Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 33)

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May 6, 2004
Tehran fears Ba`athist restoration in Baghdad
By Gareth Smyth in Tehran


After months of appealing for calm in Iraq, Tehran is increasingly wary of chaos in its western neighbour and fearful that the US is looking to members of Saddam Hussein`s Ba`ath party to stabilise the situation and counter the influence of Iraq`s Shia Muslims.

"This seems to be a turning point," said Abbas Maleki, a leading analyst in Tehran. "The US is bringing back Ba`athists because it is not easy for them to compromise with the Shia."

These fears were sparked by the recall of former Iraqi officers to police Falluja and by confusion over the transfer to Iraqi rule scheduled for July 1.

Despite misgivings about US military intervention, Tehran welcomed the overthrow of its arch-enemy Saddam Hussein.

Iran was confident that a representative government in Iraq, whose population is majority Shia Muslim, would be friendly with Iran, whose 65m people are about 90 per cent Shia.

Tehran therefore encouraged its friends in Iraq to sit on the US-appointed governing council and backed calls from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq`s most influential Shia cleric, for early elections.

"Iran`s national interest is in having a friendly Iraq," said Saeed Leylaz, a Tehran-based analyst. "Tehran would like the [Iraqi] people to decide the government, and [failing that] Iran might like to see the US face a can of worms."

In his harshest condemnations of the US role in Iraq, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran`s supreme leader, this week spoke of a "wolf caught in a trap".

Other than urging an early transfer of sovereignty, however, Tehran has found itself reacting to drift in Iraq rather than taking a pro-active approach.

Iran`s long-standing call for a greater United Nations role was stymied when Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, named Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian diplomat, as UN envoy in Baghdad.

Tehran shared the surprise of Iraqi Shia that Mr Annan should appoint a Sunni Arab to such a sensitive position, given the past role of Sunni Arab states - including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt - in supporting Mr Hussein`s regime during the war with Iran.

Commentators in Tehran argued that Mr Brahimi`s plan to empower "technocrats" in the new Iraqi authority smacked of the days of Mr Hussein when the regime was drawn largely from Sunni Arabs.

A front-page editorial in the Tehran Times this week recalled Mr Brahimi`s "friendship" with Mr Hussein at the time of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Mr Hussein`s fall raised hopes among Iranians that they might visit the holy sites of Shia Islam in southern Iraq from which he excluded them.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians streamed across the border to make pilgrimages to previously closed Iraqi holy cities, but events turned sour as explosions in March killed 170 pilgrims, including at least 40 Iranians, in Karbala and Baghdad.

Tehran then backed Ayatollah Sistani`s appeals for restraint aimed at countering the rise of Moqtada al-Sadr, the militant cleric.

In Brussels this week, Kamal Kharrazi, Iran`s foreign minister, said the stand-off in Najaf between US forces and Mr Sadr`s militia should be brokered by the city`s senior religious leaders including Mr Sistani.

Mr Kharrazi criticised the US treatment of Mr Sadr for "inflaming" his followers. "We have had some contacts with Sadr in the past in order to calm him down, and to a certain extent we were successful," he said.

On April 14 Mr Kharrazi told reporters that the US had actually invited Iran to help negotiate a solution to the stand-off in Najaf between US forces and Mr Sadr`s militia, though he added that the talks were "going nowhere".

US State Department officials told the FT that Washington opposed any Iranian mediation. The office in Iran of Ayatollah Kazem al-Hairi, Mr Sadr`s religious mentor, also denied reports it was mediating.

The frustration in Tehran is very evident. "It`s up to the Americans and the British to manage this rationally," said Mr Maleki. "Not all [new government] officials should be Shia, but there should be no return to the practices of the Ba`athists."

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004.

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May 7, 2004
Pentagon Memo Warned on Army Contractors
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:23 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A year before the Iraq invasion, the then-Army secretary warned his Pentagon bosses that there was inadequate control of private military contractors, which are now at the heart of controversies over misspending and prisoner abuse.

The author of that memo, retired Army chief Thomas White, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that the recent events show the Pentagon has a long way to go to fix the problems he identified in March 2002.

``Clearly, there was a lot of work that had to be done and still needs to be done,`` White said Thursday.

In a sign of continued problems with the tracking of contracts, Pentagon officials on Thursday acknowledged they have yet to identify which Army entity manages the multimillion-dollar contract for interrogators like the one accused in the Iraq prisoner abuse probe.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld also acknowledged his department hasn`t completed rules to govern the 20,000 or so private security guards watching over U.S. officials, installations and private workers in Iraq.

No single Pentagon office tracks how many people -- Americans, Iraqis or others -- are on the department`s payroll in Iraq.

``You`ve got thousands of people running around on taxpayer dollars that the Pentagon can`t account for in any way,`` said Dan Guttman, a lawyer and government contracting expert at Johns Hopkins University. ``Contractors are invisible, even at the highest level of the Pentagon.``

The problem has been known at the Pentagon for years.

In a March 2002 memo, White complained to three Pentagon undersecretaries that ``credible information on contract labor does not exist internal to the (Army) Department.`` The Army could not get rid of ``unnecessary, costly or unsuitable contracted work`` without full details of all the contracts, White wrote.

White`s memo was first disclosed in April 2002 by the GovExec.com Web site, a trade publication for federal employees. It was provided to AP this week by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit government watchdog group.

Spokesmen for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Coalition Provisional Authority did not return messages seeking comment Thursday.

The prison abuse controversy that erupted last week is not the first example from the Iraq war of contracting problems.

Investigators from Congress` General Accounting Office and the Defense Contract Audit Agency say lax oversight contributed to problems with several contracts in Iraq with Halliburton Co. The government is investigating allegations of kickbacks and inflated charges on several contracts with Vice President Dick Cheney`s former company.

Guttman said the Pentagon in the past decades has significantly cut its contract management work force while increasing its number of contracts with private companies.

The contract with CACI International Inc. is one example. An Army report on alleged abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad says a CACI interrogator lied to investigators and ordered soldiers to abuse prisoners.

Pentagon officials said Thursday they have not determined which agency oversees the contract, which originally was with the Premier Technology Group, a smaller company providing contract interrogators that CACI bought last May.

``We haven`t been able to find anyone who knows what contract that was,`` said Deborah Parker, a spokeswoman for the Army`s Intelligence and Security Command. Parker said her agency did not hire any contract interrogators.

CACI in March landed an $11.9 million contract with the Army`s European Command for ``intelligence analyst support services,`` which includes providing intelligence operatives for the global war on terrorism.

Pentagon officials said they did not know whether the CACI workers in Iraq were under a predecessor to that contract, which was not in effect at the time of the alleged abuse last fall.

CACI chairman J.P. ``Jack`` London, in a conference call with investment analysts Wednesday, did not identify the Army agency that managed the Iraq interrogator contract. London said the Pentagon had not told CACI about any problems.

The lack of oversight extended all the way down to the Abu Ghraib prison itself, said the report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. The contractors ``do not appear to be properly supervised within the detention facility,`` the report said.

``During our on-site inspection, they wandered about with too much unsupervised free access in the detainee area,`` the report said. Pentagon officials refused to release the report but said copies posted on the Internet by MSNBC and other news organizations are accurate.

White said contractors should not be in charge of interrogating prisoners.

``You can hire translators and people that would support the interrogation or the intelligence gathering efforts, certainly, but I would not think it would be wise to give up control of that process,`` said White, a Vietnam veteran and retired brigadier general.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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May 7, 2004
THE NEW IRAQ CRISIS
Donald Rumsfeld Should Go

There was a moment about a year ago, in the days of "Mission Accomplished," when Donald Rumsfeld looked like a brilliant tactician. American troops — the lean, mean fighting machine Mr. Rumsfeld assembled — swept into Baghdad with a speed that surprised even the most optimistic hawks. It was crystal clear that the Defense Department, not State and certainly not the United Nations, would control the start of nation-building. Mr. Rumsfeld, with his steely grin and tell-it-like-it-is press conferences, was the closest thing to a rock star the Bush cabinet would ever see.

That was then.

It is time now for Mr. Rumsfeld to go, and not only because he bears personal responsibility for the scandal of Abu Ghraib. That would certainly have been enough. The United States has been humiliated to a point where government officials could not release this year`s international human rights report this week for fear of being scoffed at by the rest of the world. The reputation of its brave soldiers has been tarred, and the job of its diplomats made immeasurably harder because members of the American military tortured and humiliated Arab prisoners in ways guaranteed to inflame Muslim hearts everywhere. And this abuse was not an isolated event, as we know now and as Mr. Rumsfeld should have known, given the flood of complaints and reports directed to his office over the last year.

The world is waiting now for a sign that President Bush understands the seriousness of what has happened. It needs to be more than his repeated statements that he is sorry the rest of the world does not "understand the true nature and heart of America." Mr. Bush should start showing the state of his own heart by demanding the resignation of his secretary of defense.

This is far from a case of a fine cabinet official undone by the actions of a few obscure bad apples in the military police. Donald Rumsfeld has morphed, over the last two years, from a man of supreme confidence to arrogance, then to almost willful blindness. With the approval of the president, he sent American troops into a place whose nature and dangers he had apparently never bothered to examine.

We now know that no one with any power in the Defense Department had a clue about what the administration was getting the coalition forces into. Mr. Rumsfeld`s blithe confidence that he could run his war on the cheap has also seriously harmed the Army and the National Guard.

This page has argued that the United States, having toppled Saddam Hussein, has an obligation to do everything it can to usher in a stable Iraqi government. But the country is not obliged to continue struggling through this quagmire with the secretary of defense who took us into the swamp. Mr. Rumsfeld`s second in command, Paul Wolfowitz, is certainly not an acceptable replacement because he was one of the prime architects of the invasion strategy. It is long past time for a new team and new thinking at the Department of Defense.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 7, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A President Beyond the Law
By ANTHONY LEWIS

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

The question tears at all of us, regardless of party or ideology: How could American men and women treat Iraqi prisoners with such cruelty — and laugh at their humiliation? We are told that there was a failure of military leadership. Officers in the field were lax. Pentagon officials didn`t care. So the worst in human nature was allowed to flourish.

But something much more profound underlies this terrible episode. It is a culture of low regard for the law, of respecting the law only when it is convenient.

Again and again, over these last years, President Bush has made clear his view that law must bend to what he regards as necessity. National security as he defines it trumps our commitments to international law. The Constitution must yield to novel infringements on American freedom.

One clear example is the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Third Geneva Convention requires that any dispute about a prisoner`s status be decided by a "competent tribunal." American forces provided many such tribunals for prisoners taken in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But Mr. Bush has refused to comply with the Geneva Convention. He decided that all the Guantánamo prisoners were "unlawful combatants" — that is, not regular soldiers but spies, terrorists or the like.

The Supreme Court is now considering whether the prisoners can use American courts to challenge their designation as unlawful. The administration`s brief could not be blunter in its argument that the president is the law on this issue: "The president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has conclusively determined that the Guantánamo detainees . . . are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention."

The violation of the Geneva Convention and that refusal to let the courts consider the issue have cost the United States dearly in the world legal community — the judges and lawyers in societies that, historically, have looked to the United States as the exemplar of a country committed to law. Lord Steyn, a judge on Britain`s highest court, condemned the administration`s position on Guantánamo in an address last fall — pointing out that American courts would refuse even to hear claims of torture from prisoners. At the time, the idea of torture at Guantánamo seemed far-fetched to me. After the disclosures of the last 10 days, can we be sure?

Instead of a country committed to law, the United States is now seen as a country that proclaims high legal ideals and then says that they should apply to all others but not to itself. That view has been worsened by the Bush administration`s determination that Americans not be subject to the new International Criminal Court, which is supposed to punish genocide and war crimes.

Fear of terrorism — a quite understandable fear after 9/11 — has led to harsh departures from normal legal practice at home. Aliens swept off the streets by the Justice Department as possible terrorists after 9/11 were subjected to physical abuse and humiliation by prison guards, the department`s inspector general found. Attorney General John Ashcroft did not apologize — a posture that sent a message.

Inside the United States, the most radical departure from law as we have known it is President Bush`s claim that he can designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" — and thereupon detain that person in solitary confinement indefinitely, without charges, without a trial, without a right to counsel. Again, the president`s lawyers have argued determinedly that he must have the last word, with little or no scrutiny from lawyers and judges.

There was a stunning moment in President Bush`s 2003 State of the Union address when he said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists "have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let`s put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States."

In all these matters, there is a pervasive attitude: that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. But commitment to law is not a weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis memorably expressed 75 years ago.

"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher," he wrote. "For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."

Anthony Lewis is a former Times columnist.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 7, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
When Liberators Become Tyrants
By ANTOINE AUDOUARD

PARIS

Fifty years ago today, at dawn on May 7, 1954, after 56 days of battle, silence fell upon the hills of Dien Bien Phu. The French had named the hills Dominique, Béatrice and Isabelle, sweet and feminine names, evocative of the mists of the northern Vietnamese countryside. They had been taken and lost, and taken again, and their shell-plowed soil was drenched in sweat and blood. For years to come they would deliver up fragments of human bodies and muddy jungle boots. This once calm mountain valley had become the symbolic graveyard of the 60,000 French soldiers who died in the Indochina war.

Cruelly, the night before, the Vietminh radio had broadcast "Le Chant des Partisans," the hymn of the French Resistance. Some of the 10,000 French soldiers there had, 10 years earlier, been part of the fight against the Nazis. Hearing the familiar lyrics, they felt their hearts being torn apart. What was defeat and humiliation for them — the surrender of their fortified camp to the Vietnamese and the end of French colonial rule in that country — was victory and liberation for their adversaries, the Vietnamese. It was one and the same reality: the two sides of the coin.

My grandfather was in the French colonial army, my father was born in Saigon and I was born two years after the battle of Dien Bien Phu. It took me a long time to understand why, every time the name Dien Bien Phu was pronounced, so many eyes welled up with tears. I knew about French military disasters from what I`d read in history books, but my closest notion of defeat was limited to a laughable rage after the loss of a soccer game.

I was 40 when I traveled to Vietnam for the first time and began a strange quest to track down ghosts, to meet veterans from both sides. I was struck by an overwhelming impression that the silence after the battle had never been broken, that it had pervaded the memories of the victors and the defeated alike.

This may seem a paradox for the Vietnamese. The moral of victory draws a clear line between the heroes (those who took part in the glorious war of independence against the French colonialists and the American imperialists) and the others, who were then called "viet gian," or traitors. But behind the scenes, in a quiet, shabby sitting room, in the dim light above the ancestors` altar, more painful and complex truths are whispered. They say that according to where you happened to be, the neighborhood you lived in, your father`s occupation, or even mere luck, you found yourself thrown on one side or the other.

Your whole life and the life of your family for several generations would be decided by this simple twist of fate. In a regime that is now making way for capitalism, silence remains the mark of communism: these tales are recounted in hushed voices and without witnesses, "between friends," as the Vietnamese say. When facing their own history, the Vietnamese are well trained in concealing their unspeakable sufferings, their anger and their fears.

The reasons for the French silence are easier to understand: the vanquished lie low. Many survivors of the Indochina war are content to end their lives without answering the question their children never ask: Did you participate in acts of torture? Some did, burning villages, killing children they mistook for terrorists, raping women. "I did what a soldier is supposed to do; and for the rest, I did what I could." This medieval soldier`s saying is no longer an excuse. To do "what one could" is indeed a far cry from doing what one dreamed of doing.

For those who lived through the humiliation of the German takeover of France in 1940, Indochina was an opportunity for redemption. They were soon to find out a simple and harsh truth: they were not welcome. The first Westerners to tell them so were hated and dismissed. They were American. Year after year, the French fought on, ignoring their own growing scepticism about the nature and objectives of the war. "A man of honor," De Gaulle once wrote, "pays his debts with his own money." Soon enough, the French war in Vietnam was heavily financed by American money. We might once have had honor, but we had certainly run out of money. All we had left to give was blood.

The soldiers could only hang on to the simple words that belong to all wars: those bastards, my pals. In the valley of Dien Bien Phu, scores of men died every day. And every night, scores more volunteered to parachute onto the battlefield under heavy antiaircraft shooting. They knew the battle was lost: yet on they went, in the knowledge that their friends had been abandoned and that they should not die alone. In the lost honor of their country, they alone came to embody honor. If they die forgotten and despised, their bitterness will eat into our flesh and bones, and generations to come will inherit their suffering.

During my research, I sought to meet Georges Boudarel, the French "traitor" who gave Marxist classes to French prisoners in a Vietminh camp. "The French victims of the camp," he later wrote, "weigh on my heart, but not my conscience." Such a strange sentence. Maybe it was his way of expressing regret, the beginning of a confession. Boudarel could not talk to me; he had become aphasic.

Can the echoes of the valley of Dien Bien Phu be heard in the streets of Falluja, at the prison of Abu Ghraib? Forty years ago, French friends of America tried to warn Washington about the pitfalls of Vietnam. The French themselves repeated their mistakes in Algeria. In Iraq every day even the best of intentions are cruelly put to test by the miseries and sorrows of war. As the promoters of a modern, "clean" war would have it, torture, humiliation, rapes, the killing of innocents, useless destruction are now avoidable.

But to go to war is to go to the bottom of the pit: what if those tragedies are not "collateral damage" but war itself, the essence of war? And when the damage is done, the pain and the shame are there to stay, and the dead (those bastards, my pals) keep coming back like ghosts.

Antoine Audouard is the author of the forthcoming "Farewell, My Only One," a novel.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 7, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
My Life as a Guard
By TED CONOVER

When they see the photographs of the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraqis and many others around the world will focus on the debasement and humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners. When I looked at the photos, I noticed something more: I couldn`t take my eyes off the American soldiers. I couldn`t stop trying to imagine the scene as one of the photos was set up: "Hey, let`s put `em in a pyramid. And now, you — get over there and give me the thumbs-up."

This is not torture as we see it in movies, with bare wires or fizzy water up the nostrils. Those scenes always have an evil sadist directing things, an eccentric genius of pain. These soldiers do not look like sadists or geniuses, but rather like Americans abroad creating their very own souvenirs.

It is a heady thing to have prisoners at your mercy. Prison officials in the United States often say that the job involves "care, custody and control." In New York, where I worked as a prison guard for almost a year in the late 1990`s, training focuses mainly on the final element — control — but the care and custody are in some ways more crucial. Because therein lies the true test of the officer, the system and indeed the nation: how will you treat those who are helpless before you?

President Bush has said that "the practices that took place in that prison are abhorrent and they don`t represent America." How, then, does such abuse happen?

Prison work is easier if you don`t get too personal with the prisoners, don`t empathize with them too much. Soldiering is probably the same: it`s easier to fight the enemy if he is faceless, less than human. A military prison, then, has the potential to be the most heartless of worlds. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Third Geneva Convention, revised in 1949, addresses the rights of prisoners of war; the horrors of World War II were the great stimulus to the writing of the convention. The nations of the world, including America, were nearly unanimous that such atrocities should never be allowed to be visited upon anybody again, anywhere.

But here we see the faces of the American torturers of wartime prisoners — and they seem to be having a pretty good time. And the victims of this torture, it should not surprise us, are hooded and . . . faceless.

Up the chain of command, heads are rolling, of course; the general who was in charge of the prison has been reprimanded, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is reported to have received a dressing-down from the president. Not all those depicted in the photos have been charged, and they may have played a small or minor role, although six military police officers at Abu Ghraib are facing courts-martial. Still, there`s been no answer yet as to how this was allowed to happen.

In the prison where I worked (and in most prisons, I suspect), there are two sets of rules. There are the official rules, which you learn during training and carry in a booklet in your pocket. And then there are the real rules — the knowing what you can and cannot get away with.

Prison officers, in charge of people who are usually not nice, are bound to overstep the rules occasionally. The infractions may be relatively minor, like forgetting to unlock the cell of a difficult inmate when it`s recreation time, or more serious, like participating in an "adjustment" of an abusive inmate. And when and if the incidents are made public, the test is always: will your superiors back you up? Is the boss a good guy or a jerk? Which rule book does he follow?

In a prison, of course, the boss is the superintendent or warden. He`s the one who, in ways that are sometimes unspoken, sets the tone for the institution, making clear what`s acceptable and what is not.

In a military prison during a time of war, it may be little harder to divine exactly who is in charge, and what`s likely to happen if something goes wrong — if a prisoner dies during interrogation, for example. The discredited former commander of Abu Ghraib, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, has said that while the soldiers in the photos were technically under her command, military intelligence effectively ran the unit where the abuse took place.

What we do know about the treatment of prisoners in this "war on terror" (of which Iraq, we are told, is a part), is that the Geneva Conventions don`t always apply — the prison at Guantánamo Bay, filled with hundreds of "enemy combatants" (who are not afforded the protections of P.O.W.`s) being Exhibit No. 1. Is Guantánamo different from Abu Ghraib? The administration would say yes. Then again, the new head of Abu Ghraib, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, was in charge of the interrogations at Guantánamo until just recently.

President Bush may indeed have felt "deep disgust" upon seeing these torture photos. Then again, the man who sets the tone for the entire war effort has never claimed to be the prisoner-protection president.

Ted Conover is the author, most recently, of "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 7, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Oil Crunch
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Before the start of the Iraq war his media empire did so much to promote, Rupert Murdoch explained the payoff: "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil." Crude oil prices in New York rose to almost $40 a barrel yesterday, a 13-year high.

Those who expected big economic benefits from the war were, of course, utterly wrong about how things would go in Iraq. But the disastrous occupation is only part of the reason that oil is getting more expensive; the other, which will last even if we somehow find a way out of the quagmire, is the intensifying competition for a limited world oil supply.

Thanks to the mess in Iraq — including a continuing campaign of sabotage against oil pipelines — oil exports have yet to recover to their prewar level, let alone supply the millions of extra barrels each day the optimists imagined. And the fallout from the war has spooked the markets, which now fear terrorist attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia, and are starting to worry about radicalization throughout the Middle East. (It has been interesting to watch people who lauded George Bush`s leadership in the war on terror come to the belated realization that Mr. Bush has given Osama bin Laden exactly what he wanted.)

Even if things had gone well, however, Iraq couldn`t have given us cheap oil for more than a couple of years at most, because the United States and other advanced countries are now competing for oil with the surging economies of Asia.

Oil is a resource in finite supply; no major oil fields have been found since 1976, and experts suspect that there are no more to find. Some analysts argue that world production is already at or near its peak, although most say that technological progress, which allows the further exploitation of known sources like the Canadian tar sands, will allow output to rise for another decade or two. But the date of the physical peak in production isn`t the really crucial question.

The question, instead, is when the trend in oil prices will turn decisively upward. That upward turn is inevitable as a growing world economy confronts a resource in limited supply. But when will it happen? Maybe it already has.

I know, of course, that such predictions have been made before, during the energy crisis of the 1970`s. But the end of that crisis has been widely misunderstood: prices went down not because the world found new sources of oil, but because it found ways to make do with less.

During the 1980`s, oil consumption dropped around the world as the delayed effects of the energy crisis led to the use of more fuel-efficient cars, better insulation in homes and so on. Although economic growth led to a gradual recovery, as late as 1993 world oil consumption was only slightly higher than it had been in 1979. In the United States, oil consumption didn`t regain its 1979 level until 1997.

Since then, however, world demand has grown rapidly: the daily world consumption of oil is 12 million barrels higher than it was a decade ago, roughly equal to the combined production of Saudi Arabia and Iran. It turns out that America`s love affair with gas guzzlers, shortsighted as it is, is not the main culprit: the big increases in demand have come from booming developing countries. China, in particular, still consumes only 8 percent of the world`s oil — but it accounted for 37 percent of the growth in world oil consumption over the last four years.

The collision between rapidly growing world demand and a limited world supply is the reason why the oil market is so vulnerable to jitters. Maybe we`ll get through this bad patch, and oil will fall back toward $30 a barrel. But if that happens, it will be only a temporary respite.

In a way it`s ironic. Lately we`ve been hearing a lot about competition from Chinese manufacturing and Indian call centers. But a different kind of competition — the scramble for oil and other resources — poses a much bigger threat to our prosperity.

So what should we be doing? Here`s a hint: We can neither drill nor conquer our way out of the problem. Whatever we do, oil prices are going up. What we have to do is adapt.

Bob Herbert is on vacation.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Residents of Fallujah celebrate Tuesday after U.S. marines handed responsibility for security in the city to the Fallujah Brigade.
washingtonpost.com

Gamble Brings Old Uniforms Back Into Style

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A01

FALLUJAH, Iraq, May 6 -- The crackle of gunfire, omnipresent here just a week ago, has been replaced with the din of car horns. Shops that had been shuttered during a month-long siege by U.S. Marines, giving this city on the Euphrates River the feel of a ghost town, have begun to reopen. Attacks on the few remaining American troops in the surrounding desert have nearly ceased.

But the seeming normalcy has come with a cost. Fallujah is now caught in a time warp. Iraqi soldiers wearing their crisp, olive-green army uniforms -- a sight unseen since former president Saddam Hussein`s government was toppled more than a year ago -- now man checkpoints on roads leading into the city. Stout generals, their lapels adorned with stars and crossed swords, stroll around the mayor`s office with the same imperious air they projected when Hussein was president.

The Iraqi soldiers are back because of an agreement that is one of the most significant military gambles in the 13-month-long U.S. occupation of Iraq. Over the past week, U.S. Marines have pulled out of positions in and around Fallujah and handed over responsibility for security to an untested militia led by a group of generals who had been barred from military service by the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq.

The agreement to give the generals a chance was negotiated by Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the top U.S. Marine commander in Iraq, who was eager to avoid an all-out attack on the resilient insurgency here. In secret discussions with Conway last month, the generals agreed to assemble a force of former soldiers to restore order to this troubled city.

Thus far, the generals appear to be opting for a strategy of co-optation instead of confrontation. They have recruited scores of young men who fought against the Marines last month, according to U.S. officials familiar with the new force, called the Fallujah Brigade. The officials said they believed that most members of the brigade participated in the fighting.

"Many of the guys who were shooting at the Marines have simply put on their old army uniforms and joined the Fallujah Brigade," said a U.S. official familiar with the new force.

Some of the Iraqi generals, including a leader of the new force, had been officers in Hussein`s Republican Guard, an elite army unit dominated by Sunni Muslims and accused of human rights abuses against Shiite Muslims and Kurds.

The generals, whose return to power has angered many Shiite and Kurdish leaders, do not pretend to hew to the U.S. military message about the insurgency in Fallujah. They have joined residents in proclaiming a victory over the Marines. They have publicly dismissed American claims that foreign militants are holed up in Fallujah. They have also urged U.S. troops to stay away from the city.

Mohammed Latif, a former official in Hussein`s intelligence service who was named the brigade`s leader, proclaimed to reporters on Thursday that "there are no insurgents" in Fallujah.

Conway`s aides said they were not alarmed by these developments. More important, they insisted, was improving security in the city and getting Iraqis to take responsibility for restoring order. They said they were encouraged by former fighters joining the brigade. They also said that Iraqis without extensive military service would not have had sufficient clout to take charge in a city such as Fallujah, where a disproportionate number of men served in the army, particularly in the Republican Guard.

"We have a potential Iraqi solution to the problem that we didn`t have 96 hours ago," Col. John Coleman, Conway`s chief of staff, said in an interview Wednesday. "As long as they can continue to show positive progress toward the mission . . . we feel that we`re closer to the end-state objective. The overarching aim of this [Marine] force is to basically work itself out of a job."

Although Marine commanders insisted that Conway`s superiors were fully briefed about the arrangement and signed off on it, the unorthodox nature of the deal has led senior officials at the Pentagon, the U.S. military command in Iraq and the civilian occupation administration to react with skepticism. "It`s Conway`s thing," said one U.S. civilian official involved in the issue. "Either it works out, and he emerges as they guy who solved the Fallujah problem, or it turns into a big failure."
Uniquely Rebellious

From the very first days of the occupation, a unique confluence of religious fervor, tribal tradition and loyalty to Hussein`s government in Fallujah created deep suspicion and outright hatred toward U.S. forces. Those sentiments hardened after a series of confrontations in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. troops. Over the following months, the city became a hotbed of resistance. Military convoys were subjected to so many roadside bomb attacks that Army commanders ordered supply convoys to bypass Fallujah and limited trips inside the city to patrols, raids and other essential tasks.

As early as last July, the Army`s 3rd Infantry Division sought to turn over security responsibilities within the city to a municipal protection force, hoping that Iraqis would be able to deal with the insurgents. That effort failed.

When they arrived in March, Marine commanders recalled, they sought to do things differently. They said they reasoned that the Army`s strategy had allowed Fallujah to become a haven for resistance fighters and a staging area for bomb attacks in and around Baghdad.

The Marine commanders added that they had always planned to conduct more aggressive raids and more frequent patrols. But after four U.S. security contractors were killed and mutilated on March 31, the Marines were ordered to shift their strategy to an all-out attack on suspected insurgent positions.

On April 5, two battalions sealed off the city. Hours later, they pushed into the city backed by tanks, attack helicopters and fighter jets. Hundreds of suspected insurgents were killed in the initial incursion, Marine commanders said.

But the operation had unforeseen consequences. Thousands of women and children sought to flee the city of 200,000, complicating military operations. Arab satellite television stations broadcast claims that hundreds of civilians had been killed by the Marines, fueling a surge of angry protests in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. By April 9, the Marines had declared a unilateral cease-fire to allow families to leave and local leaders to participate in peace talks.

On April 19, after a week of talks, a group of local civic leaders and a few Sunni politicians from Baghdad made a deal with Marine commanders. In exchange for relaxing a nighttime curfew and allowing families to return to their homes, the leaders promised to collect heavy weapons from the insurgents and hand them over to the Marines.

That never happened. All the Marines got was a pile of rusty, antiquated arms. Most of them didn`t work.

The next day, an interlocutor approached Conway with an enticing offer: A group of former Iraqi army generals was willing to assemble a force that would restore order in Fallujah. Although the commanders and other U.S. officials were dealing with several other groups of Iraqis -- tribal sheiks, religious leaders and Sunni politicians from Baghdad -- this overture piqued Conway`s interest, according to a senior Marine officer. Frustrated with the ability of the city`s civilian leadership to influence the insurgents, he hoped the generals might have more clout. He scheduled a meeting with them on April 22.

Latif, a trim, graying man, arrived in a business suit. He was accompanied by Jassim Mohammed Saleh, a portly former major general from Fallujah who commanded an infantry division before the war.

Although Conway`s aides wondered whether the generals had enough wasta -- or personal connections -- to marshal the more than 1,000 troops they promised, the Marine commander and other ranking officers who participated in the gathering were impressed with what they heard. "The conversation was in strictly military terms," Coleman recalled. "These were military professionals who understood a dynamic on the ground, who spoke in a language, although in a different native tongue than ours, that was very, very similar to how we perceived the problem."

Sitting across a table draped in brown camouflage fabric, the generals asked the Marines to hand over security responsibilities to them, saying they did not want money or equipment, Marine officials said. "Their offer had significant elements on the table that otherwise wouldn`t have been an option for us, most significantly to put an Iraqi face on the solution to this problem," Coleman said. "This option brought back into the fold an opportunity for Iraqis to deal with an Iraqi problem."
Ad Hoc Planning

While interested in the generals` plan, Marine commanders were also planning to resume offensive operations because local leaders had not held up their end of the peace deal. On April 23, Marine units in the city were drawing up new battle plans. But by the following day, with the possibility of a deal with the generals and growing concern about the broader impact of an attack, senior officials at the White House and the Pentagon told Marine commanders to exhaust all their options before mounting another offensive, according to U.S. officials familiar with the issue.

On April 25, Marine commanders announced they would conduct joint patrols with Iraqi security forces in the city on the 29th. Marine combat officers expected the patrols to get shot at. One officer called the mission a "suicide patrol" aimed at providing justification for a renewed Marine assault.

A senior Marine officer said talks were continuing in many directions. "We had all these different tracks going on," the officer said. Describing the chaotic nature of the negotiations, he said: "Ad hoc would be kind."

As they prepared for the joint patrols, the officer said commanders were set to change the rules of engagement to allow Marines to shoot at anyone with a gun, instead of waiting for them to demonstrate hostile intent. But on April 28, commanders decided to hold off on that change because the joint patrols had been delayed for a day. Although no reason was given at the time, Marine officials said they did not want to interfere with a large meeting of tribal sheiks scheduled for the 29th. Neither the U.S. military command nor the civilian occupation authority thought that Conway was close to making a deal.

Later that evening, however, Conway did exactly that. He and the generals agreed to set up the Fallujah Brigade. Starting Friday, Conway decided that two of the four Marine battalions in the city would withdraw. In their place, 300 former Iraqi soldiers would assume control of checkpoints and perimeter positions on the city`s southern border. Assuming that went well and the generals were able to recruit more soldiers, the other two Marine battalions would begin repositioning a few days later.

Senior Marine officials said Conway had been authorized to reach a deal by his superiors, including Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the overall military commander in Iraq, and Gen. John P. Abizaid, the U.S. commander for the Middle East. The Marine officials said they conveyed details of the deal to both Sanchez and Abizaid.

The next morning, however, internal reports of the deal startled officials with the civilian occupation authority in Baghdad. Although they knew Conway was making arrangements to set up an Iraqi force, they were unaware of the details until the deal was done. The civilian officials were alarmed by the decision to work with former generals, who nearly a year ago had been excluded from participation in the new security forces by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq. Bremer reversed that policy only on April 23.

"It caught everyone by surprise," an official with the occupation authority in Baghdad said. "Here was this Marine general making security policy, and we knew nothing about it."

Conway has described the Iraqi army as "the most respected institution in Iraq," and Marine officers have said that bringing it back would be key to restoring security, particularly in Sunni-dominated cities such as Fallujah, where thousands of former soldiers are unemployed and disaffected.

"These individuals may have seen themselves as somewhat left behind in the process of the last 12 months," Coleman said. "This is an opening and potentially an opportunity where they can contribute to the end state that the coalition is here to create."

But civilian and military officials in Baghdad remain wary. Among their biggest worries has been the schedule imposed by Conway, which called for Marine units to begin withdrawing before the new force was fully formed. "There`s a lot of concern about the speed of implementation," the occupation authority official said. "We need to be very careful."

Coleman said Marine commanders opted to reposition U.S. forces right away because the Iraqi generals felt that doing so would encourage residents who had fled to return and evict insurgents who may have been holing up in their homes. "They said that some of the families would have been reticent to return until they see an Iraqi on the security perimeter," he said.
`A Noble Job`

Clad in their olive-green uniforms and toting AK-47 rifles, members of the Fallujah Brigade manning checkpoints leading into the city have been drawing honks and waves this week.

"We even get food and newspapers," said Maj. Majid Hamid, who is responsible for several checkpoints on the city`s western fringe. "The people like to see us here."

Hamid, who spent 17 years in the army and eventually rose to command an air-defense unit, said he heard a call from a mosque loudspeaker asking for people to join the brigade. He said he signed up for a simple reason: "I don`t want the American soldiers to enter our city again," he said. "That`s why I`m here."

Across town in the mayor`s office, hundreds of men swarmed about on Thursday trying to apply for jobs with the brigade. There were older men in officers` uniforms, former conscripts in khakis and young men in civilian clothes with no military experience. Many came looking not just to protect their city but for a job in a place where nobody else is hiring. The generals have not said how much they will pay their troops.

"I want to be a soldier again," said Yousef Ahmed, who spent three years in the Republican Guard before the war and now sits at home with nothing to do. "It is a noble job."

Nearby, former brigadier general Mohammed Jassim Zobai strutted around in his old uniform, which he had kept hidden in his closet for the past year out of fear that U.S. troops would discover it during a raid and haul him in for questioning. "Now I can wear this with pride," he said. "It is a wonderful day."

As of Thursday, leaders of the brigade said they had assembled more than 1,000 soldiers and would continue expanding the force. The troops have not yet begun patrols inside the city, but have been deployed along the outskirts, supposedly to prevent insurgents from entering or leaving.

But at Hamid`s checkpoint, enforcement was a lax affair. His soldiers failed to stop a single vehicle during an hour-long visit.

"We`re from this city," he said. "We know who is suspicious and who isn`t."

Marine commanders said they intended to test the new brigade`s success in combating the insurgency in a week or two, when they plan to send a convoy through the center of the city. "We`re going to see whether anything has changed," one officer said. "If not, we`ll just have to go back to where we were."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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NEWS ANALYSIS
Events in Iraq Test President as Leader
By Janet Hook
Times Staff Writer

May 7, 2004

WASHINGTON — The cascade of troubling developments in Iraq has posed an extraordinary test of President Bush`s leadership, forcing him to do several things that do not come easily to him.

Although the hallmarks of his administration have been loyalty, discipline and doggedness, Bush in recent days has openly criticized a top lieutenant, changed course on troop levels and funding in Iraq and been subjected to a new spate of dissent from fellow Republicans in Congress.

Bush`s rebuke of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for his handling of the Iraq prison scandal, delivered in private but deliberately made public by top White House aides, is a rare departure for a president who has labored to keep divisions within his administration behind closed doors.

Bush`s decision this week to seek more money for Iraq, considered overdue by some members of Congress, is seen by lawmakers as an admission that costs are growing more rapidly than had been expected.

And the controversy over the administration`s handling of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, including the Pentagon`s apparent delay in notifying Congress, has so infuriated lawmakers that more Republicans are second-guessing an administration that is seen as having little appetite for public dissent from its usual allies.

Bush`s leadership style — both in domestic and foreign policy — has produced a remarkably disciplined and focused White House for most of his tenure in office.

But now, some critics argue that his administration`s tightly held process of setting and sticking by policy — described by administration insiders in several recent books — has contributed to some of the problems it faces after the end of major combat in Iraq. Critics say administration planners gave short shrift to signs that stabilizing Iraq would require more time, money and manpower than they expected.

"It is not a deliberative or particularly rational process, and it`s seldom open to new information," said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. "That was responsible for the lack of planning for what was to follow the war."

"There is a general sense out there that the administration does not tolerate any points of view that are contrary to theirs," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who has argued that the U.S. should seek more international support for the Iraq mission. "Good, sharp critical thinking is absolutely imperative to good policy."

A senior administration official disputed the contention that the White House was rigid and closed to dissenting views or new information, citing the many course corrections the administration has made since the end of major combat in Iraq.

"I think actions speak louder than words. How the administration has pursued Iraq`s reconstruction and the transfer of sovereignty is by having a plan but having a flexible plan that does adapt to changing conditions on the ground," the official said.

Recent weeks have posed a steady stream of challenges to Bush that have tested his ability to keep his Iraq policy on course.

The release of photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused created a firestorm that he and his top lieutenants were ill-prepared to douse.

It came on the heels of weeks of continuing instability and outbursts of anti-Americanism in parts of Iraq. The U.S. military has struggled for a strategy to handle Fallouja, a hotbed of the insurgency. In April, 136 American troops died in Iraq — the deadliest month yet in the conflict.

Recent polls have suggested that these troubles are affecting the public`s assessment of Bush`s handling of the conflict in Iraq. A new Gallup survey — conducted as reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse were emerging — found that 42% of those surveyed approved of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, down from 48% in April and 61% in January.

No one knows for sure how this will affect Bush`s reelection prospects. But the events that seem to be swirling beyond his control undercut one of Bush`s strongest political assets: his persona as a strong leader.

"It would be better for him if it appeared more that he was ahead of events rather than reacting," said Charles O. Jones, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. "His great strength has been a positive image of his capacity to lead … of seeming to be in charge, not letting others determine what he`s going to do."

One important aspect of Bush`s leadership style is his tendency to remain detached from the nitty-gritty details of issues. Some analysts say that may have contributed to the fact that Bush, who had been told in January in general terms about an investigation of prisoner abuse, felt blindsided when he recently learned its full extent.

"He is not known for his curiosity, for pressing for new information," Mann said. "His antennae were not well positioned to pick it up."

Another important feature of Bush`s leadership has been the priority he puts on loyalty, discipline and presenting a united administration front. That has made his White House unusually free of leaks and unauthorized disclosure of internal divisions.

That is why it was so unusual that top administration aides made a point of letting reporters know Wednesday night that Bush had told Rumsfeld that he was unhappy with the defense secretary`s handling of the prison scandal. But the scolding only went so far: The next day, Bush reaffirmed his support for Rumsfeld.

"He`s an important part of my Cabinet, and he`ll stay in my Cabinet," Bush said Thursday.

Another hallmark of Bush`s presidency has been his tendency to consult Congress less often than many of its members, including those in his own party, would like.

"It`s been like pulling teeth getting information out of this Defense Department," said Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), chairman of the House subcommittee that handles Iraq reconstruction funding.

Although such complaints are common under all presidents, the Bush White House has been especially determined to expand presidential powers and limit the reach of the legislative branch. Against that backdrop, lawmakers, especially in the Senate, were infuriated that the Pentagon had apparently delayed informing Congress about the prisoner abuse scandal.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) said the scandal might have been averted if the Pentagon was not so resistant to congressional oversight.

"Many of us have asked to go to places, and one of the places we should have been visiting were the prisons to see how difficult it was for our troops to handle these prisoners," Shays said.

Hagel argues that Bush will have to be more open to input from congressional dissidents if the president wants to shore up his political support during the potentially rocky months ahead, as Iraq makes its transition to sovereignty.

"It`s more likely Congress will hang with you" if its members do not feel cut out of discussions, Hagel said. "These problems are going to get wider and deeper."

The White House denied that there was any effort to keep Congress in the dark.

"The president has made it clear he wants Congress to be kept informed," said an administration official who asked not to be named. "But I do think that for as long as I`ve lived in this town, Congress is rarely satisfied with its level of notification on any subject."

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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY
He Must Go ... Immediately
By Jeffrey H. Smith

May 7, 2004

The disclosure of the sickening photos of American soldiers subjecting Iraqi prisoners to sexual abuse is a seminal event in the U.S. war on terror and our efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East. It is very likely that these photographs will define the American role in Iraq just as the photographs of My Lai and the little girl running from the napalm attack defined our role in Vietnam.

The acts of a relative handful of American soldiers have demolished virtually the last shred of goodwill the United States enjoyed in the region and perhaps the world. Those photos feed the hatred of the U.S. among Muslims and fuel the suspicion that we are hypocrites about human rights and are there as occupiers.

There is, however, some hope of recovering our credibility and regaining some goodwill. But it will require the immediate resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

So far, President Bush has rejected this option; he said again Thursday that he was standing behind his longtime advisor.

But Bush and his administration are responsible for the actions of American forces in Iraq, the good, the bad and the ugly. They must now accept accountability for those actions.

By law, the chain of command runs from the president through the secretary of Defense to the combatant commanders in the field, in this case Gen. John Abazaid. A series of investigations is underway to determine what happened and who should be charged with crimes or be given administrative punishments, such as being relieved from command.

Regardless of the results of those investigations, this is a colossal command failure for which the secretary of Defense has particular responsibility.

That alone should be sufficient reason for Rumsfeld to resign. But there are also ample substantive reasons. For example, he bears a heavy responsibility for the now well-known intelligence failures that preceded the war.

He also bears a heavy burden for the woefully inadequate planning for the immediate postwar activity and the occupation.

On the positive side, Rumsfeld has done many good things during his tenure, including pressing the military to move rapidly to transform itself into a modern force to meet contemporary threats. But that`s not the point. The real question is whether he is prepared to accept responsibility and step aside so there can be some hope of developing and implementing a successful strategy to stabilize the situation in Iraq, build a decent Iraqi government and get U.S. forces home.

Rumsfeld has lost the confidence of his country. In World War II, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower knew what to do when Gen. George Patton slapped a soldier suffering from combat fatigue. He ordered Patton to publicly apologize to the soldier.

In parliamentary systems, when policies fail as badly as our Iraq policy has failed, ministers resign. That has not been American practice, but there is much to commend it.



Because Rumsfeld is so intimately associated with our most aggressive, and failed, policies toward Iraq, his departure would open up opportunities to rebuild our credibility, as well as to secure the help of the United Nations, a more enthusiastic response by our allies and a more rational response by the Iraqis.

Finally, as a moral matter, Rumsfeld should recognize that he bears a heavy burden of responsibility for the loss of so many precious American lives.

He should do the decent and honorable thing. He should apologize to the Iraqi people for the conduct of those soldiers and he should resign. Immediately.

*

Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the CIA, is an attorney in Washington, D.C. He also was general counsel to the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1984 to 1988.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Minivans Do Not Have Sex
But BMW owners have plenty. And Porsche owners don`t get enough. What`s a new-car buyer to do?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 7, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/05/07/notes050704.DTL

BMW drivers have more sex.

Astonishing, this headline, ripped straight from the pages of an upstart German car magazine for men called, quite Germanically, Men`s Car, so you know it must be authoritative and irrefutable and dorky and niche-y and almost entirely pointless. So it must be true.

Basically, the survey claims that Bimmer owners claim they get it on more times per week (2.2, to be far too exact) than Audi owners or Porsche owners or Mercedes owners or VW owners and much more than those poor sorry Volvo people, because, well, it`s a Volvo, fer Chrissakes, and don`t even mention Hondas and Toyotas and Hyundais, because everyone knows Hyundai people don`t have sex given how the very word "Hyundai" sounds like a noise you might make when you`re choking. On a bratwurst.

Just another twist on the age-old sex-and-cars connection, another link in the auto-erotic chain and more proof that humans (mostly men, arguably) and cars are forever a tandem notion when it comes to sex, all about knobs and stick shifts and pumping pistons and deep throbbing engines and the like. You know how it is.

We fetishize our autos like almost no other nation on Earth, often pay more attention to them than to our own children and happily ignore our own health as we spend the GNP of a medium-size country on trim and leather and silly spinning rims and giant chrome exhaust pipes and extra horsepower and double sunroofs and DVD players and ridiculous little spoilers that make your car`s butt look like a peacock.

All in an effort to, well, look cool. And attract mates. And copulate more. Which makes us feel more cool. So we can buy cooler cars. And have more sex. Unless you buy a minivan, in which case you have euthanized your libido and forcibly removed yourself from the sexual playground and have agreed never to have sex again. This much is a given.

Indeed, for the car-lovin` male, sex is key (When is it not? You might rightly ask, as your husband ogles the Weber barbecue catalog and dreams of grilling giant wienerschnitzels and slapping them into warm buns). And Bimmer owners clearly think they`re hotter and hunkier and sexier and therefore their cars must, by default, be more alluring and sexy and therefore they have more sex because they have cool cars and they have cool cars because they have more sex. See? It`s all connected.

I know this. I have to: I am right now in the market for a new car. I have been browsing and researching makes and models and have found tragically few that suit my finicky desire for a sexy classy premium well-designed small sporty car that`s not entry level and not a two-seater and not a wildly impractical sports car or something so stiff and uncompromising it would give my butt calluses on long cross-country drives that I never really take.

So as I browse, I am compelled to ask: What will this car say about me? About my dreams and ambitions and my hidden desire to be secreted away to a remote tropical island by teams of moist wood nymphs and plied with truffles and Astroglide and scotch? How will this vehicle represent my identity? And my lifestyle? And my inner being and my politics and my choice in nubile long-eyelashed callipygian female companions? And how much should I be slapped for thinking any of these things in the first place?

Vital questions, all. Totally irrelevant and totally silly and totally vain and thoroughly moot and, as the BMW survey proves, still completely valid in every single goddamn way. Benign narcissism. Whoo-hoo.

Because with cars, as with life, sex and sex appeal are mandatory. And right now, in BushCo`s pedantic and desperately asexual, violent, ass-clenched little world, open-thighed sexual energy is desperately needed. I am merely trying to contribute, to participate where it is needed most. And God knows, we are a country tragically awash in beige Honda Accords and limpid Toyota Camrys and impotent Ford Aerostars, trembly little Civics and wimpy Tercels and sterile Neons. It`s unfortunate, really.

Not to mention how we are all too overrun with the veritable army of knuckle-dragging thick-necked hairy-backed butt-ugly SUVs that millions of Americans have somehow been convinced are attractive or macho or badass or safe or somehow better than your average Subaru wagon when, in fact, they are merely silly and deadly and sort of sad.

And so as I seek an upscale but nimble sexy thing with a manual transmission (a fading tradition, alas) and a great stereo and a decent backseat for hauling groceries and for picking up the parents at the airport when they visit and for hauling the dog to the beach, I am also seeking something suitable for parking somewhere remote and starry skied with the S.O. and then having sex in the soft leather cushions of.

I must take this sex thing into consideration. I live in California, after all, where you are what you drive and you think how you steer and your worth is generally measured by how well you can score a rock-star parking spot in front of Ikea on a Sunday. It says so in the brochure.

I must take the Men`s Car survey a step further. Or, rather, one button lower. I wish to actually be able to have sex in my car, with a reasonable amount of comfort and a minimal amount of torn ligaments, and still be able to fit the thing into a diminutive San Francisco parking space.

This is not too much to ask. Even if I never actually fulfill this need, the ability to copulate in a vehicle -- or, I should say, a car`s general structural practicality for such wondrous acts -- is a present and alive factor in every true car purchaser`s mind. Or rather, it should be.

Admit it. Such an activity is in our genes, as well as our jeans. Every even remotely sexually knowledgeable person who`s ever been happily stickily sweatily pantingly groped in the tight backseat of a Camaro at some point in their lives (probably high school, probably smelling of Budweiser and Mary Jane, probably with either the Cure or Morrissey or Van Halen as aural backdrop) will look at any new car and casually check out the backseat and go, hmm, well, that`s good for passengers and good for groceries and the dog could sleep right there, and it gets good gas mileage and I love the color and the stereo cranks and all is fine and good.

And if I was naked and supine and the sunroof was open I suppose my leg could wrap around that seat and my arm could go there and I could use the headrest as leverage and then if s/he was positioned just right I could still reach the CD player with my toes.

Hey, it`s a tradition. Patriotism. Yay.
# Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
# Subscribe to Mark`s deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.

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. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

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Abuse photos undermine Bush`s religious rhetoric
Church leaders object to casting God on U.S. side
Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/07/MNGV66H4IU1.DTL

The abuse of Iraqi prisoners by some U.S. soldiers points to the danger of President Bush describing the occupation of Iraq and the war on terror as battles between forces of good and the "evildoers" of the world, religious leaders say.

Even before compromising photos of nude and hooded prisoners surfaced in the news media, some mainline Protestant and American Muslim leaders had criticized the president for a series of speeches that appeared to say that God was on the side of America.

"We question that kind of theology -- putting `good` on us and `evil` on the other,`` said Antonios Kireopoulous, the associate general secretary for international affairs at the National Council of Churches, the major ecumenical agency in the United States.

"Seeing these photos of prisoner abuse puts the lie to that,`` he said in an interview Thursday. "It shows the crack in that kind of thinking.``

In his remarks Thursday marking the annual National Day of Prayer, President Bush showed new caution in his use of religious language. "God is not on the side of any nation," he said during the White House gathering.

"He finds his children within every culture and every tribe,`` the president added.

Former President Ronald Reagan established the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer. While the day is described as an interfaith event, it is primarily promoted by conservative evangelicals. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush often spoke of his Christian faith in personal, self- help terms, revealing how a conversation with evangelist Billy Graham and a "born-again" conversion helped him overcome a drinking problem and lack of direction in his life.

But in the aftermath of the terror attacks, Bush`s religious rhetoric began to reflect what one noted theologian calls "American messianic nationalism.``

Rosemary Ruether, a professor of theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, said the president and many of his supporters on the Christian right speak of his administration as "messianic agents chosen by God to combat evil and to establish good.``

But that is not the impression given by the photos coming out of Iraq in the past week.

"They fly in the face of that kind of language,`` Ruether said. "There is something horrendous and contradictory in having all this torture come out of the very same prison used by Saddam Hussein`s torturers.``

At a White House news conference Thursday, Bush continued his defense of U.S. troops in Iraq, calling them "honorable, decent, loving people.``

Later in the day, the president seemed to go out of his way to answer theological critiques of his religious rhetoric during his National Day of Prayer remarks.

"Americans do not presume to equate God`s purposes with any purpose of our own,`` the president said. "God`s will is greater than any man, or any nation built by men. "

Those comments come one week after "Frontline" aired a PBS documentary on Bush titled "The Jesus Factor.``

In the program, a top leader in the Southern Baptist Convention says Bush told him that "God wants me to be president.``

Before that, journalist Bob Woodward quoted Bush as saying that he didn`t ask his father, the former president, whether he should invade Iraq, but that he turned instead to "a higher Father" for advice.

Earlier this week, the president`s God-talk was criticized at a national convention of Bush`s own United Methodist Church.

And at a news conference Tuesday in Pittsburgh, Bishop McKinley Young of the African Methodist Episcopal Church said Bush "is not the only one who hears from God.``

"We did not elect him as priest of the nation,`` Young said. "We elected him as president.``

The most controversial comments about God`s role in the Iraq war have come from Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the president`s deputy undersecretary for intelligence.

Referring to an encounter he had with a Muslim general in Somalia, Boykin said, "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.``

As for the war on terror, the general told a church group, "We are an army of God raised up for such a time as this."

The comments offended many Muslims, including Helal Omeira, the Northern California director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Omeira also has been shocked by the abusive photos coming out of Iraq in the past week, but has urged his fellow Muslims not to overreact.

"Blaming Americans for the actions of a few soldiers,`` he said, "is the same as blaming all Muslims for 9/11.``

E-mail Don Lattin at [e-mail].

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

[Joerver]

ohn Chuckman: `The thing with no brain`
Date: Friday, May 07 @ 09:07:13 EDT
Topic: Commander-In-Thief

By John Chuckman

I had an unpleasant moment on the day Bush decided to address "the Arab world." He is a man I cannot stand hearing, so when his voice comes on the radio, I always switch it off. Well, this time I was too far away and necessarily heard a couple of sentences, the ones starting with "People in Iraq must understand -- And they must understand -- ."

Must? The dumb arrogance of his words was stunning. On top of his poorly-chosen vocabulary, the man never apologized as I later learned from the Internet. Here was a commander talking about inexcusable brutality against helpless prisoners telling millions of angry people that they must understand. Here was a pathetically-inadequate man so overtaken by events that he felt the need to address "the Arab world," and he was telling them what they must understand.

Of course, his immense, brainless arrogance was transmitted in other ways. He addressed the "Arab world" without using the networks that many listen to. He wanted a safe outlet - safe, that is, for him and his known inability to handle any question more complex than "How`s Mom?" He deliberately avoided al Jazeerah, a network that asks tough questions and whose employees his soldiers have deliberately targeted and killed.



I wonder how many new terrorists Bush has created throughout the Middle East? Imagine the rage of young Arab men seeing pictures of other young Arab men with their heads in bags being used like the cast of a vile underground pornographic film? Some of the most terrible scenes undoubtedly have no photographs because the actors were almost certainly murdered. Even the smiling cretins from the bayous and backwoods of America seen in the published pictures know better than to be photographed committing murder.

For the most part, the armed forces of the United States do not hire the kind of clean-cut, Sir-spouting faces invariably used as their public-relations spokesmen. They need people who will be trained to kill and obey orders, and most of the killing is to be done in poor, distant places where the victims` voices are never heard in America.

Military recruiters fill a good part of their quotas from the many dismal backwaters and slums of the Republic. They fill them with the kind of people who otherwise might not be employed at all. They undoubtedly get a disproportionate share of the people who enjoy killing and inflicting pain, the kind of people found in every society on earth.

It doesn`t take a great effort of the imagination to anticipate what will happen when you give such people a few weeks training in killing and shining shoes and send them off to a remote land like Iraq, a place whose people they cannot understand, and about whom they know only the uninformed, provoking slogans of their President.

When a contemptible moral weakling like Bush sits comfortably in his leather chair and signs an order to invade a distant land, it is precisely the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison he necessarily releases.

Remember Lieutenant Calley and his boys murdering an entire village in Vietnam? That good old boy never experienced a moment`s meaningful justice. There was actually a brisk business for a while in Lieutenant Calley souvenirs, especially in the South.

There were several such massacres discovered in Vietnam, and one cannot doubt others went undiscovered. More disgusting still was the slitting of about twenty-thousand throats, mostly village officials, by the brave men of the Special Forces. But even their Nazi-like slaughter couldn`t compare to the work of the men flying jets, men still called war heroes in America, men who systematically bombed and napalmed countless towns, villages, and farms, producing enough victims to bury the city of Washington under a mountain of burnt flesh and gore, almost all of them civilians.

During that war, I once talked to an American veteran of World War II about the horror of what was going on. He told me a story. He was on a train with two other Americans and a German prisoner of war. One of the Americans suddenly put his automatic pistol to the head of the German and blew his brains out. He had no reason and just laughed after doing it.

As I`ve written before, I can never forget someone I knew in high school telling me about how he and his friends would pile into a car and drive down to the ghetto some nights, trying to "run down niggers" for the hilarious entertainment of seeing them run for their lives. I`ve always associated that painful memory with the men who later raped and murdered their way across Vietnam.

It is not that Americans are worse than other people, it is that they are the same. Yet they are encouraged constantly to think they are better - more advanced, more educated, more dedicated to democratic and human values. In the President`s words, "The America I know cares about every individual." Well, apart from the fact that those descriptions fit at best a minority of Americans, thinking that you are better than less fortunate people is a guaranteed method for producing injustice and horror.

I note that to this day even more hideous pictures of Iraqi children mangled and killed by American bombing are not published by the county`s main press. Many Americans are sentimental, and pictures of smashed and mangled children might produce results not desired by those running the country, but the prison pictures can be characterized as an exception, as the fault of a few bad people breaking the rules.

Well, what society doesn`t have such rules? There`s nothing special about America in officially opposing torture, humiliation, and murder. Even dictatorships publicly set such rules, but what society doesn`t violate the rules as soon as it sinks to the putrid business of war?

A French television station has obtained a three-and-a-half minute videotape from an American helicopter taken last December. There is a pilot and a military gunman on board, and their commanding officer talks to them on a radio. The American soldier shoots three unarmed Iraqis, one by one, as the commanding officer barks his directions to him. The third man attempts to hide, and then tries to crawl away, clearly wounded. The officer orders him killed, and he quickly is.

Remember the broadcast conversations of American pilots during the first Gulf conflict as they strafed and bombed miles of Iraqi soldiers caught in a traffic jam while retreating from Kuwait City? We heard the words, clearly spoken with the same sense of amusement I heard as a young man in Chicago, "It`s like shootin` fish in a barrel!" broadcast on television without any comment or criticism from broadcasters or politicians.

To this day, there is no examination into the disappearance of about three thousand prisoners in Afghanistan. A European documentary film strongly suggests American complicity in their mass murder out on the dessert by some of the more grotesque warlords with which the U.S. allied itself. The prisoners reportedly were driven, batch after batch, stuffed into vans, through a sun-baked wilderness, suffocating in the heat while American troops idly watched.

Don`t forget the words of Donald Rumsfeld concerning prisoners in Afghanistan. He said publicly that all foreign fighters captured should be killed or permanently walled away. Do you think that kind of leadership might influence the attitudes of creeps in the unwatched corridors of military prisons with people at their mercy?

Wars are an utterly filthy business, and, unless you are depraved, you don`t start them. Bush is responsible for what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan as surely as German leaders were responsible for the acts of their soldiers during World War II.



This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=16080

[Joerver]

Our illegal, immoral, meretricious war

Betrayed by images that reveal our racism

by Robert Fisk

07 May 2004 "The Independent" -- First, our enemies created the suicide bomber. Now, we have our own digital suicide bomber, the camera. Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi. Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner`s face. No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash.

The Muslim suicide bomber cries Allahu Akbar, God is great. And what does Specialist Charles Graner - Lynndie`s partner-in-crime, the man who appears in several of the torture photographs posing with Lynndie behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners - do back home in Pennsylvania. Why, his garden is plastered with a legend from the Book of Hosea, about sowing and righteousness and ploughing.

Could ever Islam have come so intimately into contact with the sexuality of the Old Testament? Could neo-conservative Christianity - Lynndie is also a churchgoer - have collided so violently, so revoltingly, so obscenely with Islam?

And who were the innocent in these vile photographs? The American torturers and humiliators? Or the Iraqi victims?

President Bush is fearful of Arab reaction to these pictures. Why? For a year now, Iraqis have been trying to tell journalists of the brutal treatment they are receiving at the hands of their occupiers. They don`t need these incriminating photographs to prove to them what they already know to be true.

But, in the history of the Middle East, these pictures already have the status of those most damaging snapshots of the Vietnam war: the police chief in Saigon executing his Vietcong prisoner, the naked girl burnt by napalm, the pile of bodies at My Lai. For Arabs, read Deir Yassin and the corpses piled in the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra and Chatila in 1982.

Not long after the occupation of Baghdad in April of last year, we got our hands on videotape of the whipping of Iraqi prisoners by Saddam`s security police.

I`m not sure which circle of hell the victims were enduring in the 45 minutes of sadism which I still have on one tape. They are whipped, they are kicked into sewers and they cower like dogs. And why were these war crimes filmed? I thought at first that it was intended for the enjoyment of Saddam or his disgusting son Uday. But now I realise the videos were taken so that the prisoners could be humiliated. Their suffering, their pathetic pleas for mercy were to be recorded - to add the final layer of degradation to their fate. And now I realise, too, that the pictures of the Iraqis so cruelly treated - so tortured - by the Americans, were taken for precisely the same reason.

Someone decided that the photos would be the final straw, the breaking point, the moment of capitulation for these young men. Make them simulate oral sex. Make them look at the penis of their best friend. Get a girl to admire their attempted erection. This was truly Saddamite in its perversity. So let`s, as the Americans say, get real. Who taught Lynndie and her boyfriend and the other American sadists of Abu Ghraib prison to do this?

I used to ask who taught the Syrian and Iraqi secret police to do this. The answer to the latter question was simple: the East German secret police. But the answer to the first question? Well, we have been told that there were "contracted" interrogators at Abu Ghraib.

I have reason to believe General Janis Karpinski, the luckless prison commander who is going to be dumped out of the army for interrogations over which she had no control, knew "outsiders" were questioning her inmates. She was never allowed into the interrogation room. And I can see why. So, no doubt, can she.

So who were these mysterious "interrogators"? If they were not CIA or FBI staff, who were they? Several names are already doing the rounds - journalists claim they have no final proof - and a number, I understand, hold more than one passport. Why were they brought to Abu Ghraib? Who brought them? How much are they paid? And who trained them?

Who taught them it was a good idea to get a girl to point at an Arab who was being forced to masturbate, to humiliate an Iraqi by hooding him with a girl`s lingerie?

We are not just talking "sick" here. We`re talking professionals. President Bush at last apologised yesterday to the Arab world for this filth - only, no doubt, because of the latest picture on the front of The Washington Post - but the constant, insistent refrain from US officers that these were a tiny group of unrepresentative Americans makes me very suspicious.

Lynndie and her boyfriend were not part of a "rogue" unit. They were told to do these despicable things. They were encouraged. This was an order from someone. Who? When can we see their pictures, their identity, their passports, their orders?

Yes, it`s part of a culture, a long tradition that goes back to the Crusades; that the Muslim is dirty, lascivious, unChristian, unworthy of humanity - which is pretty much what Osama bin Laden (now forgotten by Mr Bush, I notice) believes about us Westerners. And our illegal, immoral, meretricious war has now brought forth the images that betray our racism.

The hooded man with the wires attached to his hands has now become an iconic portrait, every bit as memorable as the picture of the second aircraft flying into the World Trade Centre. No, of course, we haven`t killed 3,000 Iraqis. We`ve killed many more. And the same goes for Afghanistan.

Copyright: The Independent

[rightnow]

16000000000000

bis november bleibt dein klasse thread pflichtlektüre.


cu
rightnow

[DOLCETTO]

congratulations Joerver

16.000 posts >>> dein service hier im board
ist untoppbar, checker

mit hohem Rüspekt,
greetz

[Joerver]

__________________

Aus gegebenen Anlass, ein Herr mit schmutzigen Händen.
Danke für die Glückwünsche. Und als kleine Aufmerksamkeit der Chambers des Tages. Chambers die Quelle alles Bushschen Handelns.

May 7

Building For Eternity

Which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it . . .
—Luke 14:28

Our Lord was not referring here to a cost which we have to count, but to a cost which He has already counted. The cost was those thirty years in Nazareth, those three years of popularity, scandal, and hatred, the unfathomable agony He experienced in Gethsemane, and the assault upon Him at Calvary— the central point upon which all of time and eternity turn. Jesus Christ has counted the cost. In the final analysis, people are not going to laugh at Him and say, "This man began to build and was not able to finish" ( Luke 14:30 ).

The conditions of discipleship given to us by our Lord in verses 26, 27, and 33 mean that the men and women He is going to use in His mighty building enterprises are those in whom He has done everything. "If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple" ( Luke 14:26 ). This verse teaches us that the only men and women our Lord will use in His building enterprises are those who love Him personally, passionately, and with great devotion— those who have a love for Him that goes far beyond any of the closest relationships on earth. The conditions are strict, but they are glorious.

All that we build is going to be inspected by God. When God inspects us with His searching and refining fire, will He detect that we have built enterprises of our own on the foundation of Jesus? (see 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 ). We are living in a time of tremendous enterprises, a time when we are trying to work for God, and that is where the trap is. Profoundly speaking, we can never work for God. Jesus, as the Master Builder, takes us over so that He may direct and control us completely for His enterprises and His building plans; and no one has any right to demand where he will be put to work.
http://www.gospelcom.net/rbc/utmost/

[Joerver]

t Starts at the Top. Hooah.

The following text is taken from remarks by President Bush

07/19/2002

THE PRESIDENT: As we prepare our military for action, we will protect our military from international courts and committees with agendas of their own.

AUDIENCE: Hooah.

THE PRESIDENT: You might have heard about a treaty that would place American troops under the jurisdiction of something called the International Criminal Court. The United States cooperates with many other nations to keep the peace, but we will not submit American troops to prosecutors and judges whose jurisdiction we do not accept.

AUDIENCE: Hooah. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Our nation expects and enforces the highest standards of honor and conduct in our military. That`s how you were trained. That`s what we expect. Every person who serves under the American flag will answer to his or her own superiors and to military law, not to the rulings of an unaccountable international criminal court.

AUDIENCE: Hooah. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: This new war is going to take some time. We`re in this for the long haul. After all, we defend our nation we love. We defend the values we uphold.

We love freedom. We love freedom; we love our freedoms, and we will defend them, no matter what the cost.

AUDIENCE: Hooah. (Applause.)

Full item here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/07/20020719.htm…

[Joerver]

________________

[Joerver]

Published on Friday, May 7, 2004 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Time for a Graceful Exit from Iraq
by Helen Thomas


WASHINGTON -- The United States is now at a fork in the road in its Iraq policy.

We can either try to save face for our mistaken military adventure by desperately hanging in there, no matter what.

Or we can try to save lives and gracefully depart -- troops and all -- by the end of the year.

The Bush administration`s rhetoric enthusiastically opts for "staying the course," whatever that means.

But there are abundant signs that we are slowly retreating.

Special note should be made of the fact that we are crawling back to the United Nations Security Council, which we so arrogantly shunned a year ago when we were determined to invade Iraq. We were touting our superpower military prowess in going it alone then, remember?

Now we are grateful that the United Nations is willing to help us out of the very tight corner we have embarrassingly trapped ourselves in, by sponsoring a caretaker government for Iraq to take over sovereignty by June 30.

The new governing body is being organized by Lakdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy for Iraq, with the purpose of paving the way for general elections in January.

Another sign we are retreating is the fact that U.S. policy-makers have decided not to try to capture Falluja and Najaf -- cities controlled by rebel Moslem militias. Apparently, the price in terms of human losses and what little remains of our tattered credibility in the Arab world would be too steep to justify a military invasion of the two cities.

And get this. We are establishing an Iraqi military unit -- the "Falluja Brigade" -- and have called back to arms some of Saddam Hussein`s formidable Republican Guard to help secure those cities for us. This is the same military force that we triumphantly disbanded a year ago. Will ironies never cease?

This is the 21st century`s rendition of the U.S. policy in Vietnam. When it became apparent that we were helplessly trapped there in an endless war to suppress an indigenous insurgency that had its roots in anti-colonialism, we adopted the policy of "Vietnamization."

That meant turning over the military mission to the South Vietnamese, despite no realistic expectation that they could cope with the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese army. But it allowed the U.S. military to begin its departure.

Now we have "Iraqization" of the security mission in Iraq. Good grief, the Bush administration has even come to the point where it is allowing former member of Iraq`s Baath party to regain their government jobs, a belated recognition that the occupation force needs their expertise.

Further proof that we are winding down is the gradual disintegration of the "coalition of the willing," which was an administration fantasy in the first place.

It seems more and more friendly nations are dropping out, among them Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic, with others barely hanging in there.

As administration officials like to say, "Those are the facts on the ground."

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the May 1 proclamation of the end of "major combat" in Iraq, the president stepped into the Rose Garden and spoke of freedom and democracy for the Iraqis and no more of Saddam`s "mass graves."

Against this background, the disclosure of American abuse of Iraqi prisoners couldn`t have come at a worse time for the Bush administration. The stunning scenes of prison atrocities were being shown by CBS` "60 Minutes-II" prove that old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, a truth that explains the administration`s heavy-handed photo censorship that has barred pictures of military caskets.

As for the prison brutality, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was "stunned by it all and it was clearly unhelpful in a fundamental way." That was an understatement.

The deplorable prison abuse and the mounting casualty toll may wake up Americans to ask a question about Iraq, a question that Bush and his administration have never clearly answered: Why are we there?

©1996-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Joerver]

_______________

[Joerver]

his article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040524&s=forum
How to Get Out of Iraq

by VARIOUS CONTRIBUTORS

[from the May 24, 2004 issue]

As the situation in Iraq goes from bad to worse, many Americans who opposed the war, including Nation editors and writers, understand that the country must find a way to extricate itself from the disaster they predicted. There is, however, no agreement or even clarity about such an exit strategy. Nor is any leadership on this crucial issue coming from the Bush Administration or as yet, alas, from the presumptive Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry. With a sense of obligation and urgency, The Nation, has asked a range of writers, both regular and new contributors to the magazine, for their ideas on America`s way out of Iraq. Some responded with short essays, while others were interviewed by contributing writer Scott Sherman, who transcribed and edited their remarks. We hope that what follows is the beginning toward a necessary end. And we invite readers to respond; we will publish an exchange in an upcoming issue. --The Editors

Jonathan Schell

In the debate over the Iraq war, a new-minted fragment of conventional wisdom has fixed itself in the minds of mainstream politicians and commentators. Whether or not it was right to go to war, we are told on all sides, the United States must now succeed in achieving its aims. In the words of John Kerry, "Americans differ about whether and how we should have gone to war, but it would be unthinkable now for us to retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals." Or as Senator Richard Lugar has said, "We are in Iraq and so we`re going to have to bring stability." Or, as Senator Joseph Biden, among so many others, has said, as if to put an end to all discussion, "Failure is not an option."

The argument is an irritating one for those of us who opposed the war, suggesting, as it does, that we must now sign up for the project ("stay the course") because the very mistake we warned against was made. But the problems are more serious than annoyance. Of course, no one wants to see anarchy or repression in Iraq or any other country. But what can it mean to say that failure is not an option? Has the decision to go to war exhausted our powers of thought and will? Must we surrender now to fate? "Failure" is in truth never an "option." The exercise of an option is a voluntary act; but failure is forced upon you by events. It is what happens when your options run out. To rule out failure is not a policy but a wish--and a wish, indeed, for omnipotence. Yet no one, not even the world`s sole superpower, is omnipotent. To imagine otherwise is to set yourself up for a fall even bigger than the failure you imagine you are ruling out.

And so decisions must still be made. It`s true that we opponents of the war cannot simply say (as we might like to do), "Please roll history back to March of 2003, and make your disastrous war unhappen." It`s also true that when the United States overthrew the Iraqi government it took on new responsibilities. The strongest argument for staying in Iraq is that the United States, having taken over the country, owes its people a better future. But acknowledgment of such a responsibility is only the beginning, not the end, of an argument.

To meet a responsibility to someone, you must have something on offer that they want. Certainly, the people of Iraq want electricity, running water and other material assistance. The United States should supply it. Perhaps--it`s hard to find out--they also want democracy. But democracy cannot be shipped to Iraq on a tanker or a C-5A. It is a homegrown construct, which must flow from the will of the people involved. The expression of that will is, in fact, what democracy is.

But today the United States seeks to impose a government on Iraq in the teeth of an increasingly powerful popular opposition. The result of this policy can be seen in the shameful attacks from the air on the cordoned-off city of Falluja, causing hundreds of casualties. The more the United States tries to force what it insists on calling democracy on Iraq, the more the people of Iraq will hate the United States, and even, perhaps, the name of democracy. There is no definition of an obligation that includes attacking the supposed beneficiaries` cities with F-16s and AC-130 gunships.

President Bush commented recently of the Iraqis, "It`s going to take a while for them to understand what freedom is all about." Hachim Hassani, a representative of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni Muslim group represented on the so-called Governing Council, might have been answering him when he commented to the Los Angeles Times, "The Iraqi people now equate democracy with bloodshed."

Under these circumstances, staying the course cannot benefit Iraq. On the contrary, each additional day that American troops continue to fight in Iraq can only compound the eventual price of the original mistake--costing more lives, American and Iraqi, disorganizing and pulverizing the society, and reducing, not fostering, any chances for a better future for the country.

There are still many things that the United States can do for the people of Iraq. Continued economic assistance is one. Another is to help international organizations assist (but only to whatever degree is wanted by the local people) in the transition to a new political order. But all combat operations should cease immediately and then, on a fixed and announced timetable, the American forces should withdraw from the country. In short, the United States, working with others, should give Iraqis their best chance to succeed in their own efforts to create their own future.

According to the most recent Times/CBS poll, the public, by a margin of 48 percent to 46 percent, has decided, with no encouragement from either of the two major-party presidential candidates or from most media commentators, that the war was a mistake. Forty-six percent have decided that the American troops should be withdrawn. They are right. The United States should never have invaded Iraq. Now it should leave.

The Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, he is the author, most recently, of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (Metropolitan).

Howard Zinn

Any "practical" approach to the situation in Iraq, any prescription for what to do now, must start with the understanding that the present US military occupation is morally unacceptable. Amnesty International, a year after the invasion, reported: "Scores of unarmed people have been killed due to excessive or unnecessary use of lethal force by coalition forces during public demonstrations, at checkpoints and in house raids. Thousands of people have been detained [estimates range from 8,500 to 15,000, often under harsh conditions] and subjected to prolonged and often unacknowledged detention. Many have been tortured or ill-treated and some have died in custody." The prospect, if the occupation continues, whether by the United States or by an international force (as John Kerry seems to be proposing), is of continued suffering and death for both Iraqis and Americans.

The history of military occupations of Third World countries is that they bring neither democracy nor security. The laments that "we mustn`t cut and run," "we must stay the course," our "reputation" will be imperiled, etc., are exactly what we heard when at the start of the Vietnam escalation some of us called for immediate withdrawal. The result of staying the course was 58,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese dead.

The only rational argument for continuing on the present course is that things will be worse if we leave. In Vietnam, they promised a bloodbath if we left. That did not happen. It was said that if we did not drop the bomb on Hiroshima, we would have to invade Japan and huge casualties would follow. We know now and knew then that this was not true. The truth is, no one knows what will happen if the United States withdraws. We face a choice between the certainty of mayhem if we stay, and the uncertainty of what will follow if we leave.

What would be a reasonably good scenario to accompany our departure? The UN should arrange, as US forces leave, for an international group of peacekeepers and negotiators from the Arab countries to bring together Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and work out a solution for self-governance that would give all three groups a share in political power. Simultaneously, the UN should arrange for shipments of food and medicine, from the United States and other countries, as well as engineers to help rebuild the country.

The one thing to be avoided is for the United States, which destroyed Iraq and caused perhaps a million deaths through two invasions and ten years of sanctions, to play any leading role in the future of that country. In that case, terrorism would surely flourish. It is for the United States to withdraw from Iraq. It is for the international community, particularly the Arab world, to try to reconstruct a nation at peace. That gives the Iraqi people a chance. Continued US occupation gives them no chance.

Author, in 1967, of Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, and, later, A People`s History of the United States.

William R. Polk

Lakhdar Brahimi`s proposals are interesting, perhaps even hopeful, but they pose almost as many problems as they address. The Shiites are worried that he is attempting to undercut their claims on power, and after the siege of Falluja the Sunnis will probably worry that he is, inadvertently or not, acting as a cover for American attempts to hang on to control. They have reason to worry.

The world press has reported that very little real authority will be handed over to the Iraqis or the United Nations. If the UN is to be of any value in pacifying Iraq, it cannot simply be used by the United States as a fig leaf. It must show Iraqis that it is truly independent, and so a worthwhile step forward for them. For all that, some form of UN trusteeship appears to be the best answer now available. It seems to me that the best form of trusteeship is minimal, not much more than attempting to keep order. Anything more will certainly raise fears in Iraq that outsiders--the United States or the UN--really intend to stay. That will create the only unity there now is in Iraq, hostility to foreigners.

Responsible for planning Middle Eastern policy at the State Department, 1961-65 and then a University of Chicago professor of history. His books include The United States and the Arab World and The Elusive Peace.

John Brady Kiesling

President Bush promised the Iraqi people and the international community that our military victory would make Iraq a peaceful, democratic state, a model for its neighbors and a bastion against terrorism. If this was our war aim, our victory did not achieve it. The resistance movement has pinned down our soldiers and contractors as enemy occupiers. If our troops pull out, there will be civil war among a dozen rival factions. If our troops stay, in redoubled numbers to suppress the violence, their hulking presence will doom each future Iraqi government to illegitimacy and failure. So let us consider the alternatives to victory.

In the end a fractured Iraq can be held together only by a man wrapped, like George Washington or Ho Chi Minh, in the legitimacy that derives from successful armed struggle. We should note the ease with which a scruffy young cleric united Sunnis and Shiites against the US presence. A victorious Secretary Rumsfeld could not impose Ahmad Chalabi. However, a retreating US military can designate Iraq`s liberator. We must select the competent Iraqi patriot to whom we yield ground while bleeding his competitors. There will be casualties and disorder, no matter how brilliantly we orchestrate our withdrawal. But the overwhelming majority of Iraqis will rally around any man who claims to drive us out, and elections would validate his relatively bloodless victory.

The man on a white horse can bring the UN back as invited guests rather than as our despised surrogates. His police will enforce the law, when ours cannot. His debts will be forgiven, when ours would not. America must swallow its resentment and keep a measure of control by doling out the money to keep the Iraqi state functional. Ten billion dollars a year will buy more counterterrorism cooperation than a military occupation that costs five times as much. And we will let the Iraqis do the work. The most virtuous Halliburton employee is ten times more expensive than the most corrupt Iraqi. Democracy and human rights may take a generation, but our defeat will convince a resentful and fatalistic Middle East that change is possible.

The Kurds, admittedly, will resist any weakness in their US ally. Our parting gift to them will be the southern border for an autonomous Kurdish entity. The price will be US cooperation with Turkey to extort a semblance of respect for the Iraqi central government and the rights of Arab and Turkmen minorities.

We were defeated once, in Vietnam, and the dominoes did not fall. We remained the leader of the free world, sadder but wiser. The ignorance and megalomania that brought us into Iraq are far more dangerous to US security and prosperity than would be the symbolic military defeat that gets us out.

A career diplomat who served in US embassies in Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Athens and Yerevan. In February 2003 he resigned from the Foreign Service in protest against Bush Administration foreign policy.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

The United States faces two critical issues in Iraq. First is the necessity of genuinely engaging the international community in stabilizing the security situation, supporting the new Iraqi government after June 30 and rebuilding the country`s infrastructure and economy. Crucially, this does not mean simply brokering a face-saving resolution and handing off to the UN, only to blame the UN later when Iraq slides into chaos or worse. On the contrary, it means clearly defining a UN mandate, to be supported by NATO and other regional organizations, and then committing the human and material resources necessary to carry out that mandate. Handing off to the UN without such support is an abdication of responsibility and an admission of failure.

Second is accepting that a genuine democracy in Iraq will bring a genuine majority to power. The way to protect minorities in a democratic Iraq is through federalist provisions and explicit guarantees of minority rights. In principle, even a Shiite theocracy can abide by such guarantees. The United States has proclaimed the principles of democracy and self-determination and must now abide by whatever results are consistent with the protection of basic international human rights.

Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.

Noam Chomsky

Occupying armies have responsibilities, not rights. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner determined by the occupied population. It follows that the orders issued by proconsul Bremer are illegitimate and should be rescinded, including those designed to place the economy effectively in the hands of Western (mostly US) banks and MNCs, and the 15 percent flat tax, which, apart from its injustice, bars the way to desperately needed social spending and reconstruction. Without economic sovereignty, prospects for healthy development are slight and political independence verges on formality.

It also follows that Washington should end the machinations to insure its long-term military presence and control of Iraqi security forces, in defiance of the will of Iraqis, who call for Iraqis to control security, according to Western-run polls, which record only minuscule support for the occupying military forces and their civil counterparts (the CPA) or the US-appointed Governing Council. With a decision, however reluctant, to transfer authentic sovereignty to Iraqis--not just the traditional facade for Great Power domination--there will be no justification for the huge diplomatic mission, apparently the world`s largest, announced by the occupiers.

Such steps entail abandonment of plans to establish the first secure military bases in a client state at the heart of the world`s major energy reserves, a powerful lever of world control, as has been understood for sixty years, and a means to subordinate the region more fully to US interests--and the prime motive for the invasion, according to Western polls in Baghdad, though some agreed with articulate Western opinion that the goal was to establish democracy (1 percent) or to help Iraqis (5 percent).

A large majority of Americans believe that the UN, not the United States, should take the lead in working with Iraqis to transfer authentic sovereignty as well as in economic reconstruction and maintaining civic order. That is a sensible stand if Iraqis agree, as seems likely, though the General Assembly, less directly controlled by the invaders, is preferable to the Security Council as the responsible transitional authority. Reconstruction should be in the hands of Iraqis, not delayed as a means of controlling them, as Washington has indicated. Reparations--not just aid--should be provided by those responsible for devastating Iraqi civilian society by cruel sanctions and military actions; and--together with other criminal states--for supporting Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities and beyond. That is the minimum that honesty requires.

His most recent books are A New Generation Draws the Line; New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; 9-11; Understanding Power; On Nature and Language; The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?; Chomsky on Democracy and Education; Middle East Illusions; and Hegemony or Survival.

Stephen F. Cohen

For the sake of American lives, values and real security, as well as peace and stability in the increasingly explosive Middle East, the United States must find a way to withdraw its military forces from Iraq as soon as possible. And do so with some vestige of, yes, honor--not for the bogus reason of international "credibility" but to prevent a malignant who-lost-Iraq politics in our own country.

The only near-term and honorable way out is by linking a firm US commitment to a phased military withdrawal to an Iraqi popular election for a representative national assembly that would itself, not the occupation authorities or its appointees, choose an interim government, adopt a constitution for the country and then schedule elections for the new permanent institutions of government.

For Iraqis, only such a directly elected assembly can have legitimacy and thus the "sovereignty" that the Bush Administration is desperately trying to manufacture and "transfer." Do not mistake this approach for the Administration`s afterthought of "building democracy in Iraq," which would mean resolving all that tormented country`s internal conflicts, and for which America utterly lacks both the power and wisdom even to attempt. It means instead giving the Iraqis an opportunity to do it themselves. (Whether or not they can is their destiny, not ours.) Considering the devastating consequences of an unnecessary American war, providing such a democratic opportunity is both the least and most we can now do. And having done so, the United States can declare, paraphrasing sage but ignored advice given during the Vietnam War, "Mission accomplished. We`re going home."

For this democratic exit to work, the United States must, as the otherwise vacuous refrain goes, "stay the course," but a course based on four promises that must be kept. American-led occupation authorities will permit free and fair elections to the national assembly, within the next six to nine months, under the auspices of the UN or another international body. They will accept the electoral outcome even if it is an anti-American majority. Meanwhile, the United States will prepare Iraqi security forces but begin its military withdrawal once the interim government is functioning. And Washington will continue to provide funds for the reconstruction of Iraq as long as the new Iraqi authorities generally abide by their democratic origins.

We must flatly dismiss American proponents of a permanent US garrison in Iraq--for the sake of oil, Israel, some "anti-totalitarian" crusade, or empire--but there still may be three objections to this relatively quick and honorable exit strategy. One is that the American occupation should not end until there is stability in Iraq, because the consequences will be chaos and violence. But this admonition ignores the historical lessons of occupations elsewhere and of the current situation in Iraq: There can be no stability until foreign occupation ends, as is clear from the chaos and violence unfolding today. The second objection is that anti-American "extremists" will disrupt the election for the national assembly. But if such Iraqis really want America gone, they will support an electoral process that leads to a US withdrawal.

The third objection may be heartfelt: We did not go to war, and lose lives, to risk the advent of another anti-American regime in Baghdad. Yes, the Bush Administration went to war to eliminate Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction, and when there were none, it said the war was really about democracy. Now this afterthought, whatever the political (or economic) outcome, is the only way out and our last chance to be remembered as liberators. The alternative is indefinite colonial-style rule, growing and increasingly violent Iraqi resistance, and an ever-more brutal and self-corrupting American occupation--and eventually an even more anti-American regime that will come to power by means other than the ballot box.

A professor of Russian studies and history at New York University. His latest book is Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.

Ray Close

The first thing we have to adjust to is the reality that nationalism is the most significant force in Iraq today. It is replacing the genuine feelings of gratitude that many Iraqis had toward the United States immediately following their liberation. We have always had a set of objectives--based on neocon ideology, not Iraqi hopes--which are unattainable because they offend the spirit of Iraqi nationalism.

One, we want long-term strategic military bases. Two, we count on retaining significant influence over Iraqi oil policy. Three, we favor unrestricted foreign investment in a country that has a history of intense hostility toward alien ownership of the country`s economic enterprises and natural resources. Four, we expect Iraq to support America`s role in the Middle East peace process even when it would mean aligning Iraqi policy with that of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon. Failure to achieve those four objectives will appear to both Republicans and Democrats to be a failure of Bush`s overall Iraq policy. But the Administration has already boxed itself in to the point where there is no way it can modify those objectives to meet reality.

There has to be regime change in Washington. It`s the only way to solve the Iraq problem.

Former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, he served for twenty-seven years as an "Arabist" for the agency.

Phyllis Bennis

One year after President Bush`s announcement of the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, Washington`s drive to empire faces new and serious challenges. One year to the day after US military forces famously pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein, the front page of the Washington Post featured a photograph of a US soldier pulling down another potent symbol--this one a poster of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr--from a pillar in the same Baghdad square.

The US-led occupation of Iraq is failing, and ending the Bush Administration`s disaster can only begin with ending that occupation--not with a nominal "transfer of power" that leaves 130,000 US troops still occupying Iraq, but with an actual end to the occupation. Unlike in Vietnam, the constant barrage of "we`re building democracy in Iraq" rhetoric may have made it impossible for Bush to "declare victory and get out." Instead, ending the occupation will likely mean admitting that the war was wrong, that "staying the course" is only making things worse and that hundreds of young American and coalition soldiers as well as thousands of Iraqi civilians are paying an unacceptable price.

The end of the US occupation will not alone, however, mean the end to Iraq`s crisis. Devastated after years of crippling economic sanctions, internal repression and US assaults that destroyed its governing capacity, Iraq will require significant international help. But only after full US withdrawal can serious thought be given to how the global community might--indeed must--support Iraq`s post-occupation efforts to reclaim its sovereignty.

The withdrawal and the dissolution of the US-imposed "Governing Council" will make possible the entry into Iraq of an international team, led by the United Nations and backed by the key regional alliances--the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference--to provide protection and support. Accountable to whatever Iraqi authority emerges after the occupation ends, that team should be made up primarily of technocratic experts--in elections, in development, in economic planning, etc.--and only secondarily include a military self-defense and security component.

Most Iraqi military resistance is aimed directly at the occupation; an international assistance mission that does not control Iraqi territory, does not impose laws on Iraq, does not hand Iraqi assets over to corporate profiteers and does not claim Iraq`s oil as its own will almost certainly be welcomed by a majority of the Iraqi people. UN credibility will be severely diminished if, with or without a new Security Council resolution, the organization sends personnel, funds or other assistance to Iraq to bolster, legitimize or "internationalize" the US occupation. Only after the US occupation ends will UN involvement in Iraq reflect its international legitimacy.

Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today`s UN.

Mansour Farhang

Iran and the United States both have competing ambitions and common concerns in Iraq. Tehran favors popular sovereignty, political equality and majority rule in Iraq, the exact opposite of its own governing system. This emanates from the fact that the Shiites of Iraq, the Iranian theocrats` co-religionists, constitute 60 percent of Iraq`s population. The Bush Administration, in contrast, advocates democracy in abstraction but fears majority rule in practice. What favors Iran in this competition is the fact that only the Shiite clerics possess the capacity for mass mobilization in Iraq. During the terror of Saddam Hussein, more than 200,000 Iraqi Shiites took refuge in Iran. Today most Iraqi Shiites are grateful to Iranians and perceive them as allies. Washington is aware of this sentiment and wants Iran to use its influence to contain the radical anti-occupation elements in the Shiite communities.

Iran`s fears are another story. The Iranian authorities, like most people in the region, are convinced that Ariel Sharon and his neoconservative allies in Washington want to ignite a civil war between the Shiites and Sunnis of Iraq, with the Kurds remaining on the sidelines. Such a war would likely engulf almost the entire region. Iran would back the Shiites, while Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf would aid the Sunnis. Al Qaeda and the pro-Saddam Baathists, like the Likud government in Israel, view such a conflict as an advantage for their competing objectives. Iran`s reigning mullahs are convinced that the United States has nothing to gain and much to lose from such a conflict, but they believe the Bush Administration can be manipulated to pave the way for it.

The key to preventing this calamity is for the United States and Iran to start negotiating their differences and support a UN initiative to establish a federal system consisting of autonomous entities for the Shiites, the Kurds and the Sunnis. Iran`s theocrats have used their confrontation with the United States to create crises for the purpose of justifying cruel treatment of their democratic opponents. Normalization of US-Iran relations can contribute to both the goal of peace in Iraq and the cause of democracy in Iran.

Professor of politics, Bennington College.

Sherle R. Schwenninger

The most commonly proposed Democratic alternative to the Administration`s policy in Iraq--turning over political authority to the United Nations and getting more countries to provide more troops and money--is well intentioned but lacks seriousness, for two reasons.

First, it is not realistic to expect the UN to assume such responsibility without more resources, without assurances from the United States about security and without some control over the conduct of American military strategy. Likewise, it is not realistic to expect countries like Egypt, France, Germany, Russia, India and Pakistan, which opposed the war, to now commit substantial troops to Iraq in the middle of a major insurgency, especially without a larger shift in US policy. For both domestic and international reasons, these countries do not want to be seen as instruments of what they consider to be a misguided American policy toward the Middle East in general.

Second, the Democratic alternative does not go far enough to change the political dynamic from one of occupation (albeit a more legitimate one) to one of Iraqi sovereignty. After all, the UN itself has been a target of the insurgents, and there now seems to be a general mistrust and impatience with any foreign control over Iraq`s future. Any proposal to stabilize Iraq must restore a sense of ownership to the Iraqi people as well as real power.

For these reasons, we need to think in bolder terms about what we can offer to the international community and to the Iraqi people in order to gain their active support for a plan that would transfer authority to the UN and to an Iraqi interim government. There would need to be three elements to this grand bargain. The first would be the promise of substantial resources to the UN, not only for this Iraqi state-building effort but also for comparable efforts in the future, including resources that would increase the capacity of the UN to provide more of its own security in the future for such missions. Unless the United States can demonstrate to the other major stakeholders in the UN that its attitude toward the organization has changed, it is unlikely to elicit more than a token response.

The second element of the grand bargain must be the internationalization of other elements of US Middle East policy that affect the political dynamic inside Iraq. It makes no sense whatsoever for other countries to commit money and security forces to Iraq as long as the United States continues to condone Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and pursues a hostile policy toward Iran and Syria. At a minimum, this means a shift in American policy toward nonbelligerence toward Iran and Syria, a commitment to a clear timetable for a Palestinian state and a commitment to a true no-weapons-of-mass-destruction zone in the Middle East, which means a commitment to confront Israel over its possession of nuclear weapons.

The third and final element would need to be a quick turnover of true sovereignty to the Iraqi people, however ill prepared they may now seem for this task. At a minimum, any interim government must have control over its own security forces and economy. To demonstrate that Iraqis own their own economy, we might consider the idea proposed by Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, which would give every Iraqi an ownership stake in the country`s oil wealth. If, for example, on June 30 every Iraqi received $300 as a distribution of future profits from the nation`s oil wealth, it might change dramatically the political dynamics within Iraq, insuring a more peaceful transition to full statehood.

But unless we are willing to think more boldly along these lines, the wiser course may be for the United States to withdraw its troops and disengage more generally from the region, allowing the Iraqi people to sort out their future, with the understanding that there may be a long period of instability, but at least the United States would not be a contributing factor to that instability and no longer a target of Arab anger and frustration.

Senior fellow, World Policy Institute at the New School University.

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Diese Woche mußte der NeoCon im Schrank bleiben und auch Angela Merkel http://www.zeit.de/2004/20/AMerkelhat auch ihre Begeisterung für das Kriegsspielen stark eingschränkt, nachdem sich die Menschenabschlachterei im Irak zu Folterorgien, eines Saddam würdig, ausgeweitet hat.

0/2004
http://www.zeit.de/politik/
Außer Kontrolle

Bilder gefolterter Iraker erschüttern Amerikas Glauben an sich selbst. Hat George Bush die Kraft, die zerstörten Werte wieder aufzurichten?

Von Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff

Washington

Natürlich sind nun Scham und Empörung riesig. Seit 1968, seit dem Massaker von My Lai, hat wahrscheinlich kein einzelnes Ereignis das Selbstbild der Amerikaner so beschädigt wie die Veröffentlichung der Folterbilder aus dem Irak. Die Abscheu vereint Kriegsgegner und Kriegsbefürworter. „Unamerikanisch, total unamerikanisch“, ruft Madeleine Albright aus, die frühere Außenministerin. Das klingt wie ein Echo jenes Präsidenten, den sie lieber heute als morgen aus dem Amt jagen möchte. „So ein Verhalten“, sagt George Bush, „spiegelt nicht die Natur des amerikanischen Volkes wider.“ Ungezügelt heult die US-Presse auf. „Verbrecher, amerikanische Verbrecher“, hätten dafür gesorgt, dass „diese Geschichte im Nahen Osten zu einem Mythos werden wird, der unser aller Leben überdauern dürfte. Er wird uns verfolgen und helfen, Terroristen zu rekrutieren.“ Wann hat man je so einen Ton in der New York Post gelesen, Amerikas rechtspopulistischem Pendant zur Bild? Oder The New Republic, linksliberal und für den Krieg: Die Bilder symbolisierten „den totalen Betrug an allem, was wir im Irak erreichen wollten“. Im Internet machen sich US-Soldaten Luft. Einer nennt sich „Stryker“: „Ihr habt mich persönlich geschändet und alle, die dieselbe Uniform tragen. Sie ist das Bindeglied zwischen jenen, die dienen, einst gedient haben oder künftig dienen werden. Diese Uniform trägt das Blut derer, die im Kampf für ihr Land gefallen sind. Aber ihr habt diese Uniform – meine Uniform! – beschmiert mit den Exkrementen der Barbarei.“ So klingt es, wenn die eigenen Leute eines der großen Tabus des Westens verletzen.

Kopflose Menschenpakete, namenlose Fleischhaufen

Am Wochenende hat der Skandal noch mal eine neue Dimension erhalten. Seymour Hersh, eine Legende des investigativen Journalismus, der schon das Massaker von US-Soldaten an vietnamesischen Zivilisten in My Lai zu enthüllen half, veröffentlicht im New Yorker den geheimen Untersuchungsbericht des Heeres. Darin wird deutlich: Was zwischen Oktober und Dezember 2003 im Gefängnis Abu Ghraib nahe Bagdad geschah, wussten Armeeführung und Pentagon längst. Sie versuchten, es zu beschweigen und öffentlich sichtbare Konsequenzen zu vermeiden. Das interne Dossier beschreibt eine ganze Serie von „sadistischen, himmelschreienden und mutwilligen Verbrechen“. Und zwar: Häftlinge mit „phosphorhaltiger Flüssigkeit“ übergießen; mit „Besen und Stuhl schlagen“; an „die Zellenwand werfen“; mit „einem Leuchtstab“ sexuell misshandeln; vom „Hund beißen“ lassen. Alles durch „detaillierte Zeugenaussagen“ und den Fund „extrem anschaulicher fotografischer Beweismittel“ belegt. Dem Bericht werden die Aufnahmen wegen ihres „äußerst sensiblen Charakters“ nicht beigelegt. Sie finden aber ihren Weg ins Fernsehen.

Diese Bilder erzählen von einem Dauer-exzess. Zu sehen sind zu amorphen Bergen aufgeschichtete Körper, die nackten Gliedmaßen ineinander verschlungen. Kapuzen machen die Menschenpakete kopflos und identitätslos. Fleischhaufen, die nichts sein sollen als namenlose Materie. Es sind pornografische Unterdrückungsszenen. Ein Bild zeigt die junge Gefreite Lynndie England, wie sie grinsend auf die Genitalien eines offenbar zur Masturbation gezwungenen Häftlings zeigt. Ein Zeuge berichtet: „Ich sah zwei nackte Häftlinge. Der eine masturbierte, während der andere mit offenem Mund vor ihm kniete. Ich sah den Unteroffizier Frederick auf mich zukommen und hörte ihn sagen: ,Schau, was diese Tiere tun, wenn man sie auch nur zwei Sekunden alleine lässt.‘ Ich hörte die Gefreite England rufen: ,Er wird hart.‘“

Das Pentagon will nun den Schaden begrenzen. Es lässt Brigadegeneral Mark Kimmitt in jedes Mikrofon sagen, bloß eine „kleine Minderheit“ der Wärter habe sich so abscheulich verhalten. Nur in einem Gefängnis, nur in einem Gebäudeblock. Es habe sich „ganz klar“ um „Handlungen Einzelner“ gehandelt. Und um die werde man sich – in den Worten von George Bush – „kümmern“. Die ganze Wachmannschaft sei schon ausgetauscht, weitere Ermittlungen seien eingeleitet. Ein Einzelfall, quasi schon bereinigt.

Doch diese Katzenwäsche stellt die amerikanische Öffentlichkeit nicht zufrieden. Wenn Aufseher während der Misshandlungen für Fotos posieren, „legt das nahe, dass sie von Vorgesetzten nichts zu fürchten hatten“, meint Kenneth Roth, Geschäftsführer von Human Rights Watch. Schon der Bericht des Pentagon spricht von „systemhaften“ Problemen und einem „Zusammenbruch der Kommandostruktur“. Einer der Soldaten beschwerte sich bei Vorgesetzten. Doch nichts geschah. Ein Unteroffizier schrieb am 18. Dezember 2003 per E-Mail nach Hause: „Wir haben eine hohe Erfolgsrate mit unserem Stil. Normalerweise brechen wir die Häftlinge schon nach wenigen Stunden.“ Er habe einige der Methoden infrage gestellt, aber zur Antwort erhalten: „So will das der Militärgeheimdienst.“

Eigentlich unterstand das Gefängnis dem Heer. Doch die damalige Kommandeurin, Brigadegeneralin Janis Karpinski, hat am Wochenende behauptet, „die Führung des Militärgeheimdienstes“ habe die Kontrolle inne gehabt. Der Untersuchungsbericht spricht vom Wunsch der Geheimdienstler, die Häftlinge vor dem Verhör „aufzuweichen“ und dafür zu sorgen, dass sie „eine schlechte Nacht haben“. Manche Wärter hörten später: „Gut gemacht.“ Offenbar bestand erheblicher Druck, Aufständische zu finden oder Kontakte zu al-Qaida aufzudecken. Karpinski, die nicht im Gefängnis stationiert war, will von der Folter nichts mitbekommen haben. Sie ist inzwischen vom Dienst suspendiert und findet, sie werde „zum Sündenbock“ erklärt. Einer ihrer Offiziere schreibt in einer E-Mail, „die Führungsprobleme“ seien viel „höher anzusiedeln als auf der Ebene des Brigadegenerals“. Worum es eigentlich geht, hat der demokratische Senator Joseph Biden formuliert: „Ich wünschte mir, jemand würde sagen: ,Wir werden die Sache untersuchen – und wenn die Spur bis ins Pentagon führt.‘“

Diese Frage stößt ins Herz des Krieges gegen den Terror vor. „Um den Terror zu besiegen, ist Gewalt notwendig, Zwang, Geheimhaltung, Irreführung, vielleicht sogar die Verletzung von Rechten“, schreibt Harvard-Professor Michael Ignatieff im Magazin der New York Times. Und fragt: „Wie können Demokratien zu solchen Mitteln greifen, ohne die Werte zu zerstören, für die sie stehen?“ Die Antwort gibt er selbst. Rechtsverletzungen seien nur gerechtfertigt, um Schlimmeres zu verhüten: „Die Frage ist nicht, ob wir uns auf kleinere Übel einlassen, sondern wie wir sie unter Kontrolle freier Institutionen halten.“ Das Problem ist, dass die regierenden Konservativen so einen Mittelweg ablehnen. Vor allem Justizminister John Ashcroft, schreibt Ignatieff, weigere sich zu glauben, dass „irgendetwas, das der Verteidigung Amerikas dient, von Übel sein kann“.

Amerikas gegenwärtige Regierung steht ganz in der Tradition einer Politik des reinen Herzens. Sie ist, wie die Mehrheit ihrer Landsleute, von der Unschuld der Nation überzeugt. Sie halten die auf Anstand und Recht gegründeten Vereinigten Staaten für unfähig, Schaden anzurichten, solange die Nation ihren Instinkten gehorcht. Diese Idee, daran erinnert der Philosoph Jedediah Purdy, stamme aus der Vorstellungswelt der englischen Siedler, die ihre Kolonien in einem Bund mit Gott wähnten. Hierin wurzele die Kultur der moralischen Gewissheit und auch der Unwille, sich im Kampf gegen „das Böse“ Bindungen aufzuerlegen.

Wohin die Suche nach Ermessensfreiheit führen kann, wird schon wenige Wochen nach dem Anschlag auf das World Trade Center deutlich. Am 21. Oktober 2001 schreibt die Washington Post vom „Dilemma des FBI“. Die Ermittler seien „zunehmend frustriert“ über das Schweigen jener eilig Verhafteten, die der Zusammenarbeit mit dem Terrornetzwerk al-Qaida verdächtigt werden. „Einige Beamte“ sagten nun, die „traditionellen Menschrechte“ müssten „zurückgestellt werden“, wolle man „Informationen über den 11. September und die Pläne der Terroristen extrahieren“. Ein anonymer Ermittler meint, man erreiche so langsam „einen Punkt“, an dem man „keine andere Wahl“ habe, als „Druck auszuüben“. Wenige Tage später lautet die Überschrift einer Kolumne in Newsweek: Zeit, über Folter zu sprechen. In der Rückschau scheinen die gezielten Indiskretionen der Ermittler Hilferufe gewesen zu sein. Sie wollten wissen, welches Mittel den Zweck heiligt im Angesicht der monströsen Verbrechen.

Tatsächlich beginnt eine öffentliche Debatte, angestoßen vom Juristen Alan Dershowitz, einem Harvard-Professor. Der konstruiert folgenden Fall: Das FBI verhaftet einen Araber und entnimmt den beschlagnahmten Dokumenten, dass ein Anschlag auf zwei Wolkenkratzer in New York geplant sei. Nur wann? Und durch wen? Der Verdächtige schweigt. Ist Folter nun gerechtfertigt, um – wie Dershowitz fragt – „Menschenleben zu retten“?

Es handelt sich um das Szenario der „tickenden Bombe“, ein moralisches Dilemma, über das schon Philosophen wie Michael Walzer und Jean-Paul Sartre nachdachten. Die meisten Staaten haben sich für ein kategorisches Folterverbot entschieden und die Genfer Konventionen unterschrieben. So idealtypisch wie tragisch ist der Fall des italienischen Ministerpräsidenten Aldo Moro. Er wurde 1978 entführt. Die Ermittler nahmen einen Mann fest, von dem sie glaubten, er wisse, wo der Premier festgehalten werde. Als dem Ermittlungschef die Misshandlung des Verhafteten vorgeschlagen wurde, entgegnete er: „Italien kann den Tod von Aldo Moro überleben, aber nicht die Einführung der Folter.“ Moro wurde schließlich ermordet.

Dershowitz meint, die „Gefahr von Megaverbrechen“ erhöhe „den Einsatz in der Folterdebatte“. Wo Tausende bedroht und vielleicht zu retten seien, werde anders argumentiert. Drum liebäugelt Dershowitz mit einer Verrechtlichung der Folter. Wie eine Abhörerlaubnis stellt er sich die „Foltervollmacht“ von Richtern vor. Das begrenze und kontrolliere die Gewalt an Häftlingen.

Für diesen Vorschlag ist Dershowitz viel kritisiert worden, nicht zuletzt von seinem Harvard-Kollegen Ignatieff. Letzterer ist zwar auch für Einschränkungen von Bürgerrechten, aber gegen Ausnahmen vom Folterverbot: „Der Versuch, hier das kleinere Übel durch Gesetz zu regeln“, sagt Ignatieff, „schafft wahrscheinlich ein größeres Übel.“ Schrittweise werde die Folter auch dann eingesetzt, wenn keine unmittelbare Gefahr abzuwenden sei. Es ist dies das klassische „Argument der schiefen Ebene“. Wer einmal draufsteht, rutscht weiter ab. Am Ende bleibt nur noch die Quälerei von Sadisten übrig.

Die Regierung hat nie mit kräftiger Stimme in diese Diskussion eingegriffen, sondern widersprüchliche Signale ausgesandt. Mal lässt sie ihren Sprecher sagen, die Verhörmethoden seien „human“ und folgten „internationalem Recht“. Dann wieder tritt der Antiterrorismus-Chef des Geheimdienstes CIA vor den Kongress und spricht von neuen Formen „operationeller Flexibilität“. Seit dem 11. September 2001, orakelt er, gehe es „zur Sache“.

Was das bedeutet, hat die Washington Post in einer jahrelangen Recherche enthüllt. Danach werden Häftlinge in verbündete Länder exportiert, die für rabiate Methoden berüchtigt sind: Marokko, Jordanien und Ägypten. Amerikaner können schriftlich Fragen einreichen und erhalten später Vernehmungsprotokolle. Manchmal dürfen sie hinter der Glasscheibe zuschauen. Folter gibt es, jedenfalls offiziell, nicht. Oft werden Häftlinge in eigene Verhörzentren ins Ausland geschafft. Berüchtigt ist neben Guantánamo die afghanische Luftwaffenbasis Bagram. Einer der zuständigen Beamten hat ein bemerkenswertes Berufsverständnis zu Protokoll gegeben: „Wenn du nicht manchmal die Menschenrechte von jemandem verletzt, machst du deinen Job nicht ordentlich.“ In Bagram hat irgendwer seinen Job so ordentlich gemacht, dass dort im vergangenen Dezember zwei Häftlinge starben, nach dem Ergebnis der Autopsie an „einem Tötungsdelikt“. Mehr ist nicht herauszubekommen aus der amerikanischen Lagerwelt.

Denn es handelt sich um ein Schattenreich, internationalen Regeln weitgehend entzogen. Die Genfer Konventionen, reklamiert die US-Regierung, seien auf verdächtige Al-Qaida-Kämpfer in Guantánomo und in Afganistan nicht anwendbar. Viele Häftlinge, auch im Irak, werden an unbekannten Orten festgehalten, unter unbekannten Haftbedingungen. Ohne Kontakt zur Außenwelt. Wo aber „Häftlinge im Geheimen festgehalten werden“, schreibt Michael Ignatieff, „blüht die Folter“. Kurz vor Redaktionsschluss sind erste Berichte über Misshandlungen in einem weiteren US-Gefängnis im Irak aufgetaucht.

Zu den schaurigen Details im Bericht des Heeres zählt die Geschichte einer „Expertenreise“ von Guantánamo ins Abu-Ghraib-Gefängnis. Die Vernehmer aus Kuba empfahlen den Kollegen im Irak, zwecks besserer Verhörergebnisse Gefängniswärter zuvor als „enabler“, als „Möglich-Macher“ einzusetzen. Zu den bizarren Folgen der Affäre gehört, dass der Lagerchef von Guantánomo soeben nach Abu Ghraib versetzt wurde. Nach dem Motto: Guantánamo ist überall.

Die Regierung Bush hat die schiefe Ebene schon wenige Tage nach dem 11. September 2001 betreten. Die Misshandlungen seien „Folge der Weigerung, sich Regeln und unabhängiger Beobachtung zu unterwerfen“, schreibt Leonard Rubenstein, Geschäftsführer der Gruppe Physicians for Human Rights. Die bittere Frage ist jetzt: Hat es angestrengtes Wegschauen gegeben? Oder sogar eine Politik des Wegschauens?

Wer gab in den Kerkern die Befehle?

Ob die Antwort je gefunden wird, hängt vom Umfang der Ermittlungen ab. „Glaubt jemand wirklich, ein paar Jungs vom Land haben selbst entschieden, was sie tun?“, fragt Gary Myers, der Anwalt eines Verdächtigen. „Jeder Verteidiger wird rausfinden wollen, wer da wirklich die Befehle gab. Aus der Sicht des Heeres wäre es das Dümmste, diese Reservisten anzuklagen.“ Myers weiß, wovon er spricht. Er war schon beim Kriegsgerichtsprozess von My Lai dabei. Und als hätte das Pentagon die Drohung des Anwalts gehört, gibt es am Montag bekannt, die Verdächtigen kämen nicht vors Kriegsgericht. Stattdessen werden sieben Disziplinarstrafen ausgesprochen. Nun kann es nur noch Strafverfahren vor Zivilgerichten geben.

Ein Gutes hat das ganze Drama: Die helle Empörung zwingt die Regierung Bush, die äußeren Grenzen ihres Kampfes gegen den Terror eindeutig abzustecken. Der Skandal könnte zur Wiederaufrichtung erodierter Normen und Tabus führen. Die Zeit moralischer Selbstgewissheit und größtmöglicher Ermessensfreiheit ist vorüber. Eine Regierung guter Menschen ist eben nicht allein dem eigenen Gewissen verpflichtet.

Als George Bush zum Jahrestag seiner „Mission accomplished“-Rede vor das Weiße Haus tritt, kommt es zu einer bizarren Szene. Erst zieht er Bilanz: „Es gibt im Irak keine Folterkeller, keine Vergewaltigungsräume, keine Massengräber mehr.“ Sofort fragt ein Journalist: „Wie reagieren Sie auf die Bilder, auf denen amerikanische Soldaten irakische Gefangene misshandeln?“ Bush weiß, dass die Aufnahmen aus Saddam Husseins ehemaliger Folterzentrale stammen. Und er weiß, dass ihm soeben der zweite Kriegsgrund abhanden kommt. Nicht nur sind die Massenvernichtungswaffen verschwunden. Plötzlich wirkt auch seine Befreiungsrhetorik doppelbödig. Er äußert also „Ekel“ und fährt in diesem Moment ein in die Hölle seiner guten Absichten.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Der Bush des Tages von Chambers. Man muß es nur richtig übersetzen, denn nur wenige sind auserwählt.
God ventured His all in BUSH to save us


May 8

The Faith to Persevere

Because you have kept My command to persevere . . .
—Revelation 3:10

Perseverance means more than endurance— more than simply holding on until the end. A saint’s life is in the hands of God like a bow and arrow in the hands of an archer. God is aiming at something the saint cannot see, but our Lord continues to stretch and strain, and every once in a while the saint says, "I can’t take any more." Yet God pays no attention; He goes on stretching until His purpose is in sight, and then He lets the arrow fly. Entrust yourself to God’s hands. Is there something in your life for which you need perseverance right now? Maintain your intimate relationship with Jesus Christ through the perseverance of faith. Proclaim as Job did, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" ( Job 13:15 ).

Faith is not some weak and pitiful emotion, but is strong and vigorous confidence built on the fact that God is holy love. And even though you cannot see Him right now and cannot understand what He is doing, you know Him. Disaster occurs in your life when you lack the mental composure that comes from establishing yourself on the eternal truth that God is holy love. Faith is the supreme effort of your life—throwing yourself with abandon and total confidence upon God.

God ventured His all in Jesus Christ to save us, and now He wants us to venture our all with total abandoned confidence in Him. There are areas in our lives where that faith has not worked in us as yet—places still untouched by the life of God. There were none of those places in Jesus Christ’s life, and there are to be none in ours. Jesus prayed, "This is eternal life, that they may know You . . ." ( John 17:3 ). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance—a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.
http://www.gospelcom.net/rbc/utmost/05/08/

[Joerver]

________________________
Did you see the one where that one prisoner
was forced to blow the other prisoner?

[Joerver]

Wie die konservativen Radiomoderatoren mit den Folterbildern umgingen. Das sind beides Leute mit den besten Verbindungen ins Weiße Haus. Und es sind die bekanntesten US-Radiomoderatoren.

Limbaugh: prisoner abuse "brilliant"

On his May 6 radio show, Rush Limbaugh continued to defend U.S. military personnel accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners, comparing the abuse photos to "good old American pornography":

LIMBAUGH: All right, so we`re at war with these people. And they`re in a prison where they`re being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it`s pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we`re sitting here, "Oh my God, they`re gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?" I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they`re gonna think we are serious. Maybe they`re gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they`re gonna think we`re not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us -- in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.

Still, Limbaugh says it`s no different from a pop concert or homoerotic pornography:

LIMBAUGH: The thing though that continually amazes -- here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography, the Britney Spears or Madonna concerts or whatever, and yet the Libs upset about the mistreatment of these prisoners thought nothing of sitting back while mass graves were being filled with three to 500,000 Iraqis during the Saddam Hussein regime.

On his May 5 show, Limbaugh attributed the American public`s outrage over the allegations to "feminization":

LIMBAUGH: I think a lot of the American culture is being feminized. I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

Listen to this audio clip:

* mp3 audio file
05.Mai
Limbaugh on torture of Iraqis: U.S. guards were "having a good time," "blow[ing] some steam off"

Hours before President George W. Bush announced plans to address the Arab world to condemn the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison, Rush Limbaugh justified the U.S. guards` mistreatment of the Iraqis, stating that they were just "having a good time," and that their actions served as an "emotional release."

As reported by Wonkette.com, Limbaugh`s comments can be found on his website. From the May 4 Rush Limbaugh Show, titled "It`s Not About Us; This Is War!":

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men --

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we`re going to ruin people`s lives over it and we`re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I`m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

The day before, on his May 3 show, Limbaugh observed that the American troops who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were "babes" and that the pictures of the alleged abuse were no worse than "anything you`d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage."

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war -- have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

LIMBAUGH: You know, if you look at -- if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don`t know if it`s just me, but it looks just like anything you`d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I`m -- yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City -- the movie. I mean, I don`t -- it`s just me.

03.Mai
Hannity & Colmes guest compared U.S. soldiers` maltreatment of Iraqi POWs to "frat hazing"

Two days after CBS`s 60 Minutes II first broadcast photographs of U.S. military police posing and smiling next to naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners of war, Hannity & Colmes hosted a guest who compared the maltreatment of the Iraqi POWs to "frat hazing." On the April 30 broadcast of FOX News Channel`s Hannity & Colmes, former U.S. Army sergeant and former interrogation instructor Tony Robinson stated that "frat hazing is worse" than "what [was] happening in these pictures":

ROBINSON: Well, one thing that needs to be understood, is that there`s also an impact on the torturer. ... Now, I use the word torture, but that`s not what`s happening in these pictures.

HANNITY: What is it?

ROBINSON: I`ve seen -- I`ve seen worse than this at -- frat hazing is worse than this.

HANNITY: So in other words, this is not a big deal? What should the punishment be if these guys in fact are found guilty of whatever is going on over there, whatever is going on?

ROBINSON: Well, it`s not torture. If it was, they`d be accused of torture. They`re accused of maltreatment. I`m not making excuses for them.

The April 29 edition of The New York Times gave the following account:

In one photograph obtained by [60 Minutes II], naked Iraq prisoners are stacked in a human pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In another, a prisoner stands on a box, his head covered, wires attached to his body. The program said that according to the United States Army, he had been told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted. Other photographs show male prisoners positioned to simulate sex with each other.

[Joerver]

Noch eine Sendung von Limbaugh, der erst vor kurzen von einem Drogenentzug zurückgekommen ist. Wenn man das liest, weiß man auch wo einige Poster ihre `Überlegungen` herhaben.
Mehr von den Ehrenmännern:http://mediamatters.org/


Rush returned fire, attacked media focus on his Iraqi prisoner abuse rants

On May 7 -- while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered his personal apology for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on Capitol Hill, saying that the wrongdoings were "fundamentally un-American" -- radio host Rush Limbaugh defended the prison abuse for the fifth straight day and attacked media coverage of the controversial remarks Limbaugh made on May 3, May 4, May 5, and May 6.

Limbaugh on the May 7 Rush Limbaugh Show:

Now why -- why on the NBC Nightly News and why on Crossfire does my name come up, and why do I have to be challenged? Don`t - don`t misunderstand - I don`t mind that I am. Don`t misunderstand that, I said, but "Do you condemn Limbaugh?" "Do you - ?" "I condemn Limbaugh! [mocking CNN Crossfire co-host Paul Begala and guest Representative Robert Wexler (D-FL)]" ...

I think the reason that I have to be condemned and they`ve got to play sound bites from this show and have everybody pooh-pooh it is because it`s effective -- it`s because there`s one voice in this country that`s contrary to the herd, to the to the to the mentality here that has -- that has picked up steam. And everybody is in that herd and everybody`s making a rush in that certain direction, and there`s one voice out there that`s saying "Hey wait a minute! This is not what everyone`s saying it is." ...

I`m not an elected official. I`m not part of the Joint Chiefs. I`m not in the command structure. I`m not in the chain of command at all, and yet I have to somehow be condemned. It proves it`s politics, folks! ...

Who died? Who, who died here? What are we, what are we investigating? We haven`t learned anything here. In fact, this is not about learning what happened, this is about these senators. ...

If you people in the media want to continue to characterize what I said, you can at least put it in context. You could say that it also reminds me of things I`ve seen at a Britney Spears or Madonna concert and on the MTV music awards. And if you`re gonna do this let`s just go ahead and get it right. ...

[We did.]

I do not subscribe to the theory that the American military is a bunch of idiots, I don`t subscribe to the theory the American military is a bunch of boobs. .... The whole thing here just troubles me because what could have been or what could be actually something pretty smart is being cast now as one of the biggest most egregious mistakes that`s ever been made. ... It could well be that the whole purpose here, which has been said, was to humiliate these prisoners. And there`s no better way of doing it than what was done. These are Arab males -- what better way to humiliate them than to have a woman have authority over them? What`s the purpose here? What`s the objective of this? The objective is to soften them up for interrogation later, later on. As I said, there was no horror, there was no terror there was no death, there was no injuries, nothing. And given the profound fear of these jihadists and these prisoners, if you confront them with that fear, if you humiliate them that way, it might open them up, you might get keys to unlock what it is that have that they`re not coming forward with. ...

If you look at these pictures you cannot deny that there are elements of homoeroticism and as was stated by a woman -- and I forget her name [Donna M. Hughes] -- column on National Review Online yesterday, her point was, -- yeah, I`ve seen things like this on American websites. You can find these if you have the passwords to these various porn sites, you can see things like this. And her point was maybe these kids -- the soldiers, the guards whoever, who are of a certain age group, who`ve grown up with access to this -- are simply acting out what they`ve on these websites or something, just for the fun of it. Or maybe other reasons.

— G.W.

Posted to the web on Friday May 7, 2004 at 7:05 PM EST

[Joerver]

May 8, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS: AN ASSESSMENT
Will Rumsfeld Keep His Job? It Depends on Bush, Congress and, Most of All, Himself
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, May 7 — In the aftermath of Donald H. Rumsfeld`s appearances on Capitol Hill on Friday three critical forces will probably determine whether the defense secretary keeps his job: the White House, Republican lawmakers and Mr. Rumsfeld himself.

The White House is the most important, and some people close to its inner circle suggest that despite the outward display of support for the defense secretary, years of battles with the Pentagon over Iraq war planning and the occupation have taken a toll.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, repeated on Friday that President Bush remained in support of his defense secretary, as did some others. But a person close to Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, speculated that Ms. Rice, who has a history of tense dealings with Mr. Rumsfeld, might not be unhappy if he resigned.

"He appears to have become a liability for the president, and has complicated the mission in Iraq," the person close to Ms. Rice said, adding that Ms. Rice, like the president, is leaving options open: "They`re waiting to see what the system will bear, and if the story dies down after today, Rumsfeld survives."

Sean McCormack, the National Security Council spokesman, said Friday night that it was "100 percent absolutely false," that Ms. Rice would welcome Mr. Rumsfeld`s resignation.

Others who know the president said Mr. Bush, who puts a premium on loyalty, would be reluctant to fire Mr. Rumsfeld, and might even have trouble accepting his resignation. Although Mr. Bush has dismissed subordinates like Treasury Secretary Paul H. O`Neill, he has done so only after months, if not years, of dissatisfaction with their service.

Mr. Bush, who was on a bus campaign trip on Friday in Iowa and Wisconsin, phoned Mr. Rumsfeld before flying home to tell him he "did a really good job" in his testimony, Mr. McClellan told reporters. Nonetheless, Mr. Bush made no public comments on Friday about Mr. Rumsfeld`s testimony to the Senate and House Armed Services Committee.

Mr. McClellan said that Mr. Bush had not watched Mr. Rumsfeld`s performance on the television aboard the presidential bus, but that he been updated "a few times" by his staff. Mr. McClellan said that the president "appreciates Secretary Rumsfeld keeping Congress informed about the steps being taken to keep something like this from happening again and holding those responsible accountable."

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Rumsfeld`s testimony met with mixed reaction, as Democrats continued to call for his resignation while his own party supported him. Mr. Rumsfeld managed to hang on for now to the Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, the group with the biggest influence on his future.

"I thought he did a good job saying `I`m sorry,` " Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told reporters afterward. "I`m still unclear about who knew what when, and that`s important, in terms of how much accountability to assess to someone." Mr. Graham, a member of the Armed Services Committee, added that removing a defense secretary in the middle of a war "may send the wrong signal to our enemy and empower them," and implored Democrats calling for Mr. Rumsfeld`s resignation to slow down.

But Mr. Graham, in comments echoed by his colleagues, also made it clear that Mr. Rumsfeld`s job was not assured, particularly after videos and more pictures detailing the American abuse become public.

"I was trying to tell the secretary, it`s going to get worse before it gets better — do you think you can handle this? And he said he thought he could. And I would just ask people who are calling for his resignation, give him a chance."

Perhaps the single greatest factor in whether Mr. Rumsfeld remains in his job is Mr. Rumsfeld himself. In the direct way that became his trademark during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld described his own calculations as he considered his future.

"Needless to say, if I felt I could not be effective, I`d resign in a minute," he told Mr. Graham.

Mr. Graham had asked Mr. Rumsfeld a pivotal question: Could the greatly diminished prosecutor of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still have the power to carry out his duties? Did he have the ability, in Mr. Graham`s words, to come to Capitol Hill and carry the message and carry the water for the Pentagon?

"Well, it`s a fair question," Mr. Rumsfeld replied. "Certainly, since this firestorm has been raging, it`s a question that I`ve given a lot of thought to. The key question for me is the one you posed, and that is whether or not I can be effective."

Mr. Rumsfeld, a man who has understood and used power as few others in Washington, took the matter even further. In response to a question from Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, he appeared to suggest that there might be some advantage to his resigning.

Mr. Bayh asked Mr. Rumsfeld if his resignation might serve to demonstrate how seriously the United States takes the prison abuse scandal, and therefore, might his stepping down help undo some of the damage to the nation`s reputation around the world.

Mr. Rumsfeld, as is his style, was blunt. "That`s possible," he replied.

A former member of the current Bush administration put it this way on Friday: "Nobody is going to ask Rumsfeld to resign. He has to come to the conclusion himself."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

__________________

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

An American soldier in Karbala threw a grenade on Friday over a wall behind which a militiaman was hiding in bushes

May 8, 2004
G.I.`s Kill Scores of Militia Forces in 3 Iraqi Cities
By EDWARD WONG

KARBALA, Iraq, May 7 — American soldiers battled insurgents led by a rebel Shiite cleric on Friday, killing scores of Iraqis, as the cleric delivered a defiant, derisive sermon that dismissed President Bush`s expressions of regret for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

"What kind of peace could come from you or your agents when you feel pleasure at torturing prisoners?" the 31-year-old cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, said to cheering supporters at his mosque in Kufa. "How are you going to control the world when you can`t control a few soldiers here and there? If anyone did this to one of your people, would you accept it?"

The Americans pursued Mr. Sadr`s militia forces in the warrens and alleyways of two of the holiest Shiite cities, Karbala and Najaf, where the rebels have barricaded themselves for more than a month. Mr. Sadr`s militiamen in Karbala fired rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47`s at more than 100 soldiers, who moved low along walls and inched their way down a mile-long stretch of road, returning fire as roadside bombs exploded near them.

The soldiers reportedly killed at least 25 insurgents in Karbala, 12 in Najaf and at least 41 in two separate battles around Kufa. There were no United States casualties reported Friday, but a Pole and an Algerian working for a state-run Polish television network were killed by gunmen as they drove through the town of Mahmudiya on the road from Baghdad to Najaf. A Polish cameraman was wounded.

The firefights were the most intense since the American military started an operation here on Tuesday night to crush Mr. Sadr`s thousands-strong militia, called the Mahdi Army. The stiff resistance seems to indicate that many of the militiamen are prepared to fight to the death.

More than 2,500 American soldiers have surrounded Najaf, where Mr. Sadr lives, but have refrained from a full-scale invasion because its golden-domed central shrine is one of Shiite Islam`s holiest sites. On Thursday, American soldiers took over the governor`s mansion on the city`s outskirts and installed a new governor. Powerful Shiite politicians and religious leaders have called for Mr. Sadr to withdraw his militia.

Lt. Col. Gary Bishop of the First Armored Division said the soldiers would continue patrols and raids until they drive the Mahdi Army from Karbala. The goal is to put Iraqi security forces back in charge of the city and limit Mr. Sadr`s circle of influence to Najaf, where it is hoped that senior clerics will deal with him, he added.

A prominent Shiite cleric in Najaf, Sadr al-Din al-Kubanchi, repeated the call for the Mahdi withdrawal during Friday Prayers. Hospital officials reported eight Iraqis — including three children and two women — had been killed there in overnight clashes between militiamen and American soldiers.

A Polish diplomat identified the slain Polish reporter as Waldemar Milewicz, while Polish television said the Algerian was Mounir Bouamrane, a 36-year-old producer, according to The Associated Press.

A 20-minute tape said to have been recorded by Osama bin Laden offered gold to anyone able to kill senior American and United Nations officials in Iraq or citizens of countries with troops there. The message appeared on two militant Islamic Web sites and could not immediately be authenticated, The A.P. reported.

In Baghdad, Shiite followers of Mr. Sadr held a rare joint Friday Prayers service with Sunni Muslims at the hard-line Abu Hanifa Mosque in the Adhamiya neighborhood, once a stronghold of Saddam Hussein and the scene of fierce battles involving American soldiers last month. Organizers said the cooperation showed that Iraqis were united against prisoner abuse.

The fighting in Karbala erupted when members of Mr. Sadr`s militia attacked an American patrol on Thursday evening and another on Friday morning, resulting in firefights that lasted for several hours. In the first one, soldiers killed at least five insurgents and wounded six, Maj. Mark Grabski of the First Armored Division said. Soldiers on patrol on Friday morning killed at least 20 insurgents, Capt. Robert Adcock said.

A male civilian riding by on a moped was accidentally shot and killed by American soldiers at the end of the battle on Friday.

The fighting took place in a Karbala neighborhood less than a mile southwest of two of the holiest places of pilgrimage for Shiite Muslims, the Shrine of Hussein and the similarly ornate Shrine of Abbas. The American military has been careful not to encroach on the area of the shrines for fear of inflaming Shiites across the country. Instead, commanders here have been sending waves of patrols through the troublesome neighborhood to draw fire from militiamen and then kill them.

"I think they had enough today," Captain Adcock said of the insurgents as he chewed on a cigar after the battle on Friday. "They may get ready and go back tonight. But right now they`ve had enough."

Soldiers first attacked the neighborhood early Wednesday morning, raiding the former Baath Party headquarters and blowing up the old governorate building, but insurgents have resisted each incursion. By Friday morning, the fighters had laid trunks of palm trees and boulders across the main avenue. A dozen Bradley fighting vehicles and two armored personnel carriers rolled around the obstacles as more than 100 soldiers made their way on foot along the low-slung buildings on either side.

At one point, a sniper blew away the head of an insurgent looking around the corner of an alley. A rocket-propelled grenade whistled past the faces of more than a dozen soldiers crouched against a wall. At least one Bradley fighting vehicle took a direct hit from the same type of projectile, though no one inside was wounded.

One soldier fainted from heat exhaustion, and two were dragged into Bradleys and given water before they collapsed. Some soldiers found a hose by a house and doused one another with it after taking off their helmets.

Roadside bombs exploded along the length of the street. Soldiers had to sprint past some that had not been detonated. The Bradleys fired powerful 25-millimeter cannons at figures darting down alleyways, even as insurgents poked their AK-47`s around corners and sprayed the area.

By the time the last bullet was fired, bodies lay strewn across the roads. One Iraqi crouching in a bush had been killed by shrapnel from three grenades. In the middle of the street, a man in a beige robe writhed in a pool of blood for half an hour before falling still.

At Camp Lima, a Polish-controlled base that the First Armored Division occupied last weekend, soldiers drained by the battle lay asleep in the sand next to their vehicles. They were on call, waiting for word on whether they would have to go out on patrol again in the evening.

"The insurgents don`t have the support of the people here," Colonel Bishop said. "They now know the local populace is working with us against them."

Some residents of Karbala expressed a more ambiguous view. People in Karbala and Najaf generally want the Mahdi fighters — many of whom hail from the slum of Sadr City in Baghdad — to leave their cities. But those same residents have little regard for the foreigners who have invaded their soil.

"We don`t support either side," said Ahmed Abbas, 24, a grocery store owner. "We don`t want the Americans to kill the members of the Mahdi Army, but we also don`t want the Mahdi Army to win."

Ian Fisher contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Najaf, Kufa and Karbala.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Das Thema bekommt in den letzten Tagen sehr viel Raum. Wird der Abzug vorbereitet?

May 7, 2004
Q&A: Odom on an Iraq Exit Strategy

From the Council on Foreign Relations, May 7, 2004

William E. Odom, the head of the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration, says that President Bush should "eat a little humble pie," admit the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and seek U.N. forces to take over for U.S. troops. Odom, who opposed the war before it began, argues that Iraq will never become a liberal democracy. He also warns that "we`ve also nearly broken the U.S. Army by over-extension and over-commitment."

A retired three-star general who is now a senior fellow and the director of national securities studies at the Hudson Institute, Odom says that President Bush, "no matter if he`s re-elected or not, will regret it" if he doesn`t withdraw troops quickly. He also says he does not believe Democrat John Kerry can win the presidential election if he does not call for an early pullout.

Odom was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on May 6, 2004.

You`ve said the United States should withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible. Why?

It was not in our interest to enter Iraq in the first place. It was, however, in the interest of Osama bin Laden for us to destroy a secular Arab leader; it was very much in the interest of the Iranians because they wanted revenge against Saddam Hussein for Iraq`s invasion in 1980.

Our presence in Iraq risks turning it into a country that could become the base for terrorist operations and organizations like al Qaeda. Of the three war aims that the president set out--destruction of weapons of mass destruction, overthrowing Saddam`s regime, and creating a liberal democracy there--the first has supposedly been accomplished, although it seems to have been accomplished before we invaded; the second, as I just pointed out, was not in our interest, it`s more in our opponents` interest; and the third I don`t think is possible.

Our creating a liberal democracy there is not going to happen any time soon. We`re more likely to have an illiberal democracy with theocratic rulers, very much as in Iran. And any Iraqi [leader] who has much legitimacy with the population cannot afford to be pro-Western or pro-United States. Therefore, once U.S. forces leave, it is almost inevitable that an anti-Western, anti-U.S. regime will arise. I don`t see that as an outcome that makes sense for the United States. In fact, it struck me when we invaded last year that if we did it without European and East Asian support, we were risking losing our alliance in Europe in exchange for Iraq, and that is a very undesirable exchange.

Why did you wait until very recently to make this argument?

I held these views before the invasion. I was quoted in The Washington Post in February 2003 on my point of view. But during the first three, four, or five months after the intervention, the mood of the country was such that you really couldn`t debate this, so I decided to raise these issues again this spring because I think events are beginning to show that these judgments may be well-founded.

Is it physically possible for the United States, with more than 130,000 troops in Iraq, to just pull out?

When I say pull out as soon as possible, I say this to galvanize the discussion about whether we ought to decide to do it. The tactics of the withdrawal are quite another thing. First, I would go to the United Nations Security Council, eat a little humble pie, and point out to the Europeans that what happens in Iraq is as important to them as it is to us, maybe more so, and that we made a mess of it and we would like to have the United Nations endorse some sort of United Nations force there, a stability force. And while we will contribute to it for a time, we`re beginning to bring our forces down, and clearly our 134,000 troops are not enough. So we hope the United Nations and the Security Council will be able to generate forces to back up ours and actually supplement them now.

I would use the 30 June deadline [for turning sovereignty over to Iraq] to try to start that process, if [the members of the Security Council] agree. Now, there are reasons they may not agree. Of course, if I were advising the president right now, I would tell him to be quite candid, in [communications via] confidential diplomatic channels, that the United States is headed out and that his timeline for getting U.S. troops out of there will be somewhere toward the end of this calendar year, maybe into early next calendar year. Not necessarily setting a specific date. But I would make it unambiguously clear that we are going to withdraw, and if Iraq falls into civil war and if all these unhappy things occur, we`re just going to have to accept them.

Is it possible, in an election year, for either side to say, "Let`s get out?" Both John Kerry and President Bush have talked about staying the course.

I realize that you can make an argument from a political strategist`s point of view that neither candidate can advocate pulling out on my timetable. I think President Bush, no matter if he`s re-elected or not, will regret it if he doesn`t do this. He`s looking at his larger historical legacy. It would make a lot more sense to start turning this around than to stay in longer [and pay the] price. In the case of Kerry, thus far he has done what one would call the prudent political thing in an election year. I think he should be more imaginative. He needs to say something more or less along the lines of what I`m saying, and explain to the American people that we made a big mistake, and if we were a middle-size power it would be devastating for us, but we are such an enormous power that credibility is not much of an issue for us and that over the long run we will establish full credibility by being willing to reverse a strategic error. Kerry should just step up to this thing and face it head on. If I had to bet right now, I would say that hedging his position, as Kerry has done, will make it unlikely for him to win the election.

Did the Pentagon go into this war with its eyes closed? The top Pentagon people seemed to be most avid advocates for it.

I don`t know what goes on in the mind of [Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz, [former chairman of the Pentagon`s Defense Policy Review Board] Richard Perle, [the vice president`s chief of staff] Lewis Libby, [Vice President Richard] Cheney, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld. But, because I am a student of comparative politics and because I participated in nation building in Vietnam, I know that you don`t do this easily. And I also know that liberal institutions don`t just take root rapidly in non-Western cultures. They did in the case of Japan and, possibly, Taiwan. [Japan is] a special case, and goes back to the [1868] Meiji Restoration. Many people don`t know the history of that and don`t know that it is very special; it`s not a good model for the Middle East.

I don`t understand how [U.S. decision-makers] believed a liberal democracy could arise from Iraq. There are no clear property rights in Iraq. The whole notion of land property rights in the Arab world is different from that in Europe. Until that`s sorted out, creating the political infrastructure, the civil society, is out of the question. How many multi-national or multi-ethnic or multi-religious liberal democracies do we have? Belgium has teetered on the brink of break-up over the Walloons and the Flemish. Canada has trouble with Quebecois. As for Britain`s four tribes, one tribe--the Irish--doesn`t want to be in it at all; the Scots have gone into devolution as of late; and even the Welsh now have an internal parliament. You and I know what a multi-national state like the Soviet Union experienced with the centrifugal tensions there. Switzerland looks like a great exception. So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

What about the aftermath? If the United States does essentially what you advise, would this not be seen by the terrorist groups as a tremendous victory?

There`s no question about that, and I don`t think that`s avoidable. And that`s why I said to people before we went in that the person most pleased by this is Osama bin Laden. We`ve given him a heck of a boost. I don`t see how, by staying in, you keep that from being the case. We`re in a situation that economists call "a sunk cost." You don`t save [the situation] y putting more money in. We`re going to have to live with that. The question is, what price do we pay to live with it? How do we eventually turn it around? We`ve also nearly broken the U.S. Army by over-extension and over-commitment, which means there`s less of it available for Afghanistan and even for al Qaeda in other parts of the world.

One can never predict the future precisely, but unless there were to be some radical transformation there, which looks highly unlikely, things will be worse in a year and the price of getting out will be higher.

There are reports of prisoner abuses in the Iraqi jails run by U.S. forces. Is that kind of harsh treatment of prisoners old hat to you, or are these new incidents on a different scale?

It`s old hat in the sense that in many wars the abuse of prisoners have taken place. But I`ve always believed--and was taught--that such actions hurt the morale of your own forces and have a very negative effect on your own operations. It is a very bad old hat, very deleterious to our operations out there.

The second point I would make is that this seems to be on a scale that I find hard to imagine within the U.S. Amy, and I have thought, since [reports of abuses] broke out, about the statements of the president and in particular of the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld] and others. While people out there on the spot certainly have to be held accountable for what they`ve done personally, the chain of command responsibility for this strikes me as just as important and should be dealt with.

Should the secretary of defense be asked to resign?

I`ll leave that to members of the Congress, who have the powers to impeach.

You mentioned the chain of command. How high up the chain should responsibility go?

I`d rather not go on the record on that issue.

Copyright 2004

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May 8, 2004
Mr. Rumsfeld`s Defense

If Donald Rumsfeld went to Congress yesterday to explain why he should remain secretary of defense, he failed. His daylong testimony in the House and Senate has confirmed that Mr. Rumsfeld fatally bungled the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

But the hearings highlighted broader issues.

Mr. Rumsfeld, the military brass and some of the lawmakers badly missed the point by talking endlessly about a few bad apples in one military unit. The despicable acts shown in those famous photos — and in videos that are being held back by the military but may still produce another round of global humiliation — were uniquely outrageous and inexcusable criminal acts. But behind them lies a detention system that treats all prisoners as terrorists regardless of their supposed offenses, and makes brutal interrogations all too common.

The hearings also gave Americans a chilling new reminder of the mess the Bush administration, particularly Mr. Rumsfeld, has made of the Iraq occupation. With their perfect sense of certainty that they were right and everyone else wrong, Mr. Rumsfeld and his colleagues never planned adequately for the occupation. They were unprepared to handle the 43,000-plus Iraqi prisoners they ultimately took or the armed insurgents they faced — even though disorder and resistance were widely predicted.

The destructive stress created by the administration`s lack of preparation was distressingly evident yesterday, when the hearings revealed that the members of the Army Reserve military police detachment stationed at Abu Ghraib had been sent to Iraq without being trained as ordinary prison guards, much less for the nightmarish duty they would face. Mr. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon witnesses said those untrained part-time soldiers had been put under the supervision of military intelligence officers who farmed out interrogation work to private contractors. That inexplicable chain of shifted responsibility violated not just any sort of common sense, but also military rules.

Although the Army`s own report said the guards had been told by intelligence officers and their consultants to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation by depriving them of sleep and subjecting them to pain and humiliation, Mr. Rumsfeld said he "cannot conceive" that they thought their actions were condoned or encouraged. When he insisted that the normal rules for handling prisoners were in effect, several senators reminded him that he had said in January 2002 that suspected terrorists were not covered by the Geneva Convention.

Mr. Rumsfeld told the senators that his remarks about ignoring the international rules on the treatment of prisoners applied only to people captured in Afghanistan, not Iraq. That was a fine distinction some of the minimally prepared guards at Abu Ghraib may not have grasped, particularly since they were never instructed on the rules of the Geneva Convention. Like most Americans, however, they had heard their commander in chief paint the war in Iraq as an antiterrorism campaign.

Mr. Rumsfeld`s belated apology yesterday was nice to hear. But the secretary spent a lot of time dodging responsibility. When he was chided for not telling the public, Congress or even the president about Abu Ghraib, Mr. Rumsfeld claimed that the Army had provided all the disclosure necessary last January with its inadequate press release announcing the criminal investigations. But when he was pressed on why he had not kept track of the case, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the astonishing argument that he could not have been expected to find this one case among the pile of 3,000 courts-martial initiated in the last year.

Yesterday, Senator John McCain eloquently warned that the administration must deal quickly and publicly with the investigation. "As Americans turned away from the Vietnam War, they may turn away from this one unless this issue is quickly resolved with full disclosure immediately," he said.

We strongly agree.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Matt Davies hat den Pulitzer Preis 2003 gewonnen. Hier die Seite mit seinem Preis Portofolio:http://www.thejournalnews.com/davies/
Er zeichnet für The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York.

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May 8, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Empire Strikes Out
By BEN MACINTYRE

LONDON — This week the world learned that the United States Army has been investigating more than 30 claims of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2002. So far, officials have found a catalog of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the hands of American captors. This horrible scandal represents the most serious crisis for the coalition since the war on terrorism began. Occupation inevitably creates resentment; but humiliation fosters outright rebellion, and winning back the moral high ground after this calamity is far more important than reasserting control in Falluja or in the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.

Military domination is fatally undermined when occupiers, even if only a tiny minority of them, misuse their power to demean the conquered. The perils of such behavior resonate throughout history. As America finds itself ever more deeply embroiled in Central Asia and Iraq, it need only look at the experience of its coalition partner, Britain, in Afghanistan to learn about the hubris and transience of empire.

Curiously enough, the most astute witness to one of Britain`s worst imperial episodes was an American — a doctor, soldier, Quaker, Freemason and adventurer by the name of Josiah Harlan. In 1839, General Harlan (as he chose to style himself) stood on the ramparts of Kabul and watched as a foreign army marched in to "liberate" the city, with flags waving and trumpets blaring. General Harlan had spent the previous 12 years in Afghanistan, and he had a premonition of disaster: "To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force," he later wrote, "is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe."

The current situation in Afghanistan appears, if not peaceful, then manageable, at least compared to Iraq. Coalition troops are working alongside the indomitable Afghans to rebuild a country shattered by two decades of war. But as always in Afghanistan, peace is fragile. Much of the country remains riven by the fiefs of competing warlords, the government`s authority beyond Kabul varies from tenuous to nonexistent, and the still-rising toll of American dead is a reminder that the Taliban is far from vanquished.

Over the centuries, successive foreign armies have tried to pacify Afghanistan — Macedonian, Mogul, Persian, British, Russian and Soviet — only to discover that this deeply divided land has a way of uniting furiously against any invader that does not tread with the utmost care. As America is discovering, with much of the Islamic world united in outrage over the images of Iraqi captives being abused by servicemen and women, maintaining the peace is a far more delicate and demanding task than winning the war.

No one knew this better than Josiah Harlan. While many of his contemporaries were exploring the Wild West, Harlan had headed for the rather wilder East. Eccentric, cantankerous, ambitious and ludicrously brave, he plunged into the unmapped wilds of Afghanistan in 1827, determined to make himself a king.

General Harlan was no stranger to hubris. Over the ensuing years he parlayed with princes and potentates, led an army across the Hindu Kush mounted on an elephant, and was appointed commander in chief of the Afghan Army by Dost Muhammad Khan, the mighty emir of Kabul. Finally, by striking a pact with native chiefs high in the Hindu Kush, General Harlan became prince of Ghor, a potentate in his own right.

But his reign was short-lived. By 1839, the British, in a decision with eerie modern echoes, opted to remove Dost Muhammad and replace him with a more pliable puppet. The emir was a threat to stability, London declared, an unpredictable autocrat ruling a rogue state. A vast army was assembled in British India, and marched on Kabul: Dost Muhammad`s bodyguards melted away, and the ousted ruler took to the hills. When they entered the city, the British found General Harlan calmly having breakfast. The American introduced himself as "a free and enlightened citizen of the greatest and most glorious country in the world."

The British settled in, importing foxhounds, cricket bats, amateur theatricals and all the appurtenances of empire. After an easy victory, it was assumed that the Afghans were docile. The invaders rode roughshod over the local culture, treating the Afghans with disdain, oblivious to the growing rumble of discontent. General Harlan was outraged at such arrogance: "I have seen this country, sacred to the harmony of hallowed solitude, desecrated by the rude intrusion of senseless stranger boors, vile in habits, infamous in vulgar tastes."

What would he have made of his own country`s forays into Afghanistan and Iraq nearly two centuries later? In some respects he might have approved. He believed strongly in using military force to bring civilization to the benighted of the earth. He was no friend to tyrants and religious fanatics: he would have been equally revolted by the extremism of the Taliban and the brutality of Saddam Hussein.

Yet he was also insistent that the imperial impulse brought with it heavy responsibilities, an obligation to treat indigenous cultures with respect, to work within local power structures. He saw the British occupation through the eyes of an Afghan, but his response was that of an American; instead of bringing enlightenment, he believed, the British had imposed their own heavy-handed tyranny, and would pay the price in anger and bloodshed. Today, 165 years later, it is America`s turn to stand accused of brutal occupation, as the grim and graphic secrets of Abu Ghraib prison are revealed.

Josiah Harlan warned the British of the growing danger, but his words went unheeded. The occupying British swiftly bundled this interfering American out of Kabul, and carried on with their imperial tea party, alternately abusing and offending Afghans.

"Vainglorious and arrogant, the invaders plunged headlong towards destruction," General Harlan wrote in an angry anti-British polemic, as he headed home to America, and obscurity. Within two years the entire British garrison, 15,000 men, women and children, soldiers, families and camp followers, was massacred by Afghan tribesmen in the passes of Kabul, leaving a single wounded survivor, Dr. William Brydon, to stagger into Jalalabad with news of the worst disaster in British imperial history.

Ben Macintyre is the author of "The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Lasst sie den ‚Cakewalk‘ kosten
von Paul Street
ZNet 04.05.2004


Denken wir für eine Sekunde an die 137 amerikanischen Soldaten, die diesen April – es ist der zweite April seit der amerikanischen Besatzung des Irak –, ihr Leben verloren. Sie können sich deren Gesichter auf der Titelseite der ‚USA Today‘ vom letzten Wochenende ansehen. Es ist der größte monatliche Bodycount (Leichenzählung) amerikanischer GIs seit Kriegsbeginn. Seit Anfang Mai stieg die US-Todesrate weiter rasant an. Wenn es so weitergeht, wird die Zahl toter Amerikaner dieses Frühjahr oder diesen Sommer die Tausendermarke durchbrechen. In einem illegalen, unmoralischen, arglistig erkauften Krieg befiehlt der Präsident junge Leute - meist aus der Arbeiterklasse – in ihr frühes Grab. Im April lag das Durchschnittsalter der Opfer bei 23 Jahren. Aber für GI-Beerdigungsfeiern – und deren gibt es inzwischen immer mehr -, ist der Präsident nicht zu haben. Dazu scheint er unter anderem zu sehr mit Fundraising beschäftigt. Er füttert die überbordenden Schatullen der größten finanziellen Kriegskasse, die je einer Wahlkampagne zur Verfügung stand - in der Geschichte moderner Plutokratien.

Stellen Sie sich vor, Sie sind „Abdul M.“, ein Iraker, dessen gesamte Familie, inklusive Ehefrau und Tochter, sterben musste, weil US- „Verteidigungsplaner“ 18 Zivilisten in einem Haus in Al Mansur in die Luft jagten, da man annahm, das Haus beherberge Saddam Hussein. „Ich grub sie aus“, so Abdul letztes Jahr gegenüber ‚Frontline‘, „mit meinen eigenen bloßen Händen. Ich trug sie hinaus, auf meinen eigenen bloßen Händen. Ich begrub sie mit meinen eigenen bloßen Händen“. Im „befreiten“ Irak gibt es viele Geschichten wie die von Abdul. Abduls tote Angehörige sind nur zwei von vielen tausend Irakern, die im Verlauf ihrer „Befreiung“ durch die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika den Tod fanden. Wie hoch die Zahl dieser Opfer genau ist, bleibt unklar – die Besatzungsbehörden sehen keine Notwendigkeit, die irakischen Toten zu zählen -, Schätzungen zufolge sind es viele Zehntausende. Dabei ist das von den ‚guten‘ US-Militärs eingesetzte abgereicherte Uran noch gar nicht mitberücksichtigt – es wird seine volle, furchtbare, Langzeitwirkung erst noch entfalten. Oder denken wir an die unbekannte Zahl Iraker, die von amerikanischem Militärpersonal gefoltert und gedemütigt wurden – im Verlauf der ‚Operation Freiheit für Irak‘. Die jüngsten Veröffentlichungen über Folter und Misshandlungen durch US-Soldaten in Saddams wichtigstem Gefängnis sind sicher nur die Spitze des Eisbergs.

Denken wir an das strategische Imperial-Desaster – beziehungsweise den moralischen Abgrund – zu dem sich die Besatzung entwickelt hat. Hinsichtlich der jüngsten Aufdeckung von US-Folter schrieb das Editiorial Board der New York Times kommentierend: „die Invasion des Irak, die (uns) in vielerlei Hinsicht als schlechter Traum zu erscheinen begann, kann (nun) nicht mehr sehr viel alptraumartiger werden“. Oder denken wir an den antiamerikanischen Hass, der inzwischen – verständlicherweise – in der gesamten arabischen Welt hochbrodelt. Für islamische Terrorgruppen stellt die Besatzung einen wahren Glücksfall hinsichtlich Rekrutierung dar. Neue, noch größere Terrorangriffe auf Amerikaner – daheim wie im Ausland – sind sehr wahrscheinlich. Vergessen wir nicht, wir Amerikaner werden nach neuen Anschlägen kaum auf globale Sympathie zählen können, die Besatzung hat eine globale Entfremdung von Amerika geschaffen - von bemerkenswertem Ausmaß. USA - Schurken-Supermacht der Welt.

Können Sie sich noch an die vielen Gruppen, Persönlichkeiten und Einzelne erinnern (wenn Sie diesen ZNet-Artikel hier lesen, sind Sie wahrscheinlich eine(r ) davon), die sich vehement gegen den Einmarsch im Irak wehrten? Zu den (Kriegs-)Gegnern zählte damals auch eine ansehnliche Zahl Prominenter und Gruppen des Establishment, die besorgt waren, ein Einmarsch im Irak wäre eine Katastrophe für die globale Macht der USA. Begleiten Sie mich auf eine Tour durch das Privatleben einiger wichtiger Herren des Kriegs. In Bob Woodwards neuem Buch ‚Plan of Attack‘* (New York, NY: Simon und Schuster 2004) - das behauptet „die definitive Erklärung zu liefern, warum und wie George W. Bush und dessen Kriegsrat und Verbündete einen präemtiven Angriff durchführten, um Saddam Hussein zu stürzen und den Irak zu besetzen“ -, steht auf Seite 409 bis 411 Folgendes. Da ist die Rede von einer grandiosen Dinner-Party in der Residenz des Superfalken, Ex-Haliburton-Chef und Vizepräsidenten Dick Cheney. Es ist Sonntagabend, der 13. April 2003. Zu den Gästen zählen Kenneth Adelman, ein Freund Cheneys, der in den 70gern Assistent Donald Rumsfelds im Verteidigungsministerium war. Ebenfalls anwesend der stellvertretende Verteidigungsminister Paul Wolfowitz - oberster Kriegsverteidiger - sowie Cheneys Kriegsfalke und Stabschef Lewis „Scooter“ Libby. Drei Tage vor dem Dinner hatte Adelman in der Washington Post eine Op-ed publiziert, die Cheney entzückte. Titel: ‚Cakewalk Revisited‘**. Adelmans Kommentar zog über jene Leute her, die eine Katastrophe im Irak prophezeit hatten. Adelman behauptet darin, die Invasion würde zum „Spaziergang“ (cakewalk), er selbst habe das schon im Februar 2002 vorhergesagt. Zum Dank lud Cheney ihn großzügig zum Dinner – Cheneys Art, sich zu bedanken. Adelman brach seinen Paris-Urlaub vorzeitig ab und kam.

Woodward schreibt: „Als Adelman an diesem Sonntagabend in die Residenz des Vize-Präsidenten ging, war er so glücklich, dass er in Tränen ausbrach. Er umarmte Cheney das erste Mal, und er kannte ihn seit 30 Jahren“. Während des Dinners habe „Wolfowitz sich ausführlich über den Golfkrieg von 1991 ausgelassen“. Sicher äußerst spaßig. Cheney hätte geäußert, „dass ihm nicht bewusst gewesen sei, welches Trauma diese Zeit für die Irakis war“. Nun - über hunderttausend Tote können schon mal ein paar kleine traumatische Folgen nach sich ziehen. Dann brachte Adelman die Diskussion auf die Gegenwart. „Stopp! Stopp!“ sei er (so Woodward) dazwischengefahren. „Reden wir lieber über DIESEN Golfkrieg. Es ist so toll zu feiern“, „sagte er“, laut Woodward. „Er war ja nur ein Ratgeber von außen, einer, der den Druck in der Öffentlichkeit erhöhte. „Es ist so einfach für mich, einen Artikel zu schreiben, in dem ich sage, macht das. Paul (Wolfowitz) hat es da viel härter, er muss es vertreten. Paul und Scooter (Libby), ihr gebt Ratschläge, und der Präsident hört zu. Dick (Cheney), dein Rat ist der wichtigste, er ist der Cadillac. Eine sehr viel ernstere Sache (für dich), das zu vertreten. Aber letztendlich war alles, was wir gesagt haben, nichts als Rat. Der Präsident ist derjenige, der entscheidet. Ich bin ganz hin und weg, wie entschlossen er ist.“ Der Krieg sei einfach grandios gelaufen, so Adelman. „Also möchte ich hier einen Toast ausbringen, ohne zu pathetisch zu werden. Auf den Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten.“ Alle erhoben ihr Glas. Hört! Hört! Und Adelman sagte, je länger es ging, desto mehr habe er Todesängste ausgestanden, es könnte keinen Krieg geben“ (Woodward, ‚Plan of Attack‘, Seite 409-410). Später auf dem Treffen in festlichem Rahmen „sagte Cheney, er habe gerade mit dem Präsidenten geluncht. „Demokratie im Mittleren Osten hat große Bedeutung für ihn. Das treibt ihn an.“ Dann hätte Adelman einen delikaten Punkt berührt: „Bevor das Fest allzu lieblich wird, lassen Sie mich eine Frage stellen (P.S.: zu spät!). Was mich sehr wundert, wir haben keine Massenvernichtungswaffen gefunden.“ „Wir finden sie“, sagte Wolfowitz. „Es sind ja wirklich erst vier Tage“, sagte Cheney. „Wir werden sie finden““ (Woodward, ‚Plan of Attack‘, 409-411).

Wieviele Menschen starben im Irak – durch die US-Invasion – seit jenem Tag, als Cheney, Wolfowitz, Adelman und Libby ihr Glas erhoben, in einer streng bewachten Villa, die ein unglaubliches Privileg darstellt? Diese Villa befindet sich nur eine kurze Taxifahrt von Szenen des – mit - schlimmsten städtischen Elends in der ganzen industrialisierten Welt entfernt. Aus Gründen, die ich oben nannte, ist die genaue Zahl der Toten unbekannt – sicher ist sie hässlich hoch, sodass man sich fragen muss, was geht in der Seele eines Menschen vor, der Todesängste“ aussteht, aus Sorge, „es könnte keinen Krieg geben“? Können Sie sich vorstellen, dass jemand aus so einem Grund nachts wachliegt? Hoffentlich ersticken sie jetzt an ihrem „Spaziergang“ (cakewalk). George W. Bush, sein übler Klüngel und sein bösartiges Imperium gehören in die Wüste geschickt!

Anmerkung d. Übersetzerin

*Deutscher Titel: ‚Der Angriff‘, erscheint demnächst bei DVA
**Der Bedeutung nach: ‚Wieder ein Spaziergang‘

Paul Street ([e-mail]) ist ‚Urban Social Policy Researcher‘ in Chicago, Illinois. Artikel von ihm erschienen in ‚These Times‘, ‚Monthly Review‘, Z Magazine, ‚Dissent (USA)‘, ‚Dissent‘ (Australia)‘, ‚Black Commentator‘, ‚Dissident Voice‘, ‚The Journal of Social History‘ und vielen anderen Zeitschriften.



[ Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "Let them eat cakewalk" ]

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If we see our enemies as inhuman, then we ourselves end up as savages
The present-day equivalent of the soldier in my father`s book is Hollywood, with its poisonous, racist portrayal of Arabs and Muslims

By Robert Fisk - 08 May 2004

http://www.k1m.com/antiwarblog/archives/000107.html

Less than six month before the outbreak of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page book of imperial adventure, Tom Graham VC, A Story of the Afghan War. "Presented to Willie by his Mother," she wrote in thick pencil inside the front cover. "Willie" would have been almost 15 years old.

Only after my father`s death in 1992 did I inherit this book, with its handsome, engraved hardboard cover embossed with a British Victoria Cross, and only last month did I read the book. An adventure by William Johnston and published in 1900, it tells the story of the son of a British mine- owner who grows up in the northern English port of Seaton and, forced to leave school and become an apprentice clerk because of his father`s sudden impoverishment, joins the British Army underage. Tom Graham is posted to a British unit in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland - he even kisses the Blarney stone - and then travels to India and to the Second Afghan War where he is gazetted a Second Lieutenant in a Highland regiment. As he stands at his late father`s grave in the local churchyard before leaving for the army, Tom vows that "he would lead a pure, clean and upright life".

The story is typical of my father`s generation, a rip-roaring, racist story of British heroism and Muslim savagery. The real-life murder of the British embassy staff in Kabul in 1879 provoked a British military response and Tom Graham marches into Afghanistan with his regiment. Within days, Tom is driving his bayonet "up to the nozzle" into the chest of an Afghan, a "swarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate". In the Kurrum Valley, Graham fights off "infuriated tribesmen, drunk with lust and plunder". The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, "their bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by those fiends in human form". Afghans are a "villainous" lot at one point in the text, "rascals" at another and, of course, "fiends in human form".

The text is not only racist but also anti-Islamic. "Boy readers," the author pontificates, "may not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878-80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out of the unfortunate Britisher the higher his summit of bliss in Paradise." After Graham is wounded in Kabul, the Afghans - in the words of his Irish-born army doctor - have become "murtherin villains, the black niggers". A British artillery officer urges his men to fire at close-packed Afghan tribesmen with the assurance that his cannon fire "will scatter the flies".

It`s not difficult to see how easily my father`s world of "pure, clean and upright" Britons bestialised its enemies. Though there are a few references to the "boldness" of Afghan tribesmen, no attempt is made to explain their actions. The notion that Afghans do not want foreigners invading and occupying their country does not exist in the story.

But, of course, history is not kind to latter-day liberals. For I have in my library another book of the period, a sensitive and thoughtful biography of Henry Mortimer Durand - the man who drew the "Durand Line" between Afghanistan and the British Raj - which includes a replica of an original letter sent by the real-life Durand to his biographer`s sister. On 12 December 1879, he recalls, "Two Squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives... I saw it all."

The problem is clear. The Afghans really did chop bits off young Englishmen - later historical works would make it quite clear what bits these authors were talking about - just as Iraqis kicked the head off an American mercenary in Fallujah on 30 March this year and hanged his burned remains, along with those of a colleague, from the girder of an old British railway bridge over the Euphrates river. Our enemies are savages. So are we. First we learn to hate our enemies and bestialise them - and then we bellow our wrath and take our revenge when our enemies oblige us by behaving in exactly the way we expect them to. And then we torture them and humiliate them.

The present-day equivalent of Tom Graham VC is Hollywood, with its poisonous, racist portrayal of Arabs and Muslims. True to form, our enemies turned out, on 11 September 2001, to be as terrible as our movies made them out to be. One day, some serious research might be conducted into how far the pilot killers modelled themselves on Hollywood`s version of their ruthlessness.

But it`s not difficult to see how the American thugs at the Abu Ghraib prison acquired their cruelty. Born-again Christians who no doubt publicly wished to be seen upholding a "pure, clean and upright life" treated the Iraqis as if they were "fiends in human form", as "fanatics", as "flies". Hadn`t the US proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, described America`s enemies as "dead-enders", "die-hards", "terrorists"? When the young woman involved in this torture expressed her surprise at all the fuss, I immediately understood why. Not because what she did was routine - though it clearly was - but because that is how she was told to treat these Iraqi prisoners. Hadn`t they been killing American soldiers, setting off car bombs, murdering schoolchildren? Hollywood turned into reality.

Now maybe you don`t think that entertainment influences the young, that Tom Graham VC could no more influence a young Englishman than Hollywood could bend the mind of the American guards at Abu Ghraib. Well, you would be wrong. For Bill Fisk - the "Willie" of that dedication almost a century ago - was also taken from school in a northern English seaport because his father Edward could no longer support him. He was apprenticed to a clerk, in Birkenhead. In the few notes he left before his death, Bill recalled that he tried to join the British Army underage; he travelled to Fulwood Barracks in Preston to join the Royal Field Artillery on 15 August 1914, 11 days after the start of the First World War and almost exactly six months after his mother had given him Tom Graham. Successful in enlisting two years later, Bill Fisk, too, was sent to a British battalion in County Cork. I even have a pale sepia snapshot of him then, kissing the Blarney stone. Two years later, in France, my father was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the King`s Liverpool Regiment. Was he not consciously following the life of the fictional Tom Graham?

No, Bill Fisk didn`t torture prisoners - at the end of the First World War, with great nobility, he refused to command a firing party ordered to execute an Australian soldier for murder. But don`t tell me we aren`t conditioned by what we read and what we see as a child. All his life, Bill Fisk talked about "niggers", demeaned the Irish and talked about the "Yellow Peril" - the Chinese - as the world`s greatest danger. He was a man of the Victorian age. I fear the American torturers in Iraq are creatures of our century. For if you are taught to despise your enemy as inhuman, you will - if you get the chance - cease to be a human yourself.

Copyright: The Independent

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http://www.robert-fisk.com

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The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don`t know
We don`t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Ich weiß, dass ich nichts weiß, oder mein Name ist Hase!

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 08. Mai 2004, 0:04
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,299014,00.html

Rumsfeld-Vernehmung

Büßer-Show eines angezählten Raubeins

Von Matthias Gebauer

Zweieinhalb lange Stunden grillte der Armee-Ausschuss des Senats US-Verteidigungschef Donald Rumsfeld in einer historischen Sitzung. Mit seiner Entschuldigung für die Folter-Vorfälle konnte der Stratege zwar etwas gut machen, doch der teils reumütige Auftritt wird die Kritik an dem Armee-Oberen nicht verstummen lassen.

Berlin - Es war nicht der Tag von Donald Rumsfeld. Die Kolumnisten der liberalen US-Tageszeitungen belehrten ihn am Freitagmorgen in ihren Editorials, er solle doch lieber zurücktreten, bevor ihn sein Präsident aus Selbstschutz feuere. Über die Fernsehschirme kam ebenfalls nichts Gutes. Das Land wartete gespannt auf Rumsfelds Aussage vor dem Verteidigungsausschuss des Senats. Die Diskussion um die Folterbilder aus irakischen Gefängnissen spitzte sich auf die Frage zu: Kann Rumsfeld seinen Kopf retten oder stürzt der Stratege über den Skandal in seiner Truppe?

Kaum hatte der Pentagon-Chef im holzgetäfelten Konferenzraum Platz genommen, ging es mit den Rücktrittsforderungen weiter. Plötzlich stand eine Gruppe von Zuschauern in den hinteren Reihen auf, begann zu schreien und hielt Plakate hoch. "Feuer` Rumsfeld", riefen sie und wollten so dem US-Präsidenten ihre Meinung zum aktuellen Fall per Live-Schaltung mitteilen. Das Geschrei hörte erst auf, als Saalordner die Protestler aus dem Raum drängten. Rumsfeld gab sich äußerlich gelassen, blätterte in seinen Unterlagen und wartete auf die einkehrende Ruhe. Kein Blick wandte er nach hinten und starrte lieber auf seine Aktenseiten. Innerlich aber muss er gekocht haben.

Scharfe Fragen aus den eigenen Reihen

Doch dieser Tag galt der Buße, nicht dem Zorn. Ausschüsse in den USA sind etwas anderes als in der zahmen Berliner Republik. Wie Angeklagte werden die Vorgeladenen zurechtgewiesen, scharf schießen die meisten Senatoren ihre Fragen ab und lassen keine Ausflüchte zu. Selbst die Verbündeten aus den eigenen Reihen kennen oft kein Pardon, wenn es um die Wahrheit in heiklen Affären geht. Und so eine wie diese hatten die meisten Senatoren in ihrem Leben noch nicht erlebt.

Für Rumsfeld war klar, dass er sich entschuldigen musste, dass er keinen Fehler machen durfte. Genauso tat er es dann auch. Keiner seiner sonst linkischen Grinser huschte über sein Gesicht, die Augen lagen ungewohnt weit geöffnet hinter der randlosen Brille. Statt wie sonst weitläufige Gesten zu machen, auf die Geprächspartner mit dem Finger zu zeigen, saß der Mann vor den Senatspolitikern wie auf dem Büßerstuhl. Die Hände lagen meist halb gefaltet auf dem Tisch und die Antworten brauchten stets eine Weile, bis er sie zwischen seinen Lippen hindurchgepresst hatte.

Rumsfeld fände Abriss von Abu Ghureib eine gute Idee

Seine erste Mission hat Rumsfeld mit dem Auftritt vor dem Ausschuss erfüllt. In seinem Eingangsstatement entschuldigte er sich bei den Opfern der Folter-Knechte. "Schockiert" sei er wie jeder Mensch. Jeder in seinem Ministerium sei "empört" über die Bilder amerikanischer Soldaten, die auf sadistische Weise Iraker gequält hatten. "Wenn sie in die Gesichter meiner Mitarbeiter sehen könnten, wüssten sie wie wir uns fühlen", sagte Rumsfeld. Mehr als eine Woche nach der Veröffentlichung der Folter-Fots zeigte der Chef des riesigen amerikanischen Verteidigungsapparats endlich die von politischen und publizistischen Gegner geforderte Scham, die zuvor sein Präsident und viele andere demonstriert hatten.

Ebenso wie die Entschuldigung gehörten einige Ankündigungen zu Rumsfelds Auftritt. Er werde den Opfern eine Entschädigung anbieten, sagte er. "Es tut mir schrecklich Leid, was den irakischen Häftlingen widerfahren ist. Unser Land hatte eine Verpflichtung, sie korrekt zu behandeln. Wir taten es nicht", fügte er theatralisch hinzu. Rumsfeld kündigte die Bildung einer Sonder-Kommission zur Untersuchung der Misshandlungen an. Wie diese aufgestellt wird und welche Befugnisse das Vier-Mann-Team bekommen soll, ließ er offen. "Noch liegen nicht alle möglicherweise interessanten Fakten auf dem Tisch", sagte er zur Begründung der weiteren Untersuchung. Selbst einen möglichen Abriss des Knasts in Bagdad erwog Rumsfeld.

Die Büßer-Show aber täuschte nicht über die wirkliche Haltung Rumsfelds hinweg. Zwar übernahm er die "volle Verantwortung" für die Verfehlung seiner Soldaten, die nun schonungslos aufgeklärt würden. Doch die Folterungen der Uniformierten sind für Rumsfeld eindeutig das Werk einzelner. Wörtlich nannte er die auf den Bildern zu sehenden Soldaten nur ein Promille-Anteil der "großartigen Menschen", die im Irak für die "Freiheit des Landes und unsere Sicherheit" kämpfen. Umso länger er von diesen Menschen, seinen Untergebenen berichtete, umso mehr wurde er wieder der alte Rumsfeld. "Wir glauben an die Freiheit des Einzelnen und das Gesetz", sagte er den Senatoren und schwärmte von den amerikanischen Werten, welche die Soldaten unter seinem Kommando dort verbreiteten.

"Die Frage ist, ob ich weiter effektiv arbeiten kann"

Dazwischen gab sich der sonst so selbstbewusste Minister immer wieder devot. Schon zu Beginn ertrug er mit eiserner Mine das bohrende Verhör seines Parteikollegen John McCain, der den Lavierenden immer wieder scharf anging: "Antworten Sie auf meine Frage, Herr Minister".

Später räumte Rumsfeld sogar eigene Versäumnisse ein - ein echtes Novum. "Ich habe nicht erkannt, wie wichtig es gewesen wäre, Vorkommen solcher Schwere an die höchsten Stellen, wie den Präsidenten und die Mitglieder des Kongresses, weiterzuleiten", sagte er. Rücktritt allerdings sei für ihn keine Alternative. Er werde nicht zurücktreten, nur weil seine Gegner eine politische Streitfrage aus der Angelegenheit machten: "Ich habe mich gefragt, ob ich weiter effektiv arbeiten kann". Die Antwort kam sofort und von ihm selbst. "Wenn ich das nicht mehr könnte, würde ich sofort zurücktreten."

Für die Unterrichtung hatte sich Rumsfeld gut vorbereitet. Auf einem groß ausgedruckten Plakat hatten seine Mitarbeiter die Schritte der internen militärischen Ermittlung aufgezeigt. Demnach recherchieren die Fahnder in Uniform seit einem Tipp im Januar den Fall der Folter-Soldaten. Penibel wollte der Verteidigungsminister der Kritik entgegenwirken, er habe zu langsam reagiert oder die Öffentlichkeit und den Senat über die Affäre im Dunkeln gelassen. Als Feigenblatt dient ihm dabei nun eine dürre Presseerklärung aus dem vergangenen Januar. Darin wird ohne Details mitgeteilt, dass es eine Ermittlung zu Verdächten von Missbrauch gebe. In der Presse war sie freilich untergegangen.

Doch die bisher veröffentlichten Bilder scheinen noch nicht alles zu dokumentieren, was in den irakischen Gefängnissen passiert ist. Indirekt deutete Rumsfeld an, dass es noch viele weitere Bilder und sogar Videos gebe, die den bisher gezeigten ähneln. Die Bilder, so Rumsfeld, würden brutale Übergriffe und sadistische Methoden zeigen, die die bisher gesehen vielleicht noch überträfen. Offen ließ der Minister, ob auf den neuen Bildern die gleichen Soldaten zu sehen sind oder ob es aufgrund der anderen Fotos neue Ermittlungen gegen weitere Soldaten geben wird. Bisher, so seine Aussage, kenne er den vollen Umfang der Ermittlungen noch nicht und werde sich auch nicht in die unabhängige Arbeit einmischen.

Verschnaufpause nach der Büßer-Show

Nicht nur diese neuen Bilder werden die Affäre weiter brodeln lassen. Denn neben den vielen symbolischen Sätzen und parteipolitischen Sperrfeuern kamen die wirklich wichtigen Fragen noch gar nicht auf den Tisch des Ausschusses. Zum Beispiel die Rolle der Geheimdienste in den Gefängnissen. Als ein demokratischer Senator wissen wollte, wer eigentlich das Sagen bei den Vernehmungen hat, wich Rumsfeld aus. Die bisher bekannten Fakten deuten allerdings darauf hin, dass die Soldaten zu den Folterungen gedrängt wurden, um Gefangene gefügig zu machen.

Donald Rumsfeld hat sich durch seinen Auftritt maximal eine Verschnaufpause verschafft. Nicht nur die Demokraten im Ausschuss machten klar, dass sie den Minister zur Not noch mehrmals vorladen wollen, um alle Details über die Vorgänge im Irak zu erfahren. Vor allem die Rolle der Geheimdienste und die mögliche Anordnung von Folter zum Erlangen von Informationen werden den Minister weiter unter Druck halten. Vorerst aber dürfte sich Rumsfeld mit der öffentlichen Büßer-Show ein kleines Stück aus der Schusslinie gebracht haben. Der mögliche Rücktritt oder Rausschmiss des Raubeins wird allerdings auch am Samstag das Thema der amerikanischen Politik bleiben.



© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

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washingtonpost.com

Capitol Hill Sees the Flip Side of a Powerful Warrior

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 8, 2004; Page A01

Congress saw a new face of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday.

Summoned to Capitol Hill for a bipartisan trip to the woodshed over the Iraq prison abuse crisis, the man who has spoken so often of transforming the world`s largest military testified that he has been trying for "days and days and days" simply to get a CD copy of the Abu Ghraib photographs and video -- but has not been able to find one.

"The disc that I saw that had photos on it did not have the videos on it," Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. All the pictures, both stills and video, have been in the hands of military investigators since January, he told Congress. But the secretary has had trouble getting hold of them.

Rumsfeld testified that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, finally saw the stills Thursday night, more than a week after CBS broadcast the first images of U.S. soldiers humiliating and threatening naked Iraqi prisoners.

This image of a powerless secretary unable to summon up a cheap piece of plastic in the face of a "catastrophe," as Rumsfeld described the prison scandal, was a long way from the boldly assured Rumsfeld of a year ago. Back then, during the U.S. military`s lightning drive on Baghdad, the civilian architect of two wars in two years described a computerized force in which data leapt from soldier to satellite to smart bomb, in which unimaginable firepower was just a few keystrokes away.

Rumsfeld was a sort of Achilles for the Information Age, and his bold assurance won him a place among People magazine`s sexiest humans. President Bush nicknamed him "Rumstud."

Like Achilles, he had a vulnerable heel. Rumsfeld returned over and over again to the idea that the military has effectively handled the prison crisis as a criminal matter but failed to realize that those pictures were, themselves, high-tech dynamite. One-stripe soldiers could zip the disastrous images through the ether, but the Pentagon could not get them onto Rumsfeld`s radar screen at even an 18th-century pace.

"I wish I knew how you reach down into a criminal investigation when . . . it turns out to be something that is radioactive, something that has strategic impact in the world," Rumsfeld said, with unfamiliar helplessness. "We don`t have those procedures. They`ve never been designed. We`re functioning in a -- with peacetime constraints, with legal requirements, in a wartime situation, in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had -- they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

At another point, he said: "We`ve been trying to get one of the discs for days and days and days. And I`m told by General [Lance] Smith that there were only a couple of these, that they were in the criminal investigation process. And we finally -- Dick Myers and I finally saw them last night."

Even then, he was not sure how many discs exist or why his disc did not have the video on it.

"I checked with General Smith, and he indicates he does have a disc with the videos on it," Rumsfeld said. "I don`t know if they`re -- that means there`s two discs with all these photographs, or if the photographs are the same and one disc doesn`t have the video."

The embattled secretary looked weary, especially toward the end of about six hours of scoldings, grillings, admonishments and questions from both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate side and on the House side about whether he has considered resigning. He was flanked by uniformed generals, but when he tried to pass an uncomfortable early question to the nearby brass, Rumsfeld was dressed down by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

"No, Secretary Rumsfeld, in all due respect, you`ve got to answer this question," McCain said. "This is a pretty simple, straightforward question. Who was in charge of the interrogations?"

And with the likes of Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) still ahead, Rumsfeld`s seat only got hotter.

At moments, the old Rumsfeld flashed through, as he corrected the premises and disputed the conclusions drawn by especially hostile interrogators. But then Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) couched one of the most pointed attacks of the day in a sort of "What ever happened to Rumstud?" tone, and there was nothing the secretary could do but sit for it.

"It was moms and dads from homes who had to write me and tell me that their kids weren`t getting the proper body armor," Taylor said.

"Then it was David Kay, a Bush appointee, who had to tell me in Baghdad that because of a lack of manpower, huge ammunition caches were left unguarded in Iraq . . .

"It was a National Guard unit from home, shortly before Christmas, that showed me proudly their efforts to make their own up-armored Humvee, because apparently no one above was bothering to tell Congress, which writes the checks for these things, that they needed to be protected . . .

"I mean, you`re probably one of the smartest people I know," Taylor continued. "And what`s troubling is how someone who is so smart and so detail-oriented, why does it take from January to May for this committee now to find out about" the Abu Ghraib photographs?

In response, Rumsfeld spoke of the 18,000 criminal investigations the Pentagon launches each year. He said he heard "rumors of photographs . . . in that period of January, February, March."

"But I would have believed," Taylor interjected, "that . . . somehow, someone would have seen that it got to you. Because I know you`re a smart, detail-oriented guy."

"It wasn`t," Rumsfeld said. "It just wasn`t."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com

Most Want Rumsfeld to Stay, Poll Finds

By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 8, 2004; Page A12

A large majority of Americans believe that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld should not resign over the Iraq prison scandal, but the public remains divided over whether the administration moved quickly enough to investigate reports of abuse, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Seven in 10 Americans said Rumsfeld should not be forced to quit, a view held by majorities of Republicans, Democrats and self-described independents.

The survey comes a day after President Bush gave Rumsfeld a vote of confidence, and as Rumsfeld faced stiff questioning by members of Congress enraged that they were kept in the dark about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

As details continue to emerge, the survey found that public opinion on the way Bush is handling the scandal is sharply divided and deeply partisan but not yet fully formed. Fewer than half of respondents -- 48 percent -- said they approved of the way the president is dealing with the issue, while 35 percent disapproved. But 17 percent are undecided, a clear indication that many Americans are waiting for more information.

Taken together, the poll findings suggest that the prisoner abuse scandal has become another major unwelcome surprise in Iraq, further broadening the partisan divide over the conflict and raising new doubts about the way the administration has managed the aftermath of the war.

But there was no clear indication that the scandal has significantly affected the public`s overall attitudes toward the war, which have become more negative since the first of the year as the military situation has grown increasingly violent and unstable.

About half of the country continued to say the war was "worth fighting," while nearly as many disagreed. Six in 10 said the U.S.-led coalition is bogged down in Iraq, unchanged from a Post-ABC News survey three weeks ago.

Even though overall attitudes remain essentially unchanged, the proportion who believe the administration has a clear plan in Iraq stands at 38 percent, down 7 percentage points in the past three weeks, while a growing majority -- 57 percent -- see the administration adrift, a new high in Post-ABC News polling.

No consensus has emerged over the way the Bush administration handled reports of abuse before the scandal broke in the media last week. Four in 10 faulted the administration for failing to move quickly enough to investigate the reports, while an identical proportion disagreed.

Americans also are split on whether the administration made a good-faith effort to probe claims of abuse. Slightly more than four in 10 said the administration was seriously investigating the incidents before they were made public -- but just as many said officials were trying to "cover it up."

A total of 802 randomly selected adults were interviewed Wednesday and Thursday for this survey. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Americans have recoiled in disgust over the graphic photos that appear to document physical abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel. Seven in 10 said the reports were "a big deal" and about half said they were either "upset" or "angry" about them.

Two-thirds said the soldiers involved should be charged with a crime. A slight majority also believed higher-level officers should be held responsible for allowing a breakdown in training and discipline.

Still, six in 10 believe these were isolated incidents, while fewer than a third said such abuse was more widespread.

Despite the increasingly partisan cast of opinion on Iraq, Republicans and Democrats largely agreed on the seriousness of the allegations. Majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents agreed that the kind of abuse documented in photographs is unacceptable, even in time of war. Similar percentages in each group said they were disturbed by the reports.

When it came to Bush and his role in the controversy, however, bipartisan agreement vanished. Roughly six in 10 Democrats said the administration moved too slowly in investigating the reports and mainly tried to cover up the scandal. At the same time, an even larger proportion of Republicans -- about seven in 10 -- said the administration acted quickly and was making a genuine effort to investigate the problem. Independents roughly split on both issues.

Neither have the two parties drawn any closer in their views of the bigger picture in Iraq. The large majority of Republicans continue to say that the war is worth fighting and the United States is making good progress, while the large majority of Democrats said the war is not worth the costs and worry that the United States is getting bogged down.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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bushisms
The Misunderestimated Man
How Bush chose stupidity.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Friday, May 7, 2004, at 6:54 AM PT

Adapted from the introduction to The Deluxe Election-Edition Bushisms, published by Fireside Books/Simon & Schuster. Reprinted with permission; © 2004 Jacob Weisberg.

The question I am most frequently asked about Bushisms is, "Do you really think the president of the United States is dumb?"

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is yes and no.

Quotations collected over the years in Slate may leave the impression that George W. Bush is a dimwit. Let`s face it: A man who cannot talk about education without making a humiliating grammatical mistake ("The illiteracy level of our children are appalling"); who cannot keep straight the three branches of government ("It`s the executive branch`s job to interpret law"); who coins ridiculous words ("Hispanos," "arbolist," "subliminable," "resignate," "transformationed"); who habitually says the opposite of what he intends ("the death tax is good for people from all walks of life!") sounds like a grade-A imbecile.

And if you don`t care to pursue the matter any further, that view will suffice. George W. Bush has governed, for the most part, the way any airhead might, undermining the fiscal condition of the nation, squandering the goodwill of the world after Sept. 11, and allowing huge problems (global warming, entitlement spending, AIDS) to metastasize toward catastrophe through a combination of ideology, incomprehension, and indifference. If Bush isn`t exactly the moron he sounds, his synaptic misfirings offer a plausible proxy for the idiocy of his presidency.

In reality, however, there`s more to it. Bush`s assorted malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms, and truisms tend to imply that his lack of fluency in English is tantamount to an absence of intelligence. But as we all know, the inarticulate can be shrewd, the fluent fatuous. In Bush`s case, the symptoms point to a specific malady—some kind of linguistic deficit akin to dyslexia—that does not indicate a lack of mental capacity per se.

Bush also compensates with his non-verbal acumen. As he notes, "Smart comes in all kinds of different ways." The president`s way is an aptitude for connecting to people through banter and physicality. He has a powerful memory for names, details, and figures that truly matter to him, such as batting averages from the 1950s. Bush also has a keen political sense, sharpened under the tutelage of Karl Rove.

What`s more, calling the president a cretin absolves him of responsibility. Like Reagan, Bush avoids blame for all manner of contradictions, implausible assertions, and outright lies by appearing an amiable dunce. If he knows not what he does, blame goes to the three puppeteers, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld. It also breeds sympathy. We wouldn`t laugh at FDR because he couldn`t walk. Is it less cruel to laugh at GWB because he can`t talk? The soft bigotry of low expectations means Bush is seen to outperform by merely getting by. Finally, elitist condescension, however merited, helps cement Bush`s bond to the masses.

But if "numskull" is an imprecise description of the president, it is not altogether inaccurate. Bush may not have been born stupid, but he has achieved stupidity, and now he wears it as a badge of honor. What makes mocking this president fair as well as funny is that Bush is, or at least once was, capable of learning, reading, and thinking. We know he has discipline and can work hard (at least when the goal is reducing his time for a three-mile run). Instead he chose to coast, for most of his life, on name, charm, good looks, and the easy access to capital afforded by family connections.

The most obvious expression of Bush`s choice of ignorance is that, at the age of 57, he knows nothing about policy or history. After years of working as his dad`s spear-chucker in Washington, he didn`t understand the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, the second- and third-largest federal programs. Well into his plans for invading Iraq, Bush still couldn`t get down the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the key religious divide in a country he was about to occupy. Though he sometimes carries books for show, he either does not read them or doesn`t absorb anything from them. Bush`s ignorance is so transparent that many of his intimates do not bother to dispute it even in public. Consider the testimony of several who know him well.

Richard Perle, foreign policy adviser: "The first time I met Bush 43 … two things became clear. One, he didn`t know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn`t know very much."

David Frum, former speechwriter: "Bush had a poor memory for facts and figures. … Fire a question at him about the specifics of his administration`s policies, and he often appeared uncertain. Nobody would ever enroll him in a quiz show."

Laura Bush, spouse: "George is not an overly introspective person. He has good instincts, and he goes with them. He doesn`t need to evaluate and reevaluate a decision. He doesn`t try to overthink. He likes action."

Paul O`Neill, former treasury secretary: "The only way I can describe it is that, well, the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection."

A second, more damning aspect of Bush`s mind-set is that he doesn`t want to know anything in detail, however important. Since college, he has spilled with contempt for knowledge, equating learning with snobbery and making a joke of his own anti-intellectualism. ("[William F. Buckley] wrote a book at Yale; I read one," he quipped at a black-tie event.) By O`Neill`s account, Bush could sit through an hourlong presentation about the state of the economy without asking a single question. ("I was bored as hell," the president shot back, ostensibly in jest.)

Closely related to this aggressive ignorance is a third feature of Bush`s mentality: laziness. Again, this is a lifelong trait. Bush`s college grades were mostly Cs (including a 73 in Introduction to the American Political System). At the start of one term, the star of the Yale football team spotted him in the back row during the shopping period for courses. "Hey! George Bush is in this class!" Calvin Hill shouted to his teammates. "This is the one for us!" As governor of Texas, Bush would take a long break in the middle of his short workday for a run followed by a stretch of video golf or computer solitaire.

A fourth and final quality of Bush`s mind is that it does not think. The president can`t tolerate debate about issues. Offered an option, he makes up his mind quickly and never reconsiders. At an elementary school, a child once asked him whether it was hard to make decisions as president. "Most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you." By leaping to conclusions based on what he "believes," Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).

Why would someone capable of being smart choose to be stupid? To understand, you have to look at W.`s relationship with father. This filial bond involves more tension than meets the eye. Dad was away for much of his oldest son`s childhood. Little George grew up closer to his acid-tongued mother and acted out against the absent parent—through adolescent misbehavior, academic failure, dissipation, and basically not accomplishing anything at all until well into his 40s.

Dubya`s youthful screw-ups and smart-aleck attitude reflect some combination of protest, plea for attention, and flailing attempt to compete. Until a decade ago, his résumé read like a send-up of his dad`s. Bush senior was a star student at Andover and Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, where he was also captain of the baseball team; Junior struggled through with gentleman`s C`s and, though he loved baseball, couldn`t make the college lineup. Père was a bomber pilot in the Pacific; fils sat out `Nam in the Texas Air National Guard, where he lost flying privileges by not showing up. Dad drove to Texas in 1947 to get rich in the oil business and actually did; Son tried the same in 1975 and drilled dry holes for a decade. Bush the elder got elected to Congress in 1966; Shrub ran in 1978, didn`t know what he was talking about, and got clobbered.

Through all this incompetent emulation runs an undercurrent of hostility. In an oft-told anecdote circa 1973, GWB—after getting wasted at a party and driving over a neighbor`s trash can in Houston—challenged his dad. "I hear you`re lookin` for me," W. told the chairman of the Republican National Committee. "You want to go mano a mano right here?" Some years later at a state dinner, he told the Queen of England he was being seated far away because he was the black sheep of the family.

After half a lifetime of this kind of frustration, Bush decided to straighten up. Nursing a hangover at a 40th-birthday weekend, he gave up Wild Turkey, cold turkey. With the help of Billy Graham, he put himself in the hands of a higher power and began going to church. He became obsessed with punctuality and developed a rigid routine. Thus did Prince Hal molt into an evangelical King Henry. And it worked! Putting together a deal to buy the Texas Rangers, the ne`er-do-well finally tasted success. With success, he grew closer to his father, taking on the role of family avenger. This culminated in his 1994 challenge to Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who had twitted dad at the 1988 Democratic convention*.

Curiously, this late arrival at adulthood did not involve Bush becoming in any way thoughtful. Having chosen stupidity as rebellion, he stuck with it out of conformity. The promise-keeper, reformed-alkie path he chose not only drastically curtailed personal choices he no longer wanted, it also supplied an all-encompassing order, offered guidance on policy, and prevented the need for much actual information. Bush`s old answer to hard questions was, "I don`t know and, who cares." His new answer was, "Wait a second while I check with Jesus."

A remaining bit of poignancy was his unresolved struggle with his father. "All I ask," he implored a reporter while running for governor in 1994, "is that for once you guys stop seeing me as the son of George Bush." In his campaigns, W. has kept his dad offstage. (In an exceptional appearance on the eve of the 2000 New Hampshire primary, 41 came onstage and called his son "this boy.") While some describe the second Bush presidency as a restoration, it is in at least equal measure a repudiation. The son`s harder-edged conservatism explicitly rejects the old man`s approach to such issues as abortion, taxes, and relations with Israel.

This Oedipally induced ignorance expresses itself most dangerously in Bush`s handling of the war in Iraq. Dubya polished off his old man`s greatest enemy, Saddam, but only by lampooning 41`s accomplishment of coalition-building in the first Gulf War. Bush led the country to war on false pretenses and neglected to plan the occupation that would inevitably follow. A more knowledgeable and engaged president might have questioned the quality of the evidence about Iraq`s supposed weapons programs. One who preferred to be intelligent might have asked about the possibility of an unfriendly reception. Instead, Bush rolled the dice. His budget-busting tax cuts exemplify a similar phenomenon, driven by an alternate set of ideologues.

As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he`s something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.

Correction, May 7, 2004: This article originally misstated the date of the Democratic convention where Ann Richards twitted President George H.W. Bush. It was 1988 not 1992. Return to the corrected sentence.

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/2100064/

[Joerver]

Smoke Them
May 07, 2004
ROBERT FISK
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20040507&fname=…

The pictures are appalling, the words devastating. As a wounded Iraqi crawls from beneath a burning truck, an American helicopter pilot tells his commander that one of three men has survived his night air attack. "Someone wounded,` the pilot cries. Then he received the reply: "Hit him, hit the truck and him.` As the helicopter`s gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot fires a 30mm gun at the wounded man, vaporising him in a second.

British and most European television stations censored the tape off the air last night on the grounds that the pictures were too terrible to show. But deliberately shooting a wounded man is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions and this extraordinary film of US air crews in action over Iraq is likely to create yet another international outcry.

American and British personnel have been trying for weeks to persuade Western television stations to show the video of the attack. Despite the efforts of reports in Baghdad and New York, most television controllers preferred to hide the evidence from viewers. Only Canal Plus in France, ABC television in the United States and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have so far had the courage to show the shocking footage. UK military personnel in the Gulf region have confirmed that the tape is genuine.

The camera, mounted beside the 30mm cannon of a US Apache helicopter on patrol over central Iraq on 1 December, first picks up movement on a country road, apparently several hundred metres from an American military checkpoint. A lorry and a smaller vehicle, probably a pick-up, come into view and a man--apparently unaware of the hovering helicopter-- is seen moving to a field on the left of the screen.

He is carrying what seems to be a tube with a covering; it may be a rocket-propelled grenade. One of two helicopter pilots is heard to say: "Big truck over here. He`s having a little pow-wow.` The driver of the pick-up looks around, reaches into the vehicle, takes out the tube-shaped object and runs from the road into the field. He drops the object and returns to the truck. The pilot then radios:

"I got a guy running, throwing a weapon.` Another pilot, or a ground controller, instructs him: "Engage...smoke him.`

At this point, a tractor arrives close to where the man from the lorry dropped the object in the field. One of the Iraqis approaches the tractor driver. The Apache pilot opens fire with his 30mm cannon, killing first the Iraqi in the field and then the tractor driver. The camera registers the bullets hitting the first man. All that is left is a smudge on the ground.

The pilot then turns his attention to the large truck, opens fire and waits to see if he has hit the last of the three men. The third man is then seen crawling, obviously badly wounded, from his cover beneath the blazing truck.

The pilot reports: "Wait. Someone wounded by the truck.` An officer replies: "Hit him. Hit the truck and him.`

The video tape shows that the incident took four minutes, during which the two helicopter pilots--whose names are listed as Nager and Alioto--expended 300 high-velocity cannon rounds at their targets. The tape shows that the first 15 rounds missed the men. One of the pilots says: "Fuck, switching to range auto." The tape then documents the firing of four bursts of 20 rounds each at the three men.

The pictures, apparently taken through thermal-imaging cameras, leave no doubt that the pilot knew his third victim was wounded and crawling along the ground--and that whoever gave him the order to hit him also knew this.

Coming only days after the appalling photographs of Iraqis being tortured and humiliated by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the new pictures can only further inflame Arab opinion throughout the Middle East.
It is common Israeli practice to kill wounded enemies from the air; a devastating helicopter assault by Israel on a Hizbollah training camp in Lebanon 10 years ago was accompanied by a series of attacks in which pilots sought out wounded guerrillas as they hid behind rocks in the Bekaa Valley and then fired at them.

The film, while it shows men acting in an apparently suspicious manner, does not prove they were handling weapons. The occupation authorities in Baghdad chose to keep the incident secret when it occurred in December. Watching the video images, it is easy to understand why.

Courtesy, Znet

[Joerver]

You have the right to be misinformed

Also in this series:
Bush against Bush
Kerry, the Yankee muchacho


BERKELEY, California - Eighty percent of Americans get their information from Fox News, according to a recent University of Maryland poll. Not included in this estimate are the usual customers at the Free Speech Movement Cafe in one of the top US universities, dedicated to a Berkeley student leader-icon of the 1960s, Mario Savio (1943-96). Buried behind waves of laptops, stealing a glance toward a flat-screen TV not tuned to Fox, an international elite at the cafe skateboards to academic - and professional - glory. Wherever you look around - Cory Hall, the Campanile, the library - at least 50 percent of the students at the University of California, Berkeley are from Asia, the future elites of China, South Korea, India, Singapore, Malaysia.

According to a new Harvard University study, young people are much more interested in substance concerning the 2004 presidential election campaign than in previous US elections. An informal survey in Berkeley reveals that for the absolute majority of students, in view of the miserably poor planning of the war on Iraq, the current chaos and an unending series of recent scandals, Washington has definitively lost the battle for hearts and minds of Iraqis, the people of the Middle East, and Muslims as a whole. This is what they`re discussing at the cafe, and this is what they read in, among other places, the Daily Californian, established in 1871 and an independent student paper since 1971.

To compare the students` view with what academe is talking about, nothing could be more appropriate than the recent annual Travers Ethics Conference on "Media, Democracy and the Informed Citizen" - a stimulating debate after conversations with students and professors on campus had revealed that California`s intellectual elite is appalled at the transformation of elite newspapers to "attack dog journalism" or "lapdog journalism". Howard Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, has spoken widely about the current "stenographic function" of the press.

Mark Danner, who writes for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, cannot understand "how seven in 10 Americans became convinced that Saddam [Hussein] was involved on September 11 [2001], without the government explicitly saying so". The only answer he can find is that "we`ve had no political opposition. The press itself, increasingly commercialized, cannot function as an opposition voice."

For Jay Harris, a presidential professor at Santa Clara University and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board of directors, the whole problem is centered on "corporate ethics ... The news media are now a large part of big business. They are more concerned with how much profit they make, not with how to best fulfill their role." Because these corporations invariably resort to "propaganda techniques to shape mass opinion", the "distrust of news media is at a dangerously high level": they "are not seen anymore as being disinterested". Harris complains, for example, that TV networks "don`t even acknowledge that have-nots exist in American society". He despairs that "corporations will not heal the wounds of democracy".

Douglas Kellner, who holds a chair in philosophy of education at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and has written, among other books, a delicious study of the 2000 election (Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and the Theft of an Election), places the whole process in terms of an orgy of infotainment and tabloidization. He is seriously worried about the "effects of the Iraqi spectacle" on the 2004 election. Kellner says, "We have better information sources than any country in history, but everybody is misinformed." His solution: go and find accurate news sources on the Internet and in the blogosphere, a process that is "great for democracy".

John Zaller, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and whose next book studies how the conflicting interests of reporters, politicians and citizens shape the news, is also worried about the "ratings obsession". But in his take on "celebrity politics" may be the answer to rescue politics as usual from the abyss: "[Arnold] Schwarzenegger was a good thing. Because he is interesting. They like to watch him. Even before he started in office [as governor of California], eight networks established bureaus in Sacramento [the state capital], which they`ve never bothered to cover."

Do ghosts cross the Pacific?
Sandy Close, executive director of Pacific News Service, believes a ray of light can be found in the work of ethnic media. In California, there are 40 Vietnamese publications in Orange County, 14 Armenian papers in Burbank, 15 Thai papers in the state. "This is new, vibrant, hungry media, sharing information about each other`s communities." For these media, the story of an obscure Vietnamese in San Jose is big news. Close insists that in a state where one in four people is an immigrant and 40 percent of the population speaks a foreign language at home, "we can`t use the [phrase] `public opinion` in California anymore without considering other languages than English".

Political scientist Lance Bennett, a professor at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, has been studying the phenomenon of the "unelectability" of former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. He started with the first long character-assassination profile in the Washington Post ("he was depicted as arrogant, disrespectful, fiery, red-faced", as compared with a "brilliantly cranky" Donald Rumsfeld). Dean upset insider Democrats. The press linked his anger to electability. And the growth of the Dean anger story led to "voters are angry, down, Dean is angry, up." Then the media clinched it with the contrast with John Kerry, "electable, and not angry". With "electability" as the story frame, even Dean "going into news rehab" was not enough to save him.

So this is how it works, says Bennett. 1) Opposition spin and/or candidate slips prompt "insider" views from press. 2) Press corps recognizes a good story and decontextualizes everything that does not fit. Bennett is absolutely sure Kerry will be the next victim, tagged as a "rich, liberal elitist".

Darry Sragow - a character who looks as if he stepped out of Martin Scorsese`s Goodfellas - brings a political-insider perspective to the debate. He is one of California`s leading consultants to political campaigns: he has managed five of them, statewide. Sragow complains, "There`s no interest for campaigns, apart for the big circus for president." He believes Dean was indeed out of control, because "he is an out-of-control guy. In the beginning they didn`t even have a communications director" - certainly a not-so-subtle way to plug his skills. Sragow insists that the Kerry candidacy now "has to grow. Voters feel they are in a rudderless ship. But a lot of the debate will be focused on who is less risky."

Sragow`s perception scares the hell out of Democrats. Many are horrified that Kerry`s campaign has been so out of focus that even with President George W Bush`s credibility being undermined practically on a daily basis - especially by Iraq fallout - Kerry has not been able to open up a lead, either on a national level or in key swing states such as Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, Michigan and Florida. If he can`t manage to do just that in the crucial month of June, he`ll be in deep trouble. Not only at Berkeley, but in Los Angeles and all over California`s huge infotainment industry, the regime-change-in-Washington sentiment is overwhelming. Kerry will most certainly win in California. But at the same time there`s a feeling that the ultra-cautious and exceedingly boring Kerry campaign simply can`t keep droning on like this. "Kerry has not focused his message. And he has not offered a broad vision for our future," says a Korean-American student.

Sragow compares the US presidential election to "a tennis match between two opponents". And he insists negative ads do work. So in the end US democracy seems to be reduced to a system of two tennis players running after big checks to pay for a barrage of negative ads. Is there any way out of despair for a concerned citizen? Mark Danner believes so: "Forget Fox News. Read a book! Let a million flowers bloom!"

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)



May 8, 2004

[Joerver]

Kerry, the Yankee muchacho

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico - The mother of a New Mexico air force pilot has been responsible for one of the biggest scoops of the 2004 election campaign: she managed to extract from John Kerry his own strategy to deal with the Iraq debacle.

Kerry, the Democratic senator running for the US presidency in November, answered that he would immediately ask for international support - meaning the United Nations, the European Union and the Arab world; "un-Americanize" the occupation; and internationalize all decisions. If this is not a mere campaign promise, it means the end of the neo-con agenda for Iraq. Talking to reporters later, Kerry added: "I think our troops are in greater risk today, because of the lack of leadership, frankly. I think the president has made some enormous mistakes in respect to Iraq. The intelligence, the mistakes in strategy, decisions, timing ..."

According to Vietnam War historian Marilyn Young, Iraq is now "Vietnam on crack cocaine". Until this exchange with the mother of the air force pilot, Kerry was practically mum on Iraq, venturing only to say he was in favor of sending more troops and keeping them on the ground until Iraq, maybe by an intervention from Divine Providence against imperial hubris, becomes "stable, peaceful, tolerant and free".

Kerry, along with Vanessa, one of his daughters, came to New Mexico`s capital this Tuesday on a Champion Airlines flight for a whirlwind one-hour tour of an elementary school, before leaving in a hurry to Los Angeles. In a blue blazer, khaki slacks, and blue checkered shirt with no tie, he posed for the inevitable photo with a wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran, Jim Buhaug. He signed Kerry posters at the airport. And then he spoke to about 100 fans at Longfellow Elementary School. He`s still stiff and as sexy as a spreadsheet on the campaign trail. Wife Teresa "Ketchup Queen" Heinz Kerry should at least have taught him a few charming words in Spanish. And somebody from Kerry`s California staff should urgently consider hiring a Hollywood public relations diva.

Kerry argued that the No Child Left Behind Act, President George W Bush`s education plan, has led to a national high school dropout rate of a million kids a year. Kerry instead proposes fewer students in each class in high school, mentors for middle school students, better salaries for teachers, and heavy investment in a National Education Trust Fund in order actually to find the money for Bush`s plan. Before leaving for California, Kerry said, "The most critical issue now is putting America back to work." Bush, meanwhile, was flipping pancakes in the middle of Ohio, trying to convince a bleak army of blue-collar voters in a crucial industrial swing state that he can deliver better news for the ailing manufacturing sector for the next four years.

And then it was back to muckracking. The Bush campaign insists Kerry voted in favor of both the war on Iraq and the No Child Left Behind Act. Kerry added: "These guys have spent 70 million bucks to, quote, destroy me. That was their goal. They haven`t done it."

Viva Bush
Albuquerque is a sister city with Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. They`re both close to the desert, but as a tribute to US democracy, any talk of elections in the Central Asian gas republic implies a death sentence, courtesy of the Turkmenbashi, supreme ruler for life. On the other hand, a liter of gasoline in Turkmenistan costs one-fifth the price of a bottle of mineral water. Albuquerque - boasting an inevitable armada of sport-utility vehicles - is alarmed by the price of gas. A US gallon of regular unleaded is now US$1.80 (47.6 cents per liter) in New Mexico, a new state record. It`s still peanuts compared with Los Angeles, for example, where about $2.30 a gallon is the norm. The Saudis may soon have to come to Bush`s rescue - as the June contract price for a barrel of North Sea Brent crude has reached almost $36 in New York.

New Mexico illustrates to perfection the education-and-jobs nightmare afflicting millions of Americans. Those who succeed in graduating from high school and getting a degree at the pleasant adobe-filled University of New Mexico in Albuquerque can only find a county or school job if they are part of a politically well-connected family. The other option is to do technical support work at Los Alamos, the largest weapons-of-mass-destruction lab in the United States. The bottom of the scale - for those who at least finished high school - is to join the military and be deployed in Iraq, as this correspondent found out in the Sunni triangle. But northern New Mexico right now is strongly anti-war - and this includes even employees of Los Alamos.

New Mexico will be a crucial swing state come November, along with Ohio, Michigan and Florida. At the Flying Star Cafe in Albuquerque - southwest chic, excellent newsstand, great huevos rancheros - the feeling is New Mexico may be one of two or three states actually to decide the election. In 2000, Bush lost to Al Gore in New Mexico by only 366 votes.

The New Mexico headquarters of Bush`s campaign - staffed with six people since March 18 - is a supreme model of organization. One of the maps on the walls is a labyrinth of color-coded pins where pro-Bush sentiment is carefully recorded. Kerry still has no HQ and no staff. In all key states with a heavy Hispanic vote - Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Florida - Bush has HQs, has a full working team, and has run a barrage of television ads in Spanish. The Kerry campaign has done nothing - yet. The problem is obvious: lack of money. Kerry`s HQs in these states will open only in late May. He will eventually launch his own TV ads in Spanish. But Armando Gutierrez, a political consultant in Albuquerque who produced TV ads in Spanish for both Bill Clinton and Gore is very worried: "He will have to be heavily sold as John Kerry. If people don`t have a clear reason to vote for him, they`d rather stay home."

By contrast, only one day before the whirlwind Kerry visit, the "Viva Bush" campaign was alive and kicking in the pleasant, low-key, fake-adobe low-rises of downtown Albuquerque. "Viva Bush" is rapidly spreading this week to Arizona, Nevada and California. Bush has actively courted the Hispanic vote since he was governor of Texas. His mangled Spanish is very effective - occasionally more so than his English. Both his doctor and his lawyer are Hispanics.
To have any chance of winning the Hispanic vote, Kerry will have to convince people like former US treasurer Rosario Marin from California: "He doesn`t know us," she says, before launching on an autograph binge of $1 bills. "Viva Bush" events are materializing as pretty informal affairs: in Albuquerque, the speeches were followed by a mariachi band playing ultra-corny tunes.

Enter `the gutsy gov`
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson may become one of the key deciders of the 2004 election. He is the only Hispanic governor in the United States. He is also on record saying his political action group, Moving America Forward, will support Kerry among Hispanic voters everywhere, but especially in several key Western and mountain states. Richardson will chair the Democratic National Convention in July, in Boston. Widely tipped to be chosen as Kerry`s running mate, he has repeatedly dismissed those rumors, saying he is concentrated on finishing his term as governor.

Richardson has plenty of assets: a former energy secretary under Clinton, ambassador to the UN, proven international experience. New Mexicans are happy with their progressive governor. He cut income taxes; attracted investment to New Mexico; spent heavily on public schools; is an impassioned defender of the environment; and is working to give New Mexico a leading role in alternative energy production. The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance calls him "the gutsy gov" because of his opposition to plans by Yates Petroleum, HEYCO and Burlington - all of them major Bush donors - to drill one of America`s wildest grasslands, Otero Mesa. Richardson seems to have aligned himself with national conservation instead of oil development. According to a recent poll by the Albuquerque Journal among New Mexico Democrats, Richardson scores 78 percent on popularity, against 55 percent for Kerry and 44 percent for Bush.

The US population is about 12.5 percent Hispanic (in New Mexico it`s a staggering 42 percent). The majority of the Hispanic vote - currently only 7 percent of the US total - is historically Democrat. In 2000, 61 percent voted for Gore and 38 percent for Bush, according to a Los Angeles Times poll. For 2004, Bush strategists are aiming for 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. It`s not far-fetched, and Democrats know it: Republican Arnold "Gubernator" Schwarzenegger is extremely popular among California Hispanic voters. Charming-as-a-gas-pump Kerry could do worse than start practicing his "hasta la vista, baby" routines.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)



May 7, 2004

[Joerver]

Bush against Bush


NEW YORK - Ground Zero at midnight is a cold, emotionless, otherworldly place, refashioned into a mix of developer`s dream-cum-tourist attraction. The only hint of humanity is a small collection of mementos by the crater on Gate 7, beside a huge US flag, and a simple message from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police: "Thank you America for your prayers and support for all those lost and their families."

The contrast could not be more spectacular with the apotheosis of vertical capitalism in Times Square - the mad flow of infotainment emanating from a collection of towers like a digital dervish dance. Between Ground Zero and Times Square, between the abyss and euphoria, the United States stares at its longest and dirtiest of all political campaigns.

From Park Avenue to Greenwich Village, the chattering classes are still digesting the new Bob Woodward book, Plan of Attack. In connection to no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, President George W Bush told Woodward, "You travel in elite circles." Woodward believes Bush disdains "the fancy-pants intellectual world". This means only elitists and snobs care about no WMD in Iraq. What matters, says Bush, is that the Iraq war was right because he has a "duty to free people". Then "there is a higher father that I appeal to". Who are mere mortals to argue with a commander-in-chief on a mission from God?

Richard Clarke`s book Against All Enemies in essence argued that the Bush system got it all wrong - before and after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Woodward`s book presents an uncritical president who is not responsible, not accountable and incapable of self-doubt. Does that bother someone like larger-than-life, I-love-New York media tycoon Rupert Murdoch? Not at all. His New York Post echoes Fox News when it says that "the war was and is on firm ground morally, legally and politically", and "the United Nations can`t be trusted to do the right thing".

Seen from Wall Street or Madison Avenue, Republicans and Democrats are both facing their own non sequiturs. The occupation of Iraq is untenable. But the Democratic critique is shallow and dour. Republicans can`t utter a single word about Iraqi oil. Democrats can`t talk about Zionism. In Iraq it is politically impossible to pack up and go, and militarily it`s impossible to win. "It`s not Vietnam. It`s worse than Vietnam," says a Madison Avenue ad executive.

The talk at the smart Osteria Fiamma in SoHo is that Democrats want to keep Iraq as much as Republicans. Yitzhak Nakash, chairman of the Brandeis University Middle Eastern Studies Department, pretty much sums up the Democratic position on Iraq. If the United States "stays the course" (copyright Bush), the occupation will become "untenable". For Nakash, the only chance of success in Iraq is a pluralistic, checks-and-balances political system. What Nakash is subtly saying is that "technical democracy" is a better method of population control than blunt occupation. But this may be way too subtle for Washington neo-cons.

A lot like Lincoln
Before the February Iowa caucus that changed John Kerry`s life, Gore Vidal said the senator from Massachusetts was looking "a lot like Lincoln, after the assassination". The same applies today. Kerry, now labeling himself an "entrepreneurial Democrat", has spent April as silent as Ground Zero at midnight - aside from proposing a "contract with America`s middle class". In his latest two ads, a resolute Kerry faces the camera and declares himself committed to more jobs, better health care and strong defense. From now to the Democratic Convention in late July, this will be the face of John Kerry. And Vietnam is inevitably part of the package - as a metaphor for Kerry`s love of the motherland.

Kerry`s contract with the middle class is not resonating in New York with the failed, angry, money-obsessed screenwriter forced to set up pack shots of designer jeans to pay for his US$5,000 SoHo loft monthly rent, or the marketing executive for a cosmetics giant who quit her quiet previous job for a roller-coaster that could land her in riches or in hell. For Sikh taxi drivers and Punjabi corner-store keepers, the masseuse from Fujian with barely a word of English spoken and a "naked cowboy" proposing photos with gaping tourists on Times Square, Kerry`s contract is social Darwinism on steroids. "There`s certainly nothing the government or John Kerry can do to help me pay my bills," says a fashion photographer.

Everyone in New York complains about taxes. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has just published a detailed study on Bush`s tax policies. According to the study, families making more than $1 million a year will have an average of almost $124,000 in tax cuts this year. On the other hand, middle-class families will be eligible for an average of only $647.

Even with the odds stacked against them, cynical New Yorkers wouldn`t be caught dead taking lessons from the ultimate tycoon for the age of reality TV, Donald Trump. Like Trump, they may dream of turning their entire life into a huge marketing ploy. As on Trump`s reality TV show The Apprentice, they may subscribe to the core values of mega-corporate America: always finish your tasks before a deadline; always please the boss; make a lot of money; be a winner. But they identify the persona behind the mask. They know Trump was a rich kid given a huge head start by Dad; they know he is nasty and mean; they know he is a lousy manager endlessly saved from ruin by the banks; they know that in Wall Street, Donald Trump is a joke. To sum it all up: they know the system is heavily biased. So what`s left for these cynical New Yorkers? The dream of exile in paradise - be it Canada or Costa Rica.

Same same but different
There`s a widespread feeling in New York of a US political establishment gone out of control, drenched on the macho-narcissism of the Bush doctrine.

Kerry vs Bush will be the longest and dirtiest of US political campaigns. If New York could cast a definitive ballot, Kerry would win by a landslide. But of roughly 200 million US citizens of voting age (out of a population of 293 million), fewer than half will even bother to show up at the polling stations.

Kerry vs Bush fits the classic Asian dictum "same same but different". Both John Forbes Kerry, 60, and George Walker Bush, 57, come from private-school, northeastern money and privilege, Yale and Skull and Bones. One went to Vietnam, the other didn`t. Bush skipped Vietnam, became a Republican and a B-list Texas oil partner before finding God, leaving alcohol and cocaine behind and following George Bush Sr to the White House. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam hero, turned against that war and became a "flip-flop senator" (copyright the Republican Party).

Madison Avenue execs delight on how Bush has been carefully sold as a man of the people - including his trademark specialty of mangling the English language. As the whole world knows, he doesn`t do nuance. As for Kerry, his elitism precludes even a whiff of sense of humor. The Bush world view can be summed up by the famous "either with us or against us". Kerry, on the other hand, does nuance. He is "thoughtful", not a flip-flopper, counterspin the Democrats.

New York has been plunged into a frenzy of polls. It`s very enlightening to check on voters` priorities: 39 percent of likely voters say it`s the economy, 28 percent terrorism and 22 percent Iraq. With an interesting add-on: in 2004, Iraq is Vietnam, thus the Kerry campaign`s emphasis on his war hero`s background.

By 36 percent to 30 percent, voters are saying that only Kerry can do a good job on the economy. Fifty-two percent disapprove of Bush on the economy. But by 2-1, voters are in essence saying that only Bush can do a good job fighting terrorism. By nearly as much, 40 percent to 26 percent, they are saying only Bush can do a good job in Iraq. Bush`s approval rating on terrorism is still a huge 60 percent. The election may be more than six months away, but at least for the moment it is being debated on Bush`s terms, and to his total advantage, although Bush has been under 50 percent in the absolute majority of polls.

Democrats are puzzled: How could Bush have possibly not floundered with the accumulated Fallujah and Najaf debacles and the debate on the 9-11 Commission? This means that the massive Bush negative ad campaign ("John Kerry: Wrong on defense") has reached its Karl Rove-masterminded target. In the maze of poll-land, Bush always wins, as much as national security and war hit the front page - even if they invariably hit the front page in the form of very bad news. Even when voters learn that Saudis are more important to the Bush system than Colin Powell - with the added benefit of being willing to contribute with cheap oil for his re-election - Bush`s numbers don`t sink.

A new poll by the University of Maryland`s Program in International Policy Attitudes suggests that as late as mid-March, 57 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had supported al-Qaeda, quoting "clear evidence" found in Iraq; 45 percent believed Saddam had WMD before the war; and 72 percent of these say they will vote to re-elect Bush (see Bush`s believe it or not, April 24). University of Michigan professor and Middle East expert Juan Cole comments that "if it were accepted that Saddam had virtually nothing to do with al-Qaeda, that he had no weapons of mass destruction ... and that no evidence for such things has been uncovered after the US and its allies have had a year to comb through Ba`ath documents - if all that is accepted, then President Bush`s credibility would suffer. For his partisans, it is absolutely crucial that the president retain his credibility. Therefore, rather than face reality, they rejigger it to create a fantasy world in which Saddam and Osama [bin Laden] are buddies."

So the United States in 2004 seems to be indeed a "polarized nation". Roughly, the dies are cast. Bush has a hold on 45 percent of the voters, no matter what happens. Another 45 percent of the voters are ABB (Anybody But Bush), not exactly John Kerry fans. This leaves a crucial 10 percent of voters swinging back and forth. The "escape to paradise" version of political strategists, Republican and Democrat alike, is to capture the largest chunk of these 10 percent.

The view from on high
Executives and the not-so-idle rich make up roughly 0.1 percent of the US population. But they are responsible for no less that 83 percent of political contributions in this country. For most of them, Bush is indeed God. F Scott Fitzgerald observed that the rich are different. Wall Street, at least for the moment, is betting on Bush.

In February - according to the latest data available by the Center for Responsive Politics - Bush got almost $6 million from financial corporations, compared with $1.3 million for Kerry. Major Bush-boosters include Merrill Lynch, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse First Boston. Bush raised four times more cash from Goldman Sachs than Kerry. But Goldman Sachs vice chairman Robert Hormats says Kerry is set to raise much more in the coming weeks because Wall Street is "worried about Iraq and worried about the deficit".

This fuses with talk in the wealthy salons of Park Avenue. It`s not uncommon to hear the well-heeled talk of Bush Jr misdirecting the ship of state toward chimerical escapades: a polite way of characterizing Iraq as the Mother of All Strategic Blunders (attacking the wrong target). Iraq is also considered "bad for business". More than $500 billion of deficits have destabilized the well-heeled`s holdings. And the Bush clique, "quite a few Jews and zealots", in the words of a snob, is viewed with extreme suspicion.

The anti-Bush feeling in the well-to-do set derives from a very clear fact. The people in control in Washington have forgotten about their first priority: to protect the assets of the ruling class. This may spell big, big trouble for Bush in the next few months. As an investment banker puts it, "sooner or later people will start questioning why the half-a-trillion [dollar] military budget simply does not protect us from the half-a-trillion [dollar] trade deficit".

Meanwhile, on ground level, the atmosphere in New York is overwhelmingly fatalistic. From Harlem to Ground Zero, most New Yorkers seem to agree that the White House will do anything to win - or steal - the coming election. There is widespread talk of an October Surprise - a spectacular political manipulation such as the capture of Osama bin Laden. Fresh from breakfast at Tiffany`s, a Park Avenue lady and self-confessed disillusioned Republican sums it all up: "This looks like a referendum to me. This election will be Bush against Bush."

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

[Joerver]

BUSH: IRAQI PRISON SCANDAL RAISES NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT KERRY’S WAR RECORD

Promises Iraqi People Vigorous New Attack Ads

Speaking to the Iraqi people last night, President Bush vowed that he would respond to the Iraqi prison scandal with a vigorous new round of campaign ads attacking Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass).

“In a democracy, it is important to have transparency, and there is no one more transparent than I am,” Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Bush promised the Iraqis that he would spare no expense in producing the new attack ads and said that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners had raised fresh questions about Sen. Kerry’s Vietnam War record.

“As you saw the abhorrent images from Abu Ghraib prison, I’m sure that you were asking yourselves the same question I was: why did John Kerry throw away his war medals?” Mr. Bush said.

The speech to the Iraqi people culminated a busy day for Mr. Bush, who earlier in the evening announced that the U.S. had invaded Michael Moore.

Mr. Bush said that the invasion of Michael Moore was “a last resort” after the filmmaker repeatedly refused to destroy copies of his latest film, Fahrenheit 911.

The invasion, which the Pentagon is calling Operation Shut His Piehole, commenced in the southern region of Michael Moore, with troops expected to reach the Oscar-winning director’s mouth in a matter of days.

But according to retired General Wesley Clark, securing Michael Moore may prove considerably more difficult than invading him.

“It’s important to remember that Michael Moore is approximately the same size as the state of Texas,” Gen. Clark said.

**** BOROWITZ LIVE IN NYC THIS SUNDAY ****

Andy Borowitz moderates the panel “Politics as Entertainment” Sunday May 9 at the Tribeca Film Festival. For ticket info go to www.tribecafilmfestival.org

[Joerver]

Military Industrial Complexes

by Karen Kwiatkowski
by Karen Kwiatkowski

LINK TV’s "Active Opposition" aired a show last Wednesday discussing the military industrial complex. It featured a panel discussion, opening with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech of 43 years ago.

In preparation for this panel, I re-read War Is a Racket, by two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Lieutenant General Smedley Butler. Butler’s post-World War I, pre-World War II assessment is far more direct than Ike’s speech. Marines often tend to tell it like it is.

I wonder what Butler or Ike, generals who had served in several brutal wars, would have thought about the latest news from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Smedley Butler noticed how defense industries carefully nurtured politicians for war. Like good cops, they emphasized the job creation benefits and their own outstanding ability to produce needed armaments and supplies. All you want, and then some, yessiree! If that didn’t do the trick, the bad cop defense industrial establishment worried that without war, vast debts owed them by allies or opponents might never be collected, and domestic economic collapse would follow. Politicians, unchanging from the time of Plato, knew exactly what to do.

Ike was concerned that the average American did not really understand the sycophantic and co-dependent relationship between the defense industries, the military leadership, and the Congress. He noted "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. …We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications."

Ike advised America to stay vigilant, observant, "alert and knowledgeable." Smedley Butler, more of a realist I suppose, simply advised that when talk of war raged, all of the industrialists and politician be conscripted first, then their children, and lastly, the rest of us. Butler conceived a simple democratic plan that would require a decision for war be approved by a majority of all those who would be sent to fight. Draftable young men would vote yea or nay for the next war. No votes by older folks or politicians and industrialists would be considered. Such a system would ensure that truly defensive wars would be fought, and all other wars rejected.

American soldiers today are quite familiar with the military industrial complex and outsourcing. They see inedible food, an extra burden of providing security, and shocking pay inequities. They see inscrutable accountability mysteries.

Some Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib Prison have met the modern American military industrial complex up close and personal. Contractors from CACI International and Titan Corporation, as well as members of our own military, are under investigation for "mistreating" prisoners.

CACI International and Titan Corporation represent numbers 63 and 35, respectively, of the Pentagon’s top 100 contractors for 2002. These companies are small fry, as out-sourcing goes.

Rational people may debate whether America’s occupation of Iraq is purely defensive, a Republic behaving imperially, or the blueprint for a new kind of empire. But underlying the debate is a fact – that by its very existence – undermines the Constitution, American traditions of justice, and the laws of armed conflict.

We have today over 15,000 military contractors in Iraq, doing not just the cooking and cleaning, but the fighting, the guarding, the strategizing, and even some of the dying. After the U.S. and the U.K. militaries, this third largest "force" outnumbers the entire remaining coalition of the paid for.

The military industrial complex lobbies Congress on a daily basis, costs the taxpayer billions each year, chips away at the credibility of the United States as a force for justice and good will, exists in a hazy legal wasteland unaccountable to domestic or international law, and serves to embarrass the country periodically with overcharges, technology leaks to other countries, and human rights abuses.

Outsourcing contracts for everything from toilet paper to bullets to guards and interrogators have become the Soylent Green of the military industrial complex, an "artificial nourishment whose actual ingredients are not known by the public." The top 100 CEOs and Vice Presidents cheerfully move from government circles into defense industries, and sometimes back again.

This third-generation spawn of Smedley Butler’s racketeers go where we pay them to go and do what they are told. They can hardly complain later that they were forced into anything, or misled by faulty intelligence, or didn’t know what they were getting into. You see, it’s all in their contracts. This makes them worth far more to Washington than our all-volunteer force of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.

When we consider the American military, we don’t think about contracts or contractors, and we don’t worry about the parasitical military industrial complex. Smedley Butler and Dwight D. Eisenhower thought we should. America at war, circa 2004, proves them to be not only patriots, but prophets as well.

May 3, 2004

Karen Kwiatkowski [send her mail] is a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. She now lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley, and writes a bi-weekly column on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com.

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May 9, 2004
Europeans Like Bush Even Less Than Before
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, May 8 - Earlier this year, George Osborne, a Conservative member of Parliament, took a straw poll of some legislators from his party. The subject was President Bush. The results were not pretty.

"George Bush scares the hell out of me," one Tory said, according to an article by Mr. Osborne in The Spectator. Another told him: "Bush is a man who might wail at the moon. I don`t feel comfortable with him." A third said that while he would vote for Bush in November if he could, "I think Anglo-American relations would be better if Kerry won."

That was long before pictures showing the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners were published all over the world, horrifying even Mr. Bush`s allies. And the people Mr. Osborne polled were all Conservatives, by tradition and temperament the Republican Party`s natural friends across the Atlantic.

But perhaps the only surprising thing about the vehemence of anti-Bush feeling, based on a reading of newspapers, opinion polls and interviews around Europe, is how unsurprising it truly is. In fact, one reason the recent disclosures have proved so damaging to the American cause here is that Mr. Bush had so little good will upon which to draw.

Across Europe, anti-Bush feeling has contributed to a consensus that the coming American election is of singular importance: for the United States, certainly, but also for the rest of the world. Anxieties about the direction America is going are accompanied more often than not by a passionate desire, cutting across national borders and party lines, to see President Bush voted out of office in November.

Europeans are in general more liberal than Americans, and among Europe`s mainstream liberals, rejecting Mr. Bush is a matter of course. But a strange thing seems to have happened to many conservatives, who would ordinarily be the American president`s cheerleaders. Even those who favor him seem loath to admit to wholehearted support, tempering their praise with caveats and qualifications.

It is as if admiring Mr. Bush is seen as slightly shameful among thinking Europeans, like confessing a preference for screw-top wine bottles.

"I must say, he`s not very popular," said Sergio Romano, an Italian teacher and commentator who has served as ambassador to NATO and to the former Soviet Union. "It`s quite understandable that he wouldn`t be popular with the bulk of the center-left European intelligentsia, but he`s not very popular with the conservatives or moderates either."

In Britain, Lawrence Freedman, a professor of war studies and the vice principal for research at King`s College London, paused for an awkward moment when asked about an article he had written for The Financial Times arguing that Mr. Bush seemed "the safer bet," based on past experiences with second-term United States presidents.

"I wouldn`t want to come across as a supporter of President Bush," Mr. Freedman said. "It was more of not being pro-Bush, but of explaining why Europeans, despite appearances, might end up not being unhappy if Bush was elected."

In poll after poll, Europeans have shown themselves to be fervently anti-Bush. In Britain, America`s staunchest ally in the war in Iraq, a poll of 1,007 people taken last month for The Times of London by the British polling company Populus found support for Senator John Kerry over President Bush by a margin of 56 to 22 percent.

From America, a poll of people in nine nations conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in March found that opinion of the president and, by extension, the United States, had plummeted across Europe since Mr. Bush took office.

In France, the poll found, the president had an 85 percent negative rating; in Britain, 57 percent; in Germany 85 percent; and in Russia, 60 percent.

"People say, `I`m very frustrated that I can`t vote in the U.S. elections, because these are the ones that affect my way of life more than anything else,` " Ken Dubin, a political scientist at Carlos III University in Madrid, said in an interview.

Referring to the prewar meeting last year of President Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and José María Aznar, who was then the prime minister of Spain and whose recent election loss was attributed to antiwar feelings by Spanish voters, Mr. Dubin said, "I`ve heard the comment, `One down, two to go.` "

In an editorial in March, the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian put it more starkly. "Senator Kerry carries the hopes not just of millions of Americans but of millions of British well-wishers, not to mention those of nations throughout Europe and the world," the newspaper wrote. "Nothing in world politics would make more difference to the rest of us than a change in the White House."

Of course there are Bush supporters here. Mr. Osborne is one: "I think he`s been a good president for the U.S. and for Britain, and I`d like to see him re-elected," Mr. Osborne said in an interview.

So are leaders like Mr. Blair and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. Many European thinkers, while acknowledging the depth of anti-Bush feeling, say it is simplistic and unfair.

"I was impressed by Bush`s reaction to Sept. 11, and how he helped put the country back on its feet," said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, an international lawyer and political writer in France, and the author of "An Alliance At Risk: The United States and Europe Since Sept. 11."

"Europeans tend to attribute the rift between the U.S. and Europe essentially to one man and one administration, and to believe that the mere election of a different president would mend the relationship quickly," he added. "Unfortunately, the reasons for the current Atlantic divide are deeper and more complex."

Some countries, like Poland, which has committed troops to the war in Iraq, have their own reasons for wanting Mr. Bush to succeed.

"Given that the Polish fate in Iraq is linked with President Bush and his policies, there are more sympathies on the Bush side," said Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, a former European affairs minister who is running for the European Parliament. "We think he`s been a decisive and courageous president."

But on the whole it is hard to find unreserved enthusiasm for Mr. Bush in Europe. Not that Senator Kerry is seen as particularly dynamic or gifted, or even as especially likely to solve all of America`s foreign-policy problems. But he has one irresistible attraction: his non-Bushness.

Europeans` objections to Mr. Bush are multifaceted. Some are still obsessing about stolen elections and hanging chads. Others cannot get past the president`s plain-spoken manner, his proudly aggressive anti-intellectualism, his ties to the religious right and his tendency in public to trip over words and concepts.

The criticism can be expressed in ways that are exceptionally disparaging of an American president.

The Express, a British tabloid, for instance, ridiculed Mr. Bush`s news conference last month in an article titled, "The President`s Brain Is Missing," saying his performance had revealed him as a "bumbling embarrassment."

The paper printed a series of unflattering photographs showing Mr. Bush`s various facial expressions after a reporter asked whether he had made mistakes since the Sept. 11 attacks. "In what was meant to be a rallying defense of the war," the caption read, "George Bush appears alternately flummoxed, panicked, forgetful and distant as he struggles to remember what he`s been doing in Iraq for the past year."

But beyond distaste for Mr. Bush`s personal style are serious questions about what Europeans see as his American-centric, us-or-them worldview.

These began soon after Mr. Bush took office, when he diverged from the European position on a host of international treaties. Then came Sept. 11, the conflict with Iraq, the subsequent backpedaling about the rationale for entering the war and, now, the prisoner abuse scandal.

"The thing that Europeans cannot understand is how you can vote for a liar," said Peter Schneider, a German essayist and novelist. "Here is somebody who lies about something that leads to a war where tens of thousands of people`s lives are involved."

Nor are Europeans thrilled about the American values they feel Mr. Bush has encouraged, in which anti-Europeanism is applauded as a virtue, people boycott French wine in protest at the French position on Iraq and Senator Kerry is ridiculed by the Republicans for being able to speak French.

"The idea that you have a leader of the U.S. who`s not interested in listening to his allies is important in the way people perceive Bush," Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States at the French Institute of Foreign Relations, said in an interview. "He has a very simplistic view of the world, which we find difficult to accept. In fact, that we find dangerous."

In Moscow, the political commentator Aleksandr Yanov said Mr. Kerry was a superior candidate for many reasons, high among them that he appears to have a far more nuanced view of the world.

Writing in Nyezavisimaya Gazeta, Mr. Yanov said, "In contrast to Bush, he will never put the Bolshevik principle - `Those who are not with us are against us` - at the center of his policy."

Nick Clegg, a British Liberal Democrat who is a member of the European Parliament, said it was "difficult to exaggerate" the European hope that President Bush would lose the election - particularly in Brussels, whose multilateral ethos is mightily offended by Mr. Bush`s unilateralism.

"At the moment, a consideration or analysis of Kerry`s positions is pretty underdeveloped," Mr. Clegg said in an interview. "Partly, it`s because it`s still early days and he hasn`t revealed his hand fully. But what really drives people is alarm about George Bush`s policies, more than some overwhelming attraction to Kerry.

"Kerry`s greatest attraction is that he`s not George Bush."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 9, 2004
THE TRANSITION
U.S. Presses U.N. on Role in Iraq for Politicians
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, May 8 — The Bush administration is pressing the United Nations envoy to change his proposal for a transitional Iraqi government once self-rule is returned on June 30, Iraqi and administration officials say.

Instead of a government that is nonpolitical, the administration is pushing for one that gives prominent roles to people with ties to political parties, the officials say.

The officials said the new thinking in Washington reflected doubts that a transitional government of technocrats would be strong enough.

Leading Kurdish and Shiite political figures, many of them members of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, have pressed for the change, administration officials said. These figures are clamoring to hold on to power after the council is dissolved on June 30.

In particular, the administration is said to be wedded to a large role for Adnan Pachachi, the former foreign minister who has guided the process of writing Iraq`s transitional constitution, and to figures tied to political groups loyal to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite cleric.

"The government is going to have to have both technocrats and people of political stature," said a senior administration official. "It`s important to have both sides in the government."

In Iraq on Saturday, insurgents backing a rebel Shiite cleric took the offensive after several days of attacks by American troops by trying to seize government buildings and striking at convoys in two big cities in the south. The move signaled the opening of a possible new front in the American campaign to crush the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, and his followers. [Page 12.]

Only two weeks ago, the administration embraced the proposal of Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy to Iraq, that the government consist of technocrats, though a top official cautioned then that some political presence could not be ruled out. Now the administration is insisting on such a presence, officials say.

The administration agrees with Mr. Brahimi that whoever joins the government should not make long-term commitments or reach any decisions that might benefit the parties they represent.

"The structure should allow political balance at the top," said one official, along with "competence and efficiency as the quality for the ministers who run things day to day."

This official said: "People generally think that anyone in the new government should not run for office later on."

American, European and United Nations officials say the establishment of a new government has become extremely difficult because of the mistreatment of some Iraqi prisoners and the continuing American military actions in Falluja, Najaf, Karbala and elsewhere.

"We`re at a point where the more it looks like the new Iraqi government is led or directed by the United States, the less legitimate it will look," said a prominent European diplomat. "But if we give too much responsibility to the United Nations, the knives will be out for them, too."

The makeup of the new government is to be decided in the next week or two by Mr. Brahimi, in consultation with L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, and Robert D. Blackwill, a White House adviser serving as a special envoy of President Bush in Baghdad.

It was Mr. Brahimi, however, who first sketched out the idea that the new government would be as nonpolitical as possible. Several officials say that one possible candidate for prime minister he has put forward is Dr. Mahdi al-Hafidh, the current planning minister.

Dr. Hafidh is said still to be a possibility for that job, but other candidates are being put forward by Kurdish and Shiite leaders, with particular interest focused on another minister who is a prominent Shiite Islamist, Adel Abdul Mehdi.

Mr. Mehdi is described by some Iraqi officials as unacceptable to Sunni leaders, who are said to fear that he might try to impose Islamic law over family matters.

Iraqi officials who have been in close contact with Washington say the parties that will have to be represented in the caretaker government include the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has close ties to Iran, and Dawa, another influential Shiite group. The Communist Party is also likely to be represented, they said.

It was not clear, however, whether Ahmad Chalabi, a Pentagon favorite who has accused Mr. Brahimi of trying to marginalize him and other former exiles, would be included in the government. Despite his mostly favorable standing at the Pentagon, administration officials say, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, military commanders and Mr. Bremer all oppose a role for Mr. Chalabi in the government.

"The Shia and Chalabi have been running quite a campaign against Brahimi, and against any idea that the Iraqi Governing Council will be eclipsed," a Western diplomat said. "I don`t think it will be eclipsed." As the diplomat put it, Mr. Brahimi had not yet figured out how to accommodate Shiite interests close to Ayatollah Sistani, which is considered essential to maintaining legitimacy, without angering restive Sunni.

The latest timetable for setting up a government is for Mr. Brahimi to pick the leaders by the end of this month and have them in place in early June, so they can begin to negotiate with the American occupation officials and others about several matters to take effect on June 30, including the exact role the Iraq government will play in its security.

The United Nations Security Council is expected to define that role, but disagreements have already emerged, with France and Germany suggesting that the Iraq government have at least some control over its own armed forces, and the United States suggesting that the Iraqis serve under American command.

The American plan is for the Security Council to declare that all forces in Iraq are part of a United Nations-mandated multinational security force under United States command. But it is not clear that Russia and other Security Council members will be ready to go that far, many diplomats say.

There are also questions about whether the United Nations, rather than the United States, will have the larger role in advising the new government on where to spend reconstruction money, and about such difficult matters as whether American military forces are to remain shielded from prosecution by Iraqi courts, and whether there should be an international role in running Iraqi prisons.

Diplomats say it will be very important to hear from Iraqi leaders themselves as the United Nations confronts a new Security Council resolution — another reason why jockeying is under way over whether the Iraqi government is political or technocratic in nature.

The government structure proposed by Mr. Brahimi, widely accepted by the United Sates and other countries, calls for a prime minister to serve as the main power, and a president and two vice presidents in ceremonial or advisory capacities, representing each of the three main groups — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

Mr. Brahimi has also pressed for a national conference of Iraqis after June 30, with 1,500 people choosing a smaller "consultative council" to serve as a kind of legislature — though with no legislative power — advising the government and ministers.

But Iraqi officials say that this idea is being resisted in many parts of Iraq, and that the Iraqi Governing Council, which Mr. Brahimi wants to dissolve, is still jockeying to stay on and serve as a legislative body after June 30.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Rumsfeld Releases Shocking New Photo
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WASHINGTON (IWR News Parody) - Donald Rumsfeld today released a shocking new photo showing "prison torture techniques" being tested by high government officials.

*Note for John Ashcroft: That`s just a lava lamp.

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Diese armen, unglücklichen Superreichen, was haben diese doch für Probleme!

May 9, 2004
Itemizing That $500 Million Tax Return
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

WASHINGTON — Always interested in stimulating private investment, John Kerry proposed early in his Senate career that stock dividends be exempt from income taxes. In 1998, he voted to reduce the holding period necessary for claiming a lower tax rate on capital gains.

Imagine if Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, became president and supported such measures. He would immediately be accused by his political opponents of padding his own pockets - or at least those of his wife, one of the richest people in America, worth more than $500 million.

How much, they would ask, would his wife save? Five million dollars a year? 10 million dollars?

No one would know for sure if Teresa Heinz Kerry continues to refuse to release her income tax returns.

"There will be innuendo around much of what he does,`` said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington research institute. "There will be a good deal of misunderstanding. His motives will be impugned, and unnecessary controversies will hinder presidential decision-making."

In the last 30 years, all other major party candidates for president and vice president and their spouses have made their personal tax filings public. Except for Geraldine A. Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984, all filed joint returns with their spouses. Ms. Ferraro resisted at first but eventually released the separate return filed by her husband, John A. Zaccaro.

None were even remotely as well off as the Kerrys, said Kevin Phillips, who has written books about wealth and politics. Ms. Heinz Kerry`s inherited wealth would make her and her husband by far the richest people ever to live in the White House.

President Bush, for instance, is worth about $20 million, according to Forbes magazine. John F. Kennedy`s parents were alive when he was killed, so he never came into his inheritance. Franklin D. Roosevelt left an estate that would be worth about $10 million in today`s dollars.

Mr. Kerry has released his tax returns. But Ms. Heinz Kerry, 65, told reporters last month and repeated on the ABC program "20/20" Friday night that her finances were so linked with those of her adult children that she could not release her separate tax forms without invading her children`s privacy.

She inherited her wealth when her previous husband, Senator John Heinz, the heir to the Heinz food fortune, was killed in a plane crash in 1991. Financial information filed with the Senate shows that she shares about 10 trust funds with her three sons from that marriage.

"What I have and what I receive is not just mine, it is also my children`s, and I don`t have the right to make public what is theirs,`` she told reporters. "If I could separate it, I would have no problem."

But a half-dozen prominent tax and estate lawyers interviewed last week said Ms. Heinz-Kerry`s returns would almost certainly reveal nothing about the children except a hint at how wealthy they are. Her returns, for example, would show nothing about her prior marriage or where the children live or how they spend their money or the nature of their families - matters most people would say were outside the bounds of political disclosures.

More likely, some of these lawyers guessed, Ms. Heinz Kerry does not want to reveal the immensity of her income - possibly $30 million or more each year. Or, they suggested, she may pay relatively little in taxes because she has taken advantage of the many ways available to very wealthy people to plan their estates and minimize their taxes legally.

Last year, the author Arianna Huffington, running for governor of California during the Gray Davis recall, released her tax returns. They showed that because of legal write-offs, she paid no state income taxes and only $771 in federal income taxes in the previous two years. Ms. Huffington is divorced from the multimillionaire Michael Huffington and lives in a mansion valued at $7 million.

One of Ms. Heinz Kerry`s friends speculated that she was afraid the tax returns would raise more questions than they answered, leading to demands that she reveal still other documents, like the terms of the trust agreements, that could violate her children`s privacy.

Many people outside politics say that Ms. Heinz Kerry`s finances are separate from her husband`s and no business of the public. "The spouse is not the candidate and is free to do with his or her money whatever he or she chooses," said Ellen K. Harrison, a tax lawyer here.

But in political circles, the consensus is that the details of her wealth cannot be kept under wraps, especially since Mr. Kerry has used her money for his political benefit.

"The rule of thumb is, the more authority a person asks for in a democracy, the less privacy they`re entitled to," said Stephen Hess, an expert on politics and the presidency at the Brookings Institution.

Last year, for example, Mr. Kerry borrowed $6.4 million against his share of the house on Beacon Hill in Boston that was bought with her money but owned jointly by the couple. The money enabled Mr. Kerry to decline public financing in the Democratic primaries, giving him a leg up on his opponents who accepted public money and were bound to spending limits.

Under the law, Ms. Heinz Kerry can only donate $4,000 directly to her husband`s campaign. But she is free to spend whatever she wants independently to help her husband`s cause, and she has left open the possibility she might dip into her personal fortune.

One politician who does not release his own tax returns and does not think Ms. Heinz Kerry should is Ralph Nader, who revealed in the 2000 campaign that he had a net worth of about $4 million.

"Anything she does for his campaign, she should disclose voluntarily," Mr. Nader said. "If she has tax shelters, she should disclose them. But there`s lots of information in tax returns that`s nobody`s business."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Teresa Heinz Kerry played an active role in the construction of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. She said the old center was "a brick box" with "nothing redeeming about it."

Es ist kein Problem in den USA reich zu sein, auch nicht reich und Präsident oder Senator. Was ein Problem ist, ist reich zu sein und Demokrat. Das läßt die meist sehr konservative Presse niemandem durchgehen, denn Reiche haben Republikaner zu sein.


May 9, 2004
THE MASSACHUSETTS SENATOR`S WIFE
In Vast Philanthropy, Kerry`s Wife Wields Sway
By STEPHANIE STROM

When the newly widowed Teresa Heinz took over the stewardship of one of the country`s largest philanthropic organizations more than a decade ago, all she had to guide her was a soggy, charred legal pad of handwritten notes that had been found in the debris of the plane that crashed in 1991, killing her husband, Senator H. John Heinz III.

Mr. Heinz had been jotting down plans for a sweeping overhaul of the organization that would put it on sounder financial footing by diversifying its holdings out of H.J. Heinz Company shares and changing its management structure.

"When Jack died and we had to diversify, I had to learn about everything," recalled Teresa Heinz Kerry, who in 1995 married John Kerry, the Democratic presidential contender, "and I knew nothing about money and investments."

Thirteen years later, she is the guiding force behind the Heinz Endowments, which control $1.3 billion in assets and gave away $54.5 million last year. She also runs the Heinz Family Philanthropies, an umbrella for a $70 million family foundation she created after her husband`s death and the two non-tax-exempt charitable trusts that finance it.

As a result, the city of Pittsburgh is in many ways a monument to Mrs. Heinz Kerry`s philanthropy. It is home to more environmentally sound buildings, certified as green buildings, than any other city in the country, thanks in large part to the Heinz Endowments. The city`s riverfronts are undergoing a renaissance, led by the endowments. Its school administration has changed in response to the endowments` concerns. Even the look of a bridge over the Allegheny River bears the endowments` influence.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry says that she does not have political ambitions like Hillary Rodham Clinton. At the same time, she has made it clear that she intends to carry on her philanthropic activities should she get to the White House. "I checked it out with lawyers before the campaign began," she said in a recent one-hour interview about her philanthropy. "There is nothing that says I cannot do it."

Yet the idea of a first lady who gives out $50 million to $70 million a year in private grants has intensified focus on her record and her role, supporting not just Pittsburgh but advocacy on issues like women`s economic security, drug costs and environmental policy.

Terence Scanlon, president of the Capital Research Center, a conservative nonprofit organization that monitors the charity world and has been critical of some of Mrs. Heinz Kerry`s giving, said she could well have even more influence than Mrs. Clinton, who led an effort to enact national health care when she was first lady.

"When Hillary was doing health care," Mr. Scanlon said, "it wasn`t like she controlled nine health maintenance organizations that could lend their clout to her. Teresa has three endowed foundations at her disposal."

Mrs. Heinz Kerry insists that there is little chance her philanthropy would influence a Kerry presidency. "My husband does not have a lot, or almost anything at all, to do with what Heinz does," she said, referring to the endowments. "It`s my life, my work, it`s nothing to do with him."

In fact, her philanthropic activity seems most of all to be a reflection of her strong loyalty to the Heinz family, which made its fortune in ketchup, and a commitment to building its legacy.

"There was no one else," she said of her decision to lead the endowments rather than take her husband`s place in the Senate, as many Republicans were urging her to do when he died. "My husband was an only child," she said. "If I had not done this, there was no one else from the family to do it."

She said she also had a sense of loyalty to Pittsburgh, where the Heinz company is based, at the time a gritty, hollowed-out industrial city that had lost 120,000 jobs and, two months before her husband`s death, a beloved mayor. "It was just a lot of loss, and I felt, `You know what? I`m needed here,` " she said.

One of the Heinz Endowments was established on the death of the grandfather of Senator Heinz, Howard Heinz, heir to the pickle-and-ketchup fortune accumulated by his father, H. J. Heinz, and one was created by Howard Heinz`s sister-in-law, Vira I. Heinz. The two have separate boards but function pretty much as a single entity. Mrs. Heinz Kerry is chairwoman of the Howard Heinz Endowment and is on the board of the Vira Heinz Endowment.

Under the administration of Senator Heinz`s father, H. J. Heinz II, the endowments initiated the development of a cultural core of Pittsburgh, building and restoring theaters. A down-at-the-heels movie theater was turned into Heinz Hall, home of the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Senator Heinz — who ran the philanthropies for only four years before he died — had big ideas but little time to put his stamp on the endowments. That fell to his widow.

Janet L. Sarbaugh, who heads the arts and culture program at the Heinz Endowments, remembers the first board meeting Teresa Heinz attended, barely a month after the senator was killed.

"She was not only present but already playing a role in the grants agenda and in setting strategic direction," Ms. Sarbaugh said. "It is a clear memory because it was evident how devastated, fragile and stunned she still was."

A Family Legacy Expanded Mrs. Heinz Kerry, who is still known as Mrs. Heinz at the endowments, has remained true to the family`s historic commitments yet expanded them. She created an environmental program and won the support of a board dominated by Republicans who had been her father-in-law`s friends.

"There has been continuity, but she has also managed to make them think bigger," said Morton Coleman, director emeritus of the Institute of Politics at the University of Pittsburgh.

The River Life Task Force, for instance, came to life at a joint board meeting of the endowments. Restless, Mrs. Heinz Kerry got up and walked over to the window, said several people who were at the meeting, gazing on a cluster of apartment buildings on the north shore of the Allegheny River that Maxwell King, the endowment`s president, describes as having "that medium-security prison look."

Nearby, the new Alcoa building, modern and environmentally "green," was going up, and across the river, the city had plans to demolish and rebuild its convention center, "which was awful," Mrs. Heinz Kerry recalls. "It was a brick box, like a brick wall along the river," she said, "and it had nothing redeeming about it."

She and other board members decided that they wanted a voice in what was going to go up along the riverfronts, and they approved a $1 million grant to seed a sort of watchdog organization, the task force, to keep an eye on things.

The task force, made up of city officials, community leaders and developers, is responsible for the plan to create a riverfront park. The Heinz Endowments contributed $5 million to the $12 million project but attached strings to its gift, reserving the right for staff members to approve signs, maintenance plans and budgets and to review the selection of plants and grasses.

It also demanded a guarantee that the new convention center would receive certification as a green building. The task force also swung into action when the state announced that as part of its reconstruction of the Fort Pitt Bridge and Tunnel, it would erect 42-foot-high concrete barriers that would obliterate spectacular panoramic views of Pittsburgh.

After the task force scoured the country in vain for a barrier that would satisfy aesthetic demands and meet the state`s safety requirement, the Heinz Endowments put up $113,000 to hire the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects to design a barrier that would preserve the views and provide safety at about the same cost. The barrier won an award, and other states are now looking at it for their own reconstruction projects.

A hallmark of Mrs. Heinz Kerry`s administration has been a demand for hard-nosed assessment of the effectiveness of grants, say organizations that receive the money. The endowments stunned the city two years ago when, together with two other local foundations, they announced that they would stop financing programs in the public school system until oversight of the system improved.

Only $3 million out of a total schools budget of $700 million was involved, but the move caused a major controversy. "It was a break with the old style of philanthropy, of course, but I`m still surprised at how many people are still angry about that," Mr. King said.

In the wake of the foundations` decision, the mayor formed a commission on public education that issued a stinging rebuke of the school system, and the public elected a reconstituted school board.

In February, the foundations announced that they would resume the financing of school programs.

Frustration Over Education Then there was the Early Childhood Initiative. Mrs. Heinz Kerry is, in her words, passionate about early childhood development. So in 1998, the endowments started a program to make education programs available to Pennsylvania preschool children from low-income families at little cost to the public.

"Teresa was very active in building support for that program," said James Roddey, a former Allegheny County executive, "and she was responsible personally for raising a good deal of money from sources other than the Heinz Endowments for that project."

Mrs. Heinz Kerry helped assemble $60 million to serve some 7,600 preschoolers.

But three years later, with $34 million spent and just 680 children enrolled, the group stopped the program. It was spending $11,500 a child, much more than it had planned, the endowments said, and providing only half the number of hours of service it had anticipated.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry calls the program "our biggest disappointment," adding: "Philosophically, pedagogically, it was absolutely correct, and we have the numbers to prove it. But it was too expensive."

Part of the philanthropy Mrs. Heinz Kerry oversees supports advocacy on issues ranging from women`s economic security to drug costs to environmental policy. It is her environmental activities that some conservative critics question.

The criticism has been led by the Capital Research Center, which pointed to grants the endowments made through the Tides Center, a Pennsylvania-based organization that is loosely affiliated with the liberal Tides Foundation in San Francisco. The critics suggested that some of the money ended up in the hands of groups like the Ruckus Society and Greenpeace U.S.A., which have used confrontational tactics to promote environmental causes.

Both the endowments and Tides insist that none of the Heinz money ended up with such groups. "The money that went through Tides went almost exclusively to environmental and youth programs in Western Pennsylvania as laid out in our contract with Tides," Mr. King said.

Question of Politics In April, Capital Research also published an article suggesting that the endowments` support for the League of Conservation Voters and Mrs. Heinz Kerry`s position as a board member of other environmental groups was responsible for the league`s endorsement of Senator Kerry over other Democratic contenders in the primary.

"The United States has never had a wealthy spouse overshadow its president," wrote Ron Arnold, the author of the article. "But Teresa Heinz Kerry leads and funds philanthropic foundations, and she is on the board of directors of highly political nonprofit groups that receive her foundation`s support and that can advance or frustrate the policies of her husband, should he become president."

Mrs. Heinz Kerry is adamant that she has stayed clear of the policy work of her husband. "I`ve never, ever once asked them to help me to come up to the Hill and talk about an issue I was interested in," she said. "Nor did I ever tell my husband now or my late husband, you have to vote on this this way."

The Capital Research Center counts as one of its biggest backers the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which reports that it has donated $700,000 to the center from 1998 to 2002.

It and two other foundations that have contributed to the center have as their chairman Richard Mellon Scaife, whose wife, Ritchie, is one of Mrs. Heinz Kerry`s closest friends, Mrs. Heinz Kerry`s aides said. And Mr. Scaife`s cousin, James M. Walton, is chairman of the Vira I. Heinz Endowment. Mr. Walton also sits on the board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation and thus has approved the grants that have underwritten Capital Research.

Messages left at Mr. Scaife`s foundations went unanswered.

In an e-mail response to questions submitted through the Heinz Endowments, Mr. Walton said he supported Capital Research because it provides a distinctive point of view in discussions of public interest. "Foundations and their board members frequently support organizations based on broad goals even though they may not necessarily agree with every individual action or position taken by that grantee," he wrote.

But he said he disagreed with Capital Research`s accusations about the endowments. "The Heinz Endowments has not used its funding to support either extremist groups or inappropriate political activity," he wrote.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry notes that the bulk of the endowments` support for environmental groups mentioned by Capital Research came out of the Vira Heinz Endowment, of which Mr. Walton is chairman. "I am not the one with a conflict," she said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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Die Homepage von Doonesbury. Er wurde von einigen Zeitungen wegen seiner kritischen Haltungen nicht mehr gedruckt.
Der Spruch des Tages:

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we`re going to ruin people`s lives over it...You know, these people are being fired at every day. I`m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of the need to blow some steam off?"
-- Rush Limbaugh
Der Link mit Musik und Sprüchen:
http://www.doonesbury.com/

Der Poll des Tages:
We don`t have a watercooler, but we do have a statistically meaningless weekly Straw Poll. Help us shape a sense of the Site on vital and semi-vital topics of the day. You`re here, so you might as well vote. Don`t let others define you.


President Bush has bet his political future on the war in Iraq, which Ted Kennedy has dubbed "George Bush`s Vietnam." Insurgent attacks on Coalition troops in Najaf and Fallujah have evoked comparisons to the 1968 Tet Offensive, leading many to ponder the question we pose today.

Is Iraq like Vietnam?

Just. False pretenses. Arrogant planners. White House hubris. Open-ended. Unwinnable. Fear of losing "credibility". Misunderestimating the enemy. Quagmire.
Somewhat. Though it`s also like WWII in that an insane, murdering despot was dealt with. March of Folly redux? Possible. Avoiding same? Job one.
Not. Because this time we`re going to successfully complete the mission. We have to. There`d be no waging a Cold War against a radical-Islamic-terrorist-friendly-after-we-cut-and-run Iraq.

Age

Lived through Nam_______Barely remember________ Wasn`t born

http://cgi.doonesbury.com/cgi-bin/view_poll.cgi[//URL]

Die letzten 30 Jahre Doonesbury:http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/flashbacks.html

Vor wieviel Jahren:
" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://cgi.doonesbury.com/cgi-bin/view_poll.cgi[//URL]

Die letzten 30 Jahre Doonesbury:http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/flashbacks.html

Vor wieviel Jahren:

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The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison has complicated American plans to extricate its troops from Iraq and threatened its credibility around the world.
May 9, 2004
EXIT OPTIONS
They`ve Apologized. Now What?
By ROGER COHEN

LONDON — A military defeat is a damaging thing, and Iraq remains a tense battleground. But a moral one may be more devastating and more enduring for a power like the United States that has long held that its actions are driven, at least in part, by the desire to be a force for good with a liberating mission for all humanity.

It is precisely such a rout of the American idea that now confronts the United States in Iraq. The world is asking what sort of liberation is represented by an American woman holding a prone, naked Iraqi man on a leash in Saddam Hussein`s Abu Ghraib prison, of all places. No matter that the offenders represent a tiny minority of the American military or that torture may be common in Arab jails. Such images will be held aloft for many years whenever America declares itself determined to right a wrong.

"This is the most serious setback for the American military since Vietnam," said Richard Holbrooke, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration. "We now have to admit that the American position is untenable." In Europe, some people are saying that if America were a country of 10 million people, its leaders would be hauled before an international criminal court.

So, a little more than a year after American tanks swept into Baghdad, the central question has become how to salvage the American credibility on which peace in places from Kosovo to the Korean peninsula depends.

Suggested short-term fixes include apologies like that more or less offered by President Bush, convictions of those responsible or even the departure of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who in testimony before Congress on Friday accepted full responsibility for the scandal. But the longer-term issue is how to snatch victory, or at least honor, from the jaws of the current debacle in Iraq and so deliver the remote objective outlined by President Bush last month: an Iraq that "will stand as an example to the Middle East, encouraging reform and hope by demonstrating what life in a free society can be like."

Three distinct approaches appear possible.

Announce that America is reversing course, rather than staying the course, and that its troops will be gone from Iraq by a date in 2005, so focusing the minds of Iraqis on how best to benefit responsibly and peacefully from their liberation from Mr. Hussein.

Empower the United Nations, giving it the central international role in Iraq`s fate after June 30, while keeping American troops as part of a United Nations-mandated force in the country, but confining them increasingly to a few bases.

Or, finally, pay lip service to the United Nations while fighting a ferocious campaign with 135,000 American troops or more, until resistance is crushed.

Several factors complicate the pursuit of any of these strategies. Even before the abuse at Abu Ghraib became apparent, the failure to secure United Nations backing for the war and, above all, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction had eroded American moral legitimacy. As Peter W. Galbraith, a former American diplomat and an expert on Iraq, remarked: "How you are seen depends in large part on how people see you anyhow. Right now, the world tends to see the United States as a habitual drunk, so the photos fit the image."

In unsuccessful wars, a certain rot tends to set in. The first 100 days are often critical; after that, it is harder to regain the initiative. So whatever America does now, it is facing a rising tide of not easily reversible resistance and doing so in a country whose stability is tenuous.

An unstable Iraq is increasingly divided among Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites whose aims diverge and whose interest in a united Iraq is probably smaller than their interest in the assertion of their own identities. The prospects of defeated, economically prone and multiethnic states freed from ruthless dictatorship have been amply illustrated in recent years by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Despite this danger of fracture, and its potentially explosive impact on the Arab world and Iran, Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American and longtime critic of the United States` Middle East policy, argues that the fastest possible withdrawal of American troops is now essential.

"The entire rationale for this whole adventure has to be jettisoned in order to save something," said Professor Khalidi, adding that in his view the extent of Iraqi nationalism makes a breakup of the country less likely than many believe.

A withdrawal, in his view, is justified because the American forces are part of the problem rather than the solution, because occupation in any form will only engender more resistance in a country with vivid memories of British colonialism, and because the Bush administration`s strong support of Israel has tended to make Falluja and Gaza a single struggle in the eyes of many Arabs.

American officials involved in the Bush administration`s planning for Iraq believe such an option would be catastrophic, inviting mayhem that would destabilize the small gulf principalities and possibly Saudi Arabia. "We have to stick to our guns on the basic strategy of keeping the force there, because without it, there will be chaos," said one of those officials, speaking on condition that his name not be used. "At the same time, we have to defuse the uproar of the photographs by being as transparent as possible in what we do about the abuses."

In fact, the administration`s "basic strategy" has changed considerably, a shift measurable on what might be called the Bremer-Brahimi barometer. The needle has swung away from L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American occupation, toward Lakhdar Brahimi, the chief United Nations official at work there. Mr. Brahimi`s name skips off Mr. Bush`s tongue these days; Mr. Bremer`s has largely disappeared. The barometer`s swing offers a rough measurement of the limits of American power.

This change has brought the administration and its chief ally, Tony Blair, the British prime minister, toward a broad, but never explicitly avowed, embrace of the second option: retreat through osmosis as the United Nations decides who gets to run Iraq after June 30, organizes the elections planned for January 2005 and authorizes an internationalized military force that the administration hopes will include NATO.

This approach has several problems.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of American forces in Iraq, will remain for many Iraqis the true ruler of the country, whatever happens on June 30. The chalice now offered to the United Nations appears to be poisoned, because resistance to any outside presence has spread.

NATO is divided, with France and Germany insisting they will not send troops to Iraq under any circumstances (and Spain pulling out its forces), so an alliance presence there is uncertain. And the neoconservative hawks so influential in the planning and execution of the Iraqi invasion remain deeply skeptical of the United Nations. Their sympathies are inclined to the third option: prosecuting the battle with vigor.

That there are no good options at this point is fast becoming a cliché. Mr. Holbrooke, an adviser to the Kerry campaign, said that the administration must now explicitly concede that the American presence in Iraq is illegitimate and illegal in the eyes of the Arab world and turn affairs over to the United Nations. Then the administration can maneuver behind the scenes to ensure that the interim Iraqi government installed after June 30 quickly invites American troops to begin a phased withdrawal over an extended period. Such a request could hardly be refused.

But Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair see Iraq as a fight to deliver the Middle East from Al Qaeda`s poisonous ideology by opening up Arab society and linking it to the West. They point to the 2,300 schools rehabilitated, the $32 billion pledged for reconstruction, the higher-than-expected oil revenues in recent months and the relative strength of the new currency. A withdrawal on their watch, even a phased one, looks unlikely.

Their goal, however, has never looked more elusive. Abu Ghraib is not My Lai. Nothing like the infamous massacre of Vietnamese civilians took place in the Iraqi prison. But it is assuming something of the mantle of that tragedy - a vivid stain on America`s conscience. How the United States can recover the moral authority with which much of the world still yearns to vest it will depend on its choices over the next few weeks. The battle for Iraq now begins again, for the third time, and on tougher terms than ever.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Heute etwas später, da Bush wohl in Texas ist. H. Schmidt hatte doch Recht, wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen.

May 9

Reaching Beyond Our Grasp

Where there is no revelation [or prophetic vision], the people cast off restraint . . .
—Proverbs 29:18

There is a difference between holding on to a principle and having a vision. A principle does not come from moral inspiration, but a vision does. People who are totally consumed with idealistic principles rarely do anything. A person’s own idea of God and His attributes may actually be used to justify and rationalize his deliberate neglect of his duty. Jonah tried to excuse his disobedience by saying to God, ". . . I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm" ( Jonah 4:2 ). I too may have the right idea of God and His attributes, but that may be the very reason why I do not do my duty. But wherever there is vision, there is also a life of honesty and integrity, because the vision gives me the moral incentive.

Our own idealistic principles may actually lull us into ruin. Examine yourself spiritually to see if you have vision, or only principles.

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?

"Where there is no revelation [or prophetic vision]. . . ." Once we lose sight of God, we begin to be reckless. We cast off certain restraints from activities we know are wrong. We set prayer aside as well and cease having God’s vision in the little things of life. We simply begin to act on our own initiative. If we are eating only out of our own hand, and doing things solely on our own initiative without expecting God to come in, we are on a downward path. We have lost the vision. Is our attitude today an attitude that flows from our vision of God? Are we expecting God to do greater things than He has ever done before? Is there a freshness and a vitality in our spiritual outlook?

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May 9, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Cursed by Oil
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I visited the Japanese cellphone company DoCoMo in Tokyo 10 days ago. A robot made by Honda gave me part of the tour, even bowing in perfect Japanese fashion. My visit there coincided with yet another suicide bomb attack against U.S. forces in Iraq. I could not help thinking: Why are the Japanese making robots into humans, while Muslim suicide squads are making humans into robots?

The answer has to do in part with the interaction between culture and natural resources. Countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China have relatively few natural resources like oil. As a result, in the modern age, their first instinct is to look inward, assess their weaknesses, try to learn as much as they can from foreigners and then beat them at their own game. In order to beat the Westerners, they have even set aside many of their historical animosities so they can invest in each other`s countries and get all the benefits of free trade.

The Arab world, alas, has been cursed with oil. For decades, too many Arab countries have opted to drill a sand dune for economic growth rather than drilling their own people — men and women — in order to tap their energy, creativity, intellect and entrepreneurship. Arab countries barely trade with one another, and unlike Korea and Japan, rarely invent or patent anything. But rather than looking inward, assessing their development deficits, absorbing the best in modern knowledge that their money can buy and then trying to beat the West at its own game, the Arab world in too many cases has cut itself off, blamed the enduring Palestine conflict or colonialism for delaying reform, or found dignity in Pyrrhic victories like Falluja.

To be sure, there are exceptions. Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai, Morocco and Tunisia are all engaged in real experiments with modernization, but the bigger states are really lost. A week ago we were treated again to absurd Saudi allegations that "Zionists" were behind the latest bombing in Saudi Arabia, because, said Saudi officials, "Zionists" clearly benefit from these acts. Someone ought to tell the Saudis this: Don`t flatter yourselves. The only interest Israelis have in Saudi Arabia is flying over it to get to India and China — countries that actually trade and manufacture things other than hatred of "infidels."

The Bush team has made a mess in Iraq, but the pathologies of the Arab world have also contributed — and the sheer delight that some Arab media take in seeing Iraq go up in flames is evidence of that. It`s time for the Arab world to grow up — to stop dancing on burning American jeeps and claiming that this is some victory for Islam.

One thing about countries like Singapore, Korea, Taiwan and Japan, they may not have deserts but they sure know the difference between the mirage and the oasis — between victories that come from educating your population to innovate and "victories" that come from a one-night stand by suicidal maniacs like 9/11.

As I said, the Bush team has made a mess in Iraq. And I know that Abu Ghraib will be a lasting stain on the Pentagon leadership. But here`s what else I know from visiting Iraq: There were a million acts of kindness, generosity and good will also extended by individual U.S. soldiers this past year — acts motivated purely by a desire to give Iraqis the best chance they`ve ever had at decent government and a better future. There are plenty of Iraqis and Arabs who know that.

Yes, we Americans need to look in a mirror and ask why we`ve become so radioactive. But the Arabs need to look in a mirror too. "They are using our mistakes to avoid their own necessity to change, reform and modernize," says the Mideast expert Stephen P. Cohen.

A senior Iraqi politician told me that he recently received a group of visiting Iranian journalists in his home. As they were leaving, he said, two young Iranian women in the group whispered to him: "Succeed for our sake." Those Iranian women knew that if Iraqis could actually produce a decent, democratizing government it would pressure their own regime to start changing — which is why the Iranian, Syrian and Saudi regimes are all rooting for us to fail.

But you know what? Despite everything, we still have a chance to produce a decent outcome in Iraq, if we get our eye back on the ball. Of course, if we do fail, that will be our tragedy. But for the Arabs, it will be a huge lost opportunity — one that will only postpone their future another decade. Too bad so few of them have the courage to stand up and say that. I guess it must be another one of those "Zionist" plots.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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An alabaster sculpture which bears a striking resemblance to shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, made by Iraqi artist Abdul-Kareem Khalil in March 2004 is seen on display at a gallery in Baghdad, Iraq (news - web sites), Saturday, May 8, 2004. The words `We are living in an American democracy` are inscribed on its base. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim/HO)

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May 9, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
World of Hurt
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Good golly, you knew Rummy wasn`t going to pretend to stay contrite for long. Not with lawmakers bugging him about the Pearl Harbor of PR, as Republican Tom Cole called it.

The flinty 71-year-old kept it together as John McCain pounced and Hillary prodded. But soon he was once more giving snippy one-word answers to his inquisitors, foisting them on his brass menagerie or biting their heads off himself.

By Friday evening, when the delegate from Guam, Madeleine Bordallo, pressed him on whether "quality of life" was an issue in the Abu Ghraib torture cases, you could see Donald-Duck steam coming out of his ears.

"Whether they have a PX or a good restaurant is not the issue," he said with a veiled sneer.

Rummy was having a dickens of a time figuring out how a control-freak administration could operate in this newfangled age when G.I.`s have dadburn digital cameras.

In the information age, he complained to senators, "people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, mourned that America was in a "world of hurt." If Gen. Richard Myers knew enough to try to suppress the CBS show, Mr. Graham asked, why didn`t he know enough to warn the president and Congress?

Donald Rumsfeld, a black belt at Washington infighting, knew the aggrieved lawmakers were most interested in an apology for not keeping them in the loop. He no doubt was sorry — sorry the pictures got out.

The man who promised last July that "I don`t do quagmires" didn`t seem to be in trouble on Friday, despite the government`s blowing off repeated Red Cross warnings.

But who knows what the effect will be of the additional "blatantly sadistic and inhuman" photos that Mr. Rumsfeld warned of? Or the videos he said he still had not screened?

Dick Cheney will not cut loose his old mentor from the Nixon and Ford years unless things get more dire.

After all, George Tenet is still running the C.I.A. after the biggest intelligence failures since some Trojan ignored Cassandra`s chatter and said, "Roll the horse in." Colin Powell is still around after trash-talking to Bob Woodward about his catfights with the Bushworld "Mean Girls" — Rummy, Cheney, Wolfie and Doug Feith. The vice president still rules after promoting a smashmouth foreign policy that is more Jack Palance than Shane. And the president still edges out John Kerry in polls, even though Mr. Bush observed with no irony to Al Arabiya TV: "Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country, and we will help them rid Iraq of these killers."

The only people who have been pushed aside in this administration are the truth tellers who warned about policies on taxes (Paul O`Neill); war costs (Larry Lindsey); occupation troop levels (Gen. Eric Shinseki); and how Iraq would divert from catching the ubiquitous Osama (Richard Clarke).

Even if the secretary survives, the Rummy Doctrine — using underwhelming force to achieve overwhelming goals — is discredited. Jack Murtha, a Democratic hawk and Vietnam vet, says "the direction`s got to be changed or it`s unwinnable," and Lt. Gen. William Odom, retired, told Ted Koppel that Iraq was headed toward becoming an Al Qaeda haven and Iranian ally.

By the end, Rummy was channeling Jack Nicholson`s Col. Jessup, who lashed out at the snotty weenies questioning him while they sleep "under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it."

Asked how we can get back credibility, Rummy bridled. "America is not what`s wrong with the world," he said, adding: "I read all this stuff — people hate us, people don`t like us. The fact of the matter is, people line up to come into this country every year because it`s better here than other places, and because they respect the fact that we respect human beings. And we`ll get by this."

Maybe. But for now, the hawks who wanted to employ American might to scatter American values like flower petals all across the world are reduced to keeping them from being trampled by Americans. As Rummy would say, not a pretty picture.

E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Der Alkoholismus in den Führungszentralen scheint sehr hoch zu sein. Anders kann man manche Handlungen nicht erklären.

No more booze for former Enron boss

Fri May 7, 5:12 PM ET


By C. Bryson Hull

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A federal judge has ordered former Enron Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling to stop drinking alcohol and submit to a curfew, the fallout from the former corporate star`s drunken misadventure in New York in April.


U.S. Magistrate Judge Frances Stacy on Friday also ordered Skilling, 50, to undergo alcohol dependency treatment and find full-time employment or regular community service to perform.

The new restrictions came down during a hearing in Houston federal court over the conditions of Skilling`s $5 million (2.8 million pound) bond. Skilling, sporting a fresh haircut, appeared at the hearing accompanied by his wife.

Once hailed by Wall Street as a visionary, Skilling now faces trial on 35 counts of fraud, insider trading and lying about Enron`s finances. He has pleaded not guilty.

Friday`s court appearance came about as the result of an April 9 incident in New York City, which ended with police sending a drunken Skilling to the hospital as an "emotionally disturbed person."

He scuffled with his drinking partners after accusing them of being undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and trying to lift up a woman`s blouse to see if she was hiding a microphone. The tussle ended with Skilling falling to the ground and accidentally knocking down his wife.

Prosecutors had asked the court to impose much stricter terms on Skilling including an additional $2 million in bond, a midnight curfew and an order restricting his travel to Texas. Currently, he can travel in the continental United States.

Stacy only agreed to the curfew, but left it up to the federal Pretrial Services workers in charge of monitoring Skilling to decide what hours he must be home.

"Personally, I can`t imagine what good things would happen outside of your home between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m.," Stacy told Skilling.

Daniel Petrocelli, Skilling`s lead trial lawyer, said his client for the past two weeks has been undergoing alcohol counseling.

"That`s going quite well," he told Stacy. The judge also ordered Skilling to submit to drug and alcohol testing and psychiatric counseling.

Stacy expressed some aggravation that Skilling was not actively employed, a requirement of his bond when he signed it on February 19.

Skilling believed he was going to remain self-employed running his business ventures, but could not do so once the government froze his bank accounts, Petrocelli complained.

Another of his attorneys, Ron Woods, said Skilling has a "full-time job" helping prepare his defense and guiding his lawyers through 120 million pages of records.

"We really need his time when he`s not asleep," Woods told the judge.

"I`m still going to require a few hours a week of employment," or community service, the judge responded.

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An Apache helicopter flies over a burning car after a two-car convoy came under attack Saturday in Baghdad.
washingtonpost.com

Dissension Grows In Senior Ranks On War Strategy
U.S. May Be Winning Battles in Iraq But Losing the War, Some Officers Say

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page A01

Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq.

Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading and being voiced publicly for the first time.

Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, "I think strategically, we are."

Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said in an interview Friday.

"I lost my brother in Vietnam," added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. "I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don`t understand the war we`re in."

The emergence of sharp differences over U.S. strategy has set off a debate, a year after the United States ostensibly won a war in Iraq, about how to preserve that victory. The core question is how to end a festering insurrection that has stymied some reconstruction efforts, made many Iraqis feel less safe and created uncertainty about who actually will run the country after the scheduled turnover of sovereignty June 30.

Inside and outside the armed forces, experts generally argue that the U.S. military should remain there but should change its approach. Some argue for more troops, others for less, but they generally agree on revising the stated U.S. goals to make them less ambitious. They are worried by evidence that the United States is losing ground with the Iraqi public.

Some officers say the place to begin restructuring U.S. policy is by ousting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whom they see as responsible for a series of strategic and tactical blunders over the past year. Several of those interviewed said a profound anger is building within the Army at Rumsfeld and those around him.

A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. "It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this," he said. "The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not."

Asked who was to blame, this general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. "I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion," he said. "Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice."

Like several other officers interviewed for this report, this general spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. One reason for this is that some of these officers deal frequently with the senior Pentagon civilian officials they are criticizing, and some remain dependent on top officials to approve their current efforts and future promotions. Also, some say they believe that Rumsfeld and other top civilians punish public dissent. Senior officers frequently cite what they believe was the vindictive treatment of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki after he said early in 2003 that the administration was underestimating the number of U.S. troops that would be required to occupy postwar Iraq.

Wolfowitz, the Pentagon`s No. 2 official, said he does not think the United States is losing in Iraq, and said no senior officer has expressed that thought to him, either. "I am sure that there are some out there" who think that, he said in an interview yesterday afternoon.

"There`s no question that we`re facing some difficulties," Wolfowitz said. "I don`t mean to sound Pollyannaish -- we all know that we`re facing a tough problem." But, he said, "I think the course we`ve set is the right one, which is moving as rapidly as possible to Iraqi self-government and Iraqi self-defense."

Wolfowitz, who is widely seen as the intellectual architect of the Bush administration`s desire to create a free and democratic Iraq that will begin the transformation of the politics of the Middle East, also strongly rejected the idea of scaling back on that aim. "The goal has never been to win the Olympic high jump in democracy," he said. Moving toward democratization in Iraq will take time, he said. Yet, he continued, "I don`t think the answer is to find some old Republican Guard generals and have them impose yet another dictatorship in an Arab country."

The top U.S. commander in the war also said he strongly disagrees with the view that the United States is heading toward defeat in Iraq. "We are not losing, militarily," Army Gen. John Abizaid said in an interview Friday. He said that the U.S. military is winning tactically. But he stopped short of being as positive about the overall trend. Rather, he said, "strategically, I think there are opportunities."

The prisoner abuse scandal and the continuing car bombings and U.S. casualties "create the image of a military that`s not being effective in the counterinsurgency," he said. But in reality, "the truth of the matter is . . . there are some good signals out there."

Abizaid cited the resumption of economic reconstruction and the political progress made with Sunni Muslims in resolving the standoff around Fallujah, and increasing cooperation from Shiite Muslims in isolating radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. "I`m looking at the situation, and I told the secretary of defense the other day I feel pretty comfortable with where we are," he said.

Even so, he said, "There`s liable to be a lot of fighting in May and June," as the June 30 date for turning over sovereignty to an Iraqi government approaches.

Commanders on the ground in Iraq seconded that cautiously optimistic view.

"I am sure that the view from Washington is much worse than it appears on the ground here in Baqubah," said Army Col. Dana J.H. Pittard, commander of a 1st Infantry Division brigade based in that city about 40 miles north of Baghdad. "I do not think that we are losing, but we will lose if we are not careful." He said he is especially worried about maintaining political and economic progress in the provinces after the turnover of power.

Army Lt. Col. John Kem, a battalion commander in Baghdad, said that the events of the past two months -- first the eruption of a Shiite insurgency, followed by the detainee abuse scandal -- "certainly made things harder," but he said he doubted they would have much effect on the long-term future of Iraq.

But some say that behind those official positions lies deep concern.

One Pentagon consultant said that officials with whom he works on Iraq policy continue to put on a happy face publicly, but privately are grim about the situation in Baghdad. When it comes to discussions of the administration`s Iraq policy, he said, "It`s `Dead Man Walking.` "

The worried generals and colonels are simply beginning to say what experts outside the military have been saying for weeks.

In mid-April, even before the prison detainee scandal, Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, wrote in the New York Review of Books that "patience with foreign occupation is running out, and violent opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy." The New York Review of Books is not widely read in the U.S. military, but the article, titled "How to Get Out of Iraq," was carried online and began circulating among some military intellectuals.

Likewise, Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), a former Marine who is one of most hawkish Democrats in Congress, said last week: "We cannot prevail in this war as it is going today," and said that the Bush administration should either boost its troop numbers or withdraw.

Larry Diamond, who until recently was a senior political adviser of the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, argued that the United States is not losing the war but is in danger of doing so. "I think that we have fallen into a period of real political difficulty where we are no longer clearly winning the peace, and where the prospect of a successful transition to democracy is in doubt.

"Basically, it`s up in the air now," Diamond continued. "That`s what is at stake. . . . We can`t keep making tactical and strategic mistakes."

He and others are recommending a series of related revisions to the U.S. approach.

Like many in the Special Forces, defense consultant Michael Vickers advocates radically trimming the U.S. presence in Iraq, making it much more like the one in Afghanistan, where there are 20,000 troops and almost none in the capital, Kabul. The U.S. military has a small presence in the daily life of Afghans. Basically, it ignores them and focuses its attention on fighting pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda holdouts. Nor has it tried to disarm the militias that control much of the country.

In addition to trimming the U.S. troop presence, a young Army general said, the United States also should curtail its ambitions in Iraq. "That strategic objective, of a free, democratic, de-Baathified Iraq, is grandiose and unattainable," he said. "It`s just a matter of time before we revise downward . . . and abandon these ridiculous objectives."

Instead, he predicted that if the Bush administration wins reelection, it simply will settle for a stable Iraq, probably run by former Iraqi generals. This is more or less, he said, what the Marines Corps did in Fallujah -- which he described as a glimpse of future U.S. policy.

Wolfowitz sharply rejected that conclusion about Fallujah. "Let`s be clear, Fallujah has always been an outlier since the liberation of Baghdad," he said in the interview. "It`s where the trouble began. . . . It really isn`t a model for anything for the rest of the country."

But a senior military intelligence officer experienced in Middle Eastern affairs said he thinks the administration needs to rethink its approach to Iraq and to the region. "The idea that Iraq can be miraculously and quickly turned into a shining example of democracy that will `transform` the Middle East requires way too much fairy dust and cultural arrogance to believe," he said.

Finally, some are calling for the United States to stop fighting separatist trends among Iraq`s three major groups, the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds, and instead embrace them. "The best hope for holding Iraq together -- and thereby avoiding civil war -- is to let each of its major constituent communities have, to the extent possible, the system each wants," Galbraith wrote last month.

Even if adjustments in troop presence and goals help the United States prevail, it will not happen soon, several of those interviewed said. The United States is likely to be fighting in Iraq for at least another five years, said an Army officer who served there. "We`ll be taking casualties," he warned, during that entire time.

A long-term problem for any administration is that it may be difficult for the American public to tell whether the United States is winning or losing, and the prospect of continued casualties may prompt some to ask of how long the public will tolerate the fighting.

"Iraq might have been worth doing at some price," Vickers said. "But it isn`t worth doing at any price. And the price has gone very high."

The other key factor in the war is Iraqi public opinion. A recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that a majority of Iraqis want the United States to leave immediately. "In Iraq, we are rapidly losing the support of the middle, which will enable the insurgency to persist practically indefinitely until our national resolve is worn down," the senior U.S. military intelligence officer said.

Tolerance of the situation in Iraq also appears to be declining within the U.S. military. Especially among career Army officers, an extraordinary anger is building at Rumsfeld and his top advisers.

"Like a lot of senior Army guys, I`m quite angry" with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration, the young general said. He listed two reasons. "One is, I think they are going to break the Army." But what really incites him, he said, is, "I don`t think they care."

Jeff Smith, a former general counsel of the CIA who has close ties to many senior officers, said, "Some of my friends in the military are exceedingly angry." In the Army, he said, "It`s pretty bitter."

Retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a frequent Pentagon consultant, said, "The people in the military are mad as hell." He said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, should be fired. A spokesman for Myers declined to comment.

A Special Forces officer aimed higher, saying that "Rumsfeld needs to go, as does Wolfowitz."

Asked about such antagonism, Wolfowitz said, "I wish they`d have the -- whatever it takes -- to come tell me to my face."

He said that by contrast, he had been "struck at how many fairly senior officers have come to me" to tell him that he and Rumsfeld have made the right decisions concerning the Army.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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U.S. troops and Iraqis walk outside the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The prison was the site of the reported mistreatment of Iraqi detainees. President Bush has apologized for the abuses.
washingtonpost.com

Pentagon Approved Tougher Interrogations

By Dana Priest and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page A01

In April 2003, the Defense Department approved interrogation techniques for use at the Guantanamo Bay prison that permit reversing the normal sleep patterns of detainees and exposing them to heat, cold and "sensory assault," including loud music and bright lights, according to defense officials.

The classified list of about 20 techniques was approved at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the Justice Department, and represents the first publicly known documentation of an official policy permitting interrogators to use physically and psychologically stressful methods during questioning.

The use of any of these techniques requires the approval of senior Pentagon officials -- and in some cases, of the defense secretary. Interrogators must justify that the harshest treatment is "militarily necessary," according to the document, as cited by one official. Once approved, the harsher treatment must be accompanied by "appropriate medical monitoring."

"We wanted to find a legal way to jack up the pressure," said one lawyer who helped write the guidelines. "We wanted a little more freedom than in a U.S. prison, but not torture."

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said: "These procedures are tightly controlled, limited in duration and scope, used infrequently and approved on a case-by-case basis. These are people who are unlawful combatants, picked up on the battlefield and may contribute to our intelligence-gathering about events that killed 3,000 people."

Defense and intelligence officials said similar guidelines have been approved for use on "high-value detainees" in Iraq -- those suspected of terrorism or of having knowledge of insurgency operations. Separate CIA guidelines exist for agency-run detention centers.

It could not be learned whether similar guidelines were in effect at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, which has been the focus of controversy in recent days. But lawmakers have said they want to know whether the misconduct reported at Abu Ghraib -- which included sexual humiliation -- was an aberration or whether it reflected an aggressive policy taken to inhumane extremes.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. military and the CIA have detained thousands of foreign nationals at the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, as well as at facilities in Iraq and elsewhere, as part of an effort to crack down on suspected terrorists and to quell the insurgency in Iraq. The Pentagon guidelines for Guantanamo were designed to give interrogators the authority to prompt uncooperative detainees to provide information, though experts on interrogation say information submitted under such conditions is often unreliable.

The United States has stated publicly that it does not engage in torture or cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. Defense officials said yesterday that the techniques on the list are consistent with international law and contain appropriate safeguards such as legal and medical monitoring. "The high-level approval is done with forethought by people in responsibility, and layers removed from the people actually doing these things, so you can have an objective approach," said one senior defense official familiar with the guidelines.

But Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the tactics outlined in the U.S. document amount to cruel and inhumane treatment. "The courts have ruled most of these techniques illegal," he said. "If it`s illegal here under the U.S. Constitution, it`s illegal abroad. . . . This isn`t even close."

According to two defense officials, prisoners could be made to disrobe for interrogation if they were are alone in their cells. But Col. David McWilliams, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, said stripping prisoners was not part of the permitted interrogation techniques. "We have no protocol that allows us to disrobe a detainee whatsoever," he said. Prisoners may be disrobed in order to clean them and administer medical treatment, he said.

Several officials interviewed for this article, including two lawyers who helped formulate the guidelines, declined to be identified because the subject matter is so sensitive.

With the proper permission, the guidelines allow detainees to be subjected to psychological techniques meant to open them up, disorient or put them under stress. These include "invoking feelings of futility" and using female interrogators to question male detainees.

Some prisoners could be made to stand for four hours at a time. Questioning a prisoner without clothes is permitted if he is alone in his cell. Ruled out were techniques such as physical contact -- even poking a finger in the chest -- and the "washboard technique" of smothering a detainee with towels to threaten suffocation. Placing electrodes on detainees` bodies "wasn`t even evaluated -- it was such a no-go," said one of the officials involved in drawing up the list.

During the Pentagon debates, one participant drew on his memory of a scene from the movie "The Untouchables," in which a police officer played by actor Sean Connery bent the rules to persuade mobsters that they should provide evidence against Mafia kingpin Al Capone. Much like the officer, the participant suggested, interrogators could shoot a dead body in front of a detainee, then suggest to him that is what they did to people who refused to talk.

Pentagon lawyers declared the technique out of bounds, and it was discarded.

The guidelines were the product of three months of discussion between military lawyers, medical personnel and psychologists, and followed several incidents of abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo.

In late 2002, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, until recently commander of the detention operation at Guantanamo Bay, asked the Pentagon for more explicit rules for interrogation, four people involved in the process said.

"They don`t want to be in the situation where we are making things up as we go along," said one lawyer involved in the sessions.

"We wanted to outline under what circumstances we could make them feel uncomfortable, a little distressed," another lawyer involved said. During the discussions, "the political people [at the Pentagon] were inclined toward aggressive techniques," the official said. Military lawyers, in contrast, were more conservative in their approach, mindful of how they would want U.S. military personnel held as prisoners to be treated by foreign powers, the official said.

Mark Jacobson, a former Defense Department official who worked on detainee issues while at the Pentagon, said that at Guantanamo and the Bagram facility in Afghanistan, military interrogators have never used torture or extreme stress techniques. "It`s the fear of being tortured that might get someone to talk, not the torture," Jacobson said. "We were so strict."

Interrogation teams routinely draw up detailed plans, which list all techniques they hope to use. These plans are passed to superior officers for discussion and pre-approval, Jacobson said.

"I actually think we are not aggressive enough" at times in interrogation techniques, he said. "I think we are too timid."

In a March 11 interview at his office at the Guantanamo Navy base -- one of his last interviews before leaving to take over detention facilities in Iraq -- Miller said that his interrogators treated prisoners humanely and that the operation had yielded important intelligence.

On Thursday, the U.S. military acknowledged that two Guantanamo Bay guards had been disciplined in cases involving the use of excessive force against detainees. Detainees released from the facility have given disparate accounts of their stay there, some praising the food and free schooling, others claiming that guards roughed them up.

Two Afghans died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan in December 2002. Both deaths were classified as homicides by the U.S. military. Another Afghan died in June 2003, at a detention site near Asadabad, in Kunar province.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Gunmen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr take positions in the center of Basra in southern Iraq, attacking British patrols and public buildings while trying to show their power.

washingtonpost.com

Iraqi Cleric`s Forces Broaden Assaults
U.S. Troops Raid a Sadr Stronghold

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 8 -- Shiite Muslim militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr attacked coalition positions in two southern cities Saturday, broadening their assault beyond their headquarters in Najaf where U.S. forces have been battering them for four days.

Hundreds of black-clad guerrillas assaulted British positions and public buildings in Basra and in Amarah with rifle and grenade fire. Youths set fires to obscure the vision of charging British troops.

The attacks appeared aimed at relieving pressure on Sadr`s forces in Najaf and demonstrating that the group has power to launch a general insurrection in Shiite areas of Iraq.

U.S. troops, for the first time during this week`s offensive, brought their battle against Sadr to Sadr City, a vast slum in Baghdad that is home to the cleric`s largest base of support. In a quick thrust Saturday night, the troops raided the small al-Amer mosque searching for weapons. U.S. soldiers traded gunfire with guerrillas hidden in the dark as Apache attack helicopters hovered overhead.

Sadr and his militia stand in the way of U.S. efforts to establish relative calm in the vast southern region of the country as the June 30 deadline for the creation of a new interim Iraqi government approaches.

After struggling for a month against Sadr`s attempts to take over several Shiite towns, U.S. forces this week settled on a strategy of driving his militia, the Mahdi Army, from urban centers by destroying its offices and fixed positions, killing as many guerrillas as possible and collecting weapons from storehouses. Sadr, who is wanted by occupation officials on murder charges, is bunkered in the twin cities of Najaf and Kufa, protected by as many as 1,000 guerrillas.

U.S. commanders have likened the Mahdi Army to a Los Angeles street gang, but some Iraqis have questioned whether the occupation forces are taking Sadr seriously enough. The Iraqis point out that Sadr, whose fiery rhetoric draws large crowds to his sermons, appeals to the many unemployed and poor among Iraq`s majority Shiite population.

"The Americans cannot neglect this phenomenon," said Sabeeh Jasim, a former Iraqi policeman and political prisoner. "The problem now is that the Americans and British cannot let the Mahdi Army return to any place they have been driven from. That would really give Moqtada a big push forward."

In Amarah, a city between Basra and Baghdad, masked gunmen attacked a convoy Saturday morning, according to television and news service reports. For nine hours, British troops fought hit-and-run battles with the insurgents, who wielded rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and automatic weapons. Three Iraqis were killed in the battles, which subsided by late afternoon.

In Karbala, which U.S. forces have attacked three times this week, tanks rumbled into the city from two directions in an effort to surround Mahdi forces near the city`s central mosque, according to television and news service reports. Witnesses said two U.S. armored vehicles were set aflame.

Clashes later erupted in Najaf, where U.S. troops took possession of a government compound Thursday. Tanks fired on a building where suspected Mahdi fighters had hidden and blasted an apartment house, killing seven Iraqis, witnesses said.

Troops in flak jackets put up sand barriers in front of the government complex and roamed the nearby neighborhood in six tanks, six Bradley Fighting Vehicles and three Humvees. Apache helicopters patrolled the night skies and at one point dropped leaflets with quotes from L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, urging peace, democracy and political and economic freedom.

In early evening, U.S. forces clashed with guerrillas on the outskirts of Kufa, six miles northeast of Najaf. There were no reports of casualties Saturday, but U.S. military officials said that more than 40 Mahdi Army fighters were killed near the city this week. It was impossible to confirm the numbers; Sadr followers bury the dead directly rather than take them to hospital morgues.

About 2,500 U.S. troops are based near Najaf and Kufa, and repeated battles have brought business to a standstill. Many residents blame Sadr.

"The city is a battleground, and our business is a wreck," said Hussein Alwan Safeena, owner of the Nabaa Hotel. Najaf relies on pilgrims who visit its major Shiite shrines for much of its prosperity. "They have stopped visiting the city," Safeena said.

Rafed Farhan, another hotel owner, said: "I want the Mahdi Army to leave, not tomorrow, but now. People don`t like Moqtada."

U.S. officials say they expect Shiite religious and political leaders to help persuade Sadr to leave the Najaf area and disband the Mahdi Army.

A leaflet circulated in Najaf and Karbala accused Sadr of undermining the Shiite drive for political power in Iraq. "We ask, how did the nation allow this arrogant young man to lead it to destroy all the Shiite efforts which we fought for all these years?" the leaflet asked.

The document raised the issue of whether Iranians were influencing Sadr`s actions. Sadr is backed financially by Ayatollah Kadhim Husseini Haeri, a top Iraqi Shiite cleric based in Qom, Iran, Iraqi analysts say. Haeri chose Sadr, who is the son of a deceased grand ayatollah, as a counterweight to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the paramount Shiite religious leader in Iraq.

Haeri has the blessing of hard-liners in Iran`s intelligence service and Revolutionary Guards to support Sadr, said Jasim, the former policeman. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and other Shiite parties that are cooperating with the United States have the support of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and his reformist allies. "Iraqi is mirroring the struggle between the conservatives and reformers in Iran," Jasim said.

Meanwhile, a Polish soldier was killed when an "improvised booby trap" exploded as he walked by in a town south of Baghdad, the Polish military said, according to the Associated Press. Another Polish soldier was killed and two were injured when a civilian truck accidentally hit their vehicle in a convoy near Karbala, said Lt. Col. Robert Strzelecki, a spokesman for Polish forces in the area.

A U.S. soldier from the Army`s Stryker Brigade was killed in an electrical accident, in the northern city of Mosul, the U.S. command said.

[One U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded Saturday in a mortar attack on a military base in Mosul, a U.S. military statement said on Sunday, the Reuters news agency reported.]

Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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THE WORLD
NATO Balking at Iraq Mission
Amid rising violence and public opposition to the occupation, allies want to delay a major commitment until after the U.S. election.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

May 9, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration`s hopes for a major NATO military presence in Iraq this year appear doomed, interviews with allied defense officials and diplomats show.

The Western military alliance had expected to announce at a June summit that it would accept a role in the country, perhaps by leading the international division now patrolling south-central Iraq. But amid continuing bloodshed and strong public opposition to the occupation in many nations, allies want to delay any major commitment until after the U.S. presidential election in November, officials say.

The clear shift in NATO`s stance deals another blow to U.S. efforts to spread the military burden as it grapples with a deadly insurgency in Iraq, fury in the region over its endorsement of Israeli plans for Palestinian territories and the unfolding abuse scandal at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison.

The Pentagon`s announcement last week that it intends to keep 135,000 U.S. troops in the country was a sign that the administration does not expect to be able to shift more of the burden to other nations anytime soon.

One U.S. hope had rested with NATO. Within the alliance, there seemed to be "a sense of inevitability about the mission" as recently as a few weeks ago, said one NATO official. "But it`s just not there anymore…. Any enthusiasm there was has drained away."

Compounding the allies` wariness is the fact that some countries with troops already in Iraq are unhappy with the U.S. war strategy. Some British leaders and officials of other countries in the occupying coalition have felt that the Americans have been too quick to resort to overwhelming force against insurgents, according to NATO and European defense officials. Some countries also have complained that the U.S. military has been slow to consult with coalition partners on planned moves, including some that have put coalition troops under fire, the officials said.

Although the friction does not amount to a major rupture, said one European defense official, "it`s hard to talk other people into joining a mission when those who are there already aren`t 100% happy."

U.S. officials have been courting NATO as a potential partner in Iraq since launching the war last March. Some U.S. lawmakers, as well as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, continue to push the administration to draw in NATO, hoping a partnership with the well-equipped 26-nation alliance would give the effort enhanced military capability and international legitimacy.

Kerry called on President Bush this month to work harder on the necessary diplomacy "to share the burden and make progress" in Iraq. He said NATO member nations must be treated with respect and said their involvement and other steps to internationalize the reconstruction could be "the last chance to get it right."

But there have been indications of the administration`s awareness of potential problems. Bush said at a news conference last month that the administration was "exploring a more formal role for NATO," but national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said afterward that the involvement of the alliance would have to come "in the right time."

U.S. officials are still pressing for a NATO commitment as soon as possible. R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said in a speech in Luxembourg this week that defining such a mission would be "a leading issue" at the NATO summit next month.

But officials of several allied countries said that even if NATO accepts a role at that time, it is more likely to be a supporting one, such as training police or dealing with unexploded ordnance, rather than peacekeeping. Guarding Iraq`s borders, another proposal, also may be rejected as too ambitious, some officials say.

If NATO takes on a peacekeeping role, it would provide only a few hundred headquarters personnel to serve as leaders for the current force rather than contribute the tens of thousands of new troops sought by the United States, some officials said.

The reluctance of NATO to commit troops was confirmed in interviews over the last several days with European defense officials from several nations along with NATO administrators and others who work closely with the alliance. Most declined to be identified, in keeping with diplomatic protocol.

U.S. officials had hoped that NATO could be convinced to accept a role through the influence of a core group of NATO members — Spain, Poland, Italy and Britain, with encouragement from the United States. Many European leaders believed opposition to sending troops would recede in their countries if the United States transferred sovereignty to a new Iraqi government and gave the United Nations a leading role in the effort.

But the U.S. hopes faded after the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, which upended the political equation in Europe by motivating voters to elect a Spanish government that sided with Germany and France, which opposed the invasion of Iraq and have been skeptical about the Iraq war and the occupation. The death of one of several Italian hostages taken by insurgents has made it more difficult for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to argue for a NATO mission that would increase Italy`s commitment.

Amid the violence of recent weeks in Iraq, there has been increasing public opposition to the war in other countries that had supported the postwar effort, such as the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark, diplomats said.

Now, instead of being able to push for an expansion of the European role in Iraq, American officials have their hands full simply trying to maintain the participation of those who are there. International outrage over disclosure of mistreatment of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison have added to allied discomfort.

"The tide is still ebbing," said one European official, describing the regional enthusiasm for sending troops.

In addition, NATO has struggled to provide enough troops and equipment for its mission in Afghanistan, which holds a considerably higher priority with most members than any future assignment in Iraq. NATO officials have been trying to cajole members for months to contribute more to the Afghan effort, but continue to be rebuffed by officials of governments who say they are overstretched in other peacekeeping missions and do not have equipment designed for southwest Asia.

Even so, most members take the view that "Afghanistan is where NATO`s credibility is on the line," said a NATO official. "In Iraq, it`s the U.S.` credibility that`s on the line."

Some officials said they would want to work out some of the wrinkles in recent coalition operations before NATO troops were sent to Iraq. Some Polish military officials, for example, have felt their troops have been placed in danger. In one recent engagement, U.S. forces attacked insurgents in the Polish zone of control without advance notice, bringing Polish troops under fire, NATO officials said.

Nevertheless, a Polish diplomat in Washington, Michael Wyganowski, said he knew of no operational problems between the military units, and he insisted that Polish troops will remain to at least the end of 2004.

"We don`t cut and run," he said.

Operations in Iraq have increasingly brought out differences in approach between the American and British forces. The British, for example, believe the Americans are applying excessive force when they use heavily armed AC-130 Spectre gunships to destroy individual buildings being used for cover by insurgents, one NATO official said.

"The Americans are wedded to the use of overwhelming force," a British defense analyst said. "They`ve got strict rules about collateral damage, so that`s not indiscriminate force. But sometimes when you use overwhelming force, it`s hard to make it not indiscriminate."

Jeremy Greenstock, the British diplomat who formerly was the second-ranking official in the Coalition Provisional Authority, told the BBC last month that whereas British troops have been conditioned by low-intensity fighting in Northern Ireland and the Balkans, "the Americans have been trained to hit hard and conquer large areas quickly."

"Their reaction to violence has sometimes been too strong, in my view," he added.

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THE WORLD
Marines on a Mission to Win Friends in Iraq
Armed with toys and candy for the children and seeds and farm tools for the adults, U.S. troops reach out to villagers near Fallouja.
By Tony Perry
Times Staff Writer

May 9, 2004

SECHER, Iraq — For Marines here Saturday, it was the way it was supposed to be.

Accompanied by Navy corpsmen and a chaplain, the Marines spent much of the day handing out toys, candy, crackers, backpacks and soccer balls to eager children in this farming village adjacent to Fallouja.

For adults, the Americans had bags of planting seed, farm tools and sluice gates to help with irrigation.

This was to be the Marines` strategy for winning friends in the restive Sunni Triangle region. But when four American civilian contractors were killed and their bodies mutilated, the newly arrived Marines were ordered to place a cordon around Fallouja, where they battled heavily armed insurgents for nearly a month.

Now, as a result of an agreement cobbled together with help from former Iraqi generals and Iraqi politicians, the shooting appears to be over, at least temporarily.

No one knows whether the truce will hold, or whether the Fallouja Brigade will prove capable, or willing, to bring the insurgency movement to heel. But this much is known: For five days, not a shot has been fired at the Marines.

So Marines on Saturday fanned out in the surrounding countryside, distributing goodies to kids and farming implements to adults. They also asked what battle damage the village had suffered; a Marine lawyer will do follow up and decide on compensation.

When the Marines in mid-March assumed responsibility for much of Al Anbar province from the Army`s 82nd Airborne Division, they hoped to emphasize the first part of the 1st Marine Division`s motto, "No better friend." Instead they found themselves emphasizing the second part, "No worse enemy."

Now they`re attempting a new beginning.

"We`re trying to do as much good as we can," said Navy corpsman Marcos Figueroa, 28, of Culver City. "The children are less hostile than the adults. They`re the key to the adults. If you`re good to someone`s kids, it makes them feel better about you."

As the Marine convoy rolled into the village center, barefoot children came running in anticipation. "Mistah, mistah, mistah," they pleaded.

Soon men and young girls, often with babies in arms, also came near the Humvees. Women peeked out from behind curtains in their one-story cinderblock homes; they are rarely seen in public here, and almost never heard.

Sheik Ahmed Huraysh Mohammed Jumaill, the elder of a local tribe, arrived to inquire about compensation for battle damage. He was told that a lawyer would arrive Monday for discussions. He nodded but then stomped off.

At one group of homes, the Americans were offered small glasses of chilled goat milk. Thin and sour, the milk was seen as a peace offering, and the Americans took large gulps.

"We just want them to know we`re here to be their friend," said Cpl. Reynold Rosado, 20, from the Cleveland area. "It`s our primary mission now. In the end, it`s for their benefit."

Corpsmen looked at three ailing adults: a middle-aged man with high blood pressure, an elderly woman suffering hip problems and a man who said he was still having trouble with injuries received while in an Iranian prison during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. He said he was 52; he looked much older.

The convoy was restricted to farming areas just north of Fallouja. Someday, Marines hope to go into the city of 300,000 on a similar goodwill mission.

"Maybe the people in the city will see this and say: Look, we could have had that but we decided to fight," said Sgt. David McLaughlin, 27, of Dickson, Tenn. "Maybe they`ll realize they could have this too."

The Americans were surprised at the amount of happiness a small gift could bring.

Children receiving ballpoint pens smiled and ran off excitedly. Other children hugged small toiletry kits. A Navy chaplain`s assistant showed pictures of his family as curious children gathered.

One child, as a Marine put a pair of sunglasses on the boy`s head, smiled and said, "Gorgeous."

The village is not unfamiliar to the Marines. During recent fighting, insurgents in a nearby factory sprayed the Americans with bullets. It is possible that some of the villagers sided with the insurgents.

At least two motorcycles were seen of the type that insurgents were known to favor as they positioned themselves at night for attacks on Marine positions.

"You have to put that aside," said Staff Sgt. Frank Ortega, 37, of Oceanside. "You know that some of these people were probably shooting at us last week. But this week, if they don`t shoot at us, we can make good things happen for them.

"You have to be a professional and drive on."


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Right`s Wrong Turn
Once in power, U.S. conservatives failed to place freedom first
By Mickey Edwards
Mickey Edwards is a former member of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. He is also a former national chairman of the American Conservative Union and was a founding trustee of t

May 9, 2004

PRINCETON, N.J. — Forty years ago this November, Lyndon B. Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in the Arizona senator`s bid for the presidency. But far from conceding defeat, Goldwater`s supporters saw the election as a mandate to build a reinvigorated national conservative movement aimed at changing America`s course.

How well that mission succeeded is a matter of considerable debate within the conservative political community today.

There is no question that the machinery put in place during Goldwater`s campaign endured, and that over time conservatives began to win elections. Ronald Reagan, who rose to national political prominence promoting Goldwater on network television, was helped into office by a later generation of that machine, and his presidency kicked off a quarter-century in which Republicans won four of six presidential elections.

Even after Democrat Bill Clinton`s election in 1992, conservatives continued to gain ground. Republicans — conservatives, for the most part — took control of both houses of Congress, and most states elected Republican governors. And the conservatives` power extended beyond the boundary of the GOP. The word "liberal" became "the L-word," a descriptor that candidates of both parties wished to avoid. Clinton moved aggressively rightward, proclaiming "an end to welfare as we know it," bombing Iraq and frustrating Republicans by borrowing many of their ideas.

On the electoral level, there is no doubt that Goldwater`s defeat has been avenged. Conservatives have come out on top and liberals are on the run. But to what end?

Clearly there are many ways in which today`s elected conservatives differ markedly from their liberal colleagues. They are more inclined to spend on national defense and less inclined to spend on domestic social programs. They support a more aggressive defense policy and back President Bush`s concept of preventive military operations in some cases. On issues such as these, it is clear that the election of conservatives has made a significant difference on many national policy decisions.

But on other matters, there are disturbing signs that conservatism has lost its way in the years since Goldwater argued that the most important question to ask of any public policy proposal was whether it maximized freedom.

Many of the Goldwater supporters who built the movement could best be described not as conservatives but as constitutionalists. Because of their focus on individual liberty, they could have been called liberals if the term had not already been captured by the political left.



That emphasis on individual rights no longer seems to be the principal focus of conservatives. When voters in Oregon, for example, opted to permit physicians to help terminally ill patients speed their own deaths, conservatives in Congress rushed to pass a federal law that would supersede the state decision — a shocking embrace of increased federal power — and thus to insist, by federal order, that dying citizens must simply endure the agony of their final days. This was, indeed, a different sense of what American conservatism was all about.

A number of the political battles of the fledgling days of the conservative movement revolved around decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court. The "enemy" in those battles was "judicial activism," judges who viewed the Constitution merely as a set of guidelines, the spirit of which was to be applied to contemporary situations.

On the other side — the conservative side — were the so-called strict constructionists, whose position was that the Constitution was made up not of guidelines but of rules, and that those rules established the acceptable limits of federal authority. It is perhaps an exaggeration, but not much of one, to assert that conservatives held the Founding Fathers (always capitalized) in an esteem that approached reverence. It was not the "spirit" of the Constitution, which was subject to considerable interpretation, but the actual wording of the Constitution that conservatives saw as controlling.

It is important to note that there has never been an occasion on which conservatives proposed to reconsider that perspective, or a time when that perspective was rejected. If one were to teach modern conservative political theory, as I have been doing for some years, one would have no cause to revise the course reading list to include either significant literature or public pronouncements in which conservatives embraced the left`s propensity for treating the Constitution as a set of flexible guideposts.

And yet, with little public debate about the fundamental question — what is the role to be assigned to the Constitution in considering issues of public policy? — modern conservatives have come increasingly to treat the Constitution as something far less than America`s founders intended.

The most recent, and most egregious, example of this changed perspective is found in the willingness of many conservatives, the president among them, to amend the Constitution to prohibit marriage between people of the same sex. This is not to argue in favor of such marriages; it is simply inappropriate for the Constitution to set rules for the granting of marriage licenses.

And that is not the only example of conservative attempts to undermine the Constitution. A group of Republican legislators is revisiting the possibility of a constitutional prohibition against the burning of the American flag. Such an act is widely and properly disapproved. But the Constitution`s purpose is to guarantee individual rights, not to foreclose them.

Thankfully, many prominent conservatives have joined in opposing a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage, and some have opposed the flag-burning amendment. But a disturbingly large number supports both amendments.

Some supporters of the same-sex marriage prohibition argue that whether or not gays and lesbians are permitted to marry is, in fact, a question so fundamental to the nature of our society that it is properly within the scope of constitutional delineation. Yet the Constitution`s authors took up precisely such an issue when they considered whether the document should establish rules for religious worship. They ultimately refused to designate a particular religion or sect for approval or promotion, which left the door open for the flourishing of many religions or for none at all. These Founding Fathers for whom conservatives profess such esteem concluded that it was the purpose of the Constitution to establish rules for the interaction between state and citizen and not to try to shape what might strike them as an ideal society.

It is a distinction too easy to forget. When Judge Robert H. Bork, ostensibly a conservative, was nominated for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, he criticized activist judges for creating rights not granted by the Constitution. Amazingly, many conservatives supported Bork`s nomination. In Goldwater`s time, not a few would have risen to challenge the judge and point out to him that it is not the Constitution that grants rights but rather that all rights belong to, and remain with, the people unless specifically ceded to the federal government.

Over the years, "strict construction" has lost its meaning for conservatives, who have apparently forgotten the essential focus of the Constitution they once worshipped.

During the Reagan and first Bush presidencies, this newly cavalier attitude toward the Constitution took several forms, including support for a line-item veto, which would effectively transfer the power over spending decisions from the people`s representatives to the executive — a first-level assault on the separation of powers and a departure from long-standing conservative resistance to the centralization of power in a strong chief executive. (It is in keeping with this relaxed attitude toward the Constitution that the current administration has announced plans to resurrect the campaign for a presidential line-item veto.)

The modern conservative movement is now 40 years old. It has succeeded in gaining the influence it sought and in making far-reaching changes in both foreign and domestic policy. Sadly, however, it has set aside some of its most basic principles along the way. Once, conservatives were the people advocating as much distance as possible between the citizen and the state, ever resistant to federal intrusions.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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IRAQ
Official U.S. Reaction Compounds the Rage
By Abbas Kadhim
Abbas Kadhim is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern studies at UC Berkeley and an Iraqi American.

May 9, 2004

BERKELEY — From the first moment of the Iraq war, President Bush and his advisors have failed to recognize that there are two Iraqs — one imagined in his postwar plan, the other real. The former was shaped by flawed intelligence, hollow Orientalists, cunning Iraqi exiles and wishful thinking. The latter remains a mystery to the U.S. occupiers.

After every dreadful event in Iraq, the administration`s reaction reveals its dangerous attitude: It`s all about the United States. Already, we have a pile of news articles and commentary on the effects the prisoner abuse scandal will have on the future of the occupation, U.S. credibility, Bush`s chances for reelection and the reputation of the Army. What`s missing is anything about the scandal`s effect on the hearts and souls of the Iraqis. They are the ones who will carry the scars of this sad episode for generations to come.

The U.S.` self-absorbed angst plays well at home. But where it matters, in Iraq and in the Middle East, it only adds fuel to the raging fire. Arabs have a favorite expression for such behavior: "He slapped me and cried." The U.S. reaction to the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib has reinforced the prevailing view among Arabs that the life and dignity of an Iraqi — or any Arab, for that matter — is beside the point.

Equally damaging to the U.S.` standing was the spiritless language initially used by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in trying to dilute the seriousness of the misconduct. "My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe, technically, is different from torture," he told reporters after news of the scandal broke, as if this distinction would make all the difference in Arab minds. Such a technicality might impress an Army judge. But for a proud nation shocked by photos depicting the sexual abuse of its men, it represents callousness and insensitive rationalization in the face of a moral quagmire.

Most Iraqis feel their country has been raped twice, once by the U.S. military guards at Abu Ghraib and once by the indifference of their bosses. The recently resigned, handpicked Iraqi human rights minister was quoted as saying that he notified L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, in November about possible prisoner abuse, "but there was no answer." The minister was not even allowed to visit the prisons.

The apparent incuriosity of the top military officer in the U.S., Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, equally stands out. During his damage-control appearances on Sunday news shows last weekend, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted that he hadn`t read the Army`s latest internal report on the abuses, claiming that it was working its way up to him. At the time, Rumsfeld said he`d read only a summary of the report. Yet both seemed at ease in theorizing about its contents.

U.S. officials` pretentious displays of disgust over the abuse photos have frustrated and angered Iraqis. They know that steps taken in early days of the U.S.-led occupation made it inevitable that such atrocities would occur. Most notorious was Bremer`s Order No. 17, which immunized all foreign soldiers in Iraq against any local Iraqi scrutiny; practically speaking, coalition authorities recognized a complaint against a soldier only if it was filed by a fellow soldier.

On those rare occasions when an Iraqi`s complaint is addressed, insult is often added to injury. According to the New York Times, one Iraqi man was given $5,000 in compensation for the accidental killing of his wife and three children by a U.S. missile. Iraqis say that a gallon of gas is more precious than a gallon of blood these days. Yes, Iraqis have not tasted freedom and have not practiced true democracy. But they are masters at detecting oppression and contempt.

Bush often patronizes Iraqis by calling them "a proud people." Yet he fails to recognize that the photos of U.S. soldiers abusing and humiliating naked Iraqis are a direct blow to the essence of their pride. There is no room for rape counseling in Iraqi culture. Cruel as it is, this is the reality of their culture, and it cannot be ignored. It is also a cruel reality that all the approximately 10,000 Iraqi detainees have been stigmatized by the shame at Abu Ghraib, no matter what these detainees claim. This helps explain why many released prisoners don`t return to their neighborhoods and why many of them may join the resistance against the occupation as a means to reclaim their pride and dignity.

This cultural divide is the main contributor to the crisis in Iraq. Iraqis expect Americans to do no less than translate their democratic rhetoric into reality, to respect local culture and adhere to the rule of law. The Americans, in turn, expect Iraqis to show gratefulness for the removal of Saddam Hussein and the opportunity to build a democratic society.

But Americans and their allies must understand that Iraq is not a pragmatic society when it comes to religion, culture and sexual mores. It is never acceptable to touch a woman and then come back later to express regret or, worse, offer money. In their culture, Iraqis would accept money and a public apology for the killing of a family member. But in matters of honor — sexual assault, for example — an apology is accepted only when it comes with the head of the perpetrator. Those who are unable to pay such a price had better not commit the offense in the first place. This is why Bush`s appearance on Arab TV last week was insulting and meaningless. He can never have enough money to cleanse the shame that his soldiers inflicted upon the Iraqi prisoners, and no words can do this either.

The magnitude of this scandal is increasing so rapidly because there are no statesmen in charge of the situation. Bush had a golden opportunity to come clean and apologize to the Iraqis, but he didn`t. When he did offer an apology, he seemed to direct it to Jordan`s King Abdullah II, not the Iraqi people.

Talking points, creative definitions and legal jargon will not heal the wounded pride of the Iraqis. The prisoner abuse crisis is too overwhelming to simply go away. Therefore, prudence cries out for doing the right thing: The administration should stop treating the scandal as a political crisis or a public relations setback.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Untying an ethical question on torture
Happiness for all is one justification
Ariel Dorfman
Sunday, May 9, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/09/INGPD6FP5L1.DTL

Is torture ever justified?

That is the dirty question left out of the universal protestations of disgust, revulsion and shame that greeted the release of photos showing British soldiers and American military police tormenting helpless prisoners in Iraq.

It is a question that was most unforgettably put forward over 130 years ago by Fyodor Dostoevsky in "The Brothers Karamazov.``

In that novel, the saintly Alyosha Karamazov is tempted by his brother Ivan, confronted with an unbearable choice. Let us suppose, Ivan says, that in order to bring men eternal happiness, it was essential and inevitable to torture to death one tiny creature, only one small child. Would you consent?

Ivan has preceded his question with stories about suffering children -- a 7-year-old girl beaten senseless by her parents and then enclosed in a freezing wooden outhouse and made to eat her own excrement; an 8-year-old serf boy torn to pieces by hounds in front of his mother for the edification of a landowner. True cases plucked from newspapers by Dostoevsky that merely hint at the almost unimaginable cruelty that awaited humanity in the years to come.

How would Ivan react to the ways in which the 20th century ended up refining pain, industrializing pain, producing pain on a huge, rational, technological scale, a century that would produce manuals on pain and how to inflict it, training courses on how to increase it and catalogs that explained where to acquire the instruments that ensured that pain would be unlimited, a century that handed out medals for those who had written the manuals and commended those who designed the courses and rewarded and enriched those who had produced the instruments in those catalogs of death?

Ivan Karamazov`s question -- would you consent? -- is just as dreadfully relevant now, in a world where 132 countries routinely practice that sort of humiliation and damage on detainees, because it take us into the impossible heart of the matter regarding torture, it demands that we confront the real and inexorable dilemma that the existence and persistence of torture poses, particularly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Ivan Karamazov`s words remind us that torture is justified by those who apply and perform it: This is the price that needs to be paid by the suffering few in order to guarantee happiness for the rest of society, the enormous majority given security and well-being by those horrors inflicted in some dark cellar, some faraway pit, some abominable police station.

Make no mistake: Every regime that tortures does so in the name of salvation, some superior goal, some promise of paradise. Call it communism, call it the free market, call it the free world, call it the national interest, call it fascism, call it the leader, call it civilization, call it the service of God, call it the need for information, call it what you will, the cost of paradise, the promise of some sort of paradise, Ivan Karamazov continues to whisper to us, will always be hell for at least one person somewhere, sometime.

An uncomfortable truth: The American and British soldiers in Iraq, like torturers everywhere, do not think of themselves as evil, but rather as guardians of the common good, dedicated patriots who get their hands dirty and endure perhaps some sleepless nights in order to deliver the blind ignorant majority from violence and anxiety.

If it turns out -- a statistical certainty -- that at least one of the victims is innocent of what he is accused, as blameless as the children mentioned by Ivan Karamazov, that does not matter. He must suffer the fate of the supposedly guilty. Everything is justified in the name of a higher mission -- state stability in the time of Saddam Hussein and now, in the post- Hussein era, making the same country and the whole region stable for "democracy."

So those who support the present operations in Iraq are no different from citizens in all those other lands where torture is a tedious fact of life, all of them needing to face Ivan`s question, whether they would consciously be able to accept that their dreams of heaven depend on an eternal inferno of distress for one innocent human being or whether, like Alyosha, they would softly reply, "No, I do not consent."

What Alyosha is telling Ivan, in the name of humanity, is that he will not accept responsibility for someone else torturing in his name. He is telling us that torture is not a crime committed only against a body, but also a crime committed against the imagination.

It presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine someone else`s suffering, to dehumanize him or her so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness, those who know and close their eyes, those who do not want to know and close their eyes, those who close their eyes and ears and hearts.

Alyosha knows, as we should, that torture does not, therefore, only corrupt those directly involved in the terrible contact between two bodies, one that has all the power and the other that has all the pain, one that can do what it wants and the other that cannot do anything except wait and pray and resist. Torture also corrupts the whole social fabric because it prescribes a silencing of what has been happening between those two bodies, it forces people to make believe that nothing has been happening, it necessitates that we lie to ourselves about what is being done not that far after all from where we talk, while we munch chocolate, smile at a lover, read a book. Torture obliges us to be deaf and blind and mute -- and that is what Alyosha cannot consent to.

There is a further question, even more troubling, that Ivan does not ask his brother or us: What if the person being endlessly tortured for our well- being is guilty?

What if we could erect a future of love and harmony on the everlasting pain of someone who had himself committed mass murder, who had tortured those children, what if we were invited to enjoy Eden all over again while one despicable human being was incessantly receiving the horrors he imposed upon others? And more urgently: What if the person whose genitals are being crushed and skin is being burnt, knows the whereabouts of a bomb that is about to explode and would kill millions?

Would we answer yes, I do consent? That under certain very limited circumstances, torture is acceptable?

That is the real question to humanity thrown up by the photos of those suffering bodies in the stark rooms of Iraq, an agony -- let us not forget - - about to be perpetrated again today and tomorrow in so many prisons everywhere else on our sad, anonymous planet as one man with the power of life and death in his godlike hands approaches another who is totally defenseless.

Are we that scared?

Are we so scared that we are willing to knowingly let others perpetrate, in the dark and in our name, acts of terror which will eternally corrode and corrupt us?

Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer, is the author of "Desert Memories" and the coming "Other Septembers, Many Americas."

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Inside war room, a battle is raging
Some generals fear Iraq war becoming unwinnable despite superior firepower
Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post
Sunday, May 9, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/09/MNGOU6IJN71.DTL

Washington -- Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States is facing the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its stated goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq.

Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily, yet failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal -- but it is spreading, and being voiced publicly for the first time.

Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, "I think strategically, we are."

Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view. He noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said in an interview Friday.

"I lost my brother in Vietnam," added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is still involved in formulating Iraq policy. "I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don`t understand the war we`re in."

The emergence of sharp differences over U.S. strategy has set off a debate, a year after the United States ostensibly won the war in Iraq, about how to preserve that victory. The core question is how to end a festering insurrection that has stymied some reconstruction efforts, made many Iraqis feel less safe and created uncertainty about who actually will run the country after the scheduled turnover of political sovereignty on June 30.

Both inside and outside the armed forces, experts generally are arguing that the U.S. military should remain there but should change its approach. Some argue for more troops, others for fewer, but they generally agree on revising the Bush administration`s stated goals to make them less ambitious. They are worried by evidence that the United States is losing ground with the Iraqi public.

Some officers say the place to begin overhauling U.S. policy is by ousting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom they see as responsible for a series of strategic and tactical blunders over the past year. Several of those interviewed said a profound anger is building within the Army at Rumsfeld and those around him.

A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. "It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this," he said. "The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not."

Asked who was to blame, the general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. "I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion," he said. "Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman (of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) refused to listen or adhere to military advice."

Like several other officers interviewed for this story, the general spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. One reason for this is that some of these officers deal frequently with the senior Pentagon civilian officials they are criticizing, and some remain dependent on top officials to approve their current efforts and future promotions. Some say they believe that Rumsfeld and other top civilians punish public dissent. Senior officers frequently cite what they believe was the vindictive treatment of then-Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki after he said early last year that the administration was underestimating the number of U.S. troops that would be required in postwar Iraq.

Wolfowitz, the Pentagon`s No. 2 official, said he doesn`t think the United States is losing in Iraq, and he said no senior officer has expressed that thought to him, either. "I am sure that there are some out there" who think that, he said in an interview Saturday.

"There`s no question that we`re facing some difficulties," Wolfowitz said. "I don`t mean to sound Pollyanna-ish -- we all know that we`re facing a tough problem." But, he added, "I think the course we`ve set is the right one, which is moving as rapidly as possible to Iraqi self-government and Iraqi self- defense."

Wolfowitz, who is widely seen as the intellectual architect of the Bush administration`s desire to create a free and democratic Iraq that will begin the transformation of the politics of the Middle East, also strongly rejected the idea of scaling back on that aim.

"The goal has never been to win the Olympic high jump in democracy," he said. Moving toward democratization in Iraq will take time, he said. Yet, he continued, "I don`t think the answer is to find some old Republican Guard generals and have them impose yet another dictatorship in an Arab country."

The top U.S. commander in the war also said he strongly disagrees with the view that the United States is heading toward defeat. "We are not losing, militarily," Army Gen. John Abizaid said in an interview Friday. He said the U. S. military is winning tactically. But he stopped short of being as positive about the overall trend. Rather, he said, "Strategically, I think there are opportunities."

The prisoner abuse scandal and the continuing car bombings and U.S. casualties "create the image of a military that`s not being effective in the counterinsurgency," he said, but in reality, "The truth of the matter is ... there are some good signals out there."

Commanders on the ground in Iraq seconded that cautiously optimistic view.

"I am sure that the view from Washington is much worse than it appears on the ground here in Baquba," said Col. Dana J.H. Pittard, commander of a 1st Infantry Division brigade based in that city about 40 miles north of Baghdad. "I do not think that we are losing, but we will lose if we are not careful."

Lt. Col. John Kem, a battalion commander in Baghdad, said the events of the last two months -- first the eruption of a Shiite insurgency, followed by the detainee abuse scandal -- "certainly made things harder," but he said he doubted they would have much effect on the long-term future of Iraq.

But some say that behind those official positions lies deep concern.

One Pentagon consultant said officials with whom he works on Iraq policy continue to put a happy face publicly, but privately are grim about the situation in Baghdad. When it comes to discussions of the administration`s Iraq policy, he said, "It`s `Dead Man Walking.` "

A senior U.S. military intelligence officer experienced in Middle Eastern affairs said he thinks the Bush administration needs to rethink its approach to Iraq and to the region. "The idea that Iraq can be miraculously and quickly turned into a shining example of democracy that will `transform` the Middle East requires way too much fairy dust and cultural arrogance to believe," he said.

Even if adjustments in troop presence and goals help the United States prevail, it will not happen anytime soon, several of those interviewed said. The United States is likely to be fighting in Iraq for "at least" another five years, said an Army officer who served there. "We`ll be taking casualties" during that entire time, he warned.

A long-term problem for any administration is that it may be difficult for the American public to tell whether the United States is winning or losing, and the prospect of continued casualties raises the question of how long the public will tolerate the fighting.

"Iraq might have been worth doing at some price," said defense consultant Michael Vickers. "But it isn`t worth doing at any price. And the price has gone very high."

Tolerance of the situation in Iraq also appears to be declining within the U.S. military. Especially among career Army officers, an extraordinary anger is building at Rumsfeld and his top advisers.

"Like a lot of senior Army guys, I`m quite angry" with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration, said the young general. He listed two reasons. "One is, I think they are going to break the Army." But what really incites him, he said, is, "I don`t think they care."

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |

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Kurt Nimmo: `Rush Limbaugh and the babes of Abu Ghraib`
Date: Sunday, May 09 @ 09:20:33 EDT
Topic: Hate Radio

By Kurt Nimmo, CounterPunch

Torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq? It`s no different than fraternity hazing. Or so declares the king of reactionary radio, Rush Limbaugh.

Beating and killing Iraqi detainees, according to Limbaugh, is good fun. "I`m talking about people having a good time, these people [CIA agents and MPs at Abu Ghraib], you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?" Limbaugh asked a caller. "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we`re going to ruin people`s lives over it and we`re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time."

Limbaugh is attracted to people who torture. On his May 3 show, the loudmouth drug addict said "have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture."



Limbaugh is talking about Spec. Sabrina D. Harman, a military police officer who has been charged with abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib. Harman is now probably the world`s most infamous dominatrix of sadomasochism. She took her orders from Army military intelligence officers, CIA operatives, and civilian contractors who conducted brutal, Israeli-styled interrogations. She is accused of photographing dead Iraqis, posing with corpses, striking several prisoners by jumping on them as they lay in a pile, writing "rapeist" on a prisoner`s leg, and attaching wires to a prisoner`s hands and penis while he stood on a box with head covered.

Most of us would likely find Harman seriously deranged and in need of years of psychological treatment. But Limbaugh finds her and Pfc. Lynndie England attractive. England is featured in many of the torture photos. In one, she smiles happily with a cigarette clenched between in her teeth as she points at a hooded Iraqi man`s private parts. England`s boyfriend, Sgt. Charles Graner, is a former prison guard with a history of domestic violence. None of this bothers Rush. On the contrary, Harman and England are patriotic Americans innocently engaged in "good old American pornography," as Limbaugh said on May 6.

More like "good old American" snuff films.

In fact, for Limbaugh, torture is a good thing. It builds character. Americans are too squeamish, too wimpy, unable to face up to the neocon plan of total war against Muslims and Arabs, a war Bush has promised will last for generations. "I think a lot of the American culture is being feminized. I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country," he told his audience. In other words, if torturing people makes you sick you`re effeminate, or maybe French. Get used to it, Rush seems to be saying, there`s more where that came from.

For Rush and the neocons, it`s all about humiliating and torturing as many Arabs as possible. "It could well be that the whole purpose here, which has been said, was to humiliate these prisoners. And there`s no better way of doing it than what was done. These are Arab males -- what better way to humiliate them than to have a woman have authority over them? What`s the purpose here? What`s the objective of this? The objective is to soften them up for interrogation later, later on. As I said, there was no horror, there was no terror there was no death, there was no injuries, nothing." Never mind that people were killed -- and photographed by Limbaugh`s centerfold, Spec. Sabrina D. Harman. The point Rush is making is that Arabs are untermenschen, sub-humans, and they do not experience horror and injury the same way Americans do. It`s okay to saddle up a 70 year old Iraqi woman with a harness and ride her around like a donkey because Arabs are immune to terror and abuse.

Finally, you`d think Bush, given the chance, would distance himself from Limbaugh`s obvious sadism and racism. But no, instead White House press secretary Scott McClellan refused to go on the record and condemn Limbaugh. Here`s how McClellan responded during a news conference:

Q: Scott, there`s a segment of society that differs with the White House as it relates to these pictures and the investigation of the U.S. soldiers` conduct to include Rush Limbaugh who, Tuesday, agreed with the caller, equating the pictures to a college fraternity prank, and said the U.S. soldiers should not be punished because it was an emotional release as they were letting off steam. What`s the White House say about that?

MR. McCLELLAN: April, I think the White House says what we said yesterday and what the President has said over the last few days.

Q: No, but Scott -- no, seriously. This man is a conservative --

MR. McCLELLAN: And I actually got asked a question earlier today about that matter.

Q: But none --

MR. McCLELLAN: And I addressed it then.

Q: But if you stand out strongly trying to let the Arab world know that this is wrong and then you have the proverbial spokesperson for the conservative party saying this, doesn`t that send a mixed message?

MR. McCLELLAN: The President`s views have been very -- have been made very clear.

Indeed, Bush`s views are clear -- and they are the views of the neocon rabble in the Pentagon and ensconced deep within conspiratorial neocon foundations: this is a war against Islam and the Arabs, at the behest of Likudite whack jobs and Christian Zionists. Bush has "apologized" for the depravity of Abu Ghraib -- an apology not accepted by Arabs who understand his sincere motivations and those of the neocons -- but only because there is an election right around the corner. It can be stated without much doubt that Bush supports whatever plan the CIA and the Pentagon come up with to defeat the Iraqi resistance -- including torture. For a man who mocked the anguished plea of a death row inmate in Texas and killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqis under false pretenses, the humiliation and beating death of a few Iraqis cannot be of much concern.

Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, is free to say what Bush most certainly thinks but cannot say if he wants another four years in the White House.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair`s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.

He can be reached at: [e-mail]

Reprinted from CounterPunch:
http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo05082004.html

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So hätte ich es auch gezeichnet, nicht wie in #16058

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Military Fatalities: Total: 879
http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

Sunday, May 09, 2004
War News for May 9, 2004 draft

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Seven Iraqis killed in explosion at Baghdad market.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, one soldier wounded in mortar attack near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqis killed in bomb attack in Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in mortar attack near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: British troops under mortar fore near Amarah.

Bring ‘em on: Nine British soldiers wounded in fighting near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: Two Polish soldiers killed in fighting near Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting reported as US troops enter Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: Seven Iraqis wounded by roadside bomb near Ramadi.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi judge assassinated near Hilla.

Bring ‘em on: US troop convoy ambushed near Baghdad.

OPTEMPO. “Troops are complaining of a shortage of windshields, which are shot out by insurgents` fire or pitted with rocks that kick up on rough Iraqi or Afghan roads. Fine desert sand is gnawing away at helicopter rotor blades at an alarming rate. The Army is struggling to supply batteries to power radios, computers, laser range finders and night-vision goggles.”

Mothers’ Day. “This Mother`s Day, Gloria Bonaccorso`s thoughts will be on Iraq.
Her 49-year-old son, John Bonaccorso, is there, serving with the Seabees. Just this last weekend, seven sailors in his unit were killed. ‘We always get together on Mother`s Day,’ the Titusville mother said. ‘We would love to do it if he were only home.’”

Baghdad art gallery. “The alabaster sculpture on display at a Baghdad gallery bears a striking resemblance to some of the shocking photographs that emerged last week of Iraqi prisoners abused by their American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison. But the 15-inch sculpture with words ‘We are living American democracy’ inscribed on its base was fashioned two months ago. “

“Free press” vs. corporate greed in Baghdad. “While the Bush administration has faced a spiraling scandal around prison abuses, a quieter controversy raged last week in one of Washington`s most critical strategies to rebuild Iraq -- providing the country with a US-funded, and US-friendly, media network. The editor of the coalition-funded daily newspaper quit two weeks ago in protest at what he called ‘interference’ by American contractors hired to oversee the network…He was referring to Harris Corp., the Florida-based company that has the $96 million US government contract to run the Iraqi Media Network. Besides Al-Sabah, the network consists of television and radio stations that offer US-friendly alternatives to Arabic satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera… Zaher had pushed to make the newspaper a profit-making private entity by May 17, the first anniversary of the paper`s debut issue. Harris Corp. rejected the idea. Zaher said Al-Sabah no longer needed the US funding, since it now had lucrative printing and advertising contracts, including one to print 25,000 copies of Stars and Stripes, the US military`s daily newspaper, for troops in Iraq.”

Progress Report. “A year ago, just 17 percent of Iraqis wanted the troops gone, according to Dulame’s respected research center in Baghdad. Now, the disturbing new results mirror what most Iraqis and many international observers have said for months: Give it up. Go home. This just isn’t working.”

Osama offers bounty for Baghdad fashion maven and incompetent administrator L. Paul Bremer. “Ten thousand grams of gold, a little less than $125,000 on last week`s London exchange, for the heads of people such as Paul Bremer, the U.S. Iraq administrator…” That’s a big price tag for a fifty-cent head.

Bethesda Naval Hospital. “Marines arrive at the hospital daily, sometimes as many as 18 at once and usually in the middle of the night. Two trauma surgeons perform up to 10 operations apiece daily. ‘We are getting about as many people’ as during the first months in Iraq, said one of the trauma surgeons, Cmdr. James Dunne. ‘The trouble is, it is more steady. There is no end in sight.’”

General Clark tears Lieutenant AWOL a new one. “The truth is President Bush made mistake after mistake as Commander-in-Chief, taking us into a war we didn`t have to wage, alone and under false pretenses and is now managing it poorly.”

Commentary

Opinion: “Take the confident manner in which President Bush keeps asserting that ‘he says what he means and means what he says,’ as if consistency is the highest virtue and the inability to re-consider one`s actions is a strength. He has the benighted notion that saying a thing makes it so. We have only to watch the faces of Iraqi women and children when their homes are invaded and torn apart by soldiers in search of terrorists. That is enough to make us know that life is not now better for families despite our president`s insistent protestations that the people of Iraq are better off because we have liberated them.”

Analysis: “A military defeat is a damaging thing, and Iraq remains a tense battleground. But a moral one may be more devastating and more enduring for a power like the United States that has long held that its actions are driven, at least in part, by the desire to be a force for good with a liberating mission for all humanity. It is precisely such a rout of the American idea that now confronts the United States in Iraq. The world is asking what sort of liberation is represented by an American woman holding a prone, naked Iraqi man on a leash in Saddam Hussein`s Abu Ghraib prison, of all places. No matter that the offenders represent a tiny minority of the American military or that torture may be common in Arab jails. Such images will be held aloft for many years whenever America declares itself determined to right a wrong.”

Opinion: “We`re done in Iraq. The genie of Arab outrage is flowing over the Babylonian desert, and we will never jam it back into the bottle. We`ve lost all hope of winning hearts and minds. The longer we stay, the more we`ll aggravate the problem, and the more soldiers we`ll lose…It`s time to start planning an orderly exit and bona fide transition of power to Iraqis, under the watch of the United Nations. Yes, our reputation will suffer, but it has already because the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz experiment has failed, and there`s no excuse to spill more blood in the administration`s ideological petri dish.”

Analysis: “Through a cruel accident of timing, each of these images was in turn cross-cut with a retread of a golden oldie: President Bush standing under the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner of a year ago. ‘I wish the banner was not up there,’ Karl Rove had told a newspaper editorial board in the swing state of Ohio in mid-April. Not ‘I wish that we had planned for the dangers of post-Saddam Iraq before recklessly throwing underprepared and underprotected Americans into harm`s way.’ No, Mr. Rove has his eye on what`s most important: better political image management through better set design. In prewar America, presidential backdrops reading ‘Strengthening Medicare’ and ‘Strengthening Our Economy’ had worked just fine. If only that one on the U.S.S. Lincoln had said ‘Strengthening Iraq,’ everything would be hunky-dory now.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Florida Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier dies in Iraq.

Local story: Florida soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Texas Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Arkansas Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Oklahoma soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Two North Dakota Guardsmen die from wounds received in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier killed in Iraq.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:10 AM
Comments (2)
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Note to Readers, May 5, 2004

I`m visiting my little sister in Chicago. She`s sick. Really sick. The last time I saw a human being as bloated, green, and yellow-eyed as she is now, that person was already dead for two days in the tropics. Her children, and our mother and father are here and I`ve got more on my mind than updating the war news.

Her husband is a Teamster so at least they have health insurance.

Expect the next update on Sunday, May 9th. Until then, I`ll post an open thread every day so alert readers can post updates.

Thanks, YD.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 7:41 PM
Comments (87)

[Joerver]

CHAIN OF COMMAND
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-17
Posted 2004-05-09
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040517fa_fact2
In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he “knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI”—military intelligence—“personnel at Abu Ghraib.” Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used “military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”

An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog handlers. Other photographs show the Iraqi on the ground, bleeding.

Taguba’s report was triggered by a soldier’s decision to give Army investigators photographs of the sexual humiliation and abuse of prisoners. These images were first broadcast on “60 Minutes II” on April 28th. Seven enlisted members of the 372nd Military Police Company of the 320th Military Police Battalion, an Army reserve unit, are now facing prosecution, and six officers have been reprimanded. Last week, I was given another set of digital photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files, the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib.
An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog handlers. Other photographs show the Iraqi on the ground, bleeding.

One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the camera’s view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate’s leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood.

There is at least one other report of violence involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, “the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people.” (One of them was Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then “turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten.” (The Defense Department said that it was unable to comment about the incident before The New Yorker went to press.)

When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the Army’s military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with dismay. “Turning a dog loose in a room of people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I’ve never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated,” Hines said. He added that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he said, “I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I’d have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army.”

The International Red Cross and human-rights groups have repeatedly complained during the past year about the American military’s treatment of Iraqi prisoners, with little success. In one case, disclosed last month by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the three were fined “at least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank,” the newspaper said.

Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. The Army’s senior commanders immediately understood they had a problem—a looming political and public-relations disaster that would taint America and damage the war effort.

One of the first soldiers to be questioned was Ivan Frederick, the M.P. sergeant who was in charge of a night shift at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, who has been ordered to face a court-martial in Iraq for his role in the abuse, kept a running diary that began with a knock on his door by agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division (C.I.D.) at two-thirty in the morning on January 14th. “I was escorted . . . to the front door of our building, out of sight from my room,” Frederick wrote, “while . . . two unidentified males stayed in my room. ‘Are they searching my room?’” He was told yes. Frederick later formally agreed to permit the agents to search for cameras, computers, and storage devices.

On January 16th, three days after the Army received the pictures, Central Command issued a blandly worded, five-sentence press release about an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was then that he learned of the allegations. At some point soon afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush. On January 19th, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the officer in charge of American forces in Iraq, ordered a secret investigation into Abu Ghraib. Two weeks later, General Taguba was ordered to conduct his inquiry. He submitted his report on February 26th. By then, according to testimony before the Senate last week by General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people “inside our building” had discussed the photographs. Myers, by his own account, had still not read the Taguba report or seen the photographs, yet he knew enough about the abuses to persuade “60 Minutes II” to delay its story.

At a Pentagon news conference last week, Rumsfeld and Marine General Peter Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the investigation into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely through the chain of command. If the Army had been slow, it was because of built-in safeguards. Pace told the journalists, “It’s important to know that as investigations are completed they come up the chain of command in a very systematic way. So that the individual who reports in writing [sends it] up to the next level commander. But he or she takes time, a week or two weeks, three weeks, whatever it takes, to read all of the documentation, get legal advice [and] make the decisions that are appropriate at his or her level. . . . That way everyone’s rights are protected and we have the opportunity systematically to take a look at the entire process.”

In interviews, however, retired and active-duty officers and Pentagon officials said that the system had not worked. Knowledge of the nature of the abuses—and especially the politically toxic photographs—had been severely, and unusually, restricted. “Everybody I’ve talked to said, ‘We just didn’t know’—not even in the J.C.S.,” one well-informed former intelligence official told me, emphasizing that he was referring to senior officials with whom such allegations would normally be shared. “I haven’t talked to anybody on the inside who knew—nowhere. It’s got them scratching their heads.” A senior Pentagon official said that many of the senior generals in the Army were similarly out of the loop on the Abu Ghraib allegations.

Within the Pentagon, there was a spate of fingerpointing last week. One top general complained to a colleague that the commanders in Iraq should have taken C4, a powerful explosive, and blown up Abu Ghraib last spring, with all of its “emotional baggage”—the prison was known for its brutality under Saddam Hussein—instead of turning it into an American facility. “This is beyond the pale in terms of lack of command attention,” a retired major general told me, speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. “Where were the flag officers? And I’m not just talking about a one-star,” he added, referring to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib who was relieved of duty. “This was a huge leadership failure.”

The Pentagon official told me that many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld’s office, General Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the first months of the year. The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. “You’ve got to match action, or nonaction, with interests,” the Pentagon official said. “What is the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems.”

Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. “They always want to delay the release of bad news—in the hope that something good will break,” he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official told me, when it became clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to deal with the insurgency, “we had call-up orders that languished for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of Defense.” Rumsfeld’s staff always seemed to be waiting for something to turn up—for the problem to take care of itself, without any additional troops. The official explained, “They were hoping that they wouldn’t have to make a decision.” The delay meant that soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a few days to prepare wills and deal with other family and financial issues.

The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the past year, the Pentagon official said, when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs. In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future planning be based on the most optimistic scenario. “The optimistic estimate was that at this point in time”—mid-2004—“the U.S. Army would need only a handful of combat brigades in Iraq,” the Pentagon official said. “There are nearly twenty now, with the international coalition drying up. They were wildly off the mark.” The official added, “From the beginning, the Army community was saying that the projections and estimates were unrealistic.” Now, he said, “we’re struggling to maintain a hundred and thirty-five thousand troops while allowing soldiers enough time back home.”

In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when asked whether he thought the photographs and stories from Abu Ghraib were a setback for American policy in Iraq, still seemed to be in denial. “Oh, I’m not one for instant history,” he responded. By Friday, however, with some members of Congress and with editorials calling for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at length before House and Senate committees and apologized for what he said was “fundamentally un-American” wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also warned that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come. Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of the Abu Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared in press accounts, and hadn’t reviewed the Army’s copies until the day before. When he did, they were “hard to believe,” he said. “There are other photos that depict . . . acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.” Later, he said, “It’s going to get still more terrible, I’m afraid.” Rumsfeld added, “I failed to recognize how important it was.”

NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the unreleased photographs showed American soldiers “severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and ‘acting inappropriately with a dead body.’ The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.”

No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on modifying the culture of the military leaders and finding ways to encourage them “to take greater risks.” One memo spoke derisively of the generals in the Pentagon, and said, “Our prerequisite of perfection for ‘actionable intelligence’ has paralyzed us. We must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered.” The Defense Secretary was told that he should “break the ‘belt-and-suspenders’ mindset within today’s military . . . we ‘over-plan’ for every contingency. . . . We must be willing to accept the risks.” With operations involving the death of foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should not be carried out in the Pentagon: “The result will be decision by committee.”

The Pentagon’s impatience with military protocol extended to questions about the treatment of prisoners caught in the course of its military operations. Soon after 9/11, as the war on terror got under way, Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva conventions. Complaints about America’s treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to “isolated pockets of international hyperventilation.”

The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has evolved into a sprawling set of related investigations, some of them hastily put together, including inquiries into twenty-five suspicious deaths. Investigators have become increasingly concerned with the role played not only by military and intelligence officials but also by C.I.A. agents and private-contract employees. In a statement, the C.I.A. acknowledged that its Inspector General had an investigation under way into abuses at Abu Ghraib, which extended to the death of a prisoner. A source familiar with one of the investigations told me that the victim was the man whose photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has been assigned to the case. The source also told me that an Army intelligence operative and a judge advocate general were seeking, through their lawyers, to negotiate immunity from prosecution in return for testimony.

The relationship between military policing and intelligence forces inside the Army prison system reached a turning point last fall in response to the insurgency against the Coalition Provisional Authority. “This is a fight for intelligence,” Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, told a reporter at a Baghdad press briefing in November. “Do I have enough soldiers? The answer is absolutely yes. The larger issue is, how do I use them and on what basis? And the answer to that is intelligence . . . to try to figure out how to take all this human intelligence as it comes in to us [and] turn it into something that’s actionable.” The Army prison system would now be asked to play its part.

Two months earlier, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guantánamo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. “Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence,” Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the prisons should make support of military intelligence a priority.

General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, “effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties.”

Taguba also criticized Miller’s report, noting that “the intelligence value of detainees held at . . . Guantánamo is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaeda.” Taguba noted that Miller’s recommendations “appear to be in conflict” with other studies and with Army regulations that call for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller’s recommendations and Sanchez’s change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were “either directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action.

In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became publicly known, Geoffrey Miller was transferred from Guantánamo and named head of prison operations in Iraq. “We have changed this—trust us,” Miller told reporters in early May. “There were errors made. We have corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again.”

Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore “sterile,” or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. “You couldn’t tell them apart,” the source familiar with the investigation said. The blurring of identities and organizations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom, and who had the authority to give orders. Civilian employees at the prison were not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they were bound by civilian law—though it is unclear whether American or Iraqi law would apply.

One of the employees involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, according to the Taguba report, was Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian working for CACI International, a Virginia-based company. Private companies like CACI and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over a hundred thousand dollars for the dangerous work in Iraq, far more than the Army pays, and were permitted, as never before in U.S. military history, to handle sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last week, General Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined to comment on any employee in Iraq, citing safety concerns, but said that the company still had not heard anything directly from the government about Stefanowicz.)

Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not all, of their interrogations in the Abu Ghraib facilities known to the soldiers as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. The interrogation centers were rarely visited by the M.P.s, a source familiar with the investigation said. The most important prisoners—the suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detainees—were housed at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, but the pressure on soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt throughout the system.

Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. “I said, ‘No, we will not do that,’” the captain said. “The M.I. commander comes to me and says, ‘What is the problem? We’re stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.’ I ask, ‘How? You’ve received training on that, but my soldiers don’t know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to get creative.’” The M.I. officer took the request to the captain’s commander, but, the captain said, “he backed me up.

“It’s all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commanders—both low-ranking and high,” the captain said. “The system is broken—no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and we’ve got to depend on them to do the right thing.”

In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A few months after General Miller’s report, Taguba wrote, General Sanchez, apparently troubled by reports of wrongdoing in Army jails in Iraq, asked Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general, to carry out a study of military prisons. In the resulting study, which is still classified, Ryder identified a conflict between military policing and military intelligence dating back to the Afghan war. He wrote, “Recent intelligence collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom posited a template whereby military police actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews.”

One of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war was John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old Californian who was captured in December, 2001. Lindh was accused of training with Al Qaeda terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans. A few days after his arrest, according to a federal-court affidavit filed by his attorney, James Brosnahan, a group of armed American soldiers “blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled ‘shithead’ across Mr. Lindh’s blindfold and posed with him. . . . Another told Mr. Lindh that he was ‘going to hang’ for his actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian organization.” Some of the photographs later made their way to the American media. Lindh was later stripped naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, and placed in a windowless shipping container. Once again, the affidavit said, “military personnel photographed Mr. Lindh as he lay on the stretcher.” On July 15, 2002, Lindh agreed to plead guilty to carrying a gun while serving in the Taliban and received a twenty-year jail term. During that process, Brosnahan told me, “the Department of Defense insisted that we state that there was ‘no deliberate’ mistreatment of John.” His client agreed to do so, but, the attorney noted, “Against that, you have that photograph of a naked John on that stretcher.”

The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused.

One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq “was not an inspection or an investigation. . . . It was an assessment.”) In his report to Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that “there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as an agent of the C.I.D., told me that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind. The Army had revised its command structure last fall, and Ryder, as provost marshal, was now the commanding general of all military-police units as well as of the C.I.D. He was, in essence, being asked to investigate himself. “What Ryder should have done was set up a C.I.D. task force headed by an 0-6”—full colonel—“with fifteen agents, and begin interviewing everybody and taking sworn statements,” Rowell said. “He had to answer questions about the prisons in September, when Sanchez asked for an assessment.” At the time, Rowell added, the Army prison system was unprepared for the demands the insurgency placed on it. “Ryder was a man in a no-win situation,” Rowell said. “As provost marshal, if he’d turned a C.I.D. task force loose, he could be in harm’s way—because he’s also boss of the military police. He was being eaten alive.”

Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. “He’s not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon,” a retired Army major general said of Taguba. “He’s the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public.”

[Joerver]

No Good Defense
He leaned forward, changing the way America fights wars and shaking up a staid bureaucracy. But his culture of intimidation alienated the brass—and helped pave the road to Abu Ghraib. Donald Rumsfeld`s journey to the brink

By Evan Thomas
Newsweek

May 17 issue - Donald Rumsfeld likes to be in total control. He wants to know all the details, including the precise interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners. Since 9/11 he has insisted on personally signing off on the harsher methods used to squeeze suspected terrorists held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conservative hard-liners at the Department of Justice have given the secretary of Defense a lot of leeway. It does not violate the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, the lawyers have told Rumsfeld, to put prisoners in ever-more-painful "stress positions" or keep them standing for hours on end, to deprive them of sleep or strip them naked. According to one of Rumsfeld`s aides, the secretary has drawn the line at interrogating prisoners for more than 24 hours at a time or depriving them of light.
Die Titelgeschichte:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4934213/

Prisoner abuse in Iraq
Key dates in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal
Aug. 31-Sept. 9, 2003
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who runs the military prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, conducts an inquiry on interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq. He suggests that prison guards can help set conditions for the interrogation of prisoners.
October-December
Many of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib take place during this time period.
Oct. 13-Nov. 6
Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, provost marshal of the Army, investigates conditions of U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. He finds problems throughout the prisons. Some units, including the 800th Military Police Brigade, did not receive adequate training to guard prisons, he notes. He also says military police (MPs) should not assist in making prisoners more pliable to interrogation, as their job is to keep prisoners safe.
Nov. 19
The 205th Military Intelligence Brigade is given responsibility for Abu Ghraib prison and authority over the 800th Military Police Brigade.
November
Two Iraqi detainees die in separate incidents that involved CIA interrogation officers.
Jan. 13, 2004
Army Spc. Joseph M. Darby, an MP with the 800th at Abu Ghraib, first reports cases of abuse at the prison.
Jan. 16
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez orders a criminal investigation into reports of abuse at the prison by members of the brigade. The military also announces the investigation publicly.
Jan. 19
Sanchez orders a separate administrative investigation into the 800th MP Brigade. Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba is appointed to conduct that inquiry on Jan. 31.
Late January - early February
President Bush becomes aware of the charges sometime in this time period, according to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, although the spokesman has not pinpointed a date. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tells Bush of the charges, McClellan has said.
Feb. 23
Seventeen U.S. soldiers suspended from duties pending outcome of investigation.
Feb. 24
International Committee of the Red Cross provides the Coalition Authority with a confidential report on detention in Iraq. Portions of the report are published without ICRC consent by the Wall Street Journal on May 7.
March 3-9
Taguba presents his report to his commanders. He finds widespread abuse of prisoners by military police and military intelligence. He also agrees with Ryder that guards should not play any role in the interrogation of prisoners.
March 20
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt tells reporters six military personnel have been charged with criminal offenses.
Mid April
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asks CBS-TV to delay airing photographs it has obtained of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Myers says the photos would exacerbate an intense period of violence under way in Iraq. CBS delays its program for two weeks.
April 28
# Rumsfeld meets with senators in a closed briefing on the war in Iraq. Rumsfeld neglects to mention the issue of prisoner abuse or the coming disclosure of photos.

# CBS “60 Minutes II” airs the photos, setting off an international outcry. Bush first learns about these photos from the television report, his aides say.
Early May
CIA confirms that some of its officers hid Iraqi prisoners from watchdog groups like the Red Cross.
May 1
An article by Seymour Hersh, published on The New Yorker magazine`s Web site, reveals contents of Taguba`s report.
May 2
Myers admits on ABC’s "This Week" that he has not yet read the Taguba report issued in March.
May 3
Officials say the Army has reprimanded seven soldiers in the abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib.
May 4
U.S. Army discloses that it is conducting criminal investigations of 10 prisoner deaths in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq - beyond two already ruled homicides - plus another 10 abuse cases. (The number grows by two on May 5, when the CIA says it is investigating more cases.)
May 5
President Bush appears on two Arab television channels to address the scandal but does not apologize for the abuse of iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops. The following day Bush does apologize.
May 6
# The Washington Post publishes four additional photos.
# President Bush privately admonishes Rumsfeld for not keeping him informed about the issue.
May 7
Rumsfeld testifies before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on the issue of prisoner abuse in Iraq. Separately, Army Pfc. Lynndie England, shown in photographs smiling and pointing at naked Iraqi prisoners, is charged with assaulting detainees and conspiring to mistreat them.
Source: Associated Press, MSNBC research, NBC News

[Heizkessel]

[Joerver]

US military confirms existence of horrific pictures and video
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

09 May 2004

The Bush administration was bracing itself last night for the release of new pictures and video footage from Abu Ghraib which show US soldiers having sex with an Iraqi woman prisoner, troops almost beating a prisoner to death, and the rape of young boys by Iraqi guards at the jail.

Senior officials have warned that the new images and details of the abuse and torture at the prison west of Baghdad will be even more shocking than those already released. They will undoubtedly place even more pressure on President George Bush and his beleaguered Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as they desperately try to limit the political damage from the growing scandal.

NBC News has quoted military officials as saying that the new photographsalso show US soldiers "acting inappropriately with a dead body". This may refer to a picture, which The Washington Post described but did not publish, of Sabrina Harman, one of seven reservists charged with abuses, posing with thumbs up next to a decaying corpse.

NBC also reported that the rape of young boys by Iraqi guards, apparently in a special section of the prison, had been filmed by US soldiers.

There are even suggestions that the murder of a prisoner has been recorded. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina questioned Mr Rumsfeld on Friday about why the abuse had not been detected earlier. "The American public needs to understand we`re talking about rape and murder here. We`re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience."

The new images will further rock the Bush administration, suffering its worst crisis yet after photographs showing US army reservists abusing and sexually humiliating prisoners caused international revulsion and outrage. But the knowledge that the abuse was much more widespread, and that there are more shocking images to come, is threatening even more problems for Mr Bush as he prepares to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi government on 30 June.

Further evidence emerged, meanwhile, that the abuse of prisoners by military police reservists was ordered by military intelligence officers, CIA operatives or even by privately hired civilian interrogators. Ms Harman said they were told to break the prisoners down in preparation for questioning.

"They would bring in one or several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed. The job of the MP [military police] was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk," Ms Harman, 26, from northern Virginia, told The Washington Post. "The person who brought them in would set the standards on whether or not to `be nice`."

A total of seven reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company based in Cumberland, Maryland, have now been charged over the abuse, including Lynndie England, 21, who was photographed with a prisoner on a leash. Seven other soldiers have been reprimanded, and several relieved of command.

Rumours of the existence of more pictures have been circulating in Washington for days and were confirmed on Friday by Mr Rumsfeld, who said they were "sadistic, cruel and inhuman".

The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who revealed the extent of the abuse, warned earlier last week: "It`s going to get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more widespread.

"There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn`t want to mention on national television ... There were things done to young boys."

President Bush insisted that while the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was "a stain on our country`s honour and reputation", it would not deflect his mission in Iraq.

"[The photographs] do not reflect our values," he said.


10 May 2004 00:16

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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May 10, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS: THE PROSPECT
U.S. Must Find a Way to Move Past the Images
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, May 9 — When President Bush travels to the Pentagon on Monday morning for a classified briefing on the Iraq war, the subtext of the conversation will have little to do with the commanders` latest assessments of whether insurgents can be routed from Falluja and Najaf.

Instead, some of Mr. Bush`s senior aides conceded in conversations over the weekend, the far larger question hanging over Mr. Bush`s encounter with his embattled secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and the nation`s military leaders is whether the revelations of prisoner abuse have so undermined American political objectives for remaking Iraq that the military challenges have suddenly become a secondary problem.

Even some of the most vociferous enthusiasts of Mr. Bush`s plan to make Iraq the cornerstone of a freer, more democratic Middle East are now conceding privately that their early optimism has been shattered.

Just weeks ago, some of these same officials expressed cautious confidence that once the insurgents were captured or killed, the occupation authority would somehow stumble through the next seven weeks, cobbling together a transitional Iraqi government and making the transfer of sovereignty the crowning symbol of how America liberated a nation from tyranny. But now, they say, the main issue is regaining American political legitimacy as the power behind that transition.

With Arab television stations broadcasting images of the abused prisoners and only snippets of Mr. Bush`s vow to punish those responsible, some of Mr. Bush`s aides say they fear many ordinary Iraqis can no longer take the risk of backing any plan that carries the American imprimatur.

Worse, aides fear the images are becoming recruiting posters for the insurgents. It is a problem, one senior aide said over the weekend, "that you simply can`t solve with the First Armored Division."

Another senior official, insisting on anonymity, put the ugly turn in the American occupation more starkly. "If in the coming months Iraq looks relatively stable and on some path to democracy, this whole issue of abuse will be a tragic problem that was addressed and solved," he said.

But, he continued, "If the wheels come off in the next few months, then it will be an example of how our discipline broke down, and it will be regarded as a signpost on the road" to far worse troubles.

The question facing Mr. Bush, aides say, is a narrow one. Should he order the release of the remaining photographs and videos — even if they contain graphic images, as rumored, of assaults or rapes?

No matter how Mr. Bush handles the question of the graphic evidence, the bigger issue for the war, and for his re-election campaign, is whether he can undo the damage that the revelations have done to his broader political goals for Iraq.

It will be months, maybe years, before anyone will know for certain whether the image of a hooded Iraqi prisoner connected to electrical wires that was splashed across the world`s magazine covers last week will become the symbolic image of the American occupation — the way the photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from an American attack helped turn opinion against American action in Southeast Asia.

But clearly, the prisoner abuse issue is affecting how Mr. Bush talks about the liberation of Iraq. He still tells audiences, as he did in Pittsburgh last month and Cincinnati last week, that "because of our actions, because of the actions by our coalition, Saddam Hussein`s torture chambers are closed." But he no longer dwells on such comparisons, perhaps mindful that Mr. Rumsfeld found himself last week rejecting any comparisons between the prisoner abuses and the systemic use of torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons under Mr. Hussein`s rule.

In fact, the American abuses appear more a product of poor training, a breakdown of command authority and astoundingly bad judgment than any premeditated plan.

One of Mr. Rumsfeld`s most skilled bureaucratic opponents inside the administration, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, drove the point home on CNN last week when he said, "For many of our European friends, what they saw on those horrible pictures is tantamount to torture, and there are very strong views about that." He added, "In the Arab world, there is general dismay and disgust, but in some places we were not real popular to start with."

If Mr. Bush has a strategy for undoing that damage beyond the television appearances he made on two Arab networks last week, White House officials freely admit they cannot describe it.

"I`m not sure such a strategy is possible," one senior official said late last week. "The facts are simply not with us."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 10, 2004
U.S. Forces Destroy Office of Cleric in Baghdad
By CHRISTINE HAUSER and IAN FISHER

BAGHDAD, Monday, May 10 — American forces destroyed the Baghdad headquarters of a rebel Shiite cleric on Monday, a day after troops killed at least 19 of his militiamen in clashes in the Sadr City slum district, the military and witnesses said Monday.

Witnesses said American armored vehicles had pummeled the walls of the compound, the offices of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, which also contained a small mosque, around 2 a.m., toppling large portions of the brick and cement building.

Witnesses said the building had been evacuated, and that there had been no casualties.

After a tense day on Sunday, security checkpoints in the neighborhood were being guarded again, and businesses were open, residents said.

The American military said that all of the 19 fighters it killed Sunday had been carrying rocket-propelled grenades. No American casualties were reported.

The militia fighters took to the streets of the neighborhood after Americans detained several people, including Mr. Sadr`s lieutenant and a man accused of being his financier, at Mr. Sadr`s office Saturday.

The militia was reported to have taken over some municipal buildings in Sadr City, in northeastern Baghdad, and to have blocked off roads parts of the district. Many shops were closed there on Sunday.

"There are still some inside that district that are of the belief that Moktada`s militia can operate freely," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said in a news conference Sunday. He said the militia fighters believe "that somehow, Moktada has some sort of legitimate control over that district. They`ll find out they`re wrong."

Sadr City, a predominantly Shiite district, has been a stronghold of support for Mr. Sadr, whose militias have also been fighting with American-led coalition troops in Shiite cities south of the capital.

When an uprising broke out early last month, Mr. Sadr`s militia tried to seize control of police stations there, and local hospitals reported dozens of people killed in the heavy fighting that ensued.

On Sunday morning, Iraqi police stations jointly guarded by American forces came under fire, the military said. It said the troops returned fire and secured the area.

The military statement said a grenade hit a Bradley Fighting Vehicle while on patrol, and that militia fighters also tried to fire rocket propelled grenades at soldiers, who returned fire, killing two of the insurgents. It said 15 fighters had been killed in airstrikes by close air support craft.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 10, 2004
Eye on F.C.C., TV and Radio Watch Words
By JACQUES STEINBERG

The reverberations from this year`s fiasco of a Super Bowl half-time show are reaching every corner of the broadcasting world, and not even the viewers of "Masterpiece Theater" are immune.

The producers of "Masterpiece Theater," intent on staying in the good graces of a Federal Communications Commission increasingly vigilant for instances of indecency, took a step last month they never had before. They chose not to make available to PBS member stations an unexpurgated version of the critically acclaimed British series "Prime Suspect," and instead sent out two edited versions: one with all of the salty language edited, and another with only some of the possibly offending words excised.

Taking similar cues from regulators, an Indianapolis radio station pre-empted words like "urinate," "damn" and "orgy" from going out over the air during a recent broadcast of Rush Limbaugh`s talk show.

And classic rock radio stations have felt compelled to prune their playlists, striking songs like Elton John`s "The Bitch Is Back" and "Bitch" by the Rolling Stones.

Television and radio broadcasters say they have little choice but to practice a form of self-censorship, swinging the pendulum of what they consider acceptable in the direction of extreme caution. A series of recent decisions by the F.C.C., as well as bills passed in Congress, have put them on notice that even the unintentional broadcast of something that could be considered indecent or obscene could result in stiffer fines or even the revocation of their licenses.

"If you`re asking if there has been overcaution on the part of broadcasters today, I think the answer is yes," said Jeff Smulyan, the chairman and chief executive of Emmis Communications, which owns 16 television stations and 27 radio stations in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and other cities. "Everyone is going to err on the side of caution. There is too much at stake. People are just not sure what the standards really are."

The uncertainty over standards, Mr. Smulyan said, has convinced station executives to hire at least two paralegals whose responsibilities will include deleting potentially offensive material on live broadcasts before those words can be heard by the audience, using technology that delays the airing of those programs by an interval of several seconds.

Among those who will be subject to that legal backstop is the Chicago radio host known as "Mancow," who mixes celebrity interviews with racier fare.

Michael J. Copps, an F.C.C. commissioner who has been one of the strongest critics of media companies, acknowledged that some broadcasters appeared to be overreacting. But, he said, "I applaud the effort at self policing."

He also disputed the notion that the commission`s standards on indecency were too vague. "I think most of the things we`re dealing with right now are pretty clear, from the standpoint of being indecent," he said. "There`s enough stuff out there that shouldn`t be on."

Still, Mr. Copps said that the broadcasters themselves could resolve any ambiguities they perceive by drafting and adopting what he described as a "voluntary code of broadcaster conduct."

James P. Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonpartisan organization that advocates better programming aimed at children and families, said that "a few extreme, silly examples" of media companies being perhaps too cautious were far preferable to what he considers the "completely unregulated environment" of the recent past.

Complaints about indecency on the airwaves are not uncommon in election years, although they often grow fainter once the first Tuesday in November goes by.

This year, the exposure of Janet Jackson`s right breast during a Super Bowl halftime show seen by tens of millions of viewers provided something of a gift to a Republican administration seeking to shore up its standing with conservatives, as well as with those who complain that media companies have grown large in recent years while facing little government scrutiny.

Two recent rulings by the F.C.C. have had a particularly chilling effect on broadcasters. Last month, the agency proposed levying nearly $500,000 in fines on six radio stations owned by Clear Channel Communications for broadcasting a 20-minute snippet of Howard Stern`s program dealing mostly with sexual talk. (Clear Channel has since stopped carrying Mr. Stern`s program.)

And in March, the commission overturned an earlier ruling and found that NBC had violated decency standards by broadcasting a single vulgarity uttered by Bono, the lead singer of U2, during the Golden Globes in 2003.

Meanwhile, the House passed a bill in March that would increase fines on transgressing broadcasters to $500,000 a violation, up to a maximum of $3 million, from $27,500 a violation.

In a petition filed last week with the F.C.C. protesting the Bono decision, PBS and its stations argued that the process of determining what might run afoul of the F.C.C. was both costly and time-consuming.

For example, on an internal Web site used by PBS executives, a station manager posed the question last month of whether WGBH, the public television station in Boston, should edit an episode of "Antiques Road Show." The station manager was worried about displaying a photograph of a nude celebrity — in this case, Marilyn Monroe, as depicted a half-century ago. It was only after reviewing and debating the footage that the show decided to let the image remain.

But in the case of "Prime Suspect," the mystery series with Helen Mirren on PBS, the producers of "Masterpiece Theater" believed that more extreme action was warranted.

In the past, "Masterpiece Theater" has occasionally sent stations two versions of an episode — one as it appeared on British television, and another that deleted a particularly strong expletive, said Rebecca Eaton, executive producer of "Masterpiece Theater."

But in response to the recent commission rulings, Ms. Eaton said, the producers decided to create a version of last month`s episode that was more heavily edited for profanity than any in the past, as well as a version that received some lighter editing.

In a petition filed last month with the F.C.C., a group representing other media organizations objected to a portion of the Bono decision in which the commission said it would now consider any use of the vulgarity in question to have a sexual connotation, regardless of the context. (Bono used that graphic expletive as an adjective in accepting an award.) That directive, the petitioners wrote, had sent radio stations scurrying to remove or edit songs with profanities that involve "neither sexual nor excretory references."

A similar scouring has been going on at WABC Radio in New York, home to a stable of politically conservative talk-show hosts — including Mr. Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Phil Boyce, the station`s program director, recently posted a sign on the control room door that urged his technicians not to resist the urge to press the so-called "dump" button, in which a host`s words are pre-empted on tape delay before the audience ever hears them.

"You will never be criticized for dumping something that may not have needed to be dumped. But God forbid we miss one and let it slip up," Mr. Boyce wrote.

Last week, a WABC technician heeding that warning used the "dump" button to prevent the word "parachute" from being heard. The technician did so because a host had tripped over the second half of the word in a way that made it sound as if he had stepped in something offensive, Mr. Boyce said.

A similarly vigilant technician had his finger on the "dump" button at WIBC-AM, an Emmis station in Indianapolis, during its broadcast of Mr. Limbaugh`s syndicated program on March 3 — one day after Emmis informed its employees that the broadcast of material it deemed offensive could result in their suspension or firing.

In an e-mail message to the station`s program director, the assistant program director wrote that the delay was used 11 times that day for Mr. Limbaugh`s program. "I can only guess we are erring on the side of safety given that I don`t know of any instance a licensee has ever been fined or cited for airing Rush unedited," the assistant program director wrote, "but we`ll continue to do these cuts until we`re directed otherwise."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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In temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, U.S. soldiers fired at positions in Karbala held by the militia of Moktada al-Sadr.


May 10, 2004
INSURGENCY
U.S. Asks Politicians and Sheiks to Help Rebuild Iraqi Corps in South
By EDWARD WONG

KARBALA, Iraq, May 9 — The American military has begun to recruit Iraqi fighters from prominent Shiite political parties and tribal sheiks to rebuild the national security forces in the south that have been decimated by the uprising led by the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

The move is an effort to restore Iraqi security forces that American officials had touted for much of the last year as a measure of progress in stabilizing Iraq. Those forces crumbled when the uprising began in April. Many Iraqi security officers refused to fight the insurgents, and some even joined them.

In Baghdad, half the American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a national militia, either chose not to fight or sided with the insurgents, said Maj. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, which controlled Baghdad and is now responsible for crushing the insurgency in the south. All the members of that militia here in Karbala and half in the nearby holy city of Najaf — the two places where fighting has been heaviest in the last week — also abandoned their jobs, American officers said.

The new recruitment policy is intended to place part of the responsibility for security in the south, where most of Iraq`s Shiites lives, in the hands of political and tribal leaders, American officers said.

General Dempsey said in an interview that leaders of five national political parties led by Shiite Muslims had been asked at a meeting in Baghdad to contribute a total of 2,000 fighters to the police and civil defense corps in the south.

Three of the parties — the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi National Accord — have a history of maintaining private armies. The other two parties, the Dawa Islamic Party and Iraqi Hezbollah, are both influential in the south. All five parties have seats on the Iraqi Governing Council.

American commanders say they are also asking tribal sheiks to recruit fighters. Some sheiks say they are drawing up lists of names.

"I have met with very senior religious leaders and the heads of the political parties whom I see as having a stake in all this," General Dempsey said during a visit over the weekend to Camp Lima, the military base here. "I`m not going to sit here and say this will 100 percent come out the way it`s going to happen, but I think it`s going according to plan."

There is no guarantee that fighters recruited from rival political parties and tribes will work together. If civil war were to break out, policemen and militiamen recruited from parties and tribes could put their loyalty to those groups first, because that is the dominant form of allegiance in Iraq. Furthermore, such groups could interpret the recruitment plan as permission to maintain private armies, which the American occupation authority has opposed.

One sheik in Karbala, Ali Kammouna, said he and other sheiks were recruiting men to build a force that will "support" the Iraqi police rather than be part of it — a move that sounds like building a private militia. But General Dempsey insisted that all the fighters will be part of the Iraqi police or Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and will have to work together.

The general said the new recruits would train for two weeks. He said that a "credible" Iraqi security force could be operating in the south by the end of June and that he planned to triple the size of the 430-man Iraqi Civil Defense Corps in Najaf, where Mr. Sadr has sought refuge.

The new strategy by the First Armored Division is similar to the Marine change of plan last month in the volatile city of Falluja, where Lt. Gen. James T. Conway delayed an assault on insurgents by placing prominent local Sunni Arabs in charge of security. The Sunni leaders were asked to bring hundreds of their own men to form the Falluja Brigade, a militia responsible for controlling the insurgents.

But while General Conway is relying on former officers in Saddam Hussein`s army to calm Falluja, General Dempsey is turning to American-backed political parties that long fought Mr. Hussein.

American officials have long said they want to rid Iraq of private armies by folding them into the national security forces.

The ineffectiveness of that policy became apparent when Mr. Sadr ignited the uprising in the south by calling on his thousands-strong militia, the Mahdi Army. But successful experiments in Baghdad and in Kurdish areas in the north have inspired a new effort in the south.

"This is our ticket home," said Brig. Gen. Mark P. Hertling of the First Armored Division. "We`re asking the sheiks for their best people."

Mr. Kammouna, the sheik in Karbala, said he and other tribal leaders were ready to give names of potential recruits. But the police might balk at the plan, he said, because they could perceive it as a threat to their power. "They will say it will be just like Sadr`s militia," he said.

The chief of police here, Col. Kareem Sultan, appeared to want to keep his distance from the plan, saying in an interview that General Dempsey`s move was "just an idea," even though the American military and the local sheiks were clearly pushing ahead with it. What is more, he said, "all the police stations are working normally, and policemen did not leave their jobs and their duties."

At a looted police station in Karbala`s Hay al-Mualimeen neighborhood, Sgt. Ahmed Amana offered a different assessment. Standing next to a handful of colleagues, he said, "We are powerless and do not have enough weapons." Last week, he said, police headquarters asked his men to set up a checkpoint to prove they could maintain order, but they abandoned the post when members of the Mahdi Army showed up.

Abdul Razzaq al-Saeidy contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company









Iraqi gunmen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr displayed weapons in front of a mosque.

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May 10, 2004
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
A Father`s Nemesis Who Became a Son`s Trusted Aide
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON

At the heart of the melodrama playing out in Washington is the complex character of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the great warrior of Iraq and Afghanistan who is now struggling to hang on to his job. If he survives, it will largely be because of President Bush, who spanked him last week for his handling of the Iraq prison abuse scandal but insisted Mr. Rumsfeld`s position was secure.

Mr. Bush`s relationship with Mr. Rumsfeld seems complicated right now, but it is nothing compared to the relationship that Mr. Rumsfeld had with Mr. Bush`s father. People close to the Bushes say the family history may color Mr. Rumsfeld`s future, even if it means that the second President Bush, whose administration has so often gone in the opposite direction of the first one`s, will deal with Mr. Rumsfeld in an entirely different way than his father did.

As veterans of the Ford White House remember, Mr. Rumsfeld was an intense rival of George Bush`s, and by all accounts the men had a terrible relationship in the 1970`s and 1980`s. Bush partisans still say that Mr. Rumsfeld masterminded what became known as the Halloween Massacre, the 1975 Ford cabinet shake-up in which Mr. Rumsfeld jumped from his position as White House chief of staff to become secretary of defense, thereby enhancing his prospects, never realized, of being President Gerald R. Ford`s running mate in 1976.

In that same shuffle, Mr. Bush, who had been the chief United States envoy to China, was sidelined as director of central intelligence — a job that took Mr. Bush out of the running for vice president, since at the time C.I.A. directors were thought to have no future in politics.

The defense secretary and the C.I.A. chief soon clashed over the agency`s estimates of Soviet military spending. In 1988, when Mr. Bush was the vice president running for president, Mr. Rumsfeld briefly joined the race.

"There`s a certain amount of disrespect when Rumsfeld decides to run for president in `88 with a sitting vice president," said James Mann, the author of "Rise of the Vulcans," a history of the current president`s war cabinet.

Today the relationship between Mr. Rumsfeld and Bush père is said to be thawed, or at least that is what the elder Mr. Bush indicated Friday from his office in Houston, where he was watching, on and off, Mr. Rumsfeld`s Congressional testimony about the scandal.

"He asked me to tell you that he would characterize his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld as a very pleasant one, and he thinks Donald Rumsfeld would say the same," said Jean Becker, Mr. Bush`s chief of staff.

Which brings us to Mr. Rumsfeld`s selection as defense secretary for a second time, by the current President Bush. Mr. Bush, who had rejected Daniel R. Coats, the former Republican senator from Indiana, turned to Mr. Rumsfeld as a bureaucratic strongman (and Vice President Dick Cheney`s old friend) who could go one on one against the star of the new cabinet, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Republicans who know both Bushes say that the father`s history with Mr. Rumsfeld was either irrelevant to the son or, more interestingly, another way to show that he was his own man. Just as he would march into Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein — the road his father never took — the current President Bush would manage Mr. Rumsfeld.

Today Mr. Bush`s relationship with his defense secretary, who is facing worldwide calls to resign, is described as professionally close but hardly cozy. "Rumsfeld`s relationship with Bush is based on performance, not personal factors," a senior administration official said. "When the performance was there, the relationship was fine."

Republicans close to the Bushes say that Mr. Rumsfeld is nothing but deferential to the president, 15 years his junior, and that he admires Mr. Bush for something he was not able to do: win a presidential election.

Mr. Bush, in turn, feels enormous loyalty to the defense secretary for managing the Pentagon in one of the country`s most perilous times.

"He`s conducted two wars on behalf of the president," Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said Saturday as part of a White House communications offensive to broadcast support for Mr. Rumsfeld. On Monday, Mr. Bush will continue to shore up the defense secretary with a rare presidential visit to the Pentagon.

For now, only a handful of people know precisely what happened in the Oval Office last Wednesday, when Mr. Bush chastised his father`s old rival for failing to inform him about the graphic pictures of abuse by American soldiers. In the authorized recounting by Mr. Bush`s aides, there was little detail.

Did Mr. Bush yell? Did he speak more in sorrow than anger? Was it a slap on the wrist? How did Mr. Rumsfeld respond?

Whatever occurred, it is a safe bet that no one in the room brought up the president`s father.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Conservatives Restive About Bush Policies
Fresh Initiatives Sought On Iraq, Domestic Issues

By Dana Milbank and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A01

After three years of sweeping actions in both foreign and domestic affairs, the Bush administration is facing complaints from the conservative intelligentsia that it has lost its ability to produce fresh policies.

The centerpiece of President Bush`s foreign policy -- the effort to transform Iraq into a peaceful democracy -- has been undermined by a deadly insurrection and broadcast photos of brutality by U.S. prison guards. On the domestic side, conservatives and former administration officials say the White House policy apparatus is moribund, with policies driven by political expediency or ideological pressure rather than by facts and expertise.

Conservatives have become unusually restive. Last Tuesday, columnist George F. Will sharply criticized the administration`s Iraq policy, writing: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts." Two days earlier, Robert Kagan, a neoconservative supporter of the Iraq war, wrote: "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now."

The complaints about Bush`s Iraq policy are relatively new, but they are in some ways similar to long-standing criticism about Bush`s domestic policies. In a book released earlier this year, former Bush Treasury secretary Paul H. O`Neill described Bush as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people" and said policymakers put politics before sound policy judgments.

Echoing a criticism leveled by former Bush aide John J. DiIulio Jr., who famously described "Mayberry Machiavellis" running the White House, O`Neill said "the biggest difference" between his time in government in the 1970s and in the Bush administration "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl [Rove], Dick [Cheney], [Bush communications strategist] Karen [Hughes] and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics."

Michael Franc, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, said the criticism by O`Neill, Will and Kagan has a common thread: a concern that the administration is "using an old playbook" and not coming up with bold enough ideas, whether the subject is entitlement reform or pacifying Iraq. Conservative intellectuals "are saying, `Don`t do things half way,` " he said.

"It`s the exhaustion of power," said a veteran of conservative think tanks who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Ideology has confronted reality, and ideology has bent. On the domestic side, it has bent in terms of the expansion of the government embodied in the Medicare prescription-drug law. On the foreign policy side, it has bent because of what has transpired in the last few weeks in Fallujah."

A Bush spokesman quarreled with that notion, saying there has been no let-up in Bush`s policymaking. "We are marching ahead," said the spokesman, Trent Duffy, pointing to Bush`s plans for community-college-based job training, space exploration and modernizing health records. "He`s continuing to push the policies that have made the country better and stronger."

Part of the current perception of policy fatigue in the White House is a reflection of the political calendar: With a presidential election approaching, there is little possibility that the closely split Congress will enact serious legislation this year regardless of what the White House proposes. "It`s a combination of how very challenging it is to move anything in the Senate these days, and it is an election year," said one former Bush aide, who like some of the conservatives interviewed for this article declined to be identified to avoid offending the White House.

But conservative policy experts and a number of former Bush administration officials say there are more systemic reasons for the policy sclerosis. For three years, the president pushed policies conceived during his 2000 campaign for the White House, but with most of those ideas either enacted or stalled, policymaking has run out of steam, they said.

Bush has also discouraged the sort of free-wheeling policy debates that characterized previous administrations, and he relies on a top-down management style that has little use for "wonks" in the federal bureaucracy. At the same time, many of the top domestic policy experts in the Bush White House have moved on to other jobs; in many cases they have been replaced by subordinates with much less experience in governing.

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist with the National Center for Policy Analysis, said policy ideas typically bubble up from experts deep inside federal agencies, who put together working groups, draft white papers, sell their wares in the marketplace of ideas and hope White House officials act on their suggestions. In this case, ideas are hatched in the White House, for political or ideological reasons, then are thrust on the bureaucracy, "not for analysis, but for sale," Bartlett said.

The result is a White House that has become unimaginative with domestic policy and, in foreign policy, has struggled to develop new policies to adapt to changing circumstances in Iraq, according to several conservatives.

"In Iraq, you don`t see the thinking, `Things have not happened as we had planned. What do we do now?` " said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, who last week organized a Cato forum entitled "The Triumph of the Hacks?"

Richard W. Rahn, a prominent Republican economist, excoriated the administration`s telecommunications, antitrust and international economic policies in a Washington Times column April 30 along similar lines. "From the beginning of the Bush administration, sympathetic, experienced economists have warned its officials about the need to avoid some obvious mistakes," he wrote. "Unfortunately, these warnings have gone unheeded."

In an interview, Rahn said he has grown concerned over what he sees as "a lack of vision and policy consistency" in the Bush administration. "I mean, we knew where [President Ronald] Reagan was heading; at times there were deviations from the path, but we knew what it was all about," he said. In contrast, he said, now "there doesn`t seem to be a clear policy vision."

Some attribute the policy lethargy to personnel changes, particularly on the domestic side. For example, three veterans of previous White Houses with lengthy experience in Washington have left their policymaking roles; their successors, though capable, have significantly less policymaking experience.

Joshua B. Bolten, the deputy chief of staff for policy, has been replaced by Harriet Miers, a Texas lawyer and former chairman of the Texas Lottery Commission. Jay Lefkowitz, director of the Domestic Policy Council, has been replaced by Kristen Silverberg, who was a young aide to Bolten. And Lawrence B. Lindsey was replaced as top economic adviser by investment banker Stephen Friedman.

Likewise, John Bridgeland, a former director of the Domestic Policy Council, was replaced as director of Bush`s USA Freedom Corps initiative by Desiree Sayle, the former director of correspondence in the White House. And public-policy professor DiIulio was replaced as chief of Bush`s "faith-based" initiative by Jim Towey, who had ties to the president`s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Leading experts in welfare and health policy have left the White House and been replaced by less experienced hands.

"It would be fair to say the policy shop is less policy-oriented in its apparatus and more administratively managed," said a Republican with close ties to the White House.

In interviews, former officials of the current and three previous administrations described Bush`s domestic policy team as unusually green -- particularly compared with Bush`s top political adviser, Karl Rove. At the Cato forum last week, former Bush speechwriter David Frum said Rove is "the top hack and the top wonk" in the White House.

"I don`t think he should be the most important wonk in the White House," said Bruce Reed, former domestic policy chief to Bill Clinton and author of an article about how policy "wonks" had been bested by political "hacks" in the current White House. "Every White House takes on the enthusiasms and the interests of the president, and most of the time this president seems to take more joy in the politics than in the policy."

Defenders of the Bush policymaking apparatus agree that the volume of policymaking has diminished significantly from 2001 and 2002, when the White House was fighting for passage of policies developed during the presidential campaign, such as tax cuts and education accountability. But they say the cause is outside the administration.

Frum said much of the policy energy has been channeled into fighting terrorism at home and abroad because of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "On the most critical issue of our time, they have been bold, creative, and in some cases, they have shocked the intelligentsia with their assertiveness," he said.

Whatever the cause, conservatives say the remedy to policy malaise won`t come until the election. Conservative strategist Jeffrey Bell said the big items on the policy agenda -- such as an overhaul of Social Security -- are necessarily on hold as Bush fights for reelection. "He`s having to defend the forward motion he`s already had," Bell said. "Reagan in `84 was the same way. People who thought Reagan`s creative period was going to end after `83 were wrong. I think Bush will be the same way."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Iraqis loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, many of them armed, block an entrance to the Sadr City area of Baghdad. The uprising was triggered by a U.S. raid Saturday in which two Sadr aides were detained.
washingtonpost.com

Shiite Cleric`s Militia Seizes Control of Baghdad Slum

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 9 -- Gunmen and commanders loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr took over the giant Sadr City slum in Baghdad on Sunday, seizing control of police forces, municipal administration and schools and blocking freedom of movement in an area just five miles east of U.S. administration headquarters.

Teenagers wielding rocket-propelled grenade launchers commanded entrances to the slum, home to about a third of Baghdad`s 5 million residents. The youths waved commands to visitors with one hand and slung rifles around with the other.

With the quick takeover, which was completed at dawn, Sadr City joined two southern towns, Najaf and Kufa, now under the control of Sadr`s militia.

The immediate trigger for the uprising in Sadr City was a U.S. raid Saturday night on a former office of Sadr`s organization and the detention of two of Sadr`s lieutenants, Amr Husseini and Amjad Saedi. U.S. officials said the men were responsible for Sadr`s finances and operations in eastern Baghdad.

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said the decision to raid the building was "based on intelligence suggesting that a large group of armed Moqtada militia were attempting to reestablish operations and reoccupy the building."

"After the arrests and following the call of the leader . . . we decided to rise up with him and stop the Americans from coming into Sadr City again," said Sheikh Latif Moqtadai, commander of a small militia unit. His group manned an intersection on Orfali Street on the western edge of Sadr City, which was named for Sadr`s father, Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, a revered grand ayatollah who was assassinated in 1999.

A cluster of young men surrounding Moqtadai nodded. The men, with scarves wrapped around their heads and wearing sandals, brandished AK-47 rifles, while others in the area carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers, their pointed projectiles locked in place.

Sadr, 30, has defied a U.S. arrest warrant for involvement in the murder of a Shiite cleric, Abdel-Majid Khoei, who was killed last year. Sadr has taken refuge around Najaf, home to the shrine of Ali, a cousin of the prophet Muhammad and the first Shiite imam, a development that has complicated the U.S. drive against him because commanders say they want to avoid storming the holy city.

The commanders say they are chipping away at Sadr`s forces by hitting them in several other southern cities, including Diwaniyah, Karbala, Kut and Kufa, just east of Najaf. U.S. tanks roared deep into Kufa for the first time Sunday.

In less than eight weeks, the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority is supposed to transfer at least nominal authority to a new Iraqi government. Sadr`s rebellion against the American-led occupation, which started more than a month ago, has dimmed prospects for a smooth transfer.

A rebellion also continues in central Iraq, spearheaded by Sunni Muslims. Shiite religious and political factions have grown nervous about a U.S. decision to reach out to members of Hussein`s former army and Baath Party to pacify the Sunni revolt in the western city of Fallujah. Hundreds of opponents of the Baathist revival demonstrated peacefully Sunday in downtown Baghdad.

Sadr`s Shiite rivals also fear they might have to deal with the radical cleric and risk intra-Shiite fighting. Sadr has rejected proposed political transition plans, which so far have excluded him.

"This problem cannot be left to hang there unsolved," said Sabeeh Jasim, a former political prisoner who runs a relief charity in Baghdad. "The turmoil can only grow."

Sadr City`s warren of alleys had already proved to be volatile territory. The slum erupted in violence on April 4, a few days after the chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, closed Sadr`s newspaper, al-Hawza, and a day after the arrest of one of Sadr`s chief aides. But the violence had subsided after a U.S. counterattack, and until Sunday, Mahdi Army forces had withdrawn from the streets.

Members of the Mahdi Army, which numbers in the thousands, blocked streets with all manner of debris: fruit crates, stones, cinder block, automobile bumpers and iron grating. They set tires aflame and also burned the abundant street-side trash in the neighborhood. Heavy cranes and bulldozers were placed on main thoroughfares, available to block any American approach.

Owners of the few open businesses and shops kept assault rifles by their counters. Posters of Sadr, an index finger jutting at an angle, covered walls around one-story houses, shops and mosques.

Around midday, masked men shot rocket-propelled grenades at the Karameh police station, which was guarded by a pair of tan Bradley Fighting Vehicles and a lone police guard. The Bradleys rattled side streets with heavy fire and 10 others soon rumbled into Sadr City to escort them out. U.S. military officials said the Americans killed 18 insurgents at Karameh and at another police station. U.S. officials also said they had secured the sites, but the Karameh station stood abandoned. Other municipal buildings were vacant as well.

Clutches of young men formed an inner cordon of checkpoints deep in Sadr City near Sadr`s abandoned main offices. They ushered autos onto side streets, where suspicious eyes gazed into the passing vehicles, particularly four-wheel-drive vehicles, which many Iraqis view as the cars of foreigners. Checkpoints popped up where none had existed. New flocks of youths, some armed, diverted traffic onto narrow streets to face lines of cars herded there from the opposite direction.

On Orfali Street, Moqtadai tried to reorganize the watch. "You will not be able to shoot from here," he told his underlings. "The civilian cars are in the way. Let`s move from here."

A youth in a black scarf arrived and asked about a jeep that, he said, had been circling nearby. A visitor assured him it was only his awaiting transportation. "We have to be sure," he said. "We`re afraid of spies who will tell the Americans where we are gathering."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com

Mr. Bush and the Economy



Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A24

ON HIS BUS TOUR through four Midwestern states last week, President Bush tried to broaden his campaign message away from dispiriting foreign events and toward better news at home. Even though polls commissioned by The Post suggest that most voters have yet to feel positive about the economy, the tide appears to be turning: Friday`s employment report for April produced the second consecutive month of sturdy job creation, and growth is running above 4 percent. Mr. Bush therefore delivers a compound message: He feels voters` pain over the hard times they have lived through, then he explains why the hardship wasn`t his fault and why better times have come. As he reminded audiences last week, the economy was headed for trouble when he came into office. It was then buffeted by the Sept. 11 attacks, corporate scandals and uncertainty leading up to the Iraq war. Now it is recovering robustly, thanks not least to his tax cuts.

The president`s account is self-serving, in that the tax cuts were conceived before the economic downturn and were not primarily designed to address it. The bigger question, however, is what Mr. Bush would do on the economy if he were to win a second term. In his more expansive moments, the president speaks of a society in which investment, hard work and initiative are rewarded; hence his belief in tort reform and smarter regulation, as well as tax cuts. He speaks of training and education, as well as portable individual accounts for health care expenses and Social Security, which he presents as a way to empower individuals as they face global competition that forces frequent job hops. In an attempt to distinguish himself from Sen. John Kerry, he denounces economic isolationism.

Some of Mr. Bush`s policies sound attractive. But despite more than three years in office, he has failed to act on some of them -- even though most were featured during his last campaign. On Social Security reform, for example, Mr. Bush convened an expert commission and then did nothing. On trade, he successfully launched a new round of global negotiations but compromised his record with farm and steel protectionism. On tort reform and health savings accounts, Mr. Bush can point to modest legislative progress but not enough to justify the expansive campaign rhetoric. Only on education and tax cuts can Mr. Bush point to substantial action.

Not all of that action is welcome. Mr. Bush`s effort to hold failing schools accountable is good principle that has been implemented falteringly. His tax cuts, which remain the heart of his economic platform, are ruinous. Mr. Bush wraps those cuts in talk of rewarding hard work and initiative. But they will penalize the hard work and initiative of future generations, who will have to repay the national debt that Mr. Bush racks up. Moreover, many of the particular tax cuts that Mr. Bush champions are indefensible. How does abolishing the estate tax foster hard work and initiative? To the contrary, it entrenches inherited privilege and will ultimately force the government to raise revenue some other way -- for example, from income taxes on hard-working Americans. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush`s promise to bring the budget deficit under control ignores costs that are bound to materialize, such as additional military expenditure and reform of the alternative minimum tax. The nation`s fiscal crisis will only deepen as the president`s tax cuts are fully implemented. No wonder that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan declared Thursday that the budget deficit threatens economic stability.

If Mr. Bush wants to make an economic case for reelection, he needs to give up the idea of making his tax cuts permanent. He also needs to flesh out the other parts of his program, to offer more than the rhetoric that he produced four years ago and then failed to implement. Unless he comes up with detailed plans in areas like health savings accounts and Social Security privatization, it will be impossible to know how he would deal with the pitfalls. Social Security reform, for example, would entail huge transition costs: How would Mr. Bush pay for them? Tax-exempt health savings plans would probably be inequitable, because people in high tax brackets would benefit most: How will Mr. Bush make his idea work for people of modest means? The Bush campaign`s economists have a lot of work to do.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Sebastian Mallaby grew up in Britain and has been a correspondent in Japan and Southern Africa. He joined the Washington Post editorial page in 1999 after 13 years with The Economist of London, and is the author of "The World`s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations," to be published in September 2004. His column appears on Mondays.

washingtonpost.com

For a `New Imperialism`

By Sebastian Mallaby

Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A25

The images from Abu Ghraib make you recoil from the Iraq mission: You want to forget this awful chapter in our history, with all its tragic errors. But the really bad news about the Iraq war is that we`re going to fight more wars rather like it. Technological, demographic and ideological trends make that just about inevitable. There can be no withdrawal from this broader struggle. The only real hope is to get better at it.

The first technological trend is the proliferation of weapons. However successful arms-control diplomacy may be, the underlying logic is that proliferation will be exponential. The more weapons spread, the faster they are likely to spread; the longer a country like Pakistan has nukes, the more Pakistani scientists there`ll be who can sell the formula to others. Chemical and biological know-how is even harder to control. It`s difficult to see how this trend can be contained forever.

Because this proliferation presents a catastrophic threat, we cannot ignore it. Most of the time, especially after Iraq, we will respond with nonmilitary means: deterrence, inspections, containment. But sometimes that won`t work. Either a state will look threatening enough to trigger a preemptive invasion, as in Iraq, or it will be chaotic enough to afford terrorists sanctuary -- in which case an invasion will be triggered too, as happened in Afghanistan.

The Afghan scenario is especially likely. Both the ingredients -- terrorist groups seeking havens and collapsing countries ready to provide them -- are likely to become more abundant.

We don`t fully understand the sources of terrorism, but we face some scary trends: a rising strain of religious anti-Americanism in much of the Muslim world and a destabilizing population explosion that`s especially acute in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Palestinian territories. The more these people watch al-Jazeera and visit jihad Web sites, the greater the propaganda payoff from spectacular terrorism.

Meanwhile, state failure may also grow more common. The population explosion is one reason, but globalization and technology contribute to the problem. A man with a suitcase of dollars can hire a militia in West Africa or Afghanistan, take over a diamond mine or an opium field, then whip out a satellite phone and sell his wares on the global market. Because this crime-cum-rebellion is growing easier to finance, civil wars since 1980 have lasted twice as long as those in the preceding 20 years, according to Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University.

Even before Sept. 11, the West was being drawn into civil wars at an accelerating rate. Of the 56 U.N. peacekeeping operations since World War II, 42 have taken place since 1989. Many of those recent interventions were humanitarian "wars of choice." But the convergence of civil conflict, the ideology of sacred terror and the proliferation of weapons are likely to remove the luxury of choice in the future.

So we have to get better at intervening in chaotic places and especially at nation-building. Bits of the government already seem to know that. The Pentagon is talking about training other countries` peacekeepers so as to lighten the burden on the United States. The State Department boasts of some NASA software that will accelerate the mobilization of linguists and other expert personnel when a civil conflict demands action.

But the challenge demands more than that. The Bush administration, which has already changed its theory of the world once, needs to do so a second time.

The Bush team began with the "realist" view that our security depends on the balance of power between great states. Then a non-state based in a failed state hit us on Sept. 11, and the Bush team switched to the imperialist view that security depends on extending civilized values to the periphery. This imperialism combined the right diagnosis -- that failed states, poverty and chaos threaten us -- with the wrong prescription: unilateral intervention. The triumph of America`s democratic and egalitarian ideals makes Bush`s nakedly American imperialism unacceptable to the rest of the world; our soft power constrains our hard power.

What`s needed is a new style of imperialism, legitimized by international institutions and to some extent enforced by them. We need to make sure that the next time we go into a place like Iraq, we have an undisputed international mandate and backing from international nation-building experts. That means we need a fresh debate: Internationalist imperialism can`t work without better international institutions.

This won`t be a short debate. But we need, at a minimum, a way of legitimizing wars of preemption that is not so hostage to veto: The U.N. Security Council should have a weighted system of voting, so that players like Russia or France get a reasonably big say but not the ability to block everything. And we need an international institution that pools nation-building expertise. When a financial crisis breaks out, we have the International Monetary Fund. When a security crisis demands nation-building, we need an International Reconstruction Fund.

George Bush and John Kerry could begin this debate: After the images from Abu Ghraib, we need some really big ideas to show that we`ll work differently in the future. Alternatively, Bush and Kerry could just muddle along -- until more crises demonstrate why that`s not good enough.

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Der Bush-Chabers des Tages: Be determined to act immediately in faith on what God says to you when He speaks, and never reconsider or change your initial decisions.

May 10

Take the Initiative

. . . add to your faith virtue . . .
—2 Peter 1:5

Add means that we have to do something. We are in danger of forgetting that we cannot do what God does, and that God will not do what we can do. We cannot save nor sanctify ourselves— God does that. But God will not give us good habits or character, and He will not force us to walk correctly before Him. We have to do all that ourselves. We must "work out" our "own salvation" which God has worked in us ( Philippians 2:12 ). Add means that we must get into the habit of doing things, and in the initial stages that is difficult. To take the initiative is to make a beginning— to instruct yourself in the way you must go.

Beware of the tendency to ask the way when you know it perfectly well. Take the initiative— stop hesitating— take the first step. Be determined to act immediately in faith on what God says to you when He speaks, and never reconsider or change your initial decisions. If you hesitate when God tells you to do something, you are being careless, spurning the grace in which you stand. Take the initiative yourself, make a decision of your will right now, and make it impossible to go back. Burn your bridges behind you, saying, "I will write that letter," or "I will pay that debt"; and then do it! Make it irrevocable.

We have to get into the habit of carefully listening to God about everything, forming the habit of finding out what He says and heeding it. If, when a crisis comes, we instinctively turn to God, we will know that the habit has been formed in us. We have to take the initiative where we are, not where we have not yet been.
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Der Lake Powell hat sehr viel an herrlicher Landschaft unter sich begraben. Wieder mal ein Bericht über das Indianerland im nördlichen Arizona an der Grenze zu Utah.


COLUMN ONE
A River Losing Its Soul
Along the banks of the Colorado, the Grand Canyon`s habitat is still vanishing despite years spent trying to minimize the effects of damming.
By Bettina Boxall
Times Staff Writer

May 10, 2004

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. — Four decades after one of the West`s last big dams blocked the free flow of water into the wild recesses of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado still manages to roar through here like the granddaddy of Western rivers. But it has become the Hollywood version — strikingly beautiful and in vital ways, fake.

With every passing year, the Grand Canyon`s stretch of the Colorado River bears less and less resemblance to its former self. The fine, white sand beaches on which thousands of weary boaters unfurl their sleeping bags every summer are disappearing.

So are native fish species that have been in the canyon for millions of years. Millennium-old Native American burial sites are washing away with the eroding sands.

Without the scouring of regular flooding, the feathery green tamarisk bush imported to the United States in the 1800s is overrunning the river banks, and boulders washed out of side canyons are piling up in the main channel. The river`s mythic rapids are growing more difficult to navigate and some may become impassable.

The 1963 completion of Glen Canyon Dam just upstream from the park is best known in environmental circles for drowning stunning canyon lands under the waters of Lake Powell. But its effects have also been traumatic in the downstream river corridor of the Grand Canyon, through the heart of the park.

A warm, muddy, violently unpredictable river that shaped the canyon`s ecosystem for millions of years turned cold, clear, steady and aquamarine. It may match the romantic notion of a river, but it is utterly unnatural in this sunbaked cleft in the Colorado Plateau.

The damage has long been recognized. Congress in 1992 passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act, directing the Interior Department to devise ways of making the dam`s water releases for generating hydroelectric power less harmful to the canyon environment.

But it is increasingly apparent that the modified flows, adopted eight years ago, haven`t worked. The failure has deepened the pessimism of some experts that, short of taking down the dam, humans may not be able to offset the harm done by its construction.

"The Grand Canyon river corridor is getting nuked," said David Haskell, a retired National Park Service career officer who directed the Grand Canyon`s science center from 1994 to 1999. "It`s in the final stages of having the natural ecosystem completely destroyed and replaced with a man-made one because of the presence of the dam."

That is not exactly the way federal scientists put it in their briefings to a group of some two dozen water managers, Interior Department officials and journalists who recently spent a week rafting down the river, discussing the drought and federal water policy with Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley.

But the canyon told the tale.

"The beaches continue to erode. The humpback chub [a native fish] continues to decline," said Jeffrey Cross, the current director of the park`s science center. "Tamarisk has not only invaded the main stem but has moved up many of the tributaries of the canyon. These are all changes that have happened and have continued to happen."

There were 10,000 humpbacks in canyon reaches in 1992. Now there are 2,200. Of the eight native fish species found in the canyon before the dam, four are now gone.

In the early 1970s, there were about 180 sand beaches roomy enough to allow rafters to pitch a tent. Half that number are left, Cross said. The rest have washed away or are so overrun by the alien, salt-exuding tamarisk bush that camping is impossible.

Lars Niemi, a 42-year-old boatman who has been on the river since he was a teenager, has watched the beaches dwindle. "We just used to be able to throw down in a lot of places that aren`t there anymore," he said, his hand on the rudder of one of the Raley group`s two big pontoon boats.

It was the third trip through the canyon for Raley, the Bush administration`s point man on water policy. A Colorado attorney and property rights advocate who has no qualms about dams, Raley is nonetheless drawn back here, not just by the rock-walled grandeur, but by the river`s imprint on the Western psyche.

"I don`t know how you can come down here and not be humbled," said Raley, who sees political life as a tug of war between idealism and compromise — one that is reflected on the river. "There`s virtually nothing that goes on here that doesn`t involve trade-offs or balances."

The rafting party glided by pale red and beige canyon walls that opened onto majestic vistas of mesa and then closed into dark gorges chiseled into a million different faces. The water arched in polished blue-green curls, looking more like the Caribbean than a river named Colorado — "colored red" in Spanish — after the ruddy sediment washed into it along its 1,400-mile length.

Geologically, the river functions as a huge watery conveyor belt carrying ancient, eroded bits of the Colorado Plateau to the Gulf of California. Before the Glen Canyon dam, at least 60 million tons of sand and silt tumbled and slid through the Grand Canyon every year, swept along by annual floods four times greater than today`s high flows. When the dam went up, it stopped not only the floods, but the sand, which is piling up at the bottom of Lake Powell, the reservoir behind the dam.

Now the canyon`s only sand comes from two tributaries below the dam, the Paria and Little Colorado rivers, which contribute less than 10% of the river`s historic volume of sediment.

Without sand, the Grand Canyon river system is like a body without nourishment. Fine sands and silts are loaded with nutrients for aquatic life that become food for insects that, in turn, become food for fish and birds. The sediment builds spawning beds for fish and sand bars where plants can grow and river rafters can sleep.

"At all sorts of levels the sand is the foundation of the system," said Ted Melis, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist with the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center who has studied the river for years.

The banks are actually more verdant than they used to be because there are no longer any major floods to wash out vegetation. But most of the growth is tamarisk, which is shunned by the canyon`s desert bighorn sheep and displaces native willow and cottonwood that offer more diverse bird habitat.

With less sand in the canyon, long-buried Indian sites have become exposed, as have the chub, which depended on the murky cover of muddy water to hide from predators.

The endangered fish is a snout-nosed survivor of the canyon`s harsh extremes. Its hump helped it navigate the river torrents. It withstood the leaps in river temperature from freezing in winter to 80 degrees in the summer and spawned as the water warmed.

It can`t stand the clear, cold water now released from the depths of Lake Powell at a year-round 46 to 48 degrees. The only adequately sized spawning population of chub left is in the Little Colorado, which is warmer, and often murkier, than the main stem. But as soon as the young fish swim into the big Colorado, they are stunned by its frigid temperature and became sitting targets for nonnative trout, which have thrived in the chill.

"We get [reproduction] here but we never see them again," Arizona Game and Fish research biologist Bill Persons said as he logged a silvery young chub caught in a monitoring net on the Little Colorado.

In 1996, the Interior Department conducted an ambitious flooding experiment that officials hoped would reverse some of the declines by reestablishing sand bars and washing away nonnative vegetation. They opened Glen Canyon Dam`s floodgates, letting out enough water to raise the Colorado by as much as 13 feet.

At first they declared success. But within a couple of years, the new beaches were gone. Scientists learned that the river didn`t work the way they thought it did. It wasn`t a bathtub in which sand would settle, to be later lifted to the banks with higher flows. It was a pipeline, constantly pushing sand through unless flows were kept low.

The results of the big flood experiment led researchers to question the basic premises of the flow regimens adopted under the Grand Canyon Protection Act. Traditionally, operators had cranked dam releases up and down every day to respond to the rise and fall of energy demand, causing the river to advance and retreat along its banks as if it had tides. The new rules restricted those fluctuations on the theory that more stable flows would arrest beach erosion and help the native fish.

"It turned out we were wrong. The larger fluctuating flows were probably better, at least for the fish," said Dennis Fenn, director of the Southwest Biological Science Center, of which the Grand Canyon monitoring center is an arm.

Officials also are planning another, shorter flood to rebuild beaches with sediment dumped into the Colorado from the Paria after monsoonal rains. But the drought has thwarted that effort.

The ongoing decline of the river ecosystem has sparked criticism. "The environmental community is looking at this as somewhat of a failed process," said Jennifer Pitt, a senior resource analyst with Environmental Defense who was on the river trip. "There`s so much foot-dragging it`s hard to move forward."

A linchpin of the restoration program is adaptive management, an approach that is supposed to give officials the freedom to try something different if their initial game plan doesn`t work.

But there are so many competing interests on the program`s advisory committee — power producers, environmentalists and state water managers, to name a few — that Fenn says it`s not easy to adapt.

"I think too many people are saying, `I don`t want anything to happen because I don`t want to lose what I got,` " he said. "They`re all well-meaning and want to do the right thing, but they have their interests."

Another obstacle is the complicated body of law that governs use of the Colorado River and the Glen Canyon Dam. Under 1968 legislation, for instance, dam spills above the amount needed to generate power are legal only if done for safety reasons. Environmentalists argue the 1992 protection act changed that, allowing for spills for ecological purposes, but power producers disagree. Ultimately the dispute will probably have to be settled in court.

Raley concedes the program is "struggling a bit now." But he contends the experiments hold promise. "I think we`re making material progress, whether it`s sediment, fish or the cultural resources," he said. "It`s easy to say you haven`t fixed this."

Raley grew up in a ranching family and rafted the river in cowboy hat and jeans waxed to keep out water. He said he was frightened by water and the Grand Canyon`s churning rapids. But, riding in a red rubber kayak, he insisted on shooting some of them, including "Hermit," one of the bigger drops on the river.

Halfway through, he flipped. Clinging to the overturned kayak, he was carried by the churning white water to a calm stretch, where he climbed, somewhat shaken, back on a raft. He later scribbled the name "Hermit" on the back of his lifejacket, a souvenir of his dunking.

There are those who believe that as long as Glen Canyon Dam is in operation, efforts to restore the river through the Grand Canyon are doomed to failure. The only solution, they argue, is to decommission the dam.

"There really isn`t any hope," said Haskell, who has become active in environmental causes since leaving the Park Service. "They can continue to tinker and try to slow the demise," but the task, he said, is as futile as trying to "raise rhinos and elephants in the Arctic."

The dam provides hydropower that supplies electricity to the rural West, flood control and nearly half the water storage space on the Colorado. "These are the things you`d give up" if the dam was decommissioned, Fenn said.

If the dam is an immovable object, what remains are little fixes. Under one scheme officials are considering, temperature control devices would be installed in the dam to draw water flows from the warmer top layers of the lake. Another idea is to scoop sediment from Lake Powell and pipe it around the dam into the river.

"We`re not a drain-the-reservoir group," said Nikolai Ramsey, president of the Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental group based in nearby Flagstaff that has a seat on the adaptive management committee. "We think there are plenty of management alternatives to be tried."

But, if anything, the unsuccessful 1996 experimental flood taught caution. Raising the water temperature to make the chub more comfortable would make the river more hospitable to some of the chub`s warm-water predators. Piping in sediment trapped behind the dam would be expensive and could stir up contaminants in the lake bottom and funnel them into the canyon.

"Playing God is a lot harder than it looks," Raley said. "I`m not aware of a bold move we could jump to on this canyon that would be responsible."



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

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[therman]

Die Verachtung von Menschenrechten hat bei den US-Amerikanern eine Jahrhundert-alte Tradition.

Den Indianern haben sie nicht nur das Land geklaut,
sie haben sie nicht nur menschenverachtend misshandelt,
sie haben die Indianer nicht nur gedemütigt,
sie haben die Indianer nicht nur gefoltert,

Nein, sie haben die Indianer fast vollständig ausgerottet.

Die Schwarzen wurden Jahrhunderte lang versklavt,
misshandelt, gefoltert, ermordet, gedemütigt.

Und nun wollen die USA diese Mission auf die islamische
Welt ausdehnen?

NEIN - Sie wollen eigentlich nur das ÖL.
alles andere ist ihnen eigentlich egal.

[Joerver]

WASHINGTON OUTLOOK
For Bush, the Prison Abuse Scandal Brings His Political War Home
Ronald Brownstein

May 10, 2004

By now, the presidency must look like a Rubik`s Cube to George W. Bush. Last year, when Americans thrilled to statues of Saddam Hussein tumbling in Baghdad, the economy was stalled. Now that the economy is finally moving into gear, Americans are growing increasingly restive over events in Iraq.

For Bush, the revelations about abuse at Abu Ghraib prison could not have emerged at a worse time. April`s turmoil in Iraq — which saw more American soldiers die than in any month since combat began — had already strained the public`s confidence in the occupation.

Now, after the bloodiest month, comes the most mortifying: a scandal that looms over both the administration`s short-term goal of reversing rising anti-Americanism in Iraq and its long-term hope of encouraging democratization across the Mideast.

The horrors inside the prison have so bruised America`s image across Europe and the Arab world that Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) probably had a good idea at Friday`s Armed Services Committee hearing when he suggested razing the place.

But the controversy over the abuse and the administration`s reaction to it does not only threaten Bush abroad. It also presents him with four distinct political challenges at home. Let`s look at them, ranked from the least to the most dangerous for the president:

Alienating Congress: The Pentagon`s failure to inform Congress about the progress of the investigation into troop misconduct has sharpened long-standing frustrations over the administration`s resistance to sharing information on Capitol Hill, even with Republicans.

Some senior GOP lawmakers, such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, openly acknowledge that the administration virtually ignores them. Many Republicans were especially outraged that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld didn`t inform them of the impending abuse revelations when he briefed them on the same day CBS broke the story.

These frustrations may create some headaches for Bush, but are unlikely to become a serious threat. Most congressional Republicans long ago hitched their star to Bush; few are eager to risk damaging him with aggressive oversight. Indeed, judging by the windy, unfocused questioning from legislators in both parties at Friday`s hearing, the Senate is so out of practice that more oversight might damage its own reputation most.

Avoiding accountability: As a candidate, Bush promised to inaugurate a "responsibility era." But as a chief executive he has been reluctant to hold anyone accountable for failure. He didn`t fire CIA Director George J. Tenet or other intelligence officials after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — or the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He`s dug in his heels on Rumsfeld now.

Typically, the more outsiders demand that Bush dismiss one of his subordinates, the more he resists. But he faces the growing perception that he has only one firing offense: dissent from his administration`s prevailing wisdom.

Bush endured only modest criticism after the departures of in-house skeptics such as Treasury Secretary Paul H. O`Neill and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki. But if the top Pentagon officials all thrive while those below are prosecuted in the abuse case, the White House is likely to face much louder complaints.

Failing to act: The heart of Bush`s case for reelection is that he is a strong, decisive leader in the war against terrorism. But the prison scandal could reinforce earlier questions about his management style.

Rumsfeld made clear Friday he never briefed Bush about the full magnitude of the scandal. But Pentagon officials have indicated that Rumsfeld informed Bush at least in broad terms about the problem soon after the secretary learned of it in mid-January. There`s no indication Bush pressed further; White House officials say the president felt satisfied the Pentagon was investigating.

The president`s reaction was similar when he received the famous intelligence briefing on Osama bin Laden in August 2001: He later said he did not seek to meet afterward with the FBI director because he believed the bureau would contact him if it unearthed information he needed to act upon.

All of this is oddly passive behavior for an executive whose chief selling point is his resolve. Like his direction or not, Bush has excelled at defining a clear course for his administration. But his frustration at the explosion of the prison scandal shows the price of most often choosing not to grapple with the details. He`s painfully learning that presidents who want to watch only the forest sometimes smack head-on into the trees.

Losing Iraq: Looming far above all these risks to Bush is the threat that the scandal will weaken America`s position in Iraq and strengthen fears at home that our effort there is unraveling.

The last month`s grim cascade of casualties softened public support for the war, but did not shatter it because most Americans still believe a democratic, Western-oriented Iraq is in our national interest. As long as we are progressing toward that goal, Americans are probably willing to accept more losses than conventional wisdom assumes.

The greatest danger to the White House is that the scandal, after a month of grueling unrest and violence, will deepen concerns that Iraq is spiraling out of control. The public may be willing to accept a steady stream of casualties as the painful price of success; it will probably have much less tolerance for lives sacrificed to a mission in disarray.

Most Americans accept Bush`s insistence that the U.S. will benefit if we can steer Iraq to democracy and stability. But polls show they are no longer sure he knows how to reach that destination. In this confusing and increasingly inhospitable terrain, the photos from Abu Ghraib are likely to leave more Americans wondering whether we are losing our compass altogether.

Ronald Brownstein`s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times` website at http://www.latimes.com/brownstein .

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/172437_trahant09.html

The transformative election

Sunday, May 9, 2004

MARK TRAHANT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

This presidential election starts with an interesting twist: It`s only May and most of us have already decided how to vote. We`re already in one of two camps -- roughly 45 percent of the country favors President Bush and a similar number would replace him with John Kerry. The ads, the speeches and all the hoopla is focused on the remaining 10 percent -- along with efforts to make sure the right voters actually show up on Election Day.

This American ideological division was true four years ago and unless there`s a transformative event, it might be true four years from now. I think the president had a chance -- after Sept. 11 -- to re-engage the country in such a way that would have realigned politics. But he didn`t and so we remain split along our deeply divided lines.

One way to upset a 45-45 split is to move a large voting block to your side. This is what happened for some four decades in the South when the region`s white voters shifted to the Republican side.

The new South is Latino, U.S.A.

Bush recognized this in his Texas campaigns and four years ago. He started this election season by touting immigration reform. He also is spending a share of his significant advertising budget on Spanish-language television and radio.

Last week, Kerry spent Cinco de Mayo in New Mexico and Arizona and promised his own Spanish-language campaign.

But neither of these efforts has the potential to realign party politics. Sure, either Bush or Kerry may pick up Latino votes in 2004, but how long will that last? Probably until 2008.

But Kerry has a transformative opportunity; he could name Bill Richardson to the ticket.

Richardson is New Mexico`s governor. And despite his Anglo-sounding name, he is Hispanic, speaks fluent Spanish and is a great campaigner.

It`s a risky strategy because we still live in a country where people lie to pollsters when someone who`s not white runs for office. (They tell a pollster, "Oh, sure, I`ll vote for so and so" ... and then vote the opposite way.)

On the other hand, a Kerry-Richardson ticket would be a visible demonstration of the changing demographics that is America.

Most vice presidential nominees really don`t help the ticket beyond their home state borders (if that). Not so with Richardson on the ticket -- he could engage Latino voters in Nevada, Arizona and Colorado. If you include New Mexico, that`s 29 electoral votes.

And in Washington and Oregon, Richardson could change the vote tallies east of Interstate 5 and the Cascades. He`d attract Latino votes in Yakima and Toppenish in Washington and Woodburn in Oregon that could offset normal Republican strongholds surrounding them.

A Kerry-Richardson ticket would even make Texas a competitive state. Bush-Cheney would have to spend their money on a state that`s now a sure thing.

Perhaps what`s most intriguing about Richardson is that he brings qualifications to the post. He knows world leaders on a first-name basis. His public-service experience is deep, ranging from Congress to the Energy Department. (Not to mention his record as a Western state, tax-cutting, education-boosting governor.)

Richardson says he does not want the job. Last week he told The Associated Press in Santa Fe that he`s thinking of saying, "I would not accept at gunpoint."

Right. That`s what Richardson is supposed to say. But the pressure from Kerry -- not to mention the historical implications -- could help change the governor`s mind. And it might tip the 45-45 tie.

Mark Trahant is editor of the editorial page. E-mail: [e-mail]

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Beyond the shock

Monday, May 10, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/10/EDGBV6HJTO1.DTL

THE RESIGNATION of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, while probably inevitable and certainly deserved, will not necessarily change a culture of unaccountability that has pervaded the Bush administration.

Rumsfeld is a problem, but he is not the problem in an administration that thinks it can set its own rules without having to answer to anyone, whether the issue is its formation of an energy policy with industry lobbyists behind closed doors, the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without regard to the Geneva conventions or its resistance to various international treaties. It is worth remembering that this very invasion and occupation of Iraq was launched in defiance of the United Nations.

No one could reasonably suggest that President Bush, Rumsfeld or other top leaders in our government, military or civilian, would condone or tolerate the sadistic treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Their expressions of shock and outrage ring genuine.

Still, this administration`s response to the allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad reflects a continuing pattern of secrecy and hubris. It is deeply disturbing to know that Rumsfeld not only withheld the allegations from Congress for months, but did not even think it worthy of mention when he briefed legislators just hours before the images of abuse were shown on "60 Minutes II."

It is hard to accept that Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to work behind the scenes to keep CBS News from airing the abuse scenes, ostensibly out of concern for the safety of U.S. troops. The fact is, those indelible images are putting U.S. troops, and civilians, at risk for years to come, and that would be the case whether they were aired last week, next week or next year.

It is not going to be easy to repair the damage from these abuses. The images of their countrymen being humiliated and tortured by U.S. troops are now seared in the minds of Iraqis. The rest of the world, which has long bristled at U.S. refusal to join hands for a common good -- whether the matter is nuclear proliferation, global warming or the International Criminal Court -- will cite this as Exhibit A of superpower hypocrisy.

The Bush administration has insisted it will, as it should, punish the perpetrators of these abuses and identify and correct any systemic flaws that allowed them to happen. The role of private contractors must be a major focus of the probe. In testimony before two Senate committees Friday, Rumsfeld never gave a clear or satisfactory answer to repeated questions of "who was in charge" of those wayward soldiers. Resignations, convictions and more apologies are sure to follow.

The perception of the United States as an arrogant bully, inflamed by the Abu Ghraib images, is not just a public-relations problem. It is a matter of national security.

Much of the world will not be convinced of this country`s contrition until it sees a foreign policy with less sanctimony and more of a willingness to adhere to the standards it demands of others. The question is whether this administration is capable of it.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

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[bares@nobles]

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE CONVENTION SCHEDULE

New York, NY

6:00 PM Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Fallwell

6:30 PM Pledge of Allegiance

6:35 PM Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd amendment)

6:45 PM Salute to the Coalition of the Willing

6:46 PM Seminar #1: Iraq Stratergies — Voodoo/DooDoo WMD

7:30 PM First Presidential Beer Bong

7:35 PM Serve Freedom Fries

7:40 PM EPA Address #1: "Mercury—It`s what`s for dinner!"

8:00 PM Vote on which country to invade next

8:10 PM Call EMT`s to revive Rush Limbaugh

8:15 PM John Ashcroft Lecture: The Homos are after your Children!!

8:30 PM Round table discussion on reproductive rights (MEN ONLY)

8:50 PM Seminar #2 Corporations: The Government of the Future

9:00 PM Condi Rice sings "Can`t Help Lovin` Dat Man"

9:05 PM Second Presidential Beer Bong

9:10 PM EPA Address #2 Trees: The Real Cause of Forest Fires

9:30 PM Break for secret meetings

10:00 PM Second prayer led by Cal Thomas

10:15 PM Lecture by Carl Rove: Doublespeak made easy

10:30 PM Rumsfeld demonstration of how to squint and talk macho

10:35 PM Bush demonstration of trademark "deer in headlights" stare

10:40 PM John Ashcroft demonstrates new mandatory Kevlar chastity belt.

10:45 PM Clarence Thomas reads list of Black Republicans

10:46 PM Third Presidential Beer Bong

10:50 PM Seminar #3 Education: A Drain on our Nation`s Economy

11:10 PM Hillary Clinton Piñata

11:20 PM Second Lecture by John Ashcroft: Evolutionists: The Dangerous New Cult

11:30 PM Call to EMT`s to revive Rush Limbaugh again.

11:35 PM Blame Clinton

11:40 PM Laura serves milk and cookies

11:50 PM Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself

12:00 PM Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord

[bares@nobles]

Shortly after his 1998 re-election as governor of Texas, Republican heavyweights begin to discuss George Bush Jr. as a presidential prospect. W. is dubious. Then one day he`s sitting in church, Highland Methodist in Dallas, with his mother. The pastor, Mark Craig, preaches on Moses` ambivalence about leading the Israelites out of bondage. ("Sorry, God, I`m busy," the minister has Moses responding. "I`ve got a family. I`ve got sheep to tend. I`ve got a life.")

Pastor Craig moves on from the allegorical portion of his sermon. The American people are "starved for leadership," he says, "starved for leaders who have ethical and moral courage." He reminds his congregation, "It`s not always easy or convenient for leaders to step forward. Remember, even Moses had doubts."
Barbara Bush, the high-church Episcopalian tells her son, "He was talking to you."

George W. Bush, the born-again Christian, apparently hears his mother`s "he" as the providential He.

According to Stephen Mansfield`s sympathetic account in The Faith of George W. Bush, he then calls his friend, the Charismatic preacher James Robison, host of the TV show Life Today, and tells him, "I`ve heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for president."

It`s hard to be perturbed when you believe what our president believes. ... the president "does feel that people are called upon by the Divine to undertake certain positions in the world, and undertake certain actions, and to be responsible for certain things. And he makes, I think, quite clear-explicitly in some contexts, and implicitly in a great many others-that he occupies the office by a Divine calling. That God put him there with a sense of purpose."

G. W. B. is associated with Howard Ahmanson, a fantastically wealthy Californian who is an acolyte of the "Christian Reconstructionist" movement-which aims to place the United States under Biblical law (though Ahmanson proclaims himself personally against, say, the stoning of homosexuals). Others point up his connections to apocalyptic millennialists like Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind novels. The problem is that, theologically, Bush can`t serve both these masters at once. Reconstructionists, Alan Jacobs, a professor at the evangelical college Wheaton, has explained, "are pretty confident Jesus isn`t going to show up any time soon," which is precisely their rationale for bringing the Book of Leviticus to life in the here-and-now.

"Wherever the U.S. happens to advance something that he can call `freedom,` he thinks he`s serving God`s will, and he proclaims he`s serving God`s will."

[bares@nobles]

Jennifer Shroder is the pseudonym of a California housewife and religious-right activist whose agitations against textbooks she claims teach children "how to pray to Allah" and "to participate in any and all religions except that of His Son, Jesus Christ" have won her coverage from the Associated Press, the New York Post, and USA Today. In an e-mail to the Voice, she explains President Bush`s divine selection by way of 1 Corinthians, and also the Book of Isaiah-the latter for its injunction "Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people," the former for its description of the leader Jehoiada, "who is very similar to President Bush, using `sword and shield` along with the leaders with him."

She illustrates an article on her website, http://blessedcause.org/, called "President Bush, National Hero" with a painting of the president alongside the ghostly figures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who rest their hands upon his shoulders, heads bowed. A halo of light emanates from Bush`s head; in intersection with the horizontal of the presidential lectern, it appears to form a crucifix.

Lest you think Jen is alone, the painting comes from a another website, http://presidentialprayerteam.com/, through which 2.8 million members receive daily instructions on how to coordinate prayer for the president. I don`t know about you, but if I had 2.8 million people advertising the fact that they were praying for my well-being every day-and, to boot, if I actually believed that prayer worked-I`d feel pretty damned relaxed, too.

No, President Bush feels little reason to doubt. "It`s different from, say, Dick Nixon," says Lyn Nofziger, "who was putting on a brave front but knew underneath he was wrong-that he was doing things that if he ever got caught he would be in trouble. I don`t think this guy thinks that. He thinks he`s doing the proper thing."

(c) 2004 Rick Perlstein is chief national political correspondent for The Village Voice and the author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus."

[Joerver]

Sun, May 9, 2004
Sadism in war old habit
By Eric Margolis

JUST AS the Vietnam War was personified by a photo of a terrified, naked girl fleeing a blast of napalm, so George Bush`s "liberation" of Iraq will inevitably be remembered by the horrifying photo of a hooded prisoner standing on a box with electric cables attached to his fingers.

Americans are reeling in disgust at the torture, abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. soldiers. Their revulsion is genuine: Americans are a decent, humane people who believe themselves well above such medieval abominations.

But they should not be surprised their soldiers and intelligence agents are using torture and sexual humiliations to break the will of Iraqis to resist American occupation. That is the nature of colonial warfare and so-called "war of terror."

In August 2003, this column warned about Iraq: "Protracted guerrilla warfare eventually turns even the best-disciplined troops into brutes, and corrupts entire governments." Colonial troops in Kenya, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Palestine, Indochina, Kashmir, Timor, Aceh, and Chechnya all became infected with brutality and sadism.

Americans, in spite of their deep respect for law and human rights, are not immune to such corruption. During the 1900-1904 conquest of the Philippines, U.S. forces killed 50,000-100,000 Muslim civilians. Few recall that U.S. forces in Vietnam threw prisoners from helicopters, burned them alive with white phosphorus, or wiped out entire villages without a second thought. The communist enemy was even more merciless.

Demoralized soldiers

That was the nature of counter-insurgency warfare fought among a hostile civilian population by demoralized American soldiers who knew the war was lost.

During the invasion of Afghanistan, America ignored evidence U.S. Special Forces troops had watched -- or even participated -- in the massacre of 3,000 Taliban prisoners by communist Northern Alliance soldiers.

Persistent reports of prisoners being tortured by U.S. captors in Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Jordan, Egypt and Guantanamo were also been ignored -- until the Abu Ghraib outrage. Now, we learn of a ghastly new apparition: Free-enterprise torturers known, in Pentagon Orwell-speak, as "civilian interrogation contractors."

When this writer stated last year on American network TV that the U.S. was using torture against terrorism suspects, he was quickly cut off the air.

Three years ago, this column wrote about Gen. Paul Aussaresses, a former senior French intelligence officer who battled Algeria`s FLN rebels during the late 1950s. The one-eyed general boasted in a recent book how he brutally tortured and murdered many FLN leaders during the murderous Battle of Algiers. French officers who served under Aussaresses in the "pacification" of Algeria would later say they had been more savage and sadistic than the Gestapo during World War II.

Savage, sadistic

The pictures of gloating U.S. soldiers posing over piled-up, naked Iraqi prisoners recalls Soviet gulag guards who called prisoners "logs." They also conjure nightmare images of terrified Jewish prisoners herded by Nazi SS guards, and cowering Bosnian Muslim captives about to be murdered by laughing Serb soldiers.

But don`t believe the torture and abuse in Iraq was solely the work of a few cretinous hillbillies and miscreants, as the Pentagon is claiming.

The process of inflicting pain, humiliation, and degradation on captives -- dehumanizing them -- has been perfected by CIA psychologists and psychiatrists. These tortures, based on Israeli techniques, were designed more to break Iraqis` will than to elicit information. The sexual humiliations were designed to inflict maximum mental punishment on Muslims.

For U.S. occupiers of Iraq, dreaded Abu Ghraib plays the same role it did under Saddam Hussein: Terrifying the population into docility. The U.S. now may hold more Iraqi prisoners -- up to 20,000 -- than did Saddam`s prisons.

After last week`s revelations from Abu Ghraib, the only people likely to still believe President George Bush`s claims to be fighting in Iraq for "freedom and democracy" will be brain-numbed American TV viewers.

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Monday, May 10, 2004
War News for May 10, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Two killed, three wounded in at
tempted assassination of Iraqi governor near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: South African, New Zealand contractors and one Iraqi killed in Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Eight wounded in bombing at Baghdad hotel.

Bring ‘em on: Nineteen Iraqis killed in fighting in Sadr City.

Bring ‘em on: Insurgents assassinate Iraqi police colonel near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed in Baghdad gun and bomb attacks.

Bring ‘em on: Shi’ite militia take control of Sadr City.

Bring ‘em on: US aircraft bomb al-Sadr’s offices in Sadr City.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis killed, ten wounded as US tanks enter Kufa.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline in flames near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: Bulgarian troops under grenade attack near Karbala.

US Marines begin joint patrols in Fallujah. “Marines in Humvees and armored vehicles entered the Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad in a convoy with Iraqi security forces in pickup trucks. The first Iraqi pickup truck flew the red, white and black Iraqi flag, which the Iraqi Governing Council has proposed changing to the outrage of many Iraqis.”

ICRC report: The report by the International Committee of the Red Cross supports its allegations that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and ‘not individual acts’ -- contrary to President Bush`s contention that the mistreatment ‘was the wrongdoing of a few.’”

Interrogation policy. “Although the specific abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred far down the chain of command from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it was a chain closely supervised from the top. Indeed, in cases of high-level detainees, rules imposed by Rumsfeld dictated that Pentagon officials up to and including the Defense secretary be involved in approving the use of coercive interrogation methods… The policy stemmed from the urgent need to extract information from terrorist and insurgent suspects about possible impending attacks. In Iraq, the priority was on finding out about plans to strike U.S. forces. In effect, it gave the Pentagon veto power over the use of coercive techniques against subjects when, for political or other reasons, senior Defense officials believed such methods would be counterproductive.” It appears that Rumsfeld’s OSD authorized a blanket policy of coercive interrogation methods but reserved the right to restrict coercive interrogation in individual cases.

General Boykin, Rummy’s Deputy Undersecretary for Intelligence. “It did not take a heap of naked bodies and other photographs to expose who Boykin is and always was. Arab-Americans and American Muslims have long complained about Boykin. The photographs are a confirmation of what the man was suspected to be as the man in charge of hunting down intelligence and tasked with, among other duties, catching Osama bin Laden.” Nobody should be surprised if the policy that changed interrogation methods originated in Boykin’s office. Putting an individual with his views in charge of interrogation policy was a disaster waiting to happen.

Court-martial. “A 24-year-old military policeman from Pennsylvania will be court-martialed here on May 19, becoming the first U.S. soldier to face trial in the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, military officials said yesterday. In an extraordinary gesture to address outrage over the abuse scandal, the trial will be conducted openly and members of the Arab news media will be invited to attend.”

Military working dogs receive flak vests.

Officers sound off. “A senior general at the Pentagon tells the Washington Post he believes the United States is on the path to defeat – and Rumsfeld and his advisers are to blame. The Post reports great anger is building at Rumsfeld and his top advisers among career Army officers. ‘The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice,’ the general said on the condition his name not be used, in part out of fear of punishment. ‘It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this,’ he added. ‘The American people may not stand for it - and they should not.’”

British war graves desecrated in Gaza over prisoner abuse in Iraq. “Some 33 graves were desecrated or destroyed in the cemetery for troops from the two world wars. Photographs of US and British soldiers allegedly abusing Iraqi prisoners were hung from some of the tombstones.”

Commentary

Opinion: “…In the past few years it has become fashionable in the U.S. to think that failed states could be reformed by the imposition from the outside of order and the trappings of democracy, as if Americans could pick up the mantle of empire laid down by European powers. The dream of the neo-imperialists was idealistic; they imagined that after U.S. soldiers had secured Iraq, the invisible infrastructure of the modern state—such as independent judges, honest civil servants and an efficient tax collection—would gradually take shape under a benign American tutelage until, one day, a beacon of democracy in the Middle East was lit.”

Editorial: “President Bush, who could not be bothered to get the facts before going to war in Iraq, now cannot be bothered to get the facts about the war. As a result, his attempt to explain away the horrific reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers has only made matters worse.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: South Carolina contractor killed in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania contractor missing in Iraq.

Note to a Specific Reader

After checking my Sitemeter stats, I`ve noticed a whole bunch of hits in the last 24 hours from an IP address that resolves to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Let`s establish a dialogue.

I hope you`re somebody from Wolfowitz`s staff because I`ve called him an incompetent dickhead ten different ways over the past year. If I had a digital camera I`d post a picture of my asshole with the caption, "Hey Wolfie! French kiss THIS!"

And you can tell Rummy he`s an incompetent dickhead, too. If I had my way you`d all receive the criminal prosecutions you so richly deserve. You miserable bastards, chickenhawks all, have crapped all over my Army, my brother officers, NCOs and soldiers, my flag, my country and the American ideals I hold so dear.

And for any conservo-bots who would point out that Rummy was a fighter pilot, I reply that so was Hermann Goering.

Fuck you all. Right where you breathe. Fuck your pets, too.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:01 AM
Comments (4)

[Joerver]

Bush Visits Pentagon, Rumsfeld
WASHINGTON, May 10, 2004


President Bush is standing by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld as both men brace for the anticipated release of more pictures and video images showing Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers.

Mr. Bush, who is facing eroding confidence in senior military ranks and declining credibility abroad, visits the Defense Department on Monday for a previously scheduled briefing that takes on new significance because of the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners uncovered at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Mr. Bush has said he wants Rumsfeld to "stay in my Cabinet." But a chorus of criticism from Capitol Hill has at least one Republican wondering whether Rumsfeld, and perhaps Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers, might have to step down.

"Let`s get the facts before we indict Secretary Rumsfeld," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., told CBS News` Face the Nation on Sunday. "I think they have made major mistakes. And we will see how far this goes and where it goes."

But Hagel added: "Yes, I think it`s still in question whether Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and, quite frankly, Gen. Myers can command the respect and the trust and the confidence of the military and the American people to lead this country."

Hagel said abuses will have major repercussions abroad.

"This is deeper and wider than I think most in this administration understand," he said. "Aside from the fact we`re losing the Iraqi people, we`re losing the Muslim, Arab world, and we`re losing the support of our allies."

On Sunday, a senior general at the Pentagon tells the Washington Post he believes the United States is on the path to defeat – and Rumsfeld and his advisers are to blame. The Post reports great anger is building at Rumsfeld and his top advisers among career Army officers.

"The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice," the general said on the condition his name not be used, in part out of fear of punishment. "It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this," he added. "The American people may not stand for it - and they should not."

The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Times, the civilian-owned trade papers of the military sold at every U.S. military installation, accuse Rumsfeld and Myers of professional negligence in their handling of Iraqi detainees in a new editorial. “Accountability here is essential - even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.”

Rumsfeld told Congress on Friday that more "sadistic" photos and video images were still to be released.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Pentagon investigators will give lawmakers the photos to view in private. Others urged the administration to make them public quickly.

"If there`s more to come, let`s get it out," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on NBC. "For God`s sake, let`s talk about it because (U.S. military) men and women`s lives are at stake given how we handle this."

Mr. Bush`s trip across the Potomac River to the Pentagon comes a day after it was announced that Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits, 24, of Hyndman, Pa., will be the first soldier to face a court-martial in connection with the abuse. He will be tried May 19 in Baghdad on charges of mistreating detainees. In all, seven soldiers face abuse allegations.

A senior Pentagon official told The Associated Press on Sunday that guards and interrogators in Iraq were expected to follow the Geneva Conventions and other international rules against cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners.

They were not to apply techniques approved in April 2003 for use at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba where suspected al Qaeda terrorists are held, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But last fall, the head of Guantanamo Bay, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, reviewed prisons in Iraq and suggested that military police serving as prison guards set "the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees." The Army report on the Abu Ghraib abuse criticized that policy, but Miller now has been put in charge of the Baghdad prison.

Miller said last week that MPs` role in intelligence gathering was supposed to be only from "passive" observation, and he blamed Abu Ghraib`s leadership at the time for not following military guidelines.

Some lawmakers say there are clear indications from the widely published photos of troops abusing Iraqi prisoners that even if such acts were not ordered by U.S. commanders, the soldiers thought they were at least condoned.

"All the guards are smiling, they`re taking all these pictures, because they know that nobody above them is going to object. They have to know that somebody up there is agreeing to it," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said on ABC.

Earlier in the week, a senior State Department official indicated that Secretary of State Colin Powell repeatedly warned the Pentagon about the treatment of detainees, but to no avail.


©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

May 10, 2004
Why Is Consumer Confidence Falling?
Measure hits its lowest level of the year in May


by Dennis Jacobe



GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- Last Friday`s job report suggests that new hiring is finally beginning to happen in the U.S. economy, with the addition of 600,000 new jobs over the past two months. Add in the fact that the economy continued to expand at a 4% annual rate during the first quarter, and one might reasonably assume that consumers have good cause to be increasingly optimistic about the economic outlook.

New Gallup Poll economic data, however, show just the opposite. In early May, more consumers rate current economic conditions as "poor" than at any time this year. Even more surprisingly, half the public thinks the economy is "getting worse" as opposed to "getting better" -- nearly twice the number who held that view in January. Combined, these two key findings suggest that consumer confidence is now at its lowest point of the year.

Why is consumer confidence declining just when the economic expansion finally seems to be building some positive momentum? Part of the explanation may involve growing consumer concerns about increasing prices and higher interest rates. Another part lies in the way higher-income consumers remain much more optimistic about the economy and its future prospects than do their middle- and lower-income counterparts.

http://www.gallup.com/content/?ci=11611

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Iraqis reconstructed the Baghdad headquarters of Moktada al-Sadr today after U.S. troops killed some three dozen militiamen loyal the Shiite cleric.
May 10, 2004
U.S. Destroys Cleric`s Baghdad Office
By CHRISTINE HAUSER and IAN FISHER

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 10 — American forces said today that they had killed some three dozen militiamen loyal to a rebel Shiite cleric during two days of fighting that included the destruction of the cleric`s Baghdad headquarters in the Sadr City slum district here.

American armored vehicles bombarded the walls of the compound, which contains the offices of the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, and a small mosque, witnesses said. The building had been evacuated and there were no casualties, witnesses said.

But later, the United States military said 18 of Mr. Sadr`s followers had been killed during heavy nighttime fighting that echoed around the capital. Those deaths came on top of at least 18 militiamen reported killed in fighting on Sunday.

The director of a hospital in Sadr City, the poor Shiite neighborhood here where Mr. Sadr draws most of his support, said that it had received nine bodies since Sunday, including that of a woman.

In addition to the 18 militiamen reported killed in Baghdad each of the last two days, Mr. Sadr`s forces lost 41 dead in a battle against American forces in Najaf last week, the military said.

While American troops have battled regularly with Mr. Sadr`s supporters since he led an uprising against the American occupation last month, clashes are now erupting daily in the southern cities of Najaf, Kufa, Karbala and Basra amid heightened threats to kill and kidnap foreigners in Iraq. An aide to Mr. Sadr said today that the cleric had ordered his militia to widen its battle against occupation troops across Iraq.

"We have now entered a second phase of resistance and our patience is over with the occupation forces," said Qais al-Khazali, Mr. Sadr`s chief lieutenant, according to Reuters. "Our policy now is to extend the state of resistance and to move it to all of Iraq because of the occupiers` military escalation and crossing of all red lines in the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf."

Separately, United States officials said that the unidentified body of what appeared to be a Westerner had been found near a bridge in western Baghdad. A military official said the body was not that of a soldier and was not believed to be one of the three surviving Italian hostages captured last month, one of whom was executed by militants who had demanded Italy withdraw its troops from Iraq.

The American military command also announced that a soldier from One Task Force Olympia had died from small-arms fire during a patrol in western Mosul.

There were new signs of growing impatience with Mr. Sadr among more moderate Shiites — and the possibility of clashes among Shiites themselves.

This evening in Najaf, the most holy city in Shiite Islam, leaflets were distributed with photographs showing corpses and armed men.

The leaflets carried this warning: "To al-Sadr followers: If you continue fighting you will be killed in the end. You must be killed. It is your choice." The leaflets` reverse side showed worshipers and people eating in a restaurant. "There is a chance for Iraqi people to live in peace," the reverse side read. "Just put your weapons aside and be happy with what your country has given to you."

The leaflet was not signed, but in the last few weeks a shadowy death squad calling itself the Thulfiqar Army has reportedly killed at least seven of Mr. Sadrs` militiamen in Najaf.

The fliers were distributed a day after Sadr Edin Qubanchi, a top cleric in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a mainstream Islamic political party and a rival to Mr. Sadr`s more militant group, called for the people of Najaf to take power back from Mr. Sadr, who has taken over important Shiite shrines there.

With almost daily clashes and a ring of some 2,500 American troops in and around Najaf, the city`s lucrative business as a destination for Shiite pilgrims has all but dried up. And many more moderate Shiite leaders see Mr. Sadr — who appeals largely to young and jobless Shiites — as a dangerous threat to an orderly political transition. Shiites represent some 60 percent of the population and so stand to gain the most power in any future democratic government.

The council is calling for a huge demonstration, which its leaders hope will reach 250,000 people, to demand that Mr. Sadr leave the city, and there are fears that the demonstration could lead to violence.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt of the Army, the chief military spokesman for the occupation, responded to a question at a news conference here by saying that the "first response" would be to rely on the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

However, he added: "If they were to call on the coalition for assistance, we`d evaluate that, given the conditions of what`s happening on the ground. But that would be appropriately an Iraqi-led operation, so that they could show the proper cultural sensitivity to that particular engagement."

In other fighting today, gunmen fired on a vehicle in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing two construction workers, from South Africa and New Zealand, as well as their Iraqi driver, said the city`s police chief, Torhan Abdel Rahman Yusuf, according to The Associated Press.

In Karbala, occupation troops and Mahdi Army fighters loyal to Mr. Sadr clashed in two areas of the city today, The Associated Press reported. The roof of a bank was damaged and the windows shattered after coalition troops fired on rebel snipers there, residents told the A.P.

In Falluja, an American Marine convoy, accompanied by Iraqi security forces, entered the city for the first time in more than a month, witnesses told Reuters. The convoy traveled to the mayor`s office in the town center and encountered no resistance.

But a top Iraqi police official there, Capt. Hammed Alayash, said he would prefer if the Americans left the policing to the Iraqis.

"We are glad you are here with us and that you liberated Iraq," Captain Alayash told Maj. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the First Marine Division, Reuters reported. "But we would like the Americans to stay out and let us deal with the security." He added, "I think it would be safer if we are not seen with foreign forces."

When the convoy withdrew, hundreds of Falluja residents spilled out into the streets and claimed victory in the recent fighting.

In Sadr City, the walls of Mr. Sadr`s headquarters were pocked with big holes, and shrapnel from a missile lay among the rubble.

"At 2:00 a.m., tanks and armored vehicles entered out street," said a tribal leader, Sheikh Fakher al-Azawi, who was helping to clean up the small mosque. "Our youth responded to that force. People were hiding in their houses. It was a street battle."

"I think the Mahdi Army attacks will continue until the complete withdrawal from our land," he added. "We are all Mahdi Army."

After a tense day on Sunday, security checkpoints in the neighborhood were being guarded again, and businesses were open, residents said.

But residents still did not feel safe. A man who gave his name as Abu Ali, 50, said that the civilians in Sadr City were caught in the middle of the fighting.

"We are stuck in the middle between the Mahdi Army and the coalition forces," he said.

He gestured to some of the residents. "Look at those poor people," he said. "The Mahdi Army was hiding behind the buildings shooting at the Americans. The Americans in return bombed the whole street. It is really chaotic. All we can do is to watch, nothing more."

The American military said that all of the 18 fighters it killed on Sunday had been carrying rocket-propelled grenades. No American casualties were reported. A Sadr City hospital official, Abdul-Jabbar Soulagh, said that at least 9 had been killed and 32 wounded in the battle.

The militia fighters took to the streets of the neighborhood after Americans detained several people, including Mr. Sadr`s lieutenant and a man accused of being his financier, at Mr. Sadr`s office on Saturday.

The militia was reported to have taken over some municipal buildings in Sadr City, in northeastern Baghdad, and to have blocked off roads in parts of the district. Many shops were closed there on Sunday.

"There are still some inside that district that are of the belief that Moktada`s militia can operate freely," General Kimmitt said in a news conference on Sunday. He said the militia fighters believe "that somehow, Moktada has some sort of legitimate control over that district," adding, "They`ll find out they`re wrong."

Sadr City has been a stronghold of support for Mr. Sadr. When an uprising broke out early last month, Mr. Sadr`s militia tried to seize control of police stations there, and local hospitals reported dozens of people killed in the heavy fighting that ensued. On Sunday morning, Iraqi police stations jointly guarded by American forces came under fire, the military said. It said the troops returned fire and secured the area.

The military statement said a grenade hit a Bradley Fighting Vehicle while on patrol, and that militia fighters also tried to fire rocket propelled grenades at soldiers, who returned fire, killing two of the insurgents. It said 15 fighters had been killed in airstrikes by close air support craft.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, the American-led occupation authority handed over control of Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources to its Iraqi minister. The authority has relinquished control of seven Iraqi government ministries as part of the American plan to hand over power to a sovereign Iraqi government on June 30.

"Today we pass another milestone on the path to full Iraqi sovereignty," L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, said in an outdoor ceremony in Baghdad`s American-controlled green zone, The A.P. reported.

Iraq`s Water Ministry will continue its clearing of irrigation canals and reflooding of the vast marshlands in southern Iraq that were drained by the government of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Bremer said, according to The A.P.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

U.S. TO HAND OVER BLAME ON JUNE 30

Rumsfeld `Delighted` by News

In a nationally televised address, President George W. Bush revealed that the blame for the Iraqi prison abuse scandal would be transferred from the U.S. to the new Iraqi government on June 30.

“Accepting blame for the prison abuse scandal is an important step in Iraq’s evolution towards democracy,” Mr. Bush said, adding that accountability for the scandal must go to the highest levels of Iraq’s yet-to-be-appointed government.

“It is my hope that Iraq’s new leaders will accept full responsibility for these abuses,” Mr. Bush told his television audience. “There’s an old saying: in a democracy, the dinar stops here.”

While diplomatic experts had questioned what exactly the sovereignty handed over to Iraq on June 30 would consist of, the president made it clear that it would consist solely of blame for the prison abuse scandal.

“As of June 30, we fully expect to put an Iraqi face on this fiasco,” Mr. Bush said.

At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that he was “delighted” by news of the decision to blame the prison scandal on the new Iraqi government.

“This is a solution that should satisfy even our toughest critics, because now those critics will be transferred to the new Iraqi government,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Prior to the president’s announcement, Mr. Rumsfeld had been bracing himself for the release of the Abu Ghraib Golden Edition DVD, including never-before-seen footage and special tormenters’ narration.

“This DVD is full of extremely radioactive stuff,” Mr. Rumsfeld. “Come June 30, the new government of Iraq will have a lot to answer for.”

[Joerver]

Published: May 17, 2004

Editorial: A failure of leadership at the highest levels

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.

There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides. This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world.

How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.

One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.

Army commanders in Iraq bear responsibility for running a prison where there was no legal adviser to the commander, and no ultimate responsibility taken for the care and treatment of the prisoners.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked “60 Minutes II” to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn’t read Taguba’s report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media.

By then, of course, it was too late.

Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.

If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush.

He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders.

On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence.

To date, the Army has moved to court-martial the six soldiers suspected of abusing Iraqi detainees and has reprimanded six others.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the MP brigade that ran Abu Ghraib, has received a letter of admonishment and also faces possible disciplinary action.

That’s good, but not good enough.

This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

— Military Times editorial, May 17 issue

[Joerver]

Bush approval hits new lows in poll
Support for war in Iraq also lowest ever


(CNN) -- President Bush holds a single-point lead over Democratic challenger John Kerry in the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll of likely voters, but voters` approval of Bush`s performance and support for the war in Iraq dropped to new lows in the survey.

With nearly six months remaining before the November election, Bush led Kerry 48 percent to 47 percent in the survey -- a reversal of a poll taken last week, which found the Massachusetts senator with a 1-point edge, 49-48.

With consumer advocate Ralph Nader`s independent candidacy factored in, the latest results showed Bush the choice of 47 percent of likely voters. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had 45 percent. Nader had 5 percent

The poll, conducted Friday through Sunday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points, meaning the presidential race remains close.

The survey found that among all adults -- not just likely voters -- only 46 percent approved of Bush`s performance in office -- the lowest rating of his presidency in this poll.

After April`s heavy casualties in Iraq and the emerging scandal of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops, only 44 percent said they believed the war was worthwhile -- another low.

Fifty-four percent said last year`s invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and only 41 percent of adults said they believed Bush was doing a good job handling the war.

Only 37 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States -- a sharp drop from early January, when 55 percent said they were satisfied. Those findings had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Bush`s handling of terrorism issues remained his strongest point among American adults.

Fifty-four percent of those surveyed said they approved of his performance.

Those poll also said he would do a better job than Kerry by 17 percentage points -- 55-38.

Only 41 percent of voters said they thought Bush was doing a good job handling the economy, with 56 percent disapproving; and 58 percent said they disapproved of how he was handling the war in Iraq.

On economic matters, 54 percent said they thought Kerry would do a better job, while on Iraq, Bush held a 3-point advantage over Kerry, 48-45.

The survey found the country was split over how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has handled his job, with 46 percent approving and 45 percent disapproving.

But less than a third of those questioned thought Rumsfeld should resign or be fired over the Abu Ghraib scandal.



Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/10/war.bush.kerry…

[bares@nobles]

Ich stell hier mal einen lesenswerten Kommentar aus einem amerikanischen Forum rein. Ich schätze diesen Schreiber sehr, nicht weil ich unbedingt seine Meinung teile, sondern weil er analytisch ist und die Dinge kanllhart auf den Punkt bringen kann. Dr. Strangelove aus Stanley Kubricks "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" ist sein Markenzeichen. Deswegen auch das Bild am Ende des Textes.

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I’ve been reading a lot of the commentary on the prisoner scandal on LNF and I have a few comments.

Preliminaries (where I stand on general issues):
Let me just make a few comments for those of you who don’t know me. This is my own little bit of pre-emption because I know how a lot of people here do business. I am neither conservative nor liberal, though I probably lean to the conservative side. I believe in a strong military, solid borders, and realistically less federal government. I am against affirmative action and most gun control laws. I am against abortion but not for religious reasons. I support as much distance as possible between religion and government. I think the U.N. is a fairly useless organization and should be completely reformed. I feel comfortable questioning ALL elected leaders. I am not a Bush fan. I am not a Kerry fan. I will vote for neither of them. I have never supported Clinton and I feel he should have been summarily kicked out of office. I am a happy capitalist. I support lower taxes in general. I see the benefits of globalization and, in fact, I personally sent loads of your good American engineering jobs over to China. So, if someone is going to call me a leftist, be prepared to back it up.


Where I stand on Iraq:
I initially supported the war in Iraq. I am on the record here saying this many times though it’s been a little while since I posted. I never bought the WMD bit and I have stated this. I never believed that Iraq was a direct threat to the U.S. in any way, and I stated this as well. I did feel, though, that we screwed the Iraqis when we left them in the lurch after the last Gulf War. I also had no big qualms about taking out a ruthless dictator who we substantially assisted in the past. Atoning for past sins, you see.


Before anyone reads on, I state the following disclaimer (lest the LNF paleos declare me a traitor and send stormtroopers to my place of residence):

I support the troops.

I do NOT believe the actions of a few (very very) bad apples should reflect on the many who are doing their duty with honor.


So, now we come to the present day. And how the present looks a lot different from the past. I am just going to say it: American foreign policy is a fiasco, a fiasco of the first order. Period.

Regarding Abu Ghraib:
Yes, it WAS torture. Rumsfeld has basically said exactly that. Sick and sadistic if I recall his words correctly. Further, the pictures we have seen show psychological torture. So far, the parts of the report leaked to the press talk about murder, sodomy, and the like. We’ll probably get the full picture very shortly. No matter how you cut it, it’s torture. It’s NOT humiliation, as some here want to delude themselves into believing. If it quacks, it’s a duck. And those pictures quack like a duck in the fan belt of my car.

Further, many people here are arguing that “So what? Torture is ok anyway for these people.” I guess that particular crowd gave up on convincing people it wasn’t torture and decided to, as I like to say, embrace the horror.
To that crew, I say this:
It does not matter how Arab prisons in the Middle East are run. WE are not them.
It does not matter how inhumane and sick the people we may fight are. We are NOT them.
It does not matter what sick crap we see on T.V. against our people. WE ARE NOT THEM.

To save some people the trouble of asking, yes I would have nuked Japan and yes I would endorse torture in the most extreme of circumstances (i.e. we have terrorist who planted a nuke that’s going off in an hour in Chicago). HOWEVER, that doesn’t apply to Abu Ghraib.

The sick crap that our enemies do to us is horrible. The atrocity in Fallujah is horrible beyond words. I denounced it here when it happened, I denounce it again now. However, Fallujah was one rung up the evolutionary ladder from Mogadishu. What the hell did people expect? That the Iraqis were going to welcome us with open arms? The outlaying areas from Baghdad are TRIBAL. They are PRIMATIVE. It’s the third world where life is cheap and people act according to that fact.

The people we are fighting don’t have a country. Many of them can barely read. They know NO rules of law or of war. Of course these people will NEVER apologize. Of course they will NEVER obey civilized rules of war. (Civilized war, now that’s funny.) Anyway....we KNEW the lay of the land going in. We knew what we were getting into in Iraq. Yet now I see people advocating that all civilized rules be set aside. We should fight a jihad with a jihad, right? Torture is ok? Atrocities are just fine? Well, if we do, we have lost. It’s over now.

I no longer support the mission in Iraq. I was mistaken to support it in the first place. I officially and formally withdraw my support for the government to continue with this debacle. And, again for the record, I FULLY support the troops. But Iraq was the wrong mission. Afghanistan was a good mission (which we have followed up for crap), Iraq was not.

But do you know what the rub is? WE CAN’T LEAVE! I don’t support our being there but I know we can’t bloody leave! We have to finish whatever it is we are going to do. I am convinced that Iraq is lost, but we still have to at least put a bowtie on this steaming bag of sh*t before we can extricate ourselves. Therefore, we have to continue to spend billions and billions of dollars and our people have to keep dying. It was bad policy and now we’re stuck with it.

Again, to put myself on the record:
There is NO Iraq/9-11 connection. Zero. If there was a connection, the Bush administration would be using it.
No WMDs have been found. If they had been found, the Bush administration would be using them.
There is no VERIFIED link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. If there was, the Bush administration would be trumpeting it everywhere.

The original reasons have not panned out. People can post a million conspiracy theory links as to how I am wrong but the only one that matters is Bush saying it officially. Hints dropped on a Saturday morning talk show by some “senior official” don’t count. The above points are only disproved by the White House OFFICIALLY stating it as fact through OFFICIAL channels.

So, what are the reasons that remain for our involvement in Iraq?
1. Freeing the Iraqi people from a government that deprived them of rights and subjected them to horrible crimes.
2. Removing the Iraq regime and creating a more peaceful, stable, and friendly, alternative.

And how are we doing on the remaining reasons? Not so hot on number one judging by the few hundred (!!!) pictures and video that are about to be released by the Pentagon.. Number two is screwed because we insist on setting up an artificial democracy with no bearing in the reality of ethnic or religious cleavages. Iraq will disintegrate when we leave. The Sunnis and Shi’ites hate each other. Their recent joining of hands against us is just a speed bump on the road to mutual ethnic cleansing. The Kurds don’t want anything to do with either of them. They’re already basically independent. Yet, instead of CONTROLLING the break-up of Iraq and making sure it happens peacefully, we are forcing a square peg in a round hole. We will fail. Iraq is going to turn into a worse terrorist haven than before.

Where are our allies in all of this you ask? We are, in fact, the “Leader of the Free World”. We should be leading other countries, no? Whoops, looks like they pretty much all hate us. The only country offering us SIGNIFICANT support in Iraq is Britain, and Britain’s doing it even though 70%+ of the population does NOT support Iraq. The other countries supporting us have offered only a pittance of troops; little more than a token. And their governments are taking heat for that little bit of support. When did pre-emption mean pissing off the rest of the world? We NEED allies folks. And, we’re running a bit short at the moment. How did we get to the point where a good chunk of the CIVILIZED world is hoping for a “regime change” in the U.S. come November? Jealousy? Nope. It’s fear. Yes indeed, the rest of the world actually fears us. I thought they were supposed to fear the terrorists. Hello.

[Joerver]

May 11, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Tourists and Torturers
By LUC SANTE

So now we think we know who took some of the photographs at Abu Ghraib. The works attributed to Specialist Jeremy Sivits are fated to remain among the indelible images of our time. They will have changed the course of history; just how much we do not yet know. It is arguable that without them, news of what happened within the walls of that prison would never have emerged from the fog of classified internal memos. We owe their circulation and perhaps their existence to the popular technology of our day, to digital cameras and JPEG files and e-mail. Photographs can now be disseminated as quickly and widely as rumors. It`s possible that even if Specialist Joseph M. Darby hadn`t gone to his superiors in January and "60 Minutes II" hadn`t broken the story last month, some of those pictures would sooner or later have found their way onto the Web and so into the public record.

Leaving aside the question of how anyone could have perpetrated the horrors depicted in those pictures, you can`t help but wonder why American soldiers would incriminate themselves by posing next to their handiwork. Americans don`t seem to have a long tradition of that sort of thing. I can`t offhand recall having seen comparable images from any recent wars, although before the digital era amateur photographs were harder to spread. There have been many atrocity photographs over the years, of course — the worst I`ve ever seen were taken in Algeria in 1961, and once when I was a child another kid found and showed off his father`s cache of pictures from the Pacific Theater in World War II, which shook me so badly that I can`t remember with any certainty what they depicted. I`m pretty sure, though, that they did not show anyone grinning and making self-congratulatory gestures.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib are trophy shots. The American soldiers included in them look exactly as if they were standing next to a gutted buck or a 10-foot marlin. That incongruity is not the least striking aspect of the pictures. The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A. Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that for a few seconds I took it for a montage. When I registered what I was seeing, I was reminded of something. There was something familiar about that jaunty insouciance, that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon other humans. And then I remembered: the last time I had seen that conjunction of elements was in photographs of lynchings.

In photographs that were taken and often printed as postcards in the American heartland in the first four decades of the 20th century, black men are shown hanging from trees or light fixtures or maybe being burned alive, while below them white people are laughing and pointing for the benefit of the camera. There are some pictures of whites being lynched, too, but these tend not to feature the holiday crowd. Often the spectators at lynchings of African-Americans are so effusive in their mugging that they all seem to be vying for credit. Before seeing such pictures you might expect the faces in them to express some kind of collective rage; instead the mood is giddy, often verging on hysterical, with a distinct sexual undercurrent.

Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably never crossed their minds. In both cases a contagious collective frenzy perhaps overruled the scruples of some people otherwise known for their gentleness and sympathy — but isn`t the abandonment of such scruples possible only if the victims are considered less than human? After all, it is one thing for a boxer to lift his hands over his head in triumph beside the fallen body of his rival, quite another to strike a comparable pose next to the bodies of strangers you have arranged in quasi-pornographic tableaus. The Americans in the photographs are not enacting hatred; hatred can coexist with respect, however strained. What they display, instead, is contempt: their victims are merely objects.

It is conceivable that such events might have occurred in a war in which the enemy looked like us —certainly, there are Americans to whom all foreigners are irredeemably Other. Still, it is striking how, in wartime, a fundamental lack of respect for the enemy`s body becomes an issue only when the enemy is perceived as being of another race. You might have heard about the strings of human ears collected by some soldiers in Vietnam, or read the story, reported in Life during World War II, about the G.I. who blithely mailed his girlfriend in Brooklyn a Japanese skull as a Christmas present. And the concept of the human trophy is not restricted to warfare, but permeates the history of colonialism, from the Congo to Australia, Mexico to India. Treating those we deem our equals as game animals, however, has been out of fashion for quite a few centuries.

Of course the violence at Abu Ghraib was primarily psychological — hey, only a few people were killed — and the trophies were pictorial, like the results of a photo safari. Some commentators have made a point of noting this very relative nonviolence, contrasting it with the lynching of the four American military contractors in Falluja last month. This line of argument is notable for what it leaves out: there is a difference between the rage of a people who feel themselves invaded and the contempt of a victorious nation for a civilian population whom it has ostensibly liberated.

That prison guards would pose captives — primarily noncombatants, low-level riffraff — in re-enactments of cable TV smut for the benefit of their friends back home emerges from the mode of thinking that has prevented an accounting of civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war. If civilian deaths are not recorded, let alone published, it must be because they do not matter, and if they do not matter it must be because the Iraqis are beneath notice. And that must mean that anything done to them is permissible, as long as it does not create publicity that would embarrass the Bush administration. The possible consequences of the Abu Ghraib archive are numerous, many of them horrifying. Perhaps, though, the digital camera will haunt the future career of George W. Bush the way the tape recorder sealed the fate of Richard Nixon.

Luc Sante, who teaches creative writing and the history of photography at Bard College, is the author of "Low Life," "Evidence" and "The Factory of Facts."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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May 11, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Just Trust Us
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Didn`t you know, in your gut, that something like Abu Ghraib would eventually come to light?

When the world first learned about the abuse of prisoners, President Bush said that it "does not reflect the nature of the American people." He`s right, of course: a great majority of Americans are decent and good. But so are a great majority of people everywhere. If America`s record is better than that of most countries — and it is — it`s because of our system: our tradition of openness, and checks and balances.

Yet Mr. Bush, despite all his talk of good and evil, doesn`t believe in that system. From the day his administration took office, its slogan has been "just trust us." No administration since Nixon has been so insistent that it has the right to operate without oversight or accountability, and no administration since Nixon has shown itself to be so little deserving of that trust. Out of a misplaced sense of patriotism, Congress has deferred to the administration`s demands. Sooner or later, a moral catastrophe was inevitable.

Just trust us, John Ashcroft said, as he demanded that Congress pass the Patriot Act, no questions asked. After two and a half years, during which he arrested and secretly detained more than a thousand people, Mr. Ashcroft has yet to convict any actual terrorists. (Look at the actual trials of what Dahlia Lithwick of Slate calls "disaffected bozos who watch cheesy training videos," and you`ll see what I mean.)

Just trust us, George Bush said, as he insisted that Iraq, which hadn`t attacked us and posed no obvious threat, was the place to go in the war on terror. When we got there, we found no weapons of mass destruction and no new evidence of links to Al Qaeda.

Just trust us, Paul Bremer said, as he took over in Iraq. What is the legal basis for Mr. Bremer`s authority? You may imagine that the Coalition Provisional Authority is an arm of the government, subject to U.S. law. But it turns out that no law or presidential directive has ever established the authority`s status. Mr. Bremer, as far as we can tell, answers to nobody except Mr. Bush, which makes Iraq a sort of personal fief. In that fief, there has been nothing that Americans would recognize as the rule of law. For example, Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon`s erstwhile favorite, was allowed to gain control of Saddam`s files — the better to blackmail his potential rivals.

And finally: Just trust us, Donald Rumsfeld said early in 2002, when he declared that "enemy combatants" — a term that turned out to mean anyone, including American citizens, the administration chose to so designate — don`t have rights under the Geneva Convention. Now people around the world talk of an "American gulag," and Seymour Hersh is exposing My Lai all over again.

Did top officials order the use of torture? It depends on the meaning of the words "order" and "torture." Last August Mr. Rumsfeld`s top intelligence official sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantánamo prison, to Iraq. General Miller recommended that the guards help interrogators, including private contractors, by handling prisoners in a way that "sets the conditions" for "successful interrogation and exploitation." What did he and his superiors think would happen?

To their credit, some supporters of the administration are speaking out. "This is about system failure," said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina. But do Mr. Graham, John McCain and other appalled lawmakers understand their own role in that failure? By deferring to the administration at every step, by blocking every effort to make officials accountable, they set the nation up for this disaster. You can`t prevent any serious inquiry into why George Bush led us to war to eliminate W.M.D. that didn`t exist and to punish Saddam for imaginary ties to Al Qaeda, then express shock when Mr. Bush`s administration fails to follow the rules on other matters.

Meanwhile, Abu Ghraib will remain in use, under its new commander: General Miller of Guantánamo. Donald Rumsfeld has "accepted responsibility" — an action that apparently does not mean paying any price at all. And Dick Cheney says, "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had. . . . People should get off his case and let him do his job." In other words: Just trust us.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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The Road to Abu Ghraib | Global Detentions
Ein Bericht in 3 Teilen.

washingtonpost.com

A Prison on the Brink
Usual Military Checks and Balances Went Missing

By Scott Higham, Josh White and Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page A01

First of three articles

For U.S. military police officers in Baghdad, the Abu Ghraib prison was particularly hellish. Insurgents were firing mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades over the walls. The prisoners were prone to riot. There was no PX, no mess hall, no recreation facilities to escape the heat and dust. About 450 MPs were supervising close to 7,000 inmates, many of them crowded into cells, many more kept in tents hastily arranged on dirt fields within the razor-wired walls of the compound. Around the perimeter, GIs kept wary eyes on Iraqi guards of questionable loyalty.

Precisely how many prisoners were being held at Abu Ghraib was anyone`s guess. Roll calls were spotty. Escapes were commonplace. Prison logs were replete with flippant and unprofessional remarks. MPs were occasionally out of uniform, and some were out of control. Discipline was breaking down. So was the chain of command.

Abu Ghraib was on the brink.

"Most of the time, I felt like my life was in danger," said Sgt. William Savage Jr., a Florida corrections officer sent to Abu Ghraib as a reservist with a military police company. "I always thought something was going to happen."

Few could imagine what was about to happen at Abu Ghraib. The photographs featuring piles of naked Iraqis seem as though they were taken from a pornographic magazine, not from the digital cameras carried by American servicemen and women. But an examination of military investigative reports and interviews with soldiers and officers in Iraq at the time reveal that there were early warnings, and that a combination of conditions inside Abu Ghraib produced a culture of licentious behavior and abuse. Confusion was high. Morale was low. The checks and balances established to hold soldiers accountable during the vagaries of war were virtually non-existent.

By the fall of 2003, rumors of abuse began to circulate. Sgt. Blas Hidalgo heard them while working the guard towers of Abu Ghraib. He dismissed the talk as made-up military gossip.

"It sounded too crazy," he told The Washington Post in a recent interview.
`Unnerving as Hell`

The problems at Abu Ghraib, which have unleashed an international scandal and shaken the Bush administration, were foreshadowed by experiences at two earlier prison camps set up by U.S. forces after the invasion in March 2003.

As U.S. troops marched north, Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, near Basra, quickly became the largest facility for Iraqi prisoners. For two months, military commanders sent thousands of prisoners to the makeshift camp. Soon the camp held more than 7,000 prisoners.

At Bucca, there were troubling signs in a military police unit that would later be at the center of what took place at Abu Ghraib.

On May 12, four soldiers from the 320th Military Police Battalion, based in Ashley, Pa., were charged with beating prisoners after transporting them to Camp Bucca. MPs from a different unit reported the incident, saying the legs of prisoners were held apart while soldiers kicked them in the groin.

Around that time, President Bush had announced the end of major combat operations, and spirits in many military police units were high. It appeared that many MP units would be headed home. By the end of May, the several thousand members of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which included the 320th Battalion, were told that they would instead be managing the Iraqi prison system.

For many of the MPs, it was a crushing blow.

"Morale suffered, and over the next few months there did not appear to have been any attempt by the Command to mitigate this morale problem," Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba would later conclude in his 53-page report examining the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Located on the outskirts of Baghdad, Abu Ghraib, a symbol of torture and repression under Saddam Hussein, had been looted. It was decrepit and falling apart. While renovations were underway, the military came up with a temporary alternative: Camp Cropper, a collection of tents and small buildings at the Baghdad airport.

Cropper was originally designed to hold 200 captives. But with street crime on the rise and the insurgency in Baghdad becoming bolder, Cropper was teeming with prisoners by the summer of 2003. On some days, more than 1,000 prisoners were in the camp.

It became a dangerous place that smelled of sewage and sweat. Flies infested the camp. Those who have been there describe it as an outdoor cesspool where detainees stockpiled their feces to throw at MPs. The prisoners also turned the dust beneath their feet into weapons by pouring their water rations and fashioning hardened dirt clods.

"It was worse than you can imagine on days when there was no breeze," said one MP assigned to the camp who requested anonymity because he signed a "nondisclosure" agreement before leaving Iraq. "If there was a hell, I can imagine that`s what it smelled like."

The poor conditions had consequences.

"Abu wasn`t running, none of the satellite prisons were running, so we had nowhere to send these guys," said one military officer assigned to the camp who has been ordered not to discuss Cropper. ". . . Anytime it got real hot, there were riots."

The uprisings rattled even the most seasoned of soldiers. Detainees would cut themselves on the concertina wire that surrounded the camp and try to smear their blood on MPs. They rushed the wire and threw rocks they had stored up.

"It was unnerving as hell," the officer said.

On June 9, the detainees rioted after one of the prisoners hit an MP. The prisoner was subdued, and one of the MPs took off his camouflage shirt and "flexed his muscles to the detainees, which further escalated the riot," according to the military report.

Rocks started to fly. One soldier was hit in the head. Another was struck by a tent pole. A prisoner pulled an MP through the concertina wire.

"This thing was out of control," the officer said.

The MPs were overwhelmed, and guards opened fire. Five prisoners were wounded. An investigation into the incident concluded that the shooting was justified, and no soldiers were punished. Still, the incident symbolized a severe lack of training, said another officer familiar with the incident.

Officers said they complained about the conditions at Camp Cropper, but no one seemed to listen. They said they were told that the military was preparing to open Abu Ghraib as quickly as possible.

"The challenge was trying to find a place to take them," one officer said.
Setting the Conditions

For 18 months, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller had run the detainee operation at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Aug. 31, he and a team of inspectors arrived in Baghdad to examine prison operations in Iraq. They visited Camp Cropper and the refurbished Abu Ghraib prison, which had opened Aug. 4.

Miller recommended that Cropper be closed. He made another recommendation: that MPs and military intelligence officers work closely to gather information from the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

At Guantanamo, where suspected al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban fighters are kept and interrogated, Miller said, he found that separating MPs, who serve as jailers, from intelligence officers, who conduct interrogations, was counterproductive. He viewed MPs as key players in the process because they could serve as the ears and eyes of military intelligence officers on the cellblocks. Miller recommended that the new commander in charge of the 800th MP Brigade, Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, consolidate the two functions, permitting MPs to set "conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation" of the prisoners.

One month after Miller`s team left Iraq on Sept. 9, another inspection team arrived in Iraq. This one was headed by Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, the provost marshal in charge of Army military police. Ryder arrived in Baghdad on Oct. 13, two weeks after Camp Cropper was closed.

Ryder conducted a "comprehensive review of the entire detainee and corrections system in Iraq." He found flawed operating procedures, improper restraint techniques, a lack of training, an inadequate prisoner classification system, understrength units and a ratio of guards to prisoners designed for "compliant" prisoners of war and not criminals or high-risk-security detainees.

But Ryder also found "there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices."

At Abu Ghraib, the guard-to-prisoner ratio was about one to 15, with one battalion guarding 7,000. Army doctrine calls for one battalion per 4,000 enemy soldiers. In civilian prisons, one guard per three inmates is considered ideal.

In his report submitted on Nov. 6, Ryder recommended that military police not "participate in military intelligence supervised interrogation sessions." He concluded that allowing MPs to "actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews runs counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility."

But even as Ryder was writing his report, Abu Ghraib was descending into chaos and worse.

Taguba`s report detailed numerous lapses:

Standard operating procedures and copies of the Geneva Conventions were not distributed to the guards handling the prisoners. No one knew for sure how many prisoners were being kept at Abu Ghraib. It took MPs four days to document transfers of detainees within the prison, making it nearly impossible to determine who was where at any given time. Roll calls were supposed to be conducted twice a day. Instead, they were conducted twice a week.

When MPs did count prisoners, there was no standard method. Sometimes MPs lined up detainees in rows of 10 and counted them in bulk. Other times, the soldiers moved prisoners to one end of a cellblock, ordered them to walk and counted them as they passed by.

Sometimes, "Other Government Agencies," a common expression for the CIA, would bring prisoners to Abu Ghraib. MPs were kept in the dark about the prisoners` identities and the reasons behind their captures. On at least one occasion, MPs moved these captives around the Abu Ghraib complex to keep them away from inspectors with the International Committee of the Red Cross. MPs called the prisoners "ghost detainees." Military investigators called that practice an apparent "violation of international law."

Prisoners learned to exploit the chaos. Military investigators said they discovered one report that documented at least 27 escapes from the facility. Karpinski said 32 had escaped. No one knew for sure because oversight was so poor.

"It is highly likely that there were several more unreported cases of escape that were probably `written off` as administrative errors or otherwise undocumented," military investigators later wrote.

After escapes, follow-up and accountability were lacking. Investigations into escapes were "rubber-stamped" and approved by Karpinski, but there was no evidence that any of the general`s orders for changes were followed, Taguba found.

If the recommendations had been followed, investigators concluded, "many of the subsequent escapes, accountability lapses and cases of abuse may have been prevented."
Not Trained to Be Guards

The real trouble started after Oct. 15, when the 372nd Military Police Company, a segment of the 320th Battalion based in Cresaptown, Md., took over Abu Ghraib from a military police company based in Henderson, Nev. The 372nd soldiers, reservists from small-town America, were not trained to be prison guards. An MP officer from another unit at Abu Ghraib said he was struck by their unprofessionalism.

"It was lots of things, from the way they wore the uniforms to the way they interacted with each other," said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ". . . They didn`t carry themselves like soldiers."

And their ranks were thinly stretched. Savage, the Florida corrections officer, said soldiers were far outnumbered by the prisoners, most of whom were common criminals. For the guards, the sense of a siege was ongoing. At night, the soldiers on the towers squeezed off hundreds of rounds into the darkness in response to the incoming mortar and small-arms fire.

The 372nd company commander was Donald J. Reese, 39, a salesman from New Stanton, Pa. His unit was given perhaps the most sensitive mission: control of Tier 1A, where "high priority" detainees were held for interrogation by civilian and military intelligence officers. The 203 cells of Tiers 1A and 1B were in a two-story cinderblock building known as the "hard site" at Abu Ghraib, so called to distinguish it from the many tent compounds on the prison grounds. 1B held "high risk" or trouble-making detainees.

With little experience in corrections to fall back on, the unit deferred to MPs who had civilian prison backgrounds.

"Detainee care appears to have been made up as the operations developed with reliance on, and guidance from, junior members of the unit who had civilian corrections experience," Taguba later found.

Those members included Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, 37, who had worked as a correctional officer at Buckingham Correctional Center in Virginia, and Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., 35, a divorced father of two who worked as a prison guard in Greene County, Pa. Frederick was the top enlisted man in charge of 1A, where he and Graner worked closely with intelligence officers, their colleagues said.

The officer in charge of the prison was Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, a reservist who commanded the 320th Military Police Battalion. Taguba found that Phillabaum was "an extremely ineffective commander and leader" who did little after the Camp Bucca beating incident five months earlier to put his soldiers on notice about proper detainee treatment.

Phillabaum`s boss was Karpinski, the reservist general in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade. She rarely visited Abu Ghraib, Taguba`s report found. Karpinski was based at the Baghdad airport.

Karpinski, a corporate management consultant from Hilton Head, S.C., was called to active duty in June. She said she tried to regularly visit each of the detention facilities under her command. But she scaled back as the insurgency stepped up attacks. She was responsible for 3,400 soldiers at 16 facilities, including Abu Ghraib.

Soon after the 372nd arrived at Abu Ghraib, it became clear that there was a problem at the top of the prison`s chain of command: Karpinski sent Phillabaum, a 1976 West Point graduate, to Kuwait for two weeks to "give him some relief from the pressure he was experiencing," the report states. Phillabaum later told The Post he was gone from Oct. 18 to Oct. 31.

Also during this period, military intelligence made a focused push on interrogations in Tiers 1A and 1B, Karpinski would later say.

"The MI said -- they specifically came to me in the September-October time frame, and said, `Man, could you talk to those prison guys and ask if we could have those cells?` " she later told The Post. "They explained why. I said, `I will go down and campaign for you because I understand.` "

Taguba`s report and interview with MPs and their attorneys reveal what happened next.

Spec. Sabrina D. Harman, 26, of Alexandria told Taguba`s investigators that Graner and Frederick were responsible for getting "these people to talk." She told The Post that military intelligence officers "made the rules as they went."

Sgt. Javal S. Davis, 26, also with the 372nd, supported that account.

"In Wing 1A we were told that they had different rules," Davis, a college dropout from New Jersey, told investigators. He said intelligence officers frequently said things such as "loosen this guy up" and "make sure he has a bad night." Davis said he was told: "Good job. They`re breaking down real fast."

Davis said Graner told him agents and military intelligence personnel "would ask him to do things, but nothing was ever in writing," the report states.

The methods moved from the unorthodox to the perverse.

They "handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other by insuring that the bottom guys penis will touch the guy on tops butt," Adel L. Nakhla, a U.S. civilian contract translator, told military investigators.

The Post obtained a series of digital photographs that were taken by MPs. Scattered among the hundreds of travelogue images of Iraq were some depicting prisoner abuse, most of them stamped with dates. The earliest of the abuse pictures, stamped Oct. 17, shows a naked man handcuffed to a cell door. A photograph of a naked man handcuffed to a cot with women`s underwear stretched over his head was stamped Oct. 18. A photograph of Pfc. Lynndie R. England holding a chain or strap that is wrapped around the neck of a naked man outside a cell was stamped Oct. 24. A picture of a pile of naked men was stamped Oct. 25.

England, 21, who grew up in a West Virginia coal town, worked as a processing clerk in the cellblock and is reportedly engaged to Graner.

Military investigators said prisoners endured many other forms of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Soldiers kept some detainees naked for days and forced others to masturbate in front of female soldiers. They attached wires to the fingers and genitals of a man and threatened him with electrocution. One male MP had sex with female detainees. In one case, a detainee was severely injured during a dog attack. MPs broke chemical lights and poured the phosphoric liquid on detainees. One prisoner was sodomized with a chemical light.

Karpinski later said she was unaware of the abuse and blamed much of it on military intelligence personnel, who she said gave the MPs "ideas" that led to the abuse.

The Taguba report found that command of the prison was placed under military intelligence on Nov. 19, well after the abuses began. But Karpinski says that order formalized changes made earlier. The report also says that although there was not a clear order that the MPs were to "set conditions" for military intelligence interrogations, "it is obvious . . . that this was done at lower levels."

Phillabaum also said he did not know what was going on and blamed it on a few rogue soldiers, particularly Frederick.

"I have been made the scapegoat in this event," Phillabaum wrote in an e-mail to The Post. "Frederick was the NCO [noncommissioned officer] in charge of that wing of the prison. No one higher in his chain of command, starting with his platoon sergeant, knew what was occurring. If he thought that his actions were condoned, then why were they only conducted between 0200-0400 hours for a few days in late October and early November?"

Phillabaum added, "The acts of a couple of demented Reserve MP guards who are prison corrections officers at home were their own idea."

The soldiers` attorneys and relatives have said the MPs were following orders.

"It is clear that the intelligence community dictated that these photographs be taken," said Guy L. Womack, a Houston lawyer representing Graner, who has since been charged in the case.

The father of another charged soldier, Spec. Jeremy C. Sivits, 24, a mechanic from Hyndman, Pa., also said his son did the bidding of others. "He did what he was told," Daniel Sivits told The Post.

It is unclear when the abuses ended, though Taguba said in his report, it "is important to point out that almost every witness testified that the serious criminal abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib . . . occurred in late October and early November 2003."

On Jan. 13, a soldier in the battalion, identified by the New Yorker magazine as Spec. Joseph M. Darby, placed an anonymous note describing the photographs under the door of an Army criminal investigator.

The next day, an Army Criminal Investigation Division team set to work.

"On 14 Jan 2004 at approximately 0230 hours there was a knock at the door to my room," Frederick wrote in a statement sent to his family. "Cpt. Reese opened the door and said, `Freddy, CID is here and they want to talk to you.` "

Frederick was told to dress and surrender his weapons. He wrote in his statement that he "questioned some of the things that I saw." But "the answer I got was this is how Military Intelligence (MI) wants it done."

Over the next three weeks, investigators would interview 50 people, including several 372nd MPs and 13 detainees.

Harman and Davis gave statements to investigators. They, along with five other MPs -- Frederick, Graner, Sivits, England and Spec. Megan M. Ambuhl, 29 -- were eventually charged in the abuse incidents and face courts-martial.

The military told the media that about the investigation in a one-paragraph news release on Jan. 16. But no details were provided -- and the release attracted little attention.

On Jan. 31, Taguba was assigned to investigate the officers involved. In March, he recommended that Karpinski and Phillabaum be relieved of their commands and given reprimands for various command failures. He recommended the same for Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and his liaison officer, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan.

Taguba said Reese, the commander of the 372nd soldiers, should also be relieved and reprimanded. In all, administrative actions were recommended against seven officers, three sergeants and two employees of a private contractor, CACI International. Steven Stephanowicz, an interrogator, and translator John Israel both worked with military intelligence officers. The contractors are receiving intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers learned last week that 37 civilian interrogators worked with the military in Iraq.

Six of the seven criminally charged soldiers are now stationed in Camp Victory, a U.S. base near the Baghdad airport, where they are awaiting their fate.

Back in Washington, top officials are trying to minimize the damage to their careers. On Thursday, President Bush issued an apology from the Rose Garden. The next day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared before legislators and apologized.

He told the lawmakers to brace themselves for more photographs, videos and disclosures of abuse.

"It`s not a pretty picture," Rumsfeld said.

Staff writer Jackie Spinner, correspondent Sewell Chan in Baghdad and research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company
As Insurgency Grew, So Did Prison Abuse
Needing Intelligence, U.S. Pressed Detainees

By Scott Wilson and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A01

Second of three articles

BAGHDAD, May 9 -- In the fall of 2003, U.S. officials watched anxiously as a potent guerrilla resistance rose across broad swaths of northern and central Iraq. Insurgents assassinated diplomats, detonated car bombs and mounted daily hit-and-run strikes on U.S. soldiers. Fearful of reprisals, Iraqis shrank from collaborating with an occupation authority that appeared powerless to reverse the tide of violence and lawlessness.

Less than two weeks after 1,000 pounds of explosives demolished U.N. headquarters here on Aug. 19, driving the organization from Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was warden of the U.S. detention facility for suspected terrorists. Miller`s mission in Iraq signaled new zeal to organize an intelligence network that could hit back at the insurgents, but through unorthodox means.

"He came up there and told me he was going to `Gitmoize` the detention operation," turning it into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the military prison system in Iraq. "But the difference is, in Guantanamo Bay there isn`t a war going on outside the wall."

The worsening war outside the walls of the U.S. prison system in Iraq had a direct bearing on the abuses that occurred inside the facilities, according to Iraqi and American sources. Through the summer and fall of 2003, when detainees at Abu Ghraib prison suffered mistreatment now notorious throughout the world, the security situation in Iraq and the treatment of Iraqi prisoners ran parallel courses, both downward.

U.S. officials were under mounting pressure to collect wartime intelligence but were hobbled by a shortage of troops, the failure to build an effective informant network and a surprisingly skilled insurgency. In response, they turned to the prison system. Today, as outrage spreads over images of abused prisoners, the practices inside the prisons have the potential of strengthening the insurgency that they were designed to defeat.

Interviews with U.S. officials, former prisoners and Iraqis who have supported the occupation, along with findings outlined in the Army`s internal investigation of prison abuses, make clear that there was a connection between changes in conditions inside the prisons and the struggle to control an increasingly hostile country.

Last fall, U.S. military leaders cast about for ways to generate more information on the insurgency after focusing their early intelligence efforts on the hunt for Saddam Hussein, his top lieutenants and the weapons of mass destruction that were the Bush administration`s rationale for going to war.

The urgency of the problem prompted U.S. officials to accept a new intelligence service they once opposed because of its similarity to Hussein`s. It also led to more widespread detentions of Iraqis. The strategy was reflected in the rising number of Iraqis arrested for questioning across the country in the late fall. At Abu Ghraib alone, the number of prisoners rose from 5,800 in September to 8,000 five months later, when Karpinski received an official admonishment.

The harsh treatment of prisoners was seen by some of the perpetrators as consistent with Miller`s recommendation for "setting conditions" for interrogations by military intelligence officers. Although abuses of prisoners have been denounced as aberrations, former detainees describe humiliation, pain and discomfort as commonplace.

The treatment could also be traced to other outside pressures on the American jailers. Pre-interrogation punishment at Abu Ghraib was dispensed by reservists embittered by their prolonged stay in Iraq and plagued by frequent attacks from outside the prison walls, according to the Army investigation conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba.

"Psychological factors, such as the difference in culture, the soldiers` quality of life, the real presence of mortal danger over an extended time period, and the failure of commanders to recognize these pressures contributed to the perversive atmosphere that existed at Abu Ghraib," Taguba wrote.
Purge Damages Occupation

Some American and Iraqi commentators attribute the growth of the insurgency to the decision in May of last year by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, to dissolve the Iraqi military.

The decision was another step in the dismantling of Hussein`s government, once dominated by members of the Baath Party. But it had a practical effect of leaving an estimated 400,000 men with military training without jobs. U.S. commanders worried about the consequences, which Iraqis sympathetic to the U.S. project now say have turned out worse than any of the Americans expected.

Many former Baathist officials fled Iraq for their safety, according to former military officers, taking with them their intelligence training and unrivaled knowledge of Iraq`s pre-war political landscape. Many who stayed were too angry or too frightened to help the Americans, these officers said.

One result, the former officers said, was that violence against U.S. troops began to increase almost at once. Twice as many U.S. troops were killed in hostilities in June than in May, when President Bush had declared an end to major combat operations.

"The way to get information was very easy for the Americans, if they had chosen," said Abdul Jalil Mohsen Muhie, a retired Iraqi brigadier general with the Iraqi National Accord, a party that opposed Hussein from exile and has a long-standing relationship with the CIA. "The intelligence and security services were intact, they were experienced and would have been highly useful after purged of pro-Saddam elements."

The continuing strife had an impact on troops deployed in Iraq and looking forward to a prompt return home. In early June, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which would play a central role in the future U.S. intelligence strategy, received disheartening news. Instead of returning to the United States, the soldiers would be staying on in Iraq.

Their job would now be to administer the new prison system and supervise several specific detention centers, including Camp Bucca, Abu Ghraib and the special ward for "high-value detainees" at Camp Cropper on the grounds of Baghdad International Airport. The brigade had been in charge of the Army`s Camp Bucca, a prison in the southern city of Umm Qasr that in the war`s aftermath held 7,000 to 8,000 prisoners.

The 320th MP Battalion was assigned to Abu Ghraib, a prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad synonymous with Hussein`s oppression. The unit was severely understaffed, with 450 soldiers responsible for as many as 7,000 prisoners at a time, according to the Taguba report. The jail was built to hold 4,800 prisoners.

"Morale suffered," Taguba wrote, "and over the next few months there did not appear to be any attempt to mitigate this morale problem."

Karpinski, a business consultant from South Carolina who was a member of the reserves, took command of the brigade at the end of June. Although she had participated in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and later helped oversee a women`s military training program in the United Arab Emirates, she had no experience running a large prison.

As Karpinski took charge, American troops were in the midst of Operation Sidewinder, the largest offensive since the invasion. The air and ground assault swept through the heart of the resistance in the crescent of Sunni territory north of Baghdad. There and in the capital, U.S. forces seized hundreds of suspected insurgents.

Amnesty International, the London-based human-rights organization, criticized the U.S. military for subjecting Iraqi prisoners to "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" conditions in a July 1 report. At the time, a U.S. official said, "We are more than complying with our obligations under the Geneva Convention."

Then, on July 3, more than 50 militants ambushed an Army patrol near the town of Balad. Another attack rained mortars on a base, wounding 17 soldiers.. Suddenly, the insurgency seemed capable of taking the initiative.

"At first, there wasn`t so much fear and there was a little cooperation" by Iraqis with the Americans, said Saher Dabbagh, a former Iraqi lieutenant colonel who has worked with U.S. officials here and supports the occupation. "But the curve declined very quickly after that."

The Balad attack surprised U.S. military commanders for what it revealed of the size and skill of the insurgency, several said at the time. On the next day, an audiotape believed to be from Hussein was broadcast on Arab television. In his first public comments since the fall of Baghdad, he called on Iraqis to resist the occupation and claimed that guerrilla cells were being formed to do so.

In the following days, U.S. military officials began to worry publicly whether the 150,000 U.S. troops then in Iraq were sufficient to maintain order. U.S. officials reached out to Iraqi political allies for help, turning to the Iraqi National Accord among others for advice on how to build an Iraqi intelligence service and for assistance looking for two soldiers who were missing following the attack in Balad. The two soldiers were later found dead.

"We told them you cannot play the role of the intelligence and security forces in Iraq because you are not Iraqis," Dabbagh said. "They were trying to find Iraqis, but they were going about it the wrong way. None of the ones they found were professionals, and all of the information they received was false."
Escalation Spurs Change

After receiving reports that large military operations in the north had angered the local population, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, decided in early August to use more small-unit raids that rely for success on precise intelligence.

But the next weeks were among the most damaging to the U.S. occupation to date. A car bomb exploded Aug. 7 in front of the Jordanian Embassy, killing 11 people in the first appearance of such tactics. Twelve days later, another car bomb detonated at the U.N. offices, killing more than 20 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. envoy to Iraq.

Within days, U.S. officials disclosed that they were recruiting a new domestic intelligence service from former agents of Hussein`s intelligence organization, the Mukhabarat, despite deep misgivings from some of the 25 members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council.

"The only way you are going to combat terrorism is through intelligence," a senior U.S. official here said at the time. "Without Iraqi input, that`s not going to work."

Miller, a former paratrooper with a mild Texas drawl, arrived in Baghdad from Cuba on Aug. 31 at the head of a team "experienced in strategic interrogation," according to the Taguba report. Their aim was "to review current Iraqi theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence," Taguba wrote.

"We`re enormously proud of what we have done at Guantanamo to be able to set that kind of environment where we were focused on getting the maximum amount of intelligence," Miller said last week in Baghdad, after he returned to Iraq having been named to supervise the country`s military prison system. "We were bringing expertise into the theater. We made a number of recommendations, the vast majority of which were implemented following the visit."

The Taguba report cites one of those recommendations as saying that the detention centers had to act as "an enabler for interrogation." Miller recommended giving military intelligence officers a greater role in how prisoners were detained, not only how they were questioned. He also recommended training a guard force that "sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation on internees/detainees."

These new procedures came into force as increasing numbers of Iraqis were being detained and interrogated. According to interviews with former prisoners, many arrests were made in predawn raids on houses. Others were swept up if weapons -- even licensed ones -- or suspicious items were found during roadside vehicle searches.

Ahmad Naje Dulaimi, a waiter at a restaurant in Baghdad`s Adhamiya neighborhood, was arrested in the middle of the night of July 18. He had once worked for the Iraqi Olympic Committee, which was run by Hussein`s son, Uday, and used as a cover for political persecution.

Dulaima was a long-distance freestyle swimmer on the Iraqi national team. A neighbor had informed U.S. soldiers of his affiliation, he said, and suggested to U.S. troops that he was a member of Hussein`s militia, Saddam`s Fedayeen.

"I had an Olympic Committee card in my wallet, but I told them I was a swimmer," said Dulaimi, a lanky 23-year old with floppy hair and acne. "I guess the Americans believed their spy."

Within days, the informant, a well-known religious figure in the neighborhood, was killed for working with U.S. troops, Dulaimi said.

Dualimi`s 11-month imprisonment began in the interrogation rooms of the Adhamiya Palace, a former Hussein villa now being used by U.S. troops. He spent the first night in the T-shirt and shorts he was sleeping in at the time of his arrest, but he was also hooded, with his hands and feet bound by plastic cuffs.

For two days, he consumed only a cracker and several sips of water, he said. On the third night, he was interrogated by two U.S. soldiers, a man and a woman, who were assisted by a Kuwaiti interpreter. The male soldier strode into the interrogation room, Dulaimi said, and immediately urinated on his head.

"They asked me about Baathists in the neighborhood, if there were officers, who sold weapons, and who were Fedayeen. I told them I knew nothing," said Dulaimi, who also spent time in Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib before he was freed on Thursday, according to his release papers and prison identification bracelet. "They said, `We know you are innocent, but we want information from you. You know these people.` "

As the prisons filled up and the frequency of rioting and escapes increased, U.S. troops turned to force to keep order, particularly at Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper. Sanchez, the commanding general, dispatched Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder to study the situation.

In a Nov. 5 report, Ryder recommended that military police and military intelligence should operate independently, as Army regulations require. He also said "security detainees," the term for those alleged to pose a threat to U.S. forces, should be put under the watch of one brigade.

But two weeks later, Abu Ghraib`s military police units were placed under the military intelligence command. Taguba suggested in the report that Miller favored the move by recommending that "the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the detainees."

In a news conference here Saturday, Miller said, "There was no recommendation ever by this team -- the team that I had here in August and September -- that recommended that the MPs become actively involved in interrogation, in the interrogation booth."

The prison system`s new "Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy," issued Oct. 12, came in the wake of Miller`s recommendations. According to the Taguba report, the "numerous photos and videos portraying detainee abuse by Military Police personnel" were dated soon after the policy was adopted, sometime between October and December.

As the new policies took hold, the Abu Ghraib compound was suffering the effects of the war outside its walls.

"We were being fired on at Abu Ghraib every single night, with mortars, RPGs and small-arms fire," Karpinski said. "

U.S. military commanders changed tactics again in an attempt to corral the widening insurgency. In late November, U.S. forces began using 2,000-pound bombs and precision-guided missiles for the first time since the war ended.

U.S. officers described the effort as an attempt to intimidate the guerrillas, and it marked a shift back to large-scale tactics Sanchez had suspended two months earlier. U.S. generals said the large strikes were made possible by a major improvement in their ability to wage war: better intelligence.

Since then, uprisings in the Shiite south and the area north and west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle have inflamed much of the country. The evidence of abuse inside Abu Ghraib has shaken public opinion in Iraq to the point where it may be more difficult than ever to secure cooperation against the insurgency. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, acknowledged last week that winning over Iraqis before the planned handover of some sovereign powers next month had been made considerably harder by the photos.

Last week, denunciations and threats rang out from mosques across Iraq during Friday prayers. Powerful clerics ridiculed the U.S. occupation authority`s central justification for the war -- that it would bring justice to a country suffering under dictatorship -- and warned or reprisals if those who carried out the torture were not tried by an independent court.

"Saddam didn`t claim that he was for freedom and equality," Moqtada Sadr, the rebellious Shiite cleric now commanding a thousands-strong anti-U.S. militia, told hundreds of worshippers in the southern city of Kufa. "I call for humanitarian organizations to change this prison into a humanitarian establishment, and to try the criminals in honest courts as soon as possible. Otherwise, we`ll do the necessary actions in ways that you don`t expect."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company


Secret World of U.S. Interrogation
Long History of Tactics in Overseas Prisons Is Coming to Light

By Dana Priest and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A01

Last of three articles

In Afghanistan, the CIA`s secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as "The Pit," named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say U.S. government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safekeeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.

"The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands," said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners.

The largely hidden array includes three systems that only rarely overlap: the Pentagon-run network of prisons, jails and holding facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere; small and secret CIA-run facilities where top al Qaeda and other figures are kept; and interrogation rooms of foreign intelligence services -- some with documented records of torture -- to which the U.S. government delivers or "renders" mid- or low-level terrorism suspects for questioning.

All told, more than 9,000 people are held by U.S. authorities overseas, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts, the vast majority under military control. The detainees have no conventional legal rights: no access to a lawyer; no chance for an impartial hearing; and, at least in the case of prisoners held in cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib, no apparent guarantee of humane treatment accorded prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or civilians in U.S. jails.

Although some of those held by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have had visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the CIA`s detainees have, in effect, disappeared, according to interviews with former and current national security officials and to the Army`s report of abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The CIA`s "ghost detainees," as they were called by members of the 800th MP Brigade, were routinely held by the soldier-guards at Abu Ghraib "without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention," the report says. These phantom captives were "moved around within the facility to hide them" from Red Cross teams, a tactic that was "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."

CIA employees are under investigation by the Justice Department and the CIA inspector general`s office in connection with the death of three captives in the past six months, two who died while under interrogation in Iraq, and a third who was being questioned by a CIA contract interrogator in Afghanistan. A CIA spokesman said the hiding of detainees was inappropriate. He declined to comment further.

None of the arrangements that permit U.S. personnel to kidnap, transport, interrogate and hold foreigners are ad hoc or unauthorized, including the so-called renditions. "People tend to regard it as an extra-judicial kidnapping; it`s not," former CIA officer Peter Probst said. "There is a long history of this. It has been done for decades. It`s absolutely legal."

In fact, every aspect of this new universe -- including maintenance of covert airlines to fly prisoners from place to place, interrogation rules and the legal justification for holding foreigners without due process afforded most U.S. citizens -- has been developed by military or CIA lawyers, vetted by Justice Department`s office of legal counsel and, depending on the particular issue, approved by White House general counsel`s office or the president himself.

In some cases, such as determining whether a U.S. citizen should be designated an enemy combatant who can be held without charges, the president makes the final decision, said Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president, in a Feb. 24 speech to the American Bar Association`s Standing Committee on Law and National Security.

Critics of this kind of detention and treatment, Gonzales said, "assumed that there was little or no analysis -- legal or otherwise -- behind the decision to detain a particular person as enemy combatant."

On the contrary, the administration has applied the law of war, he said. "Under these rules, captured enemy combatants, whether soldiers or saboteurs, may be detained for the duration of hostilities."

Because most of the directives and guidelines on these issues are classified, former and current military and intelligence officials who described them to The Washington Post would do so only on the condition that they not be identified.

Along with other CIA and military efforts to disrupt terrorist plots and break up al Qaeda`s financial networks, administration officials argue that the interrogations are a key component of their global counterterrorism strategy and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. As the CIA`s deputy director, John McLaughlin, recently told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks: "The country, with all its capabilities, is now much more orchestrated into an offensive mix that is relentless."
Military Jails and Prisons

Abu Ghraib -- where photographs were taken that have enraged the Arab world and rocked U.S. political and military leadership -- held 6,000 to 7,000 detainees at the time of the documented abuse. Today, it and other sites in Iraq hold more than 8,000 prisoners, U.S. and coalition officials said. They range from those believed to have played key roles in the insurgency to some who are held on suspicion of petty crimes.

Until the current scandal cast some hazy light, little has been publicly known about the Iraq detention sites, their locations and who was being held there. That has been a source of continuing frustration for international monitoring groups such as New York-based Human Rights Watch, which has repeatedly sought to visit the facilities. Even the military`s investigative report on abuses at Abu Ghraib remains classified, despite having become public through leaks.

Far better known has been the Defense Department`s facility at Guantanamo Bay. The open-air camps there house about 600 detainees, flown in from around the world over the past two years. Secrecy there remains tight, with detainees and most of the facilities off-limits to visitors.

The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether detainees held there, whom the Pentagon has declared "enemy combatants" in the war against terrorism, should have access to U.S. courts.

Last week, the U.S. military acknowledged that two Guantanamo Bay guards had been disciplined in connection with use of excessive force against detainees. And U.S. defense officials confirmed the existence of a list of approved interrogation techniques, dating to April 2003, that included reversing sleep patterns, exposing prisoners to hot and cold, and "sensory assault," including use of bright lights and loud music.

The treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan has received less public attention.

The U.S. military holds 300 or so people at Bagram, north of the capital of Kabul, and in Kandahar, Jalalabad and Asadabad. Human Rights Watch estimates that at least 700 people had been released from those sites, most of them held a few weeks or less. Special Forces units also have holding centers at their firebases, including at Gardez and Khost.

In December 2002, two Afghans died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. The U.S. military classified both as homicides. Another Afghan died in June 2003 at a detention site near Asadabad.

"Afghans detained at Bagram airbase in 2002 have described being held in detention for weeks, continuously shackled, intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time, and forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods," said a report in March by Human Rights Watch. "Some say they were kicked and beaten when arrested, or later as part of efforts to keep them awake. Some say they were doused with freezing water in the winter."
CIA Detention

Before the U.S. military was imprisoning and interrogating people in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA was scooping up suspected al Qaeda leaders in such far-off places as Pakistan, Yemen and Sudan. Today, the CIA probably holds two to three dozen captives around the world, according to knowledgeable current and former officials. Among them are al Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh in Pakistan and Abu Zubaida. The CIA is also in charge of interrogating Saddam Hussein, who is believed to be in Baghdad.

The location of CIA interrogation centers is so sensitive that even the four leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who are briefed on all covert operations, do not know them, congressional sources said. These members are given periodic reports about the captives, but several members said they do not receive information about conditions under which prisoners are held, and members have not insisted on this information. The CIA has told Congress that it does not engage in torture as a tactic of interrogation.

"There`s a black hole on certain information such as location, condition under which they are held," said one congressional official who asked not to be identified. "They are told it`s too sensitive."

In Afghanistan, the CIA used to conduct some interrogations in a cluster of metal shipping containers at Bagram air base protected by three layers of concertina wire. It is unclear whether that center is still open, but the CIA`s main interrogation center now appears to be in Kabul, at a location nicknamed "The Pit" by agency and Special Forces operators.

"Prisoner abuse is nothing new," said one military officer who has been working closely with CIA interrogators in Afghanistan. A dozen former and current national security officials interviewed by The Washington Post in 2002, including several who had witnessed interrogations, defended the use of stressful interrogation tactics and the use of violence against detainees as just and necessary.

The CIA general counsel`s office developed a new set of interrogation rules of engagement after the Sept. 11 attacks. It was vetted by the Justice Department and approved by the National Security Council`s general counsel, according to U.S. intelligence officials and other U.S. officials familiar with the process. "There are very specific guidelines that are thoroughly vetted," said one U.S. official who helps oversee the process. "Everyone is on board. It`s legal."

The rules call for field operators to seek approval from Washington to use "enhanced measures" -- methods that could cause temporary physical or mental pain.

U.S. intelligence officials say the CIA, contrary to the glamorized view from movies and novels, had no real interrogation specialists on hand to deal with the number of valuable suspects it captured after Sept. 11. The agency relied on analysts, psychologists and profilers. "Two and a half years later," one CIA veteran said, "we have put together a very professional, controlled, deliberate and legally rationalized approach to dealing with the Abu Zubaidas of the world."

U.S. intelligence officials say their strongest suit is not harsh interrogation techniques, but time and patience.
`Renditions`

Much larger than the group of prisoners held by the CIA are those who have been captured and transported around the world by the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government for interrogation by foreign intelligence services. This transnational transfer of people is a key tactic in U.S. counterterrorism operations on five continents, one that often raises the ire of foreign publics when individual cases come to light.

For example, on Jan. 17, 2002, a few hours before Bosnia`s Human Rights Chamber was to order the release of five Algerians and a Yemeni for lack of evidence, Bosnian police handed them over to U.S. authorities, who flew them to Guantanamo Bay.

The Bosnian government, faced with public outcry, said it would compensate the families of the men, who were suspected of making threats to the U.S. and British embassies in Bosnia.

The same month, in Indonesia, Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, suspected of helping Richard C. Reid, the Briton charged with trying to detonate explosives in his shoe on an American Airlines flight, was detained by Indonesian intelligence agents based on information the CIA provided them. On Jan. 11, without a court hearing or a lawyer, he was hustled aboard an unmarked U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet parked at a military airport in Jakarta and flown to Egypt.

It was no coincidence Madni ended up in Egypt. Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are well-known destinations for suspected terrorists.

"A lot of people they [the U.S.] are taking to Jordan, third-country nationals," a senior Saudi official said. "They can do anything they want with them, and the U.S. can say, `We don`t have them.` "

In the past year, an unusual country joined that list of destinations: Syria.

Last year U.S. immigration authorities, with the approval of then-acting Attorney General Larry Thompson, authorized the expedited removal of Maher Arar to Syria, a country the U.S. government has long condemned as a chronic human rights abuser. Maher, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was detained at JFK International Airport in New York as he was transferring to the final leg of his flight home to Canada.

U.S. authorities say Arar has links to al Qaeda. Not wanting to return him to Canada for fear he would not be adequately followed, immigration officials took him, in chains and shackles, to a New Jersey airfield, where he was "placed on a small private jet, and flown to Washington D.C.," according to a lawsuit filed recently against the U.S. government. He was flown to Jordan, interrogated and beaten by Jordanian authorities who then turned him over to Syria, according to the lawsuit.

Arar said that for the 10 months he was in prison, he was beaten, tortured and kept in a shallow grave. After much pressure from the Canadian government and human rights activists, he was freed and has returned to Canada.

CIA Director George J. Tenet, testifying earlier this year before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, said the agency participated in more than 70 renditions in the years before the attacks. In 1999 and 2000 alone, congressional testimony shows, the CIA and FBI participated in two dozen renditions.

Christopher Kojm, a former State Department intelligence official and a staff member of the commission, explained the rendition procedure at a recent hearing: "If a terrorist suspect is outside of the United States, the CIA helps to catch and send him to the United States or a third country," he testified. "Though the FBI is often part of the process, the CIA is usually the main player, building and defining the relationships with the foreign government intelligence agencies and internal security services."

The Saudis currently are detaining and interrogating about 800 terrorism suspects, said a senior Saudi official. Their fate is largely controlled by Saudi-based joint intelligence task forces, whose members include officers from the CIA, FBI and other U.S. law enforcement agencies.

The Saudi official said his country does not participate in renditions and today holds no more than one or two people at the request of the United States. Yet much can hinge on terminology.

In some interrogations, for example, specialists from the United States and Saudi Arabia develop questions and an interrogation strategy before questioning begins, according to one person knowledgeable about the process. During interrogation, U.S. task force members watch through a two-way mirror, he said.

"Technically, the questioning is done by a Saudi citizen. But, for all practical purposes, it is done live," he said. The United States and Saudis "are not `cooperating` anymore; we`re doing it together."

He said the CIA sometimes prefers Saudi interrogation sites and other places in the Arab world because their interrogators speak a detainee`s language and can exploit his religion and customs.

"As hard as it is to believe, you can`t physically abuse prisoners in Saudi Arabia," the Saudi official said. "You can`t beat them; you can`t electrocute them."

Instead, he said, the Saudis bring radical imams to the sessions to build a rapport with detainees, who are later passed on to more moderate imams. Working in tandem with relatives of the detainees, the clerics try to convince the subjects over days or weeks that terrorism violates tenets of the Koran and could bar them from heaven.

"According to our guys, almost all of them turn," the Saudi official said. "It`s like deprogramming them. There is absolutely no need to put them through stress. It`s more of a therapy."

The Saudis don`t want or need to be directed by American intelligence specialists, who have difficulty understanding Arab culture and tribal relations, he said. "We know where they grew up," he said of the detainees. "We know their families. We know the furniture in their home."

Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Across America, War Means Jobs
Defense Spending Pumps New Life Into Small or Dying Towns

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A01

FAIRFIELD, Ohio -- Along a quiet strip of gray corrugated metal buildings, across the street from a La-Z-Boy distribution center, Gary Allen and his ever-expanding crew are running one of the most urgent operations of the Iraq war.

Around the clock, seven days a week, O`Gara Hess & Eisenhardt churns out heavily armored Humvees, designed for the guerrilla combat and roadside bombs bedeviling U.S. troops. Last August, a back-lot warehouse held excess inventory. Now, after a $1.5 million investment, 30 new workers on two shifts produce 500 sets of three-inch-thick bulletproof glass a week. As many as 10,000 sets are on back order.

In November, the company snapped up a 40,000-square-foot building down the road, moved its entire commercial armoring operation there and in three days, with an additional $1.5 million, it doubled the Humvee operation.

In six months, employment has more than tripled, to over 600, and 250 more people in this part of southwestern Ohio work as direct suppliers. Production manager Ronnie Carson figured he interviews 15 job applicants every day and hires 10 to 12 of them. Just yesterday, the company`s parent corporation, Armor Holdings Inc., announced it received an additional $16.6 million from the Army to ramp up production yet again. The clocks setting the pace on the assembly line were reset, from one vehicle every hour and a half to one every hour and 15 minutes.

"For us, the economy is great," said Allen, senior vice president and general manager of Armor Holdings Inc.`s Mobile Security Division. "It`s a sad situation, but . . . " His voice trailed off, then he added, "I don`t think anyone here is thinking about it that way."

In this corner of a critical presidential-election battleground state, the economy is surging with the urgency of a boom. But it wasn`t President Bush`s tax cuts, Federal Reserve interest rate policies or even a general economic turnaround that did the trick. It was war.

The frenetic activity is repeated all over the country. New kilns in California bake ceramic body-armor plates. Apparel plants in Arkansas, Alabama, Florida and Puerto Rico struggle to keep up with uniform orders. Once-idle textile mills in South Carolina spin rugged camouflage fabric. Army depots operate 24/7 to repair and rebuild the wreckage of war in time to ship it back with the next troop deployment.

In the first three months of this year, defense work accounted for nearly 16 percent of the nation`s economic growth, according to the Commerce Department. Military spending leaped 15.1 percent to an annualized rate of $537.4 billion, up from $463.3 billion in the comparable period of 2003, when Bush declared major combat operations in Iraq over.

"That`s pretty good, considering it`s only 3 to 4 percent of the economy," said Joseph Liro, an economist at the New Jersey-based research firm Stone & McCarthy. "For one quarter, that`s a pretty big number."

It is impossible to know how many of the 708,000 jobs created in the past three months are defense-related, since the Labor Department does not track defense contractor employment. But anecdotal evidence suggests the contribution is significant.

The flagging textile and apparel industry, which lost 50,000 jobs last year, gained 2,400 in April and is up 500 through the first four months of 2004, said Charles W. McMillion, president and chief economist of MBG Information Services. That is the first net job gain for the industry in the first four months of any year since 1990, the last year for which the Labor Department maintained statistics. Since civilian textile demand is satisfied largely through imports, "Buy American" military orders must be driving the increases, McMillion said.

In pockets of the country, the effect is magnified greatly, as in picturesque St. Marys, Ohio, 90 miles north of here, where a 65-year-old red-brick Goodyear plant bustles around the clock, building the tracks for the Army`s Bradley Fighting Vehicles, supplies of which have been dangerously depleted. Goodyear officials refused to open the plant for a visit or even to comment on operations and employment there. Workers also would speak about the factory only on condition of anonymity.

But over beers at the windowless Wayne Street Bar and Grill, just beyond the plant gate, a Goodyear manager confided that at around 650, employment is up, overtime is up and "it`s humming pretty good, I`ll tell you." After a terrible lull, traffic is picking up at the bar as well, said bartender and waitress Debra Temple.

"The economy is always helped by war. That`s just a fact," said Gary Gayer, an appliance salesman in St. Marys.

There are economic downsides. In inflation-adjusted terms, the war`s cost will surpass the United States` $199 billion share of World War I sometime next year. Coming on top of three major tax cuts, that spending will drive the federal budget deficit to more than $400 billion this year. That borrowing will eventually have to be repaid in higher taxes or reduced government services and benefits.

Economists have long argued that war is an inefficient use of government revenue. A dollar spent on a highway not only employs workers but also creates a lasting, broadly shared benefit for the economy. A dollar spent on military equipment is soon lost to enemy attack or the rapid wear of war. If it bought a bomb or bullet, it simply explodes.

The families of thousands of National Guard members and reservists have been dealt severe financial blows by the extended deployments of breadwinners.

"They`ve taken husbands and wives and sons and daughters over there, and we`re working and struggling to make up for it," said Temple, noting that a new contingent of reservists from the St. Marys area will soon ship out. "Somebody`s got to help these people."

Then there`s the constant worry that all this work will disappear as quickly as it materialized. A machinist at the Goodyear plant, whose son drives an Army truck in the volatile area west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle, fretted that Goodyear has put too many eggs in the military basket.

"We`re only a pawn. You know that. Everybody in this community hopes like hell that Goodyear keeps this plant here. If the military drops out, we could be done. It`s a bad deal," he said.

But for now, it`s a good deal for thousands of workers. The Red River Army Depot, near Texarkana, Tex., has hired 400 people -- 27 percent of its current workforce -- in the past four months to repair and rebuild wheeled vehicles laid low by the war, said Jimmy Shull, the depot`s chief of staff. Sixty new security guards will be coming to work this month.

Columbia Sewing Co., in nearby Magnolia, Ark., lost its main customer in 2001, when Bass Pro Shops took its business to China, said Brian Smith, the company`s vice president. Columbia nearly closed. Then came the war, and the firm`s first military contract, to sew battle-dress trousers and woodland camouflage coats. Employment is up 30 percent over last year.

"We needed business, they needed small businesses and it fell in just right," Smith said. "If it wasn`t for [Defense Department] contracting, we would not be here, and 200 people would be out of a job."

American Apparel Inc. of Selma, Ala., the largest military uniform supplier, is sewing 50,000 uniforms a week, said Jim Hodo, the company`s chief operating officer. To keep up with demand, the firm invested more than $1 million to open two new plants in the impoverished Alabama towns of Opp and Roanoke, and hired 300 workers; 150 more could be added soon.

"We had so many minorities out of work," said Roanoke Mayor Betty Slay Ziglar. "These people have grown up sewing in textile plants, and there are so few now. They were desperate to have jobs, and it`s going to expand again. I am just so grateful."

For the South Carolina textile mills supplying the fabric, the impact may have been even more dramatic, Hodo said.

"They were sitting down there, staring at the empty walls, wondering what was next," he said of his suppliers, Delta Mills Marketing Co. and Milliken & Co. "It`s been a godsend to them."

At Goodwill Industries of South Florida, which trains and employs severely disabled people, orders for camouflage trousers have jumped 70 percent in the past year, said Dennis Pastrana, the organization`s president and chief executive. Within a three-mile radius of the plant, per-capita income averages a mere $10,590 a year, but nearly 600 workers now have sewing jobs, more than double Goodwill`s prewar level.

There`s no sign that it will end soon. Hodo said military officials assured him the buildup will last at least another year, and Allen at O`Gara Hess said the same. The Humvee plant turned out 600 vehicles in 2002, 860 last year, and on Thursday the last Humvee on the assembly line sported a tag identifying it as the 890th vehicle so far this year. To get to one vehicle every 51 minutes, as the Army wants, O`Gara Hess will have to hire an additional 100 workers by July.

"At the rate I`m at, all these people will be here through 2006," Allen said.

As his shift neared its end, Don Meier, a 24-year-old still sporting an Army-issue crew cut and an Operation Iraqi Freedom T-shirt, took a break from installing heating and air-conditioning equipment into battle-ready vehicles he would have loved to have had a year ago.

Back then, he was a mechanic with the Army Reserve`s 478th Engineering Battalion, ducking mortar rounds and pulling up the rear as troops pushed toward Baghdad. He recalled watching Pvt. Jessica Lynch and her crew set off on their ill-fated supply mission last spring. He and his comrades were driving basic Humvees that his plant now loads with 3,000 pounds of glass, steel and ceramics to protect the soldiers who followed him to Iraq.

When Meier returned home -- on July 26, 2003, he said with relish -- he first found work stocking shelves at an AutoZone store. Then a friend told him that O`Gara Hess was hiring at $11 an hour, with full benefits. He might get to meet acting Army secretary Les Brownlee or Gen. Paul J. Kern, commander of the Army Materiel Command, on their frequent plant visits.

"It`s a regular job to pay my bills with," Meier said, "but at the same time, I know if you get one of these vehicles, you`re well off."

Bo Gilmore, another former military man, said: "To be able to do something like this, protecting our troops, that`s invaluable."

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Rules of the System



Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A18

ON JUNE 27 President Bush pledged in a speech that the United States would not use torture on detainees in the war on terrorism. The same day, the Defense Department`s general counsel released a letter specifying that "all interrogations, wherever they may occur," would not violate prohibitions in the U.S. Constitution against cruel and unusual punishment. It turns out those assurances were false. Two months earlier, The Post reported Sunday, the Pentagon had approved interrogation techniques for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison that allowed the disruption of sleep patterns and exposure to heat, cold and "sensory assault." Officials told reporter Dana Priest that similar procedures had been approved for "high value" detainees in Iraq. Such abuse is impermissible under the Constitution; as recently as 2002 the Supreme Court ruled that similar treatment of an Alabama prisoner was an "obvious" violation of the Eighth Amendment. Such practices also violate the Geneva Conventions, which the Bush administration says it is following in Iraq and applying to other detainees elsewhere.

The crimes at the Abu Ghraib prison grew out of this improper system of interrogation. It is a regimen the administration has never fully disclosed, and about which it has misled Congress and the public through statements such as those of last June. Despite the incalculable damage caused by Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration persists in defending the system and in justifying its continued use, both at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq. At congressional hearings last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior military commanders repeatedly tried to distinguish what they characterized as isolated acts by a handful of individuals at Abu Ghraib from the general procedures under which physical and mental harassment is used to soften up prisoners and under which prison guards are ordered to "set the conditions" for intelligence interrogators. They pretended there was no connection between the two.

Yet a growing body of evidence shows that the connection is integral. The commander who oversaw the implementation of the interrogation procedures at Guantanamo Bay, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, visited Abu Ghraib in September and recommended that at least one part of what he calls the Guantanamo Bay "model" be applied there: the subordination of prison guards to the intelligence interrogators trying to extract information. There is considerable evidence that Abu Ghraib prison guards abused prisoners on the instruction of interrogators. The abuses they committed were, to a certain extent, an extreme and undisciplined version of practices that the Pentagon has officially condoned. Mr. Miller is now in charge of Abu Ghraib; he recently acknowledged that techniques such as hooding, sleep deprivation and other "very aggressive" techniques had been used there. He did not say the practices would be stopped -- only that they would need specific approval in the future.

Administration officials have justified the use of aggressive tactics in interrogations by saying that they are used on al Qaeda terrorists and others who can be legitimately deemed "unlawful combatants" under the Geneva Conventions and that they are needed to extract intelligence essential to preventing terrorist attacks. It may or may not be true that such techniques, when practiced under close supervision by highly trained interrogators, are effective. The administration has offered no evidence that they are, and many outside experts believe otherwise.

But the administration hasn`t limited its system to Guantanamo Bay or to senior al Qaeda detainees. It has applied the practices loosely across a network of detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and it has trusted its implementation to civilian contractors and reservists. The result has been outrages that have done far more damage to the United States than any intelligence collection could justify.

Mr. Bush traveled across the Potomac yesterday to congratulate Mr. Rumsfeld for the "superb job" he is doing as defense secretary. The president again characterized the abuses as the aberrations of a "small number" of servicemen and women. These are not the right responses to one of this nation`s worst disgraces. Instead, the administration should reform the system so that it meets the guarantees that Mr. Bush falsely offered last June.

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Getting Out of a Quagmire

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A19

It`s not clear anymore that there is a plausible way to turn the Bush administration`s disastrous policy in Iraq into anything that would look remotely like success.

That`s why the conventional wisdom among policymakers has reached a tipping point over the past month. Until recently, the widely accepted view was that the United States would have to "see through" the commitment President Bush made. Now, thoughtful people -- including moderates, conservatives and foreign policy realists -- are discussing how to get the United States out of Iraq sooner rather than later, at the lowest possible cost to our own standing in the world and to Iraqis.

This view is being taken seriously because of the incoherence of the administration`s approach and its arrogance in dealing with its critics. If you think that word "arrogance" is too strong, consider the statement Vice President Cheney issued through a spokesman over the weekend: that "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had," and that "people ought to get off his case and let him do his job."

Let`s see. A couple of congressional committees get roughly a half-day each to ask Rumsfeld about one the most appalling moral disasters in our military`s history, at the Abu Ghraib prison, and now they should shut up. Cheney knows Rumsfeld is the best. That should be enough.

This was too much for Sen. Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican from South Carolina. Last week`s Senate hearing, Graham said Sunday on NBC`s "Meet the Press," was not about "being on Secretary Rumsfeld`s back. . . . The Congress has an independent duty to find out what happened in that prison. It affects us all."

We are also affected by the fact that nearly every problem we face in Iraq is a problem the administration was warned about before it started the war. But an all-knowing administration felt no need to listen.

How many voices were raised suggesting the White House was being too optimistic about the way American troops might be received in the long run? Even if we were greeted as "liberators," in Cheney`s famous phrase, many Iraqis who would be happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein might soon want to be rid of us as well.

Given the uncertainties, critics said that we needed a much bigger force than we were sending to restore order and prevent an insurgency from taking root. Gen. Eric Shinseki made this point before the war started. He was swatted aside and told to get off the administration`s case.

Knocking over Hussein was always going to be easier than nation-building, a practice the administration was against until it started engaging in it. To pull it off, the administration might have used a little more help from allies and a little more of the legitimacy that U.N. endorsement could have conferred. The administration told those who offered this view to get off its case and go munch freedom fries with some Old Europeans.

Voters will ask now, and historians will ask later: Why did this administration take such an enormous gamble with apparently so little planning against what could go wrong? Why did it rush into war -- a war whose date it had complete freedom to choose -- without working through the potential problems that senators such as Joe Biden and Richard Lugar, both war supporters, kept raising? I guess when you have the best secretary of defense the United States ever had, you don`t sweat the details.

The administration`s supporters like to ask its critics: So what would you do? It`s only a partly fair question because the critics have already said how many things they would have done differently. Belatedly, the administration is finally following their advice to find more allies and gain more legitimacy. But the administration`s failures will hardly inspire a lot of new coalition partners to join in.

The more relevant question between now and the election is to Bush and his administration: How will they turn this mess into either success or something short of failure? A president asking voters to grant him four more years owes them evidence that the era of recklessness and overconfidence is over.

Robert Kagan and William Kristol, two of the war`s strongest supporters, write in the current issue of the conservative Weekly Standard that "if the administration does not take dramatic action now, it may be unable to avoid failure." If Kagan and Kristol are that worried, the rest of us should be petrified. Most likely, Cheney will just tell Kagan and Kristol to get off Bush`s case.

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No Flinching From the Facts

By George F. Will

Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A19

Listen to the language. It is always a leading indicator of moral confusion.

The lawyer for a soldier charged in the Iraq prison abuse investigation was explaining a photograph. It showed some Americans standing over a pile of naked Iraqis: "Intelligence officers came into the facility, pulled two men out of their cells, took them away, brought them back with a third prisoner, ordered the MPs to undress all of them, and then started interrogating them, and had them . . . in this position where they`re all embracing each other."

"Embracing."

The lawyer`s client probably will offer -- this should deepen Americans` queasiness -- the Nuremberg defense: I was only obeying orders. If the abuse was the result of orders -- or of the absence of them -- fault must extend up the chain of command.

So, forgive the lawyer`s language. But note what it betokens: a flinching from facts. Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.

And some people will be corrupted by dominating. That is why the leaders of empires must be watchful. Very watchful. Donald Rumsfeld is clearly shattered by the corruption he tardily comprehended. Testifying to Congress last week, he seemed saturated with a sadness that bespeaks his deep decency and his horror at the vast injury done to the nation by elements of the department he administers. He knows that he failed the president. And he knows that his extraordinary record of government service -- few public careers, including presidential ones, can match Rumsfeld`s -- has been tarnished.

How should he, and we, think about what comes next? Consider an axiom, a principle, two questions and then a second axiom.

The first axiom is: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. Leave aside the question of who or what failed before Sept. 11, 2001. But who lost his or her job because the president`s 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud -- the story of Iraq`s attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging preemptive war -- weapons of mass destruction -- was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today`s insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.

The principle is: The response by the nation`s government must express horror, shame and contrition proportional to the evil done to others, and the harm done to the nation, by agents of the government.

Americans are almost certainly going to die in violence made worse in Iraq, and not only there, by the substantial aid some Americans, in their torture of Iraqi prisoners, have given to our enemies in this war. And by the appallingly dilatory response to the certain torture and probable murder committed in that prison.

The nation`s response must, of course, include swift and public prosecutions. And the destruction of that prison. And punctilious conformity to legal obligations -- and, now, to some optional procedures -- concerning persons in American custody. But this is not enough.

One question is: Are the nation`s efforts in the deepening global war -- the world is more menacing than it was a year ago -- helped or hindered by Rumsfeld`s continuation as the appointed American most conspicuously identified with the conduct of the war? This is not a simple call. But being experienced, he will know how to make the call. Being honorable, he will so do.

He knows his Macbeth and will recognize the framing of the second question: Were he to resign, would discerning people say that nothing in his public life became him like the leaving of it?

This nation has always needed an ethic about the resignation of public officials. Such an ethic cannot be codified. It must grow in controlling power from precedent to precedent, as an unwritten common law, distilled from the behavior of uncommonly honorable men and women who understand the stakes. A nation, especially one doing the business of empire, needs high officials to be highly attentive to what is done in their departments -- attentive far down the chain of command, as though their very jobs depended on it.

Finally, the second axiom. It is from Charles de Gaulle: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

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From AxisofLogic.com

Critical Analysis
The Human Hell and the Demons of War: Think Never Again? Try Again and Again.
By Manuel Valenzuela, Contributing Editor
May 11, 2004, 00:22


Branch Warfare and the Evolution of Aggression



The pages of history, those monuments to humankind�s brief rule over the planet, are replete with violence, death and destruction. Indeed, it can be argued successfully that war, genocide, ethnic cleansing and human violence against each other have defined humanity�s tumultuous existence on Earth. We are inseparable from death and destruction, suffering and violence, having become creatures addicted to the malice inherent in human evil. Turning the pages of the little we know of our own past, one thing becomes quite apparent: Throughout time, in all corners of the world, mankind has lived side by side with war, destruction and death. We have defined our existence through the self-inflicted violence we unleash upon ourselves. What is it about the human condition that espouses in us a propensity to grossly annihilate ourselves, inflicting horrendous misery onto our kind and never learning from the devastation unleashed by us unto us?



Violence and humanity were born conjoined twins out of the thick canopy of our ancestral home in the Eastern African jungles. Even in the ape-like appearance and behavior of our primate selves could our violent genes be discerned. Competition forced upon us the will to survive through the defeat of competitor groups. Wars waged high in the canopy became the first symptoms of our disease. Group versus group, competitor versus competitor, the violence ingrained in us manifested itself in the primitive battles and hollowed screams of our long-gone ancestors.



Branch to branch, foot by foot, with nail and teeth the prelude to modern warfare was born. This reality can today be seen in modern mammals of today. In time we fell off our comfortable branches high above the canopy, now bipedal and stepping forward in evolutionary exigencies, ready to take the next leap forward. As we made the savannah our new ecosystem competition once more reared its ugly head. New predators arose, new rivalries emerged. Survival of the fittest never seemed so important. Those born aggressive survived, those less fortunate perished.



Struggling over territory we fought interlopers; competing for finite resources we waged battles. Our drive to procreate pitted male versus male in animalistic bouts of combat that killed, wounded or banished. The winner of such fights controlled fertile females, claiming new forested territory as a result, thus becoming the new procreator of genetic bonds, killing off genetic competitor�s offspring if he had to. Survival of the fittest ensured that only our most able ancestors succeeded and passed on their seed to future generations.



Our story mirrors that of so many diverse mammals. We are similar to them in so many ways, living, breathing and surviving in nature much the same as they have for hundreds of thousands of years. Species have come and gone, yet mammals we all remain, birthing, eating, parenting, sleeping, defending, surviving, thriving and dying in very similar ways. Behaviors and social structures, hierarchy and competition are, if studied carefully, similar in many species, including our own. We were once part of the animal world as much as the animal world was once part of us.



In a world of survival that depended on an ability to defend the group and protect territory from alien invaders our primate ancestors had to evolve violence. Only those who developed the greatest propensity to violence and those who possessed the best skills in combat could be assured of survival. Thus, it was these skills and propensities that got passed down generation to generation, eventually becoming attached to our evolving makeup. Survival of the fittest demanded that violence become part of the human condition, a necessary and adaptable behavior needed to survive and thrive. Through eons and generations of evolutions our bodies changed and minds grew, yet the struggle for survival heeded the need to defend, kill, maim and protect. Aggression thus became a tool necessary for continued existence. To fail in this genetic battle was to declare defeat and almost certain death. Left without genetic progeny, those lacking violent arsenals disappeared into the realm of the forgotten, made extinct by the insufficient predisposition toward aggressiveness.



To fight or fail, to battle and survive became, in our early days full of competition for sexual mates, territory and finite resources, the primitive engenderer of the violence that befalls humanity today, just as it has throughout history. To develop aggressiveness, propensity to violence and skill in combat assured our ancestors lived another day. To fail in battle meant almost certain extinction and genetic banishment. It was those who survived and those who are today our most direct predecessors that were the most violent, the most lethal and most adept in aggression whose genes we eventually inherited.



The greatest symptom of our disease today was spawned in the wars of survival emanating in the now forgotten days of yesteryear. The virus that causes so much death, destruction and misery today was forged before we knew what we would eventually become. Out of necessity, out of adaptability and based on the laws of nature humankind arose from the jungles and the savannah bipedal and intelligent, predisposed of violence and competition. The laws meant for the animal world mutated in form and substance with our ever-evolving brains, creating the most lethal, self-destructive and violent mammal the world has ever spawned.





Conditioned Minds, Hidden Realities





Our mistake is not wanting to see who and what we truly are. It is living in the delusion of our grandeur and the imposition of our omnipotence. It is neglecting to acknowledge the reality of our origins and the truth behind our behaviors. It is living in the myth that we are something we are not. Thinking ourselves placed on this planet through the hands of our metaphysical idol, we believe in the façade of the magnificence of our civilization and the perfection of our existence.



Failing to erase the delusion of our god-appointed reign over the planet or the deity-inspired anointment over all living creatures we blindly devour anything in our path, destroying the knowledge of our being by the evisceration of our home. Thinking ourselves a completely different entity than the mammal world we belong to, we refuse to realize that from our cousins our behaviors arise. All mammals derive from a common ancestor, a rat like creature that evolution transformed to the plethora of diversity our species is slowly making extinct. It is only natural, then, that we share many of the same traits and behaviors as our blood relatives. As an example, we share over 98 percent of the same genes as a chimpanzee, while we share over 90 percent of the same genetic makeup as a common mouse.



To study the animal world is to in many ways delve into the far and not so far reaches of human behavior, peering through the unobstructed lens creatures sharing many of our traits comprise. To study the behavior of our closest relatives is to dive into the deepest wells of human evolution and seeing who and what we really are. By understanding that which we fail to escape but refuse to acknowledge better humans can we all be made to be.



We fail to understand where we come from, what we once were and how evolution works. Thinking ourselves immune to the same laws of nature encapsulating the rest of the animal world we are in essence abandoning an enormous chunk of information that can allow us to better understand the human condition. We do not comprehend that evolution works in eons, not decades, that behaviors and genetic mutations transcend generations and that much of what we think of as human nature today was first brought to light hundreds of thousands of years ago, long before the arrival of civilization, technology and religion.



Our religions have made us believe in the exquisite creation of our civilization and in the chosen ascendancy of our almighty sovereignty. They have, through the perceived greatness of our species deriving from the heavens above, guided us on paths of human myths, not realities. Created before our minds could conceive of or understand our relationship with the animal and natural world, religion furthered beliefs at odds with our animal selves and our own behavioral and instinctual evolutions. It condemned the idea of us as animals inclined with many of the same characteristics as the mammalian world. Instead, its dogma demanded that we become gods onto ourselves, rulers of the planet, created by our deity in its same image.



Religion commanded that we look upon ourselves as separate entities from anything living on Earth. We were placed on the planet by powers higher than ourselves, created out of thin air, becoming human the moment we took our first breath. Evolution was non-existent, as was the idea that humankind was once part of the animal world. Our evolving physical and mental realities were never taken into consideration, nor the truth of the natural world that enveloped us.



Religion that was created thousands of years ago continues to control our lives today, with the same primitiveness of days gone by and with the same belief structure that fails to include the knowledge and intelligence we possess today. It is these mechanisms, along with our inability to escape the cloud of self-aggrandizing delusion hovering above us that continues to plague our advancement.



We live in the denial of our existence, believing us superior and chosen, unable, unwilling really, to accept that which our minds and egos refuse to acknowledge. For to degrade ourselves as having risen and indeed being part of the world of the beasts and mammals would be to strike down the fallacy of our own self-absorbed greatness that has led us down the wrong road for the last ten-thousand years. Conditioned for millennia to believe in our own hegemony and importance, we have been led astray, lost in our concrete jungle ecosystems, wandering aimlessly on our road to perdition, passing through the ruins of the knowledge that can save us but that we are destroying, even as we refuse to accept the reality of our creation and the truth behind our behaviors.



The animal world that birthed us have we abandoned, along with the vast knowledge it possesses. The keys to understanding ourselves lie in front of our eyes, in the world we refuse to acknowledge and only seem to want to destroy. Instead primitive we remain, thrust upon our violent selves by our refusal to evolve past the dogma of ancient times that was born to ignorance and fear. A perplexing quandary has arisen that denies the truth behind our ways and the understanding we desperately need to squash our demons. In light we see no evil and in darkness the truth remains.



The grand lie we live of our god-like divinity has for centuries clashed with the great truth of our animal-like reality. Except we are too delusional to see beyond the mirage of greatness we espouse onto our fragile egos. The great fallacy of our omnipotence is corrosively leading to the impotence of our continued existence.


Evolving Brain, Advancing Civilization, Destructive Violence





Spit out of the jungles by evolution after we landed on solid ground from the dense branches of our trees above, we began our great Diaspora, ever-slowly traversing savannah, desert, forest, tundra and oceans, reaching the far reaches of the globe. Yet within us we carried the virus that to this day continues to plague our existence.



Attaching itself to the human condition like a blood-sucking leach firmly entrenched on a mammalian body, our propensity towards violence has never left us. Like many species of animal, including our primate cousins, aggression and violence are deeply entrenched in our psyches. The real danger, however, lies in the evolving brain we have over the millennia allowed to develop.



What separates our aggression from the instinctual one residing in the animal kingdom is our capacity for intelligent, analytical and cognizant understanding. That is, our intelligent brain has the capability to mutate our many passions, emotions and aggressions into organized violence against our own kind, done methodically and purposefully, thereby superceding any instinct we might possess to the great detriment of our fellow man. The threat to our race is that unlike animals, whose aggression is minimal and based on instincts of survival that also serve the laws of nature, our propensity towards violence exerts pressure to endanger our own kind thanks to the complex mechanizations of the mind. Our deep thinking and highly intelligent brain unleashes violence not according to the laws of the jungle but for much more sinister purposes dealing with our highly volatile and misunderstood animal passions.



With feelings of anger, hatred, competition, revenge and jealousy so ingrained into our animalistic selves, it becomes extremely difficult to sequester them in our daily lives. These emotions, and the reactions inherent in such circumstances, are unique to the human race. It is our species that can act out violently against such passions; we are the only animal that can direct our passions in violent outrage, whether at one person, an entire army or an absolute nation. Our vast superiority in intelligence over the animal world, combined with the same behaviors and propensities as our mammal relatives, makes us much more dangerous animals than previously existed. It is our mind, combined with our animal passions, that allows our violent and aggressive selves to mutate to the kind of destruction, death and misery we are so capable of.



It is this Molotov cocktail of human intelligence and animal passions that makes of man that most dangerous of animals. Intelligence and passion, when mixed together, can create a volatile concoction that has been manifested in the often bloody history of man.



When combined with the collective brain of the many, such as in the case of tribes or nation-states, the propensity towards violence against competitors or rivals becomes even greater, escalating into full-fledged war. The same parameters that led to fighting among our primate ancestors and the animal world of today helps bring to the surface the human hell that has shackled us from our earliest beginnings and that today leads to untold levels of misery worldwide.



Competition for food, resources, sexual partners and territory condemn humans to releasing into the open the virus of violence attached to our psyches that lingers hibernating in the innermost closets of our minds, ready at any moment to makes its ominous entrance into our lives.



With our more intelligent mind, however, new non-nature parameters that open the scabs of violence have emerged in the last several hundred thousand years. As differences of religious dogma arose, eroded and mutated throughout tribal societies, so did the propensity for war based on differences of belief. Indeed, wars of religious inclinations have killed, maimed and destroyed more humans than any other excuse for warfare. The untold suffering caused by religious wars cannot be adequately described in words. The �my god is better than your god� syndrome, combined with the �my religion is the true and only religion� belief in which battles for the true religion continue to be fought, has condemned hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of human spirits to the nadir of nothingness.



Wars of religious proclivity are the greatest example of the malignant human hell that legitimizes the murder and killing of our fellow man. Added to the already prevalent munitions of aggression our animal selves are born with, this breed of violence, encompassing a small timeframe of our life on Earth, against differences of religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, beliefs, goals and vision of the world, has elevated the violence against one another to a scale the first humans to inhabit the world could never possibly envisage.



Conflict has defined human society from time immemorial. Our gravitation to violence has characterized our existence and our history. After leaving our cradle in Africa, from our earliest nomadic tribal predecessors to our most advanced societies today our fate has in large measure been determined as a result of warfare. Competition for land, homes, food, sexual partners and resources were once the sole reason for human combat. Today, added to those just mentioned we can include the much more sinister wars based on differences of religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, beliefs and goals. With the advancement of human civilization our primitiveness only grows. The introduction of new anthropological creations in human societal evolution have only exacerbated the need to kill one another. The reasons for human hell keep increasing with the advancement of our existence and the continued growth of our species.



Conquest, usurpation, power and control have sealed destinies and advanced humankind to where it stands today. It is these same that will help seal our fates the more we clash and more we bump into each other�s vested interests. Under growing pressures for the finite space available and as nation states compete for Earth�s dwindling resources, the human hell we have known since the dawn of time will only resurface once more, continuing to dance alongside humanity�s unsustainable desires, animalistic passions and our voracious inability to understand the complexity of who and what we truly are that has scarred us during our entire time on Earth.





The Human Hell





What is it about war that makes beasts and demons of man? What is it about destroying our own kind that unleashes such anger and passion? What is it about the human hell that returns us to the savage and barbaric days of the past? Our animal and primitive selves are resurrected with the call to war, opening in our minds the collective memories of an entire history of death, destruction and misery. The human hell opens the conveyor belts of accepted violence, a time when those in power make it moral to destroy a fellow human energy along with the advancement of entire societies. The human hell allows warmonger leaders to condemn to death the citizens comprising the military while permitting those who survive to destroy their fellow men.



From nails and teeth to stones and branches to arrows and spears to guns and cannons to missiles and bullets the human condition has evolved. Along with us, however, is our twin called violence, sitting on our side waiting patiently for the bells of carnage to be heard, clandestinely shrouded in the inner bowels of man, released with the call to arms that mutates us back to the animal world we claim to rule, not be part of. For violence knows that she will eventually reap what man sows, commandeering entire armies of enraged men to become exactly that which human morality and religion stands firmly against.



Through the cross-hairs of a rifle or the aiming of a weapon man stops being man. He who fires and aims has become beast while he who is fired upon is but a subhuman target, losing all personality and humanity. The human hell turns man into beast, Jekyll turns into Hyde and the world becomes a bastion for the demons running rampant in the human condition. Atrocities become accepted, rapes become desirable, carnage fills the air and humanism erodes more and more with each new devastation of land and man.



The human hell legalizes those most heinous crimes our civilization condemns. It makes heroes out of war criminals, replaces justice with destruction and executes devastation upon innocence. Murder and cold-blooded execution are given the legal justifications never granted in society. The losers of war become war criminals while the victors become war heroes, to be honored and rewarded for the crimes against humanity they helped perpetrate. War presidents are given full reign to decimate tens of thousands of civilians and to make toxic entire nations, ruining countless lives in the process.



The human hell orchestrates a symphony of macabre manifestations, unleashing the most deadly weapons known to man upon cities and standing armies. Artillery rains down from the clouds, missiles strike like thunder from the gods. Bullets spray mercilessly onto fragile human bodies while rockets devastate both homes and lives. The human hell war is called, released from the innards of the human condition, magnifying the worst symptoms in our disease.



Death, destruction and misery enliven the energy that feeds from human blood. The animal inside us awakens with the adrenaline rush of death and survival. Hatred, anger, animosity and revenge are spawned as our animal selves usurp our human minds. Humans become worthless, their lives easily taken, their deaths expected. Entire cities are sacked, children and women are murdered without impunity, human morals and virtues are made extinct. Human hell makes monsters of entire peoples acquiescing to the crimes against humanity being committed in their name.



The enemy is hated, though he is unknown. The desire to kill him grows, though he never hurt us. Unleashing pain upon him and his people is ingrained into our minds, though we fail to realize he is as human as us. The human hell blinds us to a humanity we once possessed, unearthing our animal passions that, combined with our human intelligence, causes a weapon of death and destruction, unrepentant, unrelenting and unforgiving. The human hell makes man the incarnation of evil, released upon civilization, thrusting decimation upon our own kind.



It is evil born of man that our religions warn against. It is our violent selves our scribes write about. It is man at his worst that we must fear.



The development of stereotypes, differences in beliefs and racial identity, the arrival of fears and ignorance, ethnic and cultural complexities, different goals and ways of seeing the world, auras of superiority along with competitive pressure for land, food and resources contribute to the ever-growing need to unleash the human hell onto our environment.



Genocide and ethnic cleansing have, along with war, been a part of the virus we call human violence from the very beginning of human understanding. Entire groups have been extinguished, entire regions cleansed of humans. It goes on today as much as it did sixty years ago. Our history has been marked by genocide after genocide, ethnic cleansing after ethnic cleansing, war after war. After every atrocity cries of �Never Again� rise as if this time humanity will learn its lessons. Yet, as we know too well, the cries go mute as the deaf ears of mankind once more tremble with yet another thunderous blast from a hail of bullets and missiles wiping out an entire grouping of people.



In the unrecoverable echoes of our lost humanity can be heard wails of �Again and Again,� never learning from our atrocities or the evil born within us. War, that most dastardly of all human hells, as old as our first pioneers and as dangerous as the most venomous human to ever walk among us, has created Holocaust after Holocaust, monopolized by no group of humans, distributed to all corners of the globe, regardless of skin color, ethnic makeup or religious beliefs.



War is hell on Earth, affecting humankind throughout time and space, inconsequential to the perceptions we might have or the delusion we might live. War makes demons of our soldiers, free to roam alongside evil as it infects once placid men who respected human morality in peace but exterminate its principles in war. Through war humankind returns to our primitive selves, becoming the smartest of animals, capable of exterminating its own kind and setting free the misery that has befallen every generation of humanity from the time of first beginnings.



The absurdity of human war has yet to be stopped, for we have yet to fully understand who and what we truly are. Inside us lie the answers; in knowing the animal world lays our salvation. We claim ourselves the epitome of modernity, of civilization and of knowledge, but ape like creatures prone to violence is our reality, intelligent, sure, self-destructive, you bet. War has never ceased, and there is no reason to believe that it one day will. War is violence, and violence is humankind. Our reason is no match for our animal passions; our younger, analytical mind is easily clouded by our older, primitive one.



The salvation to the greatest symptom of our disease has been at our hands since the first human opened its eyes. Yet over the course of our brief stay on Earth we have been made blind, thanks to our own devices, to a reality that is as humbling as it is frightening. Our egos refuse to listen, see or touch that which emanates from all corners of the globe. We fear knowing that which for centuries has been denied, afraid that we will see that we are not what we once thought ourselves to be.



The human hell will continue to linger and determine our fates. It will continue to maim, murder and decimate. For as long as we have walked this now scarred Earth the demons running in our veins have dominated us, corroding our societies and humanity, manipulating us toward unleashing the great evil living within us. In the end, the human hell called war will be our demise as our inability to comprehend who and what we are will crash with the ever-expanding lethality of our technologies. From rocks and sticks to mutually assured destruction, our violent selves have never changed. Except today�s version of yesterday�s rocks and sticks could conceivably annihilate entire regions and indeed the entire surface of the planet.



Warfare is ingrained inside the human condition, unrelenting and dominating. We have yet to exorcise this most terrible demon from our wake. Humanity and violence are conjoined twins, it seems, inseparable brothers thriving off each other. Where man goes violence and war soon follow; where violence is found man will most certainly be found. In all regions of the globe, in all peoples and societies, violence lingers about and controls us, from spousal abuse to declared war among nations. All it needs to resurrect itself from outside the crate that lies hidden in our mind is a war like leader eager to launch the trumpets of war. All that is needed for violence to release its most toxic cancers upon our civilization is for good men to do nothing upon the calling of the masses.



As long as we fail to understand the world around us and the true psychology of the human condition violence and war will continue to lead to death, destruction and untold misery. As long as we remain ignorant and silent to the control violence has over our race children will continue to be buried by their parents. For, as Plato is claimed to have once said: �Only the dead have seen the end of war.�



To deny the fruit of our impulses is to deny the very existence of our being. Our denial and failure to accept the reality of what we are is guiding us down the road to perdition. The corrosive unwillingness to delve into the internal realizations of our past, present and future will inevitably lead to our never putting a stop to the dastardly deeds our species is capable of unleashing upon ourselves and the lands we inhabit.



As a result, �Never Again� will continue to be shouted in vain after yet another war, act of genocide or ethnic cleansing. The impotence of such words will only be seen in light of the omnipotence of continued human violence and war. In time, �Again and Again� will come to be seen as the perpetual reality that haunts our existence, plaguing humanity from the beginning to the very end. We seem incapable of stopping ourselves from repeating a history that is all too familiar to us.



In truth, perhaps our very existence is defined by war and violence, and addicted we have become to the horrors our creative energies wreak upon our world. Maybe violence is as ingrained a part of our psyches as love, affection and happiness are. How else do we explain an entire existence, spanning many hundreds of thousands of years, scarred by death, violence, destruction and suffering? Only when we confront our animal selves and escape this delusion of ourselves as almighty creatures of chosen prowess will we find respite from our evil ways. Until then, only the dead can be assured of never again experiencing that most devastating of human hells called war.



© Copyright 2004 by AxisofLogic.com





Manuel Valenzuela, 29, is social critic and commentator, activist, writer and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel to be published in Spring of 2004. His articles appear weekly on axisoflogic.com where he is also contributing editor. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at [e-mail]

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

The mighty windbags
Thirty years ago, conservatives embarked on a plan to subvert journalism and skew America to the right. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
http://www.salon.com
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By David Brock

May 11, 2004 | Since defecting from the Republican Party in the latter half of the 1990s and publishing a confessional memoir in 2002, I`ve discussed my right-wing past with politicians, political activists and strategists, academic scholars, student groups, fellow writers, and hundreds of readers of my book "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative." I`m rarely asked anymore why I changed, or about the baroque intricacies of the anti-Clinton movement, which I once participated in and then renounced and exposed. After a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the war with Iraq, politics has moved to a different place.

Nowadays, when I talk about "Blinded by the Right," people want to know not how I was blinded by the Right, but how so much of the country seems to be in that position. For the first time since 1929, the Republican Party controls all three branches of government. Fewer people identify with the Democratic Party today than at any time since the New Deal. Conservatism seems the prevailing political and intellectual current, while liberalism seems a fringe dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities. People ask me, a former insider, how the Republican Right has won political and ideological power with such seeming ease and why Democrats, despite winning the most votes in the last three presidential elections, seem to be caught in a downward spiral, still able to win at the ballot box but steadily losing the battle for hearts and minds.

While it is not the only answer, my answer is: It`s the media, stupid.

When I say this, in a more respectful way, to folks outside the right wing, I usually get either of two responses. Those who receive their news from the New York Times and National Public Radio give me blank stares. They are living in a rarefied media culture -- one that prizes accuracy, fairness, and civility -- that is no longer representative of the media as a whole. Those who have heard snippets of Rush Limbaugh`s radio show, have caught a glimpse of Bill O`Reilly`s temper tantrums on the FOX News Channel, or occasionally peruse the editorials in the Wall Street Journal think I`m a Cassandra. They view this media as self-discrediting and therefore irrelevant. They are living in a vacuum of denial.

Those who understand what I mean are either members of the media itself, have read media-criticism books or Internet sites devoted to the subject, or are in the political trenches every day dealing with the media. The gap between those who recognize right-wing media power for what it is and those who don`t is wide and deep, as if they inhabit parallel universes. The gap is dangerous to democracy and needs to be closed.

When I came to Washington fresh out of college in 1986, I got a job at the Washington Times, the right-wing newspaper bankrolled by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Korean-born leader of a religious cult called the Unification Church. Though Moon`s paper was said to be read in the Reagan White House, nobody paid much attention to it. We were the proverbial voice in the wilderness. Considering that the paper was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias and that its journalistic ethics were close to nil, this was a good thing. That was eighteen years ago. Today, the most important sectors of the political media -- most of cable TV news, the majority of popular op-ed columns, almost all of talk radio, a substantial chunk of the book market, and many of the most highly trafficked Web sites -- reflect more closely the political and journalistic values of the Washington Times than those of the New York Times. That is, they are powerful propaganda organs of the Republican Party. For our politics, this development in the media represents a structural change: a structural advantage for the GOP and conservatism, and, I believe, the greatest structural obstacle facing opponents of the right wing. I therefore think it is one of the most important political stories of the era. I have sought to tell this story in "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy."

I know there is a Republican Noise Machine because I was once part of it. From the Washington Times, to a stint as a "research fellow" at the Heritage Foundation (the Right`s premier think tank), to a position as an "investigative writer" at the muckraking magazine The American Spectator, and as the author of a best-selling right-wing book, I forwarded the right-wing agenda not as an open political operative or advocate but under the guise of journalism and punditry, fueled by huge sums of money from right-wing billionaires, foundations, and self-interested corporations.

By the time I said good-bye to the right wing in 1997, what was once a voice in the wilderness was drowning out competing voices across all media channels. The most influential political commentator in America, Rush Limbaugh, and his hundreds of imitators saturated every media market in the country, providing 22 percent of Americans -- not only conservatives but independent swing voters -- with their primary source of news. Conservatives had changed the face of the cable news business with the establishment of the top-rated FOX News Channel, a slicker broadcast version of the Moonie Washington Times. Pundit Ann Coulter and her fanatical ilk topped the best-seller lists, becoming superstars in the world of political punditry. The Spectator juggernaut -- which had a circulation of three hundred thousand per month at its height in the early 1990s -- had been replaced by Internet gossip Matt Drudge, who gets more than 6.5 million visitors to his site every day. Although enormous subsidies were still being pumped into right-wing media that did not turn a profit, right-wing media also had become a multibillion-dollar business, a development that powerfully affected all other commercial media.

The lies, smears, and vicious caricatures leveled against Bill and Hillary Clinton by this right-wing media, and then repeated in virtually every media venue in the country, have now been well documented, not least in "Blinded by the Right." In that book, I compared the anti-Clinton propaganda to a virus as it seeped off the pages of the Spectator into the minds of every sentient American. My memoir ended in 2000; what I did not fully comprehend then, but what is apparent to me now as I have watched the politics of the last few years unfold, is that the virus was not Clinton-specific. In fact, it had nothing to do with the Clintons per se; rather, in different strains, it would afflict any and every political opponent of the right wing, including Al Gore, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, and the mourners of Senator Paul Wellstone, every major Democrat seeking the presidency in 2004, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org. What we have here, as a criminal investigator might say, is a pattern.

In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Noise Machine, which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose the election to the Democrats on the issues, a "skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy" was adopted, the New York Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he never said -- most infamously, that he "invented" the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media. Actually, Gore had said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as true.

The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. "Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar," William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "... Gore lies because he can`t help himself," neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. "LIAR, LIAR," screamed Rupert Murdoch`s New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore`s "serial mendacity" and warned that he is a "dangerous man." "Gore may be quietly going nuts," National Review`s Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore`s increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster`s New World Dictionary defines `delusion` thusly: `The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present ... a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.`"

This impugning of Gore`s character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined "Tendency to embellish fact snags Gore," while the Boston Globe weighed in with "Gore seen as `misleading.`" On ABC`s "This Week," former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore`s "Pinocchio problem." For National Journal`s Stuart Taylor, the issue was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain." Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore "could comprehend reality," while MSNBC`s Chris Matthews compared Gore to "Zelig" and insisted, "Isn`t it getting to be delusionary?"

The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The election was far more competitive than it should have been -- and, indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in -- because of negative voter perceptions of Gore`s honesty and trustworthiness. In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election Day, voters said they favored Gore`s program over George W. Bush`s. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on everything from the size of Gore`s federal spending proposals to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked "honest/trustworthy" first -- and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said "Gore would say anything," while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore`s "untruthfulness" was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason.

Two years after the election, Gore gave an extraordinary interview to the New York Observer that could be read as an explanation of what happened to his presidential campaign. Gore charged that conservatives in the media, operating under journalistic cover, are loyal not to the standards and conventions of journalism but, rather, to politics and party. Gore said:

"The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there`s a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks -- that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what`s objective as stated by the news media as a whole....

Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, the Washington Times and the others. And then they`ll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they all start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they`ve pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist...."

True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard`s Fred Barnes said, "This is nutty. This is along the lines with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This is -- I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff." Also on FOX, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, "I`m a psychiatrist. I don`t usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there`s a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He could use a little help." "It could be he`s just nuts," Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. "Tipper Gore`s issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer to home than we know." "He [Gore] said it`s a conspiracy," Tucker Carlson said on CNN`s "Crossfire." "I actually think he`s coming a little unhinged," The Weekly Standard`s David Brooks, now at the New York Times, said of Gore on PBS.

As Gore`s experience demonstrated, Democrats ignore these attacks at their peril: Not only do such attacks confirm the preconceptions of Republicans but they shape the thinking of undecided voters and even of Democrats. One of the most frightening experiences I have had in recent years in talking with rank-and-file Democrats is the extent to which they unconsciously internalize right-wing propaganda. To add insult to injury, too many Democrats have a tendency to blame the victims of these smears -- their own leaders -- rather than addressing the root of the problem. For instance, when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that "failed" diplomacy had led to war with Iraq, right-wing media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein. The ensuing controversy caused many Democrats to think Daschle had put his foot in his mouth.

With the right-wing media now a seemingly permanent and defining feature of the media landscape, if Democrats cut through the propaganda and win back the White House in 2004, they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult. There should be no doubt that the right-wing media`s wildings of 1993 -- which led to Clinton`s impeachment four years later -- will be replayed over and over again until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated.

Ironically, though not coincidentally, this radical transformation of the media has been obscured by conservative charges of "liberal media bias" that are believed by the vast majority of the public, including about half of Democrats. I`m all too familiar with the claim. From my very first days at the Washington Times, I was schooled to invoke "liberal bias" to deflect attention from my own biases and journalistic lapses and as a rationale to justify my presence in the mainstream media conversation in the name of providing "balance" or "the other side." We sold a lot of books and magazines and commanded lavish attention for our propaganda outside the right wing by using this cover story. As I showed in "Blinded by the Right," the truth was that my work as a right-wing journalist and commentator -- in particular, my American Spectator exposés on Anita Hill and the Clintons -- did not deserve the attention they received. I was delivering a truckload of nonfacts, half-truths, and innuendos, not "balance" or "the other side." What I show in "The Republican Noise Machine" is that my experience was not the exception but the rule.

The "liberal media" mantra aside, if one looks and listens closely to what the right wing says when it thinks others may not be paying attention, there should be no doubt that it has made potent political gains not despite the media but through it. Rush Limbaugh says his program has "redefined the media" and refers to the "Limbaugh echo chamber syndrome," by which messaging originating on his show drives the twenty-four-hour news cycle. "The radical Left," he says, "is furious that liberals no longer set the agenda in the national media." "`New media` outlets pound establishment," the Washington Times announced in an op-ed by right-wing publicist Craig Shirley. In a column explaining why the "outing" in the press of the identity of a covert CIA operative by senior Bush administration officials -- a possibly criminal act committed to harm a Bush critic -- did not spark a major political scandal, Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution explained in the Washington Times, "The media culture has changed. Conservatives and GOP partisans now have more than adequate means to offer an exculpatory counter-narrative." When CBS announced the cancellation of a biopic that was deemed unflattering toward the Reagans, Matt Drudge appeared on MSNBC, on a show hosted by a former Republican member of Congress, to announce the "beginning of a second media century .... It was the Internet, it was talk radio, it was cable that put pressure on CBS, and heretofore, there`s never been this kind of pressure applied to one of the big titans, one of the big three." Brian C. Anderson, writing on OpinionJournal.com, a right-wing Web site published by the Wall Street Journal, in late 2003, informed conservatives, "[w]e`re not losing anymore" and attributed this fact to a media "revolution." "Everything has changed," he wrote.

In a syndicated column titled "Culture War Signals," John Leo of U.S. News & World Report argued that "a corner has been turned" in the "culture wars" with the "rise of a large crop of commentators the left has not been able to match" and "conservative gains in new media" like the FOX News Channel. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has written that the conservative media have "cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out." MSNBC`s Matthews, interviewing Bernard Goldberg, the author of an attack book on the "liberal media" titled "Bias," got the author to agree with his view that the cable news industry -- whose total news audience is growing while that of the traditional broadcast news networks is declining -- is biased all right, though in favor of the right wing. According to Bill O`Reilly, "For decades, [liberals] controlled the agenda on TV news. That`s over." In an interview with PBS, Tony Blankley, the former Newt Gingrich flack turned editorial page editor of the Washington Times and "McLaughlin Group" panelist, said:

"Starting in 1994, with the Republican election of Congress, I think Limbaugh made the difference in electing the Republican majority. In the following three elections, he made the difference holding the majority. And in 2000, in the presidential race in Florida, he was the difference between Gore and Bush winning Florida, and thus the presidency."

Commenting on the media while interviewing Ann Coulter about her book "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism," right-wing radio host Sean Hannity crowed, "We`ve basically taken over!" Coulter, who has made millions off the charge of "liberal media bias" while maintaining a career as perhaps the most biased right-wing voice in the media, laughed in agreement. A young writer for Rupert Murdoch`s neoconservative Weekly Standard named Matt Labash -- whom I hired into right-wing journalism at The American Spectator -- was probably laughing, too, when he was interviewed by Columbia Journalism Review partner Web site JournalismJobs.com. The interviewer asked, "Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and FOX News Channel become more popular in recent years?" In his answer, Labash conceded that conservatives reject in their own media the standards of fairness, accuracy, and unbiased coverage that they demand from the "liberal media." He unmasked the hypocrisy at the heart of these endeavors:

"Because they feed the rage. We bring pain to the liberal media. I say that mockingly but it`s true somewhat ... While these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media like to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We`ve created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective ... It`s a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It`s a great little racket."

Matt Labash`s "great little racket" is the subject of "The Republican Noise Machine." This is a book about the explicitly right-wing media and about how mainstream media, sometimes under the direction of executives who are conservative Republicans, has succumbed to an undue conservative influence and tilt. It is about the right-wing media`s history, its reach, its appeal, its practices, its methods, and its financing. It is also about the beliefs of those who populate right-wing media and the beliefs that people derive from it. My conclusion is that right-wing media is a massive fraud, victimizing its own audience and corrupting the broader political dialogue with the tacit permission of established media authorities who should, and probably do, know better.

I argue, moreover, that the creation of right-wing media, and of the strategies by which the right wing has penetrated, pressured, co-opted, and subdued the mainstream media into accommodating conservatism, was not an accident. Once upon a time, right-wing strategists, operatives, and financiers believed that they could never win political hegemony in the United States unless they won domination of the country`s political discourse. Toward this end, a deliberate, well-financed, and expressly acknowledged communications and deregulatory plan was pursued by the right wing for more than thirty years -- in close coordination with Republican Party leaders -- to subvert and subsume journalism and reshape the national consciousness through the media, with the intention of skewing American politics sharply to the right. The plan has succeeded spectacularly.

The implications of this right-wing media incursion extend well beyond particular political outcomes to the heart of our democracy. Democracy depends on an informed citizenry. The conscious effort by the right wing to misinform the American citizenry -- to collapse the distinction between journalism and propaganda -- is thus an assault on democracy itself.

The problem is really not so much one of "bias," to use the Right`s favored terminology, as it is where bias leads: In the biased right-wing media, among biased right-wing commentators, and in a mainstream media susceptible to right-wing scripting, it leads to verifiable journalistic malpractice, to the publication of misinformation, and to ethical malfeasance. At a deeper level, the existence and influence of the right-wing media as presently constituted is an affront to logic, rationality, and the maintenance of a shared knowledge base from which political consensus and correct public policy choices can be forged. While the right wing cleverly has achieved its greatest gains in mainstream media sectors that ostensibly present opinion -- columns, TV punditry, talk radio, and books -- this opinion is predicated on a raft of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies presented to readers and viewers as fact. To further confuse the picture, the right wing has funded an array of its own media institutions, including newspapers, magazines, Internet sites, and a cable news channel, that produce a large volume of "news" that is not only offensive and unfair but misleading and often false.

Because technological advances and the race for ratings and sales have made the wall between right-wing media and the rest of the media permeable, the American media as a whole has become a powerful conveyor belt for conservative-generated "news," commentary, story lines, jargon, and spin. It is now possible to watch a lie move from a disreputable right-wing Web site onto the afternoon talk radio shows, to several cable chat shows throughout the evening, and into the next morning`s Washington Post -- all in twenty-four hours. This media food chain moves phony information and GOP talking points -- manufactured by and for conservatives, often bought and paid for by conservative political interests, and disseminated through an unabashedly biased right-wing media apparatus that follows no rules or professional norms -- into every family dining room, every workplace, and every Internet chat room in America.

Equally troubling is that the cable and radio talkers who shape the national political conversation have the ability to censor news that does not serve the interests of the right wing. Every day, professional news organizations, primarily in the prestige print press, report facts, across a broad range of subjects, that are essential to an informed view of politics and policy. More often than not, these stories die on the page and never reach most Americans, owing to right-wing command of the new media "echo chamber."

The right-wing drive for media power must also be understood as an overturning of the First Amendment, which posits that good information will drive out bad information given diversity in the marketplace of ideas. As I will show, the Right`s premeditated undermining of the media as a public trust in favor of crass commercial values, its coordinated attacks on noncommercial media, and the Republican-led drive for greater consolidation of media ownership have all but wiped out liberal and left-wing views and voices in entire sectors of the American media. Perhaps most ominous, right-wing verbal brownshirts of late have used their mighty media platforms to chill the free speech of their political adversaries and to neuter aggressive journalistic fact-finding that threatens Republican power.

My view is that unchecked right-wing media power means that in the United States today, no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided. If California voters recall their governor in the belief that the state budget deficit is four times higher than it actually is, if Americans think Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 before hearing any evidence, if 19 percent of the public thinks it is in the top 1 percent tax bracket, if Americans view criticism of the government`s national security policies as tantamount to treason -- thank the right-wing media and those who abet it.

Excerpted with permission from "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy" by David Brock. Published by Crown Books.

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he private contractor-GOP gravy train
From Blackwater to CACI, mercenary companies in Iraq have a warm and cozy relationship with the Republican politicians who are employing them.
http://www.salon.com
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By Robert Schlesinger

May 11, 2004 | Private armies have become ubiquitous in Iraq, supplying everything from support services to mercenary soldiers to interrogators. While Halliburton`s contracts for logistical support have been widely reported, until the firefight in Fallujah in late March left four Blackwater Security employees dead, the public knew little about the extent to which the estimated 20,000 private military forces in Iraq are participating in direct military action.

The shocking photographs of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison raise anew questions about the U.S. military`s use of private contractors. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba`s report about practices at the prison contained information that two CACI employees "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." Contractors from Titan International were also present during the abuses.

"This industry really didn`t exist 10 years ago," says Peter Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry." A decade ago, mercenary soldiering was less the stuff of corporate America than the inspiration for Soldier of Fortune fantasies. Now, as Singer reported in Salon, the industry generates over $100 billion annually worldwide.

As little known as these companies are to the general public, they are only too familiar in Washington, where they have deployed a different kind of mercenary force -- phalanxes of lobbyists -- along with the ammunition of modern political warfare, campaign contributions. And they have found eager friends, particularly among Republican leaders in and out of Congress.

"The move into the political game tends to happen for three reasons," Singer says. "One, this business is growing. Second, companies that are in other industries move into the sector, bringing influence and lobbyists to bear." Examples include Halliburton and, in the case of private security firms and other companies that provide combat- or intelligence-oriented services, firms like CACI and Titan. Finally, Singer says, "A lot of firms have picked up lobbyists as they`ve gained a public profile."

Blackwater, the firm that guards Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer, and whose men were killed at Fallujah, has hired the well-connected Alexander Strategy Group to guide it through the current publicity storm and help influence Congress on whatever rules are generated to govern private militias in war zones, according to the Hill newspaper.

Alexander may turn out to be a clever choice: Ed Buckham, former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is Alexander`s chairman. Tony Rudy, another former top DeLay operative, and Karl Gallant, who once ran DeLay`s leadership PAC, are also onboard.

Blackwater also works other angles. One of the firm`s founders is Michigan native Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL. His father, Edgar Prince, helped religious right leader Gary Bauer found the Family Research Council in 1988. Erik Prince`s sister, Betsy DeVos, is the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party. But Blackwater is a relative newcomer to the Washington influence game, especially compared with CACI and Titan, which have been trailblazers.

For more than four years, CACI has employed the Livingston Group and its "strategic partner," Louisiana law firm Jones, Walker, Waechter, Poitevent, Carrere and Denegre, to represent the company`s interests in Washington. Since 2000, CACI has poured $160,000 into Livingston and $150,000 into Jones, Walker.

The Livingston who gave the firm its name is former House Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston, the Louisiana Republican designated as Newt Gingrich`s successor to the speaker`s gavel in 1998. Amid the House debate over the impeachment of President Clinton, Livingston dramatically announced his retirement because of his own sexual peccadilloes. "Livingston is the only former chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee now in private practice," reads a bio on his firm`s Web site.

Livingston`s former top staffers, who have joined him in the private sector, also work on the CACI account, according to lobbying filings with the House and Senate. In addition, the two firms employ former legislative liaisons (bureaucratese for lobbyists) from the Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard -- all registered to lobby for CACI.

More than 92 percent of CACI`s $843 million in revenues last year came from the federal government -- 63 percent from the Pentagon alone. The company`s lobbyists are essential in the continuing effort to grease that wheel of fortune.

Titan`s lineup of lobbyists is even broader. Its in-house team includes chairman Gene Ray, a former top Air Force official; John Dressendorfer, a former White House lobbyist under President Reagan who also worked in President Nixon`s Pentagon; Lawrence Delaney, who closed out his service to the Clinton administration as acting undersecretary of the Air Force; and, for good measure, Susan Golding, a former Republican mayor of San Diego.

Titan`s hired guns include the law firm of Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton and Shockey, which employs Letitia White, a longtime staffer to Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., to work on Titan`s issues. Lewis, by the way, is the chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The firm American Defense International, also employed by Titan, includes Van Hipp, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Army under then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney who was later appointed the No. 2 lawyer in the Navy, and Michael Herson, a former special assistant to then Secretary Cheney.

What`s more, Titan has engaged the services of NorthPoint Strategies, composed mainly of former top staffers to Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif. Cunningham, a former member of the Armed Services Committee, as it happens sits on the Appropriations defense subcommittee as well as the Intelligence Committee.

All told, Titan has spent $1.29 million since 2000 on Washington lobbying. In 2003 alone, it paid NorthPoint $240,000. And its lobbying has paid off. Last year, the company had revenues of $1.8 billion, according to its annual report: "Our revenues from U.S. government business represented approximately 96% of our total revenues for the year ended December 31, 2003."

This revolving door between congressional staffers or retired military personnel and lobbying firms is not circumscribed by the requirements of the House and Senate lobby registration. Most of the private contractors operating in Iraq have high-ranking retired brass in their executive suites. CACI`s board of directors, for example, features retired Gen. Larry Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff. Carl Vuono and Ronald Griffith, the president and executive vice president, respectively, of Alexandria, Va., firm MPRI, which is helping to train and equip the new Iraqi Army, are both retired generals.

But preexisting relationships are only one weapon in the Washington operator`s arsenal. Money remains one of the most important tools.

Not surprisingly, these companies have been very generous to the Republican Party. Titan`s PAC, for example, has contributed a dozen times more money to Republicans than to Democrats during this election cycle: It kicked in $182,000 to Republican committees and candidates, including $10,000 apiece to the leadership PACs of Lewis, Cunningham, Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. (whose leadership group is called Peace Through Strength PAC). Titan`s PAC also gave the maximum $10,000 to the campaign committees of Cunningham, Lewis and Hunter. Democrats have received a mere $15,000 from Titan.

In addition, top executives with Titan have contributed in excess of $58,000 to political candidates and committees since 2000, more than $49,000 of that amount going to Republicans. Ray alone gave $28,000, the bulk of it to Republicans. Reps. Cunningham and Hunter each got from Titan executives at least $10,000 (not including the $3,000 given to Hunter`s Peace Through Strength PAC). The Democrat who has received the most money from Titan executives is Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee`s defense subcommittee.

CACI executives gave a total of $29,250 over the same time period, $25,750 of it to Republican interests. J.P. "Jack" London, CACI`s CEO, alone gave $10,000, all to Republicans.

Some of the private security firms in Iraq are clearly fresh to the political game: Three executives from Triple Canopy -- whose forces fought a pitched battle against Iraqi insurgents in April -- each wrote $2,000 in checks to the Bush-Cheney campaign in March.

While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has now testified on Iraqi prisoner abuse -- some of it carried out by workers employed by private firms -- no hearings have yet been scheduled on the widespread use of mercenaries to fill jobs once performed by U.S. soldiers. And deployment of such workers is unlikely to decrease as election year contributions grow: The number of hired mercenaries is expected to double after the June 30 hand-over of "limited sovereignty" to an Iraqi government.

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About the writer
Robert Schlesinger, former Pentagon correspondent for the Boston Globe, is based in Washington. He can be reached at [e-mail].

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IRAQ PRISON SCANDAL
Most `Arrested by Mistake`
Coalition intelligence put numbers at 70% to 90% of Iraq prisoners, says a February Red Cross report, which details further abuses.
By Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writer

May 11, 2004

WASHINGTON — Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year "had been arrested by mistake," according to a confidential Red Cross report given to the Bush administration earlier this year.

Yet the report described a wide range of prisoner mistreatment — including many new details of abusive techniques — that it said U.S. officials had failed to halt, despite repeated complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

ICRC monitors saw some improvements by early this year, but the continued abuses "went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered as a practice tolerated" by coalition forces, the report concluded.

The Swiss-based ICRC, which made 29 visits to coalition-run prisons and camps between late March and November last year, said it repeatedly presented its reports of mistreatment to prison commanders, U.S. military officials in Iraq and members of the Bush administration in Washington.

The ICRC summary report, which was written in February, also said Red Cross officials had complained to senior military officials that families of Iraqi suspects usually were told so little that most arrests resulted "in the de facto `disappearance` of the arrestee for weeks or even months."

The report also described previously undocumented forms of abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. In October, for example, an Iraqi prisoner was "hooded, handcuffed in the back, and made to lie face down" on what investigators believe was the engine hood of a vehicle while he was being transported. He was hospitalized for three months for extensive burns to his face, abdomen, foot and hand, the report added.

More than 100 "high-value detainees," apparently including former senior officials in Saddam Hussein`s regime and in some cases their family members, were held for five months at the Baghdad airport "in strict solitary confinement" in small cells for 23 hours a day, the report said.

Such conditions "constituted a serious violation" of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, which set minimum standards for treatment of prisoners of war and civilian internees, the report said. U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted interrogations at the site, but Army units were in charge of custody operations, officials said Monday.

Portions of the ICRC report were published last week. The full 24-page report, which The Times obtained Monday, cites more than 250 allegations of mistreatment at prisons and temporary detention facilities run by U.S. and other occupation forces across Iraq.

The report also referred to, but provided no details of, "allegations of deaths as a result of harsh internment conditions, ill treatment, lack of medical attention, or the combination thereof."

Spokesmen at the Pentagon and at U.S. Central Command headquarters said they had not seen the ICRC report and could not comment on specific charges. ICRC officials in Geneva said they regretted that the document became public. The ICRC usually shares its findings only with governments or other authorities to maintain access to detainees held in conflicts around the world.

Among the abusive techniques detailed in the report was forcing detainees to wear hoods for up to four consecutive days.

"Hooding was sometimes used in conjunction with beatings, thus increasing anxiety as to when blows would come," the report said. "The practice of hooding also allowed the interrogators to remain anonymous and thus to act with impunity."

In some cases, plastic handcuffs allegedly were so tight for so long that they caused long-term nerve damage. Men were punched, kicked and beaten with rifles and pistols; faces were pressed "into the ground with boots." Prisoners were threatened with reprisals against family members, execution or transfer to the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The report also provides new details about the now-notorious Abu Ghraib prison, the focus of the prisoner abuse scandal.

During a visit to the "isolation section" of Abu Ghraib prison in October, ICRC delegates witnessed prisoners "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness, allegedly for several consecutive days."

A military intelligence officer, who is not identified in the report, told the ICRC monitors that such treatment was "part of the process" in which prisoners were given clothing, bedding, lights and toiletries in exchange for cooperation.

The ICRC sent its report to the military police brigade commander in charge of Abu Ghraib after the October visit, and the commander responded Dec. 24, a senior Pentagon official said last week. But the Pentagon did not launch a formal investigation into abuses at the prison until a low-ranking U.S. soldier approached military investigators Jan. 13 and gave them a computer disc of photos.

The ICRC report also describes torture and other brutal practices by Iraqi police working in Baghdad under the U.S.-led occupation.

It cites cases in which suspects held by Iraqi police allegedly were beaten with cables, kicked in the testicles, burned with cigarettes and forced to sign confessions.

In June, a group of men arrested by Iraqi police "allegedly had water poured on their legs and had electrical shocks administered to them with stripped tips of electrical wires," the report notes.

One man`s mother was brought in, "and the policeman threatened to mistreat her." Another detainee "was threatened with having his wife brought in and raped."

"Many persons deprived of their liberty drew parallels between police practices under the occupation with those of the former regime," the report noted.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Es ist sehr schwer einzuschätzen, wieviel Anhänger Sadr wirklich hat. Wird versucht ihn kleinzureden?

NEWS ANALYSIS
Iraq Cleric Faces Showdown With Moderate Shiites
A demonstration is planned in Najaf to expel Muqtada Sadr`s army. He calls on followers to intensify attacks on the coalition.
By Patrick J. McDonnell and Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writers

May 11, 2004

BAGHDAD — U.S. and British forces have recently inflicted heavy casualties on Muqtada Sadr`s militia, but the Shiite cleric is bracing for a showdown with a more familiar foe: moderate Shiites who do not support his uprising.

A senior Shiite leader, Sadruddin Qubanchi, allied with the powerful Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has called for a mass demonstration Friday in the holy city of Najaf to expel Sadr`s private army.

Sadr, who has long been at odds with the Shiite establishment in Najaf, responded with a call of his own. An aide told followers that it was time to intensify their battles with the U.S.-led occupation.

Sadr has apparently calculated that his enemies — both foreign and domestic — have come together to force him out.

U.S. officials have been open about their attempts to woo moderate Shiites to defeat Sadr`s ragtag Al Mahdi militia.

"We have been meeting with local sheiks, local religious leaders, local businesses," said Brig. Gen. Mark P. Hertling of the 1st Armored Division, which dispatched about 2,500 troops to the Najaf area last month after Sadr`s uprising began. "The message from everyone is that no one likes Muqtada. Everyone wants law and order installed again."

Both sides have made a high-stakes gamble by calling on their followers to show their strength. Shiites, who make up 60% of the Iraqi population, risk creating divisions that could undermine their ability to claim political power in the coming months when Iraq gears up for independent elections.

Since early April, Sadr has been stoking an uprising in southern Iraq and in a Baghdad neighborhood known as Sadr City, named for his father, a beloved Shiite cleric who was assassinated by Saddam Hussein`s regime.

Sadr`s forces suffered heavy losses in recent clashes with U.S. troops in Sadr City and with British forces in the southern cities of Basra and Amarah.

U.S. forces were also able to arrest two of Sadr`s top aides on Saturday during an operation in Sadr City.

Those arrests, commanders said, probably triggered the intense fighting Sunday and early Monday in Sadr City.

Groups of armed young men attempted to block off streets and take over police stations — the same strategy that worked for the militant cleric in Najaf and Kufa.

In the latest attacks, U.S. troops responded with armored vehicles and aircraft support.

"They blocked some roads, decided to show their faces and they lost their lives," said Gen. Jeffrey Hammond of the 1st Cavalry Division, which fought pitched battles with Sadr`s forces last weekend in Sadr City.

Hammond said his forces killed 35 militiamen. "They are an armed militia. And armed militias are dangerous."

On Monday, supporters of Sadr picked through the ruins of the headquarters destroyed by U.S. firepower and salvaged photographs of the militant cleric and his late father. They struck a defiant tone and vowed to fight on.

The younger Sadr, believed to be in his 30s, receives much of his support from disaffected young men who are drawn to his militancy and anti-U.S. rhetoric.

Sadr has never been a favorite of the Shiite establishment, but even conservative Shiite leaders have warned U.S. officials that taking direct action against the militant cleric could be counterproductive.

But in recent days, moderate Shiites have begun to complain openly about Sadr.

On Monday, demonstrators supportive of moderate Shiite groups marched through Najaf`s serpentine streets leading to the Imam Ali shrine. Pro-Sadr recruits tried unsuccessfully to block their entry.

"All the people are with Sadr!" shouted the cleric`s militiamen. "Death for Baathists."

Supporters of his rivals responded: "All the people are with Sayid Ali Al Sistani."

That was a reference to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in the country and, according to a recent poll, the most popular figure in Iraq.

Sistani has close ties to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the influential group linked to the call for Friday`s demonstration.

Many Najafis believe that Sadr`s uprising is affecting their livelihood. Since Hussein`s ouster, multitudes of visiting pilgrims boosted business in the city. But pilgrims have stopped coming since Sadr moved in with his armed men to occupy the shrine.

A Shiite-led move to oust Sadr is good news for the U.S. It avoids the need for coalition troops to confront Sadr`s forces directly in what could be a bloody battle near Imam Ali`s shrine, among the most sacred for Shiites.

Such a Shiite action would also support the oft-repeated U.S. position that Sadr is a marginal leader disrupting the nation`s economic and political development.

"They`re against the real progress that the people of Sadr City want," Hammond said.

Some fear that U.S. efforts to kill or capture him, as the top U.S. commander in Iraq has vowed to do, could set the stage for a long-term Shiite revolt that could prove as hard to put down as the Sunni Muslim revolt against the U.S. occupation.

"The Sunni insurgency, in one part of the country, has in many ways paralyzed the American enterprise in Iraq just by itself," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan.

"Another long-term insurgency among the Shiite could make the situation untenable…. It could be a disaster."

Staff writer Raheem Salman in Najaf and special correspondent Saif Rasheed in Baghdad contributed to this report.

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IN BRIEF / WASHINGTON, D.C.
Bush to Order Sanctions on Syria
From Times Wire Reports

May 11, 2004

President Bush will order economic sanctions against Syria this week for allegedly supporting terrorism and not doing enough to prevent militant fighters from entering neighboring Iraq, congressional and administration sources said.

The sanctions are being ordered because the administration believes that Syria has aggravated tensions in the Middle East. Press Secretary Scott McClellan would not say when the sanctions would be announced.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL
Bush`s Narrow Audience

May 11, 2004

Long before most Americans had ever heard of Abu Ghraib prison, the U.S. effort in Iraq was stumbling. There were too few troops to support an occupation, and the United States was getting too little help from other nations while paying too little attention to Shiite radicals. The photographs of coalition soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at the prison outside Baghdad only deepened the hole the U.S. had dug for itself.

U.S. diplomats unsurprisingly report that the prison scandal merely adds to Arab antagonism generated by White House support for Israel`s unilateral plan for only partial withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory. NATO nations, already resistant to providing troops for Iraq, now say they will delay any substantial commitment until after November`s U.S. presidential elections. The lack of support from major nations other than Britain forces the U.S. to spend additional billions of dollars and commit more troops.

President Bush`s pep talk to the military and his ringing defense of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Monday were aimed strictly at a U.S. audience. Diplomats rightly fret that more efforts need to be geared toward Europeans, who no longer see a positive side to any joint effort with Americans, and toward moderate Arab nations such as Jordan, without which larger democratization efforts in the Middle East will fail.

Next week`s start of the courts-martial of National Guard members accused in the prison abuse is one necessary step in proving U.S. determination to right its wrongs, although the seven people charged could turn out to be scapegoats.

What was the role of military intelligence officials, private contractors and the Army chain of command? It may be up to Congress to find the answers, given Rumsfeld`s continued "let me do my job" attitude.

Bush said Monday that the U.S. was "confronting problems squarely" in Iraq and "making changes as needed." These reassurances might comfort some Americans, but they have no effect on European and Middle Eastern audiences that are profoundly distrustful of U.S. motives.

Most nations understand and fear the damage that an unstable Iraq can do to the Middle East and beyond, providing haven for terrorists and offering welcome in its chaos to Islamic radicalism. Unfortunately, to move from fear of a shattered Iraq to material support of the U.S. military and political effort has become a long leap.

As steady violence continues, it becomes harder to envision the United Nations and the United States succeeding alone in handing over substantial self-governance by June 30. Time is dismayingly short for gaining the international participation that could help Iraq function as a free nation.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY
A Foreign Reporter Gets a Story of U.S. Paranoia
By Elena Lappin

May 11, 2004

As I boarded my flight from London to Los Angeles on May 3, I looked forward to my first California experience. I had a freelance assignment for a British newspaper but also had been offered a bit of sightseeing by friends during my six-day stay. Instead, I spent 26 hours as a detainee. My only view of the city was framed by the metal bars on the security van transporting me, in handcuffs, from LAX to a downtown detention facility.

Inadvertently, I had arrived on American soil as a foreign journalist without a press visa, a requirement that has been on the books for years but is actually being enforced now under the strict guidelines of the Department of Homeland Security. I was traveling on my British passport and believed that, like most visitors from countries included in the U.S. "visa-waiver program," I could still come in and go out easily without special paperwork. I was unaware that since March 2003 (when the Department of Homeland Security was created) the United States had begun to regard journalists from friendly countries as hostile aliens. Our intentions must be closely scrutinized before we are allowed to do our jobs.

What sort of country is afraid of the foreign press? I had plenty of time to ponder this during my disturbing, humiliating and deeply disappointing encounter with a United States that seems to have become a travesty of the country I love. (Only countries like Cuba, Syria, Iran and North Korea demand that journalists apply for special visas.)

If I had announced myself as a tourist at passport control, I would have been waved through. By declaring honestly that I was a journalist (as I had done on previous visits), I had become a suspect persona non grata. As I explained my situation to various officials, I was sure that my innocent mistake based on my (and my paper`s) ignorance of the still-obscure visa requirement would soon be clarified. After all, I had come from Britain, a staunch ally. Could I possibly be denied entry?

Incredibly, I was. And from the moment the decision to deport me was made, I was treated like a dangerous criminal without any basic rights. I was groped and searched. I was fingerprinted; mug shots were taken. Then, with my hands handcuffed behind my back — a particularly painful and demeaning method — I was taken through the airport to a van. Walking handcuffed among free LAX passengers was an indescribably strange experience; more than anything, it brought home the Kafkaesque fact that I was now a prisoner.

Later, I was to spend the night in a "detention tank" behind a thick glass wall, without a chair or bed. It contained only two steel benches, about 15 inches wide, a steel toilet and sink (all in full view of anyone passing by and of the camera observing all), a glaring neon light and a Big Brother-controlled television playing a shopping (!) channel all night. I found it hard to breathe in this human fish tank, yet knocking on the glass, repeatedly, brought no help. When a security officer finally walked by and I shouted through the door that I felt unwell, he wasn`t interested.

In the morning, I was transferred (again in handcuffs) back to a security room, where I spent the rest of the day awaiting my evening flight back to London. I and two other detainees, whom I was not permitted to talk to, were supervised the entire time by eight sleepy, TV-watching security officers. While they ate their breakfasts, I had to ask four times for food and was shouted at before something edible was brought to me, paid for with my own money.

I later found out that mine is not the only such case: In 2003, 12 journalists were detained and deported at LAX, and one at another U.S. airport, according to Reporters Without Borders. As a detainee, I was not allowed a pen. But it is not hard to remember what I saw: a glimpse of a country hiding its deep sense of insecurity behind an abusive façade, and an arbitrary (though not unintentional) disrespect for civil liberties. Nevertheless, I am applying for a journalist`s visa so I can come back and, I hope, see another America. May 3, as it happens, was World Press Freedom Day.

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Elena Lappin is a British journalist.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY
Thread of Abuse Runs to the Oval Office
Phony justifications for war led to brutal intelligence-gathering.
Robert Scheer

May 11, 2004

Someone`s lying — big-time — and neither Congress nor the media have begun to scratch the surface. Clearly we now know enough to stipulate that the several low-ranking alleged sadists charged in the Iraq torture scandal did not control the wing of the prison in which they openly and proudly did the devil`s work.

That power was in the hands of high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officers who established abusive conditions that were condemned by the Red Cross in a complaint to U.S. authorities well before the horrid incidents that recently shocked the nation.

The Red Cross complaint — and a follow-up report that was made available to the administration in February and obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week — raises the sobering possibility that these low-level members of the military police in Iraq may be right in claiming that they were just following orders of their superiors.

According to the report, the organization`s delegates visited Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and witnessed "the practice of keeping persons deprived of their liberty completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness" for days.

"Upon witnessing such cases, the [Red Cross] interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities. The military intelligence officer in charge of interrogation explained that this practice was `part of the process.` " The report said that what Red Cross representatives saw "went beyond exceptional cases" and was "in some cases tantamount to torture."

The Red Cross complained directly to the authorities at that time, two months before the now-infamous photographs were taken.

The White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have for months stubbornly ignored and kept from the public the conclusions of both the Red Cross report and the even more damning internal report done by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba for the Pentagon in March.

The Taguba report clearly stated that the MPs had been instructed to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses" and were using sexual humiliation, attack dogs and beatings to break prisoners.

It would appear that the Pentagon still doesn`t want to admit the seriousness of the problem, having now assigned Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to run Abu Ghraib despite the fact that it was Miller who last summer officially reported on conditions in Abu Ghraib and seems to have enabled, if not authorized, the torture that ensued in the autumn.

According to Taguba`s report, Miller "stated that detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation" and "it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees."

That would seem to support the contention of the accused MPs that they were just doing their duty. The Washington Post quotes an e-mail from Spc. Sabrina Harman in which she wrote: "If the prisoner was cooperating, then the prisoner was allowed to keep his jumpsuit, mattress, and was allowed cigarettes on request or even hot food. But if the prisoner didn`t give what they wanted, it was all taken away until [military intelligence] decided. The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk."

On Monday, President Bush reiterated his unyielding support for Rumsfeld, even as the influential Army Times newspaper called for heads to roll "even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war." The abuses of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad are "a failure that ran straight to the top," argued the newspaper.

And all of this does flow from the top. With the occupation itself built on a web of lies — that invading Iraq was part of the war on terror, that Iraq had threatening weapons of mass destruction, that anybody who resisted the occupation was a "terrorist" or "thug" — it can only be assumed that those interrogators dealing with the nearly 50,000 Iraqi detainees in the last year were under enormous pressure to produce statements that fit these phony "facts."

"I`d like to know who was the one that was giving instructions to the military intelligence personnel to turn up the heat," Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the nominal head of Abu Ghraib during the time in question, said in an interview on NBC. Unfortunately, that question needs to be addressed to the president of the United States.

The big lie that the United States is merely a selfless battler against terrorists, with no other agendas, opens the door for brutality against any who dare resist. Bush has exercised an arrogance unmatched by any U.S. president in a century and brandished God`s will as his carte blanche. His unilateral, preemptive "nation-building" — and the settling of old scores in the name of fighting terror — grants license to treat anybody, including U.S. citizens, in a barbaric manner that cavalierly sweeps aside all standards of due process.

*

Robert Scheer writes a weekly column for The Times and is coauthor of "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" (Seven Stories Press/Akashic Books, 2003).


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/172703_thomas11.html

Rumsfeld is the designated fall guy

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- One of the timeless truisms in the Harry Truman legacy was the presidential credo: "The buck stops here."

While there is plenty of blame to go around for the horrific handling of the Iraqi prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, President Bush bears the ultimate responsibility for what happened on his watch.

Under questioning recently, White House press secretary Scott McClellan refused to say whether the president took responsibility for the disgraceful acts against prisoners in Iraq, though Bush has apologized for the degradation of the Iraqi prisoners, saying their treatment was "a stain on our country`s honor and our country`s uniform."

Bush apparently had no advance clue about the potential fallout of the Baghdad prison abuse. McClellan says the president didn`t even know about the pictures until he saw them on TV, though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew about them back in January.

Since it is an election year, Bush obviously does not want to be saddled with an international scandal.

He already has received some digs from Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts -- his apparent Democratic opponent -- in the November election. Kerry said that if he were president he would "not be the last to know."

Meantime, McClellan has been dodging and weaving under the bombardment of Watergate-style questions:

"What did the president know? And when did he know it?"

All we know is that Bush was told last January that an investigation into the Iraqi prisoner abuses had begun. But apparently there was no follow-up until the public revelations last week.

The January inquiry resulted in a devastating Pentagon report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in early March. The New Yorker Magazine`s intrepid Sy Hersh got the report and published it.

The revelations were not new to the International Red Cross, which says it had repeatedly beseeched Pentagon officials for a softer approach to prisoner interrogations but to no avail. The Red Cross has concluded that the abuse was "tantamount to torture."

Since the revelations, the White House has been engaged in frantic damage control against the firestorm that erupted after the atrocities were first shown on CBS-TV`s "60 Minutes II" last Wednesday.

Rumsfeld is obviously the designated fall guy in the prison debacle.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Friday, he expressed his deepest apology to the Iraqi victims of the abuses and suggested that they be compensated.

But mainly he appeared to be trying to get the president off the hook by taking "full responsibility."

"These events occurred on my watch," he said. "As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them."

It`s doubtful that Rumsfeld can assuage critics calling for his resignation.

Although Bush said Thursday he stands by Rumsfeld, the secretary is probably expendable if the political fallout gets too hot.

Rumsfeld certainly shares much of the blame for the lack of discipline and control in the military prisons.

But aside from such chain-of-command responsibility, the defense chief should bear a larger blame because of his boisterous proclamations two years ago that U.S. treatment of detainees wouldn`t be guided by the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners of war. Rumsfeld also arbitrarily deemed that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed.

That conveyed a message down the line that "anything goes" when dealing with detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other places where U.S. interrogators have stashed prisoners. (I wonder where Saddam Hussein is being held.)

Human rights groups have registered frequent complaints about the treatment of more than 600 detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo and have been ignored.

The prisoners are literally in limbo without contact with their families, much less a lawyer. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide how this squares with the Constitution.

History shows the buck has stopped with other presidents who trusted the people enough to admit their mistakes.

Among them was John F. Kennedy who took responsibility for the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

In 1980, President Carter said "the responsibility is fully my own" for the ill-fated rescue mission to win the freedom of the American hostages in Iran.

President Reagan took the blame when the Marine barracks were blown up in Beirut in 1983.

In 1987, he took responsibility for the Iran-Contra scandal involving the illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the anti-government Nicaraguan rebels.

To restore America`s damaged global image -- where our words about freedom and democracy have been made a mockery -- Bush must take some personal responsibility.

And that takes courage.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: [e-mail]. Copyright 2004 Hearst Newspapers.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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When `Evil-Doers` Are On Our Side
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, May 10, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/05/10/hsorensen.DTL

Donald Rumsfeld pulled the old "full responsibility" scam again last Friday.

In his opening statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, our unflappable secretary of defense said he took "full responsibility" for the abuse of prisoners by American service men and women in Iraq.

I first became aware of the "full responsibility" scam when it was used by President Ronald Reagan following the October 23, 1983, truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Reagan stood before the world and said he took "full responsibility" for the deaths of 241 Marines and other military personnel. Then our responsible president went back to sleep, to awaken two days later to order the invasion of Grenada, thus inventing the now famous "wag the dog" scenario.

Reagan`s guilty plea didn`t cost him anything.

Ten years after the Lebanon tragedy, on April 19, 1993, American paramilitary forces attacked the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, an attack that concluded with the deaths of about 80 men, women and children.

Although there were criminals holed up in the compound, their ghastly end was far beyond what anybody had anticipated. Janet Reno, who was Bill Clinton`s attorney general at the time, glibly and repeatedly took "responsibility" for the horror of Waco. Then she went back to work, continuing her post in the president`s cabinet and continuing to collect her salary.

Reno had learned from Reagan. Rumsfeld on Friday demonstrated he has learned from both. Publicly "taking responsibility" for misdeeds or errors has become an acceptable way to turn down the heat.

You and I have no idea of the extent of the atrocities committed against American-held prisoners since Sept. 11, 2001, but you can bet your life it goes far beyond what is now known by the public.

President George W. Bush, a one-time cheerleader at Yale, has been the primary cheerleader for abuse against our perceived enemies.

He has declared Iraq, Iran and North Korea as evil. In his opinion, Iraqis who continue to fight against the invaders of their country are "evil-doers." (Rumsfeld likes to call them "dead-enders.")

Words have power. When spoken by people with great power, words have great power.

President Bush seems incapable of going before an audience without mentioning the criminal disasters of Sept. 11, 2001. His intent is clear. He doesn`t feel the need to be cautious. He enjoys the power. He wants to keep the nation fearful and angry.

It works. We are a fearful and angry nation. We are angry at anyone designated as enemy. We are even angry at each other. Pro-war people are angry at anti-war people, anti-war people angry at pro-war people.

Given the national fear and anger, and the loathing of our enemies, all encouraged by the Bush administration, it is not in the least surprising that undertrained service men and women abuse helpless prisoners.

We have been abusing foreign prisoners ever since Sept. 11, 2001. We refuse to call them prisoners. We call them "enemy combatants" or "detainees" or some other such poppycock. We deny them what we Americans believe to be "inalienable rights."

We interrogate them with subtle forms of torture, and then boast about it. We think constant exposure to annoying noise and sleep depravation are funny. When we consider those tools of subtle tortune inadequate, we turn our prisoners over to other governments for more serious questioning and torture.

I have a little experience with the role of prisoner and of military policeman. In 1951, while in the Army, I volunteered to go to Korea. Then, when I got to Camp Stoneman out here in California, I went into Berkeley one night to say goodbye to a new girlfriend and returned to learn the troop ship I was supposed to be on had sailed without me. That earned my 30 days in the Stoneman Stockade. I served 18 of the 30, then got shipped out.

When I arrived in Japan, I was assigned to the 45th Military Police Company, which transferred to Korea shortly thereafter, replacing the 1st Calvary. I pulled my first shift as a military policeman on Christmas Eve 1951. I had had no training. I had been a clerk. I knew how to type. I didn`t even know how to put on a brassard (that black armband with the white letters "MP" on it).

In the Stoneman Stockade, I witnessed prisoner abuse and was a victim of it. One MP corporal loved to order the prisoners to attention, and then bait them into moving. As soon as one moved, he`d say, "You`re supposed to be at attention. That`s one gig." Each gig, or demerit, meant an extra half hour of close-order drill at night, when everybody else was resting. Most of the prisoners drilled every night. A common offense was "hair too long," sometimes given two days in a row after a haircut in-between.

I have never responded kindly to abusive authority, so I spent my last week in the stockade in solitary confinement -- because of a paint fight I`d had with a guy named Rodriquez and my refusal to apologize for it.

In the end, I went from jail to the police force, an irony I considered delicious. Particularly sweet was the end of the ride from Stoneman to Pier 96 in San Francisco, escorted by heavily armed MPs. As soon as we cleared the gangway, each of us former prisoners was handed an M-1 rifle.

Our MP company in Korea had a small criminal investigation detachment attached to it. The CID guys didn`t mix with the rest of us, and they maintained a small stockade within our compound. It held Koreans, of both sexes. It was a mysterious place, as far as I was concerned, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

However, I was 20 years old. I believe that if I had been told to make those Koreans talk, by whatever means necessary, I would have become as abusive as those American prison guards in Iraq. Not likely as perverted, however.

Philip G. Zimbardo seems to be the world`s expert on how guards and prisoners interact. In 1971, while at Stanford University, Professor Zimbardo conducted a now famous experiment using students as both guards and prisoners. What that experiment showed was that the students designated as "guards" quickly became abusive, students designated as "prisoners" quickly became submissive.

Zimbardo`s experiment, which had to be cut short because the student "guards" were becoming too abusive, is fascinating. You can learn about it in detail at: www.zimbardo.com/zimbardo.html.

What Zimbardo`s work demonstrates is that anyone charged with taking care of prisoners must be well-trained for the job. That obviously hasn`t been the case with our military since Sept. 11, 2001.

What the exposure of our atrocities also teaches is that our leadership has gone against traditional American beliefs. One of our claims to respect has been our simple decency. George W. Bush`s bellicose rhetoric, echoed by others in his administration, goes against our ideals.

Bush claims to be a disciple of the Christian Prince of Peace, and he commonly exhorts the God of Love, yet the rest of his rhetoric seems to belie those beliefs. Someone should point out to Bush the difference between a moral man and a moralistic one.

And Rumsfeld, who admits responsibility for war crimes, should accept that responsibility. He should return to civilian life.

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His regular weekly column will resume in September. E-mail him at [e-mail].

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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11PM | 10C

The Daily Show features current event news, pop culture news, and more.


http://www.comedycentral.com/mp/play.php?reposid=/multimedia…

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[bares@nobles]

Constitution Ruled Unconstitutional
by John Hawkins

Today the Federal Appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the Constitution itself was unconstitutional because the phrase "year of our Lord" was used in Article Seven. Therefore, the court ruled that instead of the Constitution, the United States would in the future be governed by a combination of the principles set forth in the Sylvester Stallone movie "Judge Dredd", the lyrics of Beatles songs, and some notes the San Francisco court jotted down on cocktail napkins.

Circuit Judge Alfred T. Goodwin said this wasn`t an easy decision to make, "Well right before we ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional, the lawyer for the defense pointed out that the Constitution has the phrase "year of our Lord" in it. I was tempted to call him a liar right then and there but since I`d never read the Constitution before, I thought I`d better check it out first. You can`t imagine how shocked and disappointed I was to find out that the Constitution violated itself. That`s when I knew I had to overturn it."

There were some people who disagreed with Goodwin`s ruling like House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R - TX),

"Goodwin is a lunatic who is representative of the left`s...hey what are you guy`s doing? Get off of me! Do you know who I am?!?"

At that point Delay was dragged away for breaking the "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" Article of the new Constitution which forbids insulting judges.

Goodwin said it was sad but necessary to send Delay to a prison camp in Alaska because, "The only law we have now is our new Constitution and once you start interpreting the law any old way you please it can lead to total disaster. Besides, as they said in "Judge Dredd", `I am the Law` and I never liked Delay anyway."

Then Goodwin went on to explain the new currency that would soon be put into circulation, "Our old bills have the words "In God We Trust" on them so obviously they all have to be replaced. Our new bills have all the members of Beatles on them. Ringo, Paul, John, and George are all getting their own bills. On the downside, Yoko Ono`s picture is going to be on the hundred dollar bill but we`re hoping that having her face on there will cut down on counterfeiting."

At that point "Vice-Judge" Stephen Reinhardt entered the room and eagerly began to discuss the "Napkin Amendments", "I convinced Alfred that there were some legal questions that even Judge Dredd and the Beatles Songs weren`t capable of addressing. For example, how can you use the song "A Hard Day`s Night" to justify socialized medicine? It`s just not possible. That`s why I scribbled a bunch of ideas down on a cocktail napkin to fill in the gaps. I was going type them out but it was kind of late so we decided to just use the napkin."

When asked what these "Napkin Amendments" entailed Reinhardt replied, "Well I watched Braveheart a couple of weeks ago and I loved the whole concept of "prime nocte." You know where a noble has the right to sleep with any woman on her wedding night? So we put that in for judges and I hung a sign up sheet in the judges lounge at the courthouse. If Britney Spears or one of the Olson Twins gets married, I get first crack at `em."

At that point, Reinhardt and Goodwin had to cut the discussion short in order to talk with Paul McCartney about writing a Constitutional amendment mandating a sequel to Judge Dredd. "The only downside" Goodwin opined "is that the movie may lose so much money that it could drive the deficit up. Unless...we made it illegal NOT to go the movie." Reinhardt nodded, "I bet they never could have come up with something like that 200 years ago."

http://rightwingnews.com/humor/goodwin.php

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Mike Shannon: `How the mighty have fallen`
Posted on Tuesday, May 11 @ 10:19:27 EDT By Mike Shannon
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=16132&mode=nest…
George Bush is rightfully infamous for his ongoing losing battle with the English language. Without question, this man has more created more malapropisms, unleashed more misstatements and generally mangled his native tongue more often and more thoroughly than any other public figure in American history. But even with this dubious track record safely tucked beneath his arm, the comments he made on May 10th at the Pentagon in defense of his Secretary of Defense are staggering in their inarticulacy and in their effect.

First of all: Mr. Rumsfeld is not supposed to be "courageously leading our nation in the war against terror." Mr. President, pardon me for pointing this out but, God help us, you are supposed to be leading our nation, not one of your cabinet members. Perhaps this was just another slip of the tongue, but then again we all -- well maybe you don`t -- know what Freud said about slips of the tongue.

Even more important than who is actually running the show was Mr. Bush`s remark that the Secretary was "doing a superb job."By what definition is this man doing a superb job? To use such a superlative to praise Mr Rumsfeld is either to show a compete lack of understanding of what the word means, or even more frightening, a complete disregard for the reality of the circumstances over which Mr Rumsfeld presides.



Practically nobody, regardless of how partisan, is even attempting to argue anymore that the occupation of Iraq is going as planned. The litany of mistakes, from the trivial to the strategic, in the "postwar"occupation of Iraq -- Bush and his minions seemed to be the only people who still believe the war ended just because Mr Bush said it did -- grows more lengthy and bloody by the hour. This is not the format for a retelling of those failures. For such a list I recommend the article by Peter Galbraith, How to Get Out of Iraq, in the May 13th edition of the New York Review of Books. It is merely enough for the purposes of this discussions to acknowledge that they exist.

As bad as it has been going, the revelations of the past week have made a bad situation into a hellish one. It is a statement of the obvious to note that the United States Army -- an institution that Mr Rumsfeld has had a, if you pardon the use of the word, tortuous relationship with since taking office -- is currently embroiled in the most disastrous public relations debacle since the My Lai massacre four decades ago in Vietnam. And while that unholy assault on innocents was by far more horrific and lethal, this current nightmare come to life has the benefit of being captured in high definition digital quality; available for downloading at the touch of button from Casablanca to Karachi.

The un-named king of yore may have lost his empire for the want of a nail, Mr Bush is perilously close to losing his for a few too many pixels.

That the situation in Iraq has devolved to this sickening nadir is hardly surprising. I am a charter member of the "Bush is the worst President in recent history, and quite possibly of all time, Club." I found the thought of this man being in charge of the government of the United States an embarrassing and frightening one from the moment he anounced his candidacy. As such, I have long been personally aware of the damned if we do and damned if we don`t position he has put us members of the loyal opposition. Due to the fact that the stakes are so high-- environmentally, economicaly, fiscally and of course, in regards to foreign affairs and national defense -- as a patriot it was impossible to wish him to fail. That he would fail was never in question. In spite of his near mythical status post 9/11, he remains what he always has been; an all hat and no cattle Daddy`s boy whom if he went by any other name than Bush he would have safely found his level of anonymous mediocrity a long time ago.

Mr Bush`s voluminous inadequacies were not lost on the upper echelons of the Republican party, which is precisely why they worked so diligently to reassure the public that this neophyte was to be surrounded by well seasoned professionals in the most key departments of his administration. Unfortunately for the entire world, they chose to fill those positions with men of stilted imagination and meanness of spirit. Mr Rumsfeld and his ever loyal mentor and protégé, Dick Cheney, embody those characteristics as if they invented them.

Although as I stated above, as we are witnessing with our disbelieving eyes, the consequences of these men`s failures are so dire that I would never willfully wish them to come to their putrid fruition. But even with that being said, I cannot deny the how satisfying it will be to watch these smug, self absorbed, arrogant s.o.b`s forced to face the wrath of a people and cause betrayed.

Contact Mike at [e-mail]

[Joerver]

Released: May 9, 2004

The Election Is Kerry`s To Lose

By John Zogby

I have made a career of taking bungee jumps in my election calls. Sometimes I haven`t had a helmet and I have gotten a little scratched. But here is my jump for 2004: John Kerry will win the election.

Have you recovered from the shock? Is this guy nuts? Kerry`s performance of late has hardly been inspiring and polls show that most Americans have no sense of where he really stands on the key issues that matter most to them. Regardless, I still think that he will win. And if he doesn`t, it will be because he blew it. There are four major reasons for my assertion:

First, my most recent poll (April 12-15) shows bad re-election numbers for an incumbent President. Senator Kerry is leading 47% to 44% in a two-way race, and the candidates are tied at 45% in the three-way race with Ralph Nader. Significantly, only 44% feel that the country is headed in the right direction and only 43% believe that President Bush deserves to be re-elected - compared with 51% who say it is time for someone new.

In that same poll, Kerry leads by 17 points in the Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000, while Bush leads by only 10 points in the Red States that he won four years ago.

Second, there are very few undecided voters for this early in a campaign. Historically, the majority of undecideds break to the challenger against an incumbent. The reasons are not hard to understand: voters have probably made a judgment about the better-known incumbent and are looking for an alternative.

Third, the economy is still the top issue for voters - 30% cite it. While the war in Iraq had been only noted by 11% as the top issue in March, it jumped to 20% in our April poll as a result of bad war news dominating the news agenda. The third issue is the war on terrorism. Among those who cited the economy, Kerry leads the President 54% to 35%. Among those citing the war in Iraq, Kerry`s lead is 57% to 36%. This, of course, is balanced by the 64% to 30% margin that the President holds over Kerry on fighting the war on terrorism. These top issues are not likely to go away. And arguably, there is greater and growing intensity on the part of those who oppose and want to defeat Bush.

The President`s problem is further compounded by the fact that he is now at the mercy of situations that are out of his control. While the economy is improving, voters historically do not look at indicators that measure trillions and billions of dollars. Instead, their focus is on hundreds and thousands of dollars. In this regard, there is less concern for increases in productivity and gross domestic product and more regard for growth in jobs and maintaining of health benefits. Just 12 years ago, the economy had begun its turnaround in the fourth quarter of 1991 and was in full recovery by spring 1992 - yet voters gave the President`s father only 38% of the vote because it was all about "the economy, stupid."

The same holds true for Iraq. Will the United States actually be able to leave by June 30? Will Iraq be better off by then? Will the US be able to transfer power to a legitimate and unifying authority? Will the lives lost by the US and its allies be judged as the worth the final product? It is difficult to see how the President grabs control of this situation.

Finally, if history is any guide, Senator Kerry is a good closer. Something happens to him in the closing weeks of campaigns (that obviously is not happening now!). We have clearly seen that pattern in his 1996 victory over Governor Bill Weld for the Senate in Massachusetts and more recently in the 2004 Democratic primaries. All through 2003, Kerry`s campaign lacked a focused message. He tends to be a nuanced candidate: thoughtful, briefed, and too willing to discuss a range of possibly positions on every issue. It is often hard to determine where he actually stands. In a presidential campaign, if a candidate can`t spell it out in a bumper sticker, he will have trouble grabbing the attention of voters. By early 2004, as Democratic voters in Iowa and elsewhere concluded that President Bush could be defeated, they found Governor Howard Dean`s message to be too hot and began to give Kerry another look. Kerry came on strong with the simplest messages: "I`m a veteran", "I have the experience", and "I can win". His timing caused him to come on strong at the perfect time. As one former his Vietnam War colleague of told a television correspondent in Iowa: "John always knows when his homework is due."

Though he is hardly cramming for his finals yet and is confounding his supporters, possible leaners, and even opponents with a dismal start on the hustings, the numbers today are on his side (or at least, not on the President`s side).

We are unlikely to see any big bumps for either candidate because opinion is so polarized and, I believe, frozen in place. There are still six months to go and anything can still happen. But as of today, this race is John Kerry`s to lose.
Reprinted from Zogby International:
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews825.cfm

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"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".


These reports are strictly confidential and intended only for the authorities to which they are presented.

This report includes observations and recommendations from visits that took place between March and November 2003. The report itself was handed over to the Coalition Forces (CF) in February of 2004.

CLICK HERE FOR FULL REPORT: PDF Formathttp://informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/icrc_iraq.pdf


Excerpts from report

The ICRC draws the attention of the Coalition Forces to a number of serious violations of humanitarian law:

Brutality against protected person upon capture and initial custody, sometimes causing death or serious injury.

Physical or psychological coercion during interrogation to secure information.

Prolonged solitary confinement in cells devoid of daylight.

Excessive or disproportionate use of force against persons deprived of their liberty resulting in death or injury during their period of internment.

Seizure and confiscation of private belongings.

"The main places of internment where mistreatment allegedly took place included battle group unit stations; the military sections of Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib Correctional Facility; Al-Baghdadi, Heat Base and Hubbania Camp in Ramadi governate; Tikrit holding area (former Saddam Hussein Islamic School); a former train station Al-Khaim, near the Syrian border, turned into a military base; the Ministry of Defence and Presidential Palace in Baghdad, the former mukhabarat office in Basra, as well as several Iraqi police stations in Baghdad.


Methods of ill-treatment

Hooding, used to prevent people from seeing and to disorient them, and also to prevent them from breathing freely. ... Hooding could last for periods from a few hours up to two to four consecutive days, during which hoods were lifted only for drinking, eating or going to the toilets.
Handcuffing with flexi-cuffs, which were sometimes made so tight and used for such extended periods that they caused skin lesions and long-term after-effects on the hands (nerve damage), as observed by the ICRC.

Beating with hard objects (including pistols and rifles), slapping, punching, kicking with knees or feet on various parts of the body (legs, sides, lower back, groin).

Pressing the face into the ground with boots.

Threats.

Being stripped naked for several days while held in solitary confinement in an empty and completely dark cell that included a latrine.

Being paraded naked outside cells in front of other persons deprived of their liberty and guards, sometimes hooded or with women`s underwear over the head.

Acts of humiliation such as being made to stand naked against the wall of the cell with arms raised or with women`s underwear over the head for prolonged periods, while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position.

Being attached repeatedly over several days, for several hours each time, with handcuffs to the bars of their cell door in humiliating (i.e., naked or in underwear) and/or uncomfortable position causing physical pain.
Exposure while hooded to
loud noise or music, prolonged exposure while hooded to the sun over several hours.

Being forced to remain for prolonged periods in stress positions such as squatting or standing with our without the arms lifted.

These methods of physical or psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information or other forms of cooperation from person who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an "intelligence value."

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Tuesday, May 11, 2004
War News for May 11, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: One Russian contractor killed, two kidnapped in ambush near Latifiya.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqis killed, 22 wounded by bomb in Kirkuk market.

Bring ‘em on: One Dutch soldier killed, one wounded in ambush near Samawah.

Bring ‘em on: US troops ambushed in Mosul. One Iraqi child killed.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, one wounded by roadside bomb near Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier dies from wounds received in ambush near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Explosion reported on oil pipeline near Musayyib.

Bring ‘em on: Thirty-five Iraqis killed in fighting in Sadr City.

Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqis killed, 14 wounded in fighting near Kufa.

Bring ‘em on: US civilian found dead near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: KBR convoy ambushed near at-Rutba.

CENTCOM reports one US soldier died in a vehicle collision near Baghdad.

You can read General Taguba’s AR 15-6 Report here, in PDF format.

Professor Cole has a revealing post on US-Spanish operations near Najaf in early April. “The post-Franco, post-fascist Spanish military must have been absolutely astounded and disgusted by the Texan demand that they deliver Muqtada to the US "dead or alive." And, they immediately refused. Obviously, if the Spanish had taken the US bait and carried out the arrest, their forces would have faced the full fury of the Sadrists, who are capable of quite a lot of fury. This whole episode strikes me as shameful and cowardly on the Americans` part. It seems obvious that Bush, who must have made the decision to launch the largely unprovoked attack on Muqtada, was hoping to make the Spanish the fall guys. (Two pieces of evidence point to Bush: 1)We now know he was the one who ordered that "heads must roll" at Fallujah, so these major military campaigns are his idea; and, 2) the phraseology "take him dead or alive" is distinctively his.)”

I know how this guy feels. “Before Memorial Day 2003 Mertes painted a sign with the number of soldiers who had died in the war -- just to help make people aware. After a few days, he made a new number and stapled it to the painted sign. Then he decided to make numbers and change them. He didn`t really intend to continue keeping track. But then someone stole the sign. That`s when Mertes became determined.”

I try to avoid posting links from anonymous sources. However, this post has a ring of authenticity because the author uses accurate terminology from Army intelligence doctrine, such as “low level collector,” a term used by Army counterintelligence in low-level source operations, and he seems to have a working knowledge of Military Intelligence. Interrogators receive part of their training at Fort Huachuca. Readers can decide if the information is credible.

Commentary

Editorial: “Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked “60 Minutes II” to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn’t read Taguba’s report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media. By then, of course, it was too late. Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.”

Opinion: “Did top officials order the use of torture? It depends on the meaning of the words ‘order’ and ‘torture.’ Last August Mr. Rumsfeld`s top intelligence official sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantánamo prison, to Iraq. General Miller recommended that the guards help interrogators, including private contractors, by handling prisoners in a way that ‘sets the conditions’ for ‘successful interrogation and exploitation.’ What did he and his superiors think would happen?”

Analysis: “Vietnam and Iraq were both wars of choice. And they are also similar in that deceit and misrepresentation were employed by the US government, first to engage US forces and then to keep them there. Bush took us to war on the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al-Qaeda. No weapons of mass destruction have been found and no ties to al-Qaeda have been discovered. We were also told our troops would be greeted with open arms and flowers, which didn`t last long, and that Iraqi oil would pay for most of the reconstruction. Now we`re told we`re in Iraq to nurture democratic self-government, while political reconstruction is also going badly.”

Editorial: “A large segment of the American public still perceives Bush as strong on national security. Yet in just three years, his policies have helped squander the good will that flowed toward America after 9/11. In much of the world, that good will has been replaced with a stockpile of resentment and hatred. A hated America is not a secure America. And it`s not the America we want the world to know.”

Editorial cartoon: Le Monde.

Analysis: “Conveniently forgotten is the offhand remark of Defense Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, who is quoted by subordinates - in a 110-page report by the New York City Bar Association -- saying ‘the Geneva Accords’ on the treatment of prisoners are laws ‘in the service of terrorists.’ Which may explain why the National Guard prison guards knew squat about these international treaty obligations. Long before official reports and journalistic exposes revealed the horrific abuse of Iraqi prisoners, high-ranking American officers in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) expressed their deep concern that the civilian officials at the Pentagon were undermining the military`s detention rules and regulations, and ignoring interrogation procedures, even citing cases of torture. The Pentagon`s civilian leadership was apprised in late spring of 2003 and again in October. The Financial Times` John Dizard has dug up the New York City Bar Association`s report that leaves no doubt the practices revealed at Abu Ghraib violated both U.S. and international law. JAG officers are quoted as telling Scott Horton, the chair of the Committee on International Law of this particular Bar Association, that Feith had ‘significantly weakened’ the military`s rules and regulations governing prisoners of war… One deputy counsel at the Pentagon, a staunch Republican, recently resigned because, as he explained not for attribution, ‘right-wing ideologues are putting at risk the reputation of the U.S. military.’”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida sailor killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida sailor killed in Iraq.

Local story: Oregon soldier dies in Iraq.

Local story: Virginia Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: North Dakota soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Massachusetts soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Kentucky soldier wounded in Iraq.

Note to Readers

I have removed the comments I posted yesterday directed toward the anonymous reader from OSD. I posted those comments because I saw an opportunity to express my anger, outrage and personal contempt directly to source of those feelings. I chose my words carefully, with the intent to be as offensive and vulgar as possible. My sitemeter stats indicate that a reader from OSD viewed the page while my comments were posted. Mission accomplished.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:10 AM
Comments (7)

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Juan Cole * Informed Comment *
Thoughts on the Middle East, History, Islam, and Religion

Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

Prof. Cole ist Nah-OST Experte und seine Artikel sind immer lesenswert.

http://www.juancole.com/

US Ordered Spanish to Bring in Muqtada `Dead or Alive`
Spanish Command predicted "Large-Scale Military Response"


The new Spanish Minister of Defense, Jose Bono, is drawing the curtain from some of the events of early April when the US authorities in Iraq decided to attempt to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr in the wake of his self-identification with Hamas. It appears that at first the Coalition Provisional Authority and the US military command approached the poor Spanish about carrying out the arrest of Muqtada. The Spanish were in charge of Kufa and Najaf, where Muqtada is based.

The post-Franco, post-fascist Spanish military must have been absolutely astounded and disgusted by the Texan demand that they deliver Muqtada to the US "dead or alive." And, they immediately refused. Obviously, if the Spanish had taken the US bait and carried out the arrest, their forces would have faced the full fury of the Sadrists, who are capable of quite a lot of fury. This whole episode strikes me as shameful and cowardly on the Americans` part. It seems obvious that Bush, who must have made the decision to launch the largely unprovoked attack on Muqtada, was hoping to make the Spanish the fall guys. (Two pieces of evidence point to Bush: 1)We now know he was the one who ordered that "heads must roll" at Fallujah, so these major military campaigns are his idea; and, 2) the phraseology "take him dead or alive" is distinctively his.)

The Spanish response? "Fool me once, shame ... shame on ... you." Long, uncomfortable pause. "Fool me — can`t get fooled again!"


The Spanish commanders also appear to have worried about the possibility of being implicated in American war crimes. They insisted, as of April 13, that the situation around Najaf was no longer covered by UN Security Council resolutions 1483 and 1511, which they felt authorized their participation in peace-keeping operations in Iraq, but did not cover military aggression of the sort the US was pursuing against the Sadrists.

This anecdote sheds further light on the haste with which Prime Minister Zapatero has withdrawn Spanish troops from Iraq. The knowledge that the US tried to arrange for the Spanish to take the fall for going after Muqtada must have convinced him that he should get out quick before the US dragged his country into deadly confrontation. The Spanish, having been in Najaf and Kufa for eight months, and, unlike the Americans, having actually made a study of the local situation, knew very well that going after Muqtada would stir up a hornet`s nest, and perhaps plunge the south into a "large-scale military conflict" or at least a continuing low-grade guerrilla conflict, with themselves on the front lines.

The revelations also cast the Americans in an even poorer light as ignorant and arrogant incompetents. They were clearly completely unprepared for the insurgency throughout the South mounted by Muqtada`s followers beginning April 4, the day after they came after his aides. It is one thing to be unprepared for a major military confrontation. It is another to be unprepared for it after you were warned about it by your close ally who was in charge of the affected area!

Here`s the passage (my humble attempt at translation):
the Diario Malaga reports that, ` The minister of Defense, Jose Bono, revealed yesterday that the Spanish troops in Iraq were asked "to turn over dead or alive" "a certain religious leader", a reference the radical Shiite Muqtada Al Sadr, something which the Spanish command refused to do. In fact, the highest ranking Spanish officers in the Arab country sent a report at the beginning of April to the North American command in which they argued that increased harassment of the devotees of al-Sadr would trigger an aggravation of the situation.` But the Spanish refused: ` "The Occupying Powers can engage in offensive operations. The countries that are simply in the coalition, as in the case of Spain, cannot participate in offensive operations and, therefore, we said clearly that we were not prepared to deliver, as had been requested, a certain religious leader dead or alive." `

"We were there to help with pacification," [Bono] said. The highest-ranking Spanish military officers in charge in Iraq sent a report at the beginning of April to the North American command in which they observed that increased harassment of Al Sadr and his devotees would aggravate the situation in Iraq and would provoke "a large-scale military operation". `



posted by Juan Cole at 5/11/2004 07:31:07 AM

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Le Monde:
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Commentary: The blame shuffle in Iraq

By Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
Published 5/11/2004 8:00 AM

WASHINGTON, May 11 (UPI) -- It was the mother of all crises of confidence. America`s name was suddenly mud all over the world. Political cartoons from Bangladesh to Brazil took their lead from the Financial Times: the Statue of Liberty was portrayed as the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner, electrodes tied to his wrists, swaying precariously on a pedestal.

Doubtless Osama Bin Laden was also grateful for the U.S.-supplied recruiting poster. Would-be jihadis (holy warriors) from Morocco to Mindanao now have living proof their clerics have been speaking the truth about all the lies they teach them about America.

The damage to the United States is incalculable, but the administration`s new MO is that the defense buck no longer stops at either the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff`s or the Defense Secretary`s desk. There are sacrificial wolves between the Abu Ghraib prison and the theater commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez; a whitewash between Sanchez and CentCom commander Gen. John Abizaid; a herd of scapegoats between Abizaid and JCS Chairman Richard Meyers; and then no daylight between Myers, his deputy Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, his Commander-in-Chief President Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney, as they faced reporters phalanx-like at the Pentagon in a no-questions mode.

The fact that "Pentacon" topsiders - shorthand for the neo-conservative leadership of the Defense Department -- were alerted, first last spring and then again in the fall of 2003, about ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners gets lost in the blame shuffle. The U.S. proconsul in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, had repeatedly expressed concern about "abuses" in U.S. "detention centers" where some 50,000 Iraqis were held. Beginning a year ago, International Red Cross reports waved yellow flags verbally and in writing at the highest levels at State, DOD and the White House.

Conveniently forgotten is the offhand remark of Defense Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, who is quoted by subordinates - in a 110-page report by the New York City Bar Association -- saying "the Geneva Accords" on the treatment of prisoners are laws "in the service of terrorists." Which may explain why the National Guard prison guards knew squat about these international treaty obligations.

Long before official reports and journalistic exposes revealed the horrific abuse of Iraqi prisoners, high-ranking American officers in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) expressed their deep concern that the civilian officials at the Pentagon were undermining the military`s detention rules and regulations, and ignoring interrogation procedures, even citing cases of torture. The Pentagon`s civilian leadership was apprised in late spring of 2003 and again in October.

The Financial Times` John Dizard has dug up the New York City Bar Association`s report that leaves no doubt the practices revealed at Abu Ghraib violated both U.S. and international law. JAG officers are quoted as telling Scott Horton, the chair of the Committee on International Law of this particular Bar Association, that Feith had "significantly weakened" the military`s rules and regulations governing prisoners of war.

JAG informants also blamed the Defense Department`s General Counsel William J. Haynes II (recently appointed by President Bush to a Federal Appeals Court), along with Feith, for creating "an atmosphere of legal ambiguity that allowed mistreatment of prisoners..."

One deputy counsel at the Pentagon, a staunch Republican, recently resigned because, as he explained not for attribution, "right-wing ideologues are putting at risk the reputation of the U.S. military."

JAG officers who spoke to Horton said civilian officials, directed by Feith, removed safeguards that were designed to prevent the abuses the world has now witnessed. At Abu Ghraib, these safeguards should have included observation of interrogations behind a two-way mirror by a JAG officer, who would then be authorized to stop any misconduct on the spot.

Shortages of qualified personnel frequently left prisoners alone with civilian contractors who instructed guards on how to "soften them up." Thus, atrocities were outsourced, and Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade in charge of Abu Ghraib, acquired plausible deniability.

An internal Army report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba last February cited "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib. But Gen. Myers told a national TV audience on May 2 that he hadn`t read the report. A few days before, Myers personally called CBS` 60-Minutes II producer to request the incriminating pictures not be aired.

Also conveniently overlooked are the origins of the Iraqi debacle. In October 1998, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith together signed an "open letter" to President Clinton, in which they listed nine policy steps that were in "the vital national interest" of the United States. The very first step was "Recognize a provisional government in Iraq based on the principles and leaders of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) that is representative of all the peoples of Iraq."

In October 1998, following a major lobbying effort by the neocons, Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the "Iraqi Liberation Act," which provided funding - and Uncle Sam`s stamp of good geopolitical housekeeping - for Ahmed Chalabi`s INC, as well as five other exile groups.

Thanks to Chalabi`s unverifiable intelligence reports, neocons were remarkably ignorant about the internal situation in Iraq in particular and the greater Arab Middle East in general. There is much history to be written about the seeds of a failed policy.

Until recently, Chalabi was still the darling of the Pentagon`s neocons. No one had played a more important role in convincing Washington`s powers that be of 25 million Iraqis desperate to welcome their American liberators. But the ranks of Chalabi`s once diehard supporters are beginning to dwindle. His pledges to recognize Israel and to rebuild the Mosul-to-Haifa pipeline as a new democratic Iraq emerged on the world scene evaporated as his own political fortunes headed south.

Struggling to make a comeback, Chalabi switched his geopolitical affections to Tehran and to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq`s supreme Shia leader. The betrayal of his commitment to Israel split the neocon camp in two.

Marc Zell, a Jerusalem attorney and former law partner of Douglas Feith, and a friend of Chalabi, is now quoted as telling John Dizard: "Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat. He had one set of friends before he returned to Iraq and now he`s got another."

U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi has made it clear Chalabi is not on his list of potential members of a new governing authority. It didn`t take Brahimi long to figure out Chalabi was friendless among Iraq`s political hopefuls. This will presumably save the U.S. taxpayer the $340,000 monthly stipend Chalabi still receives from the Pentagon, courtesy of Douglas Feith. But the Iraq war policy concocted in Chalabi`s disinformation factory has left America`s global credibility at minus zero.

Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International

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Amnesty report lists 37 `disputed` killings by UK forces
Hanan Matrud, an eight-year-old girl shot dead by British troops in Basra. She is one of 37 Iraqi civilians killed in disputed circumstances by UK soldiers. Today, an independent report into all these deaths presents new problems for the allies, already reeling from allegations of torture and abuse
By Kim Sengupta and Cahal Milmo

11 May 2004

Hanan Matrud was playing with three friends when a British Army Warrior armoured vehicle pulled up near her home in a village in southern Iraq. As they ran forward to see what was going on, a shot rang out.

The girl, eight years old, was hit in the stomach with a rifle round. She was taken to the hospital, and had emergency surgery. She died the next day.

There is little dispute that a British soldier was responsible. To her family and neighbours,
it was cold-blooded murder.
The Army says she was probably hit when a warning shot was fired to disperse a stone-throwing mob. An inquiry has proved, the Army says, that the soldiers were not at fault.
Hanan was a "very unfortunate casualty of war". That conclusion is contradicted by a witness, Mizher Yassin, who claims the troops were under no threat.
He says Hanan was standing in an alley about 60 to 70 metres from the armoured car when a soldier aimed and fired a shot.

A report issued today by Amnesty International claims the shooting of Hanan, on 21 August 2003 at Karmat Ali, was one of 37 deaths of civilians in incidents involving British forces. It says those who died posed no apparent threat.

The report claims many of
these cases have not been properly investigated and inquiries launched by the Royal Military Police have been secretive. Kate Allen, Amnesty`s UK director, said: "Killings by UK forces, in situations where they should not be using lethal force, are examined in secrecy.

"Instead of the Army deciding whether to investigate itself when civilians are killed, there must be full, impartial and civilian-led investigations."

The report follows a further round yesterday of heated recriminations and accusations of torture, abuse, and killings of Iraqi civilians by US and British forces. Alleged systematic torture by Allied forces contained in two other reports, delivered to the US and British governments months ago, became public for the first time.

One dossier, by the International Committee of the Red Cross, was passed to the American and British governments in February but kept secret by both. The other, an earlier document prepared by Amnesty, was given to the Ministry of Defence in May last year, and discussed with officials from the MoD and the Foreign Office the following month.

The controversy over the handling of the issue by the British Government further intensified with Tony Blair admitting he had no knowledge of the Red Cross report until it appeared in the media.

"I have not seen this document", said Mr Blair. "But let me make it clear to you, my understanding is the two issues raised by the Red Cross document in respect of abuses of Iraqi prisoners; there is one specific case on that issue and those were actually dealt with."

The new disclosures also left a question mark over the conduct of Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister, who declared in the Commons last week that he had received "no adverse or other reports".

MPs reacted with incredulity to claims by ministers that they had not been shown the Red Cross report. Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, said the document had been passed to Britain in confidence by Paul Bremer, the US head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and copies were sent to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was the Prime Minister`s envoy to Iraq, British military officials in the country, and the military`s Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood in London. Officials decided the allegations against British forces had already been dealt with, and did not need to be referred to ministers.

The Red Cross report also describes how a 28-year-old man, Baha Mousa, was abused while in British custody and later died. Mr Mousa`s family have subsequently received an interim payment of £1,875 from the Government.

The military has also paid out a further £72,000 in compensation to 22 Iraqi families to settle abuse claims.

The Government stepped up its pressure on the Daily Mirror last night when Mr Hoon said the photographs published by the paper allegedly showing an Iraqi prisoner being mistreated by British soldiers looked "increasingly like a hoax". But Mr Hoon was earlier forced to admit in the Commons that British troops had acted illegally in "hooding" prisoners in Iraq last year.


11 May 2004 21:50


© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Rumsfeld and the `beastly` Boykin
By Ramtanu Maitra

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 7, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld apologized to the Iraqi families for the abuse of detainees by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Rumsfeld also took responsibility for the abuses since they occurred while he was head of the Pentagon.

However, it is likely that an apology might not be enough to get Rumsfeld off the hook, and it could be a matter of perhaps a very short time before his administrative career comes to an end. But behind Rumsfeld`s apologies lies an attempt to cover up a controversial character hired by him to pin down the "interrogation" process: Lieutenant-General William "Jerry" Boykin, a Christian fundamentalist and no lover of Muslims.

The `beast-man`
The Washington-based Executive Intelligence Review, a political and economic weekly, has long pointed out that the determination and ruthlessness of the Bush administration, expressed particularly since September 11, was orchestrated by what it described as a few "beast-men" who, as the word suggests, have no hesitation in acting like beasts. One person characterized as such was Boykin.

Boykin is the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Intelligence under Stephen Cambone, a personal friend of Rumsfeld and one who has the defense secretary`s ears. The presence of Cambone as Boykin`s boss has previously helped Rumsfeld avoid questions surrounding alleged mistreatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even of Muslim prisoners in general.

As the New York Times pointed out in its May 7 editorial, "the road to Abu Ghraib began in some ways in 2002 at Guantanamo Bay", pointing out it was then that the Bush administration began building up a world-wide military detention system, hidden from public view and from any judicial oversight, in which detainees were denied normal legal protections. The New York Times suggests that in reality a slew of "beast-men" function within the Bush administration. To these people, "democracy", "freedom" and "reconstruction" are convenient words to cover up the real murk underneath.

`Judeo-Christian superiority`
Boykin is one who inhabits the murk. Writing for the Los Angeles Times on October 16 last year, columnist William Arkin pointed out that Boykin sees the "war on terror" as a religious war between Judeo-Christian civilization and Satan, with Islam of course cast in the latter role. According to Arkin, Boykin told a religious group in Oregon, in June, that radical Islamists hate the United States "because we`re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan." He continued to say that "our spiritual enemy will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus".

Boykin, a 30-year veteran of the US Army`s Delta Force, the Central Intelligence Agency and Army Special Forces, told another audience, in reference to operations he was involved in in Somalia in 1993, that "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." Arkin further reports that Boykin believes that President George W Bush was not elected to the White House by mere mortals, but chosen by God, and that he himself received his orders from God. Arkin also noted that Boykin`s concept of "war on terror" is quite different from the way the US president looks at it. Boykin sees it as a war against Muslims.

Following Boykin`s comments on "my God", made in a public speech, an internal investigation has been under way in the Pentagon by the Inspector General`s department, but no findings have been made known.

It did not take a heap of naked bodies and other photographs to expose who Boykin is and always was. Arab-Americans and American Muslims have long complained about Boykin. The photographs are a confirmation of what the man was suspected to be as the man in charge of hunting down intelligence and tasked with, among other duties, catching Osama bin Laden.

But to date, the Bush administration has protected Boykin and the dubious methods of which he must have been aware - or even authored - to obtain information. Professor Yvonne Haddad, a professor at Georgetown University`s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said the administration`s failure to discipline Boykin smacked of hypocrisy. "When someone says anything against blacks or Jews, they are immediately relieved of their jobs," Haddad pointed out.

Pattern of abuse
Boykin`s job in the Pentagon makes his Christian fundamentalist background especially sensitive: he is charged with speeding up the flow of intelligence on terrorist leaders to combat teams in the field so that they can attack top-ranking terrorist leaders. It can easily be speculated that it is this urgency to obtain intelligence, and an uncompromising religious outlook backed by a "beast-man" mentality, that has led to the lower echelons in the US military to adopt Saddam Hussein-like brutalities. It is quite possible that now that the lid on the excesses in Iraq has been lifted, more reports will surface.

Since most of the people that Boykin is charged with capturing are Muslim, his words and actions will now draw even more scrutiny in the Arab and Islamic world. Bush, a born-again Christian, often uses religious language in his speeches, but he keeps references to God non-sectarian. At one point, immediately after September 11, the president said he wanted to lead a "crusade" against terrorism. But he quickly retracted the word when told that, to Muslim ears, it recalled the medieval Christian crusaders` brutal invasions of Islamic nations.

In that context, Boykin`s reference to the God of Islam as "an idol" is more than provocation; it exposes what is, at best, an ignorant mind. Bush has made a point of praising Islam as "a religion of peace". He has invited Muslim clerics to the White House for Ramadan fast-breaking dinners, and has criticized evangelicals who have called Islam a dangerous faith.

For the army, the issue of officers expressing religious opinions publicly has been a sensitive problem for many years, according to a former head of the Army Judge Advocate General`s office who is now retired but continues to serve in government as a civilian.

"The army has struggled with this issue over the years. It gets really, really touchy because what you`re talking about is freedom of expression," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "What usually happens is that somebody has a quiet chat with the person," the retired general said.

The coverup
Finally, the Boykin-Cambone partnership under Rumsfeld. Cambone was one of the staunchest believers that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction existed. Since all others at the top "believed" the same way, the views of Cambone, who resides somewhat down the rungs of the power ladder, were not given much publicity.

But at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing with Rumsfeld and others on May 7, Cambone acknowledged his role in sending Guantanamo Bay`s Camp X-Ray head, General Geoffrey Miller, to Iraq. During an exchange concerning his deployment of Miller to Iraq, Cambone said: "We had, then, in Iraq a large body of people who had been captured on the battlefield that we had to gain intelligence for force protection purposes. And he was asked to go over, at my encouragement, to take a look at the situation as it existed there. And he made his recommendations."

The decision to use General Miller apparently came after he reported on Camp X-Ray, saying three quarters of the 600 Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects held there were becoming compliant and offering intelligence tips.

The Washington Post has reported that the defense department approved interrogation techniques for Guantanamo Bay which included forcing inmates to strip naked and subjecting them to loud music, bright lights and sleep deprivation. Miller recommended that detention operations in Iraq must act as an "enabler" for interrogation.

"This is not a few bad apples. This is a system failure, a massive failure," Senate Armed Services Committee member Lindsay Graham, a conservative Republican, was quoted as saying.

So far, Rumsfeld has announced inquiries against seven defendants, with each one to be run by a senior military officer. He is now suggesting an independent review of these inquiries. Meanwhile, it`s business as usual for Boykin and Cambone.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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An American tragedy


Die ersten 3 Teile am 08.05. im Thread

# Also in this series:
Bush against Bush (Apr 30)
Kerry, the Yankee muchacho (May 7)
You have the right to be misinformed (May 8)

"Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out."
- Robert Graves, I, Claudius, 1934

AUSTIN, Texas - It is radioactive. It is a PR Pearl Harbor. But most of all, the Abu Ghraib scandal is an American tragedy.

The Bush administration`s key talking point - repeated ad infinitum for days by everybody from Condoleezza Rice to a gallery of generals - is that the "abuse" was an aberration by a group of rogue soldiers. It should fall into the Donald Rumsfeld-coined theory of "known knowns, unknown knowns".

General Richard Myers insists life as a scary porno movie in Abu Ghraib "was not a systemic pattern": it was the fault of a few individuals. Not true. Trespassing on the rigid International Committee of the Red Cross code of silence, Pierre Krahenbuhl, its director of operations, confirmed in Geneva the veracity of a leaked Red Cross report characterizing the prison abuse as part of "a model, and a general system". Red Cross spokeswoman Antonella Notari emphasized to Asia Times Online that the report details "serious violations" of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. In the context of humanitarian international law, "serious violations" mean nothing other than war crimes.

Officially, shame is spread all over the United States, a whole nation humiliated. It may be a little more complicated than that.

Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University, confesses how he can still be amazed at US innocence and naivete, a whole nation still not able to deal with human nature`s darker side, especially as revealed not by insidious foreigners but by fellow Americans.

Asia Times Online was faced with the new American tragedy deep in the heart of Texas. Even the road signs seemed not to believe it: Shall it be Highway 87 south to Eden or Highway 277 south to Eldorado?

In Brady, self-described "in the heart of Texas", a pickup heaven populated with "Don`t Mess with Texas" T-shirts and flag-decorated burrito stands remembering September 11, 2001, radio preachers call, in anguish: "Deliver us from evil!" while the rest of the dial is occupied by satanic rock, from Alice Cooper to George Thorogood. From Midland to Austin, from families at the local McDonald`s to Harley fanatics kissing the joy of the open road, everybody we talk to converges to a few key points. Rumsfeld is "a champion", "a volcano", "the linchpin in the war on terra". He simply "should not resign". The whole thing is part of a "partisan, crass, politically motivated campaign against Republicans". Some say they "can`t wait for the anti-Democratic backlash". There`s a justification that "more people were killed in Waco than in this [Abu Ghraib] prison, and nobody made a fuss". Vietnam veterans say that "some things" done by the interrogators were wrong, but the rest was "understandable".

There`s a solid esprit de corps: for the brave folks in the heart of Texas, every official in the administration of President George W Bush who volunteers any criticism is considered a Judas itching to get a book contract. Every intervention by a top Bush administration official is lauded as "statesmanlike". The media are basically "out of control, full of communists". None of America`s allies - European, Asian, whatever - has the right to criticize US policies. If there was any mistake committed in Iraq, it pales compared to the fact that Saddam Hussein "used weapons of mass destruction against his own people" and kept a close, intimate relationship with Osama bin Laden. There`s an almost religious belief on an equation that could be resumed this way: September 11 equals radical Islam equals Patriot Act equals Saddam equals war equals orange alert forever.

This may be as faithful a survey as any of what middle America - not those corrupt Gomorras New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston - think about the whole "war on terra". Compare it to what popular talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said on the air late last week: "It could well be that the whole purpose here, which has been said, was to humiliate these prisoners. And there`s no better way of doing it than what was done. These are Arab males - what better way to humiliate them than to have a woman have authority over them? What`s the purpose here? What`s the objective of this? The objective is to soften them up for interrogation later, later on. As I said, there was no horror, there was no terror, there was no death, there was no injuries, nothing."

The pattern
Democrats and Bush critics say Abu Ghraib is something like the perfect storm: repulsive methods employed in a secret universe run amok by a bunch of amateurs, detainees treated not as human beings, everything fully orchestrated and choreographed, and the whole matter treated with supreme indifference in Washington.

The endless debate by the chattering classes, live and over the media, and full-time network noise may leave the impression that the porcelain may not be broken. But few admit in the talk shows that the whole chain of command is in question - not to mention the whole strategy of neo-con Washington. It`s impossible to believe the official White House-Pentagon story, according to which Rumsfeld did not brief Bush on Abu Ghraib while at the same time General Myers, for two long weeks, was frantically stonewalling the release of the S&M material with CBS`s Dan Rather. As late as early last week, Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had not read the report he had been trying to censor for more than two weeks. In case the official version was true, this would mean that the president of the United States is kept fully oblivious of crucial matters of his own "war on terra" by the neo-cons` non-stop manipulations.

In terms of the big picture, or big tragedy, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld - the architect of both Bush wars - resigning or not, along with his warrior minion Paul Wolfowitz, is a peripheral issue. Rumsfeld`s obsession with secrecy - such as his admission in front of congressmen that "the real issue is that a secret report was given to the press" - would probably be transferred to the next Pentagon head. But the situation is unraveling very fast. Even Major-General Charles Swannack, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, has admitted that the United States is strategically losing the war in Iraq. The Washington Post reports that "a profound anger is building within the army at Rumsfeld and those around him".

Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, from the summit of their ideological infallibility, always worked for "their" Pentagon to run Iraq. The idea of a huge private army of unaccountable commandos engaged in all sorts of operations in Iraq comes from Rumsfeld (there are at least 20,000, many more than British soldiers in the coalition). The patronage of convicted fraud, zero-credibility, Ahmad "our Saddam" Chalabi comes from Rumsfeld. The heavy-handed military approach and the absolute disregard of civilian casualties are trademark Rumsfeld. The Pentagon controlling the US$18 billion in Iraqi reconstruction funds is a Rumsfeld-enforced policy.

Hubris was inevitable. Without any counter-power to refrain the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz machine, once again the logic of war - this creepy, out-of-control monster - has engulfed its practitioners. Finished by the end of February, the report by Major-General Antonio Taguba detailing abuses in Abu Ghraib had not even been opened by Myers by early May. Repeated Red Cross warnings were dismissed. Bush was oblivious of everything. And Congress was kept in the dark.

Help won`t be forthcoming. Because of initial overwhelming opposition to the war, the mess in Fallujah and Najaf, and now the Abu Ghraib scandal, European public opinion is now even more against Bush`s policies than a year ago. Asia Times Online has confirmed with European diplomats: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) won`t go to Iraq after the June 30 "handover". The Europeans will wait until the result of this November`s US presidential election. No wonder some are dubbing the whole US operation in Iraq "Dead Men Walking".

The techniques
Specialist Sabrina D Harman, a military police officer already charged with prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and now the world`s most infamous dominatrix, was in essence under command of US Army military intelligence officers, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives, and private civilian contractors specializing in conducting Ariel Sharon-sanctioned, Israeli-style interrogations. An average soldier such as Harman is not culturally equipped to assess how degrading nakedness and sexual humiliation may be to a follower of Islam. Rosemary Gartner of the American Sociological Association offers a clue of why that happened: "US rhetoric very effectively dehumanized Saddam Hussein, his regime and what remained of his supporters. This was a powerful subliminal message for all soldiers."

Abu Ghraib is the son of Guantanamo in terms of prison abuse. In April 2003 the Pentagon approved the use of hardcore interrogation techniques in Guantanamo. General Geoffrey Miller, the previous head of Guantanamo, is now the head of Abu Ghraib. In sublimely convoluted military jargon, he had recommended last August and September that US military police in Abu Ghraib should become "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees". Two months later some of the guards began to humiliate prisoners systematically. Army intelligence officers who apparently oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib are now saying that commanders were insatiable for any kind of intelligence. Even Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the top ground commander in Iraq, always wanted more, no matter how.

The system of inducing human degradation generally used by Special Forces in the United States and the United Kingdom has become a routine practice among rank-and-file soldiers and contractors. The British call these techniques R2I - resistance to interrogation. When unsophisticated US troops still thinking that Iraqis were directly connected to September 11 apply it, the result is what happened in Abu Ghraib.

Another crucial example is what happened to Jamal al-Harith, 37, a British citizen from Manchester released from Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo. In an exclusive interview to London`s Daily Mirror on March 12, he said he was beaten with fists, feet and batons after refusing a mystery injection. He said detainees were shackled for up to 15 hours straight in hand and leg cuffs with metal links cutting into their skin. He described their "cells" as wire cages with concrete floors with no privacy or protection from rats, snakes and scorpions. The prisoners were regularly beaten by a certain Extreme Reaction Force, always dressed in full riot gear. He revealed how (US) prostitutes were brought to degrade the most religiously devout Muslims, forced to watch as they touched their own naked bodies or smeared menstrual blood across their faces. There was psychological torture aplenty to force prisoners to confess to something they may never have done.

Techniques adopted from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon`s finest in Palestine include barring access to the Red Cross; not charging the prisoners with any crimes, but keeping them in prison anyway; arresting hundreds of Iraqi women, not allowing them to see their families, always without charges and under appalling sanitary conditions; and keeping prisoners hooded, as in the Abu Ghraib photos, beaten, threatened and sometimes sexually abused.

The cover-up
Transforming Abu Ghraib into a Guantanamo-style intelligence factory was the job of General Miller until these inconvenient S&M photos intervened. The entire system - Guantanamo in Cuba, Bagram and Kandahar prisons in Afghanistan - is part of what the New York Times politely referred to as "the military archipelago" and is in fact a gulag archipelago. As far as Abu Ghraib is concerned, the Pentagon strategy was to let the military investigations run their long, secret course, and meanwhile let the March 9 Taguba report sleep in the deep recesses of military bureaucracy. As late as his performance last Friday, Rumsfeld had not read the Taguba report, which mentions, among other things, "pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick". There`s ample speculation that an exasperated General Taguba himself may have leaked his report to Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker - the same Hersh who revealed to the world the My Lai massacre in November 1969.

Rumsfeld in the next few days - or hours - may become the new John Mitchell of Watergate infamy, the fall guy if the Abu Ghraib scandal can`t be stopped in Baghdad. Anyway, the scandal has already taken Washington by storm. When Rumsfeld says "it will get worse", this may even function as an instigation for some US soldiers with high moral standards to slip to the media more S&M, this time coming from Guantanamo or Bagram.

The gulag
Almost everything one needs to know about America`s military archipelago is contained in one of the most devastating books published in recent years, all the most striking when read on the road in Texas in the middle of the Abu Ghraib scandal: Chalmers Johnson`s The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books, New York. More on Johnson and his book later in this series).

Johnson, the author of the best-selling Blowback and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, says that "crime and racism are ubiquitous in the military. Although the military invariably tries to portray all reported criminal or radical incidents as unique events, perpetrated by an infinitesimally small number of `bad apples` and with officers taking determined remedial action, a different reality is apparent at military bases around the globe." The thrust of Johnson`s book is an analysis of the more than 725 military bases that configure the empire, "permanent naval bases, military airfields, army garrisons, espionage listening posts, and strategic enclaves on every continent of the globe". He makes the case that the United States is "a military empire, a consumerist Sparta, a warrior culture that flaunts the air-conditioned housing, movie theaters, supermarkets, golf courses, and swimming pools of its legionnaires".

Johnson could be talking about Abu Ghraib, although he wrote it months if not years in advance, when he says that "the military`s extreme fetish for secrecy and disinformation makes a farce of congressional oversight". He also proves how "America`s real business is covert activities, not intelligence collecting and analysis".

Why do people join the military? According to Johnson, "they often enlist because of a lack of good jobs in the civilian economy and thus take refuge in the military`s long-established system of state socialism - steady paychecks, decent housing, medical and dental benefits, job training, and the promise of a college education". He could be talking about trailer-park trash dominatrix Harman. "The Americans with whom foreigners come into contact most frequently tend to be late adolescents or 20-year-old youths, almost totally ignorant of foreign cultures and languages but indoctrinated to think that they represent a nation that President George W Bush has called `the greatest force for good in history`." This totally fits the profile of US soldiers this correspondent met in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

It`s extremely painful for average, law-abiding Americans to admit they live in a hyperpower that establishes, owns and operates its own gulag archipelago - instead of hiring contractors (Rumsfeld-style) in the form of good old friendly dictators Suharto, Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Noriega and company, always willing to take care of the dirty work.

The American gulag - from Guantanamo to Bagram and to countless "secret" CIA prisons around the world - includes at least 10,000 prisoners in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantanamo. Nobody has the exact numbers for the rest of the world. Guantanamo prisoners were defined by the Bush administration as "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld then amplified the designation to everybody else, totally snubbing the Geneva Conventions. Human Rights Watch calls it "a legal black hole".

By a process we might call "arrogance of virtue", to defend the rule of law against terrorism the neo-cons created a system beyond any law. This was justified, in their minds, because the United States by definition - or by a law of nature - is the supreme arbiter of freedom. So the law then only exists against "evildoers". But the Abu Ghraib scandal is now sedimenting an even deeper polarization across the US. This correspondent`s travels in the US for the past three weeks have led to the conclusion there is now a tremendous conflict in the soul of many Americans about two conceptions of democracy. Shall we have a democracy that respects and evaluates shades of gray, and recognizes paradox and debate? Or shall we have a democracy ruled by omniscience, a Messiah-donated instrument that requires no checks and balances because it`s pure by definition ("you`re either with us or without us") and so cannot but treat any accountability with contempt?

Reality is a cruel pill to swallow. But Republicans will have to take it, no matter how. It`s not reasonable - but nothing is reasonable in such an emotional case as the whole Iraq tragedy - and it may not even be fair, but anybody who knows the Arab and Islamic world is aware that no apologies, no prosecution, no court martial, no firing at the highest level will appease the anger composed by the perception that the United States somehow approves of the torture and sexual humiliation of Muslims.

Abu Ghraib has elevated the presidential election to a much-larger-than-life proposition. It now concerns nothing less than whether the United States will recover any moral standing or moral authority to lecture the rest of the world on its Higher Manifest Destiny. Some of the brave folks in the heart of Texas and people in daily communion with Fox News may be able to manage the cognitive dissonance between them and the rest of the world, but it`s doubtful billions in the rest of the world will.

This dovetails with the devastating conclusions of Johnson`s book. They`re worth quoting at length:

Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx. If present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative impact guarantees that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in our constitution. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a growing reliance on weapons of mass destruction among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second, there will be a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an "executive branch" of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency. Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation and glorification of war, power and the military legions. Lastly, there will be bankruptcy, as we pour our economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and short-change the education, health and safety of our fellow citizens.



Some 260 million Arabs and 1.5 billion followers of Islam are still asking why the US kept using - and even spruced up - Saddam Hussein`s main chamber of torture while it allowed the Iraqi Museum and Baghdad`s National Library - with priceless records of Mesopotamia`s 6,000-year-old history - to be looted and burned. The war in Iraq is a war of images and perception. The Abu Ghraib scandal may be the endgame of US defeat, or "may be the point at which the United States lost Iraq", as University of Michigan professor and Iraq expert Juan Cole puts it. There could not be a more incendiary affront to Iraq and the Islamic world. Compared with Osama`s gold offerings, this is really Radical Islam`s Holy Grail. Anyone who loves the best of America cannot but be appalled at how so much imperial arrogance and incompetence has produced such an American tragedy.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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Das ist der 5.Teil der Serie.

In the heart of Bushland



"The values Midland holds near to its heart are the same ones I hold near to my heart ..."
- George W Bush

MIDLAND, Texas - God is everywhere. The First Baptist Church. The Universalist Church. The First Presbyterian Church. The First Methodist Church. Even the Cowboy Church ("a new way to experience Jesus!").

It`s a long, straight road from El Paso to Midland. The temptation to fall asleep at the wheel on I-20 is enormous. Then, suddenly, we`re in the middle of a forest: a mechanical zoo of nodding donkeys and small pipelines, Pipelineistan in cowboyland, West Texas Sweet Crude sprouting from the Permian Basin, a true geological wonder. And then, after 20 minutes, on the distant horizon, we see the contours of a mini-Manhattan, a true geometrical rape of the flat desert, a true incarnation of the American Dream. Welcome to Midland, the heart of Bushland.

It`s been a long way since the Comanches - the fiercest and most feared warriors in the Permian Basin - raided settlers along the Comanche War Trail, and Captain John Pope, in 1865, tried unsuccessfully to drill artesian water for a proposed transcontinental railway. The oil rush only kicked off in the 1920s. Disputes at the time were settled the Winchester way. Then the oil boom engineered a clash of titans: Wild West cowboy landowners turned millionaires vs an armada of East Coast-educated newcomers - engineers, geologists, businessmen. But the geological miracle ensured that united they stood to get rich quick.

One of these newcomers, in 1948, was of course George Herbert Walker Bush, sent to the "middle of somewhere" (the uneasy official municipal slogan) by his father, senator Prescott Bush, at the time chief executive officer of the top oil-equipment firm in the world, Dresser Industries. Historians have already extensively documented how the Bush family soon became seriously rich. But few have examined the ramifications of so-called West Texas values - the key heritage of the original settler population that coalesced into a political philosophy of extreme individualism. After all, oil and wealth are just around the corner. All it takes is hard work and unbounded optimism. Thus "the sky is the limit".

To have and have not
The Midland ruling class, strictly WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), lives spread out around Golf Course Road: impeccable suburbia, manicured gardens, a flag and a sport-utility vehicle (SUV) in every home, a protected universe enveloped in blissful harmony the secular middle class in Baghdad cannot even dream of. A TV highlight is the new ad for the US Marines ("The Few. The Proud"), a mix of Iwo Jima iconography with some cool Tom Cruise-in-Mission Impossible rock climbing.

The "other half" - which includes a substantial presence of blacks and Hispanics - lives literally on the other side of the tracks, just as in countless blues songs. Exit the golf courses, replaced by nondescript urban wasteland. Exit the SUVs, replaced by an army of battered pickup trucks. But most of Midland anyway is an overdose of car dealers, gas stations and burger joints where a Hungr-Buster sells for 99 cents.

At a filling station on the wrong side of town - with people visibly worried about the rising price of gasoline - a young black man put some things in perspective: "You should know that West Texas was the last place in the US where they were forced to admit that racial segregation was against human rights." In his book Made in Texas, Michael Lind, a researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington, writes that George W Bush grew up in West Texas and absorbed popular Texas culture as much as the world vision of the members of the WASP elite. But "all the western imagery of the Bush ranch" should not deceive anyone, he says: "Midland, Crawford and Waco are not in the Great West, but in the Deep South, the most racist and most reactionary."

Shura Lindgren, vice president of Visitor Development, assures foreigners that "Midland is the town President George W Bush fondly recalls as his childhood home, and the place where he learned that `the sky is the limit`. A town where smiles are abundant and everyone is welcome." The smiles are indeed abundant. But there`s always that nagging feeling that everything in a flash could turn into a David Lynch movie.

The officially sanctioned Bush story reads like a sort of fairytale: man quits drinking, man rediscovers God, man falls in love with home-town girl Laura the librarian. Midland is where Bush found the roots of Messianic faith and found his own, personal Manifest Destiny. In Midland his Bible-reading group taught him to divide the whole world, the whole cosmos for that matter, into Good and Evil. You`re either with us or against us. Bush himself offered a mild version of his own enlightenment in January 2001, shortly before his inauguration: "It is here in West Texas where I learned to trust in God. There`s so much optimism in this place, such a passion for the possible."

So it comes as no surprise that virtually every Midlander cannot but praise a man who "says what he does and does what he says", in the immortal words of a lady at the Petroleum Museum. Unlike John Kerry, who in the words of Bush himself "reminds me of the old Texas saying, `If you don`t like the weather, just wait a few minutes and it will change`".

The George W Bush tour of Midland could not but include a visit to the George W Bush childhood home on 1412 West Ohio, where he spent his "formative years", from 1952-56, along with brother Jeb. Official historiography tells us "the Bush family lived the West Texas culture, savoring other people`s friendship and relishing the back-yard barbecues". Bush lived in at least six more houses in Midland, from 405 East Maple in 1950-51 to 910 Harvard Avenue in 1985-87. Mella McEwen of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, the local paper, confirms that real estate "continues to be the strongest portion" of the Midland-Odessa Regional Economic Index. If there is an economic crisis in large swaths of the United States, Midland has not been warned.

Moral certainty
In the exceptionally wealthy Petroleum Museum - boasting some great interactive exhibits - the Hall of Fame of oilmen, "dedicated to those who cherished the freedom to dare" and sponsored among others by Texaco, Chevron, Exxon, Phillips, Arco and Halliburton, praises George H W Bush, but not his son. An oilman with fabulous rattlesnake cowboy boots who insists on remaining anonymous departs from the official script and confirms that Bush Jr, unlike his father, was a champion of bankruptcy - always rescued by the FOBs (Friends of Bush): "The funny thing is, he always got off each of these deals with more money."

One of the exhibits at the museum includes - irony not intended - a poster of The Thief of Bagdad, by Douglas Fairbanks. West Texas oilmen, as a rule of thumb, believe there`s one chance in 15 of finding a very small oilfield, and one chance in 1,000 of finding a big oilfield. In the case of Iraq, of course, there was always a 100 percent chance of finding - and keeping - anything one might have wanted.

The fascinating intersection between big oil and car racing is alive at the new Chaparral Gallery. "Chaparral bird" is an alternative name for the West Texas roadrunner of Warner Brothers cartoon fame, and the Chaparral car was the Ferrari of West Texas. The cars were built by Midland`s finest, Jim Hall, and became an icon of the Can-Am motor-racing series in the 1960s. Racing enthusiasts will remember in awe how the Chaparral 2E, launched in 1966, had a gigantic wing floating on slender struts high above the rear: Chaparral engineers used the air flowing around the car to produce downforce and increase cornering speeds. The Chaparral 2J, the famous "sucker car", used two fans together with sliding skirts to create low pressure under the car: Scottish racing legend Jackie Stewart described it as "just bloody amazing". Nowadays, the only Chaparrals roaring out of Midland are Christian rock sessions.

Apart from the Bush clan, other notable Midlanders include Gulf War II supremo General Tommy Franks - though central casting would certainly prefer resident Midlander Tommy "The Fugitive" Lee Jones for the leading role in a Hollywood remake.

On the oil patch itself, life hasn`t changed much for the past 80 years. It is basically a family operation, a low-level Dynasty. Some of the wealthier firms own a couple of hundred oil wells around the Permian Basin. For the smaller independent operators a barrel of West Texas Sweet Crude higher than US$35 is a blessing: high oil prices are the official religion. With their expanded margins, some can even think of investing abroad - usually in former Soviet republics. These people are simply not concerned with politics, just business. "I don`t care about Iraq," says a survivor of the oil patch in the middle of a labyrinth of oil derricks straddling both sides of I-20. "What I care is that everybody needs to buy oil."

For the ruling class, life in Midland entails a job in the oil business, a marriage in the early 20s, at least four kids, a couple of SUVs and church every Sunday. Cultural life is sketchy. In early April there`s a "Family Literacy Style Show" at the Petroleum Club. Early this month there was the Texas Gun and Knife Show. In mid-December there`s The Nutcracker by the Midland Festival Ballet. There are a couple of mediocre art galleries. There`s not a single bookshop - which may lead cynics to explain why, when he was about to invade Iraq, Bush still didn`t know the difference between Sunnis and Shi`ites. A football match between the white collars of Midland and the blue collars of neighboring Odessa passes for a major cultural event, but not as much as the staggering mutual hatred. No nightclubs, no lap dancing in Midland. Roughly there`s absolutely nothing to do except pray to the Lord. To have some fun, one has to drive 300 miles (about 480 kilometers) west to El Paso or 315 miles (507km) east to Austin. Moral certainty is Midland`s main currency. Smiling residents are not terribly upset by the sexual-humiliation scandal at Abu Ghraib prison - as they were upset by Bill Clinton`s White House oral sex, a Sodom and Gomorrah antic so despicable that the nation simply could not survive unless the sinner was expelled from his job. Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian Midlanders manifest "disapproval" of what happened in Iraq - and no more. Meanwhile, with the United States totally polarized on key issues concerning religion, race and marriage, George W Bush continues to use his Evangelical Christian credentials very effectively to attract voters - at least those who go to church every Sunday.

Midland is a living demonstration that with Bush as cowboy-in-chief - always expanding the frontier, unwilling to subscribe to any treaties, sending in the cavalry to secure the Fort Apaches - many Americans feel indeed very secure. In virtually every poll in the current statistics deluge, Bush scores very high in terms of vision for the country and sharing the moral values of most Americans. But as one leaves Midland, there`s no way of escaping the uncomfortable direct connection between Bush`s brutal world vision and the geographic and intellectual vacuity of this oil patch "in the middle of somewhere".

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, left, and Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, testified today on Capitol Hill.

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May 11, 2004
General Blames Command and Training Lapses for Prison Abuse
By KIRK SEMPLE

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army general who wrote the report detailing abuses of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers, told a Senate panel today that rampant failures of leadership, training and discipline led to the violations at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

He said leadership failures could be traced as high as the brigade commander: Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the prison during the time the abuses were committed.

"Failure in leadership from the brigade commander on down, lack of discipline, no training whatsoever, and no supervision" were at the root of the problems, General Taguba said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee as part of the continuing congressional inquiry into the scandal.

General Karpinski has said that she knew nothing about the abuse until weeks after it occurred and that the prison cellblock where the mistreatment occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged it. She has said that she was excluded from areas of the prison where some of the abuses occurred, a claim that General Taguba said was "hard for me to believe."

But General Taguba said that he did not conduct his investigation any higher in the chain of command than General Karpinski, leaving open the possibility that responsibility for the failure in leadership went higher than General Karpinski.

General Taguba was one of the leadoff witnesses in a day of hearings before the committee and was accompanied by two other Pentagon officials, including Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of Centcom.

The hearings come a day after President Bush robustly defended Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in comments seemingly intended to dispel speculation that he would seek Mr. Rumsfeld`s resignation.

In a "town hall" meeting at the Pentagon, which was originally scheduled for Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to update Pentagon workers about Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld first addressed the prison scandal.

"It is a body blow when we find that we have, as we have just within the last — what — week or seven days, a few who have betrayed our values by their conduct," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Pete Pace can tell you the look on the faces of the people who have viewed the photographs and the videos from what took place there, they were stunned — absolutely stunned that any Americans wearing a uniform could do what they did. We are heartsick at what they did, for the people they did it to. We are heartsick for the really well-earned reputation as a force for good in the world that all of us, military, civilians and those Americans who support us will pay."

Before the Senate panel, General Taguba testified that in his investigation, he never found any evidence that the abusive techniques were part of military policy.

"I think it was a matter of soldiers with their interaction with military intelligence personnel who they perceived or thought to be competent authority," the general said. Some guards have said they had been asked by intelligence officers to rough up the prisoners to help along the interrogations. General Taguba said the guards "were probably influenced by others but not necessarily directed by others."

As in last Friday`s questioning of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, most of the Senators on the committee roundly condemned the prisoner abuse. But one committee member, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, lashed out at the outrage itself.

"I`m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," he said. While saying a few "misguided" and "maybe even perverted" perpetrators of abuse needed to be punished, he suggested that much of the criticism was exaggerated and misplaced.

"These prisoners, they`re murderers, they`re terrorists, they`re insurgents," he said. "Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we`re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."

He went on: "I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons, looking for human rights violations while our troops, our heros, are fighting and dying."

In an exchange with Senator Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan, Mr. Cambone said that he believed there were different guidelines for the interrogation of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq.

He also said that it had been decided from the beginning that the rules of the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners would be followed in Iraq.

Senator Levin responded: "And yet Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly has made a distinction between whether or not those Geneva Convention rules must be applied to the people — prisoners — will be treated `pursuant to those rules or consistent to those rules,` and he said, and this was a few days ago, that the Geneva Convention did not apply `precisely.` "

He added: "You this morning said again that the Geneva Convention applies to our activities in Iraq. But not precisely?"

Mr. Cambone, pressed by Senator Levin, said the convention guidelines applied in Iraq.

"Precisely?" Senator Levin asked again.

"Precisely," Mr. Cambone said. "They do not apply in the precise way the Secretary was talking about, in Guantánamo and the unlawful combatants there — "

The senator, saying "Let me cut you off," said Mr. Rumsfeld`s remarks in a May 5 interview applied to Iraq, not Guantánamo.

Asked if he was saying that Mr. Rumsfeld misspoke, Mr. Cambone said he could not speak for the secretary.

On Monday, in appearing alongside Mr. Rumsfeld and other cabinet and military officials, Mr. Bush sought to convey a sense of unity in the administration as it tries to manage a controversy that has sparked outrage both home and abroad, and has undermined the White House`s effort to spread democracy to Iraq.

Also on Monday, the Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution condemning the prisoner abuse and calling for a full investigation and accounting of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

In General Taguba`s report, which was completed in March and publicly revealed about two weeks ago, he cited the "systematic and illegal abuses of detainees," and said that between October and December 2003, "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees."

The White House, the Pentagon and Congress have been grappling with whether and how to release more pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers.

Some of the president`s political and communications advisers are advocating the quick release of images to avoid a slow trickle of the images to the news media over a period of weeks or months.

Officials say they are weighing issues including the effect of any release on pending criminal inquiries and the privacy of people shown in the images, some of which, government officials said, show American soldiers having sex with one another.

Separately, the Pentagon and Congressional leaders continued to negotiate ways to allow lawmakers to view the images in the absence of a public release.

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, a Virginia Republican, asked the Pentagon to hold off on delivering the classified material until legal questions are answered on how it could affect criminal investigations, privacy protections and other issues, his spokesman said.

General Taguba, who was born in 1950 in Manila, is deputy commanding general of the Third Army and of the Coalition Forces Land Component Command in Kuwait, a post he took up last July.

The Pentagon announced Friday that he would soon take a new post in Washington as a deputy assistant secretary for reserve affairs, a move that in Army culture is not seen as a major promotion.

General Taguba was appointed on Jan. 31 to conduct what was then described as "an informal investigation" in detention and internment operations by the 800th Military Police Brigade, focusing in particular on "allegations of maltreatment" at Abu Ghraib prison.

General Taguba`s team spent about a month gathering evidence and completing its report, and presented its confidential findings on March 3, the report says.

Under the scope set by his superiors, the inquiry was limited to the conduct of a military police brigade. But General Taguba used it to deliver a much broader indictment.

Among the findings laid out in the report was what General Taguba described as his strong suspicion that military intelligence officers and private contractors "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses."

Carla Baranauckas and Terence Neilan contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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A frame grab taken from web site video footage May 11, 2004, shows a man, who identified himself as Nick Berg of Philadelphia (C) seated in front of his five masked captors moments before he was executed. Al Qaeda`s leader in Iraq beheaded an American civilian and vowed more killings in revenge for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, an Islamist Web site said on Tuesday. After one of the masked men read out a statement, they pushed Berg to the floor and shouted `God is greatest` above his screams as one of them sawed his head off with a large knife then held it aloft for the camera.

Qaeda Leader Beheads U.S. Civilian in Iraq -Web Site
Tue May 11, 2004 04:37 PM ET

By Ghaida Ghantous

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda`s leader in Iraq beheaded an American civilian and vowed more killings in revenge for the "Satanic degradation" of Iraqi prisoners, an Islamist Web site said on Tuesday.

A poor quality videotape on the site showed a man dressed in orange overalls sitting bound on a white plastic chair in a bare room, then knelt on the floor with five masked men behind him.

"My name is Nick Berg, my father`s name is Michael... I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah," said the bound man, adding he was from Philadelphia.

One of the masked men read a statement urging Muslims to seek revenge after pictures were published of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

"Nation of Islam, is there any excuse left to sit idly by? And how can free Muslims sleep soundly as they see Islam being slaughtered, honor bleeding, photographs of shame and reports of Satanic degradation of the people of Islam, men and women, in Abu Ghraib prison?" the statement said.

The masked men then pushed the 26-year-old American to the floor and shouted "God is greatest" above his screams as one of them sawed his head off with a large knife then held it aloft for the camera.

The Web site said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a top ally of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was the man who cut off Berg`s head. The statement in the video was signed off with Zarqawi`s name and dated May 11.

Jordanian-born Zarqawi, 37, has raised his profile and status as al Qaeda`s most active operational leader with a series of suicide bombs and attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.

A body found in Baghdad over the weekend was identified on Monday as Berg before the videotape was released.

"Berg`s body was found with his hands behind his back and beheaded," said another U.S. official who declined to be identified. "The body was found along a roadside by a U.S. military patrol."

"This shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. "They have no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. We will pursue those responsible and bring them to justice."

MILITANT STATEMENT

Photographs shown around the world of naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts at Abu Ghraib prison have provoked international anger and pose a serious setback to U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have both apologized and pledged to punish those responsible but both governments have come under pressure for senior ministers to take the blame for the abuse.

The militants` statement, addressing families of U.S. soldiers, said Zarqawi`s group had offered Washington to swap Berg for Iraqi prisoners held by U.S. troops "but they refused."

"You will only get shroud after shroud and coffin after coffin slaughtered in this manner," it said.

"As for you Bush, dog of the Christians, anticipate what will harm you... You and your soldiers will regret the day you stepped foot in Iraq and dared to violate Muslims."

The murder was condemned by the Council of American-Islamic Relations, a U.S.-based Islamic civil rights and advocacy group.

"We condemn this cold-blooded murder and repudiate all those who commit such acts of mindless violence in the name of religion," it said.

It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the tape carried on the Muntada al-Ansar Islamist Web site, but the CIA was reviewing the video for clues of who was responsible, a U.S. official said.

"He was a private American citizen not associated with a military contract," said a State Department official.

Berg had been missing for several weeks. He was last heard from on April 9 when he telephoned his parents. He said he was trying to find a safe way home after trying to find work as an independent communications contractor.

"The Berg family is devastated by this loss. They want to extend their sympathy to other families who have also suffered," said Bruce Hauser, their neighbor in the Philadelphia suburb of West Chester.

The ritual killing resembled the murder of U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl, beheaded by Islamist militants in Pakistan. Berg`s orange overalls were reminiscent of those worn by al Qaeda suspects held by U.S. troops at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

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WARNING

Images contained at the base of this report are taken from a video which depicts the murder and beheading of Nick Berg, A U.S. CITIZEN

WARNING



Al Qaeda Leader Beheads U.S. Civilian in Iraq

05/11/04 -- DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda`s leader in Iraq beheaded an American civilian and vowed more killings in revenge for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, an Islamist Web site said Tuesday.

A poor quality videotape on the site showed a man dressed in orange overalls sitting bound on a white plastic chair in a bare room, then on the floor with five masked men behind him.

"My name is Nick Berg, my father`s name is Michael... I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah," said the bound man, adding he was from Philadelphia.

After one of the masked men read out a statement, they pushed Berg to the floor and shouted "God is greatest" above his screams as one of them sawed his head off with a large knife then held it aloft for the camera.

The Web site said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a top ally of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was the man who cut off Berg`s head. The statement read out before the killing was signed off with Zarqawi`s name and dated May 11.

Jordanian-born Zarqawi, 37, has raised his profile and status as al Qaeda`s most active operational leader with a series of suicide bombs and attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.

A State Department official said Tuesday the body of a U.S. citizen identified as Berg had been found in Baghdad. The official said Berg had no ties to the U.S. military or the Defense Department, but offered no further details.

"He was a private American citizen not associated with a military contract," said the State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the tape carried on the Muntada al-Ansar Islamist Web site.

The ritual killing resembled the murder of U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl, beheaded by Islamist militants in Pakistan.

Berg`s orange overalls were reminiscent of those worn by al Qaeda detainees held by U.S. troops at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Photographs shown around the world of naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad have provoked international anger and become a serious setback to U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have both apologized and pledged to punish those responsible but both governments have come under pressure for senior ministers to be held responsible for the abuse.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.



WARNING

Images BELOW are taken from the video referred to in the report above.

These PICTURES are horrific and should only be viewed by a mature audience.





The video is available for download as a zipped file

Right click "here" and left click on "save target as" to save to your hard drive
http://informationclearinghouse.info/murder/iraq2vediow.zip











Die weiteren Fotos:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article6172.htm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://informationclearinghouse.info/article6172.htm

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The Associated Press/Ipsos Poll: Public View Of Bush`s Handling Of Issues Slumps; Kerry Hasn`t Taken Advantage

Die Zahlen PDF:
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/act_hit_cntr.cfm?id=2231&PDF_na…
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/act_hit_cntr.cfm?id=2231&PDF_na…

© Ipsos

Public Release Date: May 11, 2004
Press Release Topline Results Presidential Ratings Chart Consumer Attitudes & Political Measures Chart

Washington, D.C. (AP) - Public opinion of President Bush`s handling of hot-button issues such as the economy and the war on terrorism is near the low point of his presidency, but Democratic rival John Kerry has been unable to capitalize on the Republican`s slide, an Associated Press poll found.

By Will Lester
Associated Press Writer

The AP-Ipsos poll found the race between Bush and Kerry remains close, with Bush`s support at 46 percent, Kerry at 43 percent and independent candidate Ralph Nader at 7 percent.

Despite recent encouraging economic news on the growth of the economy and jobs -- unemployment dipped from 5.7 percent to 5.6 percent in April -- support for Bush`s handling of the economy was at 43 percent, the lowest number since Ipsos began tracking that question at the start of 2002.

Support for Bush`s handling of foreign policy and terrorism, usually his strongest area, was at 50 percent, down from 55 percent a month ago. The current level almost matched the 51 percent who approved last November, before the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Southerners and Republican women, two key Bush constituencies, have lost enthusiasm about his handling of foreign policy and terrorism, according to the poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs.

The poll comes at a time of increasing violence in Iraq, the deadliest month yet for U.S. troops and politically damaging allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq that have Bush and his administration on the defensive. More in the poll disapprove of Bush`s handling of Iraq, 51 percent, than approve, 46 percent.

Carl Adams, a 66-year-old retiree from Louin, Miss., said recent news about prisoner abuse in Iraq has made him feel "very much stronger against Bush and against the war."

"I don`t like American soldiers being killed," Adams said. "There should have been a way to work around this Iraq situation without soldiers getting killed."

Despite the growing problems for Bush, Kerry has not been able to gain ground.

The likely Democratic nominee launched a $25 million ad campaign this week to tell voters more about himself _ notably his service in Vietnam and his career in public service. Other recent polls have found Kerry`s personal image undercut by more than $60 million worth of ads by the Bush re-election campaign and a steady stream of Kerry-bashing by Republicans.

"If I had to vote today, I would probably go with the devil I know," said 33-year-old political independent George Hillyer of Buffalo, N.Y., referring to the incumbent. Hillyer says he`s closely watching Kerry, but has many questions.

"I don`t hear a `this is what I would do` attitude," Hillyer said. "With Bush, when he says `this is what I`m going to do,` you know what he`s going to do."

One encouraging sign for Kerry is that the number of weak Kerry supporters who say they would consider supporting Bush decreased in the last month. Instead, they would stay home or vote for Nader.

When 58-year-old retiree Donna Bittle of Lugoff, S.C., talks about the presidential race, her focus is more on opposing Bush than supporting the Democratic candidate.

"I can`t think of his name, but it`s not Bush," she said in explaining who she favors for president. "I`m definitely for John Kerry, I don`t want nothing to do with Bush. I think Bush has made a mess on the economy, in Iraq, on the high cost of medicine."

Almost six in 10 Americans say the country is headed down the wrong track, about where that measure of pessimism has been since March. Southerners and Republican women were more likely than a month ago to say the country was headed down the wrong track.

Gladys Blanchard, a 74-year-old Republican from Weymouth, Mass., said she`s solidly behind Bush, and wants nothing to do with Kerry, a senator in her state for 19 years.

"I think Kerry is like the Kennedys," she said. "He`s one of Ted Kennedy`s boys. I`m not particularly fond of the Kennedys except for John."

The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,000 adults, including 778 registered voters, was taken May 3-5 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The Associated Press Poll is conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs. Between April 3-5, 2004, the AP/Ipsos poll interviewed a representative sample of 1,000 adults nationwide, including 778 registered voters. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 for all adults, +/- 3.5 for registered voters. Margin of error for subgroups may be higher.

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May 12, 2004
THE FAMILY
From a Strange Encounter With Iraqi Police to Fatal Capture
By LAURA MANSNERUS and JAMES DAO

WEST WHITELAND TOWNSHIP, Pa., May 11 - Nicholas E. Berg wanted to help rebuild Iraq. Far from having opposed the war, he believed that the American presence there was a positive thing, his family and friends said. And he saw it as a business opportunity as well.

So defying State Department warnings, Mr. Berg, 26, traveled to Iraq late last year in search of work for his small company, which builds and maintains communication towers and is based in Pennsylvania.

He did not find a job but instead was taken captive by Islamic terrorists. His decapitated body was discovered by American soldiers on a roadside in Baghdad on Saturday.

As his family and friends in this Philadelphia suburb began mourning Mr. Berg`s death, they also struggled to sort out the complicated and still murky circumstances of his beheading. It was unclear why he was singled out in what the Islamic terrorists contended was retribution for American soldiers` abuse of Iraqi prisoners, and his family wondered whether the fact that he was Jewish played a role in the killing.

"Can there be anything more tragic than this?" asked Richard Yoder, mayor of nearby West Chester. "We`re all just in a state of shock. He was a well-known, popular kid."

Mr. Berg was detained in March by the Iraqi police in the northern city of Mosul, American officials and his parents said. While he was in police custody, he was questioned by F.B.I. agents who were trying to determine what he was doing in Iraq and whether he was a United States citizen.

At the same time, his parents, frustrated by their inability to find out about their son`s whereabouts, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Philadelphia on April 5 asserting that he was being held by the American military in violation of his civil rights. A day later, he was released.

He disappeared soon after that.

On Tuesday, people involved in the case expressed frustration about whether the American government had acted quickly enough to secure Mr. Berg`s release, and whether it had done all it could to help him return safely to the United States.

"His parents contacted our office, the F.B.I., the State Department," said Representative Jim Gerlach, a Republican from Upper Uwchlan Township. Mr. Gerlach met with the Berg family on Tuesday. "They got very insufficient information,`` he said. "They felt that they were not getting full answers."

American officials said that Mr. Berg was never detained by American forces in Iraq. They said he had been detained in part because the Iraqi police thought he was using stolen or fabricated identification.

"He was never being held by the U.S. military," an American military official said. "Some element of the U.S. government was instrumental in facilitating his release. He was turned over to U.S. authorities in Mosul, not detained, and then released."

Mr. Berg, the youngest of three children, grew up in a brick and vinyl split-level house in this comfortable bedroom community. His father, Michael, a retired schoolteacher who opposed the war, told reporters that he had not wanted his son to travel to Iraq.

"He looked at it as bringing democracy to a country that didn`t have it," the father told The Associated Press.

At a candlelight vigil on Tuesday night for Mr. Berg down the block from his parents` home, more than 150 people gathered to sing "God Bless America" and recite the Lord`s Prayer. People there remembered Mr. Berg as a former Boy Scout who loved the outdoors as much as he loved reading.

"He was at the library whenever he could get into it," said John Trama, a neighbor. "He loved books."

In high school, he played in the marching band, was a member of the honor society and competed on a Science Olympiad team that made it to national competitions three consecutive years, teachers who knew him said.

Charlotte Knighton, who taught Mr. Berg in her eighth-grade science class, called him a "giant" in talent, intellect and heart. She said he was great with young children, tutoring them in a summer science program for primary school students.

He was also a bit of an entertainer, once bringing in his father`s beer-making kit to explain fermentation to his fellow eighth graders.

"He was a real dramatist," said Ms. Knighton, who now lives in Bozeman, Mont. "He just could put on a show and make you laugh."

Ms. Knighton said Mr. Berg traveled to Africa while in college and was deeply moved by the hunger and poverty he saw there.

"It was difficult for him to eat after he came home," she said. "Our country will be the poorer for having Nick Berg gone."

Bruce Hauser, a neighbor, said Mr. Berg was mechanically handy and displayed a fascination with communication towers from an early age. He even built one in his backyard, Mr. Hauser said.

"He was a great kid," Mr. Hauser said. "If anyone wanted a son, you`d want Nick for a son."

William Scott, a 27-year-old software engineer in Austin, Tex., was a close friend of Nick Berg`s and a fellow science buff while they attended Henderson High School in West Chester. Mr. Scott described Mr. Berg as an inventive man committed to volunteer work who was willing to follow his idealistic instincts.

"He was extremely friendly, but also talented and driven," Mr. Scott recalled. "He was not afraid to do his own thing."

Mr. Scott said he had not known that Mr. Berg had traveled to Iraq but said it was just the kind of thing he would have expected him to do.

"He was an adventuresome type, and always wanted to help people, even when it was difficult," Mr. Scott said.

Mr. Scott, who graduated a year before Mr. Berg, recalled that his friend was a wildly popular counselor at a summer science program for young students. Mr. Berg created his own curriculum for the students, calling it Bergology, which had students build radios and sound systems out of cardboard boxes and wire.

"They built about 100 of them, then he got the lights to move in a pattern that would change," Mr. Scott said. "I guess I always expected to see his name in the paper some day, but for some great accomplishment."

"Everybody who met him came away with a very strong impression," he added. "He didn`t try very hard to conform, but he didn`t need to because he was so likable in every way."

After graduating from high school in 1996, Mr. Berg studied engineering at Cornell University. But he dropped out before graduating, his father told CBS News, and went to work with a Texas company that built radio towers.

Around 2002, he helped start a company, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, with members of his family. The company listed his parents` home as its business address.

According to his parents` lawsuit in April, Mr. Berg traveled to Iraq hoping "to develop business opportunities."

Mr. Berg`s body will be flown to Germany on Wednesday and from there returned to the United States, American officials said.

Mr. Berg`s father said that the terrorists who beheaded his son may have known that he was Jewish.

"There`s a better chance than not that they knew he was Jewish," Mr. Berg told The A.P. "If there was any doubt that they were going to kill him, that probably clinched it, I`m guessing."

Laura Mansnerus reportedfrom West Whiteland Township for this article and James Dao from Washington.Contributing reporting wereJessica Bruder from West Whiteland Township andThomas J. Lueck and Sabrina Tavernise fromNew York.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Pa. family angry with American government over son`s brutal death

By JASON STRAZIUSO
The Associated Press
5/11/2004, 5:01 p.m. ET

WEST CHESTER, Pa. (AP) — The family of an American civilian shown beheaded on an Islamic militant Web site huddled in in tears Tuesday after learning of the existence of the graphic videotape.

The video showed Nick Berg, 26, in a staged execution carried out by an al-Qaida affiliated group. The video said the killing was to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.

"My name is Nick Berg, my father`s name is Michael, my mother`s name is Suzanne," the man said on the video before being killed. "I have a brother and sister, David and Sara. I live in ... Philadelphia."

Berg`s family said U.S. State Department officials on Monday had told them Berg was decapitated. The family, though, had wanted that information to remain private.

When told about the Web site, Berg`s father, brother and sister, grasped one another in a standing hug and slowly dropped to the ground, where they quietly shed a few tears while holding on to each other.

"I knew he was decapitated before," said the father, Michael Berg. "That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn`t want it to become public."

Michael Berg lashed out at the U.S. military and Bush administration, saying his son might still be alive had he not been detained by U.S. officials in Iraq without being charged and without access to a lawyer.

Nick Berg, a small telecommunications business owner, spoke to his parents on March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30. But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days.

His father, Michael, said his son wasn`t allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.

FBI agents visited Berg`s parents in West Chester on March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son`s identity. On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day Berg was released. He told his parents he hadn`t been mistreated.

Michael Berg said he blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son`s death. He said if his son hadn`t been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave the country before the violence worsened.

"I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights this thing has caused," he said. "I don`t think this administration is committed to democracy."

The Bergs last heard from their son April 9, when he said he would come home by way of Jordan.

Berg had traveled several times to Third World countries to help spread technology, his family said. He had previously traveled to Kenya and Ghana, where they said he had purchased a $900 brick-making press for a poor village, the family said.

Berg`s mother, Suzanne Berg, said her son was in Iraq to help rebuild communication antennas.

"He had this idea that he could help rebuild the infrastructure," she said.

Michael Berg described himself as fervently anti-war, but said his son disagreed with him.

"He was a Bush supporter," Berg said. "He looked at it as bringing democracy to a country that didn`t have it."

Suzanne Berg said she was told her son`s body would be transported to Kuwait and then to Dover, Del. She said the family had been trying for weeks to learn where their son was but that federal officials had not been helpful.

"I went through this with them for weeks," she said. "I basically ended up doing most of the investigating myself."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Copyright 2004 PennLive.com. All Rights Reserved.

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In Karbala, Iraqi and American troops were storming a building near a mosque yesterday in a search for arms when the building exploded.

May 12, 2004
U.S. Military Strikes Mosque Held by Iraqi Cleric`s Militia
By EDWARD WONG and DEXTER FILKINS

KARBALA, Iraq, Wednesday, May 12 — The American military attacked a mosque in this holy city on Tuesday in its largest assault yet against the forces of the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, even as the first signs emerged of a peaceful resolution to the five-week-long standoff with him.

The strike on the Mukhaiyam Mosque brought hundreds of American soldiers to within a third of a mile of two of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, the shrines of the martyrs Hussein and Abbas. A building behind the mosque was fired on, detonating a huge weapons cache, and soldiers stormed the mosque, chasing insurgents out into a hotel and alley.

By 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, some 30 insurgents had taken up positions around the Shrine of Abbas, and they appeared to be lobbing mortars from that area at the Mukhaiyam Mosque. Special Forces soldiers began organizing groups of Iraqi forces to counterattack. Fighting was still intense five hours later. Casualties could not be immediately determined.

Until now, American forces had kept out of Karbala and nearby Najaf, another holy city, fearing to further inflame Iraqi fury against the occupying forces, now fevered because of widely distributed photographs of American personnel abusing Iraqi prisoners.

But before the attack, Col. Peter Mansoor, commander of the First Brigade of the First Armored Division, said military officers had met with Karbala`s leaders and believed they would support the operation because they want Mr. Sadr`s Mahdi Army run out of town. American forces may be banking on the belief that Mr. Sadr is loathed by the country`s mainstream Shiite leaders and that many Muslims disagree with his use of mosques as essentially military bases. On Tuesday, several hundred Iraqis marched in Najaf to demand that he and his militia leave.

The mosque attack came as news emerged that Adnan al-Zorfi, the American-appointed governor in Najaf, had offered to delay attempts to capture Mr. Sadr if he agreed to disband his militia.

The offer, Mr. Zorfi said, was made after extensive consultations with American authorities, suggesting that American leaders are reconsidering their stated goal of "killing or capturing" Mr. Sadr.

In leaflets handed out by his office in Najaf on Tuesday, Mr. Sadr appeared to respond favorably, saying he would end his rebellion if the "occupation forces" agreed to enter talks overseen by Shiite leaders.

"I am ready to end everything if the occupation forces officially ask for negotiations, on the condition that these negotiations are just and transparent and under the stewardship of the Shiite religious authorities," the leaflets said. The leaflets bore Mr. Sadr`s signature.

Mr. Sadr, a 31-year-old cleric who commands a large following in Iraq`s poor urban neighborhoods, called last month for an uprising to expel the American forces. His men seized government offices in provincial capitals across southern Iraq, but they melted away in most of those places as American troops began to mobilize.

But they have been suffering heavy losses at the hands of the American troops.

Early Monday morning, American forces destroyed Mr. Sadr`s headquarters in Baghdad with fire from armored vehicles and possibly helicopters. The military has said it has killed 36 insurgents in the last several days in clashes in Sadr City, a slum of 2.2 million people in northeastern Baghdad. But supporters of Mr. Sadr have begun rebuilding the cleric`s headquarters, hauling bricks and concrete blocks to the site.

In the last week, the American forces attacked repeatedly in the area of Karbala, partly in preparation for the mosque attack.

On Monday night, American commanders said they had killed 13 of Mr. Sadr`s militiamen in a gun battle in Kufa, which abuts Karbala. They sent a huge convoy on a night assault down the main street of the Mukhaiyam neighborhood a week ago, and have been killing insurgents there with wave after wave of patrols ever since. The Americans also detonated a major weapons cache in an amusement park last Thursday.

Earlier this week, American forces seized the governor`s office in Najaf and installed Mr. Zorfi as the new governor.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Zorfi confirmed that he had offered to delay the prosecution against Mr. Sadr, possibly until after the American occupation ends. He said he made the offer after long discussions with the Coalition Provisional Authority, the civilian wing of the American administration in Iraq.

"This is a personal offer made by me, and I have discussed it with the C.P.A. in Baghdad," Mr. Zorfi said. "The offer links the delay of any legal prosecution against Moktada with his clear approval to disband the militias, and hand over its weapons, and letting the local police take over the security of the city."

"I have great hopes that if Moktada approves, the Americans would go along with this deal," he said.

American civilian authorities did not offer any comment.

The mosque attack began as soldiers with the First Armored Division and the Polish and Bulgarian armies left Camp Lima, a military base five miles east of Karbala`s center and moved in at 11 p.m. into the maze of streets and dusty alleyways around the one-story mosque. Apache attack helicopters and an AC-130H Spectre gunship swooped through the sky, providing air cover.

Members of Mr. Sadr`s militia, known as the Mahdi Army, fired rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47`s from rooftops and the windows of dun-colored buildings. A military intelligence analyst estimated there were 50 to 70 militiamen barricaded in the mosque and surrounding buildings. The illuminated twin minarets of the Shrine of Hussein could be seen just a third of a mile to the east.

Tracer rounds arced through the sky as a Bradley fighting vehicle crashed through the rear wall of the mosque compound, then backed up and opened fire with a 25-millimeter canon. An attached storage building burst into flames, and then explosions began erupting. The building had clearly been used to store a huge cache of munitions — the explosions shook the earth for well over two hours.

An Iraqi interpreter working with the Americans broadcast an order of surrender over a loudspeaker. Then Special Forces troops, leading Iraqi commandos, moved through the flame and rubble into the mosque, chasing insurgents into an adjacent hotel and alley.

In three hours of fighting, as many as 20 buildings were raided or destroyed, and pillars of thick smoke curled through the air above rows of palm trees.

Soldiers searching the mosque found large piles of land mines, artillery shells and small white pills, which a Special Forces medic identified as opiates, possibly for use as painkillers.

Their search was interrupted by mortar attack from the mosque near the Shrine of Hussein.

Planning the assault was done in the utmost secrecy and was approved at the highest levels of the military here. Special Forces soldiers here did reconnaissance of the area and brought back photos for the planners. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of American ground forces in Iraq, was scheduled to fly down from Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon to oversee the final planning, but canceled at the last minute.

"Our purpose in this operation is to defeat the enemy`s capability to conduct any operations in Karbala," Lt. Col. Garry R. Bishop said to more than 100 officers during a briefing on the plan of attack.

The assault will ideally result in "the re-establishment of Iraqi security forces in this area as the only legitimate security," he added.

On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the commander of the First Armored Division, said the recent success of American military operations had opened a "window" for the political process to succeed, if only briefly.

"We are trying to eliminate his militia from the outside in," General Dempsey said. "We are working from the inside too."

In a moment of remarkable candor, General Dempsey said his forces may have missed an opportunity to eliminate Mr. Sadr last year. Though Mr. Sadr routinely denounced the American occupation, was wanted on criminal charges and was thought to be hoarding guns, American officials, until recently, avoided a confrontation with him. General Dempsey said Tuesday that, in retrospect, that was probably a mistake.

"Why didn`t we marginalize him sooner?" the general asked. "Because in the course of the year that I`ve been here, and in the course of seeking advice from as many possible people as we could — religious leaders, political leaders, tribal leader — as you might expect, we received such a wide variety of advice on how to deal with Moktada al-Sadr that it caused us to be a little bit careful."

"Clearly, in the six months between October and April when he instigated this nationwide attack, he was training troops, gaining resources, stockpiling ammunition," General Dempsey said. "And so when I say we missed the opportunity, we probably gave him six months more than we should have."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Geht es schon wieder los?

May 12, 2004
Bush Imposes Sanctions on Syria, Citing Ties to Terrorism
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

WASHINGTON, May 11 - After months of debate within his administration, President Bush imposed economic sanctions against Syria on Tuesday, charging that it has failed to take action against terrorist groups fighting Israel and halt the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

Mr. Bush issued an executive order banning virtually all American exports, except for food and medicine, and barring flights between Syria and the United States, except during emergencies. The president also told the Treasury Department to freeze the assets of Syrians with known ties to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, the occupation of Lebanon or terrorist activities in Iraq.

In the near term, the action is largely symbolic, since trade with Syria, at about $300 million a year, is insubstantial and Syrian airlines do not fly to the United States. Moreover, the trade ban does not preclude investment, though American firms like ConocoPhillips and Chevron, which currently do business in Syria, will be required to turn to foreign suppliers to service their operations there, a State Department spokesman said.

The punitive steps had been anxiously sought by some members of Congress, which, in 2003, passed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. The act requires the president to select from a menu of penalties in punishing Syria. In his action on Wednesday, Mr. Bush went beyond the list`s requirements.

Representative Eliot L. Engel, a New York Democrat who was a co-author of the legislation, said Syria has been playing an increasingly destructive role in the Middle East and has ignored American appeals to crack down on militant groups like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and to disengage from occupied Lebanon.

"The United States government is sending a loud and clear message to the leaders of Syria that we will no longer turn a blind eye to their transgressions," said Mr. Engel. "The ball is now in Damascus`s court."

The United States has long had strained relations with Syria, which Washington designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1979. Ties improved briefly, in 1990, when Damascus joined the American-led coalition against Saddam Hussein and took part in the Middle East peace conference in Madrid the following year.

Subsequent talks aiming at establishing peace with Israel foundered and ultimately broke down in 2000, months before President Hafez al-Assad died. His son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, is widely seen as constrained by his father`s old advisers.

Administration officials were divided over the sanctions, with some voicing concerns that they would further antagonize Arabs alarmed by the American handling of Iraqi prisoners or the administration`s support for ceding parts of the West Bank to Israel.

Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the president apparently delayed his announcement until after Arab leaders had set the terms of debate for their next summit talks, this month in Tunisia.

Ammar Arsan, a spokesman for the Syrian Embassy in Washington, said his country was already receiving strong support within the Arab League. He predicted that the measures would have "no impact on our economic situation," given growing trade ties with investors from Europe and elsewhere.

Mr. Arsan also said his government would never compromise its political independence because of economic pressure from Washington.

"The United States needs to review its policy toward the Middle East and recognize that relations between nations are based on mutual respect, and not sanctions or an escalation of tensions in the relationship," he said.

In deciding on sanctions, Mr. Bush went beyond the lawmakers` list to order American financial institutions to cut any ties with the Commercial Bank of Syria, citing money laundering concerns. The president explicitly barred the export of military equipment or dual-use items like chemicals, nuclear technology and propulsion equipment, and he threatened to take other measures if Syria did not "take serious and concrete steps" to change its behavior.

Among other things, Mr. Bush cited the need for Syria to "cooperate fully with the international community in promoting the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq."

The White House charged that Syria provided military support to Iraq`s president, Saddam Hussein, on the eve of the American invasion last year and said that even with Syria`s having taken some steps to control its border, the country remains a transit point for foreign fighters infiltrating Iraq. It also accused Syria of failing to transfer $200 million in frozen Iraqi assets to a development fund for Iraq, as required by a United Nations resolution.

Edward P. Djerejian, a former ambassador to Syria who is now a Middle East expert at Rice University, said the president had intentionally left open the possibility of additional sanctions - including targeting the energy sector - as a prod for better compliance. He predicted that Tuesday`s announcement would revive a debate in Damascus between the conservative "old guard" and would-be reformers who want to ease confrontation with Washington.

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Miami Republican who was an original sponsor of the Syria Accountability Act, expressed satisfaction with the president`s announcement.

"He went beyond what was asked of him," she said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 12, 2004
Rumsfeld Aide and a General Clash on Abuse
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, May 11 — The Army general who first investigated abuses at Abu Ghraib prison stood by his inquiry`s finding that military police officers should not have been involved in conditioning Iraqi detainees for interrogation, even as a senior Pentagon civilian sitting next to him at a Senate hearing on Tuesday disputed that conclusion.

The officer, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it had been against the Army`s doctrine for another Army general to recommend last summer that military guards "set the conditions" to help Army intelligence officers extract information from prisoners. He also said an order last November from the top American officer in Iraq effectively put the prison guards under the command of the intelligence unit there.

But the civilian official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, contradicted the general. He said that the military police and the military intelligence unit at the prison needed to work closely to gain as much intelligence as possible from Iraqi prisoners to prevent attacks against American soldiers. Mr. Cambone also said that General Taguba misinterpreted the November order, which he said only put the intelligence unit in charge of the prison facility, not of the military police guards.

While General Taguba depicted the abuses at the prison as the acts of a few soldiers under a fragmented and inept command, he also said that "they were probably influenced by others, if not necessarily directed specifically by others." His report called for an inquiry into the culpability of intelligence officers, which is still under way.

The unusual public sparring between a two-star Army general and one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld`s most trusted aides cast a spotlight on the confusing conditions at the prison last fall when the worst abuses occurred, as well as the sensitive issue of whether the Pentagon`s thirst for better intelligence to combat Iraqi insurgents contributed to the climate there.

"How do you expect the M.P.`s to get it straight if we have a difference between the two of you?" said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Later in the day, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the Army`s deputy chief of staff, said the issue of who controlled the military police officers accused of abusing the prisoners "has to be ironed out." The key question, he said, is whether the intelligence unit`s commander told the M.P.`s "how to do their job."

As senators demanded explanations for the abuses that were caught on photographs and videos taken by Army prison guards, the Bush administration and the Senate leadership reached an agreement that would give senators a chance to view the pictures. But the White House and the Pentagon signaled that they now have serious reservations about publicly releasing the photographs and video clips.

Administration officials said no decision had been made about what to do with the images. Political advisers to Mr. Bush have been pressing for a quick release, saying full disclosure is the best way to contain the damage.

But Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials emphasized their concern that any public release could endanger efforts to prosecute the Americans responsible for the abuse.

"I`d say there are a lot of equities here besides just satisfying the desires of the press that want to have more pictures to print," Mr. Cheney said in an interview with Fox News. "There are serious questions about people`s rights, as well as our ability to be able to prosecute. We wouldn`t want, as a result of the release of pictures and the mistreatment of that kind of information, to allow guilty parties off the hook, so that they couldn`t be prosecuted."

Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said that when President Bush went to the Pentagon for a briefing on Monday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, told him he was concerned about maintaining the integrity of the criminal proceedings. Speaking over a video link from his headquarters in the region, General Abizaid said the worst outcome as far as public opinion in the Arab world was concerned would be for the prosecutions to fall apart, Mr. Bartlett said.

The decision about how to handle the pictures has been left largely to the Pentagon, Mr. Bartlett said, adding that the president "trusts their judgment."

Asked whether there was a division of opinion within the administration about how to proceed with the pictures, Mr. Bartlett replied, "There`s no daylight between the White House and the Pentagon on that front."

Senate leaders announced Tuesday night that members of the Senate who wish to view the hundreds of photos and videos will be able to do so from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday in a secure room on the fourth floor of the Capitol under Pentagon supervision. No staff members will be allowed.

But leaders of both parties said the material would remain the property of the Pentagon, keeping a decision on what to release a matter for the Bush administration to decide, not Congress.

At an open meeting with Pentagon civilian and military personnel, Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that abuse at Abu Ghraib was "a body blow" to America delivered by "a few who have betrayed our values." He said that acts of violent abuse and sexual humiliation captured in photos and video images at Abu Ghraib "ought not to be allowed to define us — either in the eyes of the world or our own eyes, adding, "We know who we are."

In the Senate hearing`s three-hour morning session, General Taguba said he found no evidence of a military policy to soften up detainees for interrogation, but uncovered plenty of examples of guards collaborating with interrogators who were "influencing their action to set the conditions for successful interrogations."

General Taguba and Mr. Cambone agreed that the main culprits so far were a small group of low-level military police officers who suffered from "a lack of discipline; no training whatsoever; and no supervision." Seven soldiers face charges of abuse. He also left open the possibility that members of the Central Intelligence Agency as well as civilian contractors were culpable.

A separate Army inquiry is under way into what role military intelligence officers played in the abuses. In afternoon testimony, senior Army intelligence officers told senators that none of their people were implicated despite conclusions to the contrary in General Taguba`s report.

General Alexander, head of military intelligence for the Army, said he believed that the abuses were carried out by "a group of undisciplined military police," adding that he had seen no evidence that military intelligence officers had told them what to do.

Those assertions were greeted with skepticism by even some Republicans on the committee.

Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, said she found it difficult to believe that junior military police officers would have chosen on their own to use "sexual humiliation, which is particularly embarrassing to Muslim men," if they had decided on their own to abuse the men.

General Alexander disclosed that two or three more individuals who had witnessed the abuses but had not reported them would be held accountable. The Army`s judge advocate general, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig, said the Army was now tracking a total of 83 different prisoner abuse cases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The pattern of abuse seen in the photographs began around Oct. 15, 2003, and lasted through late December or early January, General Taguba said.

Late last fall, the Red Cross forwarded a report containing allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib to the top lawyer at the American military command in Baghdad, Army officials said. On Nov. 6, the report was sent to Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, head of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which operated the American-run prisons in Iraq.

General Karpinski forwarded her response to the Red Cross on Dec. 24, but Army officials said there was no indication that she ever began investigations into any reported abuses by military police or intelligence officials. "I do not know if she in fact started an investigation into those, because they are serious," General Alexander said.

General Taguba said he agreed with the conclusions in the Red Cross report that coercive practices, like holding prisoners naked for long periods, were used in a systematic way as part of the military intelligence process at the prison.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee, called that "not just oversight or negligence or neglect or sloppiness, but purposeful, willful determination to use these techniques as part of an interrogation process," and asked General Taguba, "Would you include that in your definition of failure of leadership?"

"Yes, sir," the general replied. "They were."

Mr. Cambone and other military officials said the interrogation techniques approved for use in Iraq were straight out of the Army manual and followed the Geneva Conventions. In that respect, he said, they differed from harsher techniques, like sleep deprivation and forcing prisoners to disrobe entirely for interrogations, that are authorized for use at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, said that under a policy issued last Oct. 12, the only extraordinary measure authorized for use in Iraq was placing prisoners in solitary confinement for more than 30 days. That step required the approval of the American commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, but General Smith said he was not aware of it ever being used.

General Smith said the use of military working dogs was allowed so long as the animals "will be muzzled and under control of a handler at all times to ensure safety." Photographs published by The New Yorker magazine this week showed two unmuzzled dogs menacing a naked Iraqi prisoner.

Much of the morning session centered on the impact of a visit to Iraq last August and September by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller to improve the flow of intelligence from Abu Ghraib. General Miller, who is now the chief of interrogations and detentions in Iraq, has defended his recommendations to have prison guards prepare detainees for interrogations. He has said those recommendations played no role in the later abuse and humiliation of prisoners.

The hearing`s sharpest exchange came when Mr. Cambone objected to a characterization of the visit by Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat.

"Your suggestion that the report on the phrase `setting the conditions` is tantamount to asking the military police to engage in abusive behavior, I believe, is a misreading of General Miller`s intent," Mr. Cambone said.

"Mr. Secretary, what I`m suggesting is anyone in your position should have asked questions," Mr. Reed shot back. "One specifically would be: What does it mean to set the conditions for these troops under the Geneva Convention? Did you ask that question?"

"I didn`t have to," Mr. Cambone replied. "We had been through a process in which we understood what those limits were with respect to Iraq, and what those were with respect to Guantanamo."

Richard W. Stevenson, Thom Shanker, Joel Brinkley and Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 12, 2004
The Abu Ghraib Spin

he administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the bungled Iraq occupation.

The senators called one witness for the morning session, the courageous and forthright Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who ran the Army`s major investigation into Abu Ghraib. But the Defense Department also sent Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, to upstage him. Mr. Cambone read an opening statement that said Donald Rumsfeld was deeply committed to the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of prisoners, that everyone knew it and that any deviation had to come from "the command level." A few Republican senators loyally followed the script, like Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who offered the astounding comment that he was "more outraged by the outrage" than by the treatment of prisoners. After all, he said, they were probably guilty of something.

These silly arguments not only obscure the despicable treatment of the prisoners, most of whom are not guilty of anything, but also ignore the evidence so far. While some of the particularly sick examples of sexual degradation may turn out to be isolated events, General Taguba`s testimony, and a Red Cross report from Iraq, made it plain that the abuse of prisoners by the American military and intelligence agencies was systemic. The Red Cross said prisoners of military intelligence were routinely stripped, with their hands bound behind their backs, and posed with women`s underwear over their heads. It said they were "sometimes photographed in this position."

The Cross report, published by The Wall Street Journal, said that Iraqi prisoners — 70 to 90 percent of whom apparently did nothing wrong — were routinely abused when they were arrested, and their wives and mothers threatened. The Iraqi police, who operate under American control and are eventually supposed to help replace the occupation forces, are even worse — sending those who won`t pay bribes to prison camps, and beating and burning prisoners, according to the report.

The Cross said most prisoners were treated better once they got into the general population at the larger camps, except those who were held by military intelligence. "In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel," the report said.

It was alarming yesterday to hear General Taguba report that military commanders had eased the rules four times last year to permit guards to use "lethal force" on unruly prisoners. The hearing also disclosed that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, had authorized the presence of attack dogs during interrogation sessions. It wasn`t very comforting that he had directed that these dogs be muzzled.

These practices go well beyond any gray area of American values, international law or the Geneva Conventions. Mr. Cambone tried to argue that Mr. Rumsfeld had made it clear to everyone that the prisoners in Iraq were covered by those conventions. But Mr. Rumsfeld`s public statements have been ambiguous at best, and General Taguba said that, in any case, the Abu Ghraib guards had received no training. All the senators, government officials and generals assembled in that hearing room yesterday could not figure out who had been in charge at Abu Ghraib and which rules applied to the Iraqi prisoners. How were untrained reservists who had been plucked from their private lives to guard the prisoners supposed to have managed it?

General Sanchez did give some misguided orders involving the Abu Ghraib prison and prisoners in general. But the deeply flawed mission in which he participates is the responsibility of the Bush administration. It was Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, not General Sanchez, who failed to anticipate the violence and chaos that followed the invasion of Iraq, and sent American soldiers out to handle it without the necessary resources, manpower and training.

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May 12, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Lie, and the Voters Will Believe
By ADAM CLYMER

WASHINGTON — Americans like to say they are not influenced by campaign commercials, but then many people plainly believe the attack ads that President Bush and John Kerry are hurling at each other.

Even people who say they learn nothing from the advertisements believe the claims made in them, the University of Pennsylvania`s National Annenberg Election Survey shows. At the same time, people are remarkably unfamiliar with the candidates` true positions — the stuff that hasn`t been advertised much.

The Annenberg survey recently interviewed 1,026 adults in the 18 battleground states where the campaigns have been showing commercials since March. In those states, 61 percent of respondents believe Mr. Bush "favors sending American jobs overseas" and 56 percent believe Mr. Kerry "voted for higher taxes 350 times." Both of those statements have been repeated countless times in commercials — but neither is accurate.

A Kerry commercial contends that "George Bush says sending jobs overseas `makes sense` for America." Mr. Bush himself never said that, nor did he sign a document saying so. What he signed was a message accompanying the annual report of his Council of Economic Advisers, a report that asserted it made sense for the United States to buy goods and services from countries that produced them more cheaply than the United States could. Standard economic thought — although dumb politics — but Mr. Bush never said it.

Bush commercials, and the president himself, contend that Mr. Kerry "voted for higher taxes 350 times." But this list includes occasions when Mr. Kerry voted to keep taxes at existing levels, or supported lower tax cuts than Republicans sought. Now, he is calling for higher taxes only on people earning more than $200,000 a year while promising new cuts for middle-income families.

Most other dubious claims did not achieve majority acceptance in the battleground states. But one came close. Forty-six percent, including a majority of independents, agree that "John Kerry wants to raise gasoline taxes by 50 cents a gallon," a claim of Bush ads. Mr. Kerry vaguely endorsed the idea in 1994, but now opposes it.

In the survey, only 19 percent admit to learning something from commercials. But it`s plain that is where Americans get many of their "factual" conclusions. The 46 percent who believe that Mr. Kerry wants to raise gas taxes could not have "learned" that from anything except Mr. Bush`s ads. Nor could the 72 percent who say three million jobs have been lost since Mr. Bush became president (it is now fewer than two million) have drawn that conclusion from careful study of employment statistics. Democrats have sold the three million number so well that even a majority of Republican respondents believe it.

Along with the things they know that aren`t so, voters don`t know things that might matter. Sixty-six percent do not know that Mr. Bush favors extending the ban on assault weapons, and 68 percent do not know that he proposes cutting the federal deficit in half. Sixty-one percent do not know that Mr. Kerry wants to eliminate tax breaks for profits made overseas and use the money to encourage companies to invest their foreign earnings in the United States, and 44 percent do not know he wants to have the government help pay to get health insurance to all children and to help employers pay their workers` costs.

The election is still six months off. Maybe the campaigns will get around to advertising at least some of these policy positions — but only if they run out of fantasies about what the other guy stands for.

Adam Clymer, the former Washington correspondent for The Times, is the political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 12, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Why the Polls Don`t Add Up
By ANDREW KOHUT

WASHINGTON — You can hardly blame the Democrats if they seem a bit confused. After all, as the situation in Iraq has worsened over the past six weeks and national polls have shown a steep decline in President Bush`s job-approval ratings (some, including the latest CBS/New York Times survey, have him registering well below the 50 percent mark), John Kerry can`t seem to pull ahead of the president the national horse-race polls.

Last week`s Gallup, Fox News and NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys — all taken well after the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib — continued to show registered voters split about evenly between the president and the senator. New surveys by CNN/USA Today/Gallup and by my colleagues at the Pew Center did show the senator gaining a small lead, but that edge disappeared in the Gallup poll when the sampling was narrowed from registered voters to "likely" voters, and in the Pew poll when respondents were asked to also consider the candidacy of Ralph Nader.

Understandably, many Democrats have begun to despair — if Mr. Kerry can`t gain ground when the president is in trouble, when can he? His defenders suggest that the evenly divided, highly polarized electorate is so dug in that neither candidate can break away. Others attribute Mr. Kerry`s lack of progress to the multimillion-dollar Bush advertising blitz in swing states.

These explanations may have some merit, but the data show there is still a sizable independent swing vote that could drive the election one way or the other. And the declines in the senator`s favorable ratings have been modest — even in the swing states, where the Bush-Cheney advertising hit him hardest, polls show that most voters still hold positive or neutral views of him.

The real reason that Mr. Kerry is making so little progress is that voters are now focused almost exclusively on the president. This is typical: as an election approaches, voters first decide whether the incumbent deserves re-election; only later do they think about whether it is worth taking a chance on the challenger. There is no reason to expect a one-to-one relationship between public disaffection with the incumbent and an immediate surge in public support for his challenger.

We saw the same dynamic in the 1980 race. President Jimmy Carter`s favorable rating in the Gallup surveys sank from 56 percent in January to 38 percent in June, yet he still led Ronald Reagan in Gallup`s horse-race measures. For much of the rest of the campaign, voters who disapproved of Mr. Carter couldn`t decide whether Mr. Reagan was an acceptable alternative. Through the summer and early fall, the lead changed back and forth, and CBS/New York Times and Gallup polls showed conflicting results — at one point in August, Gallup found Mr. Reagan ahead of President Carter by 16 percentage points, yet just two weeks later it registered a dead heat. It was not until the two men held a televised debate eight days before the election that Ronald Reagan gained legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate.

Similarly, in May 1992 President George H. W. Bush had only a 37 percent approval rating according to a Times Mirror Center survey, but the same poll showed him with a modest lead, 46 percent to 43 percent, over Bill Clinton. Only the Democratic convention and the debates brought about an acceptance of Mr. Clinton (even though his negative ratings were higher than Mr. Kerry`s are now). It took a long time for him to be seen as an acceptable alternative to Mr. Bush.

Should the voters` disillusionment with the current President Bush continue, they will evaluate John Kerry and decide whether he is worth a chance. But, as in the past, the focus at this stage is on the man in the White House — and given the events in Iraq, it is unlikely to come off him any time soon. Mr. Kerry`s lack of progress should not, for now, be cause for concern to Democrats. Public opinion about Mr. Bush is the far more important barometer — and if it remains low, Mr. Kerry will have a chance to make his case.

Andrew Kohut is director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com

General Asserts She Was Overruled on Prison Moves

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 12, 2004; Page A01

The U.S. general who was in charge of running prisons in Iraq told Army investigators earlier this year that she had resisted decisions by superior officers to hand over control of the prisons to military intelligence officials and to authorize the use of lethal force as a first step in keeping order -- command decisions that have come in for heavy criticism in the Iraq prison abuse scandal.

Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, head of the 800th Military Police Brigade, spoke of her resistance to the decisions in a detailed account of her tenure furnished to Army investigators. It places two of the highest-ranking Army officers now in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, at the heart of decision-making on both matters.

Karpinski has been formally admonished by the Army for her actions in Iraq. She said both men overruled her concerns about the military intelligence takeover and the use of deadly force.

Each man contests portions of her account, which appears in the classified annex to the Army`s internal probe into the abuse and torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Her account was described by a U.S. government official to The Washington Post and confirmed by her attorney.

Karpinski`s account surfaced on the same day another officer accused by the Army of wrongdoing in the scandal, Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, released an official rebuttal stating that Abu Ghraib perpetually lacked key resources and personnel, and that the leadership above him was almost entirely unresponsive to his requests for help.

Phillabaum wrote that military police assigned to the prison were not properly trained in the Geneva Conventions or detention operations, but that training alone would not have prevented the abuses, which he said were committed by a few soldiers.

He also said that in one instance, a female guard under his command took "vigilante justice" -- using physical force against a male prisoner who she believed had assaulted Jessica Lynch, an Army private captured by Iraqi soldiers and later rescued by U.S. troops during the war.

Karpinski said the decision about transferring control of the prison to military intelligence officials was broached at a September 2003 meeting with Miller, who was then in charge of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, known colloquially as "Gitmo." Miller had come to Iraq at the insistence of top political officials in the Pentagon, who were frustrated by the meager intelligence coming from prisoners. Two weeks ago, he was appointed to reform the U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

Karpinski, the first female general officer to lead U.S. soldiers in combat, was a beleaguered field commander trying to cope with what she and others have described as constantly shifting assignments, poor living conditions and near-daily mortar attacks on Abu Ghraib.

Karpinski recalled that Miller told her he wanted to "Gitmo-ize" the prison -- a concept that critics have said opened the door to the use of aggressive interrogation techniques suited to loosening the tongues of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, not Iraqis in a common jail. Miller said through a military spokesman yesterday that he does not recall using the word "Gitmo-ize."

Undersecretary of Defense Stephen A. Cambone said yesterday at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the concept has been misunderstood, and that all the Pentagon had in mind was "a cooperative attitude, team-building, call it what you will, between" intelligence interrogators and military police to produce more and better information.

According to Karpinski`s account, the surrender of authority to military intelligence did not go over easily. "This prison is not mine to give you," she said she told Miller. He responded, according to Karpinski`s account: "You own the MP`s [military police] and you supply them." Karpinski replied that "it belongs to the CPA," or Coalition Provisional Authority.

Then, she told investigators, Miller said to her, "We will do this my way or the hard way," and asked that the room be cleared so the two were alone.

He then said, according to Karpinski`s account: "I have permission to take any facility I want from General Sanchez. We are going to get Military Intelligence procedures in place in that facility because the Military Intelligence isn`t getting the information from these detainees that they should. . . . We are going to send MP`s in here who know how to handle interrogation."

Miller said through a military spokesman that he never made those comments, but he did not provide his own account of the meeting.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who conducted the Army`s internal probe of the abuses from mid-January to the end of February, said in his report that the shift of responsibility, which was formalized on Nov. 19, 2003, produced "clear friction and a lack of effective communication" between commanders.

As a result, he said, "coordination occurred at the lowest possible levels with little oversight by commanders." Taguba also concluded that having a military intelligence officer in command of military police units in charge of running a prison was "not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties."

With regard to the use of lethal force to keep order at Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross, in a private February 2004 report given to Sanchez, said that military police had repeatedly engaged in "excessive and disproportionate use of force against persons deprived of their liberty, resulting in death or injury."

The ICRC said this was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, making it a war crime.

According to Karpinski`s account, it was Sanchez who decided in November 2003 to loosen the military`s rules of engagement so that the guards would be freer to use lethal force at the outset of any disturbance. His decision came in a meeting with Karpinski that both officers recall, but Sanchez -- who was asked to comment by The Post -- yesterday gave a different account.

The backdrop for their discussion was a riot at Abu Ghraib on the afternoon of Nov. 24, organized by prisoners distressed at the lack of proper food and clothing, their isolation from any family contact and their indeterminate detentions. In the melee, nine U.S. soldiers were injured, three detainees were killed by military police and nine other detainees were wounded.

"It was raining rocks and boulders," said Sgt. William Savage Jr., 41, who was assigned to a guard tower. "It was unreal," he said in an interview with The Post. "I had never seen anything like that before. It was so out of control that we had to use regular rounds" and not just rubber bullets.

On the same day, a military police officer was inadvertently shot when guards learned that a detainee had a pistol in his cell and an "ad-hoc extraction team" of military police and intelligence officials searched for it, according to Taguba`s report. He ruled that inadequate procedures, ineffective rules of engagement, poor training and an unclear relationship between the two types of personnel contributed to the incident.

Karpinski told Taguba that Sanchez expressed disappointment to her that the guard force had not used lethal firepower from the outset to put down the riot. She said yesterday through her lawyer that Sanchez said, "I`m tired of this MP mentality; I want them to shoot first and use nonlethal force later."

Karpinski told Taguba that she had objected, saying that it would violate the rules of engagement for military police, which require using lethal force only after trying other methods and obtaining command approval. She also said it would be dangerous for police to carry weapons with lethal ammunition among inmates, according to her account.

She said Sanchez told her in the presence of a military lawyer that "I don`t care about the rules of engagement," and went on say, "If the rules of engagement are a problem, then change them." According to her account, a Sanchez deputy attending the meeting told her: "There isn`t any difference if they are throwing rocks or MRE`s [Meals Ready to Eat]. They are armed. Use lethal force."

Sanchez, through a spokesman at U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad yesterday, denied saying he did not care about the rules of engagement, and said the point of the conversation was to correct Karpinski`s misunderstanding that the rule of "graduated response" required military police to put rubber bullets in their weapons and use those first. Sanchez advised her that the police could put deadly ammunition in their weapons and use it from the outset, the spokesman said.

"They changed their rules of engagement, I believe four times, to use lethal, and then, to nonlethal, [and] to lethal force based on the level of the events," Taguba testified yesterday, referring to the U.S. military command in Iraq. "I believe the last time they changed that rules of engagement . . . was in November of last year. That`s contained in one of the annexes that we have."

Col. Marc Warren, a senior legal adviser to Sanchez, said the shift in question "was a clarification to ensure that soldiers knew that when threatened with serious bodily harm or loss of life, that you could immediately use deadly force" instead of following "the general policy that we use graduated force and use deadly force only as a last resort."

In its February report, the Red Cross said 23 detainees had been shot during disturbances or attempted escapes at Abu Ghraib and two other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq between May and November 2003. It said that "non-lethal measures could have been used to obtain the same results and quell the demonstrations or neutralize persons. . . . Since the beginning of the conflict, the ICRC has regularly brought its concerns to the attention" of the U.S. force in Iraq.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Wie Meinungen entstehen.

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In Ohio, Building a Political Echo
Campaigns Rely on Word of Mouth to Spread Message

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 12, 2004; Page A01

CINCINNATI -- Christa Criddle is not the sort of person who springs to mind when political operatives talk about "opinion leaders." She does not have a column, or talk show, or Web site. But if someone wants to influence opinion in her patch of Ohio suburbia, this 35-year-old mother of three is a good place to start.

There are many reasons. Criddle has time, she is just fine with strangers, and she has friends, a bunch of whom gathered in her living room the other night for a party to support President Bush`s reelection. Most of all, Criddle has strong views -- lots of them.

"What will our country be like if John Kerry wins?" she implored her guests to imagine. "That scares me to death. . . . Liberalism today is modern socialism."

Criddle is one example of whom Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman calls an "influential." That name comes from a book about marketing, "The Influentials," one of Mehlman`s favorite texts to explain the challenge of political communication in a world crowded by the proliferation of cable networks, talk shows and Web sites. The thesis of authors Ed Keller and Jon Berry is that it is a small percentage of the population that -- by virtue of being more attentive, more vocal and more immersed in the rushing currents of modern life -- drives popular tastes.

Influentials help explain why one TV show becomes a hit while another flops. And, Mehlman believes, they will be indispensable filters and promoters of the attitudes and arguments that will frame the choices voters make this fall.

The Bush campaign has decided to put those influentials to work, adopting a strategy that might be called echo politics. It sends out talking points and lists radio talk shows for each metropolitan area as well as suggested issues and tips for getting on the air.

Its Web site provides links for supporters to e-mail local newspapers directly. The campaign has hoarded about 6 million e-mail addresses, including some purchased from lists, and has 420,000 volunteers -- 28,000 in Ohio alone -- who in addition to fulfilling traditional tasks such as voter registration and turnout are creating an echo of the Bush campaign message from the neighborhood up.

The Kerry campaign has made a nod to this type of politics. The Democrat encourages supporters to plan "meet-ups" of like-minded activists, borrowing from a phenomenon that helped drive former Vermont governor Howard Dean to prominence last year. But Kerry`s campaign, by visible evidence, does not have as well-developed a strategy for exploiting the new political marketplace, in which people get news and argument from many more sources than they did even four years ago. A Kerry aide contended that the campaign`s e-mail list of 690,000 may be just as valuable as Bush`s since it does not include purchased addresses, and that the campaign`s Web site will be updated to include some features of the Bush site, such as a letter-to-the-editor function.

A better example of echo politics on the left is the work of MoveOn.org, an online political group that claims about 1.7 million activists with whom it stays in touch by e-mail. The group has been spending heavily in the traditional manner, buying anti-Bush TV ads in Ohio and other swing states. But it also has begun a more innovative program to monitor the news media for stories that volunteers believe tilt unfairly to conservatives, and some members in Ohio are planning a campaign to promote more liberal callers to talk radio shows.

The strategies of MoveOn and the Bush campaign are responses to the new complexity of political communication. In an earlier age, two and three decades ago, shaping public opinion was a more mechanical exercise. Operatives bought many television ads on a small number of stations and, if the ads were decent, they could be reasonably confident that opinion would move as they anticipated.

In the 1990s, the ascent of talk radio and cable networks reshaped public moods -- indifferent one moment, prone to sudden attack the next, forever prowling for new subjects. Newt Gingrich, O.J. Simpson and Monica S. Lewinsky all had their moment in the cycle. Since then, each new election cycle multiplies the number of outlets in a limitless spectrum of media -- from traditional newspapers at one end to obscure Web logs at the other -- and makes the task of shaping opinion more daunting. So do new technological devices, such as TiVo, which allows television viewers to skip commercials.

"You have a world where a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention," said Mehlman, in a phrase he has made a constant refrain. "It`s almost a cacophony of information. The way people get through it is by turning to people they trust."

Strategist Matthew Dowd, his colleague, has a more colloquial way of putting it. Remember "Waterworld," Kevin Costner`s box-office bomb? "You can spend $100 million making that movie and $50 million advertising it, but people are not going to go if their neighbor says they saw it and it stinks." An opposite example, he said, is "The Blair Witch Project," a movie hit that shot from obscurity because of word-of-mouth endorsements.

The political world has its equivalents of "You`ve got to see it" and "It stinks." Which words best describe Kerry: war hero or waffler? Does Bush have a plan for winning Iraq? Or maybe this whole thing is really Vice President Cheney`s way of enriching Halliburton. A senior operative with Bush`s Ohio campaign said he heard that one from his neighbor -- the kind of conspiracy theory that gets scant acknowledgment from traditional news organizations but can thrive in the echo culture.

The influentials come in different stripes. One may be the retiree who stays on hold for an hour to get on a local call-in show. Another may be the guy who sends out half a dozen e-mails a day to friends or even vague acquaintances, with such titles as "outrageous" or "fyi . . . check this out," and filled with links to news stories and Web sites.

Billie Fiore, a paralegal and Bush volunteer in Licking County, east of Columbus, says she has to discipline herself not to overload the nearly 500 names on her e-mail address book with too many talking points and news links. Of her list, she boasts, "Basically, we are our own media."

Or an influential may be a more conventional sort such as Criddle, a cheerful and articulate woman who dropped her Junior League commitment to devote all her volunteer hours to Bush. She says she keeps Fox News "going pretty much 24-7" because she believes it is best for political news free of liberal bias. She runs her errands sporting her "Friends Don`t Let Friends Vote Democrat" T-shirt. She writes letters to the editor and spends her weekends recruiting Bush volunteers, pressing always for new e-mail addresses to add to the campaign`s list. And she is ready to talk politics at any time, including in the school parking lot while picking up her children.

That the Bush campaign is more methodical in adapting marketing concepts such as influentials to politics does not surprise Michael Harrison. He is the editor of Talkers magazine, which covers talk radio. "The Republicans have always been more organized and more visionary in taking advantage of new media," Harrison said. What is striking about this year`s politics is the way in which e-mail and Web sites have entered the mainstream at both ends of the ideological spectrum, and help promote the buzz that any new product, whether car or candidate, needs to be successful. "Every housewife has an e-mail," he said. "We`re not talking about geeks and technoheads."
Taking Action

One person Harrison is talking about is J.B. Lawton of Dublin, Ohio, a MoveOn activist.

Late last month, Lawton started his day as he ordinarily does, by bouncing around his favorite liberal Web sites. He learned something that left him seething. This was the day news broke that Sinclair Broadcast Group would not broadcast a special edition of "Nightline," in which Ted Koppel read the names of U.S. service personnel who have died in Iraq, on its ABC television affiliates. The ABC station in Columbus, WSYX, is owned by Sinclair.

Lawton`s idea was to organize a rally outside the station, with protesters carrying American flags and reading the names themselves into a bullhorn. Lawton announced the idea on his Web log, which is posted on a liberal Web site known as dailykos.com, and began calling and e-mailing other liberal activists in Columbus, some of whom he knew. "I don`t think that they`ll change their minds, but at least they`ll have some egg on their face," he urged another activist.

The idea worked. Several television stations, including WSYX, covered Lawton`s protest, which also was mentioned in the Columbus Dispatch and on CNN.

Lawton does not fit the popular stereotype of an angry liberal, using the Web to rage against the machine. His hair is not long, or spiked, or colored with a pastel streak. He is 39, and nearly all of his hair has fallen victim to male-pattern baldness. He does not live in a group house. To the contrary, he types his fulminations in the basement rec room of a large house in one of Columbus`s most affluent suburbs, which has nice cars and minivans in nearly every driveway.

His wife is a lawyer, and Lawton, who has a Ph.D in theater, is for the time being a stay-at-home father. This has given him time to nurture a fascination with politics that took root out of admiration for Bill Clinton in the 1990s and transformed into zealous activism because of his grievances over the Supreme Court`s intervention in the close 2000 presidential election, and over the Iraq war.

He is mild in manner but intense in his views. And what is notable about them is that many of his grievances are aimed at the same target many conservatives abhor: establishment newspapers and networks. "The so-called liberal media," he said. "The New York Times? They`re the ones who hounded Clinton during Whitewater."

MoveOn has started a national Media Corps, with 35,000 volunteers who monitor major newspapers and broadcasts and complain when they see bias. There is also a "Fox Watch" project, devoting special attention to the Fox News network. Noah T. Winer, who runs Media Corps from his Brooklyn apartment, acknowledges the irony that liberals now generate as much bile as conservatives over the media. "I think for a lot of reasons over the past decade, people have really started to notice that corporate ownership affects the medium" of major news outlets, he said. He cited in particular what he regarded as insufficiently tough-minded scrutiny of Bush`s assertions about weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war.

In Ohio, Lawton tries to take action, rather than simply stewing. He reads papers from around the state, and on his Web log -- he had five responses to one posting, "so at least I know someone`s reading it" -- suggests letters to the editor people can write, either critiquing coverage or suggesting other points about the election. He offers tips for potential correspondents, including this one: "Defy stereotypes. Liberals get (mis)characterized as effete, godless intellectuals who are out of touch with mainstream values. When appropriate, try some rhetorical jujitsu by citing unexpected sources. For example, the Bible -- and religion in general, for that matter -- is a valuable resource that the Left underutilizes."

"It would be great if every single day in every Ohio paper there was a letter that was either pro-Kerry or anti-Bush," he said. Of his blogging and protests, Lawton said, "I feel empowered -- instead of just shouting at my television set, I can actually do something about it."
Grievance Is Strong Force

Lawton is a reminder that grievance is perhaps the most potent force in echo politics -- a phenomenon that is equally true on both sides.

The Republicans gathered in Christa Criddle`s living room were an illustration. These people have every reason to be happy. In Ohio, the GOP has won every statewide office for the past dozen years. In Washington, conservatives control all three branches of government for the first time ever.

Yet, while there was ample positive sentiment expressed for Bush and what this group believed was his decency and strength, the conversation became visibly more animated when people were talking about subjects they do not like.

Kerry, for instance. Linda Zins-Adams, who teaches German, regards the presumed Democratic nominee as a rudderless phony who is running only because "he`s bored and wants something to do -- he has to have a reason for his $1,000 haircuts." Various speakers denounced the alleged Democratic view that terrorists should be prosecuted rather than have war waged against them. They also carped about the United Nations, welfare, Hillary Rodham Clinton and abortion-rights supporters. One man, visibly emotional, said liberals have rejected God and declared, "Hitler was a liberal."

Criddle, who got her start in politics through the abortion-opposition movement and remains passionately committed to it, said she was taken aback when a visitor suggested that her group seemed angry, and spoke as if conservatives were a beleaguered minority rather than the people running the government.

Her approach to politics is to support positive choices, she said, but acknowledged that she is frustrated by how she perceives Democrats and how some media "blame everything" on Bush. Earlier, she had urged her group not to stand for it. "If you see something in the paper that gets your goat," she advised, "write in and tell them not everyone feels that way."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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U.S. Soldiers Fight Cleric`s Militia

By QASSID JABAR
The Associated Press
Wednesday, May 12, 2004; 5:40 AM

KARBALA, Iraq - U.S. soldiers backed by tanks and helicopters battled fighters loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr near a mosque in the holy city of Karbala early Wednesday, hours after Iraqi leaders agreed on a proposal that would end al-Sadr`s standoff with the U.S.-led forces. Up to 25 insurgents were killed, the coalition said.

American troops and al-Sadr`s followers also fought overnight on the outskirts of two other southern cities, Kufa and Najaf. Residents heard large explosions. One Iraqi was killed and four were wounded in Kufa, and four Iraqis were wounded in Najaf, hospital officials said.

U.S. soldiers raided houses Tuesday night in Sadr City, a Baghdad neighborhood where support for al-Sadr is strong, witnesses said. Three Iraqis were killed. At a funeral ceremony Wednesday for one of the slain men, mourners raised Iraqi flags and al-Sadr posters as they chanted: "Down, down U.S.A."

American forces killed 20 to 25 "enemy" fighters in the Karbala battles, while seven coalition soldiers were wounded, a coalition official said on condition of anonymity. Four of the soldiers returned to duty, the official said.

Much of the fighting in Karbala took place near the Mukhaiyam mosque, which has served as a base for al-Sadr`s Al-Mahdi Army militia and is less than a mile from one of the holiest Shiite sites in the world, the Imam Hussein shrine.

Witnesses said American soldiers first tried to enter the mosque, but then traded fire with al-Sadr followers who had moved to the buildings around it. Fighting lasted for several hours.

Footage broadcast by Fox News, which has a reporter traveling with U.S. troops of the 1st Armored Division, showed a building on fire and a U.S. vehicle trying to knock down a wall.

On Tuesday, Iraqi political and tribal leaders in Najaf said al-Sadr will end the standoff with American troops if the coalition postpones its legal case against him and establishes an Iraqi force to patrol thecity.

However, the offer hinges on an agreement that U.S. forces pull out of the city and Kufa, and al-Sadr`s militia lays down its weapons, the leaders said. Al-Sadr made a similar offer earlier this month.

On Wednesday, a senior coalition official said the coalition will not negotiate with al-Sadr over its demands that he face justice, and that his militia be withdrawn from all government buildings and disbanded. However, the official said on condition of anonymity that the coalition would welcome efforts by "individuals" to help fulfill its demands.

On Tuesday, the new U.S.-appointed governor of Najaf, Adnan al-Zurufi, said he will ask the U.S.-led administration to defer murder charges against al-Sadr until after the Americans transfer power to a new Iraqi administration June 30. However, the militias will have to disband and disarm, and local police will take over security of the province, al-Zurufi said.

Al-Sadr has been holed up in Najaf since last month after U.S. authorities announced an arrest warrant against him in the April 2003 assassination of a moderate rival cleric.

Mansour al-Assadi, a senior tribal leader, said a proposed deal would require all armed groups to withdraw from Najaf in an effort to defuse rising tensions among rival Iraqi groups.

In exchange, murder charges against al-Sadr would be postponed until a permanent constitution is adopted next year, and he would be tried by an Islamic court.

Qays al-Khaz`ali, a senior aide to al-Sadr who attended the meeting, said the agreement will be submitted to Najaf`s Shiite religious leaders for approval before becoming an official offer.

The Iraqi government due to take office June 30 will not be elected but appointed after consultations with U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who is in Baghdad for meetings with Iraqi and American officials. Elections are expected by January.

Also Wednesday, gunmen fired on a car carrying Iraqi security forces north of Baghdad, killing one man and seriously wounding his brother, Iraqi authorities said. Two other members of the U.S.-backed Iraqi Civil Defense were hurt in the attack near the city of Baqouba.

In Samarra, another town north of Baghdad, about 20 gunmen raided a police station Tuesday night, and the seven police inside fled. The attackers then detonated a bomb that destroyed the building and two police cars.

Baqouba and Samarra are largely Sunni Muslim towns that formed a core of support for Saddam Hussein`s former regime.

© 2004 The Associated Press

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Protecting the System



Wednesday, May 12, 2004; Page A22

THE BUSH administration still seeks to mislead Congress and the public about the policies that contributed to the criminal abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Yesterday`s smoke screen was provided by Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Mr. Cambone assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that the administration`s policy had always been to strictly observe the Geneva Conventions in Iraq; that all procedures for interrogations in Iraq were sanctioned under the conventions; and that the abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison were consequently the isolated acts of individuals. These assertions are contradicted by International Red Cross and Army investigators, by U.S. generals overseeing the prisoners, and by Mr. Cambone himself.

Start with adherence to the Geneva Conventions, which Mr. Cambone`s boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, has publicly derided as outdated and which the administration acknowledges are not being adhered to at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison. Mr. Cambone said yesterday that the administration considered all detainees at Abu Ghraib to be covered by either the Third or Fourth Geneva Convention. But he also confirmed a statement by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the current commander at Abu Ghraib, that techniques officially available for interrogation have included hooding, sleep deprivation and stress positions. An official report by the Red Cross confirms that those techniques as well as harsher ones have been used systematically, and not only at Abu Ghraib. The report says they have been employed by tactical military intelligence units all over Iraq, including at a permanent facility at the Baghdad airport. According to Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an Army report says that the policy for Iraq specifies that permission of the commanding general can be sought for the use of "sleep management, sensory deprivation, isolation longer than 30 days and dogs."

The Third Geneva Convention, which applies to prisoners of war and captured insurgents, says that they "may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind" as a way to make them answer questions. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which covers people under foreign occupation, says "no physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against" them, "in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties." A senior Army official, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, testified that the Army believes its "harsh" techniques are allowed under these provisions. The Red Cross, which is designated by the conventions as their monitoring organization, believes otherwise: That the U.S. practices are in violation was one of the principal findings of its February report. U.S. forces were systematically breaking the conventions in five major ways, the report found, three of which concerned the treatment of prisoners under interrogation. It described the abuse as "standard operating procedure."

Mr. Cambone made no attempt to reconcile his claim of U.S. adherence to international law with the actual procedures his office has helped to promulgate. Instead he insisted that the crimes at Abu Ghraib -- which, though they went beyond the established practices, were based on the same principles -- were the responsibility of the guards and their commanders, and not the intelligence-gathering system. In this he was contradicted by the witness sitting next to him, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who repeated the conclusion of his own investigation: that the practices were introduced by intelligence interrogators who were improperly placed in command of the guards.

These contradictions go to the heart of this scandal and its impact. The sickening abuse of Iraqi prisoners will do incalculable damage to American foreign policy no matter how the administration responds. But if President Bush and his senior officials would acknowledge their complicity in playing fast and loose with international law and would pledge to change course, they might begin to find a way out of the mess. Instead, they hope to escape from this scandal without altering or even admitting the improper and illegal policies that lie at its core. It is a vain hope, and Congress should insist on a different response.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Übersetzt und einige Namen verändert, könnte dieser Artikel über das Steuerrecht auch in D geschriebenn worden sein.

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Tax Reform R.I.P.

By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, May 12, 2004; Page A23

Eugene Steuerle is one of Washington`s ranking policy wonks -- a term used here with respect. He`s forgotten more about taxes in the past 15 seconds than most of us will ever know. He arrived in Washington in 1974, worked for years at the Treasury and moved in 1989 to the Urban Institute, a think tank. Steuerle has just written a book, "Contemporary U.S. Tax Policy," that addresses the insistent question: Why is the federal tax system such a mess? The answer, in a word, is democracy.

In theory, it`s easy to imagine a simple tax system with low rates, a broad tax base -- the amount of taxable income -- and substantial "progressivity," meaning that the rich pay higher rates. But in practice it has been elusive. Democrats and Republicans alike are too eager to use tax breaks to advance various social, economic and political agendas. The resulting tax code is so confusing, complex and contradictory that it costs taxpayers (in accounting fees and the value of their time) about $100 billion annually to complete their returns, estimates economist Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan. In 2003 that roughly equaled the combined spending of the departments of education ($57.4 billion), homeland security ($32 billion) and state ($9.3 billion).

The appeal of tax breaks is that they give "the appearance of reducing the government`s size . . . even as government interference in the economy increases," writes Steuerle. But a tax system that promotes various causes (more saving, more health insurance, college attendance) cannot be simple. It brims with provisions. Goals conflict; contradictions are unavoidable. Similarly, a system that favors some taxpayers (homeowners, the elderly) must disfavor others. "Fairness" suffers.

Of course, the rich often try to skirt taxes through abusive shelters. But it`s a myth that legal tax breaks mainly benefit the wealthy. The government publishes a yearly list of "tax expenditures," indicating the costs in forgone taxes of different breaks. These favor the middle and upper-middle classes. Here are some of the biggest for 2004: tax-free employer contributions to pensions and 401(k) plans, $123 billion; tax-free employer payments for health insurance, $120 billion; the deductibility of interest on home mortgages, $68 billion; charitable deductions, $43 billion; the exclusion of some Social Security benefits from income taxes, $27 billion. For the wealthy, the biggest break involves preferences for capital gains (mainly profits on stocks); in 2004, they`re worth $82 billion.

All these tax breaks are immensely popular. They would be more defensible if they always made economic sense. Unfortunately, they don`t. One reason Americans are building ever-larger homes for ever-smaller families is that housing is subsidized through the tax code. Similarly, the tax code subsidizes health insurance and, by shielding covered patients from many routine costs, promotes higher health spending. "The United States should have a tax system which looks like someone designed it on purpose," the late William E. Simon, Treasury secretary from 1974 to 1977, once said. Dream on.

Actually, Congress and President Reagan once made a stab at a better system. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 reduced tax rates and broadened the tax base. But the new system could survive only if politicians exercised self-restraint. It wasn`t to be. Bill Clinton raised tax rates and expanded tax breaks. President Bush has gone one better. He`s lowered rates and expanded preferences.

Sometimes this ceaseless competition for new tax breaks implodes. Congress is now considering a bill to repeal a provision of the corporate tax that, because it violates international trade rules, is subjecting $4 billion of U.S. exports to European tariffs. But the House and Senate versions of the bill are so stuffed with conflicting tax breaks (including ones for cruise ships, ranchers and oil companies) that the legislation has stalled.

As Steuerle notes, taxes cannot be divorced from broader budget questions. What should government do? For whom? Who pays? How much might new taxes hurt economic growth? But this is a debate we resolutely avoid. Republicans and Democrats merely echo their supporters` fondest hopes. Republicans reject any tax increases -- ever. Democrats indicate that taxes need rise only on the wealthy. Considering existing budget deficits and future spending commitments, especially for retiring baby boomers, neither message is realistic.

Well, that`s democracy. Tell `em what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. Steuerle suggests that budgetary pressures -- including more taxpayers triggering the alternative minimum tax -- will promote sober solutions. "The grand budget compromise that must take place," he writes, "is between those who would allow retirement and health programs to continue to grow without bound and those who would continually prescribe tax cuts into the future." Based on history, that seems a triumph of hope over experience.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Fantastical Occupation

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, May 12, 2004; Page A23

Back when he was running for president, in 2000, Sen. John McCain routinely referred to Bill Clinton`s handling of world affairs as a "feckless photo-op foreign policy." Four years later, Clinton`s foreign policy seems fairly filled with feck when contrasted with his successor`s.

Has any official United States policy in recent memory been as feckless as the Bush administration`s for postwar Iraq? Can we, for a moment, recall just some of the assumptions that the administration announced or embraced? That Americans would be welcomed as liberators? That we could secure the nation with a force of a little more than 100,000 troops? That Iraqi oil revenue would be such that the occupation would pay for itself? That, in accord with our assumptions on troop requirements and postwar financing, we didn`t really need the kind of international cooperation that the nation had historically sought for this kind of venture? That, in accord with the same assumptions, there was no reason not to enact more massive tax cuts for the rich?

With the revelations that have emerged of the degradation and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, it`s become particularly clear that the administration gave no real thought to the challenges at the very heart of occupying another country. Occupations can be relatively benign, but only when the occupier is viewed by the occupied as a temporary, legitimate expedient, concerned with and able to enhance the occupied nation`s reconstruction. If that perception begins to crumble, and if resistance erupts, occupations turn brutal, no matter how noble their goals may be.

That hasn`t always posed an immediate problem for many of history`s leading occupying powers: Imperial Rome and, until its latter days, imperial Britain weren`t troubled very much by the opinions of a resentful public. But the United States, and the entire Western world, are engaged in a long-term battle against fundamentalist Islam, a battle that ultimately and immediately has as its goal the Islamic public`s support. At times that battle must be military, as was the case in Afghanistan after the al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Most of the time, however, that battle will be fought in the social, political and economic spheres, and it is on that terrain that the liberal democratic model will -- or should -- triumph.

Which is why military occupations offer the worst possible terrain on which to fight the battle of ideas. From the French in Indochina and Algeria to the British in South Asia and the United States in Central America and Vietnam, occupations are where liberal democracies go to betray their ideals -- if not as a matter of intent then, inevitably, as a matter of execution. One way or another, it becomes necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.

But if one thing is clear beyond dispute in the muddle of post-Saddam Iraq, it is that the Bush administration gave no thought whatever to the problems inherent in occupation. No one thought to protect Iraq`s cultural treasures. No one thought to secure the nation`s power grid. No one thought to enlarge our own armed forces, so that we weren`t sending civilian National Guard troops and private contractors to do a soldier`s job, with a clear chain of command in place.

And clearly, no one sought to train those Guardsmen assigned to duty at Abu Ghraib prison in the rudiments of the Geneva Conventions and our Army`s regulations on the treatment of prisoners. Instead, they were thrown into a system that was being redesigned to "Gitmo-ize" the treatment of detainees there -- that is, to deal with prisoners the same way we treat the al Qaeda prisoners and others at our Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, free from prying eyes and the codes of either civilian or military law. And Gitmo-ize the prisoners is just what some of our guards at Abu Ghraib did. Some prisoners, apparently, were Gitmo-ized to death.

It defies all belief that the young women and men of an Army Reserve unit from West Virginia were some kind of sadistic cult just waiting to be called away from their civilian lives to torture prisoners in Iraq. I doubt they brought the hoods, the dogs, the nightsticks with them. They were doing the very dirty work of an occupation that, as it`s developed, could hardly be more counterproductive to our ultimate goal -- the liberalization of the Islamic world -- if we`d planned it that way.

But then, at the White House and at the highest (that is, civilian) levels of the Pentagon, every assumption about the occupation was rooted in fantasy. And on that topic and its role in the affairs of the occupiers and the occupied, I defer to Ireland`s great poet, William Butler Yeats. "We fed the heart on fantasy," he wrote, "the heart grew brutal on the fare."

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he dismal science
The Neoconomists
The Bush administration`s other revolutionaries.
By Daniel Altman
Posted Monday, May 10, 2004, at 11:17 AM PT

While neoconservatives in the Bush administration remake American foreign policy, another cadre of ideologues—call them the neoconomists—is busy attempting to transform American society.

The revolution in economic policy is not being televised. There was no big speech by President Bush to mark its birth, no "Axis of Evil" catchphrase designed to capture headlines. Yet it is every bit as dramatic and risky a change.

The neoconomists have one goal: to increase the rate at which the economy grows by changing how the nation uses its resources. It is a worthy goal, too. Following such as path could lead to a period of untold prosperity, with living standards rising faster than ever before. Or it might not. But even if the plan works, it might just lead to the collapse of the capitalist system.

The nation`s current economic policy came to Washington in care of R. Glenn Hubbard and Lawrence B. Lindsey, who spent roughly the first two years of the Bush administration as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chairman of the National Economic Council, respectively.

For years, both men had been ardent supporters of the notion that income from savings and wealth was taxed too much. In 1990, Lindsey wrote that "with only a very modest loss of tax revenue, the tax system can be reformed to substantially encourage the savings we need to sustain our investment in a more productive economy." A decade later, Hubbard and a co-author wrote that savings and wealth had "long and widely been acknowledged as especially impaired by taxation."

Hubbard and Lindsey saw cutting taxes on savings and wealth as a recipe for faster growth. Their plans were consistent with supply-side economics, which had dominated Republican policy for decades, since they targeted the economy`s long-run potential to grow rather than short-run fine-tuning of demand. But the focus on savings was a departure from earlier conservative doctrine.

During the Reagan administration, most talk about tax cuts centered on removing disincentives to work. In the years that followed, though, academic economists began to favor a new set of theoretical models where the savings rate took a more prominent role as a determinant of economic growth. In addition, the models suggested that the pace of technological change depended on changes in the size of the capital stock, which can only grow if investors save more. The neoconomists didn`t invent these models—that was the job of theorists whose work sometimes looked more like physics than economics—but they quickly grasped the implications for policy. They used the models to postulate the following chain reaction:

1. Government cuts tax rates on savings and wealth.

2. Saving by households—bank accounts, stocks, bonds, etc.—increases.

3. More money becomes available to American businesses, since they`re the ones offering the bank accounts, stocks, bonds, etc.

4. Businesses spend more on machinery, software, and other capital, as well as on research and development.

5. The nation`s output of goods and services grows, and technological innovation accelerates.

6. Incomes and living standards rise more quickly for several years and perhaps forever.

With George W. Bush`s cooperation, the first steps have already been taken. So far, the president has signed bills eliminating the estate tax, lowering the tax rates on dividends and capital gains, and helping companies to reduce the tax they pay on their profits. In addition, by cutting rates for "ordinary" income, the Bush administration has lowered taxes on interest payments, rental income and income from mutual funds, and pensions and retirement accounts. (Though slated to be temporary, the Bush administration is campaigning to make its tax breaks permanent.) All of these changes make it relatively more attractive to accumulate wealth than to spend money.

In addition, the White House is pushing for an initiative that would almost single-handedly accomplish Hubbard and Lindsey`s goal: a huge expansion of tax-free savings accounts. And the growth of these tax-free savings accounts would dovetail well with the White House`s plan for reforming Social Security, which calls for the creation of another type of tax-free investment account for every working American.

Hubbard and Lindsey`s agenda is long-term, but it has already incurred some substantial costs. In the short term, their focus on savings has offered relatively little stimulus to the economy. Had the White House directed more incentives toward spending, the lag between recession and recovery might have been shorter.

In the long term, the cost of the Bush administration`s policy has been forgone opportunities. The combination of the weak economy and the White House`s decadelong schedule of tax cuts has left future administrations with little room to maneuver. Forecasts for budget balances from 2002 to 2011 have dropped from $5.6 trillion in surpluses to $2.9 trillion in deficits in the past three years. In the coming years, the federal government will have little money to invest in economic growth directly, by spending money on education, worker training, or basic research, which generate reliably high returns to society in the long run.

This latter cost is particularly germane, since there is no assurance that the positive chain-reaction the neoconomists envision will actually occur. Hubbard and Lindsey`s strategy has never been tried in a large, wealthy economy. One flaw in the theory is that American savings do not always stay in America for use by American companies. In the past two decades, the share of savings sent abroad appears to have risen from about 10 percent to at least 40 percent. And when the Treasury borrows to make up for large deficits, more American savings will end up in the hands of government and less in investments by businesses.

The speedy growth of the economy in the last three quarters—averaging more than 5 percent at an annual rate—could signal impressive things to come. And the experience of the Clinton administration proved that even the biggest deficits can disappear given a broad enough expansion in the economy. But even if the Bush administration succeeds, its policies could create two problems that could undo all their positive effects: rising inequality and a drastic change in incentives.

Wealthier people derive more of their income from returns on saving—both in dollar terms and as a proportion of income—than poor people do. When taxes on the return from savings suddenly disappear, the wealthy benefit the most. It may be that people who depend on their jobs for income will benefit, too, in the long run, thanks to an expanding economy and rising wages. But for several years, in all likelihood, the income gap will continue to widen.

That income gap poses some real dangers to the economy and even to the earnings of the wealthy. With rising inequality, it`s harder for poor people to obtain economic opportunities, because chances to get education and training, or to bring ideas to market, depend on money as well as talent, and because the number of these opportunities is limited.

The Bush administration has done little to alleviate either of these conditions. So, when income gaps widen, more of the potential of poor people—even the smartest and most innovative poor people—will inevitably be wasted. The wealthier people who own America`s companies won`t have as skilled a workforce, or as fast a flow of new ideas, as they might have had otherwise.

Perhaps more important, abolishing taxes on saving would give people every incentive to receive all their income from financial assets rather than wages and salaries. For some, spending all day adjusting one`s portfolio might make more sense than taking a job. Even people who work will seek ways to avoid taxes, for example by being paid solely in stock options or high-interest bonds.

Of course, those people would probably be chief executives and other financial sophisticates, rather than home health workers, call-center operators, and short-order cooks. Eventually, the new incentives could lead to a whole new way of classifying people: working and upper-class would be replaced by taxpayer and free-rider. Titans of industry, heirs and heiresses, and wizards of Wall Street wouldn`t pay for national defense, cancer research, or President Bush`s trip to Mars. All those costs would be borne by America`s breadwinners.

It sounds like a recipe for the kind of social unrest that can make an economy stagger, stagnate, or worse. A political backlash would seem almost inevitable. And something worse—like a riotous manifestation of anticapitalist sentiment—would become a real possibility for the first time in decades. And that`s what could happen if the theory works.
Daniel Altman is the author of Neoconomy, which will be published this summer. He previously wrote economics columns for the Economist and the New York Times.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2100251/

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Jessica Stern, Author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill"
May 12, 2004
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

"A few years ago I decided to do something scholars rarely do: I decided to talk with terrorists," is how Jessica Stern begins her remarkable book.

Stern, an expert on terrorism and a lecturer on the subject at Harvard, did something no one else has done. She decided to learn more about what makes terrorist ticks by going to the source and interviewing them. Stern, in her introduction, is frank about her goals and her fears in traveling around the world, at risk to herself, in order to first hand talk with individuals who "kill in the name of God." And she is an equal opportunity researcher: she interviews Christian, Jewish and Islamic terrorists.

As someone who from time-to-time consults for the government, Stern doesn`t have a partisan political agenda. We interviewed her and the name of Bush hardly came up, if at all. But she does have the desire to understand the motivations of terrorists in order to better fashion an effective strategy to reducing their omnipresent threat.
In short, although Stern doesn`t take political sides, she does take a strategic position. And her position, after interviewing terrorists and gleaning insights, is that trying to reduce terrorism requires a thoughtful, multi-faceted approach, because the causes of terrorism and the motivations of terrorists are varied.

Although Stern noted in our BuzzFlash interview with her that military action is sometimes necessary against terrorist command posts (although she opposed the invasion of Iraq), she asserts that "The terrorism we are fighting is a seductive idea, not a military target....I have come to see terrorism as a kind of virus, which spreads as a result of risk factors at various levels: global, interstate, national and personal."

The book is all the more compelling because it debunks the neanderthal "bring `em on, wanted dead or alive" approach of Bush without being a polemic against him.

"In the end, however, what counts is what we fight for, not what we oppose. We need to avoid giving into spiritual dread, and to hold fast to the best of our principles, by emphasizing tolerance, empathy, and courage."

As Stern recounts her meetings with terrorists, she is remarkably candid in discussing her personal emotions and thoughts. Her extraordinary courage has yielded an invaluable insight into why we need a government with brains to take on terrorism and not a government of simple-minded radical zealots.

In a recent book about George W. Bush, written by sympathetic authors from the Hoover Institute, one unnamed Bush relative is quoted as saying that Bush sees the war on terrorism ``as a religious war``: ``He doesn`t have a P.C. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.``

"Terror in the Name of God?" Who could be more ill-equiped to conduct a war against those who commit terror in the name of God than a man in the White House who commits terror in the name of God? What happens when the people conducting the war on terror conduct torture and light the fire of humiliation and anger that creates more terrorism? What happens when the anti-terrorist becomes the terrorizer? (This is completely BuzzFlash`s assessment, not Stern`s.)

These are not Jessica Stern`s questions. They are ours. Stern`s focus is on the terrorists and their motivations. She wants to gain information that can help save our lives. Our focus is on Bush`s ineffective, incompetent, simple-minded response to terrorism.

After reading "Terror in the Name of God," it becomes even clearer to us that Bush`s only dubious accomplishment is the implementation of policies that create more terrorism, not less. That`s because, based on Stern`s analysis of religious-based terrorism, Bush responds to terrorism exactly as terrorists would want him to, thus playing into their hands.

He becomes the evil that he beholds.

"Terror in the Name of God" is not likely to become a bestseller. It presents insights into fighting terrorism that are too complex for most Americans -- and an administration -- who want to bludgeon a problem to death.

Too bad. We are all less safe as a result -- and we are losing the battle against terrorism, because it requires a multi-pronged strategic approach, not just daisy cutter bombs and mercenary torturers in an Iraq prison.

* * *

BuzzFlash: In your Introduction to "Terror in the Name of God," you have a statement that is startling in its simplicity. You say, "I have been studying terrorism for many years in various capacities -- as a government official, a scholar, and as a university lecturer. A few years ago, I decided to do something scholars rarely do. I decided to talk with terrorists." And then you proceed in a very frank way to talk about your concerns about personal safety and so forth, but you decided to go ahead and do this over a course of four years.

You approach this in an equal opportunity way, looking not just at Islamic terrorists, but at Christian and Jewish terrorists. What patterns do you find that are common to terrorists who kill in the name of God?

Jessica Stern: One thing they have in common is a frustration with establishing a clear identity. What religious extremist groups offer -- and that can even include groups that don’t get involved in terrorism-- is a very clear identity. It’s very clear who we are, and it’s very clear who the outsiders are, and what makes us different from them. And one of the primary tasks of a religious terrorist leader is to capitalize on some feeling of humiliation, often related to identity, that they find in potential members. It could be a personal feeling of humiliation, or it could be civilizational, national. They make their followers feel that the way to forge a new identity is by getting involved with this violent group.

BuzzFlash: We tend to focus now, because of 9/11, on Islamic terrorism. You don’t read much about domestic terrorism. But you do interview a domestic terrorist in this book. And we’ve seen reports in the last couple of years of law enforcement officials stopping acts of domestic terrorism. Of course, Timothy McVeigh is an example of a successful domestic terrorist.

Jessica Stern: We have many examples. They don’t get the same kind of press coverage, but there are many examples.

BuzzFlash: Why do you think they don’t get the same kind of press coverage?

Jessica Stern: Well, especially in the wake of 9/11, we’re just focused so much on Islamist terrorists. I just want to find the name of this -- it’s a very, very interesting case in Texas. His name is William Krar. It’s extraordinary how little attention that case has gotten. Apparently he had 60 pipe bombs, 500,000 rounds of ammunition, and enough pure sodium cyanide, quote, to kill everyone inside a 30,000 square foot building, according to federal authorities. That’s a pretty big deal. Imagine the kind of press coverage a case like that would get if he were purportedly a member of al-Qaeda.

BuzzFlash: And what was his motivation?

Jessica Stern: He seemed to have links with anti-government, neo-Nazi groups. But I think it’s rather unclear exactly what he had in mind.

BuzzFlash: And yet you really had to read through the papers to find it.

Jessica Stern: Right, right.

BuzzFlash: One of the key things that comes across in your book is the complexity of terrorism. The war on terrorism is being waged almost purely as a military campaign. Yet the way your book is structured indicates the grievances that give rise to a religious terrorist are complex and varying -- humiliation, demographics, history, territory. Any individual terrorist may have one or a combination of these. And then you say, on page 283 of your book, that the terrorism we are fighting is a seductive idea, not a military target. Terrorist leaders tell young men that the reason they feel humiliated personally and culturally is that international institutions are exploiting them, and that in many cases, although not exclusively, the enemy is modernity.

Given that it’s a seductive idea and not a military target, how do we respond? You do come to some suggestions at the end, but currently we’re being told by the Bush administration that it’s virtually purely a military response.

Jessica Stern: I don’t mean that there aren’t some military targets. There are some important military targets. For example, I think it was important to destroy al-Qaeda’s headquarters in Afghanistan. But that is just a short-term measure. Over the long term, what should trouble us more than anything is what is coming out of the Pew polls, showing that the level of antipathy to the United States is continuing to go up, especially after the Iraq war, especially in the Islamic world, but not exclusively in the Islamic world.

In one of the Pew polls -- not the last one, but I think the one before that -- there was a finding that a number of Islamic-majority countries, more people have confidence in bin Laden as a leader than in President Bush. The word was confidence, not faith. To me, that is an extraordinary vulnerability. If I were advising the President, I would see that as a very significant threat to U.S. national security because, as Mao said, terrorists swim in a sea of ordinary people who are their supporters and provide logistic support. Terrorists need that support. And when there’s so much hatred toward the United States, they’re going to get that support. And they’re going to be more successful also at recruiting.

So I think what’s most important is that we try to undermine the false idea that the al-Qaeda movement is promoting that the U.S. is out to humiliate the Islamic world. There’s no military target there; indeed, military responses largely feed into that false idea. When military action is necessary, I think it ought to be as covert as possible. And I think we ought to be focusing on penetrating the groups more than killing operatives.

BuzzFlash: You point out in your book that it is an erroneous concept to think of al-Qaeda as a closed group of people -- and that you can cut off the heads of the leadership and then al-Qaeda will sort of dissolve. But that’s really not the case. In fact, terrorism -- Islamic terrorism, in any case -- is becoming more decentralized and not as dependent upon Osama bin Laden as leader. Others have also suggested that the extent of connection to Osama bin Laden among some of the terrorists is not always as direct as some government reports indicate.

Jessica Stern: Yes, yes.

BuzzFlash: If that is the case, and we’re seeing more dispersed terrorist cells, what plan of action works against that? Clearly it’s not military because there’s not necessarily a headquarters. So how does one begin to grapple with that? Let me add that from reading your book, what seems most apparent to us is that there isn’t a simple military solution -- one needs to approach the whole terrorist issue with a great deal of nuance, complexity, subtlety, and multi-pronged approach. I don’t know if I’m answering the question I asked.

Jessica Stern: Yes, you are right. I wrote about that in a piece in Foreign Affairs in July of 2003. It’s called "The Protean Enemy." You can just Google "The Protean Enemy" and my name. But yes, I think that that is a big problem. And in that article, I talk not only about the kinds of groups that we’re reading about now, including the individuals involved in the attack in Spain, but also various movements that are not terrorist groups per se, but that are being taken advantage of as sources of operatives and support. There are Islamist movements that claim not to be involved in violence at all that are beginning to play an important role as feeder organizations into violent groups.

BuzzFlash: Your book is so extraordinarily insightful. It opens a whole door which we don’t normally see because the media coverage is simplistic. We’re waging a military war and that’s pretty much as far as it goes. Your book opens a window into the extraordinary challenge and complexity of dealing with terrorism, and the motivations of terrorists.

Jessica Stern: What we need to do in the very short term to prevent an imminent terrorist strike is probably going to be counterproductive in the long term. So there’s always this trade-off: A military response may, at times, be required in the short term. But a military response may also just unify our enemies to recruit new followers and to energize the movement against us.

BuzzFlash: Such as the bombing of the mosque in Fallujah.

Jessica Stern: Right. That’s a very, very good example.

BuzzFlash: After finishing your book, I felt like this is such an extraordinary challenge because you’re dealing with something like what causes an earthquake. There’s two great forces pressing against each other. You have modernity pressing against a people who are reacting to modernity overall by finding refuge in religious zealotry, regardless of the religion in question. This seems to be one of the most consistent themes among the different religious groups -- the Jewish terrorists you talked to, the Islamic terrorists, and the Christian terrorists.

But you also talked about the lone terrorist, the man who shot up and killed people as they were driving to CIA Headquarters, who’s sort of acting on his own. How does one even deal with something like that, where you basically have a criminal act that is terrorism, but the act had no strategic relationship to any terrorist group?

Jessica Stern: There’s a spectrum between what I call a commander-cadre organization -- a kind of terrorist army; and virtual networks, which consist of individual cells that have no connection with one another. The most extreme case is the lone wolf avenger who takes action partly mobilized by some terrorist ideology, and often partly by something going on personally. Al-Qaeda is becoming a kind of hybrid organization -- a network of networks that encompasses both commander-cadre organizations -- often groups with regional agendas; and virtual networks. The mission that al Qaeda espouses has become a popular dystopioc ideology among a surprising array of groups and individuals.
More and more powerful weapons are becoming available to smaller and smaller groups; for example, biological agents. As these technologies spread, virtual networks will become more dangerous. The anthrax letter attacks are extremely troubling in that regard. Whoever perpetrated the attacks apparently didn’t want people to die because he always enclosed a note warning the recipient , "You’ve just been exposed to anthrax." But had he not done that, it could have been an extremely lethal incident. It seems likely that the anthrax-letter attacks were committed by a single individual.

BuzzFlash: Then it’s a probably domestic terrorism, and it was committed by an American, it seems.

Jessica Stern: Right. That seems to be the leading hypothesis.

BuzzFlash: Because of 9/11, many Americans have demonized that this is something that’s Islamic. But you have people like an American doctor who immigrated to Israel, who kills many Palestinians with a machine gun because of his feeling that the West Bank was the greater land of Israel, and that was a terrorist act. It’s getting back to this point that it’s not exclusive to any one religion, and, therefore, the battle against it isn’t a crusade -- quote, unquote -- because there are many more common factors between terrorists of different religions than terrorism as defined within a religion.

Jessica Stern: But there’s something about what’s going on in the Islamic world. Islamist terrorist leaders are able to raise large armies. As you know, we don’t see Jewish terrorists able to raise large armies, and we don’t see Christian terrorists able to raise large armies. I think it is because there are a large number of humiliated young men in the Islamic world. Terrorist leaders capitalize on this humiliation -- they try to strengthen it, and urge their followers to take action against the entity purportedly responsible for humiliting them. I have a very famous colleague who likes to accuse me of having a Prozac approach to terrorism.

BuzzFlash: A Prozac approach?

Jessica Stern: Because I focus so much on humiliation. But that’s what they talk about, and not just in conversations with me. In fact, on the Web, you can look at what Ayman al Zawahiri says about humiliation in his writings

Every religion is vulnerable to this kind of selective reading. Every group is susceptible to a selective reading of history -- portraying, for example, that this mosque, if you go back to year X, was built on top of a Hindu temple, and therefore we should destroy the mosque. Or if we go back to year Y, this mosque really was a Jewish temple. And every religion is susceptible to that. But the only religious terrorist groups that are taking off numerically at this point in history are the Islamic ones. But at other points in history, other religions have been more susceptible to this kind of abuse -- to using religion to justify evil acts.

BuzzFlash: Let’s talk about what you did. In your Introduction, you explain that your goal was to get inside the heads of terrorists to understand them, and it had nothing to do with any sympathy whatsoever. This was simply a way for you, given your specialty, to begin to understand the way they think and gain better insight into the psychology of terrorism. Describe your feelings as you’re interviewing these people. Because you really took some risks.

Jessica Stern: It was only after Sept. 11 that I realized the nature of the real threat I had taken. For example, I did talk at length to the leader of a Pakistani jihadi group who is personal friends with bin Laden, and his group is very closely aligned with al-Qaeda. I knew that I didn’t want to present myself to bin Laden. I thought that was not a very good idea, given my government experience. I mean, I’m not a reporter; I didn’t think that was something that would be a good idea for me. But I didn’t realize just how close I was getting. And of course, I did exactly what Daniel Pearl did.

I think part of it is that I’m a woman, and part of it is that I was doing this before Sept. 11, when I think things really changed. And I would not, myself, repeat what I did in the post-Sept. 11 environment.

BuzzFlash: And you are, as you say in your book, Jewish, which certainly among the Islamic terrorists would seem to put you at higher risk, as Daniel Pearl was.

Jessica Stern: Yes, although it came up sometimes in the conversations, most of the time it wasn’t really that big an issue. I think it also made me a bit more exotic. I’m not sure that it was always a disadvantage, and my exoticism to the group was definitely something that was in my favor, It made them extremely curious about me.

BuzzFlash: What was in it for the terrorists in talking to you?

Jessica Stern: Part of it was the curiosity that I just mentioned, and part of it was they wanted to use me to get their message out. I thought it was important to understand their perceptions of the world, so I didn’t mind the fact that they were trying to use me in that regard. They want people to understand what they’re all about. In my view, they have some misperceptions of the world, and I think it’s important for us to understand how they see the world, so that is fine. In some cases, they were trying to use me because they thought I was working for the U.S. government, and they wanted to get a message to the U.S. government. And sometimes a lot of it was, I think, just loneliness or curiosity -- they liked the idea of a woman sitting down and being so curious, not interrupting them, hanging on their every word.

My colleagues have told me that they can’t believe -- they say they couldn’t do it -- that I am capable of sitting down and talking to someone whose views I reject completely, and, during the conversation, try to enter that person’s head. Try to really almost be that person for the period of the conversation, in terms of their thought process -- to follow along with how they see the world. It’s not just a matter of not expressing disapproval, but not allowing myself to think of disapproval.

BuzzFlash: It’s sort of a suspension of your critical stance.

Jessica Stern: It’s pure listening -- and pure following, and I’m really trying to follow where they go completely. That’s what I mean by empathy, trying to sense what it is that they feel and think, to see the world through their eyes completely, and not judge.

BuzzFlash: One of these interviews, because of Islamic perceptions about the relationship with women, took place through a screen. How was that?

Jessica Stern: I was often aware of the theatre, the image that was being presented to me. It might have been just scowling on the faces of the guards, or guns salute as I would come in, or a show of force, or certain outfits. In this case, I did feel that the idea that he couldn’t look at me and I couldn’t look at him was part of a theatrical performance. That’s not really, I think, how most Islamists feel. I was completely covered, number one, much more so than their translator, who was Indonesian. But if he really thought that it was too dangerous to look at me -- covered as I was -- he could have covered his eyes, rather than speaking behind a screen.

BuzzFlash: The issue of why Ja`Far Thalid is in Indonesia, he’s a leader of a kind of splinter terrorist group. It’s an interesting study because you really go into depth about the Christian population overtaking the Islamic in a certain area, and the threat of Islamic displacement evolved into a terrorist movement. It was sort of a microscopic analysis of the birth of a terrorist organization.

And again, he spoke to you quite willingly. Terrorism is an act that is an explicit attempt to get sensational media coverage, in a way.

Jessica Stern: Right, right. And it is theatre.

BuzzFlash: And messaging, in its own perverse way. Speaking to you, the gentleman in Indonesia clearly was messaging.

Jessica Stern: Sure. And in some cases, I felt that in Pakistan they’d been briefed by their handlers about how to talk to me. In the case of the gentleman in Indonesia, Ja`Far Thalib, he was clearly, as you say, controlling the message that he wanted to get across very carefully. But as he became more relaxed, he starting contradicting his earlier lies. In an interview, people will come in and out of feeling relaxed and willing to share the truth, and feeling they need to, well, either lie or tell partial truths. It required some patience, and also some technique, initially, trying to focus on questions where they wouldn’t feel any desire to lie to me, where there would be absolutely no reason to lie to me, so that they sort of got into a mode of not lying, as opposed to starting out with questions where they might feel they had to be political.

But all my interviews are a mixture of that posturing, that theatre, and that desire to polish their image in the media, and surprising, bizarrely revealing comments about their own motivations. In one case -- you may remember I got to meet the wife of a leader and see that he lived in a gigantic mansion with servants, even though his offices were completely decrepit and designed to make it look as though -- well, like an NGO that has no funding, where it turns out the head of the NGO that has no funding is living in a LA-style mansion, which happens. But it was very impressive to see that. And I think that he apparently didn’t realize what precisely it was that he was actually showing me.

BuzzFlash: Your book is divided into two major parts. I haven’t talked about the second part, which is the different organizational structures of terrorism and further revelation as to the complexity of what we’re dealing with. Let me ask you about one of the major themes we touched upon earlier, which seems, on the surface, to be sort of an intractable problem -- this collision between modernity and religious extremists. Western society is a modern, secular society that is increasing exponentially -- in terms of its technological advancement and social mores -- and completely at odds with fundamentalists. While there are economic factors that relate to terrorism, and yes, there are funding factors relating to Saudi Arabia, the fact remains that even if you take all that out of it, modernity is going to continue to be a psychological dislocation and threat to many geographical sections of the world.

Jessica Stern: I think you’ve really put your finger on a major problem. But I think it’s important to remember that there’s no one cause. And it’s out of the question that we would change our position on women’s rights.

And it’s out of the question that we’re going to stop the process of globalization that is so troubling not only to the Islamists that we’re fighting, but also to a number identity Christian groups inside the United States. Still, I think it’s important for us to try to lessen the numbers of people who feel disenfranchised by the process of globalization.

BuzzFlash: And how do you do that?

Jessica Stern: We can try to get better at trying to reduce some of the downsides of globalization. And also I think we can get better at not feeding into this notion that what globalization means is the humiliation of the Islamic world by being more aware of how we’re perceived in the Islamic world.

That is the reason why I oppose the Iraq war. I thought that whatever benefits there might be -- and certainly there were many; most importantly, the removal of the vicious tyrant who was doing the most horrific things imaginable to his own population, horrible human rights violations that are only just beginning to come to light -- nonetheless, the downside is so profound, particularly going into that war without international support.

BuzzFlash: Your book is not politically partisan. You focus very much on the terrorists. That’s what you do.

Jessica Stern: Yes, that’s right. I’m not political at all in the book. Suddenly because of my position on the Iraq war, I think that I’m now seen as partisan.

BuzzFlash: I think your book is a tremendous asset because of that. In your exploration of the psychological terrain of terrorism, you focus on long-term prevention by reducing the number of terrorists in the world, which implies a very complex and nuanced approach.

Jessica Stern: You’re right. It’s obviously not at all partisan. It’s a problem that none of us knows how to solve. We have to do our best, but it would be inappropriate to claim that we’re failing for partisan, political reasons. I believe that we’re making some mistakes that we don’t have to make. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean that if we didn’t make those mistakes, that we would succeed in putting a stop to terrorism. It’s such a difficult problem that we’re going to have to keep struggling. And the truth is that it’s hard for either political party.

BuzzFlash: Finally, how did you become to be an expert in terrorism?

Jessica Stern: I studied chemistry as an undergrad, and then when I lived in Russia, in the Soviet Union, I started inevitably thinking about national security. It was hard, in the mid-80s, living in Russia, not to think about that. I wanted to find a way to combine my interest in chemistry and national security affairs, and ended up working on chemical weapons and the possibility that terrorists would use chemical weapons. I took a post-doctoral fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where I looked at political developments that could put nuclear weapons or materials at risk for terrorists acquiring them. I just ended up kind of falling into working on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

In the beginning of the book, I explain my interest in the problem of terrorism. I was so curious that I just decided I have to do this project, even though I wasn’t trained to do it. I’m not a psychiatrist, or an anthropologist, or a sociologist, or an expert on comparative religions, but it seemed that the terrorists felt comfortable talking to me. And so I did it on that basis.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

[Joerver]

_________________

[Joerver]

Wieder ein Land mit Erdöl nach dem die USA ihre Finger ausstrecken. Undemokratisch und gewalttätig. Wieder eine Möglichkeit durch Intressenpolitik einen Krisenherd aufzubauen.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-050704kaza…

THE POLITICS OF PETROLEUM
Oil Adds Sheen to Kazakh Regime
American now facing federal charges directed a PR effort involving former U.S. officials.
By Ken Silverstein
Times Staff Writer

May 12, 2004

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Some of Washington`s top political consultants traveled to this city in the summer of 1998 to huddle with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Their daunting mission: Convince the world that his oil-rich, authoritarian regime was actually a budding democracy.

This political SWAT team launched the opening salvo in a high-powered, high-priced lobbying campaign that seized on America`s need for oil to win U.S. support for a government with a penchant for shuttering newspapers and manipulating elections.

It was a remarkable effort both for whom it involved and what it accomplished.

Backed heavily by the U.S. oil industry, the six-year, multimillion-dollar push recruited a small army of onetime officials whose experience and contacts translated into considerable influence.

Participants included a former secretary of State, a onetime U.S. attorney general and an ex-presidential aide. Also involved were a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and a leading fundraiser for future President George W. Bush — as well as a New York consultant now facing federal charges that he made payoffs to Nazarbayev in separate business dealings.

The team that met in Almaty, dubbed the "P-Group," circulated fliers on Capitol Hill hailing Nazarbayev for promoting "an active independent press" and creating "a free and democratic electoral system" — even as the Kazakh leader was cracking down on domestic opponents. Another team of consultants arranged free trips to Kazakhstan for journalists who wrote upbeat articles, while others lobbied Congress and the White House to promote the country`s potential as a major U.S. oil supplier.

The lobbying strategy is detailed in public records and copies of dozens of internal memoranda obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The campaign got results: It rallied supporters in Congress and helped win key concessions from the current Bush administration that allowed the release of U.S. aid despite continuing corruption and human rights problems.

Administration officials rejected requests for interviews to discuss the U.S. relationship with Kazakhstan. Roman Vassilenko, first secretary at the Kazakh Embassy in Washington, said relations reflect legitimate improvement in his country. "Kazakhstan is struggling but moving forward," Vassilenko said.

Kazakhstan is one among a new generation of oil suppliers to the United States. Many of these are developing countries eager for U.S. aid — but even more important, for the aura of legitimacy conferred by official U.S. approval. Positive words from Washington can help ease doubts about doing business in their countries, as well as blunt criticism from domestic foes.

To forge closer ties to the U.S., these countries routinely hire consultants and lobbyists. American oil companies also promote the cause of countries where they operate to win favor with host governments.

A Times examination identified dozens of ex-officials from the Reagan, Clinton and two Bush administrations who have worked for the oil industry or for foreign governments with extensive energy reserves — and, almost invariably, poor human rights records.

The ex-officials include prominent names such as Brent Scowcroft, a national security advisor to former President George H.W. Bush. Scowcroft served as a board member and paid consultant for Pennzoil-Quaker State Co. and has been active in promoting closer ties between the United States and Azerbaijan, another Caspian energy producer. The ranks also include lesser-known figures such as Witney Schneidman, a deputy assistant secretary of State for African affairs in the Clinton administration who consults for oil giant Amerada Hess, which has substantial interests in West Africa.

The oil lobby has found an especially receptive ear in the administration of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — former oilmen who picked industry veterans for key positions and focused on improving the United States` energy security.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned in March 2001 that the U.S. faced a major crisis in supplies over the next two decades.

Two months later, a Cheney-led energy task force issued a report that urged that the United States find sources of imports other than the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, citing the Caspian region, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

The task force downplayed conservation as a means of reducing the gap between domestic production and demand. "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy," Cheney said.

The pursuit of oil has been a vital element of U.S. foreign policy for decades, but it has become an even more pressing issue in recent years: Domestic oil now supplies less than half of what Americans consume; by 2025, 70% of the nation`s petroleum is expected to come from abroad.

At the same time, the United States is trying to move away from dependence on the Middle East. That goal became more important after the Sept. 11 attacks. Arab anger over U.S. support for Israel and the invasion of Iraq has added urgency to the administration`s drive to forge closer ties with oil-rich regimes outside the Persian Gulf.

The new suppliers, however, have serious problems of their own. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened the door to large reserves in the oil-rich Caspian Basin, but democracy in those countries has been stifled by authoritarian regimes.

Improved technology also has increased oil production in sub-Saharan Africa, but the boom has bred massive government corruption, causing more poverty and instability.

Although America`s new oil allies "are often a threat to their own people … they do not harbor or finance groups that threaten U.S. interests," David Goldwyn, an oil industry consultant and former Energy Department official, told Congress last fall.

Moreover, current and former U.S. officials say, the countries in question become more stable and democratic as a result of the American influence that oil development brings.

Mark Siegel, a key member of the P-Group, said he was proud of his work for Kazakhstan. "I did a lot of good things. I made a contribution," he said. "I have no regrets about working for democratization for Kazakhstan."

Others ask who really is influencing whom.

Kazakh authorities have "petrodollars without limit, which they use to buy influence in Washington," said Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), a critic of U.S. engagement with Nazarbayev. "There has been no movement towards a real democracy."

Oil Fuels Boom in Key City

The city of Almaty has the bustle of an oil boomtown. New office buildings and luxury housing developments are popping up. Well-to-do locals and Western oil company employees fill bars such as Stetson`s — and nightclubs like Petroleum, where some of the city`s most expensive prostitutes court customers.

American companies have invested billions of dollars in Kazakhstan, whose estimated potential oil reserves are as high as 110 billion barrels. That`s far smaller than Saudi Arabia, the world`s top oil producer, but about five times higher than estimated U.S. reserves.

Oil production fueled economic growth of 9.5% last year in Kazakhstan, the world`s ninth-largest country in area. The nation is six times as big as California but has only half as many people.

"Kazakhstan could well be producing over 3 million barrels of oil per day by the end of this decade, making the country one of the world`s top five oil-exporting nations," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told the U.S.-Kazakhstan Business Assn. in Washington on April 27. Before joining the administration, Armitage ran a consulting firm that did business in the Caspian region.

He praised Nazarbayev for making Kazakhstan the "most stable and prosperous Central Asian state."

But few people have benefited. In 1993, when it was first ranked as an independent country in a United Nations survey of quality of life, Kazakhstan rated 54th among 173 countries; by last year it had dropped to 76th among 175.

Repression and legal harassment have eliminated Nazarbayev`s strongest political challengers and muzzled the press. The State Department`s most recent human rights report, released in February, said that "almost all media outlets willing to criticize the president directly were either closed, intimidated, or the subjects of law enforcement actions" and that opposition journalists had been systematically targeted with "politically motivated [legal] charges."

While a Times reporter visited the offices last fall of Oleg Katsiev, head of a media organization that has published stories critical of Nazarbayev, government tax auditors were combing through the group`s financial records.

An interpreter assisting the reporter received threatening phone calls from unidentified men after several interviews with critics of the regime. The threats stopped after a complaint was lodged with the Kazakh Embassy in Washington, which denied government involvement in the harassment.

Nazarbayev`s family has profited handsomely from the country`s new oil wealth. One of his daughters owns the construction firm that has built much of Almaty`s new housing and office space. Another daughter controls a media conglomerate.

Last year, the U.S. Justice Department indicted James H. Giffen, the New York business consultant, on charges he funneled more than $78 million in "unlawful payments" to Nazarbayev and his former prime minister, Nurlan Balgimbayev. The indictment says the money came from fees Giffen received from oil companies that won stakes in Kazakh oil fields. The complaint charges that he made the payments to ensure he retained his role as the Kazakh government`s oil negotiator.

The complaint charges that Giffen gave Nazarbayev and his wife gifts such as his-and-her snowmobiles, and that he set up a Swiss account that purchased millions of dollars worth of jewelry.

Nazarbayev and Balgimbayev have publicly denied wrongdoing. Kazakh officials have said the accounts Giffen set up are controlled by the state, not the president and Balgimbayev. Oil companies say they knew nothing about the alleged improper payments.

Good Start Impresses U.S.

Kazakhstan`s democratic prospects seemed far brighter in May 1992, when Nazarbayev arrived in Washington amid a wave of euphoria prompted by the collapse of the Soviet Union five months earlier.

President of the Kazakh Soviet republic during the final days of communism, Nazarbayev became head of the newly independent country. He won plaudits from the West for agreeing to return to Russia nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union had based in his republic.

The U.S. hailed Kazakhstan as a model for Central Asia, and Nazarbayev, unlike hard-liner Saparmurad Niyazov in neighboring Turkmenistan, was viewed as a reformer who would dismantle the communist legacy.

At home, Nazarbayev was a symbol of national independence and pride. He reached out to all ethnic groups, but was especially admired by Kazakhs, who barely outnumbered ethnic Russians at the time of independence.

In Washington, President George H.W. Bush warmly greeted Nazarbayev, and administration officials looked on as he and Chevron executives signed agreements calling for a partnership in Kazakh oil fields.

In 1993, Chevron acquired a 50% stake in the giant Tengiz field in western Kazakhstan. Within a few years, other American oil companies had negotiated stakes of their own. Nazarbayev rolled out the welcome mat for them, establishing a Foreign Investors` Council that included Mobil and Chevron.

James A. Baker III brokered the emerging U.S.-Kazakh relationship while serving as the elder Bush`s secretary of State. In December 1991, during the final days of the Soviet Union, he and Nazarbayev discussed Kazakhstan`s future while enjoying a sauna at a villa in the mountains above Almaty.

After leaving office, Baker became a partner at the Baker Botts law firm in Houston, which offered advice to energy companies seeking to invest in Kazakhstan and other nations of the Caspian region.

Baker was not available for an interview, but his son, James Baker IV, who works on international projects in the law firm`s Washington office, answered questions about the firm`s Caspian business. The younger Baker said that he had represented Western energy companies seeking to invest in Kazakhstan and also advised its government on "investment-related matters."

Asked whether his father`s government experience had enhanced the firm`s prospects, Baker said: "He has been very careful and reserved in his business development activities, but it would be disingenuous to say it hasn`t been an asset."

The United States` political engagement grew along with its corporate investment. In 1994, the Clinton administration established the U.S.-Kazakhstan Joint Commission, headed by Nazarbayev and Vice President Al Gore.

Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who covered the Caspian region during the Clinton years, said oil executives met regularly with National Security Council staffers to discuss Central Asia.

"In my experience, there was an unprecedented level of input from oil companies," Baer said. "We considered it to be in our national interest for oil companies to invest there, and we didn`t want anything to get in the way."

But Nazarbayev`s commitment to democracy was waning.

"Nazarbayev came to realize that there would be no serious consequences for his antidemocratic actions," said Martha Brill Olcott, a Caspian expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has consulted for ChevronTexaco.

In 1995, a year before a scheduled presidential election and only four years after Kazakhstan gained independence, Nazarbayev staged a referendum that extended his term for four years. The State Department described the election as "marred by irregularities," and in a report from the period said corruption was "pervasive throughout the government."

None of this seriously affected U.S.-Kazakh relations. A few months after postponing the presidential vote, Nazarbayev came to Washington, where he and Gore hashed out details of a pipeline that would carry oil from Chevron`s Tengiz field to international markets.

"My feeling was that it was better to be engaged with them than not engaged," said Richard Morningstar, who served as President Clinton`s special advisor on Caspian energy issues. "It wasn`t an ideal situation, but it was better than it would have been without American involvement."

Group Mounts PR Assault

By most accounts, 1998 marked a serious downturn in Kazakhstan`s human rights situation. Several newspapers that had been critical of the government were shut down. The regime passed a national security law that Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based group, said was "used to deter and punish [its] political opponents."

The law, which was enacted as public criticism of Nazarbayev was growing, defined "unsanctioned gatherings" and "prevention of the growth of investment activity" as threats to national security.

Western governments, including Washington, called on Nazarbayev to improve the situation. Instead, with the assistance of American PR specialists, he tried to spin it. Over the next two years, his regime paid more than $4 million to consultants with at least nine public relations companies, law firms and lobby shops.

Nazarbayev chose his friend Giffen to lead the offensive. A New York business consultant with a law degree from UCLA, Giffen began negotiating deals for American companies in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Giffen met Nazarbayev during the Soviet era. U.S. prosecutors say the Kazakh leader assigned him to negotiate deals with foreign oil companies seeking to invest in Kazakhstan after the country`s independence.

Nazarbayev gave Giffen a Kazakh diplomatic passport, court records show, and the indictment says Giffen also was granted the title of "counselor to the president." When Nazarbayev traveled to the U.S., Giffen accompanied him to meetings with government officials, according to others in attendance.

"He was Washington`s de facto ambassador to Kazakhstan," said Baer, the former CIA officer.

The team of political consultants that Giffen assembled in 1998 brought considerable muscle to Nazarbayev`s efforts to win Washington`s approval. The P-Group ("P" for political) included:

• James C. Langdon Jr., an energy lawyer at the Washington office of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, a prominent Washington law firm and lobby shop. Langdon is a leading fundraiser for Bush. Akin Gump received $1 million for its legal and lobbying work on Kazakhstan`s behalf, according to its foreign agent disclosure filings with the Justice Department.

• Siegel, a former Democratic National Committee executive director, who at the time served on the board of the National Democratic Institute, which was promoting democracy programs in Kazakhstan. His contract called for a daily rate of $2,800 to $3,000 from the Kazakh government, according to foreign agent disclosure filings.

• Jay Kriegel, a prominent corporate consultant and former senior vice president at CBS Inc. who was charged with keeping Giffen "fully and regularly apprised of activities, intelligence and problems" in the P-Group, according to a copy of a memo obtained by The Times.

• Michael K. Deaver, vice chairman of public relations giant Edelman who was a deputy chief of staff to President Reagan.

The P-Group developed a thick strategy document and presented it to Nazarbayev on Sept. 1, 1998. A copy of the document, obtained by The Times along with copies of dozens of other internal memorandums, said that the P-Group members "strongly believe in democracy." However, they said that they understood Kazakhstan`s need to "balanc[e] international norms and demands for reform with the need for political stability."

The document said significant steps were needed to solve Kazakhstan`s problems, including widespread corruption.

Just two weeks after delivering to Nazarbayev the P-Group`s recommendation for a cleanup, Giffen, the federal indictment charges, secretly deposited a $30-million bribe in one of the president`s Swiss bank accounts.

A month after receiving the document, Nazarbayev called a presidential election for Jan. 10, 1999, nearly two years earlier than planned. Parliament simultaneously passed constitutional amendments that increased the presidential term from five to seven years and abolished a requirement for a 50% minimum turnout.

Shortly thereafter, Nazarbayev barred his primary opponent, former Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin, from running. Kazhegeldin subsequently was forced into exile.

The P-Group sought to ensure, as one confidential document it sent to Kazakh officials and Giffen put it, that the election would be "perceived by the international community as free and fair."

Siegel was coauthor of a Nov. 20, 1998, internal P-Group memo that laid out what Kazakhstan needed to do to conduct an election perceived as free and fair. He noted the importance of swaying the National Democratic Institute — the pro-democracy group on whose board he sat.

A third memo described how the P-Group would seek to "sell" stories to the Western press by developing "repeatable and persuasive messages," among them that Nazarbayev had "brought stability to a geopolitically strategic area of the world."

According to internal documents, Deaver recruited former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger — who at the time was on the boards of Halliburton and Phillips Petroleum, both of which had interests in Kazakhstan — to write an opinion piece for the Washington Times. Eagleburger, who served in the Cabinet of the first President Bush, wrote that Nazarbayev had "rigorously pursued policies to transition the country to democracy" and that "its continuing success depends on the active support and encouragement from the West."

Deaver said his primary work involved recruiting "third parties" to write opinion pieces, but he couldn`t recall asking Eagleburger to write the Washington Times article. David Crosson, who then worked with Deaver, said Eagleburger had written the Op-Ed piece as part of the campaign. He said the P-Group did not pay people it recruited to write the pieces. Eagleburger, who is now a senior public policy advisor to the Washington office of Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, a law firm that does significant business overseas, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

The P-Group failed to win international acceptance of the election. Kazakh officials said Nazarbayev won 82% of the vote, but the U.S. State Department labeled the election "seriously flawed."

Asked recently whether the P-Group had any concerns about Nazarbayev or doubts about his commitment to democracy, Deaver said: "It was a client. Our job was to get people to write articles and get them placed. Beyond that, it`s hard to recall."

Siegel described the P-Group`s work as promoting "democratization" and proposing political reforms. "Political and economic structures and statutes in Kazakhstan have been substantially reformed, although there is still much left to do," he said in an e-mail reply to questions from The Times.

Langdon and Kriegel would not answer questions about their work for Nazarbayev.

In 2000, the Justice Department confirmed that it was investigating Giffen`s role in Kazakhstan. Fearing that the case might jeopardize close ties to the U.S., the Nazarbayev regime later hired Dick Thornburgh, an attorney general in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, as an advisor.

Kazakhstan also hired Reid Weingarten, a leading white-collar criminal defense attorney who had worked in the Justice Department`s Public Integrity Section. Weingarten wrote a letter to the Justice Department, as reported in 2002 by the New York Times, saying that he was "deeply concerned" that U.S. relations with Kazakhstan — which he noted had "significant oil and gas reserves" — would deteriorate if prosecutors aggressively pursued the case.

Nonetheless, Giffen, who is charged with money laundering and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, is scheduled to go on trial in October. He and his attorney Steven Cohen declined to comment for this report.

In a March 16 court filing, Giffen, who has pleaded not guilty, asked that charges be dropped because the crimes he is charged with were "acts he committed on behalf of [Kazakhstan] and while acting pursuant to its legal directives." The filing said that Giffen`s acts might seem unusual in the United States, but "imposing American domestic conceptions of honest services on all the world`s governments" would "wreak havoc" on the smooth functioning of international law.

In a counter-filing, U.S. prosecutors said that even if Giffen had not violated Kazakh law, he had certainly violated U.S. law.

"Giffen and the republic [Kazakhstan] have repeatedly sought to stymie the investigation by asserting that various investigative efforts encroached on the republic`s sovereign prerogatives," the counter-filing said.

P-Group members declined to comment about the indictment of Giffen.

Articles Follow Paid Trips

The investigation curtailed Giffen`s high-profile involvement in U.S.-Kazakh relations. But that had been only one front in Nazarbayev`s charm offensive.

Gerald Carmen, a former U.S. representative to the United Nations in Geneva, became one of the Kazakh government`s most highly paid consultants. His Carmen Group received more than $1.1 million for work in 1999 and 2000, according to foreign agent disclosure records. (As further thanks, Nazarbayev gave him a tasseled cap and decorative whip, the records show.) Carmen did not return phone calls seeking comment.

In a memo to a Kazakh official, Carmen said he would help "establish President Nazarbayev as one of the foremost emerging leaders of the New World."

Records show that Carmen`s office met with lawmakers and paid for at least four writers — syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, Providence Journal associate editor Philip Terzian, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of the American Spectator and Scott Hogenson of the Conservative News Service — to travel to Kazakhstan in 1999 and 2000. All wrote articles that Carmen circulated on Capitol Hill and had published in Kazakhstan.

Geyer and Hogenson noted that they traveled at the government`s invitation, but none of the writers disclosed the source of funding for the trips.

Geyer and Terzian visited in late 1999, when Kazakhstan was holding elections for the lower house of Parliament. They wrote columns that criticized Nazarbayev but offered sympathetic — and at times upbeat — commentary.

International observers found the elections substandard, Geyer wrote, but she said they were a positive first step. "The elections looked good on the surface, and the government deserves credit for holding these first-ever elections for anything on a multiparty basis in Kazakhstan," she wrote.

The U.S. State Department said the balloting "fell short of international standards" and that the regime had prohibited "some government opponents from running because they previously had been found guilty of political offenses such as publicly insulting the president."

Tyrrell and Hogenson traveled to Kazakhstan early the next year, and filed enthusiastic dispatches. In an opinion piece published in the Washington Times, Tyrrell wrote that Kazakhstan "has at least four highly competitive political parties, … the freedoms of our Bill of Rights, and commendable tolerance."

All the journalists told The Times that the Carmen Group`s financial sponsorship did not influence their reporting.

"I`m a little beyond that," Geyer said.

`Silk Road Caucus` Emerges

Three months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Nazarbayev visited the United States once more. In Houston, he met with former Secretary of State Baker and the first President Bush. Then he flew to Washington, where he attended a lunch at which Cheney played host and had a White House meeting with the current President Bush.

Nazarbayev`s cooperation in the Bush administration`s war against terrorism was one factor behind the warm reception. During the fighting to the south in Afghanistan, he allowed U.S. warplanes to use Almaty`s airport.

The welcome by the U.S. president also was a testament to Kazakhstan`s growing oil clout. Nazarbayev and Bush signed a series of agreements, including one that called for cooperation on energy security.

To keep bilateral relations on track, U.S. oil companies with major investments in Kazakhstan stepped up their own lobbying efforts. ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips helped found and finance the U.S.-Kazakhstan Business Assn.

In late 2001, the association and oil company lobbyists helped assemble the Congressional Silk Road Caucus, which has fought for closer ties with Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states. Caucus co-chairs Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) have together received nearly $600,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests since 1995, according to figures from the Federal Election Commission.

Brownback, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said U.S. relations with Kazakhstan have been "much more robust" under Bush than they were during Clinton`s presidency.

"Under Clinton they felt like all we cared about was human rights," he said. Now energy and national security concerns have been elevated and the regime is moving in a "very positive direction," he added.

Landrieu said Kazakhstan was an attractive alternative to oil suppliers in the Middle East. "As we … minimize our reliance on the [OPEC] cartel, opening up opportunities in the Caspian is all for the better," she said. "Kazakhstan has a very strong president, some might say too strong. But for emerging nations, I`m not sure it`s bad to have strong executive leadership."

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, inserted a statement in the Congressional Record on Sept. 24 in support of Kazakhstan.

"Mr. Speaker, if the United States is to become truly energy independent, it must seek non-OPEC alternatives for our supply of oil," Barton`s statement said. "Kazakhstan can — and is willing to — help greatly in this endeavor."

The statement was nearly identical to a draft prepared by Patton Boggs, a top Washington lobbying firm that is paid $60,000 a month by Kazakhstan, its foreign agent filing shows.

Larry Neal, a spokesman for Barton`s House committee, issued a statement defending the use of the draft from the lobbying firm.

"Some think Congress has no business listening to people who are paid to know something," Neal said. "They think congressmen would do better to get all their information from newspapers and social activists. We think that`s baloney. We take our facts where we find them, and we use them where we choose."

A source at Patton Boggs who spoke on condition of anonymity said the firm routinely drafted statements that members of Congress inserted in the Congressional Record.

Vassilenko, the Kazakh Embassy official, pointed to improvements, also cited by the State Department, in religious freedom and efforts against human trafficking, and noted that Nazarbayev had vetoed a draft media law that had been strongly criticized by local journalists and Western governments.

"Anyone who says the human rights situation has gotten worse is mindless of the changes that have taken place," Vassilenko said.

`On the Right Track`

Despite its oil wealth and corps of hired Beltway friends, Kazakhstan still faces significant problems in Washington.

Last May, the Senate passed a resolution calling on Nazarbayev "to create a political climate free of intimidation and harassment." During a trip to Kazakhstan last fall, Lorne Craner, assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor, criticized Nazarbayev`s human rights record, saying, "There is a lot of development still needed here … in terms of democracy."

But the money and effort put into Kazakhstan`s public relations campaign have paid off with a series of significant victories in Washington:

• At the urging of the oil industry, Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans dropped Kazakhstan from the government`s list of nonmarket economies, which imposes tougher sanctions on countries in the event of trade disputes with the United States. His decision, in March 2002, came two months after a report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, ranked Kazakhstan 131st among 161 countries in terms of economic freedom. The report said the country was "mostly unfree."

• The Bush administration certified in July 2003 that the Nazarbayev regime had shown "significant improvement" in human rights, even though the State Department had just issued a harsh report on conditions in Kazakhstan. The report said the country`s "poor human rights record worsened" in 2002 and that there had been little progress in key areas such as free elections and media freedom. The administration defended the certification, which allowed $51 million in U.S. aid to go to Kazakhstan in 2003, by saying that the Nazarbayev regime "now appears to understand the need to rectify" the situation.

• In December, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell again certified that Kazakhstan was making progress on human rights, a finding necessary to release funds from a U.S. program that helps former Soviet states dismantle their intercontinental ballistic missile arsenals.

His decision came over the opposition of Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who said the United States should rebuke Kazakhstan for failing to make improvements, but release the funds under a special waiver.

• In January, four members of the Silk Road Caucus introduced a House bill that would grant permanent normal trade relations to Kazakhstan, reducing tariffs on its exports to the United States. Approval of the status has generally been portrayed by the government as a reward to countries for improving their human rights record.

The House bill came after several years of lobbying by major oil companies and the U.S.-Kazakhstan Business Assn. The executive director of the business association, former career State Department official William Veale, has written letters calling for enhanced trade status for Kazakhstan to 140 members of Congress, according to the association`s internal newsletter.

ChevronTexaco alone delegated six lobbyists to the fight last year. The Bush administration has voiced its support for the measure, which has not yet been voted on by Congress.

Such steps have been noted with appreciation in Kazakhstan. In February, Dariga Nazarbayeva — one of the president`s daughters and founder of a new political party — came to Washington for meetings with administration officials and members of Congress.

During her stay, a Times reporter spoke to her at a reception held by a lobbying firm as about 50 government officials, oil industry representatives and lobbyists waited to meet her.

"Relations with the U.S.," she told the reporter, "are definitely on the right track."

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Helpful old hands

Kazakhstan assembled top U.S. legal, lobbying and public relations help in its campaign to win favor in Washington, including a number of high-ranking former officials, some of whom formed the "P-Group," a political SWAT team.

Michael K. Deaver, President Reagan`s deputy chief of staff, recruited "third parties" to write newspaper opinion pieces for the public relations campaign.

Jay Kriegel, a former senior vice president at CBS Inc., was asked to keep key consultant James H. Giffen "regularly apprised" of P-Group activities.

James Langdon Jr., an energy lawyer and a leading fundraiser for President Bush. His firm did lobbying and legal work for Kazakhstan.

Dick Thornburgh, an attorney general in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, was hired by the Kazakh government to provide legal advice.

Reid Weingarten, a former Justice Department lawyer, wrote a letter to his old agency warning of risks to U.S.-Kazakh ties if prosecution of Giffen went ahead.

*

Coming Next

In Angola, the government and the international oil industry earn billions of dollars yearly, but 80% of the people live in abject poverty. Critics say a growing appetite for fuel imports from sub-Saharan Africa has led the U.S. to cement the power of a wealthy and corrupt elite.

Times staff writer Warren Vieth and researcher Mark Madden in Washington contributed to this report.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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raqi Leaders in Najaf Reach Deal in Effort to Resolve Crisis
The plan includes postponing a murder case against anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr. U.S. general says militiamen may be recruited for new force.
By Monte Morin and Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writers

May 12, 2004

BAGHDAD — Iraqi religious and political leaders in Najaf agreed late Tuesday on how to end the crisis gripping the city, while a U.S. general said he might recruit Shiite Muslim militiamen now fighting U.S. soldiers for a security force there.

The accord was hammered out between about three dozen moderates and emissaries of Muqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric whose Al Mahdi army seized control of Najaf and other towns last month. Sadr`s militiamen have been fighting U.S. forces in and around the Shiite holy city.

Under the agreement, Sadr`s outlawed militia would become a legitimate political organization, participants said. A criminal case against Sadr would be postponed until after June 30, when the U.S.-led coalition is scheduled to turn over sovereignty to an Iraqi caretaker government. Sadr is wanted in connection with the slaying of a rival cleric in Najaf last year.

The deal is to be submitted today to Najaf`s religious leadership for approval, participants said.

"This is the way to solve this crisis, which is threatening everybody," Qais Khazaali, Sadr`s chief aide in Najaf, said after a meeting held in the shrine of Imam Ali.

What U.S. officials think of the agreement remains to be seen. Military commanders have stressed that they want to peacefully resolve the crisis that has gripped Najaf since Sadr`s black-clad forces took over and U.S. forces moved south from Baghdad to confront them.

The U.S. Army commander whose troops are facing off with Sadr`s militiamen announced Tuesday that he might recruit those same insurgents for an Iraqi civil defense force he plans to build in Najaf.

"I`m not against identifying some of those young men to become part of a legitimate Iraqi security force," Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters in Baghdad. "This is their holy city."

The general said that without an agreement, he worried that Sadr might blow up the Imam Ali shrine, among Shiites` holiest sites, and blame the destruction on the Americans. "I would expect him to try to cause some catastrophic event in the history of Shia Islam and blame us for it," said Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, which has about 2,500 troops in and around Najaf.

The general`s plan is similar to the blueprint agreed to by Marines last month to defuse a military standoff in the insurgent stronghold of Fallouja, a largely Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad. There, further violence was avoided when Marines withdrew and agreed to turn over security to a new force, the Fallouja Brigade, led by former officers of Saddam Hussein`s military.

Under the Najaf proposal, Dempsey said, U.S. troops would train the new unit and integrate it into the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a nationwide military force set up by the U.S. Army.

For the last two weeks, he said, commanders have recruited fighters recommended by local leaders. Some in the Sadr militia "are probably decent young men who have been badly led astray," Dempsey said.

Pressure has been mounting from within the Shiite community for Sadr to leave Najaf, where he is not especially popular and has long been at odds with the Shiite religious establishment. Residents have complained that the lucrative flow of pilgrims to Najaf has almost ceased since Sadr`s forces took control.

On Tuesday, hundreds of people marched through the streets of Najaf, calling on Sadr to leave. It was the second day of such demonstrations, and a major march is planned for Friday, the Muslim day of rest.

Word of several deals that would end the armed standoff in Najaf had been circulating for days. The new, U.S.-appointed governor of Najaf said Tuesday that he would ask occupation authorities to defer acting on murder charges against Sadr until after sovereignty is restored to Iraq, the Associated Press reported.

At Tuesday`s media briefing, Dempsey acknowledged that U.S. forces should have moved more quickly to detain or arrest Sadr last year, before he consolidated his militia.

"He was training troops, gaining resources and stockpiling weapons," Dempsey said. "We probably gave him six months more than he should have had."

Occupation authorities have for weeks attempted to approach Sadr through moderate Shiites in Najaf in an effort to avert a showdown. The military strategy marks a change from the Army`s harsh language last month, when officials declared troops sought to "kill or capture" Sadr.

From Iran, Ayatollah Kazem Haeri, Sadr`s spiritual mentor, issued a statement calling Sadr`s demands "legitimate" and said he is acting "courageously and wisely." In a statement, Sadr called on fellow Shiites to form a united front against the U.S.-led occupation.

Clashes between U.S. troops and Al Mahdi militiamen have continued, but mostly on the outskirts of the city as the U.S. avoided the shrines in Najaf and in the nearby city of Kufa. On Monday evening, a U.S. official said, U.S. forces killed 13 militiamen in a confrontation in palm groves east of Kufa.

Witnesses in the city of Karbala said U.S. soldiers battled Sadr loyalists Tuesday near the Mukhaiyam mosque, Associated Press reported. There was no immediate word on casualties.

Meanwhile, gunmen south of Baghdad killed one Russian engineer and kidnapped two others, prompting Moscow to urge hundreds of Russian workers to leave, according to news service reports from Moscow.

The Russians were described as employees of a company working on a power plant project south of Baghdad.

Farther west, insurgents attacked a civilian supply convoy on the road between Baghdad and Jordan, and some people were unaccounted for, a U.S. official said. The 21-vehicle convoy was operated by a subsidiary or subcontractor of KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co.

The convoy was probably ferrying goods to a U.S. military base, an official said, but there were no U.S. soldiers accompanying it. A number of vehicles were destroyed.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, a bomb exploded in a crowded market, killing four Iraqis and injuring 23, AP reported.

Morin, McDonnell and Salar Jaff reported from Baghdad. Raheem Salman and Saad Sadiq of The Times` Baghdad Bureau contributed from Najaf.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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In the U.S., rallying cry for hawks and doves
A reason to get out -- or to dig in?
Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/12/MNGMO6K22V1.DTL

Washington -- For some, the gruesome image of hooded murderers beheading an unarmed American civilian serves as a vivid reminder of why the nation is at war. For others, the same horrific picture demonstrates why the U.S. mission in Iraq is doomed to failure.

The grisly video, surfacing just as the world was absorbing pictures of Americans brutalizing Iraqi prisoners, provoked conflicting reactions. Some said it was precisely this sort of evil among Iraqi terrorists that prompted - - if not justified -- the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. Others said it was the abuse at the prison that perpetuated the evil.

Neither camp could claim a monopoly on outrage over the public slaughter of 26-year-old Nick Berg, nor could they predict how the gut-wrenching video would affect world opinion or American resolve. Yet many warned that the shocking images, along with the Abu Ghraib pictures, portend even more violence ahead.

"They`re not soldiers, they`re monsters ... and we are not going to rest until every last one of them is in a cell or a cemetery,`` said House Republican Leader Tom DeLay of Texas.

"The beheading video should be a wake-up call of who we`re dealing with here,`` said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who sits on the Armed Services Committee, which is looking into the prison scandal. "They are despicable in every way and behave like animals. We must vanquish this enemy because defeat is unacceptable."

Discounting the killers` claims that Berg`s slaying was an act of retaliation, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said, "Seems to me that this underscores, in part at least, the tremendous value of interrogation and better intelligence to prevent atrocities like this."

Anger at Iraqis -- those responsible for Berg`s murder, those detained at the Abu Ghraib prison and even those who have no connection to either -- would be a natural reaction for many Americans, though public opinion experts said the blur of horrific images is likely to further erode American support for the war in the long run.

"My impression is that it will add overall to the growing discontent with the war,`` said Professor John Mueller, an expert on war and public opinion at Ohio State University. Americans` support for the Vietnam War surged just after the Tet Offensive in 1968, he said, but opposition to the war began to build again shortly thereafter.

The ghastly killing of Berg showed that no matter what lengths the United States might go in its efforts to restore normal life or establish a democracy in Iraq, it must contend with extremists whose hatred of Americans has no boundaries, according to some analysts.

"We are dealing with an enemy that is using every psychological trick it can to push us out (of Iraq),`` said Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "(The enemy) is deliberately trying to provoke a clash of cultures.``

Despite anger at the United States over the Abu Ghraib abuses, Cordesman said, he expects most Iraqis will be appalled by Berg`s slaughter. But he warned that the United States is engaged in a battle against an extremist fringe.

"What we are looking at here is a situation where we are trying to win a psychological and political war, and it`s not one being fought with moderate Iraqis. It`s being fought with a large number of extremists.``

The same way that Berg`s killing will be used by Americans intent on ramping up the war in Iraq, the abuses at Abu Ghraib will be used by extremists to perpetuate hatred against the United States, he said.

"Abu Ghraib is not going to play out over days or weeks,`` Cordesman said. "It is going to play out over years.``

To many, Berg`s killing served as a sober reminder of how far the Unites States remains from winning its war on terror.

More than 700 Americans and many thousands of Iraqis have already given their lives in the name of cleaning out what Bush administration officials regarded as a breeding ground for anti-American hatred. At least $200 billion -- more than $700 for every man, woman and child in the nation -- has been spent on the war effort.

And the latest images ensure that the hatred will live on.

After no weapons of mass destruction were discovered and efforts to bring about a democracy stumbled, "there was one thread left hanging,`` said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, "that at least we got rid of a ruthless dictatorship and its human rights abuses.``

The pictures at Abu Ghraib "sever that thread in a way that is hard for anyone to get out of their minds. The images no doubt will play into the hands of the militants.``

Chronicle staff writer Edward Epstein contributed to this report from Washington.E-mail Marc Sandalow at [e-mail].

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Genital Torture For Dummies
Hey, it`s a war -- what did you expect, flowers and bunnies and hopscotch in the Baghdad streets?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/05/12/notes051204.DTL

Just in time for your morning breakfast sausage, it`s all-American rape and torture and rampant entirely condoned military sadism. Mmm, patriotism.

The pictures are worth a thousand disgusted moans. It`s all flag-draped coffins and dog chains and forced masturbation and pistol whippings and miserable bloody hooded Iraqi men -- not terrorists, just men -- with wires attached to their fingers and genitals and made to stand up for hours and days on end until their feet swell and their lungs collapse and their livers fail, and you can hear our stunned death-drunk nation cry: Hey, whatever happened to our nice, clean little war? How did it get so ugly and out of hand? And isn`t the "Frasier" finale on soon? Sigh.

Isn`t the nation just so very outraged -- outraged! -- over the nasty rogue`s gallery of photos gushing forth from the stunned media of late -- (with frightening promises that the worst is yet to come), all those snickering U.S. Army guards and sickeningly abused Iraqi POWs and dead U.S. soldiers and scowling generals.

And there`s BushCo blaming Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld blaming the military and the military blaming miserable 21-year-old female trailer-park scapegoats and once again there stands Dubya, looking angry and baffled, like a kid who just got grounded for getting another D on a spelling test.

Did you really think war would be all light spankings and fur-lined handcuffs and afternoon tea, George? All happy giggling soldiers blasting each other with squirt guns and playing jacks in the streets of Fallujah?

Did you really believe your second war in as many years would be all neat and tidy and bloodless and gift-wrapped and lacking in gruesomeness and bile and disfiguring genital mutilation? What are you, a puppet? Oh wait.

This is the thing about wars, Dubya. They are worse than a fresh cow pie on the heel of your shiny Tony Lamas. They are bloodier and uglier and nastier and more heinous and more over budget than your worst Texas oil deal (and you had plenty of those), and that`s before you even press the Start button. As the saying goes, You want to make Satan laugh? Tell him you`re planning for a polite, orderly little conflict. Watch him blast oil through his nose.

But let`s not be too hard on the least articulate, least intellectual, least accountable president in U.S. history. After all, Dubya`s just like much of America. He is the prefect embodiment of our world-famous myopia, a selective type of dangerous tunnel vision whereby if we don`t see it and don`t really feel it and the media doesn`t splash it all over us, it must not be true.

And, really, what Bush-votin` flag-wavin` God-numbed patriot wants to hear that the U.S. is a world-class hypocrite, committing many of the same crimes and tortures, rapes and humiliations that Saddam himself did, in the very same prison? Who wants to hear that, in many ways, we`ve done no better by the Iraqi (or Afghan) people than their former leadership, and in some ways have made things far worse?

And who wants to know that we have become the violent, unwanted clown on the global stage, justifiably ridiculed and thoroughly unsympathetic, as the world boos and hurls rotten foreign policies? Who wants to know that we are, in short, losing the war? Look there, isn`t that Dick Cheney, hiding behind an American coffin, fondling his Halliburton portfolio and snickering quietly? Why yes, yes it is.

The Powers That Be know one thing: This lack of perspective, of the gruesome details of war, keeps the nation stupid. It makes us compliant. It makes us all go, well sure, I know war is heck and all, but we`re the good guys therefore any bloodshed is in the name of democracy and any rapes are necessary evils and all those dead Iraqi women and babies are unfortunate casualties in the quest to protect our president`s corporate interests and life goes on and hey "American Idol" is down to three finalists! Woo!

Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is also Bush. This is a man who goes on Saudi television to claim rape and torture and sadism is not the American way of conducting a war (but not, actually, to apologize -- never that), that such behavior is contrary to our God and our principles and our morals and our happily imbecilic black-and-white, good-versus-evil worldview.

Good one, George. Here`s some words to stick in your craw, Dubya: Vietnam. Guantanamo Bay. Somalia. El Salvador. World War II. Show me a U.S.-led battle, Shrub, and I`ll show you some nifty n` horrific American-made abuses of prisoners and detainess and innocent civilians that would makes your skin peel. Hey, it`s war. You asked for it. You don`t invite the Devil to the table and not expect him to spit in the mashed potatoes, you know?

By the way, Dubya, why have you never attended a single funeral service honoring any U.S. soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan? Why have you distanced yourself from the war dead like a snake avoids roadkill? Sorry, is that an inappropriate question right now?

Look. Everyone knows the Abu Ghraib nightmare isn`t an isolated incident. These pictures merely stir that sickening, deep-down feeling that the atrocities are far worse than you can imagine and far more widespread than anyone wants to admit and they happen during every single war and Rummy and his crew not only knew it was happening but they also condoned it, promoted it, never made a move to stop it. So? Standard operating procedure, baby. It says so all over Rummy`s pinched, sour face: It`s an ugly, savage world, people. Now please just shut up and let us devour it in peace.

Even the Red Cross is coming forth and saying, oh man, you think those Abu Ghraib pictures are bad? You think it`s just that hideous little nightmare prison where American soldiers and American-funded commandos and mercenaries are torturing and abusing and grinning for the camera? You have no idea.

Cut to a close-up of Jack Nicholson`s beady eyes, boring straight into the smirking simpleton that is Bush, and then scanning over the pro-Bush American voting public, so inured and sheltered and flag waving and sucking down SUVs like baby seals. You want the truth? You can`t handle the truth!

And what is that truth now? What have these photos, these glorious wartime atrocities, accomplished? Why, nothing short of guaranteeing that the United States has never been so violently hated among Middle Eastern nations as it is right now.

Nothing short of massacring any last vestige of remaining 9/11 sympathy. Nothing short of supplying a whole new generation of enraged terrorists with all the proof they need that their cause is entirely valid and just.

And nothing short of proving, for the 10,000th time, that BushCo has dug us a grimy, violent, blood-soaked hole so deep we may never fully emerge.
# Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
# Mark`s column archives are here

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.

©2004 SF Gate

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Satire: The `Liberty Leash` Makes A Comeback
Tuesday, 11 May 2004, 3:15 pm
Column: freepressed.com

The `Liberty Leash` makes a comeback at Abu Ghraib prison

Once the premier symbol of democracy, freedom`s tether has been strapped on one last time.
Satire from� freepressed.com


Caption: Pfc. Linndie England leads an Iraqi civilian to the promised land of a free Iraq by tying a leather strap around his neck and dragging his naked body across the prison floor. Score one for democracy!

America`s Rape Rooms-- Long ago discarded into the dustbin of history, the single most important tool in the spread of democracy worldwide has once again emerged to free an oppressed people.

The Liberty Leash has played an integral role in the liberation of the human condition throughout the centuries.

In Rome, the birthplace of democracy, the predecessor of the leash, the shackle, could be seen adorning the necks of citizens in training, or slaves, in every city and village.

In the Dark Ages, the practice of setting people free by the use of restraints was frowned upon and so was practiced only in underground hideouts called dungeons.

It wasn`t until settlers set foot on the shores of the new world seeking freedom from the tyranny of European kings that tying humans up with ropes and chains for the purpose of freeing them was openly permitted in society.

Thanks to the Bush administration`s disdain for the Geneva Conventions, the Liberty Leash is once again at the forefront of coerced democratization.

But despite its rich history, many Americans had never heard of the Liberty Leash until photos of the restraint in action were released by the popular CBS TV news program, 60 Minutes II.
"Why is that guy naked and wouldn`t that thing choke him?" Cynthia Marshalls of Burkport, Maine naively asked of the liberating lead. "Oh my god, are they laughing? That`s so disturbing."

Others readily accepted the idea of humiliating Iraqis to teach them what democracy is all about.

"Hell yes we should tie em` up. They`re all godless monkeys after all," said Pritchard Johnson, a Baptist minister and president of the local Republican party in Maconville, Georgia. "The only way we`re going to bring American style democracy to the Middle East is at the end of a gun or a leash. It`s up to them."

Bush administration officials are already hoping to capitalize on the resurgence of the Liberty Leash by offering special autographed editions from members of his cabinet.

"You too can own your very own freedom restraint if you act now. Supplies are limited," Bush said. "You see, I`m the new dictator of Iraq so I say who gets to wear a leash and who doesn`t."

ENDS

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Pat Buchanan, Republikaner wie Bush und auch Präsidentschaftskandidat der Republikaner in 2000, erklärt in diesem Artikel die Strategie der NeoCons für gescheitert.
-------------

A Time for Truth

by Patrick J. Buchanan

With pictures of the sadistic sexual abuse of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison still spilling out onto the front pages, it is not too early to draw some conclusions.

The neoconservative hour is over. All the blather about "empire," our "unipolar moment," "Pax Americana" and "benevolent global hegemony" will be quietly put on a shelf and forgotten as infantile prattle.

America is not going to fight a five- or 10-year war in Iraq. Nor will we be launching any new invasions soon. The retreat of American empire, begun at Fallujah, is underway.

With a $500 billion deficit, we do not have the money for new wars. With an Army of 480,000 stretched thin, we do not have the troops. With April-May costing us a battalion of dead and wounded, we are not going to pay the price. With the squalid photos from Abu Ghraib, we no longer have the moral authority to impose our "values" on Iraq.

Bush`s "world democratic revolution" is history.

Given the hatred of the United States and Bush in the Arab world, as attested to by Egypt`s Hosni Mubarak, it is almost delusional to think Arab peoples are going to follow America`s lead.

It is a time for truth. In any guerrilla war we fight, there is going to be a steady stream of U.S. dead and wounded. There is going to be collateral damage ? i.e., women and children slain and maimed. There will be prisoners abused. And inevitably, there will be outrages by U.S. troops enraged at the killing of comrades and the jeering of hostile populations. If you would have an empire, this goes with the territory. And if you are unprepared to pay the price, give it up.

The administration`s shock and paralysis at publication of the S&M photos from Abu Ghraib tell us we are not up to it. For what is taking place in Iraq is child`s play compared to what we did in the Philippines a century ago. Only there, they did not have digital cameras, videocams and the Internet.

Iraq was an unnecessary war that may become one of the great blunders in U.S. history. That the invasion was brilliantly conceived and executed by Gen. Franks, that our fighting men were among the finest we ever sent to war, that they have done good deeds and brave acts, is undeniable. Yet, if recent surveys are accurate, the Iraqis no longer want us there.

Outside the Kurdish areas, over 80 percent of Sunnis and Shias view us as occupiers. Over 50 percent believe there are occasions when U.S. soldiers deserve killing. The rejoicing around every destroyed military vehicle where U.S. soldiers have died should tell us that the battle for hearts and minds is being lost.

Why are we so hated in the Middle East? Three fundamental reasons:
Our invasion of Iraq is seen as a premeditated and unjust war to crush a weak Arab nation that had not threatened or attacked us, to seize its oil.
We are seen as an arrogant imperial superpower that dictates to Arab peoples and sustains regimes that oppress them.
We are seen as the financier and armorer of an Israel that oppresses and robs Palestinians of their land and denies them rights we hypocritically preach to the world.

Until we address these perceptions and causes of the conflict between us, we will not persuade the Arab world to follow us.

What should Bush do now? He should declare that the United States has no intention of establishing permanent bases in Iraq, and that we intend to withdraw all U.S. troops after elections, if the Iraqis tell us to leave. Then we should schedule elections at the earliest possible date this year.

The Iraqi peoples should then be told that U.S. soldiers are not going to fight and die indefinitely for their freedom. If they do not want to be ruled by Sheik Moqtada al-Sadr or some future Saddam, they will have to fight themselves. Otherwise, they will have to live with them, even as they lived with Saddam. For in the last analysis, it is their country, not ours.

The president should also offer to withdraw U.S. forces from any Arab country that wishes us to leave. We have already pulled out of Saudi Arabia. Let us pull out of the rest unless they ask that we remain. Our military presence in these Arab and Islamic countries, it would seem, does less to prevent terror attacks upon us than to incite them.

A presidential election is where the great foreign policy debate should take place over whether to maintain U.S. troops all over the world, or bring them home and let other nations determine their own destiny. Unfortunately, we have two candidates and two parties that agree on our present foreign policy that is conspicuously failing.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.at

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Wednesday, May 12, 2004
War News for May 12, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi killed, three wounded in attack on ICDC patrol near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Insurgents destroy Iraqi police station near Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: Fourteen Iraqis killed in fighting near Kufa.

Bring ‘em on: Twenty-five Iraqis killed, seven US soldiers wounded in fighting near Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: One US Marine killed in action in al-Anbar province.

Bring ‘em on: Four Filipino workers killed in mortar attack on US base near Balad.

US applies “Fallujah Solution” to crisis in Najaf. “The U.S. Army commander whose troops are facing off with al-Sadr`s militia announced yesterday that he might recruit those same insurgents for an Iraqi civil defense force he plans to build in Najaf.”

Troop R&R cuts announced. “Following a query from Stars and Stripes last Friday, the task force was unable to make a spokesman available to discuss the impact of cutbacks on units other than 1st ID. But according to an article in the latest edition of the Desert Voice — an Army command publication circulated on bases in Kuwait — the total number of R&R slots available to all troops was cut from 470 per day to 85 per day for May 1-June 15.”

Field expedient armor. “The jerry-rigged Humvee has some advantages, the soldier said. With a plywood/sandbag sandwich in place of armor in the rear bed, the gunner has a more open field of fire than a soldier trying to shoot out of the tiny passenger windows of a M1114. But, he added quickly, ‘It would make me 100 times happier to have steel plates.’ Neither the truck commander nor his driver said he believed the vehicle would withstand a roadside bomb blast.”

Commentary

Editorial: “The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the bungled Iraq occupation.”

Opinion: “But there is a mind-set in our country, exemplified by Inhofe, that every Iraqi who doesn`t want us taking over their country must be a terrorist. That comes from looking at Arabs and thinking terrorists, which might lead somebody to think it was OK to strip them naked and stack them like firewood or attack them with vicious dogs. On talk radio today, the callers will be talking about why we aren`t writing about how outraged we are about the beheading of Berg instead of continuing to harp on the prisoner abuse. As an American, I`m sickened and disheartened by what happened to Berg, but I guess it comes down to that old business about taking responsibility for your own actions. We`re Americans. We`re responsible for the war in Iraq. We`re responsible for how it`s conducted. We could have blocked it in the first place if we`d spoken up.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Tennessee soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: North Carolina soldier dies in Iraq.

Local story: Hawaii soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: California Marine wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Virginia Guardsman wounded in Iraq.


Monkey Mail!

To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail]

Subject: That’s a big price tag for a fifty-cent head<-Dont give yourself away Opinionist

Yankee your opinion is not news or fact or even worthy a deemable source of reading.When you add these comments we all know whose side your on and cannot take your site with any legitamacy any further.Truth is truth but your opinion shows the doom cloud youre adddicted to.I seek positive outlook sorry you don`t.You and others like this traitor Informed Consent opinionist serve the side of insurgency.Shall we fail,your delight will reach heightened levels of Unamerican resent in a country for which we live.Most people move when they dislike their house.Others stay and complain,this is you.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:16 AM
Comments (19)

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[Joerver]

Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by the Inter Press Service
Chickenhawk Groupthink?
by Jim Lobe


WASHINGTON - In a 1972 book, `Victims of Groupthink: A Psychology Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes`, Irving Janis identified the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba as particularly compelling examples of how very smart people can collectively make very stupid decisions.

In studying the Bay of Pigs, for example, Janis noted that the group around President John Kennedy made a series of assumptions -- that Cubans would welcome the invasion and rise up against Fidel Castro and that the U.S. could credibly deny involvement in the invasion, if necessary -- that were fundamentally deluded.

As in Iraq, many of those assumptions were based largely on the accounts of exiles and defectors, but the group dynamics involved in decision-making also played a key role in rallying the administration of the ``best and the brightest`` behind an adventure that proved disastrous, according to Janis.

A great deal more is known about group dynamics within the Bush administration foreign-policy apparatus today -- as a result of leaks, memoirs, and books, such as Bob Woodward`s `Plan of Attack` and Jim Mann`s `Rise of the Vulcans` -- than was known at the time about the Kennedy administration.

And what is known suggests the existence of two major groups -- an ``in-group`` of hawks whose captain is Vice President Dick Cheney and which has had a decisive influence on Bush himself, and an ``out-group`` of ``realists`` headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage.

While the out-group, which ironically boasts men, including Powell, Armitage, ret. Gens. Anthony Zinni and Brent Scowcroft, with real war experience, the in-group is dominated by individuals, particularly Cheney and virtually the entire civilian leadership of the Pentagon, who have none at all.

Hence the moniker ``chickenhawks``, defined as individuals who favor military solutions to political problems but who themselves avoided military service during wartime. Cheney, who received five different deferments from the military draft during the Vietnam War, famously told an interviewer once that he ”had other priorities`` in the 1960s than military service.

What also makes the in-group so remarkable is its very small size, the long history it has shared together, and its close personal relationships.

Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, for example, worked together under Richard Nixon and have been the very best of friends ever since. Their neo-conservative aides and advisers, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, and DPB member Kenneth Adelman, likewise have been close for more than three decades and have personally mentored other top aides and advisers, such as Cheney`s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, Defense Undersecretaries for Policy and Intelligence, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone, respectively, and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, to name just a few.

The sense of kinship that unites the group is illustrated in part by a dinner hosted by Cheney shortly after U.S. troops took Baghdad 13 months ago. The guests included Wolfowitz, Libby, and Adelman; the atmosphere, warm and celebratory as they recounted their defeat of the ``realists. ``Someone mentioned Powell, and there were chuckles around the table``, Woodward noted. And then ``They turned to Rumsfeld, the missing brother``, and told affectionate stories about their past associations with the crusty Pentagon chief.

When Adelman said he had been surprised U.S. troops had not yet found weapons of mass destruction (WMD), he was assured by Wolfowitz, ``We`ll find them``, and by Cheney, ``It`s only been four days really. We`ll find them``.

Students of Groupthink list a number of symptoms of the phenomenon that can lead the group into disaster, among them:

* believing in the group`s inherent morality;
* sharing stereotypes, particularly of the enemy;
* examining few alternative or contingency plans for any action;
* being highly selective in gathering information;
* avoiding expert opinion;
* protecting the group from negative views or information that would contradict their basic assumptions;
* and - having an illusion of invulnerability.

From what is now known about planning for Iraq, each of these factors obviously played a role, and they continue to inform U.S. policy not only against perceived enemies, but even against out-groups in the administration or in Congress. And, because the in-group was so small, many of these characteristics were unusually pronounced.

The notion that the chickenhawks were morally superior, not just to Saddam Hussein or the ``terrorists`` or ``Ba`athist dead-enders`` whom they`ve been fighting since the war ended, extended even to the ``realists``, who were denounced in internal battles as ``appeasers`` or worse. As Cheney was recently quoted as declaring with regard to State Department proposals to engage North Korea, ``We don`t negotiate with evil; we defeat it``.

Middle East experts at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were likewise scorned and excluded from both planning and the immediate aftermath of the invasion, while the creation in Feith`s office of ad hoc intelligence analysis groups that ``stovepiped`` evidence of Iraqi WMD and ties to Al Qaeda was a classic illustration of selective intelligence gathering that would confirm pre-existing stereotypes.

Similarly, the total failure to prepare contingency plans to deal with looting, or even with the emergence of an insurgency against the occupation, displayed a confidence that turned out to be completely unwarranted. Likewise, former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki`s prediction that more than 200,000 troops would be needed to occupy Iraq in order to ensure security had not only to be rejected in order to protect the group from negative views; it had to be publicly ridiculed by Wolfowitz as ``wildly off the mark``.

In his latest expose on the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh noted that Rumsfeld`s penchant for ``secrecy and wishful thinking`` -- characteristics that also apply to Groupthink -- resulted in the Pentagon`s failure to do anything about it or about the many other problems they have encountered.

And whenever Powell or Armitage tried to bring to the attention of the highest levels in the administration the growing concern about prisoner abuse, according to a source recently cited in the ``Nelson Report``, an insider Washington newsletter, they were forced to endure from the chickenhawks what an eyewitness source characterized as ``around-the-table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners...``

© Copyright 2004 IPS - Inter Press Service

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Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times
Cold Turkey
by Kurt Vonnegut


Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

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When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

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And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.

Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

What could be simpler?

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My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

© 2004 In These Times

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Iraq Prison Scandal Hits Home, But Most Reject Troop Pullout
76% Have Seen Prison Pictures; Bush Approval Slips

Released: May 12, 2004

Summary of Findings

Public satisfaction with national conditions has fallen to 33%, its lowest level in eight years, in the wake of revelations of prisoner abuse committed by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. President Bush`s overall job approval rating also has dropped into negative territory: 44% approve of his job performance, while 48% disapprove.
WEITER:
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=213


President Bush has lost some ground in the presidential race, though voter opinion remains closely divided. Sen. John Kerry holds a 50%-45% lead over Bush in a two-way race, and his lead narrows to 46%-43% when Ralph Nader is included. Most of the president`s supporters say they consider their vote as a choice for the president. By contrast, Kerry`s supporters by roughly two-to-one (32%-15%) view their vote as one against Bush.

But confidence in Bush relative to Kerry has eroded on major issues like Iraq and the economy. Bush holds a slight 44%-41% edge as the candidate better able to make wise decisions in Iraq policy; in late March, he held a 12-point advantage (49%-37%). At the same time, Kerry has opened up double-digit leads on both the economy and jobs. Kerry`s advantage on the key domestic issue of health care is even larger. Currently, 51% say Kerry would be better able to improve the health care system, while just 29% say that about Bush.

The latest national survey of 1,800 Americans, conducted May 3-9 by the Pew Research Center, finds that finds that Bush retains a sizable advantage over Kerry on key personal qualities relating to leadership and judgment in a crisis. Yet roughly a quarter (26%) say their overall impression of Bush has gotten worse in recent weeks, compared to 16% who say that about Kerry.

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May 13, 2004
General Took Guantánamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners
By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT

When Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Iraq last August with a team of military police and intelligence specialists, the group was confronted by chaos.

In one prison yard, a detainee was being held in a scorching hot shipping container as punishment, one team member recalled. An important communications antenna stood broken and unrepaired. Prisoners walked around barefoot, with sores on their feet and signs of untreated illness. Garbage was everywhere.

Perhaps most important, with the insurgency raging in Iraq, there was no effective system at the prisons for wringing intelligence from the prisoners, officials said.

"They had no rules for interrogations," a military officer who traveled to Iraq with General Miller said. "People were escaping and getting shot. We tried to offer them some very basic recommendations."

According to information from a classified interview with the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison, General Miller`s recommendations prompted a shift in the interrogation and detention procedures there. Military intelligence officers were given greater authority in the prison, and military police guards were asked to help gather information about the detainees.

Whether those changes contributed to the abuse of prisoners that grew horrifically more serious last fall is now at the center of the widening prison scandal.

General Miller`s recommendations were based in large part on his command of the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he won praise from the Pentagon for improving the flow of intelligence from terrorist suspects and prisoners of the Afghanistan war.

In Iraq, General Miller`s team gave officers at the prisons copies of the procedures that had been developed at Guantánamo to interrogate and punish the prisoners, according to the officer who traveled with him. Computer specialists and intelligence analysts explained the systems they had used in Cuba to process information and report it back to the United States.

General Miller also recommended streamlining the command structure at the prisons, much as was done when military intelligence and military police units were merged when he took command of Joint Task Force Guantánamo in November 2002.

But to at least a few of the officers who met General Miller in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib crisis was partly rooted in what they described as his determination to apply his Guantánamo experience in Iraq. Senators raised similar concerns on Tuesday at the Armed Services Committee.

General Miller and some of his former aides have dismissed the notion that his visit to Iraq helped unleash the abuses. They argue that if his prescriptions had any link to the problems there, it was because they were misinterpreted by ineffective commanders in a chaotic environment.

"When you don`t have rules and you let lower-level people decide things on an arbitrary and capricious basis, you`re going to have problems," the officer who accompanied General Miller said. "Our reference to techniques was to say, `You need a policy.` "

A Democratic Senate aide who reviewed General Miller`s report on the Iraqi prisons said he had sought to revamp the intelligence apparatus in Iraq primarily to improve the collection and transmission of broader, strategic information about the insurgency that was particularly important to senior military officials.

To those officials, the work at Guantánamo by General Miller, a former paratrooper from Menard, Tex., made him an obvious candidate for Iraq.

By the time he took over in Cuba, most of the detainees there had been in custody for nearly a year. Still, General Miller was credited by Pentagon officials with using interrogations there to produce a valuable historical account of the workings and financing of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, among other subjects, officials said.

His hard-charging attitude has also raised questions that go beyond interrogation methods. He was the official most responsible for pressing a case last year against a Muslim chaplain at the base, Capt. James J. Yee, that was initially billed as a major episode of espionage. In March, the military announced that it would drop all charges.

At the Senate hearing on Tuesday, the deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, said General Miller, now the chief of interrogations and detentions in Iraq, had made it clear to the officers he briefed on his 10-day visit to Iraq that some of the procedures developed in Cuba could not be applied there.

But despite the vast differences between the settings, two officials who worked with General Miller in Cuba suggested that he offered very similar solutions to some problems he found in Iraq.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, in his report on Iraqi prison abuses, said General Miller`s recommendation of a guard force that "sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees" violated Army doctrine; the report hinted that it might also have contributed to the abuses.

The Taguba report also highlighted General Miller`s recommendation that commanders in Iraq form and train a prison guard force "subordinate to the Joint Interrogation Debriefing Center (J.I.D.C.) Commander" that "sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees."

The former director of that interrogation center, Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, was implicated in the abuses by General Taguba and is under investigation in a separate military inquiry.

At Guantánamo the role of guards in intelligence gathering was largely limited to observing the detainees` behavior and trying to detect their leaders, according to interrogators who worked there.

A fundamental difference between Iraq and Guantánamo was the Bush administration`s determination that the Geneva Conventions did not govern the treatment of the detainees in Cuba. However, military officers who served in Cuba said the controls on coercive interrogation methods appeared to have been stronger at Guantánamo than they were in Iraq.

Because the administration had designated the Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo as "enemy combatants" — to whom it would accord humane treatment but not other rights granted by the Conventions — military officers in Cuba soon grew concerned that they were operating without clear rules.

According to several officers who served at Guantánamo, the methods, begun in early 2002, included depriving detainees of sleep; leaving them in cold, air-conditioned rooms; placing them in "stress positions"; and forcing them to stand or crouch for long periods, sometimes with their arms extended, until exhausted.

Even before General Miller`s arrival at Guantánamo, the military lawyer who had taken over as the staff judge advocate there, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, sought formal clarification of what were acceptable interrogation methods, Pentagon officials said. That request prompted a broad legal review of interrogation techniques by a working group of Pentagon lawyers.

When the review was completed in February 2003, it included a spreadsheet with 24 approved techniques, officials who viewed it said. For each method, the matrix indicated whether it posed problems under various United States and international laws, and at what level of the military bureaucracy it needed to be approved. The following month, a brief document spelling out specific guidelines for approved interrogation techniques was sent to Guantánamo.

General Miller and another officer on his team said they urged commanders in Iraq to draft their own guidelines. A chart of approved techniques, entitled the "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," was drawn up for American forces in Iraq on Oct. 12, 2003, barely a month after General Miller`s visit.

"The recommendations that the team and I made was about how you could improve the interrogation process and the development and collection of intelligence," General Miller told reporters last Saturday. "Those recommendations that were made were based on the system that provided humane detention and excellent interrogation."

Three officials familiar with the methods approved for Guantánamo said they appeared to be more restrictive than those promulgated for Iraq. At Guantánamo, methods like extended isolation and putting detainees into "stress positions" require approval from senior Pentagon officials; in Iraq, they need only that of the task force commander.

Tim Golden reported from New York for this article and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 13, 2004
U.S. Officials Failed to Protect Slain Civilian, Family Says
By RICHARD LEZIN JONES and JILL P. CAPUZZO

WEST WHITELAND, Pa., May 12 — The family of Nicholas E. Berg challenged American military officials on Wednesday, insisting that the man beheaded by Islamic terrorists in Iraq had earlier been in the custody of federal officials who should have done more to protect him.

Mr. Berg`s brother, David, emerged from the family`s split-level house in this Philadelphia suburb with a four-page e-mail message that he said his younger brother, Nicholas, had sent hours after being freed on April 6 from a jail in Mosul, Iraq.

The Iraqi police took Nicholas Berg, 26, into custody on March 24 and held him in a jail that he described in the message as managed by Iraqis with oversight from United States Military Police forces. He wrote that federal agents had questioned his reasons for being in Iraq, whether he had ever built a pipe bomb or had been in Iran.

"They can detain him and deny him his basic civil rights of a lawyer, a phone call or even a charge for 13 days, but they can`t get him" on a plane, David Berg said.

Apparently in a response to the accusations that the actions of the military in Iraq exposed their son to worsening danger, the F.B.I. released a statement saying that Nicholas Berg had not heeded warnings and that he had declined assistance in leaving Iraq.

The conflicting accounts continued to swirl around Mr. Berg`s detention and release. In Baghdad, a senior adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority, Dan Senor, repeated that Mr. Berg had never been in military custody.

"My understanding," Mr. Senor said of the Iraqi police, "is that they suspected that he was involved/engaged in suspicious activities. U.S. authorities were notified. The F.B.I. visited with Mr. Berg on three occasions when he was in Iraqi police detention and determined that he was not involved with any criminal or terrorist activities. Mr. Berg was released on April 6, and it is my understanding he was advised to leave the country."

That position prompted the family`s decision to read Mr. Berg`s e-mail message to The New York Times. In it, he described the presence of American military police officers, as well as the federal agents` visits, to the Mosul jail.

"The Iraqi police is mentioned frequently, which is, of course, absurd, because there is no Iraqi government right now," David Berg said. "And if you think about it, to be detained by the Iraqi police without the U.S. government`s knowing would be tantamount to kidnapping."

Officials did acknowledge the presence of the military police at the jail but said their sole function was to "monitor his treatment."

To the family, the oversight question is paramount because they say not only that his detention was unlawful, but also that it further threatened his safety. The Bergs have said the detention prevented him from leaving Iraq before the violence grew in Baghdad and Falluja.

The F.B.I. statement, though, said that coalition authorities had offered "to facilitate his safe passage out of Iraq," but that Mr. Berg refused their help.

Recalling his brother`s independent personality, David Berg said such a refusal would not surprise his family, although he said he had no way of knowing whether Nicholas Berg had declined help. He had traveled to Iraq, in part, to generate business for his fledgling telecommunications company, which specializes in servicing radio towers. After an earlier visit, Mr. Berg returned to Iraq on March 14.

In the message dated April 6, addressed to his parents, brother and sister, Mr. Berg described the 13 days that he spent in the Shirdta Iraqiyah station near Mosul, an Iraqi detention center where, he said, the United States Military Police supervised and trained the Iraqi officers.

"The M.P.`s were a little surprised to see an American in civilian clothing, and I think out of formality and boredom they decided to do a background check, which involved C.I.D.," he wrote, referring to the Army Criminal Investigation Division.

The next morning, Mr. Berg described F.B.I. agents` questioning as amicable, but pointed. Among the questions asked, he wrote, were: "Why was I in Iraq? Did I ever make a pipe bomb? Why was I in Iran?"

He conjectured that their questions arose from some Farsi literature and a book about Iran that he had. Mr. Berg wrote that after four days he was transferred to a cellblock that included prisoners charged with petty offenses and suspected "war criminals."

"Word had spread due to the presence of certain items amongst my stuff that I was Israeli," Mr. Berg wrote. "So I felt a bit like Arlo Guthrie walking into a jail full of mother rapers and father stabbers as an accused litterbug."

The American military police, in fact, "were pretty stand-up," he wrote. "They heard the chants of Yehudien, Israelein, and told the I.P. prison staff to put me in my own cell."

"I did get on much friendlier terms with the other prisoners after they discovered I could speak a little Arabic and verified I didn`t have horns or anything," Mr. Berg said.

He described the conditions for other prisoners and their treatment, depending sometimes on nationality. The others, he wrote, were behind closed cell doors and had no time outdoors. Some prisoners, considered political or suspected war criminals from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran "had been in custody for 40 days without a single interpreter interrogation, just waiting as they still do today, and the Iraqi guards treat these poor fellows — especially the Hindis among them — as real dogs.`

Mr. Berg was released on April 6, a day after his family filed a suit against the United States government seeking to have him freed.

"I hope to catch an opening on the next available Royal Jordanian flight out of Amman this Thursday as long as my ticket is still transferable," he wrote in the message. "Dad, Mom I will e-mail or call you with exact itinerary as soon as I have it."

He was seen by friends immediately after leaving the jail. In Baghdad, one friend, Andrew Robert Duke, who stayed at Al Fanar Tower Hotel, where he met Mr. Berg last month, recalled how much he was anticipating returning home when they had their last beer together on April 9.

"We talked about how he was looking forward to having children with a woman that he had not discovered yet," Mr. Duke, 49, said. "But with the money he was going to make here, he would be able to afford a family."

The men sat at a round glass-top coffee table on the sixth floor of the hotel. Mr. Berg told Mr. Duke that he was planning to go on a holiday to Turkey and maybe do some sailing. They finished their drinks, and Mr. Berg rose to go.

"I walked him to my door," Mr. Duke said. "Watched him open his door. I said: `Good luck, my friend. Stay in touch.` He said, `I am looking forward to it.` "

Mr. Berg was often seen socializing in the dining room or at the computers next to the lobby. Of muscular build, he often wore a baseball cap, a T-shirt cut off at the shoulders and tattered blue jeans.

"He came and went by himself," said a hotel office manager who gave first name as Ahmed.

The hotel staff cleared out his room, 602, and stowed a set of weights that Mr. Berg had left.

Red-haired and charming, he was described as friendly with workers and guests, chatting about subjects like Aerosmith and Philadelphia museums.

"He never talked about the war or said anything bad about Iraqis," Hugo Infante, a Chilean who works for United Press International, said.

"Just yesterday we realized he was killed," Mr. Infante said. "I saw his name on the Web site. When I saw the name, I said it was not possible it is Nick. Then I saw the face. He looked skinnier and paler."

Mr. Berg`s friends and acquaintances at the hotel said he was working on communications towers for some Baghdad hotels. Mr. Infante said he last saw Mr. Berg on April 10, writing an e-mail message to his family. "I saw him there," he said, gesturing to the Internet cafe. "I said, `Hello, how are you?`

"And he said, `I want to go home.` "

Christine Hauser contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 13, 2004
Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations
By JAMES RISEN, DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, May 12 — The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States.

The methods employed by the C.I.A. are so severe that senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have directed its agents to stay out of many of the interviews of the high-level detainees, counterterrorism officials said. The F.B.I. officials have advised the bureau`s director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the interrogation techniques, which would be prohibited in criminal cases, could compromise their agents in future criminal cases, the counterterrorism officials said.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush signed a series of directives authorizing the C.I.A. to conduct a covert war against Osama bin Laden`s Qaeda network. The directives empowered the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda leaders, but it is not clear whether the White House approved the specific rules for the interrogations.

The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment on the matter.

The C.I.A. detention program for Qaeda leaders is the most secretive component of an extensive regime of detention and interrogation put into place by the United States government after the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan that includes the detention facilities run by the military in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

There is now concern at the agency that the Congressional and criminal inquiries into abuses at Pentagon-run prisons and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan may lead to examinations of the C.I.A`s handling of the Qaeda detainees. That, in turn, could expose agency officers and operations to the same kind of public exposure as the military now faces because of the Iraq prison abuses.

So far, the agency has refused to grant any independent observer or human rights group access to the high-level detainees, who have been held in strict secrecy. Their whereabouts are such closely guarded secrets that one official said he had been told that Mr. Bush had informed the C.I.A. that he did not want to know where they were.

The authorized tactics are primarily those methods used in the training of American Special Operations soldiers to prepare them for the possibility of being captured and taken prisoners of war. The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury.

Counterrorism officials say detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed, or tricked into believing they were being sent to such places. Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications.

Many authorities contend that torture and coercive treatment is as likely to provide information that is unreliable as information that is helpful.

Concerns are mounting among C.I.A. officers about the potential consequences of their actions. "Some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable," one intelligence source said. "Now that`s happening faster than anybody expected."

The C.I.A.`s inspector general has begun an investigation into the deaths of three lower-level detainees held by the C.I.A in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department is also examining the deaths.

The secret detention system houses a group of 12 to 20 prisoners, government officials said, some under direct American control, others ostensibly under the supervision of foreign governments.

The C.I.A. high-level interrogation program seemed to show early results with the capture of Abu Zubaida in April 2002. Mr. Zubaida was a close associate of Mr. bin Laden`s and had run Al Qaeda`s recruiting, in which young men were brought from other countries to training camps in Afghanistan.

Under such intensive questioning, Mr. Zubaida provided useful information identifying Jose Padilla, a low-level Qaeda convert who was arrested in May 2002 in connection with an effort to build a dirty bomb. Mr. Zubaida also helped identify Mr. Mohammed as a crucial figure in the 9/11 plot, counterterrorism officials said.

A few other detainees have been identified by the Bush administration, like Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another 9/11 plotter and Walid Ba`Attash, who helped plan the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000.

Some of the prisoners have never been identified by the government. Some may have only peripheral ties to Al Qaeda. One Middle Eastern man, who had been identified by intelligence officials as a money launderer for Mr. bin Laden, was captured in the United Arab Emirates. He traveled there when some of the emirates` banks froze his accounts. When the U.A.E. government alerted the the C.I.A. that he was in the country, the man was arrested and subsequently disappeared into the secret detention program.

In the interrogation of Mr. Mohammed, C.I.A. officials became convinced that he was not being fully cooperative about his knowledge of the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Mohammed was carrying a letter written by Mr. bin Laden to a family member when he was captured in Pakistan early in 2003. The C.I.A. officials then authorized even harsher techniques, according to officials familiar with the interrogation.

The C.I.A. has been operating its Qaeda detention system under a series of secret legal opinions by the agency`s and Justice Department lawyers. Those rules have provided a legal basis for the use of harsh interrogation techniques, including the water-boarding tactic used against Mr. Mohammed.

One set of legal memorandums, the officials said, advises government officials that if they are contemplating procedures that may put them in violation of American statutes that prohibit torture, degrading treatment or the Geneva Conventions, they will not be responsible if it can be argued that the detainees are formally in the custody of another country.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit "violence to life and person, in particular . . . cruel treatment and torture" and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

Regarding American anti-torture laws, one administration figure involved in discussions about the memorandums said: "The criminal statutes only apply to American officials. The question is how involved are the American officials."

The official said the legal opinions say restrictions on procedures would not apply if the detainee could be deemed to be in the custody of a different country, even though American officials were getting the benefit of the interrogation. "It would be the responsibility of the other country," the official said. "It depends on the level of involvement."

Like the more numerous detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the high-level Qaeda prisoners have also been defined as unlawful combatants, not as prisoners of war. Those prisoners have no standing in American civilian or military courts.

The Bush administration began the program when intelligence agencies realized that a few detainees captured in Afghanistan had such a high intelligence value that they should be separated from the lower-level figures who had been sent to a military installation at Guantánamo Bay, which officials felt was not suitable.

There was little long-term planning. The agency initially had few interrogators and no facilities to house the top detainees. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency began to search for remote sites in friendly countries around the world where Qaeda operatives could be kept quietly and securely.

"There was a debate after 9/11 about how to make people disappear," a former intelligence official said.

The result was a series of secret agreements allowing the C.I.A. to use sites overseas without outside scrutiny.

So far, the Bush administration has not said what it intends to do over the long term with any of the high-level detainees, leaving them subject to being imprisoned indefinitely without any access to lawyers, courts or any form of due process.

Some officials have suggested that some of the high-level detainees may be tried in military tribunals or officially turned over to other countries, but counterterrorism officials have complained about the Bush administration`s failure to have an "endgame" for these detainees. One official said they could also be imprisoned indefinitely at a new long-term prison being built at Guantánamo.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 13, 2004
PEACE EFFORTS
Shiite Leaders Report Progress in Talks on Najaf, but Cleric Balks
By EDWARD WONG and DEXTER FILKINS

KARBALA, Iraq, Thursday, May 13 — Shiite leaders reported progress Wednesday toward an agreement that would end a five-week-old standoff with the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr in the holy city of Najaf, but Mr. Sadr himself vowed to fight on and gun battles continued between American forces and his followers.

In Karbala, Mr. Sadr`s militia, known as the Mahdi Army, kept up attacks against American forces Thursday morning after the Americans occupied their stronghold in a fierce battle.

A religious leader offered to negotiate a truce between the two sides in Karbala, but was rebuffed Wednesday afternoon by the local leader of the Mahdi Army, American military officials said.

In Najaf, several Shiite leaders said Wednesday they were close to reaching an agreement that would include the disbanding of Mr. Sadr`s militia. Mr. Sadr, while making no mention of an agreement, said at a news conference that he would disband his army if senior clerics in Najaf asked him to. But he also urged his fighters in Karbala to resist American troops and expressed his own willingness to die.

The negotiations were part of the intense maneuvering taking place as American forces, which have been ringing Najaf and Karbala for weeks, have in recent days struck decisively at Mr. Sadr`s militia.

In Karbala, American soldiers killed at least 22 insurgents in an 11-hour battle around a mosque that began late Tuesday night. Soldiers killed at least three more in fighting in the same neighborhood on Wednesday, said Col. Peter Mansoor, the commander of the First Brigade of the First Armored Division, who is charged with crushing the insurgency by Mr. Sadr`s militia. At least seven Americans were wounded.

The fighting at the Mukhaiyam Mosque and the warrens of the surrounding neighborhood brought hundreds of American soldiers within a quarter mile of two of the most sacred places in Shiite Islam, the golden-domed shrines of Hussein and Abbas. Though the Americans say they are determined to destroy Mr. Sadr`s forces, they have been cautious about bringing the war to the holy areas here and in Najaf. Invading the city centers of either place, they fear, could stir the wrath of Shiite Muslims around the world, even those who dislike Mr. Sadr.

Tuesday night, the Americans made a high-risk gamble by trying to breach the Mukhaiyam Mosque, situated just west of the Shrine of Hussein. The attack was one of the largest operations carried out in the past year by the First Armored Division, which until now was responsible for controlling Baghdad. Fighting raged on all sides of the mosque, with soldiers scrambling through rubble-strewn streets and ducking sniper shots and rocket-propelled grenades.

The Americans relied heavily on the devastating cannons and machine guns of their M-1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, which pounded surrounding buildings, setting many on fire.

Colonel Mansoor said that he believed the attack on the mosque had broken the back of the insurgents and that their activities would drop off sharply. But he also observed that the insurgents were "tenacious."

"They kept sniping at us today," he said. "I expect them to come back at us, but perhaps not in the same numbers."

After the main assault force left, the military left a company of tanks in the shattered neighborhood. More than 100 Iraqi policemen were also posted around the mosque, said Colonel Mansoor.

Though fighting did not reach the shrines of Hussein or Abbas, American soldiers were forced to fight insurgents holed up in the Mukhaiyam shrine, a domed building next to a high school and near the Mukhaiyam Mosque. Militiamen had regrouped at the shrine in the middle of the fighting and had begun launching mortars from there at the American-occupied mosque. Special Forces soldiers led teams of Iraqi commandos to the area and drove the insurgents from the shrine during an intense firefight.

The two dozen or so Iraqi commandos who helped the Americans in the battle were part of the Iraqi Counter Terrorist Force, trained in Jordan to combat insurgents. They acted under the supervision of Special Forces, who instructed them on clearing munitions from the Mukhaiyam Mosque and shrine and from the high school. Special Forces soldiers guided much of the battle on the ground, storming the mosque and setting up a base there to direct troops.

The Special Forces soldiers appeared impressed by the weapons caches found in the area. Those included powerful 155-millimeter artillery shells, Italian land mines and sniper rifles. In all, the munitions were the equivalent of more than 100 roadside bombs, one of the most effective killers of American soldiers in Iraq, a military intelligence analyst said. Sappers wired the caches with plastic explosives and detonated them as most of the American troops left the area.

A huge cache in a storage shed at the rear of the mosque compound had been detonated at the start of the battle, resulting in thunderous explosions that continued for more than two hours.

Posters of chubby, black-turbaned Mr. Sadr decorated walls and pillars in various rooms of the mosque. One poster displayed a message from Mr. Sadr calling on his followers to rally against the Americans. A large room had dozens of small wooden couches with soft cushions and was presumably the place where militiamen slept. A metal plate of rice with a half-finished chunk of lamb remained on one couch.

On Wednesday afternoon, a religious leader representing Hussein al-Sadr, a respected uncle of the young Mr. Sadr, came to the American base here to offer to negotiate a truce with Hamza al-Tai, the leader of the Mahdi Army in Karbala, Colonel Mansoor said. The tribal leader, who is from Karbala and is also from the Tai tribe, later spoke with Mr. Tai, who said he would not relent in his fight against the Americans, the colonel said.

In Najaf, meanwhile, Shiite leaders said negotiations were under way on a deal that would include the withdrawal of American forces and the disbanding of Mr. Sadr`s militia. But other Shiites described the negotiations as extremely tentative.

Shiite leaders in Baghdad and Najaf said the proposed agreement had received the "blessing" of Muhammad Ridha al-Sistani, the son and representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country`s most powerful Shiite leader.

"If the agreement is achieved, then we will have completely demilitarized the holy city," Hachim Alkam Al-Shibli, the local leader of the National Iraqi Tribal Coalition, said in Najaf.

Shiite leaders said any deal would probably include delaying criminal proceedings against Mr. Sadr, who is wanted by Iraqi authorities for his suspected role in murdering a rival cleric last year.

Despite these reports of progress, Mr. Sadr made no mention of the negotiations in a public appearance on Wednesday, but he sent ambiguous signals about his willingness to give up without a fight.

"We are ready for any escalation, and we expect nothing less from the occupiers," Mr. Sadr said. "If the U.S. chooses to escalate, we will do so; if they want to ease the tension, we will, too."

Mr. Sadr urged his fighters in Karbala to fight on and indicated that he was willing to go down fighting.

"My desire is to die a martyr in this country," he said.

It was unclear whether Mr. Sadr, as some Shiite leaders suggested, was merely talking tough to cover an inevitable retreat. Though he made no mention of an agreement, Shiite leaders said one of his key aides had put his signature to it.

As he has often done in recent weeks, Mr. Sadr offered some words that suggested he was considering a peaceful deal. He appealed to mainline Shiite clerics, the followers of Ayatollah Sistani, for help. He suggested that he would disband his militia, estimated to number several hundred fighters, if the senior council of clerics in Najaf publicly asked him to do so.

But he has made that offer before, and the Shiite clerics, who are said to loathe Mr. Sadr, have never responded. His uprising has left many Shiite leaders disgruntled, saying they believe that he is endangering the chances of the country`s majority Shiite community to win power in democratic elections.

One problem yet to be resolved was the disbanding of Mr. Sadr`s militia, which American officials say numbers in the hundreds in the two cities. Taking guns away from young men in a country where nearly every household contains at least one AK-47 assault rifle is no simple matter.

Edward Wong reported from Karbala, Iraq, for this article and Dexter Filkins from Baghdad.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Comp

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May 13, 2004
REGIONAL PLANNING
U.S. to Present Revised Program for Democracy in Mideast; Skepticism Is Widespread
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, May 12 — The Bush administration, dogged by the growing abuse scandal in Iraq, is pressing ahead this week with a new appeal for democracy and political reform in the Middle East in the face of extreme skepticism in the region and in Europe.

What the administration calls its Greater Middle East Initiative, a proposal that stirred an angry outcry from Arab officials when a version leaked out last winter, is an eight-page draft that began circulating among foreign ministers this week.

The administration has said President Bush plans to get some form of the document adopted at the summit meeting of leading industrial nations and Russia, the so-called Group of 8, in June at Sea Island, Ga.

But European officials familiar with the contents said they expected that in light of widespread outrage over American soldiers` abuse of Iraq prisoners, even this new, toned-down document would have to be revised extensively to make it seem less high-handed and arrogant. Even some American officials wonder how effective such a call can be right now, especially because the administration is counting on support from Arab League nations.

"If you look at the events of the last week, you realize it`s an embarrassing moment to be discussing this subject," a European diplomat said.

The document that was leaked last year encompassed exhortations and pronouncements that offended many Arab leaders, both because they perceived it as imperialist in tone, and because it omitted discussion of the Arab-Israeli confrontation.

The new document, "G-8 Plan of Support for Reform," which was made available to The New York Times, calls for increased engagement by the West to promote democracy, women`s rights, education, political reforms, free markets and investments, an independent judiciary and media, and greater efforts to crack down on corruption.

One detail calls for a "ministerial framework for our on-going engagement on political, economic and social reform" in the Middle East. This forum would convene foreign, finance and trade ministers from the G-8 countries and the Middle East on a regular basis.

"We are working on ways we could work together with the Middle East, and whether the mechanism is a conference or a secretariat or a bureacracy will be decided by the time we issue a statement at Sea Island," an administration official said.

But European diplomats say they are extremely skeptical about setting up a bureacratic structure or secretariat, especially given the current fluid situation in Iraq.

An administration official said the document was simply a list of ideas that would be refined as the Sea Island summit meeting approaches, and especially after the Arab League summit talks, on May 22.

European and American officials emphasize that their plan is to get the Arab League to adopt a similar document; then they would issue a statement at Sea Island to support the Arab leaders, perhaps combining the two statements.

Administration officials said a document adopted this week but not made public by Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo may have made it easier to press ahead with the American plan.

According to people familiar with the Cairo document, it includes calls for women`s rights, improved governance, political freedoms, educational reforms, judicial reforms and economic liberalization.

Unlike the American document, the Arab League proposal also calls for resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as essential to all these reforms in the Middle East. The Bush administration says reform can proceed even in the absence of such a resolution.

But European, American and Arab officials say they are not certain the Cairo document will make its way into an official plan by Arab leaders at their summit meeting.

These officials note that a summit meeting planned last month in Tunis, where Jordan, Egypt and other American allies in the Middle East had been pressing for adoption of a democracy program, was canceled at the last minute in a display of acrimony and distrust of American intentions.

Arab officials have let the Bush administration know that it would not help for the United States to lead an effort at Sea Island on behalf of reform. Those views were conveyed well before the recent developments in Iraq provoked a torrent of criticism in the Arab world.

Asked about the skepticism, a senior Bush administration official said that it was widespread but not universally shared, and that many Europeans were skeptical about the American occupation from the beginning of the war last year.

"There`s broad agreement about the value of doing something to promote reform in the Middle East," the official said. "But the skepticism is focused on how we want to put it into practice."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Keine Satire!

May 13, 2004
THE DEFENSE SECRETARY
Rumsfeld Preserves Bearing, but Weighs Ability to Serve
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, May 12 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the man at the center of the furor over American soldiers` abuse of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison, spent last Sunday in the backyard garden of his elegant Washington home, poring over Pentagon documents piled 10 inches high in his lap. Mr. Rumsfeld barely listened as his wife chatted with a visiting friend.

"At least he was sitting outside — it was a beautiful day," said the friend, Margaret Robson, describing the scene. "That`s a good thing to do if you`re under a lot of pressure."

As calls continue around the world for Mr. Rumsfeld to resign — and are rejected by the Pentagon — confidantes say that the defense secretary finds stability in his normal workaholic routine. He still gets in early, close to 6:30 a.m. He still has his morning round-table conference with top Pentagon aides, his daily Central Intelligence Agency briefing and his twice-weekly breakfasts with members of Congress.

But as the scandal widens and deepens, Mr. Rumsfeld is said to weigh every day whether he can continue to effectively run the world`s largest military.

"Of course he has given consideration to it, and the reason he does is because he`s a very responsible public servant," said Victoria Clarke, Mr. Rumsfeld`s former spokeswoman, who has talked to him regularly in recent days. "People with less responsibility would be thinking about themselves. He`s not thinking about himself. What he thinks about constantly is what is best for the military and what is best for the country."

Mr. Rumsfeld himself said as much in public testimony to Congress last week. "If I felt I could not be effective, I`d resign in a minute," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Even so, Mr. Rumsfeld`s Pentagon aides vigorously denied on Wednesday that he was giving any thought to stepping down.

Ms. Clarke, who said she thought Mr. Rumsfeld should not resign, said that he was not a Hamlet wringing his hands over what to do, and that he had responded to one of the greatest crises of his life with typical focus and drive — demanding great amounts of information from aides, keeping track of the many investigations into the scandal and preparing for testimony on Capitol Hill.

Aides say that Mr. Rumsfeld is preparing what he hopes will be a morale-boosting statement for American troops in Iraq, and has been debating with his top advisers how best to talk to Iraqis about the United States military`s response to the scandal.

For now, Mr. Rumsfeld has received a powerful show of support from President Bush, who last week authorized his aides to say that he had chastised the defense secretary for his handling of the scandal, but this week stood by Mr. Rumsfeld`s side at the Pentagon to announce that the defense secretary was doing a "superb" job. Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, also attended a small dinner at the home of Mr. Rumsfeld in the graceful, old-world Kalorama section of Washington on April 30, the first day the president spoke publicly of his revulsion over graphic photographs of the abuse.

Guests at the dinner, who included Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, said that the president and his defense secretary appeared relaxed in each other`s company.

"They seemed fine," said Mr. Sessions, a member of the Armed Services Committee. He added that he heard no talk at the dinner about the pictures or the scandal, and that conversation focused on easier topics, such as a speech that Mrs. Bush was to make the next day at a college commencement in Florida.

But friends say that Mr. Rumsfeld, who has lived in Washington on and off for more than four decades and who moves easily in Democratic and Republican circles, understands that the furor is not of the usual inside-the-Beltway variety.

"This isn`t your typical, run-of-the-mill Washington scandal," Ms. Clarke said. "This is a really, really serious issue, with strategic importance to the country."

Friends say that despite Mr. Rumsfeld`s sometimes ferocious exterior, he is a principled man who spends many of his Sundays with his wife quietly visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and who in the middle of the war in Afghanistan stopped in two or three times a week to see a high school friend, John Robson, the former chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, who was dying of brain cancer. "Don is a very compassionate person, and you don`t see this," said Margaret Robson, Mr. Robson`s widow.

People close to Mr. Rumsfeld, who was chief of staff in the Ford White House in the aftermath of Watergate, said that he knew well how to handle crises in government, but that this one had touched an especially sensitive nerve. "He`s deeply affected by this, there`s no question, on every level," said the photojournalist David Hume Kennerly, who has known Mr. Rumsfeld since Mr. Kennerly was President Gerald R. Ford`s White House photographer. "But he`s not a buck-passer, he doesn`t blame people for stuff. He`s handling this the way he`s handled every difficult situation ever."

As he always does, Mr. Rumsfeld, 71, spent last Saturday working all day at the Pentagon, but he did not play his usual squash game with his top spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, aides said. Mr. Rumsfeld spent all day Sunday working, too.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense, where after responding to lawmakers` questions for more than three hours he asked to make one last comment that provided some insight into his thinking.

"I`ve been reading a book about the Civil War and Ulysses Grant — and I`m not going to compare the two, don`t get me wrong, and don`t anybody rush off and say he doesn`t get the difference between Iraq and the Civil War," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "The fact of the matter is, the casualties were high, the same kinds of concerns that we`re expressing here were expressed then." The people then, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "were despairing, they were hopeful, they were concerned, they were combative."

But in the end, he concluded, "the carnage was horrendous, and it was worth it."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Friedman war einer der größten Unterstützer von Bush und seiner Irak Politik.

May 13, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dancing Alone
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It is time to ask this question: Do we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home?

"Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You`re the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics."

Yes, that`s true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that`s getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so. It has always been more important for the Bush folks to defeat liberals at home than Baathists abroad. That`s why they spent more time studying U.S. polls than Iraqi history. That is why, I`ll bet, Karl Rove has had more sway over this war than Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns. Mr. Burns knew only what would play in the Middle East. Mr. Rove knew what would play in the Middle West.

I admit, I`m a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion — as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did — I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn`t just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.

Why, in the face of rampant looting in the war`s aftermath, which dug us into such a deep and costly hole, wouldn`t Mr. Rumsfeld put more troops into Iraq? Politics. First of all, Rummy wanted to crush once and for all the Powell doctrine, which says you fight a war like this only with overwhelming force. I know this is hard to believe, but the Pentagon crew hated Colin Powell, and wanted to see him humiliated 10 times more than Saddam. Second, Rummy wanted to prove to all those U.S. generals whose Army he was intent on downsizing that a small, mobile, high-tech force was all you needed today to take over a country. Third, the White House always knew this was a war of choice — its choice — so it made sure that average Americans never had to pay any price or bear any burden. Thus, it couldn`t call up too many reservists, let alone have a draft. Yes, there was a contradiction between the Bush war on taxes and the Bush war on terrorism. But it was resolved: the Bush team decided to lower taxes rather than raise troop levels.

Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn`t the administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have no clue how to export hope. They would never think of saying, "Let`s close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training — with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P. and Microsoft." Why didn`t the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia? (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration`s oil moneymen. Why did the administration always — rightly — bash Yasir Arafat, but never lift a finger or utter a word to stop Ariel Sharon`s massive building of illegal settlements in the West Bank? Because while that might have earned America credibility in the Middle East, it might have cost the Bush campaign Jewish votes in Florida.

And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be true to its principles. (Here`s the new Rummy Defense: "I am accountable. But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.")

Add it all up, and you see how we got so off track in Iraq, why we are dancing alone in the world — and why our president, who has a strong moral vision, has no moral influence.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 13, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Clash of Civilizations
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Testifying before the Senate yesterday, General Richard Myers admitted that we`re checkmated in Iraq.

"There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq," he said, describing the generals` consensus. "There is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."

Talk about the sound of one hand clapping. And they say John Kerry is on both sides of issues.

Sounding like Mr. Kerry, General Myers summed up: "This process has to be internationalized. The U.N. has to play the governance role. That`s how we`re, in my view, eventually going to win."

The administration`s demented quest to conquer Arab hearts and minds has dissolved in a torrent of pornography denigrating other parts of the Arab anatomy. George Bush, who swept into office on a cloud of moral umbrage, now has his own sex scandal — one with far greater implications than titillating cigar jokes.

The Bush hawks, so fixated on making the Middle East look more like America, have made America look un-American. Should we really be reduced to defending ourselves by saying at least we don`t behead people?

Gripped in a "I can`t look at them — I`ve got to look at them" state of mind, lawmakers grimly filed into private screening rooms on the Hill to check out the 1,800 grotesque images of sex, humiliation and torture.

"They`re disgusting," Senator Dianne Feinstein told me. "If somebody wanted to plan a clash of civilizations, this is how they`d do it. These pictures play into every stereotype of America that Arabs have: America as debauched, America as hypocrites.

"Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz act like they know all the answers, almost like a divine right," she said. "They don`t have a divine right, and they are wrong."

After 9/11, America had the support and sympathy of the world. Now, awash in digital evidence of uncivilized behavior, America has careered into a war of civilizations. The pictures were clearly meant to use the codebook of Muslim anxieties about nudity and sexual and gender humiliation to break down the prisoners.

Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell said some photographs seemed to show Iraqi women being commanded to expose their breasts — such debasement, after a war that President Bush partly based on women`s rights.

The problem, of course, is that the war in Iraq started with lies — that Saddam`s W.M.D. were endangering our security and that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda and 9/11.

In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of soldiers, the Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global War on Terrorism, in both wars to reinforce the idea that we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism. The truth is that our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and around the world.

That initial deception — and headlong rush to throw off international conventions and old alliances, and namby-pamby institutions like the U.N. and the Red Cross — led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib. Now the question is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.

Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological decisions, calling every Iraqi who opposed us a "terrorist"; conducting rough interrogations, perhaps to find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would not look foolish; rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball that did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or "humanitarian do-gooders," to use the phrase of Senator James Inhofe, a Republican.

Senator Fritz Hollings made it clear yesterday that Rummy has left us undermanned and undertrained in Iraq — another factor in the torture scandal. "Now, in a country of 25 million, you`re trying to secure it with 135,000," he scolded Mr. Rumsfeld, adding: "We`re trying to win the hearts and minds as we`re killing them and torturing them." At least, he said sarcastically, Gen. William Westmoreland never asked a Vietcong general to take the town, "like we have for Falluja. We`ve asked the enemy general to take the town."

The hawks, who promised us garlands in Iraq, should have recalled the words of the historian Daniel Boorstin, who warned that planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.

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80% in Iraq Distrust Occupation Authority
Results of Poll, Taken Before Prison Scandal Came to Light, Worry U.S. Officials

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 13, 2004; Page A10

Four out of five Iraqis report holding a negative view of the U.S. occupation authority and of coalition forces, according to a new poll conducted for the occupation authority.

In the poll, 80 percent of the Iraqis questioned reported a lack of confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority, and 82 percent said they disapprove of the U.S. and allied militaries in Iraq.

Although comparative numbers from previous polls are not available, "generally speaking, the trend is downward," said Donald Hamilton, a senior counselor to civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer. The occupation authority has been commissioning such surveys in Iraq since late last year, he said. This one was taken in Baghdad and several other Iraqi cities in late March and early April, shortly before the surge in anti-coalition violence and a few weeks before the detainee-abuse scandal became a major issue for the U.S. authorities in Iraq.

The new polling data, which have not been publicly released, are provoking concern among occupation authority officials and in Washington because they provide additional evidence that the U.S. effort in Iraq is not winning over Iraqi public opinion. The Bush administration and the U.S. military have said that the keys to the United States achieving its goals in Iraq are winning at least mild support from most Iraqis and creating Iraqi forces to provide security.

"How to . . . win the hearts and minds of the people [in Iraq] is one of the things that we really have to work at," Army Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, head of Army intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week. "I mean, that is the key to solving not only that problem but the rest of the problems in the Middle East."

Hamilton, who said he oversees public opinion issues for Bremer, declined to provide the number of Iraqis surveyed or other methodological details but said in an e-mail that "polls here are generally reliable" and that the new findings were consistent with those of other polls. He referred other questions to occupation authority spokesman Daniel Senor, who did not respond to requests by telephone and e-mail for comment and for historical data.

The new data reflect the fact that "the occupation, and the occupation forces, are getting increasingly unpopular," said Jeffrey White, a former Middle Eastern affairs analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. In recent months, he said, "A lot of people, including me, have been getting very pessimistic."

Reflecting that trend, the proportion of Baghdad residents who reported worries about safety has steadily increased: In the new poll, 70 percent named security as the "most urgent issue" they faced, up from 50 percent in January, 60 percent in February and 65 percent a month later.

Overall, 63 percent of those polled said security was the most urgent issue facing Iraq. In addition to Baghdad, the poll was conducted in the northern city of Mosul and the southern cities of Basra, Nasiriyah and Karbala. Some questions also were asked in the troubled western town of Ramadi.

In the poll, which was taken just before the April uprising of the militia led by radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr, a large proportion of Iraqis from the central and southern parts of the country said they backed him, with 45 percent of those in Baghdad saying they support him, and 67 percent in Basra.

Those numbers are striking because the U.S. military and the occupation authority have declared Sadr a public enemy whom they want to kill or capture. The Army has been maneuvering in central Iraq for weeks, occasionally fighting parts of his militia but avoiding a head-on clash in the holy city of Najaf. Yesterday, U.S. tanks and helicopters fought his militia in Karbala.

There were a few bright spots in the poll. The Iraqi police received a 79 percent positive rating, the best of the seven institutions about which questions were asked. The reformed Iraqi army was not far behind, with a 61 percent positive rating.

Those polled were broadly divided on who should appoint the interim government that is supposed to take over limited power from the occupation authority at the end of June. The largest group, 27 percent, said the Iraqi people should appoint the new leaders, while 23 percent said judges should. Only one-tenth of 1 percent said that the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council should name the government, which is supposed to run Iraq until elections are held next year. None said the occupation authority should.

Indicating a general skepticism of foreign involvement in their political future, 83 percent of those polled said that only Iraqis should be involved in supervising the 2005 elections.

The poll`s findings appeared consistent with one taken about the same time in Iraq by USA Today, CNN and Gallup, which found that 57 percent of Iraqis wanted foreign troops to leave immediately.

Some senior Pentagon officials have a different view of the situation. "The truth is, the majority of the Iraqi people want democracy in Iraq to succeed and are positive about what the future holds, thanks in large part to the efforts of our servicemen and women," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, said at a Senate hearing yesterday.

A poll released yesterday found that U.S. public opinion on Iraq also is shifting. "For the first time, a majority of Americans -- 51 percent -- say the war is not going well," the Pew Research Center reported. That is double the percentage who said that in January. But the poll said 53 percent of Americans favor keeping troops there until a stable Iraqi government is established.

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BEHOLD THE TORTURE APOLOGISTS
Republicans Oppose Basic American Values

NEW YORK--"If American life and values change radically because of the attacks," ABC`s Sam Donaldson wrote, ten days after 9/11, "the terrorists will have won."

Well.

As photo after photo confirms story after story of systemic torture, rape and murder by American servicemen, CIA goons and mercenary rent-a-cops in U.S. concentration camps from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad to Bagram Air Base near Kabul to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a legion of right-wing fifth columnists is finally revealing themselves as a band of wannabe fascists.

Incredible as it seems, these "Americans" actually approve of torture.

Talk radio king Rush Limbaugh, comparing the SS-style siccing of vicious German shepherds on Iraqi POWs to a fraternity initiation prank, led the charge of the torture apologists: "All right, so we`re at war with these people. And they`re in a prison where they`re being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it`s pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation--and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world." If cruelty is carefully calibrated to cultural mores, who cares whether it`s wrong?

Besides, argues El Rushbaugh, the torturers were just funnin`: "You ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?" Boys (and girls) will be (psycho) boys.

Days after articles of impeachment were introduced against him in the House of Representatives, the indefatigable Don Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that even now, even after Abu Ghraib, denying POWs sleep, starving them, subjecting them to painful "stress positions" and other forms of torture are still being inflicted upon inmates--guilty or innocent and always uncharged--throughout his Defense Department gulags.

His reception was a friendly one.

"I`m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment [of Iraqi POWs]," spat Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a card-holding member of the Party of Lincoln, to fellow members of the Armed Services Committee. "You know, they`re not there for traffic violations. They`re murderers, they`re terrorists, they`re insurgents."

Actually, according to the Red Cross report on Abu Ghraib, 90 percent of the detainees had been "arrested by mistake."

Inhofe`s rant continued: "I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons." Yup, that`s no doubt the expression on their faces: gratitude.

Liberals don`t have a monopoly on moral relativism.

You have to go down a long way to get to the darkest cellars of immorality. As Bush Administration apologists point out, there are worse fates-- far worse fates--than being stripped, beaten, bitten or even anally raped. A worse fate befell Nick Berg, the cellular phone entrepreneur who was beheaded by Iraqi insurgents. So what`s the point? Dishonest attempts to reduce the moral baseline merely reiterate one`s own ethical inferiority. The fact that other human beings can conceive of miseries even crueler and more painful to inflict cannot exculpate us for the sins we commit. Is the robber less guilty because he can look down on the kidnapper? Shall we forgive Hitler for killing six million Jews if someone else kills seven?

Other leading lights of conservatism are handling the prison torture scandal by ignoring it. In a TV appearance columnist and Fox News regular Ann Coulter blamed Abu Ghraib on "girl soldiers," but her column has been conspicuously silent about the biggest story since the end of the Democratic primaries. Coulter`s last two missives focused on the hot topics of airport security and the need for tighter immigration. Maybe she`s playing ostrich to avoid criticizing the Republican conduct of the Iraq war--a conflict so poorly conceived that no one even bothered to name it. Either that, or she approves of torture. In any case, her refusal to condemn American atrocities makes her a torture apologist too.

In a way, so is General Antonio Taguba, author of the famous Abu Ghraib report. He blames the prisoner abuse scandal on "failure in leadership from the brigade commander on down, lack of discipline, no training whatsoever, and no supervision." Yet anyone with half a brain knows that shoving a flashlight up a man`s anus as he howls in agony is torture. You shouldn`t need instruction in the intricacies of the Geneva Conventions to figure that out.

(Ted Rall is the author of "Wake Up, You`re Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right," out now. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2004 TED RALL

RALL 5/11/04

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An Iraqi schoolgirl runs past a barricade of burning tires in the Sadr City district of Baghdad, where U.S. forces clashed with militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr. U.S. forces also pushed into the centers of the besieged holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
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Iraqi Politicians Press for Wider Role
U.S.-Appointed Leaders Seek New National Council With Expanded Powers

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 13, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 12 -- Politicians on Iraq`s U.S.-appointed Governing Council are pushing for significant changes in the interim government being crafted by a U.N. envoy, posing a new complication to the Bush administration`s plan to relinquish civilian administrative powers here in 50 days.

With the Iraqi Governing Council set to dissolve on June 30, members said they wanted to form a new national council in order to retain influence in the interim government. The members want a new council to share power with the government outlined by Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy for Iraq. Brahimi`s blueprint envisions a caretaker executive branch consisting of a president, a prime minister and a 25-member cabinet of specialists, according to U.S. and U.N. officials.

Senior U.S. officials responsible for Iraq policy oppose the Governing Council`s idea. But council members said they would not abandon the proposal because they said the country`s interim constitution gives them the authority to form the transitional government that will replace them. They added that proposals advanced by Brahimi, a veteran diplomat whose role has the endorsement of the Bush administration, are not binding.

"We shall listen to the ideas of Mr. Brahimi, but his ideas are not compulsory for us," said Izzedine Salim, the current holder of the council`s rotating presidency. "The Governing Council is the one responsible for forming the government."

In contrast with Brahimi`s proposed executive branch, which emphasizes technical expertise over political connections, Governing Council members are calling for another body in the interim government that would be composed of representatives of various political groups. Such a body would give the new government credibility, they insist, and it would provide an essential check on the executive.

"The new government needs political weight," said Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a senior leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a large Shiite Muslim political party. "The major, important political parties and currents should be there."

Brahimi has said he supports the idea of convening a large national conference in July to select an advisory body that would have limited powers. But Brahimi opposes forming such an entity before June 30 or granting it lawmaking powers, as some in the Governing Council are seeking, a U.N. official involved in the transition said. Brahimi has proposed an interim government of technical experts whose powers would largely be limited to the day-to-day operations of the country and preparing for national elections early next year, the U.N. official said.

"It should be a caretaker government," the official said.

Senior U.S. officials said Wednesday they supported Brahimi`s proposal. The officials also said it would be impossible to hold a national conference before the planned June handover.

"That won`t happen. It can`t be done," a senior official with the U.S. occupation authority said. "It`s simply not possible to have a conference in the time frame before the 30th of June."

Governing Council members are still debating the contours of a new entity, but they have said they want a body that would enjoy wide authority, including control over the budget and the right to appoint new cabinet members. "It will be a sort-of safety valve," Abdel-Mehdi said. "Since we will not have an elected government, it will assure people that we have controlled results and we are not going for a dangerous adventure."

The difference of opinion about the formation of a new council threatens to cause a confrontation between the occupation authority and many of its closest political allies in Iraq at a time when both sides deem cooperation crucial to the success of the handover of power. But so far, neither side appears to be budging.

There is little time remaining to resolve the matter. U.S. officials have said they want members of the interim government to be named by June 1, to give them a month to prepare for their new jobs.

It is not yet clear who will determine membership in the new government. Brahimi has said he will not decide and instead will consult with the occupation authority and the Governing Council. U.S. and U.N. officials said it was likely that Brahimi would weigh names in collaboration with members of the Governing Council and two senior representatives of the U.S. government: L. Paul Bremer, the civil administrator of Iraq, and Robert D. Blackwill, a senior official with the National Security Council who is in Iraq to work on the political transition. Officials close to the process said the choice of president and prime minister also will involve consultations with the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.

Brahimi, Bremer and Blackwill have spent the past week meeting with various groups of Iraqis, from tribal sheiks to provincial leaders, in an attempt to identify promising candidates. Members of the Governing Council have been holding similar meetings.

Senior U.S. officials involved in the process said they had not reached any conclusions on who would be nominated. Brahimi also has not made any decisions, his spokesman said.

"It`s a process that`s evolving minute by minute, hour by hour," said the spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi. "We have more questions than answers at this stage."

U.S. and U.N. officials said they wanted to ensure that the new leaders focused on holding fair elections early next year and not holding onto power. As a result, they are trying to create a balance between politicians and technocrats who would not try to hijack the fragile new political process.

Ceremonial posts, including the presidency and two vice presidencies, likely would be given to established politicians, U.S. officials said. But the prime minister and cabinet that would run the government would be dominated by technocrats, the officials said.

"It`ll be a mixture" of politicians and technocrats, a senior Bush administration official said. The senior occupation authority official noted that recent public opinion polls have shown that political parties do not enjoy wide support in Iraq, and therefore party leaders should not dominate the new government.

Senior U.S. officials maintain that many Governing Council members share the views of Brahimi and the occupation authority in opposing the formation of a new council. A senior U.N. official said Brahimi would not be swayed by holdouts on the Governing Council.

"You don`t need all the members to say `aye,` " the U.N. official said. "If there are a few naysayers, you can still pull it off."

Although the effort to form a new national council has been endorsed by a variety of current Governing Council members, including top Kurdish politicians, the leaders of the initiative are Shiites, according to Governing Council members and their aides. Shiite leaders have been suspicious of Brahimi, a Sunni Muslim from Algeria, and have openly questioned whether he would name a disproportionate number of Sunnis to cabinet posts.

While Sunnis have ruled Iraq for centuries, Shiites are now about 60 percent of the population. Shiite leaders have insisted that Shiites receive a majority of positions in the new government, including the prime ministership.

"Without a majority of Shia, Shia will not support this institution," Abdel-Mehdi said.

Shiite members, including Abdel-Mehdi and Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, have been trying to convince the country`s most powerful Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to support the creation of a new council. To date, however, Sistani has not issued any public statements on the subject. In earlier statements, Sistani has said an interim government should not have legislative powers. "Sistani is interested in an election and seeing that elections are held as soon and openly and conclusively as possible," a senior State Department official said. "So he wants to make sure the interim government doesn`t prejudice the outcome of that election. Other than that, he`s willing to let Brahimi do his work."

Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.

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Iraqi Cleric`s Militia Storms Najaf Police Station


Reuters
Thursday, May 13, 2004; 4:32 AM

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Militiamen loyal to rebel Shi`ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stormed the main police station in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf overnight, held the police chief hostage and emptied the weapons store, police said on Thursday.

The militiamen were driven off by the arrival of 10 U.S. tanks, but not before taking dozens of AK-47 automatic rifles and pistols from the weapons store and all the ammunition it contained, policemen at the station told Reuters.

More than 40 fighters from Sadr`s Mehdi Army swept in, handcuffed the city police chief newly brought in from Baghdad and threatened to kill him if police fought back, they said.

They left the police chief, but made off with three police vehicles when the U.S. tanks arrived at the station, about one mile from the shrines of Najaf, some of the holiest in the Shi`ite world.

U.S. commanders say they do not intend to penetrate the most sacred part of the city, but the overnight operation appeared to be the deepest they have advanced from the bases on the outskirts they occupied earlier this month.

American officers said relieving the police station was one of several U.S. operations late on Wednesday, when the sound of some of the heaviest gunfire in days echoed through the town.

Mehdi Army fighters staged several ambushes of U.S. troops on the edge of town and "U.S. forces conducted extensive operations" against them, Captain Brandon Anderson told Reuters.

He said Iraqi police (IP) helped take back their headquarters.

"The insurgent operation was a failure because the IP fought back and the U.S. troops came in," he said. There were no American casualties and no immediate word on how many militiamen were killed or wounded, Anderson said.

Officials at the main city hospital said two dead bodies and six wounded people had been brought in.

© 2004 Reuters

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Europe`s Gray Future

By Jim Hoagland

Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page B07

NEW YORK -- A panel of the great and the good from Europe and the United States recently drew up an elegant blueprint for remaking the Atlantic community. They settled the hash of disunity over Iraq, looming trade disputes and American ambivalence over the European Union`s determination to have its own defense and foreign policies.

You can and should read about it in the Council on Foreign Relations paper "Renewing the Atlantic Partnership" (available at www.cfr.org). But what`s missing is a paragraph about the demographic changes in Europe and America, even though these changes are widening the economic and political divides in the world`s most important partnership.

You won`t read about the growing weight of Muslim minorities in Europe and of Hispanic and Asian populations in the United States, which will inevitably show up in domestic and foreign policies on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps even more consequential is the astonishingly rapid aging and shrinking of the populations in many of Europe`s main countries, while in the United States continued population growth feeds economic growth.

The subject was just too thorny to be tackled in a brief summary, according to several of the panel`s 26 members -- in contrast to war, protectionism or the greater Middle East. So a proposed paragraph on changes in the ethnic and social composition of populations on both sides of the Atlantic was left on the cutting-room floor.

There are good reasons for caution in talking about policy-related demographic changes. But the silence the experts stumbled into is instructive. Like individuals, nations try to avoid thinking about aging, its costs and consequences. We whistle past the rest home as well as the graveyard.

But it is vital to recognize that much of Europe is turning into a continent of geezers, however much it hates, just hates, talking about it. And countries such as France and Germany hate even more making the changes geezerhood requires -- the most important being whether the welfare state will cut its generous benefits, raise its exorbitant taxes to meet tomorrow`s rising health costs or make people work longer before retiring.

Europe is also loath to examine its restrictive immigration policies, which help curb population growth and economic renewal. (As always, Britain is an exception.) Not even this weekend`s enlargement of the European Union to 25 members will bring much immediate relief, since Germany has led the way in keeping up walls against population flows from the east and south.

I can sympathize with the historians, ex-diplomats, economists and other experts on the New York-based council`s panel. They wrestled with and walked away from slippery census numbers on the race and religion of population groups. We actually don`t know if the number of Muslims in the United States is closer to 2 million than to 7 million, or whether in France 5 million Muslims is a more accurate count than 10 million. Those commonly cited ranges cover a multitude of unknowns.

But good numbers on some little-remarked societal forces do exist. Across Western Europe, the median age of the workforce and the population at large is steadily rising, as life expectancy increases and fertility rates drop below the 2.1 children per couple needed to ensure population growth. The birthrate is now 1.4 in Germany, and even lower in Italy and Spain. Consider this: Half of all union members in Italy are retired and drawing pensions.

The median age of voters in Europe today is 46 to 47, and will be 50 by 2013, according to reports presented last month to the Council for the United States and Italy. "There is no time to waste for politicians who must cut pensions and other benefits before their governments go broke. It only gets harder from here," said one economist.

Karl Lauterbach, a German expert in demographics, asked the group: "Who will want to invest in an aging and shrinking population? Germany risks losing one-third of its natural economic growth because of these trends. From 1970 to today, 10 million German children we would have expected in other times were not born" and will not be available to work in 20 years.

The United States faces problems in its Social Security system, but they are relatively small compared with the society-bending changes in store for Europe (and for Japan). Demographics, and the aging of nations in particular, deserve to be on any transatlantic agenda today.

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Focus on What`s at Stake in Iraq

By Jim Hoagland

Thursday, May 13, 2004; Page A29

What if Bush the Illegitimate promises to wear sackcloth and ashes to John Kerry`s inaugural ball, prostrates himself for 40 days and nights before Jordan`s king and Egypt`s president-for-life, and stages an execution (real or mock, to be determined by an online poll managed by al-Jazeera TV) of Rumsfeld the Ogre? Would that do it for you?

Make no mistake: The military and congressional investigations into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal must be pursued. They offer the best opportunity to repair America`s reputation and prevent future atrocities. But this episode should not be inflated for partisan gain at home, or manipulated by those abroad who oppose the exercise of U.S. power in their precincts. Those outcomes risk throwing the American baby out with the Bush bath water.

To leap to the conclusion that Arab dictators have suddenly gained moral superiority over the United States, which is no longer fit to pursue or speak about democratic change in the Middle East, is self-defeating. The goal must be justice for the guilty and the victims at Abu Ghraib, not the donning of a national hair shirt and an American retreat from world leadership.

President Bush`s increasingly shaky management of the occupation of Iraq is a legitimate campaign issue. It is one of the factors that could bring regime change in Washington. After all, Bush`s domestic agenda is a sorry mishmash of backward-looking causes, and his economic policies are short-termism at its most egregious. There are plenty of reasons for change if you think the other guy can do better.

But there is no reason to make the same mistake those grinning, lascivious goons posing as guards made at Abu Ghraib, which is to assume that the humiliation of a foe -- in this case Bush -- is synonymous with justice. Those who were silent about torture in Iraq during Saddam Hussein`s time should be modest about cloaking established political agendas in the name of that cause now.

Abu Ghraib does not change the essential reality about Iraq, which I have flogged here for months: It is up to Iraqis to determine their political future, and it is up to the Americans and other Arabs to get out of their way -- yesterday. That has not been the Bush way. Proconsular absolutism has been abandoned in favor of yielding political power not to Iraqis but to the United Nations. This would presumably deprive Kerry of a campaign issue and placate Sunni Arab governments, which were silent about torture and mass murder when committed by Hussein`s Sunni minority. Those regimes now prefer to see Iraq in chaos rather than ruled by Shiite Arabs.

"It is impossible for Iraq to be ruled by the Shiites," a political adviser to a ruling Arab monarch said recently in a not-for-attribution setting that encouraged unusual candor. "Sunnis make up 85 percent of the population of the Arab world. How could it be democratic" for a national Shiite majority to rule an Arab country? That is the key issue for King Abdullah of Jordan, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and other Sunni autocrats. Those damning photos and videos of abuses at Abu Ghraib, and others that may show similar incidents elsewhere in the overextended U.S.-British archipelago of war prisons, are useful clubs for them to wield against the Bush administration`s most ambitious visions of democracy and gender equality in the region.

The actions of the guards and perhaps of U.S. intelligence agents at Abu Ghraib gravely complicate those goals. They force redefinition and adjustment of the U.S. mission in the Middle East. But that emphasizes the importance of keeping what is at stake clearly in view.

The United States should stay committed to working for democracy in Iraq, which means accepting the mathematical advantage that free elections would give the Shiite majority. No U.N. formula for a caretaker cabinet of "technocrats" rigged to Sunni interests can be allowed to finesse that. The alternative is a de facto partition of Iraq into armed ethnic camps.

U.S. military commanders are already cutting deals with local forces, whether Baathists in Fallujah or anti-Baathist militias in the south and in Kurdistan. The generals can feel the political wind shifting behind them in Washington. They will not waste lives in frontal assaults for political goals as uncertain and unclear as Bush`s have become in Iraq, or if they think Kerry will declare defeat and go home when elected.

The U.S. commitment to Iraq is endangered less by the crimes of the lowly in rank than by the distraction and political egotism of the mighty. Giving democracy in Iraq a chance to survive the U.S. presidential campaign is now a leadership challenge, for both Bush and Kerry.

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Es scheint so, dass die Israelis die Lehrmeister der USA im Irakkrieg waren, was wohl an dem Erfolg zu sehen ist.

Auch die Israelis foltern Araber
von John Bolender
ZNet 09.05.2004

Die brutale, erniedrigende Behandlung irakischer Gefangener durch Amerikaner zeigt erstaunliche Parallelen zu Verhörpraktiken, wie sie der israelische GSS (General Security Service, auch Shabak oder Shin Bet genannt) gegen palästinensische Gefangene anwendet. Das derzeitige Medieninteresse an ersterem Phänomen – und das Ausmaß dieses Interesses ist gesund -, bietet Gelegenheit, die Aufmerksamkeit auch auf Letzteres zu lenken. Natürlich ist es verführerisch zu argumentieren, es sei richtig, dass die US-Medien ihr Hauptaugenmerk auf amerikanische Misshandlungen richten und kaum oder gar nicht auf die israelischen. Schließlich trügen Amerikaner nur an Ersterem die Schuld – weswegen amerikanische Medien speziell die Pflicht hätten, die Schuld der eigenen Nation, der eigenen Regierung, offenzulegen. Aber Amerika trägt auch eine Mitschuld an den Misshandlungen durch den israelischen GSS, denn die USA statten Israel mit massiven Finanzhilfen aus. Seit 1985 wurden Israel jährlich 3 Milliarden Dollar bewilligt 7 (Anmerkungen – chronologisch geordnet - am Ende des Artikels).

1987 verfasste Moshe Landau, ein pensionierter Richter des Obersten Gerichtshofs Israels, Empfehlungen für den GSS. Diese gestanden dem GSS bei Gefangenen-Verhören die Anwendung von Folter zu. Allerdings gebrauchte die Landau-Kommission im Zusammenhang mit dieser Praxis nicht das Wort „Folter“. Stattdessen griff man zu Euphemismen wie „moderater physischer Druck“ oder „nichtgewaltsamer psychologischer Druck“ 5, 8. Was aber ist mit „moderatem physischem Druck“ und „nichtgewaltsamem psychologischem Druck“ gemeint? Typisch der folgende Bericht eines 15jährigen, den man verhaftete, weil er Steine warf: „Sie legten mir Handschellen an und schlugen mich auf der Fahrt nach Fara’a (Militärgefängnis in Nablus). Nach meiner Ankunft brachten sie mich zu einem „Doktor“ zum „Checkup“. Später erfuhr ich, dass der „Checkup“ dazu diente, körperliche Schwachstellen aufzudecken, auf die man sich bei der Folter konzentrieren kann. Besonderes Interesse galt meinem Bein. Es war früher mal verletzt und noch empfindlich. Vor dem Verhör fragten sie mich, ob ich bereit sei zu gestehen. Dann hängten sie mich nackt an meinen Handgelenken auf, draußen, wo es kalt war. Sie verpassten mir abwechselnd heiße und kalte Duschen. Über dem Kopf trug ich eine in Jauche getunkte Kapuze.“ 5

Der Sack über dem Kopf – ein Muster, das sich durchzieht. Bevor man ihn gegen den Gefangenen einsetzt, wird der Sack normalerweise beschmutzt – entweder mit Jauche, siehe oben oder mit Erbrochenem 4. Der Sack wird festgezurrt, sodass man (fast) erstickt 4, 11. Man hält die Gefangenen vom schlafen ab (1, 2, 5, 8, 11) und rüttelt sie heftig (1, 5, 8 11), außerdem zwingt man sie in die sogenannte „Shabeh“-Position. Sie müssen sich umgekehrt über einen Stuhl beugen, Hände und Füße sind unten gefesselt (4, 5, 6, 11). Der Gefangene kann sich nicht bewegen und muss womöglich längere Zeit laute Musik, die ihm in den Ohren dröhnt, ertragen (2, 6, 10, 11). Hier eine Aussage aus erster Hand. Sie stammt von dem palästinensischen Geschäftsmann Mousa Khoury, der bereits sechsmal von israelischen Kräften festgenommen und verhört wurde: „Meine Hände waren auf dem Rücken mit Handschellen gefesselt. Sie steckten einen Kartoffelsack über meinen Kopf. Meine Beine waren mit Handschellen an einen kleinen Stuhl gefesselt. Die Sitzfläche des Stuhls war 10cm auf 20cm. Das Rückenteil war 10cm auf 10cm. Der Stuhl war aus Hartholz. Die vorderen Stuhlbeine waren kürzer als die hinteren. Also rutschte man automatisch nach vorne; nur deine Händen waren hinten festgebunden. Wenn du dich nach hinten setzt, bohrt sich die Lehne in einem schmalen Bereich in deinen Rücken. Kippst du nach vorne, hängst du automatisch an deinen Händen. Es war sehr schmerzhaft. Zur Toilette ließen sie dich erst, wenn du deine Bitte hundertmal geschrien hast... Deine Gedanken bewegten sich immer vor und zurück, vor und zurück, und du hattest keinen normalen Gedankenfluss mehr“ 8.

Die Landau-Kommission hatte entschieden, dass diese Form des „Drucks“ nur unter „sehr besonderen, gerechtfertigten Umständen“ zur Anwendung kommen dürfe 2 – etwa in der Situation der „tickenden Zeitbombe“, wenn man annimmt, ein Gefangener hat Informationen über einen unmittelbar bevorstehenden Terroranschlag 6, 10. Aber laut Eitan Fellner, von der israelischen Menschenrechtsorganisation B’Tselem, war das keineswegs die Regel. „Die Folter wurde in allen Verhörzentren des Shin Bet zur bürokratischen Routine. Wir schätzen, dass 85 Prozent aller palästinensischen Gefangenen gefoltert wurden, und das obgleich viele später ohne Anklage freigelassen wurden“ 5. 1999 verbot der Oberste Gerichtshof Israels diese Art von „Druck“ – bedingungslos 4, 10. Was keineswegs heißt, dass er aufhörte. So dokumentiert B’Tselem noch zwischen Oktober 2000 und Januar 2001 (9) Folter an Palästinensern, die in der Polizeistation von Gush Etzion verhört wurden. Die Opfer waren Minderjährige – Teenager, die man meist mitten in der Nacht aus ihren Häusern holte und bis zum andern Morgen verhört. Diese Kinder wurden stundenlang massivst verprügelt – manchmal mit verschiedenen Objekten – sie wurden bei kaltem Wetter mit Wasser abgespritzt, man drückte ihnen den Kopf in die Kloschüssel und betätigte die Spülung. Sie wurden mit dem Tod bedroht oder anderweitig verbal misshandelt. Sie mussten lange in schmerzhaften Positionen verharren. Ziel war es, sie zu Geständnissen über andere Minderjährige zu pressen. Ich zitiere die B’Tselem-Website: „Aussagen, die B’Tselem vorliegen, lassen darauf schließen, dass es sich hier nicht um isolierte Fälle oder ungewöhnliches Verhalten bestimmter Polizisten handelte, (und) Informationen, die B’Tselem erhielt, deuten mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit darauf hin, dass die Folterpraxis bei Verhören in der Polizeistation Gush Etzion weiter andauert“ 9.

Jessica Montell ist B‘Tselems Exekutiv-Direktorin. Zur Frage, ob nach wie vor in Gewahrsam gefoltert wird, sagt sie: „Nehmen wir an, ich bin eine Verhörperson und habe das Gefühl, die Person vor mir verfügt über Informationen, die eine Katastrophe verhindern könnten, dann würde ich tun, so meine Einschätzung, was ich muss, um diese Katastrophe abzuwenden. Dem Staat obliegt es anschließend, mich anzuklagen, weil ich gegen das Gesetz verstoßen habe. Also sage ich: „Hier sind die Fakten, die mir zur Verfügung standen. Das und das habe ich damals gedacht. Das und das empfand ich als notwendig“. Zu meiner Verteidigung kann ich mich auf Notstand (necessity) berufen, dann entscheidet das Gericht, ob es sinnvoll von mir war, das Gesetz zu brechen, um diese Katastrophe zu verhindern“ 8. Klingt nach einer Verbesserung, ist aber immer noch inakzeptabel für alle, die an die Würde des Menschen glauben.

Parallelen zwischen israelischen und amerikanischen Misshandlungen an Arabern veranlassten Al-Dschasierah zu der Vermutung, die US-Armee hätte ihre Technik von den Israelis gelernt. Al-Dschasierah zitiert den israelisch-arabischen Knesset-Abgeordneten Talab al-Sanai mit den Worten: „im Irak gibt es viele israelische Folterexperten, die ihre gesammelten Erfahrungen aus 37 Jahren Folter und Misshandlung von Palästinensern an die Amerikaner weitergeben“ 11. Eine Frage, deren Klärung sich lohnen dürfte – ethisch gesehen allerdings nicht die zentrale Frage. Die zentrale Frage in ethischer Hinsicht ist: Wenn die Taten der Amerikaner weltweite Ächtung verdienen, warum nicht auch die der Israelis? Schließlich wurden die Taten Letzterer durch die Gelder amerikanischer Steuerzahler mitfinanziert. Somit handelt es sich in gewissem Sinne bzw. bis zu einem bestimmten Grad auch um amerikanische Taten. Man könnte natürlich argumentieren, was die Amerikaner im Irak tun, ist schlimmer. Schließlich verhält sich Israel nicht so orwellmäßig und verkündet „Freiheit“ und „Demokratie“, während es gleichzeitig Menschen foltert und tötet. Zudem war das, was diese Amerikaner taten, von einem Element der sexuellen Erniedrigung geprägt - vielleicht ein Unterschied zu den Taten des GSS. Das sind wichtige Punkte. Dennoch, die israelischen Taten - begangen mit Unterstützung der USA – unterscheiden sich nicht so sehr, als dass sie nicht auch öffentlich untersucht gehören. Und dazu gibt es wohl keine bessere Gelegenheit als gerade jetzt, da die Medien den Staub um die Geschehnisse im Gefängnis von Abu Ghraib aufwirbeln.

Quellen

1 - Stephanie Nebehay, 23. März 1997: „U.N. investigator says Israel tortures Palestinian prisoners“ (UN-Untersucher sagen, Israel foltert palästinensische Gefangene), Reuters
2 - 19. Mai 1998: „Israel torture condemned“ (Israelische Folter verurteilt), BBC News; news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/96535.stm
3 - 26. Mai 1999: „Israel ‚torture‘ hearing opens“ (Israels ‚Folter‘-Anhörung beginnt), BBC News; news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/353491.stm
4 - 6. September 1999: „Israel Supreme Court bans interrogation abuse of Palestinians“ (Oberster Gerichtshof Israels verbietet Misshandlung von Palästinensern beim Verhör), CNN: www.cnn.com/WORLD/meast/9909/06/israel.torture/
5 - Alexander Cockburn: ‚Israel’s torture ban‘, erschienen in The Nation vom 27. September 1999
6 - 30. Januar 2002: ‚Israel’s Shin Bet agency‘, BBC News: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1791564.stm
7 - Clyde R. Mark, 14. Mai 2003, CRS Issue Brief for Congress: Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance: fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/21117.pdf
8 - Mark Bowden: „The persuaders“ (Die Überzeuger), Guardian vom 19. Oktober 2003 observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1066041,00,html
9 - Siehe 8. Mai 2004; B’Tselem: ‚Torture‘ www.btselem.org
10 - Siehe 8. Mai 2004; B’Tselem: ‚Torture by the GSS‘ www.btselem.org
11 - 6. Mai 2004, Al-Dschasierah: „Israeli lessons for the U.S. in Iraq“ (Die israelischen Lektionen für die USA im Irak); english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C182D988-28E3-4D48-ADFC-F15D6509BOEC.htm


[ Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "Israelis Torture Arabs Too" ]

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,800 new pictures add to US disgust

Stills shown of women forced to bare breasts
Dan Glaister and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday May 13, 2004

The Guardian
Images of guard dogs snarling at cowering prisoners and Iraqi women being forced to expose their breasts were among the 1,800 new pictures and video stills depicting abuse at the Abu Ghraib jail shown to members of the US Congress yesterday.

The pictures, which have not been released to the public by the US military, were described by one member of Congress as worse than had been expected.

"I expected that these pictures would be very hard on the stomach lining and it was significantly worse than anything that I had anticipated," Senator Ron Wyden told reporters. "Take the worst case and multiply it several times over."

The pictures are thought to depict scenes of torture and humiliation similar to those seen in the photographs that have emerged over the last week. Photographs of dogs snarling at prisoners, of women being forced at gunpoint to expose their breasts, of hooded prisoners being forced to masturbate, and of forced homosexual acts were among those shown to members of Congress yesterday.

"The whole thing is disgusting and it`s hard to believe that this actually is taking place in a military facility," said Senator Dianne Feinstein.

The lawmakers were shown the photographs by Defence Department officials in a secret room in the Capitol building in Washington DC.

Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, a member of the House of Representatives armed services committee who viewed some of the pictures, told the Guardian they were "not dramatically different" from those already published but said some of the pictures showed the aftermath of a dog attack on a prisoner.

While several Republican senators argued that the photographs were no more shocking than those already seen, Democrats such as Senator Joseph Lieberman argued that "it just deepens the conclusion that this was a cellblock that had gone wild, had no standards".

The sense of disgust was compounded yesterday by the airing of an American soldier`s video diary on CBS`s 60 Minutes. The video showed her talking about two Iraqi prisoners who died in custody at Abu Ghraib prison: "Who cares? That`s two less for me to worry about."

In evidence to a Senate committee yesterday, Mr Rumsfeld defined prisoners in Iraq as "unlawful combatants" rather than prisoners of war but insisted they were treated in a manner "consistent with" the Geneva conventions.

Further down the chain of command, it was announced that two US army sergeants would face court martial for their part in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick and Sergeant Javal Davies join four other military police personnel who have already been charged.

One of those charged, Private Lynndie England, who featured prominently in the first batch of photographs, yesterday insisted she was acting on orders from "persons in my chain of command".

"I was instructed by persons in higher rank to `stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera`, and they took pictures for PsyOps [psychological operations]," Pte England told a Denver television station. "I didn`t really ... want to be in any pictures."

The controversy over the treatment of prisoners by the US army spread to Afghanistan when an Afghan police colonel, Sayed Nabi Siddiqui told reporters from the New York Times and Associated Press he had been repeatedly beaten, stripped naked and threatened with dogs for nearly 40 days last year at several US-run bases in Afghanistan.

A spokesman for US forces said an investigation into the allegations was opened yesterday.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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He`s back, and this time Clinton is getting personal about Bush
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

13 May 2004

The final sentence of his memoirs completed, Bill Clinton is back, ripping into President George Bush`s handling of the crisis in Iraq, and signalling that he intends to play a role in the race for the White House.

Liberated from literature, the old master is limbering up anew for political action. On Tuesday evening, he ripped into his successor for neglecting the real menace of Osama bin Laden to go after Saddam Hussein, and for gratuitously turning world opinion against America.

"We had unanimous support for going into Afghanistan, they [the United Nations] participated in the hunt for Bin Laden and supported giving an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to open his country to weapons inspections," Mr Clinton told a business gathering in New York on Tuesday night. "We were in good shape. What happened?"

What happened was the Bush team`s obsession with toppling Saddam, he claimed, regardless of the facts about Iraq`s WMD and Baghdad`s non-involvement in the 11 September attacks.

It was an unprecedented volley. Former presidents largely follow a code that sees them keep quiet about the performance of their successors. But Mr Clinton appears ready to re-enter the fray and his book will give him the platform to do so.

"I`ve been in writer`s jail," he told his audience. "For three months I`ve been reliving my life - and it was hard enough the first time." But now, the 900-page volume My Life is ready. In barely three weeks, the hoopla will start, at a convention in Chicago. Then comes a worldwide tour to accompany publication in late June.

The early signs are that the tome will even eclipse his wife`s Living History, which broke records for political memoirs when it hit the bookstores exactly a year ago. The former president is receiving a larger advance than Hillary, a rumoured $12m (£7m) compared with $8m. The initial print run is also larger: 1.5 million against 1 million for Hillary. And, dare one hope, it will be better-written than her pedestrian exercise in political boilerplate.

Unlike earlier political books of 2004, by the journalist Bob Woodward, the former intelligence chief Richard Clarke and others, Mr Clinton`s memoirs will not dish dirt on the Bush administration. Instead, if he is halfway true to form, it will be an opus of self-justification. Readers looking for juicy stuff about Monica Lewinsky are likely to be disappointed.

For students of modern history, there may be new material about Northern Ireland and the Middle East, in which Mr Clinton was deeply involved. There will surely be plenty about what Hillary called the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband, including the pseudo-scandal of Whitewater.

Some talk of "score settling". In fact, if Clinton rather than his ghostwriter is in charge of the narrative, the bits about his early career in Arkansas could be the most entertaining.

But whatever the content, the mere name of its larger-than-life author will ensure the impact of My Life. The timing of publication has thus been crucial - and explains why Mr Clinton`s editor even took to sleeping overnight at his home in Chappaqua, New York, to make sure his undisciplined charge finished the job, so the book could appear next month.

Any later, and publication might have stolen the thunder of John Kerry`s coronation at the Democratic convention in the last week of July. Or the book could have been delayed until after the 2 November election - by which time the country`s attentions might have shifted to an incoming Democratic president, and Clinton`s memoirs would be ancient history.

But the deeper question is, now Bill Clinton has his life back, what will he do with it? In 2000 Al Gore, anxious not to be tarred with the Clinton scandals, barely allowed his boss to put a foot on the campaign trail. The earnest Mr Kerry, however much he risks being lost in the Clinton dazzle, is unlikely to make the same mistake.

The former president will not win over wavering Republicans, for whom he is still Bubba-cum-Beelzebub. But he remains the Democrats` brightest star, and the party`s most potent fundraiser. For African Americans and other core constituencies, he is a talisman. Victory in 2004, it is said, will go to the side which most effectively gets out the vote. And no one can do that like Bill Clinton.

But his longer-term future is a mystery. Mr Clinton is only 57, three years younger than Mr Kerry. Thanks to speeches at up to $100,000 a go, and now the book, the $5m legal debts from Whitewater are a distant memory. For the first time in his life, he is rich. But then again, money never much interested him.

Since leaving office, he toyed with - but rejected - offers of a talk show. He briefly had a joint TV commentary slot with his old sparring partner Bob Dole. It has been suggested he might be UN secretary general, mayor of New York, global anti-Aids supremo, or even Mr Kerry`s running mate. Who knows? All that is certain is that after the travails of authorship, Bill Clinton is back.


13 May 2004 13:35

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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THE WORLD
Disgust at New Abuse Photos
`These people are not members of my Army,` one senator says after lawmakers privately view more images of mistreated prisoners.
By Elizabeth Shogren and Richard Simon
Times Staff Writers

May 13, 2004

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress expressed disgust and shock Wednesday after they privately viewed hundreds of additional photographs of Iraqi prisoners abused by U.S. military personnel.

Among the new photos and videos shown to lawmakers in secure rooms on Capitol Hill were those of Iraqi women apparently forced to expose their breasts. Others showed unexplained dead Iraqis with U.S. soldiers smiling or flashing a thumb-up nearby, said House and Senate members who saw the images.

The private screenings of more than 1,600 classified images offered greater detail and suggested new abuses of prisoners but shed little light on the scope of the misconduct by American soldiers. One lawmaker said senators who asked for an explanation of the actions depicted were told by a Pentagon official who remained in the viewing room that the incidents were "under investigation."

The screenings are likely to increase the controversy over whether the pictures should be made public — a decision that lawmakers said rests with the Defense Department.

The photos, many confiscated from soldiers and part of criminal investigations underway in Iraq, were shown as congressional committees pressed the Bush administration to explain the system of U.S.-run detention facilities for Iraqis after revelations that prisoners had been abused and humiliated by guards.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he feared that making the pictures public could have the effect of "inspiring the enemy to inflict further damage" on U.S. soldiers or civilians.

Before senators viewed the photos, Warner went to the Senate floor to caution colleagues to choose their words carefully when they talked about them.

Lawmakers were given a written warning that if they described a photo in a way that revealed a subject`s identity they could be in violation of federal privacy laws.

Still, the reactions were raw.

"Hard on the stomach lining," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

"Disgusting," said Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.).

"Horrible," added Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.).

Senators viewed the photos in a Capitol room used for intelligence briefings, while House members saw the images at the same time in the House Armed Services Committee room.

The photos were flashed on a screen at a rapid clip — interspersed with images unrelated to prisoner abuse, including sex acts between male and female U.S. soldiers and shots of Baghdad, lawmakers said.

The pictures — contained on 12 discs — were brought to the Capitol in a locked bag and were to be returned to the Pentagon on Wednesday night because they were "evidentiary material" in the criminal investigation, Warner said.

Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.) said that during the screening he turned to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and said, with disgust: "These people are not members of my Army."

Many lawmakers said the graphic images were far worse than anything they had expected and would make it harder to repair the damage to U.S. credibility, especially in the Arab world. Some photos were so explicit that some senators left the room.

"It was beyond anything that I had anticipated," Wyden said. "All I can tell you is that this means that it is so urgent that steps are taken to try to begin to repair the damage."

"I saw things that made me sick," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose).

Members of Congress saw pictures of corpses, including a man whose face was "virtually gone," as Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) described it.

Lawmakers said that Pentagon officials offered no explanation, including whether the deaths had occurred at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad or elsewhere.

In one photo, an unidentified young woman in a U.S. military uniform was crouched down "almost head to head" with a corpse and was "smiling," Campbell said. Another photo showed a U.S. soldier flashing a thumbs-up next to a body bag.

One image depicted an Iraqi woman undressed to the waist, while another showed a woman lifting her shirt up. "They were not smiling, believe me," Campbell said.

There were additional photos of prisoners enduring sexual humiliation, including naked inmates apparently forced to simulate oral sex or participate in group masturbation.

"It had nothing to do with trying to break them," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) "It was sadomasochistic sexual degradation."

"Even more disturbing was a video of a man who seemed to be flailing himself against a door," said Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.). He said the man`s head was bloody.

"The nature of these photos is more inflammatory than the original photos," Crowley said. They showed a "lack of supervision and the lack of oversight" at the prison.

Lawmakers said they could not determine from the images how widespread the abuse was or how many soldiers were involved.

Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.) said that after watching the photo presentation for 40 minutes, "no one can convince me, knowing the situation as I do, that this is all about seven reservists from Maryland," referring to the U.S. soldiers charged so far in the abuse scandal. "It`s about more than that."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she thought the public had seen enough of the photos to get a sense of the abuse. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said he worried that making the pictures public might compromise the criminal investigation and prosecution. "We`re at war," he said. "I don`t want to do anything that might even marginally increase the risk to our troops in the battlefield."

But Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) disagreed: "The best thing to do would be to get them out and get this behind us." And Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) said he feared that withholding the photos from the public would cause greater speculation and thoughts of conspiracy.

"I believe the pictures should be released for the sake of openness and transparency," Johnson said. "The pictures are graphic and horrendous but do not plow new ground."

The photos that have been published and broadcast have set off an international furor, tarnishing the U.S. image in the Arab world, angering members of Congress — including Republicans, who were upset they learned about the misconduct from the media, rather than the Pentagon — and leading to calls from some Democrats for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld said during congressional testimony last week that some of the unreleased images of physical violence toward prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison show "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman."

Feinstein said it was clear to her that there was "not a strong chain of command in place, and the Geneva Convention was winked at. Somebody gave the order that prisoners had to be softened up, and someone came up with this idea of doing it in this disgusting way."

Times staff writers Janet Hook and Richard A. Serrano contributed to this report.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Mußte Rummy deswegen so schnell nach Baghdad?

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KOMMENTARY
To Help Restore U.S. Standing, Rumsfeld Must Take the Fall
The Defense chief isn`t to blame for prisoner abuse, but his departure would speed the repair of our credibility.
Max Boot

May 13, 2004



Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld`s failure to offer his resignation over the Abu Ghraib scandal is sadly typical of the lack of accountability that permeates the U.S. government.

We have suffered some catastrophic failures during the last few years. On Sept. 11, 3,000 people might have been saved if FBI, CIA, immigration and customs officers had been a little more diligent and a bit more willing to cooperate with one another. More recently, we went to war in Iraq based on the assurance of the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

How many people have been canned for these egregious cock-ups? Zero. The only government employee fired in connection with the war on terror was poor old retired Adm. John Poindexter, who had the temerity to try to come up with a computer program (with the admittedly Orwellian name Total Information Awareness) designed to prevent future 9/11s.

The one part of the government that lives by a strict credo is the military, which may be why it is one of the most respected institutions in the country.

In the last 14 months at least 23 Navy captains have been relieved from command of their ships, effectively ending their careers. In many of these cases, the vessel in question, ranging from a tugboat to a nuclear submarine, suffered some minor accident that was not directly the captain`s fault. But, under the Navy`s rules, a commanding officer assumes responsibility for whatever happens aboard his ship, regardless of personal culpability. That doctrine should now be applied to the man in command of the U.S. military.

None of the attempts to link Rumsfeld directly to the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq is terribly convincing. The critics would have us believe that he somehow created a "culture of abuse" by refusing to grant terrorists status as prisoners of war or even as ordinary criminal defendants. In reality, this was the only possible decision.

Under international law, anyone who fights out of uniform and outside a clear command structure is said to be an unlawful combatant. If Rumsfeld had decided to grant them POW status anyway, he would have been doing grave harm to national security, because POWs have the right not to reveal any information beyond their name, rank and serial number. That`s not acceptable when dealing with murderous thugs whose compatriots are probably plotting fresh attacks against innocent people.

Suspected terrorists should not be tortured. But they should certainly be interrogated within the limits of the law, which allows for psychological if not physical pressure.

The GIs in the Abu Ghraib abuse clearly went too far, but there is no credible evidence to date that their conduct was countenanced by the chain of command. As soon as their superiors found out what was going on, an investigation was launched and the wrongdoers were exposed. There is nothing to suggest a cover-up. The only sin Rumsfeld clearly committed was handling this whole affair ineptly from a public relations standpoint.

That`s a small slip-up, not a firing offense. What, then, is the case for Rumsfeld resigning? Simply that this scandal has caused devastating damage to America`s moral standing in the world, and we need to recover fast. Apologizing ad nauseam isn`t going to do it. Even court-martialing the perpetrators, though important, isn`t enough. We need to regain the initiative as more nightmarish pictures emerge.

Having the Defense secretary resign might salvage some good out of this house of horrors by causing Arabs to ask why their governments tolerate torture and ours doesn`t. If the resignation were coupled with other steps, such as moving up the date of Iraq`s first election and beefing up U.S. forces, it might even help to put Iraq back on track.

Against this prospect, what are the arguments for keeping Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney`s claim that "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of Defense the United States has ever had" doesn`t pass the laugh test. (Did former Defense Secretary Cheney mean to say that he himself wasn`t as good?)

Rumsfeld has done many laudable things, but he has also miscalculated badly about many aspects of the Iraq occupation, and he has alienated much of the military. It is farfetched to claim that the war on terrorism would falter without him. In fact, it would do less damage to the war effort to change Defense secretaries than to give in to critics` other demand: granting suspected terrorists fresh legal protections.

More reasonable is the concern that by throwing Rumsfeld overboard the administration might signal terminal weakness to its Democratic critics and — more important — to our enemies abroad. That is a real risk, but at this point it seems a risk worth running to prevent the current crisis from spiraling out of control.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

Max Boot is Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is also a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

His last book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Basic Books) was selected as one of the best books of 2002 by The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor. It also won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award, given annually by the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation for the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history. He is now writing his next book, a history of revolutions in military affairs over the past 500 years, War Made New: Four Great Revolutions That Changed the Face of Battle and the Course of History, which will be published by Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin (USA).

Boot has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and many other publications. He is also a frequent public speaker and guest on radio and television news programs. He has lectured at many military institutions, including the Army and Navy War Colleges, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School, and the Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Before joining the Council in October 2002, Boot spent eight years as a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal, the last five years as editorial features editor. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at The Christian Science Monitor.

Boot holds a bachelor`s degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley (1991), and a master`s degree in history from Yale University (1992). He grew up in Los Angeles and now lives with his wife and three children in Larchmont, N.Y.

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hursday, May 13, 2004
War News for May 13, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Two Iraqis killed in continued fighting near Najaf.

Bring `em on: Two Turkish contractors killed in Mosul.

Bring `em on: One Filipino worker killed, four wounded in mortar attack near Balad.

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed, one wounded in roadside bomb ambush near Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Italian embassy under mortar fire in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Heavy fighting near Karbala.

Bring `em on: Rocket attack sets oil refinery ablaze in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: One Iraqi wounded in Baghdad mortar attack.

Rummy goes to Baghdad. "He denied on the secret, 15-hour flight from Washington that the Pentagon was trying to cover up the scandal, which emerged when proceedings were opened in January against seven military police, who have now been charged, but exploded into a global issue with the release of soldiers` photographs two weeks ago. `If anybody thinks that I`m (in Iraq) to throw water on a fire, they`re wrong,` Rumsfeld told reporters on board. `We care about the detainees being treated right. We care about soldiers behaving right. We care about command systems working.`"

Contractors. "While on missions in Iraq last year, 35-year-old Todd Drobnick was attacked by small-arms fire, grenades and makeshift bombs. Yet he continued to go out day after day, until he died in a vehicle crash on his way from one U.S. military base to another. For his loyalty and dedication, he was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star.
Thousands of Americans in Iraq have received such honors, but Drobnick`s case was unusual: He wasn`t a soldier. He was a private contractor working with a translation company."

Gold Rush. "As many people, and not just the scandal junkies, are aware, KBR was awarded by the administration of President George W Bush a contract worth at least US$5 billion for 10 years in Iraq, for engineering and construction services and the rebuilding of civil infrastructure. If war may be a blessing from heaven for aspiring truck drivers in the heart of Texas, war is certainly a very good business for KBR. A few days ago Halliburton executives confirmed that the oil giant was collecting no less than $1 billion a month for their work in Iraq. This includes US taxpayers being overcharged $61 million for fuel and $24.7 million for meals, apart from a confirmed $6.3 million in bribes. Accusations are still flying: Halliburton has not rebuilt key nodes of Iraq`s oil infrastructure and has skimmed Iraqi jobs for away from Iraqis."

Commentary

Opinion: "Our rhetoric stressing freedom, democracy and the rule of law rings increasingly hollow. Ultimate responsibility for our self-inflicted wounds in Iraq lies not with the soldiers but with an administration whose approach to the region is grounded in hubris. It is an administration with a mind-boggling lack of concern for what Arabs and Muslims think -- even as it made the deliberate choice to invade and occupy an Arab-Muslim country."

Editorial: "The wrong is not a matter of a few bad apples, but a pattern of ignoring warnings and encouraging poor treatment of prisoners. It’s amplified by battles between branches of military and intelligence services that Rumsfeld — and, more important, his commander-in-chief — can’t seem to control. Nearly everyone in the president’s inner circle shares blame for this mess."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Oklahoma Guardsman killed in Iraq.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 8:25 AM
Comments (3)

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Peter Lee: `Patriots and assholes`
Date: Thursday, May 13 @ 10:13:04 EDT
Topic: War & Terrorism

By Peter Lee

According to CNN, John McCain walked out of the hearings when Sen. James Inhofe, GOP maggot from the State of Oklahoma, test drove this excuse for torture at Al Ghraib:

"These prisoners, you know they`re not there for traffic violations," Inhofe said. "If they`re in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they`re murderers, they`re terrorists, they`re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we`re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."

Doesn`t take too much head scratching to figure out why.

John McCain spent over five years in the Hanoi Hilton getting tortured by the Vietnamese. By Inhofe`s criteria, McCain -- not only a death-dealing combatant but also an officer, a high-value intelligence target, and propaganda trophy -- had it coming.



No wonder McCain left the room for a little fist clenching and vein throbbing.

In honor of this occasion, by the authority granted me as a blogger, I have decided to unilaterally redraw the political map of the United States.

It`s no longer Red and Blue states.

No more GOP, independents, and Democrats.

And no more conservatives, moderates, and liberals.

Now it`s:

Patriots and Assholes.

In the Patriot category I include anybody, left or right, conservative or liberal, that wants to make America a better place.

In the Asshole category I include people who use and abuse the wealth, power, prestige, and future of this nation to further their own private agendas.

Patriots can disagree, they can insist on their own views, they can be wrong, Lord knows they can do wrong...but when they see that the country is going to hell, they do something about it.

Assholes, on the other hand, are solipsists. They promote their own interests, objectives, and beliefs and if the country gets hurt, well that`s just collateral damage.

George W. Bush is an asshole, the movement`s poster child. Inside his world, GWB is the measure of all things. If he`s doing well, everything`s OK. Corporations, state governments, budgets, nations, the international system, and our planet might all go to shit. But as long as George W. Bush can wake up another morning and crow from his dunghill one more time, all`s right with the world.

That`s why I don`t dismiss George W. Bush as a slow-witted, under-informed, easily-manipulated, and irrelevant puppet in the hands of Dick Cheney, Arial Sharon, and whoever else has the energy and intelligence to conceive and execute the catastrophic policies that are screwing up our world.

George W. Bush enjoys it too much. And he embodies the interests and worldview of too many of Americans.

Call them dingbats, dittoheads, Moral Majority, Middle Finger Americans, mouthbreathers, independents, whatever.

They are Americans whose moral and intellectual horizons go no further than the next tax cut. People who need the polarizing hate of a culture war or genuine military conflict to bring order and meaning to their lives.

People who prefer a government of disengagement and moral abdication because it mirrors the way they run their own lives: an amoral muddle coated with a shiny, false coat of "righteousness", "strength", and "liberty".

People who yearn to be swaddled in the cocoon of myths the Bush administration concocted to invade Iraq and divide this country.

People for whom a useful, ennobling lie counts more than the truth.

People who look for excuses for al Ghraib, instead of for the answers that its crimes scream out for.

Assholes.

I`ve decided it`s time to stop pandering for the asshole vote with carefully calibrated appeals to narrow economic interests, fear, and racism. That`s George W. Bush`s job. He`s welcome to it.

It`s time to talk over their heads and past them -- to the patriots: the people all across the political spectrum who love and care about this country.

Patriots are people who realize that George W. Bush is covering this country with filth and failure, but doesn`t have a plan for cleaning up the mess or doing anything else than covering his own ass.

There seems to be a groundswell of interest in a Kerry/McCain fusion ticket. Not because of McCain`s "values" -- those oh so important litmus tests that the religious/ideological right and lefty progs bleat about.

McCain has a ferocious temper and narrow views. I guess five years in hell didn`t teach him how to appreciate the views of the other fella.

But when he sees something disgusting, he gets...disgusted and does something about it.

We`re not looking for the conservative messiah or liberal nirvana. We`re just looking for four years without Bush to start cleaning up the fiscal, political, and moral mess he made -- and an alternative to the moral bankruptcy of the Bush/neocon wing of the GOP.

A fusion ticket seems to offer a way out of the national political impasse we`re stuck in -- where confrontation and posturing and ass-covering trumps problem-solving and sacrifice.

Maybe even invite Colin Powell to come on board, to redeem himself and his cherished reputation after the mire and futility of the Bush years.

Even if the fusion ticket doesn`t come off at the national level, maybe we can work it out at the grass roots, between liberals and conservatives who care more about the future of this country than about labels.

Don`t ask yourself, what do I want as a liberal or a conservative, Republican or Democrat?

Ask not what your country can do for you...

...you know the rest...

...Patriots.

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at [e-mail].

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U.S. Missile Shield Won`t Work, Scientist Group Says
Thu May 13, 2004 02:10 PM ET

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The multibillion-dollar U.S. ballistic missile shield due to start operating by Sept. 30 appears incapable of shooting down any incoming warheads, an independent scientists` group said on Thursday.

A technical analysis found "no basis for believing the system will have any capability to defend against a real attack," the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a 76-page report titled "Technical Realities."

The Pentagon`s Missile Defense Agency rejected the report, whose authors included Philip Coyle, the Defense Department`s top weapons tester under former President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2001.

"Even the limited defense we are mounting provides a level of protection against an accidental or unauthorized (intercontinental ballistic missile) launch or a limited attack where we currently have no protection," said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman. "It would be irresponsible to not make it available for the defense of our nation and our people."

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, concurred with the report`s findings. The Bush administration should stop buying missile-defense interceptors until they are proven to work through "combat-realistic" operational tests, he said in a statement.

The first U.S. deployment involves 10 interceptor missiles to be stored in silos in Alaska and California. The initial goal is to protect all 50 U.S. states against a limited strike from North Korean missiles that could be tipped with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.

`KILL VEHICLES`

Boeing Co. is assembling the shield, which would use the interceptors to launch "kill vehicles" meant to pulverize targets in the mid-course of their flight paths, outside the Earth`s atmosphere.

Guided by infrared sensors, the vehicles would search the chill of space for the warheads. So far, the interceptors have scored hits five times in eight highly controlled tests.

The report`s authors said demonstrating such a "hit-to-kill" capability was not the primary, or most difficult, missile-defense challenge.

Even unsophisticated "countermeasures" that could be mounted by countries such as North Korea remain an unsolved problem, they said.

For instance, inflatable balloons or other decoys coated with a thin polyester film could be given the same infrared signature as a warhead, the scientists said. The project could also be confused by sealing the warhead in a large balloon so the kill vehicle could not pinpoint its exact location, or tethering several balloons to it.

Overstating the defensive capabilities was irresponsible, said the report by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based group. It cited past Pentagon statements the capability was limited only by the number of interceptors.

"If the president is told that the system could reliably defend against a North Korean ballistic missile attack, he might be willing to accept more risks when making policy and military decisions," the report said.

"I actually worry that it`s worse than useless, that it`s really dangerous," George Lewis, a report co-author who is associate director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told reporters at a briefing.

The General Accounting Office, Congress`s nonpartisan investigative arm, said last month the system`s effectiveness would be "largely unproven" when it becomes operational.

The Pentagon estimates it will need $53 billion in the next five years to develop, field and upgrade a multilayered shield also involving systems based at sea, aboard modified Boeing 747 aircraft and in space.

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Published on Thursday, May 13, 2004 by the Globe and Mail / Canada
Jobs Down, Thumbs Up
American soldiers caught up in the Iraq abuse scandal are collateral damage from a U.S. economy that is losing good jobs
by Naomi Klein


In 1968, the legendary U.S. labor organizer Cesar Chavez went on a 25-day hunger strike. While depriving himself of food, he condemned abusive conditions suffered by farm workers. The slogan of his historic union drive was "Si se puede!" Yes, we can.

Last week, U.S. President George W. Bush went on a four-day bus ride. While stopping for multiple pancake breakfasts, he praised tax cuts and condemned everyone who says American workers need protection in the global economy. His battle cry for laissez-faire economics? "Yes, America can."

The echo was probably intentional. Mr. Bush is so desperate for the Hispanic vote that he has taken to shouting, "Vamos a ganar! We`re going to win!" during stump speeches in Ohio.

The main purpose of the "Yes, America can" bus tour, of course, was to shift the attention of U.S. voters away from the Iraq prison scandal toward safer ground: the recovering job market. According to a U.S. Labor Department Report, 288,000 jobs were created in April. Mr. Bush`s campaign has seized on these numbers to further cast John Kerry as the dour New England pessimist, always droning on with the bad news. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, is the bouncy Texan optimist, always flashing an easy smile and a thumbs-up.

"The President has to make sure that we`re optimistic and confident in order for jobs to be created," he told a carefully screened crowd in Dubuque, Iowa.

Some jobs, however, are more responsive than others to the power of positive presidential thinking. More than 82 per cent of the jobs created in April were in service industries, including restaurants and retail, while the biggest new employers were temp agencies. Over the past year, 272,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost. No wonder the President`s economic report in February floated the idea of reclassifying fast-food restaurants as factories. "When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a `service` or is it combining inputs to `manufacture` a product?" the report asks.

Not all of the job growth in the United States has come from burger-flipping and temping. With more than two million Americans behind bars (one of the ways unemployment stats stay artificially low), the number of prison guards has grown from 270,317 in 2000 to 476,000 in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Watching Mr. Bush give the thumbs-up in the face of so much economic misery put me in mind of a certain widely circulated photograph taken in Iraq. There are Specialist Charles Graner and Private Lynndie England, the happy couple, standing above a pile of tortured Iraqi inmates, grinning and giving the double thumbs-up. Everything is fine, their eyes seem to be saying, just don`t look down.

There`s something else connecting the sorry state of the U.S. job market and the images coming out of Abu Ghraib. The young soldiers taking the fall for the prison-abuse scandal are the McWorkers, prison guards and laid-off factory workers of Mr. Bush`s so-called economic recovery. The résumés of the soldiers facing abuse charges come straight out of the April U.S. Labor Department Report.

There`s Specialist Sabrina Harman, of Lorton, Va., assistant manager of her local Papa John`s Pizza. There`s Specialist Charles Graner, a prison guard back home in Pennsylvania. There`s Sergeant Ivan Frederick, another prison guard, this time from the Buckingham Correctional Center in rural Virginia.

Before he joined what prisoner-rights advocate Van Jones calls "America`s gulag economy," Sgt. Frederick had a decent job at the Bausch & Lomb factory in Mountain Lake, Md. But according to The New York Times, that factory shut down and moved to Mexico, one of the nearly 900,000 jobs that the Economic Policy Institute estimates have been lost since NAFTA, the vast majority in manufacturing.

Free trade has turned the U.S. labor market into an hourglass: plenty of jobs at the bottom, a fair bit at the top, but very little in the middle. At the same time, getting from the bottom to the top has become increasingly difficult, with tuition at state colleges up by more than 50 per cent since 1990.

And that`s where the U.S. military comes in: The army has positioned itself as the bridge across the United States`s growing class chasm: money for tuition in exchange for military service. Call it the NAFTA draft.

It worked for Lynndie England, the most infamous of the Abu Ghraib accused.

She joined the 372 Military Police Company to pay for college, hoping to replace her job at the chicken-processing plant with a career in meteorology. Her colleague Sabrina Harman told The Washington Post, "I knew nothing at all about the military, except that they would pay for college. So I signed up."

The poverty of the soldiers at the center of the prison scandal has been used both as evidence of their innocence, and to compound their guilt. On the one hand, Sergeant First Class Paul Shaffer explains that at Abu Ghraib, "you`re a person who works at McDonald`s one day; the next day you`re standing in front of hundreds of prisoners, and half are saying they`re sick and half are saying they`re hungry." And Gary Myers, the lawyer defending several of the soldiers, asked The New Yorker`s Seymour Hersh, "Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own?"

On the other side, the British Sun tabloid has dubbed Lynndie England the "Trailer trash torturer," while Boris Johnson wrote in The Daily Telegraph that Americans were being shamed by "smirking jezebels from the Appalachians."

The truth is that the poverty of the soldiers involved in prison torture makes them neither more guilty, nor less.

But the more we learn about them, the clearer it becomes that the lack of good jobs and social equality in the United States is precisely what brought them to Iraq in the first place. Despite his attempts to use the economy to distract attention from Iraq, and his efforts to isolate the soldiers as un-American deviants, these are the children George Bush left behind, fleeing dead-end McJobs, abusive prisons, unaffordable education and closed factories.

They are his children in another way, too: It`s in the ubiquitous thumbs-up sign that they flash, seemingly oblivious to the disaster at their feet. This is the quintessential George Bush pose. Convinced that U.S. voters want a positive president, the Bush team has learned to use optimism as an offensive weapon: No matter how devastating the crisis, no matter how many lives have been destroyed, they have insistently given the world the thumbs-up.

Donald Rumsfeld? "Doing a superb job," according to the optimist-in-chief.

The mission in Iraq? "We`re making progress, you bet," Mr. Bush told reporters one year after his disastrous "mission accomplished" speech. And the U.S. job market, which has driven so many into poverty? "Yes, America can!"

We don`t yet know who taught these young soldiers how to torture their prisoners effectively. But we do know who taught them how to stay happy-go-lucky in the face of tremendous suffering; that lesson came straight from the top.

Naomi Klein is the author of `No Logo` and `Fences and Windows`.

© Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.

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Poll: Support For War At New Low
NEW YORK, May 12, 2004

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/12/opinion/polls/main…
Analyse:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/12/politics/main61712…

News of the abuse charges against American soldiers appears to have exacerbated what were already growing American concerns about the situation in Iraq. While most Americans do not think the abuse was widespread, they agree it was unjustified, even though two-thirds say what happened to the Iraqi prisoners was no worse than what Iraqis have done to Americans in this war.

Americans are divided as to whether the blame should go higher up the military chain of command and whether the Pentagon tried to cover up the problem. While they are also divided in their evaluation of Donald Rumsfeld’s performance as Secretary of Defense, most don’t want him to resign or be forced out. But there are continued declines in President George W. Bush’s approval ratings -- on handling Iraq and handling the campaign against terrorism.

This CBS News Poll was conducted beginning Tuesday afternoon, just after reports of the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq, apparently in retaliation for the prisoner abuse.

THE IMPACT ON THE WAR IN IRAQ
Six in ten Americans say the abuse of Iraqi prisoners has created a very serious problem for U.S. progress in Iraq.

HOW SERIOUS A PROBLEM FOR U.S. PROGRESS IN IRAQ IS THE ABUSE OF IRAQI PRISONERS?

Very serious
60%
Somewhat serious
23%
Not serious
14%

That impact is clear on several measures of the public’s evaluations of what is now happening in Iraq, with some dramatic changes in opinion just in the last two weeks.

Just 29 percent -- the lowest figure so far in CBS News Polls -- say the result of the war in Iraq has been worth the cost in lives and money. Almost two-thirds say it has not been worth it.

WAS THE WAR WORTH IT?

Yes
Now
29%
Two Weeks Ago
33%
8/2003
46%

No
Now
64%
Two weeks ago
58%
8/2003
45%

For the first time there is a clear majority who now thinks U.S. troops should turn over control to Iraqis as soon as possible, even if Iraq is not stable. Less than four in ten think U.S. troops should remain in Iraq as long as it takes to make sure Iraq is a stable democracy.

HOW LONG SHOULD U.S. TROOPS STAY IN IRAQ?

As long as it takes for stability
Now
38%
4/2004
46%
12/2003
56%

Turn over to Iraqis as soon as possible
Now
55%
4/2004
46%
12/2003
35%

There is no indication that the situation in Iraq is close to stable now and that the U.S. is in control. Less than a third, the lowest percentage ever, say the U.S. is now in control of events in Iraq.

IS THE U.S. IN CONTROL IN IRAQ?

Yes
Now
31%
10/2003
39%
7/2003
45%

No
Now
57%
10/2003
50%
7/2003
41%

In fact, less than a third even thinks the U.S. is winning the war in Iraq. More than half think neither the U.S. nor the Iraqi resistance is winning.

WHO IS WINNING IN IRAQ?

The U.S.
31%
Iraqi resistance
10%
Neither side
54%

As for the broader battle for the Arab world, the public overwhelmingly thinks that the war in Iraq is making the U.S.’s image in the Arab world worse. Only 6 percent think the war’s result has improved the U.S.’s image.

IS THE WAR MAKING U.S. IMAGE IN ARAB WORLD…?

Better
Now
6%
Two weeks ago
10%
One year ago (4/2003)
34%

Worse
Now
73%
Two weeks ago
71%
One year ago (4/2003)
44%

No difference
Now
14%
Two weeks ago
10%
One year ago (4/2003)
13%

Still, the public remains closely divided on whether or not the U.S. did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq.

IRAQ: DID U.S. DO THE RIGHT THING, OR SHOULD U.S. HAVE STAYED OUT

Right thing
Now
49%
Two weeks ago
47%
12/2003
64%

Should have stayed out
Now
45%
Two weeks ago
46%
12/2003
28%

WHO’S TO BLAME?
Americans are divided on whether the soldiers so far implicated in the charges of abuse of Iraqi prisoners were just acting on their own or were following orders. 37 percent say they were acting on their own, but 46 percent said they were following orders from superiors.

THE SOLDIERS INVOLVED WERE…?
Acting on their own
37%
Following orders from superiors
46%

But two out of three Americans believe the behavior is limited to the few soldiers already implicated.

ABUSE OF IRAQI PRISONERS IS…?
Limited to the few soldiers involved
65%
Widespread among U.S. troops
27%

Americans expect negative things to happen in wartime. 67 percent say that what the U.S. guards did to Iraqi prisoners was no worse than what Iraqis have done to Americans in the war.

However, three in four say they expect better from American soldiers. 13 percent say the treatment of Iraqi prisoners was justified because of the nature of war -- that these things happen to prisoners of war. 77 percent can’t justify this behavior and say that U.S. soldiers should behave better.

TREATMENT OF IRAQI PRISONERS BY U.S. TROOPS WAS…?
Justified
13%
Not justified
77%

A MILITARY COVER-UP?
Just over a quarter of the public thinks senior military officers authorized the abuse of prisoners. But many -- though not a plurality -- still think that senior military officers should be held responsible. 40 percent say they should be held responsible; 46 percent would limit blame to the individual soldiers involved.

SHOULD HIGHER MILITARY OFFICIALS BE HELD RESPONSIBLE?
Yes
40%
No
46%

Opinions are divided as to how senior military officials handled the scandal. 43 percent think officials at the Pentagon tried to cover up the allegations, and 39 percent think they investigated them.

DID THE MILITARY TRY TO COVER UP OR INVESTIGATE?
Cover up
43%
Investigate
39%

And most Americans don’t think the principle reason that military officials have expressed public distress is that the abuses happened. Instead, Americans believe that the military officials are upset because the public found out about the abuses.

MILITARY OFFICIALS ARE MOSTLY UPSET BECAUSE…?
The abuses happened
29%
The public found out
61%

THE ADMINISTRATION’S RESPONSE
The President and his team receive slightly better assessments than the military when it comes to the public’s view of their handling of this situation. 51 percent say the Administration has taken the reports seriously, though 36 percent disagree.

HAS BUSH ADMINISTRATION TAKEN REPORTS SERIOUSLY ENOUGH?
Yes
51%
No
36%

Just over a third think Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should resign or be removed from office because of the scandal. 53 percent say he should remain. Support for Rumsfeld’s removal in this poll, while still less than a majority, is somewhat higher than in polls conducted last week.

SHOULD RUMSFELD RESIGN AS SECRETARY OF DEFENSE?
Yes
37%
No
53%

Overall, Americans are divided on how they evaluate Rumsfeld’s overall performance. Just about the same percentage approve as disapprove of the way he is handling his job as Secretary of Defense.

DONALD RUMSFELD JOB PERFORMANCE
Approve
43%
Disapprove
45%

Republicans and Democrats evaluate Rumsfeld differently. 57 percent of Democrats say Rumsfeld should resign, compared with only 13 percent of Republicans.

THE PRESIDENT
Evaluations of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq continue to slide. 39 percent, the lowest rating in the CBS News Polls, say they approve of the way he is handling the war in Iraq.

BUSH`S HANDLING OF WAR IN IRAQ

Approve
Now
39%
Two weeks ago
41%
12/2003
57%

Disapprove
Now
58%
Two weeks ago
52%
12/2003
36%

His other ratings have also dropped in the last two weeks, especially the evaluation of how he is handling the campaign against terrorism. While that is still his strong point, approval is now 51 percent, down nine points from two weeks ago.

BUSH’S HANDLING OF CAMPAIGN AGAINST TERRORISM

Approve
Now
51%
Two weeks ago
60%
12/2003
70%

Disapprove
Now
39%
Two weeks ago
32%
12/2003
23%

There is continued weakness in the assessment of the President’s handling of the economy -- approval there is down to 34 percent, with 60 percent disapproving. 44 percent approve of the way the President is handling his job overall. Both of those percentages are lower than in previous polls as well.

THE PRESIDENT’S APPROVAL RATINGS

Overall
Approve
44%
Disapprove
49%

Handling economy
Approve
34%
Disapprove
60%

THE NEWS MEDIA: SHOULD THEY RELEASE THE PICTURES?
Nearly eight in ten Americans say they are following the story of abuse of Iraqi prisoners closely (with 42 percent following it very closely), but it appears many of them may wish the story had never been broadcast or reported.

A bare majority says the news media should have released the photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, but 43 percent say they should not have. And when it comes to releasing the remaining pictures, just 37 percent say that should be done. 57 percent would rather the rest of the pictures never be released.

SHOULD THE MEDIA HAVE RELEASED THE ABUSE PHOTOS?
Yes
51%
No
43%

SHOULD THE MEDIA RELEASE THE REMAINING PICTURES?
Yes
37%
No
57%

There are partisan differences when it comes to opinions about the release of the photos (Republicans are more likely to oppose their release); there are also gender differences. Women are more likely than men to oppose the release of more photographs.

Nearly half the public think the news media has spent too much tine covering the story -- just about as many say the coverage has been about right or has been too little.

THE PRISONER ABUSE STORY: THE NEWS MEDIA HAS SPENT…
Too much time covering
49%
Too little time covering
6%
Right amount of time
41%


This poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 448 adults interviewed by telephone May 11, 2004. The error due to sampling could be plus or minus five percentage points for results based on the entire sample.

For detailed information on how CBS News conducts public opinion surveys, click here.





©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Berg Died for Bush, Rumsfeld `Sins` - Father
Thu May 13, 2004 03:05 PM ET

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The father of Nick Berg, the American beheaded in Iraq, directly blamed President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday for his son`s death.

"My son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. This administration did this," Berg said in an interview with radio station KYW-AM.

In the interview from outside his home in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a seething Michael Berg also said his 26-year-old son, a civilian contractor, probably would have felt positive, even about his executioners, until the last minute.

"I am sure that he only saw the good in his captors until the last second of his life," Berg said. "They did not know what they were doing. They killed their best friend."

Two days after the publication of a video showing the execution of his son by five masked men, Berg attacked the Bush administration for its invasion of Iraq and its sponsorship of the Patriot Act, which gives sweeping powers of surveillance to the federal government.

Berg described the Patriot Act as a "coup d`etat." He added: "It`s not the same America I grew up in."

The criticism came amid finger-pointing between Berg`s family, U.S. military officials and Iraqi police over the young businessman`s imprisonment before his execution.

Michael Berg rejected U.S. government claims that his son had never been held by American authorities in Iraq. The Iraqi police chief in the city of Mosul has also contradicted statements by the U.S.-led coalition concerning the younger Berg`s detention.

`FBI CAME TO MY HOUSE`

"I have a written statement from the State Department in Baghdad ... saying that my son was being held by the military," Berg said. "I can also assure you that the FBI came to my house on March 31 and told me that the FBI had him in Mosul in an Iraqi prison."

Dan Senor, spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, said this week that Nick Berg was arrested in Mosul by Iraqi police on March 24 and released on April 6.

Senor said the FBI visited Berg three times during his detention by Iraqi police and determined that he was not involved in criminal or terrorist activities.

Brig.-Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said American military police had seen Berg during his detention to make sure he was being fed and treated properly.

Berg returned to Baghdad from Mosul in April and went missing on April 9, during a chaotic period when dozens of foreigners were snatched by guerrillas west of the capital.

His body was discovered by a road near Baghdad on Saturday. The video of his decapitation was posted on the Internet on Tuesday.

Berg had been in Baghdad from late December to Feb. 1 and returned to Iraq in March. He did not find work and planned to return home at the end of March, according to his parents.

Berg`s communications to his parents stopped on March 24 and he told them later he was jailed by Iraqi officials after being picked up at a checkpoint in Mosul.

On April 5, the Bergs filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, naming Rumsfeld and alleging their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military in Iraq. The next day, he was released. (additional reporting by Maher al-Thanoon)

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George Bush`s God Is Not God

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, South Dakota

In his "war on terrorism," George W. Bush has openly made claim to be doing God`s work in the world. To be sure, the elimination of religion-based political violence (i.e., most violence) in the world would be a blessing hailed by all people on a global basis. It is, however, an act of faith to believe that the Bush administration`s inadequate and failed "war on terrorism" has actually made the world safer from terrorism (when quite the opposite is the more accurate conclusion).

This situation exists largely because of the utter failure of America`s conservative citizenry to comprehend the theological coercion at the core of Bush`s religiosity.

At no time during his war on terrorism has George W. Bush ever claimed to be on God`s side. Had he done so, Bush would be maintaining a respectful relationship with God, a relationship in which the human side makes effort to be on God`s side. After all, we are talking about God here.

Instead, George claims that God is on His side, watching over him, the American people and their worldly interests. That might be the "good news" truth for George and his compassionately conservative followers, but to make such claims on behalf of God has always required more unmitigated gall than honesty or an interest in the truth.

If George were doing God`s work in the world, the world would be quickly able to recognize that fact in George`s ideas, words and actions. One can think and talk about God all one wants, of course, without changing a thing in the world. One cannot, however, do the "actionable" work of God in the world without others taking notice.

The world has been taking notice for three years and the world has yet to see any of God`s work. The world has, instead, seen the work of George W. Bush and his "neo"-conservative, CEO administration. The world has instead seen a global display of self-righteousness, belligerence, fabrication, coercion, unprovoked war and now, in Abu Ghraib, perversion and depravity to boot.

Insofar as George`s work has met with the approval of his all-seeing, all-knowing Roman God, it is little wonder that George has lost the support of the entire educated world outside of the conservative American "bubble" (Pierre Tristam, Waiting for the Bubble`s Burst to Free America`s State of Mind, www.news-journalonline.com, May 5, 2004), a bubble comprised of the same ingredients as the Enron "bubble.

In other words, America`s downward religious spiral into despotic Roman imperialism has less and less to do with George W. Bush and the religious cult inhabiting his White House. It has more and more to do with the American people and their capitalized mindset. America`s failure on the global stage now has more to do with a failed American citizenry, a citizenry admittedly knowing very little about the human rights basis of nascent Christianity and Jefferson`s Democracy, a citizenry that only knows what it takes to survive the here and now of a shallow, greed-driven crony capitalism, a citizenry that has been coerced into unprovoked religious violence on the global stage.

In doing so, conservative religious Americans have crossed several moral lines to reach the "Point of No Return" (Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, April 28, 2004). The very thought of a return to secular human ground threatens a complete loss of religious self-identity and self-assuredness, and the self-righteousness and belligerence that have led to the current cultural watershed.

Seeing with Liberty`s light, after having doused her flames with lies and fabrications, would require something of a spiritual rebirth. It would require a change in how one is seeing the world as opposed to what one is "knowing" about the world as a "born again" Old Testament "Christian" (a notion which is an affront to Jesus and an oxymoron in Jefferson`s eyes).

In supporting Bush`s "higher" protocol, conservative Americans have loyally left themselves no exit plan, no choice but to be as children in the eyes of George`s Roman God. That coerced revisitation of Old Testament imperial religion may be the righteous thing to do in the "bubble" of Bush World, but it has literally nothing to do with citizenship in a Democracy birthed from natural philosophy and nascent (before Rome) Christian ethics.

Jimmy Breslin "can`t believe that Bush is so dumb that he thinks he actually talks to God." George Bush, in turn, must believe that Jimmy Breslin is dumb for not being adequately stupid and gullible in the face of Bush`s God (A Frank Talk With God, Newsday, April 25, 2004).

For George`s loyal conservative cult, it is a simple matter of being as dumb as George believes them to be and requires them to be. Bush is, after all, attempting to run a democracy on faith instead of human rights-based principles. That alone requires an enormous leap of faith. Faith in human nature is essential to human progress. Faith in a bankrupt status quo is the substance of all bubbles, and why they always burst.

For George`s dismayed detractors, it is an awkward matter of cultural deja vu, abiding a mindless, meaningless, lawless, Godless world under King George and Tory capitalism. For his contributions to taking America full circle into the despotic religious world from whence democracy emerged two centuries ago, George W. Bush simply does not deserve to have his religious fantasies and apocalyptic dreams reach fulfillment.

If Bush`s dreams do reach apocalyptic fulfillment, we will (at the least) all know whom and what to blame for political violence in the world. That knowledge of causation, generally held by the people, is essential to social medicine and efficacious therapeutic intervention. Even in losing, the people win.

If Bush`s dreams do not reach fulfillment and apocalypse, it will only be because the people will have seen with the light of human rights that shines through Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin - all the way from Galilee. In making this so, the people can`t lose.

It is an honest human blessing to be able to see where things are going and simply choose not to go there. This is a blessing from God, people. Consider how much bloodshed and death could be avoided in the world if the people would only think for themselves.

It is the only path to miracles on earth. It is the only path to Jefferson`s God. --posted 05.10.04

Dr. Gerry Lower lives in the shadow of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. His book, "Jefferson`s Eyes," can be explored at www.jeffersonseyes.com. It provides a new paradigm for comprehending America history. No longer can we see our history as a fiscal success story. We must see our history as a departure from original values. Dr. Lower can be reached at [e-mail].

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Originally appeared on News-Journal Online at
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/…
Waiting for the bubble`s burst to free America`s state of mind

By PIERRE TRISTAM
ESSAYS

Last update: 04 May 2004

Following up on an essay he`d written 10 years earlier called "Tides in American History," the historian Arthur Schlesinger argued in 1949 that conservative and liberal periods alternate within 30-year intervals, give or take a few years.

He predicted that the conservative period that began with the accession of a Republican Congress in 1947 would end around 1962, and that a return to conservatism would happen around 1978. He was pretty close to the mark on both counts.

The historian`s more famous son, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., revived the thesis in a New Yorker essay in 1992, when liberals couldn`t believe their luck that the Reagan-Bush era, which for a time looked like those conservative Chinese dynasties that lasted centuries, ended after 12 years.

"To justify bringing the hypothesis up now," Schlesinger wrote, "I can say that in the days when the Democrats were said to be doomed by the Republican lock on the Presidency by the manipulation of race, by the hatred of politics, by the culture of contentment, I kept invoking the family thesis that the tide would turn in the nineteen-nineties."

Junior was cheating a bit: Bill Clinton had been elected two weeks before he published the New Yorker piece, so it was more hindsight than prediction. And this time the thesis didn`t hold. Clinton only stalled the Reagan tide.

He didn`t turn it back. Schlesinger may argue that George W. Bush defied the family thesis only by cheating his way to a victory in 2000. But Bush didn`t win alone.

If in 1956 Schlesinger could write that "in a sense all of America is liberalism," an observer today could justifiably say that in a sense all of America is conservatism.

Bush is only its crude percolate. The Supreme Court that finally elected him has a conservative wing and a very conservative wing. Its last liberal, Harry Blackmun, retired 10 years ago.

The Reagan-Bush-Bush appointments have remade the federal judiciary into a synod of grand inquisitors and hanging judges. (The 9th Circuit heretics in San Francisco are the exception that prove the rule.) Except for a two-week interval in 2001 and an 18-month stretch that ended in November 2002, Congress has been all Republican for 10 years.

Monopolies breed contempt: Congress has been less a balancing political force than an incubator of ideological extremes where even Republican moderates are only as tolerated, and as resented, as the spotted owl is tolerated and resented by Northwestern loggers.

Then there`s the media, segments of which seem liberal only the way some Supreme Court justices seem liberal when compared to their reactionary brethren. The liberalism is relative, not commanding.

The major television networks and the national newspapers have so confused credibility with middle-of-the-road deference to authority that they are more apologists of power than the challengers you`d expect liberal media to be with a conservative establishment.

The election of President Bush was facilitated not by the Supreme Court, whose makeup ordained it to spin a legal yarn on behalf of its favored son (a liberal court would have done the same had the roles been reversed).

It was facilitated by a national press corps that let Candidate Bush coast on a bubble of promises as exuberantly deceptive as the stock bubble of the late 90s. When the stock bubble burst, the economy tanked, exposing the corporate corruption bubbles are made of.

When the Bush bubble burst -- those bogus promises of job creation and balanced budgets, of compassion at home and humility abroad -- the media mended the president`s fortune in the dog-wagging splint of war and patriotic gore. The charade wouldn`t have been so convincing had there been such a thing as a liberal media. All of America is indeed conservatism.

Maybe it isn`t that Schlesinger got the cycle wrong, but that the fluid meaning of conservatism and liberalism has made the cycle irrelevant.

Emerson once defined the difference between liberals and conservatives as the difference between the party of hope and the party of memory. These days liberals are just as likely to pine for a Jeffersonian past as conservatives are likely to pine for a Hamiltonian past, although Jefferson was a small government, anti-tax zealot and Hamilton was a central government monarchist in democratic drag.

Hope today is everyone`s rhetorical currency. But conservatives act from the premise that they know all there is to know and are willing to impose their brand of hope by force.

Skepticism, doubt, restraint: Those concepts once defined traditional conservatism, but they have no place in the dogmatic and popular certainties of neoconservatism. Opportunistic strategy -- what`s too politely and inaccurately referred to as "ideology" -- has won out.

Clobbered, co-opted, mired in self-doubt, the liberal alternative is a void.

The Schlesinger cycle may kick-in again in November. But a Democratic president alone won`t change a one-party state of mind.

Tristam is a News-Journal

editorial writer. Reach him

at [e-mail].


© 2003 News-Journal Corporation. ® www.news-journalonline.com. Do not republish or distribute without permission.

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May 14, 2004
Polls Show Bush`s Job-Approval Ratings Sinking
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, May 13 - As President Bush was traveling through the Midwest on his exuberant bus tour last week, his campaign aides still sounded confident that the revelations of how Iraqi prisoners were abused would do far more harm to the United States` image abroad than to the president`s standing at home.

But only a week later, at the very moment Mr. Bush`s aides had hoped to be basking in the glow of improving economic numbers, months of setbacks in Iraq are clearly taking their toll.

Mr. Bush`s job-approval numbers have sunk to all-time lows, with a majority of Americans now saying, for the first time, that the invasion of Iraq was not worth the mounting cost. At the same time, they give the president far higher marks for his execution of the battle against terrorists, even though he has argued that they are all part of one war.

Congress, including prominent conservatives, has grown so restive about the wisdom of Mr. Bush`s strategy that on Thursday the deputy secretary of defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz, had to retreat from a Senate hearing when members of both parties demanded far more specifics than he could provide about plans for spending the $25 billion the president is seeking to pursue the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And for the first time, even some of the most loyal administration aides, who have regularly defended every twist in the Iraq strategy, are conceding that the president and his top advisers are stuck in what one of them called "the perpetual debate" about whether to change strategy or soldier on. Mr. Bush`s usually sunny campaign advisers make no effort to hide the depth of the problem.

"Look, obviously events and the coverage and what`s reported are going to have an effect on how people see the direction of the country," said Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Bush-Cheney `04. "In the last two months or three months, there hasn`t been a wealth of positive news. It was bound to have an effect, and we expected that."

But Mr. Dowd said that changing Mr. Bush`s tone on the campaign trail was not an option. So with some modifications, Mr. Bush is following the script he and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, drafted as the prisoner scandal emerged: He repeats his disgust with the abuses, then turns the subject immediately back to his broader goals in the war on terrorism, merging it with the action in Iraq. He did so again on Thursday in a West Virginia school gymnasium.

"We`re being tested," Mr. Bush said. "People are testing our mettle. And I will not yield to the whims of the few."

After vigorous applause, he added, "I won`t yield because I believe so strongly in what we`re doing, and I have faith in the power of freedom to spread its wings in parts of the world that desperately need freedom."

Several of Mr. Bush`s advisers have said in recent weeks that they believe the bigger mistake for the president would be to show any weakness, or to yield even to those in his own party who may not want to cut and run, but may be interested in moving quickly to the exits after June 30.

And so far, he is under relatively little pressure from his Democratic opponent in the presidential race, Senator John Kerry, to make a major course correction. Mr. Kerry called months ago for greater United Nations participation; for the last few months, Mr. Bush has done the same. And while Mr. Kerry harshly criticized the president on the prison scandal on Wednesday, he has said that a withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous, and on Thursday he even endorsed, without qualification, Mr. Bush`s request for the $25 billion in additional financing.

"The situation in Iraq has deteriorated far beyond what the administration anticipated," Mr. Kerry said in a statement meant to pre-empt any questions about whether he would hedge his support for the additional money, as he did on a larger request last year. "This money is urgently needed, and it is completely focused on the needs of our troops. We must give our troops the equipment and support to carry out their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Mr. Bush`s advisers say they have been surprised that their own candidate`s decline in the polls has not resulted in an equivalent boost for Mr. Kerry. But several members of Mr. Bush`s foreign policy team noted Mr. Kerry`s new line of attack on Wednesday, when he said that Mr. Bush`s aides "dismiss the Geneva Conventions, starting in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, so that the status of prisoners both legal and moral becomes ambiguous at best."

Some Republicans close to Mr. Bush`s campaign are concerned that Mr. Kerry`s comments are the beginning of a new effort to fuel the notion that Mr. Bush`s take-no-prisoners attitude created the conditions that allowed prisoner abuses to flourish.

"No one in the White House knows if that argument will stick," said one conservative who met with Mr. Bush`s aides this week. "Clearly, it worries them. And it should."

Asked about the state of the presidential race on Thursday as he flew back to Washington from Little Rock, Ark., Mr. Kerry was upbeat. Saying there was much work yet to be done, he added, "I`d rather be where we are, growing, than where they are."

The polls out this week found Mr. Bush, by some measures, at the lowest point of his presidency. Only 46 percent of Americans told the Gallup Poll they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling his job, and a majority, 51 percent, said they disapproved. Other polls had similar results. A poll by the Pew Research Center found that 44 percent of Americans approved of the president`s handling of his job and 48 percent disapproved.

Those numbers alarm many of Mr. Bush`s supporters, but Mr. Dowd said: "I always counsel people when we are ahead and behind that since this country is very divided, this thing is always going to be played by the 45-yard lines. And we are still in that place."

Perhaps most alarming for Mr. Bush is the public`s assessment that things in the United States are not going particularly well, with only 33 percent of the respondents in the Pew poll saying they were satisfied with the way things were going in the country and 61 percent saying they were dissatisfied.

All this comes at a time when the public`s support for the war in Iraq is rapidly fading. For the first time since the war began, a majority of respondents in the Gallup poll, 54 percent, said it was not worth going to war in Iraq; 44 percent said it was worth it.

Only 41 percent said they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling the situation in Iraq, while nearly 6 in 10, or 58 percent, said they disapproved.

Still, despite the failure to find unconventional weapons and the failure to anticipate the rising insurgency, a majority said it was not a mistake to send troops to Iraq in the first place, a critical argument in Mr. Bush`s stump speech.

The polls were taken before the beheading of Nicholas E. Berg was made public. The Gallup poll of 1,003 adults was conducted May 7-9; the Pew, of 1,800 adults, was conducted May 3-9. Each poll was conducted nationwide by telephone and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 14, 2004
Guard Left Troubled Life for Duty in Iraq
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER and JAMES DAO

UNIONTOWN, Pa., May 13 — By late 2001, Charles A. Graner Jr.`s life was on a steady downward spiral. His ex-wife and two children had left after a bitter divorce. He had pleaded guilty to stalking and beating his ex-wife. He had been fired from his job as a state prison guard and was having trouble paying the smallest of bills.

Then his life took a fateful turn: he joined the Army Reserve. By fall 2003, he was guarding inmates in a Baghdad prison, Abu Ghraib.

Now, Specialist Graner, 35, is emerging as a central figure in the abuse scandal swirling around Abu Ghraib. To his fellow soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company, he was a voice of strength and experience, having served as a marine during Operation Desert Storm and worked as a corrections officer at one of the toughest, most secure prisons in Pennsylvania.

But to Iraqi detainees, he was among the most feared and loathed of the American guards, accused of routinely beating, intimidating and humiliating them, military investigators have said. A photograph showing him flashing a muscular thumbs-up beside a pyramid of hooded, naked Iraqis has become one of the iconic images of the abuse.

His lawyer, Guy Womack, said Specialist Graner was only following orders in Iraq. His friends say the accusations are out of character, adding that he is funny, articulate, hard-working and a devoted father whose life was unremarkable before his emotionally wrenching divorce.

"Would I trust him to baby-sit my child?" asked Diane DeMarco, a Pennsylvania corrections officer and union official who has known Specialist Graner since 1996. "Yes."

But documents portray a more ominous, hot-tempered side to the man. His former wife, who has remarried, accused him of threatening her with a gun, banging her head against the floor and sneaking into her house to secretly videotape her.

Specialist Graner also worked at one of Pennsylvania`s most notorious maximum security prisons, State Correctional Institution Greene, where dozens of corrections officers were accused of harassing, humiliating and beating inmates in the 1990`s. Though Specialist Graner was not involved in that scandal, he was accused in 1999 of beating a handcuffed inmate. That suit was later dismissed.

Which image is the truer one will be much debated in the coming months. But some officials are already questioning how Specialist Graner, given his record, could have assumed a supervisory role at a tinderbox like Abu Ghraib.

"This guy is in one of the most notorious prisons in the world?" Representative John P. Murtha, a Democrat and former marine from Pennsylvania, said last week. "Outrageous. The damage that they did was irreparable."

Specialist Graner was born in the Pittsburgh suburb of Whitehall, the son of an airline mechanic. He graduated in 1986 from Baldwin High School, where he was a member of the science club, math league and student council.

He attended college briefly but quit to join the Marine Corps in 1988. In June 1990, he married Staci M. Dean in Farmington, Pa. She was already pregnant with the couple`s daughter, Brittni, who was born the following January. Their son, Dean Charles, was born two years later.

The couple settled in Uniontown, a once-bustling coal town of 12,500 residents. After he was discharged from the Marines as a lance corporal, Specialist Graner took a guard job in the Fayette County jail.

In 1996, he took a job at State Correctional Institution Greene, a new maximum-security prison near West Virginia that housed some of the most hardened criminals in Pennsylvania. Within a year, the state had investigated accusations that guards at the prison routinely beat handcuffed inmates, used crude racial slurs and falsified reports of inmate misconduct.

Specialist Graner, who worked the overnight shift, was not implicated in the investigation. But in 1999, he was sued in federal court by a Greene inmate who accused Specialist Graner of beating him on at least two occasions.

The lawsuit, filed by Horatio Nimley, who was serving a five-year sentence for burglary, claimed that Specialist Graner and three other guards had slipped a razor blade into his potatoes in June 1998 and then beat him when he complained about not being allowed to see a nurse.

Specialist Graner and three other guards "picked me up and slammed me to the floor head first and then started hitting me in the (my) face and head with their closed fists, giving me black eyes, bloody nose and worsening the razor injury I was already suffering in my mouth," Mr. Nimley wrote.

Officials at the prison and fellow guards including Ms. DeMarco, the union official, dismiss such accusations as nonsense, and point out that prisoners routinely file lawsuits claiming mistreatment.

A federal magistrate in Pittsburgh, however, found that the complaint "has a reasonable opportunity to prevail on the merits." But Mr. Nimley disappeared after his release from Greene in 2000, so a judge dismissed the complaint. Mr. Nimley is now serving time for burglary in Montgomery County jail outside Philadelphia.

In 1997, the Graners` marriage began to unravel after he started to believe that his wife was involved with another man, according to his divorce papers. The couple divorced in 2000. His former wife declined to comment for this article.

In court applications for a protection order, Staci Graner portrayed her husband as angry and violent. After he moved out of the house, according to the documents, he secretly installed a video camera, apparently trying to catch her with a lover. A judge issued three orders of protection against Specialist Graner, in 1997, 1998 and 2001.

The couple tried to reconcile, friends and documents said. But in March 2001, in an altercation that led to his arrest and guilty plea for harassment, Specialist Graner admitted that he "did pull the victim around by her hair and banged her head on the floor" after she told him she wanted to end their relationship, according to a court document.

Phyllis A. Jin, a lawyer who represented Specialist Graner in divorce and custody hearings, said he had always displayed a steady, calm demeanor and an intense devotion to his children.

"Despite what may have happened between him and his wife, those kids were his focal point," Ms. Jin said in an interview. "I did not see him as a person who, as a way to resolve something, would look to violence."

At the same time his marriage was collapsing, Specialist Graner received three written reprimands and three suspensions from prison officials for repeated tardiness and for taking too much unscheduled time off, documents show.

In July 2000, he was fired after refusing to work a mandatory overtime shift that would have forced him to miss a weekly custody exchange of his children. Two years later, an arbitrator ruled that the prison had acted unjustly and ordered Specialist Graner reinstated with back pay.

But while he was without work, Specialist Graner struggled to make ends meet, working as a carpenter, as a security guard and at a Sony plant. When he was fined $116.50 for harassing his former wife, a judge put him on an installment plan to pay it off.

Elders at the couple`s church said in a letter that he had stopped providing financial support for his family in 2001 and 2002.

Sometime before early 2002, Specialist Graner joined the Army Reserve. Friends say he may have been motivated partly by patriotism as well as by his need for money.

Last November, said Mr. Womack, the lawyer, Specialist Graner won a commendation from the Army for his work as a military police officer in Iraq. But he has also been accused by other soldiers of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, including punching a naked detainee so hard in the temple that the prisoner passed out.

"I would doubt he did that," Mr. Womack said. "I don`t think he`s that kind of guy."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 14, 2004
France: U.S. Must Accept End of Occupation
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:15 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- The United States must accept that its occupation of Iraq will end when it transfers power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, even though U.S. troops will lead the force that stays in the country, the French foreign minister said.

Michel Barnier said the Bush administration needs to understand that there must be ``a real break`` and that the caretaker Iraqi government must be consulted about the movements and operational use of the multinational force.

Barnier spoke Thursday at a news conference after a working dinner with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan which focused on efforts by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to put together an acceptable transitional government to assume sovereignty from the U.S.-led coalition.

He heads to Washington Friday for a meeting of foreign ministers of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations, where Iraq will also lead the agenda.

France was a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq, and Barnier ruled out sending any French troops to be part of the multilateral force. But he said France will work ``in a constructive spirit`` on a new U.N. resolution dealing with the transfer of sovereignty, and he stressed that France and America ``have always been friends and allies.``

The U.N. Security Council has been holding informal discussions on the elements that need to be in a new resolution. No draft is expected until after Brahimi returns from Baghdad and makes his final recommendations on the makeup of a caretaker government.

``We have to make sure that this government has all the levers of sovereignty and control,`` Barnier said. ``What we need is for the Americans and the occupation forces to understand and accept this real break on July 1 -- and the break will be confirmed with the elections in January.``

``The Iraqi government has to be in a position to manage its affairs, to handle the economy, the justice, manage its natural resources, manage the internal security forces -- at least the law enforcement officials. And also, it has to have a say in the use of the multilateral force that will be in Iraq from July until January,`` he said.

Barnier, making his first trip to the United States as foreign minister, said ``the most sensitive issue`` in the discussions on a new resolution is the relationship between the interim government and the multinational force.

After elections in January, when a ``fully legitimate government`` will be elected, he said, ``it will be that government`s duty to say whether the multilateral force should stay on or not.``

But Barnier stressed that the period between July and January was a ``blurred period`` that the Security Council would have to discuss in depth.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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May 14, 2004
The Wrong Direction

Watching President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld this week, it was hard to avoid the sinking feeling that they had already moved on from the Abu Ghraib prison mess and were back to their well-established practice of ignoring all bad news and marching blindly ahead as if nothing unusual had happened. That was the impression that emerged from Mr. Bush`s disconnected performance on Monday, when he viewed photos and video stills of the atrocious treatment of prisoners by soldiers under his and Mr. Rumsfeld`s command, and then announced that the defense secretary was doing a "superb job." It was stronger than ever yesterday, during Mr. Rumsfeld`s road trip to Iraq, where he drew a curious parallel between himself and Ulysses S. Grant and announced his approach to the prison scandal: "I`ve stopped reading newspapers."

Mr. Rumsfeld told the soldiers that they had broad public support at home despite the Abu Ghraib scandal. That is obviously true. It is also beside the point. The proper way for Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld to show support for the troops is not to use them as a screen from the heat over the mismanagement of the military prisons. It is to fix the problem, now. The solution is real changes, not cosmetic ones like yesterday`s announcement that Abu Ghraib`s inmates would be moved within the prison grounds to new temporary quarters, which have been dubbed Camp Redemption.

Each passing day has made it more clear that the routine treatment of prisoners in military prisons violates international law, the Geneva Conventions and American values of due process and humane behavior. This is a terrible burden for the fine men and women serving in Iraq to bear, as they live their lives among an ever more hostile populace. Rather than assuring his uniformed audience — and the world — that the administration is moving heaven and earth to wipe out the rottenness within the prison system, the defense secretary simply urged the soldiers to ignore the politics back home.

There are things Mr. Bush can do quickly to demonstrate the American commitment to the decent treatment of Iraqi prisoners without jeopardizing the fairness of the coming trials of the soldiers charged with inexcusable actions at Abu Ghraib. The first is to drop the Camp Redemption foolishness, remove the prisoners from Abu Ghraib and raze the entire compound, a symbol of Saddam Hussein`s reign of terror that has become a symbol of American brutality. Beyond that, the president should take these steps:

¶Order Mr. Rumsfeld to get military intelligence personnel out of the business of overseeing the detention and interrogation of Iraqi prisoners; an overwhelming majority of the prisoners have no intelligence value.

¶Ban private contractors from American military prisons.

¶Take all of the available trained military prison guards and send them to Iraq to relieve the exhausted troops who are doing work for which they were never prepared.

¶Order Mr. Rumsfeld to immediately issue new regulations that not only say that prisoners and detainees must be treated according to the letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions, but also ban, one by one, the harsh practices inflicted on prisoners.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld should also stop trying to dump the blame on the shoulders of America`s enlisted men and women. The entire chain of command in Iraq must be part of the investigation. That includes Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq who authorized the use of dogs during interrogations. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who may have helped create the conditions that led to the outrages at Abu Ghraib, should be replaced as the head of the military prisons in Iraq.

Finally, Mr. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress should stop trying to evade responsibility by accusing those who want to ask tough questions of being disloyal to the troops and the war effort.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 14, 2004
Nicholas Berg`s Death

It`s easy to say he should not have been in Iraq, but Nicholas Berg was a type familiar to all danger zones: an adventurous and naïve young man who was perhaps keen to do a bit of business, but keener yet to test himself; old enough to understand the danger, but young enough to defy it. It is impossible not to feel grief, and horror, at his terrible end.

The claim of this young American`s murderers that they were retaliating for the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is a cruel ruse. They killed him out of the same madness that drove their comrades in Al Qaeda to slaughter thousands on Sept. 11, 2001. But this manipulative attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the gruesome execution of Mr. Berg and the torture of Iraqi prisoners is now being mimicked by some hard-core supporters of the American war in Iraq. They are cynically trying to use the images of Mr. Berg to wipe away the images of Abu Ghraib, turning the abhorrence for the murderers into an excuse for demonizing Arabs and Muslims, or for sanctioning their torture.

Mr. Berg`s parents have legitimate questions for the United States government about how he came to be in Iraqi police custody immediately before his kidnapping, what happened to him there and what knowledge American officials had about his situation. The occupation authority needs to stop passing off those questions to the Iraqi police force, which does not exist other than as an agent of American power. The Berg family deserves answers so they can grieve for their son`s death in peace.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 14, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Crude Shock
By PAUL KRUGMAN

So far, the current world oil crunch doesn`t look at all like the crises of 1973 or 1979. That`s why it`s so scary.

The oil crises of the 1970`s began with big supply disruptions: the Arab oil embargo after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war and the 1979 Iranian revolution. This time, despite the chaos in Iraq, nothing comparable has happened — yet. Nonetheless, because of rising demand that is led by soaring Chinese consumption, the world oil market is already stretched tight as a drum, and crude oil prices are $12 a barrel higher than they were a year ago. What if something really does go wrong?

Let me put it a bit differently: the last time oil prices were this high, on the eve of the 1991 gulf war, there was a lot of spare capacity in the world, so there was room to cope with a major supply disruption if it happened. This time there isn`t.

The International Energy Agency estimates the world`s spare oil production capacity at about 2.5 million barrels per day, almost all of it in the Persian Gulf region. It also predicts that global oil demand in 2004 will be, on average, 2 million barrels per day higher than in 2003. Now imagine what will happen if there are more successful insurgent attacks on Iraqi pipelines, or, perish the thought, instability in Saudi Arabia. In fact, even without a supply disruption, it`s hard to see where the oil will come from to meet the growing demand.

But wait: basic economics says that markets deal handily with excesses of demand over supply. Prices rise, producers have an incentive to produce more while consumers have an incentive to consume less, and the market comes back into balance. Won`t that happen with oil?

Yes, it will. The question is how long it will take, and how high prices will go in the meantime.

To see the problem, think about gasoline. Sustained high gasoline prices lead to more fuel-efficient cars: by 1990 the average American vehicle got 40 percent more miles per gallon than in 1973. But replacing old cars with new takes years. In their initial response to a shortfall in the gasoline supply, people must save gas by driving less, something they do only in the face of very, very high prices. So very, very high prices are what we`ll get.

Increasing production capacity takes even longer than replacing old cars. Also, major new discoveries of oil have become increasingly rare (although in my last column on the subject, I forgot about two large fields in Kazakhstan, one discovered in 1979, the second in 2000).

Petroleum engineers continue to squeeze more oil out of known fields, but a repeat of the post-1973 experience, in which there was a big increase in non-OPEC production, seems unlikely.

So oil prices will stay high, and may go higher even in the absence of more bad news from the Middle East. And with more bad news, we`ll be looking at a real crisis — one that could do a lot of economic damage. Each $10 per barrel increase in crude prices is like a $70 billion tax increase on American consumers, levied through inflation. The spurt in producer prices last month was a taste of what will happen if prices stay high. By the way, after the 1979 Iranian revolution world prices went to about $60 per barrel in today`s prices.

Could an oil shock actually lead to 1970`s-style stagflation — a combination of inflation and rising unemployment? Well, there are several comfort factors, reasons we`re less vulnerable now than a generation ago. Despite the rise of the S.U.V., the U.S. consumes only about half as much oil per dollar of real G.D.P. as it did in 1973. Also, in the 1970`s the economy was already primed for inflation: given the prevalence of cost-of-living adjustments in labor contracts and the experience of past inflation, oil price increases rapidly fed into a wage-price spiral. That`s less likely to happen today.

Still, if there is a major supply disruption, the world will have to get by with less oil, and the only way that can happen in the short run is if there is a world economic slowdown. An oil-driven recession does not look at all far-fetched.

It is, all in all, an awkward time to be pursuing a foreign policy that promises a radical transformation of the Middle East — let alone to be botching the job so completely.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Bad Signs For Bush In History, Numbers
Approval Rating Is Lowest of His Term

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 14, 2004; Page A01

Six months before the November election, President Bush has slipped into a politically fragile position that has put his reelection at risk, with the public clearly disaffected by his handling of the two biggest issues facing the country: Iraq and the economy.

Bush continues to run a close race against Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in national polls, and his reelection committee has spent prodigiously to put Kerry on the defensive in the opening phase of the campaign, with some success. But other indicators -- presidential approval being the most significant -- suggest Bush is weaker now than at any point in his presidency.

Bush`s approval rating in the Gallup poll fell to 46 percent this week -- the lowest in his presidency by that organization`s measures. Fifty-one percent said they disapprove -- the first time in his presidency that a bare majority registered disapproval of the way Bush is doing his job. A Pew Research Center survey released Wednesday pegged Bush`s approval at 44 percent, with 48 percent disapproving.

In contrast, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who were reelected easily, had approval ratings in the mid-50s at this point in their reelection campaigns and remained at or above those levels into November. But Bush`s father, George H.W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter had fallen to about 40 percent in their approval ratings at this point in their races and, after continuing to fall even further, lost their reelection bids.

Given the volatility of events, the amount of time before Election Day and hurdles Kerry must overcome, Bush has plenty of time to recover. His advisers said that they recognize the weakness in the president`s current standing but that he is far more resilient politically than his detractors suggest. They also argue that in this climate, perceptions of Kerry will be just as important as perceptions of the incumbent, and they have poured tens of millions of dollars into television ads attacking Kerry as a politician lacking clear convictions.

Frank Newport of the Gallup Organization pointed out that, in Gallup`s surveys, no president since World War II has won reelection after falling below 50 percent approval at this point in an election year. "Looking at it in context, Bush is following the trajectory of the three incumbents who ended up losing rather than the trajectory of the five incumbents who won," he said.

But Newport was quick to add that history may be an uncertain guide, given the volatility of events in Iraq. "There is the potential for this to be a disruptive year that doesn`t follow historical patterns," he said.

This president`s problems are linked directly to deteriorating perceptions of how he is dealing with Iraq and the economy. A solid majority of Americans now disapprove of his handling of both. As a result, his overall approval rating has declined. But Bush`s advisers said his standing in October, not May, is what counts.

Matthew Dowd, senior adviser for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said Bush occupies a unique position compared with former presidents. In past campaigns, Bush`s predecessors have either been above 53 percent in approval by the time of the election and been reelected, or have been below 46 percent and been defeated.

"We`re in that place where no presidential reelection campaign has ever been," he said. "People say this is a referendum on the president. It`s both a referendum on the president but also a referendum on the alternative."

At this point in the race, strategists in both parties said, a president`s approval rating may be a clearer and more reliable measure of where the contest stands than head-to-head matchups with the other party`s candidate. They say the public first makes a judgment about the incumbent and then looks more seriously at the challenger.

Douglas Sosnik, White House political director during Clinton`s 1996 reelection campaign, told the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in Phoenix last week that an incumbent`s eventual vote is linked more directly to his approval rating than to any other measure and thus serves as a leading indicator early in the race. Dowd, too, has said repeatedly that the president`s eventual vote percentage will track closely with his approval rating.

Sosnik argued that the danger for Bush is that negative perceptions of his performance could harden over the next 90 days, and that even improvements on the ground in Iraq or in the economy will not save him by that point in the campaign.

But Sosnik said yesterday that the extraordinary uncertainty that surrounds the campaign could render historical patterns moot. "Perhaps we are in a new era in politics where the lessons of history no longer apply," he said in an e-mail message. "Based on President Bush`s current job approval rating, he had better hope so."

Bush ended 2003 on a sharp spike of support after the capture of Saddam Hussein and hit 64 percent approval in mid-December. But that brief period of rallying behind the president lasted for only a month, and by mid-January his approval rating had fallen to 53 percent in the Gallup poll. He remained in the low-50s throughout the first months of the year, but in the past month, as the violence in Iraq increased and then the scandal over prisoner abuse hit with full force, his standing fell again.

A senior Bush adviser, who asked not to be identified in order to speak openly about the campaign, said: "This is a response to current affairs. When there are difficulties in the world, an incumbent by definition has a short-term hit on his numbers." But he predicted that the closeness of the race only raises the stakes on Kerry to make himself acceptable to voters.

Kerry advisers dispute the GOP view that Bush`s approval numbers can easily rebound, arguing that, in a divided nation, he will struggle to get above 50 percent. "I think what you see is a 50 percent president, with that 50 percent being punctured by events," Kerry pollster Mark Mellman said.

He noted that Bush saw his approval ratings soar after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and again when the United States went to war against Iraq. But over time, he said, those numbers receded. "It`s very hard to see where the natural line is here because it`s almost always sloped as a result of some event," he said. "But I don`t think there`s anything to suggest there`s a natural place for this president to be anything more than 50 percent."

Sour attitudes about the country`s direction also are hurting the president, and analysts such as Sosnik said that measure, too, is a leading indicator of the political mood. But Republican pollster Bill McInturff said presidents can win reelection even if a majority of voters say the country is heading in the wrong direction, as they do now. He said he believes the public`s mood will brighten if Iraq ceases to dominate the news as it has for the past month.

"Obviously as a campaign we would prefer to be above 50 [percent] than below 50, but you play the cards you`re dealt," Dowd said. "Nothing Senator Kerry is doing is affecting our numbers. It`s events in the world and how people view the situation in the world or the situation in Iraq."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Wolfowitz Draws Democrats` Ire
Hearing on Iraq Spending Request Becomes Attack on Approach to War

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 14, 2004; Page A14

Senate Democrats lit into the Bush administration`s Iraq policies yesterday, using an uncharacteristically contentious hearing on additional war spending to attack the Pentagon`s number two official in personal and bitter terms.

After listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz testify before the normally stately Armed Services Committee for several hours, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said, "What I`ve heard from you is dissembling and avoidance of answers, lack of knowledge, pleading process -- legal process."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) then hit Wolfowitz, who is seen as a major architect of the Bush administration`s approach to Iraq, with a virtual indictment. "You come before this committee . . . having seriously undermined your credibility over a number of years now," she said. "When it comes to making estimates or predictions about what will occur in Iraq, and what will be the costs in lives and money, . . . you have made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions."

She quoted to him from his previous testimony from the run-up to the war, in which he asserted that the Iraqi people would see the United States as their liberator, that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction and that the estimate of Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, that it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq was "outlandish."

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), usually the committee`s fiercest critic of the Bush administration`s stance on Iraq, seemed almost tame by comparison. He used his questioning time simply to criticize the administration`s "arrogance" and remind colleagues to fulfill their constitutional duties.

Wolfowitz, a former Yale political scientist who seems to enjoy political debate more than most senior Bush officials, ignored many of the attacks, including most of Clinton`s charges. But he told her that in disagreeing with Shinseki`s estimates on the troop requirements for postwar Iraq, he was siding with another senior Army general closer to the action -- Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq and the Middle East.

"I didn`t have time to respond . . . to the whole list" of Clinton`s points, Wolfowitz said in an interview last night. "I plan to."

Wolfowitz did respond directly to Reed`s attack, which followed a heated and confusing exchange on whether U.S. commanders permitted military interrogators to violate the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of military prisoners of war and civilian detainees.

"I`m not dissembling," he said. He tried to weave his way though the hypothetical questions Reed had posed about the rules of engagement for interrogations in Iraq, saying he had not been told that senior commanders in Iraq had approved questioning techniques that violate the Geneva accords.

Cutting him off, Reed said, "Well, I would suggest, Mr. Secretary, that you`re not doing your job."

Reed did not establish whether commanders had approved harsh interrogation methods that would violate the Geneva Conventions, and the Defense Department said in a statement last night that Reed was wrong. But in an indication of how besieged Pentagon officials have become, Wolfowitz said he had not seen the Army`s rules for interrogations of Iraqis -- a document that was released at an Armed Services hearing three days ago and carried in some newspapers.

"I saw this document for the first time this morning," Wolfowitz said. He said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is focusing on the detainee abuse scandal and had asked him to deal with the Defense Department`s other pressing business.

The hearing -- the third held by the panel on Iraq in seven days -- was striking because under the leadership of Chairman John W. Warner, a courtly Virginia Republican, the committee long has been staid in dealing with the Bush administration and on most military matters.

Warner seemed briefly to lose control of the committee yesterday, faced down by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) over whether Wolfowitz could be questioned on broad matters of Iraq policy or only the narrower issue of additional spending for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which together are costing about $4.5 billion a month.

When Warner admonished him to keep his questions to the budget issue, Kennedy erupted. "I`ve been on this committee for 24 years, I`ve been in the Senate 42 years, and I have never been denied the opportunity to question any person that`s come before a committee, on what I wanted to ask," he said. "And I resent it and reject it on a matter of national importance."

Warner persisted, provoking a formal challenge from Kennedy. "Well, Mr. Chairman, then you`re going to have to rule me out of order, and I`m going to ask for a roll call of whether the committee is going to rule me out of order," he snapped.

At that point, Warner backed down and said Wolfowitz`s preliminary remarks had invited such broad questioning. "You have opened it up in your opening statement," Warner told Wolfowitz.

In the interview last night, Wolfowitz said he believed the hearing was "pretty civil." He added: "We actually agreed to reach a compromise on the key issue, which was how much flexibility would the Congress give the administration in its [spending] request."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Double Standards



Friday, May 14, 2004; Page A24

SEN. JACK REED (D-R.I.) asked two senior Pentagon officials exactly the right question yesterday about the Bush administration`s interpretation of the Geneva Conventions. "If you were shown a video of a United States Marine or an American citizen in control of a foreign power, in a cell block, naked with a bag over their head, squatting with their arms uplifted for 45 minutes, would you describe that as a good interrogation technique or a violation of the Geneva Convention?" The answer is obvious, and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, honestly provided it. "I would describe it as a violation," Mr. Pace said. "What you`ve described to me sounds to me like a violation of the Geneva Convention," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

Case closed -- except that the practices described by Mr. Reed have been designated by the commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, as available for use on Iraqi detainees, and certified by the Pentagon as legal under the Geneva Conventions. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, they have been systematically applied to prisoners across that country. And earlier this week, the bosses of both Mr. Pace and Mr. Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, defended the techniques as appropriate.

Mr. Rumsfeld repeated that defense yesterday. "Anyone who`s running around saying the Geneva Convention did not apply in Iraq is either terribly uninformed or mischievous," he told reporters during his visit to Iraq. He has said that the administration accepted that the conventions applied in Iraq, unlike in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected Taliban fighters and al Qaeda terrorists are being held. The question, though, is whether the conventions were followed in Iraq or whether they were systematically violated, as the Red Cross and many war crimes lawyers in and outside the U.S. military have concluded. Mr. Rumsfeld brushed off those conclusions. "Geneva doesn`t say what you do when you get up in the morning," he declared. "Some will say . . . it is mental torture to do something that is inconvenient in a certain way for a detainee, like standing up for a long period . . . someone else might say [it] is not in any way abusive or harmful."

Now Mr. Pace and Mr. Wolfowitz have said the techniques approved by Mr. Sanchez would be illegal if used on Americans; Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Myers say they are fine as applied to Iraqis. But there are not separate Geneva Conventions for Americans and for the rest of the world. We learned this week that the Pentagon approved the use of hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, intimidation by dogs and prolonged solitary confinement as legal under the Geneva Conventions. By defending that policy, Mr. Rumsfeld is further harming America`s reputation while sanctioning the use of similar techniques on captured Americans around the world. Instead of defending their use, the administration should be disavowing them and rededicating itself to international law.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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The Seeds Of a Rights Scandal In Iraq

By Jimmy Carter

Friday, May 14, 2004; Page A25

To ensure that additional human rights embarrassments will not befall the United States, we must examine well-known, high-level and broad-based U.S. policies that have lowered our nation`s commitment to basic human rights.

Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, many traumatized and fearful U.S. citizens accepted Washington`s new approach with confidence that our leaders would continue to honor international agreements and human rights standards.

But in many nations, defenders of human rights were the first to feel the consequences of these changes, and international humanitarian organizations began expressing deep concern to each other and to high-level U.S. military and government officials about the adverse impact of the new American policies, and to promulgate reports of actual abuses.

Some of their recommendations were quite specific, calling for vigilant independent monitoring of U.S. detention facilities and strict enforcement of Geneva Convention guidelines. Others were more general, describing the impact of these policies on defenders of freedom and human rights around the world. These expressions of concern have been mostly ignored until recently, when photographs of prisoner abuse let Americans finally see some of the consequences of our government`s policies in graphic, human terms.

Some prominent concerns were:

� Extended incarceration of arbitrarily detained men of Middle Eastern origin living in the United States -- deprived of access to lawyers or to their families, and never charged with a crime.

� Civilians and soldiers arbitrarily detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without access to legal counsel or being charged with any crime. The secretary of defense announced that they could be held indefinitely even if tried and found to be innocent.

� The secretary of defense`s declaration, expressing official policy, that Geneva Convention restraints would not apply to interrogation of prisoners suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.

� Persistent complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross about prisoner abuse in several U.S. prisons in foreign countries.

� Reports by respected news media outlets that some accused terrorists were being sent to Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or other countries where torture was thought to be acceptable as a means of extracting information.

These American decisions had an immediate global impact. In response to urgent requests from human rights defenders from many countries, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and I agreed that it would be helpful to hear directly from a representative group. After the high commissioner`s tragic death in Iraq last August, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed Bertrand Ramcharan to serve as my co-chair, and in November 2003 the Carter Center brought together leaders of human rights and democracy movements from 41 nations.

We learned from these nonviolent activists that U.S. policies are giving license to abusive governments and even established democracies to stamp out legitimate dissent and reverse decades of progress toward freedom, with many leaders retreating from previous human rights commitments. Lawyers, professors, doctors and journalists told of being labeled as terrorists, often for merely criticizing a government policy or carrying out their daily work. Equally disturbing are reports that in some countries the U.S. government has pushed regressive counterterrorism laws, based on the USA Patriot Act, that undermine democratic principles and the rule of law. Some American policies are being challenged by Congress and the federal courts, but the reversal of such troubling policies is unlikely in countries where legislative and judicial checks and balances are not well developed.

We decided to share the disturbing findings with the media and public officials. In addition to a one-hour roundtable discussion on CNN, participants from Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), the Carter Center, and defenders from Egypt, Kenya and Liberia went to Washington and met with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz; the undersecretary of state for global affairs, Paula Dobriansky; and legislative leaders. The group also participated in a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and met with editors of the New York Times and The Post.

In each case, the adverse impact of new U.S. policies on the protection of freedom and human rights was described with specific proof and human experiences. These officials listened attentively and promised to consider ways to alleviate the problem. As subsequent events have revealed, there were no significant reforms at the highest levels of our government.

In many countries, the leaders of human rights and democracy movements represent our best hope for a safer and more just world in which fewer people will succumb to extremism fueled by hatred and fear. These human rights defenders on the front lines of freedom are our real allies, and the United States must make long-term commitments to support -- not undermine -- them.

In the interests of security and freedom, basic reforms are needed in the United States and elsewhere, including restrictions on governments` excessive surveillance powers; reassertion of the public`s right to information; judicial and legislative review of detentions and other executive functions; and strict compliance with international standards of law and justice.

The United States must regain its status as the champion of freedom and human rights.

Former president Carter is chairman of the Carter Center in Atlanta. The center`s current report on human rights defenders is available at www.cartercenter.org.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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THE NATION
In Arkansas, Kerry Finds Key Word to Be `Clinton`
By Matea Gold
Times Staff Writer

May 14, 2004

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — If there was a question about whether John F. Kerry has any qualms about invoking Bill Clinton in his quest for the White House, they were resolved this week after his visit to the former president`s home state.

The presumptive Democratic nominee ostensibly stopped here as part of a four-day effort to promote his healthcare plan. But it seemed more like a pilgrimage.

By the time he finished his 20-hour swing through the city Thursday, the Massachusetts senator had dropped Clinton`s name at least a dozen times. He had tried to imitate Clinton`s drawl. And he had visited Doe`s Eat Place, a smoky barbecue joint that was a renowned hangout for Clinton and his staff.

The senator`s embrace of the two-term president and former Arkansas governor, who still inspires devotion among some voters and is disdained by others, contrasts sharply with the posture struck by the last Democratic presidential nominee.

In the 2000 campaign, Vice President Al Gore consciously distanced himself from his boss and his travails. In the process, many analysts say, Gore failed to capitalize on the administration`s triumphs — a key reason they cite for his razor-thin loss.

This year, Kerry has shown no compunction about invoking Clinton and his legacy. In the last month, he has moved to define himself as a centrist in the Clinton mold, heralding the country`s economic vigor in the 1990s and trumpeting his support for Clinton`s deficit reduction measures. He`s also hired a raft of former Clinton White House officials to serve as his economic and foreign-policy advisors.

Clinton has returned the favor. In March, he helped kick off a $10-million fundraising drive for Kerry. On Wednesday, he sent out another e-mail solicitation, asking Democrats for more contributions. And he has signaled his willingness to do more as the campaign proceeds.

David Morehouse, a senior advisor to Kerry who worked as Gore`s trip director in the 2000 campaign, said that the senator feels freer to align himself with Clinton because he doesn`t carry the same burden that the former vice president did. "Gore`s discomfort was partly due to the shadow that Clinton cast over the party and over the administration," Morehouse said. "That shadow was much larger during the Clinton administration than it is four years later."

Some analysts think Kerry runs the risk of being upstaged by the dynamic former president, especially with the launch of Clinton`s biography next month. But others suggest that Kerry could use the contrast to his advantage. "If it`s possible to develop a confidence with somebody onstage who everyone else sees as a more charismatic speaker, then … that argues for a character strength that Kerry can demonstrate," said Wayne Fields, director of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

For his part, Kerry seems unconcerned about comparisons.

On Wednesday evening, he stood in the humid Arkansas air on the same airport tarmac where Gov. Clinton held his last rally on election day in 1992, hoping to soak up some of the same magic. It was Kerry`s first trip to the state since he effectively secured the Democratic nomination in early March.

"Thank you for being part of a great Democratic Party in the state of Arkansas that gave this country leadership over eight years that put America to work, grew our nation, made us stronger," he told several hundred people who greeted his campaign plane. "When Bill Clinton left office, not one young American in uniform was dying in a war anywhere in this world."

He added: "You look all around our country today, and you wouldn`t know that we`d had those incredible eight years of President Clinton and Al Gore, years in which we had the lowest inflation and the lowest unemployment, and we built the spirit of the nation."

At the first mention of Clinton`s name, the crowd broke into whoops and cheers.

Clinton easily carried Arkansas in his two presidential campaigns, but President Bush won it four years ago by about 5 percentage points. As of now, Kerry has targeted the state for a major push, and tying himself to Clinton is key to that.

"You`ll be very happy to hear that when he was a young president … Bill Clinton said to me, `You`ve got to watch those Razorbacks,` " Kerry said at Wednesday`s tarmac rally, attempting Clinton`s distinctive accent as he referred to the University of Arkansas football team. "I heeded it and I`ve watched a number of Razorback games because of President Bill Clinton."

On Thursday, he focused on his healthcare plan in a speech at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, saying he wanted to "complete the journey … that Bill Clinton tried to advance."

However, unlike his comments at similar forums this week in other states, he made no mention of "lessons learned" from Clinton`s failure to pass a reform proposal widely criticized as too complicated.

During his Arkansas visit, a local TV reporter told the candidate that co-workers had been taking bets about whether he would arrive at the tarmac rally late, in typical Clinton fashion.

"Whatever President Clinton did, it worked for him," Kerry answered.

Kerry`s rally, in fact, started 30 minutes late.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY
Extra! Read Nothing About It
By William Powers
William Powers is the media critic for the National Journal.

May 14, 2004

"I`ve stopped reading the newspapers," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday in Baghdad to a gathering of soldiers, who broke out in rousing applause.

It was a joke. Or was it? After all, this is not exactly an administration of news junkies. The president himself admitted last year he "rarely" reads news stories, relying instead on the more "objective sources" on his staff to tell him what`s happening in the world. (Truth be told, White House staffers often outshine real journalists. That story they did about the African uranium was unforgettable, like a great novel.)

Here`s another reason I thought it might be a joke. Just a few weeks ago, Rumsfeld told a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors that America`s leaders must be "challenged, internally through the complex constitutional system of checks and balances, and externally by a free and energetic press." He also said our political system "needs information to be self-correcting."

But that was before all this horrible news starting breaking, and reading the paper became so, well, unpleasant. The first lady said this week she "can`t bear" to look at the torture photos in the papers.

One can imagine even a man of Rumsfeld`s sturdy temperament being unable to stomach what`s on the front pages. It`s gruesome stuff, real depravity. To immerse yourself in that every day can be downright depressing. And a Defense secretary has to keep his spirits high! No wonder those soldiers cheered. A democracy may need newspapers, but that doesn`t mean anyone has to actually read them.

Still, the Pentagon chief needs a sense of the news, just in case it comes up in one of those endless Senate hearings they`re always making him attend lately.

I propose we put together an executive summary of what`s in the newspapers each day, specifically tailored to Rumsfeld`s professional needs. In fact, today`s "alpha" edition of the Daily Rummy is just out for his reading enjoyment.

Front Page: The only news that matters is the weather: "fair and breezy" in Washington. Summary: Iraq prison scandal could blow away by the weekend, as a "free and energetic press" loses steam and moves on to the Next Big Thing. Fingers crossed for a new Michael Jackson bombshell.

Politics: Kerry narrowing VP choices. Summary: Ridiculous future SecDef chatter gone, finito. And no mention of McCain — yes!

Metro: Local schools getting ready for graduation. Summary: Just as in Iraq, where schools are open, roads are being rebuilt, democracy is blossoming and many, many other good things are being ignored by this excessively negative journalistic establishment that secretly doesn`t want the truth to prevail.

Business: Wall Street mixed, but recovery appears on track. Summary: The Iraq mission isn`t hurting the economy at all. Heck, the war might even deserve a little credit for stimulating this bounce-back, but nobody ever mentions that. Talk about ungrateful.

Media: Air America, new liberal radio network, floundering. Summary: Further proof there`s absolutely no constituency for the leftist antiwar message. Besides, who listens to radio any more? It`s old hat, just like the newspapers. TV is where the action is, and really, who`s better on Russert than a certain strong-jawed, unflappable Cabinet member?

Sports: Millions watch NBA Playoffs on TV. Summary: May mean smaller audiences for newscasts, where some are taking this challenging-the-leadership idea to shameless extremes.

Comics: Beetle Bailey has a couple of good old-fashioned soldiers engaging in wholesome G-rated pranks where nobody gets hurt or humiliated — no naked pyramids or leashes. Summary: Those were the days.

Editorial Page: Defense secretary mentioned seven times, but not once in context of resignation. Summary: Mission accomplished.

Classified: Numerous help-wanted listings, perhaps a result of the recovering economy. One seeks individual "with major leadership experience on a global scale," to take over a large multinational corporation. Promises seven-figure salary with benefits. Summary: Clip and save.




Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/173235_ourplace14.html

Idealistic war invites ironic perspective

Friday, May 14, 2004

ROBERT ALLEN SKOTHEIM
GUEST COLUMNIST

Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr argued that the history of the United States was particularly susceptible to ironic interpretation because of an American innocence that imposes its idealism upon intractable circumstances it hopes to ameliorate in some way.

At the heart of Neibuhr`s concept of irony is the discrepancy between the good intent of the actor and the unintended consequences of the actions that paradoxically undermine the good intentions. Implementation of the good intentions result in the worsening of conditions the actor means to improve. Essential to the idea of irony is that the actor must be to some degree responsible for the discrepancy between the good intentions and the resulting bad consequences. Ignorance of the situation onto which the actor imposes good intentions is the most common cause of the paradoxical result.

To view the Iraq war as a Neibuhrian ironic situation, we must take President Bush`s idealistic words at face value. (It would not be an ironic situation if Bush went to war with Iraq to control the oil supply or if he did so in the course of an unconscious Oedipal struggle with his father. Neibuhr would call those circumstances tragic, but not ironic, because they lack good intentions.)

Following Sept. 11, 2001, the president declared a war on terrorism, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, in order to reduce the terrorist threat to the United States. By removing Saddam Hussein, Bush argued that peace and democracy would come to Iraq, which could serve as a beacon for the Middle East generally and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict specifically. Because Bush has consistently cast his rationale for the Iraq war in such idealistic terms, even after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (which eliminates the alternative argument of national self-interest for security reasons), the situation invites Neibuhr`s ironic perspective.

Ironic interpretation focuses upon the unintended consequences of good intention. The State Department`s counter-terrorism expert, J. Cofer Black, has recently stated the Iraq war has created closer relations between al-Qaida and other Middle Eastern jihadists. Thus, it appears that the United States, ironically, has increased, rather than diminished, its vulnerability to terrorist attack

In his idealistic appeal for war, Bush`s vision was far more grand than simple security from terrorism. It was to promote freedom, democracy and humanity in the entire Middle East. Further, according to Bush, because the United States is the foremost champion of these values, it does not need international sanction for its actions. As the reconstruction of Iraq founders, American implementation of its ideals of freedom, democracy and humanity provides further grist for the ironists` interpretation. Revelations of prisoner abuse by American forces, following destruction of Iraqi lives and properties, constitute evidence of the means of implementing the idealistic intentions of the United States.

In the international community, the deterioration of the image of the United States since its sympathetic apogee on Sept. 11, 2001, is dramatic. An ironic interpretation of this deterioration is perhaps the kindest perspective for us to entertain among the possible alternatives.

Robert Allen Skotheim, who lives on Bainbridge Island, is a former president of Whitman College in Walla Walla. He is the author of "American Intellectual Histories and Historians."

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Please Write More About Rape
Will sucking down endless stories of tragedy and war and BushCo poison the human soul?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 14, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/05/14/notes051404.DTL

I get this a lot: Mark, how can you write about light fluffy inconsequential things like dogs or yoga or car design or sex or music when there`s so many vile gut-wrenching soul-curdling life-threatening atrocities and gang rapes and beheadings and Rumsfelds happening in the world right now that deserve immediate attention?

How the hell can you possibly write a whole column extolling, say, the virtues of single-malt scotch or of having sex in the backseat of small luscious European cars, when BushCo is right this moment ravaging the planet and eviscerating the human spirit and the environment is teetering on the edge and women`s rights are being gouged and McDonald`s is poisoning our youth and Dick Cheney is still upright, barely?

This is what they say. The world is a ticking powder keg of nails and fear. Please write about this, all the time, every time. Give it voice and shape and insight. Every column should be furious and polemic. Fight the good fight! Tackle the tough snarly issues head on, nonstop, never failing to take those corrupt mother--s who are ruining our planet to the mat!

And they are so right. Painfully so. But it`s also impossible. The short answer as to why I don`t is, of course: To avoid utter spiritual meltdown and ideological wrist slitting and savage karmic pain.

But it`s more than that. And the reason I don`t is very much the same reason you should avoid imbibing too much fiery swill from this media void, too. Do you already know? Is this already a given? Open wide and say, ahh yes, I remember now.

If there is one serious peril of a media gig, it is excess white noise. A never-ending fire hose of chaos and destruction and wanton human corruption streaming in like a nasty fever dream from the global atrocity machine (a.k.a., the news wires) straight into the retina of the spirit, ever threatening my sanity and your will to get out of bed and our ability to lick the giant cherry Popsicle of joy. Hey, it`s the news. It ain`t supposed to be moist and blissful.

Like most paid media observers/culture sluts, I must scan the news wires constantly. I have developed a bizarre sixth sense for insinuative headlines and mutant irony. I have an RSS reader live at all times, culling dozens of different info sites, ever scouring and ever regurgitating and ever tossing up an eternally fascinating but always semirancid salad of curious stories and grisly tidbits and potential column fodder.

And I`m here to tell you, if you let it take over, if you allow the blood and guts and train derailments, the bile and the groped altar boys and the Dick Cheneys, their way, if this is the only place you focus and the only place you dedicate your energies and the only lens through which you choose to view the world, well, it is death. Slow, gnarled, quivering, depressive, genital-shriveling death, with zero naked beatific harp-strumming afterlife.

Humor, by the way, is a salvation. Forget Chris Rock or the Farrelly Brothers. You want to hear the finest in morbid jokes? You want to hear some of the sickest, funniest, most well-informed, most deeply twisted wisecracks to ever make you spray coffee through your nose? Hang around a newsroom for half an hour.

When you`re inundated with a nonstop barrage of inhuman tales of excess and misery and schlock, from priests molesting 10,000 boys to sneering senators openly bashing gays to the one millionth disgruntled dad who whips out a shotgun and blows away his four kids along with ex-wife in a Wal-Mart in Amarillo "before turning the gun on himself," why, the humor is a balm, a release valve, a necessary and mandatory pain-management mechanism. Humor helps. A little.

Another angle: I recently received a raft of heartfelt, angry e-mail from a number of people who do beautiful and necessary and often truly heartbreaking work at animal shelters and pet rescues and vet clinics who all fumed at me, no, no freaking way is that Ford SportKa commercial depicting the (fake) cat decapitation you wrote about the slightest bit funny, goddammit.

No way is any depiction of any animal abuse anywhere ever amusing and you should be ashamed and how could you ever suggest such a thing and you have had all rights to call yourself an animal lover permanently revoked, and I pity the dog you finally adopt and by the way I`m never reading you again even though I`ve loved your column for years.

Hey, it happens. I understand the sentiment. I know its impetus. It all follows the same rule: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a narrow media-saturated tragedy-thick anger-ravaged abuse-drenched worldview, everything looks like a crime against the spirit and everything is something meant to induce peril and everything is something that will completely piss you off, somehow.

Or, to put it more gently, if you saturate yourself with only one perspective, or you choose a path wherein you are blasted to the core every moment with the worst humanity has to offer, well, the world responds in kind and is nothing but bleak and sad and torturous, full of little tiny leeches with sharp jagged teeth and Lynne Cheney`s face that devour your large intestine while you sleep.

But most of all, the reason I don`t write about immigrant abuse or prison rape or abortion rights or the stench of BushCo every column and the reason you don`t read it every time is the exact same reason you do not right this minute see the world outside your window running through a giant storm of hellfire with its hands slapped to its screaming face as the buildings explode and the children melt into goo. It`s because that vile dark matter is not all there is.

Not only is there is more to life than politics and murder and mayhem and BushCo running around like he`s the whiniest king of the sandbox, it`s also that those other elements, those seemingly insignificant, fluffy, pointless divine things like sex and design and books and the color of your lover`s eyes actually, if you pay full attention, turn out to be far more vital to the planet and to your spiritual health than any toxic abuse BushCo could ever smirk out to the world.

Sure columns like this one don`t get me as many clicks as the pointed outraged double-barreled criticisms. Sure they don`t inspire as much hate mail and love mail and wonderful supportive replies and offers to come on slightly snide conservative radio shows to debate angry talking heads on the finer points of whether Bush is a corrupt malevolent demon or just a hollow sad imbecile.

No matter. For better or worse, I refuse to wallow. My job is to offer perspective. Your job is to take that perspective and balance it with your own and read your ass off and get as informed as possible and filter and digest as best you can.

The world`s tragedies absolutely deserve our immediate attention. And our hope. And our divine raw funky sexed-up intellectual perspective. This is not a question.

But what it needs even more is the counter-energy. For us all to remember to shut it all off and get the hell away from the computer and go have a glass of wine and a deep tongue kiss and a romp and a an intense book and a hot sweaty yoga class and a soft swoon to an incredible blues singer. This fuels the resistance. Rekindles meaning. Steals life back from those who would deign to devour it with pitchforks and judiciary committees and heavy artillery.

After all, real life is not in the dour headlines. You know this. Real life is not in BushCo`s blank confused smirk. Real life is where you launch forth, right now, just after this period coming up, this one right here.
# Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
# Mark`s column archives are here

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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DIE ZEIT

21/2004

Amerikas Selbstanklage

Die amerikanischen Folterbilder verstärken den Widerstand gegen eine Übergangsregierung in Bagdad. In Washington kommt die Regierung Bush in Bedrängnis. Der Kongress kämpft gegen Vertuschung und Irreführung durch das Pentagon. Die US-Presse findet ihre kritische Stimme wieder

Von Michael Naumann

Der Krieg war noch längst nicht gewonnen, da machte sich ein siegesgewisser Winston Churchill im November 1943 Gedanken über den späteren Umgang mit den „weltweit Geächteten“, der politischen und militärischen Elite der Nazis: Fünfzig bis hundert von ihnen sollten „ohne Überweisung an eine höhere Gewalt erschossen werden“. Der Racheakt scheiterte am Widerstand Roosevelts und Stalins. Der eine bevorzugte die amerikanische Rechtstradition, der andere wünschte sich einen Schauprozess. Die Angeklagten des Nürnberger Prozesses wurden verhört, jeder Einzelne bis zu vierzigmal. Gefoltert wurden sie nicht.

Die Verheerungen des Zweiten Weltkriegs, vor allem aber die deutschen Kriegsverbrechen hatten den dünnen Zivilisationsfirnis über bewaffneten Konflikten abgetragen. Die Neufassung der Genfer Konvention vom 12. August 1949 sollte ihn wiederherstellen. Befragt, was er von jenem Vertrag halte, erwiderte der amerikanische Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld vor Jahresfrist, die Antwort überlasse er seinen Rechtsanwälten; von „internationalem Gepluster“ halte er gar nichts.

Der Mann mit Kapuze wird zur Ikone des Terrorismus

Seit der Offenlegung der amerikanischen Folterskandale im Irak haben die Pentagon-Juristen eine neue Beschäftigung gefunden, zumal sich herausstellt, dass das Internationale Rote Kreuz die „Mißstände“ bereits im Oktober 2003 ebenso detailliert wie diskret gemeldet hatte. „Unsere Berichte waren schlimmer als die Fotografien“, erklärt die Sprecherin der Genfer Organisation.

Joschka Fischer, der am Dienstag nach Washington geflogen war, um die Chancen einer neuen Nahost-Strategie auszuloten, traf auf Politiker, die, von furchtbaren Bildern geschockt, eher auf Amerikas Gegenwart als in die Zukunft schauen möchten. Beschädigt ist das strahlende Selbstbewusstsein; auch passen die pornografisch-sadistischen Fotografien nicht zum heroischen Image der eigenen Berufsarmee. Und ganz gewiss sind die Aufnahmen aus dem Abu-Ghraib-Zuchthaus keine Belege für die mission civilisatrice, mit der George W. Bush den Einmarsch in den Irak rechtfertigte, nachdem sich der erste Kriegsgrund, die Beseitigung von Saddam Husseins Waffenvernichtungswaffen, in Luft aufgelöst hatte. Das politisch-moralische Debakel, das sich inzwischen in England wiederholt, könnte kaum größer sein. Im Irak droht sich die chaotische Nachkriegszeit spätestens am 30. Juni in eine Vorkriegszeit zu verwandeln. Jeder amerikanisch eingesetzten Übergangsregierung ist eine bis vor kurzem noch denkbare Legitimität abhanden gekommen.

In den arabischen Ländern, in denen routinemäßig gefoltert oder öffentlich hingerichtet und bisweilen auch gesteinigt wird, gelten die digitalen, elektronisch weit verbreiteten Folterfotos als Dokumente westlicher Hybris. Die mediale Verwandlung solcher Demütigung in ein Gefühl religiöser, ethischer und kultureller Überlegenheit über „den Westen“ gehört zu den dialektischen Kraftzentren des islamischen Fundamentalismus. Er erneuert sich im Zeitalter der Massenkommunikation mit jedermann zugänglichen, frischen Ikonen der eigenen Niederlage: Das Bild des Kapuzenmannes an Elektrodrähten hängt fortan in der stets geöffneten imaginären Fotogalerie muslimischer Leidensgeschichten – von den Toten der Palästinenserlager im Libanon bis zu jenem Vater, der mit seinem Sohn ins palästinensisch-israelische Kreuzfeuer geriet. Aus den individuellen Schicksalen wuchert ein allgemeiner Opfermythos, der sich mit jedem Selbstmord-Attentäter fortschreibt in eine panarabische Märtyrerlegende, in der schließlich ihr emotionales Geheimnis zutage tritt: Rache. Gegen derlei Gefühle hat eine amerikanisch geführte irakische Zivilverwaltung keine Chance.

Rache ist das archaische Motiv des Terrorismus. Es schöpft neue Kraft aus den Folterfotos, und es verbirgt sich nur knapp unter der Oberfläche des sprunghaft angestiegenen Antiamerikanismus in der muslimischen Welt. Der Rückhalt der prowestlichen Regierungen jener Länder ist bei ihren eigenen Bürgern inzwischen schwächer denn je zuvor.

Rache mag auch ein uneingestandenes Motiv George W. Bushs gewesen sein, als er zehn Wochen nach den Terror-Anschlägen vom 11. September 2001 seinen Verteidigungsminister beauftragte, einen Krieg gegen den Irak vorzubereiten. Ergänzt um die Freiheitsideale der amerikanischen Verfassungsgeschichte, setzte sich damals in Washington eine gusseiserne Rhetorik der Rechtschaffenheit durch. Bushs Aufteilung der Welt in „gute“ und „böse“ Nationen, in Terroristen und Bündnispartner beherrschte schließlich die Sprache eines Instinktpolitikers, der sich mit den völkerrechtlichen Feinheiten jenseits des eigenen Machtanspruchs nicht abmühen mochte.

Osama bin Laden wollte er vor sich sehen – „tot oder lebendig, das ist mir egal“. Nicht von seinem leiblichen, sondern von einem „höheren Vater“, so erklärte der Präsident dem Reporter Bob Woodward, empfange er die nötigen Ratschläge für seine Amtsführung. Zum Umgang seiner Soldaten und Beamten mit den Gefangenen von Guantánamo oder in Afghanistan und im Irak muss Gott geschwiegen haben. Einer Richterin des Obersten Gerichtshofs, die wissen wollte, ob die Regierung alle Vorschriften gegen Folter beachte, antwortete ein Staatssekretär des Justizministers: „Vertrauen Sie der Exekutive.“

Hier sprach der bewaffnete Geist des „Kriegs gegen den Terrorismus“. Den meisten amerikanischen Journalisten und dem Kongress hatte er bis vor wenigen Wochen die Zungen gelähmt. Erst die grausamen Bilder aus Bagdad haben das demokratische System der checks and balances wieder eindrucksvoll in Kraft gesetzt. Amerikas demokratische Selbstkorrektur beginnt mit der bohrenden Frage: „Wie konnte das geschehen?“

Die Verwandlung einfacher Soldaten in Gesetzesbrecher ist, anders als die Gottesratschläge im Weißen Haus, kein geheimnisvoller Vorgang. Kriege verrohen; seelische Abstumpfung gehört zu den individuellen Überlebensmechanismen aller Soldaten ebenso wie die Unterwerfung unter Gruppenzwang im militärischen Einsatz. Dem steht die zivilisierende, disziplinarische Einhegung der Bereitschaft zu töten entgegen. Sie dient auch dem Selbstschutz der Truppe. Die Vorgänge im Abu-Ghraib-Zuchthaus haben die Gefährdung der amerikanischen Soldaten im Irak weiter erhöht.

Während sich der Zorn der Generalität im Pentagon auf die zivile Führung um Donald Rumsfeld und seinen Vertreter Paul Wolfowitz konzentriert, die einen Feldzug ohne Friedens- und „Exit“-Strategie geführt hätten, öffnen die Anhörungen des Kongresses und die Recherchen amerikanischer Medien den Blick auf diffuse militärische Befehlsstränge, die im Elend der Gefangenenlager Afghanistans und des Iraks enden. Weder waren die Reservisten der Militärpolizei auf ihre schwierige Aufgabe vorbereitet, noch schienen ihre Vorgesetzten an dem schriftlichen Auftrag Anstoß zu nehmen, die festgenommenen Iraker auf Verhöre durch Spezialisten des militärischen Nachrichtendienstes mit ominösen Methoden „vorzubereiten“.

Der erste US-Soldat steht am nächsten Mittwoch vor Gericht

Vor 35 Jahren hatte der junge Reporter Seymour Hersh das Massaker von My Lai in Vietnam aufgedeckt: Über 600 Menschen waren einer Kompanie amerikanischer Soldaten im Blutrausch zum Opfer gefallen. Derselbe Journalist hat nun im New Yorker einen geheimen, höchst kritischen Pentagon-Bericht über die grausamen Verhältnisse in den irakischen Gefängnissen veröffentlicht. Die heftige öffentliche Reaktion auf die Szenen in den Zellen und auf Hershs Enthüllungen belegt die Bereitschaft des demokratischen Systems Amerikas, innezuhalten und Fehler zu korrigieren. Wie weit diese Korrekturen reichen, hängt ab vom Ausgang der Wahlen im November.

Der erste amerikanische Angeklagte, ein 24-jähriger Militärpolizist, wird vom kommenden Mittwoch an vor einem öffentlichen amerikanischen Militärgericht stehen. Er soll die Folterfotos aufgenommen und ein Geständnis abgelegt haben. Wahrscheinlich folgte er einem Befehl. Und über diesem lag ein anderer Befehl. Und darüber ein weiterer. Donald Rumsfeld ist in Bedrängnis geraten, und mit ihm sein Präsident George W. Bush, mitten im Wahljahr.

Derselbe Winston Churchill, der sich 1943 für ein Femegericht ausgesprochen hatte, befand in ruhigerer Stunde: „Der Umgang mit Verbrechen und Verbrechern ist der eigentliche Zivilisationstest jedes Landes.“

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DIE ZEIT

21/2004

Nur keine Schwäche zeigen

Immer mehr Amerikaner wollen den Rückzug aus dem Irak. Aber Bush nicht. Und Kerry auch nicht

Von Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff

Washington

Bilder haben die amerikanische Regierung in die Krise gestürzt. Bilder braucht sie nun, um wieder herauszufinden. Zum Beispiel den inszenierten Schulterschluss zwischen Präsident und Minister. Draum ist am Montagmorgen der Raum neben Donald Rumsfelds Amtszimmer im Pentagon sorgsam dekoriert, mit Saalwachen in blauer Uniform, mit Rednerpult und Flaggenmeer. Gegen halb zwölf fliegt die Tür auf, und der Präsident tritt hinter das Pult. Die Choreografie verlangt, dass der bedrängte Chef des Pentagon halb links hinter George W. Bush steht. „Herr Minister“, sagt der Präsident steif und dreht sich dabei nach hinten, um des anderen Blick zu finden, „herzlichen Dank für Ihre Gastfreundschaft.“ Während Rumsfeld sich ehrerbietig verbeugt, kommt Bush schon zur Sache: „Und herzlichen Dank für Ihre Führung.“

Eine ewige Frage spaltet Amerika in diesen Tagen: Sind für Gräueltaten während eines Krieges die unmittelbaren Täter verantwortlich, oder ist es eine Führung, die Auswüchse duldet oder sogar ermutigt? Zuletzt blieb die Frage während des Vietnam-Krieges ohne Antwort. Nun die Folterbilder aus dem US-Gefängnis Abu Ghraib. Waren da ein paar durchgeknallte Gefreite unterwegs, oder handelt es sich, wie Newsweek vermutet, um Enthüllungen aus „Amerikas Gulag“? Hat der Verteidigungsminister, wie der Harvard-Professor David Gergen argwöhnt, höchstselbst zu „einer Atmosphäre der Gesetzlosigkeit“ im besetzten Irak beigetragen?

George W. Bush gibt am Montag im Pentagon seine Antwort. Er spricht nicht von Folter, sondern von „wenigen“, die eine „ehrenhafte Sache“ entwürdigt hätten. Alle Landsleute schätzten „die Güte und die Charakterstärke“ der amerikanischen Truppen, weshalb er, Bush, „die Männer und Frauen in Uniform“ wissen lassen wolle: „Amerika ist stolz auf euch.“ Damit hat er sich festgelegt. Mag der Bericht des Heeres von „systemhaften Problemen“ sprechen, der Präsident erweist sich als Anhänger der Theorie von den faulen Äpfeln: Nur ein paar sind schlecht und alle anderen gesund.

Noch einmal dreht er sich zu Rumsfeld um und sagt: „Sie machen ihren Job hervorragend. Sie sind ein starker Verteidigungsminister.“ Damit hat George W. Bush eine weitere Entscheidung getroffen. Er verknüpft seinen eigenen Ruf, vielleicht seine politische Zukunft mit Rumsfeld. Zurücktreten müsste der Minister fortan aus eigenem Antrieb.

Der Präsident beweist Gespür für die Volksseele. Denn die mag keine Folterer, noch weniger aber hält sie Amerika für einen Folterstaat. Strafverfolgung soll es geben, aber in Grenzen. Die Älteren erinnern sich noch an den Fall William Calley, der 1971 von einem Kriegsgericht wegen Mordes verurteilt wurde. Der Leutnant hatte sich am Massaker an Zivilisten im vietnamesischen My Lai beteiligt. Zu seiner Verteidigung sagte er, Unterricht über die Genfer Konventionen habe er nie erhalten; wohl aber habe er gewusst, dass er wegen Befehlsverweigerung vor ein Kriegsgericht kommen könne. Am Tag nach der Verurteilung erhielt das Weiße Haus 50000 Protest-Telegramme. 79 Prozent der Amerikaner glaubten, das Urteil sei falsch. Präsident Nixon begnadigte den Kriegsverbrecher.

Heute wollen zwei Drittel der Amerikaner, dass Rumsfeld bleibt. Sie können sich nicht vorstellen, warum ein Minister in Washington dafür verantwortlich sein soll, was ein paar Reservisten nachts um zwei in Bagdad taten. Und sie mögen sich nicht vorstellen, dass es um mehr gehen könnte. Amerikas Militär ist eine Freiwilligenarmee. Wer dient, tut es zumeist, weil er glaubt, Amerika zu verteidigen und der Welt die Demokratie zu bringen. Erweisen sich die Übergriffe als Defekt des Systems oder gar als dessen Wesen, wird der Dienst der vielen entehrt. Und wer bewahrt sie vor dieser Schmach? Ihr Präsident.

Außerdem gibt es noch einige taktische Fragen. Solange nur die Opposition Rumsfelds Rücktritt fordert, ist dessen Job einigermaßen sicher: So lautet das Gesetz des Wahlkampfes. Müsste er gehen, würde der Irak-Krieg wie ein Fehlschlag aussehen und damit die ganze Präsidentschaft. Die Berufung eines Nachfolgers könnte im Wahljahr zum Albtraum werden. Die Senatsbestätigung würde sich hinziehen und wäre nicht ohne Generaldebatte über die Außenpolitik zu bekommen. Darum haben die Taktiker des Weißen Hauses übers Wochenende hineingehört in die eigene Partei, besonders in die Senatsfraktion, ob sich dort ein Aufstand gegen Rumsfeld anbahnt. Doch Rumsfeld scheint seinen Kopf einstweilen durch einen konzentrierten, beinahe demütigen Auftritt im Kongress gerettet zu haben.

Die Reihen zu schließen birgt freilich auch Risiken. Als George W. Bush am Montag aus dem Amtszimmer seines Ministers tritt, hat Rumsfeld ihm soeben ein Dutzend neuer Aufnahmen von Misshandlungen aus dem Irak vorgelegt. Der Pentagon-Chef hatte den Skandal selbst neu angeheizt, als er im Kongress weitere „sadistische, grausame und unmenschliche“ Fotos und sogar Videos ankündigte. „Ich fürchte“, sagt Rumsfeld, „es wird alles noch schlimmer kommen.“ Wie schlimm?

Binnen Minuten füllen Gerüchte die Marmorkuppel des Kongress-Gebäudes. Erniedrigung, Vergewaltigung, Körperverletzung, Mord: Ein jeder raunt dem Nächsten seine eigene Wahrheit über den Inhalt der Horror-Videos zu. Bewegte Bilder, die nicht nur Bedrohung und sexuelle Erniedrigung zeigen, sondern „Schlimmeres“.

Die Veröffentlichung ist nur eine Frage der Zeit. Bei Redaktionsschluss verhandelten Kongress und Pentagon noch über die Freigabe. Einzelne Abgeordnete sollen die Bilder zuerst sehen. Alles Teil einer Strategie der Schadensbegrenzung. Denn „die Schockwirkung der Bilder wird reduziert“, sagt ein Beamter aus dem Verteidigungsministerium, „wenn erst mal viele Leute berichten, wie schockiert sie sind“. Diese Kaskade der Empörung scheint Bushs Krisenteam besser zu gefallen, als jeden Tag ein neues Foto in der Zeitung zu finden.

Am Montag hat der New Yorker begonnen: Das Magazin zeigt das Bild eines Häftlings in Abu Ghraib. Er steht nackt vor den Gitterstäben einer Zelle, vor Angst steif. Links und rechts von ihm reißen Hunde an ihren Leinen. Das Photo stammt offenbar aus einer Serie. In einem anderen, nicht veröffentlichten Bild soll der Häftling am Boden liegen – mit einer blutenden Wunde am Bein, wahrscheinlich von einem Biss. Damit wäre die neue Ebene der Grausamkeit schon erreicht. Gezeigt werden zudem andere Soldaten als bisher bekannt. Die amtliche These vom Ausnahme-Exzess beschädigen die Bilder schon jetzt.

Die amerikanischen Medien erweisen sich in diesen Tagen als gnadenlose Aufklärer. Die Washington Post versucht in einer Serie nachzuweisen, wie durch Rumsfelds Entscheidungen „ein System der Gesetzlosigkeit“ entstand. Häftlinge „im Irak und in Afghanistan“ seien „erniedrigt, geschlagen, gefoltert und ermordet“ worden.

Das Drama begann eigentlich schon kurz nach dem 11. September 2001, als die Regierung erklärte, der Krieg gegen den Terror werde nicht nach den alten Regeln gefochten. Im Januar 2002 ließ Rumsfeld wissen, in Afghanistan besäßen Hunderte von Verhafteten „keinerlei Rechte“ nach den Genfer Konventionen. Dabei hätte es zu dieser Feststellung einer förmlichen Anhörung bedurft. Häftlinge sollten nach Rumsfelds Anweisung „meistens“ so behandelt werden, dass die Konventionen „einigermaßen“ beachtet würden. Im April 2003 billigte Rumsfelds Ministerium 20 neue Abhörtechniken für Guantánamo. „Wir wollten eine gesetzmäßige Art finden, den Druck zu erhöhen“, meint einer der beteiligten Anwälte. Im Sommer 2003 brachte der Lagerchef von Guantánamo die neuen Techniken nach Abu Ghraib. Auf den Zusammenhang zwischen den vom Pentagon genehmigten Methoden und den Misshandlungen hat am Dienstag bei den Kongressanhörungen die Senatorin Hillary Clinton hingewiesen.

Spätestens seit Frühjahr 2004 beschwerten sich Menschenrechtsgruppen über die Zustände in den Gefängnissen. Besatzungschef Paul Bremer forderte bei Minister Rumsfeld Verbesserungen ein. Als das nicht half, ging er zu Vizepräsident Richard Cheney und Sicherheitsberaterin Condoleezza Rice. Außenminister Powell muss die Frage der Häftlinge während Kabinettssitzungen regelmäßig aufgeworfen haben. Die politische Verantwortung lässt sich also durchaus zuordnen.

Jedenfalls hat der Skandal um Abu Ghraib die Debatte um die Erfolgschancen im Irak verändert. Plötzlich wird diskutiert, ob Amerika den Krieg verlieren könnte. Sogar den Befürwortern des Krieges kommen nun Zweifel. „Ohne radikales Handeln“, schreiben William Kristol und Bob Kagan im jüngsten Weekly Standard, „wird die Regierung das Scheitern nicht verhindern können.“ Die Skeptiker sind über diesen Punkt hinaus. „Abu Ghraib hat den amerikanischen Idealismus zur Farce verkommen lassen“, meint Joe Klein in Time. „Dieser Ort steht für all die perversen Konsequenzen einer Besatzung und all die moralischen Komplexitäten, die der Präsident vorzieht zu ignorieren.“

Den Umfragedaten vom Wochenende zufolge verfällt das Vertrauen in Bushs Irak-Politik. Eine Mehrheit ist inzwischen gegen den Krieg. Nur noch ein Drittel der Amerikaner glaubt, das Land werde „in die richtige Richtung“ geführt. Eine Mehrheit meint, George W. Bush verdiene „keine Wiederwahl“. Der Präsident kann nur aus einer Frage der Demoskopen Hoffnung schöpfen. Die ist freilich entscheidend: „Wen würden sie wählen?“ Da liegt Bush mit vier Prozentpunkten vorn.

Dieses Paradox erklärt Regierungsberaterin Mary Matalin: „Wenn der Irak das Problem ist, heißt die Antwort nicht John Kerry.“ So gering scheint das Vertrauen in den Demokraten derzeit zu sein, dass im Vergleich mit ihm sogar George W. Bush glänzend dasteht. Der Kandidat lässt die Regierungskrise ungenutzt verstreichen – und stürzt damit die Opposition in die Krise. Schon fragen die Kommentatoren: „Wo ist eigentlich John Kerry?“ Nun, der tingelt durchs Land. Diese Woche hat er seinem Reformvorschlag für die Krankenversorgung gewidmet. Seine Kommentare zum Folterskandal sind nicht mehr als pflichtgemäß und zudem, wie die New Republic meint, „konfus“: Manchmal macht er sich die Theorie von den faulen Äpfeln zu Eigen und spricht von „ein paar amerikanischen Soldaten“, die sich „unter bestimmten Umständen absolut unakzeptabel“ verhalten hätten. Im nächsten Moment scheint Kerry auf die Theorie vom systemhaften Missstand einzuschwenken. Dann fordert er, „die Befehlskette nach oben zu verfolgen“. Das Wort „Kriegsverbrechen“ hat auch Kerry noch nicht benutzt.

Das hat er früher einmal getan, 1971, nach dem Prozess um das Massaker von My Lai. Damals sagte er: „Leutnant Calley mag tatsächlich ein Mörder sein, aber das Urteil trifft nicht den wirklichen Kriminellen. Alle, die wir in Vietnam dienten, wissen, wer wirklich schuldig ist: die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika.“ Bald darauf verlor er seinen ersten Wahlkampf um einen Sitz im Abgeordnetenhaus.

Hinter Kerrys Zaudern verbirgt sich auch ein strategisches Dilemma. Seine Irak-Politik ist nur im Kleingedruckten von jener George W. Bushs zu unterscheiden. Beide wollen die Machtübergabe am 30. Juni, beide wollen notfalls mehr Truppen schicken, beide wollen die Rolle von Nato und UN vergrößern. Denn Kerry folgt dem Erfolgsrezept von Bill Clinton, Wahlen in der Mitte zu gewinnen. Doch spätestens seit dem Skandal um Abu Ghraib wächst die Zahl jener, die nur noch eins wollen: raus aus dem Irak. Ihr Anteil liegt schon bei gut 40 Prozent der Wähler. Sie fühlen sich von keinem der beiden Kandidaten vertreten. Manche Analytiker glauben, dass nur gewinnen kann, wer einen Abzugstermin aus dem Irak nennt.

Einer hat das schon getan: Ralph Nader, der dritte Mann. Bis vor kurzem schien dessen Kandidatur bedeutungslos zu sein. Plötzlich aber verfängt sein Argument, wonach Bush und Kerry politische Zwillinge seien. In den Umfragen liegt Nader bei fünf Prozent. Das wäre wohl genug, Bush zu einer zweiten Amtszeit zu verhelfen. Der Friedensflügel der Demokraten verlangt nun, dass Kerry den Abzug der Truppen in Aussicht stellt. Die New Yorker Szenezeitung Village Voice hat eine andere Lösung parat: „John Kerry muss weg“. Die Demokraten sollten die Delegierten ihres Nominierungsparteitages von ihrem imperativen Mandat entbinden.

John Kerry ist jetzt erst einmal abgetaucht. Eine Minderheit der politischen Strategen findet, das sei nicht unbedingt von Nachteil. Die Wahl werde ohnehin zu einem Plebiszit über die Amtsführung George W. Bushs. Kerry dürfe blass bleiben, solange Bush seine Präsidentschaft im Irak eigenhändig zugrunde richte. Nur eins dürfe Kerry nicht tun, frotzelt der Talkmaster Don Imus. Er solle das Missgeschick vom vergangenen Wochenende nicht wiederholen und „vor Kameras vom Fahrrad fallen“. Wer am Boden liegt, den wählt das Volk nicht zum Präsidenten.

[Joerver]

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HOW`S MY WAR?

[Joerver]

Fintan Dunne: `Nick Berg`s family firm was on Freeper `enemies` list`
Date: Friday, May 14 @ 10:27:29 EDT
http://www.breakfornews.com/NickBergEnemiesList.htm


By Fintan Dunne, Break For News

The family firm of beheaded American Nick Berg, was named by a conservative website in a list of `enemies` of the Iraq occupation. That could explain his arrest by Iraqi police --a detention which fatally delayed his planned return from Iraq and may have led directly to his death.

Nick Berg, 26 disappeared into incommunicado detention after his arrest by Iraqi police in March, 2004. He vanished again after his release 13 days later. His body was found last Saturday in Baghdad, and a video of his beheading --supposedly by a radical Islamic group-- was posted on the Internet on Tuesday.

The official story of his gruesome murder has many dubious aspects, not least the real reason why Iraqi police detained the young man at a checkpoint. New research by BreakForNews has uncovered a plausible explanation.

The FreeRepublic.com web site and forum has a reputation for right-wing views, fanatical Republicanism and relentless pro-war activism.



On 7th March, 2004, just three weeks before the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, an `enemies` list of anti-war groups and individuals was posted on the Free Republic forum.

It began: "Here you are, FReepers. Here is the enemy."

The list had been copied from publicly available endorsements of a call to action for an imminent anniversary antiwar protest on 20th March, 2004. The protest was being organized under the banner of the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism).

Among those listed as having endorsed the call to action was this entry: "Michael S. Berg, Teacher, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, Inc."

That`s Nick Berg`s father, Michael who acts as business manager for his son in their family radio communications firm, Prometheus Methods Tower Service.

Both father and son cared deeply about Iraq. But they were on opposite sides of opinion on the occupation --though you would never know that from reading the New York Times.

Michael was ardently antiwar, whereas his Bush-supporting son was in favor of the war to the extent that he had already visited Iraq seeking to help with rebuilding efforts.

Just seven days after "Michael Berg" and "Prometheus Methods Tower Service" had come up on that Iraq war `enemies` list, his son Nick Berg returned to Iraq under the business name of Prometheus Methods Tower Service.

The scene was set for tragically mistaken suspicions --which were to end in the horrifying death of an honorable and blameless American. A humanitarian who had traveled several times to Third World countries --such as Ghana, to teach villagers construction techniques.

The web traffic to the Free Republic forum --and it`s forum membership-- include significant numbers of serving and former US military.

Many members take their online activism very seriously. Some delight in causing mischief for those they think are identified as "enemies."

Within minutes of getting their hands on the antiwar names, one was boasting of having contacted the military about active service personnel who were on the list:

"I forwarded the list to the ISC (the command you listed), the district officer... the district legal office and the investigative services office."

The response:

"The poor moron is not going to know what hit him. Is this being mean-spirited? NO! Someone against our military does not belong in the military!"

Another was already investigating a member of the Coast Guard on the list:

"I took a look at his yahoo and he has a site which is not real fond of the war on drugs OR the war on terrorism.... That particular coastie needs some serious trouble to come his way...."

" I spoke on the phone to a senior chief yesterday in Virginia.... [who] could not believe what the guy was doing. He was both astounded and angry. I think [he] is in for some big, big trouble."

If that list could end up on an Internet forum, then it could just as readily end up with the FBI, and eventually in the hands of those in Iraq who are keen to track or harass antiwar activists entering the country.

Alternatively, the enthusiasts on Free Republic have the contacts and the clear determination to have ensured the list quickly got to the right places.

At the time the list was posted, Nick Berg had just come back from an Iraq trip lasting from late December to Feb. 1. He had reported no problems whatsoever with Iraqi police during that visit.

Yet, within two weeks of the list being posted, Nick Berg --back in Iraq on his final fatal trip-- was reportedly detained in Mosul at an Iraqi police checkpoint. The official explanation is that authorities thought his identification might have been forged and were checking his authenticity.

But a more likely reason is that by then authorities in Iraq had discovered that a `Berg` of Prometheus Methods Tower Service was in the country, and issued a detention instruction to Iraqi police because they misidentified Nick Berg as an antiwar activist entering Iraq to work for the `enemy`.

That could explain why he was held incommunicado for 13 days, without recourse to a lawyer; why US officialdom was singularly unheeding of his mother`s pleas; why the FBI visited his family to question them; why it took a US court order secured by the family to pressure his release.

And why he was cruelly murdered soon after that release, like many others around the world who suffer such a fate at the hands of state-condoned death squads --sometimes just hours after their release from official detention.

That`s the final sordid twist in this grisly story.

If the world was an uncomplicated place, then this tale would end with the mistaken arrest of Nick Berg.

We could finish by noting that Nick`s father is reportedly accusing the US government of contributing to his son`s death. Unable to find work in Iraq, Nick Berg`s last trip was set to be a short one. He planned to return to the US on the 30th of March.

Michael Berg charges that his son`s detention until 5th April, was a violation of civil rights which fatally delayed his exit from Iraq and instead left him dangerously stranded in the middle of the explosion of violence which erupted in early April, 2004.

But there are much graver aspects to all this. Another chilling perspective is best summarized by the wry cynicism of Michael Rivero at WhatReallyHappened.com

In a commentary on the beheading of Nick Berg, Rivero writes:

"How wonderfully lucky for Bush and the NeoCons that such a great piece of pro-war distract-from-the-torture-scandal event happens at this particular moment."

Rivero`s world-weary realism strikes a chord with his popular website`s visitors, but will undoubtedly shock unseasoned observers. However he is far from alone in questioning the official line. Others have noted the too-white hands and military at-ease stance of the hooded captors in the video.

The killing has certainly eased the international discomfiture of the US.

The problem with assumptions that al-Queda is responsible for Berg`s beheading, is that Musab al-Zarqawi is mentioned in a caption on the videotape of the killing.

Al-Zarqawi came to our attention in January, 2004 when the US military claimed to have intercepted a letter of his written to the al-Queda leadership. But the content of the letter read like a US military propaganda statement on the situation in Iraq.

In the letter al-Zarqawi wrote of Iraqis coming to welcome the US presence in Iraq, and about how al-Queda was loosing ground in it`s war against the US.

In February, 2004 an article "The Zarqawi Gambit," by Greg Weiher on Counterpunch was deeply skeptical of the letter:

"..if you were Karl Rove, you couldn`t design a better scenario to validate the administration`s slant on the war than this. That`s a good reason to maintain a healthy skepticism. In fact, there are a number of good reasons to take this story with a grain of salt (maybe a three- or four-pounder)."

The US has been keen to paint the opposition to the occupation as composed of many foreign fighters tied to al-Queda. The letter was clearly fabricated for propaganda purposes, with al-Zarqawi as it`s new al-Queda star.

But if al-Zarqawi is merely a flimsy propaganda creation, then what confidence can we have in the official line that al-Zarqawi and al-Queda murdered Berg?

The only plausible alternative is a covert, black operation orchestrated as part of the seedier arm of US foreign policy --which generally only come to light when candid photographs, for example, reach the public domain.

But that`s an explanation which many would reject on the grounds that no force allied to the US --no matter how black its operations-- would have members so callous as to even countenance the cold-blooded beheading of a US citizen.

However, there is a mindset amplified by war passions and found among the gung-ho brutes who beat Iraqis to death; found among the thuggish mercenary death squads who roam to slay at will; and found among the cold-blooded sociopaths who have planted bombs for political strategic reasons.

It`s war. And war begets a wartime mindset.

Nick Berg`s detention indicates that authorities regarded him an an antiwar activist and possibly also as an `enemy.`

That original post on Free Republic contains a telling indication of a mindset, which in the heat of war could well kill an American it regards as the "enemy."

A mindset which has now reacted to Michael Berg`s loss of his son like this:

"I wonder what he thinks about his Muslim buddies now... "

A mindset displayed by the search keywords used on Free Republic to categorize the list of antiwar supporters. The keywords are:

APPEASENIKS; DAMNCOMMIES; ENEMYWITHIN; LEFTISTS; PEACENIKS; RATS; SCUMBAGS; TRAITORS; TREASONOUSSCUM; USEFULIDIOTS; WARONTERROR

Reprinted from Break For News:
http://www.breakfornews.com/NickBergEnemiesList.htm

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Das ist nicht der erste Artikel in der Richtung, den ich lese. Es liegt mir nichts daran irgendeine Verschwörungstheorie zu verbreiten, aber vermutlich werden auch andere in der Richtung nachkommen.
das Video #16193
Ich erinnere nur an Kuweit.

Could N. Berg`s execution be fake? - 05/14/2004 13:35

Given the incomprehensible jungle of information, the very first question, when viewing this video of an American civilian, N. Berg-s execution, should be whether it is even true?

There appear to be a few problems with it, casting doubt on its authenticity. If these questions aren-t answered, one should be wary of the entire matter and be advised not to give in to the patriotic blindness brought on by the emotional charge this video packs.

Consider these inconsistencies with the video before making up your mind:

1) CIA claims it has examined the video and concluded that the hooded figure is Zaqrawi, a high level al-Qaeda operative. However, anyone who has seen the video will attest to the fact that there is no way to identify anyone from it, including the victim. Second, according to an US military report in April -03, Zaqrawi was killed in the bombing of Falluja. CIA does not elaborate whether Zaqrawi has magically sprung back to life or whether the April report was wrong.

2) The US media claimed that Zaqrawi lost a leg in 2001. Now, it says that he did not lose his leg after all. This flip flop seems too coincidental as the purported figure in the video doesn-t appear handicapped. The US does not elaborate on which intelligence is wrong.

3) The US media says the audio says that N. Berg was executed in retaliation to the US prison abuse. The reaction of the media was far too quick. It moved straight to using it in making a comparison between prison ?humiliation¦ and a ?beastly killing¦ saying to the shocked public ?Look, we only humiliated them in the prison and look at what the animals do to us.¦ It was quick to point out that what the terrorists do to Americans is far worse than what the US is doing to the Iraqis.

There are several problems with this. First, there have been numerous reported deaths in the US prisons caused by severe beatings so comparing ?humiliation¦ to a death is the wrong comparison. Second, the tortures and abuses have gone on for over a year. If al-Qaeda were in the business of avenging prison abuse, it would have already done it and probably on several occasions. Otherwise, it means that al-Qaeda gets their information from CNN or that it just happened to be a coincidence matching Abu Ghraib prison pictures with this video. It-s very unlikely that al-Qaeda would and could engage in this synchronized US media play. The timing of the video release and the media attempts to whip up an anti-Islamic frenzy suggests a media ruse timed perfectly to deflect the mounting outrage and condemnation of the US military.

4) The voice on the video says that an offer was made to the US military to exchange N. Berg for ?some of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib¦. The US has not commented on this.

5) The Bergs claim their son was detained by the US and are blaming their son-s death on the US military but the US says that N. Berg was never detained and instead was offered a free plane ride from Iraq. It does, however, seem that in order to offer a plane ticket, the US military must have had some dealing with N. Berg. In any case, N. Berg disappeared when in US custody.

6) The victim in the video is wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, the kind seen in pictures of Guantanamo inmates. It-s hard to believe that al-Qaeda terrorists would be supplying their victims a regulation outfit. None of the recently kidnapped hostages in Iraq (Japanese and Italian) wore any uniform outfits whatsoever.

7) [WARNING: Reader-s discretion advised] A human head contains 1.5 gallons of blood yet the freshly decapitated head shown in the video is leaking none. Neck artery would squirt a foot long geyser of blood. There is no evidence of that either. Only one answer lends itself here: the video was doctored. Either a portion was clipped out or the beheading never took place as shown, with the possibility of the victim being already dead.

8) The victim never resisted the killing. Even when on the ground, only one person sufficed to completely subdue N. Berg.

This article aims at proving or alleging nothing. The point is to provoke doubt and hopefully stave off a few readers from becoming an easy emotional target and a news puppet.

Pater Havlasa

Editor, eBigBang.com


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[Joerver]

John Nichols: When King George travels, liberties suffer

By John Nichols
May 13, 2004

The King made a royal visit to Wisconsin last week, and as is common when monarchs travel, individual liberties were suspended.

King George Bush`s bus trip across western Wisconsin closed schools and roads, prevented residents from moving freely in their own communities, and prevented citizens from exercising their free speech rights.

All in all, it was a typical George W. Bush visit.

But there`s a slight twist.

People in western Wisconsin, who hold to the refreshingly naive notion that they live in a republic as opposed to an imperial realm, are objecting.

"There`s a pattern of harassment of free speech here that really concerns me," says Guy Wolf, the student services coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. "If they`re going to call it a presidential visit, then it should be a presidential visit - where we can hear from him and he can hear from us. But that`s not what happened here, not at all."

Wolf and other La Crosse area residents who wanted to let the president know their feelings about critical issues came face to face with the reality that, when King George travels, he is not actually interested in a two-way conversation.

Along the route of the Bush bus trip from Dubuque to La Crosse, the Bush team created a "no-free-speech" zone that excluded any expressions of the dissent that is the lifeblood of democracy. In Platteville, peace activist Frank Van Den Bosch was arrested for holding up a sign that was critical of the president. The sign`s "dangerous" message, "FUGW," was incomprehensible to children and, no doubt, to many adults. Yet, it was still determined sufficiently unsettling to the royal procession that Van Den Bosch was slapped with a disorderly conduct ticket.

Up the road in La Crosse, the clampdown on civil liberties was even more sweeping. Wolf and hundreds of other Wisconsinites and Minnesotans who sought to express dissents were videotaped by authorities, told they could not make noise, ordered not to display certain signs and forced to stand out of eyesight of Bush and his entourage. Again and again, they were told that if they expressed themselves in ways that were entirely protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, they would be "subject to arrest."

"Everyone understood the need for basic security for the president, but none of us could understand why we had to give up our free speech rights," explained Wolf.

La Crosse Mayor John Medinger shares that concern. The Bush-Cheney campaign leased a portion of a local park where the royal rally was held. Yet, Wisconsinites who wanted to protest Bush`s visit were told they could not use a sound system in a completely different section of the park.

"I want to find out why the whole park was used when only a portion was leased," Medinger told the La Crosse Tribune. "So when demonstrators were told they couldn`t have (sound) systems, the question is why."

The Bush-Cheney campaign paid a $100 fee to use one part of the park, but disrupted much of the city. Medinger is now assessing the full cost of the royal visit and hopes to deliver a bill to the campaign, which State Elections Board attorney George Dunst says the Bush campaign should pay. Other communities, including Prairie du Chien, are looking at following Medinger`s lead.

But the challenge should not just be a financial one. The Bush visit attacked First Amendment rights up and down the Mississippi. A lot of people are owed apologies.

In a monarchy, of course, the King never apologizes. But in a democracy, the president is supposed to be accountable to the people.

By pressing demands that the charges against Frank Van Den Bosch be dropped and that the White House and the Bush-Cheney campaign apologize for participating in an anti-democratic endeavor, residents of western Wisconsin can, and should, take up the cause of this country`s founders. It is time once more to challenge a King named George.

John Nichols is the associate editor of The Capital Times. E-mail: [e-mail]

Published: 6:24 AM 5/13/04
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[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Pragmatism drives N.H. Naderites to Kerry

By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff | May 14, 2004

HANOVER, N.H. -- A generation of Ralph Nader supporters will come of age Nov. 2 at Dartmouth College, and they`re planning to vote for John F. Kerry.

In their cloth sandals, worn jeans, and "Support Fair Trade" sweatshirts, 15 members of the Dartmouth Greens gathered here Monday night for their weekly discussion of social justice and politics. The conversation veered from the economic abuse of sweatshop laborers to the physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners and whether a protest action of papering the campus with photos of abused Iraqis -- with the caption, "Is this the occupation you wanted?" -- would exploit the victims further.

While none of the 15 particularly like Kerry -- "wavering," "craggy," "passable," and "tree-stumpy" were among their descriptions of him -- this intensely antiwar group has almost unanimously decided to forsake Nader, a man they see as an idol, to help Kerry win New Hampshire, a key battleground state.

Al Gore lost here in 2000 by 7,200 votes, and many Democrats blamed Nader, who drew 22,000 votes. It is this psychology of defeat, a fear of throwing the election to Bush, that will steer Naderites, as well as many undecided voters, to Kerry`s side, campaign officials say.

"About 30 incoming freshmen came up to us at a campus fair recently and said, `Are you part of the Green Party, because I don`t want to support Nader after he ruined the last election,` " said Natalie Allan, a Dartmouth sophomore studying history. "We had to say we weren`t with Nader. It`s like we have to do a disclaimer now."

As the Kerry campaign looks at the Electoral College map of 538 votes -- the magic number for victory is 270 -- they aim to hold onto the 20 states that Al Gore won in 2000, which this year would net 260 electoral votes. The Kerry strategy is to cross the 270-vote threshold with aggressive campaigns in 15 to 20 swing states.

Some Kerry lieutenants are lobbying for an all-out push in Ohio (with 20 electoral votes) or Missouri (11, perhaps with local congressman Richard A. Gephardt as a running mate), while others are more inclined toward racking up wins in smaller states, including Arizona (10), West Virginia (5), and New Hampshire (4).

Bill Shaheen, who ran Gore`s operation in New Hampshire in 2000 and is now in charge of Kerry`s campaign here, said the campaign is determined to avoid what he sees as Gore`s error, writing off states such as New Hampshire, Ohio, and West Virginia too early, when Bush had not solidified support there.

Shaheen, husband of former governor Jeanne Shaheen, Kerry`s campaign chairwoman, recalled: "Gore never thought New Hampshire was in play, even though Jeanne was running for a third term, and then three weeks before the general election [the Gore campaign] told me New Hampshire was in play and to get busy. But we had no staff, no money, no budget.

"Now we`re going after every state, but you want to be able to pace yourself," he said. "Some things you have no control over, like the prisoner abuse in Iraq. What I see is a slow boil of anger against Bush that will peak in the fall, at the right time."

The high command of the Kerry forces -- for example, campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill and strategist Tad Devine -- are also committed to competing in as many states as possible, not only because they believe that voters are souring on the economy and the Iraq war, but also to force the Bush campaign to spend money matching Kerry`s advertising.

When Kerry began airing a set of ads last week in Louisiana -- which Bush won by eight percentage points in 2000 -- the Republicans were on the air there within 24 hours, Devine pointed out.

"It`s very good for us to get more states in play," he said. "That`s why we said we`re going up on the air in Louisiana and Colorado. Two weeks ago we told people we would expand the battleground. Some people doubted it; the Republicans called us a bunch of names. And then we did exactly that."

Another Kerry strategist, who asked not to be named, said "hard-core antiwar voters" were a greater threat to Democrats than Nader. This strategist expressed concern that such voters might simply stay home in November if they feel that Bush, Kerry, and Nader all lack a plan for Iraq.

But a third Kerry adviser said that antiwar voters will probably solidify in Kerry`s camp because of the likelihood that ongoing woes in Iraq will ultimately harm Bush.

"I think our message is very clear: We wouldn`t be in the mess we are in today in Iraq if Kerry were president," the campaign official said.

But some political analysts and pollsters say that states like New Hampshire typify the challenges that Kerry faces as he seeks to hold onto states Gore won in 2000 and win more.

Because of changes in state-by-state electoral votes after the 2000 Census, in which the US population count shifted toward Southern and Southwestern states, Kerry faces a harder time than Gore in reaching 270.

Andrew Smith, a University of New Hampshire pollster, pointed out that Kerry holds a lead of four percentage points in a theoretical matchup with Bush in the Granite State, down from a 14-point lead in a UNH poll in February.

Nader, who took 4 percent of the vote in 2000, needs just 3,000 signatures to qualify for the New Hampshire ballot; his name was not included in the most recent UNH poll, but Smith expects that Nader will be on the ballot.

And there are other variables: Republicans are expected to dominate the New Hampshire ballot this November, with Governor Craig Benson, Senator Judd Gregg, and the state`s two representatives up for reelection.

"Kerry won`t have the kind of inverse coattails that Bush will have from Republicans in the state," Smith said. "Gregg`s seat is so safe, for instance, he can just campaign for Bush this fall."

Nader, who plans to visit New Hampshire later this month as part of a Northeastern tour, is preparing to qualify for the presidential ballots in at least 45 states, spokesman Kevin Zeese said. On Wednesday, Nader was endorsed by the national Reform Party, putting him on the ballot in at least eight states, including the battlegrounds of Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Nader`s campaign said he would decide on a case-by-case basis whether to accept the Reform nomination.

As for Kerry, few Democratic activists are presuming that he will win here, only that he has a good shot. At Dartmouth, some Greens say they hope their lukewarm support for Kerry as the candidate with the best chance of defeating Bush will evolve into positive reasons for backing the Massachusetts senator.

"There`s nothing exciting about him," said Amber Kelsie, a government major from Texas. "He`s almost as tree-stumpy as Gore is. He feels like he wavers on issues or he won`t take an actual stance.

"But I hear that he has a good record on the environment," she said. "That`s one thing. I`d really like to feel better about this choice, since I am planning to vote for him."

Patrick Healy can be reached at [e-mail].
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Jamail war zeitweilig während der Kämpfe in Falludscha.

Falludschas Rebellen feiern den ‘Sieg’
von Dahr Jamail
The NewStandard

Falludscha, 10. Mai 2004. Die ‘US 1st Marine Division’ schickte heute einen kleinen Konvoi nach Falludscha , der sich mit dem Bürgermeister treffen sowie Kooperation mit der Irakischen Polizei (IP) und dem Zivilen Irakischen Verteidigungskorps (ICDC) demonstrieren sollte. Das beabsichtigte Muskelspiel wurde allerdings zur arrangierten Übung. Kaum zogen die Marines wieder ab, brach in der umfochtenen Stadt eine große Siegesfeier aus - anders kann man es nicht beschreiben -, Sieg über das US-Militär. Bewohner und Widerstandskämpfer in voller Bewaffnung mischten sich völlig ungezwungen unter das uniformierte IP- und ICDC-Personal.

Gegen 11 Uhr heute Morgen waren mehrere amerikanische Humvees und Stryker-Fahrzeuge in das Gebiet von Downtown-Falludscha eingefahren - begleitet von Pickup-Trucks mit IP- und ICDC-Personal; die Trucks fuhren vor, neben und hinter dem Militärkonvoi. Der kleine Konvoi bewegte sich mit langsamer Geschwindigkeit bis in den massiv verbarrikadierten ‘Komplex des Stammesrats’ . Eine Presseverlautbarung der 1st Marine Division zu dem Ereignis: Die Marines “reisten heute nach Falludscha, um Bewegungsfreiheit zu exerzieren und sich mit Offiziellen der Stadt zu treffen”.

Laut Abdul Rahman, Hauptmann der ICDC, war diese Aktion der Marines ein ausgehandeltes Zugeständnis. “Es hat Verhandlungen zwischen den Leuten von Falludscha und den Besatzungskräften gegeben”, so Hauptmann Rahman. “Der Plan sieht vor, dass die Amerikaner all ihre Truppen aus der Stadt abziehen, nachdem sie diese eine Patrouille bekommen haben”. Rahman stockt und wirft einen Blick auf die Militärfahrzeuge, die im Komplex stehen. “Wir wollen, dass sie aus unserem Land verschwinden”, ergänzt er. Nervöse Bewohner - der bis vor kurzem noch belagerten Stadt - betrachten vom Gehsteig aus schweigend die Fahrzeuge; diese befinden sich seit 30 Minuten im Innern des Stammesrats-Komplex, hinter rund acht Fuß hohen Betonbarrieren. Dutzende IP- und ICDC-Leute, die die Patrouille begleitet haben, bewachen jetzt den Eingang.

In der Presseverlautbarung der 1st Marine Division konstatiert 1st Lieutenant Eric Knapp - Öffentlichkeitsoffizier der Ersten Marinedivision: “Die Kooperation zwischen den Kräften der Koalition und den irakischen Kräften steht symbolisch für die Solidarität zwischen all jenen, die die Vision eines sicheren und reichen Irak teilen”. Zumindest einige Mitglieder jener irakischen Kräfte schätzten die Situation allerdings anders ein.

Direkt vor der Mauer des Komplexes steht Alla Hamdalide, er gehört den ICDC-Forces an. Er sagt, seine Einheit sei nötigt, um die Marines zu beschützen. “Wir brachten die Marines von der Brücke in die Stadt”. “Sie konnten nicht mal alleine hier rein. Der Sieg für Falludscha bleibt bestehen”. Die Atmosphäre im Freien ist extrem angespannt und finster. Dennoch trifft sich im Innern des Gebäudes Generalmajor James Mattis mit dem Bürgermeister von Falludscha. Angeblich diskutieren sie Wiederaufbaupläne für die Stadt. Nach nur einer halben Stunde im Komplex macht sich die Patrouille in langsamer Fahrt auf den Rückweg aus der Stadt - erneut begleitet von dutzenden IP- und ICDC-Leuten auf Pickup-Trucks, die die Fahrzeuge der Marines von allen Seiten umgeben. Es gibt keine Berichte, nach denen es während der Aktion zu Gewehrfeuer kam.

Kaum ist die Patrouille aus dem Gebiet verschwunden, brechen spontane Feiern aus. Scharenweise versammeln sich Einwohner auf den Straßen, singend und Flaggen schwenkend. Sowohl IP- als auch ICDC-Leute schließen sich dem Fest an. Sie schwenken ihre Gewehre in der Luft und formen mit zwei Fingern das “Victory”-Zeichen. Ein älterer Stadtbewohner schwenkt hinten auf einem Truck die traditionelle irakische Fahne. “Heute ist der erste Tag im Krieg gegen die Amerikaner! Dies ist unser Sieg über die Amerikaner!” schreit er. Die Menschen hier bezeichnen die Widerstandskämpfer als “Mujahideen” (“Freiheitskämpfer”). Und diese Widerstandskämpfer mischen sich jetzt unter die Menge aus unbewaffneten Zivilisten, Polizisten und irakischen Soldaten. Sie zeigen ihre RPG-Granatwerfer (geeignet für Granaten mit Raketenantrieb), ihre Kalaschnikow-Sturmgewehre und ihre Handgranaten. Als tausende Einwohner sich die Hauptstraße hinauf und hinunter bewegen, paradieren diese Leute auf Trucks.

US-Militäroffizielle geben zu, dass sich unter den irakischen Kräften der ‘Falludscha-Brigade’ - denen man, wie sie sagen, die Sicherheit der Stadt anvertraut hat -, auch eine unbekannte Zahl Guerilleros befindet, die den US-Marines noch letzten Monat gegenüberstanden, als die Kämpfe hier auf dem Höhepunkt waren. Die Führung der neuen Brigade besteht zum Teil aus ehemaligen Baath-Offizieren, die in der Armee des abgesetzten Diktators Saddam Hussein dienten. Ahmed Saadoun Jassin, ein irakischer Polizist in Uniform, der von der US-Besatzungsbehörde angeheuert und trainiert wurde, gibt sich erst gar nicht die Mühe, seine Freude beim Abzug der Marines zu verhehlen. “Ich kann Ihnen gar nicht sagen, wie glücklich ich im Moment bin”, sagt er. “Dies ist ein Sieg des Islam”. Zur Kooperation mit den Marines befragt, erklärt er: “Das war der ausgehandelte Deal. Sie könnten sich in Falludscha nicht länger als eine Stunde aufhalten, und das haben sie auch nicht getan”. Ladenbesitzer werfen mit vollen Händen Süßigkeiten in die vorbeimarschierende Menge. Viele der Feiernden schwenken alte irakische Flaggen, andere halten den Koran hoch. Aus den Moscheen dröhnt Musik, als Fahrzeuge feiernder Einwohner und bewaffneter Mujahideen die Hauptstraße Falludschas auf und ab fahren. Auch IP- und ICDC-Mitglieder und mehrere Widerstandskämpfer werden gesichtet, wie sie Gewehrschüsse in die Luft abgeben.

In ihrer Presseverlautbarung geht die 1st Marine Division nicht auf die verhandelten Beschränkungen für die Marines ein. Laut irakischen Polizisten und (irakischen) Soldaten hatte man diese den Marines im Gegenzug für sichere Fahrt (in die Stadt) auferlegt. “Die Falludschaer winkten den Marines, so wird berichtet, zu, während diese in die Stadt einfuhren und wieder heraus... Bewegungsfreiheit in Falludscha, wie durch den heutigen Besuch demonstriert, ist eine wichtige Komponente im Prozess zur Schaffung von Voraussetzungen, die nötig sind, die Stadt wiederaufzubauen und zu revitalisieren”, schreibt Lt. Knapp. “Dieses Beispiel für Teamwork sollten jene beachten, die sich der Stabilität im Irak gewaltsam entgegenstellen; sie sind nichts weiter als ungeliebte Hindernisse auf dem Weg zu einem wirklich freien Irak”.

Ein Widerstandskämpfer, der auf einem Lastwagendach reitet und einen Granatwerfer (RPG) schwenkt, sagt: “Die (Marines) haben die Menschen der Welt nur dazu gebracht, über sie zu lachen. Aber ich denke, sie werden zurückkommen, denn sie stehen nicht zu ihrem Wort”.

Dahr Jamail ist Irak-Korrespondent von The NewStandard http://newstandardnews.net



[ Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "Fallujah Rebels Celebrate `Victory`" ]

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The war of the snuff videos
6.Teil

HOUSTON - It will get worse. A secrecy-obsessed Pentagon is in total disarray. Republican Senator John McCain is in favor of releasing all of Abu Ghraib`s S&M stash right now, photos and videos.

Houston was under "tornado alert" this Tuesday. This was not merely a meteorological metaphor. Conservative Texas is getting sick and tired of it all. Some blame it on "the whole movement of our culture towards decadence". Others, like Randy Johnson, a gentleman from Houston, are more ... proactive: "Just take the camera away from the troops and replace them with 9mm pistols." Retired generals are in panic, convinced that Iraq may become, simultaneously, an ally of Iran and an al-Qaeda paradise.

The upcoming snuff videos from Abu Ghraib found their counterpart in the snuff video on the Islamic website Muntada al-Ansar of five masked men beheading civilian contractor Nick Berg from Philadelphia after warning George W Bush he will regret the day he stepped into Iraq. This snuff video even comes with a title: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Shown Slaughtering an American. Al-Qaeda-linked al-Zarqawi, with a US$10 million bounty on his head, may be the only real al-Qaeda commander active in Iraq. The Pentagon had at least three clear chances to nab him before the war. It did not - because he was one of the justifications for the war.

The war of the snuff videos may have deadly repercussions. This hardcore jihad propaganda stunt - if it`s real - may encourage different sectors of the Iraqi resistance to join, to the delight of Washington neo-cons who want an all-out clash of civilizations-cum-total war. The majority of Americans don`t seem to have the stomach to go primal, but the impatience already expressed by many people in Texas may eventually signal the go-ahead for total war without mercy.

One from the heart
The hyperactive US corporate media salivate at the prospect of figuring out what Washington neo-cons are up to next. "Superb Job" Secretary on the Defensive Donald Rumsfeld insists "the military, not the media, discovered these abuses", trying to imply that the Pentagon was always on top of it. It was, but maybe not the way he intended. Rumsfeld hates the fact that it was a journalist, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, who broke the Abu Ghraib story. And Hersh is sure the buck stops at Rumsfeld.

Serious questions have not been answered. Since his Pentagon "told the world" of an investigation on Abu Ghraib last January, Rumsfeld never bothered to tell Bush or the Armed Services Committee about the possibility of Americans practicing torture. Rumsfeld never ordered one of his countless aides to read the report by Major-General Antonio Taguba and come up with some solutions. Rumsfeld himself sanctioned the use of private contractors who were involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses, so he should know what they were up to.

Last year in the Sunni triangle, a number of sheikhs told this correspondent they knew experts from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon`s intelligence apparatus were passing prison interrogation techniques to the Americans. These consultants were used by the Pentagon exactly because they were not respecting the Geneva Conventions or even Iraqi justice - since the country was occupied anyway. So it was no-holds-barred territory, with US commanders and soldiers totally shielded from any intrusion.

Sixty-four percent of Americans believe that Abu Ghraib was an isolated case - subscribing to the official Pentagon spin. It would have to be a Pentagon insider to provide the killer evidence capable of convincing Americans that Rumsfeld and the Pentagon civilian leadership have been acting as if they were one of the rogue regimes they despise - in total violation of international law.

Rumsfeld`s departure as a pugnacious sacrificial lamb could be prevented by the White House finding the ultimate tactic for the perfect public relations strategy, an equation between cost-benefit and the polls. According to the latest CNN-Gallup poll, 46 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove of Bush on Iraq. Election-wise, Bush has 48 percent and Democratic rival John Kerry 47 percent. But CNN does not stress that among registered voters Kerry has jumped 6 points ahead of Bush.

Vice President Dick Cheney has all but ordered Congress to "get off his back" (Rumsfeld`s), a call to arms dutifully followed by the oil-oiled neo-con propaganda machine. Rumsfeld also said everybody at the Pentagon is "heartsick". In a hilarious twist of fate, this happened the same day that Cheney`s own heart was proclaimed by his doctor to be "functioning properly".

One, two, three, fire
The chattering classes are divided between the fire-Rumsfeld group and the "loyal" opposition - Democrats and moderate Republicans who want to see the neo-cons in the Bush administration back in the wilderness but who also want the United States to restore at least a measure of its badly damaged credibility. What we might call the Revolt of the Generals was expressed by the now-iconic editorial of the Army Times: "This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential - even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war."

The war of the snuff videos will keep the Abu Ghraib S&M on media red alert, with the networks hysterically falling over themselves to come up with any damage-control euphemism, such as referring to the S&M as "inappropriate sexual behavior". The wall-to-wall cover is very bad news for Bush and potential good news for the still-in-deep-slumber Kerry campaign.

No matter what happens next, 32 states have already decided how to vote next November. Eighteen are swing states. People like former Democratic pollster Pat Cadell are stressing that Kerry "has to take the high road", has to tell everyone in these 18 states what he`s actually planning to do, considering that roughly 50 percent of Americans in most polls are now saying the country is on the wrong track. But compare it with another amazing statistic: no less than 49 percent of Democrats are still saying that Kerry straddles the issues. Cadell insists that Kerry must tell voters: Bush was indeed a good leader after September 11, 2001, but then he collapsed because of Iraq and his tax cuts for the rich.

Bush keeping Rumsfeld in command, in terms of US credibility in Iraq, the Middle East and the world of Islam, would be the 21st-century equivalent of the medieval black plague. Two in three Americans may support Rumsfeld at the moment, according to a University of Pennsylvania poll, but the support is bound to drop dramatically after the war of the snuff videos.

And now for the sacrificial lamb
Republican Senator James Inhofe told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "These prisoners, they`re murderers, they`re terrorists, they`re insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood on their hands, and here we`re concerned about the treatment of those individuals." The Red Cross, in its February 2004 report, is adamant: Up to 90 percent of the prisoners in Iraq were arrested by mistake.

General Taguba`s comprehensive 53-page report on prison abuse in Abu Ghraib, "a very good job" in the words of Senator McCain, stops the buck at the brigade-commander level. Taguba in essence says this was an individual, not institutional, failure. He does not mention that Major-General Geoffrey Miller, former Guantanamo supremo, wanted to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib, employing hardcore methods widely condemned by the Red Cross and Amnesty International since early 2002. Pentagon critics insist it goes all the way up to Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander on the ground in Iraq, and the whole Pentagon leadership. Even Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, daggers pointed, wants (high) heads to roll.

But how to make the Iraq S&M story go away? The Bush administration would have to ignore it. This is now absolutely impossible. Abu Ghraib is another round in the classic case study of the Bush administration vs world public opinion (the most famous previous round was certainly February 15, 2003, when more than 10 million people around the world demonstrated in the streets against the preemptive war on Iraq). It was world opinion uproar over Abu Ghraib that forced Bush to go public and in an extra-mild way denounce the Pentagon. Mainstream US media were not willing to go all the way with such an embarrassing story in time of war.

Bush going public meant the official go-ahead for the porno deluge. One more historical irony: Bush couldn`t care less for world opinion ("focus groups", in his own words) and America`s image in the world, but it is world opinion that now has backed him into a very tight corner. The only strategy left - repeated ad nauseam by White House, Pentagon and neo-con think-tanks ("we should not abandon the oppressed throughout the Middle East", etc) is to proclaim one`s shock - and disgusted awe.

But it all comes back full circle: Who will be offered as the proverbial sacrificial lamb (or wolf) so corporate media may declare this scandal officially over? Until then, it`s the war of the snuff videos.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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The Iraq gold rush

7.Teil


HOUSTON - They may be shot by a sniper. They may be caught by a roadside bomb. They may be kidnapped. They may be held in captivity in a room in the desert under 55 degrees Celsius in the shade and with no water. They may be beheaded. But they don`t care. They keep coming back - up to 500 a week - for more. They want their Iraqi golden job, and they want it now.

As Sunnis in Fallujah and Shi`ites in Najaf keep reminding anyone who bothers to listen, there are no jobs for Iraqis - unemployment is running at 70 percent. But despite the body count - 34 killed, 74 wounded, two missing and counting - there are plenty of jobs for Americans, especially Texans, on the KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown and Root) bandwagon in Iraq. The Halliburton subsidiary, based in downtown Houston like its parent company, is now employing 24,000 people - mostly Americans, but also from 38 other countries - in Iraq and Kuwait.

As many people, and not just the scandal junkies, are aware, KBR was awarded by the administration of President George W Bush a contract worth at least US$5 billion for 10 years in Iraq, for engineering and construction services and the rebuilding of civil infrastructure. If war may be a blessing from heaven for aspiring truck drivers in the heart of Texas, war is certainly a very good business for KBR. A few days ago Halliburton executives confirmed that the oil giant was collecting no less than $1 billion a month for their work in Iraq. This includes US taxpayers being overcharged $61 million for fuel and $24.7 million for meals, apart from a confirmed $6.3 million in bribes. Accusations are still flying: Halliburton has not rebuilt key nodes of Iraq`s oil infrastructure and has skimmed Iraqi jobs for away from Iraqis.

The Balkan connection
KBR`s - and Halliburton`s - success is a key node of the so-called Iron Triangle, the US crossroads connecting business, politics and the military. KBR is the key benefactor of military outsourcing, which means that now the US Army is dependent on KBR in Iraq. KBR started building ships for the US Navy during World War II. It built air strips and prison cells in Vietnam. But the big break came in December 1995. Dick Cheney had been the chief executive officer of parent company Halliburton for only two months. KBR was sent to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo to build two army camps in the middle of two deserted wheat fields. Instead it built two cities, one in Bosnia and one in Kosovo - complete with mail delivery and 24-hour food and laundry. In other words: without KBR, there would be no operating US Army in Bosnia and Kosovo. And the money was great: from 1995-2000, the KBR bill to the US government was more than $2 billion.

KBR`s strategic masterpiece is Camp Bondsteel - the largest and most expensive US Army base since Vietnam, still in use today, complete with roads, its own power generators, houses, satellite dishes, a helicopter airfield and of course a Vietnam-style prison. By a fabulous coincidence, Camp Bondsteel is right on the path of the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian Oil (AMBO) Trans-Balkan Pipeline. This key piece of Pipelineistan is supposed to connect the oil-and-gas-rich Caspian Sea with Europe. The feasibility project for AMBO was conducted by none other than KBR.

KBR is now a lightning-fast, ultra-efficient and ultra-effective building machine on the "war on terra", as they say in Texas. The worldwide-infamous Guantanamo "cages" - still another Vietnam-style prison - were built by KBR. Cost: $52 million. The US bases in Bagram and Kandahar, Afghanistan, were built by KBR. Cost: $157 million. If perpetually infamous Abu Ghraib in Baghdad is ever razed to the ground, the new prison will certainly be built by KBR.

None of these operations has been scandalous - unlike the multibillion-dollar, non-competitive contract awarded to KBR to repair and rebuild Iraq`s oil infrastructure. This has nothing to do with logistics and field support for the army. At Houston`s wealthy Rice University - where each neo-Byzantine block oozes more riches than the entire Almustansariya University in Baghdad, the oldest in the world - the talk is about the structure of KBR`s contract: the more KBR charges the government - and the US taxpayer - the more money it makes. For a $2 billion contract, even with a small margin, this means at least a $60 million profit.

The gold rush map
The folks lining up at KBR`s Houston training center are not worried about these billions or millions. They are happy to get off with a few thousand bucks. In the Iraq gold rush, you sign for a one-year contract - renewable pending your qualifications and endurance. Basic salaries are equivalent for comparable jobs in the US - but become three times as fat because of the bonuses related to the dangers implied. A health plan and a $50,000 life insurance is included. The first $80,000 is tax-free - as long as you remain in Iraq for at least 330 days. And if you get killed, the significant other gets half a salary for life.

Who wants these jobs? The great majority are divorced, have held plenty of jobs before, are used to living near the desert, must pay outstanding debts and, in most cases, want to get a shot at saving and maybe opening their own businesses. There are not many PhD holders in the bunch. Truck drivers, cooks and housing managers are in high demand.

The majority of KBR`s workers in Iraq are veterans of the Balkans. But at least 11,000 first-timers have passed through the Houston training center, an abandoned department store not far from Bush International Airport, the last place they see in the United States before landing at Baghdad (former Saddam) International, and the place where they started getting paid.

The gold rush involves passing a first-step screening - which can be on the phone or live with one of dozens of KBR traveling salesmen all across the US. If you have a criminal record, however minor, you`re out, says a black man trying to work as a security guard who once got a drunk-driving conviction. Then the successful applicant is flown to Houston, with board and meals paid, and spends a week at the training center being drilled almost as if he were joining the army. He has to pass an Orwellian concoction called Workplace Attitude Behavioral Inventory - which basically means he is able to work in a group in a high-risk situation. John Watson, the head of recruiting, comments that a lot of people actually fail this test.

Then the applicant has to pass a medical exam. He has to become familiar with KBR`s rules on, among other things, ethics and sexual harassment. And then he has to go nuclear. This means he has to learn how to put on a gas mask and protective suit in case those absent nuclear, chemical and biological weapons allegedly possessed by Saddam Hussein decide to resurface.

After this low-key odyssey, supposing you get your Iraqi job and you land in Baghdad, you get a mobile phone supplied by KBR and a mini-holiday of 10 days every four months for R&R, which most people, instead of Dubai or Bangkok, prefer to spend back home.

One wonders, had more Iraqis been given similar job opportunities, whether the United States could have avoided a catastrophic war on both the Sunni and Shi`ite fronts.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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The new beat generation


Also in this series:
Bush against Bush (Arp 30, `04)
Kerry, the Yankee muchacho (May 7, `04)
You have the right to be misinformed (May 8, `04) 1-3 08.05.04
An American tragedy (May 11, `04) #16184
In the heart of the Bushland (May 12, `04) #16186
The war of the snuff videos (May 13, `04) #16338
The Iraq gold rush (May 14, `04) #16340

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ..."
Allen Ginsberg, "Howl", 1956

"Paranoia strikes deep/ into your mind it will creep/ starts when you`re always afraid/ step out of line/ the Man comes/ and takes you away."
Buffalo Springfield, "For What It`s Worth", 1968

"Freedom is the new F-word." Beth Lisick, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO - Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights, beat poet laureate, his voice trembling, a Statue of Liberty mask over his head like a prop straight from the commedia dell`arte, is rambling on stage against the Empire in a warehouse in the Mission District, and the audience goes wild: this must be what it felt like to be at the Six Gallery in 1955 listening to Allen Ginsberg deliver for the first time his seminal, legendary "Howl". Ferlinghetti hails "the last beatnik in North Beach with something to say", "the last cowboy in the last frontier", "the last innocent American". He denounces "the beginning of the Third World War, the war against the Third World", and "the last lament of real democracy". He fears for "wild poets with wandering minds, exiles in their own land".

More poetical Tomahawks follow in what is another trademark San Francisco display of cultural activism, commemorating May 1, Worker`s Day. "This day is celebrated by workers all over the world, except in America. But we, in San Francisco, are the exception," says a Chilean-American writer. May Day by the Bay is certainly not appropriate viewing for running-dog lackeys of imperialism. Afro-American icon Ishmail Reed raps on race relations, Jewelle Gomez on Vietnam; Afghan-American Tamim Ansary draws a striking parallel between the bazaars of Peshawar and the vanishing American lower-middle class, reduced to sub-proletarian status, spending their nights, if they can afford it, in a cheap Motel 6. Thirty local authors have three minutes each to deliver their declarations against the "logic of rule". The aim is "to forge a cultural declaration that speaks from the heart of San Francisco. Our goal is to reinvent history." Who could have organized this celebration but City Lights?

City Lights Books, still on 261 Columbus Avenue, in the heart of "little old wooden North Beach", in the words of Ferlinghetti, is the embodiment of the beatific half-a-century history of the beat generation, the head, heart and soul of literary San Francisco. This cultural crossroads is also geographically blessed. The back of City Lights faces Chinatown - the embodiment of the future superpower - while Columbus Avenue, or Corso Cristoforo Colombo, as street signs in Italian-American North Beach proclaim it, faces east, looking out on the far end of the West.

For a select few in the 1950s - poets, visionaries, dreamers, wanderers, hobos - San Francisco looked like the last frontier of some temporary lost Atlantis risen from the sea: their Muse by the Pacific represented the chance to escape from button-down conformism, consumerism and a materialistic dead end. Like Stone Age hippies, the beats then articulated all the key themes of the 1960s counterculture: pacifism, Buddhism, ecological consciousness, the psychedelic-induced expansion of the mind and hedonistic sex. Now, in an America soaked in hyper-materialism and hyper-militarism, and with civil liberties under threat, the addictive beat fix is more crucial than ever, cloning itself in literature, poetry, cinema, theater, music and politics.

Close 2 tha edge
San Francisco excels in combating weapons of mass distraction with a sonically borderless dance party. "We`re close 2 tha edge," as a member of the Quannum Projects puts it. Quannum Projects has its headquarters on 5th Street - an independent label concocting a panoply of styles: underground battle-rap, afrofuturist hip-hop, hallucinogenic sampled soundscapes, undiluted socially conscious cultural criticism. On Illinois Street, the Beta lounge collective keeps hurling the most incendiary beats all over the Internet - from DJs in neighboring Oakland or from beat intellectuals in Hamburg. Every hour or so 99.7 FM, KFRC, plays Edwin Starr`s late-1960s hit "War" ("War/ war is good for/absolutely nothing").

At the Neibaum Coppola Cafe, just two blocks away from City Lights, amid photos of Oscar winner daughter Sofia "Lost in Translation" Coppola and a perfect place to sip the excellent Cabernet Special Reserve of Papa "Apocalypse Now" Francis, the sound is early 1960s Brazilian bossa nova.

The transition is as seamless as an ultralounge DJ mix from Mediterranean North Beach to a Chinatown immersed in a gong hay fat choy mood, still saluting the Year of the Monkey. Not far from the bustling Peking Bazaar or the New Shanghai Enterprises, where wise commercial mandarins comment with awe on the new economic might of the Middle Kingdom, Lim, a clever, creative, skillful monkey (born 1980), sipping a Tsing Tao at the Buddha Bar, talks about Silicon Valley. Twenty percent of the jobs in high tech have disappeared since 2001, though he managed to keep his own. He`s lived all his life in California - 38 percent of public-school children in San Francisco are ethnic Chinese. He is a certified ABB (Anybody but Bush). His motto is "Do no evil."

Only six meters away from Lim there is a man crouching on the sidewalk, the contemporary embodiment of Bob Dylan`s "Like a Rolling Stone". Beside him a cardboard sign reads: "Have AIDS, hungry, homeless. God bless." His name is Jim and he is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American. There are 30,000 homeless and 1,000 evictions a month in San Francisco - certainly nothing compared with Jakarta, Karachi or Sao Paulo, but all the more striking because it`s happening in California, the sixth-largest economy in the world, the wealthiest state of the unique hyperpower. "The logic of the American way is that if you fall, you go from Porsche owner to homeless in a month," says Lim.

The Coalition on Homelessness is trying to organize day laborers to stop police from citing workers for waiting on a sidewalk for work, and to establish a minimum wage on the street. Many Americans don`t know - the television networks simply ignore the problem - that there is a National Homeless Civil Rights Organizing Project. The Project aims to fight against both the passage and enforcement of anti-homeless laws, counter the violations of homeless people`s civil rights, design a national public-education campaign and denounce the criminalization of homelessness.

On the other side of the spectrum - or specter - of homelessness, there`s Silicon Valley. Everyone is still talking about Google`s IPO (initial public offering). Like the founders of Yahoo, Jerry Yang and David Filo, also inventors of a technology that changed the world, Larry Page, 31, and Sergey Brin, 30, founded Google in 1998 when they were still graduate students at Stanford. The consensus among tech warriors is that Google did it on its own terms ("Google is not a conventional company"), not Wall Street`s. Problem is, the Masters of the Universe don`t appreciate business as (un)usual. As Alan Saracevic of the San Francisco Chronicle put it, "Wall Street bankers like new ideas as much as they like an Internal Revenue Service audit ... So here come Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two guys from math-student central casting, and they tell the suits how to take a tech company public in a new way."

Steve Brody, a marketing executive now creating a portal for Adobe, does not cry for the death of dot-com mania, at a time when US 101 to San Jose was always fender-to-fender, including an army of Porsche 911s. Now no one would be caught dead pronouncing the dreaded words "new economy". But Brody heartily defends the Google IPO. In Google`s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), we read the extraordinary statement: "Don`t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served - as shareholders and in all other ways - by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains." "Do no evil" - the Google corporate motto - is pure Chinese philosophy.

Silicon Valley still leads the high-tech galaxy. And that`s where the money is - the crucial venture-capitalism network. But the Bay Area is too expensive. And the infrastructure is crumbling. The result is one of the scarecrows of the 2004 election: outsourcing - to Bangalore, Penang or Prague. Many startups in Silicon Valley now make their decisions in their California HQ, and do the engineering in southern India.

What better place to check the intersection of the bit world with the beat world than at a Kraftwerk concert in San Francisco. What better place to play for the four ubermenschen from Dusseldorf, avatars of hip-hop and inventors of the heavy, metallic, pure-electronic-precision 4/4 backbeat. From "Autobahn" in the early 1970s to "Aerodynamik" in 2004, they have evolved their Man-Machine persona as a metaphor for futurism now. It`s "like a performance of contemporary art", as an ecstatic tech-meets-music concert-goer puts it. The audience is an inevitable cross-section of Silicon Valley techno wizards and post-hip-hop warriors consumed by weltschmerz.

Howling in the night
San Francisco Bay - a Valhalla of American activism - is booming ahead of the November presidential election. The Creative Philosophers Club celebrates "creativity, intelligence and spirituality". The League of Pissed Off Voters is on a mission "to engage pissed-off 17-35 year-olds in the democratic process to build a progressive governing majority in our lifetime". Code Pink (Women for Peace) is working to "give [President George W] Bush a pink slip". The Progressive Voter Project is standing up "against big-money machine politics". Not in Our Name is calling for "more than a million to protest when the Bush team meets at the Republican Convention", from August 29 to September 2.

In San Francisco, where people - on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park - still wear flowers in their hair, Iraq is Vietnam, and prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib is seen as the new My Lai. The American not-bound-by-Geneva-Convention prison guards at the sprawling Baghdad prison, a former Saddam Hussein mega-gulag, have been depicted around an outraged Middle East as the Punishing Angels of Occupation. "They are just plain criminals," say the people at Black Oak Books. Every week the free, indispensable San Francisco Bay Guardian publishes the Iraq death toll.

At the legendary Tosca Cafe in North Beach or in the Vietnamese restaurants in the outer suburbs, the talk is of the accumulated lethal incompetence of the Pentagon in Iraq - now, among other developments, resorting to a former general of Saddam`s Republican Guard to "pacify" Fallujah. There`s a sort of consensus in San Francisco that the Pentagon cannot subdue Fallujah and Najaf militarily; there`s no political support left except among the Kurds; the war is unwinnable; and it can actually end up in total political defeat.

Late at night, the Jack Kerouac alley between City Lights and the rambling Vesuvio Cafe is deserted, except for the odd shadow of a hobo of the high-tech age. For half a century City Lights has been a supreme symbol of the American spirit of intellectual inquiry, fighting for the right to read, think, write, debate and dissent, and always pursuing the great American tradition of radical dissent embodied by Sam Adams, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal. In the words of Ferlinghetti, "In a time when the dominant TV-driven consumer culture would seem to result in the `dumbing down` of America, City Lights is a finger in the dike holding back the flood of unknowing."

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of mankind". Dedicated, hopeful voices in the warm San Francisco nights refuse to stop howling, "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night", as Ginsberg himself wrote in "Howl". Just like the teenage poet Josh Begley, a member of Youth Speaks - self-described as "one of the premier non-profit presenters of the spoken word in America". He could be a techno-geek making millions in neighboring Silicon Valley; instead, he connects words in his lonely bachelor`s apartment. And Begley just can`t stop howling: "The Statue is sleeping. And her nightmare is no longer a dream."

To read "Totalitarian Democracy",http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE15Aa02.html a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, please click here.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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Brutality starts at home
By Ritt Goldstein

On April 30, US President George W Bush condemned the incidents of Iraq prison abuse and those who perpetrated them, saying: "That`s not the way we do things in America." Administration officials have launched a campaign to portray the incidents as isolated aberrations; though, "systemic" abuse has been charged by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Amnesty International claims a "pattern of torture". But while an army report has described the "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" of Iraqi prisoners - including sodomy and other physical assaults - no one has yet dared compare this to America`s well documented abuse of its own citizens, and the factors driving abuse at home and abroad.

"Five years ago, after prison scandals gripped California with tales of guards setting up inmates in human cockfights and then shooting them dead, the state Department of Corrections vowed to change its ways," read a December 28, 2003 article from the Los Angeles Times. Notably, the article was entitled "Despite State Promises, Reform Eludes Prisons", illustrating a well-established official pattern of effectively condoning abuse, then paying lip-service to outrage and reform when a scandal breaks.

The Army Times - an independent paper read widely in military circles - called for the removal of America`s top Pentagon mangers, saying that "while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership". Paralleling this question, the Los Angeles Times article had noted that a US federal court was examining allegations that both California`s corrections commissioner and the highest levels of his staff had "stopped internal investigators", the case involving the suppression of evidence against "brutal guards".

While most officials say rights are important, the status quo appears sacred, and a well-tread path of political expediency goes to and from it. US rights groups and civil-rights attorneys have long described abuses within the US criminal justice system as part of a widely entrenched "culture" of official misconduct. When Oklahoma`s Republican Senator James Inhofe declared that he was "more outraged by the outrage" over the Iraq abuse than by the abuse itself, he aptly demonstrated a perspective held by many, one which "justifies" abuse.

At the core of this logic lies the assumption that those abused have done something to deserve their illegal and inhumane treatment. And misconduct critics have long charged that many victims of US law enforcement abuse are routinely perceived in a manner similar to that in which rape victims once were - the victims viewed as having done something to "deserve it".

A December 19, 2003 article by the Washington Post revealed that a report by the US Justice Department`s Inspector General revealed foreign detainees rounded up in the wake of September 11 had their guards "ram them into a wall". The report concurrently noted that from videotape of the incidents, "there was no evidence that the detainees had provoked or attacked the guards".

In 1998, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report on systemic, coast-to-coast abuse by US law enforcement, "Shielded from Justice". The report found a pervasive violation of "the public`s trust", coupled with "defective" accountability systems and a "tolerant" leadership, allowing US law enforcement to commit crimes with "impunity" nationwide. As regards what the effective acceptance of the abuse of such authority has meant in the United States:

# A November 10, 2003 report by Houston`s 11 News began: "Where can you lie, cheat or steal and still keep your job? Or how about repeatedly getting drunk and getting behind the wheel? Or assaulting your wife or girlfriend? The answer in dozens of cases is the Houston Police Department."
# Paralleling Iraqi charges of sodomizing prisoners, the most famous case in the US was that of Abner Louima in 1997, sodomized with a toilet plunger, with the blood and feces-covered plunger then used to break out his front teeth. When initially investigated by New York City police, the incident was reported as "self-inflicted"; though officer Justin Volpe later pleaded guilty to the crime. The latest major news report of similar conduct was provided in the November 7, 2003 Minneapolis Star Tribune, with Stephen Porter alleging that "police sexually assaulted him with the handle of a toilet plunger", the paper reported, noting a witness account appeared to corroborate Porter`s story.
# HRW`s report also addressed the "repeated practice of torture by Chicago police", with electric shock being the favored technique, supplemented by burning prisoners. "Shielded from Justice" specifically cites a report of electric shock applied to the "head and genitals". The group notes that after the city "settled the claim of 13-year-old Marcus Wiggins", the attorneys representing the boy in his torture suit were able to secure internal police documents, providing further evidence to support torture claims. The City of Chicago did eventually acknowledge that "planned torture" occurred.
# While US media have reported the use of dogs and armed threat against Iraqi detainees, a November 7, 2003 report by CBS News detailed a police drug raid on Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. There, students were forced to "lie on the floor", while they endured "guns put to their head and a K9 dog". Notably, no drugs were found in the "commando-style raid", according to CBS, but the "school`s principal defends the dramatic sweep", they reported.
# As regards charges that chemicals from broken light fixtures were poured on some Iraqi detainees, the March 20, 2004 New York Times reported on a police officer "spraying pepper spray (a powerful chemical irritant used by police) into the mouth of a man who died in custody after being wrongly picked up". Lesser incidents of pepper spray abuse are widely reported as virtually commonplace.
# Regarding the alleged rape of a young Iraqi man in custody, reports of sexual assault by US law enforcement frequently surface; notably, a number of these have been alleged incidents of a male officer attacking a female officer. As regards the sexual violation of young people, a June 25, 2003 report by the Associated Press began by noting that "at least a dozen teenagers assigned to work with police departments as part of the Boy Scouts` Law Enforcement Explorers program have allegedly been sexually abused by officers during the past year", with the incidents reported from coast-to-coast. The article mentioned some specific cases, including a Texas case where "former police officer John Ross Ewing, 28, was indicted by a grand jury in March on charges that he sexually assaulted two male Explorer scouts, ages 15 and 16".

Echoing the Iraq accusations made by Army Times, HRW highlighted that domestic US abuse stems from a "problem of supervision, management and leadership". The human rights group also noted that "shortcomings in recruiting, training and management" extended across the US law enforcement abuse spectrum. And "Shielded From Justice" also provides insight as to why early reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse were ignored, demonstrating a pattern which HRW domestically termed "federal passivity".

Addressing the results of domestic allegations made to the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department, HRW found that of 10,129 civil rights cases that were reviewed, approximately 1 in 500 resulted in a Justice Department attempt to prosecute. More disturbing, HRW found that in some US police departments the particularly abusive officers are "often rewarded", being given "positive evaluations and promotions".

In their criticism of Pentagon leadership, Army Times noted: "The message to the troops: anything goes." And a 1997 Time Magazine article by former US police chief Joseph McNamara provided the precise parallel, saying: "This wouldn`t happen if some cops didn`t believe they had a mandate for such behavior."

A belief in such a "mandate" would explain Iraq pictures with smiling torturers.

McNamara noted that most contemporary police misconduct has "an element of police gangsterism. Small groups of police officers share a fermenting contempt for the people they encounter." He added: "Rogue cops band together and cover up one another`s crimes." And the most readily seen aspect of the Iraqi abuse has been the obvious contempt those perpetrating it have had for their victims.

While it is widely accepted that most of the US military, US law enforcement and US citizenry are good and decent people, many elements within American society have long voiced increasing concern over the disparity between the way the US sees itself, and the way others are increasingly seeing it.

Notably, it was a US military police officer who finally broke the Iraq scandal by courageously providing a CD of abuse`s gruesome imagery. In the US it has been well documented that many good and decent police officers have attempted to address abuse, only to be badly abused themselves. But in both Iraq and the US, patterns of nightmarish abuse have grown which have been documented as "systemic".

In 1941, famed social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in Escape From Freedom of how those who are sadistic rationalize their behavior in two ways: the first being retaliation for a perceived injury; the second is that "by striking first I am defending myself or my friends against the danger of being hurt". Fromm reflected: "Man`s brain lives in the 20th century; the heart of most men still live in the Stone Age."

Footnoting domestic US police violence, there was a time when this American journalist wrote laws instead of articles. A January 10, 1997 editorial written by the staff of America`s oldest newspaper, The Hartford Courant, was entitled "Consider a statewide review board", and advocated the pursuit of the police accountability legislation I had once authored.

On December 6, 1996 I had chaired the Senator Tim Upson-Ritt Goldstein, SCOLED Informational Hearing on Police Accountability in Connecticut`s legislature. But after spreading my legislative proposal on the national level, by July 1997 I was forced to flee the US for my life, seeking political asylum in Sweden.

While life-threatening harassment (I was shot at, had the steering unscrewed on my car, was assaulted multiple times daily, etc) was determined, I am yet forced to live underground. A February 10, 1998 Reuters article explained the reason as "it was by individual police and not authorized by police authorities". Amnesty International`s Swedish section noted that this violated Swedish legislation. Later, a June 21, 2001 article in the United Kingdom`s Guardian was entitled "European parliament committee urges Swedes to rethink".

Martin Luther King Jr once observed that "we live in an age of guided missiles and misguided men".

Cutting to what many see as the heart of America`s problems, the Army Times entitled its article "A Failure of Leadership at the Highest Levels". As the father of recently deceased Nick Berg said in criticism of the administration: "It`s not the same America I grew up in."

In the spring of 2002, this journalist interviewed the Reverend Robert Bosse, SCJ, of the Chicago-based 8th Day Center for Justice, a global-justice non-governmental organization whose 4,000 members are primarily Catholic clergy. Bosse expressed a profound concern as to America`s future, and that of the structures and values which had once made the country.

In considering the end of the road, he saw the Bush administration as taking, he solemnly noted, a parallel to World War II Germany, saying: "I thought of those good people who gradually became collaborators in an unthinkable crime, all in the name of security."

Ritt Goldstein is an American investigative political journalist based in Stockholm. His work has appeared in broadsheets such as Australia`s Sydney Morning Herald, Spain`s El Mundo and Denmark`s Politiken, as well as with the Inter Press Service (IPS), a global news agency.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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ALFRED W. MCCOY
Torture at Abu Ghraib followed CIA`s manual
http://www.boston.com/
By Alfred W. McCoy | May 14, 2004

THE PHOTOS from Iraq`s Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots not of simple brutality or a breakdown in discipline but of CIA torture techniques that have metastasized over the past 50 years like an undetected cancer inside the US intelligence community. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led secret research into coercion and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method of torture that was psychological, not physical -- best described as "no touch" torture.

The CIA`s discovery of psychological torture was a counterintuitive breakthrough -- indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel science since the 17th century. The old physical approach required interrogators to inflict pain, usually by crude beatings that often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information. Under the CIA`s new psychological paradigm, however, interrogators used two essential methods to achieve their goals.

In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple, nonviolent techniques of hooding or sleep deprivation to disorient the subject; sometimes sexual humiliation is used as well.

Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second stage with simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as standing for hours with arms extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims feel responsible for their own pain and thus induce them to alleviate it by capitulating to the interrogator`s power. In his statement on reforms at Abu Ghraib last week, General Geoffrey Miller, former chief of the Guantanamo detention center and now prison commander in Iraq, offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees," the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations."

Although seemingly less brutal, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars. The victims often need long treatment to recover from trauma far more crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to cruelty and lasting emotional problems.

After codification in the CIA`s "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual in 1963, the new method was disseminated globally to police in Asia and Latin America through USAID`s Office of Public Safety. Following allegations of torture by USAID`s police trainees in Brazil, the US Senate closed down the office in 1975.

After it was abolished, the agency continued to disseminate its torture methods through the US Army`s Mobile Training Teams, which were active in Central America during the 1980s. In 1997, the Baltimore Sun published chilling extracts of the "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual" that had been distributed to allied militaries for 20 years. In the 10 years between the last known use of these manuals in the early 1990s and the arrest of Al Qaeda suspects since September 2001, torture was maintained as a US intelligence practice by delivering suspects to foreign agencies, including the Philippine National Police, who broke a bomb plot in 1995.

Once the war on terror started, however, the US use of no-touch torture resumed, first surfacing at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in early 2002, where Pentagon investigators found two Afghans had died during interrogation. In reports from Iraq, the methods are strikingly similar to those detailed in the Kubark manual.

Following the CIA`s two-part technique, last September General Miller instructed US military police at Abu Ghraib to soften up high-priority detainees in the initial disorientation phase for later "successful interrogation and exploitation" by CIA and military intelligence. As often happens in no-touch torture sessions, this process soon moved beyond sleep and sensory deprivation to sexual humiliation. The question, in the second, still unexamined phase, is whether US Army intelligence and CIA operatives administered the prescribed mix of interrogation and self-inflicted pain -- but outside the frame of these photographs. If so, the soldiers now facing courts-martial would have been following standard interrogation procedure.

For more than 50 years, the CIA`s no-touch methods have become so widely accepted that US interrogators seem unaware that they are, in fact, engaged in systematic torture. But now, through these photographs from Abu Ghraib, we can see the reality of these techniques. We have a chance to join fully with the international community in repudiating a practice that, more than any other, represents a denial of democracy.

Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of torture upon the Philippine armed forces.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Drei Artikel zum Wahlkampf aus dem `Boston Globe`

Police union rejects Bush, backs Kerry

By Mike Glover, Associated Press Writer | May 14, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry on Friday collected the endorsement of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, a police union that backed President Bush in the 2000 election.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/kerry/articles…

Pragmatism drives N.H. Naderites to Kerry

By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff | May 14, 2004

HANOVER, N.H. -- A generation of Ralph Nader supporters will come of age Nov. 2 at Dartmouth College, and they`re planning to vote for John F. Kerry.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/…

Poll: Kerry edges ahead of Bush in Ohio

May 14, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Democrat John Kerry has edged ahead of President Bush in the key swing state of Ohio in a three-way matchup that includes independent Ralph Nader, a poll released Thursday found.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/…

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McCain ist der republikanische Mitbewerber gegen Bush um die Präsidentschaftskandidatur in 2000.


May 15, 2004
Undeterred by McCain Denials, Some See Him as Kerry`s No. 2
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JODI WILGOREN

WASHINGTON, May 14 — Despite weeks of steadfast rejections from Senator John McCain, some prominent Democrats are angling for him to run for vice president alongside Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, creating a bipartisan ticket that they say would instantly transform the presidential race.

The enthusiasm of Democrats for Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, is so high that even some who have been mentioned as possible Kerry running mates — including Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator — are spinning scenarios about a "unity government," effectively giving Mr. Kerry a green light to reach across the political aisle and extend an offer.

"Senator McCain would not have to leave his party," Mr. Kerrey said. "He could remain a Republican, would be given some authority over selection of cabinet people. The only thing he would have to do is say, `I`m not going to appoint any judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade,` " the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, which Mr. McCain has said he opposes.

Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist who once worked for Mr. Kerry, said such a ticket "would be the political equivalent of the Yankees signing A-Rod," referring to Alex Rodriguez, the team`s star third baseman.

Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, "continues to be interested in" Mr. McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran whom Kerry aides describe as the candidate`s best friend in the Senate, as a running mate, said one longtime Democratic official who works for the Kerry campaign.

But the official said the plan was unrealistic, because Mr. McCain "won`t do it." In an interview on Friday, Mr. McCain said, "I have totally ruled it out."

Even so, Democrats say a bipartisan Kerry-McCain ticket, featuring two decorated Vietnam War veterans from different parties and regions of the country, would give them a powerful edge in the debate over who can best lead the nation in the war on terror. "It would be a dream team," Mr. Lehane said.

This kind of open speculation suggests that Democrats are so eager to regain the White House in November that they are willing to overlook members of their own party, and to accept a candidate who disagrees with one of the core tenets of their platform, the right to an abortion. At the same time, the Kerry-McCain talk is testimony to the close friendship between the two, and the cool relationship between Mr. McCain and President Bush. The senator from Arizona is co-chairman of President Bush`s re-election campaign there, but it is no secret in Washington that Mr. McCain has not quite forgiven Mr. Bush for the attacks on him during the 2000 Republican presidential primaries.

Mr. Kerry defended Mr. McCain then, and the Arizona senator returned the favor in March, dismissing suggestions by the Bush camp that Mr. Kerry is weak on defense. "If you don`t stand by your friends if they are unfairly attacked," Mr. McCain said Friday, "then you`ve lost your bearings."

The two men talk on the phone periodically, most recently a few days ago. On the campaign trail, Mr. Kerry drops Mr. McCain`s name almost daily. On Friday, he invoked Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, at a news conference when asked whether he thought pictures of abuse at Iraq`s Abu Ghraib prison should be released to the public.

"I think John McCain really had the right formula, personally," he said, referring to the Arizona senator`s suggestion that the pictures would eventually find their way into public view, and should be put out in an organized fashion.

And it was not surprising that the words "our good friend John McCain" were the first thing out of Mr. Kerry`s mouth earlier this week, when he was asked to name possible replacements for Donald H. Rumsfeld, President Bush`s embattled secretary of defense.

Despite Mr. McCain`s protestations that he would not be Mr. Kerry`s No. 2, Senator Nelson, of Florida, said he had spoken to both Mr. McCain and Kerry campaign officials about it.

"There`s a collective sigh that says, `This feels right,` " Mr. Nelson said Friday, adding, "I think it`s very plausible that, with Iraq still in chaos, that if offered to him, he would say it`s time for me to go serve my country again in another capacity, where I can do some good."

Such an offer would undoubtedly be controversial among Democrats. Some say Mr. McCain would upstage Mr. Kerry; others regard him as too conservative. Among the latter is Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore`s campaign in 2000. "McCain has not been pro-choice; he`s not been out front on affirmative action," Ms. Brazile said. "He`s not been out front on core issues that have defined the Democratic Party."

The list of possible Democratic contenders is a long one and runs the gamut from senators like John Edwards of North Carolina and Bob Graham of Florida, to governors like Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Thomas J. Vilsack of Iowa.

For Mr. McCain, 68, joining a Kerry ticket would mean giving up his Senate seat, since he is up for re-election this year. He is also in line to become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee when the term of the current chairman, John W. Warner, expires in 2006.

Mr. McCain is also well aware that his power and influence in Washington derives from his candor, a trait he would have to curb as vice president. And despite his strained relationship with the president, his friends say he simply would not challenge Mr. Bush. Asked last week if he thought Mr. Bush should be re-elected, Mr. McCain said yes, "because I think he has led the nation with strength and clarity since Sept. 11."

Rick Davis, who ran Mr. McCain`s 2000 presidential campaign, said such public pronouncements were his way of tamping down speculation about him and Senator Kerry.

"His point that he`s trying to make publicly is to send Kerry a message to say, `Don`t put me in that position,` " Mr. Davis said.

The two senators were not instantly close. When Mr. Kerry first ran for the Senate in 1984, Mr. McCain, then a freshman House member, went to Massachusetts to campaign against him. Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent more than five years in captivity, had little use for Mr. Kerry, who became a war protester and famously threw away his ribbons.

"I didn`t approve of it," Senator McCain said in an interview. "I still don`t approve of it."

But the two formed a strong bond in the 1990`s as they investigated the politically sensitive question of whether American soldiers remained missing in Southeast Asia. Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia who is also a Vietnam veteran, said the relationship between Mr. McCain and Mr. Kerry was "deep and personal."

If Mr. McCain is offered the vice-presidential spot, people close to Mr. Kerry say, the request will come from the candidate himself and not through the campaign`s vice-presidential vetting process.

Asked if Senator Kerry had made such an offer, Mr. McCain said no without hesitation. But asked if the two men had ever discussed it, even casually, he paused for a moment.

"No," he said finally. "We really haven`t."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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May 15, 2004
4 U.S. Soldiers Die in Separate Incidents
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 12:32 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military on Saturday announced the deaths of four soldiers: two from wounds suffered in rebel attacks, one in a vehicle accident and one from natural causes.

A soldier died at 3 p.m. Friday from wounds he received during a mortar attack that day, and another soldier died on the same day from bullet wounds suffered when a sniper ambushed his unit, the military said.

Early Friday, a military vehicle overturned during a patrol, killing a soldier, the military said.

All three soldiers belonged to the U.S. Army`s 1st Armored Division and all died south of Baghdad.

A fourth soldier died of natural causes Friday in the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad, the military said.

``The soldier was found unconscious and transported to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad where he was pronounced dead at 6:55 a.m.,`` the military said in a statement.

The names of the soldiers were withheld pending notification of their families.

As of Friday, May 14, 775 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq last year, according to the Department of Defense. Of those, 565 died as a result of hostile action and 210 died of non-hostile causes.

It was unclear whether the latest deaths were included in the Department of Defense toll.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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An American soldier guarded a mosque Friday in Karbala, Iraq, as troops parried with insurgents there and in Najaf. Three Muslim saints are pictured above the door.
May 15, 2004
THE FIGHTING
Battles in Najaf and Karbala Near Shiites` Religious Sites
By IAN FISHER and EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 14 — Fighting erupted Friday in Najaf when American tank troops and soldiers battled militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr in a centuries-old cemetery near the revered Shrine of Imam Ali.

Amid plumes of smoke and explosions that echoed around the narrow streets, the shrine itself was reportedly hit by gunfire, pitting its golden dome with four small holes.

The damage, however slight, marked a moment that the American military has been straining to avoid in its five-week standoff with Mr. Sadr: any violation of the holy sites of Najaf and Karbala, held sacred by Shiites around the world, that could inflame Shiites here into a broader uprising against American forces.

But many moderate Shiites have called for Mr. Sadr and his militia to leave Najaf, and there were no signs of wider unrest on Friday. Despite the damage, the United States military said it was taking extraordinary pains to convince Shiites that it was doing everything to keep the violence away from the shrines.

"It`s important to understand that we have not attacked the Shrine of Imam Ali," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for the American military, told reporters. "We continue to respect the red lines that have been established by the religious clerics."

Mr. Sadr`s supporters blamed Americans for the damage, but General Kimmitt presented a large satellite map showing where the fighting took place, perhaps a quarter mile northwest of the shrine. American forces, he said, had only fired northward, away from the shrine.

"Go ask Moktada who put that hole in the shrine," General Kimmitt said. "I suspect he will tell you that it was coalition forces. But I suspect if you look very carefully, the coalition does not yet have ammunition that can shoot to the north and then turn around and head south."

Still, the fighting on Friday appeared to move the confrontation with Mr. Sadr to a more sensitive stage, not only in Najaf but in Karbala, to the north. In both cities, military officials say, Mr. Sadr`s forces have been firing from near holy sites in what appears to be a strategy of drawing American troops into fighting on ground that poses grave political consequences.

On Friday in Karbala, the site of fighting for much of the past two weeks, militiamen taking cover near two other Shiite shrines bombarded American soldiers with mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades, as the Americans tried to keep control of a mosque they occupied earlier this week.

At least five insurgents were killed, said an American officer at Camp Lima, the Polish military base five miles east.

Mr. Sadr`s forces also attacked in the south, in Nasiriya, which has been largely quiet during the past month. The insurgents attacked the local headquarters of the occupation authorities with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades, trapping foreign staff members inside and prompting a firefight with Italian soldiers and Filipino guards.

Militia members reportedly also took over the local governor`s office.

In Najaf, at least four people were killed, according to hospital officials. But even amid the fighting, Mr. Sadr, a 31-year-old whose staunch anti-American oratory has attracted a devoted following among young and jobless Shiites, still made his way from Najaf to nearby Kufa to deliver his weekly sermon at the main mosque there.

In the sermon, he continued to urge his followers to fight off the "oppressors," despite reports of a tentative deal earlier this week in which Mr. Sadr would agree to disband his militia. He called President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the key ally of the United States in Iraq, "the heads of tyranny."

The fighting near the holy sites has ratcheted up the pressure not only on the American troops and Mr. Sadr, but also on more moderate Shiite leaders.

Shiites, who compose about 60 percent of Iraq`s 25 million people, stand to gain most from any future democratic government here, and Mr. Sadr represents a divisive danger to that goal for many moderate Shiites.

At the same time, other Shiite leaders have been reluctant to attack Mr. Sadr directly, for fear of being seen as siding with the ever-more-unpopular American occupation.

In recent days, though, Shiite leaders have been issuing stronger demands for Mr. Sadr`s forces to leave Najaf, or at least to agree to end his insurgency.

On Friday, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq`s national security adviser and a top Shiite leader, condemned Mr. Sadr for allowing the fighting to stray dangerously close to the Shrine of Imam Ali, named after the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and a central figure in Shiite belief.

"Moktada should not allow the fighting to happen in the holy city," he said in a telephone interview. "I believe he should leave the city, so that he will not allow blood to be spilled there."

Mr. Rubaie is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most popular Shiite leader in Iraq and a restrained, older rival to Mr. Sadr. Another aide to Ayatollah Sistani, who is also in Najaf, urged both Mr. Sadr`s forces and Americans to stop fighting inside Najaf.

"The fighting is getting closer to the house of the Grand Ayatollah," the aide, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Mohri, told Reuters. "We fear that his life will be in danger."

American officials have expressed frustration that Shiites have themselves been reluctant to deal with Mr. Sadr more directly, and a huge demonstration against Mr. Sadr that was supposed to take place on Friday was canceled. At the same time, there is much speculation that some Shiites have given American forces a veiled green light to continue their military squeeze on Mr. Sadr, whose headquarters are near the Imam Ali shrine.

Despite the closeness of the fighting to the shrine, General Kimmitt said, there had been no change in a strategy that has amounted to keeping Mr. Sadr encircled, and not allowing him to be turned into "a martyr," as the general put it.

"Today has been characterized as something that it really wasn`t: somehow this was a strategic shift, that somehow this was the final attack on Najaf," he said. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

Rather, General Kimmitt said, the fighting was only a response to attacks from Mr. Sadr`s forces. He said that at 8:40 a.m., four mortar shells hit near the main police building north of the shrine, at the same time as two tanks at a traffic circle came under grenade fire.

In other attacks around the city, General Kimmitt said, American forces identified a mortar position in a sprawling old cemetery where every Shiite with the means has sought to be buried for centuries, within site of the Imam Ali shrine.

Just after 1 p.m., he said, tanks and ground forces entered the cemetery, a warren of blind alleys and hidden spots for snipers, to fight insurgents there.

Witnesses described heavy fighting there and around the city, damaging cars and houses and further frustrating its besieged residents, though it was unclear whether the Americans or Mr. Sadr would take most of the blame.

"We are very angry," said Yousif Rihda Yousif, 30. "Both sides are mistaken for their fighting inside the holy city of Najaf. This city must be kept away from arms."

In Karbala, intense fighting took place in the buildings and alleyways around Mukhaiyam Mosque, which the Americans occupied on Wednesday morning after a fierce 11-hour battle. The mosque is only a quarter of a mile away from the golden-domed Shrine of Hussein and Shrine of Abbas, dedicated to two of the most revered Shiite martyrs.

The Americans raided another mosque, their third in the area this week, and discovered a large weapons cache there. Soldiers detonated the munitions dump with plastic explosives.

Guerrilla fighters had positioned themselves around the two shrines and along a wide pathway between them that is usually thronged with pilgrims, military officials said. From there, they lobbed dozens of mortar rounds at the occupied mosque, clearly hoping to drive the Americans from the building. The mosque had been used as a stronghold by the insurgents.

One American soldier was killed after being shot twice in the hip by a sniper. Five other soldiers were wounded in two waves of mortar attacks before 9:30 a.m.

On Friday, General Kimmitt also announced a general court-marital against one of the seven soldiers suspected in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The soldier, Specialist Charles A. Graner, of the 372nd Military Police Company, identified as the soldier smiling over a stack of naked Iraqi prisoners in photographs released two weeks ago, faces charges of maltreatment of prisoners, abuse, cruelty and committing indecent acts.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Tawadud Abdallah Ali in South Darfur, Sudan, under an acacia tree.

Irgendwie empfinde ich den Artikel als zynisch.

May 15, 2004
A Tree That Supported Sudan Becomes a War`s Latest Victim
By MARC LACEY

KHARTOUM, Sudan, May 9 — Poor villagers have suffered most from the war ravaging the arid west of Sudan. But distant as the conflict may seem, the armed men on horseback who loot and burn villages and brutalize the local population here have also roiled corporate America.

The attacks, part of a conflict that has afflicted the Darfur region since early 2003, have begun to disrupt the collection of a rare tree sap, gum arabic, an essential ingredient in everything from soft drinks to beauty products and pharmaceuticals.

Used as an emulsifier, the sap keeps ingredients in carbonated beverages from settling at the bottom. It ensures that shampoo has the right consistency, and is used to coat pills to keep them fresh. It gives buns a perfect glaze and beer a thicker foam.

Since 1997, the United States has had economic sanctions in place against Sudan to protest the country`s links to terrorists. But because gum arabic is so rare, it has been quietly exempted at the urging of American business leaders. Sudan provides more than two-thirds of the world`s supply of gum arabic, and the colorless, tasteless resin collected here is considered top quality.

The problem now in South Darfur, a gum-producing region where the violence has displaced more than a million people, is that the poor agriculturalists who usually collect the resin from the acacia trees that produce it have been too scared to venture out. In addition, the acacia trees are being cut down in large numbers by displaced villagers in need of wood.

"It`s a big problem," said Mohammed al-Hassan Ali, the government forestry manager in South Darfur. "Last year`s harvest was down and we`re very worried about this year`s harvest."

Production of the valuable gum fell about 60 percent in the season that just ended, primarily a result of locusts and too little rain, industry leaders say. But the insecurity is only compounding the problem, they say.

The low supply means the many companies that rely on Sudanese gum for their products, like Coca-Cola and Pfizer, are paying considerably higher prices for it.

"We`ve seen reduced availability and higher pricing," said Chris Berliner, vice president of the Importers Service Company in Jersey City, which imports Sudanese gum arabic, processes it and sells it. "It`s dramatic — more than 100 percent more expensive."

The gum is such a vital ingredient in so many products that Mr. Berliner and other American business leaders now track the latest peace talks in Sudan and hope for calm.

Because of the low production, the price offered to the local people who collect the gum from the trees has increased sharply.

The gum is harvested, mostly by subsistence farmers, and sold through dealers to the Khartoum-based Gum Arabic Company Limited, of which the government has a 30 percent share.

During typical times, 100 kilograms (about 220 pounds) of gum arabic will bring in about 40,000 Sudanese pounds, about $150. Now, collectors can earn as much as five times more.

The costs in America have increased significantly, as well. A few years ago, industry officials said, a metric ton of processed gum arabic cost about $1,500. The price is now about double that, officials say.

American importers of gum arabic last faced a crisis several years ago when Osama bin Laden, who lived in Sudan in the 1990`s, was linked to the industry. A State Department official said there is no indication that such a connection currently exists.

Oil is Sudan`s biggest source of foreign currency, but this is primarily an agricultural and pastoral country, with about two-thirds of the population working in the fields. The primary cash crops are cotton, ground nuts and that sap from the acacia tree.

Until the 1970`s, Sudan had more than 90 percent of the arabic gum market. With the advent of new producers elsewhere in Africa, like Chad and Senegal, and artificial substitutes, that dominance has slid somewhat in recent years to between 70 and 80 percent.

But there is something about the climate and the soil in this part of the world that produces a resin that cannot be reproduced, experts say.

Gum arabic comes from a particular type of acacia tree, the Acacia senegal, which grows in the semi-arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly between the latitude of 10 degrees and 15 degrees north, experts say. The trees can grow elsewhere — there was an experiment to introduce them in Texas — but the sap is not the same, experts say.

"We are proud that this is a Sudanese product," said Omer el Mubarak Abuzaid, who has spent his career in the gum arabic industry. "We know how important it is to industry in the USA. We know they need it for their Coke."

To get the gum from the trees, local harvesters peel away some bark and make small cuts in the branches. The sap begins seeping out and several weeks later forms a rubbery ball that can be plucked from the trees.

After collecting the gum, more cuts are made in other parts of the trees. The process is continued throughout the annual harvest season, which lasts from the fall through to the end of April.

Kordofan, in the center of Sudan, is the major gum-producing region. Darfur, in the west, produces about 10 percent of the country`s gum. Across Sudan, about 5 million people make some portion of their income from gum arabic, officials in the industry say.

Now, in some areas of Sudan, conflict is cutting into business. Besides scaring off gum collectors, the insecurity is driving villagers into the acacia forests, where they chop down trees as fuel for their fires and as building material for their huts.

Outside of Nyala, in South Darfur, a vast settlement of displaced villagers sits atop what used to be an acacia grove. Around the camp, for as far as the eye can see, are stumps, many of which used to gum-producing trees.

"We can`t prohibit them from cutting down trees," Mr. Ali said. "It`s life for them. But we can try to cut down the destruction."

To do so, he has dispatched a community outreach worker, Tawadud Abdallah Ali, to speak with camp dwellers about the importance of the acacia trees.

During a recent visit to the Kalma camp outside Nyala, Ms. Ali talked to residents about the effect of all the chopping and urged them to reduce wood use by using mud ovens for cooking instead of open fires.

"There were many trees here before," she said, scanning a damaged forest. "It was crowded."

In the shade of one of the trees that was still standing, a giant tabaldi, known for its fine juice, were two women weaving straw baskets. They said that was how they made ends meet now that it was too dangerous to go out to collect gum arabic, which is known locally as hashab.

"With hashab, you can make a lot of money," said one of the women, never looking up from her basket. "There`s no money with this."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


The trees, which produce a rare sap, gum arabic, a staple of the economy, are being cut for firewood in the war-torn country.

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May 15, 2004
America Adrift in Iraq

Six weeks of military and political reverses seem to have left the Bush administration doing little more in Iraq than grasping at ways to make it past November`s presidential election without getting American troops caught in a civil war. The lowering of the administration`s expectations might be therapeutic if it produced a realistic strategy for achieving a realistic set of goals. Unfortunately, there appears to be no such strategy, only odd lurches this way and that under the pressure of day-to-day events. That pattern heightens the danger of an eventual civil war or anarchy, the two main things that American forces are ostensibly remaining in Iraq to prevent.

At times, the only unifying theme for Washington`s policies seems to be desperation. American field commanders have now signed over the city of Falluja to former officers of the same Baathist army they came to Iraq to fight a little more than a year ago. The original plan of having American marines storm Falluja to avenge the mob murders of four private contractors there was not a wise idea. Handing over the town to these politically ambitious soldiers looks even more shortsighted. Subcontracting security and territory out to rival Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish warlords can only increase the risks of an eventual civil war.

In the diplomatic arena, White House aides are now beseeching the same United Nations they once belittled to rescue the transition, hoping that its special emissary, Lakhdar Brahimi, can somehow produce a plan for an interim government after June 30 that will rescue the nation-building efforts American occupation authorities have badly botched. This could be a positive development. If President Bush is now prepared to yield real authority to the U.N. over transition arrangements, for example, it may create a sense of legitimacy that Washington itself is no longer in any position to bestow. But at this point it may be beyond the U.N.`s power to convince a skeptical world that Iraq will regain any meaningful sovereignty after June 30 if the real decisions on security and reconstruction are still made by Americans.

Members of the discredited, American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council are maneuvering to ensure a share of power for themselves after the council is dissolved next month. This is a terrible idea, linking the new interim government to the occupation regime and prejudicing future elections by giving council members an unfair inside track. Yet the administration seems to be wavering, reluctant to upset the transition timetable by antagonizing any of its few remaining Iraqi allies.

If any of the goals Americans wanted to achieve in Iraq can still be salvaged, it will take more than fumbling crisis management driven by the needs of the Bush re-election campaign. A clear and coherent new course needs to be set without further delay, beginning with aggressive policy and personnel changes to undo the damage of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The U.N. should be given clear authority over transitional political arrangements after June 30, with Washington fully backing Mr. Brahimi`s efforts to assemble a caretaker government of credible Iraqis who are not associated with the occupation and are willing to put aside their own political ambitions.

Important constitutional and political decisions should be deferred until elections can be held, but the interim government should assume administrative control over oil revenues and economic reconstruction projects and exercise sovereign authority over the Iraqi police and the courts. And if, as is now generally assumed, it consents to the continued presence of American occupation forces, it will also have to work out a new relationship with these troops, who will remain accountable to Washington, not Baghdad. This will go more smoothly if the administration stops subcontracting security to former Iraqi warlords and private companies and makes sure that all American troops are properly trained for the tasks assigned to them.

In the short run, replacing these proxies will probably require sending more troops, or delaying scheduled rotations out of Iraq. But over time, if the administration is finally ready to accept international oversight and a real measure of Iraqi sovereignty, Americans may see a reduction of violence and increased peacekeeping help from other nations. With June 30 rapidly approaching, Washington will soon have to choose its course.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 15, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Velvet Hand, Iron Glove
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

I had just about convinced myself that Iran is not a police state — and then the authorities detained me for a second time.

The first time was in Isfahan, for committing journalism. The police apologized and let me go after 30 minutes when my papers were found to be in order. The second time was at Tehran`s airport as I was trying to leave, and this time the interrogation was tougher.

"Have you ever been to Israel?" Gulp, yes.

"Are you working for the Israeli government?" Of course not.

"Are you working for the American government?" I tried to explain that my views make me unemployable by either the Bush or Sharon administrations, but the interrogators were weak on both subtlety and humor.

After hinting for 90 minutes that I was a spy and a liar, and that they might hold on to me indefinitely, the interrogators finally let me board my plane. Indeed, toward the end, they seemed worried principally by my threat to write about the encounter.

That episode crystallized an impression that had been forming during my trip through Iran: if it were an efficient police state, it might survive. But it`s not. It cracks down episodically, tossing dissidents in prison and occasionally even murdering them (like a Canadian-Iranian journalist last year). But Iran doesn`t control information — partly because satellite television is ubiquitous, if illegal — and people mostly get away with scathing criticism as long as they do not organize against the government.

The embarrassing point for us is that while Iran is no democracy, it has a much freer society than many of our allies in the Middle East. In contrast with Saudi Arabia, for example, Iran has (rigged) elections, and two of its vice presidents are women. The Iranian press is not as free as it was a few years ago, but it is now bolstered by blogs (Web logs) and satellite TV, which offer real scrutiny of government officials.

I was astonished that everywhere I went in Iran, people would immediately tell me their names and agree to be photographed — and then say something like, "There is no freedom here."

All this means, I think, that the Iranian regime is destined for the ash heap of history. An unpopular regime can survive if it is repressive enough, but Iran`s hard-liners don`t imprison their critics consistently enough to instill terror.

Pet dogs, for example, are strongly discouraged in Iran as dirty and contrary to Islam, and traffic police regularly arrest dogs and their owners. But the number of pet dogs is multiplying, and Tehran now has dozens of veterinary clinics.

Many Iranians believe that the Iranian leadership is pursuing a "Chinese model," in which the authorities tolerate personal freedoms but rigidly control politics. But it won`t work. In China, the greatest expansion of personal freedoms was followed, in 1989, by the biggest antigovernment demonstrations in Chinese history.

In one country after another (including Iran in 1979), repressive governments have tried to buy time by easing up a tad, and dissidents have used that as leverage to oust the oppressors. I`m convinced that Iran will be the same (although I should acknowledge that my Iranian friends, who know the situation much better, tend to be more pessimistic).

The crisis in legitimacy even manages to create nostalgia for the repressive shah. "Everybody longs for the good old days of the shah," said Amir, a peasant in a village north of Isfahan. "Prices were cheap, and he was good at building the country. If the shah built a road, it would still be good after 30 years. Now if they build a road, it cracks and falls apart in a few years."

Young people constantly told me how they scolded their parents for backing the Islamic Revolution in 1979. As a young woman, Sogand Tayebi, put it, "Those who backed the revolution are now sorry about that."

In the end, I find Iran a hopeful place. Ordinary people are proving themselves irrepressible, and they will triumph someday and forge a glistening example of a Muslim country that is a pro-American democracy in the Middle East.

I treasure a memory from the airport: after I was detained, a security goon X-rayed my bags for the second time and puzzled over my computer equipment. He snarled at me, "American reporters — bad!" The X-ray operator, who perhaps didn`t know quite what was going on, beamed at me and piped up, "Americans — very good!"

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Das ist wieder einer dieser Aussagen, die alles und auch nichts bedeuten kann. Bis jetzt wird jede irakische Übergangsregierung die USA bitten dazubleiben und das erwarte man auch von der Bush Seite.
Und auch Kerry wird nichts anderes tun und wollen. Nur Kerry wird es einfacher haben mit den Europäern, aber für die wird Kerry teuer werden.


washingtonpost.com

Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A01

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, joined by the foreign ministers of nations making key contributions of military forces in Iraq, emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after July 1, they would pack up without protest.

"We would leave," Powell said, noting that he was "not ducking the hypothetical, which I usually do," to avoid confusion on the extent of the new government`s authority.

His statement, which was echoed by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, and by the U.S. administrator in Iraq, came one day after conflicting testimony on Capitol Hill by administration officials on the issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Thursday, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say that the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, only to be contradicted by Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, sitting at his side, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.

U.S. officials emphasized that they could not imagine the new government requesting the departure of almost 170,000 troops when the security situation in the country is so dire. But the new government`s ability to assert its authority after the occupation authority dissolves on June 30 has been a central question in the international consultations over the shape of the incoming government, with the United States under pressure to transfer as much political power as possible to the Iraqi people.

"The Iraqi government has to be in a position to govern, and that`s why I mean that it has to be a break with the past, " French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said at a news conference in Washington after a preparatory meeting for next month`s Group of Eight summit in Sea Island, Ga.

Barnier had been harshly critical of U.S. actions in Iraq before he arrived in Washington, seeming to equate U.S. and Israeli actions in an interview with Le Monde published on Thursday. "What strikes me is the spiral of horror, of blood, of inhumanity that one is seeing on all fronts, from Fallujah to Gaza and in the terrible images of the assassination of the unfortunate American hostage," he told the newspaper. "It all gives the impression of a total loss of direction."

French, Russian and Italian officials pressed yesterday for the new government to be given the authority to halt military actions by U.S. forces. Powell rejected that, saying the forces will remain under the command of an American who "has to be free to take whatever decisions he believes are appropriate to accomplish his mission."

Powell said the Bush administration will set up "political consultative processes" that will keep the interim government informed about military plans and actions. He said the "various liaison organizations and cells" will also give the Americans "full insight into any sensitivities that might exist within the Iraqi interim government concerning our military operations."

But Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told reporters that an "effective transfer of power" would allow the Iraqis to halt potential military attacks.

"Effective transfer of power means that Iraqi forces should have the right and the power to have a say in decisions about their territory," Frattini said. "If we imagine a unilateral decision by coalition forces after June 30, without listening to the Iraqi people or without giving them the power to say no, there won`t be a transfer of power. And, in fact, what we want is that there is such power for the Iraqi people."

The open dispute between representatives of the leading industrialized nations over how to proceed in Iraq was evident despite a plea from President Bush for cooperation.

The foreign ministers met briefly with the president. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush and the ministers talked about the "mission they`re working to accomplish in Iraq and about the importance of putting aside past differences and all of us working together."

The French, Russian and Canadian representatives made it clear that they will not supply troops for Iraq but that they are willing to help with reconstruction.

"I have said this already, and I`m saying once again, that there will be no French troops -- not here, not now, not tomorrow," Barnier said.

The foreign ministers` discussions yesterday also focused on narrowing differences over the Bush administration`s efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East. European and Arab officials have resisted what they regard as a heavy-handed attempt by the administration to prod autocratic governments in the region to yield political power.

Officials said yesterday that there is an emerging consensus to support a "Middle East forum" that would bring together governments, businesses and nongovernmental groups to discuss reform goals. "This is an idea that is really going forward rather rapidly," a European official said, adding that there is still concern over the tone of the document the Americans want the G-8 to adopt at the summit.

The administration appeared to be inching toward the European position that progress on the Arab-Israeli conflict would assist efforts to promote Arab political reforms.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Smoke rises from the Wadi al-Salam cemetery in the Shiite city Najaf after U.S. forces attacked guerrillas loyal to cleric Moqtada Sadr.

washingtonpost.com

U.S. Forces Attack Iraqi Holy City
In Most Aggressive Tactics Yet, Tanks Fire on Ancient Cemetery

By Scott Wilson and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 14 -- U.S. tanks rumbled Friday into a vast cemetery in the southern city of Najaf, one of Shiite Islam`s most sacred places, in pursuit of insurgents loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. The fighting, which coincided with skirmishes in the other major Shiite holy city, Karbala, demonstrated some of the most aggressive tactics yet employed by U.S. forces against Sadr`s Shiite militia.

In images broadcast across the Middle East on Arabic satellite channels, U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa helicopters fluttered above the ocher and tan necropolis on the edge of the city. Abrams tanks from the 1st Armored Division fired into the warren of tombs. Plumes of gray and black smoke puffed up from between the grave markers, where guerrillas bearing rocket-propelled grenade launchers were positioned.

"The cemetery lost its holiness in the early hours of today when the U.S. forces started to attack," said Khalid Farhan, 55, who owns the Thulfiqar Hotel in downtown Najaf. "Many of the graves have been destroyed. But we can say that people are dying and nice buildings are being destroyed also today. Who cares right now about graves?"

The battle in the cemetery also prompted Sadr`s associates outside Najaf to call for a wider mobilization against U.S. forces. Sadr militants rose up in at least one other southern city to seize a government building, a police station and some of its cars.

U.S. officials had hoped a group of mainstream Shiite leaders would persuade Sadr to leave Najaf and demobilize his militia in return for a resolution to his legal problems with the United States. U.S. forces have a warrant to arrest Sadr for his alleged role in the April 2003 slaying of Abdel Majid Khoie, a rival Shiite cleric.

But fighting has overtaken negotiations with Sadr, and the Shiite leadership appears largely incapable of corralling the young cleric. U.S. officials said Sadr and the uprising he has inspired are among the most pressing security problems they must resolve before handing over limited authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 30.

For weeks, Shiite religious leaders have expressed fear that Sadr was endangering Najaf`s gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali by using the city center as a sanctuary. Those fears were realized Friday morning when, after clashes in the narrow downtown streets, witnesses said, the dome was pocked with three bullet holes. It was unclear which side had caused the damage or when it had occurred.

"Only Americans have such bullets," said Qais Khazali, a Sadr spokesmen in Najaf, as Mahdi Army fighters draped in head scarves and waving rifles shouted: "They are Jews! They are Jews!"

But Najaf residents, many of whom blame Sadr`s militia for ruining the city`s economy, said the dome was hit in the confusion of combat.

"If it was done by the Americans, I don`t think they did it intentionally," said Ali Awad, a 28-year-old Najaf resident, of the bullet holes. "If they wanted to destroy the shrine, they could destroy it. But they don`t."

In Baghdad, American officials said it was unlikely that U.S. forces had hit the dome, because they were firing in the opposite direction, toward guerrillas in the cemetery. Believed to be the second-largest cemetery in the world, the Wadi al-Salam is roughly a mile from the Shrine of Imam Ali. The name means Valley of Peace.

U.S. military officers characterized the push into Najaf as a reaction to mortar attacks on two police stations, not as a new offensive to drive out Shiite insurgents who only recently have taken up positions deep in the city.

[On Saturday, the U.S. military announced the deaths of four soldiers in separate incidents Friday, according to an Associated Press report. A soldier died from wounds received during a mortar attack, and another soldier was killed by a sniper. Earlier, a military vehicle overturned during a patrol, killing a soldier. All three soldiers belonged to the U.S. Army`s 1st Armored Division and all died south of Baghdad, the Associated Press reported.

The fourth soldier died of natural causes in the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad, the report quoted the military as saying.]

Until Friday, U.S. forces had been content to chip away at Sadr`s forces on the outskirts of Najaf, fearing that a frontal attack near the holy places would inflame Shiite opinion. Shiites, who account for 60 percent of Iraq`s population, have largely accepted the U.S.-led occupation after years of repression under the former government of Saddam Hussein, which was dominated by Sunni Muslims.

U.S. military officials also have been reluctant to move against Sadr personally for fear of angering his followers. The operations on the outskirts of Najaf and other southern cities were meant to press him to accept a negotiated solution.

U.S. military officials said Sadr, whose fighters are mostly from outside Najaf, is widely unpopular inside the city. Najaf`s primary industry is catering to Iranian Shiite pilgrims, a trade that blossomed after Hussein`s ouster but has dwindled to nothing with the violence.

On Thursday, Sadr`s militants broke up public demonstrations against him by firing rifles into the air. Shiite leaders called off an anti-Sadr rally scheduled in Najaf.

U.S. military officials said that while they believe Sadr must be defeated now to prevent his influence from spreading, they are still constrained by concerns about damaging the holy sites.

"We want to do everything we can to avoid widening this problem from Moqtada to something more," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. "We certainly want to avoid being drawn into an attack that would create an incident that has strategic impact."

The images of U.S. tanks near the Shrine of Imam Ali, one of Shiite Islam`s holiest mosques, brought calls for resistance during Friday prayer services at pro-Sadr mosques.

"Where are those people who said Najaf is a red line?" Abdul Hadi Daraji asked several thousand worshippers at the al-Hikma Mosque in Sadr City, an eastern Baghdad slum named for the young cleric`s father, who was assassinated in 1999. "I`m asking all the people here, `If anyone feels he is able to go to Najaf to support your brothers, go!` "

Witnesses said Najaf`s Thulfiqar Hotel came under fire Friday morning as U.S. tanks rattled through the streets. Correspondents from the Reuters news agency, Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press, as well as The Washington Post and the U.S.-funded al-Hurra satellite channel, reside at the hotel.

As described by witnesses, tank rounds struck the roof, the lobby and a courtyard behind the building, sending cameras toppling and reporters ducking for cover. Some suffered minor injuries.

"They first made warning shots," said Farhan, the owner. "When the reporters wouldn`t move [from the roof] they shot."

In sporadic clashes throughout the day, U.S. forces killed at least four Iraqis, including two Mahdi Army fighters, and wounded 25 others, according to hospital reports. And Ahmed Ali, assistant director of Najaf`s Hakim Hospital, said that "the number of killed could increase because we have some critically wounded people." Not all the dead reach hospitals, Najaf residents said; some are immediately buried by their comrades.

Despite the intense fighting, Sadr delivered a scheduled sermon at Friday prayers in the main mosque in Kufa, roughly six miles east of Najaf. He warned that others were trying to divide the Shiite community and advised a rival Shiite militia attached to a political party not to fall for the ploy.

Over the past three days, U.S. forces have also fought pitched gun battles with insurgents near the shrines of Hussein and Abbas in Karbala -- mosques that the insurgents have sought to use as fortresses. U.S. officials estimated that more than two dozen insurgents have been killed in Karbala in recent days.

Combat continued there Friday, and persistent firefights made gathering the dead and wounded Iraqis impossible, witnesses said. Those who fell near houses were quickly pulled inside and later returned to their families.

For the first time, fighting spread to Nasiriyah, a Shiite city southeast of Najaf. Insurgents overran the governor`s office, a police station and a hotel. At the police station, the militants briefly held 16 U.S.-trained Iraqi policemen and seized four patrol cars, witnesses there said.

The action followed a call by the Mahdi Army commander in Nasiriyah, which has been largely calm in recent weeks, to rise up. Kimmitt said during his regular afternoon news conference that the situation there was under control. A few hours later, however, Sadr`s militiamen attacked the occupation authority offices. One Philippine contractor was wounded.

Special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad, and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this story.

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U.S. Companies Put Little Capital Into Iraq
Many Firms Interested, but Are Held Back by Security Concerns, Lack of Political Stability

By Ariana Eunjung Cha and Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A17

BAGHDAD -- Commerce is thriving on Saddoun Street again, and its storefronts have the feel of a global bazaar. Glossy billboards show off electronics from South Korea. Vendors hawk cell phone service from Egypt. Corner groceries stock ice cream from the United Arab Emirates.

Conspicuously absent: U.S. brands.

Postwar Iraq was supposed to be a bonanza for American companies. The Commerce Department hosted a series of conferences attended by thousands who dreamed of investment opportunities promised by a free Iraq. The administration characterized the more than $21 billion Congress allocated to the reconstruction as a down payment, an initial investment that would spark the economy and bring riches to the Iraqi people as well as American entrepreneurs.

The reality a year after President Bush declared the end of major combat is far different.

Though many dozens of U.S. corporations have government contracts to help rebuild the country, relatively few American companies have invested their own capital. The volatile security situation has kept many potential investors away, and even as the U.S.-led coalition government has called on businesses to come to Iraq, the State Department has warned Americans to stay out of the country.

The beheading of Pennsylvania businessman Nicholas Berg, broadcast this week in a video on the Web, put a face on the dangers facing private entrepreneurs trying to operate independently in Iraq. Berg`s family said he was inspired to go to Iraq after attending a government-sponsored trade fair for potential investors. But when he arrived in Iraq and met with State Department officials, they begged him to go home and even offered him a plane ride.

Commerce Department officials say they still encourage investment in Iraq and believe the country is hospitable to U.S. businesses. William H. Lash III, assistant secretary of commerce and chairman of the department`s Iraq Investment and Reconstruction Task Force, said that when he was last in Iraq, in February, he "was out and about without a [flak] vest walking around the markets with an American flag." He said this week that it`s difficult to assess whether he would still do that if he went back today but that companies should look at investing in Iraq "not only an economic opportunity but a moral imperative."

But, Lash cautioned, "if you`re going to do large-scale investment in Iraq, if you are going to engage in reconstruction, we have to say it`s prudent to have your own security consultant."

U.S. companies that have dared to start operations in Iraq, mostly small ones, say they have had to grapple with hijacking of supplies and mortar and rocket attacks on buildings where employees reside. Given the growing hostility toward the occupation, it has been difficult for them to advertise their presence and take full advantage of the burgeoning market.

PepsiCo Inc., which committed $100 million to buy back about a 30 percent stake in Baghdad Soft Drinks Co., its old bottling plant, remains the only U.S. company to make a large capital investment.

General Electric Co. had sent a team of business development managers into Iraq to research opportunities for its medical supplies division, but began pulling people out last month due to concerns about the violence. Procter & Gamble Co. made a joint-venture deal with an Iraqi company, but is holding back marketing and distributing its products because of the unrest.

Haworth Inc., a large office equipment company based in Holland, Mich., has entered into a joint venture that hopes to provide technology to Iraqi government and commercial offices. But the company said Thursday that the recent violence has forced it to pull back from sending more staff to the Middle East.

"Right now it`s not a safe time," Haworth spokeswoman Nicole Tallman said.

Daoud L. Khairallah, an attorney with White & Case LLP in the District, said Berg`s murder has made his already hesitant corporate clients even more cautious about entering the Iraqi market. "If a client would ask me `Should I go to Iraq now?` I would not feel comfortable telling them yes," Khairallah said.

Another factor in American companies` hesitation to invest is the chaos of the Iraqi government and its laws.

"The physical risk simply inhibits people from getting around and doing anything, but the political risk is really what`s holding people back," said John DeBlasio, a U.S. Army major who until recently was an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Trade as part of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

Simon Haselock, head of the CPA`s media development, said that while he has been contacted by practically every major entertainment, music and broadcast conglomerate about their interest in investing in Iraq, many are holding back because the laws and regulations are still in flux.

"Something that is completely unregulated is not necessarily a good thing," he said.

The result is that Arab, Asian and European firms with more experience working in the region -- and more stomach for dealing with the uncertainties -- have taken the lead in the country`s emerging markets. Only one of the 15 banks that applied for licenses was American, for instance, and only a handful of the 100 companies that applied for cell phone licenses were American.

Foreign investment in Iraq during the Baath Party`s nearly three-decade reign was almost nonexistent. Practically everything was owned by the state and, by statute, only companies or individuals from Arab nations were allowed to have significant ownership rights.

U.N. sanctions imposed after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 brought the private sector to near collapse. Even simple things such as vegetable oil became hard to come by. Wages were so low that each Iraqi family depended on a monthly government-supplied food basket.

W. Tompie Hall, chief executive of Global Market Link Inc., a Colleyville, Tex.-based consulting firm helping businesses break into the Iraqi market, said the business laws of the largely socialist state must be overhauled to make it hospitable for capitalism.

"Iraq had a very weak commercial code under Saddam Hussein -- no binding arbitration, no compensation for overtime, inability for foreign companies to have majority ownership," Hall said. That makes private businesses nervous.

Officials from the occupation imagined that they would create a new Iraq where the private sector would drive the economy. Iraq`s stock market, where traders once scribbled numbers on blackboards, would become a modern, computerized multiplier of investments. Hussein`s formerly state-owned companies, many of them extremely lucrative, would be open to privatization. And a new banking system would provide capital.

But the insurgency and disputes between the CPA and the Iraqi Governing Council have delayed many initiatives. The stock market has yet to open. Plans to privatize the state-run companies had to be delayed. The banking system has yet to gain momentum with businesses or consumers. And a major trade fair for private businesses scheduled for April was postponed indefinitely.

Most foreign investment has been relatively small, in setting up distribution networks, hiring Iraqi partners, and leasing offices and other infrastructure.

Direct foreign investment, besides Pepsi`s, has been limited to the companies that snagged the banking and cell phone licenses, DeBlasio said. The three winners of banking licenses -- Britain`s HSBC Holdings PLC and Standard Chartered PLC and the National Bank of Kuwait -- have been preparing to open branches all over the country.

The three winners of the cell phone licenses -- Egypt`s Orascom Telecom Holding S.A.E. in central Iraq, Kuwait`s AtheerTel in northern Iraq and Asia Cell, a partnership between companies from Kuwait and Bahrain, in southern Iraq -- paid the interim government $9 million to fund a regulatory agency.

Meanwhile, other projects remain in the planning stages.

Sallyport Global Holdings, a Boston consulting firm, is teaming up with the Iraqi American Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Baltimore-based Target Logistics Inc. to build a 25-acre business park in Baghdad and is negotiating a lease for the land, according to Sallyport partner Thomas W. Charron.

In recent months several American and Middle Eastern companies have announced their intention to form joint ventures that would invest "billions" in Iraq. That money is still only theoretical.

James Sosnicky, an economics officer for the Iraq Development Center for the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan, said that while the business community is shaken by Berg`s killing, the security situation is not as dire as the incident might suggest. He advises Americans to start operations in the many parts of the country that are stable, seeking out Iraqi partners -- and private security.

"If you ask most Americans, they think of the whole Middle East as one wall of fire, but in many parts of Iraq things are normal -- people go to work and go shopping. That gets lost when seen through the eyes of a television lens thousands of miles away," Sosnicky said.

Richard T. McCormack, former undersecretary for economics at the State Department, said he would not fault the U.S. government for its cheerleading for investment in Iraq because the dangers are obvious. "All you have to do is open up the newspaper to see the risk involved. All you have to do is try to get life insurance and see the premiums," McCormack said.

One of the top priorities of the occupation authority before the June 30 handover of limited authority to the Iraqi government is laying the foundation for a legal and regulatory system designed to spur more private investment.

In the past few months, the CPA announced that it would permit 100 percent foreign ownership and management of businesses in Iraq, except for oil and other natural resources. It also introduced a personal and corporate income tax limit of 15 percent, clarified customs duties for importing and exporting goods, and created a Federal Communications Commission-like entity that will regulate telecommunications and media.

Dan Sudnick, until recently the CPA`s senior advisor for media and telecommunications, said his team and others have been working with Iraqi leaders to craft a legal system that will ensure that businesses can grow freely while having their rights protected. He believes the new Iraqi regulatory body will encourage investment in TV broadcasting, long-distance telephone service and Internet service. He sees Iraq`s main highway from Kuwait to Baghdad growing into something like the 101 of Silicon Valley or the Dulles toll road of the Washington area.

Among the most important unknowns about the emerging Iraqi economy is what will happen with its untapped oil wealth. Iraq has the second-largest proven reserves after Saudi Arabia, but its production was limited under the old regime by old equipment and lack of funds to explore new fields.

Halliburton Co. subsidiary KBR Inc. and Parsons Corp. won large government contracts to rebuild oil fields, but a year after Saddam Hussein fell, there has been no new investment in Iraq by the multinational oil companies.

Mohammed Aboush, a director general for the Oil Ministry, said that he has been approached by representatives for all the giant oil companies around the world but that most are not ready to commit to any projects.

"A lot of them are biding their time given the security issues and political climate. Who is going to run the show? If you sign with X, who is to say X will be in charge when the Americans leave?" Aboush said.

Isam Abbas, the Baghdad agent for a major U.S. oil company that he asked not be named for competitive reasons, agreed: "There`s too much uncertainty to make any investments yet."

Many U.S. companies have stationed teams in places just outside Iraq, including Amman, Kuwait City and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in preparation for when the country stabilizes and they will be able to pounce on the market.

Ed Rogers, partner in New Bridge Strategies LLC, a Houston consulting firm formed last year to help businesses in Iraq, agrees much of the investment money entering Iraq now is from other Middle Eastern countries.

"There`s a lot of people there," Rogers said. "But you don`t have Toys R Us. McDonald`s is not opening any time soon."

Spinner reported from Washington.

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FBI Questioned Berg on 9/11 Link
Suspect in Attacks Stole Computer ID From Iraq Victim

By Sewell Chan and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A17

BAGHDAD, May 14 -- Nicholas Berg, the American businessman who disappeared here last month and was later decapitated by Islamic guerrillas, was interviewed by FBI agents in the United States in 2002 because of a tangential connection to the case of alleged al Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui, U.S. officials said Friday.

The link between Berg, whom FBI agents in Iraq questioned three times shortly before he disappeared, and Moussaoui, who is accused of conspiracy in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was confirmed by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft.

Ashcroft emphasized that FBI agents had cleared Berg of any suspicious activity. "We did not develop any interest in Mr. Berg or determine in any way that he had any relationship to any activities of terror," Ashcroft said in Washington.

"The suggestion that Mr. Berg was in some way involved in terrorist activity . . . is a suggestion that we do not have any ability to support and we do not believe is a valid one."

Moussaoui and an acquaintance used an e-mail address or other computer identification traced to Berg, Justice Department officials said. The FBI concluded that Berg had been one of numerous victims of scam artists who were stealing e-mail addresses and passwords at the main campus of the University of Oklahoma, where Berg had been a student, several officials said.

Berg, 26, never met Moussaoui, who attended the school later, officials said.

Ashcroft said the theft of Berg`s e-mail address was unremarkable. "It is not uncommon for individuals from time to time to allow . . . computer use by other individuals in university settings," Ashcroft said.

Iraqi police arrested Berg in the northern city of Mosul on March 24. Maj. Gen. Mohammed Barhawi, the police chief in Mosul, said Thursday that Berg aroused suspicion because he was not carrying identification, according to National Public Radio. Two associates of Berg said this week, however, that he told them he had been carrying his U.S. passport and that police became suspicious because the passport contained an Israeli stamp.

Barhawi said the FBI asked the police to keep Berg in custody while its agents reviewed the case.

FBI agents questioned Berg on March 25 and 26 and a third time about a week later. He later told a friend that he was asked about terrorism.

FBI officials said Friday that the timing of the March interviews was a coincidence and did not affect the length of Berg`s stay in Iraqi custody. It remains unclear why he was held for 13 days.

On April 5, Berg`s parents filed a petition in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, asserting that the U.S. military was illegally detaining their son. They contended that his detention prevented him from returning to the United States on March 30, as he had planned.

Berg was freed April 6 and returned to Baghdad that day. He vanished April 10 after leaving his hotel. His body was found Saturday, and a video depicting his slaying was posted on the Internet on Tuesday. He was buried Friday in a family plot in Jenkintown, Pa., near Philadelphia.

The Internet video attributed Berg`s killing to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian who U.S. officials believe is linked to al Qaeda. CIA officials said Thursday that they had performed a technical analysis of the video and concluded "with high probability" that the speaker on the video was Zarqawi, and that Zarqawi was the person shown decapitating Berg.

Eggen reported from Washington.

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In Search of Iraqi Loyalty

By Colbert I. King

Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A23

The United States cannot create a free, peaceful and democratic Iraq, and it`s time we stopped pretending that we can. Not by ourselves. Not with coalition forces. Not with help from the United Nations. Iraq will become a stable country that respects human rights and the rule of law only if Iraqis themselves want it that way, and only when Iraqis are willing to put their own lives and treasure on the line to help bring it about.

At this stage, a year after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, it`s not at all clear that Iraqis are prepared to make that kind of sacrifice, at least not on the same terms asked of American troops fighting and dying in their country. American women and men in uniform, as President Bush rightly observed last year, are bound by a set of values and ideals and allegiance to their country. That`s why, when called upon, they make sacrifices.

But what of the Iraqis? What binds them together? What has a call on their loyalty?

Is it a matter of religion, tribe, blood? What will they fight to protect? Do Shiites believe every Sunni life counts? Will Sunnis fight for the unalienable right of Shiites and Kurds to live as free people?

Come June 30, an interim Iraqi government -- its shape and composition yet to be decided -- will take over the wheels of government. Claims that Iraqis share the administration`s goals will be put to the test.

Don`t be surprised if we learn that the Iraqis` view of the future is at variance with our own, especially where our role in their country is concerned.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, said in a Senate hearing this week that the majority of Iraqis want democracy and are positive about their future, "thanks in large part to the efforts of our servicemen and women." Wishful thinking? Maybe.

A new poll commissioned by the U.S.-led occupation authority showed that 80 percent of Iraqis lacked confidence in American and foreign authorities running their country. What`s more, 82 percent said they disapproved of the U.S. and allied militaries in Iraq. If winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people is the test, we may be getting a failing grade.

What about shared sacrifice? There are signs many Iraqis don`t view the insurgency as consisting of quite the same cast of thugs, militants and terrorists as described by the Bush administration.

Fallujah is a good case in point.

When four U.S. contractors were brutally murdered and mutilated on March 31, the United States vowed to hunt down the Fallujah killers, bring them to justice, rid the town of foreign guerrillas and disarm the gunmen holed up in the city. More than a month later, following weeks of fighting and a siege of the city, U.S. Marines have been ordered to pull back. Today, former Iraqi soldiers -- some of whom may have been firing on Marines -- are patrolling the streets and manning checkpoints, all under the command of a former Iraqi general.

Insurgents arrested to date? None. Foreign guerrillas? Disappeared, say the new Iraqi protectors. Disarmament? Ha!

If Iraqi security forces took up arms against the masked guerrillas sporting rocket-propelled grenades, the press must have missed it. True, shooting at Americans has stopped. But Fallujah is no less an enemy sanctuary today than it was when those contractors were ambushed and murdered. Perhaps that`s why the people of Fallujah were seen on TV treating the Marines` withdrawal as a great victory.

The situation is hardly more upbeat in southern Iraq, where U.S. troops are bearing the brunt of the struggle against a militia under the command of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr, while strapping young Iraqi men get to go off and play soccer with the Saudis.

What we see happening thus far in places such as Fallujah, Najaf and Karbala is a calculated decision by Iraqi clerics, provincial leaders, and ex-Iraqi army generals and security forces to avoid direct confrontation with insurgents who, as Bush contends, would threaten democracy in Iraq. To the extent Iraqi leaders intervene, it is only to discourage the use of American power and to protect Iraqi lives and property. Useful, perhaps, but it`s a far cry from stepping into the fray to bleed and die for the advance of freedom.

Much is made of Iraq`s transition to sovereignty and the need to produce a semblance of national government with legal institutions. Of equal concern, at least to me, is the willingness and capacity of Iraqis to take greater responsibility for their own security.

Let`s go back to Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba`s scathing report on abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Attention has rightly focused on the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees. But the second part of the Taguba report examined prison escapes and the guarding of detainees. Overshadowed by accounts of abusive American behavior were reports of misbehavior by Iraqi guards themselves.

Taguba said that the loyalty of Iraqi guards was questionable and that they were a potentially dangerous contingent within the prison, to wit: "one of the detainees . . . had gotten a pistol and a couple of knives from an Iraqi Guard working in the encampment"; "an Iraqi guard assisted a detainee to escape by signing him out on a work detail and disappearing with him."

The question of loyalty looms large today in Iraq. Loyalty to what? Allegiance to whom?

Where is the Iraqis` testament to their love of freedom? Where is their commitment to the defense of their country against fellow Iraqis and Arabs who may be insurgents, terrorists and former Hussein loyalists?

We`ll know soon enough. Meanwhile, democracy, and the blessings of liberty in Iraq, despite our best efforts, are on hold.

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How the U.S. Can Get Out

By Yossi Alpher

Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A23

The situation on the ground in Iraq is getting worse. This may or may not be linked to Washington`s faulty rationale for occupying Iraq in the first place, but it is certainly a consequence of poor U.S. comprehension of the dynamic of the country. The current prison scandal is but one more example of the United States` bad fit in Iraq. This in turn is a key factor in addressing the next important issue: How does America get out?

The current exit strategy -- democratization beginning June 30 -- looks destined to flounder or fail. Though it may appear at some point to be working, and while involving the United Nations is well advised, the United States should be wary of the implications of Shiite rule in Iraq, even if installed democratically. Remember the liberal, democratic Islamic Iran that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini promised the West before he returned to Tehran in 1979? One way or another, American planners should be ready with alternatives, a few of which may seem cynical but all of which are probably based on a better understanding of realities.

Here are a few preliminary ideas, with their pros and cons. Some are familiar from the debate about Iraq that preceded the U.S. occupation:

� Settle for a less-than-democratic regime with a strong security arm that offers stability and a pro-American policy. This would undoubtedly involve some loss of face, but with clever administration spin the real problem would not be abandoning democratization. After all, it is already clear that what the United States is doing in the greater Middle East is regime change, not democratization: Moammar Gaddafi of Libya can stay even though he`s a dictator, because he turned over his weapons of mass destruction, while Yasser Arafat, the most democratically elected leader in the region, has to go because he`s a terrorist. Rather, the problem is finding the right strongman and, worse -- because the United States dismantled the Iraqi army and is hard-put to field a replacement -- putting together an adequate local security apparatus.

� Once pure democratization is abandoned, consider reinstalling the Hashemites -- the post-British, pre-Baath rulers of Iraq who still reign in neighboring Jordan. Most of Iraq`s neighbors would be relatively comfortable with such a regime, which could serve U.S. regional interests nicely. Because the Hashemites belong to none of Iraq`s rival religious and ethnic groups, they could be more successful at ruling.

� Turn everything over to the United Nations -- to a far greater extent than the involvement being contemplated. This would be popular with the rest of the world and would involve minimal American loss of face. But it would not work without an ongoing and large American military presence, subject to U.N. command. Americans might still be killed in Iraq, but without American control. Moreover, if the United States could not retain an independent military force in Iraq it might be less capable of fulfilling some of its worthy regional objectives, such as coercing Iran and Syria into moderating their regimes and protecting U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf.

� Recognize that Iraq without a brutal dictatorial regime holding it together by force is really three countries -- Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the Shiite south and center -- and create them. This is the most revolutionary approach -- but no more so than the idea of occupying Iraq in the first place. The dismantling of Iraq into its components could be lightly camouflaged as an interim federal measure. It might be good for Iraqis but could be dangerous for the region. It might create destabilizing irredentist incentives among the Kurds of Turkey, Iran and Syria as well as the Shiites of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, and invite possible intervention by worried or opportunistic neighbors.

� Declare victory and withdraw. Save American (and coalition) lives and avoid more painful mistakes. Put future Saddam Husseins on notice that the United States has adopted a new "hit and run" strategy to remove them without the complications of extended occupation and nation-building. This may turn out in the long term to be the only realistic option.

� Status quo. Hunker down, try to reduce losses, invent new ways to "democratize" Iraq, outlast the prison scandal and hope things improve. This is probably where the United States will go in the short term, because both bureaucratically and ideologically it`s the easy option.

But let`s at least get some alternative concepts into the pipeline.

The writer is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and served as a senior adviser to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. He co-edits the Web sites Bitterlemons.org and Bitterlemons-international.org, which deal with Middle East issues.

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Poll: Support for Bush, Iraq war dropping
Kerry leads Bush in matchups


(CNN) -- As Americans express growing unease about Iraq, President Bush`s job approval rating has taken a hit, according to a poll released Friday by CNN and Time magazine.

That development appears to be helping Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. He wins the support of 51 percent of likely voters, compared to 46 percent for Bush. In February, Bush was ahead of Kerry by two percentage points.

If independent Ralph Nader is among the choices, Kerry gets 49 percent, Bush 44 percent and Nader 6 percent.

Bush`s overall job approval rating fell from 49 percent to 46 percent since the last CNN/Time poll on April 8, while his disapproval rating rose from 47 percent to 49 percent -- the first time that more people disapproved of Bush`s job performance than approved.

More people than not believe that going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do, but that number has declined to 48 percent in this poll, compared to 53 percent in April. And 56 percent of those polled say the war is not worth U.S. lives and other costs.

The poll was conducted by telephone Wednesday and Thursday, at a time when the scandal over the U.S. abuse of Iraqi prisoners was dominating news coverage, along with the beheading of American Nicholas Berg in Iraq.

The margin of error for the total sample of 1,001 adult Americans is 3.1 percentage points, but that margin varied for questions specifically asked of smaller groups, such as likely voters.

The prison abuse scandal stunned Americans, 27 percent of whom said it made them "less supportive" of the war in Iraq. And 55 percent of those polled said Bush is doing a poor job of handling Iraq, compared to 39 percent who said he was doing a good job.

But a majority of Americans expressed support for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- under fire for his handling of the abuse reports -- with 57 percent saying he should not resign.

On the question of the war, only 41 percent of those polled believe the United States is winning, although 60 percent said the country can win and 52 percent said the country will win.

Democrats were decidedly more pessimistic on the matter -- 65 percent said the United States is not winning the war, 44 percent said it can`t win and 52 percent said it won`t win.
Bush and Kerry

Kerry and Bush are essentially tied over who would handle Iraq better -- 46 percent to 43 percent.

Bush appears to have an advantage over Kerry on the war on terrorism with 49 percent saying he would do a better job, compared to 42 percent for Kerry. He also had the edge in "moral values" -- 46 percent to 42 percent.

On the question of who would do a better job, Kerry had big leads on health care, protecting the environment, reducing the deficit and reducing unemployment. He even did better than Bush on the question of taxes.

In the fight against terrorism -- one of Bush`s strengths in many polls -- this poll showed a split over whether Bush is doing a good job. Forty-six of those polled said he was, but 47 percent said he was doing a poor job.

The poll also indicated that Bush`s troubles may hurt the GOP in other races. On the generic ballot for congressional races, Democrats have a 13 point lead among likely voters.

Overall, those polled said they believed things are going well in the country, but they expressed growing concern about Bush.

Those with "doubts and reservations" about Bush`s ability to lead the country rose from 55 percent to 59 percent while those who believe the president can be trusted as a leader dropped from 44 percent to 39 percent, since early February.
Abused prisoners

Fifty percent think there was a cover-up of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, although 63 percent said they believe it is limited to a "few individual soldiers."

Those participating in the poll want to see the soldiers court-martialed, but more -- 68 percent -- want to see their supervisors face the same procedure. And the sides are nearly even -- 45 percent saying yes and 44 percent saying no -- on whether the generals in charge of Iraq should face court-martial.

Regardless of who is responsible, the pollsters found that Americans don`t want to see any more pictures of it -- 66 percent said no when asked if all other photographs should be released, while 30 percent said yes.

CNN`s Keating Holland contributed to this report.



Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/14/bush.kerry/ind…

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ublished on Friday, May 14, 2004 by Reuters
US Pushes World Court Immunity Amid Iraq Scandal
by Carol Giacomo


WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is pursuing its campaign to protect Americans from International Criminal Court jurisdiction even as it deals with the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal that may involve some of the very war crimes the court was created to handle.

So far 89 countries have signed agreements with Washington promising that Americans accused of grave international offenses, including soldiers charged with war crimes, will be returned to U.S. jurisdiction so their cases can be decided by fellow Americans rather than international jurists.

Other states may soon be added, officials said this week.

"It`s never been our argument that Americans are angels," one senior U.S. official told Reuters.

"Our argument has been if Americans commit war crimes or human rights violations, we will handle them. And we will," he added.

The permanent court was established in 2002 after ad hoc institutions dealt with war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

But President Bush opposed it and insisted on so-called Article 98 agreements under which countries guaranteed not to surrender Americans to ICC prosecution.

With military and civilians on peacekeeping and humanitarian missions in 100 countries, Washington must preserve its independence to defend its national interests worldwide, U.S. officials said.

This position is coming under new scrutiny following publication of photographs showing U.S. army soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

The photos have fueled international outrage and severely damaged U.S. credibility. U.S. officials promise the guilty will be punished but rights experts worry prosecutions will focus on lower-ranking soldiers, not their superiors.

WAR CRIMES PROSECUTION

"The political reality is that its going to be harder now to persuade democratically elected leaders to immunize the U.S. military from war crimes prosecution," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

While some states may be more reluctant to sign the bilateral immunity agreements, it is unclear they can avoid it, said Anthony Dworkin, London-based editor of the Crimes of War Project Web site .

U.S. law prohibits military aid to countries that do not sign immunity accords and Washington has used this lever to exert "enormous pressure" on countries to sign, he said.

Some legal experts disagree with the use of Article 98 agreements and question government insistence that U.S. military interrogation rules in Iraq and elsewhere comply with the Geneva Convention.

Washington "is reluctant to test its interpretation" before international jurists, Dworkin said.

"All of us are appalled by those prisoner abuse photos and we need to address them," a U.S. official said.

Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited.

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Maulkorb für Michael
Hände weg vom fetten Kerl im Hühnchenanzug, Mr. Mogul
von Gregory Palast
ZNet 08.05.2004


Als die gemästeten Katzen bei Disney den Bann über Michael Moores neuen Film “Fahrenheit 9-11” sprachen, taten sie mehr als nur einen Künstler zu zensieren. Moore mundtot zu machen ist lediglich der neuste Winkelzug, um höchst unbequeme Fakten zu unterdrücken: auf Veranlassung der Bush-Administration wurden die Untersuchungen über Saudi Arabiens finanzielle Förderung des Terrorismus ausgesetzt, einschließlich der Beweise, die einige Mitglieder der Familie Bin Ladens in den USA betrafen.

Ich weiß es, weil ich mit meinem Untersuchungsteam bei BBC Television und dem britischen Guardian die Originalberichte schrieb und filmte, auf denen Moores neue Dokumentation beruht.

Am 11. November 2001, gerade mal zwei Monate nach dem Anschlag, legte BBC Television´s Newsnight Dokumente vor, die darauf hindeuteten, dass FBI-Agenten davon abgehalten wurden, Ermittlungen über zwei Mitglieder der Familie Bin Ladens anzustellen, die einer „mutmaßliche terroristische Vereinigung“ aus Falls Church, Virginia, vorstanden – das heißt, bis zum 13. September 2001. Zu dieser Zeit waren diese Vögel ausgeflogen.

Wir berichteten weiterhin, dass hochrangige Agenten in der US Regierung BBC informiert haben, dass die Bush-Administration die Untersuchungen über die pakistanischen Khan-Laboratorien behindert haben, welche einen Flohmarkt für Atombombenbaupläne betrieben. Warum wurden die Ermittlungen gehemmt? Weil die Spur finanzieller Transaktionen zurück zu den Saudis führte.

Am nächsten Tag berichtete unser Guardian-Team, dass Agenten davon abgehalten wurden, der bei einer Sondersitzung in Paris beginnenden Geldspur zu folgen. Dort, im Hotel Monceau Royale, haben Saudische Milliardäre angeblich vereinbart, Al-Qaidas „erzieherische“ Bemühungen finanziell zu unterstützen.

Diese Berichte liefen ganz oben in den Abendnachrichten in Großbritannien und weltweit, aber nicht in den USA. Warum?

Unser Nachrichtenteam bekam mehrere Auszeichnungen, einschließlich einer, die ich besonders zu kriegen hasste: eine „Auszeichnung für zensierte Projekte“ der Schule für Journalismus der Staatsuniversität Kalifornien.

Es ist der Preis, den man für eine sehr wichtige Reportage erhält, die einfach von der amerikanischen Presse ausgeschlossen wurde.

Und das tat weh. Ich bin Amerikaner, ein Junge aus L.A., den man ins journalistische Exil nach England geschickt hat.

Was geht hier vor?

Warum zum Teufel können Agenten dem Geld nicht folgen, sogar wenn es sie nach Arabien verschlägt? Weil - wie wir wiederholt von denen gehört haben, die innerhalb der Agenturen mundtot gemacht wurden - saudische Geldquellen zurück zu George H.W. Bush und seinen sehr begünstigten Söhnen wie anderen Familienfreunden führten. Wir bei BBC berichteten auch davon, ganz oben in den Abendnachrichten; überall außer in Amerika.

Warum haben Amerikas Medienbarone Angst davor, diese Geschichte in den USA zu bringen? Die BBC und Guardian-Berichte waren die hässlichen, kleinen Punkte, die von einem einzigen Thema verbunden wurden: Ölverseuchung in der amerikanischen Politik und Geldvergiftung im Blut unserer mächtigsten politischen Familie. Und das sind Nachrichten, die ihren Namen nicht zu nennen wagen.

Dies ist nicht das erste Mal, dass Michael Moore versucht hat, unsere BBC-Untersuchungsberichte an der US-Medien-Grenzpatrouille vorbeizubekommen. In der Tat, ein Witz in unserer Londoner Redaktion ist, sollten wir unseren Bericht nicht in den amerikanischen Äther bekommen, so können wir ihn einfach dem fetten Kerl im Hühnerkostüm zuschieben. Moore könnte es an den Zensoren als „Unterhaltung“ vorbeischmuggeln.

Hier ist ein Beispiel von Moores U-Bahn-Operationen, harte Nachrichten nach Amerika zu bringen: Im Guardian und auf BBC TV berichtete ich, dass Floridas damalige Innenministerin, Katherine Harris, zehntausende schwarze Bürger kurz vor der Wahl 2000 aus der Wählerliste entfernen ließ. Ihr Büro verwendete eine Liste von angeblichen „Verbrechern“ – eine Liste, von der ihr Büro wusste, dass sie Blödsinn war und die fast ausschließlich mit Unschuldigen gefüllt war.

Ich druckte den ersten Teil der Geschichte im Guardian, als Al Gore immer noch im Rennen war. Die Washington Post veröffentlichte meinen Bericht sieben Monate später. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt konnte es mit einem Kichern in Bushs Weißem Haus gelesen werden.

Die Geschichte mit der „Ausradierung“ der schwarzen Wähler hätte niemals das Tageslicht in den USA erblickt, ganz zu schweigen von den Titelseiten in aller Welt, wenn dies nicht von Michael Moore in der Einleitung seines Buches „Stupid White Men“ aufgedeckt worden wäre.

Also mach weiter, Mr. Micky-Maus-Mogul, zensier den Kerl mit der Baseball-Mütze, lass die Kinoleinwände dunkel werden, verbreite die Blindheit, die uns umbringt. Zeig uns dafür gefälschte Flieger-Jungs, die die mit ihren aufgezeigten Daumen „Mission ausgeführt“ signalisieren. Mit den ausgeschalteten Lichtern ist es so viel einfacher für die Scheichs, ihre Kreditkarten an Killer auszuleihen, um den Ölpreis hochzutreiben, während unsere Politiker den Raub der nächsten Wahl vorbereiten, diesmal per Computer. Machen wir uns nichts vor. Fernsehnachrichten in den USA sind jetzt durch und durch Fox-ifiziert (bezogen auf die erzkonservative Fox Sendergruppe, Anm.d.Ü.) und Printmedien, mit einigen Ausnahmen, katzbuckeln immer noch vor den ausweichenden Äußerungen unseres Oberbefehlshabers. Vielleicht steigere ich mich zu sehr hinein. Schließlich ist es bloß ein Film. Aber die Verbreitung von Moores Film abzuwürgen sieht verdächtig nach einer „Suchen und Zerstören“-Mission von unerwünschten Nachrichten aus, sogar wenn diese Nachrichten in einer spaßhaften Dokumentation versteckt sind. Warum sollten die Medienmogule hierbei Halt machen? Wie wäre es mit einem extragroßen orangefarbenen Anzug für Michael für den neuen Hollywoodzweig auf Guantanamo?



[ Übersetzt von: Chi-Huy Tran | Orginalartikel: "Muzzling Michael" ]

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. Moderne Söldner statt reguläre Soldaten � Die Rolle der Sicherheitsfirmen im Irak
Dr. Karl-Heinz Harenberg
http://www.ndrinfo.de/ndrinfo_pages_std/0,2758,OID355366_REF…
Der Gefängnisskandal von Abu Ghraib hat das Augemerk wieder einmal auf
eine Entwicklung gelenkt, die sich zu Lasten der US- Regierung und ihrer
Armee immer mehr zu verselbständigen scheint: die Rolle der bewaffneten
Hilfskräfte im Irak. Sie stehen im Dienste sogenannter PMCs - private military
companies -, die ihre Aufträge von amerikanischen Regierungsbehörden
erhalten. Denn in den Berichten über die Misshandlungen irakischer
Gefangener ist - wenn auch mehr am Rande - von drei Zivilisten die Rede, die
als Dolmetscher bzw. als Verhörspezialisten in Abu Ghraib gearbeitet haben.
Zwei von ihnen gehören nach Angaben des Untersuchungsberichtes von USGeneral
Antonio Taguba der Firma CACI International an, die ihren Sitz in
Arlington, nahe der amerikanischen Hauptstadt hat. Dass ihre Angestellten in
kriminelle Machenschaften verwickelt gewesen seien, wird von der
Firmenleitung jedoch energisch bestritten.
Ungeachtet dessen ist CACI - die California Analysis Center Incorporated - ein
Beispiel für einen Unternehmenszweig, auf den die US-Besatzungstruppen im
Irak inzwischen dringend angewiesen sind. Wo immer das Militär die
anfallenden Aufgaben nicht mehr bewältigen kann, werden von den
entsprechenden PMCs zivile Spezialisten angefordert. Und da es zum
Unternehmenszweck von CACI, so auf einer Werbeseite im Internet, gehört,
„Amerikas Geheimdiensten dabei zu helfen, weltweit Informationen für den
Krieg gegen den Terror zu sammeln und zu analysieren", wurden vom
Pentagon zu den Vernehmungen irakischer Gefangener eben CACI-Mitarbeiter
hinzugezogen.
Der Boom bei den privaten Militärfirmen begann nach den Anschlägen des 11.
September. Der von George W. Bush erklärte Krieg gegen den Terror
beschränkte sich ja nicht nur auf eine detaillierte Jagd auf Al Qaida und andere
Terrororganisationen, sondern er führte zum Einmarsch von
Interventionsstreitkräften sowohl in Afghanistan als auch im Irak. Und
spätestens im Irak stellte sich heraus, dass die US-Armee mit dem Führen und
Nachbereiten zweier Kriege völlig überfordert ist. Geradezu dramatisch zeigt
sich dieser Missstand, seit die Rebellion gegen die Besatzungstruppen immer
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stärker wird. Schon jetzt schätzt man die Zahl der privaten Hilfstruppen im Irak,
die allein von amerikanischen Firmen gestellt werden, auf über 20.000 Mann -
mehr als die der regulären Soldaten, die die über 30 mit den USA verbündeten
Länder zur Verfügung gestellt haben.
Wohlgemerkt: diese Hilfstruppen, zusammengewürfelt aus Angehörigen vieler
Nationalitäten, sind bewaffnet und arbeiten, wie in Abu Ghraib, teilweise direkt
mit den Besatzungstruppen bzw. der zivilen Besatzungsbehörde, der CPA,
zusammen. Sie dürfen nicht gleichgesetzt werden mit den ungezählten
ausländischen Zivilangestellten, die am Wiederaufbau des verwüsteten Landes
beteiligt sind - auch wenn diese zum Teil von den gleichen Firmen kommen wie
die bewaffnete Hilfstruppe.
Der Unterschied zwischen den beiden Gruppen besteht nicht zuletzt in der
Bezahlung. Ein Arbeiter aus den USA verdient im Irak nicht selten das vier- bis
fünffache wie zuhause - 100.000 Dollar und mehr im Jahr, und das steuerfrei.
Die bewaffneten Spezialisten dagegen, der Einfachheit halber kurz Söldner
genannt, bekommen Spitzengagen bis zu 1.500 Dollar am Tag. Wie viel Geld
die amerikanischen Regierungsbehörden insgesamt für die Söldner ausgeben,
ist nicht bekannt. Kritiker mutmaßen darum schon, die Zusammenarbeit mit
zivilen Militärfirmen helfe der Regierung, die wahren Kosten ihres Irak-
Abenteuers zu verschleiern.
Ein anderer Unterschied ist inzwischen entfallen: dass nämlich die Arbeit der
Söldner gefährlicher sei als die der zivilen Helfer. Anschläge oder Entführungen
können jeden Ausländer im Irak treffen. Die öffentliche Enthauptung eines
amerikanischen Geschäftsmannes ist dafür ein grausames Beispiel. Eine Folge
davon ist, dass einige Unternehmen bereits Schwierigkeiten haben, genügend
Personal zu bekommen, um die Kontrakte mit amerikanischen
Regierungsstellen erfüllen zu können.
Von den bewaffneten Hilfstruppen, zu deren wichtigsten Aufgaben der
Personen- und Objektschutz gehört, sind solche Schwierigkeiten bislang nicht
bekannt. Ein Umstand, der den Verdacht nahe legt, dass bei der Anwerbung
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von Söldnern immer weniger auf deren Qualifikation für den Job geachtet wird.
Und tatsächlich: Das Auftreten der zivilen Sicherheitsangestellten, ob sie sich
nun an den Tankstellen vordrängeln oder erbitterte Schießereien mit
Aufständischen liefern, erinnert oft genug an Rambo-Filme. Während deutsche
Spezialisten vom Technischen Hilfswerk bei der Wiederherstellung der
Wasser- und Elektrizitätsversorgung beispielsweise von GSG9-Beamten
geschützt wurden, stellen amerikanische Wiederaufbaufirmen wie zum Beispiel
der US-Ölkonzern Halliburton die Sicherheitsmannschaft für ihre Fachleute
selbst. Sogar der Chef der US-Besatzungsbehörde, Paul Bremer, wird von
Angestellten eines privaten Sicherheitsdienstes bewacht.
Die Konsequenzen liegen auf der Hand. Die PMCs, die privaten Militärfirmen,
arbeiten immer häufiger in einer Grauzone zwischen dem Militärischen und
dem Zivilen. Das gilt übrigens nicht nur im Irak. In den USA unterhalten PMCs
Rekrutierungsbüros für die Streitkräfte, organisieren realitätsnahe Manöver für
die militärische Ausbildung, sind an der Ausarbeitung neuer operativer und
strategischer Pläne für den zukünftigen Einsatz der Armee beteiligt. In anderen
Fällen nehmen sie die Aufgaben staatlicher Institutionen gleich selbst in die
Hand, so zum Beispiel beim Kampf gegen den Drogenanbau und -handel in
Kolumbien oder bei der Ausbildung von Polizei und Militär im Ausland wie
während des Jugoslawienkrieges auf dem Balkan oder jetzt in einigen der
neuen NATO-Mitgliedsstaaten.
Einen Höhepunkt bei der Aufweichung des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols stellt
nun zweifellos die Entwicklung im Irak dar. Denn die Bedrängnis, in die die USTruppen
und deren Alliierte nach dem Blitzkrieg im Frühjahr vergangenen
Jahres geraten sind, hat zu einer völlig unkontrollierten Ausbreitung der zivilen
Sicherheitsdienste geführt. Es gibt keine verbindlichen Regeln für ihre
Qualifikation und Ausbildung. Die Zusammenarbeit mit den Streitkräften in
Notfällen ist ungeklärt mit der Folge, dass die Söldner in brenzligen Situationen
nicht mit der Hilfe regulärer Truppen rechnen können. Selbst in die
Befehlskette der alliierten Truppenführung bzw. der Besatzungsbehörden sind
sie häufig nicht eingeordnet. Daraus wiederum ergibt sich die Frage, wer
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rechtlich für die bewaffneten Zivilisten verantwortlich ist, wenn diese gegen
geltende Gesetze verstoßen.
Zwar hat die alliierte Militärführung im Irak Ende letzten Jahres Vorschriften
herausgegeben, unter welchen Umständen zivile Kämpfer Waffen einsetzen
dürfen: zur Selbstverteidigung, zum Schutz der ihnen anvertrauten Personen
und Einrichtungen sowie zur Rettung von gefährdeten Zivilisten. Aber wer kann
in dem herrschenden Chaos kontrollieren, ob die Söldner diese
Beschränkungen tatsächlich einhalten? Dem gegenüber steht die Frage, ob sie
ihren Posten zum Beispiel bei Gefahr von Leib und Leben verlassen dürfen,
ohne dass sie deswegen als Deserteure belangt werden können? Muss ihnen
die Armee, wenn sie in Not geraten, zu Hilfe kommen? Dürfen zivile Kämpfer
Seite an Seite mit Soldaten der Besatzungstruppen eingesetzt werden? Und
welcher Status ergibt sich aus dieser unsicheren Rechtslage für die
Beschäftigten privater Militärfirmen? Sind sie als „illegale Kombattanten"
gleichsam vogelfrei, wenn sie in Gefangenschaft geraten wie die Häftlinge in
Guantanamo oder eben im Folterzuchthaus Abu Ghraib?
Zwar haben Politiker in Washington wie die demokratische Abgeordnete im
Repräsentantenhaus Janice Schakowski Präsident Bush aufgefordert, die zivile
Söldnertruppe sofort aus dem Irak abzuziehen. Aber Tatsache ist, dass die
regulären Besatzungstruppen und -behörden auf die zivile Armee privater
Firmen inzwischen dringend angewiesen sind. Bleibt also alles beim alten?
Eben das ist mit der geplanten Übergabe eines Großteils der Souveränität von
der Besatzungsbehörde auf eine irakische Regierung wohl kaum mehr möglich.
Stichtag dafür ist der 30. Juni. Man darf gespannt sein, ob der amerikanischen
Regierung ein Ausweg aus diesem Dilemma einfällt. Denn weder darf die neue
irakische Regierung gleich zu Beginn ihrer Amtszeit durch die Anwesenheit
einer privaten Söldnertruppe desavouiert werden noch können es sich der USPräsident
und sein Kriegskabinett erlauben, ihre ohnehin überforderten
Truppen in zusätzliche Schwierigkeiten zu bringen.

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PIEGEL ONLINE - 15. Mai 2004, 20:02
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,300051,00.html

Bush beendet Spekulationen

US-Armee bleibt im Irak

Die US-Streitkräfte werden laut Präsident George W. Bush auch nach der für Ende Juni geplanten Machtübergabe an eine Übergangsregierung im Irak bleiben.

Washington - Zudem versicherte Bush, dass es nicht mehr zur Misshandlungen irakischer Gefangener durch US-Soldaten kommen werde.

"Amerika wird an seinem Einsatz für die Unabhängigkeit und die nationale Würde des irakischen Volkes festhalten", sagte Bush in seiner wöchentlichen Rundfunkansprache am Samstag. Die US-Truppen würden auch nach dem Amtsantritt einer neuen Regierung weiter Sicherungsaufgaben in dem Golfstaat übernehmen. Außenminister Colin Powell hatte einen Abzug der Truppen auf Wunsch einer Übergangsregierung nicht völlig ausgeschlossen, einen solchen Fall aber als faktisch unwahrscheinlich bezeichnet.

Bush erklärte, dass der Folterskandal sich lediglich auf das Gefängnis Abu Ghureib bei Bagdad erstrecke. Gegen sieben Soldaten sei im Zusammenhang mit der Misshandlung gefangener Iraker Anklage erhoben worden. Der erste Prozess werde in der kommenden Woche beginnen. "Meine Regierung und unser Militär sind fest entschlossen, dass es niemals wieder zu solchen Misshandlungen kommen wird", sagte Bush. "Alle Amerikaner wissen, dass die Taten einiger nicht den wahren Charakter der Streitkräfte der Vereinigten Staaten widerspiegeln."

Fotos von irakischen Gefangenen, die im Abu-Ghureib-Gefängnis von US-Soldaten misshandelt wurden, hatten weltweit Empörung ausgelöst und die Regierung Bushs sechs Monate vor der Präsidentenwahl in den USA unter Druck gesetzt. Bushs Umfragewerte waren zuletzt gesunken.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

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Saturday, May 15, 2004
War News for May 14 - 15, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Heavy fighting reported in Najaf. Sh`ite shrine, cemetary damaged.

Bring ‘em on: Sixteen insurgents killed, two British soldiers wounded in three coordinated ambushes near Amarah.

Bring ‘em on: Insurgents control bridges, besiege CPA offices in central Nasiriyah.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting reported as Shi’ite militia seal off central Samawah.

Bring ‘em on: US forces in Iraq face 50 attacks per day.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in mortar attack near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed by sniper fire near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqis killed, 18 wounded in mortar attack on Mosul recruiting office.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, one wounded by car bomb ambush near Balad.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi insurgents killed in heavy fighting near Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: Two British soldiers wounded by RPG fire near Amarah.

Bring ‘em on: CJTF7 reports five separate mortar attacks in central Baghdad.

CENTCOM reports one US Marine died in a non-hostile incident at Camp al-Asad.

One US soldier dies in vehicle accident in Iraq.

Six hundred Filipino contractors working at Camp Anaconda quit.

Coalition of the not-so-willing. “Allies of the United States are giving a lukewarm response to quiet requests that they send more troops to Iraq, amid escalating violence and public outcry over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.”

Unacceptable risk. “Though many dozens of U.S. corporations have government contracts to help rebuild the country, relatively few American companies have invested their own capital. The volatile security situation has kept many potential investors away, and even as the U.S.-led coalition government has called on businesses to come to Iraq, the State Department has warned Americans to stay out of the country.”

Great Moments in Bush Diplomacy: “Pre-war transatlantic tensions surfaced again, with the foreign ministers of France, Russia and Canada all telling a Washington news conference that their countries would not send troops to Iraq even if their demands were to be met in a UN Security Council Resolution.”

Army Times poll: “Do you think Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Richard Myers should keep their jobs, in light of allegations of prisoner abuse at Al Ghraib Prison in Iraq?” The numbers don’t look good for Rummy.

Commentary

Editorial: “If any of the goals Americans wanted to achieve in Iraq can still be salvaged, it will take more than fumbling crisis management driven by the needs of the Bush re-election campaign. A clear and coherent new course needs to be set without further delay, beginning with aggressive policy and personnel changes to undo the damage of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The U.N. should be given clear authority over transitional political arrangements after June 30, with Washington fully backing Mr. Brahimi`s efforts to assemble a caretaker government of credible Iraqis who are not associated with the occupation and are willing to put aside their own political ambitions.”

Analysis: “Here in Egypt, the ACIJLP and a number of human rights groups have launched a campaign to pressure the Egyptian government to cancel its bilateral agreement with the US that grants US personnel immunity from prosecution before the ICC. The Cairo Institute for Human Rights (CIHR) sent a statement to the Arab League urging its secretary-general to add the issue of similar US bilateral agreements with Arab countries on the agenda of the coming Arab Summit. ‘The stance of Arab states,’ a statement by CIHR said, ‘must not be limited to meaningless verbal condemnation [of human rights violations] in light of the immoral bilateral agreements some of these governments signed which protect war criminals, giving them free reign to commit their crimes.’ But CIHR`s call might fall on deaf ears.”

Editorial: “Because his policies are so badly off track, President Bush`s repeated assurances that he will soldier on through hard times sound more like folly than fortitude. ‘We will stay the course,’ he has said time and again. After Nicholas Berg was killed in Iraq, Bush repeated his resolve: ‘We will complete our mission. We will complete our task.’”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Washington State Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: New York soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Iowa Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida contractor dies in Iraq.

Local story: CNMI soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier wounded in Iraq (twice).

Local story: Massachusetts soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: West Virginia Marine wounded in Iraq.

Local story: New York soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Idaho Marine wounded in Iraq.

Local story: South Dakota soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Massachusetts soldier wounded in Iraq.


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Newsweek Poll: Bad Days for Bush
With news from Iraq becoming ever bleaker, the president’s numbers are way down. Still, he hasn’t lost ground to John Kerry
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Brian Braiker
Updated: 1:06 p.m. ET May 15, 2004

May 15 - As his administration grapples with the fallout from the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, President George W. Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to 42 percent, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, a low for his presidency. Fifty-seven percent say they disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq. And 62 percent say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States, a number that has been steadily increasing since April, 2003, when it was 41 percent.

Still, when pitted in a hypothetical two-way race with Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Bush holds his own. Forty-five percent of Americans say they would vote for Bush; 46 percent say they would support Kerry and 9 percent remain undecided.

But there’s little doubt that Bush is losing ground among the public for his policies in Iraq. With images of naked and shackled prisoners still fresh in their minds, the 35 percent of the public that approve of the handling the war in Iraq represents a nine-point drop over last month. And the number of those who think the United States did the right thing in declaring war on Iraq in the first place has fallen 11-points from December, to 51 percent.

Still, the public remains unwilling to abandon the mission in Iraq. Fifty-seven percent say the United States can still achieve its goals in Iraq, though for the first time in the NEWSWEEK poll, a majority, 54 percent, say they are either "not too" or "not at all" confident that the U.S. will be able establish a stable government in Iraq.

"You are doing a superb job," Bush said in his first public comments to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as the Abu Ghraib scandal was unfolding. "You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude." Others agree: a majority (57 percent) do not feel that Rumsfeld should be removed from his job (30 percent feel he should go). Americans are split over whether the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was a case of low-ranking soldiers acting on their own (36 percent) or authorized by higher-ups (45 percent). Nineteen percent say they don’t know.

And with emotions still raw over the beheading of Nick Berg, a young American civilian in Iraq, Americans are split over whether his murder vindicates the war or repudiates it: Forty-three percent of those polled felt his killing was a reminder of the brutality of the enemy and proof that fighting is the right tack. But 38 percent feel the assassination was evidence that Americans are becoming targets abroad as a direct result of Bush’s policies.

But Kerry has been unable to leverage increasing discomfort over Bush’s Iraq policies into a real lead over the president. Although Kerry enjoyed a statistical advantage-a seven-point spread-over Bush last month, the NEWSWEEK poll shows a dead heat in a two-way race between Bush and Kerry. Adding independent candidate Ralph Nader to the race does little to change the dynamics: Forty-two percent would vote for Bush, 43 percent for Kerry and 5 percent Nader. While overall support for Bush remains steady, just 24 percent of registered voters say they support him "strongly," a four-point drop over last month. The percentage of voters who support Kerry "strongly" remains steady at 22 percent.

Kerry does hold a strong statistical lead over Bush among women. In a three-way trial heat, 38 percent of women would cast their vote for Bush; 45 percent say they would support Kerry.

Both the president and his presumptive challenger enjoy similar favorability ratings-nearly half of all voters view both men favorably (47 percent for Kerry and 46 percent), but more have an "unfavorable" view of Bush (46 percent) than do of the senator from Massachusetts (36 percent). That may be because fewer people feel like they know Kerry-14 percent of those polled offered no opinion of the senator, nearly twice the number for Bush (8 percent). Looking forward, Kerry may have difficulty using the public’s war malaise to his political advantage. A majority (54 percent) of Americans feel it would be inappropriate for him to criticize the president while U.S. troops were fighting abroad.

For the NEWSWEEK poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed 1,010 adults aged 18 and older May 13 and 14 by telephone. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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American soldiers rested Saturday at a mosque in Karbala that was captured in a battle with Iraqi insurgents who were using it to store weapons.
May 15, 2004
Mortar Attack Kills Iraqi Army Recruits
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:20 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military said Saturday it killed 18 gunmen believed loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad, and jet fighters bombarded militia positions on the capital`s outskirts. Skirmishes persisted in the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

The U.S. military also announced the deaths of five soldiers, including three killed by rebel attacks. In northern Iraq, rebels fired a mortar round at an Iraqi army recruiting center, killing four volunteers, hospital officials said.

U.S. troops are trying to disband the cleric`s army and sideline its radical leadership before handing power to a new Iraqi government June 30. Al-Sadr is a fierce opponent of the U.S.-led occupation who launched an uprising last month and faces an arrest warrant in the death of a rival moderate cleric last year.

In Najaf, militiamen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a U.S. tank stationed at the city`s Police Directorate. The rocket missed its target, and the two sides exchanged gunfire. Elsewhere, a shell landed on a house, wounding a woman.

The normally bustling area around Karbala`s Imam Hussein shrine, one of the holiest centers for Shiite Muslims, was silent except for intermittent blasts and machine-gun fire. After one blast, a huge column of black smoke wafted over the golden-domed shrine. One Polish soldier was wounded in Saturday`s skirmishes, the Polish military said in Warsaw.

The confrontations in the two holy cities in Iraq`s southern Shiite heartland were less intense than in previous days.

In Baghdad, coalition forces killed 18 fighters, many of them in the eastern Sadr City neighborhood, a stronghold of al-Sadr, in a dozen separate engagements Friday and Saturday, the military said in a statement. Troops also killed seven gunmen who attacked them in western Baghdad on Saturday morning, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq.

Guerrillas fired a mortar round at an Iraqi army recruiting center in the northern city of Mosul, killing four people and wounding 19, hospital officials said. The shell landed in a crowd of people waiting to sign up for the military. Kimmitt said the projectile was a mortar shell or a rocket-propelled grenade.

Insurgents have previously targeted police and army recruitment centers in an effort to undermine Iraqi involvement in the U.S.-led coalition.

Hussein Assem, a 25-year-old army volunteer, suffered shrapnel wounds in a hand and leg and was taken to a hospital.

``While I was at the entrance of the volunteer center, a mortar shell fell near me,`` he said. ``I fell down together with the others on the floor. I felt I was in coma and I woke up to find myself at the hospital.``

The coalition announced a reorganization of its military command structure Saturday, creating a new headquarters with broad responsibility for operations in Iraq, including the training of Iraqi security forces and involvement in the political transition, and another headquarters that will handle daily tactical operations against the insurgency.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, a three-star general who was in charge of the previous, unified command, will oversee all operations from the Multinational Forces Iraq headquarters, Kimmitt said.

Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, a three-star general who commands the U.S. Army`s 3rd Corps, will direct daily military operations from a headquarters called Multinational Corps Iraq.

British troops killed up to 16 Iraqi insurgents after their patrol was ambushed between the southern cities of Amarah and Basra on Friday, and two British soldiers were wounded, the Ministry of Defense said in London. However, Iraqi witnesses said 21 militiamen were killed and that they were loyalists of al-Sadr.

The U.S. military said three soldiers died from wounds suffered in rebel attacks Friday, one died in a vehicle accident and one from ``natural causes.``

As of Friday, May 14, 775 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq last year, according to the Department of Defense. Of those, 565 died as a result of hostile action and 210 died of non-hostile causes.

It was unclear whether the latest deaths were included in the Department of Defense toll.

On Saturday, a rocket landed in the compound housing the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad, wounding one soldier and a civilian, both of whom later returned to duty, Kimmitt said.

The slain militiamen in Baghdad`s Sadr City included a police lieutenant who joined al-Sadr`s al-Mahdi Army, witnesses said.

U.S. jet fighters bombarded the outskirts of Sadr City overnight, forcing militiamen to flee positions, the witnesses said. On Saturday, U.S. soldiers drove through the neighborhood with loudspeakers, urging people to hand in their weapons within a week in exchange for money.

In Najaf, gunmen from al-Sadr`s militia controlled the city center. They had replaced a special force assigned to protect the Shrine of Imam Ali, one of Shia Islam`s holiest sites. Bands of fighters stood at almost every street corner around the shrine, and some patrolled the area in a commandeered police pickup truck.

On Friday, apparent gunfire slightly damaged a shrine, prompting calls for revenge and even suicide attacks.

Twenty people signed up for an al-Sadr-backed suicide squad in the southern city of Basra on Saturday, though only 10 were accepted after undergoing checks by organizers.

In Karbala, al-Sadr militiamen moved to new positions to the south, leaving the shrine district almost vacant except for small groups of Iranian and south Asian pilgrims.

``I`m not scared,`` said Ahmed Ali, who sells Turkish lace from a shop in the shrine district. ``In Iraq, we are addicted to war.``

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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THE GRAY ZONE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.

“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.

The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s élite forces—Navy seals, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: “Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.”

In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, “I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else.”

In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. “It was an active program,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States—and do so without visibility.” Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.

By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.

In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist “dead-enders,” criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime—reproduced on playing cards—had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that “the dead-enders are still with us.” He went on, “There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case.” Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who “fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.” A few weeks later—and five months after the fall of Baghdad—the Defense Secretary declared,“It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States.”

Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. “When you understand that they’re organized in a cellular structure,” General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, declared, “that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you’ll understand how dangerous they are.”

The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents’“strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.” According to the study:

Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA’s so-called Green Zone.

The study concluded, “Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”

By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld’s “dead-enders” now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well—thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, “We’d killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to ‘pray and spray’”—that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. “They weren’t really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.” In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents “spent three or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they’d do it.” Then, the analyst said, “the clever ones began to get in on the action.”

By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: “Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.” The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”

Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’sauspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”

Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial, however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.” The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”

In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller’s visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller’s recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the “flow of intelligence back to the commands” was “efficient and effective.” He added that Miller’s goal was “to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.”

It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:

If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don’t believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller’s orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward.

Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was “read in”—that is, briefed—on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, “He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ‘Holy cow! What’s going on?’”

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”

One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges. “You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a different thing.” The former intelligence official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because “they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,” as applied to the sap. “The photos,” he added, “turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”

The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, “it was their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.”

This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”

The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. “The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t know how to do it,” the former intelligence official said.

Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. “Why keep it black?” the consultant asked. “Because the process is unpleasant. It’s like making sausage—you like the result but you don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.”

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”

“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.”

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”

“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

“The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” Huntington hat ein neues Buch herausgebracht und das erklärt seinen Ideen:
He is, in this book, not interested in values per se; he is interested in national security and national power. He thinks that the erosion or diffusion of any cluster of collective ideals, whatever those ideals may be, leads to weakness and vulnerability.
The bad guys in Huntington’s scenario can be divided into two groups. One is composed of intellectuals, people who preach dissent from the values of the “core culture.”..they are deconstructionists....
The other group in Huntington’s analysis is composed of what could be called the globalists. These are the new immigrants and the transnational businessmen.

“Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity”



PATRIOT GAMES
by LOUIS MENAND
The new nativism of Samuel P. Huntington.
Issue of 2004-05-17
Posted 2004-05-10

In polls conducted during the past fifteen years, between ninety-six and ninety-eight per cent of all Americans said that they were “very” proud or “quite” proud of their country. When young Americans were asked whether they wanted to do something for their country, eighty-one per cent answered yes. Ninety-two per cent of Americans reported that they believe in God. Eighty-seven per cent said that they took “a great deal” of pride in their work, and although Americans work more hours annually than do people in other industrialized countries, ninety per cent said that they would work harder if it was necessary for the success of their organization. In all these categories, few other nations of comparable size and economic development even come close. By nearly every statistical measure, and by common consent, Americans are the most patriotic people in the world.

Is there a problem here? Samuel P. Huntington, who provides these figures in his new book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” (Simon & Schuster; $27), believes that there is. The problem is the tiny fraction of Americans in whom national pride, patriotic loyalty, religious faith, and regard for the work ethic might possibly be less than wholehearted. He has identified these people as the heads of transnational corporations, members of the liberal élite, holders of dual citizenship, Mexican-Americans, and what he refers to as “deconstructionists.” He thinks that these groups are responsible for an incipient erosion of national identity, a development that he views with an alarm that, while it is virtually unqualified, is somewhat underexplained. Although the erosion of national identity at the hands of multiculturalists and liberal élites is something that people were fretting and fighting about five or ten years ago, a lot of the conviction leaked out of the argument after the attacks of September 11th. This is partly because the public response to the attacks was spontaneously and unequivocally patriotic, suggesting that the divisions animating the so-called “culture wars” ran less deep than the cultural warriors supposed, and partly because the cultural pluralism that had once seemed threatening became, overnight, an all but official attribute of national identity. Inclusiveness turned out to be a flag around which Americans could rally. It was what most distinguished us from them. The reality, of course, is more complicated than the ideology, but the ideology is what Huntington is worried about, and either his book is a prescient analysis of trends obscure to the rest of us or he has missed the point.

Huntington’s name for ideology is “culture.” The advantage of the term is that it embraces collective beliefs and assumptions that may not be explicit most of the time; the trouble with it is that it is notoriously expansive. Culture, ultimately, is everything that is not nature. American culture includes American appetites and American dress, American work etiquette and American entertainment, American piety and American promiscuity—all the things that Americans recognize, by their absence, as American when they visit other countries. What Huntington wants to talk about is a specific cluster of American beliefs, habits, assumptions, and institutions. He calls this cluster “America’s core culture.” It includes, he says, “the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music,” plus “the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property.” (“Human rights” was on the list in the copies sent to reviewers; it does not appear in the finished book.) This, he maintains, is the culture of the original European settlers; it is the culture to which, until the late twentieth century, every immigrant group assimilated; and it is the culture that is now imperilled.

Huntington’s core values are rather abstract. It would probably take many guesses for most of the Americans who score high in the patriotism surveys to come up with these items as the basis for their sentiments. What Americans like about their country, it seems fair to say, is the quality of life, and if the quality of life can be attributed to “a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music” then Americans, even Americans who would be hard-pressed to name a single European philosopher, are in favor of those things, too.

It could be argued that Americans owe the quality of life they enjoy to America’s core culture, but Huntington does not argue this. He cares about the core culture principally for its unifying effects, its usefulness as a motive for solidarity. He is, in this book, not interested in values per se; he is interested in national security and national power. He thinks that the erosion or diffusion of any cluster of collective ideals, whatever those ideals may be, leads to weakness and vulnerability.

Most readers who are not political scientists know Huntington from his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which was published in 1996, and which proposed that cultural differences would be the major cause of global tension in the future. The book was translated into thirty-three languages and inspired international conferences; its argument acquired new interest and credibility after the attacks of 2001 and the American response to them. Huntington’s thesis could be taken as an answer to Francis Fukuyama’s idea of “the end of history.” History—that is, conflicts among groups—did not come to an end with the Cold War and the demise of liberalism’s main ideological opponent, Huntington argued. The defeat of Communism did not mean that everyone had become a liberal. A civilization’s belief that its values have become universal, he warned, has been, historically, the sign that it is on the brink of decline. His book therefore appealed both to people in the West who were anxious about the diversification or erosion of Western culture and to people outside the West who wanted to believe that modernization and Westernization are neither necessary nor inevitable.

The optimal course for the West in a world of potential civilizational conflict, Huntington concluded, was not to reach out to non-Western civilizations with the idea that people in those civilizations are really like us. He thinks that they are not really like us, and that it is both immoral to insist on making other countries conform to Western values (since that must involve trampling on their own values) and naïve to believe that the West speaks a universal language. If differences among civilizations are a perpetual source of rivalry and a potential source of wars, then a group of people whose loyalty to their own culture is attenuated is likely to be worse off relative to other groups. Hence his anxiety about what he thinks is a trend toward cultural diffusion in the United States.

You might think that if cultural difference is what drives people to war, then the world would be a safer place if every group’s loyalty to its own culture were more attenuated. If you thought that, though, you would be a liberal cosmopolitan idealist, and Huntington would have no use for you. Huntington is a domestic monoculturalist and a global multiculturalist (and an enemy of domestic multiculturalism and global monoculturalism). “Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes,” as he put it in “The Clash of Civilizations.” The immutable psychic need people have for a shared belief system is precisely the premise of his political theory. You can’t fool with immutable psychic needs.

"Who Are We?” is about as blunt a work of identity politics as you are likely to find. It says that the chief reason—it could even be the only reason—for Americans to embrace their culture is that it is the culture that happens to be theirs. Americans must love their culture; on the other hand, they must never become so infatuated that, in their delirium, they seek to embrace the world. “Who Are We?” would be less puzzling if Huntington had been more explicit about the larger vision of global civilizational conflict from which it derives. The new book represents a narrowing of that vision. In “The Clash of Civilizations,” Huntington spoke of “the West” as a transatlantic entity. In “Who Are We?” he is obsessed exclusively with the United States, and his concerns about internationalism are focussed entirely on its dangers to us.

The bad guys in Huntington’s scenario can be divided into two groups. One is composed of intellectuals, people who preach dissent from the values of the “core culture.” As is generally the case with indictments of this sort, recognizable names are sparse. Among those that do turn up are Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the political theorist Michael Walzer, and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. All of them would be astonished to learn that they are deconstructionists. (It is amazing how thoroughly the word “deconstruction” has been drained of meaning, and by the very people who accuse deconstruction of draining words of meaning.) What Huntington is talking about is not deconstruction but bilingualism, affirmative action, cosmopolitanism (a concept with which Nussbaum is associated), pluralism (Walzer), and multiculturalism (Clinton and Gore). “Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization,” Huntington says. “It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”

He thinks that the deconstructionists had their sunny moment in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, and were beaten back during the culture wars that their views set off. They have not gone away, though. In the future, he says, “the outcomes of these battles in the deconstructionist war will undoubtedly be substantially affected by the extent to which Americans suffer repeated terrorist attacks on their homeland and their country engages in overseas wars against its enemies.” The more attacks and wars, he suggests, the smaller the deconstructionist threat. This may strike some readers as a high price to pay for keeping Martha Nussbaum in check.

The other group in Huntington’s analysis is composed of what could be called the globalists. These are the new immigrants and the transnational businessmen. The new immigrants are people who, as Huntington describes them, “may assimilate into American society without assimilating the core American culture.” Many maintain dual citizenship (Huntington calls these people “ampersands”); some do not bother to become American citizens at all, since the difference between the benefits available to citizens and those available to aliens has become smaller and smaller (a trend that originated, Huntington notes, among “unelected judges and administrators”). In a society in which multiculturalism is encouraged, the loyalty of these immigrants to the United States and its core culture is fragile. What distinguishes the new immigration from the old is the exponential increase in global mobility. As Huntington acknowledges, it has always been true that not all immigrants to the United States come to stay. A significant proportion come chiefly to earn money, and eventually they return to the countries they were born in. Transportation today is so cheap and available, though, that people can maintain lives in two nations indefinitely.

Mobility is also what distinguishes the new businessmen, the transnationals. These are, in effect, people without national loyalties at all, not even dual ones, since they identify with their corporations, and their corporations have offices, plants, workers, suppliers, and consumers all over the world. It is no longer in Ford’s interest to be thought of as an American company. Ford’s market is global, and it conceives of itself as a global entity. These new businessmen “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function now is to facilitate the elite’s global operations,” Huntington says. “The distinction between America and the world is disappearing because of the triumph of America as the only global superpower.” This drives him into the same perverse position he got himself into at the end of his attack on the deconstructionists: it is better to have rivals than to be dominant. It is good to compete, but it is bad to win. If we won, we would lose our national identity. The position, though, is consistent with the argument Huntington made in “The Clash of Civilizations”—the argument that nation-states ought to remain inside their own cultural boxes.

The most inflammatory section of “Who Are We?” is the chapter on Mexican immigration. Huntington reports that in 2000 the foreign-born population of the United States included almost eight million people from Mexico. The next country on the list was China, with 1.4 million. Huntington’s concern is that Mexican-Americans (and, in Florida, Cuban-Americans) demonstrate less motivation to learn English and assimilate to the Anglo culture than other immigrant groups have historically, and that, thanks to the influence of bilingualism advocates, unelected judges, cosmopolites, and a compliant Congress, it has become less necessary for them to do so. They can remain, for generations, within their own cultural and linguistic enclave, and they are consequently likely to be less loyal to the United States than other hyphenated Americans are. Huntington believes that the United States “could change . . . into a culturally bifurcated Anglo-Hispanic society with two national languages.” He can imagine portions of the American Southwest being ceded back to Mexico.

This part of Huntington’s book was published first as an article in Foreign Policy, and it has already provoked responses, many in the letters column of that journal. Michael Elliott, in his column in Time, pointed out that in the Latino National Political Survey, conducted from 1989 to 1990, eighty-four per cent of Mexican-Americans expressed “extremely” or “very” strong love for the United States (against ninety-two per cent of Anglos). Ninety-one per cent said that they were “extremely proud” or “very proud” of the United States. As far as reluctance to learn English is concerned, Richard Alba and Victor Nee, in “Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration” (Harvard; $39.95), report that in 1990 more than ninety-five per cent of Mexican-Americans between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four who were born in the United States could speak English well. They conclude that although Hispanic-Americans, particularly those who live close to the border, may continue to speak their original language (usually along with English) a generation longer than other groups have tended to do, “by any standard, linguistic assimilation is widespread.”

Huntington’s account of the nature of Mexican immigration to the United States seems deliberately alarmist. He notes, for example, that since 1975 roughly two-thirds of Mexican immigrants have entered illegally. This is the kind of statistic that is continually cited to suggest a new and dangerous demographic hemorrhaging. But, as Mae Ngai points out, in “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America” (Princeton; $35), a work a hundred times more nuanced than Huntington’s, the surge in illegal immigration was the predictable consequence of the reform of the immigration laws in 1965. In the name of liberalizing immigration policy, the new law imposed a uniform quota on all countries, regardless of size. Originally, Western Hemisphere countries were exempted from specific quotas, but the act was amended in 1976, and Mexico was assigned the same annual quota (twenty thousand) as, for example, Belgium. This effectively illegalized a large portion of the Mexican immigrant population. “Legal” and “illegal,” as Ngai’s book illustrates, are administrative constructions, always subject to change; they do not tell us anything about the desirability of the persons so constructed. (Ngai’s analysis also suggests that one reason that Asian-Americans are stereotyped by other Americans as products of a culture that places a high value on education is that the 1965 immigration act gives preference to applicants with professional skills, and, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, for reasons internal to their own countries, many Asian professionals chose to emigrate. Like professionals from any other culture, they naturally made education a priority for their children.)

Finally, some of Huntington’s statistical claims are improperly derived. “Three out of ten Hispanic students drop out of school compared to one in eight blacks and one in fourteen whites,” he says, and he cites other studies to argue that Hispanic-Americans are less educationally assimilated than other groups. Educational attainment is not an index of intellectual capacity, though; it is an economic trade-off. The rate of high-school graduation is in part a function of the local economy. For example, according to the Urban Institute and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Florida has one of the worst high-school graduation rates in the United States. This may be because it has a service economy, in which you do not need a diploma to get reasonably steady work. To argue that Hispanic-Americans are disproportionately less likely to finish school, one would have to compare them not with non-Hispanic Americans nationally but with non-Hispanic Americans in the same region. Huntington provides no such comparisons. He is cheered, however, by Hispanic-Americans’ high rate of conversion to evangelical Protestantism.

This brings us back to the weird emptiness at the heart of Huntington’s analysis, according to which conversion to a fundamentalist faith is counted a good thing just because many other people already share that faith. Huntington never explains, in “Who Are We?,” why Protestantism, private enterprise, and the English language are more desirable features of social life or more conducive to self-realization than, say, Judaism, kibbutzim, and Hebrew. He only fears, as an American, their transformation into something different. But how American is that? Huntington’s understanding of American culture would be less rigid if he paid more attention to the actual value of his core values. One of the virtues of a liberal democracy is that it is designed to accommodate social and cultural change. Democracy is not a dogma; it is an experiment. That is what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address—and there is no more hallowed text in the American Creed than that.

Multiculturalism, in the form associated with people like Clinton and Gore, is part of the democratic experiment. It may have a lot of shortcomings as a political theory, but it is absurd to say that it is anti-Western. Its roots, as Charles Taylor and many other writers have shown, are in the classic texts of Western literature and philosophy. And, unless you are a monoculturalist hysteric, the differences that such multiculturalism celebrates are nearly all completely anodyne. One keeps wondering what Huntington, in his chapter on Mexican-Americans, means by “cultural bifurcation.” What is this alien culture that threatens to infect Anglo-Americans? Hispanic-American culture, after all, is a culture derived largely from Spain, which, the last time anyone checked, was in Europe. Here is what we eventually learn (Huntington is quoting from a book called “The Americano Dream,” by a Texas businessman named Lionel Sosa): Hispanics are different because “they still put family first, still make room in their lives for activities other than business, are more religious and more community oriented.” Pull up the drawbridge!

Insofar as multiculturalism has become, in essence, an official doctrine in public education in the United States, its effects are the opposite of its rhetoric. “Diverse” is what Americans are taught to call themselves as a people, and a whole society cannot think that diversity is good and be all that diverse at the same time. The quickest and most frictionless way to nullify difference is to mainstream it. How culturally unified do Americans need to be, anyway? In an analysis like Huntington’s, a nation’s strength is a function of the strength of other nations. You don’t need microchips if every other country on the planet is still in the Stone Age. Just a little bronze will do. But if the world is becoming more porous, more transnational, more tuned to the same economic, social, and informational frequency—if the globe is more global, which means more Americanized—then the need for national cultural homogeneity is lesser, not greater. The stronger societies will be the more cosmopolitan ones.

Perhaps this sounds like sentimental internationalism. Let’s be cynical, then. The people who determine international relations are the political, business, and opinion élites, not the populace. It is overwhelmingly in the interest of those élites today to adapt to an internationalist environment, and they exert a virtually monopolistic control over information, surveillance, and the means of force. People talk about the Internet as a revolutionary populist medium, but the Internet is essentially a marketing tool. They talk about terrorist groups as representatives of a civilization opposed to the West, but most terrorists are dissidents from the civilization they pretend to be fighting for. What this kind of talk mostly reveals is the nonexistence of any genuine alternative to modernization and Westernization. During the past fifty years, the world has undergone two processes. One is de-Stalinization, and the other is decolonization. The second is proving to be much more complicated than the first, and this is because the stamp of the West is all over the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is now putting its stamp on the West. There are no aboriginal civilizations to return to. You can regret the mess, but it’s too late to put the colors back in their jars.

And why isn’t internationalism, as a number of writers have recently argued, a powerful resource for Americans? The United States doesn’t have an exclusive interest in opposing and containing the forces of intolerance, superstition, and fanaticism; the whole world has an interest in opposing and containing those things. On September 12, 2001, the world was with us. Because of our government’s mad conviction that it was our way of life that was under attack, not the way of life of civilized human beings everywhere, and that only we knew what was best to do about it, we squandered our chance to be with the world. The observation is now so obvious as to be banal. That does not make it less painful.

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

May 16, 2004
Kerry`s Grandfather Left Judaism Behind in Europe
By JOSEPH BERGER

n May 18, 1905, Frederick A. Kerry, a 32-year-old Viennese, arrived in New York City by steamship, the Königin Luise, with his wife and 4-year-old son, hopeful that his new country would bring him the success and social acceptance that had eluded him in Europe.

Mr. Kerry probably could not have imagined that within a century a grandson, John Forbes Kerry, would find himself the Democratic candidate for president.

Frederick Kerry brought with him a secret: he was born a Jew, Fritz Kohn, in what is now the Czech Republic, but he and his wife, Ida, had converted to Roman Catholicism. Senator Kerry, a Catholic whose maternal side includes such blueblooded names as Winthrop and Forbes, said he did not know his paternal grandfather was Jewish until a reporter for The Boston Globe told him last year that it had been discovered by a genealogist in Vienna who scoured church records from the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Tomas Jelinek, chairman of the Jewish community in Prague, and Rabbi Norman R. Patz, president of the New Jersey-based Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, said that Czech Jews, in contrast to those in Poland, wore their identity somewhat more lightly. Given periodic spasms of anti-Semitism and the difficulty of advancing in the government and military as a Jew, many, like the parents of Madeline K. Albright, the former secretary of state, found conversion made their lives immeasurably easier.

The brother and sister of John Kerry`s paternal grandmother, Otto and Jenni Lowe, died in concentration camps.

Frederick Kerry`s story begins in Horni Benesov, a town near the Polish border that in 1880 had 4,200 inhabitants, most of them ethnic Germans (only two dozen of them Jewish) and was then known as Bennisch. Felix Gundacker, the genealogist who researched the senator`s roots, said church birth ledgers include the notation that on May 10, 1873, "was born Fritz Kohn, a legal son of Benedikt Kohn, master brewer in Bennisch, House 224, and his wife, Mathilde." The handwritten entry was included in the "Pages for Israelites" kept by the church in towns with small Jewish communities.

Fritz`s father died when he was 3. Fritz`s mother then moved with her three children to Vienna, where she had relatives, Mr. Gundacker said in a telephone interview. Fritz attended high school, served in the army, then worked as an accountant for a shoe factory owned by his maternal uncle in nearby Modling.

In 1896, his younger brother, Otto, seeking advancement in the military, was baptized as a Catholic; he later changed his name to Kerry. In 1901, Fritz, who had married Ida Lowe in a Jewish ceremony the previous year, was baptized in Modling.

Later that year, he changed his name to Kerry, too, a fact recorded in the original church birth ledgers for Bennisch confirming that Frederick Kerry was born Fritz Kohn. Mr. Gundacker said the records state that Frederick Kerry gave these reasons: "1) that this very common name is specifically connected to Judaism 2) that therefore this name could be detrimental to his military career."

After coming to the United States, he settled in Chicago, where he counseled stores like Sears, Roebuck on organization. By 1915, he moved to Brookline, Mass., where Ida gave birth to their third child, Richard, who grew to work as a diplomat, marry Rosemary Forbes and father John Kerry.

In 1921, a virtually bankrupt Frederick Kerry shot himself in a bathroom at Boston`s Copley Plaza Hotel.

The family`s Jewish connections did not end with his death. In 1983, the senator`s brother, Cameron, married Kathy Weinman, a Jew whose mother keeps a kosher home. Before the wedding, Cameron converted to Judaism.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

John Kerry`s parents, Richard and Rosemary. Mr. Kerry`s mother was descended from one of the founding families of Massachusetts, and his father was a graduate of Andover, Yale and Harvard Law School.
Mehr Bilder:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2004/05/15/national/2004051…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2004/05/15/national/2004051…
This is the first article in a biographical series on Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
May 16, 2004
JOHN KERRY`S JOURNEY | THE EARLY YEARS
Prep School Peers Found Kerry Talented, Ambitious and Apart
By TODD S. PURDUM

CONCORD, N.H. — He was a champion debater, a good student, a strong and graceful athlete in a small, judgmental universe that prized such skills and knew him well. But for five formative years, John Kerry stood a step apart at St. Paul`s School, gaining achievement more than acceptance.

Danny Barbiero, a middle-class boy from suburban Long Island who was Mr. Kerry`s best friend, remembers how they made common cause in a boarding school full of Pillsburys, Peabodys, Pierponts and Pells. One day, Mr. Barbiero went to see a favorite teacher, the school`s first black faculty member, and found someone else already there.

"I went into his apartment," recalled Mr. Barbiero, now an employee benefits consultant. "And he said, `This is Johnny Kerry. He`s just feeling a little out of sorts because he thinks people don`t like him.` I said, `Who cares what people think! You`re obviously a terrific person.` "

Mr. Kerry is 60 now and running for president of his country, not of his class. But to a striking degree, the personal qualities that propel him — and daunt him — are the same ones that buoyed and bedeviled him when he was 16 and striving to succeed at St. Paul`s, then an austere all-boys enclave, the seventh school Mr. Kerry had attended by the time he arrived here in eighth grade.

Mr. Kerry has always been a pace apart in every world he has inhabited — from grade school to college to Vietnam to the Senate — moving forcefully and successfully through diverse milieus without ever being fully of them. To his critics, his ambition has always been just a little too obvious, his manner too calculating. To his friends, his tenderheartedness and complexities have been too little understood. Always and everywhere, his seriousness has stood out.

"I wish I could give you fresh material, but I can`t," said Max King, another classmate, who went on to edit The Philadelphia Inquirer and now, by coincidence, is president of the Heinz Endowments, the wealthy Pittsburgh charity of which Mr. Kerry`s wife, Teresa, is the chairwoman. "He was at 13 and 14 as serious and earnest and idealistic as he is today, and very much like the person he is today."

If only because life is like high school, Mr. Kerry`s adolescent experiences are worth examining in some detail. But for him, those years may loom even larger, since as the son of a diplomat, he grew up in various temporary quarters in America and Europe. From 1957 to 1962, his real home was St. Paul`s, and it was here that enduring patterns were set.

"The culture was alien," Mr. Kerry recalled in one of two long interviews late last year. "It had a language that I didn`t know at first, kind of a body language. It was just a little different. I came from a very different experience. It took some learning."

In an 11th- or 12th-grade student production of "Julius Caesar," Mr. Kerry played a memorable Cassius, warning in his already sonorous voice, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

"And he still has that lean and hungry look," said another classmate, Philip Heckscher, now a teacher and Chinese calligrapher, who played Marc Antony. "He was a very good actor." He was also, Mr. Heckscher said, "a very focused person, and that might have made him seem ruthless to some. He was very focused in a culture where people were generally indirect about things, and that made him stand out a bit."

Mr. Kerry had his detractors then, but also many skills, said John Rousmaniere, a nautical historian who played with him on a hockey team led by the class`s best athlete, Robert S. Mueller, now the director of the F.B.I.

"I think hatred is too strong a word," Mr. Rousmaniere said. "Loathing is too strong a word. He may have seemed a little calculating to some people, and perhaps to me as well at the time, but he wanted to be liked. He may have just been a little more obvious about it. Not bad training for a politician. He wanted recognition, and in a place like that, anybody who did stand out in a noneccentric, nonsarcastic way, some people might be a little suspicious of."
Where the `Old Boys` Went

St. Paul`s was founded in 1856 and, from the beginning, was more elite than competing schools like Andover, President Bush`s alma mater, which was started during the Revolutionary War to offer education to "youth from every quarter." At St. Paul`s, the ethos was Episcopal, not Congregational, and the spirit that ruled was British, not Colonial. It was the first American school to play hockey and build squash courts. It called its classes forms, not grades, and it had six of them, beginning in the equivalent of seventh grade. Teachers were called masters. Students wore coats and ties, and there was chapel every morning, twice on Sundays.

The names of the school`s "old boys" are carved in oak panels in the vaulted dining hall, and its previous presidential aspirants include William Randolph Hearst and John V. Lindsay, who was a congressman and role model when Mr. Kerry was a student. In a hallway featuring the autographs of every president since Washington, a note to the school from Theodore Roosevelt dated 1917 exhorts students to "behave in life as a game and clean man behaves on the football field. Don`t flinch; don`t foul; and hit the line hard."

Mr. Kerry arrived here in what his classmate Piero Fenci recalls as "the last gasp of a dying era." The winds of change — civil rights, student activism — were just barely beginning to blow. Eleven years later, Mr. Kerry`s younger brother would graduate in a class whose senior-year protests helped prompt sweeping changes, including coeducation and more scholarships.

But the school Mr. Kerry entered was in some respects much like the one his brother`s class described in an angry manifesto in 1968: "Spontaneity, openness, honesty and joy in general are not encouraged. Relationships are often based on one-upsmanship of the most vicious sort. Open frankness is often greeted with cynicism; and as one master has remarked: `For someone to say to another person, "I like you" is almost unthinkable.` "

By many measures, Mr. Kerry should have fit right in. His mother was descended from one of the founding families of Massachusetts, and his father was a graduate of Andover, Yale and Harvard Law School. Yet it was not so simple. Mr. Kerry was not rich (his tuition was paid by a great-aunt). He was not Republican (his father was an ardent internationalist and staunch liberal). He was not Protestant (he had been raised Roman Catholic, and he had to take a cab to attend Mass in town).

In fact, it would turn out, Mr. Kerry was not even what he thought he was. Not at all.

Growing Up All Over

Mr. Kerry`s mother, Rosemary, was born into two of New England`s oldest families: on her mother`s side, the Winthrops, whose patriarch, John Winthrop, helped settle Boston in 1630; on her father`s, the Forbeses, who pioneered trade with China and had extensive land holdings on Cape Cod. But Rosemary was one of 11 children of an international businessman, and by the time she met a young Boston law student named Richard J. Kerry on the eve of World War II, her own family`s wealth had dwindled.

Richard Kerry had gone to the Brittany coast of France, where the Forbes family lived in a hilltop house near St. Briac, for a summer of studying ship modeling in 1938. He fell in love with Rosemary Forbes, who was studying to be a nurse. By the time Richard Kerry graduated from Harvard Law School two years later, war had broken out in Europe, and he joined the Army Air Corps as a test pilot. Eventually Rosemary joined him, they married and, a month before Pearl Harbor, they had a daughter, Peggy.

Their second child, John Forbes Kerry, was born Dec. 11, 1943, in Denver, where his father had been hospitalized with tuberculosis.

After the war, Richard Kerry went to work as a lawyer, first in private practice, with his family living in the countryside near Boston, and then for the Navy and later the State Department in Washington. In 1954, he took a job as legal adviser at the United States Mission in occupied Berlin. For John, the joys of biking around the bombed-out city quickly gave way to a harsher experience: at 11, he was sent to boarding school in Switzerland.

"I tell you, I think I cried for about three weeks," Mr. Kerry told his biographer Douglas Brinkley. "I was one homesick puppy." In his second year there, he was quarantined with a case of scarlet fever. His parents stayed in Berlin.

In an interview last year, Mr. Kerry reflected on the realities of living away from home from such an early age. "I missed not having my parents around. I consciously remember feeling their absence," he said, then interrupted himself to add: "I wasn`t angry about it or anything. I just consciously felt they were doing the thing they had to do and this is the way it was, but I nevertheless — there were times when you wished your parents were around."

"Don`t kid yourself," he added. "I also learned to be very independent, and loved that independence, may I say."

William Ducas, a Boston money manager who was one of Mr. Kerry`s St. Paul`s classmates, recalled not knowing much about Mr. Kerry`s family.

"You go to those schools, you have a clue where your friends` families come from, who their sisters are, a whole framework that attaches," Mr. Ducas said. "I promise you, I knew John for five years, but I knew nothing about that. There were echoes of a big Boston family, but that side of him was a total blank — where he went in the summer, where he went on Christmas vacations."

By all accounts, Richard Kerry was a deep but difficult man, reserved, private and more given, in his son`s words, to discussions of theory and policy than family and people. In acknowledgments for "The Star-Spangled Mirror," a book of foreign policy analysis published in 1990, Richard Kerry made no mention of his wife or children, writing instead, "I prefer not to name one by one the many members of my family" who helped.

The truth is that for all his adult life, Richard Kerry lived with the most painful kind of scar: when he was 6, his immigrant father, Frederick A. Kerry, shot himself to death in the men`s room of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, apparently in the wake of reverses in his shoe business. Richard never spoke of the details before his death in 2000, and it is not even clear what he knew about them.

What is clear is that while John Kerry "always knew that his grandfather had killed himself," as his campaign spokesman David Wade put it, he learned the details only last year, when The Boston Globe presented him with newspaper clippings from 1921 about his grandfather`s death in a hotel where he himself had held fund-raisers and celebrated birthdays.

An investigation by The Globe produced another revelation as well: Frederick Kerry had been born Fritz Kohn in what is now the Czech Republic, to parents who were Jewish, not Catholic.

"It was a revelation of enormous import, but in a nice way," Mr. Kerry said. "I found it kind of provided a picture where there hadn`t been one, sort of gave you something where there was an empty, just sort of dark hole."

Richard and Rosemary Kerry kept building their own family. Eventually they had another daughter, Diana, and a second son, Cameron, known as Cam, and moved from Germany to Norway, where Richard Kerry became chief of the political section of the United States Embassy in Oslo. Finally, he became disillusioned with the backbiting and infighting of bureaucracy and left government without ever achieving his goal of becoming an ambassador.

The young John was "sort of the leader within the family," his brother recalled in an interview. And if he lacked geographical roots and was in the dark about certain aspects of his patrimony, the light of his family legacy burned bright enough in other ways. As a student at St. Paul`s, Mr. Kerry was a founder of a political club, to discuss not ancient history or old wars but the current events of the cold war era, which was shaping his own life.

And the name he picked for that club effectively paid tribute to both his diplomat father and the grandfather he never knew. He called it the John Winant Society, in honor of a beloved St. Paul`s alumnus and teacher from the teens and 20`s who had gone on to become governor of New Hampshire and Franklin D. Roosevelt`s ambassador to Britain at the height of World War II, and who came home to New Hampshire and committed suicide in 1947.

Curiosity, Energy, Ambition

In 1956, still living in Europe, the Kerrys decided to send John back to the United States to school. He entered Fessenden, a boarding school for younger boys in West Newton, Mass., whose motto was "Labor omnia vincit" (Work conquers all). After a year there, he entered St. Paul`s, where, he recalled, he was "tiny at first, undersized," then had a growth spurt and "just shot up" toward his full height of 6 feet, 4 inches.

He loved sports and the New England outdoors, but he also loved schoolwork and activities. He was a member of the French club, Le Cercle Français, and active on the staff of the student newspaper, The Pelican (in whose pages a few years later a budding cartoonist named Garry Trudeau would test his wings). He was a superb debater and won the school public speaking contest one year. He played bass guitar in a band called the Electras, which cut an album whose liner notes described him as "the producer of pulsating rhythm that lends tremendous force to all the numbers."

"I was sort of one of those journeyman people who could do a lot of things, but none so brilliantly," he said.

Some of his classmates and teachers paint a more effusive — and complex — picture.

"You would have been very hard pressed to find somebody with as much curiosity and energy as John," said Lewis Rutherfurd, a venture capitalist in Hong Kong who was Mr. Kerry`s roommate for part of their senior year, when they were "supervisors" assisting the housemaster of Conover, a younger boys` dormitory. "He`s an extremely loyal, funny person to be with."

But, Mr. Rutherfurd added: "When you`re in an environment like those very conservative environments back then, the trick, to be cool, is not to show how ambitious you are. And John wasn`t very good at that trick."

Alan Hall, an English teacher who advised the Concordian Literary Society in Mr. Kerry`s senior year, recalled how the club`s weekly meetings always began with a bit of fluff called the Clock Report, a rundown of "comments about the world of the school and the world in general." Most people, assigned to the task on a rotating basis, "got about six ho-ho`s off" and then moved to the reading of short stories or essays and the evening`s main event: a debate.

"I can remember his skill and enthusiasm for that," Mr. Hall said. "If he ever made a joke on the Clock Report, that has not stuck with me. To be serious, outwardly, to be actively concerned about Republicans versus Democrats, or world poverty, or unions, was different from many people, and I think John was a puzzle to many people."

Herbert Church, an English teacher who was head of Conover House, recalled that Mr. Kerry would stay up late at night talking, after the younger boys had gone to bed. "The school was changing," Mr. Church said. "It was much more open than it used to be, but a place like that doesn`t change overnight. I think it`s fair to say that John reflected this more serious view of the future."

On a visit to the school last year, Mr. Kerry said simply, "The value of service was instilled in me here."

Among the Republicans

An important mentor was John Walker, the school`s first (and, at the time, only) black teacher, who arrived the same year as Mr. Kerry and would later become the Episcopal bishop of Washington. Mr. Walker opened the world of civil rights and social justice to Mr. Kerry, who helped teach him to ski. When Mr. Walker married a young Costa Rican woman who spoke virtually no English, Mr. Kerry went out of his way to speak to her in Spanish.

"I do remember my husband always talking about John," Bishop Walker`s widow, Maria, recalled. "He`d say, `He`s going to end up being a politician — a senator, or congressman, or president."

By 1960, the politician Mr. Kerry idolized was John F. Kennedy, and on the eve of the fall election, he spoke to the school on Kennedy`s behalf, while the class president, D. Lloyd Macdonald, made the case for Richard M. Nixon. With the overwhelmingly Republican student audience, Nixon won, but Mr. Kerry`s eloquence and ambition were both clear.

"I wanted to be president of the United States when I was 17, and it was the last thing in the world you would admit to," said Mr. Macdonald, now a lawyer in Boston. "In 1962, virtually the last thing, if one wanted to be honored with something, was to say to anybody that you wanted it, or thought you deserved it. You wait to have the hand of approval placed on your shoulder. I think it`s very difficult. Any issues which John had at the time have to be seen against the fact that we lived in a hermetic and completely alien environment. He was there from age 13 to 18, the first two years without being able to leave a single night," except for vacations.

Mr. Macdonald sharply disputed an account in April 12 issue of The New Republic that when he toasted the class`s prominent achievers at its 40th reunion two years ago (Mr. Kerry was not present), the room reacted to Mr. Kerry`s name only with scattered boos. "It`s an absolute fabrication," he said.

But even Mr. Kerry`s best friend from high school, Mr. Barbiero, acknowledged that old adolescent divisions linger. "I`m working with some other members of the class to put together a class of `62 support for John, and there aren`t a lot that are supporters."

Mr. Barbiero himself is a Republican who voted for George W. Bush in 2000. Not this time. Now, he wishes more people could understand his old friend as he does.

"I think what doesn`t come across publicly is exactly the problem he had when I first met him, is that people don`t see that — first of all, I liked the fact that he was hurt, that he could be hurt. He`s a guy who can be wounded. He`s got tremendous sensitivities. I don`t think that comes across at all in his public persona. He sometimes will close off, like he doesn`t need anyone. But he does."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 16, 2004
Coalition Evacuates HQ in Nasiriyah
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:30 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Most of the civilian staff of the U.S.-led coalition was evacuated from their headquarters in the southern city of Nasiriyah because of growing threats from Muqtada al-Sadr`s militiamen, a coalition official said Sunday.

The official, Andrea Angeli, said only two civilians remain in the coalition headquarters, which was attacked Friday by al-Sadr militiamen. Coalition forces regained control of the building before dawn Saturday.

The rest of the 10-member staff was evacuated Saturday afternoon to the coalition military base six miles out of town, Angeli said.

He said there was more gunfire near the building Sunday and that mortars and rocket-propelled grenades were fired by militiamen in the area the night before.

Italian media reported sporadic fighting Sunday in Nasiriyah between Italian troops and al-Sadr`s gunmen. Four Italians were slightly injured, Italian media reported.

The Apcom news agency quoted Italian contingent spokesman Lt. Col. Giuseppe Perrone as saying militants were firing light weapons, mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades. Some shots were coming from a nearby hospital.

Trouble started in Nasiriyah on Friday after daylong fighting in the holy city of Najaf between American forces and al-Sadr`s fighters.

Elsewhere in Iraq, the U.S. military said Saturday it killed 18 gunmen believed loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad, and jet fighters bombarded militia positions on the capital`s outskirts. Skirmishes persisted in the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

The U.S. military also announced the deaths of five soldiers, including three killed by rebel attacks. In northern Iraq, rebels fired a mortar round at an Iraqi army recruiting center, killing four volunteers, hospital officials said.

U.S. troops are trying to disband the cleric`s army and sideline its radical leadership before handing power to a new Iraqi government June 30. Al-Sadr is a fierce opponent of the U.S.-led occupation who launched an uprising last month and faces an arrest warrant in the death of a rival moderate cleric last year.

In Najaf, militiamen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a U.S. tank stationed at the city`s Police Directorate. The rocket missed its target, and the two sides exchanged gunfire. Elsewhere, a shell landed on a house, wounding a woman.

The normally bustling area around Karbala`s Imam Hussein shrine, one of the holiest centers for Shiite Muslims, was silent except for intermittent blasts and machine-gun fire. After one blast, a huge column of black smoke wafted over the golden-domed shrine. One Polish soldier was wounded in Saturday`s skirmishes, the Polish military said in Warsaw.

The confrontations in the two holy cities in Iraq`s southern Shiite heartland were less intense than in previous days.

In Baghdad, coalition forces killed 18 fighters, many of them in the eastern Sadr City neighborhood, a stronghold of al-Sadr, in a dozen separate engagements Friday and Saturday, the military said in a statement. Troops also killed seven gunmen who attacked them in western Baghdad on Saturday morning, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq.

Guerrillas fired a mortar round at an Iraqi army recruiting center in the northern city of Mosul, killing four people and wounding 19, hospital officials said. The shell landed in a crowd of people waiting to sign up for the military. Kimmitt said the projectile was a mortar shell or a rocket-propelled grenade.

Insurgents have previously targeted police and army recruitment centers in an effort to undermine Iraqi involvement in the U.S.-led coalition.

Hussein Assem, a 25-year-old army volunteer, suffered shrapnel wounds in a hand and leg and was taken to a hospital.

``While I was at the entrance of the volunteer center, a mortar shell fell near me,`` he said. ``I fell down together with the others on the floor. I felt I was in coma and I woke up to find myself at the hospital.``

The coalition announced a reorganization of its military command structure Saturday, creating a new headquarters with broad responsibility for operations in Iraq, including the training of Iraqi security forces and involvement in the political transition, and another headquarters that will handle daily tactical operations against the insurgency.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, a three-star general who was in charge of the previous, unified command, will oversee all operations from the Multinational Forces Iraq headquarters, Kimmitt said.

Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, a three-star general who commands the U.S. Army`s 3rd Corps, will direct daily military operations from a headquarters called Multinational Corps Iraq.

British troops killed up to 16 Iraqi insurgents after their patrol was ambushed between the southern cities of Amarah and Basra on Friday, and two British soldiers were wounded, the Ministry of Defense said in London. However, Iraqi witnesses said 21 militiamen were killed and that they were loyalists of al-Sadr.

The U.S. military said three soldiers died from wounds suffered in rebel attacks Friday, one died in a vehicle accident and one from ``natural causes.``

As of Friday, May 14, 775 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq last year, according to the Department of Defense. Of those, 565 died as a result of hostile action and 210 died of non-hostile causes.

It was unclear whether the latest deaths were included in the Department of Defense toll.

On Saturday, a rocket landed in the compound housing the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad, wounding one soldier and a civilian, both of whom later returned to duty, Kimmitt said.

The slain militiamen in Baghdad`s Sadr City included a police lieutenant who joined al-Sadr`s al-Mahdi Army, witnesses said.

U.S. jet fighters bombarded the outskirts of Sadr City overnight, forcing militiamen to flee positions, the witnesses said. On Saturday, U.S. soldiers drove through the neighborhood with loudspeakers, urging people to hand in their weapons within a week in exchange for money.

In Najaf, gunmen from al-Sadr`s militia controlled the city center. They had replaced a special force assigned to protect the Shrine of Imam Ali, one of Shia Islam`s holiest sites. Bands of fighters stood at almost every street corner around the shrine, and some patrolled the area in a commandeered police pickup truck.

On Friday, apparent gunfire slightly damaged a shrine, prompting calls for revenge and even suicide attacks.

Twenty people signed up for an al-Sadr-backed suicide squad in the southern city of Basra on Saturday, though only 10 were accepted after undergoing checks by organizers.

In Karbala, al-Sadr militiamen moved to new positions to the south, leaving the shrine district almost vacant except for small groups of Iranian and south Asian pilgrims.

``I`m not scared,`` said Ahmed Ali, who sells Turkish lace from a shop in the shrine district. ``In Iraq, we are addicted to war.``

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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May 13, 2004
Q&A: Iran`s Nuclear Program

From the Council on Foreign Relations, May 13, 2004

What`s being done to curtail Iran`s nuclear program?

The International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) has broadened its inspections program in Iran after growing evidence suggested the country was seeking the capacity to build nuclear weapons in violation of its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In particular, inspectors have recently found traces of weapons-grade fissile materials at Iranian nuclear sites, fanning fears that Iran may soon possess the key ingredients needed to build nuclear weapons. Iran claims its nuclear program is intended for peaceful energy uses only, as allowed under the NPT.

What are some of the warning signs that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons?

Among them:

* In February, the IAEA announced that inspectors had found traces of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium that either was bought overseas or developed in Iran, and an isotope of polonium-210, an initiator--or trigger--for nuclear weapons.
* Inspectors in February also discovered enriched uranium traceable to Russia or one of the former Soviet republics.
* Last fall, Iranian officials admitted that Iran has been secretly developing a uranium centrifuge enrichment program for the last 18 years and a laser enrichment program for 12 years, both violations of the NPT.
* Iran failed to reveal to the IAEA that it imported 1.8 metric tons of natural uranium from China in 1991 and stored it at an undisclosed laboratory at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center.
* Iranian officials want to mine and enrich their own uranium, which many experts say is costly and unnecessary for the civilian nuclear program that Iran is pursuing. On October 21, 2003, Iran agreed to suspend, but not dismantle, this aspect of its program. Experts point out that Iran did not commit to a permanent suspension.
* Iran was a client of Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, who admitted last year to selling nuclear secrets abroad.
* Iran acknowledged in February 2003 that it was constructing a previously undeclared gas centrifuge uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. Subsequent IAEA inspections found traces of weapons-grade uranium there.
* Traces of enriched uranium were also found at a centrifuge workshop near Tehran called the Kalaye Electric Company.
* Iran also acknowledged in February 2003 that it was constructing a secret heavy water production facility in Arak, just north of Natanz. Heavy water can be used in nuclear reactors to produce weapons-grade plutonium, another fuel for nuclear weapons.

Why would Iran want nuclear weapons?

For several reasons. Until the defeat of Saddam Hussein, Iran was clearly concerned about Iraq`s potential to develop such weapons. Iraq had already used chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980-88 war. Tehran is also worried about countering Israel, which is widely acknowledged to have nuclear weapons. Experts also say that some in Iran argue that possessing even a primitive nuclear weapons arsenal could deter a pre-emptive attack by U.S. forces stationed next door in Iraq.

Why are so many nations trying to stymie Iran`s nuclear ambitions?

Because "the world wants to prevent the further nuclearization of the Middle East," says Robert Nelson, MacArthur science and technology fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Experts fear that if Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the volatile region--including Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia--would want to follow. The NPT is intended to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and halt the arms race.

Is Iran`s behavior governed by the NPT?

It`s supposed to be. Iran signed the NPT as a non-nuclear state in 1968 and ratified it in 1970, when Iran was ruled by the Shah Reza Pahlavi, a close ally of the United States. After it was caught in what looked like violations of its NPT commitments last fall, Iran agreed to a much stricter Additional Protocol imposed by the IAEA, which called on it to suspend all uranium-enrichment and reprocessing activities, stop production of material for enrichment processes, and halt imports of enrichment-related items. Under the Additional Protocol, Iran must declare any plans to build centrifuges and must allow international inspectors expanded access to its facilities.

Why did Iran sign the NPT?

In 1968, when the treaty was negotiated, there was widespread fear that the number of states that had already tested nuclear weapons would soon grow from five to 20 or more. Experts say there was intense international pressure to limit the number of nuclear states, create an effective verification system to check nuclear proliferation, and ensure that countries could still use atomic energy for peaceful purposes. Iran, which in the mid-1970s had begun negotiations to buy nuclear power plants from the United States, had to sign the treaty to be eligible for such purchases. Iran was one of the original 43 signatories to the NPT. "It`s more and more clear that Iran, and probably many other non-nuclear signatory countries, maintained nuclear weapons programs under the guise of developing peaceful nuclear energy. They wanted to look like they were good guys," Nelson says.

Is Iran living up to its responsibilities under international agreements?

Iran claims it is, but international observers are more skeptical. "Iran is going through the steps, but every time there`s contamination they claim that it`s from somewhere else," says Michael Levi, science and technology fellow at the Brookings Institution. Experts say Iran violated the NPT by introducing nuclear material into its centrifuges before it had declared them to the IAEA, which later found samples of enriched uranium there. Iran tried to shift blame to Pakistan, the alleged source of the centrifuges. The IAEA is unable to prove or disprove this claim, because Pakistan--not a signatory of the NPT--does not allow international inspectors access to its nuclear facilities.

What is the track record of international inspections in Iran?

"The inspection process is working well," says Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The Additional Protocol has given inspectors powerful new tools to find things even when the host country is trying to conceal them," he says. Some of those discoveries include the highly enriched uranium mentioned above, as well as components of advanced P-2 centrifuges--which can be used to enrich uranium for weapons use--at an Air Force base outside Tehran, he says. But other experts say that inspections do more to help the host country than assist international watchdogs. "Inspections are Iran`s best tool to show that what they`re doing is okay," says Levi. "They`re not a tool for us."

How does the United States want to deal with the problem?

Experts say the United States is pushing the IAEA to declare Iran in breach of the NPT and bring the issue before the United Nations Security Council. If Iran is found to be in violation, the Security Council could authorize sanctions. The point, Levi says, is to show the world that in Iran, like Iraq last year, "uncertainty [about its nuclear program] is intolerable." Some U.S. officials believe that the threat of sanctions deters proliferation. Officials in other countries, however, are reluctant to apply them to Iran for fear of political fallout.

How does Europe want to deal with the problem?

The European Union, and especially France and Germany, favors discussions with Iran rather than confrontation. Levi says Germany considers strongly worded IAEA resolutions enough to prod Iran into better behavior. The European Union is reluctant to push Iran too far, lest the country withdraw from the NPT altogether; then, it is feared, the international community would lose any leverage over Iran`s nuclear ambitions. In addition, experts say, France and Russia have economic interests in Iran they are reluctant to lose to international sanctions.

What is likely to happen at the next IAEA meeting?

Iran is actively lobbying for a statement from the IAEA saying it is not in violation of international agreements. The director-general of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, met with Iranian officials in Tehran April 6 and agreed on a plan that lays out steps Iran will take over the weeks leading up to the next IAEA meeting, scheduled for June in Vienna. "Iran wants the IAEA Board of Governors to resolve this issue in June, to say Iran is clean," Levi says. "[But] I don`t see any willingness on the part of Europe or the United States to declare the case closed." Experts say, however, that the European Union and the United States are likely to make a strong effort to consolidate their positions on Iran, to show that the transatlantic alliance has recovered from last year`s split over Iraq.

Is it possible that Iran wants nuclear capability for peaceful purposes?

Possible but highly unlikely, experts say. Iran is a major oil producer, which casts doubt on its claims to need nuclear power. In addition, Nelson says, the centrifuges Iran currently possesses are far more sophisticated than what would be needed for peaceful uses. Nuclear experts warn that a more likely scenario is that Iran will develop a legal nuclear power program, then drop out of the NPT (which requires only 90 days` notice) and rapidly switch to an illegal nuclear weapons program. According to the NPT, Iran may build any nuclear facility, including uranium enrichment plants to create nuclear fuel, as long as the facility is devoted to peaceful uses and subject to IAEA safeguards and inspections.

Does Iran currently have civilian nuclear facilities?

Yes. The main one, an $800 million Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr, is scheduled to open in 2005 along the Persian Gulf in southwestern Iran. Russian officials say they will continue to build the reactor despite fears that Iran could divert expertise into a nuclear weapons program. Although the plant will eventually produce spent fuel rods that contain plutonium, experts say the substances that will be produced in the Bushehr rector are not ideal for making nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Bushehr will be subject to IAEA inspections. Russian officials have said they will require all spent fuel rods from Bushehr to be returned to Russia.

-- by Esther Pan and Sharon Otterman, staff writers, cfr.org

Copyright 2004

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Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord: Duisburg, Germany.
Ein langer Artikel:
The Anti-Olmsted
By ARTHUR LUBOW

Published: May 16, 2004

hree blast furnaces loom over Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord like rusting dragons, their flaming mouths silenced, their brown scaly skin slowly flaking away. The pipes that once water-cooled the pig-iron mills and siphoned off gases still snake and coil, but they are drained and lifeless. In 1985, as part of a wave of industrial shutdowns that changed the character of the Ruhr Valley, the Thyssen plant in Duisburg closed. The nightmarish hulks that remained -- almost mythic in their lurid grandeur -- stood stranded, presumed doomed. The notion that they would come back to life in the quintessential park of the early 21st century seemed about as probable as sighting a pterosaur in flight overhead.
Weiter:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/magazine/16ANTIPARK.html

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May 16, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Low Rates, High Expectations
Will the American economy ever recover from the debt encouraged by Alan Greenspan?
By JAMES GRANT

Inflation is returning to the American checkout counter under the unlikely sponsorship of the Federal Reserve. For the past year, the Fed has been striving to make the dollar buy less. It`s well on its way to succeeding, to judge by the recent readings on wholesale and consumer prices.

Why the Fed decided to propagate inflation, after having so long battled against it, is a story that begins with the return to common usage of an old word. Late in 2002, officials began to warn of the danger of "deflation," or broadly falling prices. Everyday low prices are well and good, the central bankers allowed. Yet if prices steadily and predictably fell, people would stop buying things. They would stay home to wait for tomorrow`s guaranteed lower prices. And if the American consumer stopped shopping — and borrowing to shop — where would we be?

So, last June 25, the Fed pushed the federal funds rate, the rate it directly controls, down to 1 percent, the lowest since the second Eisenhower administration. And it warned that "the probability, though minor, of an unwelcome substantial fall in inflation exceeds that of a pickup in inflation from its already low level."

Before the Fed was founded, in 1913, there were recurrent cycles of inflation and deflation. In general, prices rose in wartime and fell in peacetime. In the last quarter of the 19th century, prices persistently fell. Technological innovation pushed down costs, and lower costs translated into lower prices. Wage-earners flourished as the spending power of money increased. Creditors prospered, too, as interest rates declined.

Then, about 1900, the world struck gold — in Alaska, Colorado and South Africa. As gold was then the monetary asset on which national currencies were based, the world, in effect, struck money. For the next two decades, prices went up.

It is a relatively new thing in finance that prices should not be allowed to fall. The Federal Reserve implicitly admits as much. On the one hand, it extols the rising productivity of the United States economy. On the other, it declares that this extraordinary progress should not be registered in falling prices. In so many words, the central bank says that what is good for Wal-Mart`s customers is not necessarily good for the country.

The Fed doesn`t literally print money. Instead, it manipulates the interest rate that induces others to print money. In a modern economy, money-printing takes the form of credit creation, i.e., lending and borrowing.

There has been a great deal of this in recent years. By any and all measures, America is more heavily indebted than ever before. In 1958, when the funds rate was last at 1 percent, the economy`s overall indebtedness was about half of today`s. Back then, overall debt (excluding the borrowings of banks and the federal government) represented 84 percent of gross domestic product. Nowadays, it stands at 163 percent of G.D.P.

The weight of this indebtedness, foreign as well as domestic, helps to explain why the Fed set its rate so low. One percent is an emergency rate, unseen before the institution of the Fed and only rarely since. It was the rate intended to raise the economy from the Great Depression and to see it through World War II and the immediate cold war era.

The Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, and his colleagues keep saying that there is no emergency — that, on the contrary, the United States economy is a paragon of strength, lacking only an acceptable rate of job creation. Yet they have kept their rate at the emergency setting, thus fomenting a real-estate boom on Main Street and a stock-and-bond boom on Wall Street.

Now the 1 percent era is fast closing, and financial markets worldwide are shuddering. As the signs of inflation multiply, the Fed finds itself in a very interesting position. It never wanted much inflation, it protests; just a whiff would suffice.

But the subjects in the central bank`s monetary experiment are human beings, not laboratory mice. When people sense that prices are going to rise, they take steps to protect themselves. They buy extra inventory, invest in so-called hard assets (houses, not bonds) and pass along their rising costs as best they can. Once instilled, inflationary habits are hard to break, as the Fed exactly understands.

And the Fed will raise its rate, though grudgingly and gradually. It will act in this fashion not only out of conviction but also, perhaps, out of a guilty conscience. It knows that its 1 percent rate drove many risk-averse people into stocks and bonds because they could no longer afford to live on the meager returns of their savings. That is at one pole of the spectrum of financial sophistication. At the other, hedge funds borrowed at ultra-low rates to speculate in everything from gold to lead. Just the prospect of a slightly higher borrowing rate has brought about disturbances in the temples of high finance.

The Fed has another reason to be conscience-stricken. It knows, or should know, that by trying to make the dollar cheaper, it has precipitated even more borrowing in an economy heavily encumbered. The greater the debt, the more deflation-prone the economy. And the more deflation-prone the economy, the more the Fed is apt to try to cheapen the dollar. The truth is that the central bank of the United States is chasing its tail.

James Grant is the editor of Grant`s Interest Rate Observer.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Tyranny of the Minorities
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Question: What do the Shiite extremist leader Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army have in common with the extremist Jewish settlers in Israel? Answer: More than you`d think. Both movements combine religious messianism, and a willingness to sacrifice their followers and others for absolutist visions, along with a certain disdain for man-made laws, as opposed to those from God. The big question in both Iraq and Israel today is also similar: Will the silent majorities in both countries finally turn against these extremist minorities to save their future?

On May 2, the Jewish settlers mobilized enough members of the right-wing Likud Party to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon`s plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and all its Jewish settlements (7,500 Israelis live on 35 percent of Gaza, while 1.3 million Palestinians are squeezed into the other 65 percent). Polls in Israel consistently show a large majority of Israelis want to get out of Gaza. Nevertheless, Mr. Sharon, for now, has submitted to the Likud Party vote — even though Likud is only one faction in his ruling coalition and his coalition represents only a little over half the country.

The ability of the settler minority to impose its will on the Israeli majority means that Israel is not staying in Gaza to defend itself anymore — its own defense minister says it would be safer to leave. It is now staying in Gaza to preserve a settler fantasy — that Israel can and must keep every settlement everywhere.

As Ari Shavit, the Haaretz essayist, wrote on Friday: "The current war has been redefined since the events of May 2. On that day, the current war ceased to be a war on terror. It ceased to be a war for Israel`s existence. May 2, 2004, the war became a war of not-a-single-settlement [is to be given up]. The young guys of Givati [an Israeli army unit] who were blown up with their armored personnel carrier on Tuesday in Gaza differ from all of their comrades who have been killed there since September 2000. They differ, because they are no longer the victims of extremist Islam. They are no longer the victims of Arafat`s insanity. They are the victims of the settlement enterprise. The attempt of the organized settlement movement to force on the citizens of Israel a war that is not their war is unforgivable."

The Israeli silent majority is now taking to the streets under the banner: "Only The Majority Decides." The question is: Will Mr. Sharon, the patron of the settler movement, take on the settlers in the name of that Israeli majority and in order to save Israel? Meir Sheetrit, an Israeli cabinet minister from Likud who has been urging Mr. Sharon to carry out his plan anyway, told me his advice to Mr. Sharon has been very blunt: "Either you make history, or you will be history." An editorial in Haaretz was equally blunt: "A zealous, religious and messianic minority already led the people of Israel to the destruction of the Second Commonwealth 2,000 years ago. Now the struggle is over the Third Commonwealth."

There is also obviously a struggle for Iraq. Last Tuesday, two big events happened in Iraq — but only one of them made headlines. One was disclosure of the horrific beheading of Nicholas Berg. The other was the peaceful demonstration by 1,000 Shiites in Najaf, telling Moktada al-Sadr to get out of town. Sadr`s men fired their weapons into the air and shouted at the demonstrators, but the demonstrators shouted right back. The future of Iraq, and the chances of America salvaging any decent outcome there, depend on which event — the Berg murder or the anti-Sadr march — turns out to be the emerging trend.

This anti-Sadr march was a truly rare event in the modern Arab world — a large public demonstration by Muslim moderates against armed Muslim extremists. It could only have happened in a post-Saddam Iraq, where, even in the turmoil, people have enough freedom to do such a thing. But it will only define post-Saddam Iraq if it becomes a real movement among the Shiite silent majority and not just a one-day parade. "We need the moderate Shiites to take charge of the streets and their own future," a U.S. commander in Iraq told me. "Otherwise, it will become a problem for them and for us."

I am a big believer that what a culture or a society deems to be shameful and illegitimate is the most important restraint on how its people behave. It takes a village. But it also takes a silent majority to act. I`m confident that will happen in Israel, which is already a democracy. And Iraq will only become a democracy if the same happens there.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Springs of Fate
By MAUREEN DOWD

Oblivious of the consequences, the impetuous black sheep of a ruling family starts a war triggered by a personal grudge.

The father, a respected veteran of his own wars, suppresses his unease and graciously supports his son, even though it will end up destroying his legacy and the world order he envisioned.

The ferocious battle in the far-off sands spirals out of control, with many brave soldiers killed, with symbols of divinity damaged, with graphic scenes showing physical abuse of the conquered, and with devastatingly surreptitious guerrilla tactics.

Aside from dishing up a gilded Brad Pitt with a leather miniskirt and a Heathrow duty-free accent as he tosses about ancient insults, such as calling someone a "sack of wine," "Troy" also dishes up some gilded lessons on the Aeschylating cost of imperial ambitions and personal vendettas.

The Greek warriors question their sovereign`s reasons for war, knowing that he has taken an incendiary pretext (Paris` stealing Helen from Sparta) to provide emotional acceleration to his real reasons — to settle old scores and forge an empire through war.

When Mars rushes into Achilles` soul in his battle with Hector, as Alexander Pope wrote in his translation of Homer`s "Iliad," "the springs of fate snap every lock tight."

But Barbara Tuchman, in her book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam," observes that while the Trojans reject advice to keep that dagnab nag, as Rummy might put it, out of the walled city, "the feasible alternative — that of destroying the Horse — is always open."

Cassandra and others warned them. (The always ignored Cassandra is left out of the movie, but she must have sensed that was coming.)

"Notwithstanding the frequent references in the epic to the fall of Troy being ordained, it was not fate but free choice that took the Horse within the walls," Ms. Tuchman writes. " `Fate` as a character in legend represents the fulfillment of man`s expectation of himself."

A State Department official noted last week that if any of the Bush hawks had read Ms. Tuchman`s dissection of war follies, her warning about leaders who get an "addiction to the counterproductive," they might have been less rash.

"The folly" in Vietnam, she writes, "consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world."

The Bush team, working on divine right, doesn`t bother checking human precedent.

The president and secretary of defense boast about not reading newspapers, presumably because they don`t want any contrary opinion or fact to shake their faith in the essential excellence of their policies.

It`s astonishing the amount of stuff these guys don`t bother to read, preferring to filter their information through their ideology. They certainly didn`t read enough Iraqi history. They delayed looking at photos and reports on Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners. Paul Wolfowitz clearly wasn`t bothering to read updated casualty reports.

The deputy defense secretary got cuffed around at a Senate hearing on Thursday when he admitted that he had first read a document that morning detailing questionable rules of engagement for confronting Iraqi prisoners.

As Ms. Tuchman notes, wooden heads are as dangerous as wooden horses: "Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs."

President Bush`s Achilles` heel is his fear of wimpiness, and Dick Cheney and Rummy played on that, making him think he had to go to war once the war machine was revved up, or he would lose face and no longer be "The Man."

Maybe the president and vice president will catch "Troy" on their planes as they jet around to fund-raisers. But the antiwar message will probably be lost, except on the official who is both a snubbed Cassandra and a sulking Achilles, Colin Powell. "Wooden-headedness," Ms. Tuchman said, "is also the refusal to benefit from experience."

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Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Macromedia Flash Grafik über die Bush Unterstützer unde Abkassierer:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/pioneers/pione…
Dasselbe als PDF-Datei:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/pioneers/netwo…

washingtonpost.com

Pioneers Fill War Chest, Then Capitalize

By Thomas B. Edsall, Sarah Cohen and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A01

First of two articles

GREENSBORO, Ga. -- Joined by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and a host of celebrities, hundreds of wealthy Republicans gathered at the Ritz-Carlton Lodge here in the first weekend in April, not for a fundraiser but for a celebration of fundraisers. It was billed as an "appreciation weekend," and there was much to appreciate.

As Bush "Pioneers" who had raised at least $100,000 each for the president`s reelection campaign, or "Rangers" who had raised $200,000 each, the men and women who shot skeet with Cheney, played golf with pros Ben Crenshaw and Fuzzy Zoeller and laughed at the jokes of comedian Dennis Miller are the heart of the most successful political money operation in the nation`s history. Since 1998, Bush has raised a record $296.3 million in campaign funds, giving him an overwhelming advantage in running against Vice President Al Gore and now Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). At least a third of the total -- many sources believe more than half -- was raised by 631 people.

When four longtime supporters of George W. Bush in 1998 developed a name and a structure for the elite cadre that the then-Texas governor would rely on in his campaign for president, the goal was simple. They wanted to escape the restraints of the public financing system that Congress had hoped would mitigate the influence of money in electing a president. Their way to do it was to create a network of people who could get at least 100 friends, associates or employees to give the maximum individual donation allowed by law to a presidential candidate: $1,000.

The Pioneers have evolved from an initial group of family, friends and associates willing to bet on putting another Bush in the White House into an extraordinarily organized and disciplined machine. It is now twice as big as it was in 2000 and fueled by the desire of corporate CEOs, Wall Street financial leaders, Washington lobbyists and Republican officials to outdo each other in demonstrating their support for Bush and his administration`s pro-business policies.

"This is the most impressive, organized, focused and disciplined fundraising operation I have ever been involved in," declared Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, who has been raising money for GOP candidates since 1980. "They have done just about everything right."

For achieving their fundraising goals, Pioneers receive a relatively modest token, the right to buy a set of silver cuff links with an engraved Lone Star of Texas (Rangers can buy a more expensive belt buckle set). Their real reward is entree to the White House and the upper levels of the administration.

Of the 246 fundraisers identified by The Post as Pioneers in the 2000 campaign, 104 -- or slightly more than 40 percent -- ended up in a job or an appointment. A study by The Washington Post, partly using information compiled by Texans for Public Justice, which is planning to release a separate study of the Pioneers this week, found that 23 Pioneers were named as ambassadors and three were named to the Cabinet: Donald L. Evans at the Commerce Department, Elaine L. Chao at Labor and Tom Ridge at Homeland Security. At least 37 Pioneers were named to postelection transition teams, which helped place political appointees into key regulatory positions affecting industry.

A more important reward than a job, perhaps, is access. For about one-fifth of the 2000 Pioneers, this is their business -- they are lobbyists whose livelihoods depend on the perception that they can get things done in the government. More than half the Pioneers are heads of companies -- chief executive officers, company founders or managing partners -- whose bottom lines are directly affected by a variety of government regulatory and tax decisions.

When Kenneth L. Lay, for example, a 2000 Pioneer and then-chairman of Enron Corp., was a member of the Energy Department transition team, he sent White House personnel director Clay Johnson III a list of eight persons he recommended for appointment to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Two were named to the five-member commission.

Lay had ties to Bush and his father, former president George H.W. Bush, and was typical of the 2000 Pioneers. Two-thirds of them had some connection to the Bush family or Bush himself -- from his days in college and business school, his early oil wildcatting in West Texas, his partial ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team and the political machine he developed as governor.

"It`s clearly the case that these networking operations have been the key driving Bush fundraising," said Anthony Corrado, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution and a political scientist at Colby College. "The fact that we have great numbers of these individuals raising larger and larger sums means there are going to be more individuals, postcampaign, making claims for policy preferences and ambassadorial posts."

Asked whether the president gives any special preference to campaign contributors in making decisions about policy, appointments or other matters, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said, "Absolutely not." The president, Duffy said, "bases his policy decisions on what`s best for the American people."

Pioneers interviewed for these articles were reluctant to discuss on the record their contacts with the administration. "That`s dead man`s talk," one said. The Bush campaign declined repeated requests to reveal the entire 2000 list of Pioneers, saying it is contained in computer files they can no longer access.

Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said, "Our campaign enjoys support from nearly 1 million contributors from every county in this nation. We`re proud of our broad-based support, and the Bush campaign has set the standard for disclosure."

M. Teel Bivins, a rancher, Pioneer and member of the Texas Senate awaiting confirmation as ambassador to Sweden, spoke more openly in an interview with the BBC in 2001. "You wouldn`t have direct access if you had spent two years of your life working hard to get this guy elected president, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars?" he said. "You dance with them what brung ya."

For the 2004 election, the composition of the Pioneers has changed, reflecting the broad support the Bush administration has given and received from industries ranging from health care to energy.

Of the 246 known Pioneers from the 2000 election, about half -- 126 -- are Pioneers or Rangers again. They are joined by 385 new Pioneers and Rangers whose backgrounds are less from Texas and the Bush circle than from the nation`s business elite, particularly Wall Street and such major players as Bear Stearns & Co. Inc., Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.; Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., Credit Suisse First Boston Inc. and Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc.

The campaign`s most productive Zip code this year is Manhattan`s 10021: the Upper East Side, bounded by Fifth Avenue, East 80th Street, East 61st Street and the East River.

"This is the most successful political fundraising mechanism in the history of politics, and it will be emulated by other candidates and campaigns in the future," said Craig McDonald, executive director of Texans for Public Justice, a public interest group that has tracked the Pioneer network for five years.
First Goal: $50 Million

No candidate in recent history was better positioned than George W. Bush to draw on so many disparate sources of wealth. The task for the four Bush friends who met in Midland, Tex., in late 1998 -- Texas Republican fundraiser and public relations specialist James B. Francis Jr., fundraiser Jeanne Johnson Phillips, state Republican chairman Fred Meyer and Don Evans, then a Texas oil man -- was to figure out how to capitalize on the extensive network of rich and powerful people that the governor, his father, brothers, uncles, grandfather and great-grandparents had built up over the past century.

This account of the founding of the Pioneers is drawn from interviews with three of the four participants.

Two wings of the family, the Bushes and the Walkers, had long been entrenched in the industrial Midwest and on Wall Street. This establishment, in turn, had produced the investors who had bankrolled the venture of George H.W. Bush into the oil industry after World War II, his acquisition of wealth through oil and his ascent to national prominence.

The 41st president had, in pursuing his own political ambitions, built up a financial network that he in turn could pass on to two of his sons, George W. and Jeb.

At the time of the 1998 Midland meeting, Evans, Phillips, Francis and Meyer had the relatively modest goal of raising a minimum of $50 million to reject public financing for the 2000 Republican primaries and to be free to spend without limit until the summer nominating conventions.

Other Republicans had rejected public money for the primary season before, in order to spend their own wealth. Bush, in contrast, was not going to use his own money -- he was going to raise it from hundreds of thousands of donors.

The early signs were favorable. For months, Bush`s handlers had been signaling that the Texas governor was ready to run for the White House. Big givers, in turn, were promising support. The pledges posed two problems.

The first was that the Bush network was made up of men, and a scattering of women, who were used to writing big checks. Donations to Bush`s gubernatorial campaigns, to the Republican National Committee`s "Team 100," to Jeb Bush`s Florida Republican Party and to the Bushes` earlier oil and baseball ventures had no contribution limits. Transfers and gifts of $100,000 or more were commonplace within this universe.

Federal elections, however, were different. A key provision of the 1974 Watergate reforms for the first time set a limit on individual contributions to a presidential campaign: a relatively paltry $1,000.

"We had to turn these people into money raisers instead of money givers," Francis said in a recent interview -- to get them to do the dirty work of politics, to make hundreds of calls to clients, subcontractors, to their corporate subordinates, to their law partners and fellow lobbyists and plead for cash.

Their problem can be illustrated by looking at the $41 million Bush had collected for his two gubernatorial bids under rules allowing unlimited contributions. If the same number of people had contributed under federal campaign rules with a limit of just $1,000 each, Bush would have raised only $14.3 million.

At the 1998 Midland meeting, the goal was to figure how to get "two steps ahead" -- to use Meyer`s phrase -- of the $1,000 contribution limit.

Francis came up with the idea of making it a competition. "We purposely set the bar high," Francis said. "These are very successful, very competitive people," and the requirement of raising at least $100,000 in contributions of $1,000 or less was designed "to tap into their competitive instincts."

Not only would the fundraisers compete to make Pioneer, they would also vie to see who could raise the most money, and, even more significantly, who could recruit the largest number of other Pioneers.

The second problem was accountability. Fundraisers are notorious for making extravagant promises and claiming credit for every name they recognize on a donor list. "You can have an event that pulls in $3 million, and there will be 20 guys each saying they raised $1 million," said a Republican fundraiser who spoke under the condition of anonymity.

A system was needed to make certain there was no double or triple counting, that when a check came in for $1,000, proper credit was given to the fundraiser who had solicited the money.

Phillips proposed a solution: Every fundraiser would be assigned his or her own four-digit tracking number. A Pioneer would get credit only for those checks that arrived with the correct tracking number clearly printed on them.

In addition, prospective Pioneers would have a direct line into the Bush campaign finance offices. There they could routinely find out where they stood, compared with the rest of the field. Every month, they would get printouts of donations. Everyone assigned a number could check regularly to see if their $1,000 pledges had been fulfilled.

Soon after the 1998 Midland strategy session, Francis, Evans, Phillips and Meyer joined other campaign operatives in Dallas to put the plan to work. The four reported directly to Karl Rove, Bush`s principal political adviser. Francis took charge of the Pioneer program. In addition to Bush family members and friends, Francis had essentially four spheres of money to mine, all of which overlapped at various points.

The first sphere was formed by the group of men who had repeatedly gambled on George W. Bush as an entrepreneur, investing in failed Bush ventures in the oil business and then joining Bush in the highly profitable acquisition of the Texas Rangers baseball team. The Rangers made millions for Bush and his partners.

The second sphere was made up of the Texas political elite and business community that supported him as governor. Many were involved in the energy industry. Others sought tighter restrictions on lawsuits against corporations and physicians. Gov. Bush had won approval of state legislation favorable to both of these constituencies.

The third sphere was made up of the Republican financial elite with strong ties to Bush`s father, the 41st president.

During the Nixon and Ford administrations, the senior Bush had cemented alliances on crucial fronts, serving in top posts at the United Nations, the Republican National Committee and the Central Intelligence Agency. More importantly, during three runs for the presidency, two terms as vice president and one as president, the elder Bush had cultivated and assiduously maintained a national base of major donors and fundraisers. Many were ready and willing to support his son -- including some of the 252 members of the Republican National Committee`s "Team 100," each of whom had given the party at least $100,000.

The importance of this legacy to George W. Bush is clearly reflected in the composition of the 246 men and women who would become Pioneers in 2000. At least 60 -- 24 percent -- had been supporters of Bush`s father in the 1980 or 1988 campaigns.

The fourth sphere was composed of the supporters of Bush`s fellow Republican governors, most importantly those of his brother, Jeb Bush in Florida. By November 1999, well before any primaries or caucuses had been held, George W. Bush already had the endorsements of 26 of 30 GOP governors.

The Bush campaign tapped these sources to raise a then-record $96.3 million for the primaries in 2000, far outdistancing Democrat Gore`s $49.5 million. Both candidates received $68 million in public financing for the general election campaign.

In 2002, Congress enacted the McCain-Feingold bill banning contributions to political parties of what is known as "soft money" -- unlimited donations from corporations, unions or the wealthy. Instead, the legislation raised the "hard money" limit on contributions to candidates from $1,000 to $2,000.

"The organization of the Pioneers and Rangers is significant, and it is the way of the future," said Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. "People with Rolodexes and the ability to raise money have always been valuable, but with the passage of McCain-Feingold, they have become especially valuable. . . . [T]he ability to get friends, colleagues and business associates to give the maximum hard money amount is now even more valuable."

With soft money banned, the 2004 Bush campaign has greatly expanded the Pioneer program, setting a new record of more than $200 million raised so far. This year, Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, followed Bush`s lead and rejected public financing for his primary campaign, fearing he would be crushed by the Bush organization if he were forced to abide by the $45 million spending limits that accompany public financing. Kerry recently released a list of 182 people who have each raised a minimum of $50,000, helping to bring his total to at least $110 million.

The Democrats are increasingly relying on independent groups known as 527s, after their designation in the tax code. They currently raise unlimited funds for political ads that have been used to attack Bush. Two prominent examples are the Media Fund and Moveon.org. Financier George Soros and Peter B. Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corp., have each given more than $7 million to these organizations.

For the general election campaign, Bush and Kerry are accepting public money; each will get $75 million.

Until the conventions this summer, Bush can enjoy his spending advantage over Kerry, saturating the airwaves with ads that help to define Kerry, particularly in the battleground states.

The Bush reelection campaign is currently riding a wave of Wall Street money and has consolidated the Republican establishment with the backing of prominent Washington lobbyists and trade association executives. They are not only highly effective fundraisers themselves but also their client and membership lists include some of the most regulated, and most politically active, corporations in every state.

At least 64 Rangers and Pioneers are lobbyists, including Jack Abramoff, who until recently specialized in representing Indian tribes with gambling interests; Kirk Blalock, whose clients include Fannie Mae, the Health Insurance Association of America, and the Business Roundtable; Jack N. Gerard, president of the National Mining Association; and Lanny Griffith, whose clients include the American Trucking Associations, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the Southern Co., a major energy concern, and State Street Corp.
On Track to Appointments

Big donors, Republican and Democrat, have always received benefits from the administrations that received their largess. Bill Clinton brought big donors into the White House and let them sleep in the Lincoln bedroom and appointed some to government jobs.

The Bush campaign`s innovation in the late 1990s was to institutionalize what other administrations had done more informally, which is to create a special class of donors that can be singled out from the pack and tracked with precision. Some of their transactions with the administration can also be tracked.

Sometimes the interests of Pioneers are relayed in subtle, indirect ways, through members of Congress or Republican leaders, especially in the case of major administration bills enacted since Bush took office: three bills granting tax relief to the wealthy and to corporations, the 2003 Medicare bill supported by the drug industry and other major health lobbies, and pending legislation providing tax breaks and regulatory relief to the energy sector.

At another level, requests for tickets to an event, such as a White House party, are likely to be more overt than the nuanced approach needed to get on the radar for a presidential appointment.

"It is noticed that you are doing extra work and you have a lot of friends in the administration," said Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.), a Pioneer who was considered for a presidential appointment. Her son, Reagan Dunn, was hired by the Justice Department, and her new husband, E. Keith Thomson, was appointed last year as the director of the Office of Trade Relations. "A lot [of Pioneers] have a particular interest and you have lots of contacts, and you say, `I`d like to sign up to be an ambassador when one comes along.` "

The Pioneer tracking system ensures that hard work gets noticed. That`s why Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) signed up this year. He read that Dunn, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), and others were Pioneers. Portman had already raised money, "but I didn`t have a tracking number. I finally decided to get one. I wanted to be supportive, and be viewed as supportive."

Critics complain that the Pioneer and Ranger program allows the campaign to track those who raise big money while cloaking details about them from the public; campaigns are required to report the names of the individual donors, but not the fundraisers who solicit the donations.

"The campaign is tracking them and giving them credit -- and supposedly all the access and influence that comes with huge campaign contributions," said McDonald of Texans for Public Justice. He said the Bush campaign has never released a complete list of Pioneers and Rangers with the specific amounts of money they have raised. Once, in response to a lawsuit, campaign officials said that such a list was not available.

"It is unbelievable that the most successful fundraising list in the history of politics has been misplaced," McDonald said.

Gary C. Jacobson, a University of California at San Diego political scientist who specializes in campaign finance, said the Pioneer program "is a way of allowing individuals to accumulate political clout despite the fact that contribution limits are relatively low."

"You can no longer give $100,000 and be an ambassador, but you might be able to raise that amount and accumulate the same kind of political debt," Jacobson said.

Nancy Goodman Brinker, one of the 23 Pioneers from the 2000 campaign who became an ambassador, said she does not remember exactly when or who first brought up a diplomatic appointment. She said it "seemed to evolve" after someone asked her whether she wanted to serve. The next thing she knew, she was talking to Clay Johnson in the White House personnel office about her choices. "One of the reasons why I chose and asked to be placed in Budapest," Brinker said at her Senate confirmation hearing, "was because I think there`s been an amazing story of loyalty by this country."

Brinker said one of her primary concerns, before accepting the nomination, was her parents, who are in their eighties. The presidential personnel team works with a potential nominee to find a good fit, which she called "matching talent with interests." She knew George W. Bush from his days in Texas, where she founded the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, named for her sister who died of breast cancer.

"There were discussions where your talents fit in which country," Brinker said. "I specifically did not want to go -- I could not -- be farther than a 10-hour plane ride because of my [elderly] parents. I wanted to be in the European continent somewhere, particularly a country like this, where I thought I could try to make some kind of difference."

Patronage decisions for Pioneers and other friends of the president are made largely by Rove, the White House senior political adviser, and Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff, in consultation with the Office of Presidential Personnel, which handles the vetting process, according to senior Republicans who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. Any donor who wants to be considered for a major job must indicate interest to one of those two men, the Republicans said.

These Republicans acknowledged that finance issues were taken into account, but said there were instances of donors being disappointed and people getting plum positions who had done little to help the campaign treasury.

In making decisions immediately after the election, Rove consulted Jack Oliver, a trusted insider in Bush`s political family who managed the fundraising effort for both of his presidential campaigns. Oliver`s main function was to tell Rove "what people had really done" to raise money, one of the senior Republicans said. Now, such decisions are made entirely within the White House, the official said, and Rove and Card also have sway over lesser favors, and "scrub the lists" of invitations to White House holiday parties.

"I can call Karl, and I can call about half of the Cabinet, and they will either take the call or call back," said one lobbyist Ranger, who described such access as "my bread and butter" and spoke only on the condition of anonymity. He and others noted that going to top officials in either the White House or in Cabinet departments is only used as a last resort on important issues and not always with success.

"It`s much better to start with an assistant secretary or the White House public liaison office. Those people know who you are and can usually deal with the issue," another Ranger said. "You don`t seek out the maitre d` unless you really need to."

Several major fundraisers in the lobbying community complained that as the election approaches, Rove has become a "little gun-shy" when dealing with association executives and lobbyists, fearful that his involvement with any special interest might produce adverse publicity.

"It`s different now that we are in campaign mode," the lobbyist said. "Karl doesn`t even want to be involved in courtesy visits [with clients]. `Don`t bring this to my office,` he`ll say. He`s been snakebitten" because of past controversies over his alleged involvement with groups seeking special favors, especially decisions involving steel import tariffs.

In response to questions about his contacts with Pioneers and Rangers, Rove said, "I talk to a wide variety of people, members of the campaign from the grass roots on up. . . . It`s part of my job to keep an open ear to what people are saying around the county."

White House sources said that if anyone refers to fundraising while seeking something from the administration, the policy is to then "vet" the request with the White House counsel`s office to make sure no regulations or laws are being violated.

Commerce Secretary Evans also plays a key role. "Evans acts as a kind of court of appeals . . . everybody knows that Evans is one of the president`s best friends. So he can be very effective intervening for you with just about any department," one fundraiser-lobbyist said.

This lobbyist described the following situations as the type in which Evans can effectively help: "Say you`ve got a bunch of telecom companies that are frozen out of doing business in Russia, and [the] State [Department] won`t do anything, or your sugar people can`t get a fair hearing at USTR [the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative] in negotiations with Mexico. . . . [Evans] can make them stop and listen. He can get something unstuck."

Evans was the one fellow Pioneer Ken Lay turned to in desperation in the fall of 2001, when Enron spiraled toward bankruptcy. Lay wanted help with the company`s credit rating, but Enron was in too much trouble, and Evans was unable to oblige.
For 2004: Super Rangers

Last month at the Ritz-Carlton Lodge on Lake Oconee, after the golf and the entertainment and a reception with Bush for the elite Rangers, the "appreciation" of the campaign`s leading fundraisers gave way, inevitably, to a business meeting.

On a bright Saturday morning, more than 300 of Bush`s Pioneers and Rangers eschewed the links to gather in a windowless conference room. Sipping imported mineral water and coffee, Wall Street mingled with Texas.

A Post reporter walked into the session, which the campaign described later as an event closed to the media. The speakers "were under the belief that they were speaking privately with our contributors," campaign communications director Nicolle Devenish said.

There they learned that the Rangers would soon lose their top status, just as the Pioneers had before them. Raising $200,000 was a starting point, they were told. But to qualify as a "Super Ranger," they would have to raise an additional $300,000 for the Republican National Committee, where the individual contribution limit is $25,000.

"The name of the game is maxing out the dollars," Oliver told the gathering.

As the Super Ranger notion was unveiled, attendees shifted in their seats. Some looked up eagerly, but others demurred. "The rest of us, who don`t have members or clients with deep enough pockets to come up with $25,000 said, `Oh, [expletive],` " said one attendee who asked to remain anonymous.

To reach the new goals, Travis Thomas, the Bush-Cheney finance director, explained to the gathered Rangers and Pioneers how they could hold fundraisers in their homes featuring an appearance by the president that would bring in $2 million to $3 million in bundled contributions. Private homes, he pointed out, are more comfortable for the president.

And, Thomas added, "If it is in a private residence, it can be closed to the press."

Staff writer Mike Allen and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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A militiaman armed with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher patrols Sadr City, a predominantly Shiite slum in Baghdad where the U.S. military said two soldiers and 14 insurgents were killed in fighting overnight Friday.
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Divided Iraqi South Posing New Obstacles
Shiite Foes of Militia Fail to Stem Uprising

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 15 -- The battle for Iraq`s Shiite-populated south that engaged U.S. forces again Saturday is presenting U.S. officials with a more serious political challenge than the insurgency`s still potent strongholds farther north, U.S. officials and Iraqi political leaders say.

In heavy fighting over the past week, U.S. forces have inflicted substantial casualties on the Shiite Muslim militia loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a breakaway cleric wanted by U.S. forces on murder charges. U.S. and British troops battled Sadr`s forces Saturday in four southern cities, including new fighting in Amarah near the Iranian border. Firefights between U.S. forces and insurgents in the east Baghdad slum named for Sadr`s assassinated father left 14 insurgents and two U.S. soldiers dead overnight Friday.

The fighting reflects the U.S. strategy of squeezing Sadr militarily while allowing a group of local Shiite leaders to broker a deal, much as Sunni Muslim leaders did this month in the western city of Fallujah. The Americans contend that Sadr is deeply unpopular among many Shiites in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, where his men are ruining the local economy and have spurred many residents to flee the growing violence.

But the same divisions among Shiites that U.S. officials had hoped would help persuade Sadr to end his insurrection are among the principal reasons that a negotiated solution has not emerged. The deal reached in Fallujah, U.S. officials and Iraqi political leaders say, has little application in the south.

Fallujah has a homogeneous population of Sunnis with strong tribal ties. Sunni clerics who benefited under ousted president Saddam Hussein`s rule have united with former officials from Hussein`s Baath Party in support of the insurrection. By contrast, the Shiite south is divided by rival religious loyalties.

The pudgy, bearded son of a revered cleric, Sadr has used his thousands-strong militia, known as the Mahdi Army, for political leverage within a Shiite hierarchy that has long considered him a brash upstart.

Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, deputy commander of the 1st Armored Division responsible for Karbala and Najaf, said Sadr "is attempting to gain a power base and disrupt the momentum that is leading Iraq toward a representative government."

"He believes that he needed to form a following -- a militia, in this case -- that is geared toward intimidating those who are moderate," Hertling said. "We see those joining the Moqtada militia are mostly disenfranchised, mostly unemployed younger people who are looking for leadership, looking for money and looking to fight."

Sadr was a vocal opponent of the U.S.-led occupation from the outset, and his message erupted into an armed uprising in March after U.S. officials closed his newspaper, al-Hawza, for printing articles that they said incited violence. Soon afterward, U.S. officials announced a warrant for Sadr`s arrest in connection with the April 2003 killing of Abdel-Majid Khoei, a moderate cleric and potential rival who had returned from exile in Britain.

As the target of a murder charge by the occupation and the leader of a militia battling occupation forces, Sadr has become, for many, a symbol of Islamic resistance to the occupation. The insurgency he has inspired has spread to new cities and gained momentum in parts of Baghdad.

"The occupation is my enemy, and they are occupying my holy city," Sadr said in an interview Saturday with the al-Arabiya satellite channel. "There is no other alternative but for us to defend the city."

Shiite leaders say Sadr`s growing stature and the divisions it is causing among Shiites could turn him into a political power broker in Iraq`s next government.

During a meeting of mainstream Shiite tribal, political and religious leaders this month, several participants suggested that Sadr be given a role in the interim government scheduled to assume limited political authority from the Americans on June 30. Even the idea represents a sharp shift in Sadr`s political standing among the Shiite establishment.

"If we had this situation in other parts of Iraq, it would be a kind of civil war," said Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a senior leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a prominent Shiite political party. "We are in a large discussion right now about the new government and who might be a part of it."

Since late March, Sadr has been in Najaf and the nearby city of Kufa, taking refuge among the holiest shrines in Shiite Islam. His Mahdi Army has fired on U.S. forces from inside shrines and mosques there and in Karbala, according to military spokesmen.

The fighting has spurred many residents of those cities to flee in increasing numbers. Many who have stayed are angry not only at the effect the violence has had on the local economy but by the peril it places on the Shiite shrines. Anti-Sadr demonstrations have sprung up -- and been broken up by the Mahdi Army.

The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq also has a presence in Najaf and an armed wing, known as the Badr Brigades. Sadr has warned the council`s militia not to be drawn into a fight against him and said Saturday that forming a local brigade including his men was a requirement for any political settlement.

"The Mahdi Army is composed of Iraqis, so it`s normal that some of its men will join the new brigade, as long as the force is independent and the occupation forces don`t interfere in forming it," said Qays Khazali, Sadr`s spokesman in Najaf. "I think people will accept this idea. I talk to people here and I see they like the idea. It`s a lot better to solve the problem in this way."

U.S. military officials have suggested publicly that once the Mahdi Army has disbanded, its members could join such a force, even though they are avowed enemies of the occupation. But Khazali said the United States has rejected the idea, and negotiations over whether it could be formed have stopped for the moment.

"Najaf has political stakeholders, tribal sheiks and a very organized moderate religious element," Hertling said in downplaying the possibility of forming the brigade. He said sending in a battalion of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, one of several security forces being assembled and trained by the Americans, would "better address the requirements needed in this situation."

The improvised agreement that ended the Marines` month-long siege of Fallujah established a local militia to patrol the city, led by Iraqi generals who served under Hussein. But while bringing a measure of peace to the city, the Fallujah Brigade also embittered many Iraqis and some inside the U.S. occupation authority for the message it seemed to send. Shiites, in particular, were stunned by the sight of Hussein`s former generals in olive-green uniforms wielding power a year after U.S. officials dissolved the army.

There are also signs that it may not be providing the security its leaders promised. At least two Marines were killed last week near Fallujah in roadside ambushes.

Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this article.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Christian Missionaries Battle For Hearts and Minds in Iraq

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A24

There`s no sign on the rickety white storefront in central Baghdad, but for Iraqis who live nearby it is already a familiar landmark. Word spread quickly that those who enter the 1,500-square-foot expanse full of clothes and toiletries donated from overseas can expect to find bargains -- as well as answers to their questions about faith from the Christian staffers manning the counters.

"We want to be respectful to the local religion," said the Rev. Sekyu Chang, 45, of Light Global Mission Church in Vienna, who helped set up the charity thrift store. "There is nothing outwardly Christian about the shop, but most of the workers are Christian. They are going to share their personal faith when there are occasions."

With a population estimated to be more than 95 percent Muslim and outbreaks of violence in the name of Islam occurring on an almost daily basis, Iraq is not a place where Christian missionaries can openly evangelize on street corners, hold community prayer meetings or hand out stacks of Bibles. Many say they entered the country as businessmen or aid workers, roles that let them establish relationships with Iraqis about something other than religion.

Over the past year, Christian aid groups have played a significant, if unofficial, role in the reconstruction, helping with various projects: repairing water purification facilities, building a book-bag factory to create employment and holding classes to teach people English. And some have drawn criticism that they endanger the lives of secular aid workers and the military because insurgents may associate Christianity with Western domination, or because they disguise their intentions.

Even as the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and large numbers of contractors have pulled out of Iraq due to escalating violence, many Christian groups have chosen to remain.

Some call it bravery, others naiveté. More than a few of the missionaries say their willingness to stay the course is about faith. Volunteer Doug Wells, who went to Iraq this winter, for example, told a Christian newsletter that God led him out of some "sticky situations" that showed "us His faithfulness."

In sermons at mosques and in proclamations in newspapers, many Islamic leaders say Iraqis should welcome the assistance of the Christian aid groups. At the same time they have called for Christians to be banned from proselytizing in Iraq -- as they are in many other Middle Eastern countries. They say they remain suspicious that some aid workers have other motives, both religious and political.

"There is no objection to the work of Christian organizations if they are not backed up by the West. There is a condition to their work here, which is to bring aid to Iraqis and help them financially only if they are not politically supported by U.S., Britain or Israel," said Fuad Turfi, a spokesman for Moqtada Sadr, the 30-year-old Shiite Muslim cleric who in recent weeks has unleashed a violent uprising against the U.S. occupation.

As June 30, the planned date of the turnover of limited authority to Iraqis, draws closer, some missionaries worry that they will be kicked out of the country by more-conservative Islamic leaders.

Until recently, Christian groups in Iraq have operated in relative anonymity. But as shootings and kidnappings of foreigners have multiplied in recent weeks, their presence has become a source of tension in efforts to stabilize the country. Politically, the work of missionaries has been difficult to explain, with insurgents trying to characterize the violence as part of a holy war between Muslims and foreign Christians and U.S. authorities asserting it has nothing to do with religion. Practically, the occupation has had to scramble to rescue missionaries who have been attacked.

In February, four American pastors were traveling in a taxi near the capital when gunmen opened fire, killing one of them. In March, five Southern Baptist missionaries were ambushed in the north; four died and the other was seriously wounded. And in April, eight South Korean ministers who had just entered Iraq from Jordan were kidnapped. Although they were released unharmed, their abduction prompted the Korean government to evacuate all but a few of their compatriots.

The Rev. David Davis, 53, of Grace Bible Baptist Church in Vernon, Conn., was among the four pastors ambushed in February on the road from Babylon to Baghdad. A friend died in the seat in front of him, and he was shot in the left shoulder. Still, Davis, who was in Iraq to open a new church, believes that most Muslim Iraqis harbor no hostilities toward foreign Christians. He stayed on after the attack, performing a baptism a few days later. And though home now, he said he is eager to return.

"I believe Christianity is the one true way. I am willing to [preach] the gospel anywhere I can," Davis said.

Saddam Hussein`s Iraq was largely a secular state, and while Christians were allowed to worship freely, there were only a handful of churches. When the war ended, however, the country was flooded with foreign missionaries, whom some estimate to number in the thousands.

They bought houses and hoisted crosses on the facades, opening up what is estimated to be eight to a dozen new churches. Others set up projects to help rebuild Iraq. In the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, Christian aid workers started a soccer team. In the northern city of Mosul, they built bathrooms in schools. All around Iraq, they gave out food boxes.

Chang traveled to Baghdad last June with several others from his Northern Virginia church, which is affiliated with the Richmond-based Southern Baptist Convention. The goal, as he put it, was "to share the gospel with Iraqi people."

When he arrived, however, Chang concluded his mission should be more humanitarian than religious. After speaking with Iraqis, he saw how closely people associated colonialism with missionaries, and he learned how angry some people were about comments Christian leaders in the United States had made about Islam and violence. Chang didn`t want to appear to insult his new friends by aggressively proselytizing.

So he joined representatives from about a dozen Korean churches and aid organizations from all over the world, raised $300,000, and decided to use the money to open a store they called the Oasis of Mercy. It would be stocked with donated goods, and it would offer basic items at rock-bottom prices in the name of helping poor Iraqis.

Officially, the thrift store would be non-religious. There would be no pictures of Jesus on the walls, no evangelical pamphlets. But Chang knew many of those who had volunteered to help with the venture were involved only because they were interested in speaking about Christianity with Iraqis. The workers would be able to share their stories, but in a discreet way.

After months of preparations, the store hopes to hold its grand opening in a few weeks.

Mark Kelly, a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention`s International Mission Board, which has sent numerous representatives to Iraq, said that while Christian aid workers have tried to keep a low profile, they have been honest about who funded the programs. When they distributed food, for instance, they made sure to get the support of local mosques` leaders.

They also made sure recipients were aware it came from "Christians in America."

"While there may be some who predict that that`s going to cause a problem, in the real world people who are hungry are grateful that other people are generous enough to send food. All our projects are done as relief efforts and not evangelistic projects," Kelly said.

As Hal Newell, from Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., went door to door in Baghdad in late October handing out coupons for food baskets, he recalled recently, he always introduced himself this way: "Hi, I`m Hal and I`m from America. I represent the Baptist Church."

Newell, 56, the owner of an engraving company, said most everyone was curious and would invite him in for tea. Many told him about their suffering under Saddam Hussein, and afterward he would ask, without mentioning to which god, whether he could say a prayer for them.

He ran into possible trouble only once, he said, when he was helping distribute the food in a mosque, and restless crowds began to gather at the gates. One of his five co-workers worried there would be riots. So the aid workers began to belt out "Amazing Grace" and ran for their car. Their guard shot a few rounds from his AK-47 into the air.

Newell believes the Iraqis knew he was singing a Christian song, but didn`t find it disrespectful because the song expressed reverence toward the "Lord Jesus Christ or whoever god you serve, whether it`s Allah or whoever."

The capture of the South Korean ministers became a flashpoint for the debate over the role of Christian aid workers in postwar Iraq.

After foreign service representatives in Seoul, Amman and Baghdad begged them not to come, they still entered what was essentially a war zone. They told their captors they were doctors and nurses on a humanitarian mission, even demonstrating a therapeutic sports massage on the insurgents. In reality, they were in Iraq for the opening of a missionary school.

Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, associate professor of world Christianity at the Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, said some missionaries compound the tensions in Iraq because they enter with a sense of "victory and triumph."

"They come with here`s an opportunity for Christianity to grow and because the U.S. is the occupier and the U.S. is a Christian country. That`s pure ignorance," Orlandi said.

"The word `missionary` carries with it a lot of baggage. It`s tainted with notions of Western hegemony and the seeming need to establish political, economic and religious domination," said Jonathan Bonk, editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, which publishes scholarly articles on the topic.

Salah Aboud, who owns a grocery store in Baghdad and is Muslim, accuses Christian groups of offering help in an attempt to buy people`s religion.

"They are not humanitarian aid workers. They came here for business. They are trying to gain people using money so that they`ll win them to their side," said Aboud, 49.

Other Iraqis, however, have accepted the assistance with gratitude and associate the presence of Christian missionaries with democracy and freedom of choice.

Zainab Badran, 36, a pharmacist, said one missionary gave him a Bible.

Although he has no intention of converting from Islam to Christianity, he read it out of curiosity and said it was nice to learn about other religions. He believes Christian aid workers should be more open about their aims.

"I can hear their thoughts and this won`t harm me," he said. "I can accept them or refuse."

Staff researcher Richard Drezen in New York and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Hoda Ahmed Lazim in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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What Must Come Next

By John McCain and Joe Lieberman

Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page B07

The photos and reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib have understandably commanded America`s attention. The soldiers who committed these atrocities have marred the reputation of our country and have made the lives of American personnel in Iraq more dangerous and difficult. Their crimes have led some observers to question our presence in Iraq and the justness of our cause.

Yet we will have exponentially magnified the mistakes made in Abu Ghraib if we allow these abuses to destroy our goal of a free and democratic Iraq. Success in Iraq remains possible, and it is more necessary now than ever. While the path to success must involve a number of steps, a few are absolutely critical. We have a security problem and a political problem, and we need solutions for both.

On the security side, we must begin with an immediate and significant increase in our troop levels. We should sharply increase the number of troops, including Marines and Special Operations forces, to conduct offensive operations, and add other types of forces, including linguists, intelligence officers and civil affairs officers. Relying solely on reservists, guardsmen, extended rotations and troops in the country to fill the security gap will not be sufficient. The Pentagon should strongly consider redeploying large numbers of troops from our bases in the United States, Europe, Japan and elsewhere. They are needed in the short to medium terms to stabilize key areas, turn the tide against the insurgents and return a sense of tangible authority to the country.

We will also continue to see instability increase as long as we make security pledges that are left unfilled. Our retreat from Fallujah has emboldened the insurgents and convinced some Iraqis that America lacks the will or the means to enforce its demands. While it is difficult to criticize tactical decisions from Washington, our personnel in Iraq must show the determination to keep their promises. Our troops can display full resolve only by exercising the military action necessary to back up the words of political authorities. Part of this determination must mean a quick end to all independent militias in Iraq. The country will never be stable as long as bands of armed fighters roam. The coalition authorities should fold into the new Iraqi army the vetted members of some militias, and the rest must face a choice: Disarm and disband or be forced to do so.

While we pursue a revamped security strategy, we also need to deal anew with the political situation in Iraq. With no one yet identified to lead Iraq after the transfer of sovereignty, and with some questioning even the date for the handover, there is a dangerous political vacuum. This has resulted in uncertainty and instability, and an increasing sense of "us versus them," in which the "them" is the coalition. We need to reduce the uncertainty as soon as possible by clearly announcing now our plan for events after June 30, beginning with a commitment to the turnover date. Were we to decide now that the United States will continue the occupation beyond June 30, we would feed the suspicions of all those who believe that we are in Iraq for conquest rather than liberation.

The June 30 handover must mean more than the transfer of policymaking power from Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters to the new U.S. Embassy. It must also mean something more than handing power -- whether over government ministries or military forces -- back to the Baathists from whom we rightly wrested it a year ago. The handover should represent a short-term transfer of sovereignty to a caretaker government that will quickly pave the way for elections. No Iraqi government can derive legitimacy simply through selection by the United Nations or the United States. Real legitimacy is derived only from the free choice of the Iraqi people.

For this reason, we should strongly consider moving up the date of the planned elections from January to this fall. Iraqis currently have little opportunity to turn their political desires into government decisions, and Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish Iraqis all fear losing out in a political process dominated by outsiders. In this atmosphere, some have turned to violence, and more may follow. The political focus in Iraq should revolve around waging and winning elections, not around currying favor with or opposing the United Nations and the United States. Accordingly, the United States and the United Nations should move ahead as quickly as possible with a full plan for democratic elections, one that will ensure that Iraqi liberals can compete fairly in local constituencies with Islamists organized nationally.

In Iraq our national security interests and our national values converge. Iraq is the test of a generation, for America and for our role in the world. We will endure setbacks, as the past weeks have painfully illustrated. But our focus must remain on our ultimate objective: helping to fashion a responsible and representative Iraqi government, with legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis and the world. We do not have the luxury of time.

John McCain is a Republican senator from Arizona. Joe Lieberman is a Democratic senator from Connecticut.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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THE WORLD
Abuse Brings Deaths of Captives Into Focus
At least 18 U.S. detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan died from apparent ill treatment or shootings.
By Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writer

May 16, 2004

WASHINGTON — An Afghan captive froze to death in a CIA-run lockup in Kabul in 2002 after he was doused with water and shackled overnight to a wall. The prisoner died, U.S. intelligence sources said, after Afghan guards apparently sought to punish him for being unruly.

At Iraq`s Camp Bucca, a detainee was shot through the chest last year while throwing rocks at a guard tower. The Army ruled the killing a "justifiable shooting," but a Red Cross team that witnessed the incident at the facility in southern Iraq concluded that "at no point" did the prisoner pose a serious threat to guards.

At Camp Cropper, near Baghdad`s airport, detainee 7166 was shot and killed in June as he tried to crawl under a barbed-wire fence in an escape attempt that commanders had known was being planned a day earlier.

All were deaths in U.S. custody, incidents and individuals largely ignored by outsiders at the time. Now they have emerged from the thicket of military, criminal and congressional investigations into abuse of U.S. captives overseas triggered by mistreatment of detainees at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

The Times has identified at least 18 cases of deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan beginning in 2002 from apparent mistreatment or shootings during prison unrest and other incidents. At least 14 occurred in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. The CIA has been connected by investigators, witnesses or other sources to as many as five of the deaths.

Independent human rights groups insist that more have died than the military has disclosed. They say that the military has refused to release sufficient information and that the investigations so far have provided too little accountability. Apparently, only one low-ranking soldier has been tried and convicted for shooting an unarmed prisoner. He was demoted to private and discharged from the Army.

Until the prison abuse scandal erupted two weeks ago, the Pentagon had refused to say who was being held, where, for how long or on what charges, if any. Defense officials had mostly barred reporters, lawyers and human rights groups from entering America`s growing network of foreign detention camps and prisons. The International Committee of the Red Cross, however, did visit.

Faced with the uproar, Army Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder told a Senate hearing this month that the military has investigated 25 deaths in custody over the last 18 months. He attributed 12 deaths to natural causes, such as heart attack or illness, or to undetermined factors because relatives had removed the bodies for burial.

Ryder said investigations into 10 other deaths were ongoing, and three more deaths — including two in Iraq and one involving civilian contractors — had been classified as homicides.

Pentagon officials Friday declined to provide specifics about deaths in detention. Thus, some confusion remains about precisely which cases are included on Ryder`s list.

Seeking Accountability

Amnesty International and other human rights groups insist that the military`s list is incomplete. At a minimum, they say, the three homicides cited by Ryder do not include an Afghan named Mullah Habibullah and a taxi driver named Dilawar who died after they were interrogated at the Bagram air base and detention camp north of Kabul, the Afghan capital, in December 2002.

Army pathologists ruled both cases homicides due to "blunt force injuries" to the legs, military spokesmen said previously. Amnesty International alleged that both men were abused in a second-floor interrogation area of the Bagram detention facility. So far, no one has been publicly charged or reprimanded, and a Pentagon spokesman said Friday that both cases are being investigated.

"There`s been no public accounting of these two cases," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "That sends the signal that the Bush administration is not terribly serious about upholding international law."

The previously undisclosed death of the Afghan who died of hypothermia predates Ryder`s list. U.S. intelligence sources said he died after he was soaked with water and left in an exposed cell on a night when temperatures plummeted.

The Afghan guards "hosed him down and chained him to a wall and it was cold in there and dank, and when they came back in the morning, he had died," said one source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The sources said it wasn`t clear if CIA personnel or contract employees had directed, encouraged or were aware of the mistreatment. But a U.S. official said Friday that the CIA had referred the case to the Justice Department, which decided not to prosecute.

The CIA`s inspector-general is investigating three other deaths and has referred them to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Only one of the three is known to be among the homicide cases Ryder cited.

In the first case, U.S. intelligence officials said a former Afghan local military commander named Abdul Wali died during interrogation by a CIA retiree who had been rehired as a private contractor. Wali died at a U.S. facility near Asadabad in Kunar province three days after his June 18 capture, officials said.

The second CIA case concerns Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abid Hamad Mahalawi, who collapsed and died after alleged mistreatment during interrogation near the western Iraqi city of Qaim on Nov. 26. A U.S. intelligence official said CIA operatives had questioned Mahalawi but were not present when he died.

U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Mahalawi, a former Republican Guard commander, played a role in financing the insurgency in Iraq.

Interrogation Death

Another Iraqi, identified as Manadal Jamaidi, died in November during interrogation by a CIA officer and a contractor translator at Abu Ghraib prison. Sources said that Jamaidi slumped over and died during questioning and that an autopsy indicated that internal injuries were the cause of death. Officials said the case was among the three homicides that Ryder cited.

Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department had received formal referrals from the CIA requesting criminal investigations into the treatment of detainees by "CIA-associated personnel." But Sierra declined to say how many cases had been referred or how many involved CIA employees as opposed to private contractors.

The CIA has not said whether it was involved in the death of an Iraqi man who appeared in a grisly photograph showing his face bruised and his torso packed in ice in a black body bag. One of the military policemen accused of misconduct in the abuses at Abu Ghraib wrote in a diary that the CIA was involved in the man`s death.

The Pentagon has provided few specifics of deaths that Ryder said are still under investigation. But sketchy details of some cases were cited in a confidential report by the Red Cross in February and in a classified military report on prison facilities in Iraq by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba.

The Red Cross reported that last year its monitors "collected allegations of deaths as a result of harsh internment conditions, ill treatment, lack of medical attention or the combination thereof," especially at a U.S. holding facility in the former Saddam Hussein Islamic School in Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

Red Cross officials in Washington and Geneva declined to provide further specifics. A Pentagon spokesman said he was unaware of the Red Cross allegations.

The Pentagon has provided some information on cases in which U.S. forces were accused of wrongdoing. Last month, two Marines were ordered to face general court-martial proceedings at California`s Camp Pendleton for the death of Nagem Sadoon Hatab, an Iraqi captive who died of a crushed throat at a detention camp near the southern city of Nasiriya on June 5. Charges include dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, and assault.

In another case, the Army issued a letter of reprimand against a 4th Infantry Division battalion commander whose troops allegedly killed an Iraqi detainee Jan. 4 by forcing him and another man to jump off a bridge near the town of Samarra, according to a defense official. The case remains under investigation.

On March 29, a Marine at an undisclosed location shot and killed an Iraqi prisoner who reportedly tried to take his weapon. Officials said they determined that the Marine acted in self-defense and the shooting was not investigated as a crime, according to an Associated Press report.

Many of the deaths occurred during escape attempts. Eight Iraqi detainees were shot to death by U.S. guards during prison unrest, escapes or other incidents last year in Iraq, Red Cross and military reports show.

In April 2003, Red Cross monitors said a soldier at Camp Bucca opened fire "in a bid to rescue" a guard who allegedly was threatened by a prisoner of war "armed with a stick." One POW was injured and another, whose name was not released, was killed.

On June 12, detainee 7166 — a Baghdad man identified by the Red Cross as Akheel Abd Al Hussein — was shot and killed after he and several others tried to escape from a holding area at Camp Cropper by crawling under a barbed-wire fence about 3 a.m. An Army investigation deemed the case a "justifiable homicide." Commanders knew about the planned escape attempt a day in advance, Taguba reported.

At 4 p.m. the next day, U.S. guards in three watchtowers at Abu Ghraib prison opened fire when 30 to 40 detainees "rioted" and pelted military police with rocks, injuring at least one guard, according to the Taguba report. The tower guards wounded seven detainees and killed 22-year-old Alaa Jasim Hassan, who was reportedly inside his tent. Camp authorities concluded that the shooting was justified.

On Sept. 22, a military guard on a watchtower at Camp Bucca shot a detainee throwing stones. A military investigation concluded that the detainee "was the victim of a justifiable shooting." But a Red Cross delegate and an interpreter, who witnessed the incident, reported that "at no point" did the victim "appear to pose a serious threat to the life or security of the guards, who could have responded to the situation with less brutal measures. The shooting showed a clear disregard for human life and security" of the detainees.

What appears to be a similar case produced the only known conviction for a death in custody. A U.S. soldier was court-martialed and convicted of using excessive force for shooting an Iraqi captive who threw a rock at a "forward operating base," a defense official said. The soldier was reduced to the rank of private and discharged from the Army.

The worst shooting occurred in the early afternoon of Nov. 24 at Abu Ghraib, when a riot erupted in the so-called Ganci compound, injuring nine U.S. soldiers. The Taguba report said three detainees were killed.

Times staff writers Greg Miller, John Hendren and Richard B. Schmitt contributed to this report.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Iraqi Silence Indicts U.S. Occupiers
A lack of surprise at the prison abuse scandal is a symptom of the people`s discontent, experts say.
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer

May 16, 2004

BAGHDAD — Amid the angry condemnations across America, Europe and much of the Arab world over the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, Iraqi voices have been, by and large, muted.

But the generally subdued response among mainstream Iraqis is a harsh indictment in its own right, Iraqi pollsters and outside experts say. To many Iraqis, the abuse of prisoners came as no surprise. To hear them tell it, the experience of the American occupation was already one of degradation, disappointment and discomfort, and despite months of steady complaints, few U.S. officials seemed to listen.

Saddoun Dulaimi, a pollster whose firm works with a number of U.S. contractors, is among those who said he forwarded information about mistaken arrests by American troops to the U.S.-led occupation authority.

"But I received no response," he said.

The widespread and increasing resentment toward the U.S. is reflected in polling results over the last several months. Support for the U.S. presence here eroded dramatically well before photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses came to light, according to two reputable polling organizations, the Iraqi Center for Research and Strategic Studies and the Independent Institute for Research and Civil Society Studies.

Between October and April, the percentage of Iraqis viewing the United States as an occupier rather than a liberator or peacekeeper more than doubled — from 43% to 88%, according to Dulaimi`s Center for Research. The Independent Institute had almost identical numbers for the same question.

Similarly, the percentage of Iraqis wanting the U.S. troops to immediately leave the country rose from 17% in October to 57% in April, according to the Center for Research. Both polls rely on samples of between 1,200 and 1,600 people in at least five cities around the country. Interviews are done in person by Iraqi surveyors.

In what appears to be a closely related opinion shift, public support has risen dramatically for cleric Muqtada Sadr, who has been trying to rally a populist uprising against the U.S. occupation. Three months ago, 2% to 3% of Iraqis said they supported or strongly supported him; since his militia`s confrontations with the U.S., more than 50% of those polled either somewhat support or strongly support him, according to the Center for Research.

"We must pay attention to these numbers," said Dulaimi. "Why have they happened? Because the Iraqi people have experienced a series of humiliations, so they are not surprised by what happened at Abu Ghraib."

To be sure, there have been explicit responses in Iraq to the prisoner abuse scandal. A cleric close to Sadr invoked the scandal last week when offering a monetary reward for the killing or capture of American soldiers. And the captors of American civilian contractor Nicholas Berg claimed on videotape that they were beheading him to avenge the abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

But interviews with numerous Iraqis appear to confirm Dulaimi`s view that accumulated individual humiliations over several months, rather than the recent Abu Ghraib publicity, have been a major cause of growing antipathy toward the occupation.

Jabar Jawal`s case is typical. On June 18, a U.S. soldier helping to supervise the distribution of cooking gasoline was assassinated by a gunman who shot him in the back of the head at point-blank range. Within minutes, U.S. troops hunting the killer were swarming the nearby neighborhood where Jawal, a day laborer, lived.

Soldiers stormed through the dirt streets, kicking open doors.

Jawal and his extended family of 12 was home when the soldiers arrived. They ordered the women brought outside and pulled apart the house, dumping the contents of drawers on the floor, forcing open a dowry chest and even slicing some pillows. "I have no idea what they are looking for," Jawal screamed in Arabic as the soldiers left his house. He looked down at his elderly mother who was shaking and set his jaw in fury. "My mother is disabled, why did they make me take her out of the house?"

After a fruitless search, the soldiers learned from compatriots that the assailant had fled in a different direction. The soldiers rushed away without a word of apology or explanation.

The recurrence of such episodes was amplified by a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross this year that documented a wide range of humiliation and abuse by U.S. forces. The report noted that "ill-treatment during capture was frequent" and that it often included "pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles." The report also noted that, by U.S. officials` own admission, between 70% and 90% of tens of thousands of detentions turned out to be erroneous.

Those Iraqis who experienced arbitrary detention and torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein are more measured in their criticism of U.S. troops` conduct, acknowledging that Hussein`s abuses were far worse than those of the U.S. troops. But even such people often point out that the abuses suffered in the last year are particularly painful because they have been committed by an alien occupier. Others shrug and say that the comparison with Hussein merely highlights that U.S. soldiers are in the same league as Hussein`s enforcers.



The U.S. military, whose soldiers have been under escalating attack since shortly after toppling the Hussein regime, may well have had ample reason for many of their "offensive missions" — that is, aggressively raiding particular homes and arresting some people based on uncertain evidence.

Moreover, military officials repeatedly describe the abuses at Abu Ghraib as the misdeeds of a tiny number of soldiers that do not reflect most troops` conduct either in prisons or elsewhere.

"There are 135,000 other soldiers that are doing the right thing every day," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq.

But whatever the justifications of the military have been, its frequently tough practices and the perception among Iraqis that they are often gratuitous have taken a serious toll on U.S. standing.

"The Iraqis were already experiencing disappointment and humiliation from the Americans, and it has increased throughout the Americans` time here, so ultimately, when Abu Ghraib happened, for us it was part of a continuum," said Sheik Hassan Tuaima, a soft-spoken Shiite cleric who teaches the Koran at a popular Baghdad seminary.

Tuaima said that three weeks ago, the U.S. military raided a house just across the street from him, where an old man lived with his family. He said the soldiers kicked the man, who fell unconscious, and then arrested two of his sons. Two days later, the military released the sons and offered an apology to the elderly man, who had been hospitalized.

Although the story could not be independently verified, it is of a piece with many similar stories. Though most cases do not involve serious physical abuse, almost all result in some sense of humiliation.

Nissa Nisan, 54, said his family was fast asleep at 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 20 when at least five U.S. soldiers leaped over the wall surrounding their small home, cut the padlocks off their doors and broke the windows. Other soldiers entered through the roof. Nisan`s account was corroborated by neighbors, and the shattered glass and cut locks were easy to see.

"They put a bag over my head and dragged me and my son outside, tied our hands and made us kneel on the cold pavement. They kept asking me what I knew about the Wahhabis and I kept telling them, `I cannot explain about them because I don`t know anything about their program. I am a Christian,` " said Nisan. Wahhabism is an ultraconservative sect of Sunni Islam. "All the neighbors were watching; they humiliated me in front of my [four] children," he said, his hands shaking and his eyes filled with tears.

After noticing a small, fake Christmas tree still up on the coffee table and a large crucifix hanging on the wall, the soldiers apologized.

"They were looking for house No. 37 and we are No. 27," Nisan said.

Such stories often reverberate through an entire neighborhood, reflecting the phenomenon of "six degrees of separation" within this tightknit society. If one person in a town of 3,000 has his home searched, his son arrested and his wife ordered out of her bed in her nightgown, most townspeople will hear about the incident and are likely to feel almost as insulted as the family that experienced it.

The hostility engendered by these personal encounters with occupation forces appears to have been exacerbated by two other factors: Iraqis` overall sense that the occupation has shown little respect for their country and a deepening frustration over poor living conditions — few jobs, scarce electricity and rampant crime.

"From the beginning of the conflict, the United States and the United Kingdom underestimated the importance of Iraqi nationalism and the importance of treating Iraqis in a respectful way," said Joost Hiltermann, the director of the International Crisis Group`s Jordan office, which also covers Iraq. The Brussels-based ICG is a think tank that does research and reporting on areas of conflict around the world.

"The unwillingness of the U.S. to order a halt to the looting of symbols of the Iraqi nation in which Iraqis had a deep sense of pride, such as the National Museum and the library, as well as dissolving the Iraqi Army, which has been in existence for 83 years and is viewed as a symbol of the nation, not as an arm of Saddam Hussein`s regime — those acts were viewed as very deeply wounding, as acts of humiliation and gratuitous," Hiltermann said.

Resentment of U.S. troops` actions has not been lessened by any perceived improvement in daily life. Many Iraqis interviewed simply denied that the United States had done anything that materially improved their lives. The 2,000-plus schools that the United States describes as having been renovated are said by Iraqis to have been merely repainted; the electricity that U.S. officials boast is now on for three hours at a time is seen by Iraqis as more unstable than it was under Hussein.

While some admit that ridding the country of Hussein is a concrete benefit, the freedoms that followed from that, such as the free press, the ability to protest and the opening to the outside world seem to weigh little in contrast to Iraqis` deep unease about the lack of security and jobs.

"In the beginning, after the Americans arrived, we were living in a state of hope," Tuaima said. "But then month by month we saw how they were behaving and … it has ebbed away."


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Pseudo-Journalists Betray the Public Trust
Deceptively cloaked as journalists, these marketers of opinion are playing a nasty prank on the public, and indeed on journalism itself.
By John S. Carroll
John S. Carroll is editor of the Los Angeles Times. This piece is adapted from a speech he delivered at the University of Oregon earlier this month.

May 16, 2004

One reason I was drawn to my chosen career is its informality. Unlike doctors, lawyers or even jockeys, journalists have no entrance exams, no licenses, no governing board to pass solemn judgment when they transgress. Indeed, it is the constitutional right of every citizen, no matter how ignorant or how depraved, to be a journalist. This wild liberty, this official laxity, is one of journalism`s appeals.

It is also one of its myths. I`ve come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there`s informality and there`s humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.

Consider, for example, recent events at the New York Times. Even before it was discovered that the young reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated several dozen stories, the news staff of the Times was unhappy. Many members felt aggrieved at what they considered a high-handed style of editing. But until Jayson Blair came along, the rumble of discontent remained just that, a low rumble.

When the staff learned that the paper had repeatedly misled its readers, the rumble became something more formidable: an insurrection. The aggrieved party was no longer merely the staff. It was the reader, and that meant the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony. Because the reader had been betrayed, the discontent acquired a moral force that could only be answered by the dismissal of the ranking editors. The Blair scandal was a terrible event, but it also said something very positive about the Times, for it demonstrated beyond question the staff`s commitment to the reader.

Several years ago at the Los Angeles Times, we too had an insurrection. The paper had published a fat edition of its Sunday magazine devoted to the opening of Staples Center. But unknown to its readers — and to the newsroom staff — the paper had formed a secret partnership with Staples, in which the developer helped the newspaper sell ads in the magazine in return for a cut of the proceeds. Thus was the independence of the newspaper compromised — and the reader betrayed.

I was not working at the newspaper at the time, but I`ve heard many accounts of a confrontation in the cafeteria between the staff and the publisher. It was not a civil discussion among respectful colleagues. Several people who told me about it invoked the image of a lynch mob. The Staples episode, too, led to the departure of the newspaper`s top brass.

What does all this say about newspaper ethics? It says that certain beliefs are very deeply held. It says that a newspaper`s duty to the reader is at the core of those beliefs. And it says that those who transgress against the reader will pay dearly. Such commitment, deeply imbedded in newsroom culture, is taken for granted in the so-called traditional media. In newer forms of media, however, it is a foreign language.

All across America, there are offices that resemble newsrooms, and in those offices there are people who resemble journalists, but they are not engaged in journalism. What they do is not journalism because it does not regard the reader — or, in the case of broadcasting, the listener or the viewer — as a master to be served.

In this realm of pseudo-journalism, the audience is regarded as something to be manipulated. And when the audience is misled, no one in the pseudo-newsroom ever offers a peep of protest.

Last Halloween, I was stuck in freeway traffic. Punching buttons on the car radio to alleviate the boredom, I came across a rebroadcast, 65 years after the fact, of Orson Welles` famous dramatization of "The War of the Worlds."

This radio drama portrayed a Martian invasion so realistically that it prompted hysteria. Believing that creatures from Mars were actually invading the town of Grover`s Mill, N.J., listeners ran out into the streets, jammed police switchboards and gathered in churches to pray for deliverance. As I listened to the broadcast, it became obvious why people believed the Martians were at hand. It didn`t sound like fiction; it sounded like journalism. The actors who described the unfolding events at Grover`s Mill had the same stylized cadences and pronunciations as broadcast journalists of the time.

This is how the 23-year-old genius Orson Welles learned that journalism can be faked, and that people will invest their trust in something that sounds like journalism but isn`t.

You may have guessed by now that I`m talking about Fox News. I am, but I am also talking about a broad array of talk shows and websites that have taken on the trappings of journalism but, when studied closely, are not journalism at all. Deceptively cloaked as journalists, these marketers of opinion are playing a nasty Halloween prank on the public, and indeed on journalism itself.

I can offer some eyewitness testimony. Last fall, The Times did something rash. Alone among the media that covered the California recall election, we decided to investigate the character of candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The recall campaign lasted only two months, so we had to hurry in determining whether, as rumored, Schwarzenegger had a habit of mistreating women. It turned out that he did. By the time we nailed the story down, the campaign was almost over, and we had a very tough decision to make: whether to publish the findings a mere five days before the election.

We decided to do so, figuring that choice was better than having to explain lamely to our readers after election day why we had withheld the story. We braced for an avalanche of criticism, and we got it. What we didn`t expect was criticism for things that had never occurred.

Long before we published the story, rumors circulated that we were working on it, and the effort to discredit the newspaper began.

On Fox News, Bill O`Reilly`s program embarked on a campaign to convince its audience that the Los Angeles Times was an unethical outfit that attacked only Republicans and gave Democrats a free ride.

As evidence, O`Reilly said that the paper had overlooked Bill Clinton`s misbehavior in Arkansas. Where, he asked, was the L.A. Times on the so-called Troopergate story? Why hadn`t it sent reporters to Arkansas? How could it justify an investigation of Schwarzenegger`s misbehavior with women and not Clinton`s?

I wasn`t employed in Los Angeles at the time of Troopergate, but I do have a computer, so, unlike Fox News, I was able to learn that the Los Angeles Times actually was in Arkansas. It sent its best reporters there, and it sent them in force. At one point, it had nine reporters in Little Rock. And when two of them wrote the first Troopergate story to appear in any newspaper, they made The Times the leader on that subject. Not a leader, but the leader. Their story would be cited frequently as other newspapers tried to catch up.

The bogus Troopergate accusation on Fox was only the beginning. The worst of the fictions originated with a freelance columnist in Los Angeles who claimed to have the inside story on unethical behavior at The Times. Specifically, she wrote, the paper had completed its Schwarzenegger story long before election day but maliciously held it for two weeks in order to wreak maximum damage.

Now if this were true, I wouldn`t still be here to write about ethics. The reporters and editors involved in the story would have given me the same treatment Jayson Blair`s editors got in New York, and I would no longer be employed. But it wasn`t true. The idea that the newspaper held the story for two weeks was a fabrication. Nothing remotely resembling that ever occurred.

It is instructive to trace the path of this falsehood. Newspapers have always been magnets for crackpots. Hardly a day goes by that we don`t get a complaint from someone whose head has been rewired by the CIA, or who has seen a UFO, or who has a tortured theory as to why the newspaper did or didn`t publish something. I tend to shrug such things off, figuring that it`s unseemly for a large newspaper to quarrel with a reader.

But we live in changed times. Never has falsehood in America had such a large megaphone. Instead of being ignored, the author of the column was booked for repeated appearances on O`Reilly, on MSNBC, and even on the generally trustworthy CNN. The accusation was echoed throughout the talk-show world. The tale of the two-week delay — as false as any words ever penned by Jayson Blair — earned the columnist not infamy but fame. Millions of Americans heard it and no doubt believed it. And why not? It sounded just like journalism.

Let us turn now to a mundane subject: corrections. Like a factory on a river, daily journalism is an industry that produces pollution. Our pollution comes in the form of errors.

America`s river of public discourse — if I may extend this figure of speech — is polluted by our mistakes. A good newspaper cleans up after itself.

Every fact a newspaper publishes goes into a database. So do the errors. A good newspaper corrects those errors and appends the corrections to the original stories, so that the errors are not repeated. Thus we keep the river clean. Last year at the Los Angeles Times, we published 2,759 corrections. Some of you may be shocked that a newspaper could make so many mistakes. Others may be impressed that the paper is so assiduous in correcting itself.

It has now been six months since Fox and the other talk shows told their audiences that The Times did not cover the Troopergate scandal. It has been six months since they accused the newspaper of a journalistic felony by timing its story about Arnold Schwarzenegger. These are simple factual matters, easily provable. Nevertheless, corrections have not been forthcoming.

I`m not happy about this, but at least I know the truth. The deeper offense is against those who don`t — the listeners who credit the "facts" they hear on Fox and the talk shows.

In the larger scheme, these two falsehoods represent two relatively minor discharges of pollution into America`s river of public discourse. I suspect there are many others, and on much more consequential subjects — the war in Iraq, for example.

An interesting study published in October explored public misconceptions about the war in Iraq. One of those misconceptions was that Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction had been found. Another was that links had been proved between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A third was that world opinion favored the idea of the U.S. invading Iraq.

The study did not examine what had actually aired on specific media outlets, but the results spoke for themselves. Among people who primarily watched Fox News, 80% believed one or more of those myths. That`s 25 percentage points higher than the figure for viewers of CNN — and 57 percentage points higher than that for people who got their news from public broadcasting.

How could Fox have left its audience so deeply in the dark? I`m inspired to squeeze one last bit of mileage out of our river metaphor: If Fox News were a factory situated, say, in Minneapolis, it would be trailing a plume of rotting fish all the way to New Orleans.

Some view the difference between the talk shows and traditional journalism in political terms, as a simple quarrel between left and right, between liberal and conservative. Those differences exist, but they`re beside the point.

What we`re seeing is a difference between journalism and pseudo-journalism, between journalism and propaganda. The former seeks earnestly to serve the public. The latter seeks to manipulate it.

It is the netherworld of attack politics that gave us Roger Ailes, the architect of Fox News. Having spent much of his career smearing politicians, he now refers to himself as a journalist, but his bag of tricks remains the same. Over time, I believe, the public will become increasingly aware of the discrepancy between what it`s told by pseudo-journalists and what turns out to be the truth. They may even grow weary of the talk-show persona — the schoolyard bully we all know so well.

Recently this newspaper had the good fortune of winning five Pulitzer prizes. I`m not sure we`re worthy of all that, but we won`t turn them down. I wonder how the news of the awards struck the talk-show fans who know the Los Angeles Times only for its ethical outrages. Surely they must have been scratching their heads over that one.

But they probably didn`t worry about it long. My guess is that they sat back on their sofas and consoled themselves with more soothing thoughts, such as the way President Bush saved America from catastrophe by seizing those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq while the whole world cheered.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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How about a bit of inflation now -- well, why not?
Some pundits aren`t too concerned, but some hit the ceiling
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/16/INGV06KKDV1.DTL

Could a little inflation be a good thing?

After years of recession, the economy is growing, causing prices to rise. But instead of viewing price increases with alarm, the monetary gurus at the Federal Reserve are singing a new tune -- that a touch of inflation isn`t so bad.

The new tolerance for this fiscal bugaboo infuriates inflation hawks, who fault Chairman Alan Greenspan and his pals at the Fed for keeping interest rates at a 46-year low despite economic growth exceeding 4 percent.

"This is not the way a central bank should be operating,`` said Anna Schwartz, an economist with the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research.

But the Fed`s leisurely approach to raising rates has powerful fans among some economists, who believe that mild inflation lubricates the economy by making loans easier to repay.

Their sanguine view is aided by increased global competition, which restrains labor costs, preventing the wage-price spirals that made inflation so feared two decades ago.

"We used to have intense debates about inflation and how you ought to keep it to zero,`` said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist for Wells Fargo & Co. "Now almost everybody, Chairman Greenspan included, thinks that inflation in the range of 1 to 2 percent is a good hedge to make sure you don`t slip into deflation.``

It was partly this prospect of deflation, or falling prices, that prompted the Fed to lower interest rates 13 times after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the dot-com collapse.

Plunging interest rates helped ignite a housing boom, enabling first-time buyers to qualify for loans, while refinancings permitted existing property owners to use their homes like piggy banks.

"Consumers took $200 billion from homes in 2003, and $150 billion in 2002, `` Sohn said. "We basically had money to burn.``

Eventually, the economy heated up, driving the overall consumer price index to 2.3 percent for 2003, up from 1.6 percent in 2002. The index stayed under an annual rate of 2 percent in the first three months of 2004, but prices are so dependent on energy costs -- which rose nearly 15 percent last year -- that the index will probably ebb or flow depending on what happens to crude oil.

Believing that price increases will be mild, the Fed has shifted its target from zero inflation to a condition called "price stability," which allows producers to pass on increases even at the risk of tiny bumps in the price index.

"In a modestly inflationary environment, people who owe money can pay more easily,`` said Malik Crawford, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency that compiles the price index.

Not everyone swallows the Fed`s new line. Independent truck drivers have rallied against fuel prices that threaten their profitability. Builders are getting shocked by raw material costs.

In Berkeley, lumberyard manager David Preston reports that a sheet of plywood that cost $12 last April now sells for twice as much.

As for the idea that global competition will keep prices in check, Gail Hillebrand, finance specialist with Consumers` Union in San Francisco, said if prices rise but wages don`t, working people lose purchasing power. And, she points out, "When prices go up, they rarely go back down.``

Inflation hawks object that when the Fed winks at inflation, it`s like Smokey Bear getting blase about campfires in July.

"The Fed is buying down a little of the credibility it earned in the past, `` said Gregory Hess, an economist with Claremont McKenna College.

The central bank has suggested it has been reluctant to raise rates because the economy has been slow to create jobs. Strong payroll gains in March and April lessen that concern.

Any new signs of inflation will weigh heavily when the Fed`s rate-setting body holds its next scheduled meeting at the end of June.

Meanwhile, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries could be lining up to give the Fed an assist.

In April, Washington Post editor Bob Woodward wrote that Saudi Arabian leaders had promised President Bush they would try to tame oil prices before the November elections. Some subsequent reports painted this as a "deal.``

Woodward played down the conspiracy theories, and Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan said President Bill Clinton and President Jimmy Carter had also asked his nation for pre-election help curbing oil prices.

Last week, the Saudi oil minister asked OPEC to boost its production and drive down prices. Whether that`s proof of collusion between the House of Bush and the House of Saud, or just the invisible hand of the global economy, it should help to cool prices throughout the economy.

Then, if the Fed orders up some inflation, it could well be served mild, and not too spicy.

E-mail Tom Abate at [e-mail].

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Sunday, May 16, 2004
War News for May 16, 2004. draft

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi civilians killed in rocket attack on British camp near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: Explosions reported in central Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, one wounded in roadside bombing in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Eighteen insurgents killed in fighting in Sadr City.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting reported in Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi women working for US coalition assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Home of Iraqi translator bombed in Kut.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi translator assassinated near Mahmoudiyah.


Note to Readers

After reading Sy Hersch’s latest article in the New Yorker, I re-read MG Taguba’s report looking for his findings that either support or disprove Hersch’s allegations that prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib resulted from DoD policy on the coercive interrogation of detainees.

I thought it might be helpful to explain an AR 15-6 report so readers unfamiliar with Army correspondence can digest the findings and recommendations. The mission of an AR 15-6 investigating officer is to establish facts and report them to the commander who appointed him. The appointing commander sets the scope of the investigation and can also direct the investigating officer to make recommendations for corrective action.

The purpose of this analysis is to examine the issue of whether Military Intelligence personnel influenced MP guards to abuse prisoners in pursuit of interrogation operations and whether there are indicators that this policy originated at the DoD level. I’m going to leave out parts of the report that are not germane to these issues.

One of the things that the American media fails to understand is that the scope of MG Taguba’s investigation was limited to the 800th Military Police Brigade and detention operations at Abu Ghraib. He did not investigate Military Intelligence interrogation policies and procedures, but he recommends such an investigation and points an accusing finger directly at specific officers and civilian contractors from the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center.

In the Background portion of the report, MG Taguba explains the circumstances surrounding his appointment as investigating officer (IO) and the scope of his investigation. In a nutshell, on January 19, 2004 the commander of US forces in Iraq, LTG Sanchez, requested that his immediate superior officer, CENTCOM commander GEN Abazaid, appoint a General Officer to investigate alleged prisoner abuse and other issues in the 800th MP Brigade. On January 24, the CENTCOM Chief of Staff directed the commander of Coalition Land Forces Component (CFLCC) to conduct the investigation LTG Sanchez had requested. In turn, the CLFCC commander, LTG McKiernan appointed MG Taguba as AR 15-6 investigating officer.

There are four significant pieces of information contained in this portion of the report.

1. The investigation was ordered by GEN Abazaid, not LTG Sanchez, as has been reported in the press. As commander of CENTCOM, GEN Abazaid reported directly to GEN Myers at JCS and Secretary Rumsfeld at DoD.

2. LTG Sanchez specifically requested an investigating officer in the rank of Major General, indicating that the focus of the investigation would be an officer in the rank of Brigadier General.

3. The scope of the investigation is limited to the 800th MP Brigade.

4. A criminal investigation of prisoner abuse by US Army Criminal Investigation Command was already underway.

Next, MG Taguba reviewed a survey of detention and interrogation operations conducted by MG Geoffrey Miller, entitled “Assessment of DoD Counter-Terrorism, Interrogation and Detention Operations in Iraq. In his report, MG Taguba summarizes MG Miller’s assessment and comments that the detainees at Abu Ghraib are significantly different in their potential intelligence value, and that using the facility guard force to facilitate interrogation operations is both doctrinally unsound and damaging to the smooth operation of the detention facility.

I would like to know more about MG Miller’s report, such as who directed that he conduct the survey and whether his specific recommendation “that CJTF-7 dedicate and train a detention guard force subordinate to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JDIC) that ‘sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees’” was implemented. The answers to both of those questions would indicate whether or not the policy of coercive interrogation was directed from the DoD level.

MG Taguba also reviewed and commented on a comprehensive review of detainee operations throughout the Iraq theater of operations conducted by MG Ryder. While noting that commanders in the 800th MP Brigade were not formally tasked to “set conditions” for interrogation operations, “it is obvious from a review of comprehensive CID interviews of suspects and witnesses this was done at lower levels.”

In the portion of MG Taguba’s report entitled “Preliminary Investigative Actions,” MG Taguba describes his team composition, training, methodology and provides a timeline of investigatory actions.

The “Findings and Recommendations” portion of the report are divided into four parts corresponding to the four specific lines of inquiry MG Taguba was directed to undertake by his appointment orders. Part One addresses prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib; Part Two addresses detainee escapes, riots and accountability; Part Three addresses training, procedures, and command climate within the 800th MP Brigade; and Part Four includes specific findings of fact and recommendations for corrective action.

In his Part One findings, MG Taguba makes clear that COL Pappas, Commander, 205th MI Brigade was the commander of Abu Ghraib from November 19, 2003 to February 6, 2004. In addition to the abuses committed by members of the 800th MP Brigade, MG Taguba found abuses committed by members of the 325th MI Battalion, 205th MI Brigade and the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center. He also found that Military Police guards acted at the request of Military Intelligence officers to “set physical and mental conditions for the favorable interrogation of witnesses.” In paragraph 11 of the Part One findings, Taguba lists five witness statements that directly say the MPs were acting under the direction of Military Intelligence personnel.

In Paragraph 8 of the Part One Recommendations, MG Taguba recommends an inquiry under the provisions of AR 381-10, Procedure 15, to determine the culpability of Military Intelligence personnel.

In Paragraph 9 of the Part Three findings, MG Taguba found that an “ambiguous” command relationship between the 800th MP Brigade and the 205th MI Brigade was “exacerbated” by a Fragmentary Order issued by CJTF-7 on November 19th, 2003. The FRAGO made COL Pappas responsible the operation of Abu Ghraib and placed the MP guards under his command. The FRAGO was rescinded on February 6, 2004.

In Paragraph 18 of the Part Three findings, MG Taguba documents disciplinary actions taken against officers and senior NCOs of the 800th MP Brigade for misconduct. GOMOR is an acronym for General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand. This was really one fucked up unit.

In Paragraph 2 of the Recommendations portion of Part Three, MG Taguba recommends the commander of the 205th MI for a GOMOR for failing to properly supervise his soldiers, failing to ensure those soldiers were trained in Internee Rules of Engagement and failing to ensure they treated internees in accordance with Geneva Convention protections.

In Paragraph 4 of the Recommendations portion of Part Three, MG Taguba recommends relief-for-cause and a GOMOR for the commander of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center for lying to investigators, and for the same command failures as the commander of the 205th MI Brigade.

In Paragraph 11 of the Recommendations portion of Part Three, MG Taguba recommends termination of employment and security clearance for a civilian contract interrogator for lying to investigators about his conduct of interrogations and knowledge of abuses, and encouraging MP guards to abuse prisoners in pursuit of interrogation operations.

In Paragraph 12 of the Recommendations portion of Part Three, MG Taguba recommends termination of employment for a civilian contract interrogator for lying to investigators and not possessing a security clearance.

In Paragraph 13, MG Taguba recommends a Procedure 15 inquiry to determine the extent of Military Intelligence personnel culpability in the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. “I suspect that COL Thomas M. Pappas, LTC Steve L. Jordan, Mr. Steven Stephanowitz, and Mr. John Israel were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib (BCCF) and strongly recommend immediate disciplinary action as described in the preceding paragraphs as well as the initiation of a Procedure 15 Inquiry to determine the full extent of their culpability.” Emphasis in the original.

AR 381-10 is the basic regulation governing US Army intelligence activities. It contains procedures that intelligence personnel must follow to obtain and maintain legal authority to conduct intelligence collection activities, as well as prohibited activities. AR 381-10 implements Federal law regarding intelligence collection as it applies to the US Army. Procedure 15 is an AR 381-10 inquiry, punitive in nature, to determine if any persons assigned to US Army Intelligence violated Federal law in the course of their duties.

Coupled with the Hersch piece, MG Taguba’s AR 15-6 report and a few other news items I’ve posted recently, it seems to me that there was indeed a blanket policy of coercive interrogation applied to the Iraqi detainees in US custody at Abu Ghraib. The media is missing the story here. The scandal isn’t the lower-ranking MP soldiers we’ve seen in the infamous pictures or their piss-poor leadership – and I’m not defending either of them.

The issue is a blanket policy of coercive interrogation. Somebody made the decision to apply that policy through Military Intelligence channels. Presumably, the decision-maker made a conscious cost-benefit analysis, weighing the potential intelligence value of detainees against the damage that would result if word of the abuse that results from such a policy were made public, especially in light of the administration’s War on Terror.

It also appears that the administration, as well as the media, is going to try to pin the blame for this shameful decision on a few low-ranking soldiers and ignore the larger issues of incompetence – not to mention illegality – of policies originating at the highest level in the Defense Department.

The media and Congress should pursue the recommendations MG Taguba made in his report, specifically the Procedure 15 against members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and see where those policies originated in the chain of command.

There is also a report in the Army Times that MG Taguba has been unexpectedly reassigned from his duties at CFLCC to the Pentagon. Big surprise.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:50 AM
Comments (3)

[Joerver]

May 15 / 16, 2004
Taking a Closer Look at the Patriot Act
Where Are You Heading, America?

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

The parallels with 1930s Germany are ominous . . .

Have you read the USA PATRIOT Act right through, and examined every one of its amendments to existing legislation? Has anyone done this, apart from its authors and a few agitated souls in media, academia and some Congressional offices? It is 342 pages long, and went through the legislative process of the United States like a hot knife through butter. Senators voted 98 to 1 for the Act, and the House endorsed it by 357 to 56, but not one of those who approved its terms could possibly have had time to read it and cross-reference its details before endorsing it. This was governance by misplaced trust, because the Patriot Act is potentially the most dangerous piece of legislation in US history.

The Act alters 15 Statutes. The prerogatives, personal authority and dominance of the president of the United States have been extended to include drastic and quasi-imperial powers that threaten the liberties of all Americans.

One reason the Patriot Act is worrying for foreigners is that US military expansionism and economic domination are drastically affecting the entire world. What is decided in Washington today is immensely important for every other capital tomorrow. We are all dependent in one way or another on US policies. Therefore it is appropriate rather than impertinent that the rest of the world should comment on US domestic matters that inevitably impact on every person on the globe.

Another reason for concern is that there are alarming echoes of the 1930s, when a semi-elected and eventually-appointed national figure amassed such power as to be unaccountable to the people of his country, and went on to create mayhem and chaos to the extent that the entire world was shaken to its foundations.

You question or deride the notion that there could be parallels between Bush and Hitler? Very well. But please read the Act before you finally make up your mind.

The Patriot Act is hideously reminiscent of the "Decree for the Protection of Nation and State" that became law in Nazi Germany in February 1933. Its provisions were described by John Toland, in his masterly "Adolf Hitler", as ostensibly innocuous while in practice destroying every reasonable humanitarian right formerly possessed by the German people. There were "Tribunals set up to try enemies of the state", and Toland observed that Hitler made his legislation (the "Enabling Act") "sound moderate and promised to use its emergency powers "only in so far as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures"." Does that sound horribly familiar? And who would decide whether a measure was "vitally necessary"? " Why, the man wielding total power, of course. ("Trust me!" is ever the cry of the incipient dictator.)

So Hitler"s Decree and the Reichstag"s subsequent Enabling Act were never modified or repealed, because they gave the man who was served by a compliant and intensely patriotic legislature the instruments he needed to keep him in total control. This is the reason for Bush"s energetic campaign to prevent the Patriot Act being subject to the existing "sunset clause" whereby most of its more despotic provisions should lapse next year. It was passed by a compliant and intensely patriotic legislature : will it be repealed by one?

It is far from irrelevant that Hitler was appointed Germany"s Chancellor, in legal accord with the Weimar Constitution, by President Hindenburg in 1933, just as Bush was appointed president of the United States by the Supreme Court in December 2000. Shortly after Hitler came to power the chamber housing the Parliament, the Reichstag, was set ablaze. Hitler thought this an excellent opportunity to consolidate his dominance. As Toland records, he declared : "Now we"ll show them. Anyone who stands in our way will be mown down". Nobody died in the Reichstag fire, but it was Hitler"s 9-11, and it spawned the Patriot Act of its era.

Hitler"s sweeping Decree provided that ". . . restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and the right of association, and violations of the privacy of postal, communications, and warrants for house-searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."

The USA Patriot Act also restricts personal liberty "beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed". Every provision of the 1933 Protection of Nation and State Decree, save that of speech and press freedom, is mirrored in the Patriot Act which permits investigators, without having to show "probable cause", to obtain a subpoena to search anyone"s personal details held by their library, bank, credit card and insurance companies " in fact by any organisation or institution that keeps records.

This is Orwell"s Big Brother at work " but the Act is relished by those who advocate more and more state supervision and investigation of the private lives of ordinary US citizens. The Ashcroft Act (as it should be named) is accepted and even welcomed by countless millions of Americans who are kept totally unaware of its terms.

The Senate and House approved colossal extension of state control without any debate of consequence on the dangers to ordinary people posed by this modern version of the "Decree for the Protection of Nation and State". Only a tiny number of citizens have the remotest notion of the Act"s contents, because it is the intention of state-control freaks to avoid explanation and to repeat endlessly the mantras that "The Patriot Act defends our liberty" ; "It`s essential law" ; "It`s a law that is making America safer . . . It doesn`t make any sense to scale it back," all of which comforting slogans were uttered by Bush in the Chocolate Ballroom in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on April 20.

But if an American dares criticize the president in vehement terms, and that fact is recorded in the minutes of a private meeting, then the FBI can place such information on a citizen"s action file. The citizen will never know about this, because the FBI"s subpoena cannot be challenged in court " and the target, the victim, to put it bluntly, is legally kept in ignorance about its ever being served. How"s that for a slam dunk against civil liberties?

It is not only in the Patriot Act and the Decree for Protection of Nation and State that the regime of Hitler and the administration of Bush strike parallels. There is the business of God :

"God heard the nations, scream and sing and shout :

"God punish England! God save the King!"; And God this, and God that, and God the other thing. "Good God!" said God. "I`ve got my work cut out"."

And there is no doubt God has got his work cut out, because some of the people who have quoted Him and assured the world that His support for them is their . . . well . . . God-given right, have been somewhat presumptuous in their approaches to the Deity.

Take Hitler, on February 1, 1933 :

"May God Almighty give our work His blessing, strengthen our purpose, and endow us with wisdom and the trust of our people, for we are fighting not for ourselves but for Germany."

And Bush on January 28, 2003:

"We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. May He guide us now. And may God continue to bless the United States of America."

Or Nazi propaganda master Goebbels on December 31, 1938, when he asked "May God hold His hand of blessing over Germany in the future."

Then there is the serving US army three star general Boykin who announced, without censure by his superiors, that ". . . our spiritual enemy [Islam] will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus". NBC News reported on October 15, 2003 that "Boykin routinely tells audiences that God, not the voters, chose President Bush. [Boykin asks] : "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? I tell you this morning [at a prayer meeting] that he"s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this"." Politicized to his revolving eyeballs, and energized by militant religious fundamentalism, Boykin would have fitted well into Hitler"s scheme of things. And how many followers does he have in the army?

Doctor Johnson observed pithily that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", but he might have added that Christian piety is the first recourse of the western politician with tendencies to totalitarianism. It is, after all, a weapon against which it is difficult to argue in a Christian country in which many millions regard the man at the top as little short of a deity. Remember Britney Spears" loyal declaration that "I think we should just trust the president and go along with whatever he says"? This is what many millions of Americans support, without doubt or question.

Just as Hitler rejoiced to the sound of thousands of happily-duped citizens screaming "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!", so did Bush last week welcome the orchestrated chants of "four more years! four more years!" during his recent political tour, during which the Winona (Wis) Daily News of May 8 reported that : "Hundreds of soldiers from Fort McCoy, all wearing white T-shirts with an American flag on the front, enthusiastically cheered the president, especially his remarks about the war on terror. "I will never relent in bringing justice to our enemies. I will defend the security of America, whatever it takes," Bush said to enthusiastic chants of "Four More Years!""

Who sent these soldiers to cheer for Bush? Were they on official duty at the time of their attendance at a political function? Who provided transport for them to go to the Republican rally? If Bush visits soldiers on duty, as commander-in-chief, then it is proper they should pay respect to him. And if soldiers want to attend a Republican Party supporters" mass meeting as individuals, that is their right as citizens. But when they are publicly and jubilantly highlighted as soldiers by the organizers of a partisan electioneering jamboree it appears that they are being used in a political propaganda operation, just as was the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Mission Accomplished.

According to the La Crosse Tribune: "Servicemen and women from Fort McCoy filled an entire bleacher section. The soldiers, who wore T-shirts with American flags on the front and the wording, "I am an American soldier" on the back, drew lots of applause from the rest of the crowd. When Larry Gatlin of the Gatlin Brothers stopped to let the soldiers sing a line of "America the Beautiful" solo "America, America, God shed His grace on thee" people responded with huge applause.

It"s back to Boykin"s militant God, again, and this time linked with stage-managed, football-game, strident patriotism to get votes for Bush. You might think that the Bush vote-shenanigan was appropriate use of the time of American soldiers (and of US taxpayers" money), but, even if you believe that it was, you may care to bear in mind sinister memories of other places, years ago, when massed ranks of soldiers behaved and chorused in similar fashion.

Have you seen the film of Hitler"s 1934 Nuremberg Rally made by Leni Riefenstahl? (It was a classic of its time. She died last year, aged 101.) The Nazi Storm Troopers wore crisp brown shirts rather than casual white T-shirts, of course, but the same enthusiasm, the same emotional, excited, starry-eyed devotion, was on public display. The army was politicized, and followed the chief politician, the charismatic Adolf Hitler, whose soldiers sang the Horst Wessel Song ("Flag high, ranks closed, the Storm Troopers [Brownshirts] march with silent solid tread"), which is set to the tune of the Christian hymn `My God, How Great Thou Art`.

What goes around, comes around, and reappears in the enthusiastic chorus of "America the Beautiful, God shed His grace on thee" by hundreds of happy-clappy, US soldiers at a party political rally arranged to whip up support for a travelling politician. Sure, they were wearing T-shirts, not Brown Shirts, but just like the young Storm Troopers of seventy years ago they cannot differentiate between a commander-in-chief, in which appointment the incumbent is deserving of deference, and a cheapjack gobbet of political slime who was taking them for a ride in the interests of maintaining power. And why should they? How could they? They are, after all, taught to revere the great leader, and when their superiors encourage them to join in politics, who are they to question them? (Orders are orders . . . )

The American author William Shirer lived in Germany in the 1930s, and produced his definitive and terrifying "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" in 1959. Among other things he traces the policy of Hitler regarding the German army in which "it became obvious that Nazi propaganda was making headway . . . especially among the younger officers." Before Hitler came to power the German defence minister, General Groener, "requested soldiers to refrain from politics and to serve the state aloof from all [political] party strife." No chance, of course, because Hitler knew he could expect absolute obedience from all sections of the military, to whom he promised glory in patriotic defence of the interests of the Nation.

Hitler relied on the discipline that is instilled in all soldiers to ensure that their loyalty centered on him, and him alone. In an uncanny replay of history, the 21st Century US military is being manipulated through its members" instinctive patriotic feelings to believe that it is Bush and only Bush who can save the nation from unknown horrors. The strategy is identical : link patriotism and religiosity with the loyalty of gullible people who are inherently deferential to authority, or have been encouraged to be so, and you have the recipe for power, especially over those who know nothing about the outside world.

Do you think that the average American is well-informed about the world? It appears not to be the case. In fact it seems that the average American citizen has been thoroughly deceived by the very person they have been taught to revere.

It is terrifying that millions of down-to-earth, ordinary, decent people in the US believe that torture of Iraqis is permissible and even admirable, because of "what happened on 9-11". Take, for example, one particular supporter of the woman soldier, Lynndie England, who was photographed grinning at a heap of naked Iraqis. The Independent (UK) reported that the justifier of torture was "Mrs Gainor, [a] good-natured woman [in Lynndie England"s home town], who works for an internet company". She was "even more explicit in her defence of Ms England. She said: "We are not there [in Iraq] for a tea party. We are there because they blew up 5,000 of our people." She was then asked if she believed Iraq was involved in the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, and replied "They were definitely involved . . . "."

In that ignorance we see an eerie and disturbing picture of compliance with authority and unquestioning acceptance of what the powerful ones " the all-knowing, the benevolent, far-sighted Big Brothers of the masses " desire to be seen as a threat to complacency and normality. It is not just that the figure of 5000 is wildly wrong, it is that the statement "[the Iraqis] were definitely involved [in 9-11]" is contrary to demonstrable fact. But the continual linking by Bush, and his supporting propagandists, of 9-11 with "the just war" on Iraq has convinced half of all Americans, including this poor benighted soccer-mom defender of US torture, that the war on Iraq was necessary to punish those responsible for 9-11. Selling of the attractive lie about Iraqi responsibility for terrorism directed against America has become more urgent since it became obvious that other justifications for war, such as tales of "imminent threat" from nuclear weapons, "thousands of tons of chemical agents" and so forth, have been shown as the product of the Bush administration"s group psychosis, which is defined as "severe mental derangement, especially when resulting in delusions and loss of contact with external reality".

Enormous damage has been done. Much of the American public now begs to hear such declarations as "I will defend the security of America, whatever it takes" that Bush makes, time after time, to emotional audiences. A cheerleader for torture such as the seriously psychopathic Senator James Inhofe is considered patriotic when he declares "these prisoners [tortured in Abu Ghraib], they`re murderers, they`re terrorists, they`re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands, and here we`re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals. I am outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human-rights violations while our troops, our heroes, are fighting and dying." Little wonder Mr and Mrs Average American are attracted to the notion that true patriotism and moral decency are exemplified by the grotesque amorality preached by such as he. Inhofe is in need of urgent psychiatric treatment and a dose of morality therapy, but this does not alter the fact that what he says has a great deal of appeal to a surprising number of people.

The willingness of millions of Americans to believe what is comfortable and good and patriotic, in defiance of evidence that what has been taking place in Iraq is uncomfortable and evil and nationally disgraceful, is shown by the supportive yellow ribbons displayed in the hometown of the grinning sadist, Lynndie England. Direct, undeniable evidence of wickedness is ignored, derided or explained away. The facts are not patriotic ; they are not what America should be about ; they are not NICE; therefore they cannot be accepted. The Nazi propaganda chief, Goebbels, was an expert at such manipulation. He and Inhofe are a lovely pair.

It is in the interests of furthering state control over any population that a threat to the nation be presented and described, repeatedly and in simple terms (soundbites ; quick video clips), with the overlying message that the looming menace can be neutralized and "normality" restored only by constant vigilance and action on the part of a kindly and all-seeing " and all-powerful " overlord. Of course it is the responsibility of government to deter, detect and neutralise threats to the citizenry, but it is not the responsibility of government to indulge in willful misrepresentation in order to achieve its aims. Suspension of belief in morality is not usually enforceable. But it can be willingly embraced, just as it was by ordinary, decent people in Nazi Germany, who were encouraged, at first gradually and then by a mighty propaganda campaign, to believe that minor and defenseless nations presented a threat to their personal security and to their country.

Germans lost their freedom, beginning with the Decree for Protection of Nation and State. If the Patriot Act is not repealed, Americans will lose their freedom, too. The parallels with Nazi Germany are too close for comfort.

Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs. He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com

[Joerver]

___________________

[Joerver]

Military Fatalities:US: 784**UK:59**OTHER:50**TOTAL:893

Mai 2005: TOTAL:46

http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

5/16/04 CJTF: Explosion kills One Soldier, Wounds Another
One Task Force Baghdad Soldier died and another was wounded when an improvised explosive device hit their vehicle. The attack took place around 10:30 p.m. May 15.
05/16/04 AP: Strong Explosion Heard in Central Baghdad
A strong explosion was heard in central Baghdad on Sunday, and large pillar of smoke rose near the Green Zone headquarters of the U.S.-run occupation.
05/16/04 AP: Afghanistan - U.S. Soldier Killed in Afghanistan Attack
Suspected insurgents attacked a coalition combat patrol in southern Afghanistan, killing one American soldier and wounding two, the U.S. military said Sunday
05/16/04 IRIBNEWS: Cpl. Jeff Swaser injured in Iraq
He said his son was standing inside the tracked vehicle when the attack came. Shrapnel sliced into his midsection, penetrating his stomach, lungs and spleen.
05/16/04 IRIBNEWS: Two Iraqis killed in Najaf
Two militiamen loyal to Shiite Cleric Moqtada Sadr were killed Sunday in Najaf, a US officer said.
05/16/04 VOA: Insurgents Attack in Basra Kills 3 Civilians
British officials in southern Iraq say insurgents have killed at least three civilians in a failed attempt to hit a military base.
05/16/04 Staugustine: Injured serviceman back from Iraq
Akuyo Muller...had about five surgeries to repair his injuries, including punctured lungs, a shattered left ankle, reconstructive surgery on his small intestine...
05/16/04 DOD: Casualty Identified
Command Sgt. Maj. Edward C. Barnhill, 50, of Shreveport, La., died May 14 in Baghdad, Iraq
05/16/04 DOD: Casualty Identified
Sgt. Brud J. Cronkrite, 22, of Spring Valley, Calif., died May 14 in Baghdad, Iraq
05/15/04 Reuters: Two Hurt in Attack on Coalition HQ in Baghdad
A guerrilla rocket attack on the "Green Zone" compound that houses the headquarters of the U.S.-led administration in Baghdad on Saturday wounded a soldier and a civilian, the U.S. military said.
05/15/04 WCCO: Soldier Injured In Iraq
Private First Class Corey Rector ... helped a wounded soldier to a bunker before realizing he was also injured. He has shrapnel wounds in his legs, neck and back.
05/15/04 Sanfordherald: Retired Gentry Sanford Police Department Dies in Iraq
Jesse Gentry, 61, a veteran of the U.S. Army and law enforcement agencies in Lee and Harnett counties, died Thursday morning in Iraq when a taxi ran into the vehicle in which Gentry and coworkers rode.
05/15/04 Reuters: British troops kill 20 in ambushes, 2 Brits Wounded
British troops killed up to 20 Iraqis as the soldiers fought their way out of a series of three roadside ambushes in southern Iraq...Two British soldiers were wounded...
05/15/04 KyodoNews: 600 Filipino workers in Iraq quit
Fearing for their safety, about 600 Filipinos working inside a U.S. military base in Iraq have decided to quit after Wednesday`s mortar attack on the base that killed a Filipino warehouseman and wounded four others, a Philippine official said Friday.
05/15/04 Reuters: Mortar Kills Four Iraqis Waiting to Join New Army
A mortar or grenade attack on Iraqi civilians lining up to join the new Iraqi army killed four people and wounded at least 15 on Saturday, hospital staff and the U.S. military in the northern city of Mosul said.
05/15/04 Reuters: U.S. forces faced as many as 50 attacks a day
A U.S. military spokesman said recently that U.S. forces faced as many as 50 attacks a day with rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles or mortars somewhere in the country
05/15/04 CJTF: COSCOM Soldier Dies of Wounds
A 13th Corps Support Command Soldier died around 8 p.m. May 14 from wounds received in combat earlier that day

[Joerver]

U.S. TO LEAVE IRAQ JUNE 30, RETURN JULY 1

Bush Announces ‘Operation Iraqi Re-freedom’

In his weekly radio address, President George W. Bush announced that if the new Iraqi government asks the United States to leave Iraq on June 30 it will do so, but added that it will return to Iraq on July 1, one day later.

Mr. Bush expressed his hope that the U.S.’s one-day absence from Iraq would stir nostalgia for the coalition troops and cause a public groundswell of support for their re-occupation of the country.

Calling the U.S.’s planned July 1 re-invasion of Iraq “Operation Iraqi Re-freedom,” Mr. Bush said the troops’ return to the Middle Eastern nation would give the Iraqi people a unique chance to “get it right this time.”

“Last time we invaded, we were not greeted with flowers,” Mr. Bush said. “There are operators standing by at 1-800-FLOWERS even as I speak.”

The president also revealed that U.S. forces were currently re-erecting a statue of Saddam Hussein to be re-toppled upon their July 1 return.

In other developments in Iraq, Mr. Bush announced that as a goodwill gesture the U.S. would close Abu Ghraib prison and re-open it as a Wal-Mart.

The president pointed out that the prison was an ideal candidate for such a conversion since it already had the facilities necessary to lock in its employees at night as well as an extensive ladies’ underwear department.

Mr. Bush concluded his radio address by confirming that he had asked Congress for $25 billion for Iraq and a books-on-tape version of the Geneva Conventions.

**** BOROWITZ IN NYC MAY 19 ****
Andy Borowitz hosts “The Moth” Wednesday night May 19 at The Players Club, 16 Gramercy Park South. Doors open at 7; show begins at 8. Tickets available at www.smarttix.com.

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Baghdad Burning
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_riverbendblog_a…
... I`ll meet you `round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...
Saturday, May 15, 2004

Last Few Days...
That video of Nick Berg is beyond horrible. I haven`t been able to watch it whole. It makes me sick to my stomach and I can hardly believe it happened. His family must be devastated and I can`t even imagine what they must have felt. With all of this going on- first Abu Ghraib and now this, I haven`t felt like writing anything.

Ansar Al Islam are a fundamentalist militant group- mostly Kurdish- based in the north of Iraq. They made a name for themselves recently and chose the Kurdish autonomous region as `home` with the full knowledge of the CIA, who had more control over the region than the former regime. Since the beginning of the war, they have been responsible for various explosions and attacks- or so they say. The beheading has nothing to do with Islam. I`m still hoping- albeit irrationally- that the whole thing was some sort of grotesque setup.

I was sick to my stomach when I first saw the video on some news channel and stood petrified, watching the screen and praying that they wouldn`t show it whole because for some reason, I couldn`t take my eyes off of it. I feel horrible. Was I shocked? Was I surprised? Hardly. We`ve been expecting this since the first pictures of the torture of Iraqi prisoners broke out. There`s a certain rage in many people that is frightening. There`s a certain hunger and need for revenge that lame apologies from Bush and surprise visits from Rumsfeld won`t appease.

I think beheading was the chosen method of `execution` because the group wanted to shock Americans and westerners in the worst possible way. The torturers at Abu Ghraib and other prisons chose sexual degradation because they knew that nothing would hurt and appall Iraqis and Muslims more than those horrible, sadistic acts. To Iraqis, death is infinitely better than being raped or sexually abused. There are things worse than death itself and those pictures portrayed them.

Foreigners in Iraq are being very, very careful and with good reason. Many of the companies have pulled out their staff and are asking the remaining workers and contractors to be extra careful and as inconspicuous as possible.

The assumption that Al Zarqawi himself was doing the beheading seems a little far-fetched. So now the heads of terrorism in the world seem to be Ossama Bin Ladin, Aimen Al Dhawahiri and Abu Mussa`ab Al Zarqawi. Here`s some food for thought- Ossama is from Saudi Arabia, Al Dhawahiri is Egyptian and Al Zarqawi is Jordanian. Which countries in the region are America`s best allies? Let`s see now… did you guess Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt?! Fantastic! You win a trip to… Falloojeh!! (And no- it doesn`t count if you give Saudi Arabia a little slap on the wrists and poke Egypt in the ribs- you`re still buddies).

They let out around 300+ prisoners today while that sadistic fiend Rumsfeld was in town. Apparently, setting 300 prisoners free of the thousands currently detained is supposed to mollify Iraqis- quite like Bush`s lame half-apology to King Abdallah of Jordan. What is King Abdallah to us? What does it matter if Bush gets down and begs him for forgiveness? What in God`s name does he represent to the Iraqi people?

Karbala and Najaf in the south are war zones. There are Shi`a fighters in the streets and American tanks and helicopters are bombing certain areas. Today they bombed the oldest cemetery in Najaf (and one of the holiest in Iraq). It has caused quite an uproar and Al Sadr is currently calling for people to join him in the south. We are seeing another inflow of refugees into Baghdad… this time from the southern region. They are using the same tactics they used in Falloojeh on the `insurgency`. So why was it an intifadhah, or popular uprising, in 1991 and now suddenly it`s an insurgency? The people fighting in the streets of Najaf and Karbala aren`t trained warriors or former regime members… they are simply people who are tired of empty promises and hollow assurances.

There are rumors that Badir`s Brigade have been fighting alongside the Americans against Sadr`s group and that doesn`t bode well for SCIRI. The Puppets and spokespeople for the group have issued disclaimers but people sense that the Hakeems and Al-Da`awa leaders are eager to see Muqtada et al. crushed as soon as possible.

The end-of-the-year examinations have started in most of the schools. The school administrations are trying to get them over with as soon as humanly possible. It`s already unbearably hot and dusty and the heat gets worse as summer progresses. Last year examinations were held in June and July and children were fainting in the summer heat in schools with no electricity. We`re hoping to avoid that this year.

We`re all donating money to the school in the area so they can remain hooked up to the local power generator during the day while the kids are being tested. You can see them in the streets and trapped behind car windows looking flushed and wilted. We`re all praying that they`ll be able to finish the year without anything drastic happening (well, relatively drastic).

The air feels stale and stagnant in Baghdad lately. There`s disappointment and exhaustion and a certain resignation to the anger and fear that seem to have taken over during recent weeks.




- posted by river @ 12:19 AM

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Ein Flash als Poem.

http://www.voiceyourself.com/03_thoughtsfromwithin/VoiceYour…

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Car Bomb Attack Kills Iraq Governing Council Head
Mon May 17, 2004 03:48 AM ET

By Joseph Logan and Khaled Yacoub Oweis

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide car bomb killed at least nine people outside the main coalition headquarters in Baghdad Monday, including the head of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, officials said.

Abdul Zahra Othman Mohammad, a Shi`ite council member also known as Izzedin Salim, had been waiting at a checkpoint to enter the sprawling "Green Zone" compound in Baghdad when the bomb went off, Deputy Foreign Minister Hamed al-Bayati told Reuters.

"Izzedin Salim was martyred," he said.

Bayati said Salim`s car had been the last in a convoy which included other council members.

"The other members escaped unharmed. They managed to get through the checkpoint before the explosion. Salim was still waiting to enter. It is too early to say whether the attack specifically targeted the Governing Council convoy," he said.

Salim, who had been the current holder of the rotating Governing Council presidency, was the second of the 25-member Council to be killed. In September gunmen assassinated Aqila al-Hashemi, one of the three women in the council.

U.S. officers said the explosion had been caused by a car bomb.

The checkpoint was crowded with civilian cars and minibuses. More than a dozen vehicles were destroyed by the blast, which melted the asphalt of the road and covered it in pools of blood.

Doctors wearing masks and rubber gloves pulled burned bodies from twisted wrecks of minibuses. Shoes and body parts were hurled through the air. A scorched foot hung from barbed wire 30 yards away.

"There was a huge crowd at the checkpoint," said Raad Mukhlis, a security guard at a nearby residential compound.

"There were a lot of cars and people on foot standing there, and then this massive explosion. I saw body parts and martyrs everywhere."

Salim, from Iraq`s Shi`ite majority, was the head of the Islamic Dawa Party in Basra and the editor of several newspapers and magazines. He was one of the nine council members who each hold the rotating presidency for a month at a time.

On May 6, a suicide bomber killed five Iraqis and an American soldier at an entrance to the Green Zone, a sprawling compound which used to be one of Saddam Hussein`s palace complexes and now serves as the headquarters for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

A statement purporting to be from a group headed by leading al Qaeda figure Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for that attack.

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Divided Mission in Iraq Tempers Views of G.I.`s
By EDWARD WONG

Published: May 17, 2004


KARBALA, Iraq, May 16 — Six weeks ago, soldiers of the First Armored Division were renovating schools. Now they are raiding them for hidden munitions.

Children wave to them along the roads, while insurgents with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades make them targets.

"Our mission is to rebuild this country, but the thing is, the bad guys won`t let us do it," said Specialist Jennifer Marie Bencze, 20, of Santa Rosa, Calif. "At the same time we`ve got engineers rebuilding schools, fixing roads, doing all the humanitarian projects, we`ve got infantry fighting the bad guys. So the mission is really confused."

Here in the Shiite heartland, the division is caught up in the fiercest and deadliest fighting now under way in Iraq. That is a far cry from May 2003, when it rolled into Iraq thinking the war was all but over, ready to plant Western-style institutions in this arid land. Interviews with dozens of soldiers over the last two weeks suggest that their idealism has been tempered.

All agree the war is at a crucial juncture, but few soldiers can say with certainty how to achieve victory — or even what might constitute victory.

"I think Bush is a good man, but over here, it`s not as easy as he makes it sound," said Specialist Matthew DeGregorio, 35, a reservist in civil affairs charged with persuading Iraqis to work on projects with the Americans. "Nobody buys the fact that it`s so easy."

"To be honest, I`d say there are things that need to be worked out," he added. "I`d say they need even more men in the entire country. I think it goes back to the cuts in the military. I think they`re leaning too heavily on the National Guard and the Reserves."

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib concerns soldiers, too. They ask whether their work has been irrevocably tarnished in the minds of Americans and Iraqis. "Now we wonder what people back home think of us," said First Lt. Erik Iliff, 24, of Columbia, S.C. "Will it be like Vietnam, where everyone who`s fought there is labeled a baby killer?"

As for Iraqi opinion, Specialist DeGregorio said the scandal "adds fuel to the fire."

"We`re not only seen as an occupier, but we`re seen messing with their people and doing sick stuff," he said. "Rumors and stuff you see on TV are huge here. They`ve already had it driven into their heads by Saddam Hussein that America is the Great Satan."

Many of the soldiers are tired. They were supposed to go home at the end of April, but their tour was extended four months when it became clear that troop numbers were too low. They share a sense of camaraderie though, forged by working together during what is for most of them the toughest year of their lives.

At Camp Lima, a military base on the outskirts of Karbala, they sleep scores to a tent in 100-plus degree heat. They are barred from indulging in sex and alcohol. When they do leave the base, it is often to get shot at or to kill people.

The strength of the insurgency persuades some soldiers here that a strong American military presence must remain in Iraq. "We`re just trying to take this big ball of mess and keep it from exploding," said Lt. Josey Sandoval, 24, of Seattle. "If the U.S. Army left right now, this country would tear itself apart."

For others, the mission that began with clear objectives is murkier than ever.

They were assigned in Baghdad to do reconstruction work and patrol the streets. Then came the two-front uprising last month, in Falluja, west of Baghdad, and in Karbala and other southern cities, and with that the division rushed south to fight militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

Over the year, some ambitious goals fell by the wayside. Lieutenant Iliff recalled the day he had to cancel elections in December for seats on a neighborhood council in Baghdad. First, the men tried to bar women from voting. Then they mobbed the ballot box. The lieutenant ended up hand-picking three people for the seats.

Whatever government does take root, "I think it`ll have to be an Iraqi version of it," he said, adding: "Westernized democracy just won`t work. They haven`t been taught from a young age to think the way we think in the West. They don`t have an understanding of the same rights."

Cpl. Jonathan Torres, 20, of Puerto Rico, echoed that sentiment: "It`s going to take a lot longer than they thought it would. Here, people are used to another way of living. They thought they could change it in one or two years. It`s going to take a lot longer."

Asked to describe his mission, Sgt. Daniel Rigole, 23, a tent-mate of Corporal Torres, said: "It just seems like we`re trying to police. In my personal opinion, it`s a job for the United Nations." "Our job as combat engineers has nothing to do with driving around, policing people up," he added. In their hot and fetid tent, Sergeant Rigole and several soldiers talked of American casualties suffered in recent fighting around the Mukhaiyam Mosque. Three soldiers have been killed and at least 55 wounded since the First Armored Division opened the offensive against Mr. Sadr`s militia two weeks ago. Daily battles rage in downtown Karbala. The division`s casualty rate is running higher than at any time in the last year.

Sergeant Rigole said he believed that outside Iraq, "nobody cares anymore, because it`s just becoming another part of life."

"When it`s somebody of your own, that`s somebody who was watching your back and you were watching his back," he said. "It`s part of your family, you know. Even when it`s someone who`s part of another unit, you still care."

Corporal Torres observed: "It builds some type of anger. It makes you angry at the enemy."

A soldier close to an infantryman killed by a sniper stopped by a reporter`s room at the base and almost punched the wall. He was on the verge of tears. "I want you to tell people that this is ridiculous," he said. "We know where the enemy is. We could take them out. But we`re holding back because of politics."

He was speaking of the balance adopted by American commanders, who have refrained from attacking insurgents holed up around two especially important shrines in downtown Karbala out of fear that they could inflame Shiite Muslims the world over. Most of the mortars and rocket-propelled grenades being fired at Americans are coming from that area. It is a dilemma intrinsic to the kind of urban warfare the Americans have been drawn into — weighing the potential of a public backlash against the need to win a decisive victory with the fewest casualties.

"It does limit some of our options," said Lt. Col. Garry P. Bishop, the commander of American forces in Karbala. "But you can win a battle and lose a war if we turn the will of the people against us."

Many soldiers say the allegiance of the Iraqi people is still up in the air, and whichever way it swings will determine the outcome of the war. At the moment, some say, the insurgents are crushing the Americans in the propaganda campaign.

"They`re really working us over," said Capt. Charles Fowler, 37, a reservist in civil affairs from Vidalia, Ga. "We`re doing a lot of great, great stuff. We really are. We`re just not getting credit for it."

The captain said he was failing to win over noncommittal Iraqis, those he called fence riders. Without criticizing American politicians or civilian officials, he said administrators seemed to be constantly changing their plans for Iraq, sowing uncertainty among Iraqis. That seemed especially true of the muddled proposals for setting up an interim government to take "limited sovereignty" after June 30.

"I think we should have clarified it and told people we had a definite concrete plan, something like, `Look, this is what`s going to happen,` " he said. "They`re really just waiting to see what`s going to happen."

"They ask me what`s going to happen," the captain added. "Hell, I don`t even know. It makes it very difficult right now. It makes it very difficult for me. One thing I can`t do is make promises that we can`t keep."

Lieutenant Iliff, the officer who tried organizing elections in Baghdad, said: "People are so easily swayed. That`s a source of frustration. One week they`re waving at us; the next week they throw rocks at us. Then we build a playground, and they`re waving at us again."

Many soldiers also expressed disappointment at the waning support in the United States for the war effort. Some said they feared that support would further erode in light of the disclosures of Abu Ghraib. They condemned the acts of the prison guards, but also said they were not paying much attention to the scandal since they had almost no access to the news.

Specialist Bencze said: "It`s hard knowing that the actions of a few people can try to ruin the work we`ve done for the last year. I felt we`d been making a lot of progress here, and this was a roadblock."

Some soldiers blamed the news media`s coverage of the fighting for fanning antiwar sentiments back home.

"For 10 months, it was my position that the American public saw too much of the shooting and the killing and not enough of the humanitarian side of things," Colonel Bishop said. "In my area in Baghdad, there were 80 schools renovated, $1.7 million of aid given out and 29 different sewer renovation projects."

In the end, the soldiers grasped at small signs that told them they were doing some good here. On a recent morning, as a convoy was returning to base after a battle at an amusement park, children ran out of their homes and waved to the soldiers. Specialist Ryan Stewart, 26, a surfer from Santa Paula, Calif., took a hand off his M-240 SAW machine gun and waved back. "That makes things seem a bit better," he said.

He was wounded by shrapnel more than a week later and flown out to Germany for care. His fiancée awaited him there. For him, the war was over.

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May 17, 2004
Iraq Insurgents Drive Italians From Base
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:07 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Fighters loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr drove Italian forces from a base in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Sunday and attacked coalition headquarters there with grenade and mortar fire as tensions in the Shiite region escalated.

On Monday, a powerful car bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the American-led coalition, killing four Iraqis and injuring eight other people, including two U.S. soldiers, the military said.

The bomb destroyed three cars waiting in line to enter the coalition headquarters, which is called the Green Zone, Col. Mike Murray said.

Two U.S. soldiers died elsewhere, and gunmen killed three Iraqi women working for the U.S. led-coalition. Amid the ongoing violence, the United States is looking to move some of its 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to bolster forces in Iraq, South Korean and U.S. officials said.

Two Iraqi fighters were killed and 20 were wounded in battles in Nasiriyah, mostly at two bridges across the Euphrates, residents said.

The Italian troops evacuated their base as it came under repeated attack. Portuguese police were called out to support the Italians, their first action since the force of 128 deployed to Nasiriyah in November, a Portuguese duty officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

At least 10 Italians were wounded, one critically, contingent spokesman Lt. Col. Giuseppe Perrone told The Associated Press by phone. He said the Italians relocated to the nearby Tallil air base.

Also in Nasiriyah, a convoy transporting the Italian official in charge of the city, Barbara Contini, came under attack as it neared the headquarters of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, Perrone said. Two Italian paramilitary police were wounded.

Fighting in the southern city began Friday. All but two civilian staffers of the coalition were evacuated from Nasiriyah headquarters to a military base because of attacks by al-Sadr`s fighters. The radical cleric, who launched an uprising last month, faces arrest in the murder of a rival, moderate cleric last year.

In April, Shiite militiamen loyal to al-Sadr drove Ukrainian peacekeepers out of Kut earlier this month, but U.S. troops then swept into the city, pushing out most militiamen.

Elsewhere in southern Iraq, assailants in Basra fired a mortar shell that hit a house near a British military base, killing four Iraqi civilians, including 2-year-old twin girls, witnesses said. Four people were wounded. All the victims were related.

Gunmen fired on a minibus and detonated explosives in Baghdad on Sunday, killing two Iraqi women and their driver and injuring another woman. Police said the women were working for the Americans but did not specify their jobs.

Early Sunday, a female Iraqi translator working with U.S. troops was killed and another was critically injured when gunmen broke into their houses in Mahmoudiyah, said Dawood al-Taee, director of the city`s hospital.

The civilian killings appeared to be part of a rebel strategy to deter cooperation between Iraqis and the coalition, which plans to hand over sovereignty on June 30.

One U.S. soldier was killed Saturday night when a bomb exploded beside a vehicle in Baghdad, the Army said Sunday. A second soldier died of wounds suffered during a firefight Saturday south of the capital, the military said.

The deaths brought to 777 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq last year. Of those, 567 died as a result of hostile action and 210 died of non-hostile causes.

In central Baghdad, several explosions were heard near the U.S.-controlled Green Zone. It was unclear what caused the blasts, but smoke could be seen rising from the west side of the Tigris River.

Meanwhile, officials said the Pentagon was talking to Seoul about using some Korea-based forces in Iraq.

``The U.S. government has told us that it needs to select some U.S. troops in South Korea and send them to Iraq to cope with the worsening situation in Iraq,`` said Kim Sook, head of the South Korean Foreign Ministry`s North American Bureau.

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said any shift in troops from South Korea would be part of the next rotation of American troops in Iraq, set to begin late this summer.

Tapping into the U.S. military force in Korea would be an historic move by the Pentagon, underscoring the degree to which the military is stretched to provide enough forces for Iraq while meeting its other commitments

The coalition is struggling to disband al-Sadr`s army and sideline its radical leadership before handing power to a new Iraqi government. American forces and al-Sadr fighters fought heavy battles in recent days in the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

On Sunday, American tanks drove through Karbala and exchanged gunfire with insurgents. The tanks also opened fire to break up an anti-American demonstration.

Coalition forces guarding large quantities of captured arms and explosives at Karbala`s Mukhaiyam mosque came under mortar fire three times overnight from Saturday to Sunday, said Lt. Col. Robert Strzelecki, spokesman for the Polish-led multinational force in south-central Iraq.

Earlier in the week, coalition troops drove out insurgents using the mosque as a base of operations.

Apparent gunfire slightly damaged one of Shia Islam`s holiest shrines in Najaf on Friday, prompting calls for revenge against the Americans and even suicide attacks against the coalition.

The U.S. military has said al-Sadr`s al-Mahdi Army was probably responsible, but Iran`s supreme leader on Sunday accused the United States of damaging the shrine through ``shameless`` and ``foolish`` actions.

``Muslims can`t tolerate the shameless incursion of American forces into sacred places,`` Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted as saying by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Two U.S. tanks were stationed Sunday in a main square in Najaf, while militiamen held positions in the cemetery and other areas.

Several mosque imams from Fallujah, a Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad that was the site of heavy fighting last month, visited al-Sadr in Najaf to show solidarity. The siege of Fallujah by U.S. Marines ended when the coalition allowed an Iraqi force led by former officers in Saddam Hussein`s army to take over security in the city.

An explosion in the southern city of Samawah killed at least one Iraqi security force member, and there also was shooting between Iraqi security forces and al-Sadr supporters, Japan`s Kyodo News reported.

Two mortar shells were fired at Dutch soldiers guarding the provincial governor`s building in Samawah, Kyodo said. Japanese soldiers had virtually confined themselves to their base on the southern outskirts of the city because of deteriorating security.

Mohammed Rahim, an ambulance driver in southern Amarah, said hospital officials picked up 21 bodies from a British base after authorities asked that ambulances recover al-Sadr fighters slain Friday. British troops said they would hand over another seven bodies, Rahim said.

Also Sunday, the Arab news network Al-Jazeera broadcast video of two Russians taken hostage May 10 in Iraq and read a statement from a group demanding that foreign troops withdraw. Moscow strongly opposed the war and does not have any troops in Iraq.

In London, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said Sunday the government is considering whether to sending more troops to Iraq. Prime Minister Tony Blair said this month that Britain was talking with the United States about increasing its presence here after the withdrawal of Spanish, Honduran and Dominican troops. Britain has 7,500 troops in southern Iraq.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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May 17, 2004
POLITICS
U.S. and Iraq Spar Over Who Should Run Corruption Inquiry Into Oil-for-Food Program
By SUSAN SACHS and JUDITH MILLER

Iraq`s political leaders are sparring with the American occupation administration over who should investigate possible official and corporate corruption in the United Nations oil-for-food program.

The dispute pits L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator of Iraq, against the Iraqi Governing Council, whose members Mr. Bremer appointed last year. As the June 30 date for an American power transfer approaches, the two sides have increasingly been at odds over the future political setup.

It is not clear whether the present Governing Council will retain any power in a transitional government.

Governing Council members said they wanted to supervise any Iraqi inquiry into the oil-for-food program, and had asked the American accounting firm KPMG International in February to assemble possible evidence of alleged kickbacks and bribes paid under the now-defunct oil-for-food program.

Mr. Bremer has refused to release money to pay KPMG and instead has now approved the hiring of a different company, Ernst & Young, to conduct a $20 million investigation on behalf of a different agency of Iraq`s transitional government.

An adviser to the Governing Council, Claude Hankes-Drielsma, said Friday in a interview from Baghdad that those actions had resulted in "a serious delay in the inquiry."

The United Nations began the oil-for-food program in 1997 to ease the constraints of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The program permitted Iraq to sell oil in order to buy Iraqis food and medicines, all under United Nations supervision.

But the program was rife with corruption. The New York Times, citing Iraqi documents and the accounts of Iraqi officials, disclosed in February that Mr. Hussein`s government had skimmed billions of dollars from the program by collecting kickbacks from suppliers and illegal surcharges from purchasers of its oil.

Earlier, a Baghdad newspaper had published a list of hundreds of world political figures, companies, writers and others whom it said had received coupons from Mr. Hussein`s government entitling them to sell Iraqi oil under the program. The coupons could be sold at a profit to oil traders.

Mr. Bremer has said responsibility for an investigation should rest with the Board of Supreme Audit, a group of Iraqi judges, and he named the board as the sole agency to assemble and delve into documents that could be relevant.

The board is a holdover from Saddam Hussein`s reign, but has been reconstituted by the Americans to serve as an oversight body to monitor government spending and uncover corruption.

"All Iraqis we hear from agree that the investigation must be comprehensive, independent, and transparent," said Dan Senor, a spokesman for Mr. Bremer, in a telephone interview yesterday from Baghdad. "This is best left to a body that is politically impartial."

The board, after taking bids, decided last week to hire Ernst & Young, a move that was immediately denounced by the Governing Council`s British adviser, Mr. Hankes-Drielsma, a former executive of the accounting firm Price Waterhouse.

He said the decision was intended to "undermine the sovereignty" of the Governing Council. Mr. Hankes-Drielsma also suggested that the hiring of a different firm could prevent the prompt disclosure of any embarrassing information about the United Nations at a time when Washington was seeking its help in managing the crisis in Iraq.

"It is essential that the I.G.C. is allowed to continue with its investigation without any further delay and without any further stalling by the C.P.A.," Mr. Hankes-Drielsma wrote in a letter to Mr. Bremer last week. A copy was given to The Times.

The disagreement over which agency should run Iraq`s investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of any inquiry.

Beyond the political question of who should run a potentially explosive investigation, there is the practical question of access to thousands of documents that remain in the hands of individual Governing Council members like Ahmad Chalabi.

Mr. Chalabi, a former exile who returned with the strong backing of many senior Pentagon officials, has strongly objected to Mr. Bremer`s decision to bypass the council on the oil-for-food inquiry.

Mr. Bremer now controls the spending of Iraqi money. Presumably, control over the purse strings would pass to Iraqis after the transfer of sovereignty, and the transitional government, with or without the current Governing Council members, could decide who should investigate the oil-for-food program.

In addition to the two Iraqi investigations, a third investigation has been authorized by the United Nations Security Council in response to allegations that United Nations employees profited from the sale of Iraqi oil during Mr. Hussein`s last years in power.

Secretary General Kofi Annan set up a panel of outside experts, led by Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman. Panel members met last week in Baghdad with members of the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit.

Each of the three sponsors of the separate inquiries has a political stake in the outcome.

While the Bush administration has disregarded the United Nations in the past, the administration is banking on United Nations help now to devise a plan for a credible Iraqi administration to run the country until elections can be held.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 17, 2004
DIPLOMATIC MEMO
The Transfer Date, June 30, Is Crystal Clear, but Hardly Anything Else Is
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, May 16 — For weeks, the American occupation authority in Iraq has been updating the timetable leading to the day it is supposed to go out of business, on June 30, declaring on its Web site on Sunday that there were "46 days until Iraqi sovereignty."

Yet nowhere on the Web site, or anyplace else in official American statements, can be found the identity of the new Iraqi leadership or the precise powers of the new Iraqi government over many important matters, including the full authority over Iraqi armed forces.

Those forces will continue to operate under American command, but the Americans have said they will consult the new government on deployment and other issues.

Other subjects that remain unclear include to what extent Iraq will have a say in the practices of American-run prisons that hold Iraqi suspects, some of whom are not charged with any crimes, and over the Iraqi criminal justice system that might prosecute Americans for crimes against Iraqis.

"I have asked many times who will be in charge of Abu Ghraib prison after Iraq becomes a sovereign country," a European diplomat said, referring to the place where Iraqi detainees were abused. "I cannot get any answers. I can`t get answers to a lot these questions."

Nor is it clear to what extent the World Bank and other international agencies will continue to have accounting authority over the spending of huge sums derived from Iraqi assets and oil income. More than $18 billion has accrued to Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and only $8 billion has been spent so far.

Much of this money has been distributed by Americans to expedite construction projects and the like at a time when the spending of American funds appropriated by Congress has been delayed. The disbursals are audited by the auditing firm KPMG, but its work is not completed.

Some in the Bush administration and the United Nations expect issues like these to become integral to the drafting of a United Nations Security resolution intended to confer legitimacy on the new government; the resolution is also meant to persuade more countries to send aid and troops. The decision to put off these issues is becoming a source of tension and confusion in the Bush administration.

Last week, for example, two top officials from the State Department and one from the Defense Department gave contradictory testimony to a House committee on what would happen if an Iraqi government installed after June 30 were to ask American forces to pull out of Iraq.

It took Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to clear up the confusion and declare that although he viewed such a possibility as remote, the Iraqis would indeed have the right to order American and allied troops out of the country if they so chose.

American officials say all the uncertainties are a necessary byproduct of the plan to let Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy in Iraq, choose the new Iraqi leadership.

The American game plan is to let that "caretaker government," which is to stay in power until elections early next year, negotiate the definition of its own powers, in discussions with the United States and other members of the United Nations Security Council, with the active participation of Arab nations in the region.

American officials have spoken of the post-June 30 Iraqi government as having "limited sovereignty," meaning that American troops will be under American command, and that the new government will be explicitly directed by the United States and the United Nations not to enact major laws or make commitments that would bind the elected government, which is to take office next year.

The justification for letting the new government negotiate its own powers is that it would look bad to the world if the limits on Iraqi sovereignty seemed to be imposed from without.

"Any limitations on Iraqi authority are going to have to come from the Iraqis themselves," a top administration policy maker said. "I don`t see how you could do it any other way."

Another issue is the power of Iraq over its armed forces. France and Russia want Iraqi commanders to have the right to refuse to take part in operations ordered by American commanders who embark on disputed military actions, like the ones mounted against Iraqi insurgents in Falluja and Najaf.

Mr. Powell said establishing "consultative processes" could ensure that the United States would have "full insight into any sensitivities that might exist within the Iraqi interim government concerning our military operations." He provided no details.

As for the Iraqi prison and criminal justice systems, it is not clear how much of an issue Europeans and others on the Security Council will make of this matter. But one possible disagreement can be found in American assertions that an order from L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, immunizing Americans from prosecution by Iraqi courts, is to remain in force.

But a United Nations official said recently that after June 30 such an order would not be recognized legally, since it will have come from an occupation authority no longer in existence. The Iraqi government, this official said, will have to issue such an order or negotiate one with the Americans and later have it blessed by the Security Council.

A senior Bush administration official said the new temporary government was likely to adopt all of the "transitional laws" passed by the Iraqi Governing Council, the group handpicked by occupation leaders. Others are not so sure of that, considering that the Governing Council is held in disrepute by many Iraqis.

Indeed, the caretaker government`s ability to revise previous laws such as those barring the application of fundamentalist Islamic law to family matters is unclear.

The survival of these provisions after June 30 is in doubt, according to some diplomats involved in the process. One described the entire exercise at the United Nations as "a leap of faith" for all involved.

Rice Pleased With Moscow Talks

MOSCOW, May 16 (Reuters) — Condoleezza Rice, President Bush`s national security adviser, said in an interview broadcast Sunday that she was pleased with her talks on Iraq`s future with Russian leaders.

"I believe that the United States and Russia have a common understanding of how we should move forward," Ms. Rice said after consulting President Vladimir V. Putin..

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 17, 2004
A Film to Polarize Along Party Lines
By JIM RUTENBERG

The Michael Moore documentary the Walt Disney Company deemed too partisan to distribute offers few new revelations about the connections between President Bush and prominent Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden.

But this film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is scheduled to make its debut today at the Cannes International Film Festival, contains stark images of civilian casualties and disillusioned soldiers from the Iraq war zone that have rarely, if ever, been shown on American television. And the muckracking craft evident in this nearly two-hour attack on President Bush`s tenure in the White House is likely to have a galvanizing effect among both conservatives and liberals should the film be widely distributed this summer.

A reporter for The New York Times was invited to a screening of the film last week. "Fahrenheit 9/11" focuses on longstanding ties between the Bush family, its associates and prominent Saudis and on whether those ties clouded the president`s judgment in recognizing warning signs before the Sept. 11 attacks and hampered his response afterward.

Mr. Moore extends his critique of the president to his conduct of the war in Iraq, arguing that the war is victimizing not only Iraqis but also the lower-income enlisted Americans who are fighting in it. In addition he attempts to make a case that the government`s terrorism alerts at home are being used to repeal some civil liberties.

These are the subjects that have made "Fahrenheit 9/11" such a political hot potato. Icon Productions, Mel Gibson`s company and the original primary investor in the film, backed out last spring, and Miramax Films, a Disney division run by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, stepped in.

Although Disney executives said they made clear last May that Disney would not allow Miramax to distribute the film, it was only recently that the Weinsteins became convinced they would not be able to budge their corporate masters. Two weeks ago Mr. Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine," went public to protest Disney`s actions. "Some people may be afraid of this movie because of what it will show," he said at the time. (Last week, Disney agreed to sell the movie to the Weinsteins, who can arrange for its distribution in North America, though not under the Miramax name.)

But Republicans predict many viewers will discount the film as an anti-Bush screed, and that it will ultimately have no effect on the election. Democrats say they hope it will feed growing discontent in the United States with Mr. Bush`s Iraq policy and help the campaign of Senator John Kerry, his presumptive Democratic challenger.

Mr. Moore is confident it will sway votes against Mr. Bush, though he notes the film, into which he also has tried to inject a good dose of humor, is likewise critical of Democrats for not posing any significant opposition to Mr. Bush after Sept. 11. Mr. Moore said he was considering making at least one sequence from the film available to the news media today after he presents it at the Cannes film festival: that of American soldiers laughing and taking pictures as they place hoods over Iraqi detainees, with one of them touching a prisoner`s genitals through a blanket.

Mr. Moore and his production team said they also believed the film would get attention for showing that a name excised from one of Mr. Bush`s National Guard records was that of an investment counselor for one of Osama bin Laden`s brothers, Salem.

In a copy of the record released by the National Guard in 2000, the man in question, James R. Bath, was listed as being suspended from flying for the National Guard in 1972 for failing to take a medical exam next to a similar listing for Mr. Bush. It has been widely reported that the two were friends and that Mr. Bath invested in Mr. Bush`s first major business venture, Arbusto Energy, in the late 1970`s after Mr. Bath began working for Salem bin Laden.

Mr. Bath and the White House have said that the money he invested in Mr. Bush`s company was his, not that of Mr. bin Laden. The White House said Friday that Mr. Bath`s name was expunged from the record it released in February only to protect his privacy and should have been in 2000, as well.

That is one of several connections Mr. Moore highlights in the film between Mr. Bush, his family and associates and Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis, as is Osama bin Laden. As White House officials noted last week, however, many of these connections have been made elsewhere, most recently in "House of Bush, House of Saud," by Craig Unger (Scribner, 2004).

But writ large on the big screen with Mr. Moore`s narration and set to music, the connections could still prove revelatory to those who have not paid close attention to reports about Saudi Arabia`s connections to Mr. Bush and his associates. At the screening last week audience members — including people featured in the film like the mother of a serviceman killed in Iraq and a soldier unwilling to return — exclaimed loudly when Mr. Moore`s narration spelled them out.

In one connection the film notes that Mr. Bush`s father, George H. W. Bush, worked as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, a private investment company with various ties to Saudi Arabia and even, for some years, to the family of Osama bin Laden.

"My point is first of all that the Bushes were so close to the Saudis that they essentially had turned a blind eye to what was really going on before 9/11," Mr. Moore said in an interview. "And after 9/11 they were in denial."

More specifically the movie implies that the Saudi connections explain why the United States facilitated the departure of dozens of Saudi nationals from the country — including relatives of Osama bin Laden — shortly after the attacks, and charges they were not properly questioned. But like other points in the film, critics will certainly argue with that assertion, and may not have to go far to seek ammunition. The independent panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks recently reported that it believed that the evacuation was handled properly. And the family of Osama bin Laden disowned him in the 1990`s and says that it has no relationship with him anymore.

Adel al-Jubeir, foreign policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, said that any ties between Mr. Bush and his associates and prominent Saudi Arabians should not be considered odd. "Look at any Texas family that`s involved in the oil or oil services, and you will find they have a lot of connections to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf," he said, referring to assertions that the connections add up to anything more than that as nonsense.

After hearing a description of the some of the connections made in the film, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said, "It`s so outrageously false, it`s not even worth comment."

Mr. Bartlett also said he had no comment on the sections of the film that address the war in Iraq, which include gruesome images of violence, like a man angrily holding up an infant`s charred corpse after an American attack and the exposed bone of a shrapnel-infused leg.

Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he believed there was no need to prepare a public challenge to the film`s validity upon its release. "People are smart enough to know that this is someone who is very angry, who has for some time had a clearly partisan agenda," he said.

Just the same, Democratic operatives said they believed viewers` opinions of Mr. Moore would not matter if his film raised new or even old questions about Mr. Bush.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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May 17, 2004
The Dark Side of America

The sickening pictures of American troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners have led inevitably to questions about the standards of treatment in the corrections system at home, which has grown tenfold over the last 30 years and now jails people at eight times the rate of France and six times the rate of Canada. Conditions vary widely from state to state and community to community. But as The Times`s Fox Butterfield reported recently, some of the chilling pictures from Iraq — such as the ones of inmates being paraded around naked — could have been taken at some American prisons. And humiliation by prison guards is far from the first thing on most American inmates` list of worries.

The nearly 12 million people who pass through the corrections system each year are often subject to violent attacks by other inmates, and prisoner-on-prisoner rape is endemic. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, easily transmitted in tight spaces, have become a common problem. Illegal drugs ferried in by prison employees — and used by inmates who share needles — have made prison a high-risk setting for H.I.V. infection and most recently the liver-destroying hepatitis C.

Some prisons have actually cut back on testing for disease, rather than risk being required to treat large numbers of infected inmates at bankrupting costs. That means, of course, that released inmates will unknowingly pass on diseases to others. By failing to confront public health problems in prison, the country could be setting itself up for new epidemics down the line.

It is hard to quantify how many American prisoners are abused, or allowed to suffer from untreated illnesses, since the system operates largely in the shadows, outside public scrutiny. The maze of federal, state and local institutions defies easy assessment.

Things are more transparent in Europe, thanks to a powerful, independent prison commission, informally known as the Committee for Prevention of Torture. Established in 1987, The C.P.T. has unlimited access to places of detention, including prisons, juvenile centers, psychiatric hospitals and police station holding areas. Human rights violations — including medical problems — quickly become public. Such a system is long overdue in the United States.

The need for such a body was underscored last year, when Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, ordering the Justice Department to collect data on this serious problem and to create a mechanism for dealing with it. Prison officials predictably play down rape as a problem, but a harrowing report from Human Rights Watch suggested that prisoner-on-prisoner rape accompanied by savage violence was commonplace, and that officials often looked the other way.

Psychiatric care for psychotic inmates is poor to nonexistent. A recent study by the Correctional Association of New York found that nearly a quarter of inmates assigned to disciplinary lockdown — confined to small cells 23 hours a day — were mentally ill. Their symptoms worsened in isolation; nearly half had tried to commit suicide. Dissociated and sometimes violent, these people are dumped onto the streets when they finish their sentences.

The prison system can no longer be seen as the province of prison officials who cover up or mismanage problems that eventually come back to haunt the rest of the society. The country needs to formulate national prison standards and create an independent body that enforces them, if only by opening prisons to greater public scrutiny.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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50 Jahre Ende der Rassentrennung in den Schulen.
Fifty years ago today the Supreme Court of the United States decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

May 17, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Decision That Changed America Also Changed the Court
By STEPHEN G. BREYER

WASHINGTON — Fifty years ago today the Supreme Court of the United States decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Here is the question that case presented: "Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other `tangible` factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?" The court answered this question unanimously: "We believe that it does."

As a member of the Supreme Court, I am going to Topeka today to represent that court; not nine individual justices, but the institution itself — an institution as old as the Republic, charged with the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution of the United States.

May 17, 1954, was a great day in the history of that institution. Before May 17, the court read the 14th Amendment`s words "equal protection of the laws," as if they protected only the members of the majority race. After May 17, it read those words as the framers who wrote them immediately after the Civil War meant them to be read, as offering the same protection to citizens of every race. Thurgood Marshall, who later became a member of the court, represented the schoolchildren in Brown. He argued that separating children by race violated the Constitution`s promise of equal protection. The court agreed, embracing Marshall`s argument with a simple affirmation: "We believe that it does." And what great effect those few words have had.

The court told the nation that segregation based on race is wrong and that the law cannot tolerate that wrong. It said to parents in Topeka and across the country that "education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments," thereby setting the United States on a still-unfulfilled path toward a goal of quality education for all children.

Those words also forced Americans to ask themselves whether they believed in a rule of law — a rule of law that President Dwight D. Eisenhower enforced in 1957 when he sent federal paratroopers to Arkansas to take black schoolchildren by the hand and walk them safely through that schoolhouse door. We now accept that rule of law as part of our heritage, thanks to Brown and to its aftermath. But too often we take it for granted, without recollecting the conditions of 50 years ago and without adequate appreciation for those whose struggles made it possible.

Above all, Brown`s simple affirmation helped us to understand that our Constitution was meant to create a democracy that worked not just on paper but in practice — one that can work only if every citizen understands that the Constitution belongs not to the majority, or to the lawyers, or to the judges, but to us all. Brown helped us to understand that the Constitution is "ours," whoever we may be.

In this way that simple affirmation expresses the belief that many millions of Americans of different races, religions and points of view can come together to create one nation. That is the hope that Thurgood Marshall expressed in his argument to the court in Brown. It is a hope about the Constitution, one Constitution; about the people, one people; and about the nation, one nation. That is the message the court sent forth in Brown 50 years ago today. The message sets a goal: we have made progress; we aspire to more.

Stephen G. Breyer is an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court.

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Across Federal Spectrum



Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A09

The Bush Pioneers, who agree to raise a minimum of $100,000 each for the Bush campaign, are well-connected

throughout the Bush administration. Here are some examples of the subtle interaction of political fundraising and public policy.
Hunt Oil Co.

Bush Pioneer Jose Fourquet played a pivotal role in the financing of a massive Peruvian natural gas project that benefited Hunt Oil Co., whose chairman, Ray L. Hunt, signed up to be a Pioneer and is a longtime ally of the president.

The Camisea Natural Gas Project is set to extract fossil fuel from one of the world`s most pristine tropical rain forests and pipe it over the Andes toward Lima and the coast, where it will end up at a depot near a marine sanctuary. Hunt is one of several participants in the project. His company hired Halliburton`s Kellogg Brown & Root to design a $1 billion export terminal on the coast.

Fourquet, the Treasury Department`s U.S. representative to the Inter-American Development Bank, rebuffed the official written and oral recommendation from other U.S. officials to vote "no" on the project. Instead, he abstained on $135 million in financing for the project, allowing it to proceed. Opposition from the United States, a primary funder of the IDB bank, would have jeopardized the deal.

In a strongly worded memo sent before the vote, the U.S. Agency for International Development told the Treasury Department that federal law required Fourquet to cast a "no" vote because environmental reviews were deficient. In addition, others on a federal interagency task force urged opposition.

A separate proposal for financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States fell short over environmental concerns. April H. Foley, a Bush appointee and the Ex-Im Bank board member who cast the deciding "no" vote, said the president questioned her about it afterward. She told Friends of the Earth campaign director Jon Sohn, that President Bush brought it up during an overnight stay at Camp David. Bush asked her to explain her vote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was involved in providing direction to Fourquet in how to vote.

Foley declined to discuss her vote.

The Camisea project also encountered fierce opposition from worldwide environmental groups and some members of Congress, who predicted the massive extraction and pipeline project would destroy the rain forest in the Southeastern Amazon and endanger its indigenous people. Environmental groups issued reports recently saying their worst fears are coming true -- indigenous people coming down with illnesses, a massive fish kill in Paracas Bay.

Media releases from the Bush campaign do not say whether Hunt formally reached Pioneer status, but court documents list Hunt as being given Pioneer Solicitor Tracking No. 1002. The Bush campaign has stopped answering questions about who was in the program.

Hunt has declined repeated requests for information about the bank`s vote or his campaign contributions. Federal records show he has given nearly $100,000 to Republican causes in the past four years, including individual donations to the Bush campaign.

There are other significant Bush connections to Hunt. His chief of public affairs, James Curtis Oberwetter, recently became Bush`s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He was replaced at Hunt Oil by Jeanne Johnson Phillips, one of the creators of the Bush Pioneer program, a current campaign adviser and former ambassador under Bush to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.

Bush also appointed Hunt to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Fourquet, 37, who was an investment banker before he joined the administration, resigned his post last month. He did not return phone calls.
Microsoft Corp.

Among the top priorities for Bush Pioneer and Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.) was an end to the Justice Department`s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. Dunn represents Redmond, Wash., where the software giant is based.

In 2000, the Clinton Justice Department won the major parts of its case against Microsoft and proposed breaking the world`s largest software company in two. An appeals court threw out the breakup plan the next year and sent the matter back to U.S. District Court. The Bush Justice Department then settled the matter on terms widely seen as favorable to Microsoft. Critics say that the settlement fails to address the harm Microsoft`s monopoly power inflicted on other companies. The Justice Department defended the settlement as a fair resolution of the case. A federal judge accepted the terms.

Last week, the Bush administration nominated the lead Justice Department negotiator in the Microsoft case, Deborah P. Majoras, to be chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.

"I just think it is a different atmosphere now," said Dunn, who was one of the first Pioneers, exceeding her $100,000 commitment with the help of Microsoft donors. "In the Clinton administration, the Justice Department brought suit against them. President Bush said `I`m for innovation -- not regulation.` That was important to Microsoft that he kept his word."

This year, Microsoft has two Pioneers, John Connors and John Kelly. More than 100 people from Microsoft attended an event for Bush, Dunn said. Employees have given more than $160,000 in contributions, placing Microsoft among the top companies donating to Bush, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Chemical Industry

At least half a dozen members of the chemical industry became Bush Pioneers in 2000, among them Frederick L. Webber, then-chairman and chief executive of the American Chemistry Council; J. Roger Hirl, former president of the group and chief executive of Occidental Chemical Corp. in Dallas; and Allan B. Hubbard of E & A Industries Inc., who attended Harvard Business School with Bush.

Before leaving the chemical manufacturers` trade group in 2002, Webber had led a fierce battle over plant security.

After Sept. 11, 2001, chemical and petroleum plants faced the prospect of new inspections to ensure security was sufficient to prevent terrorist attacks. Reports for years had warned of chemical plant vulnerabilities. Federal studies said a properly mounted attack could kill millions. After the terrorist attacks, the Bush administration ordered the reports removed from the Internet.

The Environmental Protection Agency took the lead in formulating a policy to regulate chemical plant security. EPA officials said that under the Clean Air Act these plants had a "general duty" to secure their facilities against terrorist attack. Then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman ordered a policy developed. In 2002, EPA outlined this new enforcement regime, according to internal documents obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Separately, Sen. Jon S. Corzine (D-N.J.) proposed legislation that would mandate that EPA take the lead role in enforcing plant security.

Chemical industry officials argued that the plants were already bolstering security and they appealed to the administration to keep EPA away from the issue.

Webber and Greg Lebedev, who eventually replaced him as chief executive of the American Chemistry Council, took a group of industry executives to the White House, where they met with Bush political adviser Karl Rove and the White House Council on Environmental Quality in September 2002, Lebedev said. The group urged the administration to oppose the Corzine bill.

Afterward, Rove wrote one of the attendees, the president of BP Amoco Chemical Co. "We have a similar set of concerns," Rove stated in a letter that was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Greenpeace.

Webber, who now is president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, declined to comment. Lebedev, the lobbyist, said: "We had a meeting with Karl Rove. We think that`s a good thing. We take people to meetings with people in government around town all the time."

In 2003, the White House gave responsibility for chemical plant security to the Department of Homeland Security. The new department, however, does not have authority to enforce security upgrades at the plants, according to environmental groups, members of Congress and the chemical industry. Lebedev said the American Chemical Council is working with Congress on legislation to give the department that authority.
Friends in High Places

Tom Loeffler, a 2000 Pioneer and a 2004 Ranger, has been a Bush family loyalist for more than a quarter century. Now, Loeffler is marketing those ties in the lobby shop he has opened here.

His firm, Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey, notes on its Web site: "Members of the firm`s Government Affairs Group have strong ties to the current Administration, having worked directly with the President, the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, Cabinet Secretaries and their principal deputies and aides."

Those links were forged in President George H.W. Bush`s 1988 campaign, when Loeffler was Texas co-chairman. In 1994, Loeffler was finance co-chair of George W. Bush`s gubernatorial campaign in Texas. In the two Bush campaigns for governor, Loeffler was the largest donor, $141,000.

In the 1998 election cycle, he served as national co-chair of the Republican National Committee`s "Team 100" program for donors of $100,000 or more, and then held the same title during George W. Bush`s presidential campaign in 1999-2000.

In May 2000, Loeffler left the now-defunct Arter & Hadden, taking the Cleveland-based firm`s San Antonio lawyers, to found his own lobby-law firm, Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey, with offices here and in San Antonio.

Since Bush`s election, Loeffler`s firm has grown fivefold, an impressive feat for a K Street newcomer. In 2001, its first year in Washington, Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey received $1.01 million in lobbying fees.

In the next two years, that total skyrocketed, to $4.09 million and $5.71 million, respectively. Among clients he picked up: Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., Motorola Inc., the National Association of Broadcasters, SBC Communications Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co.

Loeffler declined to be interviewed for this article, but in January 2001 he told Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Congress, that he had recently "visited with the president-elect and said that any way that I can be helpful, I will be. I will not be a part of the administration. I`m sure that as times go forward, wherever my strengths can assist, I`ll be called upon."

-- James V. Grimaldi and Thomas B. Edsall

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Fundraiser Denies Link Between Money, Access
EPA Rule on Hazardous Waste Favored Ohio Businessman Who Is a Big GOP Donor

By James V. Grimaldi and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A01

Second of two articles (1.Teil gestern)

MASON, Ohio -- Richard T. Farmer is one of America`s richest men and a Bush Pioneer by virtue of having raised at least $100,000 for the 2000 campaign. Over the past 15 years, he and his wife have given $3.1 million to Bush campaigns, the Republican Party and Republican candidates.

Farmer`s family controls Cintas Corp., a $2.7 billion company that rents and launders uniforms and industrial shop towels. For years, Farmer`s industry has been at odds with the Environmental Protection Agency over increased regulation of shop towels, particularly a Clinton administration proposal that, though not fatal, "would have cost us a lot of money," Farmer said.

In a recent interview at company headquarters here, Farmer said his campaign donations were made with no strings attached. He said he supports Republicans because they believe in "less government, more individual freedom, more individual responsibility."

"If you think I`m giving money to get access to [President Bush], you`re crazy," Farmer said. "I`m just trying to get the right guy elected. That`s all I care about."

The Clinton proposal would have required that woven shop towels contaminated with chemical solvents be wrung dry for them to be treated as laundry, not hazardous waste. Last November, the EPA changed its position, adopting a more lenient proposal for the woven towels. Farmer and his industry were overjoyed, because the change promised to save them millions and preserve their advantage over the competition -- paper towels. "It would have been a big problem," Farmer said.

After a series of telephone calls, e-mails, letters and meetings with representatives of the laundry industry, the EPA had provided industrial-laundry lobbyists with an advance copy of a portion of the proposed rule, which the lobbyists edited and the agency adopted.

That same opportunity was not given to the rule`s opponents -- environmental groups, a labor union, hazardous-waste landfill operators and paper towel manufacturers who argue their product should be treated as environmentally equal to laundered towels. The opponents say industrial laundries send tens of thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals to municipal sewage treatment plants and landfills where toxics can get into groundwater, streams and rivers. Labor unions contend that the towels expose workers to cancer-causing fumes.

Cintas said in a statement that the rewritten rule will prevent pollution because "reusable shop towels are friendlier to the environment" than disposable paper towels.

The proposed shop towel rule is but one example of a policy change by the Bush administration that favors a company controlled by a Bush Pioneer or Ranger, who as a group have helped the president bank a record $200 million for the 2004 election campaign. The shop towel case reflects the subtle interactions between corporations and an administration determined to roll back what it considers to be regulatory overkill. For many big donors, getting "the right guy elected," as Farmer puts it, is an end in itself.

EPA Assistant Administrator Marianne Lamont Horinko said Farmer`s campaign contributions had nothing to do with the agency`s decision. Although Cintas was represented by the industrial-laundry lobbyists in discussions with the EPA, Farmer said he himself did not directly contact the administration about the proposed rule. He did say that, at the behest of the laundry industry, he called members of the Ohio congressional delegation, who wrote to then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman.

In a summary of the rule, the EPA said it would improve "clarity and consistency" of regulation, "provide regulatory relief, and save affected facilities over $30 million." Whitman -- who resigned from the EPA last year and has since become a Bush Ranger -- declined to be interviewed. But she said through a spokesman that contacts such as those from the Ohio congressional delegation "are helpful because they highlight an interest and a constituent`s interest" and "that just feeds into the deliberative process."

Fred Meyer, the former chairman of the Texas Republican Party who in 1998 helped set up the Pioneers for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, said there is a good reason money will always flow to political campaigns. "There are too many things that are important to too many people," Meyer said. "The existence of businesses and billions of dollars are affected."

Democrats have their own history of rewarding large donors. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed major contributor Joseph P. Kennedy to be ambassador to Britain. Lyndon B. Johnson funneled contracts to Texas firms.

Direct quid pro quos -- specific benefits in exchange for cash -- are illegal. There is nothing illegal, however, about the adoption of broad legislation or regulations benefiting sectors of the business community -- such as laundries disposing of wastewater containing toxic chemicals -- that happen be a source of major fundraisers and donors.

For example, securities and investment banking firms have benefited enormously from reduced capital gains and dividend taxes initiated by the Bush White House. Six produced 17 Pioneers and Rangers this year, and employees in those firms have raised $2.53 million. Altogether, finance industry employees have raised $19.68 million for the 2004 election campaign, according to an analysis produced for The Washington Post by Dwight L. Morris & Associates.

Twenty-four Rangers and Pioneers are either drug industry executives or lobbyists whose companies stand to get more business from the administration`s Medicare drug benefit bill passed last year.

Twenty-five energy company executives, along with 15 energy industry lobbyists, are either Pioneers or Rangers. Many have been deeply involved in developing the administration`s energy policy. Seven of those Pioneers served on the Bush energy transition team. The administration`s energy bill, which remains stalled by a largely Democratic filibuster in the Senate, would provide billions of dollars in benefits to the energy industry.
Industry: $400 Million Cost

The proposed shop towel rule shows how the process can play out to the advantage of a Pioneer.

For more than two decades, the EPA has grappled with how to regulate the cloth towels used to wipe up chemicals in printing plants, factories and industrial shops. Each year, 3 billion of them sop up more than 100,000 tons of hazardous solvents such as benzene, xylene, toluene and methyl ethyl ketone.

"Why should these materials be regulated as a hazardous waste?" the EPA said in a document given to the laundry industry in 2000. "Because they have the potential to cause fires, or to be the source of fugitive air emissions, and ground water contamination."

In 1997, the Clinton administration proposed a clean-water rule requiring industrial laundries to pretreat their wastewater to remove chemical solvents. The Uniform & Textile Service Association (UTSA) and Textile Rental Services Association of America (TRSA) mounted a $1.2 million lobbying campaign against the proposed rule, arguing that toxic pollutants are removed at the laundries or by municipal wastewater treatment plants. The trade groups said the proposal would have cost them more than $400 million.

In 1999, the Clinton EPA withdrew the rule. The next year, with Clinton still in the White House, the EPA floated a new draft rule that proposed to exempt shop towels from hazardous-waste requirements only if factories squeezed the towels "dry" -- defined as containing no more than five grams of solvents -- before placing them in sealed containers and sending them to laundries.

Calling this "an extremist view in the EPA," the laundry industry forcefully opposed the new proposal as overregulation.

But environmental activists, labor groups and paper towel makers said the laundries and local treatment plants frequently exceed their mandated pollution limits. Sixty-five Cintas laundries in 15 states and Canada have exceeded pollution limits on more than 1,100 occasions in the past several years, according to public records gathered by the Sierra Club and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).

For the EPA and the laundry industry, things changed when Bush took office in 2001. The industry pushed hard to derail the Clinton proposed rule in favor of a more lenient one that gives shop towels a hazardous-waste exemption without the need to wring them dry or store them in special containers.

Laundry trade groups appealed directly to EPA Administrator Whitman in February 2001: "The draft regulation in its current form . . . increases the regulatory burden."

In May, Whitman sent a conciliatory response: "Partnerships with our stakeholders will be an important part of how we will do business at EPA."

To aid in the effort, the industry urged contributions to its Textile Rental Services Association`s Political Action Committee. "Will PAC donations open doors, get appointments and allow your message to be delivered? Absolutely," Textile Rental magazine said in its March 2002 edition.
Exemption Sought at EPA

In Richard Farmer, the industry had one of the biggest political givers in the country.

For President George H.W. Bush, Farmer, now 69 , was a member of "Team 100," donors who gave more than $100,000 to Republican Party-building committees. When George W. Bush ran for office in 2000, Farmer`s "golfing buddy," Cincinnati financier Mercer Reynolds III, recruited Farmer to be a Pioneer, Farmer said. This year, he earned the more exalted Ranger status by raising a minimum of $200,000 in individual contributions.

Farmer said that his big gifts are not connected to political favors.

In the case of shop towel regulation, Farmer said Cintas itself was unconcerned. "We huddled up and [decided] no matter what happens here, it will have no impact on Cintas," he said.

Later in the interview, when specifically asked about the Clinton-era proposal, he said it would have hurt Cintas by making it difficult for the company to provide the full range of services its customers demand. Shop towels are now about 5 percent of Cintas`s business, but they remain an important service to customers who also rent uniforms.

Farmer said he never contacted the administration about the new rule. He said he did complain about the rule to Ohio Republican Sen. George V. Voinovich and Rep. Rob Portman, a fellow Bush Pioneer and chairman of Bush`s campaign in Ohio this year.

Farmer said he made the calls in 2002 on behalf of the two laundry trade groups. Cintas is the biggest company in the industry, but Farmer said that complaints from hundreds of small laundries probably had more impact than his calls. "It would have put small guys out of business," he said.

Portman said in a recent interview that he was first contacted by one of the trade groups, which he knew represented Cintas, "one of those big companies in our district." He said he considered it a constituent issue. "I do remember talking to Dick about it at least once," he said.

About the same time in 2002 that Farmer was making his calls and the trade groups were contacting members of Congress, he made a major contribution. On March 19, 2002, Farmer gave $250,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

On March 25, Portman and Voinovich co-wrote a letter to Whitman asking her to support a more encompassing waste exemption for shop towels -- this one from solid waste regulation. Gaining a solid-waste exemption would remove a further layer of regulation because some states apply additional taxes, fees and special handling requirements to solid waste.

Whitman spokesman Joe Martyak said such a letter from lawmakers "helps to precipitate a meeting to find out what`s the glitch. You help to unglitch it, to move it along."

At this point , EPA attorneys were balking at the solid-waste exemption, Portman and Voinovich said in their letter.

A month later , Whitman wrote Portman and Voinovich that the EPA was considering the solid-waste exemption and assured that it would "incorporate suggested changes where appropriate."

Three weeks later, EPA officials signed off on the exemption, according to the trade group`s timeline.

Jim O`Leary, the EPA official who wrote the original language that was rewritten, said there was no political interference from Whitman`s office. "That`s nonsense," O`Leary said. "We called it the way we saw it. No one interfered."
A Rule That Isn`t `Onerous`

On Aug. 2, EPA`s Kathy Blanton, who replaced O`Leary, e-mailed to industry attorney William M. Guerry Jr. the "language we have put together to address the laundries` concerns," according to a copy of the e-mail obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Guerry wrote back on Aug. 15 with proposed changes, documents show. Among them was deletion of a phrase in the preamble stating that shop towels "remain regulated." Instead, the lobbyist wanted the words "regulatory status . . . remains unchanged."

Guerry, in an interview, said the change was important to make sure that states did not misread the rule as a significant change in policy. Otherwise there would have been "chaos" and a "train wreck," he said. EPA officials shared the language with him, he said, because "they recognized that we had the expertise they needed."

Blanton said she sent Guerry just part of the regulatory language. "I can see how, from the outside, that it would look like colluding or something. [But] these were the people who were going to be most affected by the rule and they were the ones with the expertise." She said at this point the EPA had already had sufficient input from the paper towel people and others affected by the rule.

Opponents, including the union, environmentalists and paper towel makers, say they were not given an advance look at the language. Ralph Solarski, a Kimberly-Clark Corp. executive who chairs a task force of paper towel makers, said his group would have been glad to have one.

"Kathy Blanton and Bob Dellinger at EPA were asked on multiple occasions for advance copies and we were consistently denied," Solarski wrote in an e-mail to The Post.

EPA officials attended two industry meetings to discuss the proposed rule, one in Baltimore on Aug. 20 and one in Old Town Alexandria on Sept. 12. On Aug. 30, Farmer donated $250,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

EPA`s Office of Solid Waste Director Dellinger spoke at the Alexandria meeting. His comments later appeared in the trade group`s magazine: "EPA doesn`t want to make this onerous."

Instead of screw-on, sealed containers for transporting contaminated woven towels from factories to laundries, which were proposed in 2000, Dellinger said, a piece of plywood over a barrel would meet the new EPA proposed standard.

Also, the EPA opted not to require the towels to be wrung out. "The point of that is not to make it harder to do than what you would do through your normal course of business," Dellinger said.

However, he told the group, the paper towel industry would have to wring out its towels to make sure they had no more than five grams of solvent on them before being dumped.

The new proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on Nov. 20, 2003.

Paper industry officials say that the EPA is ignoring its own studies showing that laundries create 30 percent more waste than paper towels in the form of sludge -- lint, debris, toxics and other substances extracted from laundry wastewater -- sent to municipal landfills.

"This is a case study," Solarski said, "for how an industry has used the regulatory process to gain a market advantage."

Post database editor Sarah Cohen and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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The world`s first commercial magnetic levitation train line shuttles passengers between Shanghai`s airport and the city`s edge at speeds of up to 287 mph.


washingtonpost.com

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet Train
Cutting-Edge Maglev Rail Line Boosts Pride in Shanghai, but Ridership Lags

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A14

SHANGHAI -- Smoothly, quietly, but relentlessly, the sleek new train picked up speed.

Reaching 100 mph, it seemed similar to the fast trains of Europe and Japan. But by 200 mph, Shanghai`s passing suburbs started to blur in the window. And at 287 mph, the top speed, passengers could clearly feel that their ride to the airport had become a streak into railroad history.

"It`s great," said Andrew Suan, 35, an investment adviser on his way to catch a flight for Hong Kong. "It`s better than Disneyland."

Shanghai`s new magnetic levitation train, or maglev, built by German engineers for $1.2 billion to cover 20 miles in less than eight minutes, has proved it can make an impression, even in a city that lives on superlatives. China`s biggest, richest, most advanced, most with-it metropolis has scored again, becoming home to the fastest and most technologically innovative train in the world.

The addition of maglev transportation has been an important boost to China`s and Shanghai`s idea of themselves as a nation and city zooming toward a prosperous future under the stewardship of a forward-looking Communist Party. It also has been a key testing ground for ThyssenKrupp and Siemens, the German companies that are its main manufacturers -- and that are in the bidding for a planned $16 billion high-speed Shanghai-to-Beijing line.

Success here could boost their chances in the competition against French, Japanese and other German fast-train firms, as well as the Chinese Railway Ministry, for that lucrative project, designed to halve the 14 hours it now takes to make the 865-mile trip between China`s two main cities. Chinese officials originally announced the new rail line would be ready for the 2008 Olympics, but that schedule seems to have slipped since President Hu Jintao`s government took over last year and ordered further studies.

In Shanghai, however, the studies are finished. The airport express became the first magnetic levitation line to operate commercially early this year.

Since then, its warp speed and breakthrough technology have attracted thousands of admirers and thrill riders, including Premier Wen Jiabao. Proud city officials have opened a little museum in the city-end departure terminal to explain how the train works: The repelling and attracting forces of powerful magnets suspend the carriages above the track and, because that eliminates the drag of friction, are able to push them along smoothly at breakneck speeds.

But for most airline passengers landing after long flights from abroad or heading out on business trips, the technological marvel has not become the automatic answer to their search for a quick, convenient ride to connect the futuristic Pudong International Airport with Shanghai`s crowded downtown skyscrapers.

For the first three months of commercial operation, the maglev ran on an abbreviated schedule at less than 20 percent of capacity, city officials calculated. The beginning months were further tarnished by reports that the track was sinking. But engineers quickly reassured the public that sinking was natural in the area`s soft soil -- and foreseen in construction -- and that fixing it was only a matter of adjusting the tracks.

After cutting prices by a third, to $6 one way, on April 15 and adding runs so trains depart every 15 to 20 minutes on an 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. schedule, the city`s Maglev Transportation Department Co. has raised its estimates of passengers to about 8,000 a day. But that still is only 27 percent of capacity. And the latest period measured, the company acknowledged, included the May Day holiday week during which many passengers were Chinese tourists taking a thrill ride, the way they would at Disneyland.

Angelina Wang, 25, who arrived at Pudong International on a recent day for a break from her job at a language school in Switzerland, provided two telling explanations for the slack ridership among business and other travelers who are the target market.

Asked why she was in an airport taxi line rather than heading for the train, Wang at first expressed puzzlement, having forgotten there was such a line a 10-minute walk away. Her lack of awareness was shared by two Shanghai taxi drivers, who did not know how to find the terminal.

According to business sources who participated in the maglev start-up, Shanghai authorities have been slow to establish connections with airlines and travel agencies so arriving passengers are made aware the high-speed wonder awaits them. In addition, they said, signs are inadequate inside the airport to guide passengers toward the long corridor leading to the train`s departure area.

But Wang said the real reason she preferred a taxi was convenience. With suitcases to lug around after a tiring flight, she said, the temptation was to just plop into a taxi and give her home address. The alternative, she pointed out, was walking with her bags to the train platform, and then changing to a taxi or subway once the train arrived at its suburban Pudong departure terminal. Moreover, she said, the price of taking a taxi directly from the airport ends up being only a little higher.

"It`s just easier," she said, turning to board her taxi.

A graying businessman who travels to Shanghai from Europe about once a month agreed, saying he has tried the train but prefers a taxi. "The taxi is just more convenient," he said as a young traveling companion nodded. "It goes right to the hotel."

The city departure terminal was built adjoining an existing subway station at Longyang Road, on the edge of Shanghai`s new Pudong district. It lies well on the eastern side of the Huangpu River, a long taxi ride from the traditional center of the city on the river`s western bank.

Several extensions have been discussed. For the moment, however, the fastest train in the world takes travelers to what amounts to a subway stop on the edge of the city. But one regular traveler, who has yet to try the train, suggested that still may look good in the years to come as Shanghai`s traffic steadily worsens and the taxi ride to the airport gets longer and longer.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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The Democracy Option



Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A20

THE TROUBLES in Iraq are prompting a swelling chorus of manifestos from critics of the Bush administration, both liberal and conservative, who would have it abandon its goal of establishing a democratic regime in place of the former dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The critics style themselves as hard-nosed realists; they say it`s time to dispense with the administration`s utopian illusion that Iraq could be made a model for political freedom in the Middle East. It`s time, they say, for a more pragmatic exit strategy. Their critique of the administration`s shallow thinking and incompetent planning is incisive, and they are right that the United States needs to adjust its policy to reflect its depleted legitimacy in Iraq. But there`s a problem: The ways out of Iraq offered by the "realists" are as illusory in their fashion as were the Pentagon`s plans for a quick and easy transition.

Some want the United States to resign itself to Iraq`s becoming a military-run soft autocracy, like Egypt; they point to the emergence of a military force in Fallujah commanded by former Baathist generals as the beginning of that trend. Yet Iraq could not be consolidated under such a regime without massive bloodshed; that Saddam Hussein remained in power by filling mass graves was not an accident. Some, especially those in Washington who have long championed the cause of the Kurds, favor Iraq`s partition into three loosely confederated mini-states. This would please the Kurds but almost certainly lead to a Yugoslav-like series of wars that would prompt the intervention of Turkey, Iran and other neighbors. The Shiite and Sunni Arab populations in Iraq do not live in easily partitioned districts; Baghdad, for example, is home to millions of both.

Liberal opinion is drifting toward support for unilateral withdrawal or perhaps the fixing of a firm departure date for U.S. troops. But withdrawal in defeat would be catastrophic for U.S. interests around the world and a historic victory for Islamic extremism. The announcement of a pullout deadline would be almost as bad. If Iraqis become convinced that the United States is prepared to leave without achieving its political objectives, those objectives will be immediately discredited, leaving civil war as the only means for resolving how the country will be governed.

The administration was wrong to believe that an Iraqi democracy could be quickly established or that the resulting regime would necessarily become a showcase of liberal values. Yet now that Iraq`s previous dictatorship has been destroyed and the country`s varied communities have been freed from the apparatus of terror, the supposed utopian solution -- elections -- offers the most pragmatic way of establishing a viable government. Elections, as opposed to war or outside appointment, are still the mechanism favored by the country`s most powerful political forces for determining Iraq`s future. They offer the best chance of defeating the extremists.

Elections, in short, are the best U.S. endgame in Iraq -- provided the administration adopts a realists` view of them. It is sensible for the United States to give the United Nations as large a role as it will accept in organizing and conducting those elections; it is foolish to cling to the idea that U.S. political favorites, such as some of the exiles on the appointed Governing Council, can survive a popular vote. It is unrealistic to believe that U.S. appointees and advisers can be positioned to control the future government or that unilateral U.S. control over security matters can be maintained past the first ballot; Iraqi forces must be prepared to control security. The Bush administration also must accept, sooner rather than later, that an elected Iraqi government is likely to embrace economic or social policies not favored by the United States and may not be particularly friendly to Washington or to Israel.

At best an elected Iraqi government will be a fragile and awkward entity that exercises only loose control over the country and requires long-term support by foreign troops and other outsiders. It will look more like Lebanon than Switzerland. Getting there will require an enormous second effort by the United States, which will have to sacrifice more while somehow recruiting more support from the rest of the world. Failure is a distinct possibility. So why should democracy be tried? We believe that it is a vital goal. But it is, at this point, also the most realistic way forward.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com

Faulty Terror Report Card

By Alan B. Krueger and David Laitin

Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A21

Are we winning the war on terrorism?

Although keeping score is difficult, the State Department`s annual report on international terrorism, released last month, provides the best government data to answer this question. The short answer is "No," but that`s not the spin the administration is putting on it.

"You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," said Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. As evidence, the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report says that worldwide terrorism dropped by 45 percent between 2001 and 2003. The report even boasts that the number of terrorist acts committed last year "represents the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969."

Yet, a careful review of the report and underlying data supports the opposite conclusion: The number of significant terrorist acts increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003 -- 36 percent -- even using the State Department`s official standards. The data that the report highlights are ill-defined and subject to manipulation -- and give disproportionate weight to the least important terrorist acts. The only verifiable information in the annual reports indicates that the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years.

To be sure, counting terrorist acts is not as straightforward as counting the number of SARS victims. Specialists have not agreed to any test that would unambiguously qualify an act as one of international terrorism. But in the words of the Congressional Research Service, the State Department`s annual report is "the most authoritative unclassified U.S. government document that assesses terrorist attacks."

So how did the report conclude that international terrorism is declining?

It accomplishes this sleight of hand by combining significant and nonsignificant acts of terrorism. Significant acts are clearly defined and each event is listed in an appendix, so readers can verify the data. By contrast, no explanation is given for how nonsignificant acts are identified or whether a consistent process is used over time -- and no list is provided describing each event. The data cannot be verified.

International terrorism is defined in the report as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets" involving citizens or property from multiple countries, "usually intended to influence an audience." An event "is judged significant if it results in loss of life or serious injury to persons" or "major property damage."

A panel determines whether an event meets this definition, but the State Department refused to tell us the members of the panel or the practices used to count nonsignificant terrorist acts.

We do know that the definition leaves much room for discretion. Because "significant events" include such things as destroying an ATM in Greece or throwing a molotov cocktail at a McDonald`s in Norway without causing much damage, it is easy to imagine that nonsignificant events are counted with a squishy definition that can be manipulated to alter the trend.

The alleged decline in terrorism in 2003 was entirely a result of a decline in nonsignificant events.

Another curious feature of the latest report is that its catalogue of events does not list a single significant terrorist act occurring after Nov. 11, 2003, despite averaging 16 such acts a month in the rest of the year.

The representation that no terrorist events occurred after Nov. 11 is patently false. The bombings of the HSBC Bank, British Consulate, and Beth Israel and Neve Shalom synagogues in Istanbul by individuals associated with al Qaeda occurred on Nov. 20 and Nov. 15, respectively. Additionally, the report mentions the bombing of the Catholic Relief Services in Nasiriyah, Iraq, on Nov. 12 but somehow omits it from the official list of significant events.

So the record number of 169 significant international terrorist events for 2003 is undoubtedly an understatement. It is impossible to know if these and other terrorist events were left out of the State Department`s total of events.

Despite the lack of transparency and the rose-colored graphs, the department`s data reveal that administration policies in the past year have not turned the terrorist tide. Of course, it is impossible to know how many terrorist acts would have occurred absent the war on terrorism, but it is unambiguous that the number of significant international terrorist acts is on the rise.

The fact that the number of nonsignificant terrorist acts has headed down -- even if true -- is, well, nonsignificant. What matters for security is the number of significant acts. It is regrettable that one casualty in the war against terrorism has been the accurate reporting of statistics. This seems to be another fight we are losing.

Alan Krueger is the Bendheim professor of economics at Princeton University. David Laitin is the Watkins professor of political science at Stanford University.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Another scoop for My Lai massacre journalist
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

17 May 2004

Seymour Hersh has done it again. Back in 1969, when Richard Nixon was President, he produced the scoop on the My Lai massacre which helped turn America against the Vietnam War.

Now in the unlikely pages of the oh-so laid-back New Yorker magazine, he has repeated his achievement, bringing the world news of the nightmare at Abu Ghraib.

In a sense, Hersh`s three bombshell reports about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers, the latest alleging that Donald Rumsfeld authorised the expansion of a secret programme that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, are linear descendants of the My Lai story that made his name.

Back then, Hersh was a freelance journalist who received a tip that an officer was about to be court-martialled for the murder of Vietnamese civilians. He tracked down Lieutenant William Calley, commander of the company which carried out the slaughter of 500 Vietnamese villagers. Calley told all, and Sy Hersh had a scoop for the ages, and a Pulitzer prize to boot.

At 67, Hersh is enjoying a journalistic Indian summer. After My Lai, which generated a couple of books, he was hired by The New York Times, where he led the paper`s coverage of the Watergate scandal.

He resigned from the Times in 1979 and produced The Price of Power, a portrait of Henry Kissinger as a manipulative, cynical courtier at the Nixon White House. The book was a prize-winning bestseller. In retrospect, however, it marked Hersh`s highwater mark, until now.

Other less successful exposé books followed: on the 1983 shooting down of KAL Flight 007 by the Soviets; on how Israel built up its secret nuclear arsenal; and on the sexual excesses of John F Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot.

But at The New Yorker, where the editor, David Remnick, uses Hersh like a one-man investigative reporting team, he is back at the top of his game.

Since 11 September, he has broken story after story: the bungled efforts to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; the flaws in the legal case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker; and a piece on the business dealings of the neo-conservative adviser Richard Perle, which led to Mr Perle`s resignation as chairman of the Pentagon`s Defence Policy Board.

Hersh helped demolish the fiction about Saddam`s efforts to buy uranium in Africa which found its way into President Bush`s 2003 State of the Union speech.

And now the Iraqi prison abuse reports ­ a scandal that may be to Bush`s Iraq adventure what My Lai was to the Vietnam War.

As journalistic second acts go, it takes some beating.


17 May 2004 12:34

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Who commands the private soldiers?

Allegations of abuse have raised wider questions about the role - and accountability - of civilian contractors
David Leigh in Moyock, North Carolina
Monday May 17, 2004

The Guardian
Here on the outskirts of the Great Dismal Swamp, now a nature reserve, is the new face of the privatised American army. Some fear it is getting out of control.

Grim-faced men in battle fatigues are oiling their M4s and Glocks, blasting their way through mocked-up terrorist streets, and riddling old cars with bullets.

The TV set in the rest room is tuned to gung-ho Fox News and the mess tables are shared today by a mixed bunch of 200, mostly male. Some are freelances readying themselves for Iraq, some are from the overstretched real US military buying firing-range time, some are coastguards about to be deployed to an unspecified spot "overseas". Young men at one table have Grupe Tactico Chile on their shoulders.

This is Blackwater, a commercial army base - the largest private firearms training centre in the world, according to its owner, Eric Prince, a former Navy Seal.

Blackwater guards provincial outposts for the Iraqi coalition provisional authority, and the firm has the contract to keep its head, Paul Bremer, alive. It fought in a heroic rescue of a wounded soldier in Najaf, but four of its men were ambushed and killed in Falluja, causing an international crisis.

This week the company is bulldozing a long twisting track out of its 6,000 acres of swampland so convoy troops can experience being shot at, as they will be in Iraq. The trainers will use live ammunition.

Blackwater is at the forefront of lobbying efforts to stop a clampdown on private military companies in Iraq. The US defence department has issued draft regulations seeking to bring them under US military law, instead of their present local legal immunity.

"You simply can`t do that," said Chris Bertelli, their Washington lobbyist. "How do you enforce it? At the end of your 60-day contract, you can just go home."

Weapons ban

Other proposals being resisted are a ban on private weapons, or a rule that they be returned to the US military when off duty. Blackwater, whose weaponry ranges from M4 rifles to 20mm cannon on its helicopters, says this is impractical in a war zone. It suggests voluntary standards.

"We`re very particular. We only hire former special forces people. There is still a deep patriotism in many of them," Mr Bertelli said.

The US military has gone headlong for privatisation, urged on by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. One 2002 memo from the secretary of the army, Thomas White, suggests that as much as a third of its budget is going on private contractors, while army numbers are falling. The rationale is to save money on permanent soldiers by using temporary ones.

But the policy has other, political ad vantages. When a mortar shell lobbed at Baghdad airport earlier this year killed Corporal Tomasi Ramatau, 41, no one in the US media took much notice.

Names like his do not appear on the roll-calls of US soldiers killed in Iraq, solemnly enunciated on the daily TV shows. Ramatau was one of the unemployed men from the Pacific island of Fiji hired in their hundreds by another prominent private military firm, Global Risk of London, to take the bullets for the Pentagon.

The loose control of the 20,000-plus private-enterprise soldiers in Iraq has been thrown into painful relief by the accusations that hired civilian interrogators and translators encouraged obscene tortures at Abu Ghraib prison and that one even allegedly raped an Iraqi boy in his cell.

No senator or congressman appears to have had the least idea until the scandal broke that the drive to privatise the military had gone so far as to use civilian contractors for such sensitive jobs.

Aides to Democrat congressman Ike Skelton were particularly incensed with a reply by Mr Rumsfeld to a demand last month for information about private mil itary firms in Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld produced a list of 60 companies, half a dozen of them British, but withheld all mention of two of the biggest and best-connected recruiting firms alleged to be at the centre of the torture scandal - CACI in Washington and Titan in San Diego, California.

One of the few people to have conducted a full-scale study of military privatisation, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, said: "No lawmakers seemed to know that they were hiring civilians as interrogators. They had this concept that the civilians were there to mow lawns and answer phones." In his recent book, Corporate Warriors, he lists dangers in excessively privatised soldiering, such as cutting corners to save money, secrecy, and hollowing out the genuine military by poaching their troops. All have duly come to pass in Iraq.

CACI, for example, placed Steve Stefanowicz, a former reservist from the Philadelphia area who had once worked in naval intelligence, in Iraq. According to his fellow interrogator Torin Nelson, CACI hired interrogators over the phone, without even meeting them.

"I was interviewed in September 2003 in a very short telephone conversation, which was more like a sales pitch of how great the company was, than a typical interview for a professional job," Mr Nelson said. "I never met anyone from CACI until I landed in Fort Bliss [an army induction centre in Texas], and then it was some other new hires."

Frantic

CACI website entries show increasingly frantic efforts to attract interrogators, with the qualifications required being reduced from seven years` interrogation experience, to five years, to two.

It does not seem that CACI saved any military manpower for the US by hiring Mr Stefanowicz. According to naval records, he was on active duty as a petty officer 3rd class in the reserves already, but apparently resigned in September 2003 to join CACI. Private companies are offering pay of up to $115,000 (about £65,000) a year.

In Iraq, the status of the CACI interrogators was ambiguous. Mr Nelson said some of his colleagues went around in desert camouflage uniform. "We contractors were often able to establish our own method of actually implementing the chain of command`s intent, which was to glean information for intelligence purposes."

Mr Stefanowicz ended up being accused in the now-notorious leaked classified Taguba report, of telling untrained and unsupervised reservist military policemen to abuse the Abu Ghraib prisoners.

He remains in Iraq, according to the US army on "administrative duties" while investigations continue. The accused soldiers below him, however, all face courts martial, beginning this month.

Unlike the gun-toting security companies, firms like CACI seem to function merely as recruiting postboxes. CACI, based in a Washington suburb, put former defence officials on its board, including the former London representative of the code-breaking National Security Agency, Barbara McNamara. It moved seamlessly from origins as an IT firm to acquiring such small companies last year as Premier Technology, also in Washington, which had contracts to supply 96 analysts to US military intelligence in Germany.

From there it was a short step, when the call went out, to recruiting freelance army interrogators. Similarly, firms like Blackwater and Global have shifted, almost unnoticed, from providing bodyguard services to engaging in fighting.

Mr Singer points out that mercenaries are nothing new, and huge standing national armies are a recent development.

But one former British special forces officer, recently returned to Europe from Iraq, said: "The trouble is the private companies often have an attitude that `Yeah, we can do it`. Then they become overstretched. As officers in the military, there is an integrity level we would operate under normally. And it just isn`t there."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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This photo is only poking fun at the Bush Administration and is not intended to reflect any African-American stereotypes from the old Amos `n Andy radio program.

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NEWS ANALYSIS
Senators to Press Scandal
A GOP-controlled panel, feeling slighted by the administration and obliged to look at abuse of prisoners, has no plan to drop the issue soon.
By Richard Simon and Elizabeth Shogren
Times Staff Writers

May 17, 2004

WASHINGTON — As the White House struggles to get beyond the prisoner abuse scandal, it faces an unsettling fact: The Senate Armed Services Committee — controlled by Republicans — plans to keep the issue alive for weeks to come.

That promises more headaches for the White House and once undreamed-of opportunities for Democrats on the committee, such as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and other critics of President Bush`s handling of the war in Iraq.

The Armed Services Committee, led by 77-year-old Senate veteran John W. Warner of Virginia, has served noticed that it would not pull back, as the House Armed Services Committee has done. Instead, Warner plans extended hearings to call on the carpet such high-profile officials as Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

More disturbing still for the White House, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate committee say they will shift the focus from the misdeeds of a handful of guards at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. What they want to dig into instead is how senior Pentagon officials loosened the rules protecting prisoners during interrogation.

The rules, changed to speed the flow of intelligence on terrorism, complied with the Geneva Convention, the officials say. But critics say the changes may have contributed to a climate in which abuses could occur.

In a report on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the New Yorker magazine says this week that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld secretly approved a plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on prisoners in Iraq — a contention the CIA and the Pentagon deny.

In addition, the current issue of Newsweek says that a memo from White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, issued shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, may have established the legal foundation for the abusive treatment of prisoners.

For congressional leaders to get into such questions when a president from their party faces a tough reelection campaign isn`t the way the game is meant to be played in Washington.

These days, politicians tend to march in lock-step with their party leadership, always "on message" and quick to deny their opponents even the smallest opportunity to exploit a weakness. That`s partly because the political climate is highly polarized and partly because elected officials have become dependent on ideological constituencies that demand total loyalty.

In the prisoner abuse scandal, however, circumstances have conspired to create an exception to the current rules of political warfare.

One of those circumstances is the sheer magnitude of the scandal, which has triggered indignation around the world, inflamed public opinion in Iraq and other Muslim nations, and threatened to undermine U.S. foreign policy on a wide front.

"The Republican strategists would love for this story to die, but no one knows how to kill it," University of Wisconsin political scientist Donald F. Kettl said. "They know they can`t take a dump-it-and-run approach, and they know they can`t keep it bottled up. It`s an impossible dilemma."

There are other factors at work, too, factors unique to this Senate committee.

For one thing, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is not a typical modern-day politician. With courtly manners and an excellent tailor, Warner is a member of Virginia`s "hunt country" aristocracy. His military service began in World War II, when he joined the Navy at 17; during the Korean War, he served in the Marine Corps.

Warner was Navy secretary under President Nixon and has been in the Senate for 25 years.

That background gives Warner deep roots and a sense of independence that are increasingly rare in a Congress marked by relatively rapid turnover.

He represents a state that combines conservative rural communities, the headquarters of the Rev. Jerry Falwell`s Christian right organization, large military installations — including the Pentagon itself — and moderate-to-liberal Washington suburbs. To satisfy that political mix, Warner has been a moderate but loyal Republican most of the time, while shrewdly picking opportunities to display his independence.

"He is not one who has hewed the party line," said Robert D. Holsworth, an expert on state politics at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. "He has on a number of occasions broken with party orthodoxy."

As a senator, Warner is also a child of an earlier era. He grew up when chairmen and senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, such as former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), were powerful players in military affairs, courted and consulted by presidents and senior defense officials regardless of party.

"Warner is a man of the Senate. He revels in the institution`s traditions, and he knows that oversight is an essential part of the Senate`s work," said a veteran congressional analyst.

Warner and his committee believe they have been treated cavalierly by Rumsfeld and his senior aides, which they find personally and institutionally offensive. For example, committee members are quick to recall that Rumsfeld appeared before Armed Services the day CBS News reported on the Abu Ghraib scandal — without notifying any of them.

"The entire Senate was shocked that they were not given any notice or even a whiff of this imploding scandal," a Senate GOP aide said.

"The textbooks that members of this administration had when they were young just had two branches of government — the executive and the judicial," the aide said. "The Senate`s oversight role has been completely ignored by this administration."

"Congress does not like to be surprised," said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a member of the committee. And Warner made his feelings clear at the outset of the panel`s first hearing. With Rumsfeld facing him in the witness chair, Warner said:

"In my 25 years on this committee, I`ve received hundreds of calls, day and night, from … all levels, uniform and civilian, from the Department of Defense when they, in their judgment, felt it was necessary, and I daresay other members on this committee have experienced the same courtesy.

"I did not receive such a call in this case, and yet I think the situation was absolutely clear and required it — not only to me, but my distinguished ranking member and other members of this committee."

Warner is not the only Republican who seems determined to keep the feet of the administration to the fire. At least three other GOP senators on Armed Services questioned administration witnesses aggressively during the opening round of hearings last week: John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina.

Collins, representing a swing state, is often independent. Graham spent 6 1/2 years as an Air Force lawyer on active duty and, according to his biography, is the only U.S. senator currently serving in the National Guard or Reserves. He is a colonel, assigned as a reserve judge to the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals.

Beyond political stakes or resentment at the Pentagon`s failure to show deference to the Armed Services Committee, many committee members consider the prisoner abuse scandal — and their role in dealing with it — unusually serious.

"The role of the Senate at moments like this is to provide an educational role for the American people," said Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation. "The senators can help frame what happened and help explain why."

Both chambers have been inattentive to oversight of the war in Iraq, said Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, "reflecting a strong incentive among congressional Republicans not to damage in any way the president`s political standing."

"But the vividness of the detainee abuses and the failure of the administration to give senators a heads up has finally broken the logjam in the Senate, where there is a greater sense of institutional responsibility," he said.

"Every once in a while, members of Congress simply decide to do the right thing…. Members could not look themselves in the mirror if they didn`t get to the bottom of these horrible acts," said John J. Pitney Jr., a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Joe Garecht, a GOP political strategist, agreed.

"Lawmakers like John Warner, Lindsey Graham, John McCain and others are truly angry that this situation existed, and believe that it is the Congress` duty to reestablish America`s moral credibility abroad," he said.

Echoing that sentiment, Collins of Maine said in an interview last week, "I believe that the Armed Services Committee should continue its investigation. There are still many unanswered questions….

"I don`t see this as a partisan issue," she said. "It`s far too important."



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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RONALD BROWNSTEIN / WASHINGTON OUTLOOK
Count Bush`s Doctrine of Preemption as a Casualty of the Iraq War
Ronald Brownstein

May 17, 2004

The second anniversary is approaching of the speech in which President Bush unveiled the doctrine of preemption that he hoped to enshrine as the centerpiece of America`s national security strategy. But the celebration is likely to be muted, inside the White House and beyond. Preemption, as applied in Iraq, has become the greatest threat to its author`s reelection.

It was in a commencement address at West Point on June 1, 2002, that Bush first fully explained his belief that the age of global terrorism had undermined the principles of deterrence and containment that guided U.S. defense strategy through the Cold War.

"Deterrence — the promise of massive retaliation against nations — means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend," Bush declared. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can … secretly provide them to terrorist allies."

Against such threats, Bush insisted, America needed a strategy that would "take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge." Bush labeled this approach "preemption," and later his administration fleshed it out in a formal National Security Strategy document that pledged to "stop rogue states and their terrorist allies" before they could threaten the United States.

Deterrence and containment defined U.S. security strategy for more than four decades. But preemption, less than two years after its debut, already looks frayed.

"As a doctrine, it`s dead as a doornail," insists Ivo Daalder, a former national security aide under President Clinton and coauthor of "America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy." Even one GOP strategist familiar with White House national security thinking acknowledges that for any president looking to apply the doctrine again, "the bar is higher, the country would be more reluctant, and the case would be harder to make."

The reason, of course, is Iraq, the doctrine`s first test. Initially, the war to depose Saddam Hussein seemed to strengthen the argument for preemption. Like the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the military`s lightning run to Baghdad dramatized America`s ability to eliminate regimes it considers hostile — and to do so faster and with fewer U.S. casualties than once seemed imaginable.

The invasion freed Iraq from a brutal tyranny and might eventually produce a stable and humane country. But almost everything that has happened since the Hussein statues fell in Baghdad last spring has weakened the case for preemption as Bush defined it at West Point.

The first blow to Bush`s doctrine came when coalition forces failed to find the weapons of mass destruction the president had stressed as a principal justification for the war. That failure has been especially damaging because Bush`s vision placed such a premium on forecasting threats that weren`t as visible as the traditional justifications for preemptive attack, like armies massing on a border.

U.S. presidents, like leaders in almost all nations, have always reserved the right to strike preemptively against an enemy preparing an imminent attack. Bush`s innovation, the administration later explained, was to apply "the concept of imminent threat" to nations or groups developing "capabilities" that might one day threaten America. But after the intelligence debacle in Iraq, Bush or any successor is certain to face stiffer demands at home and abroad for proof before acting.

Building public support for another preemptive war would also be tougher because, by virtually every measure, Iraq has proved far costlier than the administration projected.

More than 770 American soldiers have now died in Iraq. The invasion and occupation have already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $127 billion, with another $67 billion to $79 billion probably due this year, according to a report last week by House Budget Committee Democrats. The war and the occupation have painfully stretched the military. And they have strained America`s relations with nations around the globe, even before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Does this mean preemption is dead? Probably yes, at least in the expansive sense Bush employed it in Iraq — using the military to depose a government America considers hostile without evidence of an imminent threat.

Even if the United States can quell the turmoil in Iraq and establish a reasonably democratic government, no president could look forward to replicating this experience, especially if Bush loses this fall. "If the architects are thrown out of office," acknowledges the GOP strategist, "that means the architecture will come down."

But that doesn`t mean a future president would entirely reject Bush`s critique of containment and deterrence, or rule out preemption in narrower circumstances. It`s telling that though Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has condemned Bush`s approach to preemption, he insists that "every president, from the beginning of time" has had the right to strike against an imminent danger.

Kerry`s aides say he would consider preemptive action to depose a regime openly harboring terrorists that threaten America. And even skeptics such as Daalder say that though the U.S., short of such a provocation, isn`t likely to enlist for another "regime change" any time soon, it might still someday strike preemptively against a more targeted danger — such as an Iranian nuclear-weapons facility.

Even in those cases, though, the world, and perhaps the American public as well, would probably demand much more proof than Bush mustered in Iraq. That looms as the ironic legacy of Bush`s attempt to elevate preemption from a tactic of last resort to a guiding doctrine. By defining preemption so much more aggressively than his predecessors, he may have reduced his successors` ability to employ it.

*

Ronald Brownstein`s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times` website at: latimes.com/brownstein.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY
Even an Empire Needs Legitimacy. The Question Is, How Do We Win It?
By Niall Fergusonhttp://www.foreignaffairs.org/author/niall-ferguson/index.ht…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.foreignaffairs.org/author/niall-ferguson/index.ht…
Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at New York University`s Stern School of Business and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. His latest book, "Colossus: The Price of America`s Empire," wa

May 17, 2004

The great Victorian Prime Minister Lord Salisbury once famously described what could happen to a great empire that relied too much on unilateral action. "Splendid isolation" was the phrase he used; and he meant to imply that there was nothing splendid about it at all.

With every new revelation of how Iraqi prisoners were maltreated in the Abu Ghraib prison, the Bush administration comes a step closer to not-so-splendid international isolation.

Spain, now under new political management, has pulled its troops out of Iraq. And the political pressure continues to mount on the most staunch of U.S. allies, Poland and Britain.

Most Americans are unaware of how steeply the domestic popularity of Salisbury`s successor, Tony Blair, has declined since he decided to back President Bush`s invasion of Iraq. There are those in London who say that Blair is now a lame-duck prime minister.

It was Secretary of State Colin L. Powell who told Bush last year: "You can`t do this alone." He meant that however easily American forces might be able to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq would be well-nigh impossible without international legitimacy.

And legitimacy is the key word here. Without it, even the mightiest empire can find itself in difficulties — as, for example, the British empire did in South Africa in 1900, the German empire did in Europe before 1914 and the Russians did in Afghanistan in 1980.

In fairness to Bush, he heeded Powell`s words of warning. All along, he resisted the pressure of Vice President Dick Cheney to act unilaterally, seeking not just one but two United Nations Security Council resolutions. When France effectively vetoed the second, Bush did not write off the U.N. He sought its support in the immediate aftermath of the war, only to be rebuffed again.

More recently, he executed what can only be described as a 180-degree policy change by asking the U.N. secretary-general`s representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, to decide the composition of the transitional Iraqi government that will take over from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority on June 30.

Yet the idea of internationalizing the problem may prove to be a chimera. Though many see the U.N. as a deus ex machina that can miraculously snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and bring the world back to our side, it could turn out altogether differently.

All the indications are that Brahimi is the wrong man for the job, overeager to undercut the very real achievements of American administrator L. Paul Bremer III in establishing the Iraqi Governing Council and the Transitional Administrative Law.

Meanwhile, the mood in Europe today is far from conducive to multilateral compromise. The mood in Berlin is of schadenfreude — delight at another`s discomfort. In Paris, it is just plain malicious. Franco-German policy toward the Middle East is increasingly predicated on a strategy of appeasement, designed to make Europe safe from Islamist terror by distancing it from the United States. Until the Europeans realize that they are as much at risk from the extremists as Americans are, there simply will be no meaningful transatlantic rapprochement. Washington is wasting its time hoping for one.

"Very well, alone" is at this point the phrase that comes to mind. Desirable though a multilateral solution to the crisis in Iraq may seem, the reality is that no such solution is likely to be forthcoming.

On the contrary, involving the U.N. any further seems quite likely to destabilize the situation. So what else can and should the United States do to reestablish the legitimacy of its occupation? The simple answer is: Make it work.

One thing is patently clear. Abandoning Iraq now is not an option. The consequences of withdrawal could be catastrophic. Imagine what they might be: a civil war among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds (like Lebanon after 1975, only much bigger) that would inevitably spill over Iraq`s borders, conceivably leading to intervention by Iran or Turkey or a political crisis for the already fragile Saudi regime.

Instead of looking to the U.N. to bail America out, let`s instead ask what can be done to speed up the economic reconstruction of Iraq — for clearly the best antidote to armed resistance must be employment and rising incomes. Here I am not wholly pessimistic, for it is still early days.

Fourteen months after the end of World War II, Germany and Japan were in far worse shape than Iraq today. Their populations were on the brink of starvation; their cities were scenes of the most terrible devastation. Indeed, it was not really until 1948 that recovery had been securely established.

But the United States did something different then. Its contributions to economic reconstruction were substantial — not only in the form of Marshall aid but in the form of a wide range of other grants. By contrast, most of the $200-billion-plus earmarked this year and last year for Iraq is being absorbed by the purely military expenses of the occupation. Precious little is available for the kind of civilian projects that have real multiplier (i.e. income- and job-creating) effects.

So here`s a proposition designed to make congressional flesh creep: $50 billion more to kick-start the Iraqi economy. Call it a Marshall Plan for the Middle East if you like. But make sure it is made available primarily as credit for new businesses. Sure, security is the sine qua non for economic recovery. But solvency matters too. And many would-be entrepreneurs in Iraqi cities could use some interest-free loans.

Expensive? Not necessarily. For if it worked, an Iraqi Marshall Plan would end up reducing the long-term costs of the U.S. military presence. Consider it an investment in stability.

Meanwhile, it is imperative that whatever Iraqi government has sovereignty conferred upon it at the end of June, there must be meaningful institutional safeguards to ensure that American forces remain in charge of the country`s security.

"Limited sovereignty" (which is what the State Department apparently has in mind) is not a contradiction in terms; for the next few years, it will be a necessary precondition for political stability.

It would, after all, be disastrous if U.S. forces were reduced to being mere targets for malcontents. But that is what will happen if their mission ceases to be clearly defined and their chain of command is subordinated to a U.N.-appointed Iraqi defense minister. Overnight, they could become like the Marines sent to Lebanon in 1983: the world`s best-trained and best-armed sitting ducks.

Isolation is certainly not splendid. But multilateralism can sometimes be worse. It is time to knuckle under and show that the United States can do it. The U.N. is not going to help.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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End the occupation
Ruth Rosen
Monday, May 17, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/17/EDGGG5VL181.DTL

I STILL REMEMBER when I read a New York Times news story in February 1997 that left me shaken. Tapes of phone conversations made by President Lyndon B. Johnson had just been released. It turns out that in 1964, Johnson already knew that the United States could win the battles, but not the war, in Vietnam.

Johnson called the war "the biggest damn mess I ever saw" and said, "I don`t think it`s worth fighting for and I don`t think we can get out." Though he viewed the war as pointless, he -- like all sitting presidents -- was unwilling to lose the war on his watch. "They`d impeach a president...that would run out, wouldn`t they?" he asked. Johnson also spoke emotionally about endangering American soldiers in Vietnam. "It just makes the chills run up my back," he said to Sen. Richard B. Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Russell responded, "It does me, too. We`re in the quicksands up to our neck, and I just don`t know what the hell to do about it."

For 10 years, Vietnam shadowed my student life. I believed the war was morally wrong; I thought it was unwinnable. But until I read that story, I never imagined that Johnson knew it as well.

Today, we are faced with a similar conundrum. The United States can win the battles, but it cannot win the war in Iraq. History teaches us that no occupation can last indefinitely. People are humiliated -- not only by depraved and violent interrogations as happened at Abu Ghraib prison -- but by the mere fact of being occupied. They inevitably resist.

Many people in Washington surely know that the war in Iraq is unwinnable and that, sooner or later, the United States will have to leave. As a sitting president, however, George W. Bush, who promoted a unilateralist pre-emptive foreign policy, is not likely to concede defeat and lose the war in Iraq on his watch.

That is why Sen. John Kerry must offer an alternative. As Bush`s Democratic challenger, he has to pledge that if he`s elected president, he will end the war by calling upon the international community to help Iraq hold early elections and by setting a date for an orderly and phased withdrawal of American troops.

If Kerry refuses to do that, then he, too, could turn into a sitting president who would also be reluctant to lose a war on his watch.

Why should the occupation end? Because WMDs have never been found, which was the reason the president said it was necessary to invade Iraq. Because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s incompetent planning sent too few troops to prevent widespread looting or to maintain electricity and the water supply. Because this was a war of choice, not of necessity. Because most of the Iraqi population now views Americans as occupiers, rather than as liberators. Because photographs revealing brutal and humiliating atrocities committed against Iraqi prisoners have shredded American moral credibility. Because the U.S. occupation of Iraq has provided al Qaeda terrorists with powerful propaganda for recruiting new suicide bombers and for justifying their barbaric act of beheading an American civilian.

This is not a time to gloat at Bush`s self-inflicted disaster. Nor is it a time to escalate into a cycle of revenge that may very well end up killing Americans on our own soil.

It is time to set things right. As New York Times columnist David Brooks has wisely suggested, we have to be prepared to permit the Iraqi people "to have a victory over us. For us to succeed in Iraq, we have to lose." Neither radical insurgents nor an American puppet government will create stability in Iraq. We must allow -- even encourage -- moderate Iraqis to express their resistance to the occupation and to prevail in Iraqi elections.

The idea of democracy spreading throughout the Middle East is still a noble idea, but, as Jonathan Schell, author of "The Unconquerable World" (Cosmopolitan, 2003) has written, "democracy cannot be shipped to Iraq on a tanker or a C-5A. It is a homegrown construct, which must flow from the will of the people involved. The expression of that will is, in fact, what democracy is."

For democracy to have a chance, the United States must withdraw its troops, leave no military base in Iraq and not try to control that nation`s oil policy. The United States must also pressure Israel to commit to a clear timetable to create a coherent Palestinian state. This is a precondition for peace in the Middle East.

It`s an act of patriotism to call for an end to the occupation. President Bush has damaged our national reputation and undermined our democratic ideals and traditions. To paraphrase a poignant question posed by a young John Kerry: How do you ask a soldier to be the last person to die in Iraq?

E-mail Ruth Rosen at [e-mail]

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Monday, May 17, 2004
War News for May 17, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Note to Readers

"Today in Iraq" is receiving an unusually large volume of traffic today. If the page doesn`t fully load, you can either hit the "refresh" button or re-size your screen. Either action causes the page to load completely. Don`t ask me why. It`s magic.

Bring ‘em on: IGC President assassinated by car bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Ten Italian soldiers wounded as Mahdi Army seizes Nasiriyah.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded in fighting south of Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Five Shi’ite militiamen killed in fighting near Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: CPA offices in Nasiriyah evacuated.

Bring ‘em on: Relative of Najaf’s new governor assassinated near Kufa.

Italy asks US to curtail offensive operations around Karbala, Kufa, and Najaf.

“Large-scale” anti-US protests reported in Karbala.

Italian soldier dies of wounds received in fighting near Nasiriyah.

Philippines forbids citizens from working in Iraq due to poor security.

Soldier son killed in Iraq, mom faces deportation for drug offense. “In many cases, including Cabral`s, immigration judges are barred from showing mercy. The law requires deportation for most drug possession charges, even for the mother of a dead hero. ‘My son gave his life for his country,’ Cabral said of Juan, 25, an Army mechanic who died in January near Kirkuk. ‘To me, he is still alive.’” I wonder if Lieutenant AWOL hugged this mom.

Bremer’s soup sandwich. “For weeks, the American occupation authority in Iraq has been updating the timetable leading to the day it is supposed to go out of business, on June 30, declaring on its Web site on Sunday that there were ‘46 days until Iraqi sovereignty.’ Yet nowhere on the Web site, or anyplace else in official American statements, can be found the identity of the new Iraqi leadership or the precise powers of the new Iraqi government over many important matters, including the full authority over Iraqi armed forces.”

Camp Cropper. “About 100 high-ranking Iraqi prisoners held for months at a time in spartan conditions on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport are being detained under a special chain of command, under conditions not subject to approval by the top American commander in Iraq, according to military officials. The unusual lines of authority in the detainees` handling are part of a tangled network of authority over prisoners in Iraq, in which the military police, military intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, various military commanders and the Pentagon itself have all played a role. Congressional investigators who are looking into the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners say those arrangements have made it difficult to determine where the final authority lies.”

Second thoughts. “After the setbacks in Falluja and Najaf, followed by the prisoner abuse scandal, hawks are glumly trying to reconcile the reality in Iraq with the predictions they made before the war. A few have already given up on the idea of a stable democracy in Iraq, and many are predicting failure unless there`s a dramatic change in policy - a new date for elections, a new secretary of defense, a new exit strategy.”

US plans to redeploy one combat brigade from Korea to Iraq.

Commentary

Opinion: “This wrong was not committed by accident but by design. In the revelatory new documentary about Al Jazeera, ‘Control Room,’ opening in New York this Friday before fanning out nationally, we are taken into our own Central Command`s media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action. The Lynch episode came at a troubling moment in the war; our troops were being stretched thin, the coalition had mistakenly shot up a van full of Iraqi women and children, and three Marines had just been killed in the latest helicopter crash. But as we see in ‘Control Room,’ the CentCom press operation was determined to drown out such bad news by disseminating the triumphant prepackaged saga of its manufactured heroine no matter what.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: California soldier dies in Iraq.

Local story: Florida sailor wounded in Iraq.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 5:16 AM
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May 16, 2004
FRANK RICH
Saving Private England

IT`S almost too perfect. Two young working-class women from opposite ends of West Virginia go off to war. One is blond and has aspirations to be a schoolteacher. The other is dark, a smoker, divorced and now carrying an out-of-wedlock baby. One becomes the heroic poster child for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the subject of a hagiographic book and TV movie; the other becomes the hideous, leering face of American wartime criminality, Exhibit A in the indictment of our country`s descent into the gulag. In the words of Time magazine, Pfc. Lynndie England is "a Jessica Lynch gone wrong."

Maybe that`s true — we are just starting to hear Private England speak for herself — but there`s a more revealing story in these women than the cheap ironies of their good witch/wicked witch twinship might suggest. Our 13-month journey from Jessica Lynch`s profile in courage to Lynndie England`s profile in sadism is less the tale of two women at the bottom of the chain of command than a gauge of the hubris by which those at the top have lost the war in both the international and American courts of public opinion. And the supposedly uplifting Lynch half of the double bill is as revealing of what`s gone wrong for us in Iraq — and gone wrong from the start — as is her doppelgänger`s denouement at Abu Ghraib.

Flash back for a moment to the creation of Jessica Lynch Superstar. It was in early April 2003 that the stories first surfaced about the female Rambo who had shot her way out of an ambush." `She Was Fighting to the Death` " read the headline in The Washington Post, an account that was then regurgitated without question by much of the press. Later we learned that this story was almost entirely fiction, from the heroine`s gunplay to the reports of her being slapped around by her Iraqi captors to the breathless cliffhanger of her rescue. Meanwhile, Jessica Lynch herself, unable to speak, was reduced to a mere pawn, an innocent bystander to her own big-budget biopic. When she emerged six months later, Diane Sawyer asked if it bothered her that she had been showcased by the military. "Yeah, it does," she answered. "It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it`s wrong."

This wrong was not committed by accident but by design. In the revelatory new documentary about Al Jazeera, "Control Room," opening in New York this Friday before fanning out nationally, we are taken into our own Central Command`s media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action. The Lynch episode came at a troubling moment in the war; our troops were being stretched thin, the coalition had mistakenly shot up a van full of Iraqi women and children, and three Marines had just been killed in the latest helicopter crash. But as we see in "Control Room," the CentCom press operation was determined to drown out such bad news by disseminating the triumphant prepackaged saga of its manufactured heroine no matter what.

The documentary captures some of the briefing at which the dramatic Lynch story was first laid out. An American journalist on hand, the veteran CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, grumbles afterward about how the "minute-by-minute" account of the rescue has superseded the major news he and his colleagues had been waiting for: the fate of troops just entering Baghdad. His cavils were useless, however; the instant legend was moving too fast to be derailed. Soon the military would buttress it with a complementary video, shot and edited by its own movie crew: an action-packed montage of the guns-blazing Special Operations rescue raid, bathed in the iridescent "Matrix"-green glow of night-vision photography. But the marketing of this Jerry Bruckheimer-style video was itself an exercise in hype, meant to blur and inflate the Lynch episode further.

The director of "Control Room" is Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American who is a protégé of D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the chroniclers of the `92 Clinton campaign in "The War Room." Though Ms. Noujaim`s principal subject may be the Arab satellite news station that has been widely condemned as a fount of anti-American propaganda, her eye for the American media is no less keen. The true control room in "Control Room" is not so much the Al Jazeera HQ as the coalition media center. It is there, from a costly Hollywood set, that the military commanded its own propaganda effort, which was aided and abetted by an American press sometimes as eager to slant the news as its Arab counterpart. The attractively forthright American press officer we follow throughout the documentary, Lt. Josh Rushing of the Marines, doesn`t deny the symmetry: "When I watch Al Jazeera, I can tell what they are showing and then I can tell what they are not showing — by choice. Same thing when I watch Fox on the other end of the spectrum."

Revisiting the invasion of Iraq again in "Control Room," we can see how much the Bush administration was seduced into complacency early on, not just by the relative ease with which it took Iraq but by its success at news management. The Lynch triumph was followed within days by the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue (which looks more like a staged event than a spontaneous Iraqi outpouring when Ms. Noujaim shows it in wide-angle shots). Next up was "Top Gun." Yet we were very good at feigning ignorance about our own propaganda while decrying Al Jazeera`s fictionalizations. In one particularly embarrassing illustration of American hypocrisy, we`re reminded of how Donald Rumsfeld berated the Arab channel for violating the Geneva Convention by broadcasting pictures of American prisoners of war. By the time of his outburst — March 2003 — we were very likely already violating the Geneva Convention ourselves. The confidential Red Cross report uncovered this week by The Wall Street Journal reveals that complaints about our abuse of Iraqi prisoners had already started by then, some 10 months before the Pentagon launched the Taguba investigation.

In retrospect, much of what we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom was as fictionalized as CentCom`s version of "Saving Private Jessica." When we weren`t staging the news, we were covering it up. "A war with hundreds of coalition and tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties" was transformed "into something closer to a defense contractor`s training video: a lot of action, but no consequences, as if shells simply disappeared into the air and an invisible enemy magically ceased to exist." That was the conclusion reached by one of the leaders of a research project at George Washington University`s School of Media and Public Affairs, which examined 600 hours of war coverage on CNN, Fox and ABC from the war`s March 20, 2003, start to the April 9 fall of Baghdad, "to see how `real` the war looked on TV." Of the 1,710 stories they surveyed, "only 13.5 percent included any shots of dead or wounded coalition soldiers, Iraqi soldiers or civilians."

That brief war, since renamed "major combat operations," seems like a century ago. As "Saving Private Jessica" symbolizes how effectively the military and administration controlled the news during Operation Iraqi Freedom, so the photos of Lynndie England and her cohort symbolize their utter loss of that control now. More scoops are on the way, and not just those of torture. "Everybody wants to cut to the chase, but the movie has just started," a top Republican aide told The New York Times this week. We are only beginning to learn, for instance, about the shadowy roles played by America`s most sizable ally in "the coalition of the willing" — not the British, with some 9,000 troops, but the mercenaries, whose duties and ranks (now at some 20,000) have crept up largely out of our view.

It has taken a while for Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers to figure out just how much their power to enforce their own narrative of this war has waned. Their many successes in news management have been their undoing, leaving them besotted by their own invincibility and ill-equipped for failure. Clearly they still believed they could control the pictures. According to Mr. Rumsfeld`s own congressional testimony, he was "surprised" that lowly enlisted men could be "running around with digital cameras" e-mailing grotesque Kodak snapshots all over the world. Even after making that discovery, such was his and General Myers`s habitual arrogance that they didn`t bother to get ahead of the Abu Ghraib story — or to familiarize themselves with its particulars — once CBS gave them a full two weeks of head`s up before "60 Minutes II" broadcast it to the world. Or maybe they just hoped that the press`s wartime self-censorship would continue. After all, in happier times, Larry Flynt had done the patriotic thing by refusing to publish half-nude snapshots of Jessica Lynch that fell into his hands at the time of her greatest celebrity.

In desperation, some torture apologists are trying to concoct the fictions the administration used to ply so well. Rush Limbaugh has been especially creative. The photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib "look like standard good old American pornography," he said as the story spread, as if he might grandfather wartime atrocities into an entertainment industry that, however deplorable to Islam, has more fans in our Christian country than Major League Baseball. In Mr. Limbaugh`s view, the guards humiliating the Iraqis were just "having a good time" and their pictures look "just like anything you`d see Madonna or Britney Spears do onstage . . . I mean, this is something that you can see onstage at Lincoln Center from an N.E.A. grant, maybe on `Sex and the City . . .` "

But this movie has just started, and it`s beyond anyone`s power to spin it any longer. Yet when the president traveled to the Pentagon on Monday to look at previews of the coming attractions, he seemed as out of touch with reality as Mr. Limbaugh. It was nothing if not an odd moment to congratulate the secretary of defense, who has literally thrown the reputation of our honorable military and our country to the dogs, for doing a "superb job." But to understand where Mr. Bush is coming from, one need only recall the interview he gave last fall to Brit Hume of Fox News, in which he griped about the press ("the filter," as he calls it) that was now challenging administration propaganda from Iraq. "The best way to get the news is from objective sources," the president said back then, "and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what`s happening in the world." Perhaps someone on that staff might tell him that, according to the latest polls, most of the country has changed the channel.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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The Roots of Torture
The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. A NEWSWEEK investigation

David Hume Kennerly / Getty Images-Pool
Tough tactics: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed for a Gitmo style approach to prisoner interrogations in Iraq

By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek International

May 24 - It`s not easy to get a member of Congress to stop talking. Much less a room full of them. But as a small group of legislators watched the images flash by in a small, darkened hearing room in the Rayburn Building last week, a sickened silence descended. There were 1,800 slides and several videos, and the show went on for three hours. The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated. There was simply nothing to say. "It was a very subdued walk back to the House floor," said Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "People were ashen."

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The White House put up three soldiers for court-martial, saying the pictures were all the work of a few bad-apple MPs who were poorly supervised. But evidence was mounting that the furor was only going to grow and probably sink some prominent careers in the process. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner declared the pictures were the worst "military misconduct" he`d seen in 60 years, and he planned more hearings. Republicans on Capitol Hill were notably reluctant to back Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And NEWSWEEK has learned that U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives could be accused of war crimes. Among the possible charges: homicide involving deaths during interrogations. "The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and mistreatment went far beyond what I expected, and certainly involved more than six or seven MPs," said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor. He added: "It seems to have been planned."

Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal—that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis—may do a lot to undercut the administration`s case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That`s because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That`s a standard torture. It`s called `the Vietnam.` But it`s not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."

Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last —week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America`s top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."

The Bush administration created a bold legal framework to justify this system of interrogation, according to internal government memos obtained by NEWSWEEK. What started as a carefully thought-out, if aggressive, policy of interrogation in a covert war—designed mainly for use by a handful of CIA professionals—evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in a big, hot war. Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break prisoners` resistance to interrogation.

"There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," as Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA`s counterterrorist unit, put it in testimony to Congress in early 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off." Many Americans thrilled to the martial rhetoric at the time, and agreed that Al Qaeda could not be fought according to traditional rules. But it is only now that we are learning what, precisely, it meant to take the gloves off.

The story begins in the months after September 11, when a small band of conservative lawyers within the Bush administration staked out a forward-leaning legal position. The attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these lawyers said, had plunged the country into a new kind of war. It was a conflict against a vast, outlaw, international enemy in which the rules of war, international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department`s Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, according to copies of the opinions and other internal legal memos obtained by NEWSWEEK.

The Bush administration`s emerging approach was that America`s enemies in this war were "unlawful" combatants without rights. One Justice Department memo, written for the CIA late in the fall of 2001, put an extremely narrow interpretation on the international anti-torture convention, allowing the agency to use a whole range of techniques—including sleep deprivation, the use of phobias and the deployment of "stress factors"—in interrogating Qaeda suspects. The only clear prohibition was "causing severe physical or mental pain"—a subjective judgment that allowed for "a whole range of things in between," said one former administration official familiar with the opinion. On Dec. 28, 2001, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel weighed in with another opinion, arguing that U.S. courts had no jurisdiction to review the treatment of foreign prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The appeal of Gitmo from the start was that, in the view of administration lawyers, the base existed in a legal twilight zone—or "the legal equivalent of outer space," as one former administration lawyer described it. And on Jan. 9, 2002, John Yoo of Justice`s Office of Legal Counsel coauthored a sweeping 42-page memo concluding that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any of the laws of war applied to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Cut out of the process, as usual, was Colin Powell`s State Department. So were military lawyers for the uniformed services. When State Department lawyers first saw the Yoo memo, "we were horrified," said one. As State saw it, the Justice position would place the United States outside the orbit of international treaties it had championed for years. Two days after the Yoo memo circulated, the State Department`s chief legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV, fired a memo to Yoo calling his analysis "seriously flawed." State`s most immediate concern was the unilateral conclusion that all captured Taliban were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. "In previous conflicts, the United States has dealt with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations under the Conventions," Taft wrote. "I have no doubt we can do so here, where a relative handful of persons is involved."

The White House was undeterred. By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a —high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva`s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars "war crimes," which were defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. As to arguments that U.S. soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued wishfully to Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers."

When Powell read the Gonzales memo, he "hit the roof," says a State source. Desperately seeking to change Bush`s mind, Powell fired off his own blistering response the next day, Jan. 26, and sought an immediate meeting with the president. The proposed anti-Geneva Convention declaration, he warned, "will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice" and have "a high cost in terms of negative international reaction." Powell won a partial victory: On Feb. 7, 2002, the White House announced that the United States would indeed apply the Geneva Conventions to the Afghan war—but that Taliban and Qaeda detainees would still not be afforded prisoner-of-war status. The White House`s halfway retreat was, in the eyes of State Department lawyers, a "hollow" victory for Powell that did not fundamentally change the administration`s position. It also set the stage for the new interrogation procedures ungoverned by international law.

What Bush seemed to have in mind was applying his broad doctrine of pre-emption to interrogations: to get information that could help stop terrorist acts before they could be carried out. This was justified by what is known in counterterror circles as the "ticking time bomb" theory—the idea that when faced with an imminent threat by a terrorist, almost any method is justified, even torture.

With the legal groundwork laid, Bush began to act. First, he signed a secret order granting new powers to the CIA. According to knowledgeable sources, the president`s directive authorized the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness. Washington then negotiated novel "status of forces agreements" with foreign governments for the secret sites. These agreements gave immunity not merely to U.S. government personnel but also to private contractors. (Asked about the directive last week, a senior administration official said, "We cannot comment on purported intelligence activities.")

The administration also began "rendering"—or delivering terror suspects to foreign governments for interrogation. Why? At a classified briefing for senators not long after 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was asked whether Washington was going to get governments known for their brutality to turn over Qaeda suspects to the United States. Congressional sources told NEWSWEEK that Tenet suggested it might be better sometimes for such suspects to remain in the hands of foreign authorities, who might be able to use more aggressive interrogation methods. By 2004, the United States was running a covert charter airline moving CIA prisoners from one secret facility to another, sources say. The reason? It was judged impolitic (and too traceable) to use the U.S. Air Force.

At first—in the autumn of 2001—the Pentagon was less inclined than the CIA to jump into the business of handling terror suspects. Rumsfeld himself was initially opposed to having detainees sent into DOD custody at Guantanamo, according to a DOD source intimately involved in the Gitmo issue. "I don`t want to be jailer to the goddammed world," said Rumsfeld. But he was finally persuaded. Those sent to Gitmo would be hard-core Qaeda or other terrorists who might be liable for war-crimes prosecutions, and who would likely, if freed, "go back and hit us again," as the source put it.

In mid-January 2002 the first plane-load of prisoners landed at Gitmo`s Camp X-Ray. Still, not everyone was getting the message that this was a new kind of war. The first commander of the MPs at Gitmo was a one-star from the Rhode Island National Guard, Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus, who, a Defense source recalled, mainly "wanted to keep the prisoners happy." Baccus began giving copies of the Qur`an to detainees, and he organized a special meal schedule for Ramadan. "He was even handing out printed `rights cards`," the Defense source recalled. The upshot was that the prisoners were soon telling the interrogators, "Go f—- yourself, I know my rights." Baccus was relieved in October 2002, and Rumsfeld gave military intelligence control of all aspects of the Gitmo camp, including the MPs.

Pentagon officials now insist that they flatly ruled out using some of the harsher interrogation techniques authorized for the CIA. That included one practice—reported last week by The New York Times—whereby a suspect is pushed underwater and made to think he will be drowned. While the CIA could do pretty much what it liked in its own secret centers, the Pentagon was bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military officers were routinely trained to observe the Geneva Conventions. According to one source, both military and civilian officials at the Pentagon ultimately determined that such CIA techniques were "not something we believed the military should be involved in."

But in practical terms those distinctions began to matter less. The Pentagon`s resistance to rougher techniques eroded month by month. In part this was because CIA interrogators were increasingly in the same room as their military-intelligence counterparts. But there was also a deliberate effort by top Pentagon officials to loosen the rules binding the military.

Toward the end of 2002, orders came down the political chain at DOD that the Geneva Conventions were to be reinterpreted to allow tougher methods of interrogation. "There was almost a revolt" by the service judge advocates general, or JAGs, the top military lawyers who had originally allied with Powell against the new rules, says a knowledgeable source. The JAGs, including the lawyers in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Richard Myers, fought their civilian bosses for months—but finally lost. In April 2003, new and tougher interrogation techniques were approved. Covertly, though, the JAGs made a final effort. They went to see Scott Horton, a specialist in international human-rights law and a major player in the New York City Bar Association`s human-rights work. The JAGs told Horton they could only talk obliquely about practices that were classified. But they said the U.S. military`s 50-year history of observing the demands of the Geneva Conventions was now being overturned. "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" about how the conventions should be interpreted and applied, they told Horton. And the prime movers in this effort, they told him, were DOD Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith and DOD general counsel William Haynes. There was, they warned, "a real risk of a disaster" for U.S. interests.

The approach at Gitmo soon reflected these changes. Under the leadership of an aggressive, self-assured major general named Geoffrey Miller, a new set of interrogation rules became doctrine. Ultimately what was developed at Gitmo was a "72-point matrix for stress and duress," which laid out types of coercion and the escalating levels at which they could be applied. These included the use of harsh heat or cold; —withholding food; hooding for days at a time; naked isolation in cold, dark cells for more than 30 days, and threatening (but not biting) by dogs. It also permitted limited use of "stress positions" designed to subject detainees to rising levels of pain.

While the interrogators at Gitmo were refining their techniques, by the summer of 2003 the "postwar" insurgency in Iraq was raging. And Rumsfeld was getting impatient about the poor quality of the intelligence coming out of there. He wanted to know: Where was Saddam? Where were the WMD? Most immediately: Why weren`t U.S. troops catching or forestalling the gangs planting improvised explosive devices by the roads? Rumsfeld pointed out that Gitmo was producing good intel. So he directed Steve Cambone, his under secretary for intelligence, to send Gitmo commandant Miller to Iraq to improve what they were doing out there. Cambone in turn dispatched his deputy, Lt. Gen. William (Jerry) Boykin—later to gain notoriety for his harsh comments about Islam—down to Gitmo to talk with Miller and organize the trip. In Baghdad in September 2003, Miller delivered a blunt message to Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was then in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade running Iraqi detentions. According to Karpinski, Miller told her that the prison would thenceforth be dedicated to gathering intel. (Miller says he simply recommended that detention and intelligence commands be integrated.) On Nov. 19, Abu Ghraib was formally handed over to tactical control of military-intelligence units.

By the time Gitmo`s techniques were exported to Abu Ghraib, the CIA was already fully involved. On a daily basis at Abu Ghraib, says Paul Wayne Bergrin, a lawyer for MP defendant Sgt. Javal Davis, the CIA and other intel officials "would interrogate, interview prisoners exhaustively, use the approved measures of food and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement with no light coming into cell 24 hours a day. Consequently, they set a poor example for young soldiers but it went even further than that."

Today there is no telling where the scandal will bottom out. But it is growing harder for top Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld himself, to absolve themselves of all responsibility. Evidence is growing that the Pentagon has not been forthright on exactly when it was first warned of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib. U.S. officials continued to say they didn`t know until mid-January. But Red Cross officials had alerted the U.S. military command in Baghdad at the start of November. The Red Cross warned explicitly of MPs` conducting "acts of humiliation such as [detainees`] being made to stand naked... with women`s underwear over the head, while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position." Karpinski recounts that the military-intel officials there regarded this criticism as funny. She says: "The MI officers said, `We warned the [commanding officer] about giving those detainees the Victoria`s Secret catalog, but he wouldn`t listen`." The Coalition commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and his Iraq command didn`t begin an investigation until two months later, when it was clear the pictures were about to leak.

Now more charges are coming. Intelligence officials have confirmed that the CIA inspector general is conducting an investigation into the death of at least one person at Abu Ghraib who had been subject to questioning by CIA interrogators. The Justice Department is likely to open full-scale criminal investigations into this CIA-related death and two other CIA interrogation-related fatalities.

As his other reasons for war have fallen away, President Bush has justified his ouster of Saddam Hussein by saying he`s a "torturer and murderer." Now the American forces arrayed against the terrorists are being tarred with the same epithet. That`s unfair: what Saddam did at Abu Ghraib during his regime was more horrible, and on a much vaster scale, than anything seen in those images on Capitol Hill. But if America is going to live up to its promise to bring justice and democracy to Iraq, it needs to get to the bottom of what happened at Abu Ghraib.

With Mark Hosenball and Roy Gutman in Washington, T. Trent Gegax and Julie Scelfo in New York and Melinda Liu, Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc

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After the tanks
The young Al-Mahdi Army soldiers said nothing as we drove past. The U.S. Army had just blasted their cemetery stronghold with Apaches, and they didn`t care about anything.

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By Phillip Robertson

May 15, 2004 | NAJAF, Iraq -- At 8 in the evening on Friday, a cloud of black smoke rose up from the western part of the city, drifting over the shrine of Imam Ali. This cloud hung over Najaf and we saw it miles before we arrived in town. The sun dropped through a screen of dust, but there was still light in the sky. At the amusement park, where we turned west, the black stain had grown and seemed to hang over the entire medina, but this was an illusion. The cloud came from the westernmost part of the city just before the floodplain called the Najaf sea.

[/]Al-Mahdi Army militiamen show destroyed U.S. Army equipment in Najaf, Iraq, on Friday.[/I]

As we turned to make our approach, an old car with a blanket-covered coffin tied to the roof passed us heading away from the fighting. The cabbie tried to speak to the other driver, to ask if it was safe to proceed. One older man looked at him with a blank expression and waved us on. He had just buried a family member in the sacred soil near the shrine of Ali, and his relatives had made a desolate pilgrimage in the middle of a battle between U.S. forces and Muqtada`s army. When has the West known faith of such intensity? Not for centuries. We turned to enter the cemetery from the secondary road and then we saw them: young Al-Mahdi Army fighters with rocket-propelled grenades standing near the gate, a hole in the wall where the road goes up a slight hill to the city streets. They were covered in dust and walked slowly. The fighters didn`t speak.

My cabdriver, who is their age, called to them, but they did not look at his decrepit car, they looked at nothing. They were not interested in the passengers entering the holy city, which is not normal. We should have been challenged, hauled out of the taxi and interrogated, but it never happened. The fighters waved us on into the tombs and we could see that there had been explosions and fighting in the graveyard. U.S. forces came with tanks and Apaches into the place where the Al-Mahdi Army stored their weapons and laid ambushes. Four holes, each approximately 12 inches long and 8 inches wide, could be seen on the golden dome of the Imam Ali mosque, burial place of Imam Ali Ibn Abu Talib, the Prophet Muhammad`s cousin and son-in-law and the Shiites` most revered saint.

You could see what happened from the rubble, but understanding came only after seeing the faces of the young fighters, the distance and emptiness. After what happened to them, they didn`t care about anything. We drove into the city following a road through a million graves.

At least four Iraqis were killed and 26 wounded Friday in Najaf, and one coalition soldier was wounded, U.S. officials said. At least three militiamen also were killed, and their coffins were brought to the Shrine of Imam Ali for family and friends to pray for their souls.

"America is the enemy of God," fighters shouted.

In the past week, the U.S. has attacked Muqtada al-Sadr`s militia in the three places where it is strongest: Sadr City in Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf. The old system, where the U.S. forces respected Ayatollah Sistani`s advice and stayed away from the holy cities, has been abandoned in favor of a military offensive, a series of moves designed to increase the pressure on Muqtada until he gives up. U.S. forces now regularly move into positions inside the cities, fight fiercely, and then withdraw to their bases. Despite rumors of negotiations, Muqtada al-Sadr, at his regular sermon last week, urged his supporters to keep fighting. He mentioned the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

"We have now entered a second phase of the resistance, and our patience is over with coalition forces," Muqtada al-Sadr spokesman Qais al Khazali explained the strategy to Reuters. "Our policy now is to extend the state of resistance and move it to all of Iraq because of the occupiers` military escalation and crossing of all red lines in the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf."

This is what Muqtada needs most -- to lure the U.S. forces into bloody battles near the shrines, battles that are taking place now. After the holy sites are damaged by the Americans, the Al-Mahdi Army is counting on a widespread uprising of the Shia Muslims in Iraq that will push the occupiers out for good. But it might not happen that way. It appears that Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the senior Shia leaders changed their minds about keeping the U.S. away from Karbala and Najaf; they said as much in a May 4 meeting in Baghdad. What is happening now is the U.S. making a final attempt to destroy the Mahdi Army. It could mean that the revolutionary conditions Muqtada al-Sadr wanted to create have come to pass. But it could also represent a bitter end to a gestating Islamic state, not a glorious beginning. Muqtada`s support in Najaf is crumbling, the pilgrim economy shattered by constant fighting. Respected Shia religious figures here have called on him to leave the city. Karbala, where his support was never that strong, wants the fighting to stop.

On Saturday night in Baghdad, just after U.S. forces arrested two senior Al-Mahdi Army leaders. I spoke to a 24-year-old Al-Mahdi Army official, Saeed Hisham al Mousawi, who said that the Shia Islamic parties brokered a sell-out deal with the coalition. "After the Islamic parties met, the U.S. forces closed all negotiations. I am sure that some parties gave the U.S. the green light to attack." Al Mousawi meant that the U.S. got the green light to destroy the Al-Mahdi Army at their meeting in Baghdad on May 4. The young revolutionary, who is still living with his parents, was bitter about the betrayal. I wanted to know which party had betrayed them and he wouldn`t come out and say the name. But it seemed clear that it was the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is close to Ayatollah Sistani. The next day the U.S. destroyed the al-Sadr heaquarters in Sadr City, attacking with tanks in another fierce battle. In 24 hours, the al-Sadr headquarters was completely rebuilt.

"They could come and destroy this place a million times, and I will rebuild it a million times," Sheikh Mustapha al Askari said on Monday, and he grinned at me in an ecstatic way. His hands were covered in plaster dust from building a wall. "The al-Sadr office is in my heart, it is not here." Fifty young volunteers working on the building shouted their agreement. But Muqtada has forgotten to appease the old men, and the old men were turning against him.

Lately the fighting has evolved from small clashes at the edge of towns to long firefights in the center of cities, and it took no time at all. This is the aftermath of the understanding between the U.S. and the Shia figures, their bid to destroy the Al-Mahdi Army. It suddenly became impossible to chase the wire reports; we didn`t know where to go, so we drove from one city to the next, from Sadr City to Karbala and now to Najaf. By early Wednesday morning, the U.S. had destroyed the al Mukhayam, an al-Sadr mosque in Karbala, and was busy fighting Al-Mahdi Army soldiers 200 meters from the shrine of Imam Hussein. In the afternoon when I arrived in the city, it was still going on. A group of young boys near a checkpoint had video cameras and showed their own footage of the attack on the al-Sadr mosque. They were intensely proud of what they had captured.

On the small camera display, a cityscape brightened and faded with the explosions of missiles from Apaches. One thin boy said, "Whenever I go to take pictures of the Americans, they shoot at me." The boy was still shaking when he said it, because he had just been down the road where the tanks were waiting. It took a second to realize that the boys weren`t in any militia, al-Sadr`s or anyone else`s, they were out watching the firefight because they were curious. It would have been interesting to stay with them, but Abu Hussein was nervous and wanted to move our car.

We drove past the shrine toward the al Mukhayam until we couldn`t move because of the shooting along the street the alley opened into. Abu Hussein felt pinned by the small streets; he kept talking about the car and keeping the car safe and he wanted to leave Karbala immediately. In the medina, we heard the deep sounds of the U.S. weapons and the small arms of the Al-Mahdi fighters reflected off the houses. I went up on foot to see where the shooting was coming from and ran into an angry mob. Abu Hussein pulled the car around the corner, and once we were out of the first alley he met an old friend, a pharmacist who was visiting his uncle who lives nearby. We talked on the street corner as the fighting went on in the medina. Alla Mohammed was incredibly reasonable as the world came apart around him. "You can talk to him, he speaks English, " Abu Hussein said. We spoke English.

I wanted to know why, if there was so much fighting going on in Karbala, there wasn`t a flood of refugees. "Nobody is leaving, where can we go?" Alla Mohammed said. "In 1991 we left and Saddam bombed the entire city." Above all, Alla Mohammed believed in peace; he wanted the fighting to stop so his children could go back to their exams. "We want to work with the Americans, we just don`t know what they want exactly. We are suffering and want something good for our future, but do you see any development in a year of occupation?" I agreed that there wasn`t much to see. "My economic situation is good, but if I had to feed my family and I was unemployed, for a hundred dollars, I would fight," he said. We had to stop talking because Alla Mohammed wanted to evacuate his uncle`s family from the medina. So they piled into our car, three women in their abayas and a 4-year-old girl sitting in the middle between them. Alla Mohammed`s uncle didn`t come with us, he stayed with the house to protect it from looters. As we turned the corner he waved at us in a cheerful way. If he was sick with dread, he didn`t show it.

"The house is much safer from the looters if it`s close to the fighting. The thieves won`t go near it," the pharmacist said. Iraqis have a particular disdain for thieves and looters because there are so many of them. Alla Mohammed and his extended family got out of the yellow Caprice and disappeared into his house, a bit farther from the fighting.

Abu Hussein`s family is from Karbala, so we went to visit them on the outskirts of town. Like Alla Mohammed`s family they were huddled inside the house and had been for 48 hours. No one had slept at his father`s house either. All the brothers had come from their houses with their families, and they were cheerful given the circumstances. All the men ate fruit and smoked cigarettes in the guest room. It was in Abu Hussein`s house that I learned that his brothers do not idolize the Mahdi Army like he does; they are Sistani people, and they look down on Muqtada. As we talked about the situation, Abu Hussein got angry and said that the sounds of shooting we heard in the medina were tape recordings, which made me think he was losing his mind. There was no choice but to come back to Baghdad.

On Friday, two directionless days later, Najaf exploded and became the next destination. In the Badr hotel, a place that I cannot leave for the time being, there is a small generator running and the steady drone is interrupted by the outside world. Now, at 2:50 in the morning, there are detonations from tank shells and bursts of small arms fire to the east. If this is supposed to be the decisive U.S. offensive against the Al-Mahdi Army, it isn`t over yet. I thought of what Alla Mohammed said to me on the street corner in Karbala. "I don`t think it will end now."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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About the writer
Phillip Robertson is reporting from Iraq for Salon.

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Ein Flash: Smoking Gun, Vote bush

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Published: May 17, 2004
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2903288.php
Editorial:A failure of leadership at the highest levels

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.

There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides. This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world.

How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.

One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.

Army commanders in Iraq bear responsibility for running a prison where there was no legal adviser to the commander, and no ultimate responsibility taken for the care and treatment of the prisoners.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked “60 Minutes II” to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn’t read Taguba’s report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media.

By then, of course, it was too late.

Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.

If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush.

He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders.

On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence.

To date, the Army has moved to court-martial the six soldiers suspected of abusing Iraqi detainees and has reprimanded six others.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the MP brigade that ran Abu Ghraib, has received a letter of admonishment and also faces possible disciplinary action.

That’s good, but not good enough.

This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

— Military Times editorial, May 17 issue