, then, about Pakistan buying weapons, buying nuclear materials from North Korea and selling it to Libya?

SEC. RUMSFELD: I do not personally -- and the implication that the United States misled allies, I would -- which is the essence of what -

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Post headline.

SEC. RUMSFELD: -- yes, of what you`re saying, I`m not in a position to comment on because I just have no knowledge of it.

It would only get better as the interview continued.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: …When you were last on the program, you said that you weren`t aware of any U.S. military operations in Iran, ongoing military operations. Since then, it`s been reported that Iran has protested to the United States about U.S. overflights on their territory and that that protest was forwarded to the Pentagon. What was the Pentagon`s response?

SEC. RUMSFELD: I have no idea. I don`t know about the protest. I have seen -- there are various --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: You don`t know about the protest?

SEC. RUMSFELD: No…

But a transcript can`t do justice to the deer-in-the-headlights style that the Don adopted in his bravura performance. He fell noticeably silent for long stretches (as the camera zoomed in on his face) and finally sputtered his part of the following exchange as if in slow-motion:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Have you ever authorized any U.S. military overflights of Iran since you`ve been Defense Secretary?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, I don`t -- I don`t think I have, but I don`t know. I`d have to check. And I don`t know that I`d answer it if I did find out that we had. But I don`t believe we have.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: You don`t believe you have?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Yes, and I can`t recall any.

While the rules of Rummy-style (still being established) prohibited our Secretary of Defense from recalling specifics when it comes to significant news about an Axis-of-Evil power with nuclear ambitions, they evidently in no way prohibit him, as happened only days later, from unequivocally denying obscure allegations that the U.S. was to "begin monitoring Argentine airspace as a preventive measure to avoid [drug] trafficking and terrorist movement." As adamant on this matter as he had, on Iran, been foggy, the SECDEF insisted that such talk was "inaccurate" because, "had there been anything like that, I would have heard something of it, and I`ve never heard of anything like that. So, you can disabuse yourself of that concern."

Evil, nuclear Iran: "I don`t think I have, but I don`t know. I`d have to check." Argentina: "I would have heard something of it." Who can deny that, only now, after years in power, is the man truly hitting his stride.

The Donald even felt free to chastise the reporter who broached the subject in regard to Argentina. ("You don`t believe everything you read in the newspaper do you?") Since then, Rumsfeld has launched his own Rummy-rules war on the media, lamenting to the New York Times about the free press in America and how it hampers propaganda efforts. ("It`s an awkward thing for our government because we have a free press here and you can`t say…you can`t speak to one audience without having it affect your own audience.") At the same time, he made a special attempt to denigrate reporters in general. And just recently, right-wing radio host Laura Ingram asked him about the "mainstream media constantly fluffing up these stories about Koran mishandling" and whether he was "frustrated by the media coverage." The SECDEF replied "There`s no question but that it`s harmful to the country and it`s harmful to the men and women in uniform and the job they`re trying to do."

Under developing Rummy rules, America`s free press may just have to go -- but the overseas one has clearly got to go first. Of late, Rummy has saved his strongest venom for Arab television outlets "like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyah and some of the others," announcing that spreading "lie is what they do." He then painted Al-Jazeera as nothing short of a terrorist TV network ("Terrorist acts on television. Now, how does Al-Jazeera get there? Obviously, they have advance notice.")

In recent months, it should be noted that, while Rummy was sticking to already elaborated Rummy rules in most situations, he also took some daring steps to expand the Rummy repertoire -- not just spouting off against the press, but launching a one-man media boycott of sorts. Already on strike at the Pentagon, when it came to basic information, he proactively and in measured stages stopped reading the press. Way back in February, the SECDEF already couldn`t be bothered to read published reports about North Korean declarations that the country possessed nuclear weapons. Then, in March, he told Stephanopolous that the Washington Post front page was on his do-not-read list. As it turned out, he was only warming up. Later that month, he placed the New York Times on the list as well. ("I didn`t read the article.") And most recently, he made sure not to have read a word in Vanity Fair or anywhere else concerning the revelation that the FBI`s former number-two man, Mark Felt, was the Watergate informant known as "Deep Throat" ("…I have not followed what`s been -- I`ve not read these articles.")

In the distant month of January 2005, Rummy had admitted to reading Newsweek; but recently, in the midst of the magazine`s Koran-in-the-toilet flap (where the government deftly shifted the national discussion from U.S. abuses and their effects upon world opinion to an indictment of that magazine`s reportage), he invoked Rummy rules in a new way. He remarked threateningly in regard to the now-retracted article: "…[T]he only other thing I`d say about it is, people lost their lives. People are dead. And that`s unfortunate. And people need to be very careful about what they say…" As the architect of wars that have killed an estimated 100,000-plus people, he invoked Rummy rules to retain for himself alone the sacrosanct right to say whatever you want without a care in the world.

While attacking the press, Rummy lauded historians for their "perspective" -- but mostly for not being reporters. He even took to offering his own historical assessments: "[M]y recollection is looking at four or five insurgencies in the last century… they ended up ending." How astute. Rumsfeld has even taken to playing instant historian in summing up the Abu Ghraib torture scandal: "I think when some perspective is put on it you`ll see some people were not treated properly and people were punished for it…"

The SECDEF lives enveloped in a reality based solely on Rummy rules and he wants us all to have the pleasure of joining him. There`s just one caveat -- we must suspend disbelief and live by the credo: "In Rummy We Trust."

And trust we must or else none of it makes sense. Sometimes Rummy can`t read. Other times he seems to refuse to do so. He`s at war with the press and members of Congress who dare to question him. He seems to have taken up his boss`s attitudes toward the media with a passion. He`s happy -- in fact, delighted -- to alter history to suit his needs. He`s remarkably uninformed, except on Argentina, and astonishingly forgetful when it comes to alleged U.S. military actions against Axis-of-Evil hot-spots with grave global implications.

His statements often fly bravely in the face of reality, not to speak of credulity. For instance, while terrorist attacks around the world have spiked so high (from 175 in 2003 to 651 in 2004) that the Department of State was forced to stop issuing its "Patterns of Global Terrorism" statistical report (which it had published every year from 1980 onward), Rummy contends that the U.S. is "doing pretty well" in the global war on terror. But when questioned about Osama bin Laden -- the man his boss declared was "Wanted, Dead or Alive" way back in September 2001 -- Rummy explained the administration`s progress on that front this way, "I don`t think -- When you`re hunting for someone and you haven`t found them, you haven`t found them." Sage words from a wizened old pro.

Rummy`s double-talk, non-answers, and general evasiveness can leave you scratching your head. Is it total incompetence or gross malfeasance? Could he really be out of the loop on so many critical issues? Or is he instituting Rummy rules in Washington, rules so bizarre yet so consistent as to ensure, in the Bush administration`s endless face-off with the press, that Rummy always rules?

Don Rumsfeld is fond of misquoting Mark Twain`s axiom that "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." The great anti-war and anti-imperialist author no doubt turns over in his grave each time the SECDEF mangles his words to suit his needs, but Sam Clemens would no doubt appreciate the stark irony of the Donald daring to call out others as liars.

If Twain were alive today, perhaps he might pen "Donald Rumsfeld`s Soliloquy" -- like the 1905 "King Leopold`s Soliloquy" that he wrote concerning the rule of an imperial power-broker who made his own grim rules in Belgium`s Congo colony. But barring a resurrection (or the growth of a spine by the American media), the Secretary of Defense is likely to go on, uncontested, writing his own rules, answering to no one, and creating a reality where, indeed, only Rummy rules.

Nick Turse, PhD, MPH works in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. He writes for the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice and regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex and the homeland security state.

Copyright 2005 Nick Turse

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Published on Friday, June 3, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
French-Fried Friedman, Nouvelle Globalizer
by Greg Palast
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/…

Vicente Fox got a well-deserved boot in the derriere for saying Mexicans come to America for taking jobs "not even Blacks want to do."

But Thomas Friedman earns plaudits and Pulitzers for his column which today announces that East Indians are taking jobs the French are too lazy to do ["A Race to the Top," New York Times, June 3]. His fit of racial profiling was motivated by his pique over France`s rejection of the globalizers` charter for corporate dominance known as the European Constitution.

It`s not the implicit racism of Friedman`s statement which is most irksome, it`s his ghastly glee that "a world of benefits they [Western Europeans] have known for 50 years is coming apart," because the French and other Europeans "are trying to preserve a 35 hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day."

He forgot to add, "and where Indian families are ready to sell their children into sexual slavery to survive." Now, THERE`S a standard to reach for.

In his endless series of pukey peons to globalization, Friedman promises that free trade, an end of regulation, slashing government welfare and privatization of industry will lead to an economic nirvana.

Yet, all he and his globalization clique can point to as the free market`s accomplishment is the murderous competition between workers across borders to cut their wages for the chance to work in the new digital sweatshops.

Friedman praises the New India, freed of the shackles of Old India`s socialist welfare state. I`ve seen the New India: half a billion people in dirt huts supporting a tiny minority`s right to shop in air-conditioned malls. It is a Fritz Lang film in Hindi.

There is, of course, a hopeful, growing India where the much-heralded cyber work is based. But, Mr. Friedman, please note these brains for hire are found in Karnataka and Kerala, states whose cussed adherence to social welfare makes them more French than France and nothing like Thatcherized dog-eat-dog Britain or Reaganized America.

The computer wizards of Bangalore (in Karnataka) and Kerala are the products of fully funded state education systems where, unlike the USA, no child is left behind. A huge apparatus of state-owned or state-controlled industries, redistributionist tax systems, subsidies of necessities from electricity to food, tight government regulation and affirmative action programs for the lower castes are what has created these comfortable refuges for Oracle and Microsoft.

And the successful Indian states, unlike the dreadful free-market Uttar Pradesh, have labor unions so tough they make the French CGT look like a luncheon club of baguette biters.

A few years ago, I dropped in on a fishing village in Kerala in Southern India. Most fisherman worked from motorless dug-out log boats. Their language is Malayalam, but a large banner slung between two coconut trees announced in English, "WordPerfect applications class today." After they brought in the catch, the locals practiced programming on cardboard replicas of keyboards.

What made this all possible was not capitalist competitive drive (there was no corporate "entrepreneur" in sight), but the state`s investment in universal education and the village`s commitment to development of opportunity, not of a lucky few, but for the entire community. The village was 100% literate, 100% unionized, and 100% committed to sharing resources through a sophisticated credit union finance operation.

This was the communal welfare state at it`s best. Microsoft did not build the schools for programmers -- the corporation only harvested what the socialist communities sowed.

The economist Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for predicting that Southern India, with it`s strong communalist social welfare state, would lead the economic advance of South Asia -- and do so without the Thatcherite sleight-of-hand of pretending that riches for the few equates to progress for the many.

When I asked the fisherman on their way to programming lessons what the West could do to encourage their efforts, they did not suggest privatizing Kerala`s social security system. Rather -- and this was before the Seattle demonstrations of 1999 brought the World Trade Organization to the West`s attention -- they called for the abolition of the WTO and greater protection for their wooden fishing fleet against the foreign factory boats marauding in their waters. With protective trade barriers, they could do as the US did for a hundred years: build up local resources and industry that creates the infrastructure of growth.

And the programmers themselves do not dream, Mr. Friedman, of stealing work from indolent Frenchmen or slothful Seattle geeks. Indians are not in love with the new method of brain-drain by satellite. They would hope for the opportunity to write code in their own languages for their own industries.

Friedman ends with the typical globalizer`s warning that, "it`s a bad time for France and friends to lose their appetite for hard work," or they will lose their jobs to Indians and Chinese willing to work for noodles. What Friedman means is that the French should give up their taste for old age pensions, universal health care, top-quality public education, protection of their skies and waters and all those things we used to call advances but now, according to the Friedman world order, stand in the way of progress.

It is too bad that the Times` opinion columns have not been outsourced to India. Were it so, a Keralite might explain to Friedman that human advances are measured not by our willingness to crawl lower and lower to buy ourselves a job from Bill Gates, or by counting the number of Gap outlets in Delhi, but by our success in protecting and nurturing liberté, égalité and fraternité among all humanity.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy which contains his investigation of globalization, "Sell the Lexus, Burn the Olive Tree." Subscribe to Palast`s columns at www.GregPalast.com.

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Saturday, June 04, 2005
War News for Saturday, June 4, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Bring `em on:

Three Iraqi policemen killed, five wounded by car bomb in Mosul.

Bring `em on:

Two Iraqis killed in fighting near Samarra.

Bring `em on:

Two Iraqi policemen wounded by car bomb in Baghdad.

Bring `em on:

Turkoman councilman assassinated in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on:

SCIRI politician dies from wounds received in assassination attempt in Baghdad.

Bring `em on:

Five Iraqi police killed, seven wounded by car bomb in Tikrit.

Bring `em on:

Two Iraqis killed by mortar fire near Tal Afar.

Iraqi wounded. After a long period of not reporting casualty figures, the Iraqi Health Ministry said Wednesday that 775 civilians were wounded in May, compared with 598 in April. Many of most seriously injured end up at the Rehabilitation and Rheumatological Center, on a leafy campus in northern Baghdad. A decade ago, most of its patients suffered from polio, vascular disorders or such diseases as diabetes that sometimes require amputations, according to its director, Emad Khudair. Today, more than two-thirds are trauma patients, he said. At the rear of the facility is the rehabilitation center and prosthetics workshop, where Thamir Aziz, a physician, oversees about 40 technicians who craft arms and legs out of aluminum, plaster and polypropylene. His warehouse`s shelves are stocked with artificial body parts: hands and feet of varying sizes, titanium knee and elbow joints, and aluminum shafts that will become limbs. `Most of our equipment was looted during the invasion, so we do the best we can with what we have,` Aziz said in a recent interview. `We have pages and pages of people waiting for prosthetics, most for at least five months.`"

Rummy fears Al-Jazeera. "U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Saturday that Arab news channel Al Jazeera was encouraging Islamic militant groups by broadcasting beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq. Al Jazeera, repeatedly accused by Washington of biased reporting over Iraq, has often shown video of hostages pleading at gunpoint for their government to withdraw its troops. But killings, posted on Internet Web Sites by militants, are not broadcast by the company. `If anyone lived in the Middle East and watched a network like the Al Jazeera day after day after day, even if he was an American, he would start waking up and asking what`s wrong. But America is not wrong. It`s the people who are going on television chopping off people`s heads, that is wrong,` he said." (Emphasis added.) That`s exactly why Rummy, Condi, Big Dick and the rest of the Bush gang hate and fear Al Jazeera, Amnesty International, Newsweek, or anybody else with the capability to wake people up. They are terrified that if people wake up and realize what the Bush gang has done, they will demand accountability.

Rummy says Americans don`t have a need to know about how well he`s doing his job. "The Army and Marine Corps, as they struggle with recruiting shortfalls, will no longer announce their monthly recruiting numbers at the beginning of each month. Instead, the Defense Department will approve the release of recruiting statistics for all four services. Normally, each service releases its monthly statistics at the beginning of each month, but a spokesman for Marine Corps Recruiting Command said on Wednesday that he was no longer authorized to do so."

Scraping the bottom of the barrel. "The US military has stopped battalion commanders from dismissing new recruits for drug abuse, alcohol, poor fitness and pregnancy in an attempt to halt the rising attrition rate in an army under growing strain as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. An internal memo sent to senior commanders said the growing dropout rate was "a matter of great concern" in an army at war. It told officers: `We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend. By reducing attrition 1%, we can save up to 3,000 initial-term soldiers. That`s 3,000 more soldiers in our formations.` The Wall Street Journal quoted a battalion commander as saying: `It is the guys on weight control ... school no-shows, drug users, etc, who eat up my time and cause my hair to grey prematurely ... Often they have more than one of these issues simultaneously.`" Just what the Army needs: a brigade of 3,000 Lieutenant AWOL clones.

Republicans (heart) veterans. "Advocates for the homeless already are seeing veterans from the war on terror living on the street, and say the government must do more to ease their transition from military to civilian life. Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, said about 70 homeless veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan contacted her group’s facilities in 2004, and another 125 homeless veterans from those conflicts last year petitioned the Department of Veterans Affairs for assistance."

Support the troops! With thousands of reservists and National Guard members being called to duty, some families are not only left without a spouse`s income, but also their health insurance. The military provides Tricare, but with low reimbursement rates, many physicians hesitate accepting the government insurance. That has made access to health care difficult for reservist families. Tricare`s $18 billion health plan provides insurance to 9.1 million active-duty military members, their families and military retirees under 65. `We stopped taking it three or four years ago,` said Dr. Susan Blue, a Fort Worth neurologist and president of the Tarrant County Medical Society. `Reimbursement rates are not high these days with anyone, but the military was the first one to go to a point that it wasn`t feasible financially to accept it anymore.` Access is somewhat easier for families living near a base. But families of mobilized reservists from cities such as Houston may have to search for Tricare doctors." Dr. Blue "stopped taking it three or four years ago" because when Rummy arrived at DoD one of his first priorities was to reduce retiree and reservist health care costs and he did that by reducing Tricare reimbursement.

Support the troops! "Nearly every day he was in Iraq, Army Staff Sgt. Steven Cummings would get so shaken by mortar round explosions that, even now, a year after his return home, he drops to the ground at the crackle of lightning. Iraq had a big impact on Cummings in another way — his finances. In his absence, his wife took out two mortgages on their home in Milan, Mich. They fell $15,000 in debt, as the pay Cummings earned during his 14 months overseas was less than he had made as a civilian electrical controls engineer. Looking back, those almost seem like the good times. Cummings has been laid off from two jobs in the year since he left Iraq. While other reasons were given for the layoffs, Cummings thinks both were related to his duty in the Michigan National Guard and the time off it requires. Like some other veterans who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, he is struggling to find work. `I don`t know what I`m going to do now. I`m in the exact position I was when I came back from Iraq,` said Cummings, a father of two. `I`m 50 years old and I have a mortgage payment due. I`m tired of it.`"

Guard and Reserve News. "May was the deadliest month of the Iraq war for part-time American servicemen. Thirty-one of them died: 14 members of the Army National Guard, 12 from the Marine Corps Reserve, four from the Army Reserve and one Navy Reserve hospital corpsman attached to a Marine combat unit."

Koran abuse. "The U.S. military released new details yesterday about five confirmed cases of U.S. personnel mishandling the Koran at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, acknowledging that soldiers and interrogators kicked the Muslim holy book, got copies wet, stood on a Koran during an interrogation and inadvertently sprayed urine on another copy." "Inadvertently sprayed urine" during an interrogation? Bullshit. Some son of a bitch pissed on a detainee.

RT over at Bump in the Beltway has the goods on Rummy and Koran desecration.

Wolfowitz: still a wanker. In his second day as World Bank president, Paul Wolfowitz sought to assuage doubts over his role as one of the architects of the U.S. war in Iraq and said he would use his White House ties to push for development aid. The former Defense Department second-in-command told a development conference on Thursday the Iraq war was morally justified, in part because of Saddam Hussein`s human rights record. `Would you really prefer to have Saddam Hussein in power?` Wolfowitz responded when asked whether he had regrets about his role in the war." Piss on you, Wolfie.

Commentary

Editorial: "The reports of the religious climate at the Air Force Academy are unsettling: A chaplain instructs cadets to try to convert classmates by warning that they "will burn in the fires of hell" if they do not accept Christ. During basic training, freshman cadets who decline to attend after-dinner chapel are marched back to their dormitories in "heathen flights" organized by upperclassmen. A Jewish student is taunted as a Christ killer and told that the Holocaust was the just punishment for that offense. The academy`s head football coach posts a banner in the locker room that proclaims, `I am a Christian first and last. . . . I am a member of Team Jesus Christ.`"

Editorial: "The fact that a largely Shiite government is pushing Operation Lightning against an overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency highlights a central dilemma for U.S. policy. There now appear to be two kinds of fighting in Iraq. One seeks to drive Americans out of Iraq, and thus targets U.S. soldiers - of whom more than 1,660 have been killed since March 2003. The second involves Sunni efforts to weaken the new Shiite-dominated government, and it will be difficult to control. Even law-abiding Sunnis suspect the Iraqi government is little more than a stalking horse for Iran. Last week, Sunni Arabs did join the government in talks about Iraq`s future constitution. Despite that progress, sectarian divisions remain deep and dangerous."

Analysis:

The military is to be reorganized at home around huge, multi-force "hub bases" from which the Pentagon, in the fashion of a corporate conglomerate, hopes to "reap economies of scale". This was front page news for days as politicians and communities from Connecticut (the US naval submarine base in Groton) and New Jersey (Fort Monmouth) to South Dakota (Ellsworth air force base) cried bloody murder over the potential loss of jobs and threatened to fight to the death to prevent their specific base or set of bases (but not anyone else`s) from closing - after all, those workers had been the most productive and patriotic around.

These closings - and their potentially devastating after-effects on communities - were a reminder (though seldom dealt with that way in the media) of just how deeply the Pentagon has dug itself into the infrastructure of our nation. With more than 6,000 military bases in the US, we are in some ways a vast military camp.

But while politicians screamed locally, Donald Rumsfeld`s Pentagon never thinks less than globally; and, if you throw in the militarization of space, sometimes even the global has proven too small a framework for its presiding officials. For them, the BRAC plans are just one piece of a larger puzzle that involves the projection of American power into the distant lands that most concern us. After all, as Chalmers Johnson has calculated in his book, The Sorrows of Empire, our global base-world already consists of at least 700 military and intelligence bases; possibly - depending on how you count them up - many more. Under Rumsfeld`s organizational eye, such bases have been pushed ever further into the previously off-limits "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union (where we now probably have more bases than the Russians do) and ever deeper into the Middle Eastern and Caspian oil heartlands of the planet.

The George W Bush administration`s fierce focus on and interest in reconfigured, stripped down, ever more forward systems of bases and an ever more powerfully poised military "footprint" stands in inverse proportion to press coverage of it. To the present occupants of the Pentagon, bases are the equivalent of imperial America`s lifeblood, and yet basing policy abroad has, in recent years, been of next to no interest to the mainstream media.



Analysis:

The Iraqi people gave them a wonderful chance-- on a plate, as it were!-- by virtue of their participation in the January 30 elections...

There could have been a political process of integrity and hopefulness that emerged from the election of that day.

But no. The Bush administration cared only for the "form" of having one single democractic "exercise"... the vote of that day. They seemed to care not one whit for the true nub of democracy in Iraq.... That is, the institution of empowered and accountable self-government there. Indeed, looking at the wilful recklessness with which the Bushies have treated political affairs inside Iraq since January 30, you`d have to conclude that they`ve been actively hostile to the emergence of any empowered self-government there.

I think I`ve written someplace before-- here or elsewhere-- that the Bushies have been handed two great chances inside Iraq. The first was in the immediate aftermath of the toppling of the Saddam regime, when the country was, effectively, theirs to remake. As we know, they blew that chance-- badly.

The second was with the amazing (even if not universal) level of trust that the Iraqi people put in the electoral process of last January 30. And now, the Bushies have blown that chance, too. This time, the repurcussions-- inside Iraq, and for the Washington`s whole broader Potemkin-project of encouraging "democratization" in the Middle East-- will be even worse.

They were very lucky indeed to get even a second chance. No-one can realistically expect that they will ever now be given a third.


Analysis:

What I find more disturbing than this cycle of tit-for-tat violence is the very strong sense that ordinary Iraqis are for the first time being infected by the sectarian bug. Western correspondents in Baghdad rely heavily on local staff for reporting. Even a few months ago it did not matter whom you sent on an assignment. Shias and Sunnis felt free to travel the country and speak to representatives of all communities. Now Sunni reporters insist on covering only Sunni areas and Sunni issues, and the same applies for the Shias. When a reporter returns with details of the latest sectarian outrage, there is a distinct tension in the office between the two sides.

This is repeated across society. Baghdad University has always been one of the few havens in the capital where young people from every background have managed to coexist peacefully. But the calm was shattered recently when Masar Sarhan, a Shia student, was murdered after he threw a party to celebrate the election of the new Government. The killing sparked unrest on the campus and some Sunni professors are too afraid to return.

The paranoia in the Sunni community is palpable. For centuries the ruling class in Iraq, they were swept aside by the US-led invasion and are now a vulnerable and angry minority. Few will openly criticise the insurgency, in spite of its brutal methods. The Americans, who still dominate politics in Iraq, remain adamant that civil war is still only a remote possibility and that everyone who matters is committed to putting “the genie back in the bottle”. Sunni leaders recently formed a new group dedicated to co-operating with the Shia Government on drawing up a new constitution. Even rabble-rousers such as Moqtadr al-Sadr, the Shia cleric who led a failed uprising last year, are now mediating between the two sides. Every political and religious leader is appealing for restraint.


Opinion: "Becky’s son was career military. He really liked to fly helicopters. He had finished one tour in Iraq and had volunteered for a second tour. He knew what he was getting into. As is so frequently quoted `He died doing what he liked best.` So why get so worked up about a soldier who was being paid to do what he chose to do? Because the whole Iraq affair has no discernible end. We will continue to fly fatal missions. The Iraqis who were in control under Hussein and who now see themselves possibly consigned to the back of the bus are going to continue shooting down helicopters in a desperate attempt to maintain control. We view these Iraqis as outlaws and criminals. They are seen by their group as valiant fighters standing up to the invaders."

Casualty Reports

Local story: North Carolina soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida soldier killed in Iraq.
# posted by yankeedoodle : 5:37 AM
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Seit einigen Wochen bringt die NYtimes eine Serie über
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http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2005/06/05/national/class/ind…
Eine weitere Grafik:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/06/05/national/20…
Die Seite mit den Daten:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/national/class/05class_gra…

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Heute im NYTimes Magazin: Mooney 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html
June 5, 2005
The Quantitative, Data-Based, Risk-Massaging Road to Riches
By JOSEPH NOCERA
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05HEDGE.html

Clifford Asness is probably going to be annoyed when he sees that this article begins with a discussion about how much money he makes, but there`s no way around it. Asness is a very successful hedge-fund manager, and very successful hedge-fund managers make stupendous amounts of money, even by Wall Street`s extravagant standards. And in the public mind, their staggering compensation tends to overshadow pretty much everything else. ``Filthy Stinking Rich`` was New York magazine`s unambiguous take on the hedge-fund phenomenon some months ago. Last month, in its survey of the best-paid hedge-fund managers, Institutional Investor`s Alpha magazine reported that the average pay for the top 25 hedge-fund managers was an astounding $251 million in 2004. Asness himself has written, in one of his better lines, that hedge funds ``are generally run for rich people in Geneva, Switzerland, by rich people in Greenwich, Conn.``

Asness likes to point out that he wrote that sentence before he moved his own hedge fund, AQR Capital Management, to Greenwich, Conn. He started AQR, with three partners, in the spring of 1998, when he was 31 and had just walked away from a high-paying job at Goldman Sachs, where he was one of the firm`s brightest young stars. During AQR`s first three years, Asness and his partners didn`t make much money. But by 2002, the firm was doing well, investors were clamoring to get in and AQR was managing about $3 billion in assets. (It`s up to around $13.5 billion today.) And the partners were getting rich. Asness cracked the Alpha list for 2002, taking down a reported $37 million. The next year, the magazine reported, he made $50 million. Asness won`t discuss the specifics of his pay, but if you ask him what it`s like to have that kind of money, he won`t duck the question the way most hedge-fund managers do. Instead, he`ll lean back on his couch, scratch his neatly trimmed beard for a minute and then offer a sheepish smile and an endearing, exaggerated shrug. ``To quote Dudley Moore in the movie `Arthur,` `` he`ll reply finally, ``it doesn`t suck.``

Cliff Asness says things like that. It is one of the qualities that make him different from his brethren in the hedge-fund community, who tend to shroud themselves in secrecy, as if they`re trying to protect some special formula they`ve devised for making investors -- and themselves -- money. They don`t just shy away from talking about their pay; they shy away from talking about just about anything. Have you ever heard of Stephen Mandel Jr., or Daniel Och, or James Simons? Among hedge fundies, they are three of the most respected names in the business. Yet they studiously avoid having their names in the paper.
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Cliff Asness, on the other hand, is an outspoken, exuberant Ph.D. in financial economics who has built a public reputation for his willingness to write and say what`s on his mind. In academia, he`s known for the witty, biting papers he writes for such publications as The Financial Analysts Journal. (One recent title: ``Stock Options and the Lying Liars Who Don`t Want to Expense Them.``) Among financial journalists, he is known as a cogent and articulate bear -- someone who can make a compelling case that stock-market returns over the next few decades will almost certainly be lower than the double-digit returns investors have come to expect as their birthright. And among the hedge-fund cognoscenti, Asness has become known as someone who has been thinking hard thoughts about the future of hedge funds. A hedge fund is nothing more than a private, largely unregulated pool of capital that can buy stocks, sell stocks or do just about anything else. It is Asness`s essential belief that hedge funds -- or, rather, some hedge funds -- are doing things that are genuinely useful for investors, especially sophisticated institutional investors like pension funds and university endowments. You will not be surprised to learn that Asness includes AQR among the useful hedge funds.

These are strange times for hedge funds. They are, right now, at the absolute forefront of the collective financial psyche. Every day, it seems, a half-dozen more young Wall Street hotshots abandon the millions they`re making at the big firms like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley and start hedge funds. There are now 8,000 of them, about 40 percent of which have been opened in the last four years, and money is absolutely pouring into them -- they`re at $1 trillion and counting -- as institutions search for ways to generate positive returns in this difficult market. Just as business-school graduates once gravitated to venture capital or private equity or dot-coms, now they all want to work for hedge funds.

Hedge funds have also become a huge force in the market. When hedge funds are enthusiastic about a stock, they have the collective buying power to drive up the price, at least for a while. When they turn on a stock, they can drive the price down. Some hedge-fund managers have become activists, buying up stakes in companies and then demanding change from management. One hedge fund -- Eddie Lampert`s ESL Investments -- engineered a merger between Kmart and Sears.

There are plenty of people, even in the hedge-fund world, who are convinced that we have entered bubble territory. Their secrecy, their power, the incredible amount of money flowing into them, the sense that everybody on Wall Street is trying to start a hedge fund and of course the staggering riches: it all seems a little crazy and out of control. Hedge funds right now feel a little like mutual funds in the late 1960`s, or junk bonds in the 1980`s, or dot-coms in the late 1990`s. You just assume they are going to get their comeuppance eventually. Isn`t that what always happens?

But do you remember what happened after the mutual-fund boom burst? Or after the junk-bond craze? Or even after the dot-com insanity? It turned out, in every case, that underneath the craziness, something enduring was being created. The modern mutual-fund industry emerged in the wake of the early 1970`s mutual-fund crash. Junk bonds today are a critical part of the world`s financial scene. Amazon and eBay and lots of other real, profitable companies emerged from the dot-com mania, after all the pretenders were swept away in the rubble of the collapse.

And so it is with hedge funds. There are hedge funds today -- big ones, run by serious people -- that are creating portfolios that are less risky than either the typical mutual-fund portfolio or the market itself. Certain hedge funds are becoming important tools for institutions that want to diversify their portfolios and become less dependent on the ups and downs of the overall stock market. Hedge-fund managers are convincing institutional investors that they are far better served not seeking outsize returns, because those returns entail taking too much risk.

Cliff Asness uses a highly complex, computer-driven investing strategy. You and I will never be able to invest the way he does. And yes, he`s become immoderately wealthy as a result. But if you can get past how much money he makes, you`ll find he has something worth listening to. Boiled down, what Asness really does is try to understand the relationship between risk and reward. And in that broad and important sense, there are lessons in what he does for anyone in the market.


Asness is hardly the first hedge-fund manager to employ techniques for managing investment risk; in fact, that concept goes back to the very origins of hedge funds. The man generally credited with coming up with the first such fund was a former Fortune magazine writer named Alfred Winslow Jones, who hung out his shingle in 1949 with $100,000 in capital and a new idea about making money in the market. He wanted to invest aggressively while still trying to protect investors` capital. These would seem to be contradictory goals, but here`s how he went about it: Instead of simply buying stocks and hoping the wind was at his back, Jones also had a certain percentage of his portfolio on the ``short`` side -- that is, he was betting those stocks would go down. In doing so, he was limiting his fund`s exposure the market, or as they say today, he was limiting his ``market risk.`` Since his shorts were likely to make money in a down market, they acted as protection -- a hedge! -- when his ``longs`` weren`t doing well. Yet because Jones also borrowed money to buy more shares -- that was the aggressive part of his strategy -- when his stocks went up (as they usually did, for he was a very good stock picker), his returns were much higher than they might otherwise have been, despite having those shorts hedging his portfolio.

Jones was enormously successful; between May 1955 and May 1965, his fund returned 670 percent, according to Fortune magazine, nearly twice as much as the best-performing mutual fund. But Jones was also an innovator in other ways. Because he wanted complete freedom to invest as he pleased -- and didn`t want to deal with regulatory restrictions -- he never let more than 100 wealthy investors into any of his funds at any one time; under the rules, this allowed him to avoid registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulated mutual funds. And he used a fee structure that called for him to get a whopping 20 percent of the profits if he made money. Mutual funds, by contrast, collected fees based on the size of the fund: the more assets under management, the more the fund company made, no matter how well (or poorly) the fund performed.

As hedge funds evolved, Jones`s essential structure stuck. Hedge-fund managers made sure their investors were both wealthy and few in number; these days, the rules allow them to have up to 500 ``qualified`` investors and still avoid most S.E.C. regulation. (The theory is that wealthy investors should be able to look out for themselves and don`t need as much government protection as the rest of us.) Of course they all adopted performance fees -- usually 20 percent, just like Jones. Hedge funds also became hooked on asset fees, just like their mutual-fund brethren. Today, when a hedge-fund manager says he charges ``2 and 20`` -- and many of them do -- he means he is taking a 2 percent asset fee as well as his 20 percent performance fee. To the extent that hedge funds remain the most Darwinian of investment vehicles, it is because most hedge funds simply can`t afford to lose money for even a single year: if they do, investors and employees head for the exits, and the funds shut down. But that fee structure of ``2 and 20`` is what makes the business so potentially lucrative. A $4 billion hedge fund that gains 10 percent in a year and charges 2 and 20 has generated $160 million for itself. A $4 billion hedge fund that charges 2 and 20 and makes no money for investors still pockets $80 million thanks to its asset fees.

What got lost over time was the idea that hedge funds were supposed to hedge. That was primarily because of the powerful bull market that began in August 1982 and ended in March 2000. Investors took outsize risks and invariably wound up being rewarded, because the market was going straight up. The bull market forgave a lot of investing mistakes. Hedging seemed unnecessary -- even a little silly.

In fact, during the bull market, hedge funds became synonymous not with hedging but with the most extreme forms of investment risk-taking. Think for a moment about the hedge-fund giants who captured the public imagination in the 1980`s and early 1990`s -- George Soros, Julian Robertson, Michael Steinhardt and a handful of others. Those men were all swashbucklers who didn`t want to control risk -- they wanted to embrace it. They ran billions of dollars, and their fame and fortune was based on their willingness to make stunning bets on markets, currencies, stocks, even on entire economies. When they bet right, they made hundreds of millions of dollars; Soros netted more than $1 billion when he made his legendary bet in 1992 against the British pound. And when they bet wrong? On Valentine`s Day in 1994, Soros got caught on the wrong side of the yen and lost $600 million in one day. ``Making money took courage,`` says Steinhardt, who is now retired, with no small satisfaction.

Today most people still think of the Soros-Steinhardt-Robertson model when they think of hedge funds. And indeed, there are still hedge funds that make the kind of big ``macro`` bets the grand old men were so justly famous for. But there are all kinds of other hedge funds as well. There are hedge funds that deal in distressed securities. Others are dedicated to short-selling. Still others deal in the various derivative markets. The main thing hedge funds have in common today is not the way they invest, but their structure -- including, of course, those lucrative fees.

Since the end of the bull market, though, the idea of using hedge funds to actually hedge has been making a comeback. Some of the best hedge funds, like Maverick Capital and Lone Pine Capital (the latter is run by the aforementioned Stephen Mandel) use the classic A.W. Jones technique of having a certain percentage of their portfolios on the short side -- betting stocks will go down -- to limit their market risk. Others search for small inefficiencies in discrete segments of the financial world to eke out small but steady returns. All of them are offering institutional investors ways to generate returns that are less connected to the rise and fall of the market itself than, say, a mutual fund is. And then there`s Cliff Asness, who runs something called a ``market neutral`` fund. Which means that although he`s buying and selling stocks, the returns he generates aren`t connected to the overall market at all.


One crisp day this past April, Cliff Asness was sitting on a sofa at one end of his large corner office in a nondescript low-rise building in Greenwich. ``Sitting,`` however, doesn`t quite do justice to what he was doing. One second he was scrunching into the sofa, the next he was leaning forward intensely, and the second after that, he was gesturing excitedly, as some new, interesting thought entered his head that he had to convey right that instant. He was like an exuberant, well-dressed, overgrown kid, so overflowing with enthusiasms that he couldn`t contain himself. Except that the enthusiasm in question at that particular moment was the research that had led to one of his earliest published papers, ``OAS Models, Expected Returns and a Steep Yield Curve`` -- which, frankly, made it a little bewildering to be on the receiving end of his monologue. Realizing that I was pretty much lost, Asness finally stopped talking and let out a loud, self-aware cackle. ``This is so geeky!`` he said finally. Well, yes, it was.

Asness did not emerge from the womb a fully formed geek. Growing up in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., he was an underachiever who played soccer and didn`t spend a lot of time engrossed in his studies. Much to everyone`s surprise -- including his own -- he did well on his SAT`s, which got him into the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with degrees in engineering and economics. It was the mid-1980`s by then, and the bull market had begun, but Asness wasn`t exactly walking around campus with The Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm. ``I tacitly assumed I would be applying to law school,`` he said, following in the footsteps of his father, a trial lawyer. When his father heard of his plans, however, he told his son: ``Why do you want to go to law school? You`re good at this math stuff. You should do that.`` It was good advice.

``I think it`s a little weird for a 20-year-old to be interested in finance,`` Asness said, but the academic, ``portfolio theory`` side of finance -- the geeky side -- had captured his imagination. By the late 1980`s, the field of portfolio theory was undergoing enormous ferment. The long-accepted academic dogma, the so-called efficient-market hypothesis -- which states that the stock market is entirely efficient, with all available information already built into stock prices, and thus can`t be beaten on any consistent basis -- was coming under at least mild assault. Accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago`s business school, Asness found himself right in the middle of the ferment.

The dominant figure in the University of Chicago`s finance department -- indeed, one of the dominant figures in all of academic finance -- is Eugene Fama. Fama is often described as the father of the efficient-market hypothesis, because in the 1960`s and 1970`s he wrote a series of elegant papers that laid out the theory with more clarity than anyone else had before, gave it its name and said, in effect, that it seemed to make a lot of sense. He also said, however, that it needed to be tested. To test it properly -- by going back and looking at the historic performance of stock prices -- you had to grapple with a series of issues that had yet to be worked out: how should a stock`s riskiness be measured? What kind of risk-adjusted returns should a stock have if it were, in fact, acting ``efficiently``? And so on. Still, a series of early, crude tests seemed to bear out the theory, and in time, the central idea behind the efficient-market hypothesis even filtered down to the rest of us. Although Wall Street still makes most of its money convincing people that they can beat the market, it also peddles index funds, which have become popular precisely because people want to be in the market but don`t believe they can beat it.

By the time Asness got to Chicago in 1988, academics had begun to come to a better understanding of risk. Most of us think of risk as being related to the volatility of an individual stock -- that is, how much it bounces around from Point A to Point B. But new research was measuring how the risk characteristics of an individual stock changes the overall riskiness of an entire portfolio. Fama, along with a younger colleague named Kenneth French, was among those conducting a newer and deeper series of tests. In particular, they were working on a paper comparing the risk-adjusted historic returns of two different types of stocks -- value stocks versus growth stocks. (Growth stocks are typically those of companies whose investors are optimistic about their futures. Their stock prices are high relative to their actual corporate earnings and other measures. Value stocks are the opposite -- their stock prices are low compared with their earnings because the market is either pessimistic or nervous about their prospects.) A draft of that paper began circulating soon after Asness arrived on campus, and when it was finally published in 1992, under the unassuming title of ``The Cross Section of Expected Stock Returns,`` it created something of a sensation. It essentially showed that if you took a large, diverse portfolio of value stocks, which are cheap, and put it next to an equally large, equally diverse portfolio of growth stocks, which are expensive, the value stocks would outperform the growth stocks more than the efficient-market hypothesis suggested they should. Asness describes the results of that paper: ``Cheap beats expensive more than it should.``

Using a large universe of stocks, going back to 1927, Fama and French showed that if you divided the stocks into thirds, put the cheapest third in the ``value basket`` and the most expensive third into the ``growth basket,`` the value stocks outperformed the growth stocks in more than two-thirds of the years. This, of course, did not mean you couldn`t lose money betting on value over growth -- no investment strategy is risk-free. It did mean that if you took this approach, history strongly suggested that the odds would be on your side. What`s more, it seemed to make no difference whether the market had a good year or a bad year. The pattern stood up. There were years when the market was down, and cheap beat expensive -- and other years when the market was up, and cheap still beat expensive. In other words, this method didn`t just reduce market risk, the way A.W. Jones did when he was devising the first hedge fund. It eliminated it entirely. To use hedge-fund lingo, the pattern was uncorrelated to the market.

By his second year in the Ph.D. program, Asness had become Fama`s teaching assistant and had enlisted both Fama and French as his thesis advisers. For his dissertation, Asness had his own idea about testing the efficient market: he would take a look at a popular short-term strategy called momentum investing, in which an investor buys a stock for the simple reason that it is going up. In an early draft, he called it the ``fool`s strategy.`` (Most day traders during the Internet bubble were momentum investors, for instance.) ``I was nervous telling Fama that I wanted to investigate momentum investing,`` Asness says now. ``But his reply was the best thing he ever said to me: `Sure you can write it. If the data shows something interesting, then write it.` What Gene really believes in is empirical testing. Go where the data takes you.``

And wouldn`t you know it? Asness (along with other academics doing similar work) discovered that a large, diverse portfolio of momentum stocks also ``worked`` more than it should under the efficient-market hypothesis. Nobody can say with any assurance why these things worked. Asness guesses that in both cases, investors, as he puts it, ``overextrapolate.`` There is usually some bad news associated with value stocks -- and investors assume there will always be bad news, so they avoid these stocks more than they should. As for momentum, people often get too optimistic about growth stocks and pay too much for them. In the short term, that enthusiasm will often drive the prices higher. But eventually the enthusiasm will wane, and the stocks will come crashing down.

Academics still argue about what these discoveries mean. Fama remains a committed efficient-market man. He says he thinks these findings don`t overturn the hypothesis but suggest instead that academic finance needs a better model for measuring risk. Asness, however, came to the view that the market was not perfectly efficient: that human beings thought and acted in ways that created market anomalies. There is now an entire branch of economics that tries to explain the market in terms of the way humans behave -- both rationally and not. Asness does not classify himself as a strict behavioralist; ``I think the market is reasonably close to efficient,`` he says, ``but there are a lot of little inefficiencies.`` And in exploiting these inefficiencies a business could be built.

After grad school, Asness landed at Goldman Sachs, where he spent a year and a half trading mortgage-backed securities on the fixed-income desk while finishing his dissertation. Then Goldman asked him to set up a ``quantitative research desk.`` The firm wanted Asness to somehow use the wealth of new research coming out of university finance departments to help it make money. Asness quickly hired two friends, Robert Krail and John Liew, both of whom he knew at the University of Chicago, and they began building a model that would combine both Fama and French`s value insight with Asness`s momentum insight.

The computer model they developed -- and which, after many refinements, they still use today -- grabs a wealth of up-to-the-minute data to identify the cheapest value stocks (Fama and French), but only value stocks that seemed to have started on an upward swing (Asness). They buy a large block -- about 200 to 300 -- of those stocks. Then the model identifies stocks with the opposite characteristics: growth stocks whose rise is stalling. They sell an equally weighted amount of those stocks short. Unlike A.W. Jones, who had only a percentage of his portfolio on the short side, the Asness portfolio is perfectly balanced between longs and shorts. That is what makes his fund ``market neutral.`` It doesn`t matter to him whether the market goes up or down. AQR makes money if its basket of value stocks beats its equally weighted basket of growth stocks -- the way the history suggests it should two-thirds of the time.

Asness and his colleagues soon discovered that the strategy they had come up with worked not only with stocks but with currencies, commodities and even entire economies. (Yes, economies. Asness and his team use economic data to sort out ``overvalued`` versus ``undervalued`` countries, and then buy -- or short -- those countries` market indexes, their S.&P. 500 equivalents.) In time, they developed models that sorted out cheap versus expensive in all kinds of different investments.

In 1995, Asness`s group started an internal hedge fund for Goldman partners and a few clients, using the new model. The fund did so well that the firm rolled it out and began to market it. Within two years, Asness and his crew had $7 billion under management. Their run was amazing -- barely a down month, and some spectacularly good years. Like A.W. Jones, they borrowed money, using leverage as their way to take on more risk and boost returns; one year they returned more than 100 percent before fees. ``Intellectually,`` Asness says, ``I knew we couldn`t sustain that kind of performance. It was a lucky period. But I was young and I was arrogant.``

And in his youth and his arrogance, he looked around him and saw that other Goldman hands were leaving to start hedge funds and that they were putting themselves in a position to make geometrically more money than he was making. For much of his time at Chicago, his working assumption was that he`d be an academic and make maybe $100,000 a year. At Goldman, by 1997, he was making millions, and he was unhappy. The firm wouldn`t leave him alone to do his research and run money; it was always asking him to fly to Tokyo, or to make a presentation to clients, or to help some in-house portfolio manager whose performance was down. One member of his original group quit to open a hedge fund. ``That bugged me,`` Asness said. ``He was doing what we had all invented together.`` His colleagues kept pushing him to quit and kept meeting secretly to map out plans. Finally, in November 1997, he decided to break from Goldman. He gave notice two days after receiving a big bonus.

The four founders of AQR -- Asness, Liew, Krail and an ex-Goldman hand named David Kabiller -- set up shop in New York City in March 1998. They immediately set out to rebuild their computer model and to raise money. By August 1998, they had $1 billion committed, which at the time was thought to be the largest sum ever raised for a hedge-fund startup. (Last year, a young former Goldman partner, Eric Mindich, started a hedge fund and raised the current record: more than $3 billion.) That first month, AQR made money. Then came a market event that all of Asness`s historical stock research, and all his complex models, hadn`t prepared him for -- a market that was not just a little bit inefficient, but that was insanely inefficient. The Internet bubble had begun.


Remember earlier in this article, when I quoted Asness`s funny line about hedge funds being ``run for rich people from Geneva, Switzerland, by rich people from Greenwich, Conn.``? There was a time when that was true -- when the vast majority of hedge-fund investors were, indeed, rich people trying to get richer. By the time Asness set up AQR, however, that was all changing. Although AQR had a few individuals among its investors -- some friends and relatives, mainly -- the fund was primarily marketed to large institutions, especially university endowments. The best of the institutional investors were sophisticated, they were demanding and they insisted on understanding the underlying strategy and having regular conversations with the fund managers.

If an investor had asked George Soros or Michael Steinhardt for that kind of access, he would been given the back of the hedge-fund manager`s hand. But the new breed of hedge-fund manager had a different mind-set. From Cliff Asness`s point of view, sophisticated investors who understood his complex, quantitative approach were exactly the people he wanted as clients. They would understand how his approach fit into their overall portfolios. If he hit a bad patch, he had a far better chance of holding on to a big institution`s money than that of a panicky rich person. Most of all, Asness and the other partners at AQR understood that the most forward-thinking of the endowments had themselves become influenced by what was going on inside academic finance and were trying to incorporate some of those ideas into the way they managed their own money. Indeed, in setting up his ``market neutral`` hedge fund, Asness was reacting to the changing demands of the marketplace.

Even in the middle of a roaring bull market, these institutions had come to believe, first of all, that they shouldn`t be completely reliant on a rising stock market for their returns. After all, someday the market was going to go down. Thus, having a diversified portfolio didn`t just mean having a broad mix of stocks and bonds. It also meant going beyond the market and adding ``alternative`` asset classes. Timber, energy, real estate -- these were all assets that could help institutions diversify. And so could hedge funds, so long as they were the right kind of hedge funds. These hedge funds weren`t set up to make the kind of huge gains Michael Steinhardt and George Soros made, but that was O.K. They had a different goal. They were trying to manage risk and produce a return that was commensurate with the risks they were taking. Just as important, by adding hedge funds that were uncorrelated to the market -- even ones that were moderately risky -- they were lowering the risk characteristics of their overall investments.

The institutional money manager who led the way into hedge funds was David Swensen, who took over the Yale endowment in 1985. A former investment banker himself, Swensen had a deep understanding of both portfolio theory and the hedge-fund industry. He and his endowment colleagues got to know which were the best of the lot and sank money into a diverse range of hedge funds. Simultaneously, he cut way down on stocks, despite the bull market. The results are undeniable: over the past decade, Yale has generated annualized returns of 16.8 percent. (The S.&P. 500, by comparison, generated annualized returns of 10.8 percent during that period.) Seeing these results, other institutions -- Notre Dame, Stanford, Princeton among them -- began emulating Swensen`s hedge-fund strategy.

Which, it turns out, was a good thing for Cliff Asness and AQR. Had he been operating in the old days, when the clients were all wealthy individuals, his firm would never have survived the Internet bubble. His investors would have all cut and run and put their money in some fund that was investing in dot-coms. But the institutions understood what Asness was doing, and even though his fund shrank from that original $1 billion to $400 million over the next 20 months, a surprising number of them stuck by him. What he was doing made intellectual sense, and it would work again so long as the bubble eventually ended. Which had to happen, didn`t it?

Not that Asness was sanguine during the bubble. AQR`s first year and a half in business was a time when investors completely lost their heads, when dot-coms with neither profits nor revenues had triple-digit stock prices and when millions of investors actually believed that the rules of investing had changed. It was a period of such utter insanity that it seemed to repudiate the essential mathematics that had always guided the market. That drove Asness completely crazy. He had never lost money for investors over any significant period; indeed, he`d never in his adult life been anything but a superstar. Now his new hedge fund was like a dripping faucet he couldn`t turn off: every month, it seemed, it was down another 2 percent. The fundamental insight that drove his model -- cheap beats expensive more than it should -- simply didn`t work during the Internet bubble. Expensive wasn`t just beating cheap. It was crushing cheap. Outrageously expensive tech stocks just kept getting more expensive. During the height of the dot-com era, the fund fell about 20 percent.

``I snapped during the bubble,`` Asness concedes today. His partner John Liew looked at the bubble the way a statistician might -- it was a hundred-year flood, and there was nothing you could do but wait for it to recede. Intellectually, Asness agreed, but emotionally he could not distance himself from the awful downward slide. He had much of his own money in the fund; many of his investors were people he had known for years; even his father had put a good portion of his retirement money in the fund. The pressure was nearly unbearable. He railed about the stupidity of investors who were driving up the stock prices of tech stocks. One night in the middle of one such diatribe, his wife, Laurel, said, ``But Cliff, you always told me you made money when people acted stupidly.`` Asness stopped talking and looked up at her. He knew she was right. ``Now you`re whining about it,`` she continued. ``I guess you just want them to be a little stupid.``

What Asness didn`t do, however, was capitulate to the bubble. ``Our belief in the process never wavered,`` Liew said. ``The evidence was that the models we had devised had worked going back to the 1920`s.`` In fact, the bubble gave Asness a cause. ``We try to make money by making a lot of little venal trades,`` Asness said. But fighting the bubble seemed to imbue him with some larger purpose. He began to see himself as on the side of good fighting evil. Bubbles, after all, put investment capital into the hands of company founders who know nothing about how to build companies. They finance lots of terrible ideas. And they hurt investors, who wind up losing money once the giddy ride ends.

Mostly, though, it offended Asness that so many investors were willing to blindly toss aside decades of accumulated market history and data. By early 2000, he began to write a lengthy article exposing what he saw as the fallacies being used to justify crazy stock prices. It was unlike anything Asness had ever written. It was biting, sarcastic, tough-minded and occasionally even funny. He laid out the math for why even the stock prices of strong companies like Cisco Systems were not sustainable. He called the paper ``Bubble Logic.``

The draft of ``Bubble Logic`` that Asness showed me is dated June 1, 2000. As we all now know, the bubble had ended by then; the air began leaking out of it three months earlier. That March was the low point for Asness and his partners at AQR. Feeling that his father had too much money in the fund, Asness -- against his father`s wishes -- tossed him out. (``If I was going to go down,`` he says now, ``I didn`t want to take him with me.``) But in April, the fund made money, and it gained again in May, and when the year ended, AQR had made back a substantial chunk of its losses. It would be another year before the partners started making hedge-fund-like compensation themselves -- that`s because it is standard practice for hedge funds to make back all their investors` money before they start tacking on that 20 percent performance fee again -- but the ship had righted itself. For months, an early draft of ``Bubble Logic`` had been circulating among Asness`s friends in academia; it was discussed in online forums; it was even quoted here and there in business publications. But it was never published. There was no need to publish it. Asness says that if the bubble had lasted six more months, he would have been out of business. But it didn`t. He had outlasted it.


Once the bubble ended, the AQR model went back to working just the way the data say it is supposed to. Over the last five years, the firm`s primary hedge fund is up an average of 13.2 percent a year after fees. Those are not George Soros-like numbers, of course, but AQR generates those returns with a little less risk than the overall market. More to the point, when it is added to an institutional portfolio of stocks and bonds, it reduces the overall riskiness of that portfolio. And though it does not seek out new investors, big institutions are banging down the door trying to get in. Why? Because once the Internet bubble ended, the market did go down, a lot. And the institutions that had loaded up on stocks for the past 18 years were suddenly losing money. So they all decided, en masse, to load up on hedge funds, to replicate what Yale was doing.

Hedge funds, it turns out, had a fabulous run during the downturn; while the mutual-fund industry was losing more than $1 trillion, the hedge-fund community was essentially breaking even. The best of the hedge funds made money during the bust. Even CalPERS, the giant California state pension fund, began dabbling in hedge funds a few years ago. The real reason so many new hedge funds are being started these days is that the demand is insatiable. And that demand is coming from institutions. Every big institutional investor in the country -- if not the world -- wants what Yale has: a truly diversified portfolio that generates decent, positive returns with less risk than the market itself offers. And really, who wouldn`t want that?

``David Swensen was so successful, and so eloquent in explaining what he did that he convinced folks that he had it figured out,`` says James Chanos, who runs Kynikos Associates, a short-selling hedge fund with more than $2 billion under management. ``It looked like he had found the Holy Grail.``

But here`s the problem: there is no Holy Grail, not when it comes to investing. Or, more precisely, investing Holy Grails are, at best, temporary phenomena. As hedge funds proliferate, for instance, the quality of fund managers is bound go down, and that will hurt the performance of hedge funds. That`s what happened when mutual funds became wildly popular, and it is already happening in hedge-fund land as well. (Hedge-fund returns are down slightly this year, for instance.) Let`s face it: even though there are 8,000 hedge funds, are there really 8,000 great hedge-fund managers? Of course not.

There is a second issue as well. You know those little inefficiencies that so many hedge-fund managers are trying to capture? Those strategies work well when there are only a handful of people employing them. But once there are hundreds of fund managers all trying to exploit the same inefficiencies, the anomalies tend to go away. The very fact that all these people are trying to do the same thing makes the market more efficient. As Chanos puts it, ``Success breeds imitation, and imitation breeds mediocrity.`` He adds: ``I think a lot of the institutions that are just getting into hedge funds now are going to be extremely disappointed. And there is going to be a gradual recognition that the fees aren`t worth it.``

Most people I talked to in the hedge-fund world don`t believe that the hedge-fund bubble will end in some giant cataclysm that threatens the foundations of the financial system. It is far more likely that the air will gradually come out of the bubble in ways that most of us will barely notice. Hedge funds with mediocre returns will go out of business. A lot of the power hedge funds now have in moving the markets will dissipate. Some scam artists -- who always emerge during bubbles of any sort -- will be exposed. Some hedge funds that have taken too much risk will crash and burn. New regulations will be put in place (indeed, next year the S.E.C. will require hedge funds to register with the agency.) Business-school grads will find the next hot thing to gravitate toward.

And what will be left? There are those, like Chanos, who say they believe that hedge funds will contract over time and that what will be left is a cottage industry of successful funds that don`t outlast their founders. But there are others who believe that the hedge funds that are left standing -- the funds run by grown-ups who understand how to manage risk, and who position their funds as an alternative asset class for institutions -- have a shot at becoming permanent institutions and a normal part of the investing landscape. There is, after all, something powerful in these ideas of managing market risk and generating returns that are uncorrelated to the market.

This is not, however, a case in which a big idea eventually filters down to the rest of us. Theoretically, mutual funds could develop market-neutral funds like the one Asness runs; the regulations that limited how much short-selling a mutual fund could engage in were repealed years ago. But the fund industry has historically shied away from shorting stocks. For one thing, there`s a strong psychological aversion to short-selling in the investing world. Rather than pumping money into companies to help them grow and prosper, the short-seller is rooting for a company`s defeat. It seems somehow un-American, or at least not very nice. But other things once viewed as unseemly or un-American, like buying on credit, were quickly adopted by the masses once some smart guy figured out how to sell the idea in an appealing way. The real obstacle to the massification of hedging is that it is hard. What Cliff Asness does requires an immense amount of skill. There just aren`t that many people who can do it well. And that`s not going to change any time soon.

Of course, if the mutual-fund industry did start rolling out such funds, it would further degrade the ability to make decent returns, because it would mean there would be yet more people trying to execute the same strategies. Around and around it goes.

Asness, of course, is in the camp of those who would like to see hedge funds become a more permanent part of institutional portfolios. But he can see the impediments as well. Last year, he published a lengthy paper on the subject of hedge funds in The Journal of Portfolio Management. Titled ``An Alternative Future,`` it was written as a two-part series. In the first part, he laid out all the reasons that hedge funds could wind up achieving the same kind of permanence as mutual funds: the power of the ideas behind them, the attractiveness of using them to diversify institutional portfolios and so on. In the second part, he laid out all the reasons that it might not happen -- at least any time soon -- including the real possibility of lower returns in the near term, as well as ``those pesky fees,`` as he put it.

In our various discussions, I pushed him often on the subject, but I could never get him to commit one way or the other. ``I`m very schizophrenic on the subject,`` he said toward the end of one of our talks. ``To me, the real question is whether these institutions are rationally going to accept lower returns. Or are they secretly hoping that even if everybody else is getting lower returns, their hedge funds will still be getting the big returns? If it`s the latter, we`ll have problems.`` Some things even Cliff Asness doesn`t have the data to predict.

Joseph Nocera is a business columnist for The New York Times and, beginning with this article, a staff writer for the magazine.

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Iraq`s Ho Chi Minh Trail

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Iraq`s porous border with Syria includes miles of trackless desert. An Iraqi border guard watches for infiltrators at his post on a berm.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/weekinreview/05burn.html
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Some American officers call him "Z." In the military`s classified signal traffic, he is "AMZ." By any name, American forces in Iraq have found in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi a mesmerizing target.

If they could capture this Jordanian-born militant, anointed by Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda`s chief in Iraq, American commanders are hoping, they could strike a compelling, perhaps decisive, blow against one crucial component of the Iraqi insurgency - the Islamic militant groups that draw zealots from across the Arab Middle East to carry out suicide bombings, beheadings and other atrocities.

The capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 dealt the insurrection no such mortal blow, and American commanders know Mr. Zarqawi`s capture or death might not either. "It`s not about one guy," a senior officer said Friday. "It`s more about the network of cells he has across the country. That`s where we`re applying the pressure."

Still, American officers acknowledge privately, eliminating Mr. Zarqawi would boost American troops` morale like nothing else, and perhaps decapitate the Islamic terrorists whose suicide bombs were a main weapon of the insurgency in the last month. Rebels killed nearly 800 civilians and more than 70 American soldiers during that period, making it one of the war`s deadliest months.

That is the backdrop to one of the most important - and, so far, undecided - campaigns of the Iraqi conflict: the American drive to close off insurgent infiltration routes that run into the Iraqi heartland down the Euphrates River corridor. From Husayba on the Syrian frontier through Qaim and the sand-blown towns of Rawa, Haditha, Asad and Hit, onward through Ramadi and Falluja to Baghdad, the corridor has become the Ho Chi Minh trail of this war.

Like the bane of American commanders in Vietnam, the 300-mile stretch of river is not so much a single route as a multi-stranded network of passages, some hewing close to the lush silted landscape of palms and reeds that run along the banks, others crossing vast reaches of stony desert on either side.

Twice since early May, in a constellation of small towns near Qaim and later in a more concentrated sweep around Haditha, the Second Marine Division, backed by American Army units - and at Haditha by Iraqi soldiers - have set out to stifle the Zarqawi network.

But the results have been disappointing, falling far short of stunting the militants` operations.

For the Qaim operation, the marines acted on a tip that Mr. Zarqawi and some of his top lieutenants had found refuge among tribal leaders downriver, in the vicinity of Haditha.

The Americans assembled a 1,000-man battle group that sought to cut off the retreat upriver with a dash across the desert on the river`s southern side. Then, close to the Syrian border, the marines crossed to the northern bank on a pontoon bridge. But this was a time-consuming maneuver that cost the crucial element of surprise, some officers said.

Then the Americans ran into fierce resistance at Ubaydi, where repeated Marine assaults, supported by tank fire and 500-pound bombs from an F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bomber, were needed to quell one group of Islamic fighters.

An account by an embedded reporter for The Washington Post described rebels lying on their backs in a crawl space beneath the concrete floor of a house, blasting marines above them with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. When the battle subsided, the marines found that many rebels who were quartered in neighboring towns had fled, some westward into Syria, others eastward into the interior of Iraq.

After the weeklong offensive at Qaim, the Marines estimated they had killed 125 insurgents, while losing nine marines. When the Haditha operation, which involved 1,000 American and Iraqi troops, ended last weekend, the American command was elusive, saying only that "a significant number of terrorists were killed."

In Baghdad, American officers acknowledged that the hope of smashing the infiltration network had been unfulfilled. "I don`t know how many scooted," a senior officer said, speaking of the rebels who escaped the cordon at Qaim. Of the infiltration route as a whole, he added, "We still have a problem with people coming across the border."

From the insurgency`s first stages, a common complaint among American officers in the field has been that American troops are overstretched, and there were whispers of this, again, after the Marine operations at Qaim and Haditha.

A Marine spokesman at Camp Falluja, Lt. Col. David A. Lapan, responding to questions sent by e-mail, acknowledged that troop levels in Iraq`s immense Anbar Province were lower than they were last year. But he said the shortfall was being filled by Iraqi troops. "There are sufficient numbers of forces to accomplish the mission," he said. "The enemy is losing and he knows it."

But a glance at the map, and even a cursory sense of the region`s history, suggests the scope of the problem the Americans face. Anbar is the vast western region that encompasses more than a quarter of Iraq, including the Euphrates corridor and nearly 600 miles of border with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria. It has one of the lowest population densities of any of Iraq`s 18 provinces, with barely 1.3 million people, many of them living in the cities and towns along the Euphrates. The deserts, of course, are mostly empty; even in the mid-19th century the Bedouins who roamed them were only a tiny fraction of the population, which was recorded as 500,000 in an Ottoman census.

Since that census, camel trains have yielded to Land Cruisers and Pajeros, and the old trading routes to smuggling. American intelligence officers say that trails across the desert used for decades to smuggle herds of sheep and goats, leather hides, car parts, gasoline and sundry other commodities have now been adapted to the insurgents` needs.

The American forces use sophisticated surveillance aircraft and unmanned drones to keep watch, especially along the 310 miles of the frontier with Syria. But how easy it is to slip unnoticed across the desert is something the Americans themselves demonstrated during the last months of Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship, when United States forces based in remote areas of eastern Jordan ran deep-penetration missions, some of them all the way to Baghdad.

For their part, the insurgents have access to a resource network of their own - Sunni Arab mosques sympathetic to the insurgency in almost every village and town from Damascus to Baghdad. American officers say they have become stations on a relay run straight into the heart of Iraq.

In numbers, the foreign Arab recruits account for a fraction of the insurgents operating across Iraq, whose total is estimated by the American command to range from 12,000 to 20,000. How small a fraction can be guessed from the fact that, as of last week, only 370 of the 14,000 men held as suspected insurgents in American-run detention centers in Iraq were foreigners, according to figures provided by the American command.

But the significance of the infiltration was starkly evident last week in an incident near Rawa in which the kidnapped governor of Anbar was killed during a shootout between insurgents and an American patrol. The American officer commanding the patrol said the four insurgents who died and three who were captured were all non-Iraqis, from Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Nor is there much doubt that the foreign Arabs` impact has been out of proportion to their numbers, primarily because of the willingness of the non-Iraqis to die in suicide bombings. According to a tally kept by the American command, more than 60 of these bombings took place across the country in May, responsible for about two-thirds of the civilians who died.

Iraqis commonly insist that suicide bombing is alien to the Iraqi character, and American commanders agree. "In every case we`ve seen, the driver has been a foreigner," an American officer who has studied the bombings said last week.

The officer said intelligence reports had established that many bombers passed through mosques in Damascus, Syria`s capital, or Aleppo, another Syrian city, and from there through a network of mosques that filtered, in many cases, down the Euphrates, through Qaim, Haditha and Ramadi. At every stage, the officer said, the handlers were organized in cells, each separate from the next, so as to guard the network`s secrecy.

As for the bombers, he said their sojourns in Iraq were generally short.

"They don`t stay in Iraq very long," the officer said. "They get a lot of indoctrination along the way, but once they`re here they are moved into operations very, very fast."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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The Independent
Why Ridley Scott’s story of the Crusades struck such a chord in a Lebanese cinema
Having lived in Lebanon 29 years, I too found tears of laughter running down my face
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=643…

Saturday, 4th June 2005, by Robert Fisk

Long live Ridley Scott. I never thought I’d say this. Gladiator had a screenplay that might have come from the Boy’s Own Paper. Black Hawk Down showed the Arabs of Somalia as generically violent animals. But when I left the cinema after seeing Scott’s extraordinary sand-and-sandals epic on the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, I was deeply moved - not so much by the film, but by the Muslim audience among whom I watched it in Beirut.

I know what the critics have said. The screenplay isn’t up for much and Orlando Bloom, playing the loss-of-faith crusader Balian of Ibelin, does indeed look - as The Independent cruelly observed - like a backpacker touring the Middle East in a gap year.

But there is an integrity about its portrayal of the Crusades which, while fitting neatly into our contemporary view of the Middle East - the moderate crusaders are overtaken by crazed neo-conservative barons while Saladin is taunted by a dangerously al-Qa’ida-like warrior - treats the Muslims as men of honour who can show generosity as well as ruthlessness to their enemies.

It was certainly a revelation to sit through Kingdom of Heaven not in London or New York but in Beirut, in the Middle East itself, among Muslims - most of them in their 20s - who were watching historical events that took place only a couple of hundred miles from us. How would the audience react when the Knights Templars went on their orgy of rape and head-chopping among the innocent Muslim villagers of the Holy Land, when they advanced, covered in gore, to murder Saladin’s beautiful, chadored sister? I must admit, I held my breath a few times.

I need not have bothered. When the leprous King of Jerusalem - his face covered in a steel mask to spare his followers the ordeal of looking at his decomposition - falls fatally ill after honourably preventing a battle between Crusaders and Saracens, Saladin, played by that wonderful Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud - and thank God the Arabs in the film are played by Arabs - tells his deputies to send his own doctors to look after the Christian king.

At this, there came from the Muslim audience a round of spontaneous applause. They admired this act of mercy from their warrior hero; they wanted to see his kindness to a Christian.

There are some things in the film which you have to be out here in the Middle East to appreciate. When Balian comes across a pile of crusader heads lying on the sand after the Christian defeat at the 1187 battle of Hittin, everyone in the cinema thought of Iraq; here is the nightmare I face each time I travel to report in Iraq. Here is the horror that the many Lebanese who work in Iraq have to confront. Yet there was a wonderful moment of self-deprecation among the audience when Saladin, reflecting on his life, says: "Somebody tried to kill me once in Lebanon."

The house came down. Everyone believed that Massoud must have inserted this line to make fun of the Lebanese ability to destroy themselves and - having lived in Lebanon 29 years and witnessed almost all its tragedy - I too founds tears of laughter running down my face.

I suppose that living in Lebanon, among those crusader castles, does also give an edge to Kingdom of Heaven. It’s said that Scott originally wanted to film in Lebanon (rather than Spain and Morocco) and to call his movie Tripoli after the great crusader keep I visited a few weeks ago. One of the big Christian political families in Lebanon, the Franjiehs, take their name from the "Franj", which is what the Arabs called the crusaders. The Douai family in Lebanon - with whom the Franjiehs fought a bitter battle, Knights Templar-style, in a church in 1957 - are the descendants of the French knights who came from the northern French city of Douai.

Yet it is ironic that this movie elicited so much cynical comment in the West. Here is a tale that - unlike any other recent film - has captured the admiration of Muslims. Yet we denigrated it. Because Orlando Bloom turns so improbably from blacksmith to crusader to hydraulic engineer? Or because we felt uncomfortable at the way the film portrayed "us", the crusaders?

But it didn’t duck Muslim vengeance. When Guy de Lusignan hands the cup of iced water given him by Saladin to the murderous knight who slaughtered Saladin’s daughter, the Muslim warrior says menacingly: "I did not give you the cup." And then he puts his sword through the knight’s throat. Which is, according to the archives, exactly what he did say and exactly what he did do.

Massoud, who is a popular local actor in Arab films - he is known in the Middle East as the Syrian Al Pacino - in reality believes that George Bush is to blame for much of the crisis between the Muslim and Western world. "George Bush is stupid and he loves blood more than the people and music," he said in a recent interview. "If Saladin were here he would have at least not allowed Bush to destroy the world, especially the feeling of humanity between people."

Massoud agreed to play Saladin because he trusted Scott to be fair with history. I had to turn to that fine Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf to discover whether Massoud was right. Maalouf it was who wrote the seminal The Crusades through Arab Eyes, researching for his work among Arab rather than Crusader archives. "Too fair," was his judgement on Kingdom of Heaven.

I see his point. But at the end of the film, after Balian has surrendered Jerusalem, Saladin enters the city and finds a crucifix lying on the floor of a church, knocked off the altar during the three-day siege. And he carefully picks up the cross and places it reverently back on the altar. And at this point the audience rose to their feet and clapped and shouted their appreciation. They loved that gesture of honour. They wanted Islam to be merciful as well as strong. And they roared their approval above the soundtrack of the film.

So I left the Dunes cinema in Beirut strangely uplifted by this extraordinary performance - of the audience as much as the film. See it if you haven’t. And if you do, remember how the Muslims of Beirut came to realise that even Hollywood can be fair. I came away realising why - despite the murder of Beirut’s bravest journalist on Friday - there probably will not be a civil war here again. So if you see Kingdom of Heaven, when Saladin sets the crucifix back on the altar, remember that deafening applause from the Muslims of Beirut.

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The Independent
Assad under fire as exiled uncle signals wish to return to Syria
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=644…

Sunday, 5th June 2005, by Robert Fisk

Uncle Rifaat wants to come home. So there’s further grim news for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Having withdrawn his army from Lebanon in humiliation, but still under constant attack by the US for allegedly helping the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, Assad, we now learn - in what is surely a gesture of defiance - has apparently test-fired three Scud missiles, debris from one of which fell in Turkey. And tomorrow Bashar hosts his Baath party’s regional congress with the knowledge that the Butcher of Hama - exiled by the late President Hafez al-Assad for attempting a coup d’état against his own brother - has announced that he wants to resume his "political responsibilities" in Damascus.

The man whose special forces killed up to 20,000 rebels and civilians in the central city of Hama during its 1982 Islamic uprising is now offering to meet Bush administration officials to arrange a "regional conciliation" between Damascus and Washington. The 67-year-old black sheep of the Assad family adds that "I have nothing but love for my nephew [Bashar]. But I have condemned the way he rules."

Can things get any worse for Bashar? Most dangerous for him is the constant condemnation from Washington and from its newly elected protégés in Iraq. Syria, they say, is not only sheltering Iraqi insurgents but has allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the supposed al-Qa’ida leader in Iraq, to hold a meeting with his comrades inside Syrian territory. The Syrians have repeatedly rejected these claims - they know, for example, that insurgents also cross the border from Jordan, something the Bush administration prefers to keep quiet about, since Jordan is a US ally. The Syrian ambassador in Washington insisted Syria had captured 1,200 foreign fighters on its soil, but said all links with US intelligence were now at an end.

President Assad still faces a major crisis over Lebanon. The UN team investigating the assassination of Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February is likely to finger elements of the Syrian security services for the crime, as a previous UN inquiry did. Thursday’s murder of the prominent Lebanese journalist and critic of Syria, Samir Kassir, in the midst of Lebanon’s first free elections in 30 years, will only have added to suspicions that the Syrian secret police intends to go on killing its enemies inside Lebanon.

There are rumours in Europe that Washington’s real purpose in supporting the UN probe is to implicate President Assad and have him taken, Milosevic-style, to an international tribunal - producing another "regime change" but without the need for an American invasion. The irony is that the Syrian Baath party’s regular claim - that if it was overthrown, Syria might become an Islamic republic - could have a lot of truth in it.

Many Syrian cities have become "Islamicised" in recent months. In Aleppo, most women now wear scarves and even state-appointed imams are telling citizens to observe their religion more strictly. Alcohol is banned in the city, a hitherto unthinkable restriction in Baathist Syria.

The majority of Syrians are Sunnis, but the minority Alawites - a branch of Shia Islam - control the state. The Assads are Alawites. Their disappearance, however, would lead to a situation not unlike that in Iraq. Just as the majority Shia took power from the Sunnis there, so the majority Sunnis in Syria will want to take power from the Alawites. And if this produces the same kind of disaster as the American invasion created in Iraq, then al-Qa’ida will have another battleground to fight on.

Even Syrian officials now profess themselves at a loss to know what is happening in their country. Is Mr Assad really in charge? Or is Syria being run by a clique of powerful intelligence officers, like Algeria? Tomorrow’s party con- gress may provide some clues.

Bashar wants to restrict party leaders’ power and rid himself of the tired old men who have dominated Syria for so many years, but he will not be able to break the strength of the intelligence services.

The best advice for President Assad came last weekend from his wife, Asma, who told an international women’s business conference in Damascus that "only corruption flourishes in the dark". If Uncle Rifaat turns up to "rescue" Syria, we will all be back in the dark again.

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THE WORLD
Bush`s Foreign Policy Shifting
Spreading democracy has become his top priority, at times trumping urgent issues. Some specialists dismiss his vision as unrealistic.
By Tyler Marshall
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-democra…

June 5, 2005

WASHINGTON — President Bush`s ambitious vision of global democratic reform has begun to dominate the administration`s foreign affairs agenda, in some cases pushing aside urgent international issues.

So far, the president`s plan has been driven mainly by high-level rhetoric, symbolic gestures and a handful of modestly funded development programs. But collectively, this mix has started to shift the focus in relations with key nations.

In the four months since Bush unveiled the approach in his second inaugural address, nearly every meeting with foreign officials and many of the changes taking place within the Bush administration, including several key appointments, has reflected the priority of expanding the boundaries of democracy.

By now, the presidential vision even has its own buzz phrase: "practical idealism," a reference to the policy`s underlying premise that in a post-Sept. 11 world, America`s national security is tied directly to the spread of free and open societies everywhere, including the Middle East.

Although few foreign policy specialists interviewed for this article questioned the president`s personal sincerity, some dismissed his plan as little more than fantasy. Others expressed doubt that the U.S. had the credibility to advance such ambitious reforms — especially in the Islamic world.

Whatever the eventual outcome, there is evidence of initial effects.

"People in the Middle East already see it as a very powerful initiative," said Walter Russell Mead, an expert on America`s role in the world at the Council on Foreign Relations. "A lot of people are beginning to wonder if American foreign policy isn`t in the midst of a fundamental change."

Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief got a taste of this change during his weeklong visit to Washington last month. Egypt is an important player in the Middle East peace process and a vital, if quiet, ally in the struggle to create stability in Iraq. But Nazief repeatedly was put on the defensive by questions on one topic: Egypt`s plans for democratic reform.

Nazief said two pressing regional issues were largely left out of his May 18 visit with Bush: the unfolding crisis just to Egypt`s south in the Darfur region of Sudan, and Syria`s involvement in Lebanon.

The president and first lady have alternately criticized and cheered the Egyptian regime. During a trip to Cairo, Laura Bush praised a controversial draft law to create multi-candidate presidential elections, while Bush condemned beatings of government opponents.

Despite the administration`s aggressive new effort to promote reform, formidable hurdles litter the path toward Bush`s goal.

In the Middle East, America`s poor image and more urgent strategic concerns, such as assuring the welfare of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, diminish the administration`s leverage to induce reform. Closer to home, bureaucratic resistance within parts of the U.S. government that are skeptical of the agenda threaten to blunt the effect of existing pro-democracy initiatives.

More significant, the new emphasis on promoting democracy has launched policymakers on a journey with no clear path to their goal.

"What we want is a world of democratic, market-oriented countries," said Stephen Krasner, whose job as head of policy planning at the State Department is to direct the search for future external challenges that the country might face. "The big challenge is how to get there."

Such daunting tasks nurture considerable skepticism about Bush`s vision.

"The simplistic notion that you talk a great deal about democracy and twist a few arms and it will somehow come magically on its own is absurd," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security advisor to President Carter.

None of the doubts, however, have visibly blunted the administration`s zeal to press for reform. In the corridors of the State Department and Washington`s many political think tanks, the talk is of "transformational diplomacy."

At the State Department, Krasner estimates he devotes about 75% of his time on how to extend the boundaries of democracy around the globe.

"We`re working actively to find the most effective ways to accomplish this goal," he said.

Within the State Department, several jobs central to the push for democracy have been filled by people who have greater access to the upper levels of power.

Krasner, for example, was a faculty colleague of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Stanford. Vice President Dick Cheney`s daughter Elizabeth recently took over responsibility for a set of initiatives meant to promote private enterprise and democracy across the Middle East and North Africa.

Carlos Pascual, head of the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was created last summer to help rebuild failing states as open societies, reports directly to Rice and also shares a Stanford connection.

Still, these programs remain modest in size. They also reportedly have become the focus of internal tensions, especially from the large U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the country`s main conduit for foreign assistance. Present and former department staff members say the development agency tends to view the newer programs as competitors.

USAID "is a disaster when it comes to what we`re trying to do now," said Edward Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt, one of the largest recipients of American foreign aid.

U.S. Embassy political officers, whose job is to keep relations with host governments as strong as possible, also reportedly question the wisdom of U.S. initiatives that aim to weaken an existing government`s grip on power.

As the administration starts to reshape the bureaucratic machinery for its new top priority, Bush, Rice and others have begun to spread the message.

In his two meetings with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin since January, Bush publicly nudged the Russian leader to reverse what the U.S. views as a worrisome erosion of democracy in Moscow.

In public speeches, Bush has reeled off the names of such countries as Ukraine, Georgia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan as proof of democracy`s inevitable triumph and warned authoritarian rulers that they must change.

In the world of international diplomacy, words matter, experts say.

"Rhetoric is very important when you`re trying to push political reform," said Kenneth Wollack, head of the National Democratic Institute, a nongovernmental group with ties to the Democratic Party that promotes the expansion of democracy overseas. "It influences the debate in these countries."

But with growing frequency, America`s nudges are more than verbal.

Bush`s itinerary for his visit to Moscow last month, for example, served as a signal in itself. He also scheduled stops in Latvia and Georgia — both former Soviet republics that are now democratic nations struggling to stay free of Russia`s orbit.

A few weeks earlier, Rice turned the spotlight on Russia`s neighbor Belarus, a country she referred to as "Europe`s last dictatorship," by holding a high-profile meeting with dissidents opposed to President Alexander G. Lukashenko. During the meeting in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, dissidents said Rice all but offered them a plan on how to press for political reform.

At one level, experts such as Moises Naim, editor of the Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine, acknowledge that Bush has been effective in presenting a series of recent displays of "people power" in countries such as Ukraine, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan as part of the inevitable march of history.

But he and others say the administration is merely "picking the low-hanging fruit." They argue that the real test of Bush`s commitment to change will come in strategically important nations, such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, where the political stakes are far higher for the U.S.

In one such country — Egypt — initial results have been mixed, experts say.

Bush openly prodded Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in his State of the Union speech in February to lead by example in spreading democracy in his region. Shortly afterward, when Rice canceled a trip to Cairo after the arrest of an Egyptian opposition leader, Mubarak announced plans for a competitive presidential election to be held in September.

Although cautiously welcomed by the Bush administration as a step forward and praised by the first lady, the resulting draft law published last month was denounced by regional experts and Mubarak`s political opponents. Middle East specialists said restrictions placed on potential candidates outside Mubarak`s ruling party were so draconian that the law was in effect meaningless.

"It`s a joke," said Walker, who now heads the Middle East Institute, a privately funded political think tank in Washington.

Some specialists also say the administration reacted more cautiously than many European countries to public uprisings against repressive governments in the Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan in March and Uzbekistan last month. One reason: They both house U.S. military bases that are crucial to supporting American forces in Afghanistan.

Administration officials dealing with the democracy issue stress that "prudence" is necessary in pushing nations to become more open politically, but they insist that the political will to move ahead is there because there is no other choice.

History, they say, has shown that politically stable allies who stifle basic freedoms may provide short-term security but pose serious dangers in the long term.

"We thought stability would bring us security," said Krasner, of the State Department. "Well, stability has not brought us security, so we have to think about how to move these regimes to another position, and our security is dependent on that."



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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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, June 05, 2005

Bombings, Shootings in Balad, Tikrit, Samarra, Mahmudiyah
Sunni Clerics Condemn Marginalization of their Community, Protest US

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports a suicide attack on an Iraqi military checkpoint in Balad Saturday, which killed three Iraqi soldiers and wounded a third.

Guerrillas shot dead an Iraqi policement from the rapid response team on a bridge in Samarra on Saturday.

Iraqi police undertook a sweep of Mahmudiyah and Latifiyah, south of Baghdad near Hilla. They killed 3 guerrillas, wounded 5, and captured 19.

A suicide bomber in Tikrit north of Baghdad detonated his payload late Friday afternoon in front of a US military base, killing 5 Iraqi soldiers and wounding 7. Another suicide bomber, in Baghdad, targeted a police patrol and wounded two Iraqi policemen seriously.

The Gulf Daily News also reports on the virtual desertion of a unit of the Iraqi military:


"Meanwhile, an Iraqi army unit has been disbanded after it refused to attend a US training course in Baghdad, former members of the unit said yesterday. The soldiers said they feared reprisals from locals if they were seen to have co-operated with the Americans."



I wouldn`t say this incident is cause for optimism about "Iraqization" or the hope that Iraqi troops will take over security provision from Americans.

Rod Nordland of Newsweek draws the curtain back about how bad the living situation is in Iraq and what widespread and irreversible damage the Abu Ghraib scandal did to American standing among the Iraqi public. His recounting of all the things that are wrong (unreliable electricity and water, lack of security, etc., etc.) is all the more convincing because he admits he began by being a supporter of the war.

Parliamentarian Dr. Raja al-Khuzai, who served in the Interim Governing Council, is visiting India. Her remarks to an Indian reporter on the situation in Iraq are revealing of the conflicted feelings the new political elite in Iraq has about the current situation. They are delighted that Saddam is gone, but they mourn the lack of security and they complain that the US military never bothered to learn Iraqi culture and humiliates Iraqis every day. And she is relatively pro-American!

Hamza Hendawi of AP explores the implications of the transformation of the Sadrist movement of Muqtada al-Sadr into a social services and political organization. (Since the militia was just young Sadrist men with guns, it could be reestablished at any moment, it should be remembered).

Al-Hayat reports that Shaikh Iyad al-`Izzi, a member of the political office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, preached at the Abu Hanifah Mosque in Baghdad Friday against "Operation Lighting," the sweep of Baghdad neighborhoods recently launched by the Defense and Interior ministries of the Iraqi government. Al-`Izzi said, "It is a lightning bolt that has fallen upon our children and our cities . . . They are arresting our youths on the basis of their (Sunni Arab ethnic) identity . . . There can be no national unity without the Sunnis . . . and no united Iraq if we are marginalized and made to vanish and driven away." There was a demonstration at the mosque after Friday prayers by hundreds of Sunnis angry over the arrest by the US last Monday of Muhsin Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, who has been generally cooperative with the Americans.

Shaikh Mahmud al-Sumaid`i said in his sermon at Umm al-Qura Mosque that "the decision-makers and the government" must halt "the humiliation of the people." He warned, "If one sect is marginalized for the benefit of another, and the role of one sect is cancelled for the sake of another, the country will never see the light of stability.."

Shaikh Salah al-`Ubaidi of the Sadr Movement warned of the dangers of the country being partitioned as a result of "the escalation among the sectarian groups."

Lt. Col. Mazhar al-Mawla criticized Operation Lightning from another point of view. He said that there was still poor coordination between the ministries of interior and defense. He also confirmed that no foreign Arab fighters had so far been arrested in the sweep of select Baghdad neighborhoods. He said the operation might be extended, since so far it has not produced the hoped-for results. He said the major successes have been finding and destroying some workshops in Doura and elsewhere used for the construction of car bombs. (Since any garage can function as such a workshop, this achievement is a fleeting one.)

The Washington Post reports that US and Iraqi forces stumbled upon a huge underground bunker in Anbar province that was being used as a headquarters and arms storage site by the guerrillas. The complex is said to be the size of 3 football fields. You wonder how many such bunkers the Baath had established around Iraq. No one should think that the capture of this one will put much of a dent in the guerrilla war. All the ordnance can be replaced fairly easily, and there are other places to hide.

posted by Juan @ [url6/5/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/bombings-shootings-in-balad-tikrit.html[/url]

The Zarqawi Myth
Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (actually Ahmad al-Khalayleh of Zarqa) has been elevated by the Bush administration to an almost mythic position as the fomenter of much of the violence in Iraq. It isn`t true. Most of the violence in Iraq is being undertaken by Baathists or Iraqi nationalists trying to drive the US out.

I haven`t commented much about the alleged activities of Zarqawi, mostly reported from anonymous and easily manipulated web sites. He was said to have had a meeting with lieutenants, maybe in Syria, maybe in Anbar. He was said to be at Ramadi. Ramadi was apparently locked down by the US military as a result. He was said to be wounded at Ramadi. Now some sites are saying he is dead. Those that maintain that he is still alive argue over he should "step down" in favor someone else to head up "Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia."

It turns out that the "meeting in Damascus" scenario is probably just propaganda. The Baath Party in Syria has a deep fear of Sunni fundamentalists. He is an unlikely ally for them.

I don`t trust those jihadi web sites. I think someone is jerking the US press around, and it could be anybody, including USG.

It doesn`t matter, anyway. We historians don`t believe in the great man theory, unlike the Bush administration. Zarqawi leads a social movement of several hundred persons, if he exists at all. If he is killed, the social movement will just go on.

posted by Juan @ [url6/5/2005 06:15:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/zarqawi-myth-jordanian-terrorist-abu.html[/url]