Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 36)

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June 10, 2004
The U.N. Go-Ahead on Iraq

At a time when not much has been going right in Iraq, the Bush administration registered a clear diplomatic advance at the United Nations on Tuesday. While the outcome was inevitable, it was still a positive step when the Security Council unanimously voted for a resolution approving the transfer of some sovereign powers to an Iraqi governing body.

There was never any chance that the Security Council would not support a motion calling for an end, at least in name, to the overt occupation of Iraq by the American military. Nevertheless, Washington`s diplomacy in the past five weeks has been encouraging. The administration has recognized, however reluctantly, that the United Nations` endorsement is crucial to its hopes for a smooth transition in Iraq and an eventual American withdrawal. This overdue enlightenment was reflected not just in the wise decision to seek a new resolution, but especially in a newfound willingness to compromise with countries like France, Germany and Russia to maximize international support.

The resolution is not expected to add any foreign troops to Iraq, apart perhaps from a small new force being created to protect U.N. workers. Nor, unfortunately, will it substantially broaden the international oversight of Iraq`s passage to elected government in the ways that Senator John Kerry and others have recently proposed. What the United States and Britain wanted was the Security Council`s endorsement of their current policies, in particular its support for the creation of the interim Iraqi government on June 30, and that is what they received.

The resolution`s main benefit is the international legitimacy that it confers on that government, which was chosen last week with the advice of a United Nations representative. The interim government, substantially shaped by the discredited Iraqi Governing Council, which was appointed by the United States, will need all the help it can get if it is to have any chance of leading Iraq to free and representative elections.

One indicator of possibly serious trouble ahead is a new threat by Kurdish leaders to separate their region from the rest of Iraq unless the predominantly Kurdish provinces retain the absolute veto that American occupation authorities once promised them over any new Iraqi constitution. Kurdish leaders were furious when Washington rejected their pleas to incorporate the constitutional guarantee in Tuesday`s Security Council resolution. Iraq`s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said yesterday that he would honor the guarantee through next January. But the new constitution will not be up for ratification before the end of next year.

The resolution leaves the real responsibility for security in Iraq where it has been, with a multinational force in which America provides five out of every six soldiers and an even higher percentage in combat zones. Iraq`s interim government could, in theory, ask this force to leave. But unless it does, which seems unlikely in the next year or so, Iraq will have only an advisory role on the force`s military operations, including decisions about whether to assault or bombard Iraqi cities. The interim government will gain full control over Iraqi security forces, as France and Germany insisted in the Security Council negotiations. But those forces have yet to prove their loyalty or effectiveness.

This is the third major resolution the Security Council has approved on Iraq since the divisive split of early 2003. Like the others, it is a positive sign of international reconciliation on Iraq-related issues and a testimony to the continuing importance and relevance of the United Nations.

Unfortunately, this progress cannot undo everything that went before: President Bush`s disastrous decision to rush into the invasion without Security Council endorsement, the ineptly planned occupation and all the damage those policies have done to Iraq and the Middle East, and to American relationships around the world.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 10, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Physician, Turn Thyself In
By M. GREGG BLOCHE

WASHINGTON

According to press reports, military doctors and nurses who examined prisoners at Abu Ghraib treated swollen genitals, prescribed painkillers, stitched wounds, and recorded evidence of the abuses going on around them. Under international law — as well as the standards of common decency — these medical professionals had a duty to tell those in power what they saw.

Instead, too often, they returned the victims of torture to the custody of their victimizers. Rather than putting a stop to torture, they tacitly abetted it, by patching up victims and staying silent.

The duty of doctors in such circumstances is clear. They must provide needed treatment, then do all they can to keep perpetrators from committing further abuse. This includes keeping detailed records of injuries and their likely causes, performing clinical tests to gather forensic evidence and reporting abuses to those with the will and power to act.

During the 1980`s and 1990`s, American human rights investigators traveled to many countries with oppressive governments, assembling evidence of medical complicity in torture. A pattern emerged in rogue regimes that claimed pride in their civility: doctors both contained and abetted torture — by treating its victims, returning them to perpetrators and then remaining silent.

I was one of these investigators. I vividly remember the Uruguayan military intelligence chief who spoke to me with contempt about Argentine "barbarians" who made tens of thousands disappear. By contrast, he boasted, in Uruguay the army kept doctors nearby to keep things from getting out of hand. Fewer than 200 Uruguayans died in detention while the army ruled.

Now the American military is essentially ruling Iraq — and it is urgent that we find out what our military doctors, nurses and medics know. They are likely to have kept records. Already, a medical assessment unearthed by investigators has given the lie to the Pentagon`s claim that the former chief of Iraq`s air force chief lost consciousness and died after saying he didn`t feel well; the medical report said his death ensued from "asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression."

Congress and others investigating abuse of detainees in Iraq, Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere should quickly obtain all relevant medical records. They should ask independent experts to review these records — and to question military medical personnel about what they saw and heard. Independent doctors should also examine people who say they were abused, using state-of-the-art protocols for documentation of torture and other ill-treatment. These protocols make it possible to find patterns of abuse.

Had military doctors come forward immediately with such evidence, brutal practices that have shamed us all could have been stopped at the outset. And had the perpetrators feared exposure through medical findings, they might have been dissuaded from their lawless course.

When guards and interrogators become torturers, doctors are first responders. International law demands that they act as such. In Iraq, it appears, a "don`t ask, don`t tell" ethic stood in the way. By staying silent for months, until an inquest began, doctors and nurses abandoned their patients. But these doctors and nurses probably saw enough to offer smoking-gun evidence of what went awry at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. It is time for us to ask and them to tell.

M. Gregg Bloche teaches law and health policy at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 10, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
An American in The Hague?
By JONATHAN D. TEPPERMAN

The Bush administration has yet to accept much responsibility for the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. True, the president has apologized for the abuse on Arab television, and several top military officials in Iraq — including the general in charge of the prison and her boss — have been quietly suspended or will soon be transferred. But so far, legal responsibility has fallen exclusively on the seven court-martialed soldiers who were directly involved. Administration officials have argued that they themselves are not liable, since the incidents were the work of a few bad actors.

This may or may not be true. Even if no smoking gun is ever found to directly link American officials to the crimes, however, they could still find themselves in serious jeopardy under international law. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, officials can be held accountable for war crimes committed by their subordinates even if they did not order them — so long as they had control over the perpetrators, had reason to know about the crimes, and did not stop them or punish the criminals.

This doctrine is the product of an American initiative. Devised by Allied judges and prosecutors at the Nuremberg tribunals, it was a means to impute responsibility for wartime atrocities to Nazi leaders, who often communicated indirectly and avoided leaving a paper trail.

More recently, the principle has been fine-tuned by two other American creations: the international tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which were established in the last decade by the United Nations Security Council at the United States` behest. These tribunals have held that political and military leaders can be found liable for war crimes committed by those under their "effective control" if they do nothing to prevent them.

If this is now the standard in international law — which the United States and the United Nations are applying to rogue leaders like the former Yugoslavian president, Slobodan Milosevic — what does it mean for Washington? The rulings of the Nuremberg and Hague tribunals don`t directly bind the United States at home. But given that these institutions were created with the support and approval of the United States, their judgments will be difficult for American officials to disown.

American courts have already accepted the doctrine of command responsibility. In July 2002, for example, a federal court in Miami found two retired Salvadoran generals liable for torture — even though neither man had committed or ordered the crimes in question. The jury held that they were nonetheless guilty, since as El Salvador`s minister of defense and head of its national guard at the time of the torture, they knew (or should have known) about it and could have stopped it.

For their part, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials recently told Congress that they didn`t know and couldn`t have known about a few instances of sexual abuse in Iraq. But this claim is contradicted by the officer formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, who has said that her superiors were warned about the abuses months before they were exposed. And the Red Cross documented widespread abuses in Iraq last year and raised them with the White House in January.

Moreover, the abuses seem to have been more than isolated actions. Instead, they now appear to be part of an explicit policy of coercive interrogations conducted around the globe and supported by Justice Department and White House lawyers, who argued in 2002 and 2003 that the Geneva Conventions and other domestic and international bans on torture did not apply in these cases.

Of course, despite all the incriminating evidence, there is little possibility that any foreign or domestic judge will ever haul top members of the current administration into court. The question of guilt or innocence will most likely remain a political one.

Nonetheless, legal principles can affect politics. If voters begin to believe that George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld is legally responsible for the torture, it could affect the president`s chances in November. Yet if American officials are not held legally accountable, the damage abroad could be even more severe. Part of the terrible legacy of Abu Ghraib may be that the United States will find it difficult to prosecute foreign war criminals if it refuses to accept for itself the legal standards it accuses them of breaking.

Jonathan D. Tepperman is senior editor at Foreign Affairs magazine.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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une 10, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Fight Fire With Compassion
By DONALD P. GREGG

Recent reports indicate that Bush administration lawyers, in their struggles to deal with terrorism, wrote memos in 2003 pushing aside longstanding prohibitions on the use of torture by Americans. These memos cleared the way for the horrors that have been revealed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo and make a mockery of administration assertions that a few misguided enlisted personnel perpetrated the vile abuse of prisoners.

I can think of nothing that can more devastatingly undercut America`s standing in the world or, more important, our view of ourselves, than these decisions. Sanctioned abuse is deeply corrosive — just ask the French, who are still seeking to eradicate the stain on their honor that resulted from the deliberate use of torture in Algeria. French soldiers had been tortured in Vietnam, in some cases revealing valuable information to their Vietminh captors. Senior French officers decided that the same tactics might work for them. As Alistair Horne put it in "A Savage War of Peace," use of torture may have won the battle of Algiers for the French, but it cost them Algeria.

In 1951, as a young paramilitary officer trainee in the C.I.A., I heard my instructors say that to win the cold war, "fighting fire with fire" would be required. I remember asking, how, if we did that, we could maintain any distinction between what we stood for, and what our communist opponents represented. I was told to sit down and shut up.

But the agency, I am gratified to say, took a strong stand against the use of torture in Vietnam. Under William Colby`s direction, interrogation centers were set up, under American control, and coercive techniques were forbidden. I learned from my experiences in Vietnam from 1970 to 1972 that by treating prisoners humanely we frequently (though not always) gained valuable intelligence from them. This was particularly true of battered prisoners who had held out against prolonged South Vietnamese torture, but responded to being treated with compassion by Americans.

As C.I.A. station chief in Seoul from 1973 to 1975, I faced a personal choice of either keeping silent about egregious use of torture by South Korea`s intelligence agency, or taking action against it. In August 1973, South Korean agents kidnapped Kim Dae Jung, the opposition political leader, from his Tokyo hotel room. When word of the kidnapping got out, anti-government riots broke out at Korean universities. The Korean spy agency arrested an American-educated Korean professor, accusing him of provoking riots at his university. The professor denied this assertion — which was false — and was tortured either to death or to the point where he jumped out a window to escape further pain.

When I learned what had happened, I reported it immediately to C.I.A. headquarters. I sent a follow-up message asking permission to protest the South Korean actions. My boss in Washington, a man who is now dead, replied: "Stop trying to save the Koreans from themselves. That is not your job. Just report the facts."

For the only time in my C.I.A. career, I disobeyed orders. I went to the chief bodyguard of President Park Chung Hee and told him that I found it difficult to work with the South Korean spy agency because it seemed more interested in stifling domestic dissent than in working against North Korea. I made clear that I was speaking personally, and that I had not been instructed to register a protest against their actions, of which the bodyguard was fully aware.

A week later, the powerful director of Korean intelligence was fired. He was replaced by a former justice minister, whose first action was to prohibit torture by the agency`s officers.

Every year or so, I speak to groups of active-duty C.I.A. officers. I always tell my Korean story to them, noting that it is one of the things I am proudest of in my agency career. I also urge my listeners to do likewise if they find themselves in a similar position. A few months ago, I received a letter thanking me for my latest presentation to such a group. It was signed by the director of the agency at the time, George Tenet.

Donald P. Gregg, national security adviser to George H. W. Bush from 1982 to 1988 and ambassador to Korea from 1989 to 1993, worked for the C.I.A. for 30 years. He is chairman of the Korea Society.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 10, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Epitaph and Epigone
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Sometimes I feel as if I`m watching a nation mourn. And sometimes I feel as if I`m watching a paternity suit.

At every opportunity, as the extraordinary procession solemnly wended its way from California to the Capitol, W. was peeping out from behind the majestic Reagan mantle, trying to claim the Gipper as his true political father.

Finally, there`s a flag-draped coffin and military funeral that President Bush wants to be associated with, and wants us to see. (It`s amazing they could find enough soldiers, given Rummy`s depletion of the military.)

"His heart belongs to Reagan," Ken Duberstein declared about Mr. Bush on CNN, in a riff on the old Cole Porter ditty "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." W. "is that bold-stroked primary-colors leader that—— somebody who has this big vision and wants to stick to it." (Well, the two presidents do share a middle initial.)

The Bush-Cheney re-election Web site was totally given over to a Reagan tribute, with selected speeches, including "Empire of Ideals" — too bad we didn`t just stick to ideals — and "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc," President Reagan`s 1984 Normandy speech, played so often last Sunday that it eclipsed W. at Normandy.

Bush hawks were visibly relieved to be on TV answering questions that had nothing to do with prison torture, phantom W.M.D. or our new C.I.A.-operative-turned-prime-minister in Iraq. What a glorious respite to extol a strong, popular, visionary Republican president who spurred democracy in a big backward chunk of the world — even if it isn`t W., and it`s the Soviet bloc and not the Middle East.

Showing they haven`t lost their taste for hype, some Bushies revved up the theme that Son of Bush was really Son of Reagan.

Never mind that back in 1989, the deferential Bush père couldn`t wait to escape the Gipper`s Brobdingnagian shadow. Though he liked Ronald Reagan, 41 had a secret disdain for 40`s White House. He was dismayed by the way media wizards treated the president like a prop and the Oval Office like an M.G.M. set. He and Barbara, who divide the world into peers and "the help," also hated being treated like "the help" by the Reagans, who did not have them upstairs at the residence for dinner and who did not always thank them for presents.

The Reagans returned the favor. "Kinder and gentler than who?" Nancy sniffed after 41`s convention acceptance speech. (As for Barbara, Nancy had warned her off wearing "Nancy Reagan red.")

For the neocons, ideology is thicker than blood. Bush père is the weakling who broke his tax pledge and let Saddam stay in power. Just as Ronnie was a poor kid from Dixon, Ill., who reinvented himself as a brush-clearing cowboy of grand plans and simple tastes, so W. was a rich kid from Yale and Harvard and a blue-blooded political dynasty who reinvented himself as a brush-clearing cowboy of grand plans and simple tastes.

While W. talks the optimistic talk, he doesn`t walk the walk; the Bush crew conducted its Iraq adventurism with a noir and bullying tone.

But Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz tried to merge Junior and Gipper. Mr. Perle said on CNN that Mr. Reagan wouldn`t have been "pushed out of Iraq before completing the mission," and Wolfie agreed that 9/11 had "changed everything. I think it would have changed it for Ronald Reagan. We`ve gone from just being concerned with the freedom of other people in the Middle East to the threat to our own country from totalitarian regimes that support terrorism."

These maunderings forget that Mr. Reagan sometimes avoided risk, compromised and retreated; when 241 marines were blown up in Beirut, he rejected advisers` pleas and pulled out. Mr. Wolfowitz has told friends this was Mr. Reagan`s low point.

As Alexander Haig told Pat Robertson yesterday, Mr. Reagan won the cold war without a shot. He championed freedom but didn`t impose it at the point of a gun barrel. He had "Peace Through Strength"; Mr. Bush chose Pre-emption Without Powell.

The Bush crowd`s attempt to wrap themselves in Reagan could go only so far. While Laura Bush and Donald Rumsfeld shared memories of fathers who had suffered from Alzheimer`s, Mrs. Bush said she could not support Mrs. Reagan`s plea to remove the absurd and suffocating restrictions on stem cell research.

Whether he was right or wrong, Ronald Reagan was exhilarating. Whether he is right or wrong, George W. Bush is a bummer.

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Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Die Menschen merken täglich, dass das sogenannte Jobwunder nur heiße Luft ist. Menschen, die täglich mit Arbeitslosen zu tun haben, berichten, dass keine Verbesserung in den letzten Monaten eingetreten ist.

washingtonpost.com

Economy Provides No Boost For Bush
Foreign Policy Concerns Hurt Approval Ratings

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A01

The nation`s economy is growing smartly, wages have begun to rise, and employers have added more than 1.4 million jobs to their payrolls in the past nine months. Yet voters continue to give President Bush poor ratings on his handling of the economy.

It may sound baffling, but interviews with voters, pollsters and economists suggest Bush`s stubborn difficulties on domestic policy boil down to an obvious problem abroad.

"It all goes back to Iraq," said Steven Valerga, 50, a Republican in Martinez, Calif., who voted for Bush in 2000 but plans to vote for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in November. "It`s a drain on the economy, when there`s so much needed elsewhere. My gosh, we didn`t need to be there."

War has usually been good for the economy in the short run, and this one appears no different. 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.

But amid the car bombings, assassinations and continuing casualties, voters are generally pessimistic about the direction the nation is taking. Bush`s negative ratings are rising not just on the economy but also on energy policy, foreign affairs and his handling of the prescription drug issue. Voters fixated on Iraq so far are not willing to see the improving economy through a positive prism, according to pollsters and Bush campaign aides.

"There`s a general anxiety that is at heart about security," said Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt, "and that`s why security is so central to the campaign. Security underlies our feelings about prosperity."

Bush`s ratings have not just been impervious to good economic news; they have fallen with it. In April 2003, 52 percent of voters approved of his handling of the economy, although at that time payrolls had not pulled out of a skid that began in March 2001.

By late May, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, the president`s approval rating on the economy had slipped to 44 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. By then, virtually every economic indicator was heading skyward.

Conversations about the economy gravitate to foreign policy, and voters find the corrosive influence of war in the most unlikely places.

To Valerga, the fighting has driven up the cost of the plywood he needed to redo his roof. Clint Doherty, a small-business man in Clarkston, Wash., sees the war in stainless-steel bolts, which have risen in price by more than 120 percent in a month and a half. To Jeremy Tuck, 31, a Republican in Hamilton, Ala., standing by Bush, it has sucked taxpayer dollars away from where it is needed: "We`re spending $150 billion on the war. That`s what`s hurting us."

For numerous voters, it is the nagging sense that a president consumed with foreign affairs no longer cares about the plight of citizens at home. Jodie Flickinger, 52, a lifelong Republican in Columbia, S.C., recalled being taken aback by economic conditions during a Memorial Day weekend trip to her native Youngstown, Ohio.

"I think he gets more joy, he gets a bigger rush, out of doing world war," she said of Bush. "The United States economy just bores him or confuses him, I guess."

Patricia Smith, 70, a Republican in Newport News, sensed the same problem: "He`s gotten so overwhelmed with these other things that he`s forgotten what he promised he would do for us."

Bush is not the first president to suffer from a disconnect between objective economic indicators and voter perceptions on the economy. The economy began growing steadily in March 1991, when President George H.W. Bush registered a 49 percent approval rating on his handling of the economy. But by July of 1992, those approval ratings had slid to an abysmal 25 percent, presaging his electoral defeat three months later.

By October 1994, economic growth had climbed to a healthy 4 percent, and unemployment had slid from 7.5 percent in 1992 to 6.1 percent. Yet President Bill Clinton`s economic job approval ratings were stuck at 43 percent, with 52 percent disapproving. The GOP swept into power on Capitol Hill the next month. It was not until June 1996, more than five years into the longest peacetime economic expansion in history, that Clinton`s approval ratings on the economy turned solidly positive.

"Americans are a show-me people," said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute. "They need to be shown that things have actually been changed, and I think in an economic recovery, this means seeing the guy down the street getting his job back rather than good jobs numbers."

For President Bush, the disconnect has been far more pronounced. Over the course of this year, according to Gallup polling, disapproval of Bush`s handling of the economy has risen in lock step with the economy`s performance, from 43 percent in early January to 58 percent. "It may be hard to evince positive responses to anything we ask them," conceded Frank Newport, Gallup`s polling director.

For Republicans, frustration is beginning to show. Last week, when the Labor Department announced that an additional 248,000 jobs had been created in May, House Ways and Means Committee Republicans e-mailed reporters, blaring, "It`s a Booming Economy, Stupid."

But John R. Zaller, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggested that voters may not be stupid. They just may have considerably sharper antennae than economists.

In the fall of 2000, when most economic indicators continued to surge, anxiety among voters began to take a toll on Democrat Al Gore`s White House bid, Zaller said. That anxiety proved to be prescient: By the spring of 2001, the economy had slipped into recession.

This go-round, jobs are coming back, but Americans may sense that those jobs are not of the same quality as the work that was lost, Newport said. Any good economic news is being tempered by high gasoline prices, and a generally sour mood has made voters skeptical.

"My dad told me when I was growing up that figures lie and liars figure," Flickinger scoffed.

For Bush, that sensitivity is compounded by the war in Iraq, Zaller said. Most economists and political scientists look to the economy to determine an election`s outcome, but foreign policy events can knock or add as much 3 percentage points to an incumbent`s vote. President Jimmy Carter may have been sunk in 1980 by the disastrous, failed rescue attempt of U.S. hostages in Iran.

For Bush, that sensitivity to foreign affairs is not all bad. Maria Sandoval, an elderly Democrat in Colorado Springs, has had a rough time of it in the past few years, living solely on Social Security and relying on the county clinic for her health care. On the economy, Bush "hasn`t done very good," she allowed. He could have offered more help, she said, and his prescription drug law does not promise her much, either.

But Bush has her vote, she said firmly. "I guess he hasn`t put too much into [the economy], but he`s busy with a lot of other things. He`s on top of everything. That`s what I like about him."

During the Clinton years, Jeremy Tuck said he had been selling mobile homes in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and, at $45,000 a year, making good money. Last year, he was assembling mobile homes, earning $15,000 and living hand-to-mouth. But Bush has his vote this November. Had Gore been elected in 2000, Tuck said, "we would`ve been taken over by Saddam Hussein or [Osama] bin Laden."

"You make more money in plain terms when Democrats are in office," Tuck said with a shrug, "but Republicans are stronger on the military, and that`s why I`m voting for President Bush."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com

Religious Left Seeks Center of Political Debate
Conferees Call For Stronger Voice

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A02

More than 350 political liberals of many faiths gathered in Washington yesterday to begin what some pollsters say is a quixotic task: restoring the voice of the religious left in the nation`s political debate.

"Progressive religious voices, which historically have fueled so much social change in this country, seem to have been washed out of the public dialogue in recent years," said John D. Podesta, a Roman Catholic who was White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. Podesta now heads the Center for American Progress, the Democratic think tank that organized the conference to highlight the "proud past" and "promising future" of the religious left.

Speakers celebrated the role of religious liberals in the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, the nuclear freeze campaign and sanctions against South Africa`s former apartheid system. They called for a stronger, more clearly religious voice against the Bush administration`s foreign policy and for environmental stewardship, universal health insurance, and efforts to fight poverty at home and abroad.

Yet even as the conference at times took on the enthusiasm of a pep rally, there were sobering reflections on why the religious left lost its prominence after the 1970s and how hard it may be to regain it. At the core of those concerns was a simple set of statistics, reinforced by numerous polls: People who say they are frequent churchgoers vote Republican by a ratio of about 2 to 1.

"All the surveys show that if you ask about either church attendance or attitudes -- how important is religion to you in your daily life? -- you get the same thing: the more religious, the more conservative," Gallup pollster Frank Newport said in an interview. "I certainly remember the days when being religious meant fighting for civil rights and social justice, and it`s not that those people aren`t still out there. But religious liberals are a small minority today."

Some liberals dispute that conclusion.

"Church attendance is not the only indicator of living out your faith," said the Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson, executive director of the Clergy Leadership Network, a group devoted to "leadership change" in Washington. "The vast majority of people of faith in this country are center to left, politically. But if you only measure religious commitment by butts in the pews, that`s what you get."

Conference attendees also blamed the media, saying news reports tend to play up the simple dichotomy between the secular left and the religious right rather than citing the full range of religious views.

"It really bothers me that whenever the media and others talk about people of faith, they talk only about the religious right and don`t seem to realize there are people like me, who grew up Baptist and believe in God and have strong religious values, but who want different policy outcomes," said Melody Barnes, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former chief counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

But some of the Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims at the conference also said they have felt excluded or even disdained by the secular left. The Rev. James A. Forbes Jr., senior minister at the Riverside Church in New York City, told the audience in his keynote address that "we have got to find a way not to be embarrassed" to speak about religion with secular progressives.

And there was no lack of hand-wringing among the conferees about what the religious left has done wrong.

"Part of it is our fault. We should take back the Bible, take back the theological principles and not just cede them to the religious right," said the Rev. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, a minister in the United Church of Christ and president of the Chicago Theological Seminary. "It`s not good enough to talk in vague terms about values. We can do better than that. We can make the theological arguments."

Historian Taylor Branch said that in the 1970s, the abortion issue split the progressive religious alliance that had formed in the civil rights movement. Since then, the left has done no better than the right in "moving beyond polemics," he said.

"Not many people who call themselves pro-choice actually want to celebrate abortion, and not many of those who call themselves pro-life want to put women in jail for having abortions," he said. "It`s more of a show than a debate, with polarizing options that aren`t real. Both sides profess that they love children, but you don`t really have the two sides doing very much to cooperate to reduce the number of neglected and abandoned and unwanted children, or to care for them."

The Rev. Charles Henderson, a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister who publishes the interfaith quarterly CrossCurrents, said that from the 1950s through the 1970s, the mainline Protestant denominations took for granted that their values would infuse television and the public schools. Evangelicals, who felt shut out of establishment institutions, created their own schools and broadcast outlets. "Then you wake up one day in 1984 and the Christian right is dominant, and you wonder why," he said.

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Nicaraguan troops mobilize during a clash with U.S.-backed contra guerrillas. Ronald Reagan called the rebels "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.
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washingtonpost.com

In Central America, Reagan Remains A Polarizing Figure

By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A08

SAN SALVADOR -- Gerson Martinez, a rebel leader in the 1980s, remembers Ronald Reagan as the man who funneled $1 million a day to a repressive and often brutal Salvadoran government whose thugs and death squads killed thousands of people, including the mother of his two children.

Ricardo Valdivieso, a businessman and a founder of El Salvador`s main conservative political party, said Reagan "saved Central America" and was "a great ray of light and hope for civilization and liberty in a dark hour for our country."

The memory of the 40th U.S. president, who served from 1981 to 1989, is still strong in the region, and the contrasting views are passionate and polarizing.

The United States was heavily involved in wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s in what Reagan described as an effort to stem Soviet influence in the hemisphere. The United States spent more than $4 billion on economic and military aid during El Salvador`s civil war, in which more than 75,000 people were killed, many of them civilians caught in the crossfire.

The United States also organized Nicaragua`s contra guerrillas, who fought that country`s revolutionary Sandinista government. Reagan referred to contras as "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers" and the United States spent $1 billion on them; the fighting in Nicaragua killed as many as 50,000 people. Honduras was a staging ground for U.S. Nicaraguan operations.

Reagan also supported the repressive military dictatorship of Guatemala, where more than 200,000 people, mostly indigenous peasants, died over 36 years of civil strife.

Reagan`s support never led to a final battlefield victory in the region. Opposing sides negotiated peace in El Salvador and the Sandinistas were voted out of office in Nicaragua. But the same divisive sentiment about Reagan that existed a generation ago persists today.

Admirers credit Reagan with changing the course of Central America and helping to nurture democratic governments and free-market systems across the region. Many said Reagan`s advocacy of open markets and U.S.-style capitalism sowed the earliest seeds of El Salvador`s adoption of the U.S. dollar as its official currency.

"As time goes on, people are going to understand what he did for us," said Valdivieso, 62, a hotel owner and coffee producer. "I remember the first time I heard him speak, I thought, perhaps things will be all right, maybe we`re going to be okay."

But for others, Reagan was an anti-communist zealot, whose obsession blinded him to the human rights abuses of those he supported with funding and CIA training.

"He was a butcher," said Miguel D`Escoto, who was foreign minister in Nicaragua`s Sandinista government. D`Escoto, speaking by telephone from Managua, said "brutal intervention" by the United States under Reagan left "the whole country demoralized."

He said another Reagan legacy was that "Nicaragua continues to have people tied to U.S. apron strings. For some people, the lesson of the `80s is that you can do nothing without U.S. approval or you will have trouble."

Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista who led Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, remains a leading political figure there. He said at a public ceremony this week that he hoped God would forgive Reagan for his "dirty war against Nicaragua."

But Adolfo Calero, a former contra leader who attended a special Mass for Reagan in the Managua cathedral on Tuesday, heralded the U.S. president`s legacy. "We are very grateful to President Reagan. Without him, we probably would have been another Cuba," said Calero, former head of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, which battled the Sandinista government.

In Guatemala, many remember that Reagan lent his prestige and backing to Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who came to power in a coup and was an ardent anti-communist. Currently under house arrest for his alleged role in violent July 2003 riots, Rios Montt has been blamed by many international human rights groups for the massacre of tens of thousands of Guatemalans, including many women and children.

Carolina Escobar Sarti, a Guatemalan newspaper columnist, said many view Reagan`s "interventionism" as part of a "difficult era."

"Of course," she said, "There are others, those on the ultra-right, who like Reagan," she said. "He has become a symbol of the conservatives."

In Honduras, where the little-known capital Tegucigalpa burst into the world`s consciousness in the 1980s as a staging area for the U.S-funded contras, the Reagan era is viewed bleakly by many.

"It was a black moment," said Guatama Fonseca, a former Honduran security minister. "Reagan is remembered for events that are very unpleasant."

Reagan`s critics contend that billions of U.S. dollars and U.S. arms and military intelligence inflamed and prolonged the 1980s wars because of Reagan`s determination to leave no trace of communist sympathizers so close to U.S. soil.

In El Salvador, Martinez, the former rebel leader, said the U.S.-backed wars under Reagan created a massive wave of refugees who fled to the United States. He called that migration, which created a huge Salvadoran population in Washington, "the daughter of Reagan`s policies."

He also said Central America`s rampant street gangs were "the grandchildren" of Reagan`s policies. Many gang members are people who had fled the wars, learned gang culture in Los Angeles or New York, then brought it home, creating the region`s most critical security issue.

But in Nicaragua, reaction to Reagan`s death included warm eulogies. President Enrique Bolaños was among those appearing at the U.S. Embassy in Managua to sign the book of condolences. He described Reagan a "great defender of Nicaragua`s return to democracy," according to a spokesman.

Jordan reported from Mexico City.

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Guantanamo List Details Approved Interrogation Methods

By Dana Priest and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A13

A still-classified list of 24 interrogation methods approved for use on Guantanamo Bay detainees includes placing prisoners in uncomfortable interrogation cells and deceiving them into thinking they are in the hands of Middle East interrogators who knew all about their culture, a U.S. government official said.

The list, approved April 16, 2003, after debate between Pentagon lawyers and political appointees, also allows interrogators to give uncooperative prisoners food that is cold or less palatable and to isolate them from their peers, the official said.

The existence of the Guantanamo list was previously known, and a few of its methods have been cited in The Washington Post, including allowing interrogators to subject detainees to irritatingly hot or cold temperatures and to reverse their normal sleep patterns. But the Pentagon has refused to release the list, citing its classified status, and most of the methods have been unknown until now.

The Guantanamo techniques -- including seven that go beyond standard U.S. military doctrine -- appeared on an unofficial list drawn up by an Army captain and posted on a wall of the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad for use by interrogators there.

But the Guantanamo list does not include some of the more severe methods available to interrogators in Iraq if they got proper approval, including forcing detainees to sit or stand in stressful positions, using sleep or sensory deprivation, and using military dogs to intimidate. Nor do the Guantanamo methods approach the definitions of torture contained in recently revealed Justice Department and Pentagon legal reviews that argued such measures might be justified in certain circumstances.

Unlike in Iraq, where prisoners were accorded unambiguous prisoner-of-war status, prisoners in Guantanamo were given a newly designated "unlawful enemy combatants." They were suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, captured on the Afghanistan battlefield. President Bush said they did not deserve prisoner of war status, but he ordered the military to treat them in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to comment on specific interrogation techniques. Given that the detainees were believed to have intelligence about ongoing threats to the United States, Whitman said, "It was appropriate to ask the question: Should there be something else we should be doing to learn about potential attacks in the making?"

In fact, on Dec. 2, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a set of more aggressive interrogation methods to be used on Mohamed al Qahtani, a Saudi detainee who some officials believed may have been the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A naval psychologist at the base protested the use of some techniques meant to humiliate prisoners and sought help from the Navy`s top civilian lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, to stop them, according to three defense officials knowledgeable about the debate.

Mora is the Navy`s general counsel. Although previous reports have highlighted the concerns of senior military lawyers about employing more severe interrogation measures, the disclosure of Mora`s role reveals that the worries extended to some high-ranking civilians in the Defense Department as well. Mora declined a request to be interviewed.

"The Navy`s general counsel was the real hero," said one senior military lawyer who participated in the discussions.

The techniques approved by Rumsfeld were suspended Jan. 15, 2003, "out of concern for their effectiveness or appropriateness," Whitman said.

Rumsfeld then asked a working group of lawyers, intelligence officials and representatives of the Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict to come up with permanent interrogation guidelines for Guantanamo. They looked at 35 techniques, including covering a suspect with wet towels to simulate drowning, and stripping detainees. Only 24 techniques survived, the result of a rancorous debate.

Seven of those approved techniques are not included in U.S. military doctrine, and are listed as: "change of scenery up; change of scenery down; dietary manipulation; environmental manipulation; sleep adjustment (reversal) ; isolation for 30 days"; and a technique known as "false flag," or deceiving a detainee into believing he is being interrogated by someone from another country.

The other 17 techniques are approved in standard military doctrine and carry these names: direct questioning; incentive/removal of incentive; emotional love/hate; fear up/harsh; fear up/mild; reduced fear; pride and ego up and down; futility; "we know all"; establish your identity; repetition; file and dossier; good cop/bad cop; rapid fire; and silence.

Four of the tactics required interrogators to notify commanders in advance of their use. They are: isolating a detainee from peers; pride and ego up or down, which means attacking someone`s personal worth and sense of pride; and "fear up/harsh," in which interrogators could yell at prisoners, throw things around the interrogation room and convince a detainee that he has something to fear.

Rumsfeld`s working group also considered a legal analysis by Pentagon and other government lawyers that said torture of detainees may be legally justifiable in some circumstances. But the 24 techniques approved by Rumsfeld were far less aggressive and severe than the types of methods contemplated in the legal review.

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Iraqi Blast At Pipeline Cuts Power


Associated Press
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A14

BAGHDAD, June 9 -- Saboteurs blew up a key northern oil pipeline Wednesday, forcing a 10 percent cut on the national power grid as demand for electricity is rising with the advent of Iraq`s broiling summer heat.

The pipeline blast near Baiji, about 125 miles north of Baghdad, was the latest in a series of attacks by insurgents against infrastructure, possibly to shake public confidence as an interim government prepares to take power June 30.

Meanwhile, gunfire rang out at night in the Shiite holy city of Najaf for the first time since an agreement last week to end weeks of bloody fighting between U.S. soldiers and militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr. Residents said gunmen attacked a police station near the city`s 1920 Revolution Square, and it appeared U.S. troops were not involved.

Clashes persisted Wednesday around Fallujah, a rebellious Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad. Four members of an Iraqi force in charge of the city since April were wounded when a mortar round exploded. First Lt. Amer Jassim speculated that the attackers were firing at Americans but missed.

Elsewhere, Polish authorities said an explosion that killed six European soldiers -- two Poles, three Slovaks and a Latvian -- south of Baghdad on Tuesday was caused by a mortar attack rather than an accident, as first reported.

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A Plunge From the Moral Heights

By Richard Cohen

Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A19

Come and sit with me for a moment. I am in a room, in a Middle Eastern country, and I am talking to a government official. He mentions the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the U.S.-run prison outside Baghdad, and what this has done to America`s image in his region. He smiles at what he says, for he is a man who appreciates irony. Of course, this same thing happens in his country, he says. Inwardly, I smile back, smug in my confidence that Abu Ghraib or no Abu Ghraib, America is a different sort of nation. It now seems I was a bit too smug.

The recent revelations that the Justice Department prepared memos parsing what is and what is not torture brings to mind regimes that, well, I would rather not bring to mind. These are the torturers of the world, although they deny it, and to bolster their lie they produce copious laws against the practice.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose Justice Department prepared the memos -- one of them running to 50 pages and signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel -- assured the Senate the other day that the memos are of no consequence. They were only internal Justice Department stuff, the scribblings of lawyers and -- most important -- the president has not "directed or ordered" torture, Ashcroft said. In another administration, such an assurance would be enough for me, but given this one`s cavalier approach to civil liberties, I have to note that "directed" or "ordered" is not the same as condoned. That`s what I wonder about.

I wonder, too, why the much-pressed Justice Department -- all those news releases to get out extolling Ashcroft -- went to all the trouble of coming up with definitions of torture that might be permissible under U.S. law when no one was supposedly considering torturing al Qaeda prisoners in the first place. A 50-page memo is not an hour`s work. It`s clear someone had torture in mind. The Defense Department and the CIA were looking for guidance.

In a way, you can understand why. The memos followed -- sometimes by more than a year -- the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. What if the CIA got its hands on a terrorist who it thought might have information about coming attacks? What should it do? What could it do? Could it, say, torture the guy a little bit -- not too much, mind you -- so he would cough up the information? In one of the memos leaked to The Post, the Justice Department said yes, precisely -- torture, but only a bit. "For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years." This is a very odd -- shall we say "tortured" -- definition.

My dictionary, compiled by lexicographers and not, thank God, by lawyers, knows precisely what torture is. "To bring great physical or mental pain upon another," is one of several definitions. Simple. Had the CIA or the Pentagon turned to a Boy Scout troop or a gathering of Future Farmers of America, they would have said something similar. They also might say that, given human nature, it is as preposterous to talk about a little bit of torture as it is to talk about a little bit pregnant. This sort of stuff isn`t possible to contain, and before you know it, a little torture is a lot of torture -- and who`s to say at the moment whether the psychological "harm" cited in the memo is going to last a week or a lifetime? A little bit of torture can go a long, long way.

The Bush administration constantly reminds us that there`s a war on. That`s wrong. There are two. One is being fought by soldiers in combat, and the other is being fought for the hearts and minds of people who are not yet our enemies. However badly the administration has botched the first war -- where, oh where, is Osama bin Laden? -- it has done even worse with the second. It has jutted its chin to the world, appeared pugnacious and unilateralist, permitted the abuse of POWs and others at Abu Ghraib, and now toyed in some fashion with torture. The Bush administration has shamed us all, reducing us to the level of those governments that also have wonderful laws forbidding torture, but condone it anyway.

It is commonly said that we are a nation of laws, not men. And we are. But beyond the laws, we are also a nation of men and women with a common ethic. Some things are not American. Torture, for damned sure, is one of them.

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Bush opens new rift over Middle East plan

• Chirac derides push for democracy • 3-point plan to reshape region
Larry Elliott and David Teather in Savannah
Thursday June 10, 2004

The Guardian
Attempts by President George Bush to exploit the diplomatic triumph of the United Nations resolution on Iraq were last night running into stiff opposition at the G8 summit, as France joined Arab countries in deriding the White House plans for a greater Middle East initiative.

Buoyed by the 15-0 UN security council vote, Mr Bush and Tony Blair were seeking a three-pronged follow-up that would involve greater Nato involvement in Iraq, plans to bring western-style democracy and economic reform to the Middle East and north Africa and a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Britain and the US believed the UN show of international unity could mark the end of the west`s year-long schism and draw a close to a turbulent period in which the two leaders have been dogged by violent insurrection and allegations of torture in Iraq.

"After almost two months of rough news, we had finally had a series of significant moves forward on the political side," said a senior Bush administration official.

But the tensions between the US and Europe resurfaced at the G8 summit of industrial countries in Sea Island, Georgia, when the French president, Jacques Chirac, said that greater Nato involvement in Iraq would be neither "timely nor well understood".

He also gave strong backing to those Middle Eastern countries that have called on Mr Bush to drop his support for the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in order to clear the path for peace in the region. Mr Bush by contrast was wholehearted in his support for Mr Sharon`s decision to pull out of the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

Mr Chirac said: "We must steer the parties back without delay on to the road to political settlement, and halt the escalation of violence." Only by doing so would the G8 "be able to dispel the hostility towards the west which is so widespread in the Middle East".

Mr Bush yesterday presented a watered down version of his plan to stabilise the region to the handful of Arab leaders that accepted invitations to attend a G8 summit for the first time. The most feted was Iraq`s newly appointed prime minister, Ayad Allawi, who was praised by Mr Bush for "having the courage to stand up and lead".

Turkey and Jordan were broadly supportive of the plan. But leading Arab states including Saudi Arabia and Egypt snubbed the event to protest what they view as heavy-handed US attempts to impose western values on their cultures.

Mr Bush`s plan pushes for reforms such as free elections, independent media and improved legal systems. The plan includes training for judges and lawyers, loans to small businesses and campaigns to reduce illiteracy by 20 million people. It sets a target for training 100,000 teachers.

Sensitive to Arab critics, the statement noted that "successful reform depends on the countries in the region and change should not and cannot be imposed from outside".

But Mr Chirac was also dismissive of Mr Bush`s initiative. "There is no ready-made formula for democracy readily transposable from one country to another. Democracy is not a method, it is a culture. For democracy to take root solidly and durably in the Arab world, it must be an Arab democracy before all else."

Mr Chirac`s downbeat assessment of progress made at the summit contrasted sharply with that of Mr Blair, who was confident that Mr Bush will be prepared to reinvigorate the "Quartet" Middle East peace process, involving the UN, the US, the EU and Russia.

Downing Street, relieved to have any small concession from Mr Bush towards multilateralism, said the Quartet would be back in Israel by the end of the month.

"Sensible people looking at the situation in the Middle East know there needs to be reform and change,"` Mr Blair said. "Now, that`s not for us to dictate to people, but it is for us to help them get there."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Wall Street Journal: DOWNLOAD AND READ THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MEMO ON TORTURE DURING INTERROGATION (PDF Format)

http://www.christusrex.org/www1/icons/wsj-6-9-04.pdf

Allies warn Bush that stability in Iraq demands Arab-Israeli deal
By Rupert Cornwell in Georgia

10 June 2004

President Bush yesterday was bluntly told by European and Arab allies alike that a serious new push for a Palestinian-Israeli peace solution was vital if his vision of a stable Iraq at the heart of a reformed Middle East were to have any chance of success.

Boosted by the unanimous United Nations vote on sovereignty, Mr Bush used the first day of the G8 summit here to try and advance his agenda for Iraq, seeking to widen the role of Nato, gain relief for Baghdad`s debt, and launch a much-touted initiative to promote democracy in the Middle East and the Islamic world.

But the Palestinian-Israeli conflict quickly leapt to the centre of proceedings, as Tony Blair attempted to secure a US commitment to revitalise the virtually moribund "road map" towards a comprehensive settlement. President Jacques Chirac of France - the fiercest critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq - warned that "real progress" toward a peace deal was a "precondition" of any successful attempt at reform of the region.

But despite some nods of assent, there was little sign that Washington has agreed to a major rethink of its Middle Eastern policies, and its embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon`s controversial plan to withdraw from Gaza.

This latest annual gathering of the G8 powers, at the exclusive and massively guarded Sea Island resort, takes place in a much improved atmosphere from its predecessor a year ago, in the angry aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, which had split the Security Council and caused the worst rift in trans-atlantic relations in decades.

The recommended attire was `business casual,` as a sports-shirted Mr Bush drove Mr Blair to their breakfast meeting in a new model fuel-efficient golf buggy, painted with the stars and stripes. Most leaders chose to go without ties. M. Chirac alone wore a formal suit and tie.

And the political content for the leaders - from France, the US, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, Canada and Germany - is also much more relaxed this time. The priority is mending fences, rather than rubbing salt into old Iraq wounds, and Monday`s unanimous UN vote has given the occasion an ideal send-off.

However each of the main US aims is likely to run into difficulties. Cancellation of the $120bn of foreign debt run up by Saddam Hussein has been resolutely opposed by France, which argues that Iraq should not be treated differently from other, and even poorer, countries in the developing world. Moreover M. Chirac declared yesterday that this was not the time for Nato to become more involved in Iraq.

But the biggest disappointment may prove to be the so called "Broader Middle East" initiative, even as the G8 opens its doors for the first time to a group of Middle Eastern and Islamic leaders, including the new Iraqi President, Ghazi al-Yawer.

From highly ambitious origins, the scheme - intended to throw the collective weight of the G8 behind a bid to foster economic reform and democracy in the region - has been steadily diluted since it was first floated earlier this year, amid a chorus of objections and criticism, from Europe as well as from sections of the Arab world.

Once modelled on the 1975 Helsinki accords which imposed human rights obligations on Communist Europe, the latest version is non-binding in any way, and is focussed on economic and educational issues.

King Abdullah of Jordan, President Karzai of Afghanistan and the Turkish Prime Minister were among those in attendance. But Saudi Arabia and Egypt - two countries crucial for the initiative - refused to come, as did Morocco.

The scheme is no more than unwanted Western meddling, they complain, and a high handed attempt to impose foreign ways on the Middle East.

Mr Blair however denied the charges. "What we`re doing today is to say, `Look, sensible people sitting down and looking at the situation in the Middle East know there needs to be a process of reform and change,`" the Prime Minister said after a private breakfast with Mr Bush. "Now, that`s not for us to dictate to people, but it is for us to help them get there."

But after the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, Washington`s moral credibility in the region has rarely been lower. US officials increasingly acknowledge that without progress on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, in a way that suggests the US is not irrevocably tilted towards the Israeli cause, prospects for any wider democratic initiative in the region are dim.

Before he left for the summit, the Jordanian monarch - one of the staunchest US allies in the region - said "no programme on the broader democratic initiative is possible, until a resolution of the [Palestinian-Isaeli] conflict has been achieved".

But Washington, outwardly at least, is hardly changing its ground. Once again US officials stressed that the Sharon plan to pull out of Gaza and parts of the West Bank was a "hugely significant" step, whose importance was missed by many countries, among them Britain.

In yesterday`s opening session Mr Bush gave an upbeat review of the strong US economy, now growing at an annual 4 per cent or more, despite the sharp rise in oil prices.

Many countries regard the soaring US budget and trade deficits as another threat to world prosperity. But Mr Bush defended his massive tax cuts, a prime cause of the budget deficit, as essential to start the present recovery.

The US believes it is up to Europe and Japan to boost their own economies, to reduce domestic unemployment and take the weight off the US.

Today`s session, to which several African leaders have been invited, will deal with debt relief, the fight against poverty and AIDS, and helping international peacekeeping operations in global trouble spots.


10 June 2004 12:41


© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108…

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108…

Kurdish Anger Rising

The Associated Press reports substantial Kurdish anger in Iraq over the failure of the UN Security Council resolution on Iraq`s caretaker government to provide any guarantees of protection of the minority rights of the Kurds. A senior UN official said off the record that he hoped "it will not develop into anything ugly." Key quotes from Kurdish leaders:


` Barham Salih, 44, of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and an American favorite, announced he would not accept the post of deputy prime minister for national security unless the powers were spelled out "appropriate to the position, sacrifice and important role of the Kurdish people," the PUK`s KurdSat television reported.

` "We do not accept that the Shiites would have the lion`s share of any Iraqi government because any Iraqi government should be composed of the representatives of all Iraqi people," Mulaha Bekhtiyar of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said Wednesday. `

` Now our future is ambiguous," said Nesreen Berwari, a Kurd who serves as minister of public works. "The interim constitution would have been the clear and bright road map to all the components of the Iraqi people." Berwari said she would resign from the government if asked to do so by the Kurdish leadership. `



Karbalanews.net quotes Barwari as saying that for the UN not to endorse the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) or interim constitution (which recognizes Kurdish claims explicitly) is a "usurpation of democracy." She added that the UN resolution, in failing to mention the TAL, "ensures that all the sacrifices of the Kurdish people have been in vain."

According to ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani said that he would announce the Kurdish position after studying the contents of the resolution. He implied that it was possible that he would ask the Kurdish ministers in the caretaker government to resign in protest (Barwari has already indicated her willingnes to do so). In a letter to President Bush, Barzan and Jalal Talabani, the other paramount Kurdish leader, threatened to boycott the forthcoming Iraqi elections and perhaps even declare an independent state if they feel their demands are being ignored.

Mahmud Uthman (Osman), an independent Kurdish politician who served on the Interim Governing Council, told the newspaper that he thought it unlikely that the Kurdish ministers would withdraw from the new government. He said that the Kurds have now noticed that the final draft of the UNSC resolution affirmed the "federal" character of the Iraqi state, and that this phraseology might be enough to hang their hopes on. The Kurds want a decentralized Iraqi government with substantial "states rights."

Sistani spokesman in Europe, Murtada al-Kashmiri, said that the Kurds had threatened to withdraw in the past, and that they should "consider what is best for all Iraqis."

Songul Chapouk, the Turkmen woman on the old Interim Governing Council, also expressed impatience with Kurdish threats to withdraw. She said she had opposed the loose federalism implied in the TAL because it was produced by an unelected body. The Turkmen have complained about not being represented in the UN-appointed government and are rivals of the Kurds in northern regions.

My remarks on the Lehrer News Hour on Tuesday concerning the UN Security Council Resolution on Iraq are now online.

I said in part: "the Kurds very much wanted the resolution to endorse the interim constitution that was hammered out last February between the interim governing council and the coalition provisional authority. It did not do so. That interim constitution recognizes the status quo of semi-autonomy for the Kurdish regions, gives them a veto over the permanent constitution that is to be drafted next year this time. Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani on the other hand wrote a letter to Kofi Annan warning the United Nations against endorsing that document which Sistani does not like. He fears that it contains the seeds of a break-up of Iraq. He wants more central authority. He doesn`t think it`s fair for the rule of the majority to be overruled by a minority of Kurds. So these two political forces in civil society came out differently. Sistani won basically. The Kurds lost and they`re very upset about it."

posted by Juan @ 6/10/2004 09:13:50 AM

Political Obituary for the Neocons

Paul Richter of the Los Angeles Times has done another political obituary of the neoconservative movement, which has fallen on hard times. He notes that it is highly unlikely that Congress would now confirm Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith for higher office (Wolfowitz had once been rumored as a candidate for Secretary of State in a second Bush term). Richard Perle`s credibility is shot both because of a financial scandal and because of his close association with Ahmad Chalabi, who has now been disgraced as an Iranian intelligence asset.

The other scarey thing about the Neocons is their warmongering. David Wurmser and Scooter Libby would have dragged us into wars with Syria and Iran if they could have. If American supporters of the Likud want to take down Bashar al-Asad, they should get Ariel Sharon to do it with Israeli troops, not put American soldiers at risk for no good reason. Al-Asad is not a threat to the United States, and he is not even a threat to Israel (Israel could be in Damascus tomorrow if it wanted to).

Richter also notes that the Neocons cry `anti-semitism` about all this. What a crock. There are many prominent Jewish Americans in the Bush administration who are not philosophically aligned with the neocons and whom I have never seen attacked in the press. Marc Grossman, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, for instance, is from all accounts an excellent diplomat and has received no unfavorable press of the sort Wolfowitz and Feith and Perle have. I conclude that critics are objecting to the political philosophy of the neocons, not to their Jewishness. Moreover, it isn`t even exactly their political philosophy that is attacked, though Doug Feith`s hatred of the Palestinians and desire to ensure they never get a state is odious. It is their sneaky methods, of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of intelligence. And here the guiltiest party of all is Dick Cheney. So it is nothing to do with ethnicity at all.

The American Likudniks are attempting to hitch a ride on political correctness and trying to equate criticism of Likud party policies in Israel with anti-semitism. It would be as though Pinochet supporters implied that his critics hate Latinos, or as though supporters of Chinese President Hu Jintao tried to paint his critics as anti-Asian. It is a stupid argument and no one is going to fall for it, so they may as well just give it up.

There is, by the way, a throwaway line in Richter`s piece from a Neocon lamenting that Bush may come to be seen as the worst president since Carter. That is ridiculous. Jimmy Carter was a far better president than W. can ever hope to be. Carter made peace between Israel and Egypt. He resolved the Panama Canal issue to everyone`s satisfaction, and we`ve never heard any more about it because there haven`t been subsequent problems. He avoided a potentially disastrous US attempt to prevent or roll back the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He used the foreign aid carrot to begin the process of pushing the Latin American military regimes to democratize (a process that has been wildly successful). He raised human rights as a foreign policy issue. Carter is a quick study and a bright engineer. He was president at a time of post-Vietnam and post-Watergate doldrums, at a time when Iran and Afghanistan spun out of control, at a time of high petroleum prices, continued stagflation, and high inflation. I am not entirely sure what he could have done about any of these problems, most of which were beyond his control (and most of which remained beyond the control of his successors).

Reagan did not overturn Khomeini, rather he sold him arms. Although Reagan got the Soviets out of Afghanistan, he did it at the cost of creating a radical Islamist international and destabilizing Pakistan and Afghanistan--i.e. Afghanistan continued to spin out of control, with fateful consequences. The price of petroleum declined from $40 a barrel in 1980 to less than $10 a barrel in 1986, helping Reagan quite a lot, but it had nothing to do with any policy pursued by Reagan. (Europe cut its energy consumption by a third after the 1970s oil shock, and OPEC has a tendency to overproduce over time). After Carter retired, he spent his time building houses for disadvantaged people. He also was key to the elimination of a painful and debilitating parasite in Africa, improving the lives of millions. The vilification of Carter and the hero worship of W. is a sign of how morally warped the American Right really is. Carter`s political and economic environment made it impossible for him to be a great president, but he was a damn sight better than W. any day of the week.

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THE NATION
A Tough Time for `Neocons`
Once, they exulted in the Iraq war. Now, with the setbacks in the region and the Chalabi spy probe, neoconservatives are feeling besieged.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

June 10, 2004

WASHINGTON — As U.S. tanks surrounded Baghdad 14 months ago, an ardent group of war supporters in Washington toasted the success of an invasion they had done much to inspire, as commentators spoke of their virtual takeover of the Bush administration`s foreign policy.

Today, that same group, the neoconservatives, is itself under siege.

Many fellow conservatives have joined liberals in criticizing their case for the war. Rivals in the State Department and the Pentagon have taken charge of the U.S. effort in Iraq. And in a grave threat to their reputation, Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime favorite of neoconservatives, is enmeshed in an FBI investigation of alleged intelligence leaks that supplied secrets to Iran.

"As these events have come one after the other, they`ve been feeling more and more embattled," said a Republican Senate aide.

"Neocons" — best known for advocating aggressive foreign and military policies — are in the painful zone between distinction and disfavor in Washington. They are losing battles on Capitol Hill. Their principles have stopped appearing in new U.S. policies. And where neoconservatives were once seen as having a future in Republican administrations, the setbacks in Iraq could make it difficult for the group`s leading members to win Senate confirmation for top posts in the future.

Fourteen months ago, Kenneth Adelman was one of the prominent neoconservatives who took part in a now-storied victory celebration at the home of Vice President Dick Cheney that was described in Bob Woodward`s book "Plan of Attack."

Since then, Adelman acknowledged, the group`s influence has declined, because "Iraq didn`t turn out to be as promising as it was billed."

Adelman, a former Reagan administration official, said that although he supported the rationale for the war, he was torn about what had happened since. "I still have to sort it all out. I`m just not settled yet," he said.

Other neocons worry that the real trouble for them could begin if President Bush is not reelected and, among conservatives, the finger-pointing begins — in their direction.

"Bush could end up looking like the worst president since Jimmy Carter because of Iraq, and people are going to say, `You got us into this mess,` " said one Washington source who considered himself a neoconservative and spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It`s going to be nasty and bitter and brutal."

While definitions vary, "neoconservative" generally refers to formerly moderate policy advocates who favor a hawkish and assertive foreign policy to implant democracy and American values abroad.

Neocons contrast with more traditional conservatives who are willing to deal with undemocratic regimes without necessarily changing them.

Neoconservatives have been especially focused on the Middle East, and they have argued that building democracy in the heart of the Arab world could foster reform throughout a troubled region.

Although Bush campaigned in 2000 on a platform that opposed nonessential nation-building missions, he moved sharply toward the neocon view after the Sept. 11 attacks. His administration includes a number of officials considered neocons, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy; and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney`s chief of staff.

Cheney shares many views with the neocons, but many analysts argue that because of his background and views, he is a traditional conservative.

Neoconservatives had been pushing the United States to oust Saddam Hussein for years, and they exulted in his fall. But they grew concerned when officials in charge of the U.S.-led occupation in Iraq took steps the neocons did not favor.

One group of neoconservatives, including onetime Reagan Defense official Richard Perle, was unhappy that the White House didn`t move more quickly to turn sovereignty over to Iraqis and put the country in control of dissidents such as Chalabi.

Other neocons, including William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and editor of the journal Weekly Standard, contended that the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had allowed security problems to spread by deploying too few troops.

In general, neocons felt as if "they had created a brilliant screenplay, and it had fallen into the hands of the wrong director," said one self-described neoconservative, borrowing a line from political satirist Bill Maher.

As the postwar problems deepened, many neocons found themselves in the strange position of criticizing the White House, while being blamed in various quarters around the world for provoking the war. An antiwar group in Brussels created a shadow international tribunal that convicted the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank founded by Kristol, for war crimes.

"It`s not fun to be accused of war crimes," said Gary Schmitt, the center`s executive director.

Some neoconservatives see an element of anti-Semitism among their critics, because many prominent adherents are Jewish. Neocons also discount views that they are a "cabal" that wields improper influence over the administration.

"It`s very popular in Washington to believe that the president`s mind is an empty vessel that`s been filled by an unholy cabal," said Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank associated with neoconservatism.

But problems in Iraq have made administration neocons lightning rods for criticism. Without significant improvements in U.S. efforts there, many of them would be unlikely to remain for a second Bush term, neoconservatives and congressional Republicans said.

Last year, Wolfowitz, a former senior State Department official, was frequently mentioned as a leading candidate to replace Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a second Bush term. Now, congressional officials and neoconservatives agree there is little chance that Wolfowitz, seen as a primary advocate of the war, could survive a Senate confirmation.

"No way," said a senior Republican congressional aide.

Feith, the No. 3 Pentagon official, has been struggling to put to rest what he regards as unfair charges that he was trying to create a separate intelligence network in the Pentagon to guide administration decisions, and that he was an "intimate" of Chalabi. Feith met with Chalabi fewer than 10 times, said a spokesman.

Feith also has drawn criticism for shortcomings in the postwar planning. A spokesman said there was no truth to persistent rumors that Feith planned to leave government.

The allegations against Chalabi most threaten the reputation of neoconservatives, coming after the former financier was accused of putting forward defectors who offered phony evidence before the war on Hussein`s alleged arsenals of banned weapons.

But the allegations have also exposed a deep rift between the neoconservatives and others in the administration.

Perle and others have charged that "wildly implausible" allegations against Chalabi were part of an effort by the CIA to try to discredit a longtime foe. "This is completely clumsy," Perle said of the alleged CIA effort in an interview. The CIA has not publicly commented on the leak investigation.

Pletka, of the American Enterprise Institute, said "the intended aim of this entire operation" against Chalabi was to reduce the neocons` influence.

No matter how the allegations turn out, the influence of the neoconservatives is likely to continue to wane.

James Mann, author of "Rise of the Vulcans," which describes the long personal ties between members of Bush`s war Cabinet, said that the neocons` influence had been greatest on Iraq policy, but that it had declined steadily over the last year as the problems in Iraq deepened.

"Some people have assumed that they`re running the administration," Mann said. "That`s never been true."

In fact, Mann said the Bush administration had not followed neocon recommendations regarding Russia, North Korea, China or even Iraq`s neighbors of Syria and Iran. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz vaguely threatened force against Syria last year, but they had not done so lately. "Nobody`s talking about force any more," Mann said.

Despite the gloom of recent weeks for neocons, many of them see signs of a turnaround that could help restore the reputation of the U.S. effort — and theirs. A new interim government in Baghdad could help do so by earning Iraqi public support and beefing up security.

In addition, many note that Bush has emphasized his commitment to the neocon goal of building democracy. Schmitt, of the Project for a New American Century, was encouraged by Bush`s words.

"His speeches are no less neocon than ever," said Schmitt.

*

Times staff writer Johanna Neuman in Washington contributed to this article.



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The faces of neoconservatism

Neoconservatives, who advocate aggressive foreign and military policies, have been especially focused on the Middle East, arguing that building democracy there could foster reform throughout the region.

Los Angeles Times
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NEWS ANALYSIS / THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Iraqi Leaders Face Difficult Tests
As religious and ethnic power struggles grow, some worry that the U.N. resolution may have a limited effect in promoting stability.
By Maggie Farley and Paul Richter
Times Staff Writers

June 10, 2004

UNITED NATIONS — Despite the Security Council`s endorsement Tuesday of sovereignty for Iraq, the interim Iraqi government faces a difficult future because of its inherent weakness and strong divisions within the country.

On June 30, the United States will hand over the reins to a caretaker government, led by a former exile, that was selected by the U.S., the U.N. and their Iraqi allies. As a result, the interim government has limited legitimacy or credibility among Iraqis, and its survival will remain dependent on U.S. backing, most notably the 160,000 American-led foreign troops providing security in the nation.

Moreover, the government is scheduled to dissolve after elections planned for January and must deal not only with a faltering infrastructure but also with a legacy in Iraq of political and religious rivalries and an entrenched insurgency.

Nearly 15 months after U.S.-led forces toppled President Saddam Hussein`s regime, interim leaders face Sunni Baathist insurgents amassed west of Baghdad in Fallouja, renegade anti-U.S. Shiites in the holy city of Najaf to the south, and Kurdish leaders with their own militia in the north who are warning that they might pull out of the interim government.

"This is a time bomb," a U.N. official said. "Now it`s up to the Iraqis to defuse it. We can only hope that they get the time and the tools they need."

The U.S. and U.N. once hoped that after the American-led occupation ended, the resistance would dissipate. Putting Iraqis in control of their own destiny might induce more nations to support the effort by providing troops. And a national conference to help elect future leaders might persuade those left out of power to help build the country rather than undermine it.

Instead, the conflict has spread as the hand-over approaches, and the struggle for power among ethnic and religious factions with competing interests has increased. Now, some international leaders worry that the Security Council resolution, which endorsed the hand-over of sovereignty and authorized multinational forces to remain in Iraq for at least a year with the government`s consent, may have a limited effect.

The resolution, approved by a 15-0 vote, is not expected by U.S. or U.N. officials to make the violence decrease or the troop contributions rise.

Envoy Alexander Konuzin said Russia would not send troops to Iraq, even to protect U.N. staffers, "because they`re shooting ambulances there."

He added, "I don`t think there are many countries volunteering to go there in such a situation when they don`t have strong national interests."

U.S. officials insist that although they are seeking help from NATO, the U.N. and other countries to take over roles the U.S.-led occupation authority has been handling, they do not plan a quick exit and will remain deeply engaged in Iraq.

"We`re eager to leave and hand everything over to the Iraqis," said a senior U.S. official. "But we`re not going to leave them in the lurch."

The hand-over "won`t perform miracles," said Chilean Ambassador Heraldo Munoz. "It will be up to the Iraq government to prove themselves. They are not elected, so they will have to earn the respect of their people by the way they perform during these months — and that respect is the key to ending the violence."

On June 30, the occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, will symbolically hand sovereignty directly to the Iraqi interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi. But Allawi made it clear last week that Iraq would continue to need the U.S.-led military forces to provide security.

The interim government is somewhat constrained because of its temporary nature — it will hold power only until elected leaders take office early next year and is not allowed to make laws or long-term contracts that would bind the permanent government. It also lacks popular legitimacy because it was selected, not elected, by the U.S. and the Iraqi Governing Council, with help from the U.N.

Therefore, the biggest challenge will be to establish itself as independent of the U.S. The easiest way for it to win credibility is by defying the former occupiers. During the selection process for the interim government, the long-unpopular Governing Council suddenly won public support when it claimed to have rejected the U.S. and U.N. pick for president and insisted on installing their own candidate.

The challenges that the hamstrung interim government must immediately deal with are tough ones. It must exert control over competing power bases and semi-autonomous regions that have increasingly defied central rule. It must find a way to include its opponents in building the country, without alienating others. But the political settlements it will inherit that are meant to quell insurgencies in Fallouja and Najaf are precarious.

Although the militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr has suffered hundreds of deaths in recent fighting in and near Najaf, and has been spurned by more moderate Shiiite religious clerics, it retains a following in poor parts of Baghdad and areas of the Shiite south.

In Fallouja, the U.S. has avoided bloodshed by making a deal with the Sunni opposition that gives it a share of autonomy.

This week, Kurdish leaders threatened to withdraw their support from the central government because their autonomy was not specifically recognized in the U.N. resolution.

"These are real issues," said Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy who just returned from brokering the selection of the interim government.

Shiites are talking about protecting the rights of the majority, while the Kurds are talking about guarantees for the rights of the minority and not being second-class citizens in their own country — a conflict that goes back decades.

"It`s not that one side or the other is being unreasonable," Brahimi said. "I`m sure that they will find common ground for Iraq to continue along this rather difficult and challenging transition towards stability."

*

Farley reported from the United Nations and Richter from Washington.



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EDITORIAL
The Carrot of Compromise

June 10, 2004

"Humble" is not a word that characterizes the Bush administration`s past dealings with foreign powers. It should become a new watchword. The administration showed a rare willingness to compromise in negotiations leading to the Security Council`s unanimous endorsement of the interim Iraqi government. And diplomats say the U.S. was quick to incorporate suggestions from Arab leaders into its proposal for democratic reforms in the Middle East, being discussed at the Group of 8 summit in Sea Island, Ga.

This new multilateralism, following the Iraq war`s fearsome cost in lives, dollars and respect, will have to be permanent if the U.S. hopes to get the assistance it desperately needs from its old but snubbed allies.

At least the administration has some able practitioners of diplomacy. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John D. Negroponte and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell were deft in negotiating with Russia, France and Germany to earn Security Council support for stabilizing Iraq. They astutely compromised on the presence of coalition troops, putting in a clause that allows an Iraqi government to call for their withdrawal. This may help give Muslim countries like Pakistan enough political cover with their own populations to send peacekeeping troops that can help relieve the burden on U.S. forces.

The United States still must provide some kind of guarantee of Kurdish rights, which was not included in the Security Council resolution after protests from Iraqi Shiites. If the Kurds attempt to carve out an autonomous sphere, Iraq could erupt into civil war. Kurdish fears that a new Shiite-dominated government would not respect their rights are legitimate, and the U.S., which has repeatedly betrayed the Kurds, should not repeat the mistake.

Numerous conflicts between the U.S. and its European allies remain. During the G-8 summit Wednesday, President Bush, elated by his U.N. resolution success, called upon NATO to enter Iraq. French President Jacques Chirac responded, "I do not think that it is NATO`s job to intervene in Iraq." Russia, Germany and Canada have indicated that despite the new U.N. resolution they have no intention of committing troops.

The U.S. will also have to keep pushing France, Russia and Canada to cancel as much of Iraq`s $120-billion debt to them as possible. Leaving Iraq with a substantial debt would be replicating the mistake the Allies made at Versailles after World War I, when they demanded onerous reparations from Germany, a move that inadvertently helped bring the Nazis to power.

If Bush continues to rely on the State Department, he will have a good chance of reaching more agreements with the allies. The U.N. resolution is not the end, but the beginning, of the creation of stability in Iraq.


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How innocent Iraqis came to be tortured as terrorists
Date: Thursday, June 10 @ 10:18:07 EDT
Topic: War & Terrorism

From USA TODAY

On Wednesday, a human-rights group released an analysis that helps answer a puzzling question about the worst military scandal in decades: How could so many U.S. soldiers commit so many acts against Iraqi prisoners that betray the Geneva Conventions they`re supposed to uphold?

The White House blames the actions of a few bad apples, such as Army Spc. Charles Graner, who starred in several of the horrific photos from Abu Ghraib prison.

But more than 100 incidents of abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan are under investigation, spanning a year and a half. The Human Rights Watch report is the latest to cite the deaths of more than 30 detainees in the two countries, some ghastly.

The bad-apple theory can`t explain a scandal of such magnitude. The rights group suggests a more plausible reason: After 9/11, the military`s long commitment to the Geneva Conventions eroded under an aggressive Bush-administration plan to deal with terrorists.



It began narrowly with the invasion of Afghanistan to wipe out al-Qaeda strongholds. In late 2001 and 2002, White House, Justice and Pentagon officials assembled for the first time legal justifications for ignoring the Geneva Conventions, international rules for handling prisoners of war.

The strategy won support from White House General Counsel Alberto Gonzales. In a January 2002 memo, he advised that the military set aside the conventions in Afghanistan. Both al-Qaeda and Taliban soldiers were dubbed "unlawful combatants," which entitled them only to humane treatment -- as defined by their captors.

Gonzales referred to some convention provisions as "obsolete." Other White House officials picked up that tone.

With the fury of the 9/11 attacks blinding judgment, few voices were raised in opposition. The image in the public`s mind was one of Osama bin Laden or his top henchmen in leg irons and stubbornly withholding knowledge of future attacks. Few had in mind the torture of innocent subjects.

Not surprisingly, such tactics expanded. In August 2002, well before the Iraq invasion, Justice Department lawyers produced a legal justification for torturing al-Qaeda detainees wherever they might be held.

They expanded again in 2003. New rules were created for dealing with 700 terrorist suspects who`ve been held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on a list of about two dozen permissible interrogation techniques, many of which veered from official Army manuals. The military says the techniques included heat, cold and sensory assaults such as loud music. Human-rights groups that interviewed suspects released from Guantanamo said they were told of beatings and sexual humiliation.

The question of which techniques are so harsh that they violate the 1994 international ban on torture that the U.S. signed remains in dispute.

None of this, however, was supposed to apply in Iraq. There, the conventions were supposed to be obeyed. Rumsfeld said so early in the Iraq war as he complained about the treatment of captured U.S. soldiers.

But as the world now knows, that`s not how it turned out.

Last August, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who oversaw the Guantanamo interrogations, arrived in Iraq to pump up useful intelligence obtained from Iraqis detained as suspected insurgents. He quickly applied the lessons learned in Cuba. Miller denies his methods sparked abuses at Abu Ghraib. But Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba`s report concludes that Miller`s approach violated Army doctrine.

At the same time, habits learned in Afghanistan were being transferred to Iraq. A military-intelligence platoon that interrogated suspects in an Afghanistan detention center where two prisoners died also questioned prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, military reservists acting as guards at the prison didn`t receive the Geneva Convention training that regular soldiers do. Why has not been explained.

Nor is Abu Ghraib the whole story. Only one of the 30 deaths occurred there.

So the chain of events seems to have worked like this: Rules violating the Geneva Conventions were invented for dealing with proven terrorists in specific places or circumstances. But they gradually came to be applied to hundreds of suspects, many of them innocent. Military officials said 70% to 90% of the Iraqis swept up for interrogation were arrested by mistake, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported.

There`s no evidence of a high-level order to engage broadly in torture. Just the opposite. But neither can the problem be blamed on a few bad actors. At the very least, it suggests indifference and conflicting goals at the highest levels that encouraged the abusers.

Repeated warnings from human-rights investigators were ignored or pushed aside. Iraq ground commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said two months passed before he learned of a Red Cross report on abuses that was submitted Nov. 6, even though the Red Cross monitors the Geneva Conventions.

The civilian chain of command also knew about the abuses. Last July 15, a United Nations envoy met with Administrator Paul Bremer to alert him to the problem. But not until photos emerged, with public outrage assured, did the investigations become serious. And then it was too late.

In short, the U.S. soldiers violated their training because they got the wrong message, from their commanders, the Pentagon and the White House. Repeatedly, President Bush referred to the insurgents as "terrorists." To soldiers accustomed to the rules of Afghanistan or Guantanamo, that could easily mean the conventions do not apply.

The result is a scandal that aids the enemy, endangers U.S. soldiers and insults the nation`s most basic standards of decency. It is reason for the congressional committees investigating the abuse to look not just at lower military ranks for blame, but at the leadership -- uniformed and civilian -- as well.Today`s debate: The Abu Ghraib scandalStandards were compromised in post-9/11 zeal to catch terrorists.

© Copyright 2004 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

From USA TODAY:
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20040610/6274434s.htm

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Frohes Trauern, Amerika
von Mickey Z
ZNet 08.06.2004
Als ich hörte, dass Ronnie Raygun endlich den Löffel abgegeben hat, sagte ich laut: "Ein Verbrecher weniger auf dieser Welt."

Als Präsident (sic) Bush die gleiche Nachricht hörte, erklärte er Freitag, den 11. Juni, zum "Tag der nationalen Trauer" für den toten Präsidenten.

Ich sehe Dubya und gebe das zurück: Ich erkläre Freitag, den 11. Juni, zum nationalen Feiertag für Rayguns Opfer. Wie Bill Blum schreibt, Ronnies "größte Verbrechen waren die blutige militärische Aktionen zur Unterdrückung sozialer und politischer Veränderungen in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala und Afghanistan." Reagen nannte die Nicaraguanische Contras "das moralische Äquivalent zu den amerikanischen Gründerväter" und diese noble Gruppe von "Friedenskämpfer" griffen regelmäßig Zivilisten an, schnitten Frauen die Brüste und Männern die Testikel ab, rissen Augen aus, köpften Babys, benutzten Kinder als Übungsziele und schlitzten Kehlen auf und zogen die Zunge der Opfer durch den Schnitt.

Trauern wir doch für das 14-jährige Nicaraguanische Mädchen, die von Reagens moralischen Helden mehrfach vergewaltigt und geköpft wurde . und deren Kopf danach auf einen Pfahl aufgespießt wurde, als Warnung für die Regierungsanhänger ihres Dorfes. (Der Vorsitzende von America Watch und Helsinki Watch zog den Schluss: "die US können sich der Verantwortung für diese Greueltaten nicht entziehen.")

Aber warum bei denen aufhören, die auf Geheiß von Kriegsverbrecher Nr. 40 gestorben sind? Trauern wir um Sacco und Vanzetti, Julius und Ethel, Fred Hampton, Rachel Corrie, Ken Saro Wiwa, und die Tausende, die von Pinochets Handlanger in das Chilenische Fußballstadion zusammen getrieben worden sind. Drei Millionen Tote in Südostasien verdienen einen Tag der Trauer, oder? Wie steht es um die 100 und mehr, die von Dubya in Texas hingerichtet wurden, und die Zehntausende die er im Irak und Afghanistan zum Tode verurteilt hat? Vergessen wir auch nicht die Vietnamesen, die die "Greueltaten" zu erleiden hatten, an die John Kerry zugibt teilgenommen zu haben, oder die Opfer der NAFTA oder des Wohlfahrtsaufhebungsgesetz, den Kerry unterstützte.

Zum Teufel mit Raygun. Ich will einen globalen Trauertag für die amerikanischen Ureinwohner und die Opfer des afrikanischen Sklavenhandels. Die Millionen Opfer in Indonesien, in den 60ern, die 300.000 in Osttimor in der 70ern, die halbe Million Irakische Kinder in den 90ern.

Ich könnte ewig so weitermachen ... aber ich bin sicher Sie begreifen die Grundidee. Es herrschte niemals Mangel an U.S.- gesponserte und unterstützte Greueltaten, und zwangsläufig herrscht auch kein Mangel an Medienpropaganda, um diese Greueltaten in edle Siege zu verwandeln. Ein ausschlaggebendes Element der linken Medienkritik betrifft die Enthüllung des vorhersagbaren Verhaltens der Massenmedien in solchen Situationen:

Ereignis A findet statt. Reaktion A erfolgt. Die öffentliche Meinung wird gebildet.

Reagen stirbt. Die Medien sprechen ihn heilig und ignorieren seine Verbrechen. Amerika trauert.

Aber wie reagieren die Linken? Reagen verröchelt ... und das Standard-Programm wird angewendet:

a) Seine tatsächliches Lebenswerk wird dokumentiert und der Medienverzerrung entgegengehalten.
b) Historische Beispiele werden vorgelegt um zu demonstrieren, dass ein derartiges Verhalten von U.S. Führer nichts ungewöhnliches ist
c) Ein paar motivierte Linken vertiefen sich in Reagens Errungenschaften und stauben ein Buchvertrag ab.

Spulen wir vor zu Kissingers Tod in, sagen wir, 2007. Ein ähnliches Muster wird sich abzeichnen ... und ein paar Bücher mehr werden publiziert werden. Sicher, die Nation Linken werden sich mit den Counterpunch Linken herumstreiten, aber die Konzern/militärische Maschine rollt weiter.

Etwas muss sich ändern...

Ronnie Raygun war nur eine symptomatische Eiterbeule einer ernsteren Krankheit. Selbst wenn er entwürdigt in einer Gefängniszelle gestorben wäre (wie er es verdient hätte), er bleibt dennoch nur eine mickrige Bazille. Wir müssen die schnellen Sofortheilmittelchen aufgeben, und unser langzeitliches Immunsystem vor systematischen Krankheiten stärken, die Männer wie ihn an die Macht bringen.

Wie viele weitere Ronnie Rayguns können wir schließlich überleben?

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Reagan, der Schlächter meines Volkes
von Miguel D’Escoto
Democracy Now! / ZNet 09.06.2004
Anmerkung der Redaktion: Pater Miguel D’Escoto ist katholischer Priester in Managua, Nicaragua. In den 80gern war er Außenminister der Sandinisten-Regierung. Damals bewaffneten und unterstützten die USA die Contra-Todesschwadronen. Reagan sagte über die Contras: „Sie sind unsere Brüder, diese Freiheitskämpfer, und wir schulden ihnen unsere Hilfe. Sie sind das moralische Pendant unserer Gründerväter.“ Im Folgenden ein Auszug aus dem Interview, das die nationale Radio/TV-Show ‚Democracy Now!‘ mit Pater D’Escoto führte:

Managua, Nicaragua. Lassen Sie mich zuerst anmerken, Ronald Reagan ist nun tot, und ich wäre der Erste, der nur Gutes über ihn sagen möchte. Ich möchte die Gefühle vieler US-Bürger, die Präsident Reagan betrauern, nicht verletzen, aber während ich hier bete, Gott, in seiner unendlichen Güte und Gnade, möge Reagan vergeben, dass er der Schlächter meines Volkes war und verantwortlich für den Tod von etwa 50 000 Nicaraguanern, können und dürfen wir nie vergessen, welche Verbrechen er im Namen von etwas beging, dem er fälschlicherweise das Etikett „Freiheit und Demokratie“ gab. Vielleicht mehr als jeder andere US-Präsident hat Reagan viele auf der ganzen Welt davon überzeugt, dass die USA ein Betrug sind, eine große Lüge. Sie (die USA) waren nicht nur undemokratisch sondern im Grunde der größte Feind der Selbstbestimmung der Völker. Reagan war bekannt als der „große Kommunikator“, allerdings nur, so meine Meinung, falls man glaubt, ein großer Kommunikator sei ein guter Lügner. Letzteres war er ganz gewiss. Er konnte die größten Lügen verkünden, ohne auch nur mit der Wimper zu zucken. Wenn ich ihn sagen hörte, wir würden, angeblich, Juden verfolgen und – nichtexistente - Synagogen niederbrennen, war ich ernsthaft versucht zu glauben, Reagan sei von Dämonen besessen. Offen gesagt glaube ich wirklich, Reagan – genau wie Bush heute – war besessen vom Dämon des Sendungsbewusstseins (manifest destiny). Natürlich ist mir, während ich dies hier sage, sehr bewusst, dass das für die Leute vom ‚Project for a New American Century‘ eine große Enttäuschung sein muss. Denn, durch Reagan und seinen geistigen Erben George W. Bush ist die Welt heutzutage unsicherer und gefährdeter denn je.

Tatsächlich war Reagan ein internationaler Outlaw. Er wurde Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten, kurz nachdem Somoza, jener Diktator, den die USA Nicaragua praktisch ein halbes Jahrhundert aufzwangen, durch die Nicaraguanischen Nationalisten unter Führung der Sandinista Liberation Front abgesetzt wurde. Für Reagan galt es nun, Nicaragua zurückzuerobern. Er warf Carter vor, Nicaragua verloren zu haben - so, als ob Nicaragua je irgendjemand anders gehört hätte als dem nicaraguanischen Volk. Das war der Start zu diesem Krieg, den Reagan erfand, installierte, finanzierte und leitete: der Krieg der Contras. Kontinuierlich hat er sein Volk belogen und so dazu beigetragen, dass das Volk der Vereinigten Staaten das unwissendste auf Erden ist. Wohlgemerkt, ich sage ‚unwissend‘, nicht ‚unintelligent‘. Aber (es ist) das unwissendste Volk, wenn es darum geht, was die USA im Ausland anrichten.

Die Menschen haben noch gar nicht angefangen zu begreifen – sonst würden sie rebellieren. Und so belog er die Leute, wie Bush heute die Leute belügt, und sie machen immer weiter, sie denken, die USA stehen über allen Gesetzen, denen der Menschen wie denen Gottes. Aber wir haben die Vereinigten Staaten – Reagans Vereinigte Staaten, seine Regierung – vor Gericht gebracht, vor den Weltgerichtshof. Ich war damals Außenminister Nicaraguas. Ich trug dafür die Verantwortung. Die Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten bekamen das harscheste Urteil, die härteste Verdammung in der Geschichte der Weltgerichtsbarkeit. Seit den frühen 20gern hatten die USA ja gegenüber der Welt proklamiert, ein Beweis für ihre moralische Überlegenheit, verglichen mit anderen Ländern weltweit, bestehe darin, dass sie sich an internationales Recht hielten und sich dem Weltgerichtshof fügten. Aber als die USA von (?) Nicaragua vor den Weltgerichtshof gebracht wurden und Verurteilung erfuhren, kümmerten sie sich einfach nicht um das Urteil. Sie schulden Nicaragua inzwischen noch zwischen $20 000 und $30 000 Millionen. Zu der Zeit, als wir die Regierung verließen, belief sich der Schaden durch den Reagan-Krieg auf über $17 Milliarden – dies eine Schätzung von gemäßigten Schadensermittlern, Leuten der ‚United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America‘, der Howard University, den Leuten von Oxford und der Universität von Paris. Aus diesen setzte sich das Team, das den Schaden schätzte, nämlich im wesentlichen zusammen. Die USA wurden verpflichtet, den Schaden zu begleichen. Aber Bush wollte mit mir noch nicht einmal darüber reden. Ich sagte: „Also, lassen Sie uns ein Treffen abmachen, mit dem Sie Ihrer Verurteilung durch den Gerichtshof entsprechen“. In zwei verschiedenen Briefen teilte er mir mit, es gäbe nichts zu bereden.

Also, Reagan hat Nicaragua einen Schaden zugefügt, der so unermesslich ist, dass alle, die mich jetzt hören, es sich nicht ausmalen können. Die Welle jener kriminellen und mörderischen Intervention wird in meinem Land noch in 50 Jahren und länger spürbar sein.

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From AxisofLogic.com

Critical Analysis
Inspired by Ronald Reagan: Of The Evil Empire, Imperialist Devastation of Peoples And the Evils Done in our Name
By Manuel Valenzuela, Axis of Logic Contributing Editor
Jun 8, 2004, 03:25





Let us for a few moments put aside our lavish lifestyles of fortuitous endowment and providence that have made us blind to the realities of billions of our fellow humans. Let us ignore our plasma televisions, our DVDs, our two-story cookie cutter homes and gas-guzzling SUVs. Let us promise to not open our overstocked pantries and refrigerators, or to go out and eat at one of many corporate controlled franchise restaurants offering vast assortments of gargantuan meals. We should ignore the opulence of our society that dwells permanently in our minds that makes us forget the severe indigence and suffering that transpires beyond our shores and borders.



In short, we should come out of our luxurious bubble that has shielded us from the evils inflicted on billions of humans that have not been as privy to a life of safety and security. Let us traverse the road of reality, sojourning through history and through mirages of hidden truths. Let us dive into the making of the Evil Empire so that we may see what our government has and continues to do in our name. The road ahead will not be easy to swallow or comprehend, yet we must open our minds to the possibility that what has happened is real and what is occurring is not fiction. Only then will we understand why our hands are smeared in the blood of tens of millions of human cadavers and countless more whose lives and futures have been devastated at the hands of the United States of America. Only by knowing who and what we are can we correct ourselves.



Our society is ingrained with an appetite for violence. It is apparent in the over 11,000 murders by firearm per year. It is apparent in Hollywood’s gratuitous assembly-line of blood and gore, violence, devastation and death. It is visible in the ever-growing number of video games sold to our children depicting egregious violence, killings and bloodletting. Our society celebrates violence, be it through football, hockey or boxing, television, cartoons and music. Even Disney cartoon movies have as a main theme battles of good versus evil and the plethora of violence, destruction and death associated with them. The US military industrial complex supplies the world with 45 percent of all weapons for sale on the market.



Yet without public demand for violence none of the above would exist. It is the citizenry – with complicit help from government and corporate media – that drives the engine that conditions us toward accepting and participating in our violent society.



Violence in America is today a manifestation of our society and history, of a never ending thirst for blood, conquest, oppression and death that sprung from the first moment of Puritan arrival. Before and after the Revolutionary war Americans participated in one of the greatest acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing the world has ever witnessed. Millions upon millions of native Indians were slaughtered, raped and cleansed from the lands of North America. Manifest destiny ransacked from Atlantic to Pacific like a devastating hurricane, destroying everything native people thought precious and sacred. Wars against native populations extinguishing the energies of men, women, children and elderly alike. The American thirst for violence had been born. The addiction for blood would become insatiable and never ending.



Native peoples’ lands were taken from them; lies, manipulations and betrayals erased their tribes from the homes they once knew and cherished. Replanted into hellholes called reservations, Indians were left to rot away their existence, given only the evil of Firewater to wash away their inner demons and scars in a land both alien and inhospitable. Hidden from the voracious Anglo onslaught, Indians of talent and ability were left to dwell on a future lost through the disappearance of opportunity. Disease, depression, lack of education and incessant poverty soon followed. Demons of a life wasted and opportunity lost consumed those who escaped the barrel of a gun and the virus of the white man.



Entire ethnicities, tribes, languages and cultures were eviscerated from the face of the Earth by those whose importance of property and ownership superceded the respect for human life. Beautiful peoples took with them to the grave lives living free, roaming pristine and untouched forests, deserts and prairies, being one with nature, respecting everything that breathed and a spirituality that has much to offer our capitalistic civilization. Advanced civilizations in wisdom and spirituality, yet seen as savages to the “more sophisticated” European people, native peoples’ way of life was vanished, never to fully flourish again. Millions ethnically cleansed, millions whose lives were made barren, all making way for the destructive bulldozer ravaging land and man. The Evil Empire had sprung to life, a trail of victims visible everywhere the giant walked.



Not satisfied with the killing of millions of native peoples, the citizens of America next decided to unleash hell onto each other. As a result the American Civil War of the latter part of the 19th century killed more than 600,000 people, leaving the United States mourning for brothers and sons, fathers and grandfathers. Graveyards littered the landscape; battlefields were transformed into fields of death and devastation. Divided a prospering nation stood, soaked in blood and agony, splitting apart families, creating widows and orphans. In the end, hundreds of thousands lay dead, many more maimed and wounded, all to quench the voracious appetite for violence, death and destruction.



The Evil Empire’s cannibalism was only the beginning of a much greater disease.



Lands and People of Asia



As the Empire grew stronger so too did its addiction for expansion. War with Spain commencing in 1898 brought forth new lands, colonies and treasure. Yet it also brought forth death and destruction. American violence had not dissipated; it had only evolved, with new forms of warfare and destruction arising with the passage of time. Tens of thousands died on both sides. In the end, the United States had conquered both man and land, thereby increasing its power and prestige. The Empire was growing, prospering and learning that force was the means by which to achieve its ends. Force was weapons, intimidation, violence and war. It was victory and imperialism. It was the means to becoming the most powerful nation on the planet. The Evil Empire had grown up, as the Philippines would soon learn.



In 1899 Filipino forces seeking independence from Spain confronted in armed struggle American forces intent on maintaining the colonization of the nation. A ruthless war of attrition between the two forces began. For the next three years tens of thousands of native resistance fighters died at the hands of the much more technologically sophisticated and economically powerful American military. Numerous war crimes were committed by American soldiers. Destruction and looting of property, shooting of captives, rapes of women, torture of prisoners and civilians, devastation of the environment and the forced social engineering of the people were thrust upon the nation in an orgy of occupier lawlessness.



In addition, over 200,000 civilians perished due to the brutal scorched earth policy implemented by the US military that destroyed agriculture, fertile land and villages. In addition, many thousands died from cholera arising out of economic devastation of infrastructure. The harsh subjugation of the Filipino people was a form of collective punishment that America used as a weapon of war in order to pacify the independently minded population. The American intervention in the Philippines indiscriminately erased from the face of the Earth hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. This is called genocide, and the Evil Empire got exceedingly good at it.



The reality of what happened over 100 years ago is comfortably hidden away from us today. The American war in the Philippines is today but an asterisk in our history books, yet the gravity of the malevolence cannot be forgotten. It certainly is not included in the educational material of our children, or in those of our own childhood, however. Why is this? What the US government does in our name cannot be made known lest the population rage in anger at the wickedness that America exports abroad. Genocide, collective punishment, scorched earth policy and ethnic cleansing leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings is not something to be proud of. Not when Stalin, Hitler and the Nazis did the exact same thing.



In the Philippines the Evil Empire was only getting warmed up. For the next 100 years it controlled all aspects of the Philippine government. The US installed minions and puppets that kept the populace in dire poverty, robbing the nation blind and fostering an era of inept and corrupt leaders handpicked by America. Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled as dictator of the beleaguered nation from 1965 until his ouster in 1986, is the best example of American complicity in the utter devastation of both the people and economy of the Philippines.



Marcos ruled with extreme harshness, subverting democracy, robbing the nation blind (some estimates have him stealing anywhere from $3 to $30 billion dollars) and killing thousands of dissenters and opposition members who dared speak out against the injustices and inequalities. He brought onto the nation’s masses untold suffering, indigence and slave labor, wages and conditions. Hundreds of thousands have died form malnourishment, disease, poverty and exploitation. The nation’s debt amassed under Marcos is today responsible for the dire circumstances of the population, and is a reason for the growth of Muslim and Marxist revolutionary groups prospering and threatening the government.



The beneficiary of the evil spawned by Marcos you may ask? The Evil Empire, which established military bases that helped expand the Empire geopolitically, collected hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, exploited slave labor for the manufacture of cheap products sold back in the US and controlled a subjugated populace through neo-liberal economic policies that privatized and made available to American corporations national industries and utilities. The Evil Empire and the Corporate Leviathan are one and the same, after all, their interests not mutually exclusive.



The Evil Empire’s claws of incessant violence soon expanded to other nations of Southeast Asia. When its addiction for destruction was not satisfied with the firebombing of Tokyo that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, it turned to that most evil of human creations: the atomic bomb. After becoming the only nation to ever use atomic weapons on innocent populated areas, killing hundreds of thousands and unleashing utter devastation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America soon launched its appetite for blood in the Korean Peninsula after it entered the war, creating vast killing fields of both soldiers and civilians. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on all sides perished along with upwards of three million Koreans (North and South) who were caught in the crossfire of ideologies and human wickedness.



Following the Korean War America soon found itself immersed in yet another war, this time in Vietnam. Decades of war led to the death of 58,000 American soldiers, over 100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and close to one million North Vietnamese soldiers. Estimates place the number of civilian deaths at anywhere from 400,000 to two million. If the illegal American bombing of Cambodia and Laos orchestrated by Henry Kissinger is considered, in which civilian targets were selected and bombed, upwards of two million more Southeast Asians can be added to the Evil Empire’s macabre statistics. Furthermore, many more died as a result of the total devastation of land and infrastructure the bombings and war created, including the continued death and disease of land and man due to the lingering effects of Agent Orange and through the enormous amount of unexploded bombs and ordinance still littering the ground.



Indonesia is another nation that, through the American imposed and supported dictator Mohamed Suharto, suffered tremendously thanks to the meddling by the Evil Empire. Under Suharto’s watch, anywhere from 500,000 to two million people were killed in a 1965 alleged coup attempt, most of them dissenters, leftists, communists or opposition members. In 1975, with American blessings and weaponry, Suharto invaded East Timor in order to stop an insurrection by the native people, killing 250,000 people out of a population of 650,000. During Suharto’s stay in power he detained and executed hundreds of thousands of Indonesian opposition members. His reign ended in 1998. During this time corruption was endemic, as was the subversion of democracy, freedoms and rights. In 1999 it was found that the Suharto family fortune totaled $15 billion, most of it coming from those government funds created thanks to international loans and the labor of the masses.



Lands and People of Latin America



The Evil Empire’s omnipotent reach has had devastating effects in Latin America as well. The US government has interfered with the internal governance of several Central and South American nations in its quest to maintain its form of democracy and capitalism. The US has meddled in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Brazil, not to mention Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. The Evil Empire has imposed coups and US friendly dictatorships and leaders in many of the above mentioned nations. In Central America it supplied death squads with military support and logistics. In Chile, Argentina and Brazil, dictators, with the consent of their American masters, initiated a war against leftist dissenters and opponents, leading to the disappearance of thousands of men and women. In Panama, Manuel Noriega, a former CIA puppet, betrayed his American masters and hell was unleashed on Panama City by the US military. Anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 civilians died as the Evil Empire pursued the capture of one man.



Today, the Evil Empire is once more interfering in the destabilization of Latin American nations. Haiti is but the latest but by no means the last country to be burned by the searing claws of America’s might. President Aristide, a champion of the poor and a seeker of equality and justice, stepped on US shoes with his defiance of neo-liberal threats imposed on him by Haiti’s elite and the Bush administration. In essence, he sealed his own fate, and the clandestine coup sponsored by the US removed Aristide from office. As a result, Haiti, which has been the slave shop for US corporations for decades, will remain poor and exploited, a cesspool of poverty and hopelessness for its citizens.



Colombia has, thanks to the US, become a militarized zone where hundreds of people are killed on a yearly basis. Civil war has ensnarled the nation, instability runs amok and the livelihood of rural peasants has been destroyed by the coca eradication program enacted the America that has ruined arable land. With the potential of large oil reserves present under the nation’s lands and the already discovered exploitable natural resources prevalent throughout the countryside, Colombia has become a target for US interests. Oil and energy companies, along with their growing infrastructure, are already protected by the US military as they continue their exploitation of the nation.



Meanwhile, the Evil Empire already has its sites set on destabilizing Venezuela and a harsh critic of the US, Hugo Chavez. Forces now at work, supported and maintained by the US, are slowly setting in motion mechanisms that, it is hoped, will unseat Chavez from office, whether by force or other means, thereby installing a friendly US pro-neo-liberal puppet that will allow for the pilfering of Venezuelan oil by the Evil Empire. A coup, assassination and or invasion are not out of the realm of possibilities, especially when black gold is involved.



What the Evil Empire has done to Latin America and its hundreds of millions of people is the imposition – by its proctors in high office and its bullying threats involving capital – of market colonialism that has had the effect of imprisoning and enslaving the masses. Neo-liberal ideology has indebted most “third-world” nations, not simply those of Latin America, and it has furthered indigence, lack of education, the corrosive caste system upon which millions are born into, inequality, injustice, hunger, disease, suffering, loss of opportunity and death.



Latin American nations have been made worse off since the inception of neo-liberal economic models forcefully imposed by the Evil Empire. As a result, labor has been made cheaper for US corporations, translating into cheaper goods for its citizens. Through the back-breaking slave labor, conditions and wages Latin Americans are exploited so that we in the rich north can consume to our hearts content. Yet millions upon millions live in squalor, surviving day to day, usually earning less than two dollars a day, living in feeble conditions and without the chance of ever improving their lives due to the non-existence of opportunity.



The Evil Empire’s domination of Latin America (for more detail please see my January 12th article, Not in Our Backyard) has resulted in the mass migration towards our borders. When mechanisms such as NAFTA and neo-liberal tools are put in place in countries such as Mexico, only the elite benefit and profit. Everyone else is made worse off; jobs are meager, scarce and dehumanizing. US subsidies to agriculture have devastated rural farmers and workers in Latin America. When these people leave for the cities they find that employment is non-existent and life unbearable. The push to migrate north, where natives no longer perform the jobs of hard labor, is tremendous.



Thus, today we see millions of undocumented workers living in the US. It is the Evil Empire’s imposed economic models and trade mechanisms that have created the eruption of Latin slave labor in our nation. Is it any coincidence that the mass migration north began after NAFTA was imposed on the region? The only entities that have benefited from NAFTA, both in the US and Mexico, are the corporations and the few ruling elite. Everyone else has been thrust into the realm of exploitation and failure.



The near enslavement of Latin America for the benefit of the Evil Empire has devastated millions of lives, talent and ability. It has created colonized economies, based on US crony capitalism that has exploited both man and land. Public companies and utilities have been privatized and subjugated to fit the Leviathan’s goals. The rich have become richer while the poor poorer, and this has led to the greatest disparity in wealth the region has ever seen.



The Evil Empire has created a region that has for the last fifty years been subservient to the US. Its many puppets and proctors have helped devastate lives and subjugate the masses. Democracy has historically been an illusion. Fraud, coups, assassinations, destabilization, dictatorships and a state of perpetual wretchedness have been used by the Evil Empire as tools to control Latin America. When the will of the people triumphs, such as in Chile with Allende, Venezuela with Chavez or Haiti with Aristide, the Evil Empire imposes its will in order to decimate democracy and maintain a system that benefits the US, its corporations and the elite.



Social democracy and economic models that benefit the masses are not allowed to flourish lest they become a threat to the US. Systems of governance that benefit the people are never allowed to prosper, lest the “pestilence” gain momentum and traverse like a virus beyond borders, giving millions of destitute people hope. Only US style crony capitalism that makes serfs and slaves of the masses for the greater benefit of the Leviathan and the elite oligarchs can exist. Only US style debauched democracy can stand, where the will of the people is silenced and their incredible ability quashed.



The Evil Empire has in the last fifty years devastated hundreds of millions of lives and we are all complicit, thanks to the work of our government, in the ruination of lives and exploitation of human energies.



Lands and People of the Middle East



With wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Evil Empire has killed tens of thousands of Arabs in the last two years. The remnants of cluster bombs and depleted uranium used by the American war machine have and will continue to kill and maim thousands more in the coming decades.



US sponsored sanctions on Iraq, in essence nothing more than a cruel form of economic genocide that was imposed in the aftermath of Gulf War I, unleashed its inherent evils for the next decade, resulting in the death of up to a million men, women and children who were denied basic necessities needed for survival. This form of crime against humanity enforced by the Evil Empire was in essence a quasi-concentration camp in which a million humans perished due to the American government’s collective punishment on an entire population.



Iraq, needless to say, has suffered tremendously both by the one-time American lackey whose tyrannical dictatorship led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians and by US wars and sanctions. The Evil Empire has made the Cradle of Civilization a walking wasteland of death, suffering and destruction, a barren desert whose fertility has been eroded.



For years the people of Iran were forced to endure the horrors and despotism of the shah, an American proctor and puppet that subjected his people to tyranny, oppression and exploitation. Democracy was subverted, many innocent civilians were killed or disappeared and the nation fell into decay while the shah and his cronies basked in the splendor of oil’s rewards. When the masses finally revolted, the American embassy was attacked and destroyed, a clear symbol of who the people thought was responsible for their misery. The Great Satan was purged from the lands of Persia and to this day has not returned.



Today, Saudi Arabia is controlled by a US-protected monarchy loyal to its masters. Meanwhile, the people linger in growing poverty and desperation. Democracy is non-existent, as are freedoms and liberties. As a result, many living below human dignity are turning toward resistance and resentment that is manifesting itself in a growing hatred of both the Saud monarchy and American “Crusaders” despoiling sacred Muslim lands.



In Turkey, the Kurdish minority has for years been ethnically cleansed by the Turkish government. Hundreds of thousands of people have died and many more maimed and injured thanks to the vast, modern and sophisticated array of weapons and military hardware provided by the Evil Empire, who has turned a blind eye to the genocide and repression that has brought misery and suffering to the Kurds of Turkey. The Empire’s failure to act in the face of such crimes against humanity and its approval of arms sales to the Turkish military makes it complicit in the systemic annihilation and plight of the Kurdish people.



Through one-sided political support for the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by Israel against the occupied and oppressed Palestinian people, the Evil Empire’s hands are smeared in the blood of a people robbed of their land, raped of their livelihood and dehumanized of their existence. It is American Apache helicopters, Abrams tanks, Caterpillar bulldozers, fast missiles, smart bombs, weapons and bullets that are decimating an entire population, making prisoners of millions who now live in Bantustans and ghettos.



This, along with billions of dollars in financial and military aid to the Israeli government has morphed the crimes of the IDF with the interests of the Evil Empire, forming a Molotov cocktail of destruction, dehumanization and death. The apartheid wall being built today that is usurping Palestinian land, crops, water, homes and lives is in large part possible thanks to American taxpayer money. The Evil Empire’s role in Israel’s treatment of the native Palestinian people is apparent in the geopolitical protection afforded the country by the US and its role in vetoing UN condemnations of Israeli behavior and by its tacit support for Israeli actions in the occupied territories.



The Evil Empire is once more involved in the devastation of millions of people who have been robbed of their lands and lives, live in utter decay and dehumanization, suffer severe forms of collective punishment and are being ethnically cleansed in a most meticulous and abhorrent way. Palestinians are today living in a state of apartheid, in ghettos resembling large concentration camps, under the watchful eyes of a trigger-happy occupying force, struggling to survive on the measly crumbs Israel throws their way and with the knowledge that their endemic and ruinous plight is endorsed by the greatest “purveyor of democracy” and “defender of human rights” the world has ever seen.



In Central Asia, the Evil Empire is systematically forging alliances with a new group of tyrannical dictators that have subjugated their people to despotism. In these nations, democracy is dwindling, freedoms are hardly existent and the decay of liberties is being exacerbated. Torture, death, misery and poverty are hallmarks of the new group of dictators now entrenched in the pockets of the US government. It seems that when vast oil wealth is involved the US altruistic fight for democracy is a principle that is easily disposed of and forgotten. The struggle for human rights and dignity the US so boldly declares as a priority is erased and ignored.



The Evils Done in our Name



The devastation of peoples throughout the planet directly or indirectly sponsored by the Evil Empire, who through no fault of their own are denied rights, freedoms and democracy, are subjected to gross human rights violations and persecutions and face death or disappearance is a crime against humanity. It is state sponsored terrorism and genocide. Market colonialism has decimated both countries and the lives of their inhabitants. Economic genocide has wrought suffering and increased indigence, robbing millions of education, healthcare, opportunity and livable wages. The world’s people have in many instances been enslaved to cater to the interests of the Evil Empire and its minions.



The evils done in our name have created worldwide animosity and hatred. They have given rise to desperation and humiliation that is today manifested by the growing number of humans fighting the system that has been imposed onto them. From Al-Qaeda to Iraqi freedom fighters to the Venezuelan poor to enlightened Europeans to the growing number of sprouting “terror” groups franchising around the world, the people of the world are growing frustrated at the Evil Empire’s devastation of peoples in order to suit its interests, both corporate and governmental.



Billions are searing in anger at the US government and by indirect complicity at its citizens as well. We are no longer welcome neighbors in the community of nations. To be American is to be scorned and castigated, to be unwelcome in the lands of the exploited and subjugated. The evils done in our name are beginning to have karmic repercussions throughout the globe, and the danger now present will affect us all who have been made blind to the crimes against humanity and the planet being committed by the Evil Empire.



In the last 200 years the United States has killed, directly or indirectly, tens of millions of human beings, surpassing the horrors of evildoers past and present. It has created untold levels of suffering and depravity, sending untold millions to the sewers of poverty and dehumanization. These truths are not easy to swallow, or to accept, yet they are as real as the air we breathe. It is time we accept the evils done in our name.



George W. Bush is but the latest in a long line of presidents who have continued the cycle of violence our nation has such a propensity towards. America, it seems, gravitates naturally towards violence and destruction, perhaps due to the fact that besides 9/11, we have never seen the true horrors of what man is capable of unleashing onto his fellow man. The reality that afflicts billions is to us a distant haze of blurriness. We have not been made privy to the suffering and misery, the death, disease and maiming of a land in war, an environment in flames and a people in battle. Our luck has been the world’s misfortune.



Our society has been made blind to endemic and ceaseless worldwide suffering at the hands of our government. Through years of conditioning we now fail to blink at the carnage our military engenders around the world. From the cradle to the grave we are subjected to incessant violence, whether real or fictional, that makes us immune to the torment prevalent in the rest of the world. Through careful manipulation we are made to believe that war is peace, destruction is prosperity and murder is life.



The world burns while we live lives of consumption and production, happy worker bees stuck in hour long commutes working most of our productive lives. We live in peace and harmony at home, distracted from reality by our television screens and movie theatres, by our lavish lifestyles and wasteful society. In the land of the individual the communality of peoples is an alien principle. Content, conformist and passive thanks to our nation of plenty, we care not for peoples outside our borders. We have everything we need, after all, and a plethora of distractions in our daily lives prevents us from even considering that a larger world exists beyond our shores.



The impenetrable bubble we live in protects us from empathizing with billions whose lives have been made worse since the birth of the Evil Empire. We have been made ignorant to that which has been unleashed onto the world and that owes its existence to our continued lifestyle and complicity by acquiescence and failure to act. The Evil Empire runs rampant through the planet, devouring all in its path, enslaving millions and conquering and despoiling lands. Meanwhile, inside the belly of the beast we sit, basking in extravagance and splendor, complacent in life and circumstance, unwilling to open our eyes and minds to the evils done in our name.







© Copyright 2004 by AxisofLogic.com



Manuel Valenzuela 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]

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Published on Thursday, June 10, 2004 by the Globe & Mail/Canada
Gorby Had the Lead Role, Not Gipper
by Lawrence Martin


Fiction has its place -- especially at the time of one`s passing. And so, the American airwaves glisten these days with tales about how it was Ronald Reagan who engineered the defeat of communism and the end of the Cold War.

It was his arms buildup, Republican admirers say, and his menacing rhetoric that brought the Soviets to their knees and changed the world forever. He was a pleasant man, the 40th president, which makes this fairy tale easier to swallow than some of history`s other canards. Truth be known, however, the Iron Curtain`s collapse was hardly Ronald Reagan`s doing.

It was Mikhail Gorbachev, who with a sweeping democratic revolution at home and one peace initiative after another abroad, backed the Gipper into a corner, leaving him little choice -- actors don`t like to be upstaged -- but to concede there was a whole new world opening up over there.

As a journalist based first in Washington, then in Moscow, I was fortunate to witness the intriguing drama from both ends.

In R.R., the Soviet leader knew he was dealing with an archetype Cold Warrior. To bring him around to "new thinking" would require a rather wondrous set of works. And so the Gorbachev charm offensive began. The first offering, in 1985, was the Kremlin`s unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests. "Propaganda!" the White House declared.

Then Mr. Gorbachev announced a grandiose plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons by 2000. Just another hoax, the Reagan men cried. More Commie flim-flam.

Then came another concession -- Kremlin permission for on-site arms inspections on Soviet land -- and then the Reykjavik summit. In Iceland, Mr. Gorbachev put his far-reaching arms-reduction package on the table and Mr. Reagan, to global condemnation, walked away, offering nothing in return.

Glasnost and perestroika became the new vernacular. For those in the White House like Richard Perle, the prince of darkness who still thought it was all a sham, Gorby now began a withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan. He released the dissident icon Andrei Sakharov and hundreds of other political prisoners. He made big strides on freedom of the press, immigration and religion. He told East European leaders that the massive Soviet military machine would no longer prop up their creaking dictatorships. He began the process of something unheard of in Soviet history -- democratic elections.

By now, the U.S. administration was reeling. Polls were beginning to show that, of all things unimaginable, a Soviet leader was the greatest force for world peace. An embarrassed Mr. Reagan finally responded in kind. Nearing the end of his presidency, he came to Moscow and he signed a major arms-control agreement and warmly embraced Mr. Gorbachev. A journalist asked the president if he still thought it was the evil empire. "No," he replied, "I was talking about another time, another era."

The recasting of the story now suggests that President Reagan`s defense-spending hikes -- as if there hadn`t been American military buildups before -- somehow intimidated the Kremlin into its vast reform campaign. Or that America`s economic strength -- as if the Soviets hadn`t always been witheringly weak by comparison -- made the Soviet leader do it.

In fact, Mr. Gorbachev could have well perpetuated the old totalitarian system. He still had the giant Soviet armies, the daunting nuclear might and the chilling KGB apparatus at his disposal.

But he had decided that the continuing clash of East-West ideologies was senseless, that his sick and obsolescent society was desperate for democratic air. His historic campaign that followed wasn`t about Ronald Reagan. It would have happened with or without this president. Rather, it was about him, Mikhail Gorbachev: his will, his inner strength, his human spirit. As for the Gipper, he was bold and wise enough, to shed his long-held preconceptions and become the Russian`s admirable companion in the process.

In the collapse of communism he deserves credit not as an instigator, but an abettor. Best Supporting Actor.

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Extended Mass Layoffs Associated With Domestic and Overseas Relocations, First Quarter 2004 Summary

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/reloc.nr0.htm

June 10, 2004
New Report Says Outsourcing Causes 9% of U.S. Layoffs
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON, June 10 (Reuters) - The bulk of outsourced jobs never leave U.S. shores, the government said on Thursday in a new report suggesting concerns over American workers losing jobs to cheaper foreign labor may be exaggerated.

Nine percent of non-seasonal U.S. layoffs in the first quarter were due to outsourcing, but less than a third of the work was sent overseas, the U.S. Labor Department said in releasing new figures on mass layoffs and outsourcing.

"In more than seven out of 10 cases, the work activities were reassigned to places elsewhere in the U.S.," the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its report on mass layoffs for the January-to-March period.

Organized labor, critical of the administration`s record on jobs, has promised to make outsourcing an issue in this year`s presidential election.

While the figures offer the first official measure of the impact of outsourcing on U.S. employment, they count only layoffs at companies where at least 50 people filed for unemployment insurance during a five-week period and the layoff lasted more than 30 days.

That restriction means the figures do not capture the impact outsourcing has had on small businesses.

In the first three months of the year, 4,633 U.S. workers were laid off because their jobs were moved to a foreign country, the BLS said. That represents less than 2 percent of the mass layoffs that totaled 239,361 during that period.

When seasonal and vacation-related mass layoffs are excluded, the proportion of workers who lost their jobs due to overseas outsourcing rises to about 2.5 out of 100.

Another 9,985 workers lost their jobs because the work moved to a different location within America, BLS said.

However, the report showed outsourcing had a huge impact on whether work sites were permanently shut-down or just temporarily closed. Fifty-one percent of mass layoffs caused by outsourcing were permanent closures of the work site, compared to just 17 percent of total layoffs.

A large proportion of mass layoffs in America are due to seasonal factors -- such as winter layoffs in agriculture or summer shut-downs at manufacturing plants -- and about two-thirds last less than a month.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 10, 2004
New Battles in Najaf, Casting Doubt on Announced Truce
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 10 — Insurgents commandeered a police station in the southern holy city of Najaf today after overnight gun battles, casting further doubt on the viability of a cease-fire announced there last week.

The governor of Najaf, Adnan Zurfi, said in an interview that he intended to rely on Iraqi security forces to retake the police station, a large building in the center of the city, but he said he would would call for help from American forces if needed.

Rebels overran the station after an earlier attempt failed, looting and burning parts of it. A local hospital reported that one police officer and one civilian were killed in the raid, and the militia said that two of its members were also killed.

The attacks, and another at the same station on Monday, came in spite of a declared cease-fire on June 4 by American authorities and Moktada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric leading a rebel insurgency centered in Najaf and nearby Kufa.

It was unclear whether the attacks were sanctioned by commanders of the militia, known as the Mahdi Army. Some members are said to no longer obey Mr. Sadr. But if the attacks were sanctioned, it would clearly indicate a breach of the truce and raise serious doubts about whether the American occupation troops and their allies can quell armed resistance before the transfer of sovereignty on June 30.

The cease-fire announced on June 4 was the second such truce declared in Mr. Sadr`s strongholds. But with the failure of the first, and doubts surrounding the viability of the second, many Iraqis question whether a cease-fire will ever hold.

The overnight battles at the police station followed a day of insurgent attacks on several fronts in Iraq, including a mortar attack at an Iraqi militia brigade west of here that set ablze two important oil pipelines in the north, and an ambush of an American military convoy in the capital.

The American military also said gunmen killed two bodyguards of a local politician in Baghdad on Tuesday and seriously wounded the politician.

In Geneva, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said the organization had resumed visits to Abu Ghraib prison, Reuters reported.

The spokeswoman, Antonella Notari, said that the initial visit took place between May 30 and June 3 and that the group was given full access. Well before the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became public, the American military had tried to severely restrict Red Cross visits.

The group issued a report last year criticizing the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and said some procedures were "tantamount to torture."

The attack on the militia unit took place near the volatile town of Falluja, about 30 miles west of here. Insurgents lobbed mortars at a camp housing members of the Falluja Brigade, which was set up by United States marines in late April to try to pacify the virulently anti-American city. The attack wounded a militia member, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces.

The 2,000-member brigade is composed partly of guerrillas who were fighting the marines and is led by Gen. Muhammad Latif, a former Baath Party member who fell out of favor with Saddam Hussein.

The attack highlighted the complex fractures among insurgent groups in the Falluja area, which has essentially become a safe haven for anti-American forces since the marines relinquished control.

The marines used concrete barriers to block off two roads leading to the city from Baghdad. Tanks, Humvees and other armored vehicles were seen parked or driving around farm pastures off the main highway outside the city.

A wooden sign on the highway said in Arabic, "No entry into the city."

Mahdi Army fighters launched their first attack on the police station in Najaf, 120 miles south of Baghdad, late Wednesday night, but were fought off by police. In the early hours today, officers were seen pursuing the insurgents through the neighborhood, with gunfire from AK-47`s echoing through the streets.

But the insurgents returned to the station later in the morning and successfully overran it.

On Monday evening the insurgents had attempted a similar attack on the same station but failed to seize it, Mr. Zurfi, the American-installed governor, said. He added that he had ordered more policemen to the area and had given permission to fire on any attackers.

Ahmad Shaibani, an aide to Mr. Sadr, took issue with an order signed earlier this week by L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, which would appear to bar Mr. Sadr from running for office in planned elections. Mr. Bremer`s order prohibits members or leaders of illegal militias from being candidates.

Mr. Bremer "has no right to determine the nature of the elections and whether militias have the right to participate or not," Mr. Shaibani said.

Sabah Mahdi, a manager in a hotel in the city, said "the whole process is disappointing" because "Mahdi Army fighters are still here, and their weapons are still here despite the latest agreement."

In northern Iraq in the early morning today, insurgents attacked a pipeline connecting the oil fields of Kirkuk to the large refinery and power plant in Bayji, said Asam Jihad, a spokesman for the Oil Ministry. Insurgents also set ablaze an export pipeline leading from Kirkuk to a Turkish port. The fire was still raging Wednesday afternoon, and video film showed thick clouds of black smoke filling the sky.

The attacks on the pipelines came after an assault on fuel and transmission lines last weekend that forced the shutdown of a large power plant south of Baghdad.

In northeastern Baghdad, gunmen raked an American military convoy with gunfire, setting one truck on fire, Agence France-Presse reported. There was no immediate news of casualties.

A deputy defense minister in Poland said an enemy mortar that hit a munitions dump on Tuesday killed six Eastern European soldiers under Polish command who were defusing mines.

James Glanz contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed from Falluja and Najaf

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une 11, 2004
Undecided Voter Is Becoming the Focus of Both Political Parties
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

ARDMORE, Pa., June 10 — They are more likely to be white than black, female than male, married than single, and live in the suburbs rather than in large cities. They are not frequent churchgoers nor gun enthusiasts. They are clustered in swing states like Ohio, Michigan and here in Pennsylvania. And while they follow the news closely, they are largely indifferent to the back and forth of this year`s race for president.

These are what pollsters describe as the rarest of Americans in this election year: the undecided voters. And with aides to President Bush and Senator John Kerry increasingly confident about their ability to turn out their base voters, and thus create an electoral standoff in as many as 15 states, these people have become the object of intense concern by the campaigns as they try to figure out who these voters are and how to reach them.

Only about 5 percent of the voting public is undecided, about one-third of what is typical at this point in the campaign, according to several recent polls. That figure increases to about 15 percent when pollsters include supporters of Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush who say they might change their minds. In addition to those who are torn between the two major-party candidates, and possibly Ralph Nader, there is a sizable number of Americans who are deciding whether to vote at all.

Here in this Philadelphia suburb, as well as elsewhere across the nation, the undecided voter was the rare exception in hours of interviews that produced vociferous declarations of support for Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry. "I am very torn," said Marge Pyle, 52, a Republican who works as an administrative assistant at Bryn Mawr College. "I really — I just don`t know who I`m going to vote for."

Carol Ferring Shepley, a college instructor in St. Louis who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000, and who is in many ways an archetype for this kind of voter, said: "I am really totally undecided. At this point, I couldn`t vote for either of them."

Aides to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry described this thimbleful of voters as a source of worry to the campaigns because they are disengaged from the presidential contest and thus less susceptible to traditional tools of political persuasion.

At the same time, many of them are closely following the news of the day, pollsters said, meaning they might well be rushed to one side in the last days of this contest by a major event, more turmoil in Iraq, good economic news at home, that is beyond the control of either campaign.

Mary Beth Cahill, Mr. Kerry`s campaign manager, said that if the two parties succeeded at turning out their base vote, as both sides said now appears increasingly likely, "this election looks as though it`s going to come down to these late deciders."

"We all read the daily polling," Ms. Cahill said, adding. "You have to try every possible way to reach them."

Both campaigns are struggling to adjust to this endlessly complicated electoral equation. Ms. Cahill said her campaign believed that one of the most effective ways to reach many of these voters was on radio shows, and had geared its surrogate speaker program to make Kerry advocates available for many radio shows.

The Bush campaign in May produced an advertisement on education featuring Laura Bush, appealing to suburban female voters, and placed it on the Web site of The Philadelphia Inquirer in an effort to reach voters in Philadelphia suburbs like this one.

"You can`t get messages to them just by broadcasting on the major nets," said Matthew Dowd, a senior Bush strategist, referring to television networks. "Primarily, the way most of them make up their mind is with glimpses here and there that they catch of the president and Kerry."

And who are they? Undecided voters are likely to be younger, lower-income and less educated than the general electorate, said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster.

These voters are more likely to put themselves at the center of the political scale: Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said approximately 45 percent of undecided voters described themselves as moderate, compared with 23 percent of the general electorate.

As a group, undecided voters in some ways mirror the general electorate.

Pollsters and analysts said an in-depth examination of undecided attitudes have identified some shared characteristics of these voters that could be of concern for both candidates, but particularly for Mr. Bush.

These voters consider the environment an important issue, suggesting, some Democrats said, an opening for Mr. Kerry this fall. They tend to support abortion rights, and while they oppose gay marriage, they do not share the intensity of Republicans, said Andrew Kohut, who runs Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Here in Ardmore, Joan Donoho, 61, an accountant who was a convention delegate for George H. W. Bush in 1980, and who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000, said she was unsure who to vote for, in part because of Mr. Bush`s strong identification with opponents of to abortion rights.

"I haven`t decided — my concern is that Bush is too conservative," said Ms. Donoho "I`m disappointed that the son isn`t more like the father." On two often revealing behavioral indicators, undecided voters were less likely than Mr. Bush`s supporters to attend church services or own guns, findings that pollsters said should be a matter of concern for the White House. A poll of undecided voters in swing states by the University of Pennsylvania`s Annenberg Public Policy Center released last week found that 33 percent of these undecided voters went to church weekly or more, compared with 40 percent of respondents at large.

Ellen Plotkin, 67, a retired surgeon`s assistant who lives near here, said that she attended synagogue about twice a year, supported restrictions on gun ownership and was against restrictions on abortion. Ms. Plotkin described herself as a Democrat who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000, but who this year was put off by some of his social policies and the war in Iraq.

"But I`m not sure about Kerry," Ms. Plotkin said. "Based on all the things I`ve heard about him, he seems wishy-washy."

By large numbers, undecided voters, like the general electorate, think the nation is heading in the wrong direction. And in another measure of incumbent distress closely traced by pollsters, just 44 percent said they approved of Mr. Bush`s job performance, the Annenberg poll found.

"To me, the most significant figure is that only 35 percent think things are going in the right direction," said Mark Penn, a pollster who released a survey of swing states on Thursday for the New Democratic Network, a Democratic advocacy group. "That means there is tremendous impetus for change."

Like most Americans, these voters generally supported Mr. Bush`s decision to go into Iraq. But they are more likely to say that troops should be brought home right away, according to the Annenberg survey. And some pollsters said that the high number of married suburban woman, many with children, in this group could be a matter of concern for the White House because of the demands of the military to fight the war.

"The draft issue is a huge concern — I have a teenage son," Susan Wood, 43, an undecided voter interviewed in Columbus, Ohio.

Still, undecided voters are not convinced that Mr. Kerry would be any better than Mr. Bush at ending the conflict. Mr. Bush has a decided advantage over Mr. Kerry on the issues of security and foreign policy that the White House sees as pivotal in this election, according to the polls.

From a tactical point of view, undecided voters present a special challenge to the campaigns because of their disinterest toward politics. The Annenberg poll found that 55 percent said they were not following the campaign closely or at all, compared with 32 percent of the general electorate in swing states, which has produced a bit of a conundrum for both campaigns.

"Sometimes I just don`t even want to watch the news," Ms. Pyle said here, as she walked along an outside shopping mall here. She said that advertisements "don`t affect me" because she does not believe what the candidates are telling her.

Ms. Plotkin said: "When I hear, `I authorized this ad,` I tune out."

Outside of Milwaukee, Karen Pauli, 52, said she saw no reason to pay attention to the contest before autumn. "Until then, I just ignore it because it`s so much confusing hot air," Ms. Pauli said, adding: "I`m not even sure who Kerry is. Too early to tell."

A senior Kerry advisor describes this segment of the electorate as "the classic picture of a relatively low-information, relatively disengaged political person. Less likely to know about the candidates, less likely to think that politics is relevant to their lives at all."

"These are the people you focus on all the way through," said this adviser. "Most of them are not going to make their final decisions until the end."

As a rule, undecided voters ultimately go against the incumbent, rejecting someone they know in favor of someone they do not, a line of history noted by Mr. Kerry`s advisers in arguing that the situation augurs well for the senator from Massachusetts this fall.

But Mr. Bush`s campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, said that in this supercharged electoral atmosphere, voters would make their decisions based on security and economic concerns, and that would hurt Mr. Kerry.

And Mr. Mehlman argued that Mr. Kerry`s wavering supporters were much more likely to drop away once they got to know Mr. Kerry and his record, or at least got to know him the way Mr. Bush is trying to portray him.

"The common theme among undecided voters is that they are not typically motivated," Mr. Mehlman said.

"We`re talking about winning the war on terror and making the economy stronger. Our base voters care about that, and the swing voters care about. He`s talking about why Bush is bad. His appeal is to his base, but undecided voters are motivated by different ideas and different issues."

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June 10, 2004
Q&A: The U.N. Iraq Resolution

From the Council on Foreign Relations, June 10, 2004

Does the new U.N. resolution resolve questions about Iraq`s status?

To an extent. Resolution 1546, passed unanimously by the U.N. Security Council June 8, declares the end of the occupation of Iraq and endorses a "fully sovereign and independent" interim government that will serve from June 30 until elections in January 2005. On the thorny question of who controls Iraqi security, it authorizes a U.S.-led force to take "all necessary means" to maintain stability but requires that it coordinate its operations with Iraqi officials--leaving open the precise extent of day-to-day control Iraqis will exercise. It does not specify whether the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL)--or interim constitution-- signed March 8 will apply after June 30. This omission is fueling an ongoing dispute between Iraqi Shiites and Kurds.

How does the resolution treat the question of security?

After the June 30 transition, Iraqi security forces will fall under Iraqi command. But they will work in a "security partnership" with the U.S.-led, U.N.-authorized "multinational force," which is the new name for the 160,000 coalition troops in Iraq. This arrangement gives Iraq`s interim leaders the right to opt out of U.S.-led military operations, but does not give them veto power.

Can the Iraqi government ask the multinational force to leave?

Yes. But experts stress this is unlikely to happen, because the government will rely on the multinational force for its security. Iraq`s armed forces are unprepared to safeguard the country on their own and will not be ready to do so for some two to five years, says retired Army Major General William Nash, director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Until we are able to provide security for ourselves, including the defense of Iraq`s land, sea, and air space, we ask for the support of the Security Council and the international community in this endeavor," wrote Iraqi Prime Minister-elect Ayad Allawi in a recent exchange of letters with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell that lay the groundwork for the new security arrangement.

What is the role of the multinational force?

The resolution gives the multinational force, which will be led by an American commander, the "authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq." According to Powell, this includes:

* engaging in combat operations against forces "seeking to influence Iraq`s political future through violence";
* imprisoning Iraqis "when this is necessary for imperative reasons of security";
* continuing to "search for and secure weapons that threaten Iraq`s security"; and
* training and equipping Iraqi security forces.

How much influence will Iraqis have on day-to-day U.S. military operations?

It`s unclear. "The United States pretty much got what it wanted in terms of security. It promised to talk to Iraqis about operations, but can still take all means necessary," says Noah Feldman, assistant professor of law at New York University and a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupation government in Iraq. "One principle both sides agree on is that if a planned operation will have political consequences--such as the moves against [the insurgents in the city of] Falluja or [radical Shiite cleric Muqtada] al-Sadr--there will be Iraqi approval before they embark on it," says Howar Ziad, the Kurdistan Regional Government`s liaison to the United Nations. "But day to day, operational decisions will be left in the hands of the multinational forces."

How will the Iraqi and U.S.-led forces coordinate policy?

A Ministerial Committee for National Security will be established to serve as a forum for "close coordination and consultation," according to the resolution. The committee will consist of nine Iraqis: the prime minister, deputy prime minister, defense, interior, foreign affairs, justice, and finance ministers, the national security adviser, and the director of the Iraqi intelligence service. Representatives of the multinational force will also attend.

At regional and local levels, the Iraqi government will set up coordination committees that will bring together local Iraqi force commanders, civilian leadership, and local multinational force commanders. International and Iraqi forces will "keep each other informed of their activities, consult regularly, share intelligence, and refer issues up their respective chains of command," the letter from Allawi states.

Is there an end date for the multinational force`s mission in Iraq?

Yes. Its U.N. mandate will expire once a permanent government is in place, scheduled for the end of 2005. Extending the mission past that deadline requires approval of a new U.N. resolution. The mandate can also be reviewed at any time at the request of the Iraqi government.

Which law will apply in Iraq after the transition?

It`s unclear. U.S. officials and Prime Minister Allawi say the new government will respect the TAL, was passed after lengthy negotiations between CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer III and the Iraqi Governing Council, which disbanded June 1. But the U.N. resolution doesn`t mention the TAL, in part because of strident objections from Iraq`s most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. This has infuriated Kurdish officials, who value the law`s mechanism to protect minority rights and fear that without international recognition via the U.N. resolution, the TAL will be subject to change. "We are officially in chaos and indeterminism in terms of what rules govern now in Iraq," Feldman says. "This government could have a constitutional crisis before it even exists." Iraq is some 60 percent Shiite, 20 percent Kurdish, and 20 percent Sunni Arab.

Will the interim government be able to pass laws?

It appears so, but the resolution is also vague on this issue. It says the interim government "will assume full responsibility and authority for governing Iraq" but adds that it must refrain "from taking any actions that will affect Iraq beyond the limited interim period until an elected transitional government of Iraq takes office"--that is, beyond January 2005. In practice, experts say the interim government will likely be able to pass legislation that applies only for the next six months. Bremer and former Iraqi Governing Council members passed an annex to the TAL June 1 affirming this right. An accompanying CPA fact sheet states that Iraqis intend "to give the [interim government] the power to modify Iraqi law, including CPA regulations, orders, and memoranda."

Will the interim government be able to change the TAL?

It`s unclear. The TAL states that it cannot be changed until a permanently elected government takes office at the end of 2005. But when Iraq becomes fully sovereign June 30, the legal status of the TAL--a document passed by an occupation government and an appointed governing council--becomes murky, many experts say. One way out of the bind: the interim government could officially vote to recognize the TAL--even a somewhat modified version--as one of its first acts, Feldman says.

What have the Kurds said about this issue?

They have threatened to walk away from the Iraqi state if the TAL is not recognized under Iraqi law. "If the TAL is abrogated, the Kurdistan regional government will have no choice but to refrain from participating in the central government and its institutions, not to take part in the national elections, and to bar representatives of the central government from Kurdistan," Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan wrote in a June 1 letter to President Bush. Allawi issued a statement June 9 that said his government was fully committed to the TAL. The statement "is somewhat useful, but it`s still just a verbal commitment to follow the document," Feldman says.

What has Sistani said?

Sistani warned of "dangerous consequences" for Iraq if the United Nations included the TAL in the resolution. This is not the first time Sistani has objected to the document: shortly after its passage last March, he issued a statement calling it illegitimate because it was created by an unelected government. He has expressed particular concern about language in the TAL that awards Kurds a de facto veto over a future constitution. In a June 6 letter to the U.N. Security Council, Sistani wrote: "This `law` that has been drawn up by an unelected council under occupation, and through its direct influence, would restrict the national assembly which is due to be elected early next year. ... This is against the laws and rejected by most Iraqi people. Therefore, any attempt to make this `law` appear legitimate by including it in the international resolution is considered as contrary to the desire of the Iraqi people and a forewarning to dangerous consequences."

What is the transition timetable?

Resolution 1546 formalizes a schedule based on a plan written into the TAL and expanded by U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. Brahimi played the key role in appointing the Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) June 1. The plan`s key dates:

* June 30, 2004: The occupation ends and the IIG takes power.
* July 2004: A 1,000-seat national conference reflecting Iraq`s religious and ethnic diversity selects a 100-member Consultative Council. The council will be able to veto decisions of the Cabinet if it musters a two-thirds majority.
* January 31, 2005: Voters elect a Transitional National Assembly that will appoint a transitional government and draft a permanent constitution.
* December 31, 2005: Voters elect a permanent government chosen under the terms of the new constitution.

How substantial a role does the resolution give the United Nations in Iraq?

It`s still unclear. The resolution lists a number of specific areas in which the United Nations will play "a leading role," but does not invest it with any additional authority or guarantee it the resources needed to do its job, says Lee Feinstein, the Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy and international law. In particular, the United Nations needs some 4,000 troops to provide security for its personnel in Iraq--and it`s not clear yet which country, if any, will provide them. The U.N. mission in Iraq pulled out in August 2003 after a suicide truck bombing at its Baghdad headquarters killed U.N. Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and 22 others.

What does the resolution call on the United Nations to do in Iraq?

Provide advice, assistance, and support for:

* Convening the July 2004 national conference;
* Organizing national elections;
* Drafting a national constitution;
* Delivering and coordinating reconstruction funds and humanitarian aid;
* Promoting human rights, national reconciliation, judicial and legal reform; and
* Planning for a national census.

Will Iraq control its oil revenues?

The new resolution gives the interim government full control over its natural resources, including oil and gas revenues. However, until the end of 2005, these funds will flow into an international fund--the Development Fund for Iraq--currently controlled by the U.S.-led coalition. After June 30, Iraqis will run this fund, but it will continue to be audited by an international board that will now include one Iraqi member. After January 2005, the Iraqi transitional government can dissolve the fund and channel the money more directly into Iraqi hands.

What else does the resolution do?

* Lifts the international ban on selling arms to Iraq, as long as those arms are used to support the purposes of the U.N. resolution;
* Calls on other nations to provide money, expertise, troops, and other support to get the Iraqi government off the ground and help reconstruct and develop the Iraqi economy;
* Calls on member nations to reduce Iraq`s sovereign debt, so it can dedicate more resources to reconstruction; and
* Affirms that all forces in Iraq will follow international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions.

Was it difficult to win passage of the resolution?

To an extent, experts say. Last year, there were bitter fights at the Security Council in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Resolution 1546 went through five drafts over the course of about two weeks of negotiations. However, in the end, "no party had an interest in really causing a row," says Charles A. Kupchan, the director of Europe studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "I kind of saw this outcome as a foregone conclusion because the stakes were relatively low," he says. "The French and others signed off, but they are under no new pressure to really do anything such as send troops, so why not wink and nod and say it`s fine?" Feinstein says he is concerned that the resolution papered over serious policy differences among Security Council members. Three steps would signal that last year`s bitterness has been overcome, Feinstein says: commitments of troops for a U.N. security force, money to help Iraq through the transition, and close and active support to promote the new government`s success.

-- by Sharon Otterman, staff writer, cfr.org

Copyright 2004

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June 9, 2004
GLOBALIST
Europe`s Loss of Focus
By ROGER COHEN,
International Herald Tribune
PARIS — For Pierre Lellouche, a center-right French parliamentarian, there is one central factor behind European-American tensions: "Europe is going through a period of weakness and the less we weigh on history the more we rail against the power that determines history. The weaker we are, the more we hit out."

It is an interesting theory. The Iraq war posed an intra-European crisis that was as acute as the trans-Atlantic crisis. The European Union was split. Most member states, if reluctantly, were inclined to support America. Most European citizens, and two of the biggest states, were strongly opposed. So deep was the division that no serious attempt to reach a united EU position was made. Javier Solana, the top EU foreign policy official, became a voice in the wilderness, irrelevant because he represented a vacuum.

This debacle came at a time when Europe is still casting around for relevance after losing the focus, and room for maneuver between the superpowers, that came with standing at the epicenter of the cold war.

The disarray over Europe`s direction coincides with a period of anemic European economic growth, which is running at about half the level of the 4 percent expected this year in the United States. The Continent`s comprehensive social security systems are under growing financial pressure as the population ages and heavily regulated economies stagnate.

In France, a recent survey by small and medium-size enterprises suggested that more than 70 percent of French youth would be happy to work as "fonctionnaires," or state employees. The appeal of security appears greater than that of risk. More energy goes into preserving acquired rights, including steadily lengthening vacations, than creating new enterprises.

"There is a depression in the European mind," argues Alexandre Adler, a writer and political analyst.

To which, of course, many Europeans would answer that the American mind is afflicted with hubris, one that comes with having an estimated 368,000 military personnel deployed in more than 100 countries around the world; with being a virtually uncontested power; and with exercising an extraordinary cultural and economic influence on the way people live from Beijing to Brasília.

The story of the last year, these Europeans would argue, is one of Iraq`s sobering influence on President George W. Bush, who has come to see that American power without the legitimacy conferred by the United Nations has its limits. The French and German position, in other words, has been vindicated by Bush`s return to the UN fold and embrace of a fuller Iraqi sovereignty after June 30 than initially envisaged.

This view may appear seductive. But it is not persuasive to Lellouche, who sees Europeans condemned by their lack of unity to the role of reacting to the exercise of American power. The continent is adrift on a "federalist voyage of good feelings," playing the role "of the grand moralizers of the planet," and ignoring the fact that "the peace road only works if everyone wants to take it at the same time," he says.

He argues that France has become a "fearful Republic," its ambitions to counter American power contained within a European project it does not fully embrace.

"Are we really ready to give up the permanent French seat and right of veto on the UN Security Council and hand it to an EU Foreign Minister?" he asked.

That is a central question as Europe debates its future. The 25-member EU exists in a kind of halfway house where national sovereignty has been ceded by many member states in critical economic areas, but the retention of sovereignty in other areas, including foreign and security policy, is viewed by several as of inalienable importance.

For Europe to have real weight, the kind that would focus the minds of American presidents in matters of war and peace, another leap of integration appears necessary. As Simon Serfaty, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, put it in Paris last week: "Europe is a power in the world, but not a world power."

Serfaty was speaking at one of a series of discussions coordinated by Lellouche, called "Liberty Week." The focus was French-American and European-American relations, and Serfaty`s analysis was acerbic: "If Europe wants to avoid subordination to America, it has to unite. In the end, the EU is subordinated because it is weak."

But the prospects for any rapid integration of the EU on foreign and military policy appear remote. Europeans are not convinced of the probability or imminence of any mortal threat; any serious increase in military budgets is therefore unlikely.

The new post of European foreign minister may be created under the draft constitutional treaty being finalized, but how much real power the position will wield remains an open question.

Britain and the newly admitted central European states remain, for different reasons, wary of the centralization of EU power and committed to the view that America`s presence in Europe is beneficent.

The prevailing tone today in trans-Atlantic relations is one of conciliation after the brawl. Everyone from President Jacques Chirac of France to the American national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is singing the praises of the Atlantic Alliance and speaking of what can be achieved when allies work together.

But the imbalance in power, the differences in threat perception, and the divergence in outlook between America and Europe all suggest that whatever rapprochement is achieved may be ephemeral, and that similar tensions are likely to recur whoever is in the White House.

Put bluntly, the United States appears at or close to the apogee of its historical power. Europe is far from that point. Over the past several centuries, the Continent has lived the transition from city states to nation states to member states. But just what an EU member state is, and how much transnational power will be vested in the Union`s institutions, remains unclear.

As a result, looking for Europe remains a puzzling game. As long as it is, America will lead and Europe will grumble - to some effect, but grumbling is stultifying.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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une 11, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS: THE CONSTITUTION
Kurds Find U.S. Alliance Is Built on Shifting Sands
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, June 10 — Before the war to oust Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration counted on the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq as its closest ally. But now ties with the Kurds have reached a bitter new phase, with some Kurdish leaders charging that they have been betrayed by Washington.

The problem, in the Kurds` view, was reflected in an administration decision this week to rebuff Kurdish pleas to have the United Nations Security Council give its blessing to the temporary Iraqi constitution, which they see as protecting their rights.

Kurds value the document because it gives the three Kurdish provinces the effective power to veto a permanent constitution, which is to be written next year. They fear that the Shiite majority may try to impose Islamic law through the new constitution, or dilute Kurdish control of oil fields in their region.

"It`s not just that we have been misled by the Americans," said a high-ranking Kurdish official. "It`s also that they change their position day to day without any focus on real strategy in Iraq. There`s a level of mismanagement and incompetence that is shocking."

The temporary constitution, hammered out under American supervision in March, was hailed by the American authorities at the time as one that would prevail until a new constitution is written and ratified and a permanent government takes office under its provisions.

But Iraq`s new leaders, in statements this week, described it as only operative until the beginning of next year, when a newly elected national assembly convenes to write the permanent charter.

Iraq`s new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, who was picked under a process led by the United Nations, said in Baghdad that the document approved last March remains the law of the land for now. His comment was intended to reassure Kurds, but Kurdish spokesmen said Thursday that it may have had the opposite effect.

The reason is that Dr. Allawi`s comments implied that the newly elected national assembly could well change the ratification process for the permanent constitution, endangering the Kurds` veto.

The omission of references in the Security Council resolution to the temporary constitution, known as the transitional administrative law, came at the insistence of the supreme Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Kurds, stunned at the omission, are threatening to withdraw from any Iraqi government unless the temporary constitution is reaffirmed through next year.

Ayatollah Sistani, the most revered figure among Iraq`s Shiites, who constitute about 60 percent of the population, has gained enormous power in the waning months of the American occupation, which formally ends in two and a half weeks.

Administration officials say they have had no choice but to follow his dictates. When he called for an end to the American offensive against Shiite rebels in Najaf, American military commanders complied, even lifting their order for the arrest of a rebel leader, Moktada al-Sadr.

In the end, the officials say, Kurds are going to have to make their own arrangements with the Shiites for ratifying the constitution.

"The Kurds are saying to us, `We are your true allies, the only people in Iraq who truly like you and who respect your values.` " said Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor who advised on the drafting of the temporary constitution.

"The U.S. is saying, though maybe not explicitly, `We want you to have power, but if Sistani is going to put his name on a letter to the U.N. demanding things be done his way, we`re not going to go to the mat over it," Mr. Feldman added. "Frankly, the U.S. is a little scared of Sistani."

Another former adviser to the American occupation, Larry Diamond, said the problem stemmed not from Ayatollah Sistani`s position, but from the original demand by the Kurds that they be given an effective veto over a future constitution.

"I am profoundly sympathetic to the concerns of the Kurds, but I think they overreached in these negotiations," said Mr. Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "They wound up obtaining a settlement that was unsustainable in light of continuing Shiite objections."

Mr. Diamond said the United States should try to negotiate some kind of a deal between the Shiites and Kurds to avoid a worse confrontation later.

He added that it was possible that without such an arrangement, Shiite religious leaders would press the new Iraqi government to take other steps to change the law, including a repeal of a ban on extending Islamic law to such matters as marriage and divorce.

"We have a budding crisis here," said Mr. Diamond. "My fear is that if we don`t get a broad societal consensus behind this document, the whole thing could unravel down the road. I would rather fix it now with a compromise."

Responding to Kurdish criticism, Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said Wednesday that the failure to include the transitional law in the United Nations resolution was insignificant, because the resolution endorsed the law`s principles of pluralism and minority rights in general.

"What the resolution did was stick to the basic principles that are embodied in that law," Mr. Boucher said.

American officials deny that they betrayed the Kurds and reject the idea that American diplomats should try to mediate a solution to Iraqi federalism.

Rather, they said, the United States had created a situation where the Kurds will have to negotiate their future with supporters of Ayatollah Sistani, and seek their own accommodations.

"This is going to become the first big test of the government in Iraq," said a United Nations diplomat. "You`ve got a government. Now let`s see how much internal and external pressure they can take."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 11, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
How Reagan Beat the Neocons
By JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS

Almost everywhere in the press one reads that President Bush sounds an awful lot like Ronald Reagan. Commentators and politicians alike have drawn the comparison between Mr. Bush`s "muscular" foreign policy and the Reagan doctrine. However macho and aggressive Mr. Bush`s foreign policy may be, when it came to the Soviet Union, Mr. Reagan`s was anything but.

In 1985, Mr. Reagan sent a long handwritten letter to Mikhail Gorbachev assuring him that he was prepared "to cooperate in any reasonable way to facilitate such a withdrawal" of the Soviets from Afghanistan. "Neither of us," he added, "wants to see offensive weapons, particularly weapons of mass destruction, deployed in space." Mr. Reagan eagerly sought to work with Mr. Gorbachev to rid the world of such weapons and to help the Soviet Union effect peaceful change in Eastern Europe.

This offer was far from the position taken by the neoconservative advisers who now serve under Mr. Bush. Twenty years ago in the Reagan White House, they saw no possibility for such change, and indeed many of them subscribed to the theory of "totalitarianism" as unchangeable and irreversible. Mr. Reagan was also informed that the Soviet Union was preparing for a possible pre-emptive attack on the United States. This alarmist position was taken by Team B, formed in response to the more prudently analytical position of the C.I.A. and then composed of several members of the present Bush administration. The team was headed by Richard Pipes, the Russian historian at Harvard, whose stance was summed up in the title of one of his articles: "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War."

Not only did the neocons oppose Mr. Reagan`s efforts at rapprochement, they also argued against engaging in personal diplomacy with Soviet leaders. Advisers like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, now steering our foreign policy, held that America must escalate to achieve "nuclear dominance" and that we could only deal from a "strategy of strength." Mr. Reagan believed in a strong military, but to reassure the Soviet Union that America had no aggressive intentions, he reminded Leonid Brezhnev of just the opposite. From 1945 to 1949, the United States was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb, and yet, Mr. Reagan emphasized to Mr. Brezhnev, no threat was made to use the bomb to win concessions from the Soviet Union.

The Star Wars missile defense system advocated by Mr. Reagan is often regarded as the final nail in the coffin of communism, as a military system that the Soviets could not afford and only fear. The first assumption was right, the second dubious. Margaret Thatcher, who urged Mr. Reagan to regard Mr. Gorbachev as "a man we can work with," also gave him more blunt advice on Star Wars: "I`m a chemist; I know it won`t work." Like Mrs. Thatcher, Soviet scientists regarded it as a fantasy, and thus they were hardly impressed with Mr. Reagan`s offer to share it with them once it was perfected. (It still hasn`t been, nearly two decades later.)

Those advisers in the Bush administration who regard themselves as Reaganites ought to remember that Mr. Reagan ceased heeding their advice. According to George Shultz`s memoir, "Turmoil and Triumph," Mr. Reagan would become uneasy when his hawkish advisers entered the Oval Office. In his own memoir, "An American Life," Mr. Reagan ridiculed the "macabre jargon" of warheads, I.C.B.M.`s, kill ratios and "throw weights," the payload capacity of long-range missiles. The president thought their figures sounded like "baseball scores" and dismissed his pesky advisers. Mr. Reagan rejected the neocons; George W. Bush stands by them no matter what.

The difference between Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush`s militant brain staff is that he believed in negotiation and they in escalation. They wanted to win the cold war; he sought to end it. To do so, it was necessary not to strike fear in the Soviet Union but to win the confidence of its leaders. Once the Soviet Union could count on Mr. Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev not only was free to embark on his domestic reforms, to convince his military to go along with budget cuts, to reassure his people that they no longer needed to worry about the old bogey of "capitalist encirclement," but, most important, he was also ready to announce to the Soviet Union`s satellite countries that henceforth they were on their own, that no longer would tanks of the Red Army be sent to put down uprisings. The cold war ended in an act of faith and trust, not fear and trembling.

But many neocons came to hate Mr. Reagan, saying he lost the cold war since he left office with communism still in place. Some even believed that the cold war would soon be resumed. Dick Cheney, as President George H. W. Bush`s defense secretary, dismissed perestroika ("restructuring") as a sham and glasnost ("opening") as a ruse, he insisted that Mr. Gorbachev would be replaced by a belligerent militarist; and warned America to prepare for the re-emergence of an aggressive communist state.

Mr. Reagan gave us an enlightened foreign policy that achieved most of its diplomatic objectives peacefully and succeeded in firmly uniting our allies. Today those who claim to be Mr. Reagan`s heirs give us "shock and awe" and a "muscular" foreign policy that has lost its way and undermined valued friendships throughout the world.

John Patrick Diggins is a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of the forthcoming, "Ronald Reagan: Morning in America."

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June 11, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
An Economic Legend
By PAUL KRUGMAN

In the movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a reporter defends prettifying history: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That principle has informed many of this week`s Reagan retrospectives. But let`s not be bullied into accepting the right-wing legend about Reaganomics.

Here`s a sample version of the legend: according to a recent article in The Washington Times, Ronald Reagan "crushed inflation along with left-wing Keynesian economics and launched the longest economic expansion in U.S. history." Actually, the 1982-90 economic expansion ranks third, after 1991-2001 and 1961-69 — but even that comparison overstates the degree of real economic success.

The secret of the long climb after 1982 was the economic plunge that preceded it. By the end of 1982 the U.S. economy was deeply depressed, with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. So there was plenty of room to grow before the economy returned to anything like full employment.

The depressed economy in 1982 also explains "Morning in America," the economic boom of 1983 and 1984. You see, rapid growth is normal when an economy is bouncing back from a deep slump. (Last year, Argentina`s economy grew more than 8 percent.)

And the economic expansion under President Reagan did not validate his economic doctrine. His supply-side advisers didn`t promise a one-time growth spurt as the economy emerged from recession; they promised, but failed to deliver, a sustained acceleration in economic growth.

Inflation did come down sharply on Mr. Reagan`s watch: it was running at 12 percent when he took office, but was only 4.5 percent when he left. But this victory came at a heavy price. For much of the Reagan era, the economy suffered from very high unemployment. Despite the rapid growth of 1983 and 1984, over the whole of the Reagan administration the unemployment rate averaged a very uncomfortable 7.5 percent.

In other words, it all played out just as "left-wing Keynesian economics" predicted.

In the late 1970`s most economists believed that eliminating the high inflation then prevailing in the United States would require inflicting a lot of pain: the economy would have to go through an extended period of high unemployment and depressed output. Once the inflation had been wrung out of the system, the unemployment rate could go back down. And that`s exactly what happened. In fact, it`s instructive to put a graph showing the actual track of unemployment and inflation during the 1980`s next to a figure from a 1978-vintage textbook showing a hypothetical disinflation scenario; the two look almost identical.

Ronald Reagan didn`t decide to inflict that pain. The architect of America`s great disinflation was Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman. In fact, Mr. Volcker began the process in 1979, when he adopted the tight monetary policy that caused that record unemployment rate. He was also mainly responsible for the recovery that followed: it was his decision to loosen up on the money supply in the summer of 1982 that set the stage for the rebound a few months later.

There was, in short, nothing magical about the Reagan economy. The United States did, eventually, experience an economic miracle — but not until Bill Clinton`s second term. Only then did the economy achieve a combination of rapid growth, low unemployment and quiescent inflation that confounded the conventional economic wisdom. (I`m aware, by the way, that this plain statement of fact will generate an avalanche of angry mail. Irrational Clinton hatred remains a powerful force in American life.)

It`s a measure of how desperate the faithful are to believe in the Reagan legend that one often reads conservative commentators claiming that the Clinton-era miracle was the result of Mr. Reagan`s policies, and indeed vindicated them. Think about it: Mr. Reagan passed his big tax cut right at the beginning of his presidency, and mainly raised taxes thereafter. So we`re supposed to believe that a tax cut passed in 1981 was somehow responsible for an economic miracle that didn`t materialize until around 1997. Apply the same timing to the good things that happened on Mr. Reagan`s watch, and you`ll discover that Lyndon Johnson deserves the credit for "Morning in America."

So here`s my plea: let`s honor Mr. Reagan for his real achievements, not dishonor him — and mislead the nation — with false claims about his economic record.

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washingtonpost.com

Use of Dogs to Scare Prisoners Was Authorized
Military Intelligence Personnel Were Involved, Handlers Say

By Josh White and Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 11, 2004; Page A01

U.S. intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the handlers provided to military investigators.

A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, according to the previously undisclosed statements obtained by The Washington Post.

The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by a U.S. Army general to be "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses."

President Bush and top Pentagon officials have said the criminal abuse at Abu Ghraib was confined to a small group of rogue military police soldiers who stripped detainees naked, beat them and photographed them in humiliating sexual poses. An Army investigation into the abuse condemned the MPs for those practices, but also included the use of unmuzzled dogs to frighten detainees among the "intentional abuse."

So far, the only charges to emerge have been against seven MPs and do not include any dog incidents, even though such use of dogs is an apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Army`s field manual. The military intelligence officer in charge of Abu Ghraib later told investigators that the use of unmuzzled dogs in interrogation sessions was recommended by a two-star general and that it was "okay."

The newly obtained documents reinforce the picture that the abuse falls into two categories: sexual humiliation and beatings at the hands of MPs, and intimidation using dogs that is clearly tied to military intelligence. The sexual abuse happened weeks and even months before the dog incidents, some of which appear to be part of an organized strategy by military intelligence to scare detainees into talking, according to the statements.

Sgts. Michael J. Smith and Santos A. Cardona, Army dog handlers assigned to Abu Ghraib, told investigators that military intelligence personnel requested that they bring their dogs to prison interrogation sites multiple times to assist in questioning detainees in December and January. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who was in charge of military intelligence at the prison, told both soldiers that the use of dogs in interrogations had been approved, according to the statements.

"I have talked to Col. Papus [sic] and he said it was good to go," Smith told an investigator on Jan. 23.

Neither Smith nor Cardona has been charged in connection with the abuse at Abu Ghraib. "It`s all under investigation," said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman.

The men could not be reached yesterday to comment. Two officers at the U.S. Army Trial Defense Service said that a military lawyer has been assigned to Cardona and that a message seeking a comment would be relayed to the attorney. The officers said they did not know whether a lawyer from the Army`s defense service had been assigned to represent Smith.

In Army memos regarding interrogation techniques at the prison, the use of military working dogs was specifically allowed -- as long as higher-ranking officers approved the measures. According to one military intelligence memo obtained by The Post, the officer in charge of the military intelligence-run interrogation center at the prison had to approve the use of dogs in interrogations. There is no explanation in the memo of what parameters would have to be in place -- for example, whether the dogs would be muzzled or unmuzzled -- or what the dogs would be allowed to do. The Army previously has said that the commanding general of U.S. troops in Iraq -- Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez -- would have had to approve the use of dogs.

Human rights experts said the use of dogs at Abu Ghraib violates longstanding tenets regulating the treatment of prisoners and civilians under the control of an occupying force, including the Army`s field manual, which prohibits "acts of violence or intimidation" by American soldiers.

"Using dogs to frighten and intimidate prisoners is a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, an international organization based in New York. "It`s a violation of U.S. policy as stated in the Army field manual, and it`s a violation of the prohibition against cruel treatment."

The dog teams at Abu Ghraib were part of a security detail that also searched for weapons, explosives and contraband. The general in charge of military prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, said the dog teams were under the control of military intelligence but had no training or experience in helping with interrogations.

Cardona`s dog, a tan Belgian Malinois named Duco, was trained to be part of a narcotics and patrol team. Cardona told investigators he also helped military intelligence with two interrogations and later was summoned by military police to draw information out of a detainee on Tier 1 of the prison, site of the worst documented abuse.

Smith said military intelligence personnel asked him to instill fear in detainees. He said that he would bring his dog, a black Belgian shepherd named Marco, to the tier specifically to scare prisoners after they were pulled out of their cells. At the behest of interrogators, he said, in some cases he would bring the barking dog to within six inches of the prisoners.

"Is using the dog in this manner an allowable tool by the MI interrogators?" an investigator asked Smith.

"Yes," he replied.

The dog handlers arrived at Abu Ghraib in late November, sometime after the abuse of detainees had been captured in photographs, including the images of the naked human pyramid and forced masturbation.

Master-at-Arms 1st Class William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, said he was summoned to Tier 1 one night in November to help search a cell for explosives using his dog, Nicky, a black and tan Belgian Malinois. Earlier that night -- records indicate it was Nov. 24 -- a prisoner had allegedly been found with a weapon. When Kimbro and Nicky concluded the search, they were called to the second floor of the cellblock to search another cell.

"There was a bunch of yelling going on in the cell and my dog started going ape," Kimbro told investigators, adding that interrogators were yelling at a detainee in the corner. "I remember one of the males saying to the detainee, if the detainee did not provide the information the guy was asking about, then he would have me let . . . my dog go on him."

Kimbro said he was surprised by the comment and tried to calm Nicky down. He soon left, he said, upset that interrogators had tried to use his dog as an interrogation tool.

"I was leaving because this is not what my dog is trained for," Kimbro said in one of three statements he provided to investigators. "We do not use our dogs for interrogation purposes."

Kimbro was singled out for praise in Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba`s report about abuse at the prison for refusing "to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI personnel at Abu Ghraib."

Smith and Cardona said they complied with the MI requests because they believed the tactics had been approved by Pappas, the military intelligence officer in charge of the prison. They told investigators that they spent time on the cellblocks, allowing their dogs to bark at the detainees.

They said a non-commissioned officer from military intelligence approached them in mid-December.

"He asked us if we could use our dogs for interrogation purposes," Cardona said in a statement. "They were trying to get it cleared. We went outside and saw Col. Pappas. He told us MI wanted to use the dogs for interrogations and he told us that they had received permission to use dogs in an interview."

Smith recalled the same conversation, saying he spoke with Pappas in the parking lot the night after Saddam Hussein was captured -- Dec. 14. He said he was told that the use of the dogs was permitted.

Later that night, the two dog handlers took their dogs to an interrogation booth holding a detainee. Interrogators told them the dogs did not need to be muzzled, they said.

"When we got to the room the detainee was sitting in the doorway, with his feet in the doorway and the door was open," Smith said. "My dog and Sgt. Cardona`s dog were both barking at the detainee and we never got closer than 18 inches. Neither dog had a muzzle on."

Also in mid-December, the dog handlers said they were asked by one of the MPs, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, for help in dealing with an uncooperative detainee. Part of what followed was captured in photographs that have come to define the abuse at Abu Ghraib: A naked prisoner was up against a wall, two dogs squaring off against him.

The detainee, identified in the documents as Ballendia Sadawi Mohammed, said he was suddenly snatched from his bed in cell No. 5 one night and sent into the hallway handcuffed.

"They sent the dogs toward me. I was scared," Mohammed told investigators. "The first dog bit my leg and injured me there and this was bad luck. The bite from the first dog caused me to have 12 stitches from the doctor of my left leg as a result I lost a lot of blood."

Spec. Sabrina D. Harman, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, said she saw the incident and said the detainee was bitten after he tried to run from the dog and was cornered. Cardona, whose dog apparently bit the detainee twice, once on each leg, justified letting his dog go to the end of its leash because he believed the detainee was fighting with Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr.

Military investigative records show that Frederick and Graner were key participants in the abuse. Harman, who said she saw two other inmates with dog bites around late December, also has been charged.

In early January, Cardona said, he used his dog during an interrogation at the "Wood" facility at Abu Ghraib, a collection of wooden interrogation booths set up behind the prison. Cardona said a non-commissioned military intelligence officer asked him to bring his dog into a booth and make it bark to scare the prisoner.

"I asked him if he wanted Duco to be in a muzzle and he said no," Cardona told investigators. "We went into the booth and there was a detainee in the booth with a bag over his head. Duco barked at him for about two or three minutes and they were asking the detainee questions."

On Jan. 13, Spec. John Harold Ketzer, a military intelligence interrogator, saw a dog team corner two male prisoners against a wall, one prisoner hiding behind the other and screaming, he later told investigators.

"When I asked what was going on in the cell, the handler stated that he was just scaring them, and that he and another of the handlers was having a contest to see how many detainees they could get to urinate on themselves," Ketzer said.

Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Remote Facility in Iraq Shows New Face of U.S. Prison System

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 11, 2004; Page A16

CAMP BUCCA, Iraq -- The sand blows across this isolated patch of desert, flecks of moving rock and dust. When the heat grows unbearable, as it often does, the men hover inside white tents, the canvas sides partially rolled and tied off. When day settles into evening, and the air is more forgiving, the young men come out to play soccer and volleyball under the red desert moon. The old ones gather in groups and pray.

Sometimes both young and old move toward the shiny new chain-link fence that surrounds the tents. They clutch the wires with their dark hands and look out. There is little to see but fuel trucks in the distance and the metal cranes towering over the nearby port of Umm Qasr.

The men are prisoners -- Iraqis brought to this desolate spot 300 miles southeast of Baghdad where the U.S. Army has established a detention facility called Camp Bucca. Set up last year during the invasion of Iraq, the camp was named for Ron Bucca, a New York fire marshal and Army Reservist who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Envisioned as a temporary place to hold Iraqi prisoners of war, the camp was emptied and closed by December. But Iraq`s postwar insurgency created the need for a place to house thousands of suspected insurgents, and commanders turned to Camp Bucca to supplement the facilities at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

This week, a resolution adopted unanimously by the U.N. Security Council granted the U.S.-led occupation force "the right to detain Iraqis viewed as a security threat." That approval, contained in a security agreement between the United States and Iraq`s new interim government, essentially settled the future of Camp Bucca. It will be the primary detention facility for people still in U.S. custody after the interim government takes power at the end of the month, and it is expected to hold between 2,000 and 2,500 detainees, officials have said.

"From the perspective of leaders responsible for the facility, it was always assumed it would be used in one form or another, so there was a continuing investment in the quality of life for the soldiers and the quality of care for detainees," said Col. David Quantock, commander of the 16th Military Police Brigade, which has soldiers at both Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib.

The U.S. military decided last month to vacate Abu Ghraib and send all the prisoners held there to Camp Bucca. Military officials were eager to distance themselves from Abu Ghraib, where former president Saddam Hussein`s security forces tortured and executed tens of thousands of prisoners and where cameras captured U.S. soldiers beating and humiliating detainees last fall. But Iraqi leaders rejected the plan, so both facilities will now remain open, with Abu Ghraib serving primarily as a processing center, with about 1,500 prisoners, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, deputy commander of detainee operations in Iraq, said in an interview.

In an Army investigation into abuses at Abu Ghraib, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that soldiers "committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law" both there and at Camp Bucca. Amnesty International reported last summer that detainees at Camp Bucca "were held in tents in the extreme heat and were not provided with sufficient drinking water or adequate washing facilities. They were forced to use open trenches for toilets and were not given a change of clothes -- even after two months` detention."

Considerable improvements have been made since then. For one, the prison population at Camp Bucca has dropped from 8,000 at its peak last fall to about 2,700 last week. Detainees are given hot meals and showers, recreation time and cigarettes for work details. Medical personnel visit the compounds every day to hand out pills and diagnose ailments. The prisoners are allowed family visits, and last week soldiers began taking photographs during the visits. A prisoner`s family gets one copy to take home and another copy is left with the detainee.

The responsibility for improving U.S. detention facilities in Iraq falls to Miller, who flew last week from Baghdad to Camp Bucca to meet with the commanders and to inspect the complex. As he toured the camp, his boots kicking up dust, Miller asked questions and offered suggestions.

"Are we giving the detainees bottled water?" he asked. Noticing a pile of sleeping bags stacked below a guard tower, Miller wanted to know if all of the detainees had been given sleeping bags. The answer was yes. "Good," he said. "Wonderful."

Miller, who ran the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- known as Gitmo -- said Camp Bucca presented a very different set of challenges. "This is a complex business," he said. "Gitmo is different because this population is a relatively small number of terrorists. It`s not the same level of evil."

During Miller`s visit, commanders showed him an area where workers were constructing large metal cages to replace the tattered tents in the isolation compound for prisoners who had been caught fighting or found with contraband.

Miller walked over to the cages, peered in, shook his head and said finally: "Guys, these don`t sing to me. I don`t like it. You can`t put people in here."

The lives of the soldiers at Camp Bucca have improved over the past year, as well. The dining facility, dubbed the Bucca Inn, is considered among the finest on any base in Iraq. Soldiers sleep in air-conditioned trailers and tents. There are hot showers, a recreation facility and a post office -- amenities that did not exist last summer.

"We come down here, we do what we have to do," said Spec. Douglas Kocian, a tower guard from the 107th Field Artillery Regiment based in Pittsburgh. "Nobody wants to be here, but I think everybody is coping with it the best they can. It`s not exciting. I`m not saying I`m the happiest camper, but my wife isn`t happy, either."

On a recent morning, Kocian watched from the guard tower as prisoners below lined up for medical call.

Some wore tribal dress, others pants and loose shirts. A few were wrapped only in towels as they scurried to the shower house set up inside the compound.

"We all recognize we could be in a lot worse places in Iraq," said Capt. Erik Fessenden, commander of Marauder Company, 172nd Field Artillery, based in Manchester, N.H.

Fessenden`s company came to Camp Bucca in late February. Its 178 members serve as exterior guards for the camp and as convoy escorts.

"We`re stretched thin -- long, 12-hour shifts -- and the weather conditions, you can see the blowing sand," he said. "There have been some long days."

Fessenden said he had little to tell his soldiers about what was coming next.

"I think there are still a lot of unknowns for exactly how things will flush out," he said. "The plans have changed. I don`t think a lot of people can tell you. We`re preparing for things to get more dangerous down here and more heat.

"But it`s difficult to predict where it`s going, to be honest with you."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Reaching Out to McCain

By David Ignatius

Friday, June 11, 2004; Page A25

In the days before Ronald Reagan`s funeral, Sen. John McCain was pondering the political puzzle that Reagan probably handled better than any modern president: how to find a language that can speak to both Republicans and Democrats.

McCain doesn`t see any easy answer, such as the much-discussed "national unity" ticket with Democrat John F. Kerry. But after visiting with his inner circle this week, I`m certain that he has thought carefully about it.

Despite McCain`s public demurrals, he has been privately deliberating how things might work if he ever did agree to run as Kerry`s vice presidential candidate. The bitter political divide in America worries McCain, especially when the nation is at war. He knows that for many Americans, he has become a symbol of a bipartisanship that could overcome these divisions -- and bring Red and Blue America closer together. That call to duty is powerful for McCain. He`ll be 68 later this summer, and he knows that his time to shape American public life is now.

The Kerry camp has made overtures, and McCain has taken them seriously. He has tried to imagine the details of how such a partnership would work in practice. But the more McCain thinks about such a unity ticket, the more difficulties he sees.

McCain`s problem is that while he genuinely likes Kerry as a friend, he disagrees with him on many important issues. Take Kerry`s recent statement that he favors bilateral negotiations with North Korea. McCain has never favored that approach and thinks it would be a potentially dangerous mistake. How, he wonders, would the two reconcile such a sharp disagreement on one of the most important foreign policy issues facing the country?

Or take the sensitive issue of gays in the military. Kerry has indicated he wants a reexamination of the "don`t ask, don`t tell" policy favored by the military. McCain disagrees. How would they resolve that one?

Advocates of the national-unity approach, like me, argue that the fact that Kerry and McCain disagree is the whole point of their running together. They would each have to give ground on issues that matter to them, for the sake of the larger issue of the country`s welfare. And they would have to work out a governing formula that allowed McCain to remain a Republican and be faithful to his values while working alongside Kerry.

That logic moves McCain, but it doesn`t convince him. He wonders what would happen when the country faced its first serious foreign policy crisis. Let`s assume that McCain was given special responsibility for defense and national security issues as vice president. That might allow McCain to insist on his preferred policy for North Korea. But he worries that if Kerry agreed to such a power-sharing formula, he would be fundamentally weakening the office of the presidency.

McCain knows that people respect him because he says what he thinks. And since he would continue to speak out if he were vice president, he fears a Kerry White House would inevitably -- necessarily -- put him on ice. And perhaps most important, by running with a Democrat, he would lose the chance to do what he most wants, which is to help broaden and revitalize the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

So the Arizona Republican probably means it when he says he won`t run as Kerry`s vice president. He rejects the idea not in principle but in practice. And he means it, too, when he says he plans to support George W. Bush and campaign for his reelection.

The Kerry campaign thus has two options if it truly favors a national-unity strategy. It can think through the problems that McCain is worrying about and try to woo him anew with a structure that could bridge differing viewpoints without destroying the coherence of a Kerry White House. Or, it can look for another moderate Republican such as Sen. Chuck Hagel or Sen. Richard Lugar, who, like McCain, are symbols of independence and bipartisanship.

What makes McCain so appealing as a unity candidate came through in a speech he gave last month on fiscal discipline. "I am a proud Republican," he said. "I revere Ronald Reagan and his party of limited government. Sadly, that party is no longer. The current version of the Republican Party is engaged in an outrageous spending binge, and they`re being steadied and encouraged by the Democrats."

McCain concluded by invoking the war in Iraq. "Thousands of miles from here young men and women are putting everything on the line so we can be free. . . . In return, the least we can do is to make America a better place for them and their children." McCain enthusiasts would turn that challenge back on him: We understand your problems, senator, but your country needs you.

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THE TIMES POLL
Going to War Not Worth It, More Voters Say
Support has slipped in the last six months. Still, a wide majority does not want to set a specific date for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer

June 11, 2004

WASHINGTON — Most U.S. voters now say it was not worth going to war in Iraq, but an overwhelming majority reject the idea of setting a deadline to withdraw all U.S. forces from the country, according to a Times poll.

Though the survey found voters increasingly worried that America was becoming ensnarled in Iraq and pessimistic that a democratic government would take root, less than one in five said America should withdraw all its forces within weeks. And less than one in four endorsed the idea advanced by some Democratic-leaning foreign policy experts and liberal groups to establish a specific date for withdrawal.

"I never thought we should go to war in Iraq," said Anne Wardwell, a retired museum curator in Cleveland who responded to the poll. "But I think we have to see it through, because if we don`t it is going to be a disaster in the region."

The survey also showed widespread concern that the war had damaged America`s image in the world, a strong desire to see NATO take the lead in managing the conflict, and deep division over whether President Bush could rally more international support for the rebuilding effort.

The Times Poll, supervised by polling director Susan Pinkus, surveyed 1,230 registered voters from Saturday through Tuesday. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Anxiety over the war`s direction and reluctance to abandon the cause in Iraq radiated through the responses.

Most voters retained faith that the U.S. could control the military situation in the country. About half of those polled — 52% — said they thought the U.S. was winning the war; 24% said the insurgents were winning.

But voters were uncertain about the prospects of achieving broader goals in Iraq. Just 35% said the U.S. was "making good progress in Iraq," while 61% said they thought the U.S. was "getting bogged down." Three-fifths of independents and more than four-fifths of Democrats shared the sense that the effort was stalling.

But a majority of Republicans, like Rosemary Wolfram of Cincinnati, see progress occurring. "I think we see some light at the end of the tunnel on the war," said Wolfram, a legal assistant.

Noting that an Iraqi interim government is preparing to assume sovereignty June 30, she added, "That is going in the right direction."

In perhaps the most emphatic measure of anxiety about Iraq, 53% said they did not think the situation there merited the war; 43% said it did. When Times polls asked that question in November and March, the numbers were essentially reversed.

In the latest survey, more than four-fifths of Republicans viewed the war as justified, while more than four-fifths of Democrats and 54% of independents said it was not.

"Since there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I have doubts that it was worth it, especially considering the amount of resentment and distrust that this has caused, not only with our allies but in the whole Muslim world," said Ray Luechtefeld, a professor at the University of Missouri.

The poll underscores how attitudes about the war loom as a dividing line in the presidential election. Among those who think the threat from Iraq justified war, Bush leads Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, 83% to 13%. Among those who think the war was not justified, Kerry leads, 84% to 11%.

Expectations are limited for the Iraqi interim government. Nearly two-thirds of those polled said they did not think the interim government would be able to govern the country without help from the U.S. and its allies.

And many are pessimistic that the Iraqis can sustain a democratic government: 38% think it is likely Iraq will maintain a democracy after the U.S.-led coalition forces leave, while 49% consider it unlikely.

Nearly three-fifths said Bush`s Iraq policies had hurt America`s image abroad; one in five thought they had improved attitudes toward the U.S.

Such concerns have eroded confidence in Bush`s management of the war. Just 44% said they approved of Bush`s handling of the war; in March, that figure was 51%. In the new poll, 35% said he had outlined a clear plan to succeed in Iraq.

Asked about his handling of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, 41% approved and 37% disapproved.

Kerry has faced criticism from some in his party for not offering a more distinct alternative to Bush`s Iraq policy. In a sign that Kerry`s position is murky to many voters, the poll found 15% said he had offered a clear plan on how to handle the situation, while 34% said he had not, and the rest did not know.

But another question pointed to the opening for Kerry created by doubts about Bush`s direction. Voters split almost in half when asked if they accepted Kerry`s contention that Bush had lost so much credibility around the world that only a new president could "rally the support of U.S. allies to help stabilize Iraq."

Forty-six percent agreed with that charge; 47% disagreed. A majority of independents sided with Kerry, including Luechtefeld, the University of Missouri professor. "I think the best option is to get rid of President Bush, have him voted out of office, so that some of the attitudes will change abroad," he said.

Leah Hubertz, a hairstylist from Delavan, Wis., embodied the ambivalence on the question.

"I think the rest of the world would like us a little bit more if we changed leaders," she said. "But if you replaced [Bush] right now with John Kerry, I don`t know how good a job he would be doing in the same position."

Most voters were eager for more international help in Iraq: 56% said the U.S. should give NATO the principal role in securing the country. Kerry has proposed such an idea, but NATO, which will discuss the question at its summit this month, has been reluctant to accept even a minor role.

Twenty-four percent of those polled said the U.S. should establish a deadline for withdrawing all its troops from Iraq, as experts such as James B. Steinberg, the former deputy national security advisor under President Clinton, had proposed. Seventy-three percent rejected the idea.

The poll found voters inclined to defer to the new Iraqi government on whether to increase or reduce the size of the U.S. deployment.

Asked what the U.S. should do as the new government took power, 41% wanted to reduce the American presence, with 18% of voters saying all troops should be withdrawn and 23% calling for partial withdrawal.

But 41% also said the U.S. should add or subtract troops only at the request of the interim government. (Another 9% wanted to increase troop deployment regardless of the interim government`s view.)

The cooperative impulse only extended so far: 51% said the Iraqi government should not be given a veto over military operations by the U.S. and its allies.



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THE NATION
Film and Election Politics Cross in `Fahrenheit 9/11`
The marketing of a scathing movie about Bush resembles a race for the White House.
By Michael Finnegan
Times Staff Writer

June 11, 2004

There are movie campaigns and there are presidential campaigns, and usually you can tell the difference. One features a red carpet, the other a war room.

But "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore`s scathing new documentary about President Bush, has both.

Its release later this month appears to mark the first time that a film slamming a major presidential candidate has opened on screens across the nation in the final months of a campaign. At the same time, the movie is producing a global publicity extravaganza for Moore and Miramax Film founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who bought the film after Walt Disney Co. refused to let Miramax release it.

The scramble to bring the dark, often satirical film to U.S. movie screens is blending Hollywood and presidential politics in ways never seen in a race for the White House. While the filmmakers deny any overt effort to promote the candidacy of the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, their efforts fall clearly in sync with the campaign to unseat Bush.

To anticipate and fend off the criticism that already is brewing, Moore has set up a "war room" populated by former Clinton White House operatives plotting swift counterattacks on Bush supporters who question the film`s credibility.

To lead the effort, Moore has hired Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, former political advisors to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. "Employing the Clinton strategy of `92, we will allow no attack on this film to go without a response immediately," Moore said Thursday. "And we will go after anyone who slanders me or my work, and we will do it without mercy. And when you think `without mercy,` you think Chris Lehane."

Moore also said he planned to use the film to register thousands of voters, and will stage screenings to benefit antiwar groups set up by families of U.S. troops in Iraq and victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

So far, the Bush reelection campaign has played down concerns about the film`s effect.

"Voters know fact from fiction coming from Hollywood," said Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel. "It`s designed to entertain. American voters want fact, not fiction, when determining their vote. And everyone knows where Michael Moore is coming from."

Others have been more aggressive in trying to discredit Moore, who attacked Bush from the Oscar podium when he won the feature documentary prize for his "Bowling for Columbine."

Former President George H.W. Bush called Moore a "slimeball" last month, dismissing the upcoming film as "a vicious attack on our son," according to the New York Daily News.

Joining Moore as chief promoter of the film is Harvey Weinstein, a top Democratic donor widely seen as the foremost strategist in Hollywood`s annual campaigns — for Academy Awards. Over the last decade, Weinstein and Miramax have transformed the Oscar balloting into a bare-knuckle brawl resembling a political campaign, with costly ads and accusations of negative attacks dominating the race.

In the case of "Fahrenheit 9/11," the mounting publicity has followed a dream script. It grabbed the media spotlight last month with a New York Times story revealing that Disney was blocking its Miramax division from distributing Moore`s film. Moore`s agent, Ari Emanuel (whose brother, an Illinois congressman, is another former Clinton White House operative), charged in that story that Disney was concerned that releasing the movie would imperil tax breaks for the company`s ventures in Florida, where Bush`s brother is governor. Disney denied it, and said it had informed Miramax a year ago that it would be barred from releasing the film because of its partisan nature.

The story broke just before the Cannes Film Festival, where the documentary was a media and critical darling. It went on to win the festival`s top prize, the Palme d`Or, and several weeks later, the Weinsteins purchased the movie themselves and lined up new distributors.

The film`s high profile has been rising ever since. To promote "Fahrenheit 9/11," the producers are screening it in New York and Washington next week for opinion makers in media and politics. Television advertising begins this weekend on national cable, along with posters and trailers before such big-studio releases as "The Stepford Wives," starring Nicole Kidman, and "The Chronicles of Riddick," with Vin Diesel.

Larry Noble, former chief counsel of the Federal Election Commission, said the film`s ads, which are apt to paint Bush unfavorably, risked drawing complaints that campaign spending restrictions should apply to the movie`s promotion. But unless the ads run in the final 60 days of the campaign and specifically call for Bush`s defeat or the election of Kerry, he said, the commission is apt to reject the complaints.

"We`re not campaigning for or against any political candidates; we`re marketing a movie," said Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Releasing, which is distributing the movie with IFC Films.

Because the Weinstein brothers own the movie, they stand to make a windfall if the film is a commercial success. The film`s distributors will collect a fee based on its performance, but all profits will ultimately flow to the Weinsteins and Moore. The brothers purchased the film for about $6 million — roughly what the documentary cost to make.

For Harvey Weinstein, the film offers a chance to profit while enhancing both his Hollywood standing and political clout. But he denies any overt political agenda.

"This is not about electing a candidate," he said.

Praising the film`s artistic value, Weinstein said he had "shown the movie to people diametrically opposed to its politics who walked away questioning things."

"I think it will have a huge influence on people`s minds," said Weinstein, who also is a producer of upcoming Los Angeles and New York concerts to raise money for Kerry.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" casts a deeply unfavorable light on Bush`s handling of the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq war, ridiculing him and his top advisors with footage that catches them in embarrassing moments clearly not intended for public viewing. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz uses spit to comb his hair; Bush jovially asks news crews to watch him swing a golf club seconds after sternly calling on the world`s nations "to do everything they can to stop terrorist killers."

Moore, who closes the film with the message "Do Something," is unabashed about his hope that the film will help dislodge Bush as president.

"I hope this country will be back in our hands in a very short period of time," he told hundreds of invited guests at a celebrity-jammed Beverly Hills screening of the film on Tuesday. The screening was part of an ambitious and unusually fast rollout to get the movie into at least 650 theaters on June 25—and possibly several hundred more.

"Are we conducting this like a campaign? Yes, we are," Moore said Thursday. "But it`s not a campaign for Kerry."

How much influence the film might have is a matter of dispute. Bill Carrick, a Democratic campaign consultant, said its effect would be negligible. He likened it to the talk radio shows of Rush Limbaugh and other hosts whose listeners hold firm, unyielding opinions on Bush.

"I don`t think it`s a place where you`re going to persuade anybody — a Michael Moore movie," Carrick said. "The audience is too small. It`s a self-selecting group of people."

But in an election where turning out core constituencies could be crucial to both Kerry and Bush, others see the film as a potent tool for motivating Democrats — especially since Republicans are typically more reliable for showing up at the polls.

"Feeling motivated, to the extent you make that extra effort to vote on your way home from work — that matters," said Thomas Hollihan, a communications professor at USC`s Annenberg School for Communication.

That potential is not lost on Moore, who plans to offer ticket discounts and prizes to newly registered voters who see the film or visit his Web site. "If it can encourage the people who belong to the largest political party in America, the non-voter party, to leave that party behind and do the very minimum of what every citizen should do on Nov. 2, then I hope that will be seen as a significant contribution to this country," he said.

A main target of the film is younger voters, who tend to turn out in low numbers. Studies have shown that younger voters increasingly get election information from non-traditional campaign media, such as late-night television comedy shows and the Internet.

"For younger people, who may or may not be all that interested in politics, these entertainment formats are a key way to bring them into the political discussion," said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at Mary Washington College in Virginia.

Staff writer John Horn contributed to this report.



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COMMENTARY
A Long Record of Abusing Jailed Foreigners in U.S.
By Mark Dow
Mark Dow is the author of "American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons," published this month by the University of California Press.

June 11, 2004

The first I heard about rituals of sexual humiliation in prison had nothing to do with Abu Ghraib. It was from a Nigerian man, an elected state senator in his own country until a military coup drove him out. He was forced to strip naked and then remain on his knees for hours with his hands on another naked male prisoner.

You might think this happened to him in Nigeria, and that it was part of what drove him to emigrate to the United States. But in fact it occurred here, in New Jersey, after he was detained by American immigration authorities.

Such extremes of mistreatment can take place in any prison, but they happen more easily in a system predicated on blurring the distinction among aliens, criminals and terrorists, and where lower-level violence and verbal abuse are standard operating procedure. That`s U.S. immigration detention in a nutshell.

Many people first heard about immigration detention after Sept. 11, 2001. But on Sept. 10, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service already had about 23,000 detainees in its custody, a number that has not changed significantly since then (although the Department of Homeland Security`s Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement now runs the operation).

These people are called "detainees" but they are, in fact, prisoners, held in federal penitentiaries, private prisons and local jails as well as in "service processing centers" while awaiting deportation or legal proceedings. The detention facilities can be found in 49 of the 50 states as well as in Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

About half of the detainees, according to the government, are "criminal aliens." That tag does the work of an army of propagandists to stave off sympathy for the victims of mistreatment. In fact, the term "criminal alien" refers equally to an illegal border-crosser-turned-serial-killer and to a 30-year legal resident with one youthful misdemeanor drug conviction.

And many immigration detainees are not criminals at all. Between 10% and 13% of them are asylum seekers who have come to the shores of the U.S. requesting protection.

These people are all lumped together and held; they`re not automatically entitled to lawyers. When they do get one, the immigration bureau often interferes with the lawyers` access to clients, transferring them from jail to jail in the middle of the night while preventing the "detainee" from making telephone calls.

Once the human shell game and the dehumanizing are in place, the rest comes easy. Among the practices I have heard about consistently, from across the country and over many years, are coerced sex in exchange for the promise of release from detention; sexual assaults; arbitrary use of solitary confinement for prolonged periods; forced sedation; stealing money from detainees` accounts; and destroying legal paperwork.

Congressional hearings and General Accounting Office reports about immigration enforcement have usually focused on management, budget or the efficiency of deportations. Why does the mistreatment of the immigration bureau`s detainees, despite reams of documentation by human rights groups for more than two decades now, remain mostly invisible?

The immigration bureau has long had a culture of secrecy and brutality. But there are a few ways to hold it accountable:

• Congress should call hearings — not just for an afternoon — to consider the 2 1/2 decades of immigration detention abuses. Congress should also request that the Office of Inspector General, which issued a welcome report on the mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees in Brooklyn, now extend its investigation.

• Independent, surprise monitoring of all detention centers, prisons and jails should be organized by nongovernmental and community groups across the country, under agreements with the jailers themselves.

• Legal counsel should be appointed for every detainee, and there should be judicial review of every prisoner`s case.

• The 1996 anti-immigrant laws — responsible for tripling the detention population and for the deportation of tens of thousands of long-term legal residents for past minor crimes — must be repealed.

Ultimately, detention authority should be removed from the immigration service except in emergencies and for strictly limited periods. The American immigration bureaucracy should not be operating a prison system at all.



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This Is Not A Hoax, Dammit!
Oh my flaming apocalyptic God but nothing beats a good conspiracy theory. Like this one
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 11, 2004

Oh man is it ever fun to annihilate the planet.

Especially when said annihilation is combined with a really juicy cataclysmic natural disaster and some fire-breathin` dread and maybe some planetary zigzagging, along with some sort of wondrous ancient Mayan/Hopi prophecies and much screaming and running and bloodshed and a mad global rending of flesh.

This is how it starts. Everyone from paranoid Rapture-ready right-wing conservatives to mysterious Australian astronomers to weird alarmist economists all suddenly realize their various yelps and screams and chat-room rants are running parallel and that they`re all ringing the same bell.

And all their stories merge into some sort of dazzling interconnected web, an impressive and slightly disturbing jamboree of destruction and mayhem and global economic collapse that, if all goes as predicted, will all come down within the next few weeks.

There is this underground doozy making the e-rounds right now, crazed and random and already being tossed about and bunked and debunked and rebunked like a conspiratorial salad as I write this.

It involves all the best ingredients listed above, along with plenty of genuine obtuse jargon and sparkling gems of actual truth (the hallmarks of any really good conspiracy theory), just enough to make everything resonate with possibility and imminence and wicked gobs of creepiness.

And you have to ask: It is in any way odd or suspicious or bizarre that all the following events are happening at the same time? Is there a common thread? And is that thread barbed and nasty and does it involve doom and destruction and scary lizard people running around eating human babies and speaking in funny clicking noises? You be the judge.

The synopsis: The Fed is suddenly acting very strangely, cranking up the nation`s Money Supply (M-3) by "crisis proportions." A massive chunk of the U.S. Navy carrier fleet is suddenly deployed in a huge, never-before-attempted global maneuver, coordinated with the fleets of a dozen other major countries. Threats of some sort of massive terrorist attack loom like alarmist storm clouds. Unprecedented numbers of meteors and comet sightings splatter all over the globe.

The CIA director suddenly quits. Venus is hurling across the sun for the first time in 122 years. The light of the planet is dimming, 10 percent less sunlight all around since the 1950s. London is preparing for a mass evacuation. Many U.S. military bases abroad that were falling into disuse have been "frantically refurbished and restocked" over the last 18 months in preparation for ... something big.

And you know what? According to various legit news stories and various semi-legit Web sites and a few perfectly unreliable chat-room postings, this is all true. Mostly.

So, then, do all these tingling occurrences line up just right and is there some overarching strategy at play and is the massive overwhelming calamitous whole greater than the sum of its prosaically creepy parts?

And almost invariably the answer is, well, no. Or, rather, maybe. But, then again, no. But isn`t it fun to imagine?

Then there`s this: A mysterious Australian astronomer calling himself "Aussie Bloke," his rantings posted on, among other places, Bushcountry.com (one of those cute little ultraconservative right-wing psycho-apocalyptic sites), all about the various proofs pointing to a massive horrific meteor mosh pit coming Earth`s way this very month.

He is articulate and weird. He is loud and crazy and then again just sane enough to make you go, hmm, that actually is a little strange, especially how it`s all synched up with the terrorist threat, and the navy-fleet thing, and the Fed and the big Venus transit -- which, as you probably know, is an incredibly rare and potent planetary shift that supposedly heralds a brave new spiritual world, a stunning cosmic shuffle not seen since the late 1800s and not to be viewed again until June 2012 -- a date that is, of course, the most famous and beloved in all of occult/prophetic wisdom.

A fast darkening of the skies as the massive dust clouds hit first. Then, one impossibly huge meteor slams the planet, alongside numerous smaller meteors of sufficient size to wipe out entire cities. Majority of population destroyed, humankind survives by way of hardcore military stratagem and subterranean infrastructure protections and lots and lots of Cipro and free marijuana and canned Spam and guns. Something like that.

This is what the mad astronomer claims. He has seen the signs. He is not a hoaxer. He is not a kid. He is, in fact, a seminotable scientist, now retired. His tirades are all wonderfully psycho and pitch-perfect frantic and he capitalizes ALL THE RIGHT WORDS to makes his rant REALLY SNAP and sing and raise your cockles that something major and catastrophic is COMING FAST I AM NOT KIDDING CHECK MY CREDENTIALS I WOULD NOT LIE YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!!

But then, weird things always happen, don`t they? There are always mysterious photos. There are always baffling reports from around the globe. There are astounding statistics. There are unprecedented indicators. This is the defining element of any really good, meaty theory, that things are happening right now that have never happened before, not quite like this, maneuvers and shifts and shuffles and world leaders who all just so happen to be gathered in an underground fortress somewhere near Geneva, swapping saliva and secret codes and deep freezing their sperm.

Oh my God how we love doomsday scenarios. Nothing raises the hair on the back of our species` necks and generates chat-room rants and sells movie tickets faster than massive global self-immolation, than piecing together all the proofs of just how screwed our gorgeous planet is and what would happen if we were all suddenly wiped out by a massive conflation of war and disease and angry space rocks.

And yet we know, deep down, that fully 98 percent of the theories are largely total bull, all a mad conglomeration of clever hoaxes and fringe pseudoscience and bogus fear yanks, a hodgepodge of delicious half-truths and orgasmic wishful thinking on the part of the fatalists and the doomsayers and the lost chat-room loners.

We know, with history at our back, that no cataclysmic conspiracy theory, no self-righteous End Times, no harp-filled Second Coming, no epic Nostradamus wipeout has ever really panned out. Yet. After all, we`re still standing. Right?

Well, sort of. Because there`s always that remaining piece. That inexplicable something. That lingering 2 percent of the truly unfathomable, of the deep magic, the Part That Can`t Be Explained.

Because we know, even deeper down, in the superconscious spirit-haunted core of our true selves, that there are energies and plots and spiritual dimensions afoot we can barely begin to understand and events ahead we can only begin to glimpse and that the universe is frightfully, beautifully capable of sudden, colossal shifts in mood and fire and tilt. We know. We sense it, that vast array of things as yet undreamt of in our meager philosophy.

And all the brilliant conspiracy theories, all the crazywonderful books and ranting astronomers and all the truly fascinating peripheral notions of parallel universes and fifth-dimension lizard beings and glowing Indigo Children, of spirit channelers and shamans and psychic healing and of MicrosoftExxonViacomDisney poisoning the water supply and dumbing down the planet, they all they pull at that thread of deeper knowing, tug on the pant leg of our cosmic consciousness, gnaw on the dry bones of our simplistic rationality.

They all remind us that we are ever at the mercy of the unknowable, ever haunted by the understanding that, hey, you know what? Sure most of it might be utter crap. Sure most of those tales and those people and those ranty Australian astronomers might turn out to be an intricate hoax, a collective ideological phantasm, just a desperate attempt by those who seek deeper explanations to make some sort of sense of an inexplicable gorgeous messy bloody violent hate-torn lovelorn world.

Sure most of it is pure fluff. But not all of it. Not by a long shot. And it`s that one remaining hunk, that one irrefutably luminous gorgeous terrifying hint of So Much More, that makes all the difference.
# 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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Is U.S. like Germany of the `30s?

June 11, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY

BERLIN -- I can understand, my German friend said, why Germans voted for Hitler in 1933 -- though he did not receive a majority of the vote. The Weimar Republic was weak and incompetent. The Great Depression had ruined the nation`s war-devastated economy. People were bitter because they thought their leaders had betrayed them in the war. They wanted revenge for the humiliation of Versailles. Hitler promised strong leadership and a new beginning. But why did they continue to support that group of crazy drug addicts, thugs, killers and madmen?

The historical question remains. I leave aside the question of the guilt of the whole German people (a judgment beyond my competence because I am not God) and ask what explanations might account for what happened. Hitler turned the German economy around in short order. He was crazy, of course, a demagogic mystic sensitive to aspirations of the German spirit. He appealed skillfully to the dark side of the German heritage. Anti-Semitism was strong in Germany, as it was in most European countries, but not violent until Hitler manipulated it. He stirred up the memories of historic German military accomplishments and identified himself with Frederick the Great -- thus placating the Prussian ethos of the German army. He promised glory to a nation still smarting from the disaster of 1918. Germany was emerging from the ashes, strong and triumphant once again. He also took control of the police apparatus. The military might have been able to dump him till 1937. After that he was firmly in power. The path lay open to holocaust.

Can this model be useful to understand how contemporary America is engaged in a criminally unjust war that has turned much of the world against it, a war in which torture and murder have become routine? Has the combination of the World Trade Center attack and a president who believes his instructions come from God unleashed the dark side of the American heritage?

What is this dark side? I would suggest that it is the mix of Calvinist religious righteousness and ``my-country-right-or-wrong`` patriotism that dominated our treatment of blacks and American Indians for most of the country`s history. It revealed itself in the American history of imperialism in Mexico and after the Spanish-American War in the Philippines. The ``manifest destiny`` of America was to do whatever it wanted to do, because it was strong and virtuous and chosen by God.

Today many Americans celebrate a ``strong`` leader who, like Woodrow Wilson, never wavers, never apologizes, never admits a mistake, never changes his mind, a leader with a firm ``Christian`` faith in his own righteousness. These Americans are delighted that he ignores the rest of the world and punishes the World Trade Center terrorism in Iraq. Mr. Bush is our kind of guy.

He is not another Hitler. Yet there is a certain parallelism. They have in common a demagogic appeal to the worst side of a country`s heritage in a crisis. Bush is doubtless sincere in his vision of what is best for America. So too was Hitler. The crew around the president -- Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Karl Rove, the ``neo-cons`` like Paul Wolfowitz -- are not as crazy perhaps as Himmler and Goering and Goebbels. Yet like them, they are practitioners of the Big Lie -- weapons of mass destruction, Iraq democracy, only a few ``bad apples.``

Hitler`s war was quantitatively different from the Iraq war, but qualitatively both were foolish, self-destructive and criminally unjust. This is a time of great peril in American history because a phony patriotism and an America-worshipping religion threaten the authentic American genius of tolerance and respect for other people.

The ``real`` America is still remembered here in Berlin for the enormous contributions of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift -- America at its best. It is time to return to that generosity and grace.

The strongest criticism that the administration levels at Sen. John Kerry is that he changes his mind. In fact, instead of a president who claims an infallibility that exceeds that of the pope, America would be much better off with a president who, like John F. Kennedy, is honest enough to admit mistakes and secure enough to change his mind.

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SAVANNAH, GA (IWR News Parody) - According to participants at the G8 Summit, President Bush displayed many shocking signs that he is suffering from an acute mental disorder. Mr. Bush, for example, attempted to play bumper cars with the world`s leaders in his golf cart. He also threatened to have Rummy`s goons torture Gerhard Schroeder for nor kissing his had like Mr. Schroeder had done for Laura Bush.

Even Mr. Bush`s strongest ally, Tony Blair said that he had never seen the president looked so disturbed. "I saw him talking by himself near a palm tree, and at first thought he was on a cell phone, but he was really just talking to the damn tree about Kerry`s lead in the pools," said Blair. French President Jacques Chirac also said: "I had always thought Mr. Bush was `la tête de bout` (butthead), but I never zat knew he was, how you say "as crazy as a shithouse rat!".


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U.S. Intervention in the Middle East

"Why do people in the Middle East hate the United States," people are asking, in the wake of the events of September 11.

This partial chronology of U.S. intervention in the Middle East illustrates the lengths to which the U.S. power structure has gone to gain and maintain U.S. domination of the Middle East--a region considered key to the U.S.`s standing as an imperialist world power. This is not a complete list of the invasions, bombings, assassinations, coups and other interventions by the U.S. government, its allies, or its client states, nor does it fully document the U.S.`s economic domination and exploitation of the region`s people and resources.

1918-1945:
BREAKING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST:
THE FIGHT FOR INFLUENCE & OIL

1920-28: U.S. pressures Britain, then the dominant Middle East power, into signing a "Red Line Agreement" providing that Middle Eastern oil will not be developed by any single power without the participation of the others. Standard Oil and Mobil obtain shares of the Iraq Petroleum Company.

1932-34: Oil is discovered in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and U.S. oil companies obtain concessions.

1944: U.S. State Department memo refers to Middle Eastern oil as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." During U.S.-British negotiations over the control of Middle Eastern oil, President Roosevelt sketches out a map of the Middle East and tells the British Ambassador, "Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it`s ours." On August 8, 1944, the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement is signed, splitting Middle Eastern oil between the U.S. and Britain.

Between 1948 and 1960, Western capital earns $12.8 billion in profits from the production, refining and sale of Middle Eastern oil, on fixed investments totaling $1.3 billion.

1945-1955:
REPLACING RIVALS AND WAGING WAR
ON NATIONAL LIBERATION

1946: President Harry Truman threatens to drop a "super-bomb" on the Soviet Union if it does not withdraw from Kurdestan and Azerbaijan in northern Iran.

November 1947: The U.S. helps push through a UN resolution partitioning Palestine into a Zionist state and an Arab state, giving the Zionist authorities control of 54% of the land. At that time Jewish settlers were about 1/3 of the population.

May 14, 1948: War breaks out between newly proclaimed state of Israel, and Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria, who had moved troops into Palestine to oppose the partition of Palestine. Israeli attacks force some 800,000 Palestinians--two-thirds of the population--to flee into exile in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. Israel seizes 77 percent of historic Palestine. The U.S. quickly recognizes Israel.

March 29, 1949: CIA backs a military coup overthrowing the elected government of Syria and establishes a military dictatorship under Colonel Za`im.

1952: U.S.-led military alliance expands into the Middle East with Turkey`s admission to NATO.

1953: The CIA organizes a coup overthrowing the Mossadeq government of Iran after Mossadeq nationalizes British holdings in Iran`s huge oilfields. The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, is put on the throne, ruling as an absolute monarch for the next 25 years--torturing, killing and imprisoning his political opponents.

1955: U.S. installs powerful radar system in Turkey to spy on the Soviet Union.

1956-1958:
UPHEAVAL AND INTRIGUE IN EGYPT,
IRAQ, JORDAN, SYRIA & LEBANON

July 1956: After Egypt`s nationalist leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, receives arms from the Soviet Union, the U.S. withdraws promised funding for Aswan Dam, Egypt`s main development project. A week later Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal to fund the project. In October Britain, France and Israel invade Egypt to retake the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower threatens to use nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union intervenes on Egypt`s side; and at the same time, the U.S. asserts its regional dominance by forcing Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from Egypt.

October 1956: A planned CIA coup to overthrow a left-leaning government in Syria is aborted because it was scheduled for the same day Israel, Britain and France invade Egypt.

March 9, 1957: Congress approves Eisenhower Doctrine, stating "the United States regards as vital to the national interest and world peace the preservation of the independence and integrity of the nations of the Middle East."

April 1957: After anti-government rioting breaks out in Jordan, U.S. rushes 6th fleet to the eastern Mediterranean and lands a battalion of Marines in Lebanon to "prepare for possible future intervention in Jordan." Later that year, the CIA begins making secret payments of millions a year to Jordan`s King Hussein.

September 1957: In response to the Syrian government`s more nationalist and pro-Soviet policies, the U.S. sends Sixth Fleet to eastern Mediterranean and rushes arms to allies Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia; meanwhile the U.S. encourages Turkey to mass 50,000 troops on Syria`s northern border.

1958: The merger of Syria and Egypt into the "United Arab Republic," the overthrow of the pro-U.S. King Feisal II in Iraq by nationalist military officers, and the outbreak of anti-government/anti-U.S. rioting in Lebanon, where the CIA had helped install President Camille Caiman and keep him in power, leads the U.S. to dispatch 70 naval vessels, hundreds of aircraft and 14,000 Marines to Lebanon to preserve "stability." The U.S. threatens to use nuclear weapons if the Lebanese army resists, and to prevent an Iraqi move into the oilfields of Kuwait, and draws up secret plans for a joint invasion of Iraq with Turkey. The plan is shelved after the Soviet Union threatens to intervene.

1957-58: Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA agent in charge of the 1953 coup in Iran, plots, without success, to overthrow Egypt`s Nasser. "Between July 1957 and October 1958, the Egyptian and Syrian governments and media announced the uncovering of what appear to be at least eight separate conspiracies to overthrow one or the other government, to assassinate Nasser, and/or prevent the expected merger of the two countries." (Blum, p. 93)

1960: U.S. works to covertly undermine the new government of Iraq by supporting anti-government Kurdish rebels and by attempting, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Iraq`s leader, Abdul Karim Qassim, an army general who had restored relations with the Soviet Union and lifted the ban on Iraq`s Communist Party.

1963: U.S. supports a coup by the Ba`ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam Hussein) to overthrow the Qassim regime, including by giving the Ba`ath names of communists to murder. "Armed with the names and whereabouts of individual communists, the national guards carried out summary executions. Communists held in detention...were dragged out of prison and shot without a hearing... [B)y the end of the rule of the Ba`ath, its terror campaign had claimed the lives of an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 communists."

1966: U.S. sells its first jet bombers to Israel, breaking with 1956 decision not to sell arms to the Zionist state.

June 1967: With U.S. weapons and support, Israeli military launches the so-called "Six Day War," seizing the remaining 23 percent of historic Palestine--the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem--along with Egypt`s Sinai Peninsula and Syria`s Golan Heights.

September 17, 1970: With U.S. and Israeli backing, Jordanian troops attack Palestinian guerrilla camps, while Jordan`s U.S.-supplied air force drops napalm from above. U.S. deploys the aircraft carrier Independence and six destroyers off the coast of Lebanon and readies troops in Turkey to support the assault. The U.S. threatens to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union if it intervenes. 5000 Palestinians are killed and 20,000 wounded. This massacre comes to be known as "Black September."

1973: The U.S. rushes $2.2 billion in emergency military aid to Israel after Egypt and Syria attack to regain Golan Heights and Sinai. U.S. puts forces on alert, and moves them into the region. When the Soviet Union threatens to intervene to prevent the destruction of Egypt`s 3rd Army by Israel, U.S. nuclear forces go to DEFCON III to force the Soviets to back down.

1973-1975: U.S. supports Kurdish rebels in Iraq in order to strengthen Iran and weaken the then pro-Soviet Iraqi regime. When Iran and Iraq cut a deal, the U.S. withdraws support, denies the Kurds refuge in Iran, and stands by while the Iraqi government kills many Kurdish people.

1979-84: U.S. supports paramilitary forces to undermine the government of South Yemen, which was allied with the Soviet Union.

THE FALL OF THE SHAH AND
THE SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN

1978: As the Iranian revolution begins against the hated Shah, the U.S. continues to support him "without reservation" and urges him to act forcefully against the masses. In August 1978, some 400 Iranians are burned to death in the Rex Theater in Abadan after police chain and lock the exit doors. On September 8, 10,000 anti-Shah demonstrators are massacred at Teheran`s Jaleh Square.

1979: The U.S. tries, without success, to organize a military coup to save the Shah. In January, the Shah is forced to flee and the reactionary Shi-ite Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini take power in February.

Summer 1979: The U.S. publicly supports the Khomeini regime`s efforts to suppress the Kurdish liberation struggle and maintain Iranian domination of Kurdestan.

1979: U.S. President Jimmy Carter designates the Persian Gulf a vital U.S. interest and declares the U.S. will go to war to ensure the flow of oil.

1979: In response to Soviet military maneuvers on Iran`s northern border, Carter secretly puts U.S. forces on nuclear alert and warns the Soviets they will be used if the Soviets intervene.

Summer 1979: U.S. begins arming and organizing Islamic fundamentalist "Mujahideen" in Afghanistan. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski writes, "This aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention," drawing the Soviets into an Afghan quagmire. Over the next decade the U.S. alone passed more than $3 billion in arms and aid to the Mujahideen, with another $3 billion provided by the U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.

November 4, 1979: Islamic militants, backed by the Khomeini regime, seize the U.S. embassy in Teheran and demand the U.S. return the Shah to Iran for trial. The Embassy and 52 U.S. personnel are held for 444 days; this international embarrassment prompts new U.S. actions against Iran--including an abortive rescue attempt.

December 1979: Soviet troops invade Afghanistan--which the U.S. rulers considered a "buffer state" between the Soviet Union to the north and the strategically important states of Iran and Pakistan to the south--overthrowing the Amin government and installing a more pro-Soviet regime.

1980: U.S. begins organizing a "Rapid Deployment Force," increasing its naval presence and pre-positioning military equipment and supplies. It also steps up aid to reactionary client states such as Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. On September 12, Turkey`s military seizes power and unleashes a brutal clampdown on revolutionaries and Kurds struggling for liberation in order to "stabilize" the country as a key U.S. ally.

Summer 1980: As the Carter administration tries to bully Iran into surrendering the U.S. hostages, supporters of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan cut a secret deal with the Islamic Republic: promising that the Reagan administration will allow Israel to ship arms to Iran if Iran continues to hold the hostages during the coming presidential campaign to cripple Carter`s campaign for re-election. (Gary Sick)

September 22, 1980: Iraq invades Iran with tacit U.S. support, starting a bloody eight-year war. The U.S. supports both sides in the war providing arms to Iran and money, intelligence and political support to Iraq in order to prolong the war and weaken both sides, while trying to draw both countries into the U.S. orbit.

1981: U.S. holds military maneuvers off the coast of Libya to bully the Qaddafi government. When a Libyan plane fires a missile at U.S. planes penetrating Libyan airspace, two Libyan planes are shot down.

1981: The Reagan administration secretly encourages Israel and other allies, such as South Korea and Turkey, to ship hundreds of millions of U.S.-made arms to Iran despite a ban on the shipment of U.S.-made weapons.

From the fall of 1981 through the winter of 1982, forces led by the Union of Iranian Communists, Sarbederan, mount an historic resistance to the Islamic Republic; the uprising at Amol at the end of January 1982 is brutally crushed by the forces of the Islamic Republic.

1982: After receiving a "green light" from the U.S., Israel invades Lebanon to crush Palestinian and other anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli forces. Over 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians are killed, and Israel seizes southern Lebanon, holding it until 2000.

September 14, 1982: Lebanon`s pro-U.S. President-elect, Bashir al-Jumayyil, is assassinated. The following day, Israeli forces occupy West Beirut, and from 16 to 18 September, the Phalangist militia, with the support of Israel`s military under now-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, move into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and barbarically massacre over 1,000 unarmed Palestinian men, women, and children.

1983: U.S. sends troops to Lebanon, supposedly as part of a multinational "peace-keeping" operation but in reality to protect U.S. interests, including Israel`s occupation forces. U.S. troops are withdrawn after a suicide bomber destroys a U.S. Marine barracks.

1983: CIA helps murder Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, a prominent Moroccan Army commander who seeks to overthrow the pro-U.S. Moroccan monarchy.

Spring 1983: The U.S. provides the Islamic Republic of Iran with a list of Soviet agents.

1984: U.S. shoots down two Iranian jets over Persian Gulf.

1985-1986: The U.S. secretly ships weapons to Iran, including 1,000 TOW anti-tank missiles, Hawk missile parts, and Hawk radars. The weapons are exchanged for U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and in hopes of increased U.S. leverage in Iran. The secret plot collapses when it is publicly revealed on November 3, 1986, by the Lebanese magazine, Al-Shiraa. (The Chronology)

1985: U.S. attempts to assassinate Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese Shiite leader. 80 people are killed in the unsuccessful attempt. (Blum)

1986: When a bomb goes off in a Berlin nightclub and kills two Americans, the U.S. blames Libya`s Qaddafi. U.S. bombers strike Libyan military facilities, residential areas of Tripoli and Benghazi, and Qaddafi`s house, killing 101 people, including Qaddafi`s adopted daughter.

1987: The U.S. Navy is dispatched to the Persian Gulf to prevent Iran from cutting off Iraq`s oil shipments. During these patrols, a U.S. ship shoots down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing all 290 onboard.

1988: The Iraqi regime launches mass poison-gas attacks on Kurds, killing thousands and bulldozing many villages. The U.S. responds by increasing its support for the Iraqi regime.

July 1988: A cease-fire ends the Iran-Iraq war with neither side victorious. Over 1 million Iranians and Iraqis are killed during the 8-year war.

1989: The last Soviet troops leave Afghanistan. The war, fueled by U.S.-Soviet rivalry, has torn Afghanistan apart, killing more than one million Afghans and forcing one-third of the population to flee into refugee camps. More than 15,000 Soviet soldiers die in the war.

July 1990: April Glaspie, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, meets with Saddam Hussein, who threatens military action against Kuwait for overproducing its oil quota, slant drilling for oil in Iraqi territory, and encroaching on Iraqi territory--seriously harming war weakened Iraq. Glaspie replies, "We have no opinion on the Arab- Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait."

August 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait. The U.S. seizes the moment to assert its hegemony in the post-Soviet world and strengthen its grip on the Persian Gulf: the U.S. condemns Iraq, rejects a diplomatic settlement, imposes sanctions, and prepares for an all-out military assault on Iraq.

January 16, 1991: After a 6-month military buildup, the U.S.-led coalition launches "Operation Desert Storm." For the next 42 days, U.S. and allied planes pound Iraq, dropping 88,000 tons of bombs, systematically targeting and largely destroying its electrical and water systems. On February 22, 1991, the U.S. coalition begins its 100-hour ground war. Heavily armed U.S. units drive deep into southern Iraq. Overall, 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis are killed during the war.

Spring 1991: Shi`ites in the south and Kurds in the north rise up against Hussein`s regime in Iraq. The U.S., after encouraging these uprisings during the war, now fears turmoil and instability in the region and refuses to support the rebels. The U.S. denies the rebels access to captured Iraqi weapons and allows Iraqi helicopters to attack them.

1991: Iraq withdraws from Kuwait and agrees to a UN-brokered cease-fire, but the U.S. and Britain insist that devastating sanctions be maintained. The U.S. declares large parts of north and south Iraq "no-fly" zones for Iraqi aircraft.

1991-present: U.S. military deployments continue after the war, with 17,000 to 24,000 U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf region at any given time. (CSM)

1992: U.S. Marines land near Mogadishu, Somalia, supposedly to ensure humanitarian relief and "restore order." But the U.S. also plans to remove the dominant warlord, Mohammed Aidid, and install a more pro-U.S. regime. In June 1983, after numerous gun battles with Aidid forces, U.S. helicopters strafe Aidid supporters, killing scores. In October, when U.S. forces attempt to kidnap two Aidid lieutenants, a fierce gunbattle breaks out. Five U.S. helicopters are shot down, 18 U.S. soldiers killed and 73 wounded, while 500 to 1000 Somalians are killed and many more injured.

March 1992: U.S. Defense Department drafts new, post-Soviet "Defense Planning Guidance" paper stating, "In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region`s oil."

1993: U.S. brokers a "peace" agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization at Oslo, Norway. The agreement strengthens Israel and U.S. domination, while leaving Palestinians a small part of their historic homeland, broken up into isolated pieces surrounded by Israel. No provisions are made for the return of the four million Palestinian refugees living outside of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

1993: U.S. launches missile attack on Iraq, claiming self-defense against an alleged assassination attempt on former president Bush two months earlier.

1995: The U.S. imposes oil and trade sanctions against Iran, reinforcing sanctions in effect since 1979, for alleged sponsorship of `terrorism`, seeking to acquire nuclear arms and hostility to the Middle East process. (BBC, CSM)

1995: With U.S. backing, Turkey launches a major military offensive, involving some 35,000 Turkish troops, against the Kurds in northern Iraq.

1998: Congress passes the "Iraq Liberation Act," giving nearly $100 million to groups attempting to overthrow the Hussein regime.

August 1998: Claiming retaliation for attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, President Clinton sends 75 cruise missiles pounding into rural Afghanistan --supposedly targeting Osama Bin Laden. The U.S. also destroys a factory producing half of Sudan`s pharmaceutical supply, claiming the factory is involved in chemical warfare. The U.S. later acknowledges there is no evidence for the chemical warfare charge.

December 16-19, 1998: The U.S. and Britain launch "Operation Desert Fox," a bombing campaign supposedly aimed at destroying Iraq`s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. For most of the next year, U.S. and British planes strike Iraq every day with missiles. (BBC)

October 1999: The U.S. Department of Defense shifts command of its forces in Central Asia from the Pacific Command to the Central Command, underlining the heightened importance of the region, which includes vast oil reserves in and around the Caspian Sea.

January 2001: Tenth anniversary of the U.S. war on Iraq: sanctions are still in place and the UN estimates that 4,500 children are dying per month from disease and malnutrition as a result. The U.S. planes, which have flown over 280,000 sorties in Iraq over the past decade, continue to attack from the air. In the past two years, over 300 Iraqis have been killed in these bombings.

October 2001: U.S. begins bombing Afghanistan, as the first act of war in "Operation Enduring Freedom"--the U.S. "war against global terrorism."

SOURCES

Many different sources were used in compiling this chronology of U.S. aggression. Here are the main ones:

Numerous issues of the Revolutionary Worker newspaper including:

"Palestine: A History of Occupation and Resistance," November 10, 1991

"Fort Apache: The Middle East" a four-part series, January 6-27, 1984

"Israel: A State of Occupation," November 20, 2000

William Blum, Killing Hope--U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Common Courage Press 1995)

Berch Berberoglu, Turmoil in the Middle East--Imperialism, War, and Political Instability (State University of New York Press 1999)

Peter Mansfield, The Arabs (Pelican Books 1980)

Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (Touchstone Books 1993)

Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds., The Gulf War Reader (Times Books 1991)

Michio Kaku & Daniel Axelrod, To Win a Nuclear War (South End Press 1987)

Joseph Gerson, ed., The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War & U.S. Intervention (American Friends Service Committee 1983)

Thomas Naff, ed., Gulf Security and the Iran-Iraq War (National Defense University Press and Middle East Research Institute 1985)

The National Security Archive, The Chronology (Warner Books 1987)

Gary Sick, October Surprise--America`s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (Times Books 1991)

"50 Years of U.S. Policy in the Middle East," Christian Science Monitor, September 27, 2001

Zoltan Grossman, "A Century of U.S. Military Interventions: From Wounded Knee to Afghanistan," online at zmag.org

V. K. Sin, "Israel: Imperialism`s Attack Dog in the Middle East," A World To Win, 1988/11

Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle (South End Press 1983)

Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace--Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Zed Books 1998)

Edward W. Said, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Muhammad Jallaj, Elia Zureik, "A Profile of the Palestinian People," in Edward Said & Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims--Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (Verso 1988)

Bob Woodward, VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 (Simon & Schuster 1987)

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United States
The Commander in Chief and his Awesome Burden as War-Time President
By Video Presentation
Jun 10, 2004, 09:25

We have all heard President Bush`s father tell of how his son prays each night for help from the Almighty under the awesome burden of presidential responsibility. Images are elicited of President Lincoln, at his bedside on bended knees during the American civil war. The weight of responsibility on President George W. Bush while making the grave decisions of a war-time president can be seen here of THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF

Note: Please turn your audio up. If you`re on a dial-up, you may have to wait for an extended period for this video to load.

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US to Correct Terror Report, Says Attacks Increased
Thu Jun 10, 2004 08:43 PM ET

By Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department said on Thursday its report that the number of international "terrorist" attacks fell last year was wrong and in fact had risen sharply.

The Department also said the number of resulting deaths was expected to be higher for 2003 than the 307 initially reported, but officials said it may not exceed 2002`s 725 fatalities.

The admissions dented the claim by President Bush`s administration that Washington is winning the "war on terrorism," an argument critical to his reelection strategy.

The State Department`s "Patterns of Global Terrorism Report" released on April 29 said "terrorist" attacks fell to 190 last year, their lowest since 1969, from 198 in 2002.

It also said those killed dropped to 307, including 35 U.S. citizens, from 725 in 2002, including 27 Americans.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said both totals were understated because of errors in compiling the data by the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. The interagency group was set up last year to address the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Boucher told reporters the terrorism experts appeared to have made a series of mistakes, failing to count attacks for the full year and possibly misinterpreting the definition of such attacks to exclude incidents included in the past.

"The data in the report are incomplete and in some cases incorrect," he said, admitting his department failed to catch the mistakes. "We got the wrong data and we didn`t check it enough ... That`s the simplest explanation for what happened."

POWELL `VERY DISTURBED`

Secretary of State Colin Powell said he was "very disturbed" that errors had made it into the report but denied the numbers were manipulated for political benefit.

When the report was released, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said it provided "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" while State Department coordinator for counterterrorism Cofer Black hailed its "good news."

Boucher said the department learned of the report`s errors in the first week of May and began an investigation. He said a May 17 letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and frequent critic of the administration, spurred its efforts.

The State Department did not publicly acknowledge the report`s errors until they were reported in the media.

Boucher said the State Department asked the Terrorist Threat Integration Center to review the numbers and would publish revised figures when they were available.

Boucher initially said preliminary indications were that the correct data would show "a sharp increase over the previous year" in both incidents and deaths, but he later said he was not sure if the number of deaths would exceed 2002`s level.

"I don`t know. We`ll have to wait and see the numbers," he later said. "As far as comparison with previous years, we`ll have to wait and see what the final numbers are."

One U.S. official who asked not to be named said the report`s errors included a failure to count "international terrorist attacks" that occurred after Nov. 11, 2003.

"I am very disturbed that there were errors in the report," Powell told reporters. "We`re going to correct it."

Asked if the numbers were manipulated to make the administration look good, Powell said: "Of course not."

"Nobody has suggested that the war on terrorism has been won. Quite the contrary, the president has made it clear that it is a war that continues and that we have to redouble our efforts," he later added.

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Molly Ivins: `The day the Constitution died`
Date: Friday, June 11 @ 10:26:19 EDT
Topic: The Bush Administration

June 8, 2004: Ashcroft`s coronation of George W. Bush

By Molly Ivins, Working For Change

AUSTIN, Texas -- When, in future, you find yourself wondering, "Whatever happened to the Constitution?" you will want to go back and look at June 8, 2004. That was the day the attorney general of the United States -- a.k.a. "the nation`s top law enforcement officer" -- refused to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with his department`s memos concerning torture.

In order to justify torture, these memos declare that the president is bound by neither U.S. law nor international treaties. We have put ourselves on the same moral level as Saddam Hussein, the only difference being quantity. Quite literally, the president may as well wear a crown -- forget that "no man is above the law" jazz. We used to talk about "the imperial presidency" under Nixon, but this is the real thing.

The Pentagon`s legal staff concurred in this incredible conclusion. In a report printed by The Wall Street Journal, "Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn`t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn`t be prosecuted by the Justice Department. ..



"The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national security considerations or legal technicalities."

The report was complied by a group appointed by Department of Defense General Counsel William J. Haynes II, who has since been nominated by Bush for the federal appellate bench. "Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker headed the group, which comprised top civilian and uniformed lawyers from each military branch and consulted with the Justice Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies. It isn`t known if President Bush has ever seen the report."

When members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Ashcroft about his department`s input, he simply refused to provide the memos, without offering any legal rationale. He said President Bush had "made no order that would require or direct the violation" of laws or treaties. His explanation was that the United States is at war. "You know I condemn torture," he told Sen. Joe Biden. "I don`t think it`s productive, let alone justified."

But another memo written by former Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge in California, establishes a basis for the use of torture for senior Al Qaeda operatives in custody of the CIA. I am not one to leap to conclusions, but it seems quite clear how whatever perverted standards allowed at Guantanamo Bay jumped across the water to Abu Ghraib prison. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commander at Gitmo, was dispatched last August to Abu Ghraib to give advice about how to get information out of prisoners. "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," according to The New York Times.

Among the legal memos that circulated within the administration in 2002, one is by White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, famously declaring the Geneva Convention "quaint," and another from the CIA asked for an explicit understanding that the administration`s public pledge to abide by the spirit of the Geneva Convention did not apply to its operatives. The only department consistently opposing these legal "arguments" was State. In April 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld sent a memo to Gen. James T. Hill outlining 24 permitted interrogation techniques, four of which were considered so stressful as to require Rumsfeld`s explicit approval before they were used.

It has been apparent for some time that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated instances -- torture from Afghanistan to Gitmo to Iraq has so far resulted in 25 deaths now under investigation. As the late Jacabo Timmermann, the Argentine journalist who was tortured during "the dirty war," said, "When you are being tortured, it doesn`t really matter to you if your torturers are authoritarian or totalitarian." I doubt it helps any if they`re supposed to be bringing democracy, either. And as Ashcroft said, it isn`t productive.

The damage is incalculable. When America puts out its annual report on human rights abuses, we will be a laughingstock. I suggest a special commission headed by Sen. John McCain to dig out everyone responsible, root and branch. If the lawyers don`t cooperate, perhaps we should try stripping them, anally raping them and dunking their heads under water until they think they`re drowning, and see if that helps.

And I think it is time for citizens to take some responsibility, as well. Is this what we have come to? Is this what we want our government to do for us? Oh and by way, to my fellow political reporters who keep repeating that Bush is having a wonderful week: Why don`t you think about what you stand for?

Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Molly Ivins Can`t Say That Can She?

© 2004 Working Assets.

Reprinted from Working For Change:
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17092

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T-Com ist seit drei Tagen nicht in der Lage die gestörten T-DSL Anschlüsse im Bereich 043.. in Ordnung zu bekommen.
Trotz immer wieder wiederholten Zusagen klappt es nicht und ich habe keinen Internetzugang.

Da sich im Irak außer den täglichn Opfermeldungen nichts Neues ereignet und in den USA Bush immer noch nach der Wahrheit sucht, und auch der Tod Reagans ihm keinen Auftrieb geben konnte, habe ich auch keine wichtige Nachrichten versäumt.

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Die letzten drei Tage:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Monday, June 14, 2004
War News for June 14, 2004.

Bring ‘em on: Car bomb in Baghdad kills 13, including five contractors.

Bring ‘em on: Former Ba’athist assassinated in Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Civilian convoy ambushed by car bomb near Iskandariyah.

Bring ‘em on: Former Ba’athist assassinated near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Two employees of US-funded al-Iraqiya television killed in western Iraq.

Bring ‘em on: New Zealand troops under mortar fire near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqis killed in fighting in Sadr City.

Failure in Fallujah. “’This was a noble experiment that may not work out,’ Col. Larry Brown, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force`s operations officer, said this weekend. ‘The brigade has not performed as well as we had hoped.’ His comments were the strongest indication from the U.S. military that the effort to contain the insurgency by depending on the Fallujah Brigade was failing. It also was a sign that the model — turning to former Iraqi military including those who served Saddam Hussein — would not solve security problems after the U.S.-led coalition hands sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.”

License to kill. “In an early test of its imminent sovereignty, Iraq`s new government has been resisting a U.S. demand that thousands of foreign contractors here be granted immunity from Iraqi law, in the same way as U.S. military forces are now immune, according to Iraqi sources. The U.S. proposal, although not widely known, has touched a nerve with some nationalist-minded Iraqis already chafing under the 14-month-old U.S.-led occupation. If accepted by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, it would put the highly visible U.S. foreign contractors into a special legal category, not subject to military justice and beyond the reach of Iraq`s justice system.”

Oregon National Guard infantry battalion suffers 10 casualties in less than two months in Iraq.

Army retention problems. “Since Fort Carson units began coming home in April, post recruiters have met only 57 percent of their quota for re-enlisting first-term soldiers for a second hitch, according to an Army report. More disturbing, recruiters say, is they`re re-enlisting only 46 percent of the quota for ‘mid-career’ noncommissioned officers. These are the young sergeants with four to 10 years of experience who are the backbone of the Army - its skilled soldiers, mentors and future senior NCOs.”

Cheney and Halliburton. “Pentagon officials have acknowledged that Vice President Dick Cheney`s chief of staff and other Bush administration political appointees were involved in a controversial decision to pay Halliburton Inc. to plan for the postwar recovery of Iraq`s oil sector, a Democratic lawmaker said yesterday. The decision, overruling the recommendations of an Army lawyer, eventually resulted in the award of a $7 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton, which Cheney ran for five years before he was nominated for vice president.”

Maybe the Bushies have a legal memo prepared to subvert this law, too. “Saddam Hussein must either be released from custody by June 30 or charged if the US and the new Iraqi government are to conform to international law, the International Committee of the Red Cross said last night. Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC, told the Guardian: ‘The United States defines Saddam Hussein as a prisoner of war. At the end of an occupation PoWs have to be released provided they have no penal charges against them.’”

Electricity shortages. “The American-led occupation missed its goal by as much as 30 percent, starving air-conditioners, lights, factories and oil pumps. That has damaged the occupation`s efforts to foster stability and good will among a populace already traumatized by the failure to guarantee their security. The goal, one of the American-led civilian administration`s highest priorities, was set soon after occupation forces overran the country in the spring of 2003. It seemed within reach, but with little progress so far, the occupation is now talking about succeeding well into this summer.” Nice going, Bremer. Is there anything you haven`t fucked up yet?

DailyKos has an excellent round-up of the latest developments in the Abu Ghraib case.

Commentary

Editorial: “Washington is hoping to cut its military presence in Germany — a little more than 70,000 soldiers — roughly in half. Two heavy divisions now based there, and the soldiers` families, would return to the United States. They would be replaced by a much smaller light combat brigade, while other units would be rotated in and out, at considerable cost, for short-term exercises. The Air Force is also thinking of moving some of its F-16 fighter jets from Germany to Turkey, where they would be closer to Middle East trouble spots but subject to restrictions by the host government. The large American military presence in Germany has long symbolized the understanding at the heart of NATO — Washington`s commitment to remain permanently engaged in Europe`s security and to integrate its military operations with those of its major European allies. Recent history has only reinforced how important that relationship is to the United States. NATO is the only alliance capable of sharing some of the global military burdens that have now overstretched America`s ground forces. Many Germans, remembering Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s scornful ‘old Europe’ put-downs of their country last year, will see these withdrawals, and the accompanying German job losses, as payback for Berlin`s diplomatic opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Washington denies that. But the Pentagon does seem to have a growing preference for stationing troops either at home or on the territories of allies ready to embrace President Bush`s notions of unilateral preventive war.”

Analysis: However, it seems that the decision in Washington to invade Iraq was made in a vacuum, and in an environment where the neo-cons were scornful and contemptuous of the necessity of acquiring legitimacy for the US actions from the world body. They envisioned America`s military power as being able to conquer even the hearts and minds of the global community, as if the latter had no mind or analytical capability of its own to judge between right and wrong. In the strange thinking of the neo-cons, the dilemmas and mental reservations about such blatant US action as the decision to invade Iraq without UN sanction were not even considered worth pondering or second thought. But when the international community showed its contempt for such an action through the strength of its non-involvement, and through stern denunciation of America, that very action - ie, the US invasion of Iraq - became snarled in a quagmire of its own making.

Analysis: “Yes, it is conceivable that Bush did not have accurate information about whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But under the international rules that the US is supposed to follow, wars should not be undertaken based on the judgment of one individual and his cabal. The judgment of the world was that the evidence was not there -- and the world was right. Had Bush only gone along with the democratic processes enshrined in the UN Charter, the trauma of Iraq need not have occurred.”

Rant of the Day

Larry the Liar, in a letter published in today`s New York Times:. “Secretary Rumsfeld has said time and again that the number of troops is based upon the professional military judgment of commanders. Gen. Tommy Franks fashioned brilliant war plans, based upon force levels he determined were needed. The plans were reviewed and supported unanimously by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

You lie, Larry. Before this war even started, General Shinseki warned that you and your boss had dramatically underestimated the troops required for a successful occupation of Iraq. You chose to ignore and humiliate that officer. General Franks was successful in the initial ground campaign in spite of your meddling, not because of your support. The disorders that followed the collapse of the Ba’athist regime were a direct result of your fiddling with a force structure required by Army doctrine in favor of a force structure dreamed up by your neo-con ideologues and based on fantasy planning.

Worse, you refuse to accept responsibility for your miserable failures by hiding behind the uniforms of officers who are forbidden by law to criticize their civilian superiors. Many retired flag officers, no longer bound by that prohibition, have repeatedly criticized your handling of the war in general and your reluctance to adequately resource the occupation forces with appropriate troop levels. Those officers include General Zinni, General McCaffrey, General Hoar and General Clark. In response, you and your minions in the GOP slime machine have attacked the motives, competence and patriotism of those officers.

In addition to being a bald-faced liar, you are a cowardly chickenshit, Larry. The Times should be ashamed of itself for printing your mendacious and self-serving drivel.




Happy 229th birthday to the United States Army.


86-43-04. Pass it on.




# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:01 AM
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Sunday, June 13, 2004
War News for June 13, 2004

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded in ambush near Taji.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqi policemen and eight Iraqi civilians killed by Baghdad car bomb.

Bring ‘em on: Senior Iraqi education ministry official assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Green Zone rocketed in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Kurdish religious leader assassinated in Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: US troops under mortar fire near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Six Iraqi policemen wounded in Kirkuk ambush.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi border guard chief escapes assassination attempt in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: US convoy ambushed near Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Senior police officer wounded in assassination attempt near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi university professor assassinated in Baghdad.

Brahimi resigns. “Brahimi explained that his decision stemmed from great difficulties and frustration experienced during his assignment in Iraq. He said that he does not intend to return to Iraq.”

Real American patriots sound off. “A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America`s national security and should be defeated in November. The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush`s foreign policy, according to several of those who signed the document.”

I’m sure they feel honored. “An infantry battalion serving in Iraq has been awarded the dubious distinction of having been attacked more times than any British Army unit since the Korean War. The officers and men of the 1st battalion of the Princess of Wales`s Royal Regiment have been ‘in contact’ with enemy forces on more than 250 separate occasions since they arrived in Iraq six weeks ago.”

Convoy operations. “Off the road, women in black robes skillfully walk with huge packages balanced on their head, barefoot children run back and forth, and shepherds tend to flocks that forage along the ditches. There are a few shattered and burned-out vehicles in medians and high brush that stand as a reminder of problems on that stretch of highway in the past.”

Neocons don’t need no stinkin’ Geneva convention. “An American engineer was killed in a drive-by shooting and another US national was believed kidnapped at the weekend in Saudi Arabia in apparent retaliation for US atrocities at Baghdad`s Abu Ghraib prison.” Torturing prisoners to extract “intelligence” is such a wise policy and fully justified because it helps prevent terrorist attacks against Americans.

Commentary

Editorial: “The administration has strenuously objected to any suggestion that it knew of or approved the mistreatment and sexual humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But an ever-expanding body of evidence shows that the president, vice president, defense secretary and attorney general sought ways to defend the use of abusive tactics on the part of American military personnel and intelligence agents that violate international law and American tradition. Their actions have removed the United States from the pantheon of civilized nations - those that have promised not to resort to torture, regardless of the circumstances. We have now taken our place alongside nations such as China, Syria and Zimbabwe that justify any means of securing national security. In the process, they have endangered every American soldier and civilian who may become a prisoner of war and depend on the same protections the Bush administration has disregarded.”

Analysis: “It was, asserted President George Bush, the biggest accomplishment of last week’s summit of world leaders at Sea Island, Georgia. Nothing to do with Iraq or the war on terrorism, but something called the ‘Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative’. This is the Bush administration’s Big Idea. It has been around for some time. But it was confined to the White House’s back room thinkers until January this year when it was given its first public airing in Bush’s state of the union speech. At the time it received a cool international response - and yet last week the G8 summit agreed to embrace it… The authors are a group of hawkish senior officials, led by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, who have believed for a long time that the removal of Saddam could be the catalyst for a dramatic change for the better throughout the whole of the Arab Middle East.”

Analysis: “But while it appears that the Prodigal Son has returned to the fold and is reaping the rewards, the United States remains largely unrepentant and continues to undermine UN and Iraqi authority in words and actions. Washington`s moral legitimacy has been in tatters for months; now the UN`s is at stake as well.”

Opinion: “The financial stress of extended deployment can be severe for military families. Fully three in 10 report that in the past year, they and their family have had trouble paying bills. For more than one in five, their current financial situation is such that they have to get food stamps or Women, Infants, and Children program aid from the government. (Even 6 percent of families of officers say they receive food stamps or WIC.) Clearly more financial support is needed for the families of soldiers risking their lives for their country for an extended period of time.”

Opinion: “Carvill was in the 112th Field Artillery of the New Jersey National Guard. He was one of four from the outfit killed in Iraq last week. His friend, Rancitelli, sat in St. Joseph`s church in East Rutherford, N.J. There were no lights or cameras. They die in Iraq and the government that sent them to die acts as if this never happened, that there is no such thing as death leaving our hands with blackened blood. The country is asked to live in illusion while soldiers die in despair. Carvill didn`t think we should be in Iraq, but if the other guys were going, then so, too, would he be in Iraq. Carvill was a National Guardsman who did not go to the dentist. He went to war and got killed.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: New York Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: New Jersey Guardsman wounded in Iraq.


86-43-04. Pass it on.




# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:09 AM
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Saturday, June 12, 2004
War News for June 11 and 12, 2004

Bring ‘em on: Insurgents storm and demolish Iraqi police station near Yusufiyah.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi deputy foreign minister assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting reported in Sadr City.

Bring ‘em on: US patrol ambushed by roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Coalition troops attacked by RPG and small arms fire near Hilla.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting reported in Najaf.

Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers wounded by car bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers, two Iraqi policemen wounded by car bombs in Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier wounded in roadside bomb, small arms ambush near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Attempted pipeline sabotage reported near Qayyarah.

Bring ‘em on: Three hostages killed near Fallujah.

US helicopter crashes near Taji. Two soldiers injured.

Bulgaria will withdraw from Iraq in 2005.

Report from Baghdad. “It is the ever-expanding US bases and the increasing difficulties and dangers of their daily lives which make ordinary Iraqis dismiss declarations by President George Bush about transferring power to a sovereign Iraqi government as meaningless. As Mr Bush and Tony Blair were speaking this week about a new beginning for Iraq, the supply of electricity in the country has fallen from 12 hours a day to six hours. On Canal Street yesterday, close to the bombed-out UN headquarters, there was a two-mile long queue of cars waiting to buy petrol.”

Progress report. “A car bomb had just hit a U.S. military convoy passing down the main avenue Friday afternoon in southwest Baghdad`s Sayediyeh neighborhood, one of the near-daily attacks on occupation troops across Iraq. By the standards of Iraqi violence over the past two months, it was not particularly bloody. The U.S. military reported no serious casualties. But for what it told about Iraqis` attitudes toward the 13-month-old U.S. occupation, the attack was devastating.”

Blackouts. "With electricity in Baghdad flowing at less than half prewar levels and a scorching summer ahead, many Iraqis see the struggle to ensure adequate power as a metaphor for a U.S.-led reconstruction mission gone bad."

Insurgent attacks on Iraqi security forces increasing. “This month so far, Iraqi policing agencies have been involved in 67 engagements, according to U.S. military numbers, which are considered to be an undercount. If that trend holds, the total for June will come close to 200. In May, it was 147, and in April it was 135. Figures for the number of Iraqi security personnel killed weren`t available.”

Kofi Annan spanks Lieutenant AWOL. “UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Thursday that the war in Iraq has sparked a global crisis that must be resolved through international co-operation. ‘What kind of world would it be, and who would want to live in it, if every country was allowed to use force, without collective agreement, simply because it thought there might be a threat?’ he said at Harvard University`s commencement…’Once again, in recent weeks, the United States found that it needed the unique legitimacy of the United Nations to bring into being a credible interim government in Iraq,’ Mr. Annan said.”

General Zinni tears Rummy a new one. “’If there would have been a military failure heads would have rolled,’ Zinni said. ‘We need a civilian response. It has to start with the senior civilian leadership at the Pentagon, with the secretary of defense on down.’”

Commentary

Editorial: “The president`s failure to adequately staff the armed forces is just one way in which he fails his own commitment to what he called this week "the imperative of our age." The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed Mr. Bush`s view of the world, but he never adjusted his fiscal strategy; he continues to reduce the tax burden on the wealthy and leave the government without adequate resources for the fight. He has yet to invest the funds and energy, on a scale appropriate to an existential struggle, in public diplomacy, Arab-language training, foreign student exchanges, nuclear materials control and many other ventures that are key to eventual victory. And he has yet to acknowledge that the downsized military he favored in 2000 is no longer suitable in 2004.”

Editorial: “President Bush, sadly, is a much discredited salesman for his own campaign, so it is easier for these leaders to snub him. His decision to promote democracy in the region late last year, as the soured occupation of Iraq continued, raised questions about his motivation. The G-8 statement includes a nod toward the need to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But President Bush`s excessive deference to Ariel Sharon on Israeli settlements — along with his indifferent response to the American military`s torturing of Iraqi prisoners — has undermined his credibility in the Arab world.”

Editorial: ‘This is frightening for many reasons. It is frightening because it fits so neatly with other legal strategies of the Bush administration. The government has sought to put many of its prisoners in the war on terrorism beyond the reach of the law. At Guantanamo Bay, for instance, inmates are "enemy combatants," with neither the prisoner-of-war protections of the Geneva Conventions nor the due-process protections given accused criminals. They are in a legal black hole. Two U.S. citizens held in U.S. jails without charge or, until recently, access to lawyers or judicial review, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, are in a similar black hole. Maher Arar of Ottawa, shipped out of the United States to Syria under orders of the deputy attorney-general, also fell into the post-Sept.-11 black hole. In that black hole, the concept of human dignity is rendered meaningless.”

Analysis: “In the new Iraq, the US is caught in pincers of its own making, between the tribes and the mosque. The Americans thought that both of these powers could be ignored as they dreamily set about crafting a secular administration that would be dominated by the hand-picked exiles Washington had airlifted into the country as the dust of war settled.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: South Carolina soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: South Dakota Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Massachusetts soldier dies in Iraq.

Local story: Kansas soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier wounded in Iraq.

Awards and Decorations

Local story: Five ICDC members decorated for valor in Iraq.

Local story: Illinois Marine decorated for valor in Iraq.


86-43-04. Pass it on.




# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:48 AM
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From Capitol Hill Blue

Bush Leagues
Prominent DC Shrink Diagnoses Bush to be a Paranoid, Sadistic Meglomaniac
By Staff and Wire Reports
Jun 14, 2004, 00:22

A new book by a prominent Washington psychoanalyst says President George W. Bush is a "paranoid meglomaniac" as well as a sadist and "untreated alcoholic." The doctor`s analysis appears to confirm earlier reports the President may be emotionally unstable.

Dr. Justin Frank, writing in Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, also says the President has a ""lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions ... [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad."

Even worse, Dr. Frank concludes, the President`s years of heavy drinking ""may have affected his brain function - and his decision to quit drinking without the help of a 12-step program [puts] him at far higher risk of relapse."

Dr. Frank`s revelations comes on the heels of last week`s Capitol Hill Blue exclusive that revealed increasing concern by White House aides over Bush`s emotional stability.

Aides, who spoke only on condition that their names be withheld, told stories of wide mood swings by the President who would go from quoting the Bible one minute to obscenity-filled outbursts the next.

Bush shows an inability to grieve - dating back to age 7, when his sister died. "The family`s reaction - no funeral and no mourning - set in motion his life-long pattern of turning away from pain [and hiding] behind antic behavior," says Frank, who says Bush may suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Other findings by Dr. Frank:

* His mother, Barbara Bush - tabbed by some family friends as "the one who instills fear" - had trouble connecting emotionally with her son, Frank argues.
* George H.W. Bush`s "emotional and physical absence during his son`s youth triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge in George W."
* The President suffers from "character pathology," including "grandiosity" and "megalomania" -- viewing himself, America and God as interchangeable.

Dr. Frank has been a psychiatrist for 35 years and is director of psychiatry at George Washington University. A Democrat, he once headed the Washington Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

In an interview with The Washington Post`s Richard Leiby, Dr. Frank said he began to be concerned about Bush`s behavior in 2002.

"I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote, and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed," Dr. Frank told Leiby. Bush, he said, "fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated."

Dr. Frank`s expert recommendation? ""Our sole treatment option -- for his benefit and for ours -- is to remove President Bush from office . . . before it is too late."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to comment on the specifics of Dr. Frank`s book or the earlier story by Capitol Hill Blue.

"I don`t do book reviews," McClellan said, even though he last week recommended the latest book by the Washington Post`s Bob Woodward to reporters at the daily press briefing.

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Iraqis carried an injured man from a damaged building on Monday after a suicide bomb exploded in central Baghdad, killing at least 13 people.
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June 15, 2004
THE INSURGENCY
21 Killed in Iraq and Dozens Hurt in Bomb Attacks
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 14 - A suicide bomber rammed a truck packed with explosives into a convoy of foreign contractors on Monday, killing at least 13 people in a busy Baghdad neighborhood during the morning rush hour. Around the same time, two more bombs went off, one south of the capital, one north, claiming eight more lives, making it one of the deadliest days in Iraq in the past month.

One American, two Britons, a French citizen and a Filipino were killed in the Baghdad bombing, military officials said. Three were General Electric employees working on power plants in Iraq, and two were their security guards. Iraqi officials said dozens of Iraqis were wounded in the attack, in addition to the eight Iraqi civilians who were killed.

Iyad Allawi, Iraq`s designated prime minister, called a news conference to express his outrage at the violence. "These people were helping to rebuild our country," he said.

American officials said the bombings were part of a well-organized campaign to derail the June 30 transfer of authority. The officials have repeatedly warned of major terrorist strikes in the days leading up to June 30, and more than 80 people have been killed in the past two weeks in a rash of bombings and assassinations.

Yet even as the violence is peaking in Iraq, American forces are deferring, more and more each day, to Iraqi security services. Much of the political handover has already happened, and American officials say it is now important to allow Iraqi security services to play a bigger role. As a result, a power vacuum seems to be forming.

On Monday, for example, minutes after the Baghdad bombing, a crowd of young men flooded into the streets and rushed toward the wreckage of the convoy.

As more than 50 Iraqi policemen stood by, the mob stomped on the hoods of the crushed vehicles, doused them with kerosene and set them alight, sparking a huge fireball in the middle of a crowded neighborhood. Even as angry men ran past them, slipping through police lines to hurl bricks at a squad of American soldiers, few of the Iraqi policemen intervened.

"What are we to do?" asked an Iraqi police lieutenant, Wisam Deab. "If we try to stop them, they will think we are helping the Americans. Then they will turn on us."

The crowd became increasingly hostile, with one man shaking a severed finger, apparently from one of the people killed by the bombing, at a British reporter.

Arab news crews broadcast the mayhem, reinforcing the image of Iraq as a country skidding toward chaos. In Baghdad, the rumble of explosions has become almost like a morning alarm clock. Many of the bombs go off between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., during morning rush hour, to inflict the maximum number of casualties.

American and Iraqi officials say they are improving security cooperation in the days before June 30, sharing more intelligence and running more joint operations. But at the Baghdad bombing on Monday, there was very little communication between the sides. As clouds of black smoke boiled up from the street and the mob grew more and more unruly, American soldiers waited in their Humvees 50 yards behind Iraqi policemen, with neither group talking much with the other.

"The Americans say we are working together," said one police colonel who asked not to be identified. "But I am confused. Nobody is in control here."

Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for General Electric, said the company had been operating safely in Iraq for the better part of a year and would continue to do business there. "We have no intention of pulling our people out," he said.

There have been at least 12 car bombings since June 1, and usually both American soldiers and Iraqi policemen respond to the attacks. But a certain pattern is emerging. As soon as the American soldiers roll in, with their armored Humvees and swiveling guns, the crowds scatter. When the troops back off, no matter how many Iraqi policemen are there, the mobs return, in greater numbers.

Brig. General Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for the occupation military forces, said the Iraqi authorities were responsible for day-to-day public security in Baghdad.

"The Iraqi Police Service personnel feel that they have the situation under control," he said. "We remain ready to support if asked."

So far, the American military has fielded a security force of more than 215,000 Iraqis. Advisers have even formed an all-Iraqi counterinsurgency force and trained them in guerrilla tactics like ambushing trucks and camouflaging themselves as trees. But many American commanders, usually in private, concede that the Iraqi forces are not up to scratch.

"I think we`ve been focused more on quantity than quality," said one high-ranking American officer. "There`s a realization out there we still have a long way to go."

According to witnesses, the contractors were driving near Tahrir Square in central Baghdad on a street they often use to commute to work when a truck came zooming up, against traffic, and slammed right into them. The explosion blasted one vehicle off the road and into a garden 30 feet away, where it landed next to a palm tree. The explosion also ripped the facade off a nearby hotel and gutted several photography shops and juice stands.

Hussein Atiha was selling watermelon up the street when his stand was nearly knocked over by the bomb. Like many Iraqis, he seemed divided in his thoughts on the occupation, the future and the rising tide of violence. At one moment, as he watched the mob pound and kick the destroyed vehicles, Mr. Atiha shook his head.

"That is wrong," he said. "That is disrespectful."

But the next moment, Mr. Atiha, 21, said of the foreigners: "We have lost more than them. They deserve this."

Witnesses to the other bombings said that four Iraqi civil defense soldiers were killed at 9:45 a.m. on a busy street in Mosul, in northern Iraq, after their patrol hit a roadside bomb. The Associated Press reported that around the same time four people were killed in Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad, when a suicide bomber drove between police vehicles and detonated explosives. American and Iraqi officials blamed the attacks on terrorists connected to Al Qaeda, but they did not offer any evidence to back their claim.

There was a hint of good news on Monday, though. Around 9 a.m., a convoy of marines drove into the heart of the troubled city of Falluja, held a three-hour meeting with sheiks and then drove out without a shot being fired. Falluja remains one of the tensest places in Iraq, even after the marines agreed last month to pull out of the city and allow an all-Iraqi security force to patrol the streets. Masked insurgents continue to operate openly, though on Monday they were nowhere to be seen.

"Everybody was calm," said Jasim Muhammad Saleh, a former military officer and respected elder in Falluja. "The marines said many good things. The people here were happy to receive them."

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June 15, 2004
LAWS OF WAR
U.S. Is Urged to Charge Hussein Soon
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 14 - If the United States government does not bring charges against Saddam Hussein relatively soon it will be technically required, because of his prisoner-of-war status, to release him after the restoration of limited sovereignty, officials with human rights and aid groups said Monday.

None of the officials were advocating Mr. Hussein`s release, and they said they wanted him to stand trial. But they also said that since the United States insists that the occupation will formally end on June 30, when limited powers will be handed to the interim Iraqi government, the Geneva Convention requires that the Americans bring charges against their prisoners of war or release them.

"We`re not making any ultimatums or calls for release," Antonella Notari, chief spokeswoman of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Associated Press in Geneva on Monday. "What we`re saying is: `Saddam Hussein, as far as we understand today, is a P.O.W., prisoner of war, protected by the third Geneva Convention as all prisoners of war are.`

"In theory, when a war ends and when an occupation ends, the detaining force has to release prisoners of war or civilian detainees if there are no reasons for holding them."

But she added that a prisoner of war who is suspected of committing criminal acts should be prosecuted and tried rather than simply released.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Mr. Hussein had "long-established ties" with Al Qaeda, The Associated Press reported. He offered no details to back up his assertion in a speech here before James Madison Institute, a conservative research group.

In making its case for war in Iraq, Bush administration officials frequently cited what they said were Mr. Hussein`s decade-long contacts with Qaeda operatives. They stopped short of claiming that Iraq was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, but critics say administration officials left that impression with the American public.

In an interview Monday on Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television channel, Iraq`s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said the United States would hand over Mr. Hussein and other leaders of his government for trial within two weeks.

"The transfer of Saddam Hussein and the others will take place within two weeks," Mr. Allawi said.

The State Department said Monday that the United States would negotiate terms with the Iraqi interim government for holding prisoners who, like Mr. Hussein, were deemed to be threats.

Wilder Tayler, the legal director for Human Rights Watch, echoed Ms. Notari`s statement that prisoners of war should be released at the end of a conflict or occupation unless they have been charged with any crimes.

"I wouldn`t say there is much time for retaining somebody after that," he said in a telephone interview.

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June 14, 2004
Al-Qaeda finds profits in drug trade
By Mark Huband

When chief warrant officer Jeffrey Fishel and his US Marine unit boarded a dhow crossing the Arabian Sea and arrested its crew on December 31, Mr Fishel`s senses confirmed what intelligence officers already suspected.

"The crew said they were fishing, but there was no smell of fish. And their nets were dry," said Mr Fishel. "We found some signs of narcotics on board, and then below deck was a thick block of ice. We dug through it, and found a false wall. Beyond that was 2,800 pounds of hashish."

The drugs seizure was the third in the area in three weeks. Its combined street value was $31m (?26m, £17m). But as significant as the drugs seizures were the identities of those associated with its sale. Of the 33 people arrested, 10 are being held in secret locations not only for being drug dealers but because they may have links with al-Qaeda, US military sources say.

The Arabian Sea seizures indicate that the global infrastructure that links al-Qaeda`s affiliates, sympathisers and Osama bin Laden`s close circle, may be evolving into an organised crime network - or at least tapping into existing criminal activities.

Despite growing evidence of the links between terrorist cells and organised crime, law enforcers are still uncertain how to tackle this new aspect of the terrorist threat.

After the US-led war in Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban regime in late 2001, al-Qaeda was forced to scatter. The freezing of about $130m of alleged terrorist funds worldwide, and action to stop charities channelling donations to the terrorists, have forced activists to find their own incomes.

The great success of the war on terror has been in hindering al-Qaeda`s access to these funds. By using the proceeds of crime, al-Qaeda can circumvent many of the formal financial measures now ranged against it.

The drugs trade is a key source of finance in al- Qaeda`s central and south Asian heartland, partly because the export route from Afghanistan is well- established and accessible.

Afghanistan is the source of 70 per cent of the world`s heroin poppies - and probably the drugs seized by the US in the Arabian Sea - US military and intelligence officials say. Narcotics, which contribute $2.5bn to the Afghan informal economy, are worth $30bn on the streets of Russia, western Europe and North America.

"Groups in Afghanistan have drugs, and they sell it to Russian gangs. The relationships are fundamentally amorphous and fluid, and although they operate within a network, they are each doing their own thing," said a leading expert on Russian organised crime.

"But there is no question at all that al-Qaeda funding in Afghanistan and Pakistan is from drugs."

If al-Qaeda operatives such as those caught on the Arabian sea want direct access to the lucrative top end of the drugs markets - rather than selling at the less profitable start of the chain - the geographical spread of their criminal connections is likely to expand.

US investigators say some of the most useful intelligence they are now receiving on terrorists linked with al-Qaeda has been given by informers or infiltrators of crime gangs.

Al-Qaeda`s contacts with other alleged crime gangs also emerged in late 2002. FBI agents posing as drugs dealers in Hong Kong agreed to buy five tonnes of hashish and 600 kg of heroin from three men alleged to be associated with al-Qaeda.

The men - Ilyas Ali, Muhammed Abid Afridi and Syed Mustab Shah - were taped in a Hong Kong hotel room saying the drugs would be swapped for four "Stinger" anti-aircraft missiles. They apparently said they planned to sell the missiles to al-Qaeda.

At a federal court in San Diego in March, Mr Ali and Mr Afridi admitted conspiring to distribute hashish and heroin and conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda. Mr Shah pleaded not guilty.

Michael Skerlos, assistant US Attorney, said after the hearing that the men were in it for the money. "Although the motive appears to have been financial, the result was an attempt to provide support to a terrorist organisation." The case adds weight to the FBI`s growing suspicion that the terrorist network has meshed with criminal gangs dealing in drugs and arms.

According to Igor Khripunov, an expert on Russian and central Asian security issues at the University of Georgia in the US, a series of fires at arms depots in Russia in the late 1990s were started deliberately by crime gangs to hide their trail after they had stolen large stocks of arms and ammunition.

"Organised crime is a very flexible phenomenon," said Mr Khripunov. "It reacts to supply and demand. The criminal groups themselves are not ideologically motivated."

The black market arms trade is a key area of contact. Security officials say Russia is the main source of weapons available to terrorists. Intelligence officials have confirmed that Strela missiles used by al-Qaeda affiliates in attacks in 2001-2 in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kenya had consecutive serial numbers. All came from the same munitions factory south of Moscow.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004.

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June 15, 2004
He Pushed the Hot Button of Touch-Screen Voting
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Kevin Shelley is a big and voluble Irish politician, the son of a former San Francisco mayor, and not the sort you would figure for the heretofore semi-obscure job of California secretary of state. But Mr. Shelley, who was elected to the post in November 2002 after a career as a state legislator, has adapted the job to suit his style, taking the arcane matter of voting machines and turning it into a hobbyhorse that some predict he could ride to the governor`s office.

Mr. Shelley, a Democrat, has gained national notice for his skepticism toward touch-screen voting and his insistence that voters be able to look at a paper record inside the voting booth to verify their ballots. He says such paper trails are crucial if government wants voters to have confidence that their ballots are being counted correctly.

As a result, he has ordered that after July 1, 2005, no county in California can buy a touch-screen system without a paper record that is verifiable by the voter, and as of July 2006, all touch-screen systems here must be equipped with paper trails, regardless of when they were bought. Until the machines have that capability, he wants people who do not trust them to have the option of voting by a traditional paper ballot.

Then, on April 30, he banned the use of certain touch screens in 4 counties and decertified them in 10 other counties until additional security measures could be put in place.

"Someone said to me, `The problem with Kevin Shelley is, he`s an activist,` " Mr. Shelley recalled in an interview earlier this month in his office here overlooking the black-and-gold dome of City Hall in San Francisco. "I plead guilty. But, oh my God, never has it been more important to be an activist."

His directive has national implications because 40 percent of all touch-screen voting machines in use are in California. If vendors start making equipment to the specifications of the huge California market, that market is likely to dictate what is available to the rest of the country.

But Mr. Shelley`s advocacy of paper trails has set off a fierce and emotional reaction among local election officials in California and elsewhere and has brought the purchase of such systems to a near standstill. Nearly one third of voters nationwide this November will vote on touch screens.

Local officials say that despite demonstrations from computer experts that hackers can break into the machines, there is no evidence that anyone has done so. Moreover, voters may expect an actual, individual receipt after they vote; what happens instead is that a paper record, visible to the voter, is created in the machine. Officials have also expressed concern about paper jams.

Mr. Shelley`s insistence on paper trails has prompted officials in four California counties to sue him. The clash is being repeated in other states and courtrooms and has even roiled the venerable League of Women Voters, where advocates of paper trails tried to overthrow the league`s establishment, which has been against them. They settled yesterday on a compromise resolution to support "secure, accurate, recountable and accessible" systems, all code words for paper trails.

Conny B. McCormack, the respected registrar of Los Angeles County, the biggest voting jurisdiction in the country, has emerged as one of Mr. Shelley`s chief critics. Ms. McCormack said that Mr. Shelley had confounded local officials by handing down directives that require a technology that does not yet exist. Rather than inspire voter confidence, she said, Mr. Shelley has undermined it.

(Manufacturers have said that if the technology were required, they could supply it, but not in time for the November elections.)

"He put out a report on April 20 saying that touch screens were 100 percent accurate," Ms. McCormack said. "And then two days later he decertified them." She said such actions had "destabilized the entire election process in California and potentially nationwide."

In random testing during the March 2 California primary, Mr. Shelley`s office found that the machines "recorded the votes as cast with 100 percent accuracy."

In an effort to prod the industry, Mr. Shelley yesterday issued standards for the manufacturers in developing paper trails, the first in the country. They include requirements that voters who are disabled be able to vote and verify their vote without assistance, that voters be able to verify their votes before casting them and that the paper records be printed in both English and the voter`s preferred language.

"I`m insisting, quite unapologetically, on the need to have these appropriate security measures in place to protect the voters, which is my principal charge," Mr. Shelley said.

Mr. Shelley, 48, grew up in politics, the son of Jack Shelley, a former mayor of San Francisco. His father also served in Congress and the California Legislature, where, he was one of two lawmakers to vote against the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

"My dad`s vote seems like a no-brainer now," Mr. Shelley said. "But at the time, it spoke to who he was and what he believed in, and he passed that on to me." (Jack Shelley died of lung cancer in 1974, when his son was 18.)

Mr. Shelley began his career as a legislative director in Washington for Representative Phil Burton, a liberal icon in California. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and then the State Assembly, where he served for the allowable limit of three two-year terms and became majority leader.

He said he ran for secretary of state because he wanted to counteract the decline in voting, though he has used the office to highlight other issues, like domestic partner rights and corporate responsibility. Mr. Shelley did not deny an interest in the governor`s office someday but said his goal for now was "to make policy and set precedent; it has nothing to do with my future."

Eric Jaye, a political consultant here and longtime associate of Mr. Shelley, said he had transformed what was essentially an administrative post "into a bully pulpit."

Several recent analyses have bolstered Mr. Shelley`s view that touch screens need more security. These include a recommendation by the chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission that every voting jurisdiction that uses touch screens enhance their security, with either paper trails or other methods, by November.

A joint report issued yesterday by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the National Science Foundation endorsed touch screens with paper trails as the most effective voting system.

Still, many officials who run elections believe the push for paper trails is more window-dressing than a necessary expense.

San Bernardino County, which is among those suing Mr. Shelley, plans to ignore his directive to provide separate paper ballots for those uncomfortable with touch screens. "It would be an expression of a lack of confidence in the machines," for which the county just spent $14 million, said David Wert, a spokesman for the county supervisors.

In May, the supervisors noted that Mr. Shelley had certified the county`s system before the March 2 primary and that "absolutely nothing has occurred since that certification to call the system`s performance or reliability into question."

To those who say he is only fanning fears, Mr. Shelley laughs.

"If a machine breaks down in San Diego, and it breaks down in Georgia, and they break down in Maryland, and they break down in Alameda and we have high schools where they can hack into the systems, the deficiencies are in the machines," he said.

"Look," he added, "I believe these machines have a very, very firm place in our future, but I also believe that in responding to the chaos in Florida in 2000 these machines were rushed out before all the kinks were worked out."

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June 15, 2004
POLITICAL MEMO
Reaganite by Association? His Family Won`t Allow It
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, June 14 - As Republicans try to cloak President Bush in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, their biggest obstacle may be Mr. Reagan`s own family.

Even before Mr. Reagan died, Nancy Reagan and her daughter, Patti Davis, made their opposition to Mr. Bush`s policy on stem-cell research well known. But on Friday, at the culmination of an emotional week of mourning for the former president, his son Ron Reagan delivered a eulogy that castigated politicians who use religion "to gain political advantage," a comment that was being interpreted in Washington as a not-so-subtle slap at Mr. Bush.

The remark has provoked intense debate among Republicans about precisely what the younger Mr. Reagan meant. Some saw the reference to religion as a message to the administration on stem-cell research. Others saw it as a possible critique of the war in Iraq. Still others insist there was no deeper message at all.

But a friend of the Reagan family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Reagan, who did not return a call seeking comment on Monday, was deeply uncomfortable with the way the Bush administration intertwined religion and politics and felt compelled to say so at the burial of his father, a ceremony watched by millions.

"I think he was making a more profound statement about style," this friend said, "and the danger of religion in politics."

First families often cause trouble for presidents. Jimmy Carter, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton each had brothers who made them uncomfortable from time to time. But rarely does the family of one president step on the toes of another. The Reagans and Bushes, who have had famously strained relations throughout the years, may be an exception, as Nancy Reagan and her children guard Ronald Reagan`s legacy, fending off efforts by both the right and left to trade on it for political gain.

"I think Nancy would not want that," said Barbara Kellerman, a Harvard expert on leadership who has written a book on first families. "She is not mad about the Bush family, and the last thing she intends is for W. to inherit her beloved and sanctified husband`s mantle."

Ron Reagan, a television commentator who has frequently been critical of Mr. Bush, has already said as much. In 2000, he fired a shot at Mr. Bush in Philadelphia during the Republican convention, which featured a tribute to his father. "What`s his accomplishment?" Mr. Reagan asked then. "That he`s no longer an obnoxious drunk?"

Last year, in an interview with the online magazine Salon, Mr. Reagan renewed his critique, making clear his distaste for the Bush administration.

"The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he`s in now," Mr. Reagan said then. "Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the 80`s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father`s - these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive and just plain corrupt. I don`t trust these people."

Mr. Reagan was not quite so pointed on Friday night. "Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man," he told mourners gathered at sunset at the Reagan presidential library. "But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians - wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference."

The remarks caused jaws to drop in California and Washington. One Republican strategist, who would not be identified for fear of repercussions to his business, said he interpreted the remarks as a clear reference to stem-cell research, which Mr. Bush opposes on moral grounds because they require the destruction of human embryos.

"I thought clearly Ron Jr. was sending a message to the administration to be tolerant and understanding of this issue," the strategist said.

He said he was also struck by Mr. Bush`s eulogy during the service at the National Cathedral. "I thought his speech was deliberately biographical in nature about Reagan, to try to show people that his biography is close to Bush`s."

A number of Republicans are openly making that association. "Bush`s name may be Bush," said Kenneth M. Duberstein, Mr. Reagan`s former chief of staff, reiterating a comment he made last week, "but his heart belongs to Reagan."

But Mr. Duberstein, who is close to Nancy Reagan and guided her in her advocacy of stem-cell research while her husband was suffering from Alzheimer`s disease, said that did not mean Mrs. Reagan would let the stem-cell issue subside.

"Nancy Reagan is not somebody who walks away from anything," Mr. Duberstein said. "When she takes on a cause and a belief, she is very much like her husband. I think this one is very dear to her heart."

It is also dear to her family. Ms. Davis wrote passionately about her father`s illness in the online version of Newsweek, this week and last month. "A messy, horrible war that has spun out of control could very well determine the next election," Ms. Davis wrote before her father`s death. "So should the miracle of stem-cell research - a miracle the Bush White House thinks it can block."

Such pronouncements could spell trouble for the president, said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. "Nancy Reagan is now an icon, related to someone that America thinks very highly of who had the disease that might be cured by stem-cell research," he said. "That`s pretty powerful."

But Republicans who are promoting the idea that Mr. Bush is Mr. Reagan`s political heir say the dispute over stem cells and the Reagan family`s comments will not put a dent in the association.

"Ronald Reagan has to be looking down from heaven and smiling at the way the current president, generally speaking, stands and the things he`s doing, even though they might well disagree on some specifics," Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said Monday. He added, "In eight days of nonstop nationwide focus, you get on the ninth day a slight hiccup."

Funeral Draws 35 Million Viewers

Just over 35 million viewers tuned in to the channels carrying the funeral of President Ronald Reagan on Friday night, the high viewing point for the coverage on the Reagan funeral events last week.

That was a big increase for the cable news networks that carried the events, though it represented a small decline compared with the entertainment programming on the broadcast channels the previous week. Among the broadcast networks, ABC had the largest audience, with 8.1 million viewers. On cable, Fox News had by far the biggest audience with about 5 million viewers.

Compared with other news events covered by all the broadcast networks, plus CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and CNBC, the funeral did not have an especially high number of viewers. The last State of the Union address, for example, was watched by 43.4 million viewers on those channels.

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une 15, 2004
California Leads on Warming

Filling a leadership vacuum left by President Bush and Congress, states have been forced to lead the fight against global warming. Yesterday California unveiled an ambitious proposal to require automakers to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming by as much as 30 percent over the next decade.

The plan will almost certainly be challenged in court by the automakers and possibly by the Bush administration. Given California`s long history as an innovator in environmental policy, however, the initiative is likely to inspire similar efforts in other states and may have the further salutary effect of forcing the issue of climate change — which even Senator John Kerry has shown little inclination to tackle — onto the campaign agenda.

The plan grows out of legislation passed by the California Legislature two years ago. It would require manufacturers to start reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the 2009 model year with the aim of achieving a 30 percent reduction by 2015. Since carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming cannot be filtered in the same way that catalytic converters filter out harmful smog-forming particles, the only way to cut global warming emissions is to reduce fuel use. That means making more fuel-efficient cars.

The manufacturers are likely to argue in court that this is merely a backdoor way of mandating a tougher fuel-economy standard, which under current law is a federal responsibility. The manufacturers will also complain about having to sell cars in states with different regulatory mandates. This is a legitimate problem, for which Washington must be blamed. Given the federal indifference, California cannot be expected to refrain from acting on its own to address global warming.

The state`s plan still faces further regulatory and legislative review. Nevertheless, whatever emerges is likely to serve as a template for similar action in other states, particularly on the East Coast, where concern over global warming runs high. In New York, Gov. George Pataki, for instance, is organizing a 10-state regional plan to cut power plant emissions, and he has announced that he will follow California`s lead on automobiles. Altogether, more than 30 states have approved global warming laws of one sort or another, many of them aimed at encouraging greater use of less-polluting fuels.

All of that leaves Washington bringing up the rear of a parade it ought to be leading. Mr. Bush reneged on his 2000 campaign promise to impose mandatory caps on carbon dioxide, and Congress has rejected all efforts to mandate meaningful increases in fuel efficiency.

Local measures alone are never going to solve the climate-change problem, which will ultimately require a global response. And that battle will never be fully joined unless America joins it. But the palpable concern on the state level may in time serve as a goad to national action.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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What`s the difference between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush?

George is only dead from the neck up.



I`m Matt Mahoney and I approved this email

Matt Mahoney - Springfield, Ohio
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June 15, 2004
The C.I.A. and Iraq

It is no secret anymore in Washington that the Senate Intelligence Committee has produced a 400-page indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency`s bungling on Iraq and of the hype and wishful thinking that underpinned President Bush`s decision to go to war. Yet the administration continues to withhold the committee`s critique from the public while the agency`s own censors vet it slowly, excruciatingly slowly, for classified material they deem too risky for disclosure.

A two-week task has grown to four weeks-plus, and it may drag on further, leaving the Senate panel`s leadership threatening the rare step of seeking a vote to release the report before the C.I.A. and ultimately the White House have signed off on it. "They don`t want it out," concluded Senator John Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the panel`s ranking Democrat. The agency denies this, claiming there are various errors to corrrect and significant sections to delete or rewrite.

But the intelligence panel`s chairman, Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, is correct in stressing that there has been time enough to review the report and that the public`s right to know is now paramount.

The delay compounds public mistrust of the administration`s interest in such disclosures; last week, the State Department was caught in an erroneous claim that the war on terror was producing a decline in the number of incidents and victims.

The Senate report, based on more than 200 interviews with intelligence analysts, gets at the heart of the question of how the president`s drumbeat for war came to be based on a claimed threat of cataclysmic weapons in Iraq that turned out to be hollow. It is time for the painful truth to emerge.

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"I personally hold Blair more responsible for this war in Iraq than I do George W. Bush, and the reason is Blair knows better. Blair is not an idiot. What is he doing hanging around this guy?" -Filmmaker, MICHAEL MOORE"
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Why Did the Chicken cross the Road?

Coalition Provisional Authority:

The fact that the Iraqi chicken crossed the road affirmatively demonstrates that decision-making authority has been transferred to the chicken well in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

Halliburton:

We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost the US government $326,004.

Muqtada al-Sadr:

The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed.

US Army Military Police:

We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken rights violations.

Peshmerga:

The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill.

1st Cav:

The chicken was not authorized to cross the road without displaying two forms of picture identification. Thus, the chicken was appropriately
detained and searched in accordance with current SOP`s. We apologize for any embarrassment to the chicken. As a result of this unfortunate incident, the command has instituted a gender sensitivity training program and all future chicken searches will be conducted by female soldiers.

Al Jazeera:

The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to eye-witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens.

Blackwater:

We cannot confirm any involvement in the chicken-road-crossing incident.

Translators:

Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.

U.S. Marine Corps:

The chicken is dead

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June 15, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Travesty of Justice
By PAUL KRUGMAN

No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.

For this column, let`s just focus on Mr. Ashcroft`s role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn`t even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure.

We can`t tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft`s post-9/11 policies are protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest otherwise.

First, there`s the absence of any major successful prosecutions. The one set of convictions that seemed fairly significant — that of the "Detroit 3" — appears to be collapsing over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. (The lead prosecutor has filed a whistle-blower suit against Mr. Ashcroft, accusing him of botching the case. The Justice Department, in turn, has opened investigations against the prosecutor. Payback? I report; you decide.)

Then there is the lack of any major captures. Somewhere, the anthrax terrorist is laughing. But the Justice Department, you`ll be happy to know, is trying to determine whether it can file bioterrorism charges against a Buffalo art professor whose work includes harmless bacteria in petri dishes.

Perhaps most telling is the way Mr. Ashcroft responds to criticism of his performance. His first move is always to withhold the evidence. Then he tries to change the subject by making a dramatic announcement of a terrorist threat.

For an example of how Mr. Ashcroft shuts down public examination, consider the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former F.B.I. translator who says that the agency`s language division is riddled with incompetence and corruption, and that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings. In 2002 she gave closed-door Congressional testimony; Senator Charles Grassley described her as "very credible . . . because people within the F.B.I. have corroborated a lot of her story."

But the Justice Department has invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege" to prevent Ms. Edmonds from providing evidence. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred to.

For an example of changing the subject, consider the origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6, 2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr. Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot. Instead of featuring Ms. Rowley, news magazine covers ended up featuring the "dirty bomber" who Mr. Ashcroft said was plotting to kill thousands with deadly radiation.

Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an "enemy combatant" with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that "administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention — that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological `dirty bomb` — has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used in court."

But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft, apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a memo on torture his department prepared for the White House almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn`t work: The Washington Post has acquired a copy of the memo and put it on its Web site.

Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down: if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain that accompanies "serious physical injury, such as organ failure," it`s not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn`t apply to interrogations of enemy combatants "pursuant to [the president`s] commander-in-chief authority." In other words, the president is above the law.

The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press conference yesterday — to announce an indictment against a man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The timing was, I`m sure, purely coincidental.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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Das Erbe Reagans
von Dennis Hans
ZNet 10.06.2004
Es ist eine typische Eigenart der Amerikaner einen Menschen erst nach seinem Ableben richtig würdigen zu können. Dies trifft sicher auch auf den Fall unseres 40en Präsidenten zu, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Sein Name, das ist wahr, hing schon vor seinem Tod an einem Autokennzeichen aus Kalifornien, einem Flugzeugträger und einem Gebäude der Bundesregierung. Aber all dies wirkt richtig mickrig im Vergleich zu den Ehrungen, die ihm Jahre zuvor von einer Horde dankbarer Nationen und Völker zuteil wurden. Gedenken wir, während wir zusätzliche Auszeichnungen für Mr. Reagan in Erwägung ziehen, einiger der kreativen Ehrenbezeugungen, die der Vorstellungskraft unserer internationalen Freunde erwuchsen, um diesen Mann und seine Werte niemals zu vergessen.

*Afghanistan. "Der Opium Ronnie". Diese Mohnblüte ehrt Präsident Reagans Beitrag zum explosiven Wachstum der afghanischen Heroinindustrie in den 80er Jahren, durch seine bedingungslose Unterstützung für die extremsten islamischen Fundamentalisten und ihrem gerechten Widerstand gegen die mörderische sowjetische Besatzung. Wenn sie nicht gerade die Rote Armee oder rivalisierende Guerillas bekriegten, oder Zivilisten terrorisierten und nicht-militärische Passagierflugzeuge beschossen, bauten Reagans Lieblingsfundamentalisten Opium an, verarbeiteten es zu Smack und versorgten damit drei Viertel aller Europäischen, und ein Drittel der amerikanischen Junkies. Ein zusätzlicher islamistischer Salut an Ronnie, für sein Hinwegsehen als der Pferdehandel boomte, und die Weigerung seinen beträchtlichen Einfluss einzusetzen, um eine Moderierung oder die Aushandlung eines Abkommens mit dem nur-zu-willigen Mikhail Gorbachov zu unterstützen. Es ist unnötig allzu lange beim Postskriptum zu verweilen: zusätzliche Hunderttausende afghanische Tote, gefolgt von Nachkriegschaos und dem Aufstieg einer so schrecklichen Regierung, dass die Afghanen den Taliban als Befreier begrüßten. Der Taliban seinerseits, rollte den roten Teppich für Osama bin Laden und Al Qaeda aus, die . Nun, Sie kennen den Rest der Geschichte.

*Angola. "Der Gipper Stumpf". Dieses Holzbein aus polierter Eiche ist ein herzlicher Gruß des Präsidenten zur Zeiten des Kalten Krieges, der mit dem südafrikanischen Apartheidstaat zusammenarbeitete, um Jonas Savimbi und seine UNITA Terroristen bewaffnet und gefährlich erhalten zu können, und so den Boom des angolanischen Marktes für künstliche Gliedmassen - ganz zu schweigen von Friedhöfen - sicherte. "Vielen Dank, dass Sie sich eins für den Gipper eingefangen haben", lautet die Inschrift. "Mit besten Wünsche für Sie und Ihre verbleibenden Gliedmassen. - In Liebe, Ronnie."

*Argentinien. "Die Reagan Inseln". Technisch gehören die früheren Falkland / Malvinas Inseln nicht mehr zu Argentinien, aber die Argentinier stimmten für den neuen Namen, um Ronnies Rolle bei der Wiederherstellung der zivilen Herrschaft in ihrem Land zu ehren. Seine enthusiastische Unterstützung der folterlustigen, antisemitischen Generäle - wahre Magier, mit der Fähigkeit Dissidenten und deren Angehörige "verschwinden" zu lassen - überzeugte das Oberkommando davon, dass Reagan ihre Partei ergreifen würde, wenn sie die umstrittene Inselgruppe besetzen würden. Sie lagen falsch, und Margaret Thatchers Gegenangriff erwies sich für die Generäle als so verwüstend und erniedrigend, dass sie die Regierung wieder an die Zivilisten zurückgaben.

*Kambodscha. "Der Reagan Schädelsack". Dieser praktische Tragesack der Marke `Roter Khmer`, hält bis zu 25 menschliche Schädel. Der Schädelsack wird in Anerkennung für die unerschütterliche Unterstützung der Reagan Regierung für Pol Pots Anschläge auf die Bevölkerung Kambodschas 1981-1989 verliehen, sowie für Reagans Politik, exilierte Rote Khmer in der U.N. als legitime Regierung Kambodschas anzuerkennen.

*Costa Rica. "El Rancho Reagan." Die ehemalige "Tarn-Farm" eines CIA und Contra-Kollaborateurs, El Rancho Reagan, wird im Zustand ihrer Glanzzeit Mitte der 80er Jahren bewahrt. Die Lounge der Contra Killer befindet sich im Garten, der Safe ist vollgestopft mit Cash für die Bestechung der Staatsbeamten von Costa Rica, um über die Verletzungen der Neutralität ihres eigenen Landes hinwegzusehen, und Kilos von Kokain liegen bereit zur Auslieferung.

*El Salvador. "Die Reagan Missionarpositionierung". Nein, nicht die Sexstellung die bei der Vergewaltigung amerikanischer Kirchenfrauen einzunehmen ist, (das würde von schlechtem Geschmack zeugen), sondern Positionierung wie in "Haltung". Die Reagan Missionärpositionierung, formuliert von den führenden Staatsbeamten Al Haig und Jeane Kirkpatrick, besagt, dass diese drei Nonnen und eine Laie, pro-marxistische "politische Aktivisten" gewesen seien, und somit kaum als unschuldig anzusehen. Außerdem war ihre Ermordung ein Unfall, keine geplante Exekution. Haig erklärte, dass die Kirchenfrauen eine "Straßensperre" geleitet hätten, oder diesen Eindruck erweckten, und möglicherweise ins "Kreuzfeuer" einer Auseinandersetzung der Nationalen Garde mit der Guerilla geraten sind. Wurden sie also im Kreuzfeuer vergewaltigt? Die Lippen der Reagan Missionärpositionierung sagt nein, aber ihre Augen sagen ja.

*Guatemala. Die "Reagan `Verleumdung` Verleumdung". Großmeister Ronnie wandte diese Verleumdung in 1982 an, um Berichte von Amnesty International und anderen Institutionen zu diskreditieren, die die Abschlachtung tausender indianischer Dorfbewohner durch das Militär, in den ersten Monaten der Regierung von General Efrain Rios Montt vermeldeten. Ronnie ließ verlauten, dass Rios Montt (ein evangelischer Minister mit dem Spitznamen "wiedergeborener Schlächter", "verleumdet" würde. Das schöne an der "Verleumdungsverleumdung" ist, dass sie die "militärische Impunität" stärkt, die von Reagan als Grundpfeiler der Pseudo-Demokratie eines Klientenstaates erachtet wird.

*Honduras. "Reagans Lausbuben." Diese wilden Kerle von Bataillon 316 bildeten eine geheime Einheit CIA-unterstützter Folterer und Mörder. Sie säuberten Honduras von echten und eingebildeten Subversiven und Dissidenten, unterstützten Reagans heißgeliebte Contras, und sicherten die ungebrochene Herrschaft korrupter Armeeschläger hinter einer zivilen Fassade - ein weiterer Grundpfeiler der Pseudo-Demokratie eines Klientenstaates.

*Haiti. "Ronnie Doc." Duvalier Loyalisten zeichneten Reagan mit der höchsten Ehrung aus, die ein Haitianer stehlen kann: den Doktor in Kleptokratie. Papa Doc und Baby Doc erwarben sich ihren auf die harte Tour, während Reagans Ehrendoktor verkündet, "Lange nachdem das rückgratlose State Department sich von dem sinkenden Duvalier Schiff distanzierte, blieben Sie standhaft. Anders als die ignoranten haitianische Massen, haben sie Baby Docs extravaganten Stil niemals beanstandet."

*Kurdistan. "Reagan Extrascharf." Nichts ist appetitlicher als menschliche Haut mit einer guten Schicht Senf, oder was das angeht, Senfgas, und genau das ist es, was den "Reagan Extrascharf" Hot Dog auszeichnet. (Großartig dazu eine Beilage aus weißen Bohnen und Bier). Irakische Kurden danken dem Gipper aus der Oberfläche ihres versengten Herzens, für seine Hingabe zu Saddam, während dieser sie mit Senfgas und anderen tödlichen Gewürze besprühte.

*Laos. "Der Ronnie Regen". In den Bergen von Laos lassen die Aprilschauer Bienenmist auf den Blumen regnen. Der "Ronnie Regen" ehrt die Desinformationskampagne des Weißen Hauses "Gelber Regen" von 1982 - verbreitet von den geistesgestörten Herausgeber des Wall Street Journals und vielen scheinbar geistig gesunden Mainstream Journalisten, die den jährlich anfallenden Bienenabfall als einen kommunistischen Anschlag mit chemischen Massenvernichtungswaffen darstellten.

*Libanon. "Der Reagan Zwinker." Fast so gut wie ein Nicken. Gehen Sie in das Haus eines beliebigen Mitglieds der libanesischen Phalange Miliz und Sie werden ein Hochglanzfoto vom schmucken Gipper sehen, der gerade das rechte Auge zudrückt. In 1982 bewerkstelligte Reagan den Rückzug der PLO Soldaten aus Beirut, indem er die Sicherheit der zurückbleibenden palästinensischen Zivilisten garantierte. Sobald sich die PLO zurückgezogen hatte, zog Reagan die U.S. Friedenstruppen ab. Das israelische Militär eröffnete daraufhin den Zugang zu den Flüchtlingslagern von Sabra und Shatila für die Phalange Milizen, die erbitterte Feinde der PLO waren und nicht geneigt irgendwelche echten oder eingebildeten PLO Sympathisanten mit Nachsicht zu behandeln. Die Milizen durchkämmten daraufhin die Lager, und ermordeten dabei etwa ein Tausend wehrloser Frauen, Kinder und alte Männer. Nur gut, das Reagans Zwinkern seine Garantie für nichtig erklärte.

* Nicaragua. "Die Reagan Mauer". Nach Vorbild des U.S Gedenkmonuments entworfen, das an die Amerikaner, die in Vietnam gefallen sind erinnert, führt die Reagan Mauer die Namen der Tausenden Zivilisten auf, die von dem "moralischen Äquivalent unserer Gründungsväter" (Ronnie`s Kosenamen für die Contras) ermordet worden sind. Ein Sternchen kennzeichnet einen sadistischen Mord - z.B. ein Elternteil, der vor Augen seiner oder ihrer Kinder verstümmelt wurde. Zwei Sternchen kennzeichnen einen sadistischen Mord, der von einem Reagan Handlager abfällig abgetan wurde - wie Elliott Abrams, Colin Powell, Ollie North oder George Shultz.

* Südafrika. "Das Reagan Weiße Haus." Kein Nachbau des Gebäudes aus der Pennsylvania Avenue, sondern ein Herrenhaus in Johannesburg, das aus einfacheren Zeiten stammt, als das Weiße noch die Alleinherrschaft über Pretoria ausübte, zu Präsident Reagans Entzücken. Für einen Eintrittspreis von 10 Rand können Sie die schwarzen Dienstboten belästigen, sie auffordern ihre Passierscheine vorzuweisen und in einer Kellerzelle, Nelson Mandela Doppelgänger verhören. Wettern Sie gegen die "Sowjetische Finanzierung des Afrikanischen Nationalen Kongresses" und denunzieren Sie es als "terroristisch" - genau wie es die Reagan Regierung getan hat. Verschwören Sie sich mit dem südafrikanischen Verteidigungsminister und dem Geist des CIA Direktors William Casey darüber wie man am besten die illegale Kontrolle über Namibia behalten und Angola und Mozambique destabilisieren kann. Natürlich, diese Destabilisierung führte zu Hunderttausende Tote, aber man kann doch kein Omelette machen ohne ein Paar Eier zu zerschlagen!

*Zaire. Der "Reagan Stock." Bevor er ins Exil gejagt wurde, marschierte Präsident Mobuto Sese Seko mit diesem goldverkrusteten Spazierstock. Seiner Zeit war der Reagan Stock ideal um das Gleichgewicht zu wahren oder einen Dissidenten zu verprügeln. Heute ist er in einem Museum von Kinshasa ausgestellt, als Erinnerung an die goldenen Jahren der U.S. - Zaire - Südafrika Allianz, als der unerreichte Plünderer Mobutu ein aufsteigender Stern der Reagan Doktrin war.

Zusätzliche Ehrungen wurden ihm in Indonesien, Osttimor, den Philippinen, Brazilien und Chile erwiesen, wo Menschen, die in den 80er Jahren für Freiheit und Demokratie kämpften, genau wussten wo Ronald Reagan stand.

Anmerkungen:

Dennis Hans ist ein freischaffender Autor, der an der Universität von South Florida in St. Petersburg Amerikanische Außenpolitik lehrte. Er kann erreicht werden unter [e-mail]

um den Sarkasmus dieses Textes richtig würdigen zu können, ist der Besuch der Webseite "The President Reagan Information Page" zu empfehlen (http://www.presidentreagan.info)

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Operation Enduring Free Trade
von Aziz Choudry
ZNet Kommentar 22.05.2004
Während sich die US-Streitkräfte in Falluja und quer durch Irak mit Bomben, Mord und Verstümmelungen ihren Weg zu “Freiheit” und “Demokratie” bahnten, wiederholte George Bush am 13. April 2004 vor der US-amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit seine Vision für den Mittleren und Nahen Osten:

„Solange ich Präsident bin, werde ich auf Freiheit drängen. Ich glaube ganz fest an die Macht der Freiheit... Ich glaube auch, und bin davon überzeugt, dass Freiheit nicht das Geschenk dieses Landes an die Welt ist. Freiheit ist das Geschenk des Allmächtigen an jeden Mann und jede Frau auf dieser Welt. Und als größte Macht dieser Welt sind wir verpflichtet, bei der Verbreitung der Freiheit zu helfen.“

Im Mittleren und Nahen Osten, wie überall, bedeutet für die US-Regierung „Freiheit” freie Märkte, freier Handel und Investitionen, und Freiheit für das US-Kapital, zu tun, was es will, wo es will und wann immer es will. Während seine Streitkräfte einen brutalen kolonialen Besatzungskrieg führen und dabei Irak in einen neoliberalen Spielplatz für US-Unternehmen umwandeln, eine Hölle auf Erden für Iraker, einen marktorientierten Vorzeigestaat zur Nachahmung für andere Länder des Mittleren und Nahen Ostens, ist die Handelspolitik der USA in der gesamten Region militärisch auf dem Vormarsch.

Im Mai 2003 verkündete Bush Pläne für die Schaffung einer US-amerikanisch-mittelöstlichen Freihandelszone (MEFTA) bis 2013. Die US-Handelsagenda für den Mittleren und Nahen Osten ist angeblich eine „Schritt-für-Schritt-Einfahrt” zu „engeren Handels- und Wirtschaftspartnerschaften mit den USA. Die USA planen die Integrierung einer Reihe von bilateralen Freihandelsabkommen (FTAs) in eine regionale Freihandelszone.

Der US-Handelsminister Bob Zoellick, der sich kürzlich selbst zum Experten für den Mittleren und Nahen Osten ernannt hat, sagte bei einem speziellen Treffen des WEF (World Economic Forum) in Jordanien im Juni 2003, dass der Islam und seine Geschichte und Kulturen des Mittleren und Nahen Ostens völlig kongruent seien mit einer neoliberalen Wirtschaft, die Region aber vom Weg abgekommen sei.

Nun – Dank dem Herrn (und gib die Munition weiter) – ist die US-Kavallerie zur Rettung eingetroffen und „erweckt eine pulsierende Vergangenheit wieder zum Leben“. Zoellick behauptete: „Wiederaufbau und -öffnung des Irak sind eine Chance zur Veränderung – eine Gelegenheit für die Völker der arabischen Welt zu fragen, warum ihre Region, einst ein Kerngebiet des Handels, weitgehend vom Gewinn dieses modernen Zeitalters der Globalisierung ausgeschlossen wurde.“

Denken wir also daran, indem mehr und mehr Iraker von den US-geführten Kräften ermordet, verstümmelt, gefoltert und missbraucht und ihre Häuser, Moscheen und Nachbarschaften zu Schutt gemacht werden, ist das Teil „einer Chance zum Wandel“.

Die US-Handelsagenda für die Region beinhaltet:

- Unterstützung einer WTO-Mitgliedschaft für „friedliche” Länder in der Region, die um sie nachsuchen;

- Angebot zu Verhandlungen über Rahmenabkommen für Handel und Investitionen (Trade and Investment Framework Agreements, TIFAs), die einen Rahmen für expandierenden Handel schaffen und noch ungeklärte Probleme lösen. TIFAs legen das Fundament für umfassende FTAs. Diese werden „die Teilnahme des privaten Sektors via Wirtschaftsräten fördern, die die Handelsagenda vorwärts treiben und uns helfen, die besonderen Probleme der Unternehmen anzugehen“;

- Angebot zu Verhandlungen über bilaterale Investitionsabkommen (Bilateral Investment Treaties, BITs);

- Angebot zu Verhandlungen über umfassende FTAs. Diese werden „alle Handelsschranken über alle Sektoren hinweg zu beseitigen – mit dem Ziel, die bilateralen FTAs in ‚subregionale’ FTAs auszuweiten, indem andere interessierte und qualifizierte Länder in die sicheren Häfen existierender Freihandelsabkommen eingebunden werden“. Marokko wäre die Nahtstelle für den Maghreb, Bahrain für die Golfregion;

- Vereinigung derselben in der MEFTA;

- Erhöhung von finanzieller und technischer Hilfe, verbunden mit dem Bemühen der Länder um Wirtschafts- und Handelsreformen.

„Indem viele Freihandelsinitiativen verfolgt werden, schaffen die USA einen ‚Wettbewerb für Liberalisierung’, der als Hebel für Offenheit in allen Verhandlungen wirken soll und Erfolgsmodelle etabliert, die an vielen Fronten eingesetzt werden können und der eine neue politische Dynamik entwickelt, die Freihandel in die Offensive drängt“, behauptete Zoellick diesen März.

Die bilaterale Handels- und Investitionsstrategie der USA im Mittleren und Nahen Osten erinnert zweifelsohne an eine Offensive. Diesen Februar schloss Washington mit den Regierungen von Jemen und Kuweit TIFAs ab. Im März unterzeichneten die USA TIFAs mit den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten (UAE) und Katar, und schlossen mit Marokko Verhandlungen über ein FTA ab. Ebenso fand die zweite Runde von FTA-Verhandlungen mit Bahrain statt.

Washington hat schon TIFAs mit Algerien(Juli 2001), Bahrain (Juni 2002), Ägypten (Juli 1999), Saudi-Arabien (Juli 2003) und Tunesien (Oktober 2002) abgeschlossen. Außerdem bestehen BITs mit Ägypten, Marokko und Tunesien, die in den frühen 1990ern in Kraft traten und seit 2001 ein BIT mit Bahrain.

1985 unterzeichneten die USA ein FTA mit Israel (als Ariel Sharon Industrie- und Handelsminister war), außerdem bestehen ein FTA und BIT mit Jordanien.

Beim bilateralen Handel besteht innerhalb der Region ein gewisser Wettbewerb um Begünstigungen von den USA. Kuwait bemüht sich, anstelle von Bahrain und Dubai das regionale Finanzzentrum zu werden. Im Februar pries der kuwaitische Minister für Handel und Industrie Abdullah Abdul Rahman Al-Taweel US-amerikanischen Wirtschaftsvertretern Kuwait an und verkaufte es als idealen Ausgangspunkt für ein US-Engagement in Irak. Kuwait tritt nun auch als Stellvertreter der [Interessen] der USA bei der OPEC auf und widersetzte sich der jüngsten Entscheidung zur Senkung der Ölförderung. Außerdem verabschiedete es vor kurzem ein Gesetz über ausländische Investitionen, das Investoren aus Übersee erlaubt, ihre eigenen Unternehmen in Kuwait zu 100 Prozent zu besitzen.

Andere Länder der Region haben sich ausländischen Investitionen geöffnet und in unterschiedlichem Ausmaß Staatsunternehmen privatisiert, was aber nicht ohne Widerstand und Kontroversen abging. Der jüngst wieder gewählte algerische Präsident Abdel Aziz Bouteflika versprach mehr Privatisierungen und Joint Venture-Partnerschaften. Er sagte, Algerien müsse „anfangen, die Wirtschaft im Kontext der beschleunigten Globalisierung auf die Ära ‚nach dem Öl’ vorzubereiten“. Die algerischen Gewerkschaften sind gegen diese Politik und die sie umgebende Geheimhaltung. Zu den Gegenmaßnahmen gehörte auch ein zweitägiger Generalstreik im Februar 2003, der praktisch das ganze Land lahm legte.

US-Unternehmen wollen Deals, die die Märkte öffnen und Regierungen zu Deregulierungen und Privatisierungen verpflichten. Und, natürlich, wollen sie NAFTA-plus-Garantien – einschließlich Regelungen zur Beilegung von Streitigkeiten zwischen Investoren und Regierung, die gegen Regierungen angewendet werden können für alle Maßnahmen und Unterlassungen, die sich nach Meinung der Unternehmen negativ auf ihre Investitionen auswirken.

Sie wollen den Dienstleistungssektor und die Öffentliche Beschaffung öffnen und versuchen, strengere Regeln für Geistige Eigentumsrechte als die der WTO zu erreichen. In der Leitung der US-Bahrain-FTA-Koalition sitzen Lionel Johnson von der Citigroup und William Rice von ALCOA, in der Leitung der US-Marokko-FTA-Koalition sitzen George Pickart von CMS Energy und Laura Lane von Time Warner Inc. CMS ist einer der Hauptinvestoren auf dem Elektrizitätsmarkt von Marokko, während ALCOA einen beträchtlichen Anteil an der Aluminum Bahrain Company (ALBA) besitzt.

Doch die US-Handelsagenda wird hauptsächlich von geopolitischen Interessen bestimmt, nicht nur von Handels- und Wirtschaftsinteressen. Die Zahlen sind sicherlich nicht gerade berühmt. Im Jahr 2002 exportierten die USA zum Beispiel Waren im Wert von 366 Millionen US-Dollar in den Jemen, während sie Waren im Wert von 246 Millionen US-Dollar aus dem Jemen importierten.

Dieses Jahr exportierten die USA Waren im Wert von insgesamt 419,2 Millionen US-Dollar nach Bahrain, während Exporte aus Bahrain in die USA einen Wert von 395,1 Millionen US-Dollar ausmachten.

Ein TIFA, BIT, oder FTA mit den USA ist ganz sicher ein Zeichen dafür, dass Washington die jeweilige Regierung als einen Verbündeten betrachtet.

Nachdem die algerische Regierung 2002 ihre Unterstützung für den „Krieg gegen den Terror” zugesichert hatte, verkündeten die USA, dass sie ihre militärische Hilfe für und Waffenverkäufe an Algerien für seinen Kampf zuhause gegen den Terror erhöhen würden. Seit 1981 ist Ägypten die Gastgeber für die alle zwei Jahre stattfindende Operation Bright Star – die sich zur größten multilateralen militärischen Übung, mit Teilnahme der USA und anderer bewaffneter Kräfte, entwickelt hat.

Kuwait, dem jüngst von Washington der Status eines wichtigen nicht-NATO-Alliierten verliehen wurde, war der Ausgangspunkt für die Invasion in Irak. Die 5. US-Flotte hat ihr Hauptquartier in Bahrain. Katar war im November 2001 Gastgeber der Doha-Ministerrunde der WTO und beherbergt das Zentralkommando der US-Streitkräfte.

Die nicht-Teilnahme an dem Wirtschaftsboykott gegen Israel ist eine Vorbedingung für Verhandlungen zu einem FTA mit den USA. Diese haben Einwände gegen die WTO-Mitgliedschaft von Ländern, die Israel weiterhin boykottieren, erhoben.

Im März 2001 sagte Timothy Deal, leitender Vizepräsident des US Council for International Business (USCIB), einem Finanzausschuss des Senats, dass die Hauptattraktion des FTA zwischen den USA und Jordanien „der Beitrag sei, den es zum Friedensprozess im Mittleren und Nahen Osten leisten könne”.

Bei einem Treffen der WTO in Genf im Februar unterstützten die USA einen Antrag, Irak bei der WTO einen Beobachterstatus einzuräumen, während sie – zum 15. Mal – den Antrag Irans in derselben Sitzung ablehnten, ein leuchtendes Beispiel für die Doppelstandards der USA im weltweiten Handel. Gemäß den Regeln der WTO kann jeder Staat eines Zollgebiets, der „volle Autonomie in seinen Außenhandelsbeziehungen besitzt“, den Antrag auf Mitgliedschaft stellen. Irak gehört ganz klar nicht in diese Kategorie, weil Wirtschaft und Politik von den USA kontrolliert werden – aber das kümmert die WTO anscheinend nicht.

Dann gibt es da noch Ägypten. Im Mai 2003 geriet Zoellick ins Schwärmen und sagte, „Ägypten sei offensichtlich das Herz der arabischen Welt... Es wird nicht einfach sein, aber wir werden den Anreiz eines Freihandelsabkommens dazu benützen und versuchen, ihre Reformen zu fördern.“ Wochen später – nachdem Ägypten aus der von den USA angeführten Klage gegen das de-facto-Moratorium der EU gegen genveränderte Organismen ausgeschert war – erklärte Zoellick schmollend, dass die USA keine Verhandlungen über ein FTA führen würden mit einem Ägypten, das „einiges zu erledigen habe“.

Während die USA zwar verneinten, dass Ägyptens Kehrtwendung in Sachen WTO/GMO der Grund dafür war, statuierten sie doch ein Exempel am größten Land der Region – eine Warnung an andere, Washington nicht zu verärgern. Ahmed Ghoneim, ein Gelehrter der Universität von Kairo, machte darauf aufmerksam, dass eine „Ameise” wie Ägypten versuchen sollte, einen „Kampf zwischen Elefanten“, EU/USA, „von Anfang an zu vermeiden. Beide Elefanten wurden sauer.” Ein ägyptischer Beamter sagte einem Reporter, dass Ägypten nicht wegen des GMO-Moratoriums gegen Europa in den „Krieg” ziehen könne, da 40 Prozent des ägyptischen Handels mit der EU abgewickelt würden.

Europäische Regierungs-, Unternehmens-, Handels- und politische Interessen in der Region sind weiterhin groß und die EU übt Druck aus auf die Regierungen, ihre Wirtschaft umzustrukturieren und zu öffnen. Aber viele haben das Gefühl, dass die Leistungen des „Barcelona-Prozesses” der EU, durch den diese versucht, die Mittelmeerländer in wirtschaftliche und politische Reformen einzubinden und bilaterale und regionale Handels- und Hilfsbeziehungen aufzubauen, ohne Reiz sind.

In einer Region, die stark von Öl und Gas abhängig ist, geht die Privatisierung in diesem Sektor – speziell der Upstream Production – nur langsam und kontrovers vonstatten, selbst unter den Regierungen, die offenbar auf Marktreformen festgelegt sind.

Die USA hoffen, dass die gewaltsame Umbildung von Irak in eine neoliberale Spielwiese für US-Unternehmen ein Beispiel für das politische Milieu schaffen wird, das ihrem Willen nach in der Region vorherrschen soll. Die erzwungene Privatisierung des irakischen Ölsektors, der Raffinerien, Pipelines und der dazugehörigen Infrastruktur könnte ein Modell sein für Privatisierungen durch andere OPEC-Länder, wodurch die Vorherrschaft des Kartells über den Energiemarkt geschwächt würde. Es würde auch den Druck auf die Regierungen des Mittleren und Nahen Ostens verstärken, diesen Sektor für ausländische Unternehmen zu öffnen.

Laut Zoellick, der Marokko als einen „guten Freund” beschrieb, zeigt währenddessen das kürzlich abgeschlossene FTA zwischen Marokko und den USA, dass Washington „fest entschlossen ist, tolerante, offene und erfolgreichere moslemischen Gesellschaften zu unterstützen“. Außerdem dient dieser Abschluss als Modell für Verhandlungen mit anderen Ländern im Mittleren und Nahen Osten und Nordafrika und als Anstoß für eine Reform der inländischen Märkte für den freien Markt.

Von einem Freihandelsabkommen mit der EU war Marokkos Landwirtschaftssektor weitgehend ausgenommen worden. Aber im Rahmen des FTAs mit Washington bekommt die US-amerikanische Agroindustrie zollfreien Zutritt, was den Lebensunterhalt marokkanischer Bauern bedroht, von denen 40 Prozent als Subsistenzbauern überleben. Mais und Sojabohnen aus den USA sind schon auf den marokkanischen Markt vorgedrungen.

Das US-amerikanisch-marokkanische FTA öffnet den Dienstleistungssektor Marokkos für US-Investoren. Diese kommen unter anderem aus den Sektoren Telekommunikation, Computer und damit verbundene Dienstleistungen, Tourismus, Energie, Transport, Finanzdienstleistungen, Versicherungen und den Unterhaltungssektor.

Da die Regeln in Bezug auf Geistige Eigentumsrechte strikter sind als die der WTO, könnte das US-amerikanisch-marokkanische FTA den Zugang zu Medikamenten bedrohen. In dem Abkommen wird die Dauer des Patentschutzes von 20 auf 30 Jahre verlängert. Das FTA bedroht das Überleben von Marokkos Generikaindustrie, die tausende Arbeitsplätze bietet und dem Gesundheitsministerium Millionen Dirham pro Jahr sparen hilft.

Die marokkanische Organisation zur AIDS-Bekämpfung Association de Lutte contre le SIDA (ALCS) warnte davor, dass das FTA ein „einen ernstzunehmenden Präzedenzfall” setzt, „für den die Länder des Südens Marokko verantwortlich machen werden, aber diese Länder werden weiterhin für den Zugang zu generischen Medikamenten kämpfen.“

Das Industry Functional Advisory Committee on Intellectual Property Rights for Trade Policy Matters (zu ihm gehören Vertreter der US-amerikanischen biotechnischen und pharmazeutischen und Infotainmentunternehmen) der US-Regierung konstatierte frohlockend, dass das FTA zwischen Marokko und den USA das „fortschrittlichste [Geistige Eigentumsrechte]Kapitel aller bisher verhandelten FTAs enthalte“.

Chadwane Bensalmia, der für die in Casablanca erscheinende Zeitschrift Tel Quel schreibt, ist besorgt darüber, dass, neben den Auswirkungen auf Marokkos Landwirtschaft und pharmazeutische Industrie, die Amerikaner Marokkos Kulturindustrie vernichten werden. Das Abkommen zu akzeptieren bedeutet seiner Meinung nach „die Aufgabe unserer Identität“.

Bushs Handelsagenda für den Mittleren und Nahen Osten soll die Invasion und Besetzung von Irak versüßen und die fortgesetzte Unterstützung der USA für Israel – das weiterhin die einzige Nuklearmacht der Region ist, und der illegale Besatzer von palästinensischem Land. Ungeachtet dessen, ob eines der Abkommen vor November den Kongress passieren wird, wird Bush den amerikanischen Wählern erzählen, dass Krieg und Freihandel die Welt zu einem sichereren Ort machen werden. Aber seine mit-uns-oder-gegen-uns-Welt bietet Rekolonisierung durch das US-Kapital für alle – mittels bewaffneter Aggression gegen „Feinde“ oder radikale Handels- und Investitionsabkommen mit „guten Freunden“.

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Abu Ghraib torture `was approved at senior military level`
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

13 June 2004

Compelling new evidence emerged yesterday that torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison were either endorsed or encouraged high up the US military chain of command, and that complaints by at least five military policemen assigned to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation were disregarded by their superiors for several months.

Army documents obtained by the Associated Press showed that the five objected to what they were asked to do last autumn, but that the noncommissioned officers they reported to did nothing to stop the beatings, sexual humiliation and brutal intimidation techniques practised in Abu Ghraib`s Tier 1/A.

The Army documents seen by the Associated Press - mostly transcripts of the military court hearings held so far - showed one soldier at Abu Ghraib complaining last November that the sight of prisoners being forced to masturbate and being stacked naked into human pyramids "made me sick to my stomach".

One lawyer representing Lynndie England, the most prominent of the accused soldiers, said in court: "It`s telling that another person ... did complain to their superior officer and was told, `There`s nothing wrong. You have to go forward.`"

One of the junior officers who received complaints, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, is among the six soldiers now being court-martialled for physical abuse inflicted on Iraqi prisoners.

Yesterday`s Washington Post, meanwhile, disclosed that the commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, had passed a policy document last September that approved the use of military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation and near-starvation diets.

General Sanchez, who announced that he was stepping down from his post soon after the scandal erupted in April, stipulated in the document he signed that such techniques (known in US military circles as "stress and duress", as opposed to torture) could be applied at will without approval from anyone outside Abu Ghraib prison.

The document - based on a similar list of techniques in use at Guantanamo Bay - was modified a month later after objections from US Central Command, the Post reported, with some of the 32 duress techniques dropped or subjected to approval higher up the system.

Subsequent events make clear that, whatever the policy, the system was lax enough for serious abuses - up to and including the killing of prisoners - to continue for several months. Considerable evidence has already emerged that that laxity was prompted from the very top of the Bush administration, following legal determinations by White House lawyers that the "war on terrorism" justified disregarding the Geneva Conventions and other articles of international law on the treatment of prisoners.

Even after General Sanchez`s list of interrogation techniques was modified, it still included such items as taking prisoners to a "less hospitable" location, restricting their diet, isolating them for more than 30 days, using dogs to intimidate them, and forcing them into "stress positions" for as long as 45 minutes.

Human rights organisations have said many of these provisions are direct violations of the Geneva Conventions and may well meet the formal definition of torture.

The administration, meanwhile, insists that the abuses were the result of unauthorised behaviour by a few "bad apples" and do not reflect broader policy.


15 June 2004 11:21

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Errors Are Seen in Early Attacks on Iraqi Leaders

By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT

The New York Times

Published: June 13, 2004

WASHINGTON, June 12 - The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.
Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful, and many, including the two well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons, appear to have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former government officials said.

The strikes, carried out against so-called high-value targets during a one-month period that began on March 19, 2003, used precision-guided munitions against at least 13 Iraqi leaders, including Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq`s No. 2 official, the officials said.

General Ibrahim is still at large, along with at least one other top official who was a target of the failed raids. That official, Maj. Gen. Rafi Abd al-Latif Tilfah, the former head of the Directorate of General Security, and General Ibrahim are playing a leadership role in the anti-American insurgency, according to a briefing document prepared last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The broad scope of the campaign and its failures, along with the civilian casualties, have not been acknowledged by the Bush administration.

A report in December by Human Rights Watch, based on a review of four strikes, concluded that the singling out of Iraqi leadership had "resulted in dozens of civilian casualties that the United States could have prevented if it had taken additional precautions."

The poor record in the strikes has raised questions about the intelligence they were based on, including whether that intelligence reflected deception on the part of Iraqis, the officials said. The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Mr. Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound, south of Baghdad, remains a subject of particular contention.

A Central Intelligence Agency officer reported, based primarily on information provided by satellite telephone from an Iraqi source, that Mr. Hussein was in an underground bunker at the site. That prompted President Bush to accelerate the timetable for the beginning of the war, giving the go-ahead to strikes by precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles, senior intelligence officials said.

But in an interview last summer, Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, of the Air Force, who directed the air campaign during the invasion, acknowledged that inspections after the war had concluded that no such bunker existed. Various internal reviews by the military and the C.I.A. have still not resolved the question of whether Mr. Hussein was at the location at all, according to senior military and intelligence officials, although the C.I.A. maintains that he was probably at Dora Farms.

One possibility, a senior intelligence official and a senior military officer said, is that Mr. Hussein was above ground in one of the houses that were not destroyed in the raid.

In the raid, the Air Force primarily used deep-penetrating munitions because of their ability to destroy an underground bunker. The person who was the primary source of the information about the bunker was killed in the raid, according to intelligence officials, but had described it using an Arabic word, manzul, that could have been translated either as place of refuge or as bunker.

A C.I.A. officer who relayed that report from a base in northern Iraq translated the word as bunker, said a senior intelligence official, who confirmed a detailed report that first appeared in "Plan of Attack," a book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

A Warning Sign

In retrospect, the failures were an early warning sign about the thinness of American intelligence on Iraq and on Mr. Hussein`s inner circle. Some of the officials who survived the raids, including General Ibrahim, have become leaders of what the Defense Intelligence Agency now believes has been a planned anti-American insurgency, several intelligence officials said.

"It was all just guesswork on where they were," said a senior military officer. Another official, a senior Army officer who served in Iraq, described early intelligence on the Iraqi leadership as producing "a lot of dry holes."

A third senior military officer described the quantity of "no kidding, actionable intel" as having been limited, but added, "In a real fight, you go with what you`ve got."

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Powell Says Terror Report Was a `Big Mistake`

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

Published: June 13, 2004

Filed at 12:10 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A State Department report that incorrectly showed a decline last year in terrorism worldwide was a ``big mistake,`` Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

He said he was working with the CIA, which helped to compile the data, to determine why the errors got into the report.

``Very embarrassing. I am not a happy camper over this. We were wrong,`` the secretary told NBC`s ``Meet the Press.``

Powell said he planned a meeting on the issue Monday and that the intelligence agency was working through the weekend in preparation.

``I`m not saying it is responsible until I sit down with all of the individuals who had something to do with this report: CIA, my department, members of my department, other agencies that contributed to it,`` Powell said.

``It`s a numbers error. It`s not a political judgment that said, `Let`s see if we can cook the books.` We can`t get away with that now. Nobody was out to cook the books. Errors crept in,`` he told ABC`s ``This Week.``

He pledged to release a corrected report as quickly as possible.

``I am regretful that this has happened. And we`re going to get it fixed, we`re going to get it corrected, and that`s the best I can do,`` Powell said.

A leading House Democrat, Rep. Henry Waxman of California, had challenged the findings, contending they were manipulated for political purposes. The conclusion that terrorism was on the decline was us ed to boost one of President Bush`s chief foreign policy claims, success in countering terror.

Waxman asked Powell for an explanation and the secretary called last week to say the mistakes for unintentional.

``He says it wasn`t politically motivated so I will accept that,`` Waxman said after their conversation. Still, the lawmaker said, ``We are still left with the fact that this report is useless until it is corrected.``

The April report said attacks had declined last year to 190, down from 198 in 2002 and 346 in 2001. The 2003 figure would have been the lowest level in 34 years and a 45 percent drop since 2001, Bush`s first year as president.

The report also showed the virtual disappearance of attacks in which no one died.

``There`s a new terrorist threat information center that compiles this data under the CIA. And we are still trying to determine what went wrong with the data and why we didn`t catch it in the State Departm ent,`` Powell said Sunday.

``It`s a very big mistake. And we are not happy about this big mistake,`` he added.

The department has said that one of the mistakes was that only part of 2003 was taken into account.

When the annual report was issued April 29, senior administration officials used it as evidence the war was being won under Bush.

``We weren`t saying terrorism has gone away. The report clearly says terrorism is a main problem facing the world today. We`ve got to continue going after terrorists,`` Powell said.

``But based on the data we had within the report, there was a suggestion that the number of incidents had dropped and it was the lowest since 1969,`` he added. ``That turns out not to have been correct. We were wrong. We will correct it.``

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Iraq Tactics Have Long History With U.S. Interrogators

By Walter Pincus

The Washington Post

June 13, 2004

A CIA handbook on coercive interrogation methods, produced 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, shows that techniques such as those used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a long history with U.S. intelligence and were based on research and field experience.

Declassified 10 years ago, the training manual carries in its title the code word used for the CIA in Vietnam, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963." Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presents "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation."

The specific coercive methods it describes echo today`s news stories about Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, for example, photographs and documents have shown that detainees were hooded, blindfolded, dressed in sloppy garb and forced to go naked.

The KUBARK manual suggests that, for "resistant" prisoners, the "circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring and of being plunged into the strange."

The 1963 handbook describes the benefits and disadvantages of techniques similar to those authorized for use at Abu Ghraib, such as forcing detainees to stand or sit in "stress positions," cutting off sources of light, disrupting their sleep and manipulating their diet.

And among the manual`s conclusions: The threat of pain is a far more effective interrogation tool than actually inflicting pain, but threats of death do not help.

Like the lists of interrogation methods approved for Iraq and Guantanamo, the KUBARK manual offers a menu of options for confusing and weakening detainees. A neat or proud individual was to be given an outfit one or two sizes too large without a belt "so that he must hold his pants up," the manual said. Forced changes in diet and sleep patterns should be done "so that the subject becomes disorientated [and] is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness."

Tactics involving deprivation of accustomed sights, sounds, taste, smells and tactile sensations were presented as primary methods for producing stress, and mirror the techniques seen at Abu Ghraib. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, approved in September a list of methods that included "sensory deprivation," "minimum bread and water," "light control," enforced silence and yelling at prisoners. Those methods have since been barred in Iraq.

The KUBARK manual cited research supporting the effectiveness of the deprivations. "Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light or weak artificial light which never varies, which is sound-proofed, and in which odors are eliminated," the manual said.

An experiment referred to in the handbook was done in the 1950s and involved conditions designed to produce stress before an interrogation -- similar to those applied to John Walker Lindh after his capture in Afghanistan. Lindh was tied to a stretcher naked and later held for long periods in a large metal container.

In the experiment done about 50 years earlier, volunteers were "placed in a tank-type respirator" with vents open so that the subjects could breathe but their arms and legs were enclosed in "rigid cylinders to inhibit movement and tactile contact." Lying on their backs in minimal artificial light, the subjects could not see their own bodies, and the respirator motor was the only sound.

Only six of the 17 volunteers completed the 36 hours of the experiment; the other 11 asked for early release -- four because of anxiety and panic, and the others because of physical discomfort.

The conclusion reached, the handbook said, was that "the early effect of such an environment is anxiety" and that "the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects," some of whom "lose touch with reality [and] focus inwardly."

The payoff of such techniques, the manual said, is that when the interrogator appears, he or she appears as a "reward of lessened anxiety . . . providing relief for growing discomfort," and that sometimes, as a result, "the questioner assumes a benevolent role."

When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."

"In general, direct physical brutality creates only resentment, hostility and further defiance," the manual said.

Intense pain, interrogators were taught, "is quite likely to produce false confessions concocted as a means of escaping from distress."

While pain inflicted by others tends to create resistance in a subject, the manual said, "his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself."

Reports from Iraq and Afghanistan indicate that detainees have been told to stand at attention for long periods or sit in "stress positions." In one of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, a hooded detainee is shown being forced to stand on a box with wires attached to his body. He was told he would get an electric shock if he moved. Seven military police soldiers have been charged in connection with the abuse shown in that and other photographs. Investigations continue into the role military interrogators played in those incidents.

In such situations, the manual said, the source of pain "is not the interrogator but the victim himself." And while the subject remains in that uncomfortable or painful position, he must be made to think that his captor could do something worse to him, creating in him the stress and anxiety the interrogator seeks.

Threats of death, however, were described as "worse than useless" because they can leave the prisoner thinking "that he is as likely to be condemned after compliance as before."

Experiments at that time also showed that creating physical weakness through prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold or moisture, or through drastic reduction of food or sleep do not work.

"The available evidence suggests that resistance is sapped principally by psychological rather than physical pressures," the handbook advised.

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General Sanchez Granted Latitude At Prison

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White

The Washington Post

June 13, 2004

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was approved in early September, shortly after an Army general sent from Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.

The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater detail than previously known the interrogation tactics Sanchez authorized, and make clear for the first time that, before last October, they could be imposed without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison. That gave officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees.

Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September, including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer in charge.

As a result, Sanchez decided on Oct. 12 to remove several items on the list and to require that prison officials obtain his direct approval for the remaining high-pressure methods. Among the tactics apparently dropped were those that would take away prisoners` religious items; control their exposure to light; inflict "pride and ego down," which means attacking detainees` sense of pride or worth; and allow interrogators to pretend falsely to be from a country that deals severely with detainees, according to the documents.

The high-pressure options that remained included taking someone to a less hospitable location for interrogation; manipulating his or her diet; imposing isolation for more than 30 days; using military dogs to provoke fear; and requiring someone to maintain a "stress position" for as long as 45 minutes. These were not dropped by Sanchez until a scandal erupted in May over photographs depicting abuse at the prison.

The Army has never said whether any of the particularly tough tactics that were authorized were used on detainees at Abu Ghraib or the other U.S.-run detention camps in Iraq before October, in the five-month period after the end of major combat operations in May 2003.

Officials have said that Sanchez approved the use of only one of the more severe techniques -- long-term isolation -- on 25 occasions after Oct. 12 and before the third set of rules was issued this May. The officials have described the abusive acts committed by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib before and during this time as aberrant activities conducted outside the rules.

One of the documents, an Oct. 9 memorandum on "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," which each military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib was asked to sign, sets out in detail the wide range of pressure tactics approved in September and available before the rules were changed on Oct. 12. They included methods that were close to some of the behavior criticized this March by the Army`s own investigator, who said he found evidence of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuse" at the prison.

The document states that the list of tactics in the memorandum is derived from a Sept. 10, 2003, "Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy" approved by Combined Joint Task Force-7, which Sanchez directs. While the document states that "at no time will detainees be treated inhumanely nor maliciously humiliated," it permits the use of yelling, loud music, a reduction of heat in winter and air conditioning in summer, and "stress positions" for as long as 45 minutes every four hours -- all without first gaining the permission of anyone more senior than the "interrogation officer in charge" at Abu Ghraib.

Although the October document calls attention to the strictures of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it neither quotes from that statute nor makes any reference to the Geneva Conventions` rules against cruelty and torture involving detainees.

Wendy Patten, a lawyer and U.S. advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said two provisions in the Oct. 9 document are particularly troubling. First, she noted its reference to "dietary manipulation -- minimum bread and water, monitored by medics" as a technique permitted with the approval of the interrogation officer in charge. "This seems a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require daily food rations to have enough quantity, quality and variety to maintain good health, prevent weight loss and prevent nutritional deficiencies," Patten said.

She also expressed concern about the policy`s blanket approval of "incentive item removal -- regarding religious items" as a tactic that may be used on civilian detainees, which she said appears to conflict with a Geneva Conventions requirement that detainees enjoy "complete latitude in the exercise of their religious duties."

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman did not defend these tactics. He said "there are a number of investigations that are looking not only into interrogation procedures and processes, but how they were implemented. The baseline standard for all interrogation as well as the security procedures for holding detainees has always been humane treatment."

The list of interrogation options in the document closely matches a menu of options developed for use on detainees held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay and approved in a series of memos signed by top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In January 2002, for example, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners there; although officials have said dogs were never used at Guantanamo, they were used at Abu Ghraib.

Then, in April 2003, Rumsfeld approved the use in Guantanamo of at least five other high-pressure techniques also listed on the Oct. 9 Abu Ghraib memo, none of which was among the Army`s standard interrogation methods. This overlap existed even though detainees in Iraq were covered, according to the administration`s policy, by Geneva Convention protections that did not apply to the detainees in Cuba.

The documents obtained by The Post, which include memos from Abu Ghraib and statements made by prison officials for the Army`s investigation, make clear that this overlap was no accident. No formalized rules for interrogation existed in Iraq before the policy imposed on Sept. 10, one day after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller -- who was then in charge of the Guantanamo site -- departed from Iraq. He was accompanied on the Iraq visit by at least 11 senior aides from Guantanamo, including officials from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.

While that list of options was subsequently truncated on Oct. 12, some military personnel at the jail told Army investigators that they lacked awareness or understanding of the changes.

For example, Spec. Luciana Spencer, a member of the 66th Military Intelligence Group who was removed from interrogations because she had ordered a detainee to walk naked to his cell after an interview, told investigators that the military police did not know their boundaries. "When I began working the night shift I discussed with the MPs what their SOP [standard operating procedure] was for detainee treatment," Spencer said in a statement. "They informed me they had no SOP. I informed them of my IROE [interrogation rules of engagement] and made clear to them what I was and wasn`t allowed to do or see."

A civilian contractor, Adel Nakhla, an interpreter for military intelligence, told investigators he was briefed on interrogation rules only after being implicated in an abusive event.

Yelling at detainees, a technique approved in September that appears to have been dropped in October, was nonetheless used throughout the last quarter of 2003, Army investigators were told. "It`s not common but it happens sometimes," Roman Krol, a military intelligence interrogator, told investigators on Jan. 31. "We asked them [military police] if they could come in and randomly yell at the detainee."

Moreover, when intelligence officers arranged for military police to help impose some of the more severe tactics, they often failed to specify how to do so, leaving wide latitude for potentially abusive behavior. Steven Anthony Stefanowicz, a civilian interrogator at Abu Ghraib, said, for example, that "the MPs are allowed to do what is necessary to keep the detainee awake in the allotted period of time. . . . I`ve referred to the MPs to give the detainee his special treatment . . . hence the MPs are not directed when and how this is to be administered."

Capt. Donald J. Reese, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company who assigned MPs to work in the isolation tiers, told investigators "it appeared that the MI [military intelligence] tactics were very aggressive and then appeared to taper in intensity as time went along."

But the atmosphere at Abu Ghraib was hardly one of strict adherence to the rules, other officials said. A photograph of the pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees -- one of the most notorious portraits of abuse -- was used as a screen saver on a computer in the isolation area where intelligence officers worked, according to Spencer`s statement.

Some of the rules for U.S. military personnel at the prison made it easy for people to duck responsibility for their actions, a factor that may also have opened the door to abuse.

The acronym MI "will not be used in the area," according to an undated prison memo titled "Operational Guidelines," which covered the high-security cellblock. "Additionally, it is recommended that all military personnel in the segregation area reduce knowledge of their true identities to these specialized detainees. The use of sterilized uniforms is highly suggested and personnel should NOT address each other by true name and rank in the segregation area."

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Last update - 01:52 13/06/2004
Brahimi quits post as UN envoy in Iraq
By Shlomo Shamir

NEW YORK - Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy to Iraq, announced his resignation from the post at a meeting yesterday of the Security Council and in the presence of Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The resignation, brewing for a number of days, shocked the diplomatic community at the world body.

Brahimi explained that his decision stemmed from great difficulties and frustration experienced during his assignment in Iraq. He said that he does not intend to return to Iraq.

The UN diplomat has still not delivered a letter of resignation but senior UN sources said the secretary general is already exploring possibilities for a replacement.

According to UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric, Brahimi`s current assignment in Iraq has been completed.
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Bush foreign policy comes under renewed attack, from within

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Monday June 14, 2004

The Guardian
American policy in Iraq will come under renewed attack from within this week when 26 former diplomats and military officers issue a statement critical of the White House.

The statement echoes an attack last month by 53 former US diplomats who accused the Bush administration of sacrificing America`s credibility in the Arab world - and the safety of its diplomats and soldiers - because of its support for the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

That in turn followed an open letter by 52 former British diplomats and government officials which was highly critical of Tony Blair, warning that his support for George Bush`s policies in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was "doomed to failure".

The latest statement, which comes as the American presidential election prepares to go into full swing, will call for Mr Bush`s defeat in November, according to sources who have seen it.

"Ever since Franklin Roosevelt the US has built up alliances in order to amplify its own power," one signatory, John Matlock, the ambassador to the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, told the Los Angeles Times.

"But now we have alienated many of our closest allies, we have alienated their populations," he said. "We`ve all been increasingly appalled at how the relationships that we worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered by the current administration in the method it has gone about things."

The signatories to the statement, to be released on Wednesday in Washington, call themselves Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change. Most of them were appointed under the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

They include Admiral William J Crowe, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the 1980s before becoming ambassador to Britain from 1993 to 1997, Arthur Hartman, an ambassador to the Soviet Union and France, and William Harrop, the US ambassador to Israel from 1991 to 1993 who was also an ambassador to four African countries.

Mr Harrop said: "A lot of people felt the work they had done over their lifetime in trying to build a situation in which the United States was respected and could lead the rest of the world was now undermined by this administration, by the arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others, the scorn for multilateral organisations."

In criticising the Bush administration`s abandonment of stability in the Middle East in favour of the aggressive pursuit of change, the statement goes to the core of the debate in US foreign policy circles over the influence of the so-called neo-conservatives.

A senior republican strategist told the Los Angeles Times: "For 60 years we believed in, quote, unquote, `stability` at the price of liberty, and what we got is neither liberty nor stability. So now we are taking a fundamentally different approach toward the Middle East. That is a huge doctrinal shift, and the people who have given their lives, careers to building the previous foreign policy consensus, see this as a direct intellectual assault on what they have devoted their lives to. And it is."

Cliff May, the president of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, said the group was out of touch.

"This seems like a statement from 9/10 people," he said, who do not see "the importance of 9/11 and the way that should have changed our thinking."

One of the signatories, Phyllis Oakley, the US defence department spokeswoman during Reagan`s second term, said the group`s criticisms went beyond Iraq.

"Unfortunately the tough stands [Bush] has taken have made us less secure," she said. "He has neglected the war on terrorism for the war in Iraq. And while we agree that we are in unprecedented times and we face challenges we didn`t even know about before, these challenges require the cooperation of other countries. We cannot do it by ourselves."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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War spending `has made country more vulnerable`
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

14 June 2004

America is "massively vulnerable" to another big terrorist attack because of President George Bush`s insistence on diverting resources from internal security to the war in Iraq, Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism chief has said.

He told The Independent the war in Iraq had taken focus and financing not only from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa`ida supporters but from homeland security programmes in the US. "America is massively vulnerable," Mr Clarke said. "Its chemical plants are vulnerable; its train systems are all vulnerable. We are a target-rich environment. There are lots of targets that could be made harder to attack but we are not doing that."

The invasion of Iraq, which Mr Clarke believes presented no threat to the US, had created three serious security problems, he said. Insufficient aid was being given to countries such as Yemen and Pakistan, where there were known to be terrorists, to help them strengthen security measures. Second, troops and resources such as satellite imaging, special forces and unmanned Predator drones, had been moved from the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to help the troops in Iraq. Third, the billions of dollars that had been spent in Iraq had used money that could have been spent on security within the US.

"The department has a long list of things they want to do - to secure trains for example, to prevent another Madrid [bombing] happening ... to secure chemical plants, to train first-responders. They are massively under-funded."

Mr Clarke served presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush snr and Bill Clinton, then was kept on as counter-terrorism chief by President Bush.

The administration denies the invasion of Iraq diverted resources and attention from the hunt for al-Qa`ida.


15 June 2004 11:56


© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Richard Clarke: `Iraq could be much more of a problem for America than if Saddam had stayed in power`
The Monday Interview: Former White House security chief
By Andrew Buncombe, in Washington

14 June 2004

Richard Clarke is the man who put the cat among the pigeons. This year, in the same week as the former counter-terrorism chief was giving evidence to an independent commission investigating the attacks of 11 September, Mr Clarke`s scathing account of the failure to deal with al-Qa`ida was published.

In his tell-all memoir, Against all Enemies, and in his public testimony, Mr Clarke could barely have been more provocative. Much of the blame for failing to stop the attacks of 11 September, he said, could be laid at the feet of the Bush administration. They ignored his warnings about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and - after al-Qa`ida had wreaked havoc and death in New York and Washington - President George Bush was distracted from taking on the terror network by his groundless wish to invade Iraq.

"Your government failed you," Mr Clarke told the hearing, turning to the relatives of those who died and who had come to Washington to hear his testimony. "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn`t matter, because we failed."

Not surprisingly, the administration hit back immediately. Mr Clarke was wrong, said officials. He was out of the loop, said Vice-President Dick Cheney. The White House now considered Mr Clarke an outcast.

He is a blunt, plain-spoken man, accused by some former colleagues of arrogance and even rudeness. But does he regret speaking out. "No, not at all," he said. "I always thought, particularly in a White House job if you placed a high value on being liked by the bureaucracy, if that was one of your primary goals, then you probably should not be in that job.

"The job of a White House NSC [National Security Council] staff person is to be an enforcer of presidential policy. The bureaucracy does not naturally do what the President tells it to do."

But Mr Clarke`s complaint is that the President and his senior staff, in the spring and summer of 2001, failed to listen to what he advised them about the dangers posed by al-Qa`ida "when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11". The day after the attacks, Mr Bush was already focusing on Iraq. "Look into Iraq, Saddam," Mr Clarke says he was told angrily as his officials briefed him on al-Qa`ida being almost certainly responsible for the attacks.

Mr Clarke, who now has a consultancy firm in Arlington, Virginia, remains uncertain whether al-Qa`ida could have been stopped. "I don`t think we know. It`s very facile to say it could have been or could not have been. There is absolutely no way of knowing. What I do believe is that had we known about the two al-Qa`ida individuals who were among the hijackers ... Had we known they were in the country, which the FBI at some level knew and which the CIA at some level knew, had my counterparts at the FBI and CIA known, had I known, then I firmly believe we could have caught those two.

"Now, you can draw all sorts of conclusions from that. One, is that, simply, there would have been 17 hijackers. Another conclusion is that we might have been able to pull strings on those two and find more of the 19. But even if we had rounded up all 19 there would have been another 19. There would have been another major attack. The point is that al-Qa`ida was on a march to have a major terrorist attack ... They would not stop until they succeeded in having one. So yes, we might have been able to stop a particular attack."

Apart from the missed opportunities he highlights, what might be of potentially greater concern is Mr Clarke`s belief that al-Qa`ida could easily attack again, and America and Britain remain exceedingly vulnerable. Another attack is not inevitable ("I think almost nothing is inevitable," he said) but possible.

He added: "I think it is harder but I can think of ways of them doing it and I`m sure they can imagine ways of doing it. It`s entirely possible there will be another major attack." A dirty bomb, he believes, is probably in the "too hard" category. It is more likely terrorists would use suicide-bombs to attack softer targets, such as casinos or shopping malls. "Those are the two scenarios I use all the time when discussing it," he said. "If you do eight guys in eight shopping malls you have an enormous effect on the economy ... so much of the US economy is tied up with retail sales.

"If you did four casinos with four guys you could destroy the economy of Las Vegas. There are lots of low-end ways of doing things. And the reason they have not done some of the low-end threats, I think, is because they set the barrier for themselves very high with the 9-11 attacks. They may want another major attack; they may feel that if they do less than a major attack [they] will look like a lesser force."

Richard Clarke has made a career out of telling uncomfortable truths. He was born in Boston, his mother a nurse and his father a worker in a chocolate factory. In 1961, aged 12, he won a chance to attend the prestigious Boston Latin School, whose famous former pupils include Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams. From there, Mr Clarke - an active opponent of the Vietnam War - went to the University of Pennsylvania to study for a career in national security. "I wanted to get involved in national security in 1973 as a career to make sure that Vietnam did not happen again." He spent five years in the Pentagon and then moved to the State Department. In 1992, he was taken on by the White House as a national security staffer. One of the first things he did there was to exert greater influence on the Counter-terrorism Security Group. Though his career stretched over four presidencies - Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr - it is the last for whom he reserves his most outspoken criticism. The American people were duped, he believes, by Mr Bush who came to office with a plan to invade Iraq but hid it during the election campaign. "It was very clear on 9/11, on the days immediately following when we had been attacked, that attention turned to Iraq, even as the smoke was still coming out of the World Trade Centre."

Mr Clarke believes Mr Bush`s decision to invade Iraq undoubtedly damaged the hunt for al-Qa`ida. He also believes it has diverted much-needed resources from Homeland Security, leaving the country unnecessarily vulnerable. "[Iraq] is a fiasco," he said. "We can only hope there is a way of minimising the losses and getting out in a way that allows us to leave behind some sort of stable government. If [it stays as it is] now there is a high risk that what we leave behind will be worse than what was there before ... Iraq could easily be much more of a problem for us than it would have been if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power."

The whistleblower highlights three ways in which the invasion of Iraq diverted resources from the real "war on terror". Money is not available for the Department of Homeland Security to protect potential targets such as trains and chemical plants adequately, funds are not available to help countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, which could do more to counter terrorism.

Finally, the war was a great propaganda coup for the jihadist movement. "It probably greatly increased its recruitment," he said. "There was a period of time as well ... where resources in the hunt for Bin Laden were pulled away, satellite resources, special forces, Predator [drones] were sent to Iraq, rather than sent to Afghanistan. That has been somewhat rectified but not entirely. If Bin Laden had written the scenario it would have been identical to what happened."

One of Mr Clarke`s friends from the national security council, is foreign policy adviser to the Democrat presidential nominee John Kerry. Mr Clarke has refused to endorse Mr Kerry in his bid for the presidency. "I do not want to be seen simply as a politically partisan commentator," he said. "I was a career civil servant. We don`t have as much a tradition of career civil servants as you do [in Britain] but we have senior executive service and I was a member of that for a long time. I have a lot of Republican friends and they agree with me on most of what I say.

"So I don`t want to lose the support of large numbers of Americans by my choosing sides, by choosing parties. I think this issue should be non-partisan. A large number of Republicans agree with me and I want them to speak out."

THE CV

Age: 53

Education: Boston Latin School and University of Pennsylvania

Career: 1985-88: Deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence

1985-92: State Department

1989-92: Assistant secretary for politico-military affairs

1998-2000: National co-ordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counter-terrorism

1992-03: Chair of the counter-terrorism group, National Security Council

March 2004: Testified to national commission on terrorist attacks

Author of `Against All Enemies: Inside America`s War on Terror - What Really Happened`


15 June 2004 11:58

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Red Cross ultimatum to US on Saddam

Release him, charge him or break international law, Bush told
Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Monday June 14, 2004

The Guardian
Saddam Hussein must either be released from custody by June 30 or charged if the US and the new Iraqi government are to conform to international law, the International Committee of the Red Cross said last night.

Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC, told the Guardian: "The United States defines Saddam Hussein as a prisoner of war. At the end of an occupation PoWs have to be released provided they have no penal charges against them."

Her comments came as the international body, the only independent group with access to detainees in US custody, becomes increasingly concerned over the legal limbo in which thousands of people are being held in the run-up to the transfer of power at the end of the month.

The occupation officially ends on June 30 and US forces will be in Iraq at the invitation of its sovereign government.

"There are all these people kept in a legal vacuum. No one should be left not knowing their legal status. Their judicial rights must be assured," Ms Doumani said.

Saddam and other senior officials of the old regime are the only Iraqi detainees to have been given PoW status. Hundreds of other Iraqis have been seized since the war often, according to critics, on flimsy suspicion and held for long periods without charge, usually without their families knowing for weeks where they are.

The ICRC visited the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in early June and found 3,291 detainees, including three women and 22 boys under 18. This was less than half the 6,527 it found in March.

President George Bush has promised to close the prison where US guards indulged in pornographic abuse of prisoners and several groups of releases have taken place since. But many prisoners have been transferred to other prisons.

The ICRC is angry that it has not been given exact figures for releases or the whereabouts of those who are moved from Abu Ghraib and it is hoping the end of the occupation will put pressure on the authorities to clean up their act. "If we consider the occupation ends on June 30, that would mean it`s the end of the international armed conflict. This is the legal situation.

"When the conflict ends the prisoners of war should be released according to the Geneva conventions," Ms Doumani said.

She accepted that US and other foreign forces would remain in Iraq.

Whether that meant an occupation continued would be "determined by the situation on the ground". The presence of foreign forces ought to be governed by a legal agreement with the host government.

The ICRC has made at least two visits to the former Iraqi president who is believed to be in a special prison at Baghdad airport.

Around 40 other members of the so-called "pack of cards", Washington`s list of high-level members of the former regime, are also there, most in solitary confinement.

Interrogation has been sporadic and none has been charged or allowed visits by their lawyers. A few have had family visits.

They include scientists who were never members of the Ba`ath party, like Dr Amer al Saadi, who was the Iraqi government`s liaison with the United Nations` weapons inspectors.

Family members claim they are being deliberately held without trial so as to be punished even in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing.

US lawyers have been helping Iraqis prepare charges against Saddam but officials say they do not expect a trial until next year at the earliest. The US and the Iraqi authorities hope other defendants will first testify against him.

But none has been willing to do so. Whether it is out of loyalty or fear of retribution by Saddam`s sympathisers is not clear.

Once charged the former president will be entitled to judicial guarantees including access to a lawyer and the right to prepare a defence.

The US has made clear it will continue to detain some Iraqis after the transfer of sovereignty as part of its security operations.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Convoy of Foreign Contractors Is Hit by Truck Bomb in Baghdad

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
and EDWARD WONG

The New York Times

Published: June 14, 2004

BAGHDAD, June 14 - A truck packed with explosives rammed into a convoy of foreign contractors and exploded in a massive fireball today, killing at least 13 people during morning rush hour.

Among the dead were two Britons, one Frenchman, one American and another foreigner of undetermined nationality, the American military said. A spokesman for General Electric said three of its employees, and two others contracted by the company to provide security, were among those killed.

The blast also wounded more than 60 people, including 10 foreign contractors, the military said.

Minutes after the explosion, a crowd of young men poured into the streets and rushed toward the wreckage.

As Iraqi police officers stood by, the mob stomped on the hoods of the crushed vehicles and smashed the windows, and lit American flags on fire.

"Oh Ali!" some yelled.

"Long live Sadr!" shouted others, referring to radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

A squad of American soldiers arrived shortly afterward and was greeted by a hail of rocks. The soldiers stayed for a few minutes and then pulled back.

It was the second car bomb in 24 hours, following an attack on Sunday that killed 12 Iraqis. It had been months since car bombs so fatal had been detonated in Iraq, and the incidents marked a surge in violence as a sweltering summer filled with political tensions began to set in. With no end to the insurgency in sight, many Iraqis - including those who once supported the ouster of Saddam Hussein - profess to having no confidence in the occupation.

The target of today`s bomb was a convoy of three sport-utility vehicles carrying foreign contractors working on Iraq`s power system, Iraqi and foreign government officials said. The General Electric spokesman, Gary Sheffer, said three employees of a wholly-owned G.E. subsidiary, Granite Services Inc., and two workers under contract as part of a security staff, were among those killed, Reuters reported. The company provided no information about the identities of the victims. Agence France-Presse said that a Filipino was among the dead.

The scene revealed not just the continuing anti-American resentment but the growing tolerance for disorder. Iraqi police officers watched as men lit the contractors` vehicles on fire, causing a huge secondary explosion in the middle of one of Baghdad`s busiest neighborhoods. Even as angry men ran past them hurling bricks at the American soldiers, none of the more than 50 policemen intervened.

"What are we to do?" asked Lt. Wisam Deab of the Iraqi police. "If we try to stop them, they will think we are helping the Americans. Then they were turn on us."

Arab television crews filmed the mayhem, sending out images reminiscent of the scene in Falluja in March when a mob attacked the vehicles of four American contractors who had been killed and dragged their corpses through the streets.

American and Iraqi officials have said they are trying to improve security cooperation in the run-up to the June 30 transfer of authority. But today, there was very little communication between American soldiers and Iraqi police.

As clouds of black smoke boiled up from the street, American soldiers waited in their humvees 50 yards behind Iraqi policemen.

"The Americans say we are working together," said one police colonel who asked not to be identified. "But I am confused. Nobody is in control here."

Iyad Alawi, Iraq`s new prime minister, said five of the people killed were foreign workers assigned to electricity projects.

"These people were helping to rebuild our country," Mr. Alawi said at a news conference today. "It was an unfortunate and cowardly act."

A policeman who carried some of the bodies away from the scene in his pickup truck before the mob came showed a British passport he found on one of the victims. The bed of his police truck was smeared with blood.

Iraqi hospital officials said eight Iraqi civilians were killed by the attack and dozens wounded.

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DOWNLOAD AND READ THE MEMORANDUM: ``RE: STANDARDS OF CONDUCT FOR INTERROGATION UNDER 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A", FROM THE THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT`S OFFICE OF LEGAL COUNSEL FOR ALBERTO R. GONZALES, COUNSEL TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (PDF Format) -
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Justice Dept. Memo Says Torture `May Be Justified`

By Dana Priest

The Washington Post

June 14, 2004

Today washingtonpost.com is posting a copy of the Aug. 1, 2002, memorandum "Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A," from the Justice Department`s Office of Legal Counsel for Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to President Bush.

The memo was the focus of a recent article in The Washington Post.

The memo was written at the request of the CIA. The CIA wanted authority to conduct more aggressive interrogations than were permitted prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The interrogations were of suspected al Qaeda members whom the CIA had apprehended outside the United States. The CIA asked the White House for legal guidance. The White House asked the Justice Department`s Office of Legal Counsel for its legal opinion on the standards of conduct under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The Office of Legal Counsel is the federal government`s ultimate legal adviser. The most significant and sensitive topics that the federal government considers are often given to the OLC for review. In this case, the memorandum was signed by Jay S. Bybee, the head of the office at the time. Bybee`s signature gives the document additional authority, making it akin to a binding legal opinion on government policy on interrogations. Bybee has since become a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Another memorandum, dated March 6, 2003, from a Defense Department working group convened by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to come up with new interrogation guidelines for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, incorporated much, but not all, of the legal thinking from the OLC memo. The Wall Street Journal first published the March memo.

At a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, senators asked Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to release both memos. Ashcroft said he would not discuss the contents of the Justice and Pentagon memos or turn them over to the committees. A transcript of that hearing is also available.

President Bush spoke on the issue of torture Thursday, saying he expected U.S. authorities to abide by the law. He declined to say whether he believes U.S. law prohibits torture. Here is a link to the White House transcript of the president`s press conference, which included questions and answers on torture.

The Post deleted several lines from the memo that are not germane to the legal arguments being made in it and that are the subject of further reporting by The Post.

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Rage Explodes After Another Baghdad Blast
Bombing in Heart of Capital Kills 8 Iraqis and 5 Foreigners

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 15, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, June 14 -- The insurgency against the U.S. occupation shook the heart of Baghdad on Monday with a powerful bombing that killed five foreigners and at least eight Iraqis -- all civilians -- and attracted a mob of enraged Iraqi men who screamed their anger at the United States, torched vehicles and vowed to kill any Americans remaining in their country.

Young men jumped on three bombed-out SUVs and smashed them with crowbars before setting them afire in scenes of uncontrolled fury heretofore unseen in the Iraqi capital with its extensive U.S. security. The blast was strong enough to rip the facade off a three-story building beside the street and rattle the Ishtar Sheraton Hotel about a mile away.

The U.S. military identified the slain foreigners as an American, two Britons, a Frenchman and one of unknown nationality. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, in a televised statement, said they were civilian contractors working to restore Iraq`s rickety electricity grid, whose constant failings are one of the Iraqis` main complaints against the 14-month-old U.S. occupation.

Papers found at the scene, written in French and English, described plans for improvements to Baghdad junction boxes by GE Energy Products France SNC. A General Electric spokesman in Brussels, Louise Binns, told the Associated Press that three of those killed worked for a GE subsidiary, Granite Services Inc., and the other two were their security guards.

Jassim Mohammed, director of the nearby Kindi Hospital, said at least five dead Iraqi civilians and 29 wounded were brought to his facility, including passersby and people from nearby blasted-out buildings. Officials at Baghdad`s neurological hospital told reporters three dead Iraqi civilians and 14 wounded were brought there.

"This terrorist attack is another cowardly action to attack the Iraqi infrastructure," Allawi said from the headquarters of the interim government in the heavily fortified area known as the Green Zone, surrounded by U.S. troops on the other side of the Tigris River.

As the mob kicked and flailed at the twisted vehicles shortly after the explosion and Iraqi police stood aside, a half-dozen Humvees roared up and U.S. soldiers jumped out. They pointed their M-16 automatic rifles and heavy machine guns at the crowd and, shouting obscenities, ordered onlookers away from the site of the explosion. One Humvee pushed its way into a knot of Iraqis to force them back over a low wall and into neighboring Nation Park.

Most Iraqis did not understand the vulgarities shouted by U.S. soldiers. But they understood the imperative tone and the brandished weapons, and many moved back. Half an hour later, the soldiers climbed back into their Humvees and, after lining up in two rows, drove slowly away from the chaos.

Iraqi police armed with pistols and automatic rifles then tried to restrain the crowd as it surged forward again. But the police, unwilling to fire on fellow Iraqis, were quickly engulfed by the mob and, after being threatened, pulled back while the shouting men burned a homemade American flag, set fire to the vehicles and chanted support for Moqtada Sadr, a Shiite Muslim cleric whose militia, the Mahdi Army, has confronted U.S. troops for weeks.

"Long live Sadr! Long live Sadr!" they shouted in rhythm as they marched down the street as oily black smoke billowed up behind them.

"We can do nothing about this chaos," said a policeman who declined to be identified by name. "These people would eat us if we tried to force them to leave. We have no authority, not enough weapons to protect ourselves. . . . They accuse us of being collaborators, so how can we convince them to obey us?"

The blast was the second fatal bombing in as many days in the Iraqi capital; a suicide car bomb killed 12 people Sunday in another part of the city. It was unclear whether Monday`s blast was caused by a street-side device or a bomb-rigged vehicle with a suicide driver. Whatever the method, the explosion left several taxis and other cars strewn about the site next to the blasted SUVs used by the foreigners.

Another bomb, aimed at police cars near Salman Pak about 20 miles southeast of the capital, killed four people Monday, police told the AP.

The continuing bombings -- more than one a day so far this month -- have created a growing impression among Iraqis of chaos and lack of control as the United States prepares to formally hand over limited sovereignty to Allawi`s interim government on June 30. U.S. and Iraqi officials repeatedly have speculated that creating such an impression is precisely the goal of those carrying out the violence.

Although no bloodier, Monday`s blast in the capital carried significantly more political meaning than its predecessors. It erupted from the point where Saadoun Street flows into Liberation Square, a central Baghdad traffic circle laden with the history of modern Iraq, from heroic sculptures commissioned by the country`s former dictator, Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem, after he overthrew the British-imposed monarchy in 1958 to the spot where, one decade and several coups later, Saddam Hussein had 14 Iraqi Jews hanged on espionage charges.

U.S. soldiers, backed by Bradley Fighting Vehicles, had returned and closed off the area by midday, while forensics specialists combed through the charred wreckage. The cordon caused a giant traffic jam as cars spilled off Jumhuriyah Bridge into the square. And it presented passing Iraqis with the spectacle of four U.S. soldiers -- kneeling in the unforgiving sun, their M-16s ready, concertina wire coiled in front of them -- just under the looming panel of carvings that Qassem ordered up to depict Iraq`s emergence from foreign domination.

Moreover, the mob of young men who shouted their contempt and anger at the United States, lumping it with Israel as an unredeemable enemy, brought to the capital`s center a display of anti-occupation fury previously seen only in outlying trouble spots such as Fallujah, 35 miles to the west, or Najaf, about 90 miles to the south. Men shouting at the top of their voices swore they had seen an Israeli flag in one of the vehicles shortly after the bomb detonated.

Many of the youths who took part, Iraqi witnesses said, came from the nearby Thieves Market, where street vendors, mostly dispossessed Shiites, line the sidewalk to sell their wares from makeshift tables. Poor and young, they have formed a ready pool of supporters for Sadr who clash nearly every day with occupation troops, particularly in the Sadr City slum of eastern Baghdad, and are eager to believe the worst about U.S. intentions here.

"It`s all the Americans` fault," shouted Amid Abdi, who displayed a bloody hand he said was wounded when the bomb went off as he walked nearby.

As he talked, a teenage boy, his head shaved close like that of a Marine, stepped up. "We will slaughter them," he said, drawing his fingers across his Adam`s apple.

"The bombings happening in Iraq these days are part of the U.S. plan," affirmed Wasam Basim, 24, who works for the Facilities Protection Service, a U.S.-financed corps assigned to prevent attacks such as Monday`s. "They are doing these bombings to show the world that Iraq is an unsafe country and they have to stay longer to maintain security. Also, they want to find an excuse not to hand over full sovereignty to the Iraqi government."

Ali Hussein, 32, a member of the same service, accused Iraqi police of paying more attention to the foreigners killed and wounded by the explosion than the Iraqis lying nearby.

"The police are traitors," he declared. "They moved the bodies of the foreigners and left the Iraqis lying in the street. They should all be killed. We have to burn these cars. We have to show them what it means to work against Iraq. This time we`ll burn the cars empty. Next time, we`ll burn them with their occupants inside."

Allawi, along with Interior Minister Falah Naqib and Defense Minister Hazem Shalan, blamed the bombings and assassinations that have hit Baghdad in recent weeks in part on Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian accused by the United States of being an al Qaeda terrorist leader fomenting violence against the United States in Iraq.

"The terrorist attack today in the Saadoun neighborhood and the assassinations in the last few days show that the terrorists are trying to stop the sovereignty handover process," Allawi declared. "Zarqawi and his followers, along with others, are working hard to prevent this process."

Shalan suggested things might get better after Iraqis take over security control from the 138,000 U.S. and about 20,000 allied troops. "Everybody knows that the coalition forces are handling security now," he said. "From now on, you will witness a change that will stop these terrorists."

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A `Moderation` of Freedom
Pakistan`s Pervez Musharraf Isn`t Practicing What He Preaches

By Samina Ahmed and John Norris

Tuesday, June 15, 2004; Page A23

Pakistan`s president, Pervez Musharraf, recently made a broad and seemingly heartfelt call for Muslims to raise themselves up through what he terms "enlightened moderation" [op-ed, June 1]. Decrying the influence of militants, extremists and terrorists, Musharraf insisted that political injustice lay at the heart of the vast suffering of Muslims around the globe. His path forward is for Muslims to disavow extremism in favor of socioeconomic progress and for the United States to take on a much bolder role in resolving political disputes in the Muslim world, particularly in places such as Palestine and Kashmir.

The words sound good, and such language from the leader of a nuclear nation on the front lines of the war against terrorism should be reassuring. But sadly, to most people who follow Pakistan closely, Musharraf`s comments come across as dangerously close to farce. While advocating enlightened moderation abroad, Pakistan`s leader is content to practice enlightenment in extreme moderation at home.

First and foremost, he continues to avoid handing real power back to democratically elected officials. While the Bush administration repeatedly holds up Iraq as a nation that could serve as a shining example of Islamic democracy in action, it continues to offer a blank check to a Pakistani government in which all power resides in the military. Curbs on democratic freedoms in Pakistan remain draconian. To discourage domestic dissent, the government has sentenced Javed Hashmi, leader of Musharraf`s main political opposition, to 23 years in prison for daring to offer criticism. And it deported an exiled opposition leader, Shahbaz Sharif, when he had the temerity to attempt to return home after the Supreme Court confirmed the right of all citizens to actually reside in Pakistan.

In the same vein, Musharraf`s domestic reforms are primarily aimed at strengthening military rule. For example, he promoted a recent plan for a devolution of power to local officials as a means to "empower the impoverished" and strengthen local government. Instead, it has undercut mainstream moderate political parties, left widespread corruption unchecked and shifted power away from the provinces as a means to bolster military rule.

U.S. officials are rightly beginning to grumble that they are not getting what they are paying for with billions of dollars of economic and military aid. In high-profile pledges two years ago, Musharraf vowed to crack down on madrassas, the religious schools where many Pakistani children receive their education and which have often been a wellspring of extremism. Pakistan has failed to deliver on those pledges; most madrassas remain unregistered, their finances unregulated, and the government has yet to remove the jihadist and sectarian content in their curricula.

The Pakistani government has taken a similar approach to jihadist organizations. The growth of jihadist networks continues to threaten both domestic and international security. After declaring that no group would be allowed to engage in terrorist activities in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the government ordered a number of extremist groups to do little more than change their name. One extremist leader was allowed to run for parliament, and won, even though he had been charged with more than 20 violent crimes. The leaders of other banned groups, designated as terrorist organizations by the United States, continue to preach freely their sectarian and anti-Western jihad. Pakistan has also notably failed to adequately address important issues such as terrorist financing, including money laundering, making the country a favorite base of operation for all too many extremist organizations.

Indeed, escalating sectarian violence in Karachi, deplored by the U.N. secretary general, painfully underscores the government`s failure to tackle extremists within its own borders. This failure was also shown in the government`s halting and contradictory statements after cordon and search operations in northwest Pakistan designed to apprehend al Qaeda operatives and Taliban militants. After initially trumpeting that the arrest of "high value" suspects was imminent, the government sheepishly had to admit that any such suspects had escaped as it engaged in negotiations with local tribesmen to free a number of captured Pakistani soldiers.

Pakistan could serve as the force of moderation and enlightenment espoused by Musharraf, but it will require enlightened leadership on his part. Pakistan`s military needs to return to the sidelines of political life and give its moderate political parties -- which have always done reasonably well in keeping a lid on extremism -- a chance to function. While the military has done a good job in using the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to strengthen its position, military governments across the globe have demonstrated that they usually do not stand the test of time or enlightenment.

Samina Ahmed is South Asia project director and John Norris is special adviser to the president of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that specializes in conflict resolution.

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Bush`s `Him-Too` Strategy

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, June 15, 2004; Page A23

In the past several weeks, there has been a remarkable shift in President Bush`s strategy for reelection. Bush once wanted to highlight his differences with John Kerry over Iraq and national security. Now the president is trying to blur them.

The change reflects the Bush campaign`s response to a widespread loss of public confidence in the administration`s handling of Iraq. What Bush`s lieutenants had once hoped would be a large plus in this year`s campaign is turning into a negative that Bush is trying to minimize.

From the days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, until very recently, Bush and his surrogates emphasized how much tougher Bush was than his opponents. Unlike the Democrats, Bush was willing to "go it alone" to battle terror. He was not prepared to wait for support from the United Nations and recalcitrant allies -- "to wait," as Bush himself once put it, "for somebody else to act."

Bush has now reversed both the public emphasis of his policy and the rhetoric of his campaign. A new phrase has entered the lexicon of Bush surrogates: Where Kerry was once denounced primarily as a wildly liberal senator from Massachusetts and a flip-flopper to boot, he is now accused of "me-tooism" on Iraq.

The Bush campaign Web site, for example, touts a statement made earlier this month by Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), who accused Kerry of "political `me-tooism` " and insisted that Kerry has "largely embraced the goals that the president has already laid to make the world a safer place."

Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican and a White House loyalist, also accused Kerry of "a striking amount of me-tooism" on foreign policy, while Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman has said that Kerry`s "only real strategy on Iraq is: `I wish I was doing it.` "

The Kerry camp makes the opposite point: that in seeking and winning a United Nations resolution supporting the new Iraqi government and in trying unsuccessfully at last week`s Group of Eight summit to win a NATO troop commitment to Iraq, Bush is himself flip-flopping and following Kerry`s lead.

But Kerry`s advisers also know the danger the new Bush gambit poses to their candidate. Bush`s drop in the polls and Kerry`s rise were fueled in large part by mounting violence in Iraq earlier this year, a strong public reaction against the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and a belief that the administration had planned poorly for the occupation on the basis of dangerously optimistic assumptions. The Bush campaign`s argument now amounts to a claim that Kerry would do no better.

Kerry himself has vigorously rejected the idea that his policies are similar to Bush`s, and the senator`s aides argue that the public sees a significant difference between Bush and Kerry on Iraq. "There`s a sense that Bush moved the nation too quickly to war on the basis of information that was false," said Tad Devine, one of Kerry`s top political advisers. Bush may be presenting himself as advocating policies that "sound the same" as Kerry`s, Devine said, but voters are skeptical that "Bush can suddenly become the guy who works well with other people" and can enlist allies in Iraq, given the president`s past go-it-alone rhetoric.

As doubts about the war grow, the Bush campaign`s "me-too" claims could serve additional purposes. They could increase pressure on Kerry to support a fixed date for a U.S. withdrawal. This might open Kerry to a new line of attack and alienate some moderate voters. Or the "me-too" charge could encourage the war`s staunchest opponents to support Ralph Nader`s third-party candidacy.

But Kerry`s aides and advisers see no likelihood that he will change his current course, and they doubt that antiwar voters will buy Bush campaign claims that there is no difference between the two major-party candidates.

A former top Clinton administration official argues that unless the situation improves dramatically in Iraq, Kerry`s stand will leave him with ample grounds on which to criticize Bush for "mistake after mistake."

"Kerry can argue that we are not safer because of the mistakes the administration has made," said this official. "He can say that we cannot afford things we need at home because of the high cost of the administration`s strategy. And he can make a strong case that there is no prospect that things are going to change unless we change presidents."

Blocking that argument is precisely why Republicans have become so fond lately of that moldy old political phrase "me, too." It`s not a slogan Bush ever expected to use.

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Settlements That Settle Nothing

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, June 15, 2004; Page A23

Fortunately for Jeffrey Goldberg, he not only once lived in Israel but served in its army. Without those credentials he almost certainly would be denounced as an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. After all, Goldberg had the consummate gall and utter chutzpah to say the obvious: Israel`s West Bank and Gaza settlements have to go.

Actually, Goldberg went even further. In nearly 16,000 words in the May 31 issue of the New Yorker, this Washington-based journalist wrote that in some ways, the Jewish zealots who have established settlements in the heart of overwhelmingly Palestinian areas are as great -- or greater -- a danger to Israel as their counterparts among the Islamic extremists, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. His article was titled "Among The Settlers; Will They Destroy Israel?"

For raising that question, he has come under unaccustomed attack. Goldberg has spent the past several years reporting and writing about Islamic radicalism and the threat it posed. This made him the darling of the neocons. But now he`s asking similar questions about Jewish zealotry, and for that his integrity, if not his very sanity, has been questioned by the usual American guardians of Israeli security. Among the slings and arrows sent his way was one from Andrea Levin, the head of a media watchdog group, published in the English-language Jerusalem Post. She called Goldberg`s piece "distorted and sloppy with facts." I read it quite differently: on the nose.

But what really matters is not this or that fact -- although I could find nothing wrong in Goldberg`s piece -- but his overall point. It is that not only has Israel gotten itself into a demographic and geographic trap with its settlements in Palestinian lands, but it has allowed the most reactionary, belligerent and racist elements in Judaism to establish some of the most provocative settlements. God might want these settlements, as the settlers themselves insist, but it is conscripts, mostly secular Jews, who have to guard them.

For American Jews to keep quiet about these settlements does Israel no favor. After all, in the long run the settlements are unsustainable -- difficult to defend militarily, impossible to defend legally. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has pledged to remove settlements from the Gaza Strip, but that still leaves the West Bank, with more than 2 million Palestinians -- and only about 200,000 Israeli settlers. The government seems to consider most of these settlements a permanent part of Israel. That`s exactly the way some Israelis saw the Gaza Strip. But Israel is pulling out -- not because it wants to but because it has to. The same will eventually happen in large parts of the West Bank. The longer Israel waits to deal with those settlements -- not all, mind you, but most -- the deeper it sinks into a quagmire. Goldberg has it right: These settlements, as much as Islamic radicalism, threaten Israel. The latter feeds off the former.

The observation is not original to either me or Goldberg. He quotes Michael Tarazi, a Harvard-trained Palestinian American who makes essentially the same point about the settlements. "The longer they are out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state," Tarazi said. Anyone who has seen how the settlements are protected and maintained, the weird road network for instance, can appreciate Tarazi`s point.

Much of Goldberg`s article is spent on Jewish religious settlers. But he talked to Palestinians, too. What they have to say is hardly encouraging, often downright frightening, and usually sad. But the issue for me is not what is good for the Palestinians -- I wish them a state of their own and also all the happiness in the world -- but what is good for Israel. Getting rid of the settlements would be good for the Palestinians. But it would also be good for Israel.

Some of what the Jewish settlers told Goldberg is disturbing. Many of them have a contemptuous, virtually racist, view of their Arab neighbors. They are wedded to the literal word of the Bible while much of Judaism is not, and while they by no means share the Islamic radicals` yen for martyrdom -- and they do not approve of the killing of innocents -- they are quite willing to die for their beliefs. Okay. But it is the nature of these things that they will take others with them. Not okay.

Goldberg has written a good article about some ugly facts -- and done so with a reporter`s keen eye, but also with a Zionist`s loving heart. It should be read by anyone interested in Israel. See for yourself.

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Iraq Conflict Disrupts U.S. Plans for Military
Goals of moving troops and building new bases to reflect end of Cold War are put on hold.
By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer

June 15, 2004

WASHINGTON — The prolonged war in Iraq has frustrated Bush administration efforts to modernize the U.S. military and has complicated plans to reposition troops from long-established bases around the world.

The pressing need for manpower in Iraq has delayed the shift of troops from Germany to the United States and drove the Pentagon to announce last week that it would move troops off the Korean peninsula to Iraq.

"The Iraq war is a vortex that is ripping apart the American armed forces and it is ripping up the ground forces," said Donald Abenheim, a professor at the Pentagon-run Naval Postgraduate School.

"The problem the leadership has is that it has this grand strategic plan that involves moving chess pieces around the globe. But its strategy does not seem to be working very well," he said.

Bush administration officials have been trying since their first days in office to take a cold-eyed look at changing security needs brought about by the close of the Cold War and advances in military technology.

Although it is too soon to know how severe the problem will be, U.S. officials acknowledged that the need to replenish forces in Iraq and keep troop numbers above 135,000 was affecting long-range planning. Observers in the defense establishment have begun questioning whether the strategic review can remain relevant in the face of the continuing conflict.

The Bush administration has not abandoned plans to revamp its global defense posture, but major pieces of the review have been buffeted by the mission in Iraq. The need to find replacements for battle-weary soldiers is delaying the repositioning of troops in Europe while accelerating the same goal on the Korean peninsula.

And although the Iraq war hastened a withdrawal of troops from South Korea, it also limited the administration`s choices. Some of those 12,500 troops are being sent to Iraq, foreclosing the option of sending them elsewhere or paring overall troop numbers, outside experts say.

Over the past month, the U.S. has announced two historic movements of troops out of South Korea, a shift that had been considered unthinkable for decades because of the North Korean threat. But with at least 3,500 troops — and possibly more — heading directly to Iraq from their bases in South Korea, anticipated opposition to the move has been muted.

In Germany, however, a cherished goal of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — to move the Army`s two fighting divisions from garrisons there to smaller bases to be built throughout Eastern Europe, where the troops would be closer to potential trouble spots — is on hold because of the burdens the Iraq conflict has put on an already stretched Army.

One of the German-based divisions, the 1st Armored, already has been sent to join the fight in Iraq. Moreover, 14,000 members of the division have been ordered to remain, after a year of service there and dozens of casualties. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said it was not out of the question that the 1st Armored would be asked to remain in the fight still longer, although other military officials expect the division to leave Iraq next month.

Because of the length of the deployment, the strain it has placed on soldiers` families and the larger constraints of the war in Iraq, defense officials say the idea of rotating the 1st Armored into and out of bases in Eastern Europe for short tours without the soldiers` families will have to wait.

At the Pentagon this week, senior administration officials working for the last 18 months on an assessment of troop numbers and deployments confirmed that in addition to the proposal to pull the two Army divisions from Germany, there are plans to reposition Navy command staff from London to Naples, Italy.

But the plan to build a string of training sites and bare-bones bases in Eastern Europe to make it easier to deploy forces to the Middle East, Central Asia and other potential hot spots has hit a snag. And with bases in the U.S. unprepared to handle the housing and training needs of the more than 30,000 soldiers who make up the two divisions, any move from their current stations in Germany could be a decade away.

In Asia, in contrast, the demands of the Iraq war appear to be greasing the wheels of Rumsfeld`s plan to shift forces from the Korean peninsula.

"In Korea, the crisis in Iraq is helping Pentagon planners make a move that Rumsfeld wanted anyway but wasn`t able to convince the world to accept," said Michael E. O`Hanlon, a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution.

"If they hadn`t had this need in Iraq, they might have had a problem convincing the Army and the administration to do this, because it`s counterintuitive at the very time we have a crisis on the Korean peninsula, to draw down forces."

Instead, O`Hanlon said, "the fact that we really do need forces in Iraq right now sort of trumps the coordination that we would normally do."

The pullout from South Korea could end up being largely offset by a buildup of U.S. forces elsewhere in the Pacific — specifically in Guam, where Pentagon officials envision stationing more aircraft and submarines, and in Hawaii, where an aircraft carrier may be relocated from the U.S. mainland. About 25,000 troops will remain in South Korea.

The re-basing plan is premised on the calculation that, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the emergence of sophisticated military aircraft and other defense technologies, it would be more efficient for the military to withdraw ground troops from South Korea, Japan and Germany and establish skeletal bases in Eastern Europe and the Central Asian republics that could serve as staging areas in the event of a crisis.

By that reckoning, long-range bombers, unmanned aerial vehicles and sophisticated computer systems would provide better security than would permanent garrisons of ground forces abroad.

There is concern, however, that paring the U.S. military presence abroad could undercut American diplomatic influence and add pressure on the military budget at a time when it is already strained.

A study last month by the Congressional Budget Office found that any significant shifts in forces overseas would require substantial spending. It estimated that although annual savings could exceed $1 billion, the net up-front investment to resettle U.S. troops "would be substantial — on the order of $7 billion." The study concluded that the redeployments "would produce at best only small improvements in the United States` ability to respond to far-flung conflicts."

To deploy troops "from the likely locations of new bases would not be significantly faster than deploying them from current bases," the agency said.

Against that backdrop, the effect of the Iraq war on the global basing strategy is potentially dire. The war, defense officials say, forced them to accelerate the process of withdrawing troops from South Korea. But it has also prevented them from proposing to cut those forces.

"We can go through this Global Posture Review, we can say we need to move troops out of all these various areas around the globe because we don`t face threats nearby, but as long as we are in Iraq, you can`t take the logical next step, which is to say that if these troops are not needed, they are not needed, and to pare down the military," said Charles V. Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian Washington think tank.

"Iraq forces us to keep things rather than to get rid of things, so all you are doing is moving chess pieces with no apparent end."

A senior defense official involved in the review of forces acknowledged last week that Iraq has the potential to throw some of the long-range planning out of whack.

"I would say that Iraq specifically, and exactly what the endgame there is, is a piece of the puzzle that has not totally been defined," the official told reporters. "And we`ll just have to see how that evolves and what security situation evolves there."

But he defended the long-term plan.

"We`re in a different century now," he said. "Things are different in the way military can bring capability to bear."

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Pentagon, Ex-Workers Hit Halliburton on Oversight, Costs
By T. Christian Miller
Times Staff Writer

June 15, 2004

WASHINGTON — Halliburton Inc. was hit Monday with some of the sharpest criticism yet of its work in Iraq and Kuwait, as government auditors faulted its control over subcontractors and whistle-blowers alleged massive overspending.

The Pentagon`s Defense Contract Audit Agency found that Halliburton`s system of billing the government for billions of dollars in contracts was "inadequate in part," failing to follow the company`s internal procedures or even to determine whether subcontractors had performed work.

At the same time, four former Halliburton employees issued signed statements charging that the company had routinely wasted money. Among other things, they said the company had paid $45 apiece for cases of soda and $100 per bag of laundry, and had abandoned nearly new, $85,000 trucks in the desert for lack of spare parts.

"There was this whole thought process that we can spend whatever we want to because the government won`t crack down in the first year of a war," said Marie deYoung, a former logistics officer with the company.

Halliburton officials declined to address specifics of the allegations by former employees but said they would investigate. The officials said they were working to correct many of the deficiencies cited in the audit, and they denied that they had failed to control subcontractor costs.

"Rebuilding Iraq is one of the largest and most complex reconstruction undertakings of the past half-century, and our employees do not let danger stand in the way of efforts to make life a little easier for long-suffering people," said Wendy Hall, a corporate spokeswoman.

The latest revelations came from Democrats. They are trying to focus attention during the presidential race on the links between Halliburton and Vice President Dick Cheney, who ran the company from 1995 to 2000, and it has become increasingly difficult to separate politics from unbiased criticism of Halliburton`s working relationship with the government.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of Halliburton`s biggest critics in Congress, had planned to introduce the whistle-blower testimony at a hearing today by the House Government Reform Committee, but was blocked by Rep. Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.), the panel`s chairman, who was seeking more time to investigate the complaints.

Instead, Waxman released a copy of the audit, the whistle-blower statements and an angry letter to Davis, demanding that the committee increase its oversight of Halliburton contracts.

A spokesman said Davis was willing to hear testimony by the whistle-blowers but wanted their claims corroborated first.

Waxman`s demands followed his statement Sunday that political appointees, not procurement experts, had recommended in the fall of 2002 that Halliburton be awarded a contract to plan the postwar reconstruction of Iraq`s oil industry.

Pentagon officials confirmed that account. Halliburton won a secretly negotiated contract worth as much as $7 billion to carry out the reconstruction effort. However, no evidence has been presented that Cheney influenced the awarding of contracts to his former company.

Waxman also disclosed a General Accounting Office report that said the Defense Department erred in awarding the Iraq planning contract to Halliburton by using an existing contract for providing logistical support to the military in general.

Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, called Monday for Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft to appoint a special counsel to investigate the awarding of the contract to Halliburton in the absence of competitive bidding designed to protect the taxpayer. Justice Department officials declined to comment.

Meanwhile, a liberal political group announced it would begin airing a 30-second television commercial today that links Cheney and President Bush to the controversy over Halliburton contracts. MoveOn PAC is spending $1.1 million to broadcast the spot in Ohio, Oregon, Nevada and Missouri — all tightly contested states in the presidential campaign.

"The Bush administration gave Dick Cheney`s old company no-bid contracts for Iraq on a silver platter," the MoveOn ad says, according to a script released Monday.

Cheney has long denied that he had any influence over the contracts. Defense officials say they notified his office that they planned to award the rebuilding contract to Halliburton, but only to alert it to a potentially politically controversial decision.

"Nobody is aware of any influence or pressure put on this contract by anyone in the White House," said David Marin, a spokesman for the Republican majority on the Government Reform Committee.

The defense audit is the latest to find fault with Halliburton`s practices. Earlier audits concluded that the company overcharged more than $27 million for meals at dining facilities in Iraq, a finding Halliburton has disputed. It also found potential overcharges of up to $61 million for gasoline costs.

The most recent audit, dated May 13, said that the company failed to follow its own procedures for billing the government. It also found that Halliburton frequently did not follow up to see whether subcontractors had performed the work for which they were being paid.

Those findings were echoed by several former employees who contacted Waxman`s office to deliver their statements.

One of them, deYoung, said she had tried to renegotiate for lower prices several times but was repeatedly rebuffed by higher-ups, who showed no interest in bringing down costs. In one instance, deYoung said, Halliburton was paying up to $1.2 million a month for a laundry service that did so little work that the laundry wound up costing $100 per bag.

Two other former Halliburton employees who worked as convoy drivers gave Waxman`s office statements saying that when the trucks, which cost $85,000, broke down, the vehicles were either burned by the side of the road or abandoned. Both men said they were later fired in an unrelated dispute.

"As someone who has been in trucking for 13 years, I do not understand how a company could ditch a brand-new truck because they didn`t have a spare tire," James Warren wrote. "No trucker I know would have been that careless with his own truck."

Times staff writer Nick Anderson contributed to this report.



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Auch hier ist schön zu sehen, die permanente Abnahmen von Jobs über die Jahre.

State Adds Jobs for 3rd Month in a Row
Economists see May`s gain of 23,600 positions as a sign that California`s recovery is sustainable.
By Nancy Cleeland
Times Staff Writer

June 15, 2004

California employers added jobs in May for a third straight month, a milestone that hadn`t been achieved in more than three years and a sign that the state`s fragile recovery is sustainable.

"We`ve had some false starts before, but this looks like the real thing," said Howard Roth, chief economist for the state Department of Finance.

The net gain of 23,600 jobs, although modest, was broad-based, lifting employment in every field except natural resources and government, the state Employment Development Department said Monday in its monthly jobs report. The leisure and hospitality category showed the largest monthly gain, thanks to a pickup in tourism and business travel, and the construction sector had the strongest consistent growth through the year, testament in part to the state`s robust housing market.

Manufacturing added a small number of jobs for the second month in a row, a sign that the sector has finally bottomed out, economists said.

Another bit of good news in the report: California`s rate of job growth nearly matched that of the nation, after lagging behind for several months. Gains in California accounted for 9.5% of the 248,000 jobs added across the country last month — close to the state`s 11% share of the national payroll.

"We are now catching up with the rest of the country in job growth," said Keitaro Matsuda, senior economist at Union Bank of California. "I see that as a very positive development."

That helps relieve concerns that the state`s economy is uniquely troubled, as it was in the early 1990s, when slumps in housing, aerospace and financial services hit California particularly hard. In the current recovery, economists had been worried about sluggish employment growth caused by high business costs, a lingering slump in technology hiring and cutbacks at government agencies.

The state`s unemployment rate remained unchanged at 6.2%, however, as the newly employed were replaced by job seekers entering or returning to the market. A year ago, unemployment stood at 6.8%.

Growth was especially strong in tourism-related jobs, such as at amusement parks and hotels. Whether higher gas prices will boost that trend through the summer by keeping Californians close to home or reverse it as potential visitors from out of state stay home remains to be seen.

After suffering through steep losses in the travel slump that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, some hotels are seeing enough demand to raise room rates, Matsuda said. "We haven`t seen that kind of pricing power in the rest of the economy."

May`s job gain followed a revised increase of 15,700 jobs in April. Compared with May 2003, nonfarm employment in the state grew by 110,200 jobs, a rise of 0.8%.

There were some cautionary notes in the overall positive news. For one, staffing agencies continued to account for many of the new jobs — more than 6,000 in May — indicating that many companies still prefer to add temporary workers rather than commit to permanent, full-time hires.

By now, economist Roth said, that trend should have begun to shift. "It`s a mixed bag," he said of the high number of temporary jobs. "We`ve been saying for quite some time that [temporary jobs] bode well for future employment, but it is taking a long time to get there."

Staffing agencies themselves had conflicting interpretations of the trend. Mara Klug, regional vice president in Los Angeles for Adecco, said she was seeing increasing project work for accountants and people in other white-collar professions, partly in response to new federal accounting rules. Those jobs pay well but will never become permanent.

"There`s not a whole lot of temp-to-hire," she said. "We`re definitely seeing some growth right now, but I can`t say it`s necessarily long-term growth."

However, Sue Foigelman, an executive in Los Angeles for Manpower Inc., said her agencies were placing many blue-collar workers, including packagers and assemblers, in manufacturing jobs that were likely to become permanent.

"Light-industrial seems to be really strong," she said. "We`re starting to have more difficulty in recruiting. The last couple of years, we`ve had an easy time getting hold of good people. Now I feel a bit of tightening."

Also, positive as the numbers are, the job growth is not strong enough to pull the state government out of its financial crisis, said Brad Williams, chief economist at the state legislative analyst`s office. Williams noted that May`s job growth would be 2% if annualized. That indicates moderate economic expansion at best, he said.

"The state still faces challenges," Williams said. "These numbers are not strong enough to change that underlying picture."

Budget-induced cutbacks in government employment led to the loss of nearly 10,000 jobs in May.

The number of unemployed in California totaled 1,087,000 in May, down 11,000 from April and lower by 100,000 compared with the year before.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY
Tout Torture, Get Promoted
Defending cruelty can be a career booster in Bush`s administration.
By Robert Scheer

June 15, 2004

What a revelation to learn that the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the infamous memo in effect defending torture is now a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge. It tells you all you need to know about the sort of conservative to whom George W. Bush is turning in his attempt to pack the federal courts.

Conservatives once were identified with protecting the rights of the individual against the unbridled power of government, but this is not your grandfather`s conservatism. The current brand running things in D.C. holds that the commander in chief is above all law and that the ends always justify the means. This has paved the way for the increasingly well-documented and systematic use of torture in an ad hoc gulag archipelago for those detained anywhere in the world under the overly broad rubric of the "war on terror."

Those still clinging to the hopeful notion that photographic evidence of beatings, dead detainees, sexual degradation and threats of electric shock were all the work of a few twisted reservists aren`t reading the newspapers. Press accounts are following the paper trail up the chain of command to a heated and lengthy debate inside the White House about how much cruelty constitutes torture.

On Sunday, the Washington Post published on its website an internal White House memo from Aug. 1, 2002, signed by then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay S. Bybee, which argued darkly that torturing Al Qaeda captives "may be justified" and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted under President Bush. The memo then continued for 50 pages to make the case for the use of torture.

Was it as a reward for such bold legal thinking that only months later Bybee was appointed to one of the top judicial benches in the country? Perhaps he was anointed for his law journal articles bashing Roe vs. Wade and legal protection for homosexuals, or for his innovative attack on the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for the popular election of U.S. senators. But it`s hard to shake the notion that his memo to Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales established Bybee`s hard-line credentials for an administration that has no use for moderation in any form.

This president has turned his war on terror into an excuse for undermining due process and bypassing Congress. For Bybee and his ideologue cohorts, however, the American president is now more akin to a king, and legal or moral restraints are simply problems that can be overcome later, if anybody bothers to question the tactics: "Finally, even if an interrogation method might violate Section 2340A [of the U.S. Torture Convention passed in 1994], necessity or self-defense could provide justification that would eliminate any criminal liability."



In fact, though, this was an argument of last resort for Bybee, whose definition of torture "covers only extreme acts … where the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure…. Because the acts inflicting torture are extreme, there is [a] significant range of acts that, though they might constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, fail to rise to the level of torture."

Bybee`s generous standard should bring comfort to the totalitarian governments that find the brutal treatment of prisoners a handy tool in retaining power or fighting wars. Even Saddam Hussein, who always faced the threat of assassination and terrorism from foreign and domestic rivals, can now offer in his defense Bybee`s memo that his actions were justifiable, on the grounds of "necessity or self-defense."

When confronted by the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee with the content of Bybee`s torture defense, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft responded that the memo did not guide the administration. Yet, the Bybee memo was clearly the basis for the working group report on detainee interrogations presented to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld a year later. And if Bybee`s work was rejected as reprehensible, why was he rewarded — with Ashcroft`s deepest blessings — with a lifetime appointment on the judicial bench only one level below the Supreme Court?

Frighteningly, the Bybee memo is not some oddball exercise in moral relativism but instead provides the most coherent explanation of how this administration came to believe that to assure freedom and security at home and abroad, it should ape the tactics of brutal dictators.

*

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).



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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/177773_thomas15.html

Bush continues on Reagan`s rightward path -- and then some

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- The late President Reagan left a legacy -- the Reagan Revolution -- that turned the country to the right, where it remains today.

I thought conservatives never had it so good as they did with Reagan, but it turns out that the Bush administration has been even kinder to those on the far right.

Compared with the present administration, Reagan almost seemed "moderate" at times, with his mix of conservative aides offset by a few others in the administration, such as the even-handed James A. Baker, who served as his chief of staff.

Bush`s hard-line advisers and strategists convinced him that the United States could unilaterally call the foreign policy shots for the rest of the world and ignore our traditional allies because of America`s global military supremacy.

This led to Bush`s pre-emptive invasion of Iraq and his self-proclaimed desire to be known as a "war president."

Reagan tolerated other points of view. The 40th president was often pictured -- incorrectly -- as set in concrete with his ideas. In reality, he showed himself to be a much more pragmatic and flexible politician, unlike the incumbent.

Bush views Reagan as his political role model -- more so that his father, former President George H.W. Bush.

The president has gone further than Reagan in proselytizing his conservative ideology. Reagan railed against "big government," but Bush has outdone him by privatizing parts of Medicare, the Civil Service system and Social Security.

Bush has less patience than Reagan had with those who disagree with him. There is a touch of religious righteousness in this president that Reagan would never embrace. Bush told author Bob Woodward that he is guided by "a higher father."

Reagan, on the other hand, kept his religion to himself, except when he survived an assassination attempt on his life in 1981. Then he said he felt the hand of God was on his shoulder "for a higher purpose."

Reagan sprinkled his administration with dedicated tax cutters who shared his strong conviction that government was the problem, not the solution. Bush has made tax cuts for the richest people in the country an article of his political faith.

Although Bush put a "compassionate" prefix before his conservatism, neither he nor Reagan deviated much from the philosophy of social Darwinism, meaning if you can`t make it, tough.

Reagan was the first leader to demonize the word "liberal" and often spoke it with a hiss. Bush has followed suit in the denigration of liberals.

Reagan grew up in the New Deal era when government programs sprouted to help the disadvantaged. During his early Hollywood days, as a liberal and a Democrat, Reagan served six terms as head of the Screen Actors Guild.

But something happened on his way to the California governorship and, eventually, to the White House that turned Reagan toward conservatism. He changed his party affiliation to Republican.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO) was the first labor union to announce its support of the Reagan candidacy.

No sentimentalist, Reagan fired 13,000 air controllers who had gone on strike in 1981.

Bush also has been militantly anti-labor, as evidenced by his campaign to change federal law to eliminate overtime pay for thousands of workers.

Both presidents ignored billowing budget deficits to meet their conservative domestic and foreign policy goals, including deregulation and enormous escalations of military spending.

Both Reagan and Bush had a choice biblical word for those not in sync with them. They are "evil."

Bush tosses around the word "evil" with evangelical fervor.

Reagan branded the former Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and helped its demise by bankrupting the economically strapped Soviets with a trillion-dollar arms race.

As president, Reagan turned the country to the right. Bush has zealously pushed it even farther down that road.

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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Abu Ghraib general says she`s being made a scapegoat
- JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 15, 2004

(06-15) 03:44 PDT LONDON (AP) --

The American general who was in charge of Iraq`s Abu Ghraib prison claimed she was being made a scapegoat for the abuse of detainees, and said her successor once told her that prisoners should be treated "like dogs."

In an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio broadcast Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski said Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller told her last autumn that prisoners "are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you`ve lost control of them."

Miller was in charge of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and now oversees U.S. prisons in Iraq.

Karpinski was suspended last month from command of the 800th Military Police Brigade after she and other officers were faulted by Army investigators for paying too little attention to the prison`s day-to-day operations and not acting strongly enough to discipline soldiers for violating standard procedures.

Several soldiers are facing courts-martial over abuse allegations at the jail, which flared when pictures of troops abusing and humiliating naked Iraqi detainees were published in April.

In her defense, Karpinski has said that interrogations at the prison were not under her command but were run by a military intelligence unit that was "under increasing pressure to get more, as they call it, actionable intelligence."

Karpinski said that during a visit to Iraq in September, Miller -- still the commander at the Guantanamo Bay prison -- spoke of wanting to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib by applying the Cuban facility`s regimented detention and interrogation techniques.

"He talked about Gitmoizing in terms of what the (military police) were going to do; he was going to select the MPs, they were going to receive special training," she said.

"That training was going to come from the military intelligence command," Karpinski added, noting that the troops under her command had no training in such interrogation techniques.

Karpinski said she was being made "a convenient scapegoat" in the abuse scandal.

"The interrogation operation was directed; it was under a separate command and there was no reason for me to go out to look at Abu Ghraib at cell block 1a or 1b or visit the interrogation facilities," she said.

Karpinski said was unaware until November that the International Committee of the Red Cross had visited the jail and expressed concerns about detainees` treatment to U.S. officials. She said she did not see the abuse photos -- believed to have been taken late last year -- until late January.

"I didn`t know in September, I didn`t know in October, I didn`t know ever" about any abuse, she said.

"Those pictures which I saw on the 23rd of January were more shocking to me than probably the rest of the world ... I was absolutely sickened by those images and I couldn`t even fathom a guess as to what happened to these people to make them go in such an opposite direction of how they were trained."


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/200…
©2004 Associated Press

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Bart ist das S-Bahn System der Bay-Area, vom Flughafen SF bis weit in die Aussenbezirke von Oakland.

Spare the air, open the gates
Free BART rides set for 5 smoggy days
- Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Morning commuters will get free rides on BART on particularly smoggy days this summer under a unique program that aims to clean the skies by getting people to abandon their cars and ride public transportation.

The free-ride program is the Bay Area`s first attempt at a regional incentive program to use mass transit and reduce air pollution. Although other cities have tried something similar -- with mixed results -- local officials say it is the biggest free-ride experiment yet.

"This has never been done at this kind of level before anywhere in the United States,`` said Teresa Lee, a spokeswoman for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which is under pressure to improve the region`s air quality.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission will pay BART to throw open its fare gates and let everyone ride free during the morning commute for the first five weekday "Spare the Air" days of the year -- when the Bay Area is in danger of violating federal air quality standards.

Those days typically occur during the summer and early fall when meteorologists forecast a high pressure system bringing hot weather, long hours of sunshine and few breezes -- prime conditions for a buildup of polluting ozone.

"Anyone who gets to a BART station between the start of service (about 4:30 a.m. varying by station) and 9 a.m., they can ride for free,`` said Linton Johnson, a BART spokesman.

That could save riders anywhere from BART`s minimum fare of $1.25 for a short hop to $6.05 for a journey from Pittsburg/Bay Point to Millbrae. The average BART ride is 13 miles, and the average fare is $2.65. BART riders who take advantage of the free ride to work will have to pay for their ride home.

The program, which is expected to cost $2 million, is an effort to avoid violating clean-air standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency -- an offense that could cause the region to lose billions in federal transportation funds.

"No one`s making money off of this (program),`` said Johnson, "but we`re trying to prevent the Bay Area from losing money.``

The money to pay for the free rides comes from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which had set the cash aside to defend itself against a pair of lawsuits that contended the regional transportation planning agency`s spending plans failed to adequately reduce air pollution.

When the commission prevailed in those lawsuits without spending the defense money, officials chose to use it for the free-ride program, said spokesman Randy Rentschler.

"We could have done nothing, or we could have done something unique and different,`` he said. "We chose to try something different.``

The program is the first region-wide attempt to clean the air by getting motorists out of their cars and onto mass transit.

The Livermore-Amador Valley Transit Authority offered free bus rides in the Tri-Valley area last summer on Spare the Air days. Officials said they saw ridership increases of 15 percent to 17 percent. The transit agency, which operates Wheels buses, will offer free rides on Spare the Air days again this summer.

Free ride programs have also been offered in conjunction with bad air days in Vancouver, Portland, Kansas City, St. Louis, Dallas and New Jersey, with mixed results, said Rentschler. But with 100,000 commuters riding BART in the morning, the Bay Area program would be the most ambitious, Lee said.

In another first, BART will wrap seven of its distinctive silver aluminum cars in a colorful sky blue sign that reads "Spare the Air, Ride BART." The cars will most likely ride the rails on the Pittsburg/Bay Point and Dublin/Pleasanton lines, Johnson said. BART has steadfastly rejected offers from companies to pay to wrap its trains in commercial advertising, Johnson said, but the Spare the Air campaign is a cooperative effort between public agencies.

"Spare the Air" days are called when the air quality district`s meteorologists determine, shortly after noon, that the next day`s weather conditions are likely to produce a bad air day. That gives transit and air quality officials little time to promote the free rides, said Rentschler, so there is no way of predicting whether the experimental program will be a success.

Transit and anti-pollution officials have long wondered how significant a jump in ridership they could produce by eliminating or sharply reducing fares, and how much that would reduce traffic.

"A lot of this is (an experiment) to see if people can adjust,`` Rentschler said. "Hopefully, we can get people change their habits.``

A promotional effort by the online bank ING offered free BART rides during the morning commute on Dec. 4, and transit agency officials estimated that they saw a 5 percent increase in ridership through the Transbay Tube.

But that free ride was a commercial gimmick -- not a public effort to cut pollution -- and came during a month in which BART ridership traditionally sags. BART carries an average of 310,000 riders each weekday with about 100,000 entering the system between its opening and 9 a.m.

BART has shortened many of its trains as it copes with a budget crisis and slumping ridership. But Johnson said the agency will add cars to trains on Spare the Air days to handle the crowds that may take advantage of the free ride.

"We`re going to throw everything we have out there on Spare the Air days,`` he said.

E-mail Michael Cabanatuan at [e-mail].

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June 14, 2004
PROCUREMENT
White House Officials and Cheney Aide Approved Halliburton Contract in Iraq, Pentagon Says
By ERIK ECKHOLM

In the fall of 2002, in the preparations for possible war with Iraq, the Pentagon sought and received the assent of senior Bush administration officials, including the vice president`s chief of staff, before hiring the Halliburton Company to develop secret plans for restoring Iraq`s oil facilities, Pentagon officials have told Congressional investigators.

The newly disclosed details about Pentagon contracting do not suggest improper political pressures to direct business to Halliburton, the Houston-based company that Vice President Dick Cheney once led.

But they raise questions about assertions by Mr. Cheney and other administration officials that he knew nothing in advance of the Halliburton contracts and that the decisions were made by career procurement specialists, without involvement by senior political appointees.

Kevin Kellems, a spokesman for the vice president, would not comment on the disclosure, except to say, "We stand by our earlier statements on this matter."

As American forces stormed into Iraq in March 2003, Halliburton`s role as an inside planner put it in place to receive, without open competition and in the shrouds of classified war planning, the major contract to carry out the oil strategy it secretly wrote months earlier. The deal yielded $2.4 billion in revenue. These oil and other war-related contracts with Halliburton, an oil services company, have been contentious because of accusations of overcharging and waste, and because Mr. Cheney was formerly the company`s chief executive.

On the oil-field pacts, the Pentagon officials said they had not been pressured by political leaders to choose Halliburton, which they regarded as best qualified of the few companies that could do such a task. Rather, these officials said, they had sought to notify senior administration officials to ensure that they did not object to the politically delicate plan.

In November 2002, a Pentagon energy group led by Michael H. Mobbs, a political appointee and adviser to Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense, gave Halliburton a $1.9 million "task order," under another contract, to develop secret contingency plans for the Iraqi oil industry.

The proposal was had been described at a meeting in late October of the Deputies Committee, a foreign policy body. Participants included the deputy national security adviser, deputy secretaries of state and defense, deputy director of central intelligence and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney`s chief of staff.

Pentagon officials, including Mr. Mobbs, provided the new details of the oil contracting to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform at a June 8 briefing.

In a letter faxed Sunday to Mr. Cheney and given to reporters, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the minority leader of the panel, asked him for all records of his office`s communications on the oil contracts and for records of Deputies Committee meetings where the Halliburton deals had been discussed.

"These new disclosures appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts," Mr. Waxman, Democrat of California, wrote. "They also seem to contradict the administration`s repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of the contracts to Halliburton."

Appearing on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, 2003, Mr. Cheney said, "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government." He referred to the Army Corps of Engineers, which has managed oil infrastructure contracts.

Asked if he had been aware of Halliburton`s noncompetitive awards, Mr. Cheney said, "I don`t know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."

Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said of Iraq contracting in a news conference last October: "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There`s a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they`re doing the contracts."

On March 8, 2003, the Pentagon chose Halliburton to carry out the plan for strengthening Iraqi oil production. Mr. Cheney has denied any role in this contract, but critics have asked about a Pentagon memo that described the plans as "coordinated" with his office.

The administration revealed the contract later that month, describing it as mainly a deal to put out oil-well fires. Pentagon officials later revealed that it was much broader, and could involve billions of dollars. But they promised that it would be temporary and would be superseded by competitively bid contracts.

After repeated delays, the contracts were awarded on Jan. 16, providing $800 million to the Parsons Corporation of Pasadena, Calif., and $1.2 billion to Halliburton.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Published on Monday, June 14, 2004 by the Capital Times / Madison, Wisconsin
Kerry Must Stress American Ideals Over Bush`s Vision of a Cruel God
by David Rozelle


Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
- Thomas Paine

Be forewarned, John Kerry. By contesting George W. Bush, you are contesting "God."

In spite of Bush`s sworn duty to uphold the constitutional separation of church and state, this president wears his Christian evangelist religious fervor on not only his sleeve but his every policy proposal and decision, including the one that lied us into waging a world-be-damned war on a sovereign nation.

From the day he took the oath of his office, George W. Bush has behaved more like a muddled mullah than a president.

Asked, for instance, by Bob Woodward (as detailed in the book "Plan of Attack") how he approached the final decision to go to war, Bush replied, "I was praying for strength to do the Lord`s will ... that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible."

Asked if he had conferred with his father, George H.W. Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher father that I appeal to."

And lest candidate Kerry simply dismiss "God as God," he should know the dimensions of the deity he may be up against. George W. Bush`s divine father is the God of an estimated 90 million evangelical Christians in America.

Most assuredly, most evangelicals conduct themselves as witnesses to Christ`s teachings of love and tolerance. Near their fringes, however, are large numbers of extremists who, unlike their more moderate co-religionists, practice no "love thy neighbor" unless their neighbors believe as they believe: no religious or racial parity, no gay or abortion rights, no stem cell research, no United Nations, no evolution, no environmentalism, no eye without an eye in return, no personal salvation without their Christ.

And at their absolute fringe, they are the befuddling prophesiers who hold that something they call the "Rapture" may be at hand. In short, this phantasmagoric forecast calls for a final "seven-year tribulation" between Israel and the hordes of the "antichrist." Before the onset of their Rapture, God`s truest believers will be lifted into heaven to observe the pestilence and bloodshed erupting below.

To ensure his re-election, this "faith-based" president will rely on the coattails of extremist right-wing Christians like these. They number in the tens of millions. They could make the difference.

So what`s to be done?

First, as Bush`s opponent, Kerry would do well to study ex-President Jimmy Carter`s broad pragmatic distinction between Christians. In a recent interview, Carter, a Baptist, said that "the two principal things in a practical sense that starkly separate the ultra-right-wing Christian community from the rest of the Christian world" are the support of peace and the "alleviation of suffering among the poor and the outcast."

Second, while Kerry cannot run as a religiously inspired candidate (he has read the Constitution), the question becomes can he win over Christian voters - including legions of evangelicals - without citing Christianity? He can.

What John Kerry must do is cast his every position on every vital issue in a bright moral light that reflects the longstanding ideals of this nation. Embedded in our ideals is a humane concept of Jesus Christ that stands in sharp contrast to Bush`s harsh, vainglorious vision. For most of us, believers or not, Christ is a peacemaker, champion of the poor, a healer, steward of the earth, a lover of each of us as a child of God without exception.

Kerry, in secular opposition to Bush, must invoke the moral philosophy that underlies our Constitution.

On Iraq, he must offer a plan for a generous withdrawal, leaving behind a country guided by the United Nations. On the economy, he must renounce the rich as the fount of economic well-being for the rest of us, while repositioning the poor and middle class for prosperity. On human rights, he must assert that all of the world`s inhabitants have the same rights to dignity and respect. On the environment, he must avow that the Earth is now in our human hands to hold precious for future generations.

Kerry must proclaim that if he is elected president of the most powerful nation on Earth, its "rules" will be a return to the "golden rule" of its Constitution and Bill of Rights. That`s all. Really. What`s so hard about saying that? These ideals embody what most of us as Americans thought we stood for. And by Nov. 3, we could stand for them again.

"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man," Paine reminds us. It also makes for a cruel nation. To defeat George W. Bush, we must defeat his god as well.

David Rozelle lives in rural Spring Green, Wisconsin. E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright 2003 The Capital Times

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June 13, 2004
FRANK RICH
First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double

Correction Appended

"BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" after he brings out the actual Marshall McLuhan to silence a pontificating McLuhan expert with whom he`s trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend life was like that.

George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat Ronald Reagan`s 1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy Noonan). It was not the first time that the current president had taken a page from his fabled predecessor`s script, but it may have been the most humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan`s death had pushed the replay of his original oration to center stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is yanked on screen in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks away in that movie, so Mr. Bush`s would-be Reaganesque speech atomized into white noise, to the limited extent that it was broadcast at all.

Some would argue that no politician in his right mind would even invite comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the aftermath of Reagan`s death, his fans and foes alike remain agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may have brought the Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived there with Reagan`s particular gifts as an entertainer. They were a product of training, not accident. He had first performed as a child in church skits put on by his mother. Later came the legendary path through baseball announcing, 52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became known as the Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned politicians, whether George Murphy before him or Arnold Schwarzenegger after, can match this résumé. To see the difference between an acting professional and an aspiring amateur, just look at the one recent president who had show business on the brain, Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton`s act may be better than any Reagan successor, he nonetheless lacks the master`s disciplined ability to hit his mark, not to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.

Mr. Clinton went so far as to incongruously appropriate Reagan ideology ("The era of big government is over") for political expediency. But no one has more strenuously tried to emulate the 40th president in both style and substance than George W. Bush. Reagan`s body was barely cold when Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I don`t know how you miss them." Yes, the parallels are there — hammered in by Mr. Bush`s packagers so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and company may have overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of Reagan`s presidency over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood epic that has glided past Iran-contra, Bitburg and the retreat from Lebanon with impressive ease, has brought into clear focus the size of the gap between the two men. To say that difference in stature is merely a function of an actor`s practiced skill at performance is both to understate the character of Ronald Reagan and to impugn the art of acting.

The White House`s efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing if not relentless. As Michael Deaver`s crew famously would have Reagan cut ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara. In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil" with the "evil empire."

Even his personality is presented to the public as a clone of Reagan`s. Mr. Bush is always characterized by his associates as a "big picture" guy who leaves any detail that can`t be fit on a 3-by-5 card to his aides. As Donald Rumsfeld says in Bob Woodward`s "Plan of Attack": "This president has a lot of the same quality that Ronald Reagan did where he`d look out, way out to the horizon and plant a standard out there and then point toward it."

To some who admire both men, the analogy is plausible. Mr. Bush`s certitude about his war on terrorism matches Reagan`s unyielding anti-communism. Both presidents made a religion out of big tax cuts, talked of curbing government even as they increased spending and then serenely ignored the daunting deficits that ensued.

Those who dislike both men see less salutary parallels. Both presidents tried every stunt imaginable to create the illusion that their wartime service had not been confined to the home front. Both pandered to the religious right by impeding urgently needed federal medical research that would have saved lives (Reagan with AIDS, Mr. Bush with stem cells). Where Bush and Reagan boosters see both men as refreshingly disdainful of intellectuals, critics see a smug lack of curiosity in any ideas but their own. The ur-text of today`s profuse Bushisms can be found in such Reaganisms as his remarks upon returning from a trip to South America: "Well, I learned a lot. . . . You`d be surprised. They`re all individual countries." Both presidents inspired "Tonight Show" gags about their endless vacations.

But whether one likes either president or not, the difference between them remains far greater than any similarities, and that difference has more ramifications during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an actor, but in Garry Wills`s famous phrase, he played "the heartwarming role of himself." Though he never studied with Lee Strasberg, he practiced the method; his performance was based, however loosely, on the emotional memory of a difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this background during the Depression, developing the considerable ambition needed to work his way through college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his vision of America as a place where perseverance could pay off for anyone. It was indeed the heartwarming role of himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own biography eventually stripped out).

Yet there was more to Reagan`s role than its Horatio Alger success story. Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during the war, but as a teenage riverfront lifeguard in Illinois, he rescued 77 people, demonstrating early on the physical courage that would see him through an assassination attempt. And for all Reagan`s absorption in show business, he was always engaged in politics (to the point of alienating his first wife, Jane Wyman, who found his preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 40`s, he was at the center of fierce labor and blacklisting battles.

Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond Hollywood. A contract player who became "Errol Flynn of the B`s," he wasn`t a big enough star to merit all the perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career dwindled in the early 50`s, he was briefly reduced to serving (at age 42) as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy, showgirl-laden revue at the Last Frontier casino on the Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E. spokesman, he spent years meeting workers in the company factories that he repeatedly toured when off camera.

Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr. Reagan would give as president, it derived from this earlier immersion in the real world. The script he used in the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly demonization of a "welfare queen") and preached family values he didn`t practice with his own often-estranged children. But even the fiction was adapted from experience. While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid of a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there had been decades when he lived in an America broader than that of Justin Dart and Alfred Bloomingdale.

Mr. Bush`s aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been manufactured from scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured out of the cocoon of privilege. He "lost a lot of other people`s money in the oil business," said Ron Reagan Jr. in 2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he`s no longer an obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his imagination to improvise play-by-play radio accounts of baseball games based on sparse telegraphic accounts, Mr. Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the help of cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of engagement with either issues or people beyond big oil or the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit until he belatedly went into the family business of politics.

He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part. In the new issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes to James Fallows that Mr. Bush, a smoother speaker in his Texas political career than now, may have "deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne" since then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type manliness." It`s as if he`s eradicating his patrician one-term father to adopt the two-term Gipper as his dad instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a jus` folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone threatens to keep him from getting his own way. It`s impossible to imagine Reagan countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes like John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has done in the heat of close campaigns.

Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an interview in which Tom Brokaw challenged his efforts to pull off a bigger flimflam than impersonating Ronald Reagan — the conflation of the Iraq war with World War II. "You referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack on America` that we went through during our time," Mr. Brokaw said. "But that wasn`t Iraq who did that, that was al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the World War II dead behind him, the president retreated to his familiar script ("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think the lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did not sound like someone who had ever experienced pain of the life-and-death intensity that comes with war. The problem is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan`s lilting vocal delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it doesn`t contain at least a kernel of emotional truth.

A front-page column in Arts & Leisure on Sunday comparing the styles and policies of Ronald Reagan and President Bush misstated the name of Mr. Reagan`s younger son. Because of editing errors, the error also appeared in a front-page article and a picture caption on Saturday about the former president`s funeral and a related article that day about his burial. The son, known as Ron, is formally Ronald Prescott Reagan. He is not "Jr."; his father was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108…

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108…

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

21 Killed, 62 Injured

Three big bombs went off in Iraq on Monday. One, Baghdad, targeted foreign civilian contractors. The 13 dead from that bombing included 1 from the US, 2 from the UK, 1 from France, and 1 from the Philippines. Three worked for General Electric at power plants, and 2 were their private security guards. 62 persons were injured, including 10 foreigners, some badly.

Bombs in Mosul and Salman Pak killed another 8 persons, mainly Iraqi police and civil defense forces.

A Baghdad crowd gathered around the bombed vehicles, setting them afire and dancing around them. Some then threw stones at Marines. Some 50 Iraqi police in the area declined to intervene, fearful that the mob would turn on them if they were perceived as helping the Americans.

posted by Juan @ 6/15/2004 08:32:52 AM

Bush`s European Allies Punished by their Publics

J. Sean Curtin argues that Bush`s European allies have paid a heavy political price for supporting his Iraq war. Labor did extremely poorly in the European Union voting. Berlusconi`s Forza Italia party also did poorly in that election, as well as suffering losses in local elections. Bush`s friend Aznar was defeated by the socialist candidate, Zapatero in recent Spanish elections. Curtin argues that the Dutch opposition has also been strengthened.

It might be argued against Curtin`s analysis that opposition parties did well across the board in the European Union elections. Thus, the German Social Democrats, who opposed the Iraq war, were also trounced, as were the French Gaullists of President Jacques Chirac. But, actually, Breffni O`Rourke seems to say here that exit polls indicated that economic issues produced the poor results for the incumbent party in the case of France and Germany, whereas voters were explicit that Iraq hurt Blair and Berlusconi. It should also be said that turn-out for the European elections was historically low, and that the deeply dissatisfied therefore were more likely to vote.

Among George W. Bush`s most important legacies may be a reinvigoration of European socialism and left-liberalism.

Zapatero is a case in point. His Defense Minister, Jose Bono, by the way, openly called the UN resolution in Iraq partially "fiction." In testimony before the Spanish Senate Defense Committee, he asked if anyone doubted it was a fiction that on 30 June the Iraqi government would recover its complete national sovereignty.

posted by Juan @ 6/15/2004 08:29:51 AM

Marines Visit Fallujah, Cut Deal

Az-Zaman: US Marines went into Fallujah on Monday, meeting with General Muhamma Latif, commander of the Fallujah Brigade, and the head of the local governing council, Saadu`llah al-Rawi. They signed an agreement on mutual confidence, with the US undertaking to release 50 Iraqis from Fallujah now in CPA prisons. The US also removed the checkpoint that had been set up to the east of Fallujah. Talks were held in the municipal building that involved several US officers and the highest ranking officers of the Fallujah Brigade.

Meanwhile, some Marine commanders consider the deal worked out with the Fallujah Brigade a failure because it has not made guerrillas give up their heavy arms or arrested those responsible for killing four foreign security guards in March.

posted by Juan @ 6/15/2004 08:25:55 AM

Sistani to Consult with Kurds
US Seeks Direct talks with Muqtada

Az-Zaman: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has decided to send a representative to Kurdistan to discuss the differences between him and the Kurdish leadership over Kurdish desires for a loose federalism that would give them substantial autonomy within Iraq. Sistani`s spokesman said that he wanted to reduce the feelings of anxiety and being slighted expressed by the Kurdish leaders and in the Kurdish street at Sistani`s stance. Sistani rejected any endorsement of the Transitional Administrative Law in the recently passed UN resolution, whereas the Kurds wanted the UN to back the TAL.

Veteran diplomat and superb Arabist Christopher Ross, who is in the Coalition Provisional Authority`s Outreach Department, has indicated a desire to meet with radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr for talks about the fate of the Mahdi Army militia. Previously the CPA had refused to deal with Muqtada directly, accusing him of having had rival cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei killed in April of 2003.

Ross`s request for a meeting may well be a sign that a more pragmatic set of officials from the State Department is beginning to take charge of such policies from the Neocon establishment that had dominated the Coalition Provisional Authority (and which had generally screwed up Iraq royally). On June 30, the real transition will be from Defense Department dominance of Iraq to State Department responsibility for Iraq. Since virtually nobody at the Pentagon knows anything serious about the Arab world, whereas State has fair numbers of Arabists and lots of experienced diplomats this transition is all to the good. The only question is whether it comes too late to do any good (see the item above about crowds dancing in the street around dead foreign contractors.

posted by Juan @ 6/15/2004 08:16:34 AM
Monday, June 14, 2004

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Ronald Reagan, Ron, Nancy Reagan and Patti Davis, circa 1967. Inset, Ron Reagan today.

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Reagan blasts Bush
"My father crapped bigger ones than George Bush," says the former president`s son, in a flame-throwing conversation about the war and the Bush administration`s efforts to lay claim to the Reagan legacy.

Editor`s note: As the Bush crowd worked shamelessly last week to wrap their man in the holy shroud of Ronald Reagan, the dead president`s son, Ron Reagan, delivered an eloquent eulogy that discreetly signaled his conviction that Bush is no Reagan. "Dad was ... a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage," said Reagan at the burial service for his father on Friday, and there was no mistaking the meaning of his words.

In an interview with Salon in April 2003, Ron Reagan was much less subtle in his assessment of the Bush presidency, denouncing it as "overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt." Reagan`s scorn for the man who would be his father was withering: "My father was a man -- that`s the difference between him and Bush."

With many Web sites and news publications referring to the Salon interview in recent days, we have reposted the interview for the convenience of our readers.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Talbot

April 14, 2003 | The Bush inner circle would like to think of George W.`s presidency as more of an extension of Ronald Reagan`s than of his one-term father`s. Reagan himself, who has long suffered from Alzheimer`s disease, is unable to comment on those who lay claim to his political legacy. But his son, Ron, is -- and he`s not pleased with the association.

"The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he`s in now," he said during a recent interview with Salon. "Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the `80s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father`s -- these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don`t trust these people."

Reagan spoke with Salon from his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife, Doria, a psychologist. A former ballet dancer ("At 45, I`m afraid those days are over"), he has worked in recent years as a magazine journalist and a TV personality, currently hosting dog shows for the Animal Planet network ("I live `Best in Show`"). He and Doria have three cats, but no children ("They`re like kids, without the tuition"). Though he never followed his father into politics, Reagan takes a strong interest in public issues, serving on the board of the Creative Coalition, an organization founded in 1989 by performers like Susan Sarandon and Christopher Reeve to politically mobilize entertainers and artists. Reagan recently moderated a Creative Coalition panel discussion in San Francisco on the topic of free expression during wartime, featuring Alec Baldwin on the left and Michael Medved on the right (and a smoldering Sean Penn in the audience).

Reagan, still as lean as he was in his dancing days, has a sharp tongue -- but like his father, he has a knack for softening his barbs with a charming affability and disarming sense of humor.

Reagan took a swipe at Bush during the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, which featured a tribute to his father, telling the Washington Post`s Lloyd Grove, "The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is simply unqualified for the job... What`s his accomplishment? That he`s no longer an obnoxious drunk?" Since then he`s been quiet about the current occupant of the White House -- until now.

Some observers have compared Bush`s persona as an intellectually challenged but politically gifted leader to that of Reagan. But the younger Reagan vehemently rejects the analogy. "The gunslinging cowboy, the actor who just read his lines -- that stereotype doesn`t fit who my father really was.

"My father had decades of experience in public life. He was president of his union, he campaigned for presidential candidates, he served two terms as governor of California -- and that was not a ceremonial office as it is in Texas. And he had already run for president, against Ford in `76, nearly unseating the sitting president in his own party. He knew where he was coming from, he had spent years thinking and speaking about his views. He didn`t have to ask Dick Cheney what he thought.

"Sure, he wasn`t a technocrat like Clinton. But my father was a man -- that`s the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush."

Reagan says he doesn`t have anything personal against Bush. He met him only once, at a White House event during the Reagan presidency. "At least my wife insists we did -- he left absolutely no impression on me. But Doria remembers him very negatively -- I can`t repeat what she said about him, I`d rather not use profanity. I do remember Jeb -- a big fella, seemed to be the brightest of the bunch. And of course their parents were very charming."

But Reagan has strong feelings about Bush`s policies, including the war in Iraq, which he ardently opposes. "Nine-11 gave the Bush people carte blanche to carry out their extreme agenda -- and they didn`t hesitate for a moment to use it. I mean, by 9/12 Rumsfeld was saying, `Let`s hit Iraq.` They`ve used the war on terror to justify everything from tax cuts to Alaska oil drilling."

Of course, Reagan`s father was also known for his military buildup and aggressive foreign policy. "Yes," he concedes, "there are some holdovers from my dad`s years, like Elliott Abrams and, my God, Admiral Poindexter, who`s now keeping watch over us all. But that observation doesn`t hold up. My father gave a speech a couple years after he left the White House calling for `an international army of conscience` to deal with failed states where atrocities are taking place. He had no thought that America should be the world`s policeman. I know that for a fact from conversations I had with him. He believed there must be an international force to intervene where great human tragedy was occurring. Rwanda would have been a prime example, where a strike force capable of acting quickly could have gone in to stop the slaughter.

"Now George and Dick and Rummy and Wolfy all have a very different idea about America`s role in the world. It was laid out by [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz back in `92 -- Iraq is the center of the Middle East, its axis, and it`s of such geo-strategic importance that we can`t leave it in the hands of Saddam. We need to forcibly change that regime and use Iraq as a forward base for American democracy, setting up a domino effect in the region, and so on. My father, on the other hand, was well aware of the messiness of the Middle East, particularly after [the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in] Lebanon."

Reagan says his opinions about the war were not changed by the rapid fall of Baghdad. "Look, whether or not Saddam was a bad guy, or whether the Iraqi people were terribly oppressed, was never the issue. I mean I`m happy for the Iraqis, but that`s not what this was all about. Nor was the military conclusion ever in doubt; this was the Dallas Cowboys playing a high school team. Their army was a third the size it was in `91, and it didn`t give us much trouble then.

"And the weapons of mass destruction? Whatever happened to them? I`m sure we`ll find some," he laughs. "They`re being flown in right now in a C-130.

"There were, and will be, a lot of people killed over there. And if you don`t care about the Iraqi casualties, what about the American? We stand to lose more people in the next months of occupation than we lost in the weeks of war. One of the reasons we escaped largely unscathed so far was because our military moved so fast. But now we`re sitting targets -- we have to establish bases, patrol the streets, guard checkpoints. We`re sitting targets for suicide bombers and other terrorists."

Reagan`s parents were notoriously remote from their four children. Ron Jr. reportedly had the closest relations with his parents and he remains close with his mother, Nancy Reagan, who as the keeper of the Reagan flame is often called upon to dedicate public sites bearing her husband`s name. Reagan says his mother shares his "distrust of some of these [Bush] people. She gets that they`re trouble in all kinds of ways. She doesn`t like their religious fervor, their aggression."

Reagan says his family feels particularly alienated from the Republican Party over its opposition to embryonic stem cell research, which could have significant benefit for Alzheimer patients like his father. "Now ignorance is one thing, ignorance can be cured. But many of the Republican leaders opposing this research know better, people like [Senate Majority Leader] Bill Frist, who`s a doctor, for God`s sake. People like him are blocking it to pander to the 20 percent of their base who are mouth-breathers. And that`s unconscionable -- there are lives at stake here. Stem cell research can revolutionize medicine, more than anything since antibiotics."

Reagan, who says the label "progressive" would fit him, does not belong to a political party. "I`m certainly not a Republican; I couldn`t belong to any party that had leaders like Tom DeLay. And the Democrats are too busy trying to out-Republican the Republicans."

His father entered politics at a relatively late stage in his life, after careers as a sports broadcaster, actor and General Electric pitchman. Has Reagan ever considered running for office? No, he insists, "I have no political ambitions. For one thing, I`m not interested in raising all that money. It`s just not the life I want to lead. When is the last time you heard a politician speak his mind? McCain? Yes, he came close. But I once asked him at a Creative Coalition meeting, `You talk passionately about this nexus of money and influence that is corrupting our democracy. Why don`t you name names?` His response was a demurral.

"I have no problem with public service. And yes, better people should be running for office. But personally I just can`t see myself doing it, to live in Washington D.C., the whole package. I was immersed in that my whole life. I saw politicians up close and there were so many who just repulsed me."

What if a group of concerned citizens approached him and helped raise money for his entry into politics -- would that make a difference? "You mean like they did with George W.? `Hey, you`ve got name recognition, that`s all that matters -- we`ll give you millions of dollars to run!` Imagine coming to a man with just two years` experience in public office, and a ceremonial one at that. Imagine installing such a blank slate in the presidency of the United States! This is a regency, not a presidency.

"And they told us, `Don`t worry about W. not knowing anything, good old Dick Cheney will be his minder.` Dick Cheney? And this was going to be compassionate conservatism? Dick Cheney is to the right of Genghis Khan, he wants to drill in your backyard, he wants to deny black people their rights --it was all there in his voting record for us to see. What were we, rubes?"

While Reagan rejects a political career, he clearly doesn`t shy from speaking out. What if GOP conservatives, who still lionize his father as the greatest president of the 20th century, pressure him to shut up? "That wouldn`t be a smart thing for anyone to do."

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Tuesday, June 15, 2004
War News for June 15, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Five Kurdish Iraqi Army recruits killed near Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: Anti-US rioting follows Baghdad car bombing.

Bring ‘em on: US troops under mortar fire near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: One civilian contractor killed by roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqis killed, four wounded by roadside bomb near Salman Pak.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi policeman killed in attack on Mosul police station.

Bring ‘em on: Four ICDC members killed by roadside bomb near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: US convoy ambushed by roadside bomb near Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqis killed in fighting with US troops near Ramadi.

Bring ‘em on: Bomb explodes at intersection near Baghdad airport.

Bring ‘em on: US troops under mortar fire near Karbala.

US forces arrest al-Sadr aide in Karbala.

Abu Ghraib. “In the interview with BBC radio on Tuesday, Karpinski said Geoffrey Miller, a two-star general sent to Iraq from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, had ordered new procedures in cell blocs where Iraqis were interrogated. ‘He said, at Guantanamo Bay we`ve learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing they have,’ Karpinski said. ‘He said they are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point they are more than a dog then you`ve lost control of them.’ The United States has charged low-ranking military police officers commanded by Karpinski with abuse after several of them appeared in photographs abusing detainees...‘The intelligence operation was directed. It was under a separate command and there was no reason for me to go out to look at Abu Ghraib at cell bloc 1a or 1b or visit the interrogation facilities.’”

Iraqi interim government wants custody of Saddam Hussein and other detainees by June 30th.

Congenital liar. “Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Saddam Hussein had ‘long-established ties’ with al-Qaida, an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers.”

PTSD. “The 2nd Infantry Division is experiencing a surge in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among soldiers who rotated here from assignments in Iraq or Afghanistan, says a senior health official…’By June, 50 to 60 percent of NCOs (noncommissioned officers) in the division will have come directly from combat theater. The majority of my caseload is NCOs with PTSD,’ she said.”

Bring THIS on: “Private Lynndie England was seen in photographs pointing at naked Iraqi detainees, at Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad, and even holding one on a leash. She has insisted that she was acting on orders and her lawyers may call defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and vice-president Dick Cheney to give evidence at her forthcoming court martial. Other possible witnesses are deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the commander of US forces in Iraq Lieutenant General Ricardo, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. According to the report, lawyers intend to defend 21-year-old England on the grounds that she was following orders to “soften up” detainees before interrogation. They are expected to argue that top Bush Administration officials are implicated in the affair.”

Commentary

Editorial: “Confidence is one thing. Competence is another. Before Rumsfeld and President Bush move to change the face of the American military overseas, Congress must ask some hard questions. Shouldn`t the failures in Iraq and the antipathy of our allies toward the United States raise serious questions about Rumsfeld`s understanding of military and geopolitical strategy?”

Editorial: “The actual figures suggest the United States isn`t prevailing at all in that fight. Why does it matter? Because for two years, critics of the Bush administration`s war in Iraq have argued that it was a serious diversion from the war on terror, an unnecessary war that may benefit the people of Iraq but has made safeguarding the United States more difficult, rather than less. In effect, critics of the administration have argued consistently that President Bush`s determination to be hard on Saddam Hussein inevitably meant he would be soft on the global threat from terrorism. The figures for 2003 bear out the criticism.”

Opinion: “You know, just because you put some rules to abuse or torture doesn`t mean that you`re then playing patty-cake. In any case, torture-lite is a lot like being a little pregnant. There may be degrees of torture, but it`s still torture even if you`re not ripping out fingernails or using hot pokers.”

Analysis: “What ultimately matters is whether the resolution gives the interim government the authority it needs to gain Iraqis` approval. The new resolution is vague on the government`s powers, portending continued confusion. In the end, how the new Iraqi government, the UN and the US handle issues of security, resources and a governing legal framework will be critical.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Oregon Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Oregon Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Oregon Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Oregon soldier injured in Iraq.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:24 AM
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Bush`s `Apex` of Unlimited Power

By Nat Parry
June 15, 2004

George W. Bush is asserting presidential authority that in theory covers the lives and liberties of everyone, everywhere, U.S. citizens and foreigners alike, a claim of power so sweeping that it permits him to imprison, torture and kill at his choice without legal constraint anywhere in the world.

Bush’s belief in his unlimited authority is implicit in a series of administration legal opinions. They include Bush’s declaration that he has the power to arrest and indefinitely imprison anyone he deems an “enemy combatant,” no need for charges or a trial. Bush’s lawyers also are claiming for him the right to order the torturing of anyone in U.S. government custody and the power to kill his international enemies whenever he judges that necessary, even if civilian bystanders also must die.

It’s not so much that Bush is saying that he is above the law or even that he – regally – is the law. He is claiming that no law can infringe on his inherent power to do whatever he wishes as commander in chief. It is a declaration of personal authority unprecedented in scope and contemptuous of American constitutional checks and balances. Ultimately, this Bush Doctrine of Presidential Power is what’s at stake in the Nov. 2 elections.

While elements of Bush’s grand self-vision have been known for months, the full picture has only slowly come into focus. In June 2002, Bush ordered U.S. citizen Jose Padilla detained indefinitely, incommunicado, without formal charges and without constitutional rights, simply on Bush’s assertion that the alleged al-Qaeda operative was an “enemy combatant.”

In August 2002, the Justice Department asserted that international laws against torture don`t apply to interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects. Around the same time, White House lawyers asserted that the President has the right to wage war without authorization from Congress. And during the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bush authorized the bombings of civilian targets, including a restaurant, merely on the belief that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein or other Iraqi leaders might be there.

The latest piece of the picture became apparent in Attorney General John Ashcroft’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 8, when Ashcroft refused to show Congress the administration’s memos arguing that Bush has the inherent authority to order torture whenever he deems that necessary.

Torture Memo

The Wall Street Journal, which obtained a draft of the torture memo, summarized its contents this way: “The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture.”

The Journal also reported that “a military lawyer who helped prepare the report said that political appointees heading the working group sought to assign to the president virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture – to assert ‘presidential power at its absolute apex,’ the lawyer said.” [WSJ, June 7, 2004]

Though administration lawyers have written legal opinions asserting Bush’s unfettered powers, the concept of “presidential power at its absolute apex” isn’t really about law; it’s about lawlessness. It’s about all power invested in the hands of one man with the law made irrelevant in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Essentially Bush is saying that the murderous attacks have required the de facto partial suspension of the U.S. Constitution and the abrogation of international law.

While the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress could theoretically repudiate this Bush Doctrine, it is not clear whether Bush would respect any commands from the two other constitutional branches. It’s also conceivable that the Supreme Court and Congress – given their conservative majorities – will either accede to Bush’s theories about his own powers or duck the central issues, allowing Bush to continue his activities for the foreseeable future.

That was the significance of Ashcroft’s haughty refusal to give Congress the torture memo. Ashcroft rebuffed the request from the Senate Judiciary Committee without even asserting a legal rationale, such as the concept of “executive privilege.” His refusal amounted to telling the Congress “I-don’t-wanna.” Though angry Democratic senators warned Ashcroft that he could be charged with contempt of Congress, the chances of such charges in the Republican-controlled legislature are extremely remote.

The real challenge against Bush is more likely to come from anonymous federal bureaucrats who have been so shocked at Bush’s decisions to cast aside traditional constitutional and humanitarian standards that they are leaking details of the secret policies to the news media, which itself has performed more professionally in reporting this news than it has in several years.

Word Games

Still, the media analysis of this Bush Doctrine has focused on its parts, not its larger meaning. Putting those pieces together creates a troubling mosaic of a leader who disdains legal limits, trusts his personal instincts and considers himself guided by the Almighty.

In his “gut” decision-making, Bush has assumed power over life and death for foreign opponents as well as civilians who get in the way. The New York Times, for instance, reported on June 13 that senior U.S. military and intelligence officials have disclosed that Bush’s orders to attack Iraq led to “many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged and some caused significant civilian casualties.” The Times reported that all 50 airstrikes were unsuccessful in killing the targeted Iraqi leaders, but did inflict dozens of civilian casualties.

“The broad scope of the campaign and its failures, along with the civilian casualties, have not been acknowledged by the Bush administration,” the Times reported.

One of the attacks aimed at killing Saddam Hussein instead blew up patrons at a Baghdad restaurant, killing 14 civilians, including seven children. One mother collapsed when rescue workers pulled the severed head of her daughter out of the rubble. Bush has offered no apology for the carnage.

During the Iraq invasion, the U.S. news media and political Establishment raised few questions about the killing of Iraqi civilians, presumably believing that Bush had the right to target Iraqi leaders because they supposedly were threatening the United States with weapons of mass destruction, the principal rationale cited by Bush for the invasion.

But the failure to find the alleged stockpiles of unconventional weapons – after having ignored the United Nations appeals for more time to search for the WMD – suggests that Bush’s self-defense argument was a bogus pretext for war. In other words, Bush was asserting a right to kill foreign leaders and civilians even if their countries were not threatening the United States. Their deaths could be ordered simply on Bush’s say-so.

Bush did win passage of a war resolution from Congress in fall 2002, but his administration argued that he already possessed the necessary war-making authority without any action by Congress. Indeed, in retrospect, the war resolution a month before the November elections was probably more a political device to create Democratic divisions and win more Republican seats than a sincere recognition of the power to declare war that the Founding Fathers invested in the Legislature, not the Executive.

Beyond simply overriding laws, Bush has sought to unilaterally redefine their meanings. The torture memo, for instance, argues that torture is not torture if the brutality doesn’t cause “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death,” or in the case of psychological abuse, if it doesn’t last “months or even years.”

White House assurances that Bush’s behavior is within the law must be taken with a grain of salt, since Bush’s view of the law is that he gets to define the terms and then he gets to decide if the law applies to him.

So, what should a listener make of White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s assurance that when prisoner interrogations are undertaken, “the President expects that we do so in a way that is consistent with our laws”? Does that mean “consistent” with Bush’s interpretation of the laws? Should there be any comfort from Ashcroft’s statement that he knows of no presidential order that would allow terror suspects to be tortured? Does an all-powerful President even have to express a decision in a formal order? Wouldn’t a presidential nod of the head be enough?

Coming to Light

The possibility of torture being approved by the White House was raised in disclosures of the March 2003 memorandum obtained by the Wall Street Journal. In it, administration lawyers offered legal doctrines “that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful.”

They argued that the president, and anyone acting at the president`s orders, are not bound by U.S. laws or international treaties prohibiting torture, asserting that the need for “obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens” supersedes any obligations the administration has under domestic or international law. [WSJ, June 7, 2004]

“In order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign,” the memo states, U.S. prohibitions against torture “must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.”

It also doesn’t seem that these considerations were simply academic. Recent disclosures about U.S.-run prisons for captives in the Afghan and Iraq wars suggest that torture has been used extensively in “intelligence gathering.” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh disclosed in The New Yorker`s May 10 issue that a 53-page classified Army report written by Gen. Antonio Taguba concluded that Abu Ghraib prison’s military police were urged on by intelligence officers seeking to break down the Iraqis before interrogation.

The abuses, occurring from October to December 2003, included use of a chemical light or broomstick to sexually assault one Iraqi, the report said. Witnesses also told Army investigators that prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks. Other abuses documented in photographs include an Iraqi standing naked covered in excrement and U.S. soldiers beating helpless prisoners.

“Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees,” wrote Taguba.

It is also clear that high-ranking military officials were directly involved in some of the abuses. Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib in September 2003, is reported to have played a key role at Abu Ghraib in overseeing interrogations. Other military personnel have described him as being intimately involved in an incident on Nov. 24, 2003, when a detainee was confronted in his cell by snarling military dogs. [Washington Post, June 9, 2004]

Jordan told Taguba during the Army investigation that a superior military intelligence officer had said that the White House was requesting information concerning “any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues.”

A former senior administration official told the Washington Post that Bush “felt very keenly that his primary responsibility was to do everything within his power to keep the country safe, and he was not concerned with appearances or politics or hiding behind lower-level officials.” [Washington Post, June 9, 2004]

At best, it seems that by placing the highest emphasis on obtaining information, regardless of the rules of interrogation, Bush created the atmosphere in which the Abu Ghraib torture was allowed to take place. As Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, put it, “The horrors of Abu Ghraib were not simply the acts of individual soldiers. Abu Ghraib resulted from decisions made by the Bush administration to cast the rules aside.”

International Law

Prohibition of torture is enshrined in a range of international treaties as well as U.S. law such as the Torture Act. The U.S. Code defines torture as "an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering ... upon another person within his custody or physical control." The code assumes jurisdiction over anyone who is "a national of the United States," with no mention of whether he or she is acting on behalf of the commander in chief.

International law includes the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which makes it clear that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Although the Covenant provides that states may “in time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation … take measures derogating from their obligations” under the Covenant, it specifically states that there are a number of obligations that cannot be abrogated, including the prohibitions against torture and other ill treatment.

The UN Convention Against Torture defines torture as, “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

It requires each state party – including the U.S., which is a signatory – to take effective measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction. “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever,” the Convention reads, “whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

The Geneva Convention provides that prisoners of war must “in all circumstances be treated humanely.” More specifically, certain acts “are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever.” These acts include “violence to life and person, in particular … mutilation, cruel treatment and torture,” as well as “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Potential Defenses

The Bush administration’s memo, however, asserts that these rules don’t apply to anyone carrying out Bush’s instructions. The March 2003 legal memorandum argues that those accused of torture need not worry about prosecution for war crimes. Violators have several potential defenses, according to the memo, including the “necessity” of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or because they were following “superior orders.”

The superior orders claim is also known as the Nuremberg defense. It is the defense used by the Nazis charged after World War II, namely that the accused were acting pursuant to an order. The Nuremberg tribunal rejected this argument, however, stating, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

A Pentagon official told the Wall Street Journal that some military lawyers objected to some of the proposed interrogation methods as “different than what our people had been trained to do under the Geneva Conventions.” Regardless, they all signed on to the final report in April 2003, just as the U.S. occupation of Iraq was beginning.

Following the legal memorandum, Donald Rumsfeld revised Pentagon interrogation procedures. Pentagon officials claim that the March report had no effect on the revisions of interrogation practices. But the report clearly intended to provide a legal “out” for the torture that traced back to Rumsfeld’s revisions.

There have been warnings over the past couple of years about torture in U.S.-run prisons. One soldier, Camilo Mejia, tried to blow the whistle on the abuses and then went to jail for refusing to fight in Iraq. But incontrovertible evidence of abuse came with the Abu Ghraib photos.
Bush’s Gulag

Human Rights Watch traces the Abu Ghraib prison scandal back to the earliest days of the “war on terror.” The group documents how the administration adopted a deliberate policy of permitting illegal interrogation techniques – and then spent two years covering up or ignoring reports of torture and other abuse by U.S. troops. [See the Human Rights Watch report.]

When the Bush administration sent detainees to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in January 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld declared the prisoners to be “unlawful combatants” undeserving of the protections laid out in the Geneva Conventions. There was an international outcry when the living conditions of the prisoners were revealed, and particularly after photographs were released showing the detainees in open-air cages being subjected to what looked like sensory deprivation techniques.

European leaders and human rights groups objected to the treatment with some of the sharpest criticism coming from the staunchest U.S. ally, the United Kingdom. Three British cabinet ministers – Robin Cook, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw – expressed concern that the prisoners were not being treated well and that international agreements about the treatment of prisoners of war were being breached.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, also objected to the treatment of the detainees and called on the Bush administration to follow the Geneva Conventions. In a Jan. 19, 2002 column in the British Independent, Robinson argued that because the Afghanistan conflict was of an international nature, “the law of international armed conflict applies.” She took issue with the administration`s assertion that the prisoners were “unlawful combatants” and thus outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

In defending the U.S. dismissal of the Geneva Convention’s jurisdiction, and as a response to the international criticism of Camp X-Ray, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer argued that “the war on terrorism is a war not envisaged when the Geneva Convention was signed in 1949.” The White House said, “the Convention simply does not cover every situation in which people may be captured or detained by military forces.”

Legal experts rejected this position, pointing to language in the Geneva Convention that clearly intends it to be all-encompassing regarding international conflict. As the Red Cross stated itself upon the signing of the Geneva Convention in 1949, “no possible loophole is left; there can be no excuse, no attenuating circumstances.” [For more on the international debate regarding Guantanamo Bay and the Geneva Conventions, see Consortiumnews.com`s "Bush’s Return to Unilateralism."]

The Bush administration rejected those arguments and has insisted that Guantanamo Bay falls outside the parameters of either U.S. or international law. The Justice Department argued in a Jan. 22, 2002, memo that U.S. officials could not be charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. The argument boiled down to assertions that the war on terror is not covered by the Geneva Conventions and that because al Qaeda fighters do not follow the laws of war, they are not protected by international law.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time

But it is now clear that even if the Justice Department’s legal argument about al-Qaeda held water, it wouldn’t pertain to many of the captives at Guantanamo Bay, because many of them do not appear to be terrorists. As some foreign nationals are being released, it is becoming apparent that many were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After five British citizens were released from Guantanamo, the Observer wrote a long article on March 14, 2004, based on interviews with the so-called Tipton Three, who had been held for two years. They had entered Afghanistan, they said, solely to help provide humanitarian aid, and had no intention of fighting the U.S. forces.

Although they had not carried arms, the Bush administration labelled them “unlawful combatants” and sent them to the prison camp at Guantanamo. Two years later, the American authorities accepted their claims that they were never members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda or any other militant group, and released them. [The Observer, March 14, 2004]

The Mirror carried an article based on interviews with other former Guantanamo prisoners called “My Hell in Camp X-Ray.” Both the Mirror and Observer articles detailed systematic abuses of the prisoners in Afghanistan, on the 20-hour plane trip to Cuba, and within the Guantanamo Bay prison.

These abuses included being kept in tight chains on the flight to Guantanamo, not permitted to even use the bathroom. The chains were so tight, claimed Shafik Rasul, that he lost feeling in his hands for the next six months. At Guantanamo, there were beatings and solitary confinement for trivial violations of arbitrary rules, endless interrogations under austere conditions, and disrespect for detainees’ religious beliefs. Sleep deprivation techniques were also used, with prisoners kept in tiny cells with bright lights left on, and the cells freezing at night and very hot during the day.
Alarm Bells

As the Guantanamo prison was being opened, leaders from around the world sounded alarm bells, warning that by refusing to adhere to the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. was heading down a slippery slope in which greater abuses were sure to follow. Some argued that the detainees must be accorded rights on basic humanitarian grounds, while other world leaders pointed out that once international standards are weakened, they become much more difficult to enforce, including situations in which U.S. soldiers are captured in battle.

But neither the Bush administration nor the U.S. news media appeared alarmed by such concerns. That remained the case even as U.S. officials were admitting to newly adopted interrogation methods that resembled torture. The Washington Post reported in December 2002 that terrorist suspects were being subjected to "stress and duress" tactics, which in some cases could be considered torture. [Washington Post, Dec. 26, 2002]

U.S. officials admitted to the use of sleep deprivation in their interrogations of prisoners, a practice with ambiguous status in international law. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that, when used for the purpose of breaking a prisoner`s will, sleep deprivation “may in some cases constitute torture.”

Senior U.S. officials defended these tactics, with one official maintaining that, “If you don`t violate someone`s human rights some of the time, you probably aren`t doing your job.” He elaborated that the U.S. shouldn`t be “promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA.”

Virtually confirming the new U.S. policy of using torture in its interrogation techniques, Cofer Black, former head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, told a joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees on Sept. 26, 2002, that there was a new “operational flexibility” in dealing with suspected terrorists. He said that "There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off."

In response to the Washington Post article, Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth reminded the U.S. that “torture is always prohibited under any circumstances.” He also warned that, “U.S. officials who take part in torture, authorize it, or even close their eyes to it, can be prosecuted by courts anywhere in the world.” The rights organization also called on the administration to investigate and condemn allegations of torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment.

In response, a Defense Department lawyer said, “United States policy condemns torture,” but didn’t say whether the U.S. has a legal obligation to refrain from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib

The direct link between the shunning of the Geneva Conventions at Guantanamo Bay and the abuses at Abu Ghraib was made plain by Ashcroft’s testimony on June 8. Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ashcroft used many of the same arguments that were made in early 2002 in deflecting criticism of Guantanamo Bay.

“The only people who are accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention,” Ashcroft said, are “those nations that are high-contracting parties to the convention. Al-Qaeda is not a high-contracting party to the Geneva Convention. It repudiates the rules of war. It operates against civilians, it doesn`t wear uniforms, and it has never sought to be a high-contracting party. The Geneva Conventions do not apply as it relates to al-Qaeda. And they are not intended to apply as it relates to al-Qaeda.”

Not only did Ashcroft ignore the fact that those tortured in Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, but the argument itself has been thoroughly debunked by experts on the Geneva Conventions. Central to the counter-argument is the fact that to determine a prisoner’s status under the Convention, a “competent tribunal” must be established.

In the case of Guantanamo, a tribunal never was established. Rather, Bush unilaterally decided which prisoners would qualify for protections, and which protections they would receive. Plus, those technicalities cited by Ashcroft do not pertain to the use of torture which is fully and unambiguously prohibited in numerous treaties.

The Supreme Court is now considering the Padilla case and Bush’s claim of his singular right to imprison even American citizens while denying them their constitutional rights.

Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg questioned White House lawyers about whether Bush also could authorize torture. She asked, “If the law is what the Executive says it is, whatever is necessary and appropriate in the Executive`s judgment, that`s the resolution you gave us that Congress passed and leaves it up to the Executive, unchecked by the Judiciary. So, what is it that would be a check against torture?”

Government lawyer Paul Clement answered, “Well, first of all there are treaty obligations, but the primary check is that just as in every other war, if a U.S. military person commits a war crime, by creating some atrocity on a harmless detained enemy combatant or a prisoner of war, that violates our own conception of what`s a war crime and we`ll put that U.S. Military officer on trial in a Court Martial.”

So, in other words, the primary – and perhaps only – check on torture and human rights violations is the Executive Branch’s “own conception” of what does or does not constitute a war crime. Again the decision is entirely Bush’s. If he is personally disgusted by behavior like the photographed sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib, individual soldiers can be prosecuted. If he is not troubled, they won’t be.

It is also now known that in at least one case, Secretary Rumsfeld ordered intelligence officers to “take the gloves off” in questioning a U.S. citizen, the so-called “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. Following the order, Lindh was stripped naked and tied to a stretcher in questioning by CIA operatives. [See http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

While some would argue that tough interrogation methods were justified in pursuit of intelligence on Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, the fact that the Secretary of Defense potentially approved the torture of an American citizen should alert other citizens that the Bush administration might choose to expand the practice.
Defining Terrorism

This possibility is particularly disconcerting considering how broadly “terrorism” is defined in the USA Patriot Act, and how protesters of government policy have in recent years been equated implicitly and explicitly with terrorists. In the Patriot Act, terrorism is defined in such a way that a wide range of legitimate political protest and civil disobedience could fall under it.

Section 802 of the Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism as activities that “appear to be intended to influence policy of a government by intimidation or coercion”

Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Bar Association have objected to this definition. The prohibition against seeking to influence government policy by “intimidation” is so vague and so subjective that virtually any act of civil disobedience or confrontational protest could fit under the definition, the critics say.

There is also quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that law enforcement is increasingly looking at demonstrators as the equivalents of terrorists. Prior to an October demonstration against the Iraq War in Washington, D.C., the FBI instructed local law enforcement agencies to report suspicious protesters to the FBI’s counterterrorism squad. In anticipation of the protests against the G8 economic summit in Georgia, there were unusual security measures taken, with the military augmenting local law enforcement in dealing with protests. Authorities brought in 2,000 body bags and a refrigerated lorry to take away potential corpses.

With the hardened stance toward political dissent, and the legal arguments on torture, there is reason for concern over what the future holds if the present course is maintained.

For his part, George W. Bush has tried to draw comparisons between the Second World War and the global war against terrorism. Bush, who keeps a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office and who has referred to Iraqi suicide bombers as “kamikazes,” kicked off this theme-building project in his speech to the Air Force Academy on June 2. In that speech, he said, “Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless, surprise attack on the United States. ... This is the greatest challenge of our time, the storm in which we fly.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell elaborated on the theme, telling France 3 Television, “I think we can compare the fight against the Nazis and the fight against communism with the fight that we are now all engaged in against terrorism. And Iraq is a part of that battlefield.”

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice offered some of her own comparisons, claiming that George W. Bush will go down in history as a world leader on par with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. “When you think of statesmen,” Rice said, “you think of people who seized historic opportunities to change the world for the better, people like Roosevelt, people like Churchill, and people like Truman, who understood the challenges of communism. And this president has been an agent of change for the better -- historic change for the better.”

However, Europeans, especially those for whom memories of Nazism and the barbarity of World War II are still fresh, might object to the comparisons with the heroes of World War II. Indeed, the Bush administration`s debate about loosening the rules on torture is more likely to bring back memories of Adolf Hitler than Roosevelt and Churchill, since it was Hitler who is blamed for reviving the practice in Europe.

In Europe, the use of torture to extract confessions had been condemned since the Enlightenment when rationality and the rule of law replaced the divine right of kings. The practice was resurrected in Germany when the Nazis rose to power and legitimized “third degree” interrogations. The Nazis used torture extensively, particularly in the nations Germany had invaded and occupied, in order to obtain information about anti-occupation resistance activities.

At the end of World War II, as the atrocities of war were reviewed, torture was perceived to be an aberration that must not be allowed to recur. In the official commentary on the text of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote that the motivation was to prevent “acts which world public opinion finds particularly revolting – acts which were committed frequently in the Second World War.” [See The Treatment of Prisoners Under International Law, by Nigel Rodley]

These sentiments led directly to the international conventions prohibiting torture, conventions that the Bush administration now claims do not apply to the United States.

By re-legitimizing torture, declaring international law irrelevant and rewriting the rules to justify whatever actions Bush sees fit, the administration is leading the United States down a dark and dangerous road. The next – and possibly last – checkpoint for changing direction will be the Nov. 2 elections, which now loom not only as a choice between the presidential candidates but as a referendum on whether the American people will endorse Bush`s concept of an all-powerful Executive and follow him toward what looks like a very different form of government.

To make a tax-deductible donation to support this Web site, either click on the Consortiumnews.com`s secure Web-based form or send a check to the Consortium for Independent Journalism, Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22201.

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U.S. jobless rate misses "hidden" unemployed

By Reuters | June 14, 2004

NEW YORK -- Buried inside the official U.S. employment report each month is a little-known figure that gives a much less rosy picture of the labor market than the headlines.

The government agency that produces the data also publishes an alternative measure that tries to capture the hidden unemployed, those who are not included in the official unemployment rate for various statistical reasons.

That broader measure is dramatically higher, at 9.7 percent in May, compared with the official level of 5.6 percent.

That`s an extra 5.96 million people, in addition to the 8.2 million "officially" unemployed, who are waiting on the sidelines and may at some point step back into the labor force.

Although it receives little notice, the adjusted jobless rate has important implications for Federal Reserve policy-makers because it suggests the job market will not tighten as quickly as some in the financial markets believe.

"It shows there is more slack in the labor market than appears on the surface and as job opportunities improve, we`ll see people re-entering the labor force to search for work," said former Fed Governor Lyle Gramley.

"That means fears that inflation is about break out all over the place do not seem warranted," he said in an interview.

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to start raising interest rates later this month, as the economy recovers from the 2001 recession and job creation picks up. But the Fed can boost rates at a slower pace if inflation is not a big threat.

DISCOURAGED WORKERS

The Labor Department`s adjusted measure of unemployment adds in people it describes as "marginally attached" to the labor force. These are workers who have not actively looked for work in the past four weeks, including "discouraged workers" who have given up altogether. They also include those who have given up looking for full-time jobs and have settled for part-time work instead.

None of the unemployment measures include the 1.7 percent of the male wage-earning population who are in prison, or another 1.36 million men, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

"We have had this unprecedented withdrawal from the labor force over the past three years," said Lee Price, research director at the independent Economic Policy Institute. "The traditional measure of labor market slack, the unemployment rate, is giving us a misleadingly tight picture."

Indeed, the labor force participation rate is at its lowest level since 1988 -- lower even than in the last recession.

Financial markets and private-sector economists pay little attention to the alternative measure of joblessness, and a search of the Federal Reserve`s entire database of research turned up only two articles on the topic.

The author of one of those papers, economist Yolanda Kodrzycki at the Boston Fed, said the broader measure is "very helpful," although it tends to move in tandem with the official rate.

On Wall street, analysts generally hold upbeat views on the economy and accept the unemployment rate at face value, said HSBC Chief Economist Ian Morris. "There is a whole debate to be had on unemployment, but it`s not happening," he said.

The adjusted measure shows "unemployment remains stubbornly high and higher than it should be at this point in the cycle," said Jose Rasco, senior economist at Merrill Lynch.

Federal Reserve officials seem to be aware of the limits of the reported unemployment rate.

Fed Governor Donald Kohn noted in a speech last week that many people who left the work force because of poor prospects are probably ready to rejoin the market.

"If that is correct, then the current level of the unemployment rate ... may, if anything, understate the availability of labor resources," Kohn said.

The return of the uncounted into the work force will also slow the improvement in the official rate, and could actually send it higher, even as new jobs are being created.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Iraqi fire fighters extinguishing a blazing patch of spilled oil after saboteurs damaged a pipeline near the southern city of Basra.

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June 15, 2004
4 Foreign Contractors Die in Ambush; Blast Shuts Oil Port
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 15 — Snipers lining a highway and an overpass staged a spectacular and well-organized ambush on a convoy carrying foreign contractors this afternoon, killing at least four of them near Baghdad International Airport, an American military official and a security contractor said.

The attack came one day after a powerful car bomb killed five foreign contractors and eight Iraqis in downtown Baghdad and underscored the extreme dangers surrounding foreign workers in Iraq.

The overnight bombing of a set of oil pipelines near the Persian Gulf forced the shutdown of Iraq`s main oil export terminal for up to 10 days, potentially costing the country $600 million in revenue. The sabotage was the most devastating attack so far in a recent series of ambitious infrastructure assaults clearly intended to paralyze the country.

The shadow of sectarian violence fell over the heart of Iraq as a furious crowd of Shiite mourners in the capital accused a hard-line Sunni cleric in the volatile city of Falluja of ordering the deaths of six Shiite truck drivers. The drivers` bodies were discovered on Monday in a morgue in the neighboring town of Ramadi. The mourners said police officers in Falluja had handed the drivers over to the cleric, who confirmed the killings but denied any role in them.

Together, the incidents of violence amounted to one of the costliest days for Iraq in at least a month and dispelled any notion that stability is at hand for the beleaguered country.

Adding to the tensions, the American and Iraqi governments clashed over several contentious issues in what appeared to be the first major test of power for this country`s new interim government.

Iyad Allawi, the prime minister, called for the Americans to hand over all detainees — including Saddam Hussein — to the Iraqis by June 30, when Iraq will gain limited sovereign powers. Mr. Allawi also said through a spokesman that foreign contractors should be subject to all Iraqi laws. The president, Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, demanded that the Americans hand over Mr. Hussein`s Republican Palace, a prominent symbol of power, to the Iraqi government after June 30.

American officials said they did not have to meet any of the demands and were in discussions with the Iraqi government over them. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the resolution passed earlier this month by the United Nations Security Council granted the Americans final authority over detainees, while President Bush said he wanted to make sure there was "appropriate security" before handing over Mr. Hussein.

"We also do not have to hand him over until there`s a cessation of active hostilities," said Dan Senor, a spokesman for the occupation. "Hostilities, unfortunately, continue."

On the issue of American contractors, Mr. Senor said such workers would answer to Iraqi laws if they committed criminal acts, but that an order signed by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator here, gave contractors immunity from legal prosecution over any incident involving their work.

As for handing over the Republican Palace, he added, "we need substantial space, property, for the U.S. mission here." The palace is being used by the Coalitional Provisional Authority as a headquarters building and will likely become an annex for the American embassy due to open here after June 30, Mr. Senor said.

The attack involving the convoy of foreign contractors took place between 1:30 and 2 p.m. on a north-south road running into the highway leading to the Baghdad airport, General Kimmitt said. Insurgents on an overpass raked a three-vehicle convoy with gunfire. Passengers in two of the cars were apparently killed, while a third car pocked with bullet holes limped to a nearby American base.

General Kimmitt said he knew nothing of the identities of the victims and did not know how many people were killed.

A security contractor who had been briefed on the attack said it appeared that at least four people were killed. Besides the gunmen on the overpass, snipers had taken up positions along both sides of the road and opened fire on the convoy. The contractor added that the assault had taken place on the main road to the airport rather than on an intersecting artery.

The five-mile airport road is considered by foreigners to be the most dangerous thoroughfare in Baghdad. Earlier this month, insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47`s killed two American security contractors and two Poles in a coordinated ambush on a convoy of sport utility vehicles.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 16, 2004
THE DICTATOR
Iraq Seeks Custody of Hussein; Bush Has Security Concerns
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and EDWARD WONG

ASHINGTON, June 15 - President Bush said Tuesday that the United States would hand over Saddam Hussein to the new Iraqi government only when it was clear that the Iraqis had the ability to securely keep him in custody.

His comments came after Iraq`s new interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, speaking in Baghdad, called for the Americans to hand over all detainees, including Mr. Hussein, by June 30, when Iraq is to gain limited sovereignty from the United States.

Custody of Mr. Hussein was one of several issues on which the Americans and the new Iraqi government remain divided as the transfer of authority draws nearer.

For example, the new government`s president, Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, demanded that the Americans cede Mr. Hussein`s marble-tiled Republican Palace, a prominent symbol of power, which the American-led civilian administration had used as a headquarters and which the United States was considering as a likely annex to its vast new embassy.

At a sweltering news conference with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan in the Rose Garden of the White House, President Bush addressed the question of control over Mr. Hussein. "We want to make sure that he doesn`t come back to power," Mr. Bush said. "And so, therefore, it`s a legitimate question to ask of the interim government - how are you going to make sure that he stays in jail?"

Mr. Bush did not say when custody would be transferred.

"We`re working to make sure there`s appropriate security," Mr. Bush said.

The White House had intended the news conference to promote progress in Afghanistan, and Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials attended. But it was dominated by questions about Iraq.

"I mean, one thing, obviously, is that we don`t want, and I know the Iraqi interim government doesn`t want, is there to be lax security and for Saddam Hussein to somehow not stand trial for the horrendous murders and torture that he inflicted upon the Iraqi people," Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Hussein, who was captured by United States forces in December 2003, is now being held as a prisoner of war at an undisclosed American detention facility in Iraq.

It is unclear who would guard him under the new government or where he might be held. A senior Bush administration official said late Tuesday that one option under serious discussion was for the American military to give legal jurisdiction to the new Iraqi government but to retain physical custody of Mr. Hussein until the Iraqis have a secure place to hold him.

A tribunal headed by Salem Chalabi - a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress - has been established to bring Mr. Hussein and members of his government to trial. War crimes and genocide are among the charges that will be considered, Salem Chalabi has said.

The Geneva Conventions require a country to release prisoners of war at the end of a war or occupation, unless criminal charges are brought against the prisoners. The Bush administration has insisted repeatedly that the occupation is ending on June 30, when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority is dissolved.

But Dan Senor, a spokesman for the authority in Iraq, said Tuesday that Mr. Hussein could remain a prisoner of war for some time. "We also do not have to hand him over until there`s a cessation of active hostilities,`` he said. "Hostilities, unfortunately, continue.``

The American military has said it intends to continue to hold 4,000 to 5,000 detainees after June 30. A lawyer for the occupation authority said those released could be charged and tried by one of three Iraqi court systems.

At the news conference, Mr. Bush also said it would be up to the new government of Iraq to determine how to handle Moktada al-Sadr, a fiery Shiite cleric who has led an insurgency against the American-led occupation and who Mr. Bush has called a "thug." Mr. Sadr is forming a political party that will probably take part in Iraqi elections next year.

His actions are in direct defiance of L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator in Iraq, who issued an order last week barring people with illegal militias - like that of Mr. Sadr - from taking part in elections in the near future.

"The interim Iraqi government will deal with al-Sadr in the way they see fit," Mr. Bush said. "They`re sovereign."

In Baghdad, President Yawar said he approved of the plan by Mr. Sadr to start a political party. "I think this is a very smart move of him," he said. "I`ve kept on saying consistently that if I were in his shoes, I would try and go into the political arena instead of raising arms."

Another dividing point was whether Iraqi law applied to foreign contractors. Dr. Allawi wants it to; Mr. Senor, the occupation authority spokesman, said such workers would answer to Iraqi laws if they are charged with criminal acts. But an order signed by Mr. Bremer gives foreign contractors immunity from legal prosecution over any incident involving their work, Mr. Senor said.

The debate over the Republican Palace is particularly intense, given the strong symbolism involved.

"We asked that the Republican Palace be vacated at the first possible opportunity in order for us to use it as Iraqis, as a Republican Palace or a museum," President Yawar said. "Whatever we do with it is a matter for Iraqi sovereignty. It is a symbol of Iraqi sovereignty."

The Rose Garden news conference started as planned, with Mr. Bush and Mr. Karzai giving lengthy statements about Afghanistan, including a pledge that the nation would hold its first democratic elections in September. Mr. Karzai said 3.8 million voters had been registered - more than a third of the electorate, but a number far short of United Nations goals. Mr. Karzai acknowledged that he was cooperating with those mujahedeen leaders who support him as a presidential candidate, a move that has upset many Afghans. But Mr. Karzai said that the mujahedeen, who fought the Soviet occupation and have dominated Afghan politics for a decade, would not join his government.

"No deals have been made, no coalitions have been made and no coalition will be made," said Mr. Karzai. The Afghan president, known for his colorful dress, wore a lavish emerald-green silk cape. He removed it at the podium after 20 minutes under the Washington sun. Mr. Karzai was on his fourth trip to Washington as leader of Afghanistan. He sought political support, NATO troops and an American understanding of his relationship with the warlords. His trip was designed to bolster his standing in Afghanistan and help stabilize the nation before the voting in September.

For his part, Mr. Bush appeared in an ebullient mood as he stood by Mr. Karzai`s side, ready to promote what he considers a good-news story of his administration, at least in relation to Iraq.

"Coalition forces, including many brave Afghans, have brought America, Afghanistan and the free world its first victory in the war on terror," Mr. Bush said. "Afghanistan is no longer a terrorist factory sending thousands of killers into the world."

Joining the president in the Rose Garden was an unusual display of his high command. Along with Vice President Cheney were Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Karen P. Hughes, an adviser to the president; and Laura Bush.

The United States in recent months has increased its forces in Afghanistan to 20,000 troops, and Mr. Bush outlined what he called America`s "iron-clad" commitment to the country.Mr. Bush did not mention assistance for one of Afghanistan`s biggest problems, the illegal cultivation of opium poppies. The trade has brought in $2.3 billion last year.

Deadly Attack in Afghanistan

By The New York Times

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, June 15 - A senior government official was gunned down outside his home in this southern city on Tuesday evening by two men on a motorbike, the deputy provincial governor said.

The official, Hamid Agha, the local director of the Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation, died a few hours later. Three workers at his house were wounded, said the deputy governor, Muhammad Anas. He blamed members of the Taliban.

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington for this article and Edward Wong from Baghdad.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Ich dachte immer US-Präsidenten kommen gleich in die Hölle.

June 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The View From Purgatory
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Q: Did it warm your heart out there in Purgatory, President Nixon, to see the friendly banter at the White House unveiling of the Clinton portraits?

RN: Same as at my funeral; everybody was forced to be gracious. Nobody would say what everybody thought: that Hillary`s portrait is fine but Bill`s is awful. Now ask me about Karzai.

Q: President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan spoke to a joint session of Congress yesterday——

RN: It was a joint meeting, you know — joint sessions are only to hear the U.S. president. But wasn`t Karzai terrific? He was grateful for America`s liberation of his country, and you don`t hear a lot of that these days. He asked NATO to put its troops where its mouth is, which it won`t. That`s why we need a new Mansfield Amendment — to threaten the French and Germans with an American pullout from Europe.

Q: But hasn`t Bush begun to do that already?

RN: Not fast enough. You saw the results of the European Parliament elections? Schröder is finished. Chirac has had it. Next year they`ll be begging Bush for support. And that`s when we should crack `em hard to bolster our friends in Afghanistan. This Karzai fellow should make a deal with his warlords to get some breathing room this fall for his election. Then he can attack his real problem, which is not so much the Taliban terrorists as it is the damned poppies. We have to help him eradicate the huge opium trade before that place becomes a criminal state. Only then can we have a Muslim model for democracy in Iraq.

Q: Do you think the handover of sovereignty in Baghdad this month will make a big difference?

RN: It`ll get the Iraqis into their own war, ready or not. If the Shiite majority has the guts to use our help in putting down Saddam`s killers, they deserve their freedom. But it`s time for them to stop whining about us and start fighting the bombers.

Q: But what of our prison abuse——

RN: Look, when the Iraqis in the street get sore, not at us but at the bombers not only blowing up their oil wells but killing their wives and children, any terrorist suspects the new government rounds up will wish the Americans were back in charge. That prison story and the C.I.A. recriminations will drag on and on in the media here because it helps the doves make a necessary war look bad.

Q: Now you`re into politics, how do you see the campaign dynamic?

RN: Let me say this about that: Bush went into a slump because of war casualties, and as we come out of the war, Bush comes out of his slump. Now he has to stop responding to Kerry`s demands — all that U.N. kissy-face — and start talking about exciting plans for the economic boom in his second term.

Q: And what should Kerry be doing as his Boston convention approaches?

RN: First, stop the daily grousing, which turns people off after a while. Stay the hell away from job creation, which has backfired on him. Claim credit for straightening Bush out on Iraq and move on to the great dream. Pick one powerful domestic issue — old folks` health or college education, whatever — hit it hard and make it his own. Kerry`s been all over the lot so far.

Q: Where will the campaign be four months from now?

RN: That`s Oct. 16, with jobs and the market rising, casualties contained, at least one terrorist attack in the U.S. Debates are over, with Kerry winning on points and Bush on personality. First, half of the swing vote, larger than expected, moves toward the incumbent, which puts Bush a couple of points ahead.

Q: That energizes the Democrats——

RN: Not all of them. The prospect of a Bush win would help Democrats in Congressional races because people who prefer Bush may not trust him, and will split their tickets. And the Hillary crowd, having done their bit for Kerry, won`t cry at his potential defeat because it would open the way to the Clinton restoration in 2008.

Q: (Gasp!) That`s absolutely Machiavellian.

RN: Thank you. And with Coach Joe Gibbs back, keep your eye on those Redskins.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 16, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
When Politics Corrupts Money
By SHIRIN EBADI and AMIR ATTARAN

The World Bank has a human rights problem: it doesn`t respect them enough. The bank also has a political problem: concern about global poverty, according to its president, James D. Wolfensohn, is "near a low point." Yet the bank, concerned about the second problem, seems to lack awareness of the first — to the detriment of its mission to help the world`s poor.

The World Bank, which provided $18.5 billion in aid in 2003, should withhold money from governments that are antidemocratic, or that violate their people`s human rights. To lend money to tyrants is to strengthen them and to become complicit when they stamp on their people`s rights. To lend money to one-party states is to lock in their hegemony, and to ridicule the dignity of people outside the party. To lend money to well-kept dictators is to enslave their citizenry, who even after the dictator is gone must repay principal and interest — to the bank.

It would undoubtedly shock most rights-loving Western taxpayers to know that the bank does not consistently differentiate between democracies and dictatorships when making decisions about loans and aid. In the last decade, the bank has offered loans to dozens of countries that violate civil rights, according to organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations.

The bank`s justification for lending to despots is contained in one word: pragmatism. The belief is that oppressed people are better off if their governments borrow money to provide socially useful services. By lending money to oppressive governments, the bank says, it is helping to make society more equal — if only a little.

Maybe, maybe not. Either way, there is no need to argue the point, because however much money the bank lends to oppressive governments (and that is plenty), there are enough poverty-stricken democracies that would gladly have it instead. Mr. Wolfensohn himself has said that if the world`s total supply of foreign aid were doubled — to about $100 billion annually — poor countries could easily absorb the increase and use it to pay for projects to help reduce poverty.

If he is right and the unfulfilled needs are that extensive, then why doesn`t the bank find other takers for the money it now lends to oppressive governments? The bank could easily redirect more than half its lending (say, $10 billion out of the $18.5 billion total) and still finance only a fraction of the poverty programs Mr. Wolfensohn deems worthy. The bank can find more than enough needy democracies willing to accept its aid.

Thus the bank`s "pragmatic" justification to lend money to oppressive governments is absurd. It amounts to giving secretive, frequently kleptocratic dictatorships priority — before the democracies have their fill. This handicaps both the citizens and leaders who together shoulder the hard work of sustaining democracies.

Instead, the bank should devise a kind of human rights scorecard. At a minimum, it should include the civil freedoms (of expression, of the press, of women) and the social and economic freedoms (access to health, education and property). The bank should monitor these freedoms and refuse to aid any country that violates them.

By using a scorecard like this, the bank would show that governments that exclude civic participation in politics are not legitimate borrowers in their people`s interest, because the people have no say. Using the scorecard would also harness the inspirational power of human rights to rekindle fading interest in the bank`s work. And, not incidentally, it would probably be the most benign form of conditionality ever applied by the bank.

So why not do it? The bank`s pragmatists point out that, under its charter, "only economic considerations shall be relevant" to lending decisions. But this argument proves nothing. If the leadership and governance of a prospective debtor are relevant considerations for a commercial bank, then surely they are important to the World Bank. Even if democratic economies do not always outperform oppressive ones, they are safer risks. As a report of the United Nations Development Program noted last year, "no democracy has ever performed as badly as the worst dictatorships."

Cutting loans to dictators would therefore avoid the worst economic outcomes like default and endless debt rescheduling. Had the bank practiced rights-based lending in the past, it never would have loaned money to corrupt despots like Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti or Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire — loans that citizens there are still paying back. Rights-based lending would also save taxpayer money while achieving equal or better results for the world`s poor.

Mr. Wolfensohn appeared to admit as much last month, when asked about the World Bank`s practice of lending to dictatorships. "The easiest thing for me, for the bank," he said, "would be to say, just wait until these countries are democratic" before lending to them.

Mr. Wolfensohn is right. The bank should either produce honest reasons for giving aid to dictators and tyrants while democracies go begging, or it should do "the easiest thing" — and stop. To carry on, laden with excuses rather than principles, is not only a waste of money. It is an insult to the human rights of billions of people.

Shirin Ebadi, a law professor at the University of Tehran, won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2003. Amir Attaran is a professor of law and population health at the University of Ottawa.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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From AxisofLogic.com

Critical Analysis
Looking Down the Precipice at the Face of Human Evil
By Manuel Valenzuela, Contributing Editor
Jun 12, 2004, 01:27


Upon the precipice do wise men and women stand, straddled with the burden of the world they see and feeling impotent to the destruction others unleash. Gazing over the canyon that encloses humanity the evisceration of forests, deserts, savannahs, jungles and oceans can they see, becoming nauseous breathing polluted air, overlooking voracious locusts as they make barren once fertile lands. Tears of sorrow befall those whose eyes can take no more, for their fellow species is on a collision course with self-extinction, destined to take away life where it once flourished, ruining a planet and all energy giving it vibrancy.

It is man in the 21st century that will finally accomplish what antecedents past once started. The birth of industry will inevitably lead to the death of man as it slowly unwinds through hills of time and space, societal change and the human condition, patient in its knowledge that eventually the same species that created it is doomed to self-destruct. The sands of time continue to pass by uninterrupted and unhindered, humankind ignorant to the path it has chosen to lead, not knowing the monster it has birthed nor the child of death that now walks among us, exploiting and destroying, ruining and pilfering, and advancing the decay and debasement of the most powerful Empire to ever rise from the soils of Earth.


Human evil has always graced us with its ominous presence, yet rarely does it succeed to grip power in times of carnage and in conjunction with strength and might. It is those memories of history, marked by genocides, cleansings, wars and exterminations that manifest the combination of evil with its ascendancy to power. When combined with sheer military might, economic prosperity and a gullible sheep-like population, human evil, ingrained in the essence of an immoral leader and his cabal of like-minded charlatans, can dispose of human flesh easier than we dispose of garbage.


The reality of war is that warmongers, war-like leaders and those whose appetite for blood is only matched by the magnified apathy for human suffering and death come to power with human evil firmly immersed into their existence. It is war-like leaders who make war-like people of those they rule. It is their human evil that releases the ghosts of war, destruction, suffering and violence upon the same brethren they command. If power corrupts, then those who carry the virus of human evil and are ascended to the throne of omnipotence are made stronger, thereby increasing the virus growing inside, waiting eagerly to become the pandemic infecting millions whose thirst for blood now matches that of their leaders.


We find ourselves living in that most dangerous of times when the world of man can destroy itself thousands of times over. It is in this time when the choosing of our leaders must be done in a most careful manner, selecting only those whose wisdom can be matched by their honor. For to leave the world�s most powerful military in the hands of wickedness is to risk perpetrating human evil upon the people of the globe. It is in this exact situation that the planet finds itself, caught in a parallel universe of devastating tragedy that is spiraling six billion people into dimensions worthy of fantasies the human mind is too terrified to enter.



A junta of miscreants usurped the will of the people and inserted itself into the halls of power, finally capable of implementing what had for years escaped their grasp. An entire nation gave way to a fraud perpetrated in front of our very eyes, helping to seal a most unfortunate future the likes of which had not existed since 1930�s Germany. The putrid breath of the neocons and the Christian fundamentalists contaminated the air of the Pax Americana, hypnotizing hundreds of millions into acquiescent enslavement that continues to detrimentally affect the collective energy of those now residing inside the belly of the beast. The evisceration of America as it had once existed could finally be set in motion.



September 11, 2001 forever altered human history for the worse, as if skyscrapers falling and disintegrating had unearthed wicked demons from the inner dungeons of the human mind. The gates of Hades had been opened, unlocking the chains that for years had kept imprisoned the worst evils in the human condition. The sons and daughters of wretchedness now dispersed to cast their malevolence on a civilization always plagued by the demons of man, never understanding the chaos of its own existence nor the frailty of its fragile cohabitation that condemned the countless of history to death, misery and destruction.



Finding opportunity has always been the hallmark of human evil, and with 9/11, an event that was purposefully allowed to transpire in order to achieve that which was most sought, evil was able to breathe freely once more as it flew like an uncaged bird, extending its wings, rising like a phoenix and awakened to once more envelope humankind with its violent virus of self-destruction that has historically wreaked havoc upon the lands and energies of man.



From the nadir of inconsequential ineptitude rose he who would help prosecute a false �war on terror� that itself has only worked to invoke terror in the psyche of human understanding. Gaining strength from death and destruction, he without mandate was thrust into history, neither ready for it nor seeking it, neither competent to grace its pages nor wise to the lessons sketched in its verses. Finding opportunity in the rubble of 9/11 human evil percolated into a frightened and easily manipulated populace, vulnerable to the human emotion and animalistic passions that were witness to live carnage and collapsing humanity. Seeping energies of anger and vengeance rose to the heavens along with smoldering plumes of heat filled smoke. Waiting anxiously stood human evil, ready to inject reaction to an action born in cause and effect.



�War on terror� was declared, human evil would have no end, traversing mountains and valleys, cities and towns, raining destruction and bringing suffering to innocent believers of Muslim faith. 9/11 became the key that ignited the engine of profitability, enriching the capitalistic oligarchy controlling the military-industrial complex. A war of perpetuity meant profits without cessation, power without accountability and control without challenge. Perpetual war with ambiguous enemies, defined by Washington and manipulated in its image, the so called �war on terror� is an illusion, based on manipulations of fear and insecurity, designed to enrich, erode and engulf.



Human evil has fused with human greed, both needing control to exist, both feeding off the fear of human psychology. War was designed and fostered by those entities ideologically driven by evil masked as good, espousing enslavement disguised by freedom and seeking control marketed as democracy. From the ashes of Ground Zero human evil emerged, passed from one group of fundamentalists to another, creating in one a messianic purpose of militaristic might, believing himself appointed by the metaphysical to alter the real, delusional in thought and ignorant to workings of human civilization past and present, born in the confines of a protected bubble, manipulated and easily controlled by zealots whose advice mask the evil intentions they possess.



America has been hijacked by tainted blood enraptured by their arrogance and absorbed by their sheer ignorance. The cloud of pollution emanating from the early morning of 9/11 New York City traversed to all corners of the nation, blinding our mind to the audacity of the warmongers controlling the strings of government that has released terror upon the world and the slow but eventual destruction of the building blocks that sustain America. Make no mistake, our foundations are crumbling from under our impotent legs while at the same time our lives are being endangered more and more every day by the purposeful policies of the human evil residing in Washington.



It is impossible to think that those in the upper echelons of power have not been aware of the consequences of their actions or do not possess the intelligence to know the danger they have placed the Western world in. It is inconceivable that men and women of power do not possess the capacity to realize the inherent defeat their policies have on the people they were appointed to protect and defend. Perhaps the time has come to acknowledge that they indeed know what they are doing and that their actions, as self-defeating as they appear, are designed on purpose. The question therefore arises whether or not they are purposefully condemning us to the cause and effect karma that will surely soon befall Americans in order to achieve their goals.



If this is the case, then human evil has come to roost in houses white and old, in halls of power shaped like pentagons and in capitols standing proud and large. Condemned we all sit, pawns in games of power and control, nothing but expendable beings destined to live inside the barrel of a gun in a sick and twisted game of Russian roulette where today�s technology will be our future catastrophe. In the capitalistic game of the �bottom line,� however, human evil�s ends justify the means, and, like the profit driven world of the corporate Leviathan, where costs are analyzed against profits, and if it takes 10,000 or 100,000 dead Americans to achieve goals, then the benefits outweigh the costs. When government is run like a money-making corporation, we need to understand cost-benefit analysis, and we need to understand the profit derived and the goals attained by the death of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans caught in the game of power and control, trapped in a disease not of their own making in which they will eventually be used to attain what human evil desires.



Those in power are not the ignorant buffoons they make themselves out to be. Rather, they are calculating, conniving creatures devoid of morals and integrity. They seek what they want, what those holding their strings want and what the giant Leviathan wants. In a perpetual war against an enemy that cannot be seen nor easily understood, possessing Eastern philosophy and intelligence, weathered by time and space, living collective experience and historical precedence, and seething in anger and vengeance, battles won are fights lost, cementing a never-ending vicious cycle of violence that will kill and maim thousands, unleashing an era of suffering that is all too familiar to all humans of times past.



Yet from Washington comes the manifestation of continuance, of feeding the flames of war and reaping the seeds sowed in hatred and revenge. When power lingers as a result of war and violence, then power is only retained by ceaseless war. When control is achieved by death and destruction then from eternal suffering will control remain. A war president ceases to exist in times of peace; profit evaporates when mankind puts down its weapons; control vanishes when fear disappears; fear is made extinct when ignorance is eliminated.



The human evil residing in our midst depends on you to obey, acquiesce, fear and remain ignorant; it thrives from your progeny�s blood and our making of instruments of death. Human evil now in power seeks American death, both at home and abroad, in order to justify its insatiable addiction to the horrors of humanity and its clandestine accumulation of control that is quietly eviscerating our rights and freedoms.



The last three years have seen an escalation of violence that only seems to grow with time and through the mechanisms of action and reaction, cause and effect. �Terrorism� worldwide has only continued to climb the mountain of violence; American state-sponsored genocide keeps rising. Humanity is climbing stairs whose top cannot be seen, robbing us of energy and hope, killing us on our sojourn upwards, eliminating what we once cherished and collapsing all semblance of humanity we once thought existed.



Human evil is prospering, from the sandstorms of Iraq released due to American missiles to the sadistic torture of innocent Iraqis in Abu Ghraib to the clandestine gulags built by Halliburton that litter the world to the rape, pillage and murder of tens of thousands of Mesopotamians whose lands and ancient rivers now run barren and polluted thanks to an occupation sponsored by human evil and the virus it has spread.



From the very top of America�s government where the buck supposedly stops to the very bottom of America�s grunt filled army human evil has proliferated, passing from host to host. From Israeli war criminals teaching torture methods to Appalachian women holding leashes to pyramids of nude Arabs to hooded prisoners to the many rapes and murders in American run prisons to privatized mercenaries killing without impunity throughout Iraq, the virus of human evil has found in the Fertile Crescent a fruitful basket from which to harvest its malevolent virus.



The endemic is spreading, masked in occupation and smeared in human wickedness, giving the world the thumbs up that the mission is almost accomplished. The human evil that has mutated into various forms since 9/11 has made a once proud Empire the laughingstock of the world, stained by the embarrassment of its military and the blatant wickedness of its leaders.



It is America wearing female underwear on its face, it is America posing in sexual positions, it is America being humiliated, raped and murdered by the same faces that today walk its Main Street USA sidewalks. America has been hooded by a human evil that instead of being eradicated keeps prospering, from fear to intimidation to preemption to ignorance to insecurity to gulags to torture to rape to murder to war to genocide. We have been made blind thanks to the hood of human evil that has been placed over our heads, festering in our minds from the swamps of the Potomac, born in the cesspools of privilege and becoming the Crawford mosquito pestering an entire world.



War, the most virulent human activity, has been made perpetual, with no end in sight, with no remedy or anti-venom available that humanity can be inoculated with. Our own fears and ignorance of what we do not know or understand is feeding the violence against Arabs. Our own failure to act is inevitably helping to seal our own fates. The America that once existed is disappearing right in front of our eyes, never to be enjoyed or cherished by our children or grandchildren, left in the grip of those whose claws drip with the blood of humanity. Because of them America has become the human evil it seems so eager to chase down, morphing into a terrorist nation through its leader`s heavenly mandate and responsibility to change cultures and peoples.



Because of this fallacy America will be struck once more, deadlier and scarier than before, giving rise to an America that is losing its soul to the human evil born on 9/11. Those holding the leashes of power have made us all nude creatures lying impotently on cold-hard floors, subjected to dehumanization and torture, ridicule and suffering. For Lyndie England lives on Pennsylvania Avenue, giving her masters the thumbs up in assurance that the American people have been defeated, in mind, body and spirit, ready to be interrogated, ready to be broken, bit by bit, until the America of freedoms, liberty and democracy lies in ruin, under control of fascism, martial law, dictatorship or the human evil whose audacity only continues to grow.



Negative energies have been released onto the world that will be almost impossible to stop. The recipe for perpetual war has been set in motion by those whose interests lie in condemning humanity to its own worst enemies. The war now encapsulating our world will only increase in size and temerity, killing scores in the process, leaving human carcasses in its wake. The war for corporate profit and elite control is upon the mass of humanity who are mere bumps in the road to the miscreants playing their deadly games.



Human evil has been set free, released from the chains of bondage it somehow always seems to miraculously escape from, as always ready, willing and able to contaminate humankind with the virus of self-destruction that has marked civilization from the beginning of time. It is the symptom of our disease, and today it resides in houses white and old, in buildings shaped like pentagons and in capitols once proud and large.



Humanity is falling into a trap, becoming the prey of a small group basking in comfort and power, driven by false beliefs, delusional ideology, thirst for human blood, addiction to power and control and guided, as always, by the omnipotence of the Almighty dollar and his sister greed. We are pawns, one and all, Muslim and Christian, American and Iraqi, turned into nothing more than the means that justify the ends, the costs justifying the benefits and the dead from which the elite oligarchs harvest control and power.



Human evil has yet again escaped the Hades of humankind, once more peering its dreadful eyes into a civilization that fails to learn its mistakes, its history and corrosive disease. And, as always, it has found opportunity once more, possessing control over the Pax Americana, the most powerful and wealthiest empire to ever sprout from the fertile soils of planet Earth.



The tremors of fear can be felt underneath America�s weakening foundations, for wise men and women can see the coming storm, looming over the canyon of humanity and into the horizon smeared in crimson.



Upon the precipice do we all stand, our feet slipping with the eroding rock. The most monumental decision in our history is upon us, from where we can either continue on our downward slippage into the nadir of human evil or where we can communally lower the rope of peace and subsequent salvation.



To follow human evil, no matter how likeable it may seem, no matter how much fear it paralyzes us with and no matter how much it tries to manipulate and condition with lies and delusions is to condemn all of humanity, not just America, to a future that may not last too long. For our decision is much more than a simple election for America. Indeed, the cumulative energy of the world is hoping our decision when leaves begin to fall is a wise one. The world knows what is at stake; the question remains, do we?



Let us purge from our pores the human evil that continues to linger in our civilization. Until it is completely eliminated, however, we will continue to suffer the sickness that has afflicted our kind since the dawn of time. Until we eliminate it from our existence it will continue to seek opportunity in the lesser endowed men that destiny bequeaths with the leashes of power collaring humanity that ultimately succeed in breaking open the dark abyss from where human evil is imprisoned. It is these men that create the human suffering spawned by war, violence, destruction and death. It is these men that should not be allowed to hold the keys to the possible extinction of the human race.



Human evil cannot be allowed to triumph, for humanity erodes more and more each time we seek to destroy one another. It is our future children who suffer through the fault of present generations who allow humanity to be diluted through the sins of our fathers. It is our children who become condemned to the chains of misery and human bondage thanks to our failure to become the wise men and women who fail to synergize all vestiges of proactive denunciations to the wrongful path we are taking.



If we fail to act, with the passage of time nothing will remain of man, and in the contours of time and space the next rulers of the planet will send their wise energies to inspect the vast precipice of deep canyons� littered with the fossils of the only species to exterminate itself. And they will understand: it was human evil and the carriers of its virus that destroyed such a wonderful species, full of promise and ability, life and energy, beauty and virtue. Humanity, they will realize, was a race whose future was betrayed by the symptoms of a disease it could never control and the hosts of the virus that were allowed to rule.



© Copyright 2004 by AxisofLogic.com

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June 16, 2004
Americans Know Little About European Union
Generally downplay its role and potential
http://www.gallup.com/content/?ci=12043
by Alec Gallup and Lydia Saad


GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- By their own admission, Americans are largely uninformed about the network of 25 countries that now comprise the European Union, or EU, as it is widely called. A landmark Gallup Poll testing U.S. public knowledge of the EU finds a remarkably high number -- 77% -- admitting they know very little or nothing about the organization. Only 3% claim to know a great deal about it. Furthermore, relatively few Americans -- just 20% -- correctly assess the population of EU nations relative to that of the United States, saying the EU is "larger."
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Although organized in the 1950s as a free-trade organization among a handful of countries (then called the "Common Market"), the EU in its current form was created in 1992. It has rapidly grown to encompass most European countries and has expanded into new areas of cooperation. The EU covers an area only 40% of the size of the United States, but, at about 455 million, its population is over 50% larger than the U.S. population (currently about 295 million), making the EU the world`s third-largest political unit after China and India.

All of this "people power" concentrated in largely peaceful and democratic countries holds tremendous economic and political promise for EU member countries. But, consistent with Americans` lack of knowledge about the EU, their assessment of the EU`s impact on world affairs is somewhat subdued. The May 21-23 survey of U.S. national adults measured the perceived likelihood that the EU will ever become a superpower such as the United States. Americans are generally dubious; just 44% say this is very or somewhat likely. An equal number, 44%, say it is not very or not at all likely, while an additional 12% are unsure.
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The poll also tested public impressions about whether the EU plays a positive or negative role with respect to economic growth, world peace, the war on terrorism, protection of the environment, and the fight against world poverty. Fewer than half of Americans assume that the EU plays a positive role on each of these dimensions. A much smaller number say it plays a negative role, while one-third to one-half are neutral or have no opinion about its role in these matters.

Role European Union Plays in World Affairs
Mehr:
http://www.gallup.com/content/?ci=12043

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Prison Tactics A Longtime Dilemma For Israel
Nation Faced Issues Similar to Abu Ghraib

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 16, 2004; Page A01

NABLUS, West Bank -- The accounts of physical abuse of Iraqis by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad sounded achingly familiar to Anan Labadeh. The casual beatings, the humiliations, the trophy photos taken by both male and female guards were experiences he said he underwent as a Palestinian security detainee at an Israeli military camp in March of last year.

There was, he added, a significant difference: The Israelis have rules, he said, and their techniques for breaking down prisoners are far more sophisticated. "What the Israelis do is much more effective than beatings," he said. "Three days without food and without sleep and you`re eager to tell them anything. It just shows us the Americans are amateurs. They should have taken lessons from the Israelis."

Many of the questions raised by the Abu Ghraib scandal, and by the United States`s self-declared war on terrorism, are the kinds that Israel has been wrestling with for decades. Where is the line in a democracy between coercion and torture? What kinds of interrogation techniques are morally acceptable when dealing with a suspect who may have knowledge of a "ticking bomb" -- an imminent attack? And what about the damage those techniques inflict on relations between an occupying power and its subjects?

"Unfortunately, when you`re fighting a war against terror there are many difficult issues you face every day," said a senior Israeli government lawyer who defended Israel`s policy on interrogating suspects. "Maybe the United States is beginning to discover what Israel has had to deal with for a long time."

Although its officials never use the word "torture," Israel is perhaps the only Western-style democracy that has acknowledged sanctioning mistreatment of prisoners in interrogation. In 1987, following a long debate in legal and security circles, a state commission established a set of secret guidelines for interrogators using what the panel called "moderate physical and psychological pressure" against detainees. In 1999, Israel`s Supreme Court struck down those guidelines, ruling that torture was illegal under any circumstances.

But after the second Palestinian uprising broke out a year later, and especially after a devastating series of suicide bombings of passenger buses, cafes and other civilian targets, Israel`s internal security service, known as the Shin Bet or the Shabak, returned to physical coercion as a standard practice, according to human rights lawyers and detainees. What`s more, the techniques it has used command widespread support from the Israeli public, which has few qualms about the mistreatment of Palestinians in the fight against terrorism. A long parade of Israeli prime ministers and justice ministers with a variety of political views have defended the security service and either denied that torture is used or defended it as a last resort in preventing terrorist attacks.

While the issue surfaces periodically, with a small but vocal minority of Israelis advocating an end to all physical coercion, fears of a new outbreak of terror inevitably take precedence.

"We are not Holland, and we do not live in the environment of Benelux," Ehud Barak told the parliament four years ago, when he was prime minister, referring to the economic grouping of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. "We are a state that is faced with a constant threat of terror. Yet on the other hand, we are a democratic state that is part of the international community. There must be sensitivity to both needs."
Broad Public Support

When she first saw cases of alleged torture cross her desk at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in the late 1980s, staff worker Hannah Friedman said it was very difficult to get human rights advocates to deal with them. Eventually, she and Hebrew University law professor Stanley Cohen, who immigrated to Israel from South Africa, set up their own organization, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, to deal exclusively with the allegations.

Shabak interrogators in those days were bound by the 1987 guidelines. While never made public, the procedures were well known to virtually every Palestinian security detainee. Prisoners were forced to stand for days at a time or were shackled in tightly contorted positions on low stools, in a procedure known as shabah. They were violently shaken, deprived of sleep, bombarded with loud, continuous music, exposed to extremes of cold and heat and forced to relieve themselves in their clothing. Their heads were often covered with canvas hoods that reeked of urine or vomit.

These techniques had widespread public support. A 1996 poll commissioned by the human rights group Btselem found that 73 percent of Israelis condoned the use of force.

Sometimes interrogators went beyond the guidelines. In October 1994, after militants abducted a 19-year-old Israeli army corporal, Nachshon Waxman, Yitzhak Rabin, then the prime minister, acknowledged that the suspected driver of the kidnap car had been tortured.

"If we`d been so careful to follow the Landau Commission, we would never have found out where Waxman was being held," Rabin said, referring to the 1987 guidelines. (Waxman was killed by his captors during an Israeli commando raid.)

Over time, interrogation techniques became less brutal and more refined. Ziad Arafeh, 40, a political activist who lives in the Balata refugee camp outside the West Bank city of Nablus, estimated he had been arrested 14 times over the past two decades. Each time, he said, his interrogators seemed to have mastered a new technique.

In the early days, he said, crude physical and sexual abuse was commonplace. When he was first arrested, in 1983, an interrogator put on rubber gloves and squeezed his testicles until he cried out in pain. On another occasion Arafeh, who was suspected of involvement in the killings of alleged Palestinian collaborators, said he was kept in his underwear in a small, cold cell and splashed with water every few hours. Now the emphasis is on psychological pressure. During his arrest a year ago, Arafeh said, he was deprived of sleep for several days but not beaten.

There is a big difference between soldiers who make arrests and Shabak interrogators, Arafeh said. The soldiers are often casually cruel, he said, kicking and humiliating detainees in ways similar to the behavior reported at Abu Ghraib. But once the interrogators take over, treatment is far more calculated and professional.

"Their strategy is much improved," he said. "They give you food without salt that makes you weak, and they prevent you from sleeping. They`re more clever and more experienced."
New Techniques

A turning point in Israel`s treatment of detainees came in September 1999 when the Israeli Supreme Court, after a year and a half of deliberations, banned all forms of physical abuse. "Violence directed at a suspect`s body or spirit does not constitute a reasonable investigation practice," the court declared.

The justices left open several loopholes. Interrogators who used force preemptively to prevent a terrorist attack could invoke the "defense of necessity" if faced with prosecution. The court also made allowances for "prolonged" interrogation, even if it involved sleep deprivation, and shackling, "but only for the purpose of preserving the investigator`s safety."

Nonetheless, the ruling was a landmark. Shabak officials complained that the decision stripped them of the tools they needed to combat terrorism. An opposition lawmaker introduced a bill allowing interrogators to use force in "ticking bomb" cases. Barak supported the idea at first but later reached a compromise that gave the agency a bigger budget, a larger staff and more tools to help it solve cases without cracking heads.

Most of the specific methods used before the 1999 decision all but vanished after the ruling. Yet slowly but surely, human rights lawyers said, new techniques took their place.

The latest report by the committee against torture, covering the period from September 2001 to April 2003, alleged that detainees faced a new regime of sleep deprivation, shackling, slapping, hitting and kicking; exposure to extreme cold and heat; threats, curses and insults; and prolonged detention in subhuman conditions.

"Torture in Israel has once more become routine, carried out in an orderly and institutional fashion," concluded the report, which was based on 80 affidavits and court cases.

The committee accused the Israeli legal system of effectively sanctioning torture by routinely rejecting petitions seeking to grant detainees access to lawyers. Not one Shabak interrogator has been prosecuted despite hundreds of allegations, the report said.

In retrospect, said Habib Labib, an Israeli Arab lawyer who has handled dozens of security cases, the Supreme Court decision was a brief, shining moment that quickly faded. "It`s like many things in this country," he said. "The theory is one thing, but on the ground things are done differently."

The case of Anan Labadeh, 31, became a cause célèbre because he is a paraplegic who has used a wheelchair since he fell from a third-story balcony while being chased by Israeli soldiers during a stone-throwing incident in the late 1980s. Labadeh was arrested in February of last year in his home town of Nablus on suspicion of helping militants who had set up a network of suicide bomb factories in the city. He was held for a month and released without being charged.

Labadeh said he was routinely punched and kicked by the soldiers who escorted him to a military detention center at nearby Hawara and then by other soldiers at the center itself over three days. He said he was blindfolded, denied food and water, left outside in the rain and cold, deprived of sleep and forced to urinate and defecate in his clothing.

"I was exhausted," he recalled. "Time became irrelevant. In the second day, it continued to rain and I couldn`t tell if it was morning or afternoon."

Each night, a group of soldiers, men and women alike, held social gatherings in the courtyard where he was being held. On the second night, they took turns posing with him while he sat blindfolded and handcuffed to his wheelchair, he said.

"For a person like me to be surrounded by a group of soldiers, punched, insulted, peeing on myself, my dignity was insulted," he recalled. "Here I was, a handicapped person, and not one soldier came to say stop this, not even one."

The experience increased Labadeh`s contempt for Israelis. But for all his complaints about the way he was treated, Labadeh believes the Israelis have higher standards than their American counterparts. He recalls a case when an Israeli military officer was accused of sexually abusing young Palestinians. Another officer turned him in, and the accused man was arrested immediately.

A government lawyer designated to discuss the questions raised by this article insisted that internal safeguards protect Palestinian detainees from random abuse, and he characterized Israel`s treatment of suspected terrorists as a matter of self-defense. "The first priority of the government is keeping people safe," said the lawyer, who insisted on anonymity. "That`s the basic social contract between a government and its people."

A key moment, he said, was the spate of suicide bombings in March 2002 that killed 135 Israelis and injured hundreds more. "It became a question of a ticking bomb -- how do you balance the need to find that bomb before it goes off at a restaurant or a pizza shop or a checkpoint with the need to respect human rights?" Israelis understood, he said, "there has to be a balance -- you can`t just do whatever you want."

What is most striking, the lawyer added, is how united the Israeli public is on the subject. "For most people it`s not the central story here," he said. "It`s not even one of the top ten questions I get asked about the Supreme Court."

But for many Palestinians, torture is the heart of the matter. Labadeh said abuses like those that took place in Abu Ghraib or in Hawara were inevitable when people were subjected to military occupation. That is why the photos from Abu Ghraib did not shock or surprise him.

"In the end, when you put a person in jail because of political reasons and you give someone power over him, you can expect to see such films," he said. "The camera is always rolling."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Torture Policy



Wednesday, June 16, 2004; Page A26

SLOWLY, AND IN spite of systematic stonewalling by the Bush administration, it is becoming clearer why a group of military guards at Abu Ghraib prison tortured Iraqis in the ways depicted in those infamous photographs. President Bush and his spokesmen shamefully cling to the myth that the guards were rogues acting on their own. Yet over the past month we have learned that much of what the guards did -- from threatening prisoners with dogs, to stripping them naked, to forcing them to wear women`s underwear -- had been practiced at U.S. military prisons elsewhere in the world. Moreover, most of these techniques were sanctioned by senior U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Iraqi theater command under Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez. Many were imported to Iraq by another senior officer, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller.

In December 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld approved a series of harsh questioning methods for use at the Guantanamo Bay base. According to the Wall Street Journal, these included the removal of clothing, the use of "stress positions," hooding, "fear of dogs," and "mild non-injurious physical contact." Even before that, the Journal reported, interrogators at Guantanamo forced prisoners to wear women`s underwear on their heads. A year later, when some of the same treatment was publicized through the Abu Ghraib photographs, Mr. Rumsfeld described it as "grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty."

Administration officials have said that tougher techniques are available at Guantanamo, where the Geneva Conventions are considered inapplicable, than in Iraq, where they unquestionably apply. Yet through much of the past year, the opposite appears to have been the case. After strenuous protests from legal professionals inside the military, Mr. Rumsfeld ordered a review of interrogation techniques in early 2003 that led, in April that year, to the dropping of a number of methods at Guantanamo that he had earlier approved, including the use of dogs, stress positions and nudity.

Later, several of the techniques that were banned in Guantanamo were adopted in Iraq. In late August and September 2003 Gen. Miller visited Abu Ghraib with the mandate to improve interrogations. Senior officers have testified to Congress that he brought "harsh" techniques from Guantanamo. Gen. Sanchez`s command then issued a policy that included the use of stress positions and dogs, along with at least five of seven exceptional techniques approved by Mr. Rumsfeld in the revised Guantanamo policy. After further objections from uniformed lawyers, Gen. Sanchez modified the policy in mid-October, but interrogators and guards at Abu Ghraib went on using the earlier rules. They were committing crimes, but they were not improvising: Most of what they did originally had been sanctioned by both the defense secretary and U.S. Central Command.

It`s not clear why interrogation techniques judged improper or illegal by a Pentagon legal team were subsequently adopted in Iraq. Nor is it clear what those standards are today, either in Iraq or elsewhere -- breaking with decades of previous practice, the Bush administration has classified them. Congressional leaders who have vowed to get to the bottom of the prisoner abuse scandal still have much to learn; they will not succeed unless the scale and pace of their investigations are stepped up.

The Senate, however, has an opportunity today to directly address the mess the administration has made of interrogation policy and of America`s global standing. An amendment to the defense authorization bill, sponsored by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), would reaffirm the commitment of the United States not to engage in torture, and it would require the defense secretary to provide Congress with guidelines ensuring compliance with this standard. Sadly, the Bush administration`s policy decisions have cast doubt on whether this country accepts this fundamental principle of human rights. Congress should insist that it does.

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So Torture Is Legal?

By Anne Applebaum

Wednesday, June 16, 2004; Page A27

To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America`s secret prisons, you don`t need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it. To see what I mean, review the content of a few items now easily found on the Internet.

Item 1: The "torture memo." Written in August 2002 by the Justice Department`s Office of Legal Counsel, at the request of the CIA and then the White House, this memo argues that it "may be justified" to torture al Qaeda suspects. The memo, posted last weekend on The Post`s Web site, also speculates that international law, which categorically prohibits torture, "may be unconstitutional."

Item 2: The "Rumsfeld memo." This document, unearthed by the Wall Street Journal, was written in March 2003 by a Pentagon working group. It declared not only that the American president has the power to evade international law and torture foreign prisoners but that interrogators who follow the president`s commands can, in addition, be held immune from prosecution.

Item 3: The Abu Ghraib photographs. Remember what they show: not just torture but guards who appear absolutely certain of their legal and moral right to torture, as well as a large number of unidentified personnel, standing around and watching.

Item 4: The "dog testimony." Two Army dog handlers assigned to Abu Ghraib have submitted sworn statements, again obtained by The Post, asserting that military intelligence officers told them to use dogs to frighten prisoners. The Army had said that any use of dogs in interrogations would have needed approval from the U.S. military commander in Iraq.

As I say, connect the dots: They lead from the White House to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White House. They don`t, it is true, make a complete picture. They don`t actually reveal whether direct White House and Pentagon orders set off a chain of events leading to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, prisoner deaths in Afghanistan or other uses of torture we haven`t learned about yet.

But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy: Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should go.

Clearly the administration will not ever, of its own volition, tell us what the White House knew and when the White House knew it: There`s an election coming up. As if to underline this point, the president ducked and dodged last week when asked at a news conference about torture, declaring that "the instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law." But which law? The Geneva Conventions? Or the law as defined by secret memos?

Unfortunately, Congress has no real motive to find the answer either. After a bit of obligatory spluttering, the House has gone silent. On Monday some Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee tried to call on the Defense Department to hand over documents related to Abu Ghraib. The Republican leadership quashed the move. Meanwhile, Sen. John Warner`s Armed Services Committee, conducting the only active investigation on Capitol Hill, is moving at a leisurely pace. With only a few working days left before the summer recess, it`s hard to see how there will be much in the way of a comprehensive report ready before the elections.

The military is conducting its own inquiries, of course. But without political support, the military alone will be unable to push further, to uncover who, exactly, gave the military its orders, and which political decisions created the conditions that made abuse possible. The press is hard at work too, at least that part of it that is not supporting the idea that the Constitution somehow permits torture, and always has. But articles, television reports and blogs are useful only insofar as they move the public.

For in the end, it is public opinion that matters, and it is on public opinion that the fate of any further investigations now depends. Voters have some items of information available to them, as listed above. Voters -- ultimately the most important source of pressure on democratic politicians -- can petition their congressmen, their senators and their president for more. If they don`t, the elections will be held, the subject will change. Without a real national debate, without congressional approval, without much discussion of what torture actually means and why it has so long been illegal at home and abroad, a few secret committees will have changed the character of this country.

Indeed, if the voters can`t move the politicians, and the politicians aren`t courageous enough to act alone, we may wake up one morning and discover that torture has always been legal after all. Edmund Burke, a conservative philosopher, wrote, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." It looks as if he was right.

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ublished on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 by the Associated Press
Poll of Iraqis Reveals Anger Toward US
by John Solomon


WASHINGTON - A poll of Iraqis commissioned by the U.S.-governing authority has provided the Bush administration a stark picture of anti-American sentiment — more than half of Iraqis believe they would be safer if U.S. troops simply left.

The poll, commissioned by the Coalition Provisional Authority last month but not released to the American public, also found radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is surging in popularity, 92 percent of Iraqis consider the United States an occupying force and more than half believe all Americans behave like those portrayed in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse photos.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of a multimedia presentation about the poll that was shown to U.S. officials involved in developing Iraq policy. Several officials said in interviews the results reinforced feelings that the transfer of power and security responsibilities to the Iraqis can`t come too soon.

"If you are sitting here as part of the coalition, it (the poll) is pretty grim," said Donald Hamilton, a career foreign service officer who is working for Ambassador Paul Bremer`s interim government and helps oversee the CPA`s polling of Iraqis.

"While you have to be saddened that our intentions have been misunderstood by a lot of Iraqis, the truth of the matter is they have a strong inclination toward the things that have the potential to bring democracy here," he said in a telephone interview Tuesday from Baghdad.

Hamilton noted the poll found 63 percent of Iraqis believed conditions will improve when an Iraqi interim government takes over June 30, and 62 percent believed it was "very likely" the Iraqi police and Army will maintain security without U.S. forces.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, "Let`s face it. That`s the goal, to build those up to the point where they can take charge in Iraq and they can maintain security in Iraq."

The poll, conducted by Iraqis in face-to-face interviews in six cities with people representative of the country`s various factions, conflict with the generally upbeat assessments the administration continues to give Americans. Just last week, President Bush predicted future generations of Iraqis "will come to America and say, thank goodness America stood the line and was strong and did not falter in the face of the violence of a few."

The current generation seems eager for Americans to leave, the poll found.

The coalition`s confidence rating in May stood at 11 percent, down from 47 percent in November, while coalition forces had just 10 percent support. Nearly half of Iraqis said they felt unsafe in their neighborhoods.

And 55 percent of Iraqis reported to the pollsters they would feel safer if U.S. troops immediately left, nearly double the 28 percent who felt that way in January. Forty-one percent said Americans should leave immediately, and 45 percent said they preferred for U.S. forces to leave as soon as a permanent Iraqi govermnment is installed.

"To a certain degree it is self-evident that Iraqis have lost some confidence in us, particularly in our ability to protect them," Hamilton said.

Frustration over security was made worse this spring by revelations of sexual and physical abuse of Iraqis by U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib prison.

The poll, taken in mid-May shortly after the controversy began, found 71 percent of Iraqis said they were surprised by the humiliating photos and tales of abuse at the hands of Americans, but 54 percent said they believed all Americans behave like the guards.

The prison scandal has also become fodder in the United States, as Democratic challenger John Kerry accuses Bush of failing to set a proper moral tone. "I think the president is underestimating the full affect of what has happened in the world to our reputation because of that prison scandal," Kerry said Tuesday.

Anger at Americans was evident in other aspects of the poll, including a rapid rise in popularity for al-Sadr, the Muslim cleric who has been leading insurgents fighting U.S.-led coalition forces.

The poll reported that 81 percent of Iraqis said they had an improved opinion of al-Sadr in May from three months earlier, and 64 percent said the acts of his insurgents had made Iraq more unified.

However, only 2 percent said they would support al-Sadr for president, even less than the 3 percent who expressed support for the deposed Saddam Hussein.

The coalition`s Iraq polling of 1,093 adults selected randomly in six cities — Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Diwaniyah, Hillah and Baquba was taken May 14-23 and had a margin of potential sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Crucial details on the methodology of the coalition`s polling were not provided, including how samples were drawn.

The most recent independent polling by Gallup found more than half of Iraqis want U.S. and British troops to leave the country within the next few months.

An Oxford International poll taken in February for ABC News and several networks from other countries found a higher level of optimism than more recent polling taken after months of bombings and other violence. Still, only a quarter of those polled by Oxford said they had confidence in coalition forces to meet their needs, far behind Iraqi religious leaders, police, and soldiers.

On the Net:
The poll results are available in slide form at: http://wid.ap.org/documents/iraq/cpapoll.htm

© Copyright 2004 Associated Press

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Extremism Sweeping Iraq Among Sunni, Shiite Muslims Alike
by Hannah Allam


BAGHDAD, Iraq - Instead of becoming a Middle Eastern model of pro-Western democracy, as the Bush administration had hoped, Iraq is being swept by Sunni and Shiite Muslim extremism.

High unemployment, little visible progress toward rebuilding the country and dissatisfaction with leaders appointed by foreigners are herding thousands of disenchanted Iraqis into the hands of hard-liners, according to political parties, Islamic scholars and social scientists.

The city of Fallujah, for example, once a cornerstone of Saddam Hussein`s secular rule, has become a seething no-man`s land of Islamic militancy where women must be veiled, alcohol sellers are flogged and an American passport is a death sentence.

Since U.S. Marines pulled out in May after a month-long siege, a mix of homegrown guerrillas and foreign holy warriors have taken over Fallujah, now nicknamed "Little Saudi Arabia" for its extremist brand of Sunni Islam.

"You go there and see the mujahedeen at the checkpoints," said a co-worker of three Lebanese men who were taken hostage, then murdered, in Fallujah last week. "Where are the Marines? Where is the Iraqi army?"

The three were hog-tied and beaten with steel pipes. Then one man was shot several times in the face, another was disemboweled and the third was hacked to pieces, said surviving hostages and other workers at their Lebanese-owned contracting firm.

The kidnappers made no ransom demand. They simply dumped the three mutilated corpses in an industrial area as a statement about who`s running Fallujah.

Sunni militants such as those in Fallujah, who seek to impose Saudi or Taliban-style Islamic puritanism, pose one threat to the new, secular interim Iraqi government that takes charge July 1. Radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and other Shiite extremists, with fertile recruiting ground in Iraq`s volatile Shiite majority, pose another, calling for an armed struggle to create an Iranian-style theocracy.

The conflict between the two, now 1,324 years old and going strong, could plunge the country into civil war and anarchy.

"Iraq is now the crossroads for the two most rigid extremist groups in the Islamic world," said Sadoun al Dulami, the head of the Iraqi Center for Research and Strategic Studies. "They think they hold all the truth. We left one brutal regime and now we are preparing ourselves for an even bloodier one."

Even parts of cosmopolitan Baghdad are slipping into the hands of militant Islamists, who, for example, forced a Christian social club to close its pool because "some extremist will throw a grenade at women in swimsuits," said Rita Jamal, 19, a club member.

A masked jihadi (holy warrior) flashing the victory sign is spray-painted across campus at Baghdad University, where seniors graduating this month only half-jokingly call themselves the "Terrorism Class of 2004."

Bearded men armed with long sticks sometimes stand outside the campus and strike college women who don`t cover their hair or don`t wear loose-fitting clothes, students said. Newly minted radicals have stopped saying hello to moderate classmates, and militant young women sometimes smear the lipstick off the faces of their former friends.

"Their minds are owned by the extremists now," said Safa Hussein, 21, a senior at the university. "In Baghdad, we used to have a special kind of open environment, but the Islamic waves are rolling in and the clerics are coming out of the woodwork. If they have their way, we`ll be living in Iran or Saudi soon."

The mosque is the only remaining occupation-free zone for millions of Iraqis who are fed up with empty promises from the coalition. And the messages from powerful imams have nothing to do with helping the United States build a free and democratic Iraq.

"These people were not invited to contribute to the political agenda, not invited to the Governing Council and were ignored until now, when they want to say, `We`re here,`" said Waleed al Hilli, a spokesman for the conservative Shiite Dawa Party. "If you`re not eating and you don`t have a job, you can`t think properly, and anyone can attract you to do anything."

While their political and theological battles date to the year 680, Sunni and Shiite extremists are united, at least for now, by a common desire to drive the United States and its allies out of Iraq.

There are reports of Sunni fighters in Fallujah supplying Shiite guerrillas in Najaf, and the leading militant Sunni newspaper this week heralded al Sadr on the front page. Al Sadr, meanwhile, has praised fighters in Fallujah for driving out U.S. troops and bringing back a "pure" Islam.

Exporting the Fallujah model is a key aim of Hareth Athari, a leading Sunni militant with headquarters at one of Baghdad`s most magnificent mosques. He said he condemned the killings of the three Arab businessmen, but quickly added that he doubted they were killed "without a reason."

"Fallujah is still safe and better than any other town in Iraq," Athari said. "Maybe, now and then, there are some events like that, but all good-willed people are safe in Fallujah. The ones with bad intentions should stay out."

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Iraq`s Oil Exports Nixed by Basra Sabotage
US Commits $2 billion of Past Iraq Oil Revenues

The Financial Times reports that Iraqi Petroleum Minister Thamir Ghadban has confirmed that saboteurs twice bombed a pipeline that takes petroleum to storage tanks in Basra, near the Persian Gulf.

Sabotage of the Kirkuk-Turkey pipeline in the north, which can carry 800,000 barrels a day, had already taken nearly a million barrels a day of Iraqi petroleum off the market in May and June. With Monday`s explosions in the south, Iraq is down to exporting only 500,000 barrels a day. Given the ramshackle and dilapidated state of its petroleum industry after over a decade of sanctions, Iraq probably can`t pump much more than 2.5 million barrels a day at best.

It would take about $30 billion a year in income for the Iraqi state to run the country properly and repair everything that needs to be repaired, as well as servicing its debts and paying reparations. In the past year, Iraq has only been able to generate about $10 billion from petroleum, and I doubt the government is able to collect much in taxes. It is not enough to keep things going. If sabotage goes on being this effective, Iraq looks likely to get only half that in oil income in the coming year, especially if prices come down (trust me, eventually they will. I`ll tell you some time about boom and bust cycles in primary commodity markets).

This development is another reason for which "sovereignty" won`t mean much on June 30.

Over 20 years with many billions of dollars of investment, Iraq may have an upward capacity of 10 million barrels a day, similar to that in Saudi Arabia. But that rosy scenario would require a return of the country to a condition of normality. If you like nightmare scenarios, consider another possibility: that the instability in Iraq spreads to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Can you say, "$5 a gallon gasoline"?

Even for Iraq just to get out 2.5 million barrels a day would have required that the main US contractor in Iraq, Halliburton, had done its job. It hasn`t, in part because of the poor security situation.

The FT reports,


` A recent internal oil ministry report, which was leaked to Reuters, criticised the repairs carried out to oil installations under contracts mostly awarded to Halliburton, the US oil company, and its subsidiaries. Work had begun, the report said, on only 119 out of 226 projects due to have been completed by April and none had been finished. `



This result is yet another reason for which the Department of Defense should kick its civilian contractor habit, to which it is hopelessly addicted, with highly inefficient results. (Hint: Pentagon contracts are not the free market; they are a form of state subsidy for big corporations. Although they create jobs, they do it in an extremely expensive way). For more on waste in government contracts, see Eric Eckholm`s article in the New York Times:

` Multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts to support military operations and reconstruction in Iraq have been plagued by "inadequate planning and inadequate oversight," the government`s chief budget investigator told Congress on Tuesday, citing management deficiencies that have fostered waste and cost overruns. `



And now, the Iraq Revenue Watch of the Open Society Institute is reporting that the Coalition Provisional Authority (i.e. the Bush Administration in Iraq) is rushing to give away $2 billion in Iraqi oil revenues in reconstruction bids before the so-called turn-over of sovereignty on June 30. This move is obscene. When the US knows very well that an Iraqi government is going to be recognized in only a couple of weeks that will have rightful claim on how that money is used, it is just ethically wrong for the Americans to commit the money now.

` "With so much money available for cash give-aways, and so little planning on how the process will work, it will be all but impossible to avoid corruption and waste" said Svetlana Tsalik, director of OSI`s Revenue Watch. `



Yup. See Erik Eckholm`s piece in the New York Times again after you`ve read the Iraq Revenue Watch report. The move is a disgusting piece of American colonialism in the worst tradition of money-grubbing through sheer imperial power. It is unfortunately probably not illegal, just revolting. And, it is another thing for which the Iraqis are going to find it difficult to forgive us.


posted by Juan @ 6/16/2004 08:10:40 AM


posted by Juan @ 6/16/2004 07:46:20 AM

Poll: 55% of Iraqis Would feel Safer without US Troops
67% Support Muqtada al-Sadr

Associated Press reports a Coalition Provisional Authority poll of Iraqis taken in the middle of May that had only been used internally by the CPA and not released to the US public. The numbers do not reflect well on Bush administration policies in Iraq. The poll is available at the CPA site.http://wid.ap.org/documents/iraq/cpapoll_files/v3_document.h…

55% of Iraqis say they would feel safer if the US troops would just leave. And over half thought that all Americans behave the way the accused prison guards at Abu Ghuraib did. AP notes


` The prison scandal has also become fodder in the United States, as Democratic challenger John Kerry accuses Bush of failing to set a proper moral tone. ``I think the president is underestimating the full affect of what has happened in the world to our reputation because of that prison scandal,`` Kerry said Tuesday. `



You betcha.

The poll shows that 59% of Iraqis feel that security is the most pressing need of the country. Some 16% say it is the economy, and a similar proportion say "infrastructure." (I suspect "the economy" and the "infrastructure" are, if not the same thing exactly, at least very similar conncerns). The cities that saw or were close to the Sadrist uprising in April and May were most concerned about security (especially Hillah), whereas Basrans were unusually concerned about infrastructural problems, which they put on the same level as security. (There were riots in Basra last August over lack of fuel and poor services, whereas security has been above average there for Iraq, in part because the British military has taken a less aggressive approach there.)

Only half of Iraqis say they feel safe in their own neighborhoods (probably a lot of these come from Basra), and where they do feel safe, it is because of neighbors, local patrols and family rather than because of the police (only 18% attributed their safety to the police).

Iraqis have increased confidence in their own police and military (what military?). But 78% of them have no confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority and 81% of them have no confidence in the US and coalition military. The approval rating for Mr. Bremer`s Coalition Provisional Authority is 11% favorable, down from 47% last November! Mr. Bremer arrived in Iraq last year with a pledge that "we" would "impose our will" on the Iraqis. I guess not so much, actually.

Some 81% of Iraqis had a much improved opinion of Muqtada al-Sadr from 3 months earlier, which tracks with an earlier Iraqi poll`s results. And, 67% of Iraqis support or strongly support Muqtada. 61% thought he had made Iraq more unified than before. Most don`t want him as president, but I`ll say more about that below.

Here is the breakdown of Iraqi politicians with regard to the percentage that say they support or strongly support them:

Ali Sistani: 70%
Muqtada al-Sadr 67%
Ibrahim Jaafari 58%
Ahmad al-Kubaisi 55%
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim 51%
Harith al-Dhari 45%
Muhsin Abdul Hamid 45%
Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum 44%
Adnan Pachachi 41%
Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi 31%
Muwaffaq al-Rubaie 29%
Iyad Allawi 23%
Jalal Talabani 21%
Massoud Barzani 19%

Sistani gets support because of his vast moral authority, and Muqtada has picked up support because he has become a symbol of Iraqi aspirations for independence from the US. Ibrahim Jaafari, who will be one of two vice presidents, gets support because of his leading role in the al-Da`wa Party, a Shiite party founded in 1958 which is probably the oldest and biggest Iraqi party after the Baath (the Communists are a shadow of their former selves). Likewise Bahr al-Ulum and Muwaffaq al-Rubaie have al-Da`wa connections. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Al-Da`wa is likely in my view to be the biggest party in parliament if there are free and fair elections in January.

A surprise for me is how popular the Board of Islamic Clerics (sometimes called in the wire services the Association of Islamic Scholars) is. Its leaders Ahmad al-Kubaisi and Harith al-Dhari come in at 55% and 45% respectively. Another Sunni fundamentalist, leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party-- Muhsin Abdul Hamid -- comes in at 45%. Since Sunni Arabs in Iraq can`t be much more than 16% of the population, this result means that some Kurds and Shiites are supporting these Sunni clerical leaders. All three protested the siege of Fallujah and al-Dhari and Abdul Hamid were involved in the negotiations, so some of their celebrity comes from that.

Iyad Allawi, whom the Interim Governing Council forced on Mr. Brahimi, isn`t actually very popular in this poll, and if things had been done democratically, Ibrahim Jaafari would be prime minister. He may yet be.

Asked for whom they would vote for president, these over a thousand Iraqis chose in this order among real candidates: Ibrahim Jaafari, Adnan Pachachi, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and Saddam Hussein in that order. Saddam came in before Muqtada al-Sadr, but with only 3%.

The Americans according to their notes tried to take some comfort from Muqtada`s poor showing on this question, but they should not. Sistani also came in low here. It means people don`t think of Sistani and Muqtada as secular politicians of a sort who would be plausible presidents. It doesn`t mean they don`t support them in other ways for other things.

posted by Juan @ 6/16/2004 07:15:26 AM

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Pentagon Waste in Iraq May Total Billions, Investigators Say
By T. Christian Miller
Times Staff Writer

June 16, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon may have wasted billions of dollars in Iraq because of a lack of planning and poor oversight, top congressional and Defense Department investigators said Tuesday.

David M. Walker, head of the General Accounting Office, told a congressional panel that Defense Department planners had failed to adequately determine the needs of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and to effectively oversee the billions of dollars` worth of contracts issued.

Though Pentagon officials blame any mistakes on the pressure of the war`s early days, the investigators said they had found ongoing waste in the contracting process a year after the invasion was launched in March 2003. In remarks to reporters, Walker speculated that the total losses from waste could amount to "billions."

"There are serious problems, they still exist and they are exacerbated in a wartime climate," Walker told members of the House Government Reform Committee, which is charged with preventing waste, fraud and abuse in the government.

Tuesday`s testimony by the GAO, Congress` investigative arm, and the Defense Contract Audit Agency, the Pentagon`s auditor, presented the most complete picture to date of the U.S. military`s decision to pay private contractors billions of dollars to help wage the war and rebuild Iraq.

Though much of the contracting was done well, the agencies said, military contract managers and the companies they oversaw were frequently overwhelmed by the magnitude of the tasks in Iraq.

The agencies singled out a contract awarded to Halliburton Co. — a Houston-based oil services giant that supplies food, housing and other logistics services to the military — as a particularly egregious example of both poor oversight by the government and overcharging by the company.

For example, a GAO report says, the military did not develop adequate plans to support its troops in Iraq until May 2003, two months after the invasion, when Halliburton was ordered to supply more dining facilities and housing. Since then, Halliburton`s contract to supply the troops in Kuwait and Iraq has been adjusted by the Army more than 176 times, or more than once every two days.

In addition, reservists with no more than two weeks` training were overseeing the contract at one point, said Neal Curtin, the GAO director charged with investigating Halliburton and other companies with logistics contracts. Even now, the Pentagon has only twice as many overseers monitoring contracts in Iraq as it did in Bosnia-Herzegovina, although it is spending 15 times as much money.

Other U.S. government actions also came under fire Tuesday.

The GAO found that most of the biggest contracts awarded without bidding in the early days of the war were justified by their emergency nature. But in some instances, the investigators said, Pentagon officers overstepped their authority by issuing billion-dollar jobs under existing contracts without putting the work out to bid, as required by law.

Pentagon procurement officials said significant progress had been made in Iraq, with new bridges, water systems and power stations up and running. But they acknowledged that mistakes were made, especially in the aftermath of the invasion.

"Have we accomplished this tremendous mission without missteps? No, we have not," said Tina Ballard, the Army`s head of contracting.

As for Halliburton, which has Iraq contracts worth up to a total of $18.2 billion, Pentagon auditors believe the company has been billing taxpayers for millions of meals never served to U.S. troops. The auditors have recommended that the government withhold nearly $200 million in payments until the dispute is settled.

In a related development, the Army recently renegotiated a contract Halliburton had with a Kuwaiti company to provide meals. By contracting directly with the Kuwaiti company, the Army cut 40% off the cost.

"Halliburton is a company whose business base expanded extremely rapidly" after it won contracts for work in Iraq, said Bill Reed, the head of the audit agency. "They were not adequately prepared to keep pace."

The findings by unbiased sources add fuel to Democrats` efforts to draw attention to Halliburton, which was run by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of Halliburton`s fiercest critics, demanded that the committee probe more deeply into the links between Halliburton and Cheney.

Investigators testified that there had been no evidence that Cheney influenced the award of any contract to his former company, but Waxman said more investigation was necessary.

He cited recent revelations that a Pentagon political appointee had informed Cheney`s chief of staff about a decision that led to a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, winning a $7-billion contract to restore Iraq`s oil infrastructure.

"Halliburton is gouging the taxpayer, and the Bush administration doesn`t seem to care," Waxman said.

But Halliburton officials defended their actions in Iraq, saying they strongly disagreed with the auditors` contention on overbilling for meals.

"We expected there would be attempts before the end of June to deflect attention from the progress being made in Iraq, but we didn`t think so much of it would originate here at home," Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said in a statement. "It is one thing to learn through experience, as we have, that war is difficult, but another to find that critics are using the war for purely political purposes."

San Diego-based Titan Corp., which employed two people identified in the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, also came under fire.

Auditors found that Titan was failing to keep track of its workers` hours, and they recommended withholding up to $4.9 million from the company`s contract to supply translators to occupation forces in Iraq.

Titan also recently refunded the government $178,000 paid for the services of two workers named in the prison scandal. Titan officials said that although the company had yet to be informed of employee wrongdoing, it made the refund in case the government made that finding.

"We don`t know what the investigation will entail, so we took the measure to be conservative," said Ralph "Wil" Williams, a Titan spokesman.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Iraqi Leaders to Decide Cleric`s Fate, Bush Says
From Times Wire Services

June 16, 2004

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Tuesday that Iraq`s government would decide how to deal with militant Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, the insurgency leader whom the United States previously vowed to capture or kill.

Interim Iraqi President Ghazi Ajil Yawer has said Sadr is welcome to participate as a political leader in elections expected next January.

At a news conference in the White House Rose Garden, Bush said: "The interim Iraqi government will deal with Al Sadr in the way they see fit. They`re sovereign. When we say we transfer full sovereignty, we mean we transfer full sovereignty. And they will deal with him appropriately."

Sadr`s Al Mahdi militia launched an uprising against American-led occupation troops this year. He later agreed to a truce in the cities of Najaf and Karbala under pressure from Shiite leaders who were appalled by the fighting in the midst of religious shrines.



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EDITORIAL
Halliburton, Once Again

June 16, 2004

Vice President Dick Cheney`s penchant for secrecy has repeatedly thrust him into an embarrassing spotlight. It began with his clandestine energy task force. Now it involves contracts in Iraq for Halliburton Inc., which Cheney ran from 1995 to 2000.

For months, Cheney has denied knowing about a controversial Pentagon contract awarded to Halliburton in 2002. Appearing on NBC`s "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, Cheney stated that he had not been informed about any Halliburton contracts and that political appointees were not involved with them. But Pentagon officials have acknowledged that Cheney`s staff was briefed at least twice by political appointees who awarded Halliburton the contract.

The meetings may have been harmless, a simple notification of how the Pentagon intended to handle the restoration of Iraq`s oil facilities after the war. And there is no evidence that Cheney used his influence to get Halliburton the contract. But what makes this more than just another Washington blip is the next chapter, the emergence of six whistle-blowers who have told Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, that Halliburton appears to be fleecing the U.S. Treasury on its cost-plus contracts.

The incentive for the company is strong. Cost-plus means Halliburton gets a set percentage above actual costs, so in general the more it spends, the more it makes.

Five of the whistle-blowers worked directly for Halliburton, and one for a major Halliburton subcontractor. The head of the Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis (R-Va.), refused to allow them to testify in a hearing Tuesday about Iraq and contracting.

David Wilson, a convoy commander for Halliburton, and James Warren, a Halliburton truck driver, stated that new $85,000 Halliburton trucks in Kuwait were "torched" if they got a flat tire. According to Wilson, the company "removed all the spare tires in Kuwait," presumably so the entire truck would have to be replaced after a blowout. In addition, they said, they were instructed not to change the oil on trucks. Warren claims that after he expressed his concerns to Randy Harl, the head of a Halliburton subsidiary, he was fired. Marie deYoung, who worked in the subcontracts department of Halliburton, said the company paid for a laundry service that was so inefficient it cost $100 a bag.

Other evidence suggests this is more than sour grapes from former employees. A May 13 Pentagon audit said Halliburton exercised little control over subcontractors and didn`t monitor the costs of contracts. The General Accounting Office has also investigated and found numerous problems.

On Tuesday, Reps. Davis and Waxman made some progress by agreeing that Halliburton executives would be asked to testify to their committee and that the two House members would consult with each other on whether any documents should be subpoenaed. There may be nothing to hide in regard to the execution of the Halliburton contract. Holding open hearings is the way to demonstrate that.



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If Bush remains president, the neoconservative moment isn`t over. It`s just begun.
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COMMENTARY
Rumors of the Neocons` Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is an editorial writer for The Times.

June 16, 2004

Neoconservatism is finished. According to the conventional wisdom, the Pentagon`s top neocons, like Paul D. Wolfowitz, Douglas J. Feith and William J. Luti, have been discredited by the insurgency in Iraq, by Abu Ghraib and by growing public discontent with the war. The United Nations has been invited back — begged, really — while the organization`s chief opponent, Richard Perle, has been marginalized. The exposure of Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi as a charlatan, and possibly as an Iranian spy, has delivered the knockout punch. The neocons have lost President Bush`s confidence, it seems, and will be abandoned if he wins a second term.

That`s the way the story goes, anyway. In Washington, it is widely believed, easy to understand and fun to pass along. But it is also wrong.

Although it is certainly true that the neoconservatives have had to beat a number of tactical retreats, they have not lost the war for Bush`s mind. Quite the contrary; that`s just wishful thinking by their enemies on both the left and right.

For one thing, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have made no fundamental revisions in foreign policy. Sure, they`ve made a few modest concessions to Europe and the U.N. on Iraq. But the basics remain unchanged: Bush isn`t bailing out of Iraq, and more than 100,000 U.S. troops will remain there for at least another year.

Rather than tone down his rhetoric, Bush has adhered to the twin neoconservative themes of promoting democracy abroad and aggressively employing U.S. military power. "If [the Middle East] is abandoned to dictators and terrorists," he said June 2, "it will be a constant source of violence and alarm, exporting killers of increasing destructive power to attack America and other free nations."

Nor has Bush wavered in his support of Israel`s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an ally of the neocons. The president has insisted that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat be sidelined. He has slapped sanctions on Syria and pushed to isolate Iran. If this is moving away from neoconservatism, what would an embrace look like?

No doubt neoconservatives have been put on the defensive in recent months. When I met Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for policy, for an interview at his home recently, he was eager to discuss the attacks on him and his neoconservative associates. Sitting in his library surrounded by stacks of Commentary magazines and books on the British empire and the Middle East, Feith stated that his critics "are being shabby with the facts, cherry-picking evidence — doing things they`re accusing us of."

But Feith was adamant in saying that the neoconservatives had not been sidelined. They remain influential, he said, and will remain so as long as ideas remain important in the administration. "Bush is not some empty vessel that we`re pouring this stuff into. He`s [been] underestimated the way critics underestimated Reagan."

The truth is that, currently, the neocons are the only ones with any ideas in the administration. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell bridles at any drafts from his speechwriters that he considers too theoretical. Feith, by contrast, filled his office with neocon intellectuals.

So far, no neoconservative has been thrown overboard. Despite charges that his homemade intelligence network at the Pentagon relied on bogus intelligence from Chalabi, Feith remains firmly in place at the Defense Department. David Wurmser, the architect of the pro-Chalabi strategy, is Cheney`s Middle East advisor now. Mark Lagon, a neoconservative who worked for Jeane Kirkpatrick, has been promoted at the State Department. A host of younger neocons remains embedded in other agencies.

If Bush loses the election, a bloodbath will ensue; neoconservatives will be cannibalized by traditional conservatives and by their rivals at the State Department and elsewhere. But if Bush wins and the GOP retains its Senate majority, they will continue to rise. Neoconservative pit bull John Bolton, an undersecretary of State, might well head the CIA. Their main targets in a Bush second term: Syria and Iran.

Irving Kristol, the godfather of the neoconservatives, recently wrote in the Weekly Standard that neoconservatism is "enjoying a second life" under Bush. Foes on the right and left may be eager to bury, not praise, the neoconservatives, but the obsequies are entirely premature. If Bush remains president, the neoconservative moment isn`t over. It`s just begun.



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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/177936_reagan16.html

Riding out denigration of Reagan policies

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

JONATHAN GURWITZ
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

With great pleasure I learned last week that Ronald Reagan was among America`s most beloved presidents.

Every major newspaper, every network devoted substantial space and time to Reagan tributes. An international chorus sang the praises of Reagan and the great legacy he left. There was a sour note here and there about tax cuts and national debt, about gutting welfare and glutting the Pentagon.

But such policy foibles were muted compared with the seemingly endless paeans to Ronald Reagan the man.

He was a straight-talker, Republicans and Democrats agreed. Liberals allowed that he possessed an aura of optimism. Political opponents conceded he had an infectiously sunny disposition.

He was a Washington outsider when, unlike today, that was considered to be a good thing. He was the Great Communicator.

Almost completely lost was the fact that behind the affable face and the one-liners was a man of consequence with serious ideas, ideas that changed the landscape of American and international politics.

All this personal adulation for Reagan came as somewhat of a surprise.

Having lived in Washington for four of Reagan`s eight years in the White House, I don`t remember this non-partisan, ideologically neutral respect for a great leader.

I remember the ugly, personal insults heaped on Reagan. He was intellectually removed from policy decisions. He was callous to the needs of real Americans. He abused presidential power. He put our nation on a reckless course of military adventurism. His cowboy foreign policy endangered the world, a world he saw in simpleton terms of black and white. He was a warmonger. He was an idiot.

It all has a familiar ring.

I remember the glee expressed by some 10 years ago at the news that Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer`s disease. I remember the hateful sarcasm from those who said the disease had fully set in a decade before Reagan acknowledged his condition to the American people in 1994. And I remember those who suggested his disease was a sign of divine retribution.

And those were the kinder, gentler things written and said about Reagan.

Chalk up some of the current revisionism to the tendency to, as the ancient Greeks advised, speak well of the dead, even the detested dead.

The word "eulogy" has its etymological roots in the Greek word for praise.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States generated a similar dynamic. The murder of 3,000 people can do that, temporarily putting enmity and loathing on hold.

"We are all Americans," shouted headlines around the world. Citizenship, however, lasted only a few weeks in most cases.

The hagiographies of Reagan will be more short-lived, if for no other reason than because of the similarities in style and substance between him and the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The cognitive dissonance created by the tributes to Reagan alongside the derision of George W. Bush can be resolved only by maligning both.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry -- who as a young politician opposed every element of the Reagan domestic and foreign policy agenda -- generously hailed Reagan`s bipartisan spirit and leadership.

"Free men and women everywhere will forever remember and honor President Reagan`s role in ending the Cold War," Kerry said.

Not quite everywhere and for a period of time considerably shorter than forever.

Only a week earlier, The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman penned this ode to the wise leaders who helped transform the former Soviet Union:

"I believe that history will judge George Bush 41, Mikhail Gorbachev, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand very kindly for the way they collectively took the Soviet Empire, which was tilted in the wrong direction for so long, and tilted it in the right direction, with barely a shot fired. That was one of the great achievements of the 20th century."

The denigration of Ronald Reagan`s contribution to that achievement was the norm a week ago. It will be the norm again a week hence.

Jonathan Gurwitz writes for the San Antonio Express-News; [e-mail]. Copyright 2004 San Antonio Express-News.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Enough With Reagan Already
The Gipper`s true legacy? Making the GOP as it is today: nasty, brutish and shortsighted. Good riddance
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Let`s get this straight. Ronnie Reagan allowed AIDS to flourish for years after it was discovered and did next to nothing to stem its virulent, lethal tide, and wouldn`t even utter the word until the end of his term, when it was too late.

Ronnie Reagan denied the existence of the nation`s homeless problem that he largely created, and then blamed the problem on not enough people caring to get out there and get a job as he meanwhile slashed civil services and assistance for the poor.

Ronnie Reagan pillaged the U.S. Treasury and ballooned the deficit more than 100 percent during his term. He gave the wealthy enormous tax breaks and gouged the living crap out health care and social services and increased defense spending so much you`d think America was on the verge of being attacked by giant marauding alien centipedes.

Get that man`s face on the dime!

History credits Reagan with ending the Cold War and putting the final nail in the already-collapsing Soviet coffin. Which he did, sort of, but not really, mostly via a massive, budget-reaming arms buildup and via strong-arming the world and launching Star Wars and by playing nice with all manner of dictators and then surprising everyone by siding with Gorbachev on disarmament.

All while selling some slick, bloated version of an uber-patriotic, thick-necked, sanitized America to a dazzled populace who were utterly hypnotized by the man`s silky-smooth ability to make toxic policy sound like Disneyland.

Let`s get this straight: Ronnie Reagan should have been impeached for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, for launching an illegal war on Nicaragua, for applauding genocide in Guatemala and death squads in El Salvador. Ronnie Reagan worked tirelessly to roll back abortion rights, affirmative action and civil rights and was instrumental in diminishing the voice and strength of the U.N. Ronnie Reagan opposed stem-cell research, which could have helped end the horrible suffering of the last decade of his own life.

Get that man`s face on the 20-dollar bill!

Let us not forget: Ronnie Reagan`s secretary of the interior, James Watt, was indicted on more than 40 felony counts for leveraging his connections at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help his cronies seek federal funds for housing projects. Nothing like a little prison time for one of your key Cabinet members to make your administration really shine.

As Tim Noah of Slate points out, Saddam`s now-famous gassing of the Kurds, the horrific event that BushCo never ceases to point to as really really bad, occurred on Reagan`s watch. And, in 1984, when Reagan`s hawks received their first reports that Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare (using chemicals sold to him, in part, by the United States), they chose to shake hands with Saddam and ignore it.

Give that man`s fluffy head a spot on Mount Rushmore!

Reagan the great government shrinker? Reagan the great decreaser of budget spending? Whatever. Truth is, spending actually increased by one-fourth, even factoring out inflation, during his term. Know who reversed that? Who actually decreased spending as an overall percentage of GNP and reduced the size of government during his term? Bill "Big Government" Clinton, that`s who. Whatta jerk.

Can we forget the lovely winking deal Reagan made with the Ayatollah Khomeini to hang on to those 52 American hostages in Iran till after the 1980 election in order to make Jimmy Carter look small and weak? Shall we remember how Reagan took full credit for their release, when he had almost nothing to do with it? True American hero, that Gipper.

Ronnie Reagan tried to tell poor people that ketchup was a vegetable.

Ronnie Reagan was largely detested by his own children and wasn`t exactly highly respected for his intellect by his own Cabinet, and his general vagueness and lack of nuanced understanding of how government works -- not to mention how to pronounce the names of foreign leaders and countries -- is matched only by the current least articulate least intelligent least educated least attuned least globally respected man who now stumbles though the Oval Office with a smirky Texas pseudo-swagger.

Reagan could be famously snarling, pinched, mean. As California governor, he fully cooperated with the CIA to investigate all those nasty commie uprisings in the UC system, ended the career of then-UC President Clark Kerr and famously warned student protesters, "If there has to be a bloodbath, then let`s get it over with." What a sweetie. Is it too much to call Reagan "a cruel and stupid lizard" and "dumb as a stump," as Christopher Hitchins writes? You be the judge.

Ronnie Reagan deregulated major industry and essentially loosed corporate America upon an unsuspecting populace, including the savings-and-loan companies, all while opening the national treasury for his wealthy pals to loot. He promised a crackdown on out-of-control deficit spending while working furiously to double the national debt. "Reagan taught us that deficits don`t matter," oozed a very proud Dick Cheney, sneeringly.

But let`s be fair. Let`s look on Ronnie`s good side, the legacy, the reason tens of thousands are mourning the Gipper`s passing and why an aging boomer nation is still held rapt by this most beguiling and masterful of proto-American Hollywood salesmen.

Reagan was, as widely noted, a pragmatist. He was a seductive charmer. Gracious. He stood by his warped ideals and admitted his mistakes and followed through on many of his promises, even if those promises mutilated progressive ideas and stomped on the environment and gave piles of money to the wealthy, all while sucker-punching the poor and the working class and promising them nice shiny pennies and a big heap of false hope if they`d just shut the hell up.

Which is why, I presume, there are any number of adorable GOP sycophants out there right now campaigning to get the Gipper`s mug on the national currency. There are even some who want his face on Rushmore, who think it`s not enough that we named a huge airport and an aircraft carrier and probably some nice road somewhere after him. After all, Ronnie gave the conservative agenda its beautiful, historic sense of bitter entitlement.

As for the mourners, they weep not because Reagan was such a profound intellect, not because he was such a generous humanitarian, not because he balanced budgets or worked to end poverty or because he, as Clinton did, brokered peace in Northern Ireland and came closer than any president in history to finally ending conflict in the Middle East, and nearly winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the process.

No, they want Reagan canonized because he was a wildly successful, hugely manipulative media presence. Because he charmed them to death, because he shaped American politics like no other president in recent history. This is what people are remembering: essentially, a surreal and often sad and yet indelible hunk of American history, a time when America fell under a slick jingoistic spell and conservatism found its voice and became much of what it is today: you know, mean-spirited and hawkish and ideologically lopsided, corporate sponsored, homophobic and fiscally reckless and more oriented toward one overarching agenda: military might uber alles.

This, then, is what we have to thank Reagan for. A bruising, devious, glossy worldview, fiscal irresponsibility, the art of the slick media sound bite, humanitarianism treated like a disease to be eradicated.

And now, with his passing, it`s only appropriate to try to show a little respect. After all, you have to give the man credit -- he did indeed do a great deal to alter the timbre and direction modern American politics. His legacy is convoluted and eternally debatable and yet absolutely, undeniably extraordinary. He is the GOP`s icon of finger-wagging righteousness. He is their demigod o` slippery prefab swagger. His attitudes and policies have had a titanic effect on the shape of modern American conservatism.

Problem is, that shape looks increasingly, and frighteningly, like a giant, bloody baseball bat.

Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

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9/11 Panel: Al Qaeda to Keep Trying to Attack U.S.
Wed Jun 16, 2004 09:03 AM ET

By Deborah Charles

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda has changed drastically since the Sept. 11 attacks but it will keep trying to strike in the United States to inflict mass casualties, the panel investigating the 2001 hijackings said on Wednesday.

In a report entitled "Overview of the Enemy," the commission gave a detailed history of Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda network, blamed for the Sept. 11 hijacked aircraft attacks that killed about 3,000 people.

Although the extremist network has become far more decentralized since then, al Qaeda still helps regional networks carry out terror attacks and assists them in training and funding.

"Al Qaeda remains extremely interested in conducting chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attacks," said the report, issued during the final two days of hearings called to find out how the United States failed to prevent Sept. 11 and what it can do now to improve security.

The commission said al Qaeda`s ability to conduct an anthrax attack is one of the most immediate threats the United States is likely to face. Al Qaeda may also try a chemical attack using industrial chemicals, or by attacking a chemical plant or shipment of hazardous materials.

"The intelligence community expects that the trend toward attacks intended to cause ever-higher casualties will continue," the report said.

"Al Qaeda and other extremist groups will likely continue to exploit leaks of national security information in the media, open-source information on techniques such as mixing explosives and advances in electronics," it said.

The report said al Qaeda may modify "traditional tactics" to prevent detection by counterterrorist forces. "Regardless of the tactic, al Qaeda is actively striving to attack the United States and inflict mass casualties," it said.

The panel`s report was issued at the beginning of the final two days of public hearings to probe funding, planning and execution of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

FBI and CIA experts were due to testify about the militant Muslim network and give a detailed timeline of the events leading up to the deadly attacks.

The report said al Qaeda`s network of training camps in Afghanistan prior to the Sept. 11 attacks offered "quite good" training. Up to 20,000 men trained in bin Laden-supported camps in Afghanistan between May 1996 and Sept. 11, 2001, it said.

The CIA estimates al Qaeda spent $30 million a year before Sept. 11 for terror operations, to run the training camps and contribute to Afghanistan`s Taliban militia.

The report said it had no evidence that any government financially supported al Qaeda before Sept. 11, though the group found "fertile fund-raising ground" in Saudi Arabia.

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Der Untersuchungsbericht 9/11 und Al Kaida in PDF:

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June 16, 2004
Original Plan for 9/11 Attacks Involved 10 Planes, Panel Says
By DAVID STOUT

ASHINGTON, June 16 — As horrendous as they were, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were only a small part of terrorist visions that called for using 10 hijacked airplanes to attack both the East and West Coasts, including the United States Capitol and the White House, the staff of the independent commission investigating the attacks reported today.

The staff also asserted that "no credible evidence" had been found that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists cooperated in the attacks, a conclusion likely to fuel the debate over President Bush`s decision to go to war to topple Saddam Hussein.

Some of the 9/11 terrorist plans, the commission staff said, called for the hijacked jets to be crashed into the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, various nuclear power plants, and skyscrapers in California and Washington State, a captured leader of Al Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has told interrogators.

Mr. Mohammed, who is believed to have originated the idea for the Sept. 11 attacks and whose nephew, Ramzi Yousef, was the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was seized in Pakistan in March 2003 and is being held at an undisclosed location.

The reports, the 15th and 16th by the panel staff, were issued as the commission, meeting in Washington, began its last two days of public hearings. A final report is to be issued by July 26.

Today`s interim report on the outline of the 9/11 plot offers new details and far more context than has previously been known. It says, for instance, that Zacarias Moussaoui, who has often been dubbed "the 20th hijacker" out of speculation that he was to have joined the 19 actual hijackers, was instead meant to participate in a "second wave" of attacks, an idea thwarted when he was arrested in August 2001 after his behavior at a Minnesota flying school aroused suspicion.

The 9/11 conspirators and their leaders, while joined in their hatred of the United States, often argued among themselves over what targets to attack, and when, the staff of the bipartisan investigating commission said.

For instance, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda`s top leader, initially pushed for a date of May 12, 2001, exactly seven months after terrorists attacked the American destroyer Cole in Yemen. Then, when he learned that Prime Minister Aeriel Sharon of Israel would visit the White House in June or July, Mr. bin Laden pressed to amend the timetable.

"In both instances," the report notes, Mr. Mohammed "insisted that the hijacker teams were not yet ready."

The plot was also riven by personality clashes and, it seems, by at least one case of cold feet. In the summer of 2001, Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the conspiracy, drove another conspirator, Ziah Jarrah, to Miami`s main airport so that Mr. Jarrah could fly to Germany to visit his girlfriend.

That Mr. Atta drove Mr. Jarrah to the airport was an "unusual circumstance suggesting that something may have been amiss," the report said. At the time, Khalid Mohammed was fretting to his fellow terrorists that if Mr. Jarrah "asks for a divorce, it is going to cost a lot of money," apparently an allusion to the costs of putting another hijacker in place.

"Given the catastrophic results of the 9/11 attacks, it is tempting to depict the plot as a set plan executed to near perfection," the staff report said. "This would be a mistake."

One apparent "failure" of the plot has been known since the day of the attacks: the Boeing 757 designated United Flight 93, which took off from Newark, crashed in a field in southwestern Pennsylvania, apparently after its hijackers struggled with the doomed passengers. (That plane is believed to have been piloted by Mr. Jarrah, who got over his case of cold feet and said good-bye to his girlfriend, and his life.)

There has been conjecture ever since that the hijackers on Flight 93 meant to crash the plane into a high-profile Washington target — the White House, perhaps, or the Capitol. Another jet, hijacked after it took off from Dulles Airport, near Washington, crashed into the Pentagon, while two jetliners that were hijacked after taking off from Boston were flown into the World Trade Center, destroying the Twin Towers.

Mr. Mohammed has told interrogators that "the U.S. Capitol was indeed on the preliminary target list" that he originally developed with Al Qaeda`s top leader, Osama bin Laden, and other terrorist ringleaders as early as the spring of 1999.

"That preliminary list also included the White House, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center," said the staff of the commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Mr. Mohammed "claims that while everyone agreed on the Capitol, he wanted to hit the World Trade Center, whereas bin Laden favored the Pentagon and the White House."

Among Mr. bin Laden and his confederates, the Capitol was "the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel," while the White House was considered "a political symbol."

Mr. bin Laden expressed his target preferences in the summer of 2001 to Mr. Atta, who was destined to fly a jetliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Had he not been able to hit the tower, Mr. Atta was determined to crash the jet he was flying into the streets of Manhattan, the report says.

Mr. Atta said he thought the White House would be too difficult a target, though it was not clear why. Better to hit the Capitol, Mr. Atta reportedly argued. "Atta selected a date after the first week of September so that the United States Congress would be in session," the report states.

As have previous staff reports on the Sept. 11 carnage, this one reveals some tantalizing "what ifs." Two of the hijackers got speeding tickets in the months before the attacks, and one was involved in a car crash on the George Washington Bridge.

There is no suggestion whatever that the police officers should have sensed that the people involved in the traffic incidents were up to something. On the other hand, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was brought to justice in part because he was stopped for speeding.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 16, 2004
Panel Investigating 9/11 Attacks Cites Confusion in Air Defense
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, June 15 - The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has found that the Pentagon`s domestic air-defense command was disastrously unprepared for a major terrorist strike on American soil and was slow and confused in its response to the hijackings that morning, according to officials who have read a draft report of the commission`s findings.

The officials said the draft had been circulated in recent days among commission members and at the Pentagon in preparation for public release of the report at a hearing on Thursday.

[In Spain on Tuesday, a judge ordered 15 people to stand trial in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.]

The 9/11 commission draft summarized the response of the military, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies with this passage:

"On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen. What ensued was a hurried attempt to create an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced."

The report, they said, suggests - though it does not say explicitly - that a more organized response by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, might have allowed fighter pilots to reach one jetliner and shoot it down before it flew into the Pentagon, more than 50 minutes after the first of the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

Instead, the report finds, an emergency order from Vice President Dick Cheney authorizing the hijacked planes to be shot down did not reach pilots until the last of the four commandeered jetliners had crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania, after a struggle between terrorists and passengers aboard that plane.

A spokesman for Norad, which is based in Colorado, had no immediate comment on accounts of the report. Norad`s commander, Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are to testify before the commission at the Thursday hearing, along with former officials of the F.A.A., which has been harshly criticized by the commission in the past.

Commission officials said that Norad and the F.A.A. believed that elements of the criticism in the draft report were wrong or exaggerated, and that they were pressing for last-minute corrections. The 10-member bipartisan commission, which is in the final weeks of its investigation, has repeatedly tangled with the air-defense command and the aviation agency, and issued subpoenas to both last year in trying to gather documents and testimony.

The commission`s public hearings this week - Wednesday on Al Qaeda and the development of the Sept. 11 plot, Thursday on the chronology of that morning and how Norad, the F.A.A. and other agencies responded to the attacks - are the last the panel is scheduled to hold before it delivers a final, all-encompassing report late next month.

Thomas H. Kean, the commission`s chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview Tuesday that the hearings this week would "close the circle" on the inquiry and alter the public`s understanding of exactly what happened on Sept. 11 and of the plotting of Qaeda terrorists in the months before.

While Mr. Kean said he could not disclose in advance what exactly the commission had learned, other panel officials said the hearings this week would depict widespread chaos within the federal government on the day of the attacks, offering extensive new evidence of how the White House, the Pentagon and federal emergency response agencies were slow to react.

Members of the commission, they said, are expected to question witnesses about hesitation among White House aides on the morning of the attacks, why President Bush was allowed to remain in a meeting with Florida schoolchildren for several minutes after it became clear that a terrorist attack was under way and why he was then taken on a perplexing, hopscotch series of flights on Air Force One that created the appearance of chaos among the nation`s leaders.

"There was a lot of chaos," Mr. Kean said. "We`ll go over what the president did, what the vice president did, what was going on in the PEOC - the whole story." PEOC is the acronym for the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a White House bunker where Mr. Cheney and senior aides were sheltered in the hours after the attacks.

Mr. Kean said that in a closed meeting on Tuesday, the panel began to debate the report`s final recommendations in earnest, including proposals for a sweeping overhaul of the nation`s intelligence agencies. He said he remained optimistic that the commission could produce a unanimous report.

Commission officials have made clear in the past that the report will offer blistering criticism of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other intelligence and counterterrorism agencies for failures before Sept. 11. Some members have suggested that the commission may want to recommend the creation of domestic intelligence-gathering agencies separate from the F.B.I., similar to Britain`s MI-5.

The intelligence overhaul "is probably the most complex and the most difficult" of the issues under consideration by the panel, Mr. Kean said. "But yes, I`m optimistic. Even with 10 very independent-minded people, this is not impossible."

Spanish Judge Orders 9/11 Trial

MADRID, June 15 (Reuters) - A Spanish judge has ordered 15 people suspected of being Al Qaeda members to face trial on charges including mass murder for the Sept. 11 attacks, court documents showed Tuesday.

The judge, Baltasar Garzón, has been investigating Islamist militants since 1996, ordering his first arrests in November 2001 in a bid to smash an alleged Qaeda cell in Spain.

Judicial sources said the trial of the 15 suspects could begin in about a year. Fourteen of them are in jail while one, a Syrian-born Spanish journalist for Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, has been freed on bail for medical reasons.

Judge Garzón has charged and issued international arrest warrants for 16 others suspected of being members the of the network. He has also issued a warrant for Osama bin Laden.

The suspects to face trial include Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, alias Abu Dahdah, whom Judge Garzón accuses of taking part in organizing the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. He has charged Mr. Dahdah with 3,000 murders.

Also to face trial is Taysir Alony, the Al Jazeera reporter, who is best known for interviewing Mr. bin Laden shortly after the attacks.

Mr. Alony is charged with providing money and information to al Qaeda operatives and recruiting fighters for the group.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com

No Evidence Connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda, 9/11 Panel Says

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 16, 2004; 1:32 PM

There is "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein`s government in Iraq collaborated with the al Qaeda terrorist network on any attacks on the United States, according to a new staff report released this morning by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Although Osama bin Laden briefly explored the idea of forging ties with Iraq in the mid-1990s, the terrorist leader was hostile to Hussein`s secular government, and Iraq never responded to requests for help in providing training camps or weapons, the panel found in the first of two reports issued today.

The findings come in the wake of statements Monday by Vice President Cheney that Iraq had "long-established ties" with al Qaeda, and comments by President Bush yesterday backing up that assertion.

The commission issued its report on al Qaeda`s history at the start of a two-day round of hearings this morning. In a separate report on the planning and deliberations for the Sept. 11 plot, the panel cited numerous pieces of FBI evidence in concluding that ringleader Mohamed Atta never met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague on April 9, 2001, as Cheney and some other Bush administration officials have alleged.

"Based on the evidence available -- including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee reporting -- we do not believe that such a meeting occurred," the second report said.

The report on al Qaeda`s history said the government of Sudan, which gave sanctuary to al Qaeda from 1991 to 1996, persuaded bin Laden to cease supporting anti-Hussein forces and "arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda." But the contacts did not result in any cooperation, the panel said.

"There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan [in 1996], but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," the report says. "Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

The conclusions provide the latest example of how the Sept. 11 commission has become a political irritant for the Bush administration. The 10-member bipartisan commission, initially opposed by the White House, has frequently feuded with the government over access to documents and witnesses and has issued findings sharply critical of the Bush administration`s focus on terrorism prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.

In testimony before the commission, CIA and FBI officials said they agreed with the staff report`s assessment of the abortive relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq.

A CIA counterterrorism analyst who testified using the pseudonym Ted Davis said, "We�re in full agreement with the staff statement," which he said did "an excellent job" of representing the agency�s current understanding of the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship.

John Pistole, the FBI`s executive assistant director for counter-terrorism, concurred.

Staff writer William Branigin contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Al Qaeda Originally Envisioned Plot With 10 Jets
9/11 Panel Finds No Collaboration Between Iraq, Al Qaeda

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 16, 2004; 1:40 PM

The terrorist attacks carried out on Sept. 11, 2001, were originally envisioned as an even more spectacular assault involving 10 jetliners on the east and west coasts, but the plan was scaled back and was nearly derailed on several occasions by setbacks and squabbling among senior al Qaeda officials, according to a new report released this morning.

The date for the attacks was uncertain until weeks before they were carried out, and there is evidence as late as Sept. 9, 2001, that ringleader Mohamed Atta had not decided whether the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania would target the U.S. Capitol or the White House, according to the report, which was issued by the independent commission probing the Sept. 11 attacks. One of the hijacking pilots apparently came close to abandoning the plot altogether, the panel found.

In an overview of al Qaeda released in a separate report earlier this morning, the commission also found "no credible evidence" that al Qaeda collaborated with Saddam Hussein`s government in Iraq on the Sept. 11 strikes or any other attacks on the United States.

The commission`s astonishingly detailed report on the planning for Sept. 11 -- which relies heavily on the previously classified interrogations of senior al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody -- portrays al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as deeply involved in planning the strikes, choosing the hijackers himself and consistently pushing to have the attacks carried out earlier than they eventually were.

Bin Laden`s fervor persisted despite heated opposition from many of his closest aides, who urged him to abandon the plot as it neared its completion in the summer of 2001, the report says.

Bin Laden "thought that an attack against the United States would reap al Qaeda a recruiting and fundraising bonanza," the report says. "In his thinking, the more al Qaeda did, the more support it would gain. Although he faced opposition from many of his most senior advisers . . . bin Laden effectively overruled their objections, and the attacks went forward."

The commission`s report represents by far the most detailed and authoritative public account of the Sept. 11 attacks since the 19 al Qaeda hijackers commandeered four jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside that day. It also comes as one of the last documents to be issued by the 10-member bipartisan panel before the release next month of its final report, which is likely to span some 500 pages.

Most of the report centers on the planning and deliberations for the Sept. 11 plot, which began with a proposal in 1996 to bin Laden by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would eventually oversee the plot and whose statements to his U.S. interrogators form a crucial part of the commission`s report. Another U.S. detainee, Sept. 11 financier and would-be hijacker Ramzi Binalshibh, also figures prominently in the account.

The report traces the emergence of the hijackers, beginning with longtime jihad fighters Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar and including the formation of a hijacking cell in Hamburg, Germany. Bin Laden approved a plan in 1999 that called for hijacking airliners in both the United States and Southeast Asia, but the latter part was soon dropped for logistical reasons.

In addition to the targets that were hit on Sept. 11, Mohammed initially proposed crashing hijacked planes into the CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants and the tallest buildings in California and Washington state," the report says.

"The centerpiece of his original proposal was the tenth plane, which he would have piloted himself," it says. Instead of crashing it in a suicide attack, Mohammed would have killed every adult male passenger on the plane, contacted the media from the air and landed the aircraft at a U.S. airport. Then he would have made a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all the women and children, the report says.

When bin Laden finally approved the operation, he personally scrapped the idea of using one of the hijacked planes to make a public statement, the report says.

Commission staff also identify at least nine, and as many as 10, potential hijackers who were at one point drafted for inclusion in the attacks but either backed out or were removed by senior al Qaeda officials. Al Qaeda had envisioned 25 or 26 hijackers total, for as many as seven hijackers on each plane, according to Mohammed.

Contrary to the popular depiction of the plotters as disciplined and unerring, the commission`s investigators indicate that the plan was beset with problems.

"Given the catastrophic results of the 9/11 attacks, it is tempting to depict the plot as a set plan executed to near perfection," the report says. "This would be a mistake. The 9/11 conspirators confronted operational difficulties, internal disagreements, and even dissenting opinions within the leadership of al Qaeda. In the end, the plot proved sufficiently flexible to adapt and evolve as challenges arose."

The commission staff found that "internal disagreement among the 9/11 plotters may have posed the greatest potential vulnerability for the plot." The clearest example is a serious rift that developed between Atta, whom bin Laden had designated as the "emir" of the plot, and Ziad Jarrah, one of the other trained pilots.

Jarrah was more gregarious and seemingly westernized than his compatriots, and he pined for his girlfriend. He had married her in an Islamic ceremony not recognized by German law, and he called her on an almost daily basis. The breaking point appears to have come in July 2001, when Jarrah was taken to the Miami airport by Atta and issued a one-way ticket to Germany.

Although Jarrah would rejoin the plot in the next month, the panel concludes that Mohammed "may have been preparing another al Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, to take Jarrah`s place" and that he was intended "as a potential substitute pilot." Moussaoui, who was arrested in Minnesota in August 2001, is charged as a conspirator in the Sept. 11 plot.

The panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also portrays an ongoing high-level debate among bin Laden, Mohammed, Atta and others over the scope and timing of the attacks.

Bin Laden, the report says, "had been pressuring KSM [Mohammed] for months to advance the attack date," even asking that the attacks occur as early as mid-2000 after Ariel Sharon caused an outcry by visiting a contested holy site in Jerusalem. According to Mohammed, bin Laden later pushed for dates of May 12, 2001 -- the seven-month anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen -- and then for June or July, to coincide with a visit by Sharon to Washington.

"In both instances," the report said, Mohammed "insisted that the hijacker teams were not yet ready. Other al Qaeda detainees also confirm that the 9/11 attacks were delayed during the summer of 2001, despite bin Laden`s wishes."

The final date was likely influenced in part by the targets chosen, investigators also found. An electronic communication between Atta and Binalshibh showed that Atta finally selected a date after the first week in September "so that the United States Congress would be in session."

Bin Laden strongly favored targeting the White House, and Binalshibh urged Atta to agree. But Atta was concerned that the presidential mansion was too difficult to hit, and backed the U.S. Capitol instead. The matter appears to have been unresolved as late as two days before the attack.

The panel`s report appears to generally side with FBI investigators on the question of knowing accomplices within the United States, ruling out, for example, any terrorist connections to a Saudi national who helped two of the hijackers in San Diego. The panel also found no evidence that the Saudi royal family or government aided the plot. But the commission raises questions about a handful of other individuals and says its investigation is continuing.

The public hearings being held today feature testimony from FBI investigators, a Justice Department prosecutor and a CIA officer about the history of al Qaeda and the makings of the Sept. 11 plot.

In a staff report and testimony tomorrow, the commission will examine the nation`s poorly prepared air defenses on Sept. 11.

A 12-page report issued earlier today offered a broad examination of the history of al Qaeda and bin Laden, who for years went unnoticed or underestimated by U.S. intelligence officials.

That report says that bin Laden was intent on carrying out attacks on the United States as early as 1992, viewing America as "the head of the snake" because of its support for Israel and Arab regimes he considered corrupt. But U.S. officials were not aware of these plans, or knowledgeable about any details of his organization, until four years later, the report says.

Although al Qaeda evidently never built a relationship with Iraq, the terrorist group may have become involved with Iran, and may have participated in the June 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 Americans and injured 372 others, the panel found.

Investigators concluded that the Khobar Towers attack was carried out by a Saudi Shiite Hezbollah group with assistance from Iran. Initially, because of the historical hostility between bin Laden`s extremist brand of Sunni Islam and Shiites, analysts had discounted cooperation between the two.

"Later intelligence, however, showed far greater potential for collaboration between Hezbollah and al Qaeda than many had previously thought," the report says. It describes contacts between al Qaeda and Iran, including a visit to Iran and Lebanon by a small group of al Qaeda operatives for training in explosives, intelligence and security.

"We have seen strong but indirect evidence that [bin Laden`s] organization did in fact play some as yet unknown role in the Khobar attack," the report says.

As al Qaeda developed, its terrorist training camps in Afghanistan provided fertile ground for its operatives "to think creatively about ways to commit mass murder," it says. Among the ideas that were raised: taking over a nuclear missile launcher in Russia and forcing Russian scientists to fire a nuclear missile at the United States, carrying out mustard gas or cyanide attacks against Jewish areas in Iran, spreading poison gas through the air conditioning system of a targeted building and hijacking an aircraft and crashing it into an airport terminal or nearby city.

In 1998, the suicide truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania -- which killed 224 people and injured more than 5,000 combined -- marked a new departure in that "they were planned, directed and executed by al Qaeda, under the direct supervision of bin Laden and his chief aides," the report says.

But a January 2000 attempt to attack a U.S. warship, the USS The Sullivans, failed because the boat to be used in the suicide attack was overloaded with explosives and sank, the report says. Ten months later, a similar attack was executed successfully against the USS Cole in Yemen.

"Contrary to popular understanding," the report says, "bin Laden did not fund al Qaeda through a personal fortune and a network of businesses," and he never received a $300 million inheritance. He actually received about $1 million a year over about 24 years as an inheritance, a significant sum but not enough to fund a global terrorist network.

"Instead, al Qaeda relied primarily on a fundraising network developed over time," the report says. It says the CIA estimates that al Qaeda spent $30 million a year, with the largest outlays ($10 million to $20 million annually) going to fund the Taliban.

"Actual terrorist operations were relatively cheap," it says.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, "al Qaeda`s funding has decreased significantly," the report says. But the group`s expenditures have decreased as well, and "it remains relatively easy for al Qaeda to find the relatively small sums required to fund terrorist operations," the report warns.

Now, the organization is far more decentralized, with operational commanders and cell leaders making the decisions that were previously made by bin Laden, the panel found.

Yet, al Qaeda remains interested in carrying out chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attacks against the United States, the report says. Although an attempt to purchase uranium in 1994 failed -- the material proved to be fake -- "al Qaeda continues to pursue its strategic objective of obtaining a nuclear weapon," according to the report.

By any means possible, it warns, "al Qaeda is actively striving to attack the United States and inflict mass casualties."

In testimony before the commission today, federal officials said they agreed that al Qaeda remains a threat to the United States.

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said that despite losing much of its leadership in the U.S. war on terrorism, al Qaeda is still dangerous and may now be more far-flung.

Pistole said the FBI views the war against terrorism as a "generational" one that may not be won until future generations in the Muslim world are weaned away from radical anti-American views.

"It may be tantamount to a hundred-year war," he said.

Staff writer William Branigin contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Wednesday, June 16, 2004
War News for June 16, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Two oil pilelines sabotaged near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline near Kirkuk sabotaged.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi killed in car bombing at US base near Hilla.

Bring ‘em on: Two contractors killed in ambush near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Oil company security chief assassinated near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi police official assassinated near Hilla.

Bring ‘em on: US patrol ambushed near Kut.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqis killed by Ramadi car bomb targeting Iraqi police.

Thailand to withdraw troops from Iraq by September.

Poll results. “President Bush is fond of telling Americans they have liberated Iraq and that the country`s future generations will be thankful. The current generation, however, overwhelmingly views U.S. forces as occupiers and wishes they would just leave, according to a poll commissioned by the administration.”

Finders keepers. “U.S. President George W. Bush, careful to protect his biggest catch in his 15-month war, has made it clear he is in no hurry to hand Saddam Hussein over to the uncertain security overseen by an interim Iraqi government. Bush said yesterday it was in everyone`s best interests to ensure the former Iraqi dictator faces justice for atrocities committed against his citizens and doesn`t somehow avoid trial as Washington passes sovereignty to Iraqis in two weeks.” I’m sure Lieutenant AWOL has directed his elite legal team to prepare a brief explaining why the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to his pampered ass. After all, we`re a nation of laws.

Wolfie’s back in Baghdad for “consultations.”

Something you won’t see in the mainstream media. “Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., introduced legislation Monday he said would improve the system that allows worried families to track service members wounded overseas. Pryor said 44 of the 3,000 Arkansans deployed to Iraq in March as part of the 39th Infantry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, have been listed as "seriously injured" or "very seriously injured" and have been evacuated from the combat zone.”

Commentary

Opinion: “All of this is a ghastly scandal, one of the worst in American history. It is evident cause for impeachment of this president, if Congress has the courage to do it, and for prosecution of cabinet figures and certain commanders. However in view of the partisan alignment in Congress, quite possibly nothing will happen before the November election. What then? It also is quite possible that George W. Bush will be elected to a second term. In that case, the American electorate will have made these practices its own. Now that is something for our children to think about.”

Opinion: “The key question is how high up the responsibility goes for these abhorrent acts. The War Crimes Act covers government officials who give the orders for inhuman treatment as well as those who carry them out. Since the War Crimes Act punishes for inhuman treatment alone, prosecutions under that act can by-pass any disagreement over the exact meaning of torture - and whether the Justice Department`s absurdly narrow definition is correct. In addition, under international law, officials who know about the inhuman treatment and fail to stop it are also liable.”

Opinion: “Bush was elected to lead the American people. With his arrogant conviction in the truth of his personal vision of God`s will, he has led us into international and domestic disaster - the daily deaths of Americans in Iraq a year beyond his declaration of victory, revelations that reports of weapons of mass destruction were lies deliberately designed to justify a grab for power, graphic tapes and photos of grotesque American abuse of Iraqi Prisoners of War, the restriction of basic American freedoms at home and soaring oil prices affecting our local gas pumps. Our religious president should not only be asking God for forgiveness, he should also be asking the American people. He should ask us to forgive him for not being a better president.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Two New York Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.


Off Topic

The Anti-Christ. “According to freelance journalist Wayne Madsden, ‘George W Bush`s blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs and his constant references to `evil doers,` in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations--the anti-Christ.’” And Lieutenant AWOL recently asked the Pope to help him get re-elected and complained that “not all the bishops are with me.”



86-43-04. Pass it on.



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June 16, 2004
Rebel Cleric Tells Fighters in 2 Iraqi Cities to Return Home
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 16 — Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who has led a resistance to the American occupation, told his fighters today to leave the holy cities of Najaf and Kufa and return home.

The order, communicated in leaflets distributed by his office, appeared to be another move by Mr. Sadr to try to gain legitimate political standing in Iraq. He has said he is starting a political party that may participate in elections scheduled for January 2005.

A spokesman for Mr. Sadr, Qais al-Khazali, said in an interview that the cleric was simply complying with the terms of a cease-fire announced on June 4. Since then, many members of the cleric`s militia, known as the Mahdi Army, have disappeared from the streets of the two holy cities. But there have been numerous infractions of the truce. Last week, fighters overran a police station in central Najaf and freed the prisoners, burned squad cars and allowed looters to plunder the building.

But Mr. Sadr has also expressed an increasingly strong desire to take part in mainstream politics. He has given conditional approval to the Iraqi interim government, a body he once mocked. And several days ago, speaking through Mr. Khazali, he said he was starting a political party, even though he insisted he could not disband his militia because it was a popular uprising rather than an organized armed force.

American administrators here say people associated with illegal militias cannot take part in elections.

In southern Iraq today, saboteurs launched another attack on Iraq`s beleaguered oil distribution network, blowing a hole in one of the country`s two southern oil export pipelines, Reuters reported.

In Kirkuk, gunmen assassinated the security chief for the northern oil fields there, Asam Jihad, a spokesman for Iraq`s Oil Ministry, said. The security chief, Ghazi Talabani, a member of the clan of the Kurdish political chieftain Jalal Talabani, was riddled with bullets as he left his home. Ghazi Talabani was the link between American forces, the Northern Oil Company and the private security firm Erinys as they tried to shield the oil fields from attacks.

Rebels also attacked an official convoy carrying foreigners in the western city of Ramadi today, Reuters reported. The attack destroyed an Iraqi police car and killed at least six Iraqis, including a policeman, Reuters reported, citing an American Marine spokesman. Witnesses told the news service that foreigners were believed to be among the casualties.

In Balad, 2 soldiers were killed in a "rocket attack" and 21 people were wounded, the American military announced without offering further details.

The pipeline attack today came amid a shutdown of Iraq`s main oil export terminal, in Basra, which was put out of service on Tuesday by two explosions at oil pipelines near the Persian Gulf. The facility, in Iraq`s most important oil-producing region, is expected to be out of service about 10 days, costing the country up to $1 billion in revenue.

American-led occupation forces have suffered a mounting number of attacks as Iraq`s new interim government prepares to assume formal control of the country on June 30. The attacks on the oil lines were the most devastating so far in a series of ambitious infrastructure assaults clearly intended to paralyze the country.

The first explosion occurred late Monday about 10 miles south of Basra and was a clear case of sabotage, witnesses said.

It was unclear whether the second explosion, about noon on Tuesday, came as the result of another attack or because technicians tried to compensate for the first incident by increasing the oil flow in a parallel pipeline, causing a violent rupture.

In April, Basra`s oil terminal was the target of a largely unsuccessful waterborne attack by suicide bombers.

Attacks on Iraq`s electrical grid, oil pipelines and other structures have been increasing in frequency since a major outbreak of the insurgency here in April. Last week the interim Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said attacks on oil pipelines alone had cost the country $200 million.

"We`ve basically been in a race with the enemy to see if we can build them up faster than they can tear them down," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, which closely tracks developments in Iraq. "To go after the oil undercuts the ability of Iraq to finance its own reconstruction and makes it more dependent on the United States."

Together, the two southern lines could carry about 80,000 barrels of oil an hour for export to ports on the Persian Gulf, said Walid Khadduri, editor of The Middle East Economic Survey and an authority on the Iraqi oil industry. Mr. Khadduri said the pipelines could take very roughly 10 days to fix and cost the country between $450 million and $1 billion over that time, although production could be increased later to compensate for the shutdown once repairs are made.

Jamal Qureshi, a market analyst at PFC Energy, said rising oil production by other countries had dampened any immediate effect the attacks may have had on crude oil prices. Another analyst at the same company, Roger Diwan, managing director of markets and countries, said that if repairs took much longer than 10 days or there was another major attack, global markets would be affected.

"It has a cumulative impact the longer it lasts," Mr. Diwan said.

Until the latest attacks, Iraq had been exporting an average of from 1.7 million to 1.9 million barrels of oil a day, compared to somewhere between 2 million to 2.2 million before the American-led invasion last year, Mr. Khadduri said.

Amid the increasing attacks to the oil infrastructure, the way that Iraq`s oil revenues are being spent in advance of the handover of sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on June 30 is being called into question. Iraq Revenue Watch, an initiative of the Open Society Institute, an organization backed by the billionaire George Soros, alleges that nearly $2 billion in expenditures recently authorized by a United States-controlled board in charge of the Iraqi budget until June 30 may have been rushed into commitments on ill-advised projects before power switches hands.

The money includes $460 million for reconstruction of the oil sector, even though most of the nearly $2 billion that Congress allocated for oil reconstruction last fall remains uncommitted to specific projects. Occupation authorities have maintained that there is no overlap in projects to be undertaken by the two pots of money.

The attack on the convoy of foreign contractors was also part of a succession well-planned incidents clearly aimed at disrupting rebuilding efforts. It took place between 1:30 and 2 p.m. on a north-south road veering into the highway leading to the Baghdad airport, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces. Insurgents on an overpass raked a three-vehicle convoy with gunfire. Passengers in two of the cars were apparently killed, while a third car pocked with bullet holes limped to a nearby American base.

General Kimmitt said he knew nothing of the identities of the victims and did not know exactly how many people were killed. He added that he had gotten a report of the attack firsthand "from some fairly shaken-up contractors."

A security contractor who had been briefed on the attack said it appeared that at least four people had been killed but said he did not know their nationalities, which company they worked for or the nature of their jobs. Besides the gunmen on the overpass, he said, snipers opened fire from positions they had taken up along both sides of the road. The contractor said he had been informed that the assault took place on the main road to the airport rather than on an intersecting artery.

The five-mile airport road is considered by foreigners to be the most dangerous thoroughfare in Baghdad. On June 6, insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47`s killed two American security contractors and two Poles in a coordinated ambush on a convoy of sport utility vehicles. Several contractors escaped by lobbing fragmentation grenades at the attackers and commandeering a civilian car at gunpoint.

Responsibility for Monday`s suicide car bombing that killed 13 people, including five foreign contractors, was claimed Tuesday by a group headed by the suspected Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A statement claiming responsibility was dated Monday and posted on an Islamist Web site on Tuesday, according to a Reuters report.

The complicated tensions underlying politics and violence emerged vividly during the funeral march through Baghdad. Hundreds of Shiite Muslims marched on Tuesday from the sprawling slum of Sadr City to a central square to demand vengeance against Sunnis for the murders of six Shiite truck drivers in Sunni-dominated Falluja, 35 miles west of the capital, according to several news wire reports.

One report quoted mourners saying the men were attacked by insurgents on a highway on June 5 after they delivered a load of tents to the Falluja Brigade, an Iraqi militia being used by the marines to try to maintain calm in Falluja.

The drivers escaped and sought refuge in a police station. The police turned the drivers over to Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi, a conservative Sunni imam, the mourners said. The imam then ordered the drivers killed, they added. The imam, however, denied that he issued such an order.

Still, Khaled Latif Matar Sihail, a tribal leader in the funeral march, told Reuters, "They are starting an old feud, a sectarian feud. We now demand blood from the residents of Falluja for our innocent sons."

The mourners carried the bodies of the drivers in wooden coffins. One 12-year-old boy, Muhammad Khudeir, told The Associated Press that he had been with the drivers when they were handed over to "a group of Arabs who spoke with non-Iraqi accents." Muhammad said he had been let go because of his age.

Sheik Janabai said in an interview on the Al Arabiya satellite television station, that if anyone had any evidence against him, he was ready to face justice before an Islamic court. He and a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, confirmed that the drivers had been killed but said they did not know who the murderers were.

Sheik Janabi said hundreds of Iraqis were killed in Falluja when the marines invaded it in April, and so it was understandable that people in town get angry at Iraqis seen as collaborators with the occupation. "People here think that anyone who works with the Americans or helps their mission is an American stooge," he said.

Kirk Semple contributed reporting from New York for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Macht lügen süchtig?

And still they lie: Bush backs Cheney on assertion linking Hussein, Al Qaeda
Date: Wednesday, June 16 @ 10:26:39 EDT
Topic: War & Terrorism

By Michael Kranish and Bryan Bender, Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- President Bush yesterday defended Vice President Dick Cheney`s assertion this week that Saddam Hussein had longstanding ties with Al Qaeda, even as critics charged that the White House had no new proof of a connection.

At a news conference with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, Bush stood by his vice president, saying Hussein "had ties to terrorist organizations," though he did not specifically mention Al Qaeda.

"I look forward to the debates where people are saying, `Oh gosh, the world would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power,` " Bush said.

Bush has previously said there was "no evidence" linking Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but he and other members of his administration have continued to say they believe there were ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda. In a speech to the conservative Madison Institute in Orlando on Monday, Cheney called Hussein "a patron of terrorism" and said "he had long established ties with Al Qaeda."



An April poll by the University of Maryland`s Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 57 percent of Americans surveyed believed that Iraq was helping Al Qaeda before the war, including 20 percent who believed Iraq was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.

However, a former top weapons inspector said yesterday he and other investigators have not found evidence of a Hussein-Al Qaeda link.

"At various times Al Qaeda people came through Baghdad and in some cases resided there," said David Kay, former head of the CIA`s Iraq Survey Group, which searched for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism. "But we simply did not find any evidence of extensive links with Al Qaeda, or for that matter any real links at all."

"Cheney`s speech is evidence-free," Kay said. "It is an assertion, but doesn`t say why we should be believe this now."

Cheney`s comments Monday echoed a January interview with National Public Radio in which he said, "There`s overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. I am very confident that there was an established relationship there."

Cheney`s continued assertions are stronger than a statement made earlier this year by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who said "I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection," while adding that "the possibility of such connections did exist."

Cheney`s statement comes amid questions about whether the Bush administration used faulty or misleading intelligence in saying that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which was a justification for Bush`s decision to go to war against Iraq.

In recent weeks, Powell has apologized for at least two lapses regarding information about Iraq and terrorism. In a recent appearance NBC-TV`s "Meet The Press," Powell said that he had relied on faulty intelligence when he told the United Nations in 2003 that Iraq had biological weapons labs. "It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading," Powell said.

Separately, Powell on Sunday said that a State Department report was mistaken in saying that terrorism events had dropped in the past three years. Blaming faulty statistics, Powell said the report was "very embarrassing."

Last September, Bush said there was no proven link between the Sept. 11 attacks and Hussein. "We`ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," Bush said, responding to questions at the time about a statement by Cheney that "we don`t know" if there was such a link to the terror attacks.

Whether Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US-led invasion and whether he had ties to Al Qaeda have become issues in the presidential campaign.

Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic presidential campaign of Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, said Cheney`s comment Monday was the latest in a series of misleading statements.

"In just the last week, the Bush Administration claimed that terrorist attacks were at their lowest levels since 1969, only to reverse itself when independent researchers showed that attacks are at their highest levels in 20 years," Singer said. "Now it`s trying to link Saddam and Al Qaeda."

When Bush was asked by reporters yesterday about Cheney`s allegation, the president responded that continuing terrorist attacks in Iraq provide the best evidence that Iraq supported Al Qaeda. He cited Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian described by administration officials before the war as an Al Qaeda facilitator who is believed to be responsible for killing hundreds in terrorist attacks in the last year.

A purported letter from Zarqawi to Al Qaeda leaders, intercepted earlier this year by the US military in Iraq, was viewed as a plea for more assistance from the international terrorist network.

"Zarqawi`s the best evidence of a connection to Al Qaeda affiliates and Al Qaeda," Bush said. "He`s the person who`s still killing. He`s the person -- remember the e-mail exchange between Al Qaeda leadership and he himself about how to disrupt the progress toward freedom? Saddam Hussein also had ties to terrorist organizations as well."

Before the war, intelligence officials said, Zarqawi was operating with the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group Ansar Al Islam in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, not in territory under the control of Hussein`s regime. Thus, questions have been raised about whether Zarqawi was working in concert with Hussein before the US invaded Iraq.

Since the toppling of Hussein, however, debate over the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship has not abated. A recent book, "The Connection: How Al Qaeda`s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America," by Stephen Hayes, has stirred the debate anew.

Hayes cites communications between Iraqi intelligence and Ansar Al Islam discussing possible financial support, as well as the discovery in February on a roster of the Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary force of a Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, the same name as an Iraqi believed to have helped plan a key Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in 2000 that sketched out the 9/11 plot.

© Copyright 2004 The Boston Globe

Reprinted from The Boston Globe:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/
2004/06/16/bush_backs_cheney_on_assertion_linking_hussein_al_qaeda

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This won`t hurt much

Terry Jones
Wednesday June 16, 2004

The Guardian
For some time now, I`ve been trying to find out where my son goes after choir practice. He simply refuses to tell me. He says it`s no business of mine where he goes after choir practice and it`s a free country.

Now it may be a free country, but if people start going just anywhere they like after choir practice, goodness knows whether we`ll have a country left to be free. I mean, he might be going to anarchist meetings or Islamic study groups. How do I know?

The thing is, if people don`t say where they`re going after choir practice, this country is at risk. So I have been applying a certain amount of pressure on my son to tell me where he`s going. To begin with I simply put a bag over his head and chained him to a radiator. But did that persuade him? Does the Pope eat kosher?

My wife had the gall to suggest that I might be going a bit too far. So I put a bag over her head and chained her to the radiator. But I still couldn`t persuade my son to tell me where he goes after choir practice.

I tried starving him, serving him only cold meals and shaving his facial hair off, keeping him in stress positions, not turning his light off, playing loud music outside his cell door - all the usual stuff that any concerned parent will do to find out where their child is going after choir practice. But it was all to no avail.

I hesitated to gravitate to harsher interrogation methods because, after all, he is my son. Then Donald Rumsfeld came to my rescue.

I read in the New York Times last week that a memo had been prepared for the defence secretary on March 6 2003. It laid down the strictest guidelines as to what is and what is not torture. Because, let`s face it, none of us want to actually torture our children, in case the police get to hear about it.

The March 6 memo, prepared for Mr Rumsfeld explained that what may look like torture is not really torture at all. It states that: if someone "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith".

What this means in understandable English is that if a parent, in his anxiety to know where his son goes after choir practice, does something that will cause severe pain to his son, it is only "torture" if the causing of that severe pain is his objective. If his objective is something else - such as finding out where his son goes after choir practice - then it is not torture.

Mr Rumsfeld`s memo goes on: "a defendant" (by which he means a concerned parent) "is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control".

Couldn`t be clearer. If your intention is to extract information, you cannot be accused of torture.

In fact, the report went further. It said, if a parent "has a good-faith belief [that] his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture". So all you`ve got to do to avoid accusations of child abuse is to say that you didn`t think it would cause any lasting harm to the child. Easy peasy!

I currently have a lot of my son`s friends locked up in the garage, and I`m applying electrical charges to their genitals and sexually humiliating them in order to get them to tell me where my son goes after choir practice.

Dick Cheney`s counsel, David S Addington, says that`s just fine. William J Haynes, the US defence department`s general counsel, agrees it`s just fine. And so does the US air force general counsel, Mary Walker.

In fact, practically everybody in the US administration seems to think it`s just fine, except for the state department lawyer, William H Taft IV, who perversely claims that I might be opening the door to people applying electrical charges to my genitals and sexually humiliating me.

So I`m going to round up all the children in the neighbourhood, chain them and set dogs on them. I might accidentally kill one or two - but I won`t have intended to - and perhaps I`ll take some photos of my wife standing on the dead bodies, and then I`ll show the photos to the other kids, and finally, perhaps, I might get to find out where my son goes after choir practice. After all, I`ll only be doing what the US administration has been condoning since 9/11.

· Terry Jones is a writer, film director, actor and Python

terry-jones.net
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Is the US clever enough to rule the world?

By Ian Williams

06/16/04 "Asia Times" -- Will the Iraq debacle cure, or at least ameliorate, the megalomania that has infected the foreign policy of the United States?

During the Cold War, the US often tended toward a position of primus inter pares, first among equals, with its allies. However, the past two years have seen both the culmination and, in Iraq, the catastrophic failure of a trend toward being solus sine paribus, alone without equals. The rest of the world is aware that the US is not equal to the task of ruling the world. In the light of Iraq, is Washington aware?

That the administration of President George W Bush even made the attempt is a demonstration that being a military and economic giant does not necessarily translate into diplomatic or intellectual acuity. We should also point out that this administration is not alone in its hubris; it took a unilateralist trend well established during the two administrations of president Bill Clinton and pursued it to a reductio ad absurdum et tragediam, reduced to absurdity and tragedy.

The overdose of Latin is a partial tribute to the imperial role model that set the standards - of decline and fall as well as triumphalism.

Former United Nations secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who unsuccessfully tried to teach US secretary of state Madeleine Albright the art of statecraft, once noted that neither the Roman Empire nor the US had any patience for diplomacy, which is "perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness".

However, as the Goths, Huns and Vandals, among others, demonstrated soon enough, this was a dangerous misperception for the Romans and is currently proving equally dangerous for the Americans.

Even if Bush is defeated for the chaos and casualties that his unilateralism has wrought, a John Kerry administration is at best likely to revert to the Clintonian norm of remaining unilateral in its formation of foreign policy, albeit with a more cosmopolitan and sophisticated attempt at multilateral execution.

There is no doubt that, short of some science-fiction-style cataclysm of the kind that Hollywood is so good at showing, the US is, and will remain, a world power. Whether it will be the world power, capable of independent unilateral action regardless of the views of the rest of the world, is another story completely.

Regardless of the opinions of the rest of the world, we really have to question whether such an ambition is even consonant with the views of most Americans, especially in view of the sacrifices such ambitions may entail.

We are used to a certain cynicism in world affairs, in which national interest often tempers morality. For example, while then French foreign minister (now Interior Minister) Dominique de Villepin`s UN speech against the proposed Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was in the best traditions of Cartesian logic, we would need to be very naive indeed not to accept that the interests of Total-Elf-Aquitaine had much to do with French policy on the subject.

Indeed, it would be good if France had practiced in Bosnia, Rwanda, or Western Sahara and West Africa the lofty principles that it was recommending to the US and Britain on this occasion.

However, no one would accuse either the Bush or even the Clinton administration of Cartesian logic in its recent policy formulations. Indeed, what makes recent US foreign policy so anomalous is how often it is in violation of any rational national interest, let alone of abstract moral and legal principles.

In this less than perfect world, real powers with real problems will occasionally bend and stretch the rules, but this administration has gone further. It has challenged the rules themselves, and denied their normative power.

The doctrine of preemptive strikes and unilateral action, and the scorn for the United Nations and its Charter, represented a fundamental threat to the very global order that the US did so much to bring about in 1945.

In 1990, George Bush Sr spoke of a New World Order, which he presented as a revival and continuation of the 1945 settlement that the Cold War suspended. By 2003, Bush Jr was presiding over a Hobbesian disorder, in which his ideologues were telling the world that rules did not apply to the US, and in fact only applied to others when Washington deemed it appropriate.

This scofflaw tendency applies not only to existing normative rules but, in a profoundly disruptive and self-defeating way, to new and developing international conventions and normative rules that the rest of the world considers essential to cope with the growing challenges, military, social, economic and environmental, that threaten global prosperity and even survival.

For example, a small group of conservative ideologues has succeeded in delaying the US signature of the Law of the Sea. It is a hopeful sign that among the factions that want it ratified are Senator Richard Lugar, the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the US Navy. The distressing thing is that a small group of fundamentalists obsessed with sovereignty can stall participation in a treaty that is so self-evidently in the interests of the US.

It reinforces the messages sent by the refusal to honor the Kyoto conventions, to sign the landmines treaty, and to control the small-arms trade. Similarly, the US has expended huge diplomatic capital across the world to sabotage the International Criminal Court. All across the world, US envoys bullied small countries into signing bilateral treaties protecting Americans from a non-existent threat - in the process getting a very bad lesson in international ethics.

One of the major problems with US foreign-policy formulation is that the democratic process of checks and balances does not function effectively, not least because far too many Americans have neither the information about nor the interest in what happens elsewhere, which leaves the field open to obsessive interest groups.

Indeed, there is a satirical dictionary definition of "war" as "God`s way of teaching Americans geography". Sadly, it has much truth in it, except that it seems that with the current teaching aids of Fox TV, MSNBC and talk radio, the curriculum does not get beyond Geography 101. It does not bode well for democratic debate of foreign policy, and leaves the field open even more to the lobbyists and fundamentalists.

That is why, for example, while it may seem to much of the Arab world that the invasion of Iraq was an imperial enterprise, we should bear in mind that to most Americans, and certainly to a majority of those reservists drafted to staff the prisons of Abu Ghraib, this was an exercise in self-defense, payback for September 11, 2001. They would not have supported an overtly imperial agenda.

Sadly, not only ordinary Americans are geographically challenged. In many ways, the ideologues of unlimited US hegemony who contrived the Iraq invasion had as little awareness of the realities of the world as those many Americans misled by a potent combination of White House spin and cable-TV collusion.

In the end, the USA is indeed powerful, but in reality, it could not exercise the sole hegemony that the more visionary planners in the Pentagon imagined.

Imperial over-reach
Despite spending as much on defense as the next 10 largest military powers, the US armed forces are hard-pressed to maintain the occupation of Iraq, let alone to attack other countries such as Syria and Iran that seemed to be very seriously in the sights of the Pentagon planners a year ago.

One of the more obvious lessons was that military power could not be effective without "soft" moral factors, such as diplomacy, which in turn are helped by moral legitimacy.

In over-reaching, the US has shown its weaknesses. US abilities to wage conventional war across the globe depend on willing allies abroad and a public at home prepared to make sacrifices. All those military bases are on sufferance from other countries, which have often imposed restrictions on their use for purposes that they disagree with. The Turks and Saudis, for example, severely disrupted US plans to attack Iraq when they refused to host the invasion forces.

Money, and credit, said Daniel Defoe, are "the sinews of war". Paradoxically, in relation to the rest of the world, the US is economically weaker than at any time since the end of World War II. The combination of ideologically motivated tax-cutting and increasing military spending has made the US more vulnerable than ever before. Domestically, it is politically impossible for a US administration to increase taxes.

In a little-reported report it published on the US budget at the beginning of January, the International Monetary Fund hints at a rapidly undeveloping country, whose fiscal irresponsibility is compounded by a political immaturity that tends to ignore geopolitical and economic reality.

Ironically, the globalization that some have denounced as an instrument of US global domination has actually made the United States more vulnerable than ever before. Once a relatively autarkic, self-contained trade system, the US economy is now integrated into world trade systems.

One simple basis of the "Bush boom" is that China is recycling its US$100 billion-plus trade surplus with the United States back into dollars, and especially into Treasury bonds. Almost half of US Treasury bonds are now owned by Asian countries.

Among Asian countries, the Pentagon dreamers have identified China as the major future threat. Yet if Taiwan, for example, became a major crisis, those Chinese T-bonds could do more damage than H-bombs. All Chinese Prime Minister Hu Jintao has to do is shout "sell" down the phone in order to devastate the US economy more than any Chinese nuclear strike.

The US refusal to take the measures necessary to reduce its oil consumption has also made it extremely vulnerable to creeping measures of readjustment, such as a decision by oil states to price their product in euros rather than dollars. There are very good economic and political arguments for them to do just that: why take payment in a depreciating currency from a country such as the US where your holdings are vulnerable to strange tort actions and arbitrary political decisions? In that light, the mystery is really why the oil states still accept dollars.

Globalization, even as it makes the US more vulnerable, also gives it some measure of protection, since anyone who pulls the plug on the dollar would get very wet himself in the resulting splash. Nevertheless, even with that qualification, the fact is you cannot be a solo superpower on borrowed money.

Apart from military and economic power, there is a power of leadership. Opinion polls worldwide show that almost no other country in the world would elect George W Bush.

At one time, the US had high moral stature, certainly in much of the world, although we should remember the trend represented even by Franklin Roosevelt, an undoubted hero, who is on record as calling Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza a "son of a bitch" but excusing him as "our son of a bitch".

Going further, there has been a strong and increasing tendency in US thought toward Manichaean binary thinking, to see the world in terms of absolute good and evil, indeed, one might say, cowboys and Indians. Allegedly in the Levant they say that "my enemies` enemy is my friend", but in the US they take it a stage farther and consider that my enemy`s enemy must necessarily be morally superior, a saint.

There is also an adage about knowing people by the company they keep. Support for the Saudi and Uzbek regimes, let alone Israeli practices, does not cover the US with glory.

Above all, to attack Iraq, allegedly for its violation of UN resolutions, in defiance of the wishes of most UN members and the UN Charter is a sin for which the US is now paying penance as it implores the international community to relieve it of its burden there. It will take a long time for Washington to regain international credibility.

Can anything be done?
At the time of the tragic and murderous attacks on New York`s World Trade Center, the one consolation was that it would focus the American public on what its government was doing abroad in their name. After all, perhaps for the first time since the British burned the White House in 1813, Americans had foreign policy happening to themselves, rather than it being something that their rulers inflicted on others.

Sadly, that was clearly not the case. There was little or no public debate on the origins of al-Qaeda, no realization that expedient and ad hoc US policies had brought about and indeed financed the organization, that it was a US ally, Pakistan, that with general US support had put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan.

The rest of the world was much more aware of that, and despite that, it was the soon-to-be-hated French who quickly moved the resolution in the Security Council expressing solidarity for September 11, shortly followed by another that in effect provided legal cover for the US to attack Afghanistan in "self-defense".

The rest of the world watched with puzzlement as the US gave up on Afghanistan and finding Osama bin Laden while the American public were, almost subliminally, persuaded that the battleground for the "war on terror" should be Iraq.

It took not much more than a year for the Bush administration to boil away nearly all the unprecedented international support it had immediately after the September 11 attack.

Of course, there are different trends in US foreign policy, with the State Department, which has the unenviable task of explaining it to the rest of the world, much more able to see the benefits for the US from a general support of a normative global structure of law and order, and a predisposition to go along with it principle.

Indeed, it is more likely to recall that the US was the main sponsor of the United Nations and in its drafting of the Charter, and throughout the decades, from Korea to Suez, has invoked its authority whenever it can - and sometimes, as in Iraq, when it really could not.

It is not surprising that for past few years, the leaders of the United Nations and most of the major powers have had as the first item in their bedtime prayers a plea that Secretary of State Colin Powell would stay on at the State Department, and much of their diplomacy has been directed at boosting his position inside the Bush administration.

It is not always successful, since the Pentagon-Powell dualism sometimes looked like a planned good-cop-bad-cop routine. On the other hand, the State Department`s attempts to keep some vestiges of multilateralist faith have occasionally been pathetically touching, like the attempt to pull together a list of states that supported the "coalition", most of whom were so vulnerable and weak that initially the department was too embarrassed to name them. However, we should take the attempt as a signal that even in the darkest days of triumphal unilateralism from the Pentagon civilians, there was a flicker, or at least a smolder, of multilateralism in the State Department.

The conundrum is that the US needs counterbalancing, as traditional political theory would suggest, but the question is whether that can be achieved without reverting to some form of antagonistic great power system. However, it is possible if we take into account one of the Anglo-Saxon inventions in domestic politics: the concept of a "loyal opposition". We often forget that for most of history, and across much of the globe even now, this is an oxymoron. Sadly, that is also true of some sections of the US body politic who have shown difficulty in accepting opposition at home or abroad as anything but starkest treachery. Last year`s rabid francophobia was very embarrassing to any sophisticated American.

However, a loyal opposition is still a useful concept. If it stood together, the European Union is big enough to insist on a hearing in Washington, and even more so if it teams with Russia and China, although it has to beware of expediency in joining with, let us say, incompletely democratic societies. In conjunction with countries such as India, and many states in Latin America, it could indeed assemble a loyal opposition.

In this connection, perhaps the British were almost as important as Prime Minister Tony Blair thinks they are. Harold Macmillan had fond paternalistic hopes of London playing the role of Athens to Washington`s Rome, perhaps forgetting that the Athenians who taught the Romans were often literally slaves.

However, for some years now the British have indeed played a special role with the US. It has been surprising how little contumely the British have attracted over the years for their role as amanuensis for successive US administrations - like Colin Powell, they have functioned at once as a bridge and a fudge between the more outrageous US wants and the realities of the world and norms of international law.

Other countries I suspect saw it as on a par with cleaning sewers: it`s a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and much better someone else than us. It also has to be said that the British have done a reasonable job of it most of the time. Their constructive engagement as a reliably loyal ally did indeed give them an occasional hand on the steering wheel, as Tony Blair said.

It seems fairly certain that President Bush would not have gone to the UN at all if were not for the British prime minister`s blandishments. Nevertheless, in the end it became clear that what Blair thought was the steering wheel in a car was just the whistle on a runaway locomotive. All he could do was warn that the train was rattling down the tracks and would not stop until it hit Iraq.

Confronted with the realities of the US style of occupying Iraq, and the reaction of the occupied, the British have reverted to their former role. In the various drafts of the resolution to end the Iraq occupation, they have been assiduously supporting a much more sovereign sovereignty for Iraq, even as they draft the successive resolutions.

The British invented the special relationship for their own reasons, once they realized that the empire thing was a dead duck. As they put it at the time, the British foreign minister in the 1945 Labour government wanted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to keep "the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out".

I would question whether that historical basis still exists, and would urge the Europeans, particularly the French and Germans, to work hard on the British, to suborn and turn the British Trojan Horse so that instead of being a source of unilateralist US infiltration into the EU, it takes multilateralism into Washington. That is always assuming that Blair survives his election and that Kerry overlooks the British prime minister`s somewhat promiscuously rapid switch from Clinton to Bush.

Will things change if Bush loses?
Returning to the point at the beginning, the present US policy has much continuity with the previous administration`s. Remember the conversation between Madeleine Albright and her British counterpart, Robin Cook, over Kosovo, in which Cook cited problems "with our lawyers" over using force in the absence of UN endorsement. Albright`s response was, "Get new lawyers."

Certainly, a Kerry policy has to be an improvement over Bush`s - but it may be a more marginal improvement than most of us would wish. There is the dreadful possibility that his fudging on foreign policy, his support for Ariel Sharon, is not just a cynical electoral maneuver, it may be the real thing.

However, no amount of internal argument or external exhortation can do as much to change US policy as has now been done by the over-reachers in the Pentagon, whose hubris has reduced the US to begging for international help to get out of the hole they dug in Iraq. Ironically, our best hope for a change of policy is the effect of the cold shower of reality on their fevered apocalyptic visions.

Whoever is elected has to pay the bills for this war, for the tax cuts, for the energy policy and all the other enormities of this administration. In the world councils where it will need help and indulgence, the next president is going to need a lot of forbearance and indulgence from other countries, since bullying has failed so egregiously.

The real battle is to get that message across to US legislators, opinion formers and indeed the electorate to maintain a continuing interest in foreign policy, what it does to others and, most tellingly, what the cost will be to them. Since the US is a world power, this is a global task, an essential task for everyone in the world. Stop pandering. Be firm but friendly. Real allies do not applaud your every move. They shout "Stop!" when you want to run over a cliff edge. Next time Gerhard Schroeder offers a US president advice, the latter should listen.

Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online

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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

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Daily Show - War on Error
Another excellent satire from Jon Stewart.
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http://www.comedycentral.com/mp/play.php?reposid=/multimedia…
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June 16, 2004
Kerry Raises Record $100 Million in Three Months
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:56 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- John Kerry raised a Democratic record $100 million from March through May, lifting his presidential campaign to more than $140 million so far.

Kerry raised roughly $25 million last month alone, figures provided Wednesday by his campaign show.

The Massachusetts senator has already surpassed his financial goal of about $106 million for the primary season. He has about six weeks of fund raising left before he accepts his party`s nomination in Boston and receives full government financing for the general-election phase of his campaign.

President Bush has raised at least $216 million since he began his re-election effort in May 2003. That includes at least $13 million raised in May through online and mailed contributions.

Bush stopped holding fund-raisers for himself in April, turning his attention to helping the Republican Party and fellow GOP candidates raise millions for the fall election.

Kerry has been holding fund-raisers for himself and the Democratic National Committee and has also taken in millions over the Internet and through direct-mail solicitations. Kerry`s total includes roughly $6 million he borrowed before his primary victories by mortgaging his Boston home.

Kerry will reach his fund-raising cutoff about a month before Bush, who can continue raising primary money until his party`s convention in late August.

Mindful that fund-raising time is running out, Kerry is soliciting donations to a legal compliance fund he can use during the general election campaign to cover legal and accounting costs, reserving his roughly $75 million in government financing for ads and other campaign costs from August until November.

The legal fund, permitted under the campaign finance law, ``will allow the campaign to put more of its resources into getting John`s message to the American people,`` Kerry national finance chairman Louis Susman wrote in a mailing to prospective donors this month. ``Given the size of the Republican war chest, every dollar counts.``

The Bush campaign also has a legal compliance fund for the general election.

Bush and Kerry will detail their finances, including spending and money in the bank, in reports to the Federal Election Commission due at midnight Sunday.

^------

On the Net:

Bush campaign: http://www.georgewbush.com/

Kerry campaign: http://www.johnkerry.com/

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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Es wird so ziemlich alles widerlegt, was die Bush-Clique und die dazugehörigen Neocons in den letzten 2 Jahren behauptet haben. Es bleibt abzuwarten, wie diese Ergebnisse sich auf den Wahlkampf auswirken
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June 17, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
With 9/11 Report, Bush`s Political Thorn Grows More Stubborn
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, June 16 - The bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks further called into question on Wednesday one of President Bush`s rationales for the war with Iraq, and again put him on the defensive over an issue the White House was once confident would be a political plus.

In questioning the extent of any ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the commission weakened the already spotty scorecard on Mr. Bush`s justifications for sending the military to topple Saddam Hussein.

Banned biological and chemical weapons: none yet found. Percentage of Iraqis who view American-led forces as liberators: 2, according to a poll commissioned last month by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Number of possible Al Qaeda associates known to have been in Iraq in recent years: one, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose links to the terrorist group and Mr. Hussein`s government remain sketchy.

That is the difficult reality Mr. Bush faces 15 months after ordering the invasion of Iraq, and less than five months before he faces the voters at home. The commission`s latest findings fueled fresh partisan attacks on his credibility and handling of the war, attacks that now seem unlikely to be silenced even if the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis comes off successfully in two weeks.

Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, was quick to seize on the commission`s report to reprise his contention that Mr. Bush "misled" the American people about the need for the war. Even some independent-minded members of Mr. Bush`s own party said they sensed danger.

"The problem the administration has is that the predicates it laid down for the war have not played out," said Warren B. Rudman, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire, who has extensive experience in assessing intelligence about terrorism. "That could spell political trouble for the president, there`s no question."

Mr. Bush has said that he knows of no direct involvement by Mr. Hussein and his government in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the president has repeatedly asserted that there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, a position he stuck to on Tuesday when he was asked about Vice President Dick Cheney`s statement a day earlier that Mr. Hussein had "long-established ties with Al Qaeda."

Mr. Bush pointed specifically on Tuesday to the presence in Iraq of Mr. Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist who sought help from Al Qaeda in waging the anti-American insurgency after the fall of Mr. Hussein, and who has been implicated by American intelligence officials in the killing of Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old American who was beheaded by militants in Iraq in March.

The White House said Wednesday that there was a distinction between Mr. Bush`s position and the commission`s determination that Iraq did not cooperate with Al Qaeda on attacks on the United States.

The commission`s report did not specifically address that distinction or Mr. Zarqawi`s role. It found that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1994, but that Iraq never responded to Mr. bin Laden`s subsequent request for space to set up training camps and help in buying weapons. It said there were reports of later contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but "they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."

It quoted two senior associates of Mr. bin Laden denying adamantly "that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq." It concluded that there never was a meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohammed Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers; in an interview with National Public Radio in January, Mr. Cheney cited intelligence reports about the possibility of such a meeting in asserting that there was not confirmation "one way or another" about links between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Democratic strategists said there was now no question that Mr. Bush would be dogged through the rest of the campaign by questions about whether the war was necessary, justified and sufficiently well planned. But Mr. Bush`s supporters said that in political terms, the amazing thing was how well he had weathered the problems thrown at him by Iraq.

"If you look at the last eight months at the White House and in particular the last 90 days, I`ve never seen more negative stories come out in a concentrated period," said Sig Rogich, a veteran Republican advertising consultant and fund-raiser. "Yet despite all that, the president is still even with John Kerry or, if you count the Electoral College votes in the battleground states, ahead. Then there`s a creeping plus for George Bush, which is that the economy is taking off."

James M. Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations, who studies the interplay between foreign policy and domestic politics, said the issue now was less whether Mr. Bush was wrong in asserting a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda than whether he could stabilize Iraq and show progress in bringing American forces home.

"Does the commission`s finding make it easier for the Democrats to say, Look, the administration got it wrong?" Mr. Lindsay said. "The answer is yes. But the bigger question for the administration is whether it can succeed in getting Iraq to be stable. If it does that it will largely neutralize the threat the Iraq issue poses to the president`s re-election."

The commission`s findings were the latest in a string of Iraq-related developments this year that have kept Mr. Bush`s campaign on the defensive, helping Mr. Kerry during a period when the White House`s political strategy had hoped he would be especially vulnerable.

The official White House strategy for Wednesday may have been to deny any real differences with the commission. But on this day as on many others recently, its real goal appeared to be to stick a bandage on whatever wound it might have suffered, keep moving toward June 30, when the United States will return sovereignty to the Iraqis, and then bank on its ability to redefine the election on terms more favorable to Mr. Bush.

In one indication of the White House`s doggedness, Mr. Bush`s campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, held a conference call with reporters about the same time the commission was delivering its description of the Sept. 11 plot. His topic: the economy.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 17, 2004
THE INTERROGATION
Account of Plot Sets Off Debate Over Credibility
By DAVID JOHNSTON and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

WASHINGTON, June 16 - In the Sept. 11 commission reports released Wednesday, the striking portrait of Al Qaeda as a wobbly but determined organization lurching toward its catastrophic strike against America was built largely on the two plot leaders` own words.

In a series of interrogations in secret locations with United States officials, two of the plot masterminds, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, have provided the most detailed account yet of the origins of the Sept. 11 attacks and the challenges faced by the group`s top lieutenants.

But their accounts have stirred an unresolved debate about their credibility. Mr. bin al-Shibh, who was captured in 2002, and Mr. Mohammed, who was apprehended in 2003, have been the subjects of highly coercive interrogation methods authorized by the Bush administration for use against high-level Qaeda detainees, senior government officials say. Those methods, some officials said, cast doubt on the reliability of the accounts.

In interviews earlier this year, some counterterrorism officials in the United States and Europe said that Mr. Mohammed had begun to cooperate and that important breakthroughs were being made in the understanding of the Sept. 11 plot and Al Qaeda`s strengths and limitations. "He`s singing like a bird," a senior European counterterrorism official said in a recent interview.

Mr. bin al-Shibh has also proven to be cooperative with interrogators, several senior officials said. But they said his cooperation also did not begin immediately. Several senior counterterrorism officials overseas said recently that they understood that both men possibly had begun to cooperate either after being subjected to coercive interrogations or after being threatened with torture, an accusation adamantly denied by American officials.

None of the high-level Qaeda figures like Mr. bin al-Shibh and Mr. Mohammed was questioned under the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which require humane treatment of prisoners in questioning. Senior officials have said Mr. Mohammed was "waterboarded," a technique in which his head was pushed under water and he was made to believe that he might drown. Another detainee had a noose placed around his neck.

These techniques have led to a debate within the government about the completeness and reliability of the detainees` statements. While the accounts of Mr. bin al-Shibh and Mr. Mohammed are believed to be mostly credible, the officials said that a significant number of law enforcement and intelligence officials took a more skeptical view than was reflected in the commission reports.

At Wednesday`s hearing, at least one commissioner, Fred F. Fielding, wondered aloud about how trustworthy Mr. Mohammed`s information was, declaring, "Our concern is that while there`s some that can be verified, there are other areas where it certainly could be a source of disinformation for whatever reason." The disagreements are nuanced, but significant. Not all counterterrorism officials believe, for example, that Osama bin Laden exercised the kind of command over the Sept. 11 operation that is described in the report released Wednesday. In part, the officials said, they suspect that the captured Qaeda figures have a strong desire to play down their own roles and have been willing to make it appear that Mr. bin Laden was the dominant figure in an effort to enhance his stature.

Investigators conducted a vast analysis of communications, including cellphone, Internet and courier traffic between the Sept. 11 plotters and their confederates, like Mr. Mohammed, the officials said. That analysis failed to show a close collaboration between them in the months before the attacks and virtually no communication with Mr. bin Laden, a finding that contradicts Wednesday`s reports.

As portrayed by Mr. Mohammed and Mr. bin al-Shibh, Mr. bin Laden was far more hands-on than was previously known, establishing attack dates and approving target sites in Washington. His subordinates say he wanted them to try to ram a plane into the White House, though Mohamed Atta, the hijacking leader who died in the 9/11 attacks, and Mr. Mohammed were reported to have been concerned that it might prove to be too difficult.

Moreover, under harsh interrogation methods, both Mr. Mohammed and Mr. bin al-Shibh appear to have been willing to provide elaborate accounts of past events. But they appeared to have been less willing to describe operations that have not yet been carried out, leading some of the intelligence officials to raise questions about the truthfulness of some or all of their statements.

In releasing a staff report on the plot on Wednesday, the commission staff members wrote that they did not have direct access to any detainee and had based their account on intelligence reports drawn from the interrogations. "Some of this material is inconsistent," one report said. "We have had to make judgment calls based on the weight and credibility of the evidence."

Much of the information cited in the reports as fact is actually uncorroborated or nearly impossible to confirm, the officials said, citing as an example the statements contained in the reports about the thinking and motivations of hijackers like Mr. Atta.

The absence of corroborating evidence was one reason that so much of the material has never been cited before by senior law enforcement or intelligence officials who have testified repeatedly about the plot. At the same time, the commission staff investigators are the first independent researchers to review the large cache of interrogation reports, which has remained classified.

The interrogation methods were authorized by a secret set of rules that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. The rules were among the first adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks and appear to have contributed to a new understanding throughout the government that intelligence and military officials would have wider latitude to deal harshly with detainees.

Some Bush administration officials have said that the interrogation techniques stopped short of torture as defined in a federal criminal statute that outlaws the use of extreme methods against detainees by Americans overseas. They have said that the methods were justified in order to obtain potentially lifesaving information to disrupt pending attacks.

The interrogation of the high-level Qaeda operatives was among the most secretive of the administration`s intelligence efforts after the attacks. All of the 12 to 24 detainees are being held outside the United States. None has ever been visited by a lawyer or human rights organization.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 17, 2004
THE HIJACKERS
In Detail: How bin Laden Set Plan in Motion in `99
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, June 16 - In early 1999, Osama bin Laden summoned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to his well-guarded compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to confide to the lieutenant that his long-discussed proposal to use aircraft as terror weapons against the United States had the full support of Al Qaeda.

That meeting, described for the first time by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, set in motion an extraordinary series of events. But the path from Kandahar to the World Trade Center was anything but a straight line.

Described in vivid detail by two captured Qaeda operatives who helped plan the attacks, the plot was more troubled and improvisational than had been previously understood.

As late as August 2001, one commission report says, Mr. Mohammed fretted about infighting between Mohamed Atta, the mission leader, and a Lebanese pilot, Ziad al-Jarrah. With his frosted hair and his fondness for Beirut nightclubs, Mr. Jarrah seemed so close to choosing a girlfriend over Al Qaeda that the plotters scrambled to line up a replacement pilot. But in the end, Mr. Jarrah was at the controls of United Flight 93 when it crashed in Pennsylvania.

Of the four Qaeda operatives first assigned to the plot in 1999, only two ended up among the final 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks. Both of them - Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi - washed out as student pilots and were relegated to lesser roles. To take their place as pilots, Mr. Mohammed turned to other recruits spotted at the camps in Afghanistan.

Mr. Atta, the Egyptian pilot who was at the center of the core group, did not join the team until after the plot was well under way. The lineup of hijackers was changing throughout the two years of preparations. Meanwhile, an impatient Mr. bin Laden began pressing for an attack as early as 2000, even if it meant using untrained pilots to crash into the ground instead of into buildings.

At the start, though, Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Mohammed envisioned attacks even more audacious than the one that was ultimately carried out, the report said.

Mr. Mohammed, the American-educated Kuwaiti from Pakistan who emerges in the commission`s account as a main partner of Mr. bin Laden, at one point planned an attack involving 10 planes. Mr. Mohammed wanted to hijack the last plane himself, then kill every man on board and land to deliver an anti-American diatribe. Another version, scrapped in 2000, envisioned near-simultaneous attacks involving aircraft in Southeast Asia and the United States. Still another, discarded only in the summer of 2001, conceived of a second wave of strikes, after those in Washington and New York, that would target skyscrapers in California and Washington State.

The date of the attacks was not settled until mid-August, the report says, and even in the final days, Mr. Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another top Qaeda lieutenant, had not decided whether the fourth plane, the one piloted by Mr. Jarrah, should aim at the Capitol or the White House.

"In the end," the report said, "the plot proved sufficiently flexible to adapt and evolve as challenges arose."

The Training and the Targets

Mr. Mohammed first presented his plan to use airliners in suicide attacks to Mr. bin Laden in 1996. Then, the Qaeda leader listened, but did not commit himself.

The proposal sketched out an aerial suicide plot that seemed to come straight from a 1995 plan by Mr. Mohammed and others in Manila to blow up 12 American commercial jets over the Pacific Ocean.

Three years later, at their meeting in Kandahar, Mr. bin Laden said the plan now had Al Qaeda`s full support. Mr. Mohammed and Mr. bin Laden chose an initial list of targets. Mr. bin Laden wanted to hit the White House and the Pentagon. Mr. Mohammed wanted to strike the World Trade Center. To that list they added the Capitol, one commission report said.

Mr. bin Laden quickly supplied Mr. Mohammed with four recruits to carry out the scheme, drawing from the thousands of young men who trained in his camps a few especially ardent followers he had singled out for martyrdom missions.

The four men were Mr. Alhazmi; Mr. Midhar; Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, known as Khallad; and Abu Bara al-Taizi. Only Mr. Alhazmi and Mr. Midhar stayed to the end.

Intensive training began in the fall of 1999. The recruits took part in an elite course at the Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan. Mr. Mohammed, who had attended college in North Carolina, taught the men English phrases, showed them how to read a telephone book, make flight reservations, use the Internet and encode communications. They played flight simulator games and sifted through airline schedules to determine which flights would be in the air at the same time.

At first, Mr. Mohammed ordered Khallad and Mr. Taizi to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to study airport security and conduct surveillance of American airlines in preparation for a smaller version of the Manila plot. But Mr. bin Laden canceled the Southeast Asia plan. Khallad and Mr. Taizi dropped out; instead, Khallad became the mastermind of the October 2000 attack in Yemen on the Navy destroyer Cole. Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were the first hijackers to enter the United States, arriving on Jan. 15, 2000.

Separately, in 1999, a group of four other young extremists were making their way from Hamburg, Germany, where they met, to the Afghan camps, as an alternative to an earlier plan to fight against the Russians in Chechnya. The four, Mr. Atta, Mr. Jarrah, Mr. bin al-Shibh and Marwan al-Shehhi, seemed ideal for Mr. bin Laden. They were Western educated and held extreme anti-American views. All except Mr. bin al-Shibh died in the attacks.

In Afghanistan, Mr. Atta quickly achieved high status, pledging "bayat" or allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, who made him the operation`s leader. The two men discussed targets for the attack. One commission report, based on the interrogation of Mr. bin al-Shibh, said the two men identified "the World Trade Center, which represented the U.S. economy; the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel."

By March 2000, the four Qaeda recruits were back in Germany researching flight schools. After learning that training was cheaper and easier in the United States, Mr. Atta, Mr. Shehhi and Mr. Jarrah left for America. Mr. bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who tried but failed to enter the country, stayed behind as a link between Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Atta.

By the fall of 2000, the recruits were training at different aviation schools around the country. But Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi, the first two hijackers to enter the country, proved to be poor pilots.

Al Qaeda proved adaptable. In place of the two men, Mr. bin Laden`s scouts recommended Hani Hanjour, who had studied in the United States and had taken flight training in Arizona. He was chosen for the plot in 2000 after he arrived at Al Faruq camp in Afghanistan. That December, Mr. Hanjour flew to California.

With his arrival, the pilots of the four planes used in the attacks were safely in the United States.

The Team Takes Shape

As 2001 dawned, all was not well among the pilots.

Mr. Jarrah was headed abroad, on the second and third of what would be five foreign trips in 10 months, to see his girlfriend in Germany and his family in Lebanon. Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi also left the United States around the New Year, but it was Mr. Jarrah, from a wealthy Lebanese family, who seemed to be having second thoughts about the plot.

The report says Mr. Jarrah "studied at private, Christian schools" in Lebanon, "knew the best nightclubs and discos in Beirut, and partied with fellow students in Germany, even drinking beer - a clear taboo for any religious Muslim." He was different from the more pious Mr. Atta and other pilots, the report says, and in his months of training in the United States, he lived separately and felt isolated.

By late July, when Mr. Jarrah headed to Germany again, on a one-way ticket bought by his girlfriend, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, Mr. Mohammed and Mr. bin al-Shibh discussed the possibility of replacing him with another man, Zacarias Moussaoui. Only after an emotional conversation in Germany in early August, in which Mr. bin al-Shibh encouraged him "to see the plan through," did Mr. Jarrah return to the United States and the team.

In fits and starts, the final lineup for the attacks began taking shape. At one time or another, at least nine candidate hijackers, all Saudis, had been dropped from the plan, the report says. But by late April, the 15 recruits who would serve in supporting roles in the hijackings had begun arriving in the United States. Most were short, slender and 20 to 28. They would serve as the "muscle" to subdue the crew and passengers.

Still, Mr. bin Laden was impatient. As early as 2000, just as the pilots were beginning to arrive in the United States, he had been pressing Mr. Mohammed to carry out the attacks, to protest harsh treatment by Israel of the Palestinians. It would be sufficient, the Qaeda leader told Mr. Mohammed, if the planes were just crashed into the ground.

At least twice in 2001, Mr. bin Laden encouraged attacks as early as May, but Mr. Mohammed deflected those requests, the report says, saying the hijackers needed more time. In the summer, Mr. Mohammed set aside his vision of attacks in California and Washington State, that would follow those in the East; he was too busy preparing for the main onslaught.

At a meeting in Spain in mid-July, Mr. Atta told Mr. bin al-Shibh that he would need another six weeks to carry out those strikes, the report said. Not until mid-August did Mr. Atta settle on the Sept. 11 date.

Since 1999, when Mr. bin Laden gave the go-ahead to the plot, the target list had been whittled down, albeit after much debate. From Boston, two hijacked planes would strike the World Trade Center, a target long favored by Mr. Mohammed. From Dulles airport outside Washington, a third plane would hit the Pentagon, a favorite of Mr. bin Laden.

But what of the Capitol and the White House? Both had been on the preliminary list, and Mr. bin Laden preferred the White House, a message conveyed to Mr. Atta. But the chief hijacker resisted. In the center of Washington, the White House might be difficult to strike; he wanted to hold the Capitol in reserve.

The fourth aircraft, hijacked after takeoff from Newark, was headed toward Washington but it crashed into the Pennsylvania field. "As late as Sept. 9, two days before the attacks," one commission report says, "the conspirators may still have been uncertain about which Washington target they would strike."

In Afghanistan, some of Mr. bin Laden`s most senior advisers were anxious, the report says. They were concerned that the attack could provoke an armed American response and would also anger Taliban leaders and the Pakistani government, whose good graces had permitted Al Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a refuge. But in a dispute over whether to go forward, Mr. bin Laden prevailed.

"In his thinking," the report says, "the more Al Qaeda did, the more support it would gain."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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June 17, 2004
THE SUSPECT
Report Says Arrest Thwarted Use of Substitute 9/11 Pilot
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, June 16 - Leaders of Al Qaeda considered using Zacarias Moussaoui as "a potential substitute pilot`` in the Sept. 11 attacks because of friction between other plotters, but his arrest weeks before the hijackings apparently scuttled that possibility, according to the report released Wednesday by the commission studying the attacks.

In an alternative scheme, Al Qaeda leaders also envisioned Mr. Moussaoui as part of a "second wave" of attacks that would come after the hijackings, and they spent at least $50,000 to finance his flight school training and other expenses in the United States after he entered the country in early 2001, the report found.

Mr. Moussaoui is now awaiting trial as the only person charged in the United States in connection with the attacks, but his role in the plot has been a subject of intense dispute since soon after the hijackings, even within law enforcement circles. Many officials have backed away from the idea that Mr. Moussaoui was supposed to be the "20th hijacker," but the new details buttress the Justice Department`s charge that he played an active role in the conspiracy.

The report was so damning, in fact, that Mr. Moussaoui`s defense team argued that it could taint his trial in federal court in Alexandria, Va.

"We`re very concerned about what I consider to be a complete and utter disregard here for Moussaoui`s fair trial rights," Frank W. Dunham Jr., one of his lawyers, said in an interview. "For a commission like this to come out with its conclusions when you have someone waiting to stand trial is just inappropriate."

Edward B. MacMahon, another member of the defense team, said the team would review the report to assess whether it could hurt his ability to get an impartial jury and whether to respond in court.

The defense lawyers took issue with the specific accusations made by the commission but said that because of restrictions on the disclosure of classified information, they could not respond publicly.

Mr. Dunham compared the situation to that of Jose Padilla, suspected as a Qaeda associate and jailed as an enemy combatant. The Justice Department laid out blistering new accusations against Mr. Padilla at a news conference this month, but his lawyers said they could not present his side because the material was classified by the government.

Mr. Dunham called the commission`s accusations against Mr. Moussaoui "selective and distorted."

Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the commission, said the panel stood by the accuracy of its findings on Mr. Moussaoui, which were reviewed by intelligence agencies before publication to assess concerns about classified material.

The commission report traces Mr. Moussaoui`s possible role in the conspiracy to friction between two central plotters, Mohamed Atta and Ziad al-Jarrah.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, said to have been mastermind of the plot, worried that Mr. al-Jarrah might pull out of the scheme, and "there is good reason to believe that K.S.M. wanted money sent to Moussaoui to prepare him as a potential substitute pilot in the event Jarrah dropped out," the commission said.

Mr. Moussaoui attended Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, and the commission said Osama bin Laden and Mr. Mohammed sent him to Malaysia in 2000 to obtain pilot training. Mr. Moussaoui came to the United States in February 2001, taking flight training classes first in Oklahoma and then in Minnesota. He was arrested Aug. 16, 2001, on an immigration violation after his flight instructors reported that he had been acting suspiciously.

His arrest "ended his simulator training and may have prevented him from joining the 9/11 operation," the report said. But it noted discrepancies about his role from Mr. Mohammed and a second suspected plotter in American custody, Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

Mr. bin al-Shibh told interrogators that he sent Mr. Moussaoui $14,000 in the summer of 2001 "as part of the 9/11 plot." But Mr. Mohammed gave interrogators a different story, saying that Mr. Moussaoui was never intended to be part of the Sept. 11 operation "and was slated instead to participate in a so-called `second wave` of attacks on the West Coast after Sept. 11."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Alle Artikel die Die NYTimes und auch die WaPost zu den Ergebnissen des Untersuchungausschusses veröffentlicht haben stehen in #17693/692/691 und 690( dort auch der Bericht in 2 PDF-Dateien als Link).
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June 17, 2004
THE FAMILIES
Relatives of the Lost Want a Longer, More Open Book
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, June 16 - The narrative of the Sept. 11 terrorist plot unfolded in fresh, chilling detail on Wednesday, complete with maps and photographs.

Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, could be seen in a grainy black and white surveillance snapshot, withdrawing $8,000 from a Virginia bank machine. There were pictures of the knives the terrorists may have used, and of a speeding ticket one received. The images flashed on two big screens, a pictorial accompaniment to the intricate tale of the attacks, told more comprehensively than ever before.

But for some listeners - family members of those who lost their lives in the attacks - the story was not nearly comprehensive enough.

"I want the definitive timeline of Sept. 11," said Lorie Van Auken, of East Brunswick, N.J., whose husband died in the World Trade Center. Another widow, Beverly Eckert, echoed the sentiment, stating flatly, "Information is still being concealed."

Ms. Eckert, Ms. Van Auken and scores of other relatives of those who died that day have religiously attended the hearings of the commission investigating the attacks. They come carrying notebooks and pictures of the dead, their hearts still aching, their minds filled with questions.

For the families, this week`s hearings, which are scheduled to conclude Thursday and will be the last the panel conducts, offer the final opportunity to learn the facts of what happened. But many have been doing their own investigative work and have spent hours poring over news clippings and Internet sites to familiarize themselves with things like Federal Aviation Administration protocol and bank wire transfers flowing from overseas Qaeda operatives to the United States.

So no matter how much information becomes public, Ms. Eckert said, "there will never be enough."

After Wednesday`s hearing, the relatives ticked off leads they wanted pursued, obscure to all but those steeped in the minutiae of the investigation.

Bill Doyle of Staten Island, a plaintiff in a $1 trillion lawsuit against the Saudi government whose son died in the trade center, wanted to know more about Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi student who befriended hijackers and helped pay their expenses.

Kristen Breitweiser, of Middletown, N.J., whose husband died in the trade center, insisted that Richard A. Clarke, President Bush`s former counterterrorism adviser, had conducted a "post-mortem report" after the attacks, analyzing intelligence files for all mentions of Al Qaeda in the 18 months before Sept. 11, 2001. "Where is that report?" she demanded. "Where are the findings?"

Ms. Van Auken was irate that there was no mention of an accusation that Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan`s intelligence services, ordered the transfer of $100,000 to Mr. Atta. As to the other details - that the plot initially included attacks in Southeast Asia and that the original target list included the White House, the Capitol and buildings in Los Angeles and Seattle - she was dismissive.

"We know all that," she said. "They`re missing key elements that tell the story."

Not all the family members were critical of the commission.

"I think the commission has been unfairly criticized," said Carolee Azzarello of Greenbrook, N.J., whose brothers, Tim and John Grazioso, died in the attacks. "I think some people want the commission to give them something on a platter, to say, these people are to blame, someone to point a finger at. For me, the person to point the finger at is Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Those are the people who killed my brothers."

But Ms. Azzarello is not impartial; her husband, John, a former federal prosecutor, is on the commission staff. Asked if she knew the contents of the commission`s report, she waved her palm in front of her face, as if to draw a wall. "Part of me," she said, "doesn`t want to know."

Throughout the commission`s investigation, many of the Sept. 11 relatives have been deeply critical of the government and have insisted that the attacks could have been prevented. Wednesday`s hearing, which also examined internal disagreements among the hijackers and operational difficulties that the commission staff said might have foiled a less flexible plot, seemed only to reinforce that perception.

"I am just appalled at the ease with which they had flight training," said Diane Horning, of Scotch Plains, N.J., whose 26-year-old son, Matthew, died in the attacks. "I don`t understand why at least some of that wasn`t tracked."

Others, like Steven Push, whose first wife died on Sept. 11, complained that the commission, which drew its account from the government`s interrogation of captured Qaeda operatives who helped plan the attack, was basing its conclusions on hearsay. "I think it was unfortunate that they didn`t have direct access to the sources," Mr. Push said.

If there was a single word the family members used to describe Wednesday`s hearing, it was "disappointing," although one grieving father-in-law, Bruce DeCell, called it simply "a waste of time." Mr. DeCell, who attends the sessions carrying a framed montage of thousands of tiny pictures of the victims, said Wednesday that he had given up hoping for answers from the commission.

"I really just come to let them know that I`m watching," he said, gesturing toward the poster,"and let them look at these faces of the innocent people who were murdered."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Bericht der Kommission:Heute ab #17708 und siehe Bemerkung in #17714
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June 17, 2004
THE OVERVIEW
Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie; Describes a Wider Plot for 9/11
By PHILIP SHENON and CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

WASHINGTON, June 16 - The staff of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks sharply contradicted one of President Bush`s central justifications for the Iraq war, reporting on Wednesday that there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The assertion came in staff reports that offer a chilling, richly detailed chronology of the Sept. 11 plot and rewrite much of the history of the attacks.

The chronology, based on the panel`s review of highly classified accounts of interrogations of captured Qaeda leaders, shows that Osama bin Laden was far more intimately involved in the planning of the attacks than previously known and approved the selection of each of the 19 hijackers. It also shows that the original plot called for attacks that would have been even larger and more deadly.

The commission`s investigators said in a pair of reports released at a public hearing that Mr. bin Laden and his deputies discussed target lists as early as 1999 that would have included the White House, the Capitol, C.I.A. and F.B.I. headquarters, nuclear power plants and skyscrapers in California and Washington State. The plot involved hijacking 10 jets instead of 4 and, the commission`s staff said, originally included a plan for simultaneous hijackings of American passenger planes in Southeast Asia.

The reports say that Mr. bin Laden, who has been depicted in the past as being far less involved in the logistics of the operation, ordered the Sept. 11 attacks over the opposition of many of his advisers and of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader in Afghanistan.

"Bin Laden effectively overruled their objections, and the attacks went forward," one report said, adding that Mr. bin Laden "thought that an attack against the United States would reap Al Qaeda a recruiting and fund-raising bonanza."

The commission`s investigators said information found in a captured Qaeda computer showed that Mohamed Atta, a ringleader of the plot and the pilot of one of the hijacked planes, selected the date for the attacks, choosing a day after the first week of September, when he knew that Congress would be in session after a summer recess. The report said information suggested that the Capitol was the target of the hijacked United Airlines plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11.

As for Iraq, the commission`s staff said its investigation showed that the government of Mr. Hussein had rebuffed or ignored requests from Qaeda leaders for help in the 1990`s, a conclusion that directly contradicts a series of public statements President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made before and after last year`s invasion of Iraq in justifying the war.

"We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States," one of the staff reports released on Wednesday said. "Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded." The report said that despite evidence of repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 90`s, "they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."

The White House said on Wednesday that it did not see the commission`s staff reports as a contradiction of past statements by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and that the administration had always been careful not to suggest that it had proof of a tie between Mr. Hussein and Sept. 11.

"It is not inconsistent for Iraq to have ties with Al Qaeda and not to have been involved in 9/11 or other potential plots against America," Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mr. Bush`s Democratic opponent in the November election, said that the reports by the Sept. 11 commission were evidence that the "administration misled America, the administration reached too far." In an interview with the Detroit radio station WDET, Mr. Kerry said that "they did not tell the truth to Americans about what was happening or their own intentions."

While Republican members of the bipartisan commission suggested in the past that their investigation might support the White House by uncovering broad links between Mr. Hussein and the terrorist network, the full panel appeared to embrace the staff reports, suggesting that they would be used as the framework for chapters in the commission`s final report next month.

"There were systematic efforts by Al Qaeda to connect with Iraq - many of them failed," Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey, said in an interview.

John F. Lehman, another Republican on the panel and Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, has often raised the issue of possible Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda. But he offered no criticism of the staff reports after their release. "I think we presented to the American people for the first time an understanding of where Al Qaeda came from," Mr. Lehman said.

The staff said it had investigated one of the lingering mysteries resulting from the Sept. 11 attacks: whether there was truth to a widely circulated report from Czech intelligence officials that Mr. Atta had met in Prague in April 2001 with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, suggesting an Iraqi connection to the plot.

"We do not believe that such a meeting occurred," the staff report said, citing phone records and other evidence that Mr. Atta was in Florida at the time.

Mr. Cheney has relied on reports of the Prague meeting in arguing that Mr. Hussein had worked closely with Al Qaeda. The vice president as recently as Monday said in a speech that he believed that the former Iraqi president was a "patron of terrorism`` and "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda."

Mr. Bush said in September of last year that "there`s no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties." Richard A. Clarke, Mr. Bush`s former counterterrorism director in the White House, testified to the commission in March that Mr. Bush had pressed him right after the attacks to search for a link to Mr. Hussein. In last year`s State of the Union address, Mr. Bush said that "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda."

The contradictions between the staff reports` findings and past White House statements on Iraq were all the more striking given that the commission`s staff director, and the final editor of the reports, is Philip D. Zelikow, a University of Virginia historian who was a member of Mr. Bush`s White House transition team and who served on his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board until last year.

The commission`s public hearings this week are the last that the 10-member panel has scheduled before issuing a final report at the end of next month, its Congressionally mandated deadline. The final report is expected to document huge law enforcement and intelligence failures before Sept. 11 and recommend an overhaul of counterterrorism agencies, including the C.I.A. and F.B.I.

The staff reports of Wednesday were described by Mr. Kean as an effort to "close the circle" on the investigation and offered what is easily the most complete and compelling government account of the attacks and the years of detailed planning by Al Qaeda that preceded them.

These are among the staff reports` other conclusions, based on intelligence reports from interrogated Qaeda leaders and other evidence:

¶Terrorist training camps run by Al Qaeda were "apparently quite good" and "the camps created a climate in which trainees and other personnel were free to think creatively about ways to commit mass murder."

¶While there is no credible evidence of collaboration between Mr. bin Laden`s network and Iraq, there is extensive evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and the fundamentalist Islamic leaders of Iran, including possible collaboration in the 1996 bombing of an apartment building in Saudi Arabia in which 19 Americans were killed.

¶The Sept. 11 plot cost "somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute," with much of the money spent in the United States on flight training, living expenses and travel, including tickets for the planes.

Mark Glassman contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 17, 2004
PRISON ABUSE
Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, June 16 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison`s rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.

This prisoner and other "ghost detainees" were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment, and to avoid disclosing their location to an enemy, officials said.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army officer who in February investigated abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, criticized the practice of allowing ghost detainees there and at other detention centers as "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."

This prisoner, who has not been named, is believed to be the first to have been kept off the books at the orders of Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Tenet. He was not held at Abu Ghraib, but at another prison, Camp Cropper, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, officials said.

Pentagon and intelligence officials said the decision to hold the detainee without registering him - at least initially - was in keeping with the administration`s legal opinion about the status of those viewed as an active threat in wartime.

Seven months later, however, the detainee - a reputed senior officer of Ansar al-Islam, a group the United States has linked to Al Qaeda and blames for some attacks in Iraq - is still languishing at the prison but has only been questioned once while in detention, in what government officials acknowledged was an extraordinary lapse.

"Once he was placed in military custody, people lost track of him," a senior intelligence official conceded Wednesday night. "The normal review processes that would keep track of him didn`t."

The detainee was described by the official as someone "who was actively planning operations specifically targeting U.S. forces and interests both inside and outside of Iraq."

But once he was placed into custody at Camp Cropper, where about 100 detainees deemed to have the highest intelligence value are held, he received only one cursory arrival interrogation from military officers and was never again questioned by any other military or intelligence officers, according to Pentagon and intelligence officials.

The Pentagon`s chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Wednesday that officials at Camp Cropper questioned their superiors several times in recent months about what to do with the suspect.

But only in the last two weeks has Mr. Rumsfeld`s top aide for intelligence policy, Stephen A. Cambone, called C.I.A. senior officials to request that the agency deal with the suspect or else have him go into the prison`s regular reporting system.

Mr. Di Rita referred questions about the prisoner`s fate to the C.I.A.

A senior intelligence official said late Wednesday that "the matter is currently under discussion."

In July 2003, the man suspected of being an Ansar al-Islam official was captured in Iraq and turned over to C.I.A. officials, who took him to an undisclosed location outside of Iraq for interrogation. By that fall, however, a C.I.A. legal analysis determined that because the detainee was deemed to be an Iraqi unlawful combatant - outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions - he should be transferred back to Iraq.

Mr. Tenet made his request to Mr. Rumsfeld - that the suspect be held but not listed - in October. The request was passed down the chain of command: to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then to Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, and finally to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. At each stage, lawyers reviewed the request and their bosses approved it.

A senior intelligence official said late Wednesday that the C.I.A. inquired about the detainee`s status in January, but was told that American jailers in Iraq could not find him, perhaps as a result of the chaos and confusion of the November and December spike in insurgent violence.

The detention was first reported in this week`s U.S. News & World Report. But the role played by senior officials in deciding the detainee`s status was not known publicly before Wednesday. Pentagon and intelligence officials gave new details on Wednesday about the prisoner and the circumstances that brought him to Camp Cropper, including the fact that his status was decided by Mr. Tenet and Mr. Rumsfeld, and approved by senior officers.

While acknowledging mistakes in the prisoner`s detention, the senior intelligence official said the detainee posed a significant threat to American forces in Iraq and elsewhere. "He also possessed significant information about Ansar al Islam`s leadership structure, training and locations," the official said.

At Camp Cropper, some prisoners had been held since June 2003 for nearly 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in small cells without sunlight, according to a report by the international Red Cross.

The suspected Ansar official was segregated from the other detainees and was not listed on the rolls. Under the order that had filtered down to General Sanchez, military police were not to disclose the detainee`s whereabouts to the Red Cross pending further directives.

The prisoner fell into legal limbo as the military police pressed their superiors for guidance, which has still not formally come.

"Over the course of the next several weeks, the custodians at the prison asked for additional guidance, but there were no interrogations," Mr. Di Rita said.

Before this case surfaced, the C.I.A. has said it had discontinued the ghost detainee practice, but said that the Geneva Conventions allowed a delay in the identification of prisoners to avoid disclosing their whereabouts to an enemy.

In Washington, the Army announced that Gen. Paul J. Kern, the head of the Army Matériel Command, would oversee an Army inquiry into the role military intelligence soldiers played in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Kern replaces General Sanchez as the senior officer reviewing the findings. General Sanchez removed himself from that role so he could be interviewed by investigators.

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Das Outsourcing von Sicherungsaufgaben fordert seine Opfer.

June 17, 2004
Workers` Comp Claims in Iraq May Be Costly
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:18 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Almost half of all injury and death claims filed by U.S. contractors so far this year were for incidents that occurred in Iraq.

The federal government ultimately will spend millions of dollars for these workers` compensation payments.

Federal law requires all U.S. government contractors and subcontractors to obtain workers` compensation insurance for civilian employees who work overseas. If an injury or death claim is related to a ``war-risk hazard,`` the War Hazards Compensation Act provides for government reimbursement to insurance carriers.

Of the 771 injury claims filed by U.S. contractors so far this year, 345 occurred in Iraq. Of the 66 deaths reported as of last week, all but nine occurred in Iraq, according to the Labor Department, which handles the reporting of claims and reimbursements.

Since January 2003, there have been claims for 476 injuries and 80 deaths in Iraq.

Casualties are rising. A convoy of contractors was ambushed Tuesday in Baghdad. Two people were killed and three were injured when shots were fired from a highway overpass.

Among the most gruesome deaths were four civilian security personnel who were killed March 31 in Fallujah, their bodies mutilated and burned. The remains of two were hung from a bridge.

``The security situation is virtually unprecedented,`` said Bob Hartwig, chief economist with the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group. ``You`ve got the potential to be kidnapped, to be killed, to be tortured, shot at, blown up.``

Labor Department officials said they had no cost estimate for reimbursements of Iraq-related claims, but given the maximum payment of $1,030.78 per week and the number of injuries and deaths, it could well climb into the multimillions. In past years, annual reimbursement costs under the War Hazards Act have ranged from $1 million to $2 million.

The Employees Compensation Fund, which pays war hazard claims as well as workers` comp claims for federal employees, is allocated about $2.3 billion annually, according to the Labor Department.

Coverage for employees of U.S. contractors, regardless of citizenship, is required under the 1941 Defense Base Act, just as workers in the United States must have workers` compensation insurance. Military personnel are not eligible and have a separate program.

Insurers are not required to provide coverage under that act, so as an enticement, the government promises reimbursement to carriers for war-related claims.

``The rebuilding of Iraq and other areas around the world would be more difficult without these laws because insurance premiums would rise dramatically, causing some contractors not to take on jobs in challenging and faraway locations and raising the overall cost of the rebuilding effort,`` Labor Department spokesman Ed Frank said.

But escalating claims are creating concerns for insurers despite the promise of government reimbursement, mainly because it can take the government months to investigate the claims and pay the insurer. In the interim, insurers are responsible for paying the claims, creating cash flow problems even though they get to keep the premiums.

``The question is, when are they going to get reimbursed? In the meantime, they are going to have to pay the claims,`` said Steven Sadler, managing director of Marsh Inc., a New York insurance broker.

Coverage under the Defense Base Act is getting harder to obtain, even as demand increases. Underwriters ``are being very, very selective,`` Sadler said ``They`re taking a very hard look at new clients because they`re all concerned about their capacity and concentration`` in Iraq.

The three major insurance companies that provide Defense Base Act coverage -- AIG WorldSource, ACT Ltd. and CNA Financial Group -- declined interview requests. Halliburton Co., the largest contractor in Iraq with about 24,000 employees, also declined comment.

The violence in Iraq is reflected in rising insurance rates for coverage under the Defense Base Act.

Rates have ranged from an early low of $10 per $100 of an employer`s payroll to as much as $40 per $100 of payroll in recent months, said Hartwig of the insurance institute. That means an employer with a million-dollar payroll would pay between $100,000 and $400,000 in premiums.

Insurers also are limiting terms of policies, such as not offering as much coverage in some locations or for certain types of jobs, and raising deductibles.

The Defense Base Act requires full disability compensation for two-thirds of a worker`s average weekly earnings, up to a maximum $1,030.78 per week. Death benefits are 50 percent of an employee`s average weekly earnings payable to the surviving spouse or to one child, and two-thirds of earnings for two or more survivors, up to the weekly maximum. Benefits may be payable for life, and are subject to annual cost-of-living adjustments.

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AP Business Writer Adam Geller in New York contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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June 16, 2004
Q&A: The Iraqi Economy

From the Council on Foreign Relations, June 16, 2004

What`s the state of Iraq`s economy?

Iraq`s economy, which suffered badly as a result of years of sanctions and the immediate devastation caused by U.S.-led invasion, has begun to rebound. Experts say improvements in oil and electricity production are getting the country back on track. However, ongoing security problems leading up to the handover of sovereignty June 30--including suicide bombings, attacks on foreign workers, and sabotage of oil infrastructure--are deterring foreign investment and derailing many reconstruction projects.

How big is the economy?

Much of Iraq`s economy is still informal, with significant economic activity done by unregistered businesses, says Thomas Foley, who served as director of private sector development for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and is the founder and chairman of the investment firm NTC Group. This makes it difficult to know exactly how big the economy is. Foley estimates that its gross domestic product (GDP) is some $10 billion dollars per year, excluding the oil sector. Iraq`s oil revenues roughly double GDP to about $20 billion annually, about that of Latvia or Bolivia.

What`s the unemployment rate?

Last summer, the World Bank and IMF estimated Iraq`s unemployment at nearly 60 percent. By January 2004, Foley says, the rate had fallen to about 28 percent, with a margin of error of some 5 percentage points, according to Iraq`s Ministry of Planning. The current rate is roughly 25 percent, says Richard Greco, Jr., who served as an economic advisor to the CPA in Iraq and is the CPA`s acting director of private sector development in New York.

Has oil production reached prewar levels?

Iraq produced 2.04 million barrels per day in 2002, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which collects official energy statistics for the U.S. government. Iraq`s oil production dropped to an average of 1.3 million barrels per day in 2003, but had recovered to prewar levels in January and February of 2004. Recent sabotage on the northern and southern pipelines, however, has curtailed production, and massive pipeline explosions June 14 and June 15 stopped all exports. Iraqi oil officials say they hope to resume exports at 700,000 barrels per day within 10 days. Export revenues from oil in 2004 so far total some $6.4 billion, according to the CPA. Assuming uninterrupted production, Iraqi oil revenues are expected to rise to $20 billion in 2005, according to The Economist. Iraq holds some 11 percent of the world`s proven oil reserves, and the eleventh largest natural gas reserves.

Where do Iraq`s oil revenues go?

Into a special fund called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI). The DFI was created by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 in May 2003 to hold Iraq`s oil revenues, seized Saddam-era assets, and leftover funds from the U.N. Oil for Food Program. The DFI is administered by the CPA and overseen by an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), made up of representatives of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development. After June 30, the Iraqi Interim Government will control the DFI.

How much money is currently in the DFI?

About $10.1 billion, according to a June 9 CPA budget report.

How much money has passed through the DFI?

The DFI has had a total cash inflow of more than $19.9 billion to date, according to the CPA, and has spent nearly $9.8 billion on reconstruction projects, security, and Iraqi ministry budgets. It has committed some $4.4 billion to other projects, leaving some $5.7 billion remaining in the 2004 budget. Iraq Revenue Watch, (http://www.iraqrevenuewatch.org) a project of the Open Society Institute, criticized the CPA in a recent report for delaying IAMB audits of its DFI spending.

Are some parts of the country doing better than others?

Experts say Kurdistan, which has seen little anti-coalition violence, has benefited economically--particularly from cross-border trade--more than other regions of the country. In the so-called Sunni Triangle in central Iraq, where most of the attacks against coalition soldiers and civilians occur, reconstruction efforts have been consistently set back by attacks. That area has been particularly bloody leading up to the handover of sovereignty June 30. More than 80 people throughout Iraq--many of them civilians in Baghdad and its surrounding neighborhoods--have been killed in the first two weeks of June in more than 16 car bombings, according to news reports. Many attacks are targeting Iraq`s economic infrastructure, including a June 14 bombing that killed 13. Among the victims were three employees of a General Electric subsidiary who were working on Iraq`s power system.

What`s the status of electricity production?

Electricity production has reached 4,100 megawatts per day, Greco says, which is significantly less than the CPA goal of 6,000 megawatts per day. The United Nations estimated before the war that Iraq could produce 4,500 megawatts per day. Iraqi energy ministers predict that demand could soar to as much as 7,000-8,000 megawatts per day this summer, The New York Times reported June 14.

What`s the status of Iraq`s debt?

Iraq owes some $120 billion in debt and interest payments to international lenders and creditor nations, according to the IMF. This figure includes $42 billion--$21 billion in debt and $21 billion in interest--owed to the Paris Club, a group of 19 creditor nations. Iraq owes some $60-65 billion to non-Paris Club creditors, and about $15 billion to commercial creditors. President Bush has actively campaigned for nearly all Iraq`s debt to be forgiven; other nations have been cool to the idea of offering financial amnesty to an oil-rich country. President Jacques Chirac of France is willing to forgive half of Iraq`s debt but no more, according to news reports. James A. Baker III, who was appointed by President Bush in December 2003 as a personal envoy on Iraq debt, has been meeting with creditor governments around the world to secure debt forgiveness commitments.

How is reconstruction progressing?

Slowly. Only $1.6 billion of the $18.4 billion approved for Iraqi reconstruction by Congress last year had been spent by the end of April 2004, according to the Congressional Budget Office. As of May 18, the CPA had committed $7.7 billion more to relief and reconstruction efforts, and plans to commit a total of $10.4 billion to such contracts by the handover of sovereignty June 30. Bureaucratic delays have slowed the reconstruction process, and the ongoing security problems have severely hampered rebuilding. Contractors working in Iraq have to spend 10 percent to 25 percent of their budgets on security, according to the CPA. "It`s difficult to attract investment to an environment where security challenges are not contained," says Jonathan Berman, director of global business solutions for the DAI Group, an international development consulting firm. "International investors are 100 percent turned off by the violence they`re seeing," he says.

Are any international corporations investing in Iraq right now?

Yes, says Berman, but they`re mostly regional concerns from the Arab world or firms run by Iraqi expatriates. "[Expatriates] are always the last out and the first back in," he says. He and Greco say international firms are for the most part making small-scale investments in Iraq right now, and waiting for security to improve before making big commitments. The election of a new government may also make a difference to both international investors and Iraqis. Experts say the new permanent government, expected to be elected by the end of 2005, will have to show that it can contain the violence and sustain a legal system that supports private sector enterprise to reassure the international business community.

What are the economic forecasts for next year?

Very promising, experts say--if the security situation is brought under control. Iraq`s economy had been declining for years as a result of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein`s regime. In 2003, the war and subsequent looting caused the economy to shrink by 22 percent. But the economy is projected to grow by 45 percent in 2005 and 25 percent in 2006, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a financial research division of The Economist. "I think the economy is very positive," Greco says. "There continues to be a steady stream of interest from international investors, not just in oil, but also the agriculture, petrochemical, glass and cement industries. There`s so much potential."

--by Esther Pan, staff writer, cfr.org

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June 16, 2004
New fears for Iraqi oil exports in wake of sabotage
By Kevin Morrison in London


There were renewed fears for the security of Iraqi oil exports on Wednesday after saboteurs blew another hole in the country`s main export pipeline.

Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the president of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, said he would write to non-Opec members Russia, Angola, Mexico and Oman, to ask them to pump more crude after the stoppage of Iraqi exports.

However, Russia, the world`s second largest producer after Saudi Arabia with about 9m barrels a day output, said it had no more spare capacity and could not boost short-term output.

After initial alarm, markets reacted calmly to the latest Iraq attacks, supported by reports of continued building of US stocks, but there were new warnings that global spare capacity is limited. Benchmark Brent futures closed 17 cents higher at $35.20 a barrel in London trade, while benchmark US crude futures were 13 cents higher at $37.32 a barrel in New York - more than $5 below their peak 16 days ago.

"The market is a lot less concerned about Iraq going down than they were two weeks ago," said one London-based oil trader. "What has changed is the perception that there is much more oil available and now supply exceeds demand," he said.

Shipping agents said the attacks on the pipeline that feeds the southern port of Basra had halted exports and it was uncertain when they would resume. Iraqi oil officials recently said Basra exported an average of about 1.7m barrels a day in May.

Exports from Iraq`s northern oilfields at Kirkuk have also halted since sabotage on the long pipeline from the fields to Ceyhan in Turkey, leaving the country without foreign earnings from oil exports in the short term.

Opec members are expected to boost oil production by a further 800,000 b/d this month from May.

This increase in output has comforted the oil market and helps to explain why prices had a muted reaction to the loss of Iraqi exports.

Also helping to calm the atmosphere, the latest weekly US commercial crude inventories report on Wednesday showed that the world`s largest oil consumer, accounting for a quarter of global demand, had increased stockpiles at refineries by 800,000 barrels in the past week to comfortable levels.

However, Paul Horsnell, energy analyst at Barclays Capital, said the factors that pushed oil prices to $40 a barrel remained and that people were overlooking the fact that a supply crunch could still loom by the end of the year.

"Iraqi exports have stopped at a time that global spare capacity of oil production is at its lowest level in decades, and if there are further problems with Iraq returning to the export market, the market balance could change very quickly and that will be reflected in higher prices," Mr Horsnell said. Saudi Arabia is the only oil producer with any significant spare capacity, following the recent output increases by the oil cartel.

The kingdom is expected to produce about 9.1m b/d this month and oil officials say the country has sustainable output of 10.5m b/d.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004.

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June 17, 2004
Bush Tells U.S. Troops `Life Is Better` in Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER

MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., June 16 - Two weeks before the handover of sovereignty to a new Iraqi government, President Bush told thousands of American troops here and around the world on Wednesday that "a democratic, free Iraq is on the way" and insisted that despite the daily toll of the insurgency the country`s economy was growing and "life is better."

Mr. Bush`s speech here at the headquarters of the United States Central Command, which oversees operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, came only a day after a poll of Iraqis commissioned by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority painted a very different picture, one in which the occupation is overwhelmingly unpopular and sentiment is rising for American troops to leave the country.

Yet to the cheers of troops here, and others connected via a video link in Bagram, Afghanistan, and a hangar at the Baghdad airport, Mr. Bush insisted that over the long run Iraqis would be grateful for the occupation, which he likened to the American reconstruction of postwar Germany. After the handover of power on June 30, he said, American troops will take on the role of "supporting" Iraqi forces, and he insisted it would become clear that the insurgents were "not fighting foreign forces, they`re fighting the Iraqi people."

Mr. Bush has repeatedly returned to Florida, a state that he narrowly won in 2000 and that is widely viewed as up for grabs this year, to drive home the major themes of his re-election campaign. So it was no surprise he chose Centcom, as it is known, for another of his speeches explaining his goals in Iraq.

Local television coverage was heavy, and Air Force One was parked as a backdrop outside the hangar where he spoke. His welcome was overwhelming, as it often is when he visits military bases, though this time he referred to the strain that long deployments were creating among families here.

Mr. Bush`s aides are increasingly apprehensive about the drop in his approval ratings that polls indicate are largely attributable to his handling of Iraq and the prisoner abuse scandal. Publicly, they express confidence that those numbers will recover once Iraq settles down. Privately, they say, they are uncertain it will settle down in time for the election.

On Wednesday, Mr. Bush focused on the best news he could find in the 14 days before the handover. He said that thousands of schools had reopened and that electricity had been restored, not mentioning that electricity was being generated far below the levels his own administration set as a goal. He described the country as a thriving start-up venture in democratic capitalism.

"Markets are beginning to thrive, new businesses have opened, a stable new currency is in place, dozens of political parties are organizing, hundreds of courts of law are opening across the country," he said. "Today in Iraq more than 170 newspapers are being published."

Of the violence in Iraq, he pledged that "the traitors will be defeated."

"Their greatest fear is an Iraqi government of, by and for the Iraqi people,`` Mr. Bush said. "And no matter what the terrorists plan, no matter what they attempt, a democratic, free Iraq is on the way."

Mr. Bush`s probable Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry, shot back with a critique of the war. "The U.S. should never go to war because it wants to," Mr. Kerry said. "The U.S. should only go to war because it has to. This president failed the test in Iraq."

Mr. Bush`s speech came only an hour or so before the 9/11 commission declared that there had been no cooperation between Al Qaeda and the now-deposed government of Saddam Hussein. That alleged collaboration, and the prospect that the two could share weapons of mass destruction, was an argument the administration marshaled last year to lend a sense of urgency to confronting Mr. Hussein. And in his talk to the troops, Mr. Bush melded the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq into a single, broader struggle against "terrorists in distant lands."

His effort on Wednesday to merge those conflicts under the umbrella of a war on terror led to an immediate response from two of Mr. Kerry`s top national security advisers, former Defense Secretary William Perry and Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida.

Mr. Graham, who has spent years on the Senate Intelligence Committee and is considered a vice-presidential contender, said Mr. Bush had "essentially ignored the war on terror" in Afghanistan once he began to divert troops to Iraq, a country that Mr. Graham argued posed no terror threat to the United States until the fall of Mr. Hussein made it a haven for terrorism.

Mr. Perry, who has been informally advising Mr. Kerry, told reporters in a conference call that "the reality is that we do not have enough boots on the ground in Iraq to maintain security in a country as large as Iraq in the face of insurgent operation.``

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 17, 2004
Suicide Car Bombing Kills 35 Outside Iraq Base
By REUTERS

Filed at 4:31 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber killed 35 people at an Iraqi military base in Baghdad on Thursday as guerrillas intensified a bloody campaign to sabotage plans for U.S.-led occupation to give way to Iraqi rule on June 30.

The blast outside an army recruiting center on a busy main road also wounded 119 people, a Health Ministry spokeswoman said. ``The toll is still rising,`` she added.

Colonel Mike Murray of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division said the bomber had blown up a white four-wheel-drive vehicle at the center near Muthanna airport, where U.S. troops are based.

Murray said about 175 army recruits inside the Iraqi base were unhurt. Passersby took the brunt of the blast.

One man lay dead in a battered white car after the explosion as Iraqi soldiers, rescuers and locals milled about in confusion. Another bloodied body lay on the road.

It was the latest attack in a lethal drive by guerrillas determined to undermine Iraq`s new interim government ahead of the transfer of power from the U.S.-led occupation.

The insurgents, thought to include Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein, Iraqi nationalists and foreign militants, have targeted Iraq`s oil industry, government officials and security forces in the run-up to the handover.

Oil exports, Iraq`s economic lifeblood, remained paralyzed on Thursday, and engineers said oil wells were being shut down while pipelines blown up in the south and north were repaired.

On foreign exchange markets, the dollar lost some of its previous day`s gains on news of Thursday`s blast.

BUSH UNDER FIRE

President Bush, whose administration is under fire for its Iraq policies, said on Tuesday the United States was ``bringing back a 5,000-year-old civilization`` in Iraq.

But retired U.S. diplomats and military officers said he had led the United States into an ill-planned war that had weakened U.S. security, directly challenging one of Bush`s main arguments for re-election in November.

Bush, speaking at an air force base in Florida, told U.S. troops they were making an essential sacrifice in Iraq.

The U.S. military said a third soldier had died after a rocket attack on a base north of Baghdad on Wednesday. That brought to 610 the number of American troops killed in action in Iraq since last year`s invasion to oust Saddam.

``We all believe that current administration policies have failed in the primary responsibilities of preserving national security and providing world leadership,`` said a statement signed by 27 retired U.S. officials. ``We need a change.``

The group includes Republicans and Democrats, a former CIA director, two former ambassadors to the Soviet Union and a retired chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Bush`s ``overbearing`` approach to foreign policy has relied too much on military power, spurned the concerns of U.S. allies and disdained the United Nations, the group said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell rejected the idea that the Iraq war had isolated the United States. ``If this is a political statement...and this is their point of view, I disagree,`` he said of the criticism by the former officials.

HINT FROM NATO

The secretary-general of NATO, which is divided over the Iraq war, said the alliance would not ``slam the door in the face`` of Iraq`s new government if it asked for military assistance.

NATO now only provides logistical support for a Polish-led division in south-central Iraq. France and Germany have said they will not send troops to Iraq, and their resistance to a collective NATO mission has hardened because of the unrelenting violence and a prisoner abuse scandal there.

In the scandal`s latest twist, the New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered at least one Iraqi detainee to be kept off prison rolls, effectively making the prisoner a so-called ``ghost detainee.``

Quoting senior Pentagon and intelligence officials, the paper said the prisoner, suspected of being a high-value ``terrorist,`` was hidden along with other ``ghost detainees,`` largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment and conditions.

Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd.

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June 17, 2004
The Plain Truth

It`s hard to imagine how the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks could have put it more clearly yesterday: there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11.

Now President Bush should apologize to the American people, who were led to believe something different.

Of all the ways Mr. Bush persuaded Americans to back the invasion of Iraq last year, the most plainly dishonest was his effort to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide. While it`s possible that Mr. Bush and his top advisers really believed that there were chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, they should have known all along that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. No serious intelligence analyst believed the connection existed; Richard Clarke, the former antiterrorism chief, wrote in his book that Mr. Bush had been told just that.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration convinced a substantial majority of Americans before the war that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to 9/11. And since the invasion, administration officials, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, have continued to declare such a connection. Last September, Mr. Bush had to grudgingly correct Mr. Cheney for going too far in spinning a Hussein-bin Laden conspiracy. But the claim has crept back into view as the president has made the war on terror a centerpiece of his re-election campaign.

On Monday, Mr. Cheney said Mr. Hussein "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda." Mr. Bush later backed up Mr. Cheney, claiming that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist who may be operating in Baghdad, is "the best evidence" of a Qaeda link. This was particularly astonishing because the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime.

The staff report issued by the 9/11 panel says that Sudan`s government, which sheltered Osama bin Laden in the early 1990`s, tried to hook him up with Mr. Hussein, but that nothing came of it.

This is not just a matter of the president`s diminishing credibility, although that`s disturbing enough. The war on terror has actually suffered as the conflict in Iraq has diverted military and intelligence resources from places like Afghanistan, where there could really be Qaeda forces, including Mr. bin Laden.

Mr. Bush is right when he says he cannot be blamed for everything that happened on or before Sept. 11, 2001. But he is responsible for the administration`s actions since then. That includes, inexcusably, selling the false Iraq-Qaeda claim to Americans. There are two unpleasant alternatives: either Mr. Bush knew he was not telling the truth, or he has a capacity for politically motivated self-deception that is terrifying in the post-9/11 world.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 17, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
How Much Is That Uzi in the Window?
By EVAN WRIGHT

LOS ANGELES

To the American troops in Iraq being subjected to a daily rain of fire from roadside bombs, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, it often seems that the insurgents have limitless stocks of munitions. In fact, in the time I spent embedded with a platoon there, I heard more than one marine joke that the insurgents must have more bullets to spare than the Americans.

But it`s no joke: some military officials told me that the Iraqis have so many weapons that they are suspected of exporting them over the Syrian border. And for this bounty, they can thank the Pentagon. Of all the blunders American military leaders have made in Iraq, one of the least talked about is how they succeeded in arming the insurgents.

By the time of the coalition invasion, Iraq had one of the largest conventional arms stockpiles in the world. According to one American military estimate, this included three million tons of bombs and bullets; millions of AK-47`s and other rifles, rocket launchers and mortar tubes; and thousands of more sophisticated arms like ground-to-air missiles. Much of the arsenal was stored in vast warehouse complexes, some of which occupied several square miles. As war approached, Iraqi commanders ordered these mountains of munitions to be dispersed across the country in thousands of small caches.

The marines I was embedded with — a forward reconnaissance unit at the front of the initial invasion — were stunned by the sheer amounts of weaponry they saw as we raced across some 400 miles to Baghdad. Along much of the route, Iraqi forces had dug holes every couple of hundred yards in which they`d piled grenades, mortars and other munitions. Village schools, health clinics and other government buildings had been turned into ammunition dumps. New rifles, sometimes still sealed in plastic bags, littered the roadsides like trash along a blighted American highway.

But under orders to reach Baghdad as quickly as possible, the marines rarely had a chance to remove, destroy or even mark the stockpiles. In one village, combat engineers (led by local children whom they had bribed with bags of Skittles candies) discovered an underground bunker crammed with dozens of sophisticated air-to-ground missiles. Yet higher-ups in the division insisted that there was no time to destroy them. The marines moved on, leaving the missiles unguarded.

The job of removing ordnance was complicated by the fact that many of the combat engineers in the invasion were not adequately trained for the task. Munitions are not easy to destroy. Bullets, bombs and rockets are designed to be shock-resistant. As the combat engineers often discovered, blowing up a stack of ammunition just scattered it, unexploded, in all directions.

Ordnance disposal is best carried out by specialized technicians; the entire First Marine Expeditionary Force (which was responsible for roughly half the invasion) had the services of only about 200. As one of those overworked technicians told me the day we reached Baghdad, it would have taken the experts attached to the First Division a year just to clear the munitions they discovered in the city`s eastern suburbs.

And within 24 hours of the fall of the capital, the dangers posed by all those unchecked arms became obvious. The marines I was with occupied a warehouse in the Shiite slum now called Sadr City, which quickly became the center of armed insurgence in Baghdad. The moment it got dark, tracer fire lit up the sky, as gun battles erupted across the city.

The marines were told not to worry; their commanders informed them that the violence was a result of "red on red" engagements, meaning that Iraqis were shooting at other Iraqis. When American patrols entered Shiite neighborhoods starting the next day, locals begged them to get rid of the arms. They told us that semi-automatic rifles, nearly unobtainable during Saddam Hussein`s rule, could now be obtained for about the cost of a pack of cigarettes. Heavier weapons were not much more expensive. Unexploded artillery shells (which are now being used to make the improvised roadside bombs) were free for the taking, scattered about backyards and alleys.

Yet several Marine commanders I spoke with at the time felt the nightly firefights were a positive development. "Mostly it`s Shiites doing a lot of dirty work, taking out fedayeen and Sunni Baathists," one officer explained. A colonel told me that the armed Shiites were acting through "a sort of agreement with us to take out the bad guys." Some enlisted men even told me that their battalion commander ordered them to distribute thousands of AK-47`s to Shiite militia members who pledged to take on America`s enemies.

Of course, American commanders long ago abandoned the wildly naïve (or cynical) view that all those arms sloshing around Iraq were somehow falling into friendly hands. But by the time occupation authorities got serious about disarming Iraq, many of the munitions that American forces bypassed in the invasion had fallen into the hands of those bent on killing Americans.

American forces have now destroyed some 300,000 tons of munitions. Yet the troops on the ground still complain that the old regime`s supply depots remain woefully underguarded. Nobody knows how long it will take to dispose of known stockpiles — American military estimates range from one year to 10. And then there are the unaccounted stashes, which, based on Iraqi documents, are thought to contain hundreds of surface-to-air missiles, tens of thousands of bombs and half a million pounds of C-4 plastic explosive.

There simply aren`t enough technical experts to do the job in Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan). With the handover of sovereignty fast approaching, concern is rising that today`s well-armed insurgency will become all-out civil war. American authorities may not be able to eliminate simmering hatreds, but it`s still within their power to reduce the numbers of bombs and bullets available to all sides.

Evan Wright is the author of "Generation Kill," about a Marine platoon in combat in Iraq.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 17, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Maids vs. Occupiers
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

BEIJING

Visiting India and now China in the past few months tells me how much we Americans need to finish our business in Iraq and lower our profile there — not so we can wash our hands of the idea, and necessity, of promoting reform in the Arab world, but so we can advance that effort.

We can`t dictate reform to the Arabs. Look at how even a watered-down reform proposal from the G-8 summit meeting — the Broader Middle East Initiative — was received in the Arab-Muslim world. No one paid any attention to it. The whole concept was dead on arrival because it was made in America, which is now radioactive in the Arab world.

The pressure for change has to come from within, and I think it can — if we lower our profile. Then the Arab world will have to look clearly at the fact that China, India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — all the countries that provide maid service for the Saudi and other Arab ruling elites and manual labor for their construction — have leapt so far ahead with their own development that they are now taking good jobs away from America.

To put it another way, there are two ways for the U.S. to promote reform in the Arab world — where there is an ocean of untapped brainpower, particularly among women. One way is to try to dictate it, which is not working. American policy has become so unpopular in the Arab world that anti-reformers can easily delegitimize the reform process by labeling it a "U.S. plot to destroy Islam," and reformers are silenced because they don`t want to be seen as promoting a made-in-America agenda.

The other way for us to promote reform is to get out of the way so people in the Middle East can see clearly that many of their maids` children — from India, China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — are excelling at math, science and engineering, leaving Arab children, not to mention many American children, in the dust. (Over one million Indians work in Saudi Arabia alone.)

Only when the Arabs focus on how their maids` children are doing in the world, not what the Americans are doing in their region, will they revisit one of the most famous sayings of the Prophet Muhammad: "Seek knowledge, even unto China. That is the duty for every Muslim."

I hadn`t been to China since 2001, and one of the first new things I noticed here was the number of women selling phone cards for cellphone minutes. While Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Saudi Arabia are using cellphone technology and cars to create bombs, China and India are making themselves the world`s new-car manufacturing centers and are inventing new profit-making uses for Internet-enabled cellphones — none of which involve blowing anything or anyone up.

An Arab journalist friend living in London told me that there is today — sadly — an all too pervasive sense in too many quarters of the Arab world of a once-great civilization having been left behind, not unlike Weimar Germany. Because Germany was already a modern state, it created a massive military response to its humiliation: the Third Reich. "The Arabs can`t," he said. "So they create bin Ladenism instead, which can`t build a state, only demolish one."

So how does one get a healthy reform debate started? "You need a courageous intelligentsia," he said. "You can`t have that as long as people feel besieged. The new historians in Israel only emerged during Oslo. When you feel besieged, you will never start a debate with your brother and sister. Now it is the battle against the enemy, be it real or imaginary."

All the more reason why we — the perceived enemy — need to hand over power to an elected Iraqi government, and move our troops into the background. If we can do that, I would suggest that next year the G-8 invite both India and China to join, and hold the next G-10 summit either at one of the manicured campuses of Indian outsourcing companies or in Shanghai`s manufacturing hub. Then invite Arab leaders to attend. India and China were once seen as their equals.

Real change happens when people see something in those they compare themselves to, and draw their own conclusions — not when it`s imposed on them. Our job was to smash Iraq`s old order and lay the foundations for a new one. Now we need to lower our profile so people in that Arab-Muslim world can see clearly something we`ve been obstructing and they`ve been deliberately ignoring: that the world today wants to invest more in their maids` children than in their own children. Once that reality sinks in, so, too, will reform.

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June 17, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Smack That Cheney-Bot!
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The whole thing was extremely suspicious.

People here still haven`t stopped buzzing about the president`s bizarre behavior at the White House unveiling ceremony for the Clintons` official portraits on Monday. Mr. Bush acted totally out of character: witty, engaged, amiable, bipartisan and magnanimous. Even to Bill and Hillary.

He gave a sly wink to his own black-sheep past and that of the wayward Rodham brothers, Hugh and Tony, when he greeted the Rodhams` mom, Dorothy: "Welcome, we`re glad you`re here. And those two boys you`re still trying to raise."

W. gave lavish encomiums — and even a nickname — to the man he once accused of stripping the White House of dignity and honor. Saying his dad was 41 and he`s 43, he grinned and said, "We`re glad you`re here, 42."

Even Bill Clinton was dumbfounded, not to mention confounded. Maybe that`s why the usually articulate 42 declared he felt like "a pickle stepping into history." Shouldn`t he have felt like the ham and cheese between two slices of Wonder bread?

Mr. Clinton told friends afterward that he was blown away, that W. had never been so nice to him before. There was no smirk, no begrudging. And Clinton pals at a Georgetown restaurant that night alternated between bellowing about getting rid of President Bush and marveling at how great he`d been at the unveiling.

"Maybe after a week of seeing the comparisons of himself and Reagan, in which he did not come out as well," one Clintonista speculated, "he`s getting the knack of acting more like Reagan." Mr. Clinton used to study Reagan tapes to pick up pointers; why shouldn`t Mr. Bush?

Perhaps we have a Potomac invasion of the body snatchers. Maybe, like the grumpy wives of Stepford, bristly W. has been replaced by soothing W. With the race with John Kerry so tight, the Republicans were reminded last week of the advantages of a leader with a light touch — not one who`s at odds with the world, and rattled about the prison torture scandal creeping toward Rummy and the sulfurous reversals in Iraq. (Although it would be natural for Mr. Bush to feel churlish. After going to war to save Iraqis from a regime that "tortured children in front of their parents," now he can`t even trust the Iraqis to bring Saddam to justice.)

Like the Stepford husbands, G.O.P. bigwigs could have met in a smoky men`s club and decided they wanted a W. who was a little less pushy and a little more sunny. All world domination, all the time, can be wearing.

The Republicans messed up their first attempt at this, when they took Dick Cheney to an undisclosed location to switch him with a replicant. Instead of an affable, reassuring presence, as he was in Bush I, the Bush II vice president is a macabre automaton who keeps repeating, over and over, as contrary evidence piles up, that Saddam and Al Qaeda were linked, and that Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.

Mr. Cheney did it again on Monday in Florida speaking at — where else? — a conservative think tank; he said Saddam "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda." This claim, used by the White House to justify its gallop to war, was once more flatly contradicted by the 9/11 panel`s report yesterday: "Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

The report says Osama did seek help from Saddam in the 90`s, "despite his opposition to Hussein`s secular regime." But aside from sending an official to meet with Osama in Sudan, Saddam stiffed his request for weapons and training-camp space.

Mr. Cheney isn`t programmed to process evidence that shows he was wrong; he simply keeps repeating the same nonsensical claims as if he has a microchip malfunction.

Unfortunately, there`s no spouse to give him a knock on the head, as the Stepford husbands do when their Farrah fem-bots go haywire and keep repeating things like, "I`ll just die if I don`t get that recipe. . . . I`ll just die if I-I-I [bop!] don`t get that recipe. . . ."

Cheney-bot just keeps going and going: "He had long-established ties with Al Qaeda. . . . He had long-established ties with Al Qaeda-a-a. . . . He-he-e-e—— brzzzrrrp!"

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Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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THE FAILED SEDUCTION OF JOHN McCAIN

How Democrats Are Their Own Worst Enemy

NEW YORK--Now we know what John Kerry has been up to this spring. Other politicians, having wrapped up their party`s nomination early in March, might have devoted those extra months to honing their stump speech, shaking down contributors and strategizing for the long slog to November.

Not Kerry. Kerry, it seems, spent the last three months begging Republican John McCain to run as his vice president. He didn`t ask officially (whatever that means) but he asked seven times. "I don`t want to formally ask because I don`t want to be formally rejected, but having said that, would you do it?" an aide who ran messages between the two senators quoted Kerry`s approach to The New York Times. Each time, each of seven times, McCain`s answer was the same: an unequivocal no.

Hey, John, wanna be my veep?

No thanks.

I`m gonna pretend I didn`t hear that. So. Shall we print up some buttons?

No.

Come on, man. I need you.

Nope.

You`re kidding! You know the Republicans will never nominate you for the presidency! They hate your ass!

Whatever. I said no.

Dude! Don`t be like that. Yes is such an easy word to say. Say it.

Get a life, John. Don`t contact me unless it`s about legislation. Got it?

Look, I`ll be honest. The CBS poll says you`ll give me a 14-point boost if you join the team. I gotta have you. I can`t take no for an answer.

No means no, John. No. No. No.

Hey, thanks, I appreciate it. I`ll call a press conference for noon. Kerry-McCain 2004!

I`m getting a restraining order against you, you jowly bassett-hound-eyed freak!!!

Seven times. Has John Kerry lost his mind?

The last time Americans elected a cross-party ticket was 1796, and with good reason. President Adams, a Federalist, feuded over matters personal and political with vice president Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party. The resulting spectacle was so appalling that Congress amended the Constitution to minimize the chances of such a fiasco reoccurring.

Not since 1932 has it been so important for Democrats to win the presidency. George Bush, a dangerous, deranged demagogue, has got to go. Anybody But Bush: I coined the phrase, and I still mean it. But it would be the height of folly to brush off the implications of the Kerry-McCain dalliance. The Democratic nominee-apparent`s judgment, and that of his advisors, has been grievously compromised.

Liberals believe that McCain is a soft-spoken moderate Republican. The shabby treatment he received in 2000 at the hands of Bush and Karl Rove, whose operatives falsely claimed that he had fathered an illegitimate daughter with an African-American hooker, earns him sympathy from the left. So does the maverick style he employed to push for campaign finance reform.

But McCain isn`t what people think he is. "At the end of the day," said the chatty aide, "he`s a Republican." His campaign finance reform banned soft money contributions, a much bigger source of funds for Democrats than Republicans. Later in 2000 he played Bush`s bitch, campaigning for the man whose staffers had smeared him. By all accounts his understated tone quickly rises to accommodate a sharp temper. Most of all, McCain`s Arizona constituents vote for him because his conservative politics match theirs.

"I am pro-life," McCain wrote on his 2000 campaign website. "I oppose abortion except in the case of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is in danger. I support the constitutional amendment to prohibit the physical desecration of the American flag. [I will] curb the gratuitous violence in the media that is desensitizing our culture to violence. Bearing arms is a constitutionally protected right."

How could liberal voters support Kerry-McCain knowing that a pro-life, flag-burning-obsessed, pro-censorship gun nut was a heartbeat away from the big leather chair? Why should anyone trust a candidate or a party so uncertain about their principles that they`re willing to sell them out for a short-term jump in the polls? Kerry should thank McCain for turning him down; in doing so a Republican may just have rescued the Democratic Party from suicidal oblivion.

Both parties, and Democrats in particular, are in trouble. The last few decades have witnessed a rise in ideological blurring. Aping the Republicans has made the Democratic Party less appealing to increasingly apathetic liberals. This has occurred during a period of unprecedented polarization, when swing voters have all but vanished. As I prescribe in my book "Wake Up, You`re Liberal!: How We Can Take American Back From the Right," the key to Democratic success this fall is motivating the long-neglected left-wing base. That means stronger, not weaker, party identification. Democratic Congressmen who vote along with the Republicans should be thrown out of the party. Democrats must act like Democrats. And you don`t do that by nominating, or running with, Republicans.

(Ted Rall is the author of "Wake Up, You`re Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right," out this week. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2004 TED RALL

RALL 6/15/04

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Saudi Arabia Did Not Directly Finance 9/11, Panel Says

By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A16

The Saudi government may have "turned a blind eye" to charities that funded al Qaeda but was not directly involved in financing the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to findings released yesterday by the Sept. 11 commission.

"Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding, but we found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded al Qaeda," the report concluded.

Al Qaeda nevertheless found "fertile fundraising ground in the Kingdom," where religious extremism flourishes and charitable giving is considered an obligation.

The panel`s conclusions about the Saudi government reflect views shared among law enforcement, intelligence agencies and many independent terrorism experts.

"The fact is we don`t support terrorism, and eventually the truth will come out," said Adel Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah.

Dennis Lormel, who until the end of last year led the FBI`s terrorist finance investigations, said that "clearly they could have done a lot more a lot sooner to stem the flow of financing, but we never were able to link the government to anything." Government officials, he said, "are one step removed."

The Saudi minister of Islamic affairs has been the titular head of global charities accused of financing al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, and there have been various claims that members of the royal family had funded such groups.

"Most of the major charities are sponsored and overseen by [interior minister Prince] Nayef," said David Aufhauser, who until recently oversaw probes of terrorism financing at the U.S. Treasury.

The Saudi government has clamped down on violent extremists since al Qaeda began launching attacks there in May 2003. This month, the government announced that it would dismantle all global charitable organizations and place their operations under a commission named by the government.

The Sept. 11 commission said it found no credible evidence to support claims that hijackers based in San Diego received funds from two Saudi citizens there, Omar al Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, who befriended two of the hijackers, or that Princess Haifa Faisal, wife of Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, "provided any funds to the conspiracy either directly or indirectly."

"It destroys the myth about Princess Haifa giving money to the hijackers and Bassnan and Bayoumi giving money to the hijackers," Jubeir said.

One passage in the new report did generate skepticism. The staff said "no persuasive evidence exists" that al Qaeda "funded itself through trafficking in diamonds from African states engaged in civil wars," a view promoted by the CIA but discounted by others.

In March, U.S. Gen. Charles Wald, deputy commander of the European Central Command, talked about "blood diamonds," saying al Qaeda "has been interested in that as a funding source -- no doubt about it; so has Hezbollah, in a huge way."

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) has pressed the FBI to do more to investigate al Qaeda and diamonds in Africa. Yesterday, Wolf said, he directed his staff to ask the commission to "call the FBI team that went over to the region to make sure they had all information that was available."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Ist das das Ende der Spekulationen über McCain als Vize bei Kerry?

washingtonpost.com

McCain, Bush Begin to Mend Ties
Senator Wooed by Kerry but Will Appear With Former Rival

By Dan Balz and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A07

After being courted by John F. Kerry to consider joining the Democratic presidential ticket, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will join President Bush on Air Force One on Friday and introduce him at a campaign event in Reno, Nev., campaign officials said yesterday.

Bush and McCain have had a frosty relationship ever since competing for the Republican nomination in 2000, and Bush aides have fumed at McCain`s occasional barbs in televised interviews during which he was asked repeatedly about the vice presidency. McCain`s trip with Bush grew out of a meeting this spring between White House senior adviser Karl Rove and John Weaver, a top adviser to McCain, who became a Democratic consultant after the bitter campaign between Bush and McCain.

Rove and Weaver, who both were GOP strategists in Texas, had a well-publicized falling-out in the late 1980s and have been rivals ever since -- a relationship that was strained further by the 2000 campaign. Weaver described Rove as "gracious" and said the two had "a very honest and very frank discussion and let`s just leave it at that."

The meeting represented the beginning of a rapprochement between the two men and in a symbolic sense between the Bush and McCain camps. "There had to be a breaking of the ice and a breaking of the logjam," said one source familiar with the meeting. "What better way for that to occur than to have the two main antagonists in the drama doing it?"

The Bush team`s outreach to McCain occurred at the same time Kerry was trying to entice the Arizonan to join him on what some Democrats fantasized could be a unity ticket that could attract moderate Republicans. McCain said yesterday on NBC`s "Today" show that Kerry had never formally offered him the job, but he did not dispute that they had discussed it. "I would concede that Senator Kerry and I have had numerous conversations, ranging from his overall well-being and other aspects," McCain said. "But for me to say that we have talked about a specific issue, I just don`t think it`s appropriate. And I promise you I will not be vice president of the United States."

McCain will join Bush on Friday morning in a hangar at Fort Lewis, Wash., where the president will discuss transformation of the military. McCain then will introduce the president at a rally in the Reno-Sparks Convention Center.

The Bush-Cheney campaign would not discuss the behind-the-scenes drama for the record. An administration official said the joint appearance had been scheduled for at least a few days. Campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said: "Senator McCain is a respected leader in our party. . . . We are grateful that he will be joining President Bush on Friday to talk about why it`s important for President Bush to be reelected for four more years."

McCain is Arizona co-chairman of Bush`s campaign, along with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Welch eine Perversion beim Verschwenden von Geldmitteln für den Wahlkampf.
Dafür gibt es dann auf beiden Seiten unsäglich dämliche Fersehspots.

washingtonpost.com

Kerry Breaks Bush Record For Pace of Fundraising

By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A01

Since locking up the Democratic nomination on March 2, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has raised more than $100 million, or over $1 million a day -- a pace breaking all presidential campaign records, including those set by President Bush.

The Kerry campaign announced the figures yesterday, before filing with the Federal Election Commission later this week. The disclosure shows that Kerry led Bush in fundraising from March through May almost 2 to 1: $100.4 million to Bush`s $55.2 million. In May alone, Kerry raised $26 million compared with $13.2 million by Bush, according to calculations by CNN that Bush officials described as accurate.

Throughout the campaign, however, Bush has outraised Kerry by an estimated $214 million to $145 million, according to FEC records and data released by the Kerry campaign.

Later this week, the Bush and Kerry campaigns will file complete, detailed reports of fundraising and spending for the month of May.

Kerry`s success has turned on its head what had been an almost universally accepted political axiom: that a Democratic presidential candidate cannot compete with a Republican in the race for cash.

Together, the Kerry and Bush campaigns are on track to raise a total of more than $400 million by the end of the summer in a demonstration that the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law has not constrained presidential spending.

Instead, the law encouraged both candidates to reject spending limits and public subsidies because individual contribution limits were raised from $1,000 to $2,000.

The single largest source of money for Kerry was the Internet, according to his campaign. It produced $44 million from March through May, compared with the $31 million raised through direct mail and phone solicitations, and $25 million from high-dollar events and major donor solicitations.

"When John Kerry essentially secured the Democratic nomination on Super Tuesday, the Bush campaign immediately launched a negative attack campaign, declaring that within 90 days they would `bury` our campaign," Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement. "I`m happy to report that 90 days later, they failed."

In a second display of fundraising prowess, the Democratic National Committee released the names of 17 "Trustees" who have collected at least $250,000 for the party, and 171 "Patriots" who have raised at least $100,000.

Kerry`s fundraising achievements in recent months pose a long-range question for his party and for future Democratic candidates:

Does the flow of cash signal a source of money for the future, or is it the momentary result of the intense animosity toward President Bush among Democratic activists?

Many Democrats have privately given Bush most of the credit for the surge in Democratic cash, but yesterday Democrats argued that the gains may be permanent.

DNC Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe contended that Kerry and the party are building a "sustainable" fundraising base, while acknowledging the importance of the backlash to Bush`s policies: "This is a perfect storm for fundraising, a visceral dislike of George Bush`s policies, a great nominee, and a unified and energized party."

Kerry treasurer Bob Farmer was optimistic about Democratic prospects, saying: "What has happened is the little guy has been empowered, and I think they like it. The Internet gives them a piece of the action."

Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, an independent group promoting the Democratic Party in Hispanic communities, said the gains are "long-lasting and momentary."

"It`s reacting to the moment, the view that Bush is not just a bad president but a threat to our values," he said, adding that "there is a whole generation of people who have become politically active, our system has been reinvigorated."

Bush-Cheney `04 spokesman Scott Stanzel did not address the question of whether the Kerry fundraising signals sustained Democratic fundraising success. But he said that "we have always indicated we will be outspent by the Democratic nominee and the liberal soft-money groups."

In fact, when money raised by the parties, the two presidential candidates and by "soft money" committees known as "527s" is added, the total on the Republican side is $574 million and on the Democratic side $421 million, a $153 million GOP advantage.

Many of the DNC`s Patriots and Trustees have already raised large sums for the Kerry campaign. Some of the new names include former vice president Al Gore and Washington lobbyists Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. and R. Scott Pastrick, who have achieved Patriot status.

Researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Retired Envoys, Commanders Assail Bush Team
Administration Unable to Handle `Global Leadership,` 27-Member Group Asserts

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A22

The Bush administration does not understand the world and remains unable to handle "in either style or substance" the responsibilities of global leadership, a group of 27 retired diplomats and military commanders charged yesterday.

"Our security has been weakened," the former ambassadors and four-star commanders said in a statement read to a crowded Washington news conference. "Never in the 2 1/4 centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted."

The statement fit onto a single page, but the sharp public criticism of President Bush was striking, coming from a bipartisan group of respected former officials united in anger about U.S. policy. The commentary emerges as public doubts about the Iraq invasion and Bush`s handling of national security have risen.

The new group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, believes Bush should be defeated in November if the United States hopes to rebuild its credibility and strengthen valuable foreign alliances.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, speaking later in the day to al-Jazeera, rejected the criticism as a political act. He said the signers, most of whom he knows personally, "made it clear what they wish to see -- they wish to see President Bush not reelected."

"I do not believe that will be the judgment of the American people," Powell added.

"I disagree that the United States is so isolated, as they say," he told the Qatar-based satellite television network. "I mean, the president has gone to the United Nations repeatedly in order to gain the support of the international community. We are in Iraq with many other nations that are contributing troops. Are we isolated from the Brits, from the Poles, from the Romanians, from the Bulgarians, from the Danes, from the Norwegians?"

Among the retired officials signing the statement were Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Ronald Reagan and U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James`s under President Bill Clinton, and Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, named by President George H.W. Bush to lead U.S. forces in the Middle East.

The participants also include a pair of former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, two former ambassadors to Israel, two former ambassadors to Pakistan and a former director of the CIA.

On a day when the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks said it found "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein worked with al Qaeda on any missions in the United States, the 27 signers accused the Bush administration of a "cynical campaign to persuade the public that Saddam Hussein was linked to al Qaeda and the attacks of Sept. 11."

The group said it did not coordinate its statement with the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), who shares many of its views. One signer, retired Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, former U.S. Air Force chief of staff, described himself as a Kerry adviser.

McPeak was the Oregon chairman of Republican Robert J. Dole`s presidential campaign in 1996, and he joined Veterans for Bush in 2000.

"This administration has gone away from me," McPeak told reporters at the National Press Club, "not vice versa."

The former officials said the administration "adopted an overbearing approach to America`s role in the world, relying on military might and righteousness, insensitive to the concerns of traditional friends and allies, and disdainful of the United Nations. . . . Motivated more by ideology than by reasoned analysis, it struck out on its own."

Charles W. Freeman Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, cited a "post-9/11 atmosphere of hysteria."

"I think we will in time come to be very ashamed of this period in history," Freeman said, "and of the role some people in the administration played in setting the tone and setting the rules."

Donald F. McHenry, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, answered a question about U.S. public diplomacy, a topic of special Bush administration focus, especially in the Muslim world.

"You can embark on all the public diplomacy you wish, but if there is no substance to the policy, it`s very difficult to sell," he said.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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An Iraq Sideshow



Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A28

IN A PAIR of interim staff reports, the Sept. 11 commission yesterday gave the fullest and most detailed report on the planning of the attacks that the American public has received to date. Yet showing a peculiar instinct for the capillaries rather than the jugular, part of the public debate immediately focused on a single passing point that is no kind of revelation at all: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." Administration foes seized on this sentence to claim that Vice President Cheney has been lying, as recently as this week, about a purported relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The accusation is nearly as irresponsible as the Bush administration`s rhetoric has been.

The importance of the two new reports lies not in the clarification of any supposed Iraq link but in the new details that fill in and correct the state of the public`s knowledge of the attacks themselves. Osama bin Laden, we learn, has not actually financed al Qaeda himself and never received his famed $300 million inheritance; al Qaeda, rather, "relied primarily on a fundraising network developed over time." Sept. 11 was initially planned as an even more ambitious attack -- involving 10 planes and targets on both coasts. Osama bin Laden was directly involved in key aspects of planning and target selection. There was division within al Qaeda`s leadership as to whether the plan should go forward. And internal disagreement among the conspirators at times threatened its success. The reports offer the first substantive look at what key al Qaeda detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh have been telling their interrogators, and it sheds light as well on the likely role of accused conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. The commission, in short, is adding a good deal of new information to the discussion and usefully reprocessing existing data.

All of which makes the flap over Mr. Cheney`s statements a bit frustrating. The administration has not recently suggested that Iraq was behind Sept. 11. Nor, in fact, did the commission yesterday contradict what Mr. Cheney actually said -- and President Bush backed up -- earlier this week: that there were "long-established ties" between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein`s Iraq. Rather, the commission reported that a "senior Iraqi intelligence officer" met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1994 and that contacts continued after he relocated to Afghanistan. Captured al Qaeda operatives, the report notes, have "adamantly denied" a connection with Iraq, and the famed meeting in Prague between Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence operative appears never to have happened. Indeed, there is no evidence of operational support for the group by Iraq, the commission staff argues; al Qaeda`s requests apparently went unanswered. That said, the commission has not denied that there were contacts over a protracted period.

The trouble for the administration is that Mr. Cheney has not always been careful to distinguish between Iraqi ties to al Qaeda and supposed support for the attacks. Indeed, it was he who kept the Prague meeting story alive long after others in the government thought it discredited. His recent comments not only overstate what now appear to be rather tentative ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but they probably help to keep alive in the minds of many Americans a link between Iraq and the attacks that not even Mr. Cheney still alleges. If the U.S. intelligence community now believes that the relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein consisted of no more than what the commission reports, Mr. Cheney ought not be implying more.

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Official verdict: White House misled world over Saddam
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

17 June 2004

President George Bush,

1 May 2003

The liberation of Iraq removed... an ally of al-Qa`ida

Vice-President Cheney,

22 January 2004

There`s overwhelming evidence... of a connection between al-Qa`ida and Iraq

Donald Rumsfeld,

14 November 2002

Within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qa`ida

Condoleezza Rice,

17 September 2003

Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged

The Bush administration`s credibility was dealt a devastating blow yesterday when the commission investigating the attacks of 11 September said there was no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein`s regime had assisted al-Qa`ida - something repeatedly suggested by the President and his senior officials and held up as a reason for the invasion of Iraq.

A report by the independent commission said while there were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa`ida operatives in the 1990s, it appeared Osama bin Laden`s requests for a partnership were rebuffed. "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qa`ida co-operated on attacks against the United States," the commission said. It also discounted widespread claims that Mohamed Atta, the hijackers` ringleader, met an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague.

The report forced the Bush administration on to the defensive, as it appeared to undermine one of its key justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

While Mr Bush has been forced to admit there was no specific evidence to link Saddam to 11 September, his deputy, Dick Cheney, claimed on Monday that the former Iraqi leader was "a patron of terrorism [with] long-established ties with al-Qa`ida``.

Last autumn Mr Cheney referred to the disputed meeting between Atta and an Iraqi official in the Czech Republic.

Critics of the White House say there was a deliberate policy to manipulate public opinion and create an association between Saddam and the attacks on New York and Washington. If true, such a plan has certainly been successful: a poll taken last September by the Washington Post newspaper found 69 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam was involved in the 11 September attacks.

The Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry seized on the commission`s report last night. "The administration misled America and the administration reached too far," he told Michigan National Public Radio.

The commission`s report - issued at the start of its final two days of public hearings into the circumstances surrounding the attacks - confirmed that in the early Nineties al-Qa`ida and Saddam`s regime had made overtures to each other.

In 1994, for instance, Saddam had dispatched a senior intelligence official to Sudan to meet Bin Laden, making three visits before he finally met the al-Qa`ida leader.

Bin Laden requested help to procure weapons and establish training camps but Iraq did not respond, the report said. There were also reports of contact with Bin Laden once he moved to Afghanistan in 1996 but these "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship". It added: "Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qa`ida and Iraq." The commission`s report also revealed that the initial plan for the attack on the US - drawn up by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a senior al-Qa`ida operative who is now in US custody - envisioned a much broader assault, simultaneously targeting 10 different US cities on both the east and west coasts.

That expanded target list included the FBI headquarters in the plot was to have been the 10th plane - on which he which personally have flown. Rather than attacking a building, Mohammed would have killed all of the male passengers on board, before contacting media and landing at an airport where he would have released women and children. He then was to make a speech denouncing the US. That ambitious plan was rejected by Bin Laden, who gave his approval to a scaled-back mission involving four planes and costing as little as between $4-500,000. Mohammed had wanted to use more hijackers for those planes - 25 or 26, instead of 19. It said at least 10 other al-Qa`ida operatives who were initially due to participate in the attacks had been identified. They did not take part in the mission for a variety of reasons including visa problems and suspicions by airport officials in the US.

The report also revealed that the plot was riven by internal dissent, including over whether to target the White House or the Capitol building that were apparently not resolved prior to the attacks. Bin Laden also had to overcome opposition to attacking the US from Mullah Omar, leader of the former Taliban regime, who was under pressure from Pakistan to keep al-Qa`ida confined.

The commission confirmed that al-Qa`ida, though drastically changed and decentralised since 9-11, retained regional networks that were seeking to attack the US.

"Al-Qa`ida remains extremely interested in conducting chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attacks," said the report. It said that its ability to conduct an anthrax attack is one of the most immediate threats. The network may also try to attack a chemical plant or shipment of hazardous materials, or to use industrial chemicals as a weapon.

The report said the CIA estimated the network spent $30m a year before September 11 on training camps and terrorist operations. The money was also used to support the Taliban.


17 June 2004 12:40


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Oil official is assassinated as guerrillas blow up last Iraq pipeline
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad

17 June 2004

Insurgents stopped all oil exports from Iraq yesterday by blowing up the one remaining pipeline to the Gulf, and assassinated the head of security for Iraqi oilfields in the north.

A bomb blast early yesterday morning destroyed a pipeline in the desolate Fao peninsula south of Basra, where saboteurs had struck the previous day. Crude oil gushing from the broken pipe formed deep black ponds in the sand. All crude oil exports from terminals in Basra and Khor al-Amaya have been stopped.

The attacks show that anti-government guerrillas now have the skill and the organisation to cripple permanently Iraq`s oil exports. This will seriously damage the prospects of the new Iraqi interim government, which is badly in need of high oil revenues in order to restore the economy and create an army.

Three gunmen assassinated Ghazi Talabani, the top security official for the state-run Northern Oil Company, yesterday when his car stopped in a crowded market in Kirkuk. He was the third senior Iraqi official to be murdered since Saturday. The export pipeline from Iraq`s northern oilfields through Turkey to the Mediterranean was blown up on 25 May.

An escalation in bombings and assassinations was expected by the US before the so-called handover of power to an Iraqi interim government on 30 June. But the attacks on the oil industry and the electric power supply have been more sophisticated and effective than had been expected.

The international price of oil did not rise significantly after sabotage stopped Iraqi oil exports but this may change if, as appears likely, the saboteurs can sustain their attacks. Iraq had been hoping to raise its output to 2.5 million barrels a day in the near future.

Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi Prime Minister, is hoping to restore security by getting senior officers from the old Iraqi army, disbanded by the US last May, to reconstitute their units. This is very different from the American plan to allow carefully vetted officers and men from Saddam Hussein`s army to join a freshly raised military force on an individual basis. Iraqi officials estimate the cost of this new army will be between $3bn (£1.6bn) and $4bn.

The US may have difficulty, however, in stomaching an Iraqi military force consisting of the same military units that it triumphantly defeated 14 months ago. Officials here suspect that the US would prefer to create an army in Iraq which would be like Latin American security forces, easily influenced by Washington and independent of the civil government.

Although the US has said for a year that it is trying to build up an Iraqi army it has provided no budget for communications, ensuring that all messages will have to be passed through the US military forces.

The one piece of good news for the US in Iraq yesterday was that Muqtada Sadr, the radical Shia cleric, has ordered his militiamen to leave the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf. They have been fighting US troops there for over two months.

But even the defusing of the crisis with Sadr is a sign of how far the US has failed to achieve its political aims in Iraq. At the end of March, Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq, started a confrontation with Sadr, seeking to arrest him and close down his Army of Mehdi militia. A month later US commanders were saying they would "kill or capture him". In the event they have so far managed to do neither.

There is a growing sense of anarchy in Baghdad. Foreign contractors driving around in their distinctive four-wheel-drive vehicles are being regularly killed in the heart of the capital. When five foreigners were blown up on Monday, a crowd spontaneously danced around one of the charred bodies chanting: "America is the enemy of God."

Many Iraqis hope that the interim Iraqi government to which power is supposedly to be transferred on 30 June will be an improvement on the occupation. But the new government will depend on the US for armed force and, given the repeated sabotage of the oil pipelines, it will have to rely on American money as well.


17 June 2004 12:43

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Hier noch einmal die Zusammenfassung des Untersuchungsberichtes durch Spiegel-Online. Es biete sich förmlich an, darüber einen Spiegeltitel zu machen.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 17. Juni 2004, 10:29
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,304490,00.html

9/11-Kommission

"Das Mastermind sitzt längst in einem US-Gefängnis"

Von Marc Pitzke, New York

Die 9/11-Kommission hat minutiös rekonstruiert, wie die Terroranschläge des Jahres 2001 vorbereitet wurden. Neue Details zerstören Mythen und zeigen, wie das Weiße Haus versucht, aus den Anschlägen Kapital zu schlagen. Überraschende Erkenntnis: Bin Laden war nicht der große Planer, sondern eher stiller Teilhaber des Terrorkomplotts.

New York - Das Armageddon sollte schon im Jahr 2000 kommen, in Form eines weltweiten, simultanen Luftangriffs. Eine Flotte aus zehn Flugzeugen wollte das Terrornetzwerk al-Qaida auf Ziele in den USA stürzen lassen, darunter auch auf Atomkraftwerke. Exakt zur selben Minute sollten, in einer parallelen Horrorwelle, mehrere Jumbojets über dem Pazifik zur Explosion gebracht werden. Doch waren diese Pläne am Ende zu teuer und zu aufwendig, und so gaben sich die Komplizen mit einer "gestutzten Version" zufrieden, deren Abwicklung eine halbe Million Dollar kostete. Der Termin, mehrfach aufgeschoben, war schließlich reiner Zufall: 11. September 2001.

Der jüngste Bericht des amerikanischen Terror-Untersuchungsausschusses, der sich diesmal dem Ablauf der 9/11-Verschwörung widmet, liest sich wie das Drehbuch eines sensationellen Hollywood-Thrillers. Da ist alles mit dabei: Killer, Fanatiker, ein reicher Oberschurke, Geheimtreffen, konspirative Weltreisen, falsche Pässe, echte Geldtransfers, Missgeschicke, persönliche Streitigkeiten und eine verschlafene US-Regierung, unter deren Augen der Plot unaufhaltsam Gestalt annahm.

Doch leider ist die Geschichte wahr. Vom Washingtoner Ausschuss gestern erstmals in fast minutiöser Dramatik enthüllt, offenbart sie, zu welchen Albtraum-Szenarien Osama Bin Ladens Terrortruppen in der Lage sind - und wie das Weiße Haus daraus eiskalt Kapital zu schlagen versucht hat. Ein Ende ist nicht abzusehen: "Al-Qaida bleibt extrem interessiert daran, chemische, biologische, radiologische oder atomare Angriffe zu führen", warnt das Gremium. Die atemberaubenden Details schockierten selbst regierungsnahe Ausschussmitglieder: "Wie in aller Welt können wir je erwarten, diesen Krieg zu gewinnen?", fragte der Republikaner James Thompson.

Die Zerstörung der 9/11-Mythen

Noch nie zuvor ist der Anschlagplan in solcher Akribie nachgezeichnet worden wie in diesem 20-seitigen Papier mit dem harmlosen Titel: "Staff Statement No. 16". Der Bericht ist das Ergebnis monatelanger Recherchen des Terror-Ausschusses, der hinter verschlossenen Türen bisher über 1100 Zeugen in zehn Ländern vernommen und mehr als zwei Millionen Akten ausgewertet hat. Die Informationen stammen meist aus Top-Secret-Dossiers von FBI, CIA, Außenministerium und Pentagon. Vieles beruft sich auf streng geheime Verhöre inhaftierter al-Qaida-Mitglieder - Aussagen, die ihnen, wie interne Regierungsmemos nahe legen, auch unter an Folter grenzendem Druck abgerungen wurden.

Mit schonungsloser Nüchternheit zerstörte der überparteiliche Ausschuss gestern so mehrere Mythen, die seit dem 11. September 2001 durch die Welt geistern und teils sogar, aus rein politischen Erwägungen, von US-Präsident George W. Bush bis heute propagiert werden.

Erstens: Das Datum der Attentate war keine bewusst symbolische Anspielung auf die US-Notrufnummer 911, sondern einfach nur das Ergebnis mehrfach geplatzter Anlaufversuche. Zweitens: Der vierte Anschlags-Jet, der über Pennsylvania niedergegangene American-Airlines-Flug 93, wurde nicht von der Luftwaffe abgeschossen, wie Gerüchte weiter behaupten.

Weltweite Simultan-Attacken

Drittens und politisch am folgenschwersten, da es die letzte noch verbliebene Rechtfertigung der US-Regierung für den Irak-Krieg zerstört: Saddam Hussein hatte weder mit 9/11 noch mit al-Qaida etwas zu tun. "Wir haben keine glaubhaften Beweise, dass der Irak und al-Qaida bei Angriffen auf die USA zusammengearbeitet hätten", erklärte die Kommission. Zwar habe Bin Laden einmal eine "mögliche Kooperation mit dem Irak" ausgelotet. Doch seien diese Kontakte schnell versandet. Damit widersprach der Ausschuss Bush, der noch tags zuvor von "besten Beweisen" für eine solche Connection geredet hatte.

Und selbst Bin Laden, Bushs Posterboy im Kampf gegen den Terrorismus und Ikone des islamistischen Terrors, war demzufolge zunächst eher ein stiller Finanzier und Hintermann. Die Ur-Idee für 9/11 kam dem eigentlichen Hauptdrahtzieher, Chalid Scheich Mohammed, schon lange bevor sie der al-Qaida-Chef absegnete. Der gebürtige Kuweiter ist ein Veteran des Dschihads; sein Neffe Ramsi Yussef inszenierte 1993 den ersten Anschlag auf das World Trade Center. Beide sitzen inzwischen in US-Haft.

Mohammed und Yussef planten bekanntlich 1994 eine erste Simultan-Attacke: Sie wollten zwölf Flugzeuge über dem Pazifik in die Luft jagen. Die so genannte "Bojinka"-Verschwörung flog 1995 auf; Yussef wurde geschnappt. Mohammed habe daraufhin einen neuen Plot geschmiedet: parallele Attacken auf Ziele an der Ost- und Westküste der USA, darunter die Zentralen von CIA und FBI und die höchsten Wolkenkratzer in Kalifornien und Washington. Insgesamt zehn Maschinen hätten dazu entführt werden sollen. Eine davon wollte Mohammed selbst steuern, allerdings nicht abstürzen lassen, sondern landen und dann vor den TV-Kameras eine Rede gegen die Nahost-Politik der Bush-Regierung halten.

Mehrere Termine verstrichen

Mitte 1996 traf sich Mohammed in Afghanistan mit Bin Laden, den er nur flüchtig kannte, von einer früheren Begegnung in den achtziger Jahren. Bin Laden habe auf Mohammeds Anschlagsplan jedoch "nur lauwarm" reagiert; er sei dem al-Qaida-Führer zu groß und komplex gewesen.

Erst Anfang 1999 habe Bin Laden ein reduziertes Szenario mit vier Flugzeugen bewilligt. Doch auch damit stieß Mohammed auf Probleme: Zwei der Mittäter schafften es nicht, US-Visa zu bekommen. Deshalb habe Mohammed seinen "Bojinka"-Plot wiederbelebt, als zweite, internationale Angriffsachse des Unternehmens: Dafür hätten die Entführer keine US-Einreisegenehmigung gebraucht. Doch Bin Laden habe auch das gestrichen, weil zeitgleiche Anschläge an entgegengesetzten Ecken der Welt logistisch zu schwierig gewesen seien.

Eigentlich sollte das Komplott auch schon viel früher zum Vollzug kommen - als Rache für den umstrittenen Besuch des israelischen Oppositionsführers Ariel Scharon auf dem heiligen Tempelberg im September 2000. Als erstes Wunschdatum habe Bin Laden danach den 12. Mai 2001 bestimmt, sieben Monate nach dem al-Qaida-Anschlag auf den US-Zerstörer "U.S.S. Cole" im Jemen. Doch die Entführer und ihr Chefstratege Mohammed Atta seien nicht einsatzbereit gewesen. Auch ein zweiter und ein dritter Termin im selben Sommer sei aus demselben Grund verstrichen.

Flugtickets aus dem Internet

Das tatsächliche Datum, der 11. September 2001, sei erst drei Wochen vorher festgesetzt worden, in einem Telefonat zwischen Atta und seinem Mitverschwörer Ramsi Binalshibh, dem Logistik-Koordinator des ganzen Vorhabens.

Und auch dazu wäre es fast nicht gekommen. Am 9. September 2001 raste al-Qaida-Mann Ziad Jarrah, auf dem Weg zum Treffpunkt der Entführer, in eine mitternächtliche Radarfalle in New Jersey. Die Cops ließen ihn weiterfahren. Zwei weitere Terroristen hatten zuvor ähnliche Knöllchen bekommen. Ein anderer baute einen Unfall auf Manhattans George-Washington-Bridge. In keinem Fall identifizierten die Beamten die Raser als Terroristen.

Monatelang bereiteten die al-Qaida-Terroristen ihre Tat vor, ohne dass die Behörden etwas davon mitbekommen. Sie flogen kreuz und quer durchs Land, stemmten sich in Sportstudios stark, absolvierten Pilotenschulen, trainierten sogar in offiziellen Flugsimulatoren. Sie ließen sich den "Hudson-Korridor" zeigen, jene Passage, die an Manhattan entlang zum Trade Center führt. Sie kauften Messer, Scheren, aeronautische Karten und ein Satelliten-Positioniersystem. Ihre Tickets erwarben sie im Internet, knapp zwei Wochen vor dem Flugtermin, als die Preise am billigsten waren. Das Restgeld überwiesen sie artig zurück auf die al-Qaida-Tarnkonten.

500.000 Dollar Terror-Spesen

Insgesamt schätzt der Ausschuss die Kosten der 9/11-Verschwörung für al-Qaida auf 400.000 bis 500.000 Dollar. Allein 270.000 Dollar davon seien für die Vorbereitungen in den USA draufgegangen, der Rest für Pässe und Visa, Reisen außerhalb der USA und "Spesen der Anführer". Das Geld sei unauffällig über Konten bei Groß- und Regionalbanken umgewälzt worden. So ahnungslos waren die Behörden, so sicher fühlten sich die Entführer, dass sie diese Konten unter ihrem eigenen Namen eröffnet und ihre zentral in Washington gespeicherten US-Sozialversicherungsnummern angegeben hätten.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures
Informers` accounts were not properly vetted and electronic data were misread, officials say.
By Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writer

June 17, 2004

WASHINGTON — A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq, whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein`s illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.

The CIA`s reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain`s MI6 in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein`s inner circle, is the latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.

U.S. experts, for example, still have not been able to determine the meaning of three secretly taped conversations that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell played to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 in making the case for war. Investigators have been unable to identify who was speaking on the tapes or precisely what they were talking about.

U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.

"We inspected a lot of chicken farms," said a former inspector who asked not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N. team printed "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team" on 20 gray T-shirts to mark the futile hunt.

The problems the U.S. experienced in gathering and analyzing intelligence mirrored difficulties experienced by other Western intelligence agencies. Investigations of intelligence agencies in at least four countries have found the misjudgments of Iraq`s weapons were founded on circumstantial evidence, unverified secondhand accounts, false assumptions, old intelligence and shoddy tradecraft.

Senate Report Due

In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to issue a verdict on what most experts describe as a sweeping intelligence failure by U.S. agencies.

Officials said the committee`s still-secret report, based on interviews with 200 intelligence analysts and officials, details major mistakes and misjudgments in collection and analysis by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon`s Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Officials portray the 400-page report as an unparalleled effort to gauge how America`s $40-billion-a-year intelligence system performed against a critical target during the Clinton and Bush administrations, including the post-Hussein period.

"We can see what worked and what didn`t," said a senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report remains classified. "Mostly, it didn`t."

Officials said the report criticizes the Pentagon`s creation of an independent intelligence "cell" called the Office of Special Plans to review raw intelligence about Baghdad`s alleged ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, and to funnel its analysis to the White House without going through normal channels.

It also reviews the CIA`s insistence before the war that Iraq`s attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes — using websites and faxes — was proof that Iraq was seeking to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Evidence found since the war confirms that, as Iraqi officials had insisted, the tubes were designed for conventional artillery rockets.

The CIA and the committee are negotiating how much of the report to release to the public.

But independent of the report, current and former intelligence officials, plus outside experts, have detailed extensive problems in accumulating and analyzing data.

Most important, they say, was the fact that the CIA was unable to recruit a spy in or close to Hussein`s inner circle before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The lack of access was especially glaring because U.S. intelligence had made Iraq a priority target since the 1980s.

"We had zilch in terms of direct sources," said David Kay, who led the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq last year as special advisor to CIA director George J. Tenet.

CIA leaders refused to accept Kay`s stark assessment when he returned from Iraq last December that most prewar assessments of Iraq`s weapons were wrong. Kay was assigned a tiny office far from the executive suites, without a working computer or secure telephone.

"I heard about meetings after the fact," Kay recalled. "It was like a bad novel."

After several weeks of isolation, Kay quit and went public with his concerns.

U.N. inspectors who scoured Iraq for four months before the war and U.S.-led teams who have investigated for the last 15 months have found no arsenals of poison gases or germ weapons and no resurgent nuclear program, contrary to CIA predictions.

The CIA`s record in Iraq was never strong. The agency not only failed to predict Hussein`s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, but then could not evacuate its operatives from Baghdad. Poland`s spy service ultimately got them out under cover of a Polish industrial project in Iraq, officials said.

Discredited Claims

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the CIA and other Western spy services infiltrated U.N. teams sent to disarm Iraq, and used the cover to spy on the regime. MI6, in particular, recruited low-level informants from Iraq`s military, intelligence, security service and secret police.

"All were given code names starting with `black,` as in `Black Star` and `Black Horse,` " recalled Scott Ritter, who served as the U.N. inspectors` liaison to intelligence agencies. "They were very good. We could send questions in. They had real access."

Some of the MI6 informants came from the Iraqi National Accord, a London-based exile group run by Iyad Allawi, now Iraq`s interim prime minister. In 1995, the CIA station chief in London took over the INA account from British intelligence. And in June 1996, the CIA backed an attempted INA coup in Baghdad that ended in mass arrests and executions.

Most remaining Western spying networks and collection efforts were crippled in December 1998, when U.N. teams were ordered out of Iraq. At that point, the CIA and other groups increasingly turned to defectors presented by Ahmad Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress, another London-based exile group that was working to overthrow the Baghdad regime.

A stream of defectors were debriefed at safe houses outside London, a German castle east of Berlin, a Thai resort south of Bangkok, a Dutch government office in The Hague and elsewhere.



The Times first reported in March that an INC defector code-named "Curveball," who defected to Germany after 1998, was the chief source of now-discredited claims by the Bush administration that Iraq had modified trucks and railway cars to produce lethal germ agents.

Classified CIA reports after 2000 similarly cited details about Iraq`s supposed germ weapons factories from another defector, codenamed "Red River." His account, which previously has not been disclosed, is also now viewed as inaccurate and possibly fabricated, intelligence officials said.

Information from other defectors turned out to be equally inaccurate.

Gary Dillion, who headed the Iraq action team at the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to 1999, interviewed about six Iraqi defectors who had been vetted by U.S., British or other intelligence authorities. All insisted that Iraq was secretly rebuilding a nuclear weapons program.

"In no instance did we get anything that was credible," Dillion said. "There were some very wild stories. One gentleman told me that Saddam was hiding thin sheets of plutonium under … the roof of a mosque."

Political `Hangers-On`

Help seemed to arrive in late 2002, as the Bush administration prepared for war, when MI6 recruited two Iraqi spies in Baghdad and gave them specially encrypted satellite phones to protect secret communications, officials said. In a Feb. 5 speech at Georgetown University defending the CIA`s prewar performance, Tenet paid tribute to the two spies, who he said had been "characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable."

The first source, Tenet said, had "direct access to Saddam and his inner circle." According to Tenet, the source said that the Baghdad regime "was aggressively and covertly developing" a nuclear weapon and "stockpiling chemical weapons," and that equipment to produce pesticides "had been diverted to chemical weapons production."

The second source, Tenet said, had "access to senior Iraqi officials" and "believed" that Iraq was producing chemical and biological weapons and had "an elaborate plan" to deceive U.N. weapons inspectors. "Now, did this information make any difference in my thinking? You bet it did," Tenet said.

The reports "solidified and reinforced" the CIA`s earlier judgments about the growing danger from Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction, he said. "I conveyed this view to our nation`s leaders," he added.

Tenet, however, did not disclose in the Georgetown speech that both spies are now viewed as highly suspect and that no evidence has been found to support their major claims.

"It`s all fallen apart," said a former CIA official, who asked not to be identified because the case remains classified. "Neither one had direct knowledge. They were describing what they had heard. They claimed to have knowledge, but they didn`t. They were hangers-on in the corridors of power, not insiders."

A senior CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it is "unresolved at this point as to whether their information was true."

The CIA official said the two spies may have "believed things that might well not have been true. The question" is whether other Iraqi officials were attempting to deceive the spies, or to mislead Washington in hopes of deterring a U.S. attack.

The official confirmed that the CIA never interviewed either spy, although agency operatives were listening when one was debriefed outside Iraq.

"We knew for a fact that`s what he was saying," said a senior U.S. official. "The other guy was reported to us by a reliable foreign service. We had to take their word for it."

High-Tech Intelligence

America`s high-tech collection of communications intelligence and imagery from satellites and sensors is also under fire.

Experts say the NSA`s powerful eavesdropping equipment netted hints of illicit activities in intercepted e-mails, telephone calls and military messages. In many cases, however, intelligence analysts were unable to identify who was talking to whom, or even about what, according to officials.

Powell played three such tapes to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. He said all were recent electronic intercepts of officers or commanders of Iraq`s elite Republican Guard. Citing U.S. intelligence analysis, he argued that they proved Iraq`s army was hiding banned weapons.

"We tried to figure those out and never got anywhere," Kay, the former head of U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq, said of the tapes. "We really had no idea who it was, or the location. All we knew is someone was hiding something somewhere and saying, `Don`t talk about it.` "



Corruption under Hussein`s rule added to the challenge of unraveling Iraqi subterfuge. The regime`s efforts to circumvent U.N. trade sanctions spawned such rampant smuggling and corruption that normal commercial transactions and government dealings often were conducted under a cloak of secrecy and suspicion.

Other frustrating intelligence came from the constellation of U.S. spy satellites and other high-altitude surveillance systems.

Between March and May 2002, for example, senior CIA officials paid close attention to a stream of photos of heavily guarded truck convoys in Iraq`s western desert, officials said. Similar trucks had hauled chemical weapons in the 1980s. But the orbiting satellites couldn`t track the convoys, and their cargo and destination were never identified.

Other pictures, from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, also caused concern. Before the war, U.S. photo analysts repeatedly spotted what they thought were "Samarra" trucks, Japanese-built vehicles used to decontaminate people or equipment from chemical exposure. They said the trucks were a clear "signature" that chemical weapons were produced or stored nearby.

But U.N. and, later, U.S. weapons hunters who searched the suspect sites never found a Samarra truck. They instead found water tankers and other fire suppression vehicles.

"It`s scandalous," said Sharon Squassoni, an intelligence expert at the Congressional Research Service. "The satellite analysts couldn`t tell the trucks were red."

Foreign Complications

The CIA`s reliance on foreign spy services was problematic on several fronts. In recent months, parliamentary inquiries in Britain, Australia, Denmark and Israel have publicly identified problems similar to those that beset the CIA.

The reports show the spy services all relied on sketchy, speculative evidence and, in some cases, exaggerated or misrepresented their findings. They thus reinforced collective misjudgments.

In Israel, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee concluded in March that the Mossad intelligence agency and Israeli military intelligence "magnified" the Iraqi threat as the war approached. Over a period of months, official estimates of the number of Iraqi ballistic missiles able to hit Israel inexplicably surged "from several to tens" and finally to between 50 and 100.

The Knesset committee blamed, in part, Israel`s exchange of secrets with other spy services, "particularly with those of the U.S., with whom the cooperation very much tightened as the war approached."

The result "was a vicious cycle of sorts, in the form of reciprocal feedback that at times was more damaging than beneficial," the committee found. In some cases, unconfirmed data were passed to Washington, then relayed back in another form, creating the impression of "validation by a reliable source."

Layers of secrecy within the CIA compounded the problem.

"We have found cases in which a single source has different source descriptions, increasing the potential for an analyst to believe [there was] a corroborating source," Jami A. Miscik, deputy director of intelligence, said in a speech to CIA analysts in February.

In other cases, analysts weren`t told that information came from secondary sources "about whom we know little," Miscik said.

Several mysteries remain concerning the prewar intelligence.

Still unexplained is Britain`s claim, cited by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, that Baghdad recently had sought to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. Some experts speculate that British intelligence misinterpreted or misrepresented Iraq`s rejection of an unsolicited and perhaps bogus offer. U.S. officials said a document found in the basement of Iraq`s intelligence headquarters, for example, showed Baghdad had received a similar offer for uranium, cobalt and other minerals from a Congolese businessman in Nairobi, Kenya. A note attached to the document shows that an Iraqi official declined the deal.

David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector, said Iraqi officials told him they received numerous such offers in the late 1990s.

"They said not a week goes by when they don`t get an offer for nuclear weapons, uranium, red mercury, or something," he said. "Everything was sent back to Baghdad, where the general policy was to turn it down. It could be fundamentalists, it could be a scam, it could be an intelligence dangle. They didn`t turn everything down. But their general reaction was, `Forget it.` "


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Der Einsatz von privaten Verhörspezialisten bei Gefangenen bleibt erlaubt und die Bereicherung bei Rüstung und anderen Geschäften im Umfeld des Krieges ist weiterhin erlaubt und im Sinne einer effektiven kriegsführung.

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Senators Split on Party Lines in Vote on Iraq-Related Issues
By Richard Simon
Times Staff Writer

June 17, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday rejected a move, prompted by the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, to prohibit the use of private contractors in the interrogation of detainees.

The measure, one of the first legislative responses to the abuses at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, was rejected by the Republican-controlled chamber on a largely party-line vote of 54 to 43.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that the measure — which would have required the Pentagon to replace civilian interrogators with military personnel within 90 days — could cripple intelligence-gathering amid the conflict.

The Senate also overwhelmingly approved a Republican-drafted measure that would strengthen federal anti-fraud laws but defeated, again mostly along party lines, a stronger Democratic-sponsored amendment designed to crack down on war profiteering. That vote was 46 in favor of the amendment and 52 against.

"Nobody wants to use the word `Halliburton` around here," complained Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), referring to the company once led by Vice President Dick Cheney that has come under fire for allegedly overcharging the government for its work in Iraq.

Leahy proposed making war profiteering a crime, subjecting violators to prison sentences of 20 years and fines of up to $1 million. But the GOP majority again followed the lead of Warner, who argued that the measure was so vague it could discourage businesses from seeking military contracts and hurt the war effort.

Senators from both parties came together on another measure — reaffirming the nation`s opposition to torture or other inhumane treatment of prisoners, such as that depicted in the photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. The Defense secretary would be required to issue guidelines ensuring that troops comply with anti-torture standards.

The votes came as the Senate moved toward approval of a bill that would authorize $447 billion for the Pentagon for the 2005 fiscal year, including $25 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, the Senate will consider a measure to increase the size of the Army by 20,000 troops, at an annual cost of $1.7 billion.

The proposal to prohibit contractors from serving as interrogators was sponsored by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who reminded his colleagues of the international furor over prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

"Don`t you understand how much trouble our country`s in?" he asked them.

The role of military contractors in the scandal is under investigation. Eight Iraqis last week filed a lawsuit accusing contractors of abusing them in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq. A report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba recommended disciplinary action against two civilian contractors who dealt with Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib and identified a civilian interpreter as a possible criminal suspect.

Dodd argued that contractors serving as interrogators have operated with minimal supervision and said it was unclear whether any who might have mistreated prisoners could be prosecuted.

Warner argued that it would be difficult to find experienced military replacements for the contractors, many of whom are former military officers. Dodd`s measure called for replacing contractors serving as interrogators with military personnel within 90 days after the defense bill is signed into law and replacing contractors serving as interpreters within one year.

Dodd disputed that his proposal would harm intelligence-gathering, noting that more than 500 military interrogators are about to graduate from the Army Intelligence Center at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz.

But Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), also speaking out against the measure, said: "We may need the very best interrogator in the United States of America who has the ability to [obtain] information that can save thousands of lives…. A young MP who is just out of training school [would] not be as good as an interrogator who is a retired MP who`s worked in the detective division of the New York Police Department, or a retired CIA agent."

California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats, supported Dodd`s measure as well as Leahy`s proposal.

Despite the measure`s defeat, at least one Republican, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina, indicated that there might be support for replacing contractors serving as interrogators with military personnel over time.

Although Graham said he voted against the measure, he told Dodd: "It bothers me greatly that our interrogation systems are being outsourced. We don`t know who is interrogating these people in prison … and who they answer to."

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

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NEWS ANALYSIS
Rebuke of Bush Underscores Foreign Policy Clash
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer

June 17, 2004

WASHINGTON — The call for President Bush`s defeat in a statement released Wednesday by a group of former diplomats and military officials highlighted the stark divide that has opened among foreign policy experts over the administration`s national security strategy.

Although some of the 27 members of Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change are identified most closely with Democratic administrations, almost all served presidents of both parties — either as ambassadors, executive branch officials or military officers.

In that way, the group`s formation symbolizes how Bush`s search for new approaches to safeguard America has triggered a backlash among the centrist foreign policy establishment.

It also indicates that the debate over Bush`s direction could provoke the sharpest realignment of loyalties on foreign affairs since the emergence of neoconservative thinkers roughly 30 years ago.

"The statement suggests how much certain parts of Bush`s foreign policy do mark a break with the establishment," said Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a leading conservative theorist. "The simplest way to put it is that Bush thinks 9/11 was a fundamental break and we needed a new doctrine after that, and the foreign policy establishment doesn`t believe that."

Indeed, a central critique by the group is that Bush abandoned alliance-based strategies that had provided the foundation of U.S. security since World War II.

"Today, we see that structure crumbling under an administration blinded by ideology and a callous indifference to the realities of the world around it," said Phyllis Oakley, a former State Department official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations and a group member.

The group`s criticisms largely track those leveled against Bush in the last year by other career national security officials. These include former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke; retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command; and a large number of retired diplomats who released a statement last month criticizing Bush`s Middle East policy.

Wednesday`s statement also echoed the dissent over Bush`s policy by Sens. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), some of the last embodiments of the "internationalist" wing of the GOP that prizes cooperation with other nations.

Yet Bush`s insistence that old strategies, such as emphasizing deterrence of threats rather than preemptive action against them, are inadequate to meet the new challenges of terrorism has drawn support from some traditionally left-leaning voices, such as Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

Also, former Clinton national security aide Ivo H. Daalder has argued that internationalists such as the diplomats and military officers` group may be overestimating the degree to which the U.S. can rely on international institutions like the United Nations to pursue its goals.

The result of these tremors may be the most turbulence in the foreign policy landscape since the late 1970s, when a flight of hawkish Democratic thinkers known as neoconservatives migrated to the GOP in reaction to the dovish post-Vietnam foreign policy embraced by most Democratic politicians.

"I don`t know where it ends up, but clearly it is a very fluid moment like the late 1970s," Kristol said.

Those signing the sharply worded statement included Arthur A. Hartman, ambassador to the Soviet Union for President Reagan; and Jack F. Matlock, who assumed that post toward the end of Reagan`s second term and held it under President George H.W. Bush. Others were William Harrop, the elder Bush`s ambassador to Israel; retired Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff during the Persian Gulf War; retired Adm. William J. Crowe, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under Reagan; and Donald McHenry, the U.N. ambassador under President Carter.

The statement charged that the younger Bush had "weakened" American national security and left the U.S. more isolated in the world than at any other time by overemphasizing military force and shunning traditional allies. The group condemned the invasion of Iraq as "an ill-planned and costly war from which exit is uncertain."

Although the statement did not explicitly endorse Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, it directly urged Bush`s defeat.

The Bush campaign disputed the group`s claim that it was bipartisan or nonpartisan. Campaign officials noted that at least 13 of the 27 signers had made political contributions to Democrats and that 11 endorsed Clinton in at least one of his presidential campaigns or Al Gore in 2000.

The group`s organizers acknowledged that some of its members were primarily identified with Democratic administrations. But they said that many members had supported Republicans and that it was inaccurate to portray the group as allied with either party.

Harrop and Oakley said they voted for Bush in 2000. At a news conference Wednesday, McPeak acknowledged that he had endorsed Kerry after earlier supporting former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in the Democratic race. But he said he served as the Oregon chairman for GOP nominee Bob Dole in 1996 and on a veterans committee for Bush in 2000.

"This administration has gone away from me, not vice versa," McPeak said.

The group`s membership is drawn almost entirely from career diplomatic and military officials who reflect the commitment to internationalism that mostly has held the upper hand in U.S. foreign policy since World War II. In that sense, the group`s statement might be best understood as a revolt of professionals who believe Bush has radically veered from the course set for decades by Republican and Democratic presidents.

"If we were on active duty," said Charles W. Freeman Jr., ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Bush`s father and a signer of the document, "this would be the equivalent of a mass resignation."

Bush allies agree that he has set a different course through an increased willingness to act without overt international sanction, to use the military more aggressively and to heighten efforts to encourage democracy in the Middle East. But they argue that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks demanded those changes.

"This is a group that shares John Kerry`s pre-Sept. 11 worldview and supports [his] … failed ideas for treating terrorism as a matter mainly for law enforcement and intelligence," said Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign.

In their statement, and more directly in interviews, the group`s members argue that the attacks did not justify Bush`s new directions, particularly his move toward greater unilateral action. "The fundamentals of protecting American citizens, of protecting our national security, [have] not changed," said Robert V. Keeley, ambassador to Greece under Reagan.

But some analysts who have criticized aspects of Bush`s decisions argue that the terrorism threat sharpened a divergence of interests between the U.S. and Europe that would make it difficult for any president to re-create the close alliances America enjoyed during the Cold War.

"With Sept. 11, the focus of American foreign policy has changed from Europe to the Middle East," said Mead, author of "Power, Terror, Peace and War," a new book largely sympathetic to Bush`s foreign policy. "That is going to cause a certain distancing of the U.S. and Europe in any case."

The question of how much America can rely on allies and how much it must act alone looms as a central issue in this year`s presidential campaign. Wednesday`s statement provides additional evidence that the question also is likely to endure as a key foreign policy debate long beyond November`s vote.

Times staff writer Mary Curtius contributed to this report.

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Der Krieg hat den Terror gefördert, den er vernichten sollte:
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There is "no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States," the new report states. In fact, prewar Iraq spurned Al Qaeda`s overtures. Though Zarqawi may be directing attacks against Americans in Iraq, and Baghdad may now be Terror Central, it is a consequence of the war itself.
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EDITORIAL
Knowledge Is Preemption

June 17, 2004

On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney declared that Saddam Hussein "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda." A day later, President Bush pointed to Islamic militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, who may be hiding in Fallouja. "Zarqawi`s the best evidence of a connection to Al Qaeda affiliates and Al Qaeda" in Iraq, he declared.

It`s hard to imagine that either Bush or Cheney had an inkling of what an interim staff report of the independent 9/11 commission would say Wednesday. There is "no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States," the new report states. In fact, prewar Iraq spurned Al Qaeda`s overtures. Though Zarqawi may be directing attacks against Americans in Iraq, and Baghdad may now be Terror Central, it is a consequence of the war itself.

On the other hand, the staff said, Al Qaeda probably forged ties early on with Hezbollah, the global terror group blamed for many of the attacks inside Israel. Those ties were not uncovered before 9/11. On the luckier side, a plan by the 9/11 terrorists for a much wider attack, involving 10 planes and other cities including Los Angeles, was scrapped by internal dissent and leadership doubts. Given that the Pentagon`s air defenses were almost nonexistent on Sept. 11, according to the staff, any number of planes might have reached their targets.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command are predictably trying to play down their ineffectiveness, and the commission had to issue subpoenas to officers of the FAA and the command to appear before the panel today. Fortunately, the commission shows no signs of being cowed. Similarly, the CIA is trying to shield itself from blame. The agency has decided that about one-third of the commission`s prospective final report should remain secret. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who heads the committee, should bluntly remind the CIA that it can edit out vital secrets but not embarrassment.

There are plenty of signs that Al Qaeda and its offshoots plan more violence against the U.S. The commission cites evidence that the terrorists are seeking nuclear, chemical and biological materials, a sort of gruesome twist on the shoddy prewar accusations that Iraq possessed such weapons and intended to use them against the U.S or furnish them to terrorists. As Bush himself declared in his State of the Union speech before the war: "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."



Despite the administration`s continued attempts to justify the war, it`s become increasingly obvious that Iraq was not intent on creating that day. Al Qaeda is. A full accounting from the commission and the Senate can`t single-handedly prevent such a disaster, but it can help avoid a repetition of dangerous errors.




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Firms face handover headaches
Transfer of power brings greater risk
- David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004

Days before Iraq retakes control of its own government, U.S. contractors rebuilding Iraq are watching a bad situation get worse.

The firms had hoped the June 30 handoff of sovereignty would not bring further risks to their work, already hampered by sabotage and direct attacks. Instead, the approach of the deadline has triggered an escalation of bloodshed as well as raising questions about the status of contractors after the transfer of power.

The latest federal data show that at least 85 U.S. contractors have died in Iraq since the spring of 2003. This week alone, at least eight reconstruction workers were killed.

In addition, no one knows whether contractors working in Iraq will be subject to U.S. or Iraqi law. It all adds up to an increasingly hazardous environment.

"You`re going to see an increase in random attacks against Westerners and Iraqis," said Kenneth Kurtz, chief executive of San Francisco`s Steele Foundation, a risk management firm that provides security for reconstruction teams in Iraq. "You`re going to see much more violent attacks against reconstruction participants."

Many view the recent spate of attacks on foreigners and their rebuilding projects as a concerted effort by insurgents to disrupt the transfer of power. "What we can expect is, there will be an increase of attacks on not just Westerners but key infrastructure sites," said Kurtz.

For companies trying to do business in Iraq`s unpredictable conditions, the questions outnumber the answers.

For example, what if the interim government, which will have -- at least in theory -- the power to send American troops home, asks contractors to leave?

"Like everyone else, we`re waiting to see how these changes play out," said Michael Kidder, spokesman for San Francisco`s Bechtel Corp., which has spent the last year repairing Iraq`s water, sewage and electrical systems.

Waiting is about all Bechtel and the other reconstruction companies can do. The answers to their questions lie well outside the companies` control, subject to the negotiations of governments.

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority that has run the country since last year`s invasion has asked the incoming government to let contractors such as Bechtel and Pasadena`s Parsons remain under U.S. law. The idea has received a chilly response from Iraqis.

"We certainly hope they agree on the conditions so we can continue working to rebuild the country," Kidder said.

And while no one expects Iraqi officials to send American contractors packing, the U.S. agency that hired Bechtel and other companies said it would bring them home if asked.

"If the host government asked us to leave -- asked USAID to leave -- we would leave, absolutely," said Portia Palmer, spokeswoman for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Despite Iraq`s violence and uncertainty, the companies don`t want to go. Perched atop the world`s second-largest oil reserves, Iraq may one day regain its former status as a major regional power, and the American companies at work there want to plug into its new government.

"We`re committed to a Middle Eastern business strategy, and if part of your business portfolio is in the Middle East, you can`t ignore Iraq," said Jack Herrmann, spokesman for the Washington Group International, which repairs electrical lines in the Sunni triangle north and west of Baghdad.

Most of the major reconstruction contracts won`t expire for at least another year. Bechtel`s runs through December 2005. And after a turbulent year of occupation, much work remains.

The money for most of the work comes from U.S. taxpayers, a fact that won`t change with the handover. Almost $3 billion from Iraqi oil sales and seized government assets has gone into reconstruction, although recent sabotage has cut petroleum exports. Just the same, the incoming government, which will take over the oil revenues, has agreed to honor existing reconstruction commitments as part of the United Nations resolution backing it.

The occupation authority, which issued many of the contracts, will dissolve at the end of the month. But its office dealing with reconstruction companies will remain, reporting both to the U.S. Army and new U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte. USAID will continue as before.

But the ground beneath reconstruction may shift. Contractors have not been subject to Iraq`s legal system under an immunity granted by the occupation authority. The occupation has asked the incoming government to continue that immunity, but the idea grates on Iraqis, who want as much control over their internal affairs as possible. No formal agreement has been announced.

"The contractors are going to be operating within a foreign land, a land that is not controlled by the U.S.," said Robert Nichols, an attorney with the law firm of Piper Rudnick, which advises several reconstruction companies.

Nichols said many wonder whether they will be asked to leave. If the Iraqi leadership asks American officials to pull the companies out, the reconstruction firms would have a right to recover any expenses already incurred, Nichols said, with the cash coming from the U.S. government. They also would be entitled to a reasonable profit on the work already done, he said.

Such a demand for a U.S. pullout won`t happen if Iraqi`s public works minister, Nasreen Barwari, has anything to say about it.

Her ministry is in charge of Iraq`s dilapidated water and sewer systems. Of its entire $250 million budget, about 40 percent has been earmarked for new construction or repairs, she said. America is spending roughly $4 billion on similar work in the country.

"The $4 billion allocated for those projects is the biggest budget I could receive," Barwari said. "We want these companies to stay."

Barwari hopes, however, that the handoff changes the relationship between the contractors and the Iraqis. She said she had had problems coordinating with Bechtel, which started working on the country`s water and sewer systems right after the U.S.-led invasion. With the Iraqi government in shambles, the company worked on its own -- and maintained that attitude after her ministry began functioning again, Barwari said.

"It was very difficult last year," she said. "I`m hoping after the transition it will be different."

Bechtel`s Kidder said the company`s work was coordinated with the occupation authority, which should have been consulting with the Iraqi ministries. In addition, the company also discusses its work directly with the Iraqis.

"From day one, Bechtel has always sought input from all the Iraqi ministers we`ve been working with," Kidder said.

E-mail David R. Baker at [e-mail].

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan
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Thursday, June 17, 2004

2 US Troops, Oil Official killed;
21 Wounded in Rocket Attack

Reuters reports a string of attacks and mayhem yet again on Wednesday, with the petroleum industry a special target.

Guerrillas attacked a U.S. base near Balad in the Sunni heartland on Wednesday with rockets, killing two US troops and wounding 21 other persons.

Assassins in Kirkuk killed Ghazi Talabani, 70, who worked as a senior adviser in the North Oil Company. He is a second cousin of Kurdish political leader Jalal Talabani. The thinking is that this assassination is part of a set that included two high government officials this past weekend, aimed by insurgents at punishing collaborators with the Americans. But it could also have been aimed at the oil industry.

Then, saboteurs blew another two holes in the southern oil pipeline to Basra, just in case the holes made by bombs on Monday could be fixed in a timely manner.

Guerrillas also detonated a bomb in Ramadi, destroying an Iraqi police vehicle and a civilian automobile transporting foreigners. At least 6 Iraqis are dead, and some foreigners were also probably killed or wounded.

posted by Juan @ 6/17/2004 07:36:44 AM

Muqtada Asks Militiamen to Leave Najaf
Creates Party for January Elections

Az-Zaman: Muqtada al-Sadr asked his supporters who had headed to Najaf to fight the Americans to now leave the city and return to their own cities only hours after US President George W. Bush announced that the United States does not oppose a political role for al-Sadr.

Meanwhile, Liz Sly of the Chicago Tribune reports from Iraq that Muqtada is pressing ahead with plans to turn his faction of the Sadrist movement into a political party to contest the January elections. Informed Iraqi observers believe that the party could do very well, especially now that the Americans have turned Muqtada into a symbol of national resistance to Western colonial control. Sly writes:


` Many Iraqi observers blame the U.S. administration`s mishandling of al-Sadr for his surge in popularity. The U.S. initially underestimated the appeal of al-Sadr`s radicalism to the impoverished Shiite masses and then enhanced it by turning him into an outlaw, said Saadoun Dulame, whose institute conducted one of the polls. "America created Muqtada Sadr with its mistakes and missteps," he said. "If elections are held tomorrow, Muqtada would win." `



Muqtada`s order to his militiamen is considered a powerful indication that the crisis between the Americans and him is coming to an end, with the US dropping demands that Muqtada present himself for trial on charges of complicity in the murder on April 10, 2003, of Shiite clergyman Abdul Majid al-Khoei. Some 745 members of the Civil Defense Force who had entered Najaf on Wednesday took up positions around the governor`s mansion and other strategic points in the city to prevent outbreaks of civil turmoil, according to a spokesman for Iraqi government security.

A communique issued by the office of al-Sadr in Najaf was addressed to "Every individual in the Army of the Mahdi, and the faithful who sacrificed so dearly and preciously, and did not fall short before their Lord or before their society." It asked that the militiamen "return to their provinces to undertake their responsibilities, and that which pleases God, his Prophet, and the Family of his House."

Muqtada had undertaken, in a letter dated 27 May, to have his militiamen leave the holy city of Najaf, a promise that led to the truce between him and the US forces (one that often did not hold initially, but which is being solidified with patience and cool heads.)

The office of Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a moderate cleric close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, had issued a statement that an agreement had been reached with the Sadrists on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning that would allow the police back into the city. Bahr al-Ulum`s spokesman, Ali al-Ghurayfi, said that the police would not only be allowed to return, but would have full authority, including the right to arrest anyone who commits a crime. (I.e. the Sadrists will not be able to use gang tactics and thuggery to prevent their own arrest in future if they commit a crime). He said that the "Shiite Establishment" (Bayt al-Shi`ah), which includes clerics, notables and tribal leaders around Najaf, had engaged in the successful negotiations.

What to make of all this? Muqtada has not really lost anything as compared to the situation before last April 3, when the American suddenly came after him. He did not control Najaf at that time, or the holy city of Karbala, either. His militia was strongest in the slums of East Baghdad. This is still true. The Americans killed perhaps 1500 of his best fighters, and captured or destroyed a lot of ordnance. But Muqtada has thousands of cadres, and they can be rearmed fairly easily (most have not really been disarmed). In the meantime, Muqtada was able to draw to himself the allegiance of a lot of Shiites, including armed fighters, who had not shown any loyalty to him before. I can only imagine that the militiamen in Kut and Amarah who fought for him included a lot of Marsh Arabs, most of whom had not been Sadrists in the past (they had their own Hizbullah organization). And his national standing has vastly improved, as even the Americans admit.

The Americans began with the Spanish in Najaf, and asked the Spanish to kill or capture Muqtada. The Spanish declined, and then withdrew from Iraq altogether (no doubt entertaining a suspicion that Bush was trying to get them killed). The Americans then declared that they were going to kill or capture Muqtada, which they failed to do because he went to ground in the shrine of Imam Ali, which the US could hardly blow up or storm for religious and political reasons.

Muqtada launched an insurgency to teach the Americans a lesson, and it certainly did. They lost control of the south, their supply and communications lines were cut, and they even lost control of most of the capital for a while. It must have been tense times in the Green Zone, with some wondering if the Tehran hostage crisis might be repeated, this time in Baghdad. Although the US military was able fairly easily to roll the ragtag ghetto militiamen back over time, it took a long time in some instances, and the US suffered many casualties, especially woundings.

The US foolishly took the Sadrists` bait and fought them in downtown Najaf and Karbala, the two holiest sites in Shiite Islam. The Shiite world was infuriated. 5000 demonstrated in Bahrain and brought down the Interior Minister. 150,000 demonstrated in Beirut, and many Lebanese Shiites that had begun to moderate their policies turned angry again. Hundreds demonstrated in Islamabad. The Friday prayer leader in Lucknow, India, declared Shiite historic cites off limits to American and British tourists, and now has announced that they Indian Shiites will ritually burn the American, British and Israeli flags.

So, whoever decided to go after Muqtada in such a clumsy and hamfisted way, and then to completely disregard Muslim religious sentiments by desecrating the tombs of the Prophet Muhammad`s son-in-law and martyred grandson--whoever made that decision managed to infuriate 130,000,000 Shiite Muslims at the United States. Since al-Qaeda is hyper-Sunni, the Shiites were potential friends and allies of the Americans. But Bush blew that for us, big time.

The episode has made all Americans less safe, and it contributed to a further destabilization of Iraq. And, while I am delighted that President Bush has openly attempted to draw Muqtada into civil, parliamentary politics, I have to say it would have been better if he had done that last March instead of trying to kill him first and failing. Now Bush just looks weak to all those Mahdi Army fighters.

I`d say the entire thing has to be seen as one of the biggest fiascoes in all of US military and diplomatic history.

posted by Juan @ 6/17/2004 06:45:42 AM

Someone Tell Cheney

The 9/11 commission says that there was no link between Iraq and September 11. Duh.

But someone tell Dick Cheney, please. He apparently doesn`t read the newspapers, either.

Anyone who followed September 11 knew that the money trail went back to Afghanistan via the UAE and Pakistan, and that not a dime could be traced to Iraq. Likewise there were hardly any Iraqi al-Qaeda-- a handful of scruffy Kurds (not in Saddam`s control anyway) and a few strays. Likewise no government official with a return address is crazy enough to be heavily involved in a massive attack on New York. That some shadowy contacts might have taken place between Iraqi security and some guys with al-Qaeda connections doesn`t prove anything. There were certainly CIA contacts with al-Qaeda over the years, too. And, the contacts alleged would have to be proven by good documentation now that we know the full extent of Ahmad Chalabi`s fabrications.

It`s over. Someone tell the National Review and the American Enterprise Institute, too. Or, wait. Let them go on looking silly.

posted by Juan @ 6/17/2004 06:42:54 AM

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Published on Thursday, June 17, 2004 by the Guardian/UK
Oil Chief: My Fears for Planet
Shell Boss`s `Confession` Shocks Industry
by David Adam


The head of one of the world`s biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him "really very worried for the planet".

In an interview in today`s Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration.

"Sequestration is difficult, but if we don`t have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world," said Lord Oxburgh. "No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can`t predict but are probably not good."

His comments will enrage many in the oil industry, which is targeted by climate change campaigners because the use of its products spews out huge quantities of carbon dioxide, most visibly from vehicle exhausts.

His words follow those of the government`s chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.

"You can`t slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position," said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March.

Companies including Shell and BP have previously acknowledged the problem of climate change and pledged to reduce their own emissions, but the issue remains sensitive, and carefully worded public statements often emphasize uncertainties over risks.

Robin Oakley, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace, said: "This is an important statement to make but it does have to come with a commitment to follow through, and that means making the case to his peers in the oil industry who are still skeptical of climate change."

Mr Oakley said a gulf was opening between more progressive oil companies such as Shell, which invests in alternative energy sources including wind and solar power, and ExxonMobil, the biggest and most influential producer, particularly in the US.

In June 2002 ExxonMobil`s chairman, Lee Raymond, said: "We in ExxonMobil do not believe that the science required to establish this linkage between fossil fuels and warming has been demonstrated."

Lord Oxburgh`s words will also fuel arguments over sequestration. Supporters say it will allow a smoother transition to reduced emissions by allowing us to burn coal, oil and gas for longer. Critics argue that the idea is an expensive and probably unworkable smokescreen for continued reliance on fossil fuels.

Last year the Guardian revealed that ministers were considering plans for a national network of pipelines to carry millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from power stations to be buried under the North sea.

"You probably have to put it under the sea but there are other possibilities. You may be able to trap it in solids or something like that," said Lord Oxburgh, who claimed even vehicle emissions could be trapped and disposed of. "The timescale might be impossible, in which case I`m really very worried for the planet because I don`t see any other approach."

According to a 3,000m (about 10,000ft) ice core from Antarctica revealing the Earth`s climate history, carbon dioxide levels are the highest for at least 440,000 years.

Lord Oxburgh said the situation is particularly urgent because many developing countries, including India and China, are sitting on huge untapped stocks of coal, probably the most polluting fossil fuel.

"If they choose to burn their coal, we in the west are not in a very good position to tell them not to, because it`s exactly what we did in our industrial revolution."

Bryony Worthington, a climate campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: "It isn`t a responsible attitude to say we`re going to pledge to do sequestration but if the plans don`t work out then the world`s messed up. He`s done quite a clever job by making it clear he`s concerned but at the same time not pledging to do anything about it."

She called for tougher emission standards for new vehicles, as well as greater investment in energy efficiency measures and renewable sources.

A former non-executive director with Shell, Lord Oxburgh was catapulted into the chairman`s role after the company was forced to reveal it had overstated the extent of its reserves. He was widely viewed as a safe pair of hands.

He followed his long-standing academic career with spells as chief science adviser to the Ministry of Defense and rector of Imperial College, London. A crossbench life peer, he still chairs the Lords science and technology select committee, although he must retire from Shell next year.

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WASHINGTON (IWR News Parody) - Vice President Dick Cheney last night starred as "Sally Bowles" in special performance of the Musical Cabaret at a $10,000 plate dinner for the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign.
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Poll reveals hostility to US and support for rebel cleric
By Anne Penketh Diplomatic Editor

17 June 2004

The Bush administration`s last remaining justification for the invasion of Iraq has been demolished by a private poll revealing that only 2 per cent of Iraqis regard the occupying forces as liberators.

The poll results are devastating for both President George Bush and Tony Blair, who are fond of saying that future generations of Iraqis will thank them for liberating their country. Tony Blair has consistently said that history will prove him right for engineering the downfall of a cruel tyrant, even if weapons of mass destruction were not found.

President Bush, giving a pep-talk to American soldiers in Florida yesterday, said: "We have come not to conquer, but to liberate people and we will stand with them until their freedom is secure."

Yet the main findings of the poll, which was commissioned by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) last month and which was leaked yesterday, reveal that only 2 per cent of the Iraqis polled in mid-May see coalition troops as liberators, while 92 per cent said they were occupiers. In a crumb of comfort for the coalition, only
3 per cent expressed support for Saddam Hussein.

A total of 54 per cent believed that all Americans behaved like the guards at Abu Ghraib. But 71 per cent of those polled in face-to-face interviews in six Iraqi cities said they were surprised by the guards` behaviour.

Safety and security emerged as a major concern for the population in general, as nearly half of Iraqis said they felt unsafe in their neighbourhoods.

Asked whether they would feel safer if the 138,000 US troops left immediately, 55 per cent agreed, nearly double the 28 per cent who held that view in a poll carried out in January.

Asked if the Americans should leave immediately, 41 per cent agreed, while 45 per cent said they preferred US forces to leave once a permanent Iraqi government was installed.

Hostility towards the Americans was also reflected in strong support for the rebel Shia leader, Muqtada Sadr, who galvanised the resistance to the occupation in April. His blend of religion and populism has proved popular The CPA`s poll shows that 67 per cent of Iraqis say they support or strongly support him, making him the most popular man in the country after the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. A total of 81 per cent of Iraqis had an improved opinion of Sadr in May from three months earlier, and 64 per cent said the acts of his insurgents had made Iraq more unified. But only 2 per cent would support him for president. The coalition`s confidence rating in May stood at 11 per cent, down from 47 per cent in November, while the troops themselves had the support of only 10 per cent.

The survey questioned 1,093 adults who were selected randomly in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Diwaniyah, Hillah and Baquba between 14 and 23 May.

The White House spokesman, Scott McClelland, put on a brave face when reacting to the survey: "The President has previously said no one wants to be occupied. And we don`t want to be occupiers," he said

But a coalition official in Baghdad interviewed by the Associated Press news agency, which obtained the survey, was despondent. "If you are sitting here as part of the coalition, it [the poll] is pretty grim," said Donald Hamilton, a career diplomat who helps oversee the CPA`s polling of Iraqis.

In Washington, Congressman Ike Skelton, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he found the poll "disturbing. ... It demonstrates quite jarringly that we are not winning the hearts and minds" of Iraqis.

Among the poll`s other findings, 63 per cent believed conditions would improve when the Iraqi interim government takes over at the end of the month, and 62 per cent believed it was "very likely" the Iraqi police and army would maintain security without US forces.

A State Department spokes-
man said: "Let`s face it. That`s the goal, to build those up to the point where they can take charge in Iraq and they can maintain security in Iraq."

The Foreign Office had no comment last night.


17 June 2004 20:44

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Hep E on `Vietnam Street`
by Dahr Jamail | Posted June 14, 2004 at 07:50 PM Baghdad time

I haven’t slept very well the last couple of nights, as the growing anxiety of car bombs has me waking at the smallest noises outside my window nowadays.

Dave was typing on his computer as I walk past him to the kitchen to make some coffee at 8:15 this morning and a huge explosion rumbles down the street near Tharir Square.

“Morning, man,” I said. “Morning,” he replied as we both stare at the huge, brown mushroom cloud that rises above the buildings out our window.

Our daily car bomb viciously welcomed another day of this wretched occupation of Iraq.

At least 13 people died in this one, according to wire reports. The targets were the passengers in several of the typical SUV’s used by CPA contractors. Five of the foreigners are killed, in what was apparently a carefully planned and orchestrated attack.

In the aftermath of blood and chaos, reports said, the front of a nearby building was left sheared and scores of Iraqis began dancing on and around the charred vehicles while holding pieces of twisted metal blown from the vehicles over their heads and chanting, “Down, down America!” and “America is the enemy of God!” Then the vehicles were set abaze.

As the crowd grew in size and furor, US tanks with soldiers in riot gear arrived to seal the area. Soldiers kept their guns aimed at the angry crowd as investigators attempted to collect evidence from the scene of devastation.

I went back to Sadr City to interview doctors at Chuader Hospital. Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, the head manager there, said his hospital often receives upwards of 125 dead and wounded Iraqis each time fighting between the Mehdi Army and US soldiers breaks out in the Shi’ite slum, which the US military refers to as the “Black Zone” of Baghdad.

“Whenever large groups like this are brought in, we know it is because of the Americans,” he said in a rare slip of sentiment. For during the rest of the interview he was very careful not to reveal too much about the misdeeds of the occupation forces in his area. He, like so many other doctors and hospital administrators I’ve interviewed over the last 2 months, won’t answer some of my more pointed questions regarding civilian casualties or troops raiding the hospital to interrogate or arrest wounded fighters.

He was quick to point out the struggles his hospital is facing under the occupation. “We are short of every medicine,” he said while insisting that this rarely occurred before the invasion. “It is forbidden, but sometimes we have to reuse IV’s, even the needles. We have no choice.”

This hospital treats an average of 3000 patients each day.

Another major problem that he and other doctors spoke of was their horrendous water problem.

“Of course we have typhoid, cholera, kidney stones... but we now even have the very rare Hepatitis Type-E…and it has become common in our area.”

As a quick google search reveals:

HEV…is transmitted by the fecal-oral route. Transmission is associated primarily with ingestion of feces-contaminated drinking water. The highest rates of symptomatic disease (jaundice) have been in young to middle-aged adults... particularly among pregnant women in the second or third trimester. Fetal loss is common. Case-fatality rates as high as 15%–25% have been reported among pregnant women. Perinatal transmission of HEV has also been reported. Signs and symptoms, if they occur, include fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, abdominal pain, and fever. Hepatitis E has a low (0.5%–4.0%) case-fatality rate in the general population.

The best prevention of infection is to avoid potentially contaminated water and food.

Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri said a German NGO called APN was bringing in water trucks for a while, but they still only had 15% of the necessary clean water supply to operate hygienically.

Upstairs in a room full of 7 younger doctors, we found them even more forthcoming with information.

“The most important thing is no clean water,” said Dr. Ali, a 25 year-old resident physician, while the other six doctors in the room nodded in agreement. “This problem is affecting us so much,” Ali added.

He also said that US soldiers have periodically stormed his hospital looking for wounded resistance fighters. “They come here asking for patients, and are very rough because they shout, cuss, and aim their guns at people,” he said. “We have patients run away when the Americans come, and then we hear that they die at home because they didn’t get their treatment.” According to Dr. Ali, US soldiers also entered the hospital in order to remove posters of Muqtada Al-Sadr from the walls.

Dr. Ali described more of the horrendous conditions the hospital has faced under the occupation like the ongoing power, water, medicine and equipment shortages. Again the other doctors nodded in agreement. “I think the cause of these worse conditions is the Americans,” he said firmly at the end of our interview.

Driving out of the sewage-filled, garbage-strewn streets of Sadr City we passed a wall with “Vietnam Street” spray-painted on it. Just underneath this was written, “We will make your graves in this place...”

Shortly after taking this picture from the car window, we were pulled over by two men in a beat up car who had waved us down. One of them, holding his hand on a pistol beneath his dishdasha, asked what we were doing, who we are, and why we were taking pictures. After our interpreter does a brilliant job of explaining to him that we were writing about the situation of the hospital and are Canadian, the self-proclaimed member of the Mehdi Army begged our pardon. “Excuse us, Sir, but we are defending our city. We are at war with the Americans here, and we are responsible for patrolling this area.”

When we told him we photographed the “Vietnam Street” graffiti, he said, “We call it this because we’ve killed so many Americans on this street.”

He’d wanted to take us to a sheikh to question/interrogate us, but thanks to Hamid being quick on his feet, we avoided the detention and promptly left Sadr City.

Later today, after visiting the Baghdad Morgue (that’s another story for another time), Hamid and I picked up some food and were driving back to the hotel.

We passed yet another group of Humvees and soldiers near a fuel station. As drove by them in the blazing heat, Hamid shook his head. He was pro-invasion, but now does his best to cope while watching what is left of his beloved country disintegrate with each passing day. I tell him I think Iraqis are amazing... for all they have dealt with, and now this, how do they go on?

“Each day we know it is up to God to decide if we will be spared from a bomb. We Iraqis have no choice but to take it day by day,” he calmly explained.

“I understand,” I say while nodding.

Tonight I’ll remember his words when I lay down to sleep, knowing theywill bring me deeper sleep for a change.

Beirut, Iraq
by Dahr Jamail | Posted June 16, 2004 at 11:32 PM Baghdad time

Dr. Faiq Amin, the manager of the Medico Legal Institute (ie, the Baghdad morgue), told me a couple of days ago that their maximum holding capacity is 90 bodies.

Since Janurary an average of over 600 bodies each month have been brought there. Of these, at least half have died of gunshots or explosions. He also pointed out that these numbers do not include the heavy fighting areas of Fallujah and Najaf.

In addition, Dr. Amin said, “We deal only with suspicious deaths, not deaths from natural causes.”

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Yet another car carrying a coffin approaches the Baghdad Morgue.
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The crime rate in Baghdad is out of control. According to Dr. Amin, this current rate of bodies brought to the Baghdad Morgue is 3-4 times greater than it ever was during the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Dr. Amin said that despite the number of bodies being delivered to his morgue on a daily basis, “I am sure that not all of the bodies that should come here do.” He paused before diplomatically explaining, “Because our legal system has some problems right now.”

Before the invasion, there was a coordinated system between Baghdad and the other governorates which allowed his morgue to track deaths throughout the country, but this too has been smashed along with the rest of the infrastructure of his country.

Outside of the morgue today, a man is mourning the loss of his 5 year-old daughter Najala. Mr. Jassim and his family were driving, he tells me, when an American Humvee abruptly pulled in front of their car, causing him to lose control. His car flipped over, and Najala was crushed.
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Mr. Jassim, sadly explaining the death of his 5 year-old daughter. She died when his car flipped due to a US patrol cutting him off.
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He was frustrated with the fact that he was being forced to wait yet another day to pick up her body.

“Why can’t we take her? They insist on an autopsy, yet she was crushed to her death because we tried to avoid the Americans and our car flipped. So I must wait to bury my daughter.”

Abu Talat and I give him our condolences, and begin to walk away when Mr. Jassim says, “Be careful, don’t die in Iraq!”

Earlier we had visited the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi Police for interviews and to obtain handwritten permission to visit a police station from Brigadier General Amer Ali, who is also the Assistant Commander of the Iraqi Police in the capital.

He isn’t happy with the situation in his country. “Now everything is smashed,” he told me. “We are in a crashed country.”

Major Said, the Information Officer for the Baghdad police, was overtly negative about the occupiers of his country. He said: “The Americans invaded our country. They are the invaders, so of course Iraqis don’t like to work with them.”

He addressed the ongoing problem of US soldiers occupying their police stations.

“While the Americans are in our stations, nobody comes to us for help because they are afraid of them,” he said. “This is interfering with our men doing their job, as well as Iraqis getting assistance.”

He was frustrated, and the longer we talked the more it came out, and at one point he was almost ranting.

“We didn’t want this `democracy` to come. This is not democracy here. Even if I say this as a civilian and not as a police officer, I can say it would be better if the Americans let us do our work and stayed out of our stations. The Americans are making IPs into targets.”

While walking out of his office, since we’d told Major Said we were heading towards Adhamiya for some lunch, he said, “Adhamiya is the next Fallujah.”

Over in Adhamiya we were dining on tasty kebabs on a sidewalk roughly 200 meters from the Adhamiya Palace, which is the US encampment in the heavily pro-resistance area of Baghdad. At 2pm three huge explosions sounded from inside the US base. Mortars, promptly followed by a huge black billowing plume of smoke from the target.

Everyone in the café was watching the smoke and spontaneous celebrations erupted as men clapped, cheered and yelled. “Here they go! The Americans have been killed!”

We continued eating, not missing a beat in our conversation. Abu Talat and I have grown very accustomed to the explosions that rock Baghdad on a regular basis these days. He looked at me and said: “You know, Dahr, I used to read about how the Lebanese got used to the bombs in Beirut. I never thought that could happen to me, yet here I am.”

“I know, and now me too,” I said, and we laughed together at the insanity of what has become our everyday life while working in occupied Baghdad.

We left Adhamiya and traveled to the Asha’ab Iraqi Police station. As I mentioned before, we had obtained written permission from Brigadier General Amer Ali from the Central Command Headquarters of the Iraqi Police in Baghdad. General Ali is also the Assistant Commander of all of the IPs in Baghdad.

So we felt pretty confident about getting into this police station to conduct some more interviews.

At Asha’ab Police Station, US soldiers were scattered across the roof, and a Humvee sat near the entrance at the suicide blockades.

Nevertheless, we wheeled around back and attempted to enter. After all, we were carrying our handwritten permission from the Assistant Commander of the Iraqi Police.

Our entry was denied. Despite seeing our permission letter, an American Military Policeman named Schneider took my passport and disappeared inside for 15 minutes. He returned, handed me my passport after calling in a check to the CPA and told me: “You must contact the Public Affairs Officer at the CPA for information about the Iraqi Police stations. Press aren’t allowed inside.”

So, in sum, a US MP effectively usurped the authority of an Iraqi Police Brigadier General who is the Assistant Commander of all of the police in Baghdad.

So much for sovereignty.

It brought to mind something said by Bassim Mahmoud Hamid, the Iraqi Police spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, in a recent interview at the CPA:

“We are ready to take over the security situation, because we know how to do this. The Americans will commit the biggest mistake in their life if they don’t let the Iraqis control the security situation.”

Dahr Jamail is Baghdad correspondent for The NewStandard. He is an Alaskan devoted to covering the untold stories from occupied Iraq. You can help Dahr continue his crucial work in Iraq by making donations. For more information or to donate to Dahr, visit The NewStandard.

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Published in the June 28, 2004 issue of The Nation
Bush (41) and Reagan Officials Say Bush (43) Must Go
by Katrina vanden Heuvel


Today a group of former senior diplomatic officials and retired military commanders--several of whom are the kind who "have never spoken out before" on such matters--issued a bracing statement arguing that George W. Bush has damaged the country`s national security and calling on Americans to defeat him in November. It`s too early to tell if the statement will have an impact on this fall`s campaign. But Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, as the group is called, reveals (again) how dangerously isolated the Bush Administration is not just around the world but even from America`s own bipartisan foreign policy and military establishments.

This latest missive, as the LA Times and the Washington Post reported last Sunday, is being sent by Democratic and Republican officials who refuse to stay silent in the face of Bush`s extremist and ideological foreign policy which, they say, is squandering America`s moral standing. These signatories aren`t exactly a Who`s Who of the American left.

Jack Matlock, who served as Reagan and Bush 41`s ambassador to the Soviet Union, has signed the statement, as has Ret. Adm. William Crowe, who served as Reagan`s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar has added his name to the list, and he commanded US forces in the Middle East under Bush Sr. Phyllis Oakley, who served as a State Department spokesperson under Reagan, is another signatory. The vast majority of the signatories are, in fact, either conservative Republicans who served under Reagan and Bush 41 or they are bipartisan, consensus-driven ex-diplomats who served their country from Africa to Asia because they believed in America`s leadership role around the world.

Now they feel so enraged by Bush`s extremist foreign policies that they can no longer stand by as this Administration makes America less secure by upending alliances and alienating much of the world. Against the metastasizing scandal of Abu Ghraib; the botched postwar occupation of Iraq; and the Administration`s lies about WMDs in Iraq in the run-up to the war, these old hands are now taking an uncompromising, intelligent stand against what they see as the most arrogant, unilateral and incompetent foreign policy in their adult lifetimes.

Today`s signatories join a large and growing chorus of former senior officials who were so enraged by Bush`s conduct of the Iraq war that sitting on the sidelines simply wasn`t an option for them. John Brady Kiesling, now a retired diplomat, led the charge in February 2003 when he courageously quit his foreign-service job with the American Embassy in Athens, and wrote a stinging rebuke to Bush`s headlong rush to wage a war in Iraq. Then another career diplomat Gregory Thielmann went public, telling Bill Moyers that Iraq didn`t pose an "imminent security threat" to America. Thielmann attacked Bush for hyping intelligence reports and for misleading the American people about the need to go to war in the Middle East. The Administration, he said, "has had a faith-based intelligence attitude.We know the answers--give us the intelligence to support those answers`."

Around the same time, retired military commanders were growing aghast at Bush`s utterly inept lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq. That`s why, for example, the former Centcom commander Gen. Anthony Zinni ultimately went on 60 Minutes last month and argued that if Bush stayed on the current course in Iraq, America was "headed over Niagara Falls." Hoar, the retired Marine general, has publicly declared that the United States is "absolutely on the brink of failure" in Iraq.

Meanwhile, other former ambassadors and career foreign-service officers began speaking up, each in their own way and on their own timetables. GOP strategists with ties to the White House were quick and shameless in denigrating those who`ve spent their life serving the national interest.

Ronald Spiers, the former Ambassador to Turkey and Pakistan and well versed in the politics of the Middle East, argued that W.`s policies have unraveled our most important alliances around the globe. Spiers faulted Bush for causing us to lose "a lot of our international partnerships. We`ve lost a lot of lives. We`ve lost a lot of money for something that wasn`t justified."

George Harrop, a former ambassador to Kenya and Israel, spoke for many in the diplomatic corps, and I suspect for even some former Bush I officials like Brent Scowcroft, when he said: "I really am essentially a Republican. I voted for George Bush`s father, and I voted for George Bush. But what we got was not the George Bush we voted for." And former Ambassador Joseph Wilson has reminded Americans of just how many lies the Administration was willing to make in its quest to convince people that Iraq posed a nuclear threat to the United States.

Then, of course, there are the high-level NSC officials who, after getting a ringside seat for Bush`s bungling national security strategies, decided that enough was enough, and that now was the season to speak up and take a stand. Rand Beers left W.`s White House after serving under Reagan and Bush I, and he is now running foreign policy operations for John Kerry`s presidential campaign. Richard Clarke, is one of the most experienced counterterrorism officials America has produced in the last three decades; he, too, could no longer stand idly by as the Administration pursued a fool`s errand by starting a war against Iraq.

Just last month a separate group of fifty-three ex-diplomats and other high-level national security officials wrote a letter to Bush in which they excoriated the President for sacrificing America`s credibility in the Arab world and squandering America`s status as honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

The statement issued today marks the high-water point of dissent among diplomats and military commanders who cannot stomach Bush any longer, but there is still time, and a need, for more high-level officials to come forward and voice their opposition to policies that are undermining our security.

The anger towards W., and the antipathy towards his extremely dangerous policies has now, at long last, reached a critical mass. Today`s statement reveals just how extremist the Administration`s approach has been, and the staggering stupidity of their radical ideologies. This letter is a profound wake-up call to all Americans: George W. Bush must be defeated.

Copyright © 2004 The Nation

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Calif. attorney general sues Enron for alleged energy price manipulation
- ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004

(06-17) 13:39 PDT SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) --

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed suit Thursday against Enron Corp. and several subsidiaries for allegedly manipulating market prices during the state`s 2000-01 energy crisis and costing Californians billions of dollars.

The suit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, seeks restitution and unspecified damages from the Houston-based energy giant whose trading practices are under investigation by the Justice Department.

Three former Enron Corp. traders have been charged with wire fraud involving price manipulation in California. Two of them have pleaded guilty and a third awaits trial in October.

"The evidence, we think, is very, very compelling that California rate payers should be entitled to well in excess of a billion dollars -- probably closer to 2 billion dollars -- in profits that Enron took that were illegal," Lockyer told reporters at a news conference in Santa Monica.

A message left with an Enron spokeswoman was not immediately returned.

The lawsuit comes amid a series of developments in the case of Enron, the once high-flying energy company that declared bankruptcy in 2001 amid revelations of hidden debt and inflated profits.

Tapes recordings released earlier this month of Enron traders` profanity-laced calls showed them opening gloating of manipulating California`s power market and boasting they would bring the state to its knees.

In excerpts of the calls, some of which Lockyer played Thursday, the traders bragged of ripping off California "to the tune of" a million dollars a day and of stealing money from "Grandma Millie."

"Grandma Millie is California. I am her lawyer and she seeks justice," Lockyer declared.

The attorney general also is bringing suit amid his ongoing battle with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to collect as much as $9 billion in refunds from energy wholesalers that officials say the state is owed to cover overcharges it paid during the energy crisis. FERC has estimated the overcharges at around $3 billion and has collected less than $100 million to date.

"If FERC had been aggressive from the beginning we wouldn`t have to file these lawsuits," Lockyer said.

The attorney general is also attempting to reverse a decision by FERC last month requiring that California refund Enron and other energy companies nearly $270 million in overcharges from power the state sold during the energy crisis.

The sales took place after the state stepped in to buy power on behalf of three nearly bankrupt California utilities to ensure an adequate supply.

Most of California`s electricity purchases were used by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Co.

But some of the power sold to the state was eventually resold to other energy companies, including Enron. Those are the sales subject to the refund order.

Lockyer`s lawsuit contends that between 1998 and 2001 Enron violated California`s commodities and unfair competition laws by engaging in "a number of unlawful, unfair, fraudulent and manipulative trading schemes" to artificially boost energy prices and the company`s profits.

Each violation of the state`s unfair competition law is punishable by a fine of up to $2,500, while breaches of the state`s commodities law can be punishable by up to $25,000 per incident.

The suit, the first filed against Enron by the state`s top law enforcement officer, accuses the company, among other things, of deliberately causing congestion along power transmission lines, then reaping extra revenue for taking action to relieve the bogus congestion. The company also allegedly misrepresented out-of-market energy sales so it could sell power back to the state at a higher price.

"While the state reeled from the combined impact of sky-high power prices, supply shortages and rolling blackouts, the Enron defendants enjoyed massive, unprecedented profits and extracted millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from utilities and their customers through a variety of fraudulent schemes," according to the 20-page complaint.

By bringing the case to state court, Lockyer said he is hopeful California can get its hands on some of Enron`s assets before its plans to emerge from bankruptcy reorganization are completed.

"I want to get Enron and its executives before a California jury ... and let them make judgments," he said.
On the Net:

California attorney general: www.ag.ca.gov


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/200…
©2004 Associated Press

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Influencing Energy Policy
Did Cheney know about Grandma Millie?
- Derek Cressman
Thursday, June 17, 2004

Recently released tape recordings reveal not only that Enron traders knew they were engaging in ethically bankrupt practices to rig the California energy crisis, but so did higher-ups in Enron. So it`s fair to ask whether CEO Ken Lay knew of the faked shortage and if he discussed it with Vice President Dick Cheney during their meetings on energy policy.

Previously released Enron memos from December 2000 demonstrated that Enron was intentionally manipulating the California energy market through schemes called "Fat Boy" and "Ricochet." Tape transcripts recently released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Snohomish County Public Utility District near Seattle reveal the true extent of the greed embraced by Enron and its traders. Traders named Kevin and Bob joke about the millions of dollars they "stole" from "Grandma Millie" in California. Other traders openly talk about how the election of George W. Bush would benefit Enron. They boast that Enron was the No. 1 contributor to Bush`s campaigns and predicted that Bush would end price caps that were impeding their unbridled profiteering.

Lay had long been grooming Bush as a supporter of policies that would be good for Enron. Lay was one of Bush`s first donors to his 1994 campaign to unseat Texas Gov. Ann Richards, giving some $146,000 along with other Enron executives, according to Texans for Public Justice. Enron`s contributions helped make Bush the early frontrunner in the Republican presidential primaries in 2000, causing candidates such as Elizabeth Dole to drop out before a vote was cast. Bush`s war chest helped him defeat Sen. John McCain with a slew of negative advertising following McCain`s upset victory in New Hampshire. Enron traders talked about Lay being appointed as energy secretary if Bush won the presidential election.

But the tapes also reveal that it wasn`t just low-level traders who knew about the West Coast market manipulation. Tim Belden, the head of Enron`s Western trading desk, told Richard Shapiro, Enron`s vice president of regulatory affairs, about the schemes and brazenly said that he would continue them even if it meant that president Jeff Skilling might get hauled before some commission to explain Enron`s actions. Investigative reporter Jason Leopold, writing in Dissident Voice on June 7, concludes that the transcripts also show that Lay personally knew of Enron`s market manipulations. Belden says in the tapes that Enron`s West Coast trading division was responsible for 80 percent of Enron`s profits in 2000 and 2001. If this is correct, it`s hard to imagine that Lay wasn`t paying close attention.

We already know that Lay met with Vice President Dick Cheney at least once while Cheney was heading up an energy task force in early 2001 -- the same time California`s electricity prices were skyrocketing. But Cheney refuses to say what they talked about. The Congressional General Accounting Office filed a lawsuit against the vice president, seeking to disclose the content of these meetings. The GAO lost in a lower court and opted not to appeal, but other cases by the citizen groups Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in April. The smoking gun to date has been that Lay handed Cheney a memo with Enron`s recommendations for national energy policy; seven were incorporated into the plan.

Given that this news is already public, what more does Cheney have to hide about those conversations? The Supreme Court should rule on this matter before the end of its session in June, so maybe then the truth will come out. Regardless of what the court does, the vice president owes Californians an answer to the following question: When did he learn that Enron and other energy companies were intentionally causing the California energy crisis and what did he do about it?

It`s unclear if Cheney broke any laws even if he did know about Enron`s market manipulations. But if Enron`s favorite vice president knew about Enron`s swindling of Grandma Millie and took no action to stop it, the rest of us deserve to know.

Derek Cressman directs TheRestofUs.org, a nonprofit in Sacramento that works to expose the role of big money in politics.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Der 3.Teil des Berichts der 9/11 Kommission:
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June 17, 2004
Panel Doubts Claim That F-16`s Would Have Stopped Flight 93
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, June 17 — The doomed passengers who fought with terrorist hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 probably saved "countless" other lives and might well have prevented an attack on the White House or the Capitol, the staff of the commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said today.

The heroism of the passengers was vital because — contrary to some earlier official statements and impressions — the pilots of F-16 fighters that had been scrambled to protect Washington did not have the authority to shoot down a hijacked aircraft, the report said.

Noting that officials of the North American Aerospace Defense Command have maintained that they would have intercepted and shot down Flight 93, which crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania, had it reached Washington, the staff of the 9/11 commission differed.

"We are not so sure," the report said of Norad`s assertions. "We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93. Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction."

The staff report was presented at the final round of public hearings by the Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as the independent, bipartisan commission is formally known. It is to present an all-encompassing final report of its findings on the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people by July 26.

President Bush singled out one finding of the commission staff today when he asserted that "there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," even though the staff reported finding no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had any role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The staff said in a report on Wednesday that there had been "numerous contacts" between Osama bin Laden and the Baghdad dictatorship, but that nothing had come of them. Mr. Bush embraced the first part of that finding today, asserting that Mr. Hussein had "not only Al Qaeda connections but other connections to terrorist organizations."

As for the events of Sept. 11, the heroism of some of the approximately 40 passengers on Flight 93, which crashed in Stony Creek Township, Pa., at 10:03 a.m., 1 hour and 21 minutes after taking off from Newark International Airport bound for San Francisco, has been widely acknowledged before.

But the importance of the passengers` contributions in fighting off their four hijackers, apparently causing the Boeing 757 to fly erratically and ultimately plunge to earth, emerged in far greater detail today.

What also became starkly clear today is that even many months afterward, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were still not fully understood by Norad officials. In May 2003, the staff report said, Norad officials gave incorrect accounts of how Norad`s Northeast Air Defense Sector tracked Flight 93 and the other three jetliners hijacked that day, American Airlines Flights 11 and 77 and United Airlines Flight 175.

American Airlines Flight 11 and United Flight 175, both Boeing 767`s, took off from Boston and were bound for Los Angeles. They were flown into the World Trade Center, destroying the Twin Towers. (Fighters were scrambled from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, Mass., after it became clear that hijackings were under way, but the fighters were miles away from New York by the time the towers were hit.) American Flight 77 departed from Dulles Airport near Washington bound for Los Angeles but was flown into the Pentagon.

Had Flight 93 not crashed in Pennsylvania, it would have arrived in the Washington area 10 to 20 minutes later, the staff report said.

"There was only one set of fighters orbiting Washington, D.C., during this time frame," the report said, referring to a pair of F-16`s from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. "They were armed and under Norad`s control."

But they had not been told that they were authorized to shoot down an aircraft, contrary to what Vice President Dick Cheney thought at that time. In fact, the report noted, "the Langley pilots were never briefed about the reason they were scrambled" and did not know that the vice president had ordered that a Washington-bound hijacked jet be shot down.

The F-16 pilots understood their mission as "to identify and divert aircraft flying within a certain radius of Washington, but did not know that the threat came from hijacked commercial airliners," the report noted.

As the lead pilot F-16 recalled later, "I reverted to the Russian threat...I`m thinking cruise missile threat from the sea."

The confusion was illustrated in a telephone exchange between Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that began at 10:30 a.m., almost an hour after the Pentagon was struck and, although they did not know it, 27 minutes after Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Cheney said he had given authorization for hijacked airliners to be shot down.

"Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?" Mr. Rumsfeld asked.

"Yes, it has," Mr. Cheney replied, unaware that the fighter pilots from Langley had not been so instructed. A moment later, Mr. Cheney said, "it`s my understanding they`ve already taken a couple aircraft out."

"We can`t confirm that," Mr. Rumsfeld replied.

By 10:45 a.m., another pair of F-16`s was over the capital. These were part of an Air National Guard wing based on Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The pilots of these F-16`s did understand that they had the authority to shoot down a hijacked airliner, since the wing commander was in telephone contact with the Secret Service and the Vice President.

But the F-16`s from Andrews would almost surely have been too late to shoot down Flight 93 had it not crashed in Pennsylvania.

"We learned there was great chaos that morning," Thomas H. Kean, the former governor of New Jersey, who heads the commission, said after today`s session. "This whole story is one of a failure of communication."

And "a failure of imagination," added Lee H. Hamilton, the former Indiana Democratic congressman, who is vice chairman. "Our policy people simply were not able to imagine using an airplane as a weapon."

Nearly two years after the hijackings, there was still confusion among high-level officials about the movements of the four hijacked aircraft and about exactly what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. That became obvious when officials of the North American Aerospace Defense Command testified before the commission in May 2003.

The officials said that Norad`s Northeast sector was notified by the Federal Aviation Administration at 9:16 a.m. that Flight 93 had been hijacked.

"This statement was incorrect," the staff report said. "United 93 was proceeding normally at that time."

In the same testimony, the Norad officials said their Northeast sector was notified at 9:24 of the hijacking of Flight 77. "This statement was also incorrect," the report said. Rather, the Northeast sector had been told, wrongly, that Flight 11 was headed for Washington. In fact, Flight 11 had struck one of the Twin Towers 39 minutes earlier.

In their testimony and in other public statements, Norad officials maintained that the fighters from Langley were responding to reports that American Flight 77 and United Flight 93 had been hijacked. "These statements were incorrect as well," the staff report said.

In fact, the fighters had been scrambled at Langley because of the erroneous report that American Flight 11 was headed to Washington — "a phantom aircraft," as the report put it.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the commission today that "we fought many phantoms that day," an allusion to the numerous false and conflicting reports that swirled that morning.

The staff report presented many details of miscommunications and misunderstandings on Sept. 11, 2001, but it did not condemn military or civilian officials. It noted that people were dealing with unprecedented, fast-breaking events.

One bright spot was what happened when all aircraft over the United States were told to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible. "This was a totally unprecedented order," the report said. "The air traffic control system handled it with great skill, as about 4,500 commercial and general aviation aircraft soon landed without incident."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Public Support for War Resilient
Bush`s Standing Improves

Released: June 17, 2004

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=216

Summary of Findings

Americans are paying markedly less attention to Iraq than in the last two months. At the same time, their opinions about the war have become more positive. The number of Americans who think the U.S. military effort is going well has jumped from 46% in May to 57%, despite ongoing violence in Iraq and the widening prison abuse scandal. And the percentage of the public who believes it was right to go to war inched up to 55%, from 51% in May.

The new Pew survey indicates that many Americans are becoming less connected to the news about Iraq and possibly more hardened to events there. Just 39% say they are tracking developments in Iraq very closely � down 15 points since April and the lowest level this year. In addition, 35% say that people they know are becoming less emotionally involved with the news from Iraq, a sharp increase from 26% last month.

The poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, conducted June 3-13 among 1,806 Americans, found lower attention to the war in Iraq even before the death of former President Ronald Reagan dominated the news. Overall, four-in-ten paid very close attention to Reagan`s death and memorial service, which is about the same level as interest in former President Nixon`s death and funeral a decade ago (36% very closely).

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June 18, 2004
Panel Says Chaos in Administration Was Wide on 9/11
By PHILIP SHENON and CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

WASHINGTON, June 17 — Offering an extraordinary window into the government`s chaotic response on Sept. 11, 2001, the commission investigating the terrorist attacks detailed on Thursday a series of communications breakdowns at the White House and the Pentagon that were so severe that military commanders did not tell fighter pilots that they had been given the authority by Vice President Dick Cheney to shoot down hijacked planes.

The commission showed that White House communication systems were so close to collapse in the hours after the attack that President Bush, who was visiting a Florida elementary school that morning, could not obtain an open line to Mr. Cheney at the White House and had to resort to a cellphone to reach him.

In the commission`s final public hearing after an 18-month investigation, members said that Mr. Bush had complained to them in his recent interview that the communications problems continued after he boarded Air Force One.

A staff report released at the hearing provided new details about the confusion that enveloped the White House, the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration. It found that Mr. Cheney did not issue a shoot-down order — on Mr. Bush`s behalf — until after 10 a.m., more than an hour after Mr. Bush had been told by his chief of staff that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and that "America is under attack." [Excerpts, Page A20.]

After the hearing, White House spokesmen rejected any suggestion that the response on Sept. 11 had been any more confused than would have been expected after a major terrorist attack, and they continued to question the findings of a staff report issued Wednesday by the commission that said there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

In justifying the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and Vice President Cheney cited what they called long-standing ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And on Thursday they both repeated the assertion.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney cited what they called longstanding ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And on Thursday, they both repeated the assertion. Mr. Bush said there had been "numerous contacts" between Al Qaeda and Mr. Hussein, while Mr. Cheney said "there was clearly a relationship" between the two.

The bipartisan 10-member commission has tried to bring its investigation full circle by focusing this week on the details of the attack plot, how it was conceived by Osama bin Laden and his terror network and how the White House, the military and other government agencies responded on the morning of Sept. 11.

The interim staff report issued Thursday offered harsh criticism of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, which is responsible for defense of the nation`s airspace, and the F.A.A., which tracked the hijacked flights, and said they had been unable to share information quickly or coherently as the terrorist attack unfolded.

Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, the commander of Norad, testified to the commission that had information about the hijackings been passed along faster from the F.A.A. - and had there been an immediate shoot-down order - fighter jets could have intercepted and shot down most or all of the hijacked planes, a statement that was received by commission members with skepticism. "I`m assuming that they told us, F.A.A. told us as soon as they knew," General Eberhart said.

The staff report included an exhaustive minute-by-minute re-creation of the morning of the attacks, showing that there had never been a hope of intercepting and shooting down the planes before they hit their targets because of communication gaps between Norad and the F.A.A., which prevented armed fighter jets from being scrambled fast enough. The timeline demonstrated that the last of the four planes had crashed before Mr. Cheney ordered the shoot downs.

The report found, as the panel has indicated before, that a passenger uprising aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, was what had prevented the plane from reaching its intended target in Washington.

"The nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93," the staff wrote. "Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction."

Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged in testimony to the commission on Thursday that the Pentagon`s planning had always focused on threats from abroad - not from a terrorist strike launched from within the nation`s borders - and that "the lessons learned from 9/11 are many."

After the hearing, the panel`s chairman, Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, said there was "great chaos" within the government on the morning of Sept. 11. "This is a story of a lot of problems, and shame on us if we don`t learn from them," Mr. Kean said.

He suggested that the military`s faults went far beyond a failure of planning and strategy and that the events of Sept. 11 posed a more fundamental question about its willingness to follow a chain of command that begins with the president.

"That`s very, very disturbing," said Mr. Kean, whose commission is expected to recommend a sweeping overhaul of the structure of the nation`s intelligence community and of the government`s emergency-response systems. "When the president of the United States gives a shoot-down order, and the pilots who are supposed to carry it out do not get that order, then that`s about as serious as it gets as far as the defense of this country goes."

The staff report found that the extraordinary order allowing fighter pilots to shoot down passenger planes was issued by Mr. Cheney at the White House shortly after 10:10 a.m., minutes after a telephone conversation with Mr. Bush from Florida in which the president is said to have approved the decision.

According to notes of the call cited by the commission, Mr. Bush told the vice president: "Sounds like we have a minor war going on here. I heard about the Pentagon. We`re at war."

But the commission`s investigators found that while the shoot-down order had been relayed to the Pentagon, it had not been shared by Norad commanders with fighter pilots then in the skies over New York and Washington.

Their report found that one commander did not pass along the order ``because he was unaware of its ramifications," while two other officers said "they were unsure how pilots would, or should, proceed with this guidance."

"In short," the report said, "while leaders in Washington believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to `take out` hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed" to the pilots were to try to locate the hijacked planes.

The confusion of that morning was so great, the report found, that Mr. Cheney told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a teleconference at 10:39 that he had received information that two of the hijacked planes had already been brought down on his order. "It`s my understanding that they`ve already taken a couple of aircraft out," he said.

The report also provides an explanation of one of the lingering mysteries of Mr. Bush`s actions on the day of the attacks: why he remained in a meeting with pupils at the Florida elementary school for between five and seven minutes after he was interrupted in the classroom by his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., and told that the major terrorist attack was under way.

According to the report, Mr. Bush told commission members in his interview with the panel this spring that his "instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis." The president, it said, "felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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June 18, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
Questioning Nearly Every Aspect of the Responses to Sept. 11
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, June 17 - For most of 2002, President Bush argued that a commission created to look into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would only distract from the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

Now, in 17 preliminary staff reports, that panel has called into question nearly every aspect of the administration`s response to terror, including the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda were somehow the same foe.

Far from a bolt from the blue, the commission has demonstrated over the last 19 months that the Sept. 11 attacks were foreseen, at least in general terms, and might well have been prevented, had it not been for misjudgments, mistakes and glitches, some within the White House.

In the face of those findings, Mr. Bush stood firm, disputing the particular finding in a staff report that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization. "There was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Mr. Bush declared.

Such assertions, attributed by the White House until now to "intelligence reports," may now be perceived by Americans as having less credibility than they did before the commission`s staff began in January to rewrite the history of Sept. 11, in one extraordinarily detailed report after another.

With its historic access to government secrets, the panel was able to shed new light on old accountings, demonstrating, for example, that Mr. Bush himself, in the weeks before the attack, had received more detailed warnings about Al Qaeda`s intentions than the White House had acknowledged.

For now, the panel is casting its work in tentative terms. Its final report is due next month, on the eve of the Democratic convention. In this election year, its contribution has already been to portray Sept. 11 not just as a starting point in the war on terrorism, but also as a point on a continuum, one preceded and followed by other treacheries and failures.

At a briefing, a senior White House official sought again to turn away attention from the past. "The real issue is how do we move forward," the official said. "We`ve made a lot of changes since Sept. 11, because this country was simply not on war footing at the time of the attacks."

In the studies, Mr. Bush in particular has come off as less certain and decisive than he has portrayed himself. The final report, issued on Wednesday, reminded Americans that Mr. Bush remained in a classroom in Florida for at least five minutes after the second jet struck the World Trade Center, in what he told the panel was an effort "to project calm" for a worried nation.

Initially it was Henry A. Kissinger, the pillar of Republican foreign policy, whom Mr. Bush selected as the panel chairman, with George J. Mitchell, a former Democratic leader in the Senate, as vice chairman.

But those two appointees quickly fell by the wayside, to be replaced by former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, a Republican, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana , whose milder manners undoubtedly gave the panel a less partisan demeanor.

Notably, the two men joined forces successfully to persuade the White House to allow the panel access to crucial documents, including copies of the Presidential Daily Brief, and to pivotal figures, including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, who testified under oath in March, and to Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who appeared jointly in a closed session.

Whether the two leaders and the other panel members, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, can join forces in presenting final conclusions remains to be seen. Among the issues to be decided, and which the White House is closely watching, is the position on how and whether to reorganize United States intelligence agencies, in hopes of closing gaps that might have contributed to the Sept. 11 failures.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation bore the particular brunt of the staff reports, for missteps in communication, intelligence gathering and analysis that contributed to failures in anticipating the attack and in intercepting the hijackers.

So too, the Justice Department and the Pentagon came under fire, the Justice Department for doing too little to speed information sharing among law enforcement and intelligence agencies and the Pentagon for being ill prepared to combat the peril posed by aircraft hijacked by suicide pilots.

The staff has been critical of the Clinton administration, too, pointing out missed opportunities in the late 1990`s, when that White House shied from what might have been opportunities to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda.

But it was Mr. Bush and his top aides, particularly Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice, who were most in the spotlight, particularly in this final week of the public hearings. On Thursday, it was Mr. Bush`s self-image of being calm under fire that came under scrutiny, with a portrayal of a White House that was slow to respond as the attacks unfolded.

Starker still were preliminary staff conclusions on Wednesday that took aim at the assertions made by Mr. Cheney, in particular, of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda in connection to Sept. 11, including what the White House has repeatedly said might well have been a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the chief hijacker, and a senior Iraqi intelligence officer.

Much of the support for the American invasion of Iraq last year was based, polls have suggested, on a perception that Mr. Hussein and his government were behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Bush acknowledged last fall that there was no evidence of such ties, but it was a perception that the White House never actively sought to squelch.

With the commission staff`s saying it did not believe that the Prague meeting had occurred and that there was no evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq in connection with the attacks, Mr. Bush on Thursday sounded very much on the defensive.

"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda," he said.

The sole example he cited of "numerous contacts" between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda was a meeting between a senior Iraq intelligence agent and Mr. bin Laden in Sudan in 1994, one that the commission said appeared to have gone nowhere.

In 2002, Mr. Bush did finally sign off on the plan to form the commission, bowing to Congressional pressure. Until now, he has resisted other proposals being pushed by Congress, including a major overhaul of intelligence agencies.

A plan for such an overhaul is expected to be among the commission`s final recommendations next month, presenting Mr. Bush and the White House with yet another challenge.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 18, 2004
Contractor indicted over Afghan detainee death
By Joshua Chaffin and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington

An interrogator working for the Central Intelligence Agency was indicted on Thursday over the death of a detainee at a US camp in Afghanistan, making him the first private contractor to face criminal charges in connection with the prisoner abuse scandals.

David Passaro, 38, was arrested in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Thursday and charged with four counts of assault and assault with a deadly weapon.

Mr Passaro is accused of beating a suspected Taliban sympathiser at a base five miles from the Pakistan border, with his hands, feet and a large torch, over two days of interrogation last June.

The victim, Abdul Walid, had turned himself in after he was suspected of taking part in attacks on the camp. He died in his cell on June 21 2003.

The arrest comes as Pentagon and Justice Department leaders face new questions about whether they set policies that sanctioned the abuse of prisoners at US military facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq. The role of private contractors has come under particular scrutiny amid concerns that their exemption from military and local legal codes put them beyond prosecutors` reach.

Speaking in Washington, John Ashcroft, US attorney-general, cast the case as the reassertion of American values in the midst of one of the darkest national scandals in a generation.

"The American people are familiar by now with the images of prisoner abuse committed in our detention facilities overseas," he said. "Today, a wholly different - and more accurate - picture of our nation emerges. Today we see a nation dedicated to its ideals of freedom, respect for human dignity, to its insistence for justice and the rule of law."

The Justice Department is currently investigating more additional prisoner abuse cases. It announced Mr Passaro`s arrest as Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, admitted ordering the military last year to hide an Iraqi prisoner from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international organisations.

Mr Rumsfeld said the order to hide the prisoner, believed to be a senior member of terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, following a request from George Tenet, CIA director. "The decision was made that it would be appropriate not to [inform the ICRC] for a period," Mr Rumsfeld said. Under the Geneva Convention, the Pentagon should have informed the ICRC "promptly" about the prisoner, a Pentagon official said. The Pentagon also said it was investigating whether other prisoners had been detained without telling the ICRC.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon on Thursday said General Paul Kern, a four-star general, would replace General George Fay in overseeing the investigation into the role of military intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib. It was unclear on Thursday whether Mr Passaro was employed by a private company or was working for the CIA under one of the individual contract arrangements the agency has struck with numerous veterans to bolster its forces following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Employees from two private companies, CACI International and Titan, which supplied the army with interrogators and translators, respectively, at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, are also being investigated.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004.

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June 18, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
How the Holy Warriors Learned to Hate
By WALEED ZIAD

WASHINGTON

Afghanistan is no longer a terrorist factory sending thousands of killers into the world," President Bush announced on Tuesday, as he stood in the White House Rose Garden next to his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai. And, true, Afghanistan has been a success story, at least compared with Iraq. Still, the offensive against militants who fled into northwestern Pakistan continues, and Osama bin Laden remains on the lam. Achieving lasting peace and democracy in this trouble spot will take more than Special Operations troops — we must gain a far better understanding of the militants and their motivations.

A good place to start is a hand-scrawled inscription I saw on a crumbling wall in a border town in northern Pakistan that read, "Jihad of the sword, like prayer, is a religious obligation." Most Westerners probably assume that this is an ancient dictum — and I bet the man who wrote it did, too. But the fact is, the slogan was conjured up no more than 25 years ago.

Here`s the point: contrary to popular theories, the fight against militant religious groups in South Asia is not a clash of age-old civilizations or a conflict between traditionalism and modernism. Rather, it is a more recent story of political ineptitude and corruption, and of a postcolonial class struggle between the disenfranchised poor and these countries` elites.

The story begins early in the 19th century, in the religious schools called madrasas. For centuries under India`s Muslim rulers, madrasas were centers of learning, open to all classes, concerned with teaching law, the sciences and administrative subjects. As British rule grew stronger, however, a system of colonial education was established for wealthier, urban children. Its purpose, as Lord Macaulay put it in 1835, was to create "a class of persons Indian in blood and color but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect."

The madrasas were sidelined and many leading scholars, or ulema, were persecuted. In Delhi, madrasas were razed. It was left to the urban and rural poor, neglected by the colonial schools, to support the increasingly decrepit madrasas. The curriculum shrunk, and by the mid-20th century most taught only the rote learning of scripture and a dogmatic version of Islam.

During this period of degeneration, several schools of thought aimed at educational revival emerged, the largest being the Deobandi school, in 1867, and the Barelvi school later that century. Over time, these apolitical movements not only established madrasas but became de facto representatives of self-declared religious groups. Various factions — representing Sunnis, Shiites and radical Wahhabists — began to enter politics. Still, there was no real concept of a "religious" political party.

Throughout the 20th century, the leaders of these groups desperately tried to enter the political mainstream by jumping onto any ideological bandwagon, but none ever secured more than a handful of National Assembly seats. When India was partitioned in 1947, the major Deobandi party in Pakistan, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, began to call for "Islamization" (a mysterious term no one quite knew how to define at the time).

The party initially demanded new laws — based on false scriptural readings — covering superfluous issues like women`s dress, and bans on interest and popular entertainment. In the 1950`s, its catch phrase was "Islamic Constitutionalism"; by the 1960`s, it was "Islamic Democracy"; and in the early 1970`s "Islamic Socialism." By the end of that decade, it was back to "Islamic Democracy." In any case, no slogan translated into a mass following. The leadership engaged in occasional diatribes against rivals religious sects or alcohol, but foreign politics and militancy barely entered the ideological equation.

So where did the "Islamic" political parties and their militants emerge from?

The turning point was the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The West and its allies decided the best resistance to Moscow would come through presenting the war as a religious struggle. While Pakistani religious leaders had little political power, they did have considerable influence over the madrasas in Pakistan`s northwestern frontier region and in Afghanistan. Even the most benign found this to be an opportunity to finally win recognition (and a fortune), and they set up their own militant subsidiaries. Madrasas were converted overnight into training grounds for mujahedeen. In exchange for political power and global recognition, these impoverished students readily became cannon fodder in Afghanistan.

Of course, the eventual Soviet withdrawal meant an end to all that Western attention and money. The mujahedeen needed a new cause. International events — including the Persian Gulf war and the Palestinian intifada — provided one: hatred of America. An ethnic Pashtun militia, which metamorphosed into the Taliban, provided a rallying point for the unemployed mujahedeen. The rest is history.

Today, Western politicians, academics and intelligence experts continue to search through the annals of history to determine the sources of this jihadist mindset. But the truth is, it is just another ideology adopted by so-called religious parties in the former British Empire for short-term political gains, and fueled by the frustrations of a disaffected lower class.

To battle this phenomenon, then, we need to open a new front on the war on terrorism. Permanently dislodging these extremists calls for educational, economic and cultural development. A first step should be working with Afghanistan and Pakistan to move the focus of the madrasas away from holy war. Equally important is providing more Western money for new schools to provide functional education, coupled with real economic opportunities for graduates. Education and jobs, not rooting out some faux-religious doctrine, are the means by which the disenfranchised may be brought back into the fold.

Considering the vast populations of the underclasses in these countries, changing their lot may take longer than war, but it would be cheaper and is the only long-term solution. And in doing so, America would be seen not as an occupier but as a purveyor of prosperity, winning the hearts and minds of generations to come.

Waleed Ziad, an economist consultant, contributes to The News, a Pakistani daily.

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9/11 Report Cites Lack of Preparation
FAA Too Slow in Alerting Military, Panel Says

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 18, 2004; Page A01

U.S. aviation and military officials were woefully unprepared for the brazen terrorist assault carried out on Sept. 11, 2001, and were so blinded and disorganized that jet fighters were sent to chase phantom aircraft while real airliners crashed undisturbed into their targets, according to a government report issued yesterday.

In a detailed re-creation of U.S. air defense efforts that day, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks found that the Federal Aviation Administration was so slow to notify military commanders about the hijackings that U.S. fighter jets had no chance to intercept any of the aircraft.

The military was not notified about United Airlines Flight 93 until after it crashed and did not learn about United Flight 175 until the minute it hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center. And for 36 minutes, the FAA lost track altogether of American Airlines Flight 77, which was able to turn around and fly east toward the Pentagon, undetected by radar.

The head of the U.S. air defense system told the commission yesterday that if the FAA had notified military authorities immediately when the planes were hijacked, fighter jets could have reached all four jetliners in time. "If that is the case, yes, we could shoot down the airplanes," testified Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Yet the Sept. 11 commission`s report, issued during the panel`s final public hearing in Washington yesterday, cast serious doubt on Eberhart`s claim, finding that even if the fighter pilots had had more time, an executive order by Vice President Cheney that gave the military permission to shoot down hostile aircraft that morning did not come until long after the last hijacked airliner had crashed. Furthermore, the panel found, the instruction was never passed on to fighter pilots scrambled from Virginia`s Langley Air Force Base to Washington because of uncertainty about the order`s ramifications.

"The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex," the commission`s investigators concluded. "But the details play out a simple theme. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet."

The panel also concluded that jets probably would not have been able to stop the last airplane, United Flight 93, from barreling into the White House or the Capitol if it had not crashed in Pennsylvania.

"We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93," the report`s authors wrote, referring to an apparent effort by passengers to foil the hijackers` plans. "Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction."

The stark conclusions came as part of the last interim report to be issued by the staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which is racing to complete a book-length final report by the end of next month.

Among the new information contained in the latest report is a detailed reconstruction of the reactions of President Bush, Cheney and other top government leaders on the morning of Sept. 11.

Relatives of Sept. 11 victims, scattered throughout the sparsely attended final public hearing in L`Enfant Plaza yesterday, also listened through tears to recordings of two hijackers` voices, which were captured in radio transmissions picked up by air traffic controllers.

"We have some planes," an unidentified hijacker, who may be ringleader Mohamed Atta, said in heavily accented English from American Flight 11 at 8:24 a.m. "Just stay quiet and you`ll be okay. We are returning to the airport." A few seconds later, he says: "Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you`ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet." The plane was the first to crash, hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. The commission`s report documents a succession of mistakes, wrong assumptions and puzzling errors made on the morning of Sept. 11 by air defense and aviation employees, who often did not communicate with one another and frequently seemed unsure of how to respond to the attacks.

Panel investigators also tersely concluded that authorities with NORAD repeatedly misinformed the commission in testimony last fall about its scrambling of fighters from Langley. NORAD officials indicated at the time that the jets were responding to either United Flight 93 or American Flight 77. In fact, the panel found, they were chasing "a phantom aircraft," American Flight 11, which had already struck the World Trade Center.

The commission found that officials were confronted with numerous false reports of hijacked aircraft that morning. "We fought many phantoms that day," testified Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The commission also found no evidence that FAA headquarters ever issued an order to implement cockpit security measures once it became clear that airplanes were being hijacked. The FAA office in Boston recommended to FAA headquarters that such action be taken before the hijackers had taken over United Flight 93, but their suggestion was not taken. The new account essentially shifts the terms of the debate about air-defense response that day, because it indicates that it is unlikely that any of the jetliners could have been intercepted given the time available. But the report also suggests that the amount of time to respond might have been lengthened if the FAA had communicated the status of the flights to NORAD more quickly.

Several commission members were critical of the FAA`s response, arguing that headquarters was too slow to act and ignored the entreaties of some underlings. The FAA`s unprecedented decision to ground all 4,500 aircraft in the skies originated with a command center rather than headquarters.

"If there was one unmistakable failure, it is the failure of the headquarters at FAA," said Republican commissioner John F. Lehman, a former Navy secretary.

Democratic member Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska senator, said, "I think headquarters blew it."

Monte Belger, the acting deputy administrator of the FAA at the time of the attacks, said his attention on Sept. 11 quickly became focused on getting airborne planes safely on the ground. He also said he never received intelligence reports suggesting that al Qaeda was determined to strike the United States or that one suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been arrested on suspicion of training for a hijacking.

But one current FAA official, Benedict Sliney, who made the decision to ground all aircraft that morning, told commissioners that problems persist, recounting a recent incident in which he could not receive an answer from FAA headquarters as to whether he had the authority to scramble fighter jets in response to a suspicious aircraft. "I don`t think the lines of communication are as clear as they should be," he said.

Chairman Thomas H. Kean said after yesterday`s testimony that he was not satisfied with the answers from FAA officials and that the agency should have been better prepared for terrorist acts. The panel`s vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a Democratic former congressman from Indiana, cited a "failure of imagination" and said, "Our policy people simply were not able to imagine using an airplane as a weapon."

Kean also said he found it "very disturbing" that Cheney`s shoot-down order, authorized by Bush, would go unheeded. "When the president of the United States gives a shoot-down order, and the pilots who are supposed to carry it out do not get that order, then that`s about as serious as it gets as far as the defense of this country goes," Kean said.

Eberhart defended one general`s decision not to hesitate before passing on the shoot-down order to the Langley fighters, saying it was not clear at the time that there were any more confirmed hijackings. "Let`s make sure we understand this order, convey it properly, that in fact we do not make a mistake."

He said his belief that NORAD could have intercepted all four flights if given proper notice by the FAA was based on computer modeling. He also said that changes implemented since the attacks, including NORAD access to domestic radar and immediate notification procedures, would allow the interception of all the flights.

Eberhart pointed to the example of American Flight 11, which crashed nine minutes after the military had been notified. "Today we believe we would have at least 17 minutes to make that decision," he testified. "On 9/11, we were 153 miles away. Today, we would be in a position to fire for eight minutes."

Staff writer William Branigin contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Cheney Authorized Shooting Down Planes

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 18, 2004; Page A01

At 10:39 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney, in a bunker beneath the White House, told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a videoconference that he had been informed earlier that morning that hijacked planes were approaching Washington.

"Pursuant to the president`s instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out," Cheney told Rumsfeld, who was at the Pentagon. Informing Rumsfeld that the pilots had received orders to fire, Cheney added, "It`s my understanding they`ve already taken a couple of aircraft out."

Cheney`s comments, which were soon proved erroneous, were detailed in a report issued yesterday by the commission investigating the terrorist attacks. The comments are part of the considerable confusion that surrounded top government officials as the tense drama unfolded.

The commission`s description of actions taken by Cheney and President Bush, based in part on interviews with both men, provides new details of that morning. The report portrays the vice president taking command from his bunker while Bush, who was in Florida, communicated with the White House in a series of phone calls, and occasionally had trouble getting through.

Cheney, who told the commission he was operating on instructions from Bush given in a phone call, issued authority for aircraft threatening Washington to be shot down. But the commission noted that "among the sources that reflect other important events that morning there is no documentary evidence for this call, although the relevant sources are incomplete." Those sources include people nearby taking notes, such as Cheney`s chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Cheney`s wife, Lynne.

Bush and Cheney told the commission that they remember the phone call; the president said it reminded him of his time as a fighter pilot. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who had joined Cheney, told the commission that she heard the vice president discuss the rules of engagement for fighter jets over Washington with Bush.

Within minutes, Cheney would use his authority. Told -- erroneously, as it turned out -- that a presumably hijacked aircraft was 80 miles from Washington, Cheney decided "in about the time it takes a batter to swing" to authorize fighter jets scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., to engage it, the commission reported.

Only later did White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten suggest that Cheney call Bush once more to confirm the engagement order, according to the commission. Logs in Cheney`s bunker and on Air Force One confirm conversations at 10:18 and 10:20, respectively.

Later, Cheney spoke to Rumsfeld via videoconference. When the vice president said the orders had been relayed to the jets and "a couple of aircraft" had been downed, Rumsfeld replied: "We can`t confirm that. We`re told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that they did it."

But the commission determined that the Langley jet fighters sent to circle Washington never received the shoot-down order. It was passed down the chain of command, but commanders of the North American Aerospace Defense Command`s northeast sector did not give it to the pilots.

"Both the mission commander and the weapons director indicated they did not pass the order to fighters circling Washington and New York City because they were unsure how the pilots would, or should, proceed with this guidance," the commission reported.

"In short," the report added, "while leaders believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to `take out` hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed to the Langley pilots were to `ID type and tail.` "

Unknown to Cheney or Bush, however, by 10:45 other fighter jets would be circling Washington, and these had clear authority to shoot down planes, the commission determined. They were sent from Andrews Air Force Base by the commander of the 113th Wing of the Air National Guard, in consultation with the Secret Service, which relayed instructions that an agent said were from Cheney.

That arrangement was "outside the military chain of command," according to the commission report. Bush and Cheney told the commission they were unaware that fighters had been scrambled from Andrews.

Cheney would give the order to engage twice -- at news that United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was approaching Washington, and at what turned out to be a medevac helicopter, the commission determined. Neither aircraft was engaged.

About 9 a.m. that day, at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., it was Bush`s top political adviser, Karl Rove, who first told him and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, though initially it was believed to be a small private plane, the commission reported.

Cheney, told by his assistant to turn on his television, was pondering "how the hell a plane could hit the World Trade Center" when he saw the second plane crash into the South Tower, the commission reported.

White House officials jumped into action, but the commission was skeptical about whether their efforts that morning had much effect. It said a video teleconference in the White House situation room, chaired by Richard A. Clarke, then head of counterterrorism at the White House, "had no immediate effect on the emergency defense efforts."

Bush remained in the classroom for "five to seven minutes" after learning of the second crash as the children around him continued reading. He had his first conversation with Cheney at about 9:15. Those traveling with the president did not know other aircraft were missing, the commission reported.

Communications with Washington were so poor that Bush, who told the commission he was "deeply dissatisfied" with the technical problems, at one point resorted to using a cell phone on the way to Air Force One, according to commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton. Both said Bush`s motorcade took a wrong turn on the way to the airport and had to reverse.

Bush and Cheney spoke again at 9:45, while Bush was on the tarmac aboard Air Force One. By that time, both towers of the World Trade Center were aflame and the Pentagon had been hit.

"Sounds like we have a minor war going on here," Bush told Cheney, according to the commission report. "I heard about the Pentagon. We`re at war . . . somebody`s going to pay."

Cheney joined the Secret Service and Card in urging Bush not to return to Washington. The two apparently were still on the phone, about 10 minutes later, as Air Force One took off from Florida without a destination. "The objective was to get up in the air -- as fast and as high as possible -- and then decide where to go," the commission report noted.

Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Annan Opposes Exempting U.S. From Court

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 18, 2004; Page A24

UNITED NATIONS, June 17 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday urged the Security Council to oppose renewal of a resolution that would shield U.S. troops serving in U.N.-approved peacekeeping missions from prosecution before the International Criminal Court, saying the "exemption is wrong."

Annan noted that the United States is facing international criticism for abuses of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. He told reporters: "It would be unwise to press for an exemption, and it would be even more unwise on the part of the Security Council to grant it. It would discredit the council and the United Nations that stands for the rule of law."

The U.N. chief`s remarks added momentum to a campaign by supporters of the war crimes court to defeat the U.S.-sponsored initiative. Senior U.N. diplomats said Annan would press his case in a closed-door luncheon Friday with the 15 Security Council members.

"Blanket exemption is wrong," Annan said. "It is of dubious judicial value, and I don`t think it should be encouraged by the council."

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States is well aware of Annan`s position but will press the council for renewal. The resolution, first adopted two years ago, applies to "current or former officials" from countries that have not ratified the treaty establishing the court -- which includes the United States -- and exempts them from prosecution before the court for crimes committed in U.N.-authorized operations. The council expressed an "intention" to renew the resolution each year "for as long as may be necessary."

"It should be renewed the way the council said it would," Boucher said. "And so we`re still talking to other governments in New York and discussing this with them."

The United States faces fierce resistance within the council as the July 1 deadline for renewal approaches.

China has threatened to veto the resolution, citing concern that it could be use to provide political cover for abuses. U.S. and other Security Council officials say that China -- which also has not ratified the court treaty -- is confronting the United States because it recently supported Taiwan`s bid for observer status in the World Health Assembly. "This could have an impact," said one council ambassador, who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the issue. China is sending a "signal" to Washington that this "will threaten the development of bilateral relations."

U.S. diplomats acknowledge that they are struggling to line up the nine votes required to pass the resolution. Six countries -- Russia, Britain, the Philippines, Pakistan, Algeria and Angola -- are expected to support the United States, according to council diplomats.

France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Benin and Chile have indicated they will abstain. Romania`s U.N. ambassador, Mihnea Ioan Motoc, said his government will abstain unless its vote is responsible for defeating the U.S. resolution.

The International Criminal Court was established by treaty at a 1998 conference in Rome to prosecute individuals responsible for the most serious crimes, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The treaty has been signed by 135 nations and ratified by 94; it took effect in July 2002.

President Bill Clinton signed the treaty in December 2000, but the Bush administration renounced it in May 2002, warning that it could be used to conduct frivolous trials against U.S. troops. The United States subsequently threatened to shut down U.N. peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and East Timor unless the council exempted U.S. personnel from prosecution.

That strategy has fueled resentment against the Bush administration at the United Nations. More than 40 countries have a standing request to discuss the resolution in a public debate. A senior diplomat said most nations will use the event to criticize the resolution, and to draw attention to U.S. abuses of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We think the resolution is not compatible with the U.N. charter," one Canadian diplomat said. "It`s harmful to international accountability for serious crimes and the rule of law."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Forgivable Once



Friday, June 18, 2004; Page A28

THE LATEST interim report by the Sept. 11 commission describes a litany of errors and miscommunications by aviation and air defense authorities during the attacks. Under normal circumstances, these failures would be simply unforgivable, yet the tone of the report, if not commissioners` questions at a public hearing yesterday, is relatively understanding. So little about the attacks actually corresponded to situations these officials had ever envisioned that they ended up, as the report`s title aptly puts it, "Improvising a Homeland Defense." Blaming them for the inadequacies of the improvisation smacks of perfect hindsight. That said, it is critical that officials have a more flexible and comprehensive strategy for heading off catastrophe from the skies. Such errors would not be forgivable a second time.

The 29-page report details just how muddled communications were both within the Federal Aviation Administration and among the FAA, the military and the White House. Different FAA offices did not know that others were tracking hijacked planes. The military was not notified of the hijackings promptly. Given the timing of the notification, it never had a chance of actually shooting any airliners down, yet Vice President Cheney at one point believed that two planes had been intercepted. While Mr. Cheney and President Bush authorized incoming jets to be shot down, they did so after the last had crashed, and pilots in the air never learned of the order. Communications were so poor that at one point, the military spent time chasing a plane that, it turned out, had already crashed into the World Trade Center.

The U.S. air defense system was designed to deal with Soviet bombers -- and was greatly ramped down after the end of the Cold War. While protocols did specify how the military and the FAA were supposed to interact in the event of a hijacking, the assumption was that it would be obvious which plane had been hijacked and that the hijacking would be a traditional one. Nobody had contemplated coordinated, multiple hijackings in which the hijackers themselves would be able to fly the planes and their ambition would be to use them not for extortion but as missiles. In that context, it hardly seems surprising that systems functioned less than optimally.

The events of Sept. 11 demonstrated that defense systems need to be adaptable and speedy if they are to be effective against terrorists, who are constantly envisioning new and creative modes of attack. Officials testified yesterday that their systems are much improved. But it is not enough to be able today to prevent a recurrence. An attack exploiting the same vulnerabilities that al Qaeda took advantage of on Sept. 11 probably will not happen again, after all. Rather, future attacks will seek to flummox U.S. defenses in ways just as surprising as airplane-weapons were then. The key question is whether American defenses will be flexible enough to respond quickly and appropriately -- a task for which flawless communications and clear lines of authority are obviously key. Testimony before the commission yesterday suggests that more work needs to be done in the field of aviation. Rigorously assessing the adequacy of the changes since Sept. 11, not just the response that day, will be an important contribution for the commission to make as it puts together its final report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Defiant Bush and Blair insist Saddam had al-Qa`ida links
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor and David Usborne in New York

18 June 2004

President George Bush and the Prime Minister`s Office yesterday defied the independent US commission on 11 September and insisted that there were links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa`ida.

The report by the commission on Wednesday dealt a devastating blow to the credibility to one of President Bush`s reasons for going to war against Iraq by finding there was no credible evidence linking Saddam`s regime to Osama bin Laden`s terrorist organisation.

In a carefully co-ordinated riposte to the commission, London and Washington both insisted that Saddam had allowed al-Qa`ida to operate inside Iraq before the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qa`ida is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qa`ida," Mr Bush said. "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qa`ida. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa`ida."

A few hours earlier, Tony Blair insisted that Saddam had created "a permissive environment" for terrorists and al-Qa`ida operatives in Iraq.

"The Prime Minister has always said Saddam created a permissive environment for terrorism and we know that the people affiliated to al-Qa`ida operated in Iraq," said a spokesman for Mr Blair. "The Prime Minister always made it clear that Saddam`s was a rogue state which threatened the security of the region and the world."

In contrast to the US administration, Tony Blair has carefully avoided claims that Saddam was involved in the 11 September attacks. Even the so-called "dodgy dossier`` avoided making such a claim.

Challenged by The Independent, the Downing Street spokesman said the Government was not claiming a direct link between the attackers on 11 September and Saddam, but insisted there was evidence that Saddam had created a "permissive regime" in which al-Qa`ida could operate.

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, also refused to back down. He told al-Jazeera television there was a connection between Iraq and al-Qa`ida. "We have seen these connections ... and we stick to that," he said. "We have not said it was related to 9/11."

The link was a key factor in President Bush`s justification for the war. But it did not play a part in Mr Blair`s argument for action, which rested entirely on Saddam Hussein`s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

In a further embarrassment for the Bush administration yesterday, the independent commission reported that America`s defence forces failed to respond quickly enough on the morning of 11 September.

The ensuing chaos and miscommunications caused a crucial delay in relaying orders for the planes to be intercepted and shot down.

"On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen," the report asserted. "What ensued was a hurried attempt to create an improvised defence by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced."

Such was the lack of coordination between air traffic controllers, military officials and senior members of the government, that when Mr Cheney, the Vice-President, finally authorised shooting down the planes they had already hit their targets. Yet, Mr Cheney briefly believed that two of the planes had in fact been shot down.

"It`s my understanding that they`ve already taken a couple of aircraft out," Mr Cheney told the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in a telephone conversation, the transcript of which was released last night.

The panel also played segments of tapes carrying portions of other conversations from that day. One apparently carried words spoken by Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, while he was at the controls of American Airlines flight 11, which took off from Boston and was the first plane to strike the World Trade Centre.

"We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you`ll be OK. We are returning to the airport," Atta is heard telling the passengers. Later he warns: "If you try to make any moves, you`ll endanger yourself and the airplane."

The commission held its final public hearing yesterday on the terror strikes before issuing a complete and final report next month.


18 June 2004 14:23


© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Putin says Russia gave U.S. information about potential Iraqi attacks in the United States
- BAGILA BUKHARBAYEVA, Associated Press Writer
Friday, June 18, 2004

(06-18) 08:31 PDT ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) --

Russia gave the Bush administration intelligence after the September 11 attacks that suggested Saddam Hussein`s regime in Iraq was preparing attacks in the United States, President Vladimir Putin said Friday.

Putin said he couldn`t comment on how critical the Russians` information was in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.

In Washington, a U.S. official said Putin`s information did not add to what the United States already knew about Saddam`s intentions.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, said the Russian tip did not specify a time or a place where an attack might take place.

The Bush administration in part justified the invasion of Iraq by saying Saddam had links to terror groups, including al-Qaida. The U.S. commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said this week there was no evidence of any collaboration between Iraq and Osama bin Laden`s terror network.

Putin said Russia didn`t have any information that Saddam`s regime was actually behind any terrorist acts.

"After Sept. 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services, the intelligence service, received information that officials from Saddam`s regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests," Putin said.

"It`s one thing to have information that Saddam`s regime is preparing terrorist attacks, (but) we didn`t have information that it was involved in any known terrorist attacks," Putin said in the Kazakh capital Astana after regional economic and security summits.

He said President Bush personally thanked one of the leaders of Russia`s intelligence agencies for the information.

At the White House, National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack would not directly address Putin`s remarks. "We have excellent cooperation with Russia in the war against terrorism and a big part of that is the sharing of intelligence information," McCormack said. "We don`t typically comment on intelligence matters."

Putin said the intelligence didn`t cause Russia to waver from its firm opposition to the war.

"Despite that information about terrorist attacks being prepared by Saddam`s regime, Russia`s position on Iraq remains unchanged," Putin said.

Putin didn`t elaborate on any details of the terror plots or mention whether they were tied to the al-Qaida terror network.

The Sept. 11 commission reported this week that while there were contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq, they did not appear to have produced "a collaborative relationship."

Bush, however, insisted Thursday that Saddam had "numerous contacts" with al-Qaida and said Iraqi agents had met with the terror network`s leader, Osama bin Laden, in Sudan.

Saddam "was a threat because he had terrorist connections -- not only al-Qaida connections, but other connections to terrorist organizations," Bush said.

Also Thursday, a top Russian diplomat called for international inspectors to conclusively resolve the question of whether Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction -- one of the main reasons Bush used to justify the war. No such weapons have been found since Saddam`s fall.

"This problem must be resolved ... because to a great extent it became the pretext for the start of the war against Iraq," Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov said in Moscow, according to Interfax news agency.

He said such a finding would allow the U.N. Security Council to "turn a page and finally close the dossier on Iraqi weapons."
AP correspondent George Gedda in Washington contributed to this story.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/200…
©2004 Associated Press

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From AxisofLogic.com

Critical Analysis
The Dumbing Down of America: Part I of II
By Manuel Valenzuela, Contributing Editor
Jun 17, 2004, 13:27

Something is amiss in the great nation called America. Ominous sirens warning this reality can be heard emanating loudly through invisible winds of change circulating our towns and cities. The American people are being strangulated; unbeknownst to the masses they are being transformed and conditioned, becoming the entity the elite have long sought, the culmination of decades of social engineering designed to make of hundreds of millions the slaves of times past and the automatons of the future.

Yet in this present day we find ourselves in, struggling to comprehend a world gone mad, unable to discern neither the direction we are headed nor the inevitable course time is guiding us on. It is because of what has been done to us, and is presently being done to our children, that we fail to comprehend the severity of the road that lies ahead. Quite successful have the elite become in shifting the balance of power from the masses to themselves. How, one might wonder, has this been accomplished, especially when we are the many and they the few?

It is through the dumbing down of America, the methodical destruction and purposeful elimination of the means by which a society educates and enlightens itself. The evisceration of a system that extols accountability and dialogue, opens up the gates of opportunity with the keys of ability and questions authority and seeks debate is in full swing. A system that in theory creates a wealth of knowledge, illuminates talent, births an informed citizenry and creates free thinking, analytical minds has been slowly implemented for the last several decades. The dumbing down of America continues into the present, unrelenting and unhindered, squashing the masses for the benefit of the elite.

A giant threat to the system is being disposed of, systematically and without remorse, making of America and its citizens yet one more cog in the engine called capitalistic exploitation of humanity.

What has happened to the Pax Americana?

Here stands the Pax Americana, the most imposing Empire that ever rose from the short reign of human civilization, responsible for placing the entire manifestation of world citizens at the threshold of perilous danger. It is the Pax Americana that has unwound the stitches holding a volatile world together, the nation that has over the last fifty years caused so much damage to the peoples of the globe. The karma of ceaseless negative energy is coming back to haunt an empire whose actions, while helping enrich its own belly and those residing in its entrails, have decimated untold millions whose only crime was being born in lands destined to suffer the harsh exploitation of America and its capitalistic pandemic.

How has a once admired and loved leader of nations fallen from grace in such a short period of time? What has happened to a populace living in the wealthiest nation in human civilization? Why has the United States transformed itself into the malicious beast the world sees through frightful eyes?

Gluttony and materialism have enveloped all corners of the United States, from Pacific to Atlantic Oceans, from the border with Canada to the one with Mexico. The vices of consumerism and greed are all-encompassing, years ago having replaced virtues long since gone. The clandestine enslavement hidden in mass production and ever-longer working hours has in the last few decades become the value by which we measure one`s worth to society.

The ability to question authority has vanished in a haze of indifference, even as the evaporation of the American mind continues unabated. Government has been transformed right in front of our eyes, becoming not democracy but corporatism, the marriage between the corporate and government elite. Our freedoms and liberties are in shambles, now fragile porcelain being decimated by the thundering herd of bulls in Washington.

The government of, by and for the people is now comprised of leaches flourishing in rotten swamps, prostitutes roaming bordellos masquerading as palaces of governance and fecal matter prospering in the nation`s sewers. Corporations and their minions we help elect dominate and transform society, leading us into the black holes they easily maneuver us into. We are being used and abused, yet with the dumbing down of America easily controlled beings we have turned into, comatose to the danger we have embraced and oblivious to the strings attached to our appendages.

Something eerie seems to have engulfed us in the land of the free and the home of the brave. From the land where all men are created equal has equality disappeared; from a nation espousing freedom has freedom been eviscerated. Once brave dissenters and seekers of accountability have gone missing, allowing free reign to those endowed with power. Free-thinking and analytical minds are as rare as the great apes humanity is making extinct. Rare is the citizen not captive to fear, insecurity and intimidation. The ability to question authority or to seek accountability has collapsed along with the towers of the World Trade Center. A world existing beyond the borders and shores of America, containing six billion fellow humans, has been forgotten and disregarded as ignorance to cultures, nations, beliefs and ethnicities is conditioned into our minds practically from birth.

Something is amiss in a nation where one would expect the plenitudes of Empire to trickle down into every man, woman and child. To bestow upon its citizens the tools needed to seek true freedom of thought and a path towards enlightenment would be expected of an American utopia that is more often preached rather than practiced. Yet the question arises as to the cause of why hundreds of millions continue to fall downwards into empty wells of promises unkept instead of reaching for the zenith of those fulfilled.

What mechanisms left to erode the citizenry of free thought and freedom of mind have been allowed to linger in American society, and how have they been allowed to remain when the reality of what has occurred continues to degrade the Pax Americana from the inside out?

Conditioned Producers and Consumers

Spawned from the assembly line called human procreation we open our eyes to a world ready to transform our life energies into expendable disseminators of the patterns of production and consumption that will mark our time on Earth, in essence becoming the reason for our existence. To the system called capitalism we become nothing more than a number which will in time be exploited to the full extent envisaged by man. We are given social security numbers, digits that will follow us through the journey from newborn to cadaver. To the system we are this number, easily traceable, easily conditioned.

Television begins to inculcate us with rampant bombardments of advertisements, thereby beginning to condition the young, innocent mind to a life trained for consumption. The foods we eat and the products we buy begin establishing the tastes we will forever enjoy. Associations of pleasure, ingrained tastes and smells, nostalgia of fantasy and perfection enter the young brain. It is because of this that corporations want to hook us from the first moments of infancy so loyal lifelong consumers we become.

To the innocent and pure mind television thus becomes the window to a world that is neither real nor complicated. The virgin brain sees in the shows it is blitzkrieged with a fiction that in reality does not exist. It sees perfection, fantasy, beauty, consumption and loyal acquiescence, and, with the passage of time, seeks to emulate this world in a false belief that it can be attained. Ingrained in this principle is the belief, channeled by corporations, that to achieve what can never be a person must consume and produce, be obedient to authority, friendly to her corporate masters and eager to embrace what society dictates. The dumbing down of America thus begins.

As television becomes parent, teacher, role model, babysitter and entertainer to the child, given the abandonment of historical parental roles thanks to society`s pressure to produce and consume, everything shown becomes everything learned, thus habituating a child to the role corporations have decided to bestow onto him. When everything seen on the screen is created, controlled, manipulated and disseminated by the corporate world the child`s perception of what reality encompasses will indeed also conform to the corporate vision. After image after image, fantasy after fantasy, conditioning after conditioning, the young human mind has no choice but to accept the commands of the brainwashing taking place right in front of his or her baby eyes.

It follows that children learn every behavior from their parents as well. From the very beginning entrenched behaviors to produce and consume become ingrained in the young brain. The long hours at work, the short amount of time spent with the child, the abandonment of parental roles and supervision, the incessant drive for consumption, the wasting of money and pursuit of material possessions, the behaviors of stress, depression, unhappiness, anger and frustration are all absorbed by a mind that in infancy acts like a sponge, learning human society from those closest to its environment, whether it is family or television.

In adulthood, these same behaviors will be manifested, thereby helping fulfill the role of producer and consumer the corporate world has reserved for yet one more human energy sprouting from the conveyor belt of procreation. Thanks to the television and parental subservience to the same system of their youth, one`s progeny will become the bogged down producer of the same products he or she will later voraciously and seemingly without conscious consume.

The vicious circle that is the virus of American capitalism infects seemingly from birth, inoculating children to the vices of exploitation from which they will forever derive their existence. It is at the height of innocence that the forces of capitalism attack, attaching themselves in the depths of a human brain, dissolving precepts not in tune with its compulsive and exploitive self. Once attached the virus is not easily displaced, thereby becoming personality as well as behavior. From the cradle to the grave, destiny in today`s America is guided by the corporate world and its sinister virus, helping not its host but its disseminator, unleashing wave after wave of unhappy and exploited producer and easily conditioned and controlled consumer.

Consequences of a Controlled Populace

Education in the United States has become an exercise in government and corporate brainwashing, used to achieve a citizenry devoid of analytical and free-thinking minds. The purpose, quite simply, is to retain the class warfare structure that has marked American society for decades. Education has become a tool used to make the wealthy richer and the poor more indigent. It is now a mechanism to separate the have nots from the haves, the higher castes from the untouchables. As it stands today, though certainly being eviscerated more and more daily, education is making of the masses impotent creatures of indifference, happily droned into complacency and deprived of a knowledge that once served to curtail the power of the elite that run the nation.

The result is the age of corporatism, the age of unfettered and unaccountable power and the control of the masses through media manipulation, societal fabrication and education eradication. As the world slowly passes through the sands of time the people of the United States, those living inside what has become a most hated geopolitical entity, are seeing the result of being dumbed down and of letting incompetents, warmongers, profiteers and deranged zealots run unfettered and unopposed, ransacking the globe, its people and land in the process.

Today we see the ramifications of a citizenry that has allowed itself to be made ignorant through its submission to those in power whose purposeful malfeasance continues to destroy the very essence of knowledge that grants freedom to enslaved minds. Iraq and the coming disaster in the Middle East are a consequence to the decimation of education in the United States. George W. Bush is a consequence of the dumbing down of America, to which he owes his very position perched like the vulture he is atop the dying tree of America that has been contaminated by his inept and infected claws smeared in human blood.

Those in power have succeeded in making the masses a herd of sheep following the shepherd straight into the slaughterhouse, unaware of the destiny that awaits them nor of their role in the furthering of death, destruction and violence now gripping the world. Like a deer caught in headlights, the masses are hypnotized, unable to see beyond the sight of their own meeting with a fate conditioned into our brains from infancy that is destroying freedom, knowledge and our ability to question the evils being done in our name. America today and the world tomorrow are a manifestation of this truth.

Ignorance has replaced knowledge, resulting in power running amok, incapable of being restrained, mutating and growing, feeding off our inability to escape the debacle currently gripping our collective mind.

Brainwash Education

The education system in America has been carefully eroded over the course of time, altered in such a way as to make creative and curious children barren and submissive adults indifferent to the world around them. The system now in place begins robbing a child`s ability to think for himself or herself from the very start of the education process. The class structure itself eliminates individuality, personality and energetic ability, as one teacher must educate many students competing for attention. It is here when talents that need to be discovered get ambushed instead. Yet with a class structure that has endured for decades, the child must become part of the whole, learning from books laced with government and/or corporate propaganda.

In many school districts, mostly poor ones strapped for cash, books can be dozens of years old, lacking modern thought or progress. Many books are tools created by entities with special interests that have as a purpose the teaching of their ideology or the furthering of their goals. The absurd teaching of creationism is one such example. Many corporations now create and donate books to school districts that contain references and examples to their brand names and product descriptions. Even in school children cannot escape the growing omnipresence of the corporate Leviathan which thirsts to program the innocent the way it sees fit.

Indeed, the young mind is needlessly brainwashed with a history of a nation that in many instances contradicts and even subverts the true historical reality of the United States. Only the `good` that America has fostered during its rapid and short rise is taught, without ever dealing with the requisite bad inherent in an Empire that has laid claim to land and man during years of brutal conquest, both militarily and economically. Glossing over national heroes, mythifying them into deities and transforming them into perfect human beings is the role of the school book, brainwashing the young to a fictional perfection when reality begs to differ. Yet humanity must be balanced and its reality etched in stone so that future generations learn the human condition as well as its civilization.

The genocide of indigenous Americans is whitewashed; the slavery of blacks that lasted hundreds of years, oftentimes suffering barbaric treatment at the hands of their white masters is easily covered up in a few paragraphs, deceiving readers to the true horrors their ancestors committed or suffered. The subservient role women were placed under for centuries is hardly mentioned, and the great civil rights movement that helped change history for the better never gets the coverage it deserves.

The war crimes and crimes against humanity America has perpetrated worldwide to millions of anonymous people under the rubric of freedom and democracy is never mentioned, rather, they are sugarcoated and glamorized, serving as examples of America�s `great history.` Also, the corrosive and damaging effects of American capitalism disguised as democracy that has condemned untold millions to the dustbins of history is manipulated to look like a chivalrous attempt to save lives and free nations.

Brainwashing unquestioned patriotism into our young one�s minds government controlled education furthers the squashing of dissent and the questioning of our sovereign�s motives. We are conditioned that our elected leaders are gods walking among men, to be trusted and never to be questioned. Their intentions are always noble, their reasoning pure. Dissent and debate, protest and curiosity are seen not as patriotic manifestations of an informed citizenry but rather as an alien afterthought not worthy of nationalistic pride.

The ingraining of loyalty to flag and country, even when committing evil worldwide, is to be allowed to continue, eventually becoming the means by which the state is allowed to declare war, economic genocide and market colonialism, without so much as a whisper from its constituency. The elite therefore bask in the glow of the radiant beam called patriotic fervor, indoctrinated from childhood, lasting until death.

Preaching the noble deeds yet hiding or disguising the evil ingrained in empire building serves only to alter history and manipulate the young, eroding our future in the process. To understand humanity in past, present and future an entire history must be taught, both good and bad, thereby creating in our future citizens the ability to grow wise to the mistakes of times past in order to comprehend the ever-changing and oftentimes complex conditions of the present. To not teach the truth of what has come before is to leave behind the keys to unlocking the door of the human condition, essentially condemning our children into repeating the errors that continue to bear witness to unnecessary suffering, death, destruction, violence and war.

The fruits of our past mistakes can be seen in our history; the essence of the human condition lies written for all to see. American education serves no purpose if the result of its actions leads to a replay of years gone by; it becomes an exercise in futility when our future repeats the blunders of their ancestors and the follies of those who once led.

Brainwash education is the means to an end, a device that entraps rather than make free. It is a valuable tool to exert hegemony over the populace. When begun from the first years of youth, becoming attached and most difficult to extract, brainwashing to suit the state and the elite`s goals is a dangerous device. When combined with the 9/11�s of history, it takes on a life of its own, becoming a Molotov cocktail ready to explode in seething rage. The system would not have it any other way.

Made Ignorant to a World Beyond our Borders

American education makes no attempt to expose the wonders of a world existing beyond its borders to its children. The outside world and its plethora of diverse people are hardly mentioned, easily summarized in brief mentions of world history. The ignorance of cultures, religions, ethnicities, nationalities and beliefs that has ensued has made America a nation neither curious to a grand spectrum of peoples nor understanding to the vast complexities of an ever-changing world. Failing to understand what exists beyond our oceans, American children, through the damaging effects of the nation�s dilapidated educational system, become isolated from the world community and the fraternity of peoples.

It is understanding the world and becoming part of it that prevents the Iraq`s and Vietnam`s of history from ever arising. It is knowledge of a world and its people that creates peace and good-will. Ignorance, on the other hand, fosters only exploitation, indifference and arrogance. Iraq today is the result of this failure in American education. Abu Ghraib and its war crimes is the result of a system that isolates, indoctrinates and makes ignorant to the lives and realities of six billion people whose world is larger than that of our own borders. The debacle in Iraq is a manifestation of American ignorance to a world and its diverse peoples; Iraq`s daily explosions are testament to its failure to understand the people it is occupying and the anger emanating from the arrogance and ignorance of its soldiers.

The failure of American education to teach about a world existing beyond the confines of its own grandeur is exemplified today by an Iraq that is the catalyst to a most dangerous era in American history. Societies that are ignorant to the greater world around them suffer a dereliction of humanity and the far reaching implications their actions tend to unsettle. From the actions of ignorance rise the reactions of those ignored.

America`s failure to educate its children to a world beyond its shores, in a world coming closer together is a travesty, and an error, especially for an Empire whose grip is all-encompassing, its power circulating around the globe. A leader of nations and an Empire such as America must learn and understand the world it dominates and the people it controls. For it to govern wisely its citizens must be brought into the sphere of a world community that is both heterogeneous and aware of the dangers the Pax Americana is capable of releasing. For it to avoid the wrath seen today its ambassadors and representatives must be educated to the songs of the world and the tunes of human civilization.

In order to prevent the never-before seen levels of hatred, animosity and anger directed at the United States and the blowback that is now being manifested the American education system must open itself up to the outside world. If it remains isolationist and ignorant, preferring to enclose itself in the bubble it continues to lock itself into, the karma we are witnessing will be but the tip of the iceberg. Ignorance leading to exploitation can only go so far; a world beyond our borders exists, and must be taught, learned and understood.

For if the Empire`s people fail to grasp the lands and peoples beyond their borders, preferring instead to live in the comfort of their own existence and the ignorance of their upbringing a world that was never known will be once more forgotten, and the blowback birthed by our ancestors will be made that much more difficult to comprehend.

Separate and Unequal

The purposeful inequality inherent in American education is created by design, fostered by an elite that manipulates in society a separation between rich and working class. It is abundantly clear that education systems in America are nowhere near to being equal. On the contrary, their inequality stems from a government and the elite that control it that seek to maintain the status quo of preventing millions of children from ever advancing beyond the caste they are born into. Without opportunity, ability is wasted and those capable of threatening the power structure as it exists at present are left to rot in the cesspool created by those social engineers sealing the destiny of millions of Americans.

Maintaining separate and unequal education systems assures the elite, government and corporations of millions of exploitable slaves that through no fault of their own are condemned to a life stuck in the working class, living off low wages, surviving on a day to day basis, uneducated and ignorant to the exploitation they are subjected to. The millions that fate has placed in corrosive school districts starving for pennies from the government are subjected to an education that is shameful at best and a crime against humanity at worst. Unequal distribution of tax schemes makes it impossible for children born into poor neighborhoods from ever getting the education the few elite children of privilege are guaranteed.

With rotting school districts that cannot afford good teachers, books, buildings, administrators and a semblance of hope children receive substandard education levels that forever alter their ability to learn and advance in society. When this is compounded year after year the ramifications are severe, serving to quash all ability and potential opportunity. It is this level of education most American children, both urban and rural, are subjected to, forced to endure the worst inequality of teaching found in the developed world.

When the elite that run the nation are deciding futures, however, this is to be expected. Their corporations need low-class workers; their armies need soldiers; their government needs slaves. By maintaining separate and unequal education systems, in essence two completely different systems, one reserved for privilege, the other for future serfs, the elite are assured of control, exploitation, power and growing wealth, mostly at the hands of the slaves they have created. The masses, having been trained from birth to become the slaves of the nation`s capitalists, are subjected to years of subservient education mechanisms that encourage and indeed guide us toward exploitation. The dreams and hopes of childhood are thus eviscerated as the reality of the environment and education we are born into collides with once creative talents and utopian goals.

Born into environments offering the worst in American education creates in the masses ignorance to the plight our government is subjecting us to. We are made unaware and become indifferent to the massive crime being perpetrated by government officials who help foster separate and unequal education and even encourage it by their unwillingness to make right what has been made wrong. The continued apathy of our government to the vastly different levels of education is proof that it is complicit in the manufacturing of an entire class of slaves produced to be exploited by the powerful few. To continue a system that is so dastardly in its scope and so damaging to millions is to acknowledge the purposeful disregard our government has in alleviating a reality that in this nation at least does not need to exist. It is shameful, it is wrong, it is a crime.

An assembly line of slaves has been created, socially engineered through years of manipulations and exploitations, breeding ignorance, robbing opportunity, erasing talent and harvesting entire generations of worker bees. For America the beautiful needs slaves to work and enrich the elite, it needs soldiers to wage war in the name of capitalism, it needs ignorance to continue its sovereignty and castes from which to maintain the balance that has kept those in power at the top for generations.

Separate and unequal, the secret ingredients to the American juggernaut; separate and unequal, the oil that assures the mighty engine of capitalism from ever corroding and malfunctioning. Through the backs of the masses the elite survive; through the exploitation of the many the few thrive.

Leaving all Working and Middle Class Children Behind

The dumbing down of America continues its injurious path through the policies of George Bush, who is quietly decimating the talents and energies of the nation`s youth. Wishing all children to become the bumbling idiot that characterizes his existence, his policies have washed away what remained of viable education. The dumbing down of America has only picked up its pace as children today are being deprived of the tools necessary to think for themselves. Forced by the government to teach to standardized tests, school districts are erasing the arts and other important classes from curriculum. Instead, teachers are being forced to prepare their students to passing the test that determines financial reward or punishment.

This form of education is leveling critical thinking, analytical skills and free-thinking minds. It is destroying education as we know it, along with the futures of millions of children who are being made automatons lacking a mind to question the world around them. This sinister mechanism is purposefully being implemented to dumb down American children. It is yet another tool those in power are using to create a nation devoid of free thought.

Teaching to the test entails sacrificing all subject matter not included in the test itself. As a result, vital tools such as music, art, languages, social sciences, philosophy, health and other liberal arts are being ignored, thrown away into dark closets of indifference. Worthy teachers now have their hands tied down, unable to bring out the blossoms of talent from their students. Instead, they must partake in the manipulation of America`s children, becoming the instructors to a new generation of students those in power want desperately to transform into unthinking sentinels easily manipulated and controlled.

America`s teachers, already underpaid and under funded, battling a system eager to destroy youth, must now see the seeds they sow become homogenous crops succumbing to ignorance, eroding all semblance of individuality and wasting away once fruitful and talented lives. All children are being left behind, and American society will pay the ultimate and most severe price.

Fostering Ignorance, Creating Sheep, Cementing Decline

Children are brainwashed at a very early age to follow the dictates of the state, to become the obedient drones the state needs in order to survive. Curriculum programs prevent the free-thinking mind from ever emerging even as such paramount subject matter such as art, foreign language, music and philosophy are being eliminated or never implemented. It is at a very early age when these classes can make a such a vital difference in children, in essence granting an enormous head start towards a long lasting, happy life. It is at early youth that the human brain absorbs everything that is taught, it is at this stage in development when positive and all-inclusive education bears fruit. Yet American children, living in the wealthiest nation on the planet, are being denied the essential tools needed for human progress to move forward, individuals to prosper and for a nation to thrive.

Becoming an exercise in futility, education has become a weapon to militarize millions of children to the tune of the government, robbing them of the free-thinking and analytical mind whose questioning of government and individual thought the elite want eliminated. In today`s America, no child must be allowed to think or understand what is being done to them and the society they inhabit. Every child being taught must march in lock-step with millions more, becoming benign drones made ignorant to a process robbing them of their existence, neither challenging those in power or absorbing the ingredients necessary to develop a mind that may one day become the ultimate weapon for freedom and salvation.

As in all state systems, in order to have subservient citizens, the young must be programmed early on to the dictates of those in power. In America, these entities are the elite capitalists that have transformed democracy into corporatism. Entire generations of people have become an enormous herd of sheep, unaware of the slavery that grips them and the exploitation that befalls every waking hour. The corporatist state has accomplished the ignorance of its citizens, now ruling unobstructed and unaccountable, free to unleash wave after wave of crimes, both upon those it rules and those it conquers.

The majority of the American people now fail to question authority, debate policy, seek accountability or demand answers. Indifferent we have become to the dangerous ways of our government or to our own plight. Every generation has seen its ability to understand, question and analyze dwindle with each subsequent decade that passes. Soon the day will arrive when complete drones our descendants become, completely subservient to the will of the rulers, shackled in chains of ignorance, transformed into exploitable energies deficient of free-thinking minds.

The only vestige of freedom left is that of the mind, a realm never before touched by the claws of the state and the powerful. Yet this freedom is disappearing, for the state has found a way to annihilate a freedom once thought untouchable. Free-thought is fading fast from an American psyche that once espoused the belief in the power of the individual. In its wake lie hundreds of millions of energies whose minds have been captured in a war we failed to realize we were being subjected to. Free-thinking minds are being made extinct, suffering from years of social engineering and artificial conditioning.

More and more we are failing to understand what is being done to us and our children. With each passing day the corporate Leviathan absorbs more of our collective brain, inculcating us with garbage, conditioning us to its version of what American society should be. The wretched symptoms of capitalism are devouring our very existence, making us the sheeple the system feeds off of. We are being herded to the slaughterhouse, ready to be gutted and mass produced, sold to the hungry wolves and vultures concomitantly ready to feast off our once vibrant energies.

Tell the Children the Truth

The time has come to tell the children the truth. The time has come to tell them that most are condemned to castes, unable to escape, destined to be exploited, destined for modern man`s version of slavery. The time has come to tell the children of privilege that they are being trained to become the exploiters of the masses, becoming condoners of subservience, inequality, injustice, corruption and thievery.

We must awaken from this lethargy catapulting us into a future missing freedom and individuality, happiness and a worthy existence. The dumbing down of America cannot be allowed to continue, for if it does, George Orwell`s prophetic vision will become George Bush`s sinister reality. It is time to tell the children the truth. It is time to liberate ourselves from a system that is making us all automatons. Freedom of thought, freedom of mind and freedom to live are our goals. The elimination of the virus inflicting ignorance and enslavement upon us and our children should be our mission.

The time to retake the American mind is upon us, and this starts with telling our children the truth of what our indifference, subservience and inability to act is condemning them to. For knowledge is power, the kryptonite that weakens the energy leading us to nothingness. They know this, which is why the dumbing down of America is taking place. Knowledge is a threat to their existence and continued control, which is why they want it destroyed. Education is liberation, something they want desperately to avoid. An enlightened populace is their nightmare; an ignorant citizenry their wet dream.

It is through the awakening of the masses that mountains are moved and canyons crossed. It is through the slumber of the masses that evil awakens. It is through our collective energy that those in power have no future and no place left to hide. The future of America is in our hands: either the dumbing down continues or the awakening commences.

© Copyright 2004 by AxisofLogic.com

Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, activist, writer and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel to be published in Summer 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]

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This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040705&s=alterman

stop the presses by Eric Alterman
The Soros Slander Campaign Continues

[from the July 5, 2004 issue]

We return this week to the conservative crusade to destroy the reputation of financier and philanthropist George Soros. The Hungarian-born billionaire has driven Republicans to distraction for two reasons. First, after decades of dedicating his fortune to fighting for democracy and civil society in his native Eastern Europe, he has turned his attention to the United States, where he is spending as much as $15 million to help various liberal groups improve their efforts to expose the malfeasance of the Bush Administration and defeat it in 2004. Second, in response to some surprise questioning at a meeting with Jewish leaders last year, Soros offered his opinion that Israeli foreign policy is in significant measure responsible for increasing anti-Semitism around the world.

The attacks have been ratcheted up in recent weeks because the Republicans see his prominent role in funding organizations like America Coming Together, MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress (where I am a senior fellow) as a means to tar John Kerry as a dangerous radical by association. They`d also like to scare off others who might be considering such roles for themselves. The Republican National Committee has circulated a briefing paper on Capitol Hill in which Soros is referred to as "Lord of the Democrats" and the "Daddy Warbucks" of the drug legalization movement, and which highlights what it deems to be his controversial positions on abortion, gun control and the right to end one`s own life. In Richard Mellon Scaife`s NewsMax magazine, a writer named Richard Poe has extended the attack against the "somewhat loony" Soros, who, he says, "hates America" and is seeking to engineer a "coup" against George W. Bush. Poe has been invited out of the Scaife swamp to repeat this nonsense to millions of people via Bill O`Reilly`s Fox program, in which the host has repeatedly denounced the alleged crimes of the man he calls "as far left as you can get and not move to Havana," "the most powerful Democrat in the country" and "the Godfather." Not much on nuance, O`Reilly describes Soros`s position on immigration as follows: "Come on in, Al Qaeda. We`ll get bin Laden a condo. If he doesn`t have the money, we`ll income-redistribute and get it to him." Mr. "No Spin" alleges that the mainstream media present Soros as if he were "Little Bo Peep" in order to protect the Democrats "because most Americans don`t buy into his agenda."

O`Reilly also heaps scorn on Soros for being a "committed atheist," characterizing him as "definitely anti-Israel in the sense that he believes...that the Palestinians are the aggrieved and the oppressors are the Israeli government." But even he does not go as far as Tony Blankley, editor of the editorial page of Sun Myung Moon`s Washington Times, former spokesperson for Newt Gingrich and a frequent guest panelist on cable and network chat shows. Using unmistakably anti-Semitic tropes and metaphors, Blankley appeared on Fox`s Hannity & Colmes to call Soros a "robber baron" and "pirate capitalist." "This is a man who blamed the Jews for anti-Semitism," he continued. "This is a man who, when he was plundering the world`s currencies, in England in `92, he caused the Southeast Asian financial crisis in `97. He said that he has no moral responsibility for the consequences of his financial actions.... He is a self-admitted atheist; he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust." As blogger Josh Marshall pointed out, "You have to hand it to [Blankley], pasting together a rant which manages to weave together accusations of anti-Semitism and most of the key anti-Semitic slurs and motifs." Moreover, Blankley implies that Soros should somehow be blamed for surviving the Holocaust.

Along with others, I called attention to this incredible outburst on my website, Altercation (www.altercation.msnbc.com), and a reader contacted Blankley about it. Blankley responded with an e-mail that was then passed on to me with no promise of off-the-record protection. The pundit made his meaning plain: "Soros and his family converted from their Jewish faith and survived the Holocaust (there was speculation that they may have collaborated with the Nazi`s [sic])." When I both called and e-mailed Blankley to ask him to defend this slander, he did not deny he sent the e-mail, nor did he specifically address its contents, though he expressed "regret" that his statement on Hannity & Colmes was "both incomplete and pregnant with a malicious implication I did not intend." He claimed that, having read an assertion on the Internet that Soros collaborated with the Nazis, he "started down that path and thought better of it in mid-sentence" in his appearance on Fox. What`s unclear is why he continued to circulate this outrageous tale--as he did in the e-mail he sent to my Altercation correspondent--long after he had time to rethink the comments he made for which he now expresses regret. It is hard to imagine a more immoral strategy to use against a Jewish opponent than to insinuate that his family were Nazi collaborators (not that a teenage George Soros would have had much say in the matter at the time).

All of the above bespeaks the desperation that Republicans and their punditocracy shock troops apparently feel at the prospect of being challenged by someone with the resources to make a difference in an election in which polls show that a majority of voters disapprove of George Bush and that a plurality plan to vote for his opponent. And while they cannot be held responsible for the poisonous rhetoric of Blankley and others, mainstream Jewish organizations like Abe Foxman`s ADL have sought to stigmatize Soros because they cannot countenance the view--openly stated by Jewish leaders in Europe--that Israel`s harsh treatment of the Palestinians under Ariel Sharon contributes to worldwide hatred of, and violence against, diaspora Jews.

Soros tells me that none of these ugly slanders of his good name will in any way deter him from his task of helping to save the nation and the world from the Bush Administration. "The more I am attacked, the more I am ready to stand up for what I believe in. But I am frustrated by the reach and influence of the RNC propaganda machine. They are presenting a totally distorted picture of who I am and what I stand for."

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Iraq, 1917

By Robert Fisk

Thursday 17 June 2004 "The Independent" -- They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain`s 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books...

On the eve of our "handover" of "full sovereignty" to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don`t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005.

Yes, we are preparing to give "full sovereignty" to Iraq. That`s also what the British falsely claimed more than 80 years ago. Come, then, and confront the looking glass of history, and see what America and Britain will do in the next 12 terrible months in Iraq.

Our story begins in March 1917 as 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment peels a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It is a turning point in his life. He has survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 150 miles from its capital, Constantinople. He has then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate, and enduring the grim battle for Baghdad. The British invasion army of
600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens`s attention was Maude`s official "Proclamation" to the people of Baghdad, printed in English and Arabic.

That same 11in by 18in poster, now framed in black and gold, hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this story of empire and dark prophecy. Long ago, the paper was stained with damp - "foxed", as booksellers say - which may have been Private Dickens`s perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of
1917. It has been folded many times; witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall 86 years later, to its presence in his army knapsack over many months.

In a letter to me, she called this "his precious document", and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy; with the false promises of the world`s greatest empire, commitments and good intentions; and with words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens`s death. It reads now like a funeral dirge:

"Proclamation... Our military operations have as their object, the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators... Your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers... and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile... But you, people of Baghdad... are not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals... It is the hope and desire of the British people... that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth... Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain... so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.

(signed) F.S. Maude, Lieutenant-General, Commanding the British Forces in Iraq."

Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army - which included Iraqi soldiers - in Mesopotamia. He spoke "often and admirably," his daughter would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at 55 had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion.

But Munro`s leadership did not save Dickens`s sister`s nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers: "My father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his `nephew`. I don`t know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years."

In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign. The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than 80 years later, Shameem Bhatia, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan, would send me an amused letter, along with a series of 12 very old postcards, which were printed by The Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms; another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him; others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river, and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, one of its buildings shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. The ruins then looked, of course, identical to the Iraqi ruins of today. There are only so many ways in which a shell can smash through a home.

As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by "local [Arab] notables" that "we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition". But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters, ending in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle.

The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of United Nations sanctions that followed Iraq`s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when spare parts for the pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague Patrick Cockburn found "tombstones... still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed... A quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage."

Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived in 1917. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets "gaped emptily. The shops were mostly closed... In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia, coffins and half-mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town [three hundred people were dying of it every day] the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves... There was no longer any life in the town."

The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. There was, of course, no "cordial" reception of British troops in Baghdad. Indeed, Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army but who "always entertained friendly ideas towards the English" were jailed - not in Abu Ghraib, but in India - and found that while in prison there they were "insulted and humiliated in every way". These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand Iraq over to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz - to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of "independence" for the Arab world if he fought alongside the Allies against the Turks - on the grounds that "some of the Holy Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia".

British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia (the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that) and that "clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end" - which was not how Lt-Gen Maude expressed Britain`s ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917.

Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that "taking Mesopotamia... means spending millions in irrigation and development". Which is precisely what President George Bush was forced to do only months after his illegal invasion in
2003.

Those who want to wallow in even more ghastly historical parallels should turn to the magnificent research of the Iraqi scholar Ghassan Attiyah, whose volume on the British occupation was published in Beirut long before Saddam`s regime took over Iraq, at a time when Iraqi as well as British archives of the period were still available. Attiyah`s Iraq,
1902-1921: A Socio-Political Study, written 30 years before the Anglo-American invasion, should be read by all Western "statesmen" planning to occupy Arab countries.

As Attiyah discovered, the British, once they were installed in Baghdad, decided in the winter of 1917 that Iraq would have to be governed and reconstructed by a "council" formed partly of British advisers "and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants". The copycat 2003 version of this "council" was, of course, the Interim Governing Council, supposedly the brainchild of Maude`s American successor, Paul Bremer.

Later, the British thought they would like "a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives". The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became "oriental secretary" to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion: "The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased... They can`t conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it."

Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude`s proclamation issued * * 11 months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told (which, of course, they were not) that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name, and which in fact had been written by Sir Mark Sykes - the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with F Georges-Picot for French and British control over much of the post-war Middle East.

But, by September 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain`s plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. "I imagine," the correspondent for The Times wrote on 23 September, "that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination... From the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration."

Within six months, Britain was fighting a military insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. "Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression? What would happen if we withdrew?" Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to "anarchy and confusion". By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on "local political agitation, originated outside Iraq", suggesting that Syria might be involved.

Come again? Could history repeat itself so perfectly? For Lloyd George`s "anarchy", read any statement from the American occupation power warning of "civil war" in the event of a Western withdrawal. For Syria - well, read Syria.

AT Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq in
1920, took a predictable line. "We cannot maintain our position... by a policy of conciliation of extremists. Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money... We must be prepared... to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions."

There was fighting in the Shia town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The British demanded "the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot", and the leading Shia divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house. Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a target. "Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out," a British political officer wrote.

The British now realised that they had made one big political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq - the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf
1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. For Badr, read Muqtada al-Sadr.

In 1920, another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed a British officer, Colonel Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad. The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted "heavy punishment" on the tribe. For Fallujah, of course, read Fallujah. And the location of the heavy punishment? Today it is known as Khan Dari - and it was the scene of the first killing of a US soldier by a roadside bomb in 2003.

In desperation, the British needed "to complete the façade of the Arab government". And so, with Winston Churchill`s enthusiastic support, the British gave the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, a consolation prize for the man the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria. Henceforth, the British government - deprived of reconstruction funds by an international recession, and confronted by an increasingly unwilling soldiery, which had fought during the 1914-18 war and was waiting for demobilisation - would rely on air power to impose its wishes.

There are no kings to impose on Iraq today (the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan pulled his hat out of the ring just before the invasion), so we have installed Iyad Allawi, the former CIA "asset", as prime minister in the hope that he can provide the same sovereign wallpaper as Faisal once did. Our soldiers can hide out in the desert, hopefully unattacked, unless they are needed to shore up the tottering power of our present-day "Faisal".

And so we come to the immediate future of Iraq. How are we to "control" Iraq while claiming that we have handed over "full sovereignty"? Again, the archives come to our rescue. The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill`s support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen in Iraq. Churchill urged the employment of mustard gas, which had been used against Shia rebels in 1920.

Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, later Marshal of the Royal Air Force and the man who perfected the firestorm destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other great German cities in the Second World War, was employed to refine the bombing of Iraqi insurgents. The RAF found, he wrote much later, "that by burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we`d warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt [sic], and they soon stopped their raiding and looting..."

This was what, in its emasculation of the English language, the Pentagon would now call "war lite". But the bombing was not as surgical as Harris`s official biographer would suggest. In 1924, he had admitted that "they [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured".

TE Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - remarked in a 1920 letter to The Observer that "it is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions". Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers that he resigned his post as Senior Air Staff Officer Iraq because he could no longer "maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb". He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen. After the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Sulaymaniyah, Charlton "knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally."

Already, we have seen the use of almost indiscriminate air power by the American forces in Iraq: the destruction of homes in "dissident" villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons are allegedly concealed, the slaughter-by-air-strike of "terrorists" near the Syrian border, who turned out to be a wedding party. Much the same policy has been adopted in the already abandoned "democracy" of Afghanistan.

As for the soldiers, we couldn`t ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East 80 years ago, so we buried them in the great North Wall Cemetery in Baghdad, where they lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties. We didn`t hide their coffins. Their last resting place is still there for all to see today, opposite the ruins of the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy.

As for the gravestone of Samuel Martin, it stood for years in the British war cemetery in Basra with the following inscription: "In Memory of Private Samuel Martin 24384, 8th Bn, Cheshire Regiment who died on Sunday 9 April 1916. Private Martin, son of George and Sarah Martin, of the Beech Tree Inn, Barnton, Northwich, Cheshire."

In the gales of shellfire that swept Basra during the 1980-88 war with Iran, the cemetery was destroyed and looted and many gravestones shattered beyond repair. When I visited the cemetery in the chaotic months after the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, I found wild dogs roaming between the broken headstones. Even the brass fittings of the central memorial had been stolen. Sic transit gloria.

Copyright: The Independent.

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Arab Television Reports U.S. Hostage Has Been Killed
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: June 18, 2004

Filed at 2:05 p.m. ET

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- An al-Qaida group said Friday it killed American hostage Paul M. Johnson Jr, posting an internet message that showed photographs of a beheaded body.

The statement, along with three still photos, was posted on a Web site where the group frequently makes announcements. It appeared around that the time that a 72-hour deadline set by the kidnappers ended.

``In answer to what we promised ... to kill the hostage Paul Marshall after the period is over ... the infidel got his fair treatment,`` the statement said.

``Let him taste something from what Muslims tasted who were long reached by Apache helicopter fire and missiles,`` the statement said.

Johnson, who worked on Apache helicopter systems for Lockheed Martin, was kidnapped last weekend by militants who threatened to kill him by Friday if the kingdom did not release its al-Qaida prisoners. Saudi security forces launched an all-out search, going door-to-door in some Riyadh neighborhoods, as Johnson`s wife went on Al-Arabiya Friday pleading for his release.

American Nicholas Berg, a businessman, was beheaded last month by his captors in Iraq, and his last moments later appeared on a videotape posted on an al-Qaida-linked Web site. U.S. officials say al-Qaida-linked Muslim militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may have been Berg`s killer.

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Published on Friday, June 18, 2004 by Knight-Ridder
Republicans Defeat Effort to Subpoena Justice Documents on Torture
by Sumana Chatterjee


WASHINGTON - Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday defeated a Democratic-sponsored effort to subpoena documents on torture and interrogation practices from the Justice Department.

The 10 to 9 vote reflected the mounting partisan rancor over the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and whether U.S. officials condoned harsh interrogation practices on prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The vote came a day after the Senate unanimously voted, without debate, to add a provision to a defense spending bill that the United States should abide by anti-torture laws and international treaties. But even that vote reflected the controversy over what practices are acceptable.

The voice vote without debate allowed lawmakers to keep to themselves their views on whether torture is justified and when. In interviews, though, some senators said torture may sometimes be acceptable.

"I think it is unwise for us to try to announce in concrete the absolute limits of the military in wartime," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who taught refresher courses on the Geneva Convention to military police.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he was grappling with what interrogation techniques, including torture, are acceptable in wartime. "We are in a brave new world," he said.

Thursday`s Judiciary Committee vote was aimed at subpoenaing 23 documents, including an Aug. 1, 2002, memo that argued that the president wasn`t bound by U.S. and international prohibitions against torture. Attorney General John Ashcroft refused last week to surrender the memo to the committee.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who sponsored the request for a subpoena, said he was outraged by Ashcroft`s refusal and concerned that U.S. officials had changed how prisoners are treated and interrogated without open discussion. Leahy`s subpoena request also asked for copies of "any and all orders, directives, instructions, findings or other writings signed by Bush or on his behalf ... relating to the treatment or interrogations" of prisoners.

"We need to know what license those lawyers provided and why they went about redefining legal and international obligations in ways that have contributed to exposing Americans around the world to greater dangers," Leahy said. "The president has said we need to get to the bottom of this scandal. But how can we get to the bottom of it when there is stonewalling at the top?

"Hiding these documents from view is the brazen sign of a cover-up, not of cooperation."

But committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, countered that White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, to whom the August 2002 memo was addressed, had promised to cooperate. Hatch said Gonzales hasn`t said when the memo, which has been posted on the Internet, would be given to the committee.

He accused the Democrats of partisanship, saying they were trying to "score cheap political points." He called voting on a subpoena "a dumb-ass thing to do."

But Hatch and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said they might support subpoenas if Ashcroft continued to withhold the documents.

Democrats have been eager to explore what role senior military and civilian officers` view of acceptable interrogation practices might have had in the abuses at Abu Ghraib and how widespread incidents of prisoner abuse were in Afghanistan and at the U.S. prison camp for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

On Thursday, the Justice Department announced that a civilian contractor hired by the CIA had been charged with two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and two counts of assault in the death a prisoner in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has said that it`s investigating 37 cases in which prisoners died while in custody in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Leahy has long been concerned with U.S. treatment of detainees. Last June, Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes III had written Leahy in response to a letter that "it is the policy of the United States to comply with all of its legal obligations prohibiting torture. ... The United States does not permit, tolerate or condone any such torture by its employees under any circumstances."

But three months earlier, Haynes ordered a legal analysis that offered a justification for harsh interrogation techniques and concluded that laws or treaties against torture don`t bind the president. The analysis drew heavily on the August 2002 memo.

The Bush administration also is facing congressional criticism for not providing other documents related to prisoner treatment that lawmakers have requested. The Pentagon hasn`t sent all the paperwork related to the Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba`s investigation into the Abu Ghraib cases.

Also outstanding are reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross that detailed abuses in Iraq dating from May 2003. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the ICRC didn`t want to share the confidential memos. But the ICRC told lawmakers that it`s willing to share the documents with the Pentagon`s approval and in a closed-door setting, said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, however, said he isn`t ready to issue subpoenas. "If you ratchet this up to be even more controversial, I am not sure that is helpful," he said.

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Pictures Purporting To Show The Body Of Paul Johnson After His Barbaric Murder: - WARNING - THE PICTURES ON THIS PAGE ARE OF A PARTICULARLY HORRIFIC NATURE AND SHOULD ONLY BE VIEWED BY A MATURE AUDIENCE.

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Statement, photos show that American hostage in Saudi Arabia has been killed
05:46 PM EDT Jun 18

Paul M. Johnson Jr. (AP)

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - The al-Qaida group that kidnapped American Paul Johnson Jr. said in an online statement Friday that it had killed the hostage and posted three still photographs of his beheaded body.

"In answer to what we promised . . . to kill the hostage Paul Marshall after the period is over . . . the infidel got his fair treatment. . . . Let him taste something from what Muslims tasted who were long reached by Apache helicopter fire and missiles," the statement said.

Johnson, 49, worked on targeting and night-vision systems for Apache helicopters, and the group had cited his job as one of the reasons he was kidnapped.

"We, God willing, will continue our road to fight the enemies of God," the statement said.

The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh had no immediate comment. "We are working on verification," the spokesperson said.

One of the three photographs posted on the Internet site showed a man`s head, face toward the camera, being held by a hand. The other two showed a beheaded body lying prone on a bed, with the severed head placed in the small of his back.

The face looked like Johnson`s.

The beheaded body was clad in a bright orange suit, similar to those issued to suspected Islamic militants imprisoned by the United States at Guantanamo Bay - and similar to the suit another American captive, Nicholas Berg, was wearing when he was beheaded in Iraq last month by another group of Islamic militants inspired by al-Qaida.

"To the Americans and whoever is their ally in the infidel and criminal world and their allies in the war against Islam, this action is punishment to them and a lesson for them to know that whoever steps foot in our country, this decisive action will be his fate," the statement said.

Soon after the statement appeared, the website was inaccessible, with a message saying it was closed for maintenance.

Arab satellite network Al-Arabiya said there was also a video of the beheading.

An Internet site often used by Islamic militant groups linked to al-Qaida displayed a link to Johnson`s beheading, but initial efforts to access the video were unsuccessful.

Johnson was kidnapped last weekend by militants calling themselves al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula who threatened to kill him by Friday if the kingdom did not release its al-Qaida prisoners.

A Saudi senior security official, reached by The Associated Press, said: "We have so far nothing on this."

In Washington, a CIA spokesperson said the agency was not able to immediately confirm the report of Johnson`s beheading.

Johnson was kidnapped last weekend by militants who threatened to kill him by Friday if the kingdom did not release its al-Qaida prisoners.

© The Canadian Press, 2004

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June 18, 2004
China Will Not Back U.S. on Immunity from New Court
By REUTERS

Filed at 4:54 p.m. ET

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - China said on Friday it would abstain on a resolution giving the United States immunity from the new International Criminal Court, a decision that may leave Washington short of votes to pass the resolution.

``I said to my colleagues we will abstain,`` Beijing`s U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, told Reuters after a luncheon among the 15 Security Council members and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Wang said earlier the resolution would send a wrong signal in light of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

China`s abstention could deprive the Bush administration of the nine ``yes`` votes required to adopt a resolution. So far only Britain, Russia, Angola and the Philippines are considered sure votes in favor.

All other members are contemplating an abstention or are undecided, following a rebuke by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who said on Thursday the resolution was ``wrong,`` would ``discredit the council`` and was of ``dubious judicial value.``

He said that resolution ``would be a very unfortunate signal to send at any time -- but particularly at this time.``

On Friday Annan distributed a memorandum to council members, ``strongly`` urging them not to renew the measure.

``The secretary-general believes that extending the exemption once more would contradict the efforts of the United Nations -- including the council itself -- to promote the rule of law in international affairs,`` the memorandum said.``

The United States, for the third year, is seeking to renew a U.N. Security Council resolution that would exempt from the court`s prosecution military and civilian personnel ``related to a U.N.-authorized operation`` such as that in Iraq.

The immunity would be extended to all nations not among the 94 countries that have ratified a treaty establishing the court, set up to prosecute the world`s worst atrocities -- genocide, mass war crimes and systematic human rights abuses.

``We`re going to be coming back to the council by Tuesday with a final plan -- with our position in terms of next steps,`` said U.S. representative Stuart Holliday.

``Our position remains the same,`` he said. The resolution was first adopted in 2002 after the United States began to veto U.N. peacekeeping missions.

ABU GHRAIB IMPACT

The United States is investigating the abuse of prisoners by the U.S. military in Iraq, particularly in the large Abu Ghraib jail, and in Afghanistan.

Among the 15 council members, Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Benin, Romania and now China are expected to abstain, diplomats said. Pakistan and Algeria were undecided.

The Chinese position is unusual because Beijing has not signed or ratified the court`s treaty. Diplomats believe it was also related to disputes with Washington over Taiwan, although Beijing envoys have denied it.

Algerian Ambassador Abdallah Baali, whose ``yes`` vote had been considered certain, said his government had not decided.

``Obviously the Americans don`t have the nine votes. The secretary-general`s statement was quite strong and apparently the Abu Ghraib situation had an impact,`` said Baali, the only Arab member of the council.

The Bush administration is opposed in principle to an international court having any jurisdiction on American soldiers abroad and has signed 89 bilateral agreements to exempt any American officials.

Based in The Hague, Netherlands, the tribunal is a court of last resort. Analysts say it would not, for example, interfere in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners as long as a country`s judicial system probed the allegations.

Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd.

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A G.I. stood guard this week at a sewage treatment plant in Baghdad that restarted last month. It is the first time in a decade or more that the Iraqi capital`s sewage has been treated.
June 19, 2004
It`s a Dirty Job, but They Do It, Secretly, in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ

AGHDAD, Iraq, June 18 — It was an engineering success on the order of stringing the first cables for the Brooklyn Bridge or coaxing the first glimmer of starlight through some giant telescope to unravel the structure of the universe.

But when it occurred late last month, the achievement remained cloaked in absolute secrecy, marked only by a quiet celebration among participants who may remain forever unknown to history.

Raw sewage was treated in Baghdad.

The stream of treated water that eventually found its way into the Tigris River was hardly more than a trickle, roughly 20 million gallons a day from a city that produces raw sewage at something like 10 times that rate or more. But the accomplishment is all but epoch-making in a city where the sewage plants are in such disrepair that for the last 10 to 15 years, every drop of that muck was poured untreated into the river, fouling everything from boat landings to drinking water systems downstream.

Successes like this one were just what Congress envisioned when it appropriated billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq, hoping the improvements would convince Iraqis of America`s good will.

But for what those in charge of the work, the United States Agency for International Development and its major contractor, Bechtel, curity reasons, the sewage breakthrough remained secret. A reporter from The New York Times agreed not to give the location of the plant in exchange for receiving a general description of the work from the engineers involved. The reporter also agreed not to use the names of the engineers and to print no photographs of their faces.

A.I.D. and Bechtel say the breakthrough occurred in a dangerous part of Baghdad where any publicity could make the project a target for saboteurs, who struck again on Wednesday, killing a senior Oil Ministry official and damaging another oil pipeline. That argument and the bizarre concept of a secret sewage project have generated frustration among some of the engineers, who say secrecy defeats the original purpose of the work.

This is the first sewage treatment in Baghdad in 15 years but "we can`t get the word out," said one American government engineer on the project. To the suggestion that publicity could lead to bombings and the like, the engineer said, "Well, guess what — we`re getting bombed anyway."

Just three days before, he said, terrorists had lobbed a concussion grenade at a car carrying an electrical engineer working on one of the three huge sewage treatment plants that are being rehabilitated in Baghdad. (Two of them have not yet started processing sewage.)

Of course, sewage plants are hard to hide, a fact that complicates the effort to keep them secret from those who would like to destroy them. Probably not by accident, though, they do tend to be on less populated outskirts. And except for the big tanks where anaerobic bacteria munch away on sludge, there are few structures that poke very far above the perimeter walls.

To date, Congress has set aside roughly $24 billion for rebuilding Iraq`s electrical, water, sewage, oil, transportation and security installations, among other areas, according to an analysis by the George Soros-backed Iraq Revenue Watch.

In a desert land where water is society`s lifeblood, the need for the work is unquestioned. Ghazi J. Maghak, 68, a civil engineer whose mind is a vast compendium of detail on the Baghdad sewers, which he has worked on for three decades, said in an interview that there were 4,000 miles of sewer lines, most overstressed and falling apart.

Parts are receiving a thousand times more waste than they were designed for, creating the rivers of sewage that stream through the streets in many neighborhoods, Mr. Maghak said. And under Saddam Hussein, who was no friend to civil infrastructure that did not have a palace sitting on it, repairs were undertaken capriciously and always with the dark threat of punishment.

Those crumbling sewer lines then feed Baghdad`s three great sewage plants, which have fared even worse. In the last decade or two they became so decrepit that engineers simply shunted the raw sewage through jury-rigged pipes and dumped it into the Tigris with no treatment whatever. Then, after the American-led invasion last year, the plants were looted to the ground.

Left behind were grotesquely dysfunctional graveyards of sludge and ransacked buildings. Initial work to clean them up, largely with shovels and wheelbarrows, began late last year.

A trip approved by Bechtel and the development agency to one of the plants on June 13 gave some insight into the parlous security situation that has given rise to the secrecy. As a car carrying a reporter, an interpreter and a driver approached the plant, it became apparent that a huge bomb had gone off a short time before — probably intended for a line of cars, now charred and crumpled, that had been waiting for gasoline in front of a nearby station.

A group of agitated Iraqi civilians tried to direct the car away, then relented, before blue-shirted Iraqi police officers waved their handguns to get the car to stop again. Finally, heavily armed American soldiers who were clustered around an armored vehicle told the driver to go through.

Inside the plant, the big round clarification tanks had been cleaned out and were ready for sewage, new filtration screens were soon to be put in place and augurlike screw pumps were lifting sample sewer water into the air for its ride through the system.

At one point a sand-blasting machine was suddenly turned on somewhere and two of the people in the party, including the American government engineer, hit the deck, thinking it was a mortar attack.

The plant was all quite impressive, but somehow unsatisfying, since nothing was actually being treated yet. The company and the development agency said the other plants were in areas too dangerous to visit.

But the next day the First Cavalry Division, which is charged with guarding sites like the sewage plants around Baghdad, agreed to transport two visitors to another plant, using a three-vehicle convoy laden with weaponry.

Inside, under the blazing afternoon sun, was a scene that perhaps only the combination of occupied Iraq and a secret sewage plant could produce — a Turkish site manager who did not seem to speak either English or Arabic, Iraqi engineers with strict orders not to show anyone the treated sewage without permission from the front office, and a compound mostly deserted except for some low-level staff members and managers and the few engineers.

After some hasty cellphone calls, the permission came through. Accompanied closely by the soldiers, their rifles at the ready, the visitors walked past the blue-gray murk spilling over a ledge in clarification ponds, above scum-covered holding pools toward three little concrete canals that merged at one corner of the site.

There, near an empty guard tower and some sparse plants called adgal, was a strange but tangible glint of hope on the outskirts of Baghdad: treated sewage, swirling around a corner and out of sight into a pair of mismatched tunnels on its way to the Tigris.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 19, 2004
ECONOMY
Flow of Oil May Resume on Sunday, Officials Say
By JAMES GLANZ and SOMINI SENGUPTA

BASRA, Iraq, June 18 — Oil could be flowing as early as Sunday through one of two major pipelines that were sabotaged a few miles from this southern Iraqi city earlier this week, government and military officials said Friday. The assessments raised hopes that oil exports, the basis of Iraq`s economy, could be back to normal within a week, if there were no further attacks.

But one of those officials, Dominic d`Angelo, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in southern Iraq, cautioned that one of the pipelines was still submerged in a slough of oil-fouled desert sand around the damaged area. Mr. d`Angelo said the timetable would be uncertain until workers had uncovered the line.

"Then they`ll be able to say exactly how bad the break is," he said.

Also on Friday, pressure continued to mount on the Bush administration to file charges against Saddam Hussein, as New York-based Human Rights Watch said it would be unlawful not to do so once Iraq was declared sovereign on June 30. Unless criminal charges are filed, the Geneva Conventions require a country to release prisoners of war at the end of a war or an occupation.

A soldier with the First Cavalry Division was killed and a contractor working for the American firm Kellogg Brown & Root was wounded when mortars hit a American base in Baghdad on Friday afternoon, the American military said in a statement. Fierce clashes continued in Baquba, 35 miles north of Baghdad, as American military snipers posted on rooftops battled what appeared to be a united force of Shiite and Sunni gunmen. Five Iraqi gunmen were killed, and one American soldier was wounded, a spokesman for the Army`s First Infantry Division said.

The fighting was concentrated in a tribal neighborhood in the southern section of Baquba, a stronghold of anti-American resistance, where American soldiers arrived Thursday morning and arrested more than 50 people, according to a witness speaking from Baquba by telephone. When American troops returned later in the day, they were met by fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles, the staples of the insurgency here. By Friday, civilians had cleared out of the neighborhood, the witness said.

No charges have been brought against Mr. Hussein, who has been in custody at an undisclosed location since Dec. 13, and American officials have said nothing about when they plan to hand him over to Iraq`s interim government. The American military has said it will continue to hold 4,000 to 5,000 detainees after June 30.

In a statement issued Friday, Human Rights Watch said that to hold Mr. Hussein without charges past June 30 would flout international law.

"The Bush administration can`t have its cake and eat it too," said Kenneth Roth, the group`s executive director. "If the occupation is over, so is the U.S. authority to detain Iraqis without criminal charges."

The group urged that Mr. Hussein be charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.

The attacks last Monday and Tuesday on the oil pipelines near Basra shut down exports from Iraq`s southern oil fields, by far the most important and productive in the country. Oil has continued to flow through mostly smaller pipelines from oil fields to Iraq`s web of refineries and petrochemical plants.

Maj. Trina C. Patterson, an officer with the Army Corps of Engineers, said sabotage of critical infrastructure had been far less common in the south than elsewhere in Iraq, where oil pipelines, electrical transmission lines and other facilities had been repeatedly hit.

Still, Major Patterson said, the big oil lines to export terminals in the Persian Gulf may have been too tempting to pass up for the insurgents.

Before the latest attacks, Iraq had been exporting something close to the roughly two million barrels of oil a day that it had averaged before the American-led invasion last year. The great majority of that output came from the southern fields. Analysts have warned that a long-term disruption of oil exports from the south could destabilize world markets, but Ken Miller, vice president of Purvin & Gertz, an international energy consulting firm based in Houston, said the effects on the price per barrel of oil had been minor so far.

"Over the last few days we`ve had a little volatility, up and down a dollar or something," he said, "but nothing dramatic."

James Glanz reported from Basra and Somini Sengupta from Baghdad for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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The Hue-Man Bookstore in Harlem is among many taking advance orders for President Bill Clinton`s book.

June 19, 2004
In a Sprawling Memoir, Clinton Cites Storms and Settles Scores
By JOHN M. BRODER

Former President Bill Clinton, in a 957-page autobiography that is by turns painfully candid about his personal flaws and gleefully vindictive about what he calls the hypocrisy of his enemies, blamed his affair with Monica Lewinsky on the "old demons" that have haunted him all his life.

He said the affair was personally humiliating and almost cost him his presidency and his marriage. In the end, after months sleeping on the couch, a year of intensive marital counseling and his acquittal on impeachment charges in the Senate, he said he finally felt free.

"In some ways it was liberating," he wrote in the book, "My Life," which is to be released on Monday with an initial printing of 1.5 million copies, adding that he no longer had a secret to hide. A copy was obtained by The New York Times from a bookstore. Mr. Clinton received an advance of more than $10 million for the memoir and is planning an extensive publicity campaign beginning this weekend to sell it.

The book provides an intimate glimpse not only of Mr. Clinton`s struggle with the affair and the impeachment battle that followed, but also of eight eventful years in the White House, an improbable childhood and a precocious political career in Arkansas.

The book is sprawling, undisciplined and idiosyncratic in its choice of emphasis. It devotes nearly 100 pages to his childhood but treats large spans of his presidency as a travelogue of campaign cities and foreign capitals. Mr. Clinton wrote his book after the Sept. 11 attacks, and he devotes a good deal of space to his administration`s efforts to deal with terrorism, and its growing concern about Osama bin Laden.

The signature events of Mr. Clinton`s presidency are largely familiar and many of his former aides as well as his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, have written their accounts of them. But this is the first full-length explanation from Mr. Clinton of how it felt to be at the center of so many storms.

The book`s length gives the former president plenty of room to settle scores, and he does so with his customary élan. He takes the whip to Republicans in Congress; Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director; the National Rifle Association; and even the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in 1997 that Paula Jones`s sexual harassment case against him could go forward while he was in office. He called that one of the most politically naïve and damaging court decisions in years.

He reserved special venom for Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who chased him for years in one of the most expensive government investigations in the nation`s history. He writes that Mr. Starr was the tribune of an organized right-wing cabal that was determined to destroy his presidency because he was a personal anathema to them and repeatedly defeated them on policy grounds.

He accused Mr. Starr of pulling a "cheap, sleazy publicity stunt" by hauling Mrs. Clinton before a federal grand jury investigating the Whitewater affair. He said Mr. Starr could have come to the White House.

Yet Mr. Clinton also readily acknowledges that his sexual self-indulgence and his carefully crafted evasions gave his enemies all the ammunition they needed to derail his presidency at least temporarily and damage his standing with the public.

Mr. Clinton wrote that from a very early age he lived "parallel lives," with a public gregariousness and sunny disposition masking private turmoil and weakness.

Several times he saw his alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton, beating his mother and once firing a gun at her head. But he wrote that he would go to school the next day as if nothing had happened. This pattern was especially evident again in 1998, he said, when the Lewinsky affair was revealed and Mr. Clinton spent months lying to his family, his aides and the nation about it.

He said that as a child he learned, too well, how to live with secrets. His family creed, he said, was "don`t ask, don`t tell."

He called 1998 the strangest year of his presidency, when he was compelled to lead two incongruent lives. The Lewinsky investigation brought what he called the "darkest part" of his personal life into full view.

He said he was disgusted by his sexual encounters with Ms. Lewinsky, which he said ended after several months when he could no longer live with himself. He admits that his actions were immoral and foolish, but repeatedly says he was determined not to let Mr. Starr drive him from office because of them.

When he belatedly confessed to Mrs. Clinton in August 1998, he wrote, she reacted as if he had punched her in the gut. Telling their daughter, Chelsea, was even worse. He felt for weeks afterward, as he slept on a couch in the White House and a borrowed vacation home on Martha`s Vineyard, that his indulgence and mendacity risked not only his marriage but also the love and respect of his only child.

He said he spent the several days immediately after his confession alternately begging for forgiveness and plotting a retaliatory strike against Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the August 1998 bombings of United States embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Aides warned him that such a strike might be seen as an effort to change the subject from his personal and legal woes.

He said he forcefully told his aides to stick to national security advice. Mr. Clinton forgives most of his opponents their own foibles, even former Speaker Newt Gingrich who led Republicans into control of Congress in the 1994 elections and into pitched battle with Mr. Clinton. But his judgment of Mr. Freeh, the F.B.I. director he appointed in 1993, is harsh. He said Mr. Freeh, a former federal district judge, turned on the White House to deflect criticism from serious lapses at the F.B.I., including scandals in its forensic laboratory and its handling of the shootout in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

The book pulses with Mr. Clinton`s own voice and is bursting with a typical profusion of anecdote and detail. Mr. Clinton writes that his father`s death at age 28, before he was born, made him conscious of his own mortality and spurred him to live every moment to the fullest. Mr. Clinton writes with rueful candor about his chubby adolescence, confessing that he was once the only child at an Easter egg hunt not to get an egg, not because he could not find them, but because he could not move fast enough to compete with the other children.

He describes his youth as "a fat band boy" and recalls that in junior high school, as he began to learn more about his mind and body, some of it scared him, including his first sexual stirrings. Mr. Clinton also tells about his effort to avoid the Vietnam draft, which later became an issue in his presidential campaign. He details his aversion to going to Vietnam, and writes that he searched his heart at the time, trying to determine whether it was "rooted in conviction or cowardice." He says he is not sure, given how events played out, that he ever answered the question for himself.

He dwells briefly, though, on his confrontation with Mr. Gingrich and the other Republican leaders in Congress over the government shutdown during one of the big budget battles of 1995 and 1996. Mr. Gingrich, then the speaker of the House, told Mr. Clinton that he had thought the president would cave in to Republican demands, and said Republicans underestimated him. There are glimpses of his world view: Mr. Clinton argues that the Middle East conflict and the China-Taiwan conflict were polar opposite problems. The first would worsen with lack of attention, he believed, and the second would get better as long as neither side did anything too aggressive. But he devotes only a sentence to the harrowing moments when he sent a Navy carrier near the Taiwan strait to stop China from missile tests meant to intimidate the island`s voters before a crucial election.

Mr. Clinton defends his record on terrorism, arguing that he pressed the allies for more of a focus on counterterrorism and citing speeches in which he called terror "the enemy of our generation.``

He also notes that in 1996 he signed two directives on terrorism and appointed Richard A. Clarke to be the administration`s terrorism coordinator.

Mr. Clinton has surprisingly little to say about his opponent in the 1996 election, Bob Dole, but he paces readers through his campaign stops and analyzes the cultural factors that influenced the election in many states. Much as he often did in person, he runs through poll results state-by-state, concluding that over all he was happy with the re-election results, an overwhelming electoral and popular victory.

Mr. Clinton weaves the tale of the Whitewater investigation through the account of his White House years, always with a dismissive tone. He explained the sudden appearance of Mrs. Clinton`s legal billing records in the White House residence as the product merely of sloppy record-keeping in Arkansas.

He expressed remorse and gratitude to Susan McDougal, who went to jail rather than testify against the Clintons on Whitewater. He said that she suffered because she refused to lie and tell prosecutors what they wanted to hear.

Mr. Clinton closes the book with a short meditation on the lessons he has learned about accepting personal responsibility, letting go of anger and granting forgiveness. He said that in the many black churches he had visited he had heard funerals referred to as "homegoings."

"We`re all going home," he wrote, "and I want to be ready."

Todd S. Purdum and David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 9, 2004
GLOBALIST
Europe`s Loss of Focus
By ROGER COHEN,
International Herald Tribune
ARIS — For Pierre Lellouche, a center-right French parliamentarian, there is one central factor behind European-American tensions: "Europe is going through a period of weakness and the less we weigh on history the more we rail against the power that determines history. The weaker we are, the more we hit out."

It is an interesting theory. The Iraq war posed an intra-European crisis that was as acute as the trans-Atlantic crisis. The European Union was split. Most member states, if reluctantly, were inclined to support America. Most European citizens, and two of the biggest states, were strongly opposed. So deep was the division that no serious attempt to reach a united EU position was made. Javier Solana, the top EU foreign policy official, became a voice in the wilderness, irrelevant because he represented a vacuum.

This debacle came at a time when Europe is still casting around for relevance after losing the focus, and room for maneuver between the superpowers, that came with standing at the epicenter of the cold war.

The disarray over Europe`s direction coincides with a period of anemic European economic growth, which is running at about half the level of the 4 percent expected this year in the United States. The Continent`s comprehensive social security systems are under growing financial pressure as the population ages and heavily regulated economies stagnate.

In France, a recent survey by small and medium-size enterprises suggested that more than 70 percent of French youth would be happy to work as "fonctionnaires," or state employees. The appeal of security appears greater than that of risk. More energy goes into preserving acquired rights, including steadily lengthening vacations, than creating new enterprises.

"There is a depression in the European mind," argues Alexandre Adler, a writer and political analyst.

To which, of course, many Europeans would answer that the American mind is afflicted with hubris, one that comes with having an estimated 368,000 military personnel deployed in more than 100 countries around the world; with being a virtually uncontested power; and with exercising an extraordinary cultural and economic influence on the way people live from Beijing to Brasília.

The story of the last year, these Europeans would argue, is one of Iraq`s sobering influence on President George W. Bush, who has come to see that American power without the legitimacy conferred by the United Nations has its limits. The French and German position, in other words, has been vindicated by Bush`s return to the UN fold and embrace of a fuller Iraqi sovereignty after June 30 than initially envisaged.

This view may appear seductive. But it is not persuasive to Lellouche, who sees Europeans condemned by their lack of unity to the role of reacting to the exercise of American power. The continent is adrift on a "federalist voyage of good feelings," playing the role "of the grand moralizers of the planet," and ignoring the fact that "the peace road only works if everyone wants to take it at the same time," he says.

He argues that France has become a "fearful Republic," its ambitions to counter American power contained within a European project it does not fully embrace.

"Are we really ready to give up the permanent French seat and right of veto on the UN Security Council and hand it to an EU Foreign Minister?" he asked.

That is a central question as Europe debates its future. The 25-member EU exists in a kind of halfway house where national sovereignty has been ceded by many member states in critical economic areas, but the retention of sovereignty in other areas, including foreign and security policy, is viewed by several as of inalienable importance.

For Europe to have real weight, the kind that would focus the minds of American presidents in matters of war and peace, another leap of integration appears necessary. As Simon Serfaty, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, put it in Paris last week: "Europe is a power in the world, but not a world power."

Serfaty was speaking at one of a series of discussions coordinated by Lellouche, called "Liberty Week." The focus was French-American and European-American relations, and Serfaty`s analysis was acerbic: "If Europe wants to avoid subordination to America, it has to unite. In the end, the EU is subordinated because it is weak."

But the prospects for any rapid integration of the EU on foreign and military policy appear remote. Europeans are not convinced of the probability or imminence of any mortal threat; any serious increase in military budgets is therefore unlikely.

The new post of European foreign minister may be created under the draft constitutional treaty being finalized, but how much real power the position will wield remains an open question.

Britain and the newly admitted central European states remain, for different reasons, wary of the centralization of EU power and committed to the view that America`s presence in Europe is beneficent.

The prevailing tone today in trans-Atlantic relations is one of conciliation after the brawl. Everyone from President Jacques Chirac of France to the American national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is singing the praises of the Atlantic Alliance and speaking of what can be achieved when allies work together.

But the imbalance in power, the differences in threat perception, and the divergence in outlook between America and Europe all suggest that whatever rapprochement is achieved may be ephemeral, and that similar tensions are likely to recur whoever is in the White House.

Put bluntly, the United States appears at or close to the apogee of its historical power. Europe is far from that point. Over the past several centuries, the Continent has lived the transition from city states to nation states to member states. But just what an EU member state is, and how much transnational power will be vested in the Union`s institutions, remains unclear.

As a result, looking for Europe remains a puzzling game. As long as it is, America will lead and Europe will grumble - to some effect, but grumbling is stultifying.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 20, 2004
FRANK RICH
What O. J. Passed to the Gipper

NOT a single jelly bean remained unturned in the weeklong interment of Ronald Reagan, but a week later there`s one question that still hasn`t been laid to rest: what in heaven`s name was going on?

Was this runaway marathon of mourning prompted by actual grief? A vast right-wing conspiracy? A vast reservoir of displaced sorrow about the war in Iraq? Global warming? Whatever it was about, it was not always about Ronald Reagan. His average approval rating in office was lower than that of many modern presidents, including each George Bush. His death at 93, after a full life and a long terminal illness, was neither tragic nor shocking. And in 2004, his presidency was far from the center of American consciousness. The cold war that he "won" (with no help from the Poles, the Czechs, Mikhail Gorbachev, the first President Bush or anyone else, mind you) had dropped into the great American memory hole in our age of terrorism, along with his administration`s support of incipient bin Laden-style Islamic militants in Afghanistan.

Of course, Reagan`s funeral was must-see TV. But then there was all the rest of it. You knew things had gotten out of hand when CNN`s Anderson Cooper invited an expert from the "Grief Recovery Institute" to instruct the nation: "Today I`m saying we need to feel sad." Or when C-Span broadcast uninterrupted late-night video of Americans trooping past Reagan`s coffin in the Capitol`s rotunda. (Though those mourners were often touted as representative of the entire nation, you could nod off counting the white visitors before a black person appeared.) Even those voting at the Web site of The Wall Street Journal`s editorial page, that permanent shrine to all things Reagan, decided by a slightly larger than the Gore-Bush margin by the week`s end that the coverage was "too much" (36 percent to 34, when I checked).

To liberals, the circus was a political plot to cover up Reagan`s failures and obscure fresh headlines about the paper trail linking the Bush administration to the practice of torture. To conservatives, anyone who opted for even modest restraint in Reagan coverage (like The New York Times, with its three-column headline announcing his death) was guilty of insufficient sentimentality; anyone who criticized the man was a traitor. "Thoughtless, mean, hateful" were just some of the epithets heaped by Fox`s Sean Hannity on a rare Reagan dissenter who showed his face on TV, the political cartoonist Ted Rall.

By the time the final rites reached their finale, however, you could see that other, more powerful cultural forces had shaped the week`s excess, not mere partisanship. The crucial influence may have been an apolitical event whose 10th anniversary all too aptly coincided with Reagan`s farewell — the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. That crime sped the profound transformation of American television in the ensuing decade, when news was remade into a 24/7 "news" reality show. (Which in turn begat the equally fictionalized genre of reality television, the bastard child of the original bastard.) The impact of O. J. Simpson on America`s infotainment media culture was as pronounced in its way as the Gipper`s touchdown for conservatism in American politics.

During the Reagan show the Simpson impact was sometimes literally acted out: the gratuitously attenuated aerial shots of the hearse streaking on California freeways to Simi Valley carried an eerie visual echo of the Bronco chase. But the greater symmetry was in the overall dramatic format of the seven-day extravaganza. Like every other story in the post-O. J. era involving some admixture of death, scandal or celebrities, from presidents to punks, Reagan`s farewell was automatically supersized to satisfy our bottomless appetite for the mediathon, an epic form of TV news that has become as rigid and familiar as a game show or a sitcom.

There has been blanket coverage of news events since TV`s infancy — this spring marks the 50th anniversary of the first story to receive it, the Army-McCarthy hearings — and of presidential funerals since the Kennedy assassination. But it was not until the O. J. trial, all 251 days of it, that the powerful and relatively new tool of the all-news TV channel collided with a news story of big emotions and little actual news to become an addictive brand of marathon diversion. Though Reagan, the first true TV president, was a master of showbiz manipulation, he would hardly recognize the bizarre brew of fact and fiction that so thoroughly redefined televised reality in the decade since his withdrawal from the public stage. (His letter announcing the diagnosis of his Alzheimer`s followed O. J.`s arraignment by some four months.) It was during the O. J. soap opera that we first learned we could spend not just hours and days but weeks watching a drama even when it was unfolding in slo-mo (under Lance Ito`s Warholesque direction) and even when nothing was happening beyond the idle, frequently erroneous speculation of camera-hogging "experts" (most of them looking for fame or book deals).

So went the seven days of Reagan. As we now know, the former president`s aides and family had devised some of the settings years in advance through a secret plan they code-named Operation Serenade: the camera angles and sunset timing of the California service, the distribution of 50,000 small American flags to extras organized along the route. Such Old Hollywood cinematic touches no doubt seemed clever when the Reaganauts first hatched them, but by the time of Reagan`s death they were as dated as "Bedtime for Bonzo." The post-O. J. arsenal of media weapons all but upstaged the prissy soundstage pageantry. Unchanging, lachrymose platitudes were repeated histrionically again and again day after day, padded out with faux controversies (will Reagan wipe Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill, Alexander Hamilton off the $10 bill, or J.F.K. off the half-dollar?) and the musings of third-tier experts like Gahl Burt, "former Reagan social secretary." When all else failed, non-celebrated victims of Alzheimer`s were rolled on to CNN to supply some collateral tragedy. Network anchors interviewed former colleagues like Cokie and Sam, who were happy to airbrush the history of the presidency they covered as payoff for reliving their own salad days as TV stars.

But there was one encouraging sign in the flood of blather about optimism. America`s infatuation with these exercises in overkill shows signs of waning. More viewers realize that the excessive length and grave tone of a mediathon are not necessarily an indication of either the importance of the events getting the air time or of the accuracy of the flowery storytelling. Experts kept saying how "surprised" everyone was about "the outpouring" for Reagan, but saying didn`t make it so. The dirty little secret of the week: the outpouring didn`t live up to its hype. "There was this kind of extraordinary outpouring not by the public but by reporters who should know better," as Morley Safer told Larry King after it was over.

A total of some 200,000 Americans passed by the coffin in California and Washington. The crowds watching the funeral procession in Washington numbered in the "tens of thousands," reported The Washington Post. By comparison, three million Americans greeted the cross-country journey of Warren Harding`s funeral train from San Francisco to Washington when he died in office in the steamy August of 1923, according to Mark Sullivan`s history, "Our Times." It took 3,500 soldiers to direct the crowd in his hometown of Marion, Ohio, alone. The grief for Harding was so pronounced in New York, a city that hardly knew him, that The Times reported how theaters canceled their shows to hold impromptu memorial gatherings for those citizens unable to jam into the packed services held in Trinity Church at Wall Street and Temple Emanu-El uptown and most houses of worship in between. Next to that, the Reagan outpouring, much of it carried out by bubbly TV-camera-seeking citizens in halter tops and shorts, was grief lite.

Harding`s huge turnout didn`t alter his hapless historical fate, but at least it was a genuine event. When every tragic news story, from Columbine to the Columbia shuttle to JonBenet Ramsey and Chandra Levy, is supersized in our national theater of TV, all of them are downsized. Incessant hyperbole becomes as numbing as Muzak. No matter how many TV recyclings, the close-ups of Nancy Reagan`s three trips to her husband`s coffin may never trump the single long shot of John John saluting his father. No matter how many pundits proclaim Reagan a great president, a realistic assessment remains on hold — especially since, as The Los Angeles Times reported, 90 percent of the 55 million pages of his papers is still off-limits to scholars at the presidential library where he was entombed. (A 2001 George W. Bush executive order could restrict access to every modern president`s historical record indefinitely.)

When that entombment finally arrived, national mourning was giving way to national boredom. Except at Fox News Channel, ratings did not spike on either network or cable. "It was not a massively watched event," one CNN producer said to The Times`s Bill Carter. "It was a largely watched event." Translation: Is it too late to grab a piece of the new J. Lo nuptials? Eventually, even Fox was elbowing Reagan into the wings for its O. J. retrospectives. On the Friday morning of Reagan`s National Cathedral funeral, Matt Lauer tried to hold the "Today" show audience by promising a medley of mediathon standards: "A lot of news coming out of Washington, Katie, but there`s other news to talk about as well, including major developments in the Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart and Scott Peterson cases."

Only three days later, Bill Clinton, the star of the longest-running news miniseries of them all, "Impeachment of the President," was back in the White House, as a preview of coming attractions for the televised book tour he kicks off tonight on "60 Minutes." Even President Bush was glad to see him. Once people line up to buy the book, there will be no shortage of talking heads remarking on "the surprise outpouring" for the man they declared dead just a few years ago. At least Ronald Reagan, who understood nothing if not the cruel and fickle vagaries of show business, might find it funny. You can almost hear him saying, "There you go again."

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une 19, 2004
Show Us the Proof

When the commission studying the 9/11 terrorist attacks refuted the Bush administration`s claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, we suggested that President Bush apologize for using these claims to help win Americans` support for the invasion of Iraq. We did not really expect that to happen. But we were surprised by the depth and ferocity of the administration`s capacity for denial. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have not only brushed aside the panel`s findings and questioned its expertise, but they are also trying to rewrite history.

Mr. Bush said the 9/11 panel had actually confirmed his contention that there were "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said his administration had never connected Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Both statements are wrong.

Before the war, Mr. Bush spoke of far more than vague "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said Iraq had provided Al Qaeda with weapons training, bomb-making expertise and a base in Iraq. On Feb. 8, 2003, Mr. Bush said that "an Al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990`s for help in acquiring poisons and gases." The 9/11 panel`s report, as well as news articles, indicate that these things never happened.

Mr. Cheney said yesterday that the "evidence is overwhelming" of an Iraq-Qaeda axis and that there had been a "whole series of high-level contacts" between them. The 9/11 panel said a senior Iraqi intelligence officer made three visits to Sudan in the early 1990`s, meeting with Osama bin Laden once in 1994. It said Osama bin Laden had asked for "space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded." The panel cited reports of further contacts after Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, but said there was no working relationship. As far as the public record is concerned, then, Mr. Cheney`s "longstanding ties" amount to one confirmed meeting, after which the Iraq government did not help Al Qaeda. By those standards, the United States has longstanding ties to North Korea.

Mr. Bush has also used a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush used to refer to Mr. Zarqawi as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner" who was in Baghdad working with the Iraqi government. But the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime, nor under the direction of Al Qaeda.

When it comes to 9/11, someone in the Bush administration has indeed drawn the connection to Iraq: the vice president. Mr. Cheney has repeatedly referred to reports that Mohamed Atta met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent. He told Tim Russert of NBC on Dec. 9, 2001, that this report has "been pretty well confirmed." If so, no one seems to have informed the C.I.A., the Czech government or the 9/11 commission, which said it did not appear to be true. Yet Mr. Cheney cited it, again, on Thursday night on CNBC.

Mr. Cheney said he had lots of documents to prove his claims. We have heard that before, but Mr. Cheney always seems too pressed for time or too concerned about secrets to share them. Last September, Mr. Cheney`s adviser, Mary Matalin, explained to The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney had access to lots of secret stuff. She said he had to "tiptoe through the land mines of what`s sayable and not sayable" to the public, but that "his job is to connect the dots."

The message, if we hear it properly, is that when it comes to this critical issue, the vice president is not prepared to offer any evidence beyond the flimsy-to-nonexistent arguments he has used in the past, but he wants us to trust him when he says there`s more behind the screen. So far, when it comes to Iraq, blind faith in this administration has been a losing strategy.

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3,000 more UK troops for Iraq

· Nato force to be deployed to bolster new government
· Bloody career of al-Qaida`s leader in Gulf
Richard Norton-Taylor and Ewen MacAskill
Saturday June 19, 2004

The Guardian
A Nato force including up to 3,000 British troops will be deployed to Iraq to support the vulnerable new government as it takes over the running of the country, under a plan being drawn up in London and Washington.

The force would consist of Nato`s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, based in Germany under the command of a British general, Sir Richard Dannatt, reinforced by a British battle group.

Officials said yesterday the corps would be "temporarily extracted" from Nato to make it more politically acceptable to members of the alliance - notably France and Germany - that were opposed to the war, as well as Russia and many Iraqi leaders.

The new force would not be deployed under a Nato banner but would be described as a British-led international force. About 60% of the corps` staff are British.

Officials said the plan is expected to be formally agreed at the Nato summit in Istanbul on the eve of the official handover of sovereignty on June 30 to the interim Iraqi government led by Ayad Allawi.

Britain`s chiefs of staff have been working on plans for weeks involving the deployment of up to 3,000 troops to south central Iraq, including the holy city of Najaf, the scene of fighting between US forces and the militia of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Defence sources said the plan would increase pressure on the army but that it could live with it for a finite period. A deployment of 18 months is envisaged.

The government announced on Thursday that 600 Royal Marines are to be deployed to bolster British forces in southern Iraq. Though they will replace an army battalion, the deployment will increase the number of British troops in Iraq by around 270, to 9,200.

The proposed British-led international force is likely to include troops from several members of the alliance.

The US has been struggling to find countries willing to put up troops for Iraq, even after the UN resolution agreed earlier this month on the status of the interim government.

British military comman ders have insisted that the role of their troops must be seen in the overall strategic, political, and economic situation in Iraq. Their concerns were reflected in a leaked Foreign Office memo last month. In the event of Britain agreeing to send reinforcements, it said, "we must ensure that ... we can prevent US action, either at the strategic or operational levels, which would jeopardise our objectives".

It added: "We need a more flexible approach towards cooperation with existing militias". Mr Sadr`s decision this week, under pressure from moderate Shia leaders and perhaps with political ambitions in mind, to order his Mehdi militia to go home, should make the task of a new international force easier.

The US-led coalition force in Iraq received a much-needed boost yesterday when South Korea announced it is to deploy more than 3,000 troops. They will be based in Arbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, a relatively peaceful region.

The original plan in April was to base them in Kirkuk, an area disputed between Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Arabs and the scene of several bombings. But the South Korea government, under pressure from domestic opposition to sending troops to Iraq, insists that it can only participate in peace-keeping rather than take a combat role.

The first of the troops, about 900, are to be deployed in early August, with another 1,000 the following month, and another 1,000 later. South Korea already has about 670 military engineers and medical staff at Nassiriya, in southern Iraq, and they will join the larger deployment at Arbil. About half the troops are combat-ready forces.

Meanwhile, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Nato`s secretary general, said yesterday the Istanbul summit would also decide on "a stronger Nato presence" in Afghanistan.

There are 20,000 foreign, mainly US, troops in Afghanistan in addition to the Canadian-led 6,400-strong International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), whose troops come from Nato and other countries and are concentrated in Kabul.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Saturday, June 19, 2004
War News for June 18 and 19, 2004 draft

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Car bomb kills 35, wounds 141 in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in firefight near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: One Portuguese contractor, one Iraqi policeman killed by roadside bomb near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, civilian contractor wounded in mortar attack near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqis killed, three US soldiers wounded in coordinated ambush near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One British soldier, two Filipino contractors wounded in mortar attack near Amarah.

Bring ‘em on: US troops attacked at Samarra police station.

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers wounded in fighting near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi civilians wounded in roadside bomb ambush near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqi policemen killed by bomb in Nasiriyah.

Bring ‘em on: Hungarian soldier killed in ambush near Hillah.

Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers killed, 23 wounded in rocket attack near Balad.

Bring ‘em on: Twenty Iraqis killed in US airstrike in Fallujah.

RPG Alley. “Scores of U.S. military convoys and Western contractors have been hit in sophisticated guerrilla ambushes that have claimed dozens of lives along the thoroughfare. ‘According to the latest information, there is one successful attack every two days on that road. It is a high risk area,’ said one of the hundreds of Western security consultants hired to protect foreigners in Iraq.”

Axis of deceit. “On balance the strong, unambiguous language contained in the case for war seemed more the work of salespeople than professional intelligence officers. The claims that the repeated assertions reflected accurately the views of national intelligence agencies are plainly wrong. They were simply too much at odds with the piles of intelligence material I was privy to. In all the material I saw on Iraq, never did I see such a string of unqualified and strong judgements as was contained in the official case for war presented by Bush, Blair and Howard.”

Ingrates. “From Iraq`s new president to the men who stand guard at the Martyrs` Monument to the country`s war dead -- itself taken over as a US base until last month -- Iraqis are irritated at the prospect of US diplomats occupying their country`s equivalent of the White House. The dispute is becoming a test of how strongly the new Iraqi state can assert its will against a country that will retain great power here even after the occupation formally ends, because the 138,000 US troops remaining far outnumber Iraq`s military and the United States controls $18 billion in reconstruction aid.”

Freedom and liberation. “Iraq`s caretaker government weighed imposing emergency powers to conquer a wave of violence and sabotage that has killed more than 180 people this month and halted oil exports for at least five days. Justice minister Malik Dohan al-Hassan said the government may resort to ‘exceptional’ laws imposed by former dictator Saddam Hussein after it takes power on June 30.”

Commentary

Editorial: “Mr. Cheney said he had lots of documents to prove his claims. We have heard that before, but Mr. Cheney always seems too pressed for time or too concerned about secrets to share them. Last September, Mr. Cheney`s adviser, Mary Matalin, explained to The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney had access to lots of secret stuff. She said he had to ‘tiptoe through the land mines of what`s sayable and not sayable’ to the public, but that ‘his job is to connect the dots.’ The message, if we hear it properly, is that when it comes to this critical issue, the vice president is not prepared to offer any evidence beyond the flimsy-to-nonexistent arguments he has used in the past, but he wants us to trust him when he says there`s more behind the screen. So far, when it comes to Iraq, blind faith in this administration has been a losing strategy.”

Editorial: “The Bush administration has misled the American people. It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the clear and present danger.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Colorado soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Illinois soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Four Pennsylvania Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Texas contractor killed in Iraq.

Local story: Maine contractor killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida contractor wounded in Iraq.



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Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden`s hands

Al-Qaida may `reward` American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office, senior intelligence man says
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday June 19, 2004

The Guardian
A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America`s counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden`s hands.

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.

In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.

He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror" yesterday with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was one of al-Qaida`s protectors in Waziristan.

But Anonymous, who has been centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden, said: "Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes forget how big the tribal areas are." He believes President Pervez Musharraf cannot advance much further into the tribal areas without endangering his rule by provoking a Pashtun revolt. "He walks a very fine line," he said yesterday.

Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking the administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented in being the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.

The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken.

Peter Bergen, the author of two books on Bin Laden and al-Qaida, said: "His views represent an amped-up version of what is emerging as a consensus among intelligence counter-terrorist professionals."

Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt for the Bush White House and its policies. His book describes the Iraq invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantage.

"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."

In his view, the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied on surrogates who proved to be unreliable.

"For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora," Anonymous said.

Yesterday President Bush repeated his assertion that Bin Laden was cornered and that there was "no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American justice".

Anonymous said: "I think we overestimate significantly the stress [Bin Laden`s] under. Our media and sometimes our policymakers suggest he`s hiding from rock to rock and hill to hill and cave to cave. My own hunch is that he`s fairly comfortable where he is."

The death and arrest of experienced operatives might have set back Bin Laden`s plans to some degree but when it came to his long-term capacity to threaten the US, he said, "I don`t think we`ve laid a glove on him".

"What I think we`re seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation," he said."The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more professional group.

"They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly more literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate, more comfortable with the tools of modernity. I also think they`re much less prone to being the Errol Flynns of al-Qaida. They`re just much more careful across the board in the way they operate."

As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does not have them already, it will inevitably acquire them.

The most likely source of a nuclear device would be the former Soviet Union, he believes. Dirty bombs, chemical and biological weapons, could be home-made by al-Qaida`s own experts, many of them trained in the US and Britain.

Anonymous, who published an analysis of al-Qaida last year called Through Our Enemies` Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.

"I`m very sure they can`t have a better administration for them than the one they have now," he said.

"One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president."

The White House has yet to comment publicly on Imperial Hubris, which is due to be published on July 4, but intelligence experts say it may try to portray him as a professionally embittered maverick.

The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly angry and urgent, and the stridency of his warnings about al-Qaida led him to be moved from a highly sensitive job in the late 90s.

But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA counter-terrorism centre, said he had been vindicated by events. "He is very well respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject."

Anonymous believes Mr Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy.

He said: "It`s going to take 10,000-15,000 dead Americans before we say to ourselves: `What is going on`?"
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Latest horror could destroy President of divided nation
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

19 June 2004

Is this the horror that will finally undo George Bush`s presidency? First Nicholas Berg, now Paul Johnson: in two months and in two different countries, two US civilians have been kidnapped and beheaded by their al-Qa`ida-affiliated captors, becoming not only pawns in a deadly geopolitical game but also symbols of the complicated feelings of revulsion unleashed by the Bush administration`s "war on terror".

It is hard not to think back to earlier acts of defiance against the might of the United States and wonder if we are not seeing a parallel erosion of presidential authority: the steady drip-drip of casualty figures from Vietnam that proved the undoing of Lyndon Johnson`s presidency in 1968, or the corrosive effect of the Iran hostage crisis on Jimmy Carter 12 years later.

We have now witnessed four similar killings of Western civilians in the conflicts unleashed by the attacks of 11 September 2001, starting with Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in January 2002 and including the Italian Fabrizio Quattrocchi in Iraq in April. Even in our jaded, news-saturated age there is something about these cases that bespeaks almost bottomless horror, in a way that the deaths of more than 800 US servicemen in Iraq or the violence and death visited upon thousands of Iraqi civilians have not.

The fact that the images of ritual slaughter have been posted on the internet has only made the brutality more vivid, more palpable - even to those who have not had the stomach or the inclination to watch. This is a propaganda war, fought with images as much as with guns and knives.

With each new beheading, the political mood has shifted. When the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted in Karachi two-and-a-half years ago, it gave rise to a sense of national, even international solidarity. There was nothing divisive or controversial about the mourning that greeted news of his death. Indeed, his family has gone on to set up a foundation in his name to promote cross-cultural understanding that enjoys universal admiration.

The case of Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old from Pennsylvania abducted and killed in Iraq just last month, was very different. There was the question of how exactly he had come to grief, with his family alleging he had been in US custody and that the FBI somehow put him in the path of danger on his release. And there was the anger of his father, Michael Berg, who said unequivocally: "My son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld."

Mr Berg Snr was at an anti-war demonstration in Washington two weeks ago in which he continued to denounce the administration for its "callous behaviour" which, he said, had "in effect tied him [his son] to the track until it was no longer possible to escape that speeding hate train".

It would be wrong to believe that the rest of the United States shares Michael Berg`s outlook. Rather, his anger has underscored the deep polarisation in American politics between those who have come to loathe the Bush administration and those determined to defend its every action. And it remains to be seen whether Mr Johnson`s death provokes anger against the administration or rather cries for revenge against his butchers.

Still, the overall mood is slipping away from the President. Two recent polls show that a majority believe the war against Saddam Hussein was not worth it. The Abu Ghraib torture scandal remains incendiary. And the recent traumatic events in Saudi Arabia - the siege of a residential compound in the oil town of al-Khobar last month, the shootings of Americans and other Westerners, and now the grisly fate of Mr Johnson - have raised anxious questions about the direction of US foreign policy and its ostensible goal of diminishing the terrorist threat.

Yesterday, a Washington Post article was headlined: "Is al-Qa`ida winning in Saudi Arabia?" It was just such questions about America`s enemies that led President Johnson to his "Cronkite moment" in 1968 - his realisation that he could no longer count on the support of the country`s favourite television news anchor, Walter Cronkite, and that he had therefore lost the sympathy of the electorate as a whole.


19 June 2004 20:41


© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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River: `Here in Baghdad, you can`t tell the puppets without a program`
Date: Saturday, June 19 @ 09:00:31 EDT
Topic: Occupied Iraq

By River, Baghdad Burning

I have had neither the time, nor the inclination, to blog lately. The weather is, quite literally, hellish. The heat begins very early in the morning with a blazing sun that seems unfairly close to our part of the earth. You`d think, after the sun has set, that the weather would be drastically cooler. This is not the case in Baghdad. After the sun has set, the hot sidewalks and streets emanate waves of heat for several hours, as if sighing in relief.

The electricity has been particularly bad these last two weeks in many areas. For every four hours of no electricity, we get two hours of electricity. And while we should be taking advantage of these two hours to do such things as wash clothes, get the water pump going and blog, we find ourselves sitting around in front of the air conditioner for a couple of hours of bliss, procrastinating and making empty promises to no one in particular.

School is out for most of the kids- both in grade school and in college. Everyone is just generally sitting around at home. It’s a huge relief for parents and teachers alike. There was a time when, according to many frazzled parents, sending one’s kids to school was the highlight of the day… now it has come to mean more anxiety and worry. While having them virtually trapped inside of the house is something of a trial on everyone involved, it is also a relief.



The new government isn’t very different from the old Governing Council. Some of the selfsame Puppets, in fact. It’s amusing to watch our Karazai- Ghazi Ajeel Al-Yawer- trying to establish himself. It’s a bit of a predicament for many an Iraqi, and possibly foreigners too. Here he is- your typical Arab- the dark skin, dark hair and traditional ‘dishdasha’ wearing an ‘iggall’ on his head and playing the role of tribal sheikh quite well.

Beyond these minor details, however, he remains an ex-member of the Governing Council and was actually selected by the Puppets, supposedly over the American preference- Adnan Al-Pachichi (who is adamantly claiming he is *not* the American preference at this point). That whole charade is laughable. It has been quite clear from the very start that the Puppets do not breathe unless Bremer asks them, very explicitly, to inhale and exhale. The last time I checked, Puppets do not suddenly come to life and grow a conscience unless a fairy godmother and Jiminy the Cricket are involved.

He is, purportedly, one of the heads of one of the largest tribes in the region- Al-Shummar. This tribe extends over parts of Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. They are largely Sunni but have several Shi’a clans. During and after the war, they were largely responsible for the northern and western borders. They are landowners, farmers, and- occasionally- smugglers of everything from sheep, to people, to arms…

Now, Yawer is our Karazai. He sits exuding all the outward signs of the stereotypical Arab (almost down to the camel) and yet, he seems to support Bremer et al. in almost every decision. Sure, he gives an interview now and then and says he doesn’t agree with this decision or that one, but the first major meeting he attends, he calls for NATO forces inside of the country- as if Americans, Italians, Brits and the rest aren’t already enough. There are also rumors that he is married to a certain lady who is a personal friend and adamant supporter of none other than Ahmad Chalabi... I`m still looking into that.

His image, admittedly, bothers me. I’m getting visions of corrupt Gulf emirs, oil wells, and shady business dealings.

Iyad Allawi is completely America and Britain’s boy. He has been on the CIA’s payroll for quite some time now and I don’t think anyone was particularly surprised when he was made Prime Minister. The cabinet of ministers is an interesting concoction of exiled Iraqis, Kurdish Iraqis who were in the northern region and a few Iraqis who were actually living inside of Iraq. Of the 37 members of the new government, 11 were actually living inside of Iraq. Of those 11, one or two are known to be quite competent. The rest are either unknown or generally infamous.

Several of the new government actually have more than one nationality. Now don’t get me wrong- I hold nothing against people with dual or triple or whatever number of nationalities. I do, however, have something against people with dual nationality being a part of government. It makes one wonder how many Americans would actually agree to having a senator or minister with, say, a French or German passport along with the American one.

While I don’t have any definite numbers, I can assure the world that we have *at least* 20 million Iraqis, both inside and outside of Iraq, who have only a single nationality. I can even go further to assure the world that the majority of those Iraqis with a single nationality actually have lived inside of Iraq for most of their lives. However bizarre the statistics may seem, I do believe that out of those millions of Iraqis, 37 competent ones could have been found. True, they might not have CIA alliances, bank accounts in Switzerland, armed militias or multimillion dollar companies in Saudi Arabia… but many of them actually have a sense of national pride and an anxiety for their country and for the future of their children and their children’s children inside of said country.

My favorite minister, by far, is the Defense Minister, Sha’alan Hazim. According to American newspaper Al-Sabah, Mr. Sha’lan Hazim “received a Masters degree in business administration from the UK before returning to Iraq to run a Kuwaiti bank. After being forced to leave Iraq by the former regime, Mr.Sha’alan became the head of a real-estate company in London until he returned to Iraq last June and has since worked as the governor of Qadisiya”.

Now this is highly amusing. I must have missed something. If anyone has any information about just *how* Mr. Sha’alan Hazim qualifies as a Defense Minister, please do send it along. At a point when we need secure borders and a strong army, our new Defense Minister was given the job because he… what? Played with toy soldiers as a child? Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace six times? Was regional champion of the game Commandos?

Beyond the unsure political situation, I have spent the last few days helping a relative sort things out to leave abroad. It is a depressing situation. My mother`s cousin is renting out his house, selling his car and heading out to Amman with his three kids where, he hopes, he will be able to find work. He is a university professor who has had enough of the current situation. He claims that he`s tired of worrying about his family and the varying political and security crises every minute of the day. It`s a common story these days. It feels like anyone who can, is trying to find a way out before June 30. Last summer, people who hadn`t been inside of Iraq for years were clamoring to visit the dear homeland that had been `liberated` (after which they would clamor to leave the dear homeland). This summer, it is the other way around.

The Syrian and Jordanian borders are packed. A friend who was returned at the Jordanian border said that they were only allowing 20 cars to pass per day... people were being made to wait on the borders for days at a time and risked being rejected at the border guard`s whim. People are simply tired of waiting for normality and security. It was difficult enough during the year... this summer promises to be a particularly long one.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
2004_06_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#10875789067030428" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
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ZNet Deutschland Interview, Teil 1
1. US-Amerika und Europa*
von Noam Chomsky und Timo Stollenwerk
ZNet Deutschland 24.05.2004
In einem Kapitel des Buches Understanding Power, das gerade unter dem Titel Eine Anatomie der Macht auf Deutsch erschienen ist, beschreibst du eine Interviewsituation in Kanada. Der Interviewer wurde wütend, weil du anfingst, Kritik an Kanada zu üben, statt dich, wie es ihm lieber gewesen wäre, auf die USA zu beschränken.[1] Du sagst in dem Buch, einer der Gründe dafür, dass du so oft in der Mainstreampresse außerhalb der USA interviewt wirst, sei die Tatsache, dass du die USA kritisierst und nicht das Land, in dem du interviewt wirst. Ich möchte deswegen über die Frage sprechen, welche Bedeutung deine Schriften und dein Aktivismus für europäische Länder, besonders Deutschland, haben können.

Wo immer ich hingehe, versuche ich, Kritik an dem Land zu üben, in das ich komme, aber das ist nicht meine Hauptsorge. Tatsächlich erinnere ich mich an diese Geschichte in Kanada. Das war ein Interview für die wichtigste nationale Interviewsendung im Radio, und jedes Mal, wenn ich in Toronto landete, waren sie ganz entzückt, mich in ihrer Sendung zu haben. Aber dieses Mal merkte ich, dass ich es allmählich wirklich satt hatte. Die erste Frage war: „Wann sind sie hier angekommen?“ Ich sagte, dass ich gerade erst auf dem Lester-B.-Pearson-Kriegsverbrecher-Flughafen angekommen sei. Der Interviewer sagte: „Was soll das heißen – Lester B. Pearson soll ein Kriegsverbrecher gewesen sein?“ Da begann ich, aufzuzählen, was Lester Pearson so alles getan hatte. In Kanada wird er als großer Held betrachtet – Friedensnobelpreisträger und so weiter. Er hat furchtbare Dinge getan, die ich aufzählte, woraufhin der Interviewer krebsrot im Gesicht wurde und ich plötzlich nicht mehr auf Sendung war. Er brach das Interview einfach ab und fing an, herumzuschreien.

Als ich das Studio verließ, sah ich diese ganzen Lämpchen aufleuchten, die anzeigen, dass Leute im Studio anrufen; sie bekamen Anrufe von überallher in ganz Kanada. Die Leute waren sehr wütend auf den Interviewer. Das waren gar nicht mal Leute, denen es gefiel, was ich sagte, aber sie fanden, dass man Studiogäste so einfach nicht behandeln kann. Als ich ging, baten mich die Leute vom Studio, doch wieder zu kommen, um ein richtiges Interview zu machen, worauf ich sagte, ich wüsste nicht, ob ich Zeit hätte – vielleicht bei meinem nächsten Besuch in Kanada. Sie schickten dann sogar ein Team nach Boston, das mich interviewte, weil die Zuhörer das verlangt hatten, aber in ihre Sendung eingeladen haben sie mich nie mehr. Dasselbe ist mir noch ein paar Mal passiert, sowohl in Kanada als auch in anderen Ländern.

Du hast gestern für dein Lebenswerk den Carl-von-Ossietzky-Preis bekommen, wofür wir dir gratulieren wollen. Der Preis würdigt deine Kritik an der US-Außenpolitik, aber auch deine Forschungsarbeit zur Funktionsweise der Medien in demokratischen Gesellschaften. Du hast zusammen mit Edward S. Herman einen analytischen Rahmen entwickelt, der versucht, zu erklären, wie die (Mainstream-)Medien in den USA arbeiten. Diesem Propagandamodell zufolge dienen die Medien den Interessen der konzentrierten Macht von Staat und Konzernen und präsentieren eine Sicht von der Welt, die diesen Interessen entspricht. Bist du der Meinung, dass das Propagandamodell auch auf den europäischen, und insbesondere den deutschen Medienmarkt anwendbar ist?

Nun, ich lese die deutsche Presse nicht regelmäßig, und so kann ich dazu nichts Definitives sagen. Aber von dem Wenigen her, was ich gesehen habe, würde ich deine Frage bejahen. Und ich würde vermuten, dass man, wenn man die deutsche Presse ebenso intensiv untersuchen würde, wie dies mit der amerikanischen Presse getan wird, zu denselben Ergebnissen kommen würde. Es ist eine ziemlich bemerkenswerte Tatsache, dass die Kritik an den Medien sehr stark in den USA konzentriert ist. In den Vereinigten Staaten arbeiten eine Menge Leute zu diesem Thema, und dementsprechend finden wir etliche Analysen und Diskussionen dazu.

In Kanada findet so etwas praktisch gar nicht statt, in Großbritannien ein bisschen – so gibt es z.B. ein gutes Medieninstitut in Glasgow und eine Reihe von anderen Institutionen und Initiativen. In Frankreich sehr wenig. In Deutschland dachte ich bis gestern, es gäbe nichts, aber gestern abend erzählte mir ein Professor, einige Leute würden daran arbeiten. Es mag also sein, dass manches vorhanden ist, aber ich konnte das nicht weiter verfolgen. Das ist tatsächlich eine Frage, die ihr euch selbst stellen müsst. Ihr müsst euch eure Medien hier in Deutschland systematisch anschauen. Eben mal die Zeitungen zu lesen, wenn man wie ich alle paar Jahre mal hierher kommt, reicht dazu einfach nicht aus. Wenn ich dann allerdings die Presse hier zu Gesicht bekomme, scheint mir durchaus, dass es hier auch nicht anders ist als in den USA.

MS: Glaubst du, dass die Bandbreite der Medien von der Tatsache beeinflusst ist, dass wir in Europa bis vor kurzem Arbeiterparteien wie die sozialdemokratische Partei hatten – Parteien, die sehr rasch im Verschwinden begriffen sind, die es aber gab? Bist du der Meinung, dass das die Bandbreite von Meinungen, die in der Presse geäußert werden können, beeinflusst hat?

Wahrscheinlich, das sollte man erwarten. England kenne ich besser, dort gibt es immer noch eine Arbeiterbewegung und diese Partei, die sich Labour Party nennt. Jedenfalls gab es in England eine Arbeiterpresse, und sie wurde viel gelesen, genoss große Unterstützung und hatte ihre Wirkung. Der Daily Herald war die meistgelesene Zeitung in England, mit großer Leserbeteiligung. Er hielt sich bis Anfang der sechziger Jahre, und in den sechziger Jahren orientierte sich auch die Boulevardpresse, wie z.B. der Daily Mirror, an der Arbeiterbewegung und den Gewerkschaften. Die Arbeiterpresse selbst hatte da schon eine lange Zeit des Niedergangs hinter sich, und Anfang der sechziger Jahre war dann im wesentlichen Schluss damit. Das ging hauptsächlich über die Kapitalkonzentration, die Verteilung der Werbeeinnahmen und ähnliche Prozesse vor sich.

Dadurch spiegelt sich die Weltsicht arbeitender Menschen immer weniger in den Medien wider. Wie sich das auswirkt, konnte ich vor ein paar Tagen in England beobachten. Ich hielt an allen möglichen Orten Vorträge, unter anderem auch in Liverpool. Das war auf einer Veranstaltung, die von den Dockarbeitern organisiert worden war, die nach einem großen Arbeitskampf einige Jahre zuvor entlassen wurden. Damals verloren Hunderte von Arbeitern ihren Arbeitsplatz und wurden im Rahmen der Anstrengungen der Arbeitgeber zur Vernichtung der Gewerkschaften durch Streikbrecher ersetzt.

Das war in den Jahren nach Thatcher, aber es lief genauso ab wie bei den Arbeitskämpfen zuvor. Sie gaben nicht auf, sondern kämpften wirklich hart, nur um am Schluss doch entlassen zu werden, aber danach wendeten sie sich anderen Aktivitäten zu, kulturellen Aktivitäten in Liverpool und politischer Tätigkeit, und neben anderem hatten sie diese jährlichen Veranstaltungen zur Erinnerung an den Streik, und mein Vortrag war ein Teil davon. Aber das Publikum bestand jetzt natürlich nicht mehr nur aus Dockern. Über die Sicht, die solche Leute von der Welt haben, wird in den Medien einfach nicht mehr berichtet. Wenn man in den Vereinigten Staaten zurück bis an den Anfang des letzten Jahrhunderts geht, findet man Zeitungen wie Appeal to Reason, die eine Art links-sozialdemokratische Zeitschrift war und ebenso weit verbreitet war wie die kommerzielle Presse. Und Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts gab es eine sehr lebendige Arbeiterpresse. Selbst in den fünfziger Jahren des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts gab es immer noch 800 an der Arbeiterbewegung orientierte Zeitungen, die vielleicht 20 bis 30 Millionen Leserinnen und Leser erreichten, aber heute ist es mit all dem praktisch vorbei. Und so verloren die unabhängigen Medien Schritt für Schritt an Boden, während das Kapital die Kontrolle übernahm.

Früher hatte jede Zeitung einen Kolumnisten für Belange der Arbeiter, einen Redakteur, der über Nachrichten aus der Arbeitswelt berichtete – heute hat das praktisch keine einzige mehr. Stattdessen schreiben die Wirtschaftsredakteure gelegentlich einen Artikel über einen Streik oder ähnliches – aber einen großen Wirtschaftsteil haben sie alle. Jede Zeitung hat diesen Wirtschaftsteil, aber die Idee, dass sie auch einen eigenen Teil über Probleme der Arbeiter haben sollten, ist inzwischen nahezu unvorstellbar.

Wenn man also etwas über die Aktienkurse erfahren will, kann man das sofort, aber wenn man sich über das Lohnniveau oder über die durchschnittliche Arbeitszeit informieren will, muss man sich durch komplizierte Statistiken hindurcharbeiten. Und in den Vereinigten Staaten werden einige dieser Informationen nicht einmal gesammelt. Die USA sind eines der wenigen Industrieländer, vielleicht sogar das einzige, in dem die offiziellen staatlichen Daten – obwohl sie zu jedem einzelnen Thema sehr umfangreich sind – nicht klassen- und schichtenspezifisch klassifiziert sind. Wenn zum Beispiel jemand die Daten zur Gesundheit und Sterberate von Industriearbeitern mit den entsprechenden Daten für Selbständige vergleichen will, ist die einzige Möglichkeit, dies zu tun, sich durch die Daten zu arbeiten, die es tatsächlich gibt und komplizierte Korrelationen zwischen ihnen herzustellen. Es gibt eine ziemlich enge Korrelation zwischen ethnischer Zugehörigkeit und Klasse, und es gibt etliche Daten, die nach dem Kriterium der ethnischen Zugehörigkeit geordnet sind – und wenn man dann diese Daten analysiert und noch eine Reihe von anderen Daten dazu, findet man schließlich auch etwas über klassenspezifische Daten heraus.

MS: In Deutschland gibt es sehr wenige Daten über die Reichen. Über Besitz und Reichtum etwas herauszufinden, ist sehr schwierig. Man muss dieselben Methoden anwenden, die du in Bezug auf den Gesundheitszustand der arbeitenden Bevölkerung beschrieben hast, wenn man herausfinden will, wer was hat und so weiter.

Das hat zum Teil noch einen anderen Grund. Es gibt soziologische Studien über die Armen, aber nur sehr wenige über die Reichen. Das ist unter anderem deswegen so, weil die Reichen nicht sehr auskunftsfreudig sind. Nur Leute, die kaum Möglichkeiten haben, sich zu wehren, lassen einen zu sich ins Haus, um sich befragen zu lassen. Wenn man in einen Slum geht und anfängt, den Leuten Fragen zu stellen, werden sie vielleicht mit einem reden. Wenn man dagegen in die reichen Vorstädte geht und dasselbe versucht, werfen sie einen raus. Das geht einen nichts an, und sie befürchten dann, man würde irgendwie unfair zu ihnen sein.

Wie dem auch sei, die anthropologischen, soziologischen und psychologischen Studien sind meistens Studien über Unterdrückte. Und interessant daran ist, dass man Daten über die Verteilung des Reichtums finden kann, aber wenn man nach Dingen sucht, die mit dieser Verteilung korrelieren, wie z.B. dem Gesundheitszustand, wird es schwierig.

Tatsächlich wird den Leuten in den Vereinigten Staaten immerzu eingehämmert, sie gehörten alle zur Mittelklasse. Meine Tochter unterrichtet an einem staatlichen College, wo die Studenten aus einer Schicht kommen, die wir als Arbeiterklasse bezeichnen oder noch weiter unten ansiedeln würden, viele von ihnen sind nur Gelegenheitsbeschäftigte, jedenfalls eindeutig aus der Unterschicht. Am ersten Tag fragt meine Tochter die Studenten im Seminar immer: „Zu welcher Schicht zählt ihr euch“, und alle antworten, zur Mittelschicht, und dann versucht sie, herauszufinden, was für Zukunftsvorstellungen sie haben: „Warum geht ihr aufs College?“, „Was ist euer Vater von Beruf?“ und so weiter. Dann sagen sie regelmäßig so etwas wie, dass ihr Vater, wenn er gerade Arbeit hat, Hausmeister ist, und dass sie hoffen, später einmal als Krankenpfleger oder Krankenpflegerin zu arbeiten – aber sie gehören zur Mittelklasse. Alle gehören zur Mittelklasse.

Gestern habe ich in der britischen Presse einen Artikel in einer der so genannten linken Zeitungen, dem Guardian oder dem Observer, gelesen, der von jemandem stammte, der beim Filmfestival in Cannes ein Interview mit Michael Moore gemacht hatte. Der Autor versuchte dann, einen möglichst kritischen Artikel zu schreiben, in dem er sagt, Moore sei ein Heuchler und Betrüger, und in diesem Zusammenhang sagte er dann auch, Moore gebe vor, aus der Arbeiterklasse zu kommen, während er in Wirklichkeit aus dem Mittelschichtmilieu der Vorstädte stamme. Dann stellt sich heraus, dass sein Vater Arbeiter in einer Autofabrik war – aber deswegen gehörte er noch lange nicht zur Arbeiterklasse, weil er sich immerhin ein eigenes Haus kaufen konnte. Moores Vater arbeitete in einer Autofabrik, und jetzt kommt sein Sohn an und betrügt die Leute und gibt vor, er käme aus der Arbeiterklasse. Ich bin sicher, dass der Autor das noch nicht einmal komisch fand, und die Leser fanden vermutlich auch nichts Merkwürdiges daran.

Im Rahmen der Diskussion über den jüngsten Golfkrieg wurden der deutsche Kanzler und die deutsche Regierung für ihre Antikriegshaltung gelobt, obwohl Deutschland den USA erlaubte, mit ihren Kriegsflugzeugen auf dem Weg in den Irak den deutschen Luftraum zu überfliegen und die Infrastruktur der NATO zu benutzen. Was waren deiner Ansicht nach die Motive Deutschlands und anderer europäischer Staaten, als sie sich gegen die US-In­tervention im Irakwandte?
Ich weiß nicht genug über Deutschland, um darauf wirklich antworten zu können, aber es ist schon eine interessante Frage. Ist die Frage, die gestellt werden sollte: Was waren die Motive Frankreichs und Deutschlands, sich nicht am Krieg der USA zu beteiligen? Niemand fragt, warum Italien sich bereit fand, beim Krieg mitzumachen oder warum Spanien dies tat. Schließlich ist es in Wirklichkeit so, dass die Bevölkerung dort entschieden gegen diesen Krieg war – sie war sogar in noch höherem Maß gegen den Krieg als die Bevölkerungen in Frankreich und Deutschland. Wenn überhaupt irgendjemand an die Demokratie glaubte, was leider Gottes nicht der Fall ist, würde diese Frage überhaupt nicht gestellt. Es gibt nichts weiter zu fragen, wenn eine Regierung dieselbe Position einnimmt wie die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung, denn so soll es in einer demokratischen Gesellschaft doch sein. Aber diese Frage muss natürlich nur für diejenigen gestellt werden, die nicht einfach Befehle aus Crawford in Texas entgegennahmen. Hier haben wir ein Problem. Was diejenigen betrifft, die 90 Prozent ihrer Bevölkerung ignorierten und ihrem Herrn gehorchten – da stellt sich keine Frage. Warum die deutsche Regierung beschlossen hat, dem Willen von 70 Prozent der deutschen Bevölkerung entsprechend zu handeln, weiß ich nicht. Aber in einer demokratischen Gesellschaft sollte sich eine derartige Frage gar nicht stellen. Die Regierung sollte gar keine Wahl haben. Sie sollte tun, was die Bevölkerung will, oder zum Rücktritt gezwungen werden.

Sind die Differenzen zwischen dem „Alten Europa“ und den USA im Hinblick auf den Irak Ausdruck einer wachsenden politischen und wirtschaftlichen Rivalität zwischen diesen Ländern und den Vereinigten Staaten?

Der Begriff „Altes Europa“ ist interessant, und zwar aus einer Reihe von Gründen. Er wurde von Rumsfeld erfunden und machte von da aus seine Runde. Er wird jetzt von der westlichen Elite überall verwendet. Das Kriterium dafür, ob ein Land zum „Alten Europa“ oder zum „Neuen Europa“ gehört, ist glasklar: Ein Land gehört zum „Alten Europa“, wenn die Regierung, aus welchem Grund auch immer, dieselbe Haltung eingenommen hat wie die große Mehrheit der Bevölkerung. Es gehört zum „Neuen Europa“, wenn es sich gegen eine noch größere Mehrheit der Bevölkerung stellte und stattdessen den Befehlen aus Washington gehorchte. Das „Alte Europa“ wird verdammt, während das „Neue Europa“ gelobt wird und als die Hoffnung der Zukunft gilt. Darin kommt ein derartiger Hass auf die Demokratie zum Ausdruck, dass es wirklich kaum zu glauben ist. Und dieser Tatbestand wurde so gut wie keines Kommentars gewürdigt.

Der dramatischste Fall war die Türkei. In der Türkei waren 95 Prozent der Bevölkerung gegen den Krieg, und zur Überraschung aller stimmte das Parlament mit einer knappen Mehrheit dafür, dem Willen von 95 Prozent der Bevölkerung Genüge zu tun. Colin Powell drohte der Türkei sofort mit der Einstellung jeder Hilfe, und Paul Wolfowitz, der große Visionär, verurteilte das türkische Militär dafür, dass es nicht interveniert hatte, um die Regierung von diesem schrecklichen Fehler abzuhalten. Er verlangte von ihnen, sich bei den Vereinigten Staaten zu entschuldigen und sich darüber klar zu werden, dass ihre Aufgabe in der Unterstützung Amerikas besteht. Das ändert nichts daran, dass Wolfowitz weiterhin als großer Visionär gilt.

Auch hier war die Reaktion der Presse wieder ziemlich interessant. Sie verurteilte fast einmütig die Türkei und begann, zum ersten Mal, über die türkischen Gräuel gegen die Kurden in den neunziger Jahren zu berichten. Das hatte sie zuvor noch nie getan, aber um zu zeigen, wie schrecklich die Türken sind, weil sie sich geweigert hatten, den Befehlen aus Washington zu gehorchen, fing sie nun an, darüber zu berichten, was die Türken den Kurden angetan hatten. Natürlich sagte die Presse nichts darüber, dass die Türken diese Untaten nur begehen konnten, weil sie so viel Militärhilfe aus den Vereinigten Staaten bekamen, und dass diese Hilfe intensiviert wurde, während die Gräuel immer schlimmer wurden. Und natürlich schrieb die Presse nichts darüber, dass sie selbst nicht über diese Gräueltaten berichtet hatte, als solche Berichte dafür hätten sorgen können, dass die Schrecken aufhören. Das ist niemals ein Thema.

Statt dessen brachte der Korrespondent der New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, einen Artikel über Heuchelei.[2] Das war das Thema. Es ging um die Heuchelei der arabischen Staaten, die jetzt gegen die Gräuel der USA protestieren, aber nie gegen die Gräuel der Türken gegen die Kurden protestiert haben. Das stimmt – solche Proteste sind heuchlerisch. Aber was hat Nicholas Kristof getan, als die Türkei, finanziert von den Vereinigten Staaten, ihre Gräuel beging? Hätte er damals davon gesprochen, hätte man sie leicht verhindern können, aber er ließ keinen Mucks hören. Und auch jetzt hören wir von ihm nichts über US-finanzierte Gräuel, und niemand wird je auf diesen Aspekt seines Verhaltens hinweisen, entweder, weil die jeweiligen Leute keine Ahnung davon haben oder weil sie nicht darüber sprechen wollen.

Das ist also schon mal ein Kriterium, aber zudem gibt es noch ein weiteres Kriterium, das mehr oder weniger damit korreliert. Das „Alte Europa“ ist das wirtschaftliche, kommerzielle, industrielle und finanzielle Zentrum Europas. Das „Neue Europa“ liegt an den Rän­dern dieses Zentrums. Nicht erst seit gestern, sondern schon seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg treibt die USA die tiefe Sorge um, dass Europa einen unabhängigeren Kurs einschlagen könnte. So um 1970 herum hatte Europa sich so weit vom Krieg erholt, dass es wirtschaftlich mit den Vereinigten Staaten gleichgezogen hatte. 1973 war „das Jahr Europas“, in dem Europa seine Wiederauferstehung vom Krieg feiern sollte. Aus diesem Anlass hielt Henry Kissinger eine wichtige Ansprache, nämlich die „Rede zum Jahr Europas“, in der es in erster Linie darum ging, dass die Europäer sich auf ihre „regionalen Verantwortlichkeiten“ innerhalb des „großen Ordnungsrahmens“ beschränken sollten, dessen Kontrolle den Vereinigten Staaten obliege.

Der entscheidende Punkt ist, dass sämtliche europäischen Unabhängigkeitsbemühungen sich auf Frankreich und Deutschland stützen müssen. Das ist einer der Gründe, weshalb die Vereinigten Staaten sich so für die Erweiterung der EU einsetzen. Die USA gehen davon aus, dass sie den Einfluss Europas schwächen können, indem sie diese ehemaligen Satelliten der Sowjetunion in die EU bringen, bei denen sie, wahrscheinlich zu Recht, davon ausgehen, dass sie in stärkerem Maß unter dem Einfluss der USA stehen werden. Aus demselben Grund befürworten die USA auch eine Mitgliedschaft der Türkei – damit die EU in stärkerem Maß unter US-Einfluss steht.

Und inzwischen gibt es für die USA noch eine größere Bedrohung, nämlich Nordostasien. Nordostasien ist die am raschesten wachsende Wirtschaft der Welt, das Bruttosozialprodukt der Region ist bedeutend größer als das Nordamerikas oder Europas, es hat die Hälfte der Finanzreserven der Welt, es gibt Rohstoffe in Sibirien, und diese Region könnte sich in eine unabhängige Richtung entwickeln. In diesem Gebiet befinden sich zwei der größten industriellen Ökonomien der Welt, nämlich Japan und Südkorea. Chinas Wirtschaft wächst und befindet sich an der Peripherie Ost-Sibiriens, wo es viele Ressourcen gibt – darunter ein großer Teil der Ölreserven der Welt.

Das sind also die wirklichen Probleme der Weltordnung, und ein Großteil der Geschehnisse im Nahen Osten hängt genau damit zusammen. Die USA müssen die wichtigsten Energiequellen kontrollieren, um dafür zu sorgen, dass Europa und Asien sich nicht auf Abwege begeben. Europa und Asien wiederum sind teilweise gehorsam, aber nicht immer, wie zum Beispiel in ihrer Politik gegenüber dem Iran. Die USA geben sich große Mühe, Europa und Japan davon abzuhalten, in die iranische Ölproduktion zu investieren, aber sie tun es trotzdem. Japan hat gerade einen Vertrag über viele Milliarden Dollar zur Entwicklung eines großen iranischen Ölfeldes abgeschlossen. Den USA hat das nicht gefallen, aber sie können nicht viel dagegen tun – hier handelt es sich durchaus um ernsthafte Konflikte.

Einer der Gründe für die Invasion des Irak war die Tatsache, dass Frankreich und Russland den geschäftlichen Zugang zum Irak hatten und das irakische Ölsystem kontrollierten. Damit ist nun natürlich Schluss. All das sind Themen und Konflikte, die weit in die Vergangenheit zurückreichen.

Tatsächlich spielt dabei auch Deutschland eine große Rolle. 1952 machte Stalin das Angebot einer Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands inklusive international überwachter demokratischer Wahlen, Wahlen, die die Kommunisten mit Sicherheit verloren hätten. Er stellte nur eine Bedingung, nämlich die, dass es keine Wiederbewaffnung Deutschlands im Rahmen eines westlichen Militärbündnisses geben dürfe, eine Forderung, die angesichts der Geschichte der vorausgegangenen Jahrzehnte ziemlich einleuchtend war. Dieses Angebot wurde, als es gemacht wurde, in den Vereinigten Staaten erst einmal unterschlagen, weil es zum falschen Zeitpunkt kam – nämlich als die US-Regierung sich darum bemühte, die Mittel für einen rasanten Anstieg der Militärausgaben zusammenzubringen. Aber dann sickerte es doch durch, und es gab einige Diskussionen darüber.

Damals wurde ein Buch von einem ziemlich bekannten und einflussreichen politischen Kommentator, James P. Warburg aus der Warburg-Familie, einem recht bedeutenden Mann also, veröffentlicht, und er brachte dieses Thema auf. Das Buch hieß Germany, Key to Peace und kam 1953 heraus,[3] und er sprach darin über dieses Angebot, worauf er heftig kritisiert und verhöhnt wurde: „Wie konnte er auf die Idee kommen, dass Stalin Frieden geschlossen hätte?“ Nun, auf die Frage, ob Stalin das wirklich getan hätte, gibt es keine definitive Antwort. Wie sich jetzt anhand der Materialien in den russischen Archiven herausstellt, meinten die Russen es wahrscheinlich ernst.

Uns gegenüber hat man im Geschichtsunterricht behauptet, das sei kein ernstgemeintes Angebot, sondern nur eine taktische Finte Stalins gewesen.

Das stimmt einfach nicht. Genau dasselbe wurde damals gesagt, aber der richtige Weg, herauszufinden, ob es nur Taktik war, wäre gewesen, das Angebot anzunehmen und zu sagen, gut, machen wir es so, und wenn Stalin dann einen Rückzieher gemacht hätte, hätte es sich als Finte erwiesen, aber genau das wollte man im Westen nicht tun. Und die Historiker weisen auf diesen einfachen Tatbestand nicht hin. Aber jetzt werden die Archive geöffnet und es gibt andere Materialien, und sie deuten in zunehmendem Maß darauf hin, dass die Stalin-Offerte ernstgemeint war – nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil sich jetzt herausstellt, dass die Russen sehr gut verstanden hatten, dass die Vereinigten Staaten versuchten, sie auf dem Wege des Wettrüstens wirtschaftlich in die Knie zu zwingen. Sie wussten, dass die USA eine viel stärkere Wirtschaft hatten und dass sie mit den Militärausgaben der USA auf keinen Fall mithalten konnten. Selbst die schlimmsten Verbrecher wie Berija[4] machten in Bezug auf Deutschland dasselbe Angebot wie Stalin: Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands durch demokratische Wahlen, unter der Voraussetzung, dass Deutschland entmilitarisiert bleibt. Und Beria war eines der schlimmsten Ungeheuer. Aber er und später Chruschtschow vertraten glasklar die Meinung, die Vereinigten Staaten versuchen uns tot zu rüsten, wir können mit diesen Militärausgaben nicht mithalten, und 1954, als Chruschtschow an die Macht kam, machte er Eisenhower den Vorschlag, beide Seiten sollten ihre Militärausgaben zurückschrauben und ihre offensiven Militärpotentiale zurückfahren. Die Eisenhower-Admini­stration ging nicht darauf ein, aber die Russen taten es trotzdem, einseitig und gegen den Widerstand der russischen Generäle, denen das gar nicht gefiel. Später fuhren sie die russischen militärischen Offensivkräfte scharf zurück und forderten die Kennedy-Administration auf, dasselbe zu tun. Dort dachte man darüber nach, aber das Ergebnis war stattdessen eine rapide Steigerung der Militärausgaben der USA. Dann kam die Kubakrise, in der die Russen wirklich gedemütigt wurden. Die Kennedy-Administration unternahm alles, um die Russen zu erniedrigen, und das wurde den russischen Militärs schließlich zu viel. Sie stürzten Chruschtschow und beteiligten sich an diesem wahnwitzigen Rüstungswettlauf, bis sie in den Militärausgaben ungefähr mit den USA gleichgezogen, dabei aber ihre Wirtschaft ruiniert hatten. Tatsächlich kann man, wenn man sich die russischen Statistiken anschaut, sehen, dass die sechziger Jahre die Zeit waren, in der die Wirtschaft zu stagnieren begann, die Gesundheitsstatistiken schlechter wurden und vieles andere mehr. Es war die Kennedy-Administration, die dafür sorgte, dass ihrer Wirtschaft die Puste ausging. Wenn die Kennedy-Regierung den russischen Vorschlägen zugestimmt und kooperiert hätte, wäre vielleicht schon früher eine Figur wie Gorbatschow aufgetaucht, und der Welt wären vielleicht alle möglichen Schrecken erspart geblieben. Russland wäre möglicherweise ein sanfterer Übergang zu einer Art sozialdemokratischer Wirtschaftsform gelungen, und es hätte nicht die Katastrophe der letzten zehn Jahre durchleiden müssen. Auch was diese Lektion betrifft, bezweifle ich, dass man bei euch im Geschichtsunterricht darüber spricht. Aber unter ernsthaften Wissenschaftlern sollte all das eigentlich nicht mehr kontrovers sein.

Selbst die antikommunistischsten Wissenschaftler, wie der mir persönlich bekannte, vor ein paar Jahren verstorbene Adam Ulam,[5] der ein sehr guter polnisch-ameri­kanischer Sowjetologe in Harvard war, wie alle Polen die Russen hasste und ein großer Antikommunist war – selbst er begann kurz vor seinem Tod Artikel über das Angebot von 1952 zu schreiben, in denen er sagte, es sehe mehr und mehr danach aus, als sei es ernstgemeint gewesen. Beweisen lasse sich das natürlich nicht, aber es sei sicherlich ein Fehler gewesen, nicht auszuloten, was es damit auf sich hatte – wenn deine Lehrer also noch weiter rechts stehen als Adam Ulam, dann kann ich dir nur sagen, dass sie wirklich sehr weit rechts stehen!

Innerhalb unserer intellektuellen Eliten gibt es eine Diskussion über das so genannte Problem eines „Demokratiedefizits“ im Hinblick auf die Institutionen der Europäischen Union. Das Problem wird im allgemeinen als ein bloßes Public-Relations-Problem diskutiert – wobei man davon ausgeht, Demokratie bedeute, dass „Führungspersönlichkeiten rechenschaftspflichtig sind und in letzter Instanz von der Bevölkerung abberufen werden können“. Um dem Genüge zu tun, reicht es dieser Auffassung zufolge aus, wenn die gewählten Parlamente ihre Vertreter für die europäischen Institutionen ernennen. Wie denkst du darüber? Stellt die Europäische Union einen Versuch dar, den Einfluss der Bevölkerung auf die Politik zu reduzieren?

Es ist interessant, dass die Rechte in den Vereinigten Staaten über das Demokratiedefizit in Europa entsetzt ist. So findet man in Foreign Affairs – diese Zeitschrift ist nicht wirklich rechts, das sind eher Mainstream-Konservative – Artikel, in denen die Unabhängigkeit der Europäischen Währungsbank heftig gegeißelt wird. Sie sei äußerst undemokratisch, habe einen starken, vorwiegend negativen Einfluss auf die europäische Wirtschaft, und unterliege keinerlei öffentlicher Kontrolle, womit sie eine noch viel größere Rolle als die Federal Reserve Bank in den Vereinigten Staaten spiele – so wurde sie in Foreign Affairs kritisiert.

Die Idee, dass Abgeordnete von ihrer Wählerschaft abberufen werden können, ist durchaus stimmig, wenn man tatsächlich eine funktionierende Demokratie hat, aber funktionierende Demokratie bedeutet Beteiligung der Bevölkerung, und nicht, dass sie alle paar Jahre ein Kreuzchen irgendwohin macht; es bedeutet, dass sie sich organisiert, ihre Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten auswählt und sie regelmäßig wieder abberuft und vieles andere mehr, und so etwas haben wir gar nicht. Was wir stattdessen haben, ist eine Art politische Klasse, die eng mit den wirtschaftlichen Eliten und dem Führungspersonal der Wirtschaft verbunden ist und aus diesem Kreis ausgewählt wird. Und man erlaubt der Bevölkerung, die dort getroffene Wahl auf die ein oder andere Art zu ratifizieren, aber das ist keine Demokratie. Tatsächlich wird so etwas in der Politikwissenschaft Polyarchie genannt, nicht Demokratie.

Dies gilt für die Vereinigten Staaten in besonders extremem Maß, aber es gilt auch für Europa, wenn auch nicht so stark, wegen des Faktors, über den wir vorhin gesprochen haben. Europa hatte in der Bevölkerung verankerte Parteien – Arbeiterparteien, sozialdemokratische Parteien und so weiter, und das machte einen gewissen Unterschied. So liegt zum Beispiel die Wahlbeteiligung in den Vereinigten Staaten viel niedriger als in Europa, und das ist ein Phänomen, zu dem ausführliche Studien angestellt worden sind, von denen die wichtigste schon vor langer Zeit, so um die 1980, veröffentlicht wurde.[6] Heute ist dieses Phänomen noch ausgeprägter.

Walter Dean Burnham, ein Politikwissenschaftler, hat eine Art sozioökonomischer Analyse der Nichtwähler in den Vereinigten Staaten durchgeführt, und dabei stellte sich heraus, dass sie ihrem Profil nach sehr stark den Wählern in Europa ähneln, die für die Arbeiterparteien oder die sozialdemokratischen Parteien stimmen. Diese Option gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten einfach nicht, und daher gehen diese Leute dann gar nicht wählen. Aber der Kontrast, den Europa zu diesem Modell darstellte, schwindet immer mehr. Europa folgt jetzt selbst mehr und mehr dem amerikanischen Modell, und das bedeutet, dass es sich immer weiter weg von einer Demokratie und hin zu einer Polyarchie entwickelt. In den Vereinigten Staaten war das politische System von vornherein so angelegt; die Verfassung war darauf angelegt, dass es so funktioniert, und so ist es dann aus allen möglichen Gründen im Großen und Ganzen auch geblieben. Aber die Länder Europas haben ihre eigene Geschichte, und hier ist jetzt ein klarer Trend in Richtung Polyarchie erkennbar.

Ihr wisst über die Dinge, über die ich jetzt spreche, besser Bescheid als ich, und ich habe Vorbehalte, über Europa zu sprechen, aber meinem Eindruck nach bewegt sich Europa in zwei entgegengesetzte Richtungen. Einerseits bewegt es sich in Richtung Zentralismus und Demokratiedefizit, auf der anderen Seite gibt es Entwicklungen hin zu einer Art Regionalismus, als Reaktion auf den ersten Trend. Wenn man sich in Europa umsieht, findet man einen zunehmenden Druck zugunsten regionaler Autonomie, die Belebung traditioneller Sprachen und der regionalen Kultur, ein gewisses Maß an politischer Autonomie und so weiter und so fort. Am fortgeschrittensten ist dieser Prozess in Spanien. Spaniens Struktur wird immer föderaler, wie zum Beispiel in Katalonien. Das Katalanische, die Sprache Kataloniens, hat sich vollständig regeneriert, und dasselbe gilt auch für andere Bereche der katalanischen Kultur. Vor einigen Jahren wohnte ich in einem Hotel im Stadtzentrum von Barcelona, und am Sonntagmorgen strömten die Leute von überall her auf den Stadtplatz vor der Kathedrale und führten traditionelle katalanische Volkstänze mit katalanischer Musik und ähnlichem auf. Dasselbe geschieht im Baskenland, es geschieht in Asturien, in Galizien, und es gibt einen Druck zur Auflösung des künstlich konstruierten spanischen Staates in regionale Gebiete, die den Gegebenheiten besser angepasst sind. Ähnliche Entwicklungen finden in England statt. In Wales hat sich die lokale Sprache wiederbelebt, die Kinder sprechen untereinander Walisisch, es gibt eine walisische nationale Identität. Dasselbe findet sich in gewissem Maß in Schottland und ein wenig auch in Frankreich.

Meines Erachtens handelt es sich hier um begrüßenswerte Entwicklungen, die vielleicht ein Gegengewicht zu den zentralistischen Tendenzen der Europäischen Union darstellen und dem deutlichen Demokratiedefizit entgegenwirken könnten, das auf eine Form der Zentralisierung zurückgeht, die der Bevölkerung immer weniger Zugang zur Macht gewährt. Regionalisierung ist keine schlechte Idee. Das System der Nationalstaaten ist ein sehr künstliches und brutales System, und das ist der Grund, weshalb Europa Jahrhunderte lang der grausamste Ort der Welt war: Weil Europa versuchte, dieses wahnsinnige System mit Gewalt durchzusetzen, und weil die meisten Konflikte im Rest der Welt letztendlich Konsequenzen der Versuche Europas sind, dieses System durchzusetzen. Die Auflösung dieses Systems könnte eine gesunde Entwicklung sein.

Du weist oft auf ein grundlegendes moralisches Prinzip hin, an dem du dich orientiertst: „Man ist verantwortlich für die vorhersehbaren Konsequenzen seiner eigenen Handlungen; man ist nicht verantwortlich für die vorhersehbaren Konsequenzen der Handlungen anderer.“ Heißt das, dass europäische Aktivisten sich stärker auf das konzentrieren sollten, was ihre eigenen Regierungen tun, und weniger auf das weltweite Vorgehen der USA?

Das hängt von der Antwort auf die Frage ab: „Was sind die Konsequenzen meiner Verwicklung in das, was die USA weltweit tun?“ Und hier gibt es Konsequenzen, reale Konsequenzen. Wenn Deutschland zu irgendetwas Stellung bezieht und die deutsche Bevölkerung in Deutschland Stellung zu etwas bezieht, hat das einen indirekten Einfluss darauf, wie die USA handeln. Und man muss immer versuchen, herauszufinden, wie groß dieser Einfluss ist. Als zum Beispiel die Deutschen auf die Straße gegangen sind und gegen den Krieg gegen den Irak protestiert haben, war das von großer Bedeutung, so etwas hat einen Einfluss auf die US-Politik.

Aber das Kriterium ist immer dasselbe. Ich meine, das Kriterium ist nicht einmal diskutierbar. Leute, die dieses Kriterium nicht verstehen können, sollten besser den Mund halten oder sagen, gut, ich bin eben ein Nazi. Denn dieses Prinzip ist ja auch in persönlichen Angelegenheiten einfach elementar; andererseits ist die Frage seiner praktischen Anwendung durchaus kompliziert. Aus diesem Kriterium könnte hervorgehen, dass man sich mehr um die örtlichen Probleme in Oldenburg kümmern sollte; es könnte besagen, dass man sein Augenmerk auf die Welthandelorganisation WTO und die US-Initiativen dort richten sollte. Wie dieses Kriterium auf Fälle der realen Welt angewendet werden sollte, muss man jeweils herausfinden, aber das Kriterium selbst ist nicht diskutierbar. Es ist ja so, dass Deutschland nicht Ruanda ist, es hat großen Einfluss auf die internationale Politik, und daher kann das, was in Deutschland geschieht, einen großen Unterschied machen. Nehmen wir das Thema, über das wir vorhin sprachen, das Thema der europäischen Unabhängigkeit. Wenn Europa allmählich eine unabhängigere Rolle in der Welt einnehmen würde, könnte das große Auswirkungen haben. Tatsächlich könnte Europa gerade jetzt eine sehr wichtige Rolle bei der Regelung des israelisch-ara­bischen Konfliktes spielen. Dazu müsste es mit seinem Oberherrn brechen. Es müsste aufhören, den Befehlen des Herrn und Meisters zu gehorchen. Die europäischen Eliten wollen diesen Schritt nicht tun, aber wenn sie durch Druck dazu genötigt würden, könnten sie intervenieren und als Vermittler zu einer Lösung beitragen, die nicht unter Kontrolle der USA steht. Und dasselbe gilt auch für eine Reihe von anderen Gebieten und Bereichen.

Anmerkungen:

* Einige im Text gekennzeichnete Fragen wurden von Michael Schiffmann (MS) gestellt.
[1] Understanding Power. The Indispensable Chomsky, The New Press 2002, S. 289ff. Deutsch: Eine Anatomie der Macht. Der Chomsky-Reader, Europa Verlag 2004, S. 351ff.
[2] Nicholas D. Kristof, „Calling the Kettle Black“, New York Times, February 25, 2004.
[3] James P. Warburg, Germany, Key to Peace, Harvard University Press 1953. Mehr darüber findet sich in Chomskys Buch Deterring Democracy, Verso 1991, S. 24-25, darunter folgende Passage: „Wenn der Vorschlag des Kreml umgesetzt worden wäre, hätte er jede mögliche Art einer sowjetischen militärischen Bedrohung Westeuropas beseitigt. Wahrscheinlich hätte es keine sowjetischen Panzer in Ostberlin 1953, keine Berliner Mauer, keine Invasion in Ungarn oder der Tschechoslowakei gegeben – aber was noch wichtiger ist, auch keine bequeme Rechtfertigung für US-Interventionen und US-Subversion auf der ganzen Welt, für eine staatliche Politik des ökonomischen Managements im Dienste der fortgeschrittensten Industrie oder für ein System der Weltordnung, in dem sich die Vorherrschaft der USA zum großen Teil auf militärische Macht stützte.“ (S. 25) Siehe außerdem Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival. America’s Quest for Global Dominance, Metropolitan Books 2003, S. 223-224, wo Chomsky Adam Ulam zitiert, einen hochgeachteten, extrem antikommunistischen polnisch-amerikanischen Historiker des Kommunismus und der Sowjetunion, von dem auch im vorliegenden Interview kurz die Rede ist (s.u.). Deutsch: Hybris. Die endgültige Sicherung der globalen Vormachtstellung der USA, Europa Verlag 2004; S. 268-269.
[4] Lawrentij Pawlovitsch Berija, Chef des russischen Innenministerium NKWD (später KGB), das wie ein Geheimdienst betrieben wurde; siehe http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrentij_Pawlowitsch_Berija.
[5] Adam Ulam (1922 – 2000) ist der Autor vieler Werke über die Sowjetunion und den Ostblock, darunter einer 760-seitigen Biografie Josef Stalins, Stalin: The Man and His Era (1973).
[6] Walter Dean Burnham, “The 1980 Earthquake,” in T. Ferguson and J. Rogers, Herausgeber, The Hidden Election: Politics and Economics in the 1980 Presidential Campaign, Pantheon 1981. Zu verwandten Themen siehe auch Walter Dean Burnham and Martha Wagner Weinberg, American Politics and Public Policy, MIT Press 1980.

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Thousands of Arabs, like these children living in a damaged building in Baquba, have been forced from their homes in northern Iraq by Kurds.

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June 20, 2004
Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS

MAKHMUR, Iraq, June 17 — Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.

The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters.

The new movement, which began with the fall of Mr. Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about American policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs. It is happening at a moment when Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the national government if they are not confident of having sufficient autonomy.

In Baghdad, American officials say they are struggling to keep the displaced Kurds on the north side of the Green Line, the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region. The Americans agree that the Kurds deserve to return to their ancestral lands, but they want an orderly migration to avoid ethnic strife and political instability.

But thousands of Kurds appear to be ignoring the American orders. New Kurdish families show up every day at the camps that mark the landscape here, settling into tents and tumble-down homes as they wait to reclaim their former lands.

The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread misery, with Arabs complaining of expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded camps.

American officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces.

"The Kurds, they laughed at us, they threw tomatoes at us," said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. "They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, `You don`t own anything here anymore.` "

Ten years ago, Mr. Qadam said, Iraqi officials forced him to turn over his home in the southern city of Diwaniya and move north to the formerly Kurdish village of Khanaqaan, where he received a free parcel of farmland. Now, like the thousands of Arabs encamped in the parched plains northeast of Baghdad, Mr. Qadam, his wife and three children have no home to return to.

The push by the Kurds into the formerly Arab-held lands, while driven by the returnees themselves, appears to be backed by the Kurdish government, which has long advocated a resettlement of the disputed area. Despite an explicit prohibition in the Iraqi interim constitution, Kurdish officials are setting up offices and exercising governmental authority in the newly settled areas.

The shift in population is raising fears in Iraq that the Kurds are trying to expand their control over Iraqi territory at the same time they are suggesting that they may pull out of the Iraqi government.

American officials say they are trying to fend off pressure from Kurds to move their people back into the area. "There is a lot of pressure in the Kurdish political context to bring the people who were forced out back into their hometowns," said a senior American official in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "What we have tried to do so far, through moral suasion, is to get the Kurds to recognize that if they put too much pressure on Kirkuk and other places south of the Green Line, they could spark regional and national instability."

But local occupation officials appear in some areas to have accepted the flow of Kurds back to their homes. According to minutes of a recent meeting of occupation officials and relief workers in the northern city of Erbil, an American official said the Americans would no longer oppose Kurds` crossing the Green Line, as long as the areas they were moving into were uncontested.

And Kurdish and American officials say the occupation authority has been financing projects here in Makhmur, a formerly Arab area recently resettled by Kurds.

The biggest potential flash point is Kirkuk, a city contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. Kurdish leaders want to make the city, with its vast oil deposits, the Kurdish regional capital and resettle it with Kurds who were driven out in the 1980`s.

To make the point, some 10,000 Kurds have gathered in a sprawling camp outside Kirkuk, where they are pressing the American authorities to let them enter the city. American military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.

"The Kurds are pushing, pushing," said Pascal Ishu Warda, the minister for displaced persons and migration. "We have to set up a system to deal with these people who have been thrown out of their homes."

To treat the burgeoning crisis, American officials last month approved spending $180 million to compensate Arab families thrown out of their homes; earlier they set up a similar program, with similar financing, for the Kurds.

The Americans have distributed handbills in Arab and Kurdish camps calling on Iraqis to file claims and produce ownership documents.

But some Iraqi and American officials say those claims could take months or even years to sort out, and will provide little immediate help to the families, Arab and Kurdish, languishing in the camps.

Some people said American officials waited too long — more than a year — to set up a mechanism to resettle displaced Iraqis. By then, they said, the Kurds, tired of waiting, took matters into their own hands.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador, who has advised the Kurdish leadership, said he recommended a claim system for Kurds and Arabs to Pentagon officials in late 2002. Nothing was put in place on the ground until last month, he said, long after the Kurds began to move south of the Green Line.

"The C.P.A. adopted a sensible idea, but it required rapid implementation," Mr. Galbraith said. "They dropped the ball, and facts were created on the ground. Of course people are going to start moving. If the political parties are encouraging this, that, too, is understandable."

Kurdish leaders say they are merely taking back land that was stolen from them over four decades. Publicly, the Kurdish leaders say that they are committed to working within the Iraqi state as long as their federal rights are assured, and that no Arabs have been forced from their homes.

But in the villages and camps where the Kurds have returned, Kurdish leaders are more boastful. They say they pushed the Arab settlers out as part of a plan to expand Kurdish control over the territory.

"We made sure there wasn`t a single Arab left here who came as part of the Arabization program," said Abdul Rehman Belaf, the mayor of Makhmur, a large area in northern Iraq that was emptied of Arabs and is now being resettled by Kurds.

Mr. Belaf is a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish political parties active on the other side of the Green Line; virtually all of Makhmur`s officials belong to the party, too.

"We haven`t stopped yet," he said. "We have more land to take back."

Before the war began in 2003, Arab settlers worked the fields in the areas surrounding Makhmur. Most of the settlers were brought north by successive waves of Mr. Hussein`s campaign to populate the north with Arabs, killing or expelling tens of thousands of Kurds.

Exactly what happened when Mr. Hussein`s army collapsed is disputed. Kurdish officials say the Arab settlers fled with the army. No expulsions were necessary, they said.

But some Arab families, like those who settled around Makhmur long ago, have largely been left alone.

"Saddam`s people asked me to take Kurdish lands in 1987, and I said no," said Salim Sadoon al-Sabawi, a 60-year-old Arab farmer in the village where his family has lived for generations. "When the Kurds returned, they left me alone. There was no violence. We are like brothers."

Asked what the Kurds did to the Arabs who migrated into the area recently, Mr. Sabawi paused, and his son, Arkan, broke in. "They threatened people with death," Arkan said. "They told them to get out."

"Let`s be honest," Mr. Sabawi told his son. "The Arabs who left all came here as part of the Arabization program. They kicked out the Kurds. It wasn`t their land to begin with."

Mr. Belaf, the Kurdish mayor, said that before the war, the area around Makhmur was 80 percent Arab. A year later, he said, it is 80 percent Kurdish, as it used to be.

As hard as life is for Arabs in refugee camps, it seems to be hardly better for the Kurds displacing them.

Adnan Karim, 34, said his home was burned by the Iraqi Army in 1987. He began a life on the run after that, fighting Mr. Hussein as a pesh merga, marrying, having children and moving from one place to another. Last year he returned to an old military camp near Kirkuk, Qara Hanjir, hoping the new government would set aside some land for returnees like him. Nearly a year later, he is still waiting in a camp.

Mr. Karim said he was trying to provide for his wife and three children with a $40-a-month pesh merga pension and money from odd jobs. But much of his money is spent buying water from a truck.

Watching his children play in the dirt around him, Mr. Karim, a bedraggled man, gave in to despair.

"I have spent my whole life this way," he said, "just as you see me."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company





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June 18, 2004
Q&A: The Iraqi Insurgency

From the Council on Foreign Relations, June 18, 2004

Will the Iraqi insurgency quiet down after June 30?

Probably not. Violence caused by insurgents has surged as the June 30 handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi Interim Government approaches. A campaign of car bombings, assassinations, sabotage and armed attacks has left dozens dead and hundreds wounded since June 1, and many experts warn that the situation is unlikely to improve after the handover. "I think we`re going to see violence through the [transition] period and after the transition occurs, with armed and violent political factions" contesting for power, says Jeffrey White, an associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. On June 17, Iraq`s interim interior minister, Falah Hassan al-Naqib, said martial law could be declared after June 30 if the insurgency continues.

How many people have died in the upsurge of violence?

More than 90 people were killed and over 300 wounded in Iraq from June 1 to June 17, according to news reports. There is now an average of one car bombing per day and some 35-40 violent engagements per day in Iraq, White says. Three senior government officials were assassinated between June 10 and June 15. Anyone seen to be cooperating with U.S. and coalition efforts to exert control over the country has become a target in what experts call a deliberate campaign to destabilize Iraq.

Who is behind the insurgency?

It is made up of a confusing array of groups, some with defined leaders, and others loosely connected. It also includes criminals--some of whom have been paid to kill foreigners--and ordinary Iraqis who have been radicalized by the occupation. "We`re in a situation without precedent, where we`ve been fighting a second war against insurgents for over a year now, and we don`t know [exactly] who the enemy is," says Andrew Bacevich, international relations professor at Boston University. Experts say that both Sunni and Shiite groups are participating. Sunnis make up some 20 percent of the Iraqi population and were favored by Saddam Hussein`s regime. Many live in Baghdad and north and west of the capital. Shiites, some 60 percent of the population, are based largely in the nation`s south.

Who are the Sunni insurgents?

Experts say they include:

* Baathists, former members of Saddam Hussein`s military--including members of the Special Republican Guard, the Fedayeen Saddam militia, and intelligence officers--and other former regime leaders, known as FRLs. Kenneth Katzman, a senior Iraq analyst at the Congressional Research Service, says the Baathists were the original force behind the insurgency. "They were the brains behind getting the insurgency started," he says. "They advised, directed, and funded it."
* Foreign fighters, including Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians and others working with al Qaeda-linked terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He called for violent attacks against Americans and those who work with them in a February letter said to be written to Qaeda members.
* Iraqi Islamic radicals, including members of the Kurdish Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Islam.
* Young Iraqi men, driven to violence by the occupation and recruited by Baathists into the insurgency. Katzman says these younger fighters are now taking a more central role in the violence, and increasingly using tactics--including suicide bombings--characteristic of Islamic radical elements in the broader Arab world.

Who are the Shiite rebels?

Most of the fighters--whose attacks have been calmed by a recent truce--appear to be aligned with Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army, which experts call a centrally directed, well-organized, armed presence of one branch of Shiite nationalism. Katzman says Sadr`s followers are predominantly young, poor Shiite men from the Baghdad slum of Sadr City who agree with his message of armed resistance. These fighters see public figures like the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq`s preeminent Shiite cleric, as too accommodating to U.S. and international interests.

Are the insurgent groups working together?

Many experts say the recent violence has been caused by a mixture of these forces, but that they`re not formally cooperating. "There`s no coherent organization [behind the insurgency]," says Gary Anderson, a retired Marine Corps colonel who has been to Iraq twice in the last year to examine the security situation for the Pentagon. "Each [group] is in it for their own purposes. It`s an alliance of convenience against the Americans."

What are the insurgents` goals?

Broadly speaking, all the insurgents share one similar goal: "They want the Americans and the new government to fail," says Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine Corps general and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Beyond that, most experts say, it`s difficult to predict what each group wants. "If they actually do succeed in getting the occupiers out, what would they do next?" says Katzman. "You could have a free-for-all." Some groups, such as the Baathists, may be fighting for a chance to be part of the political system, some experts say. "They want into the tent," Anderson says. "They`re secular opportunists. They don`t totally want the Americans out, because they realize there`s a lot of money to be made. But they want a seat at the table." Others, particularly the foreign fighters and terrorists, seek instability and chaos. Many of them would like to establish a Taliban-like system in Iraq so they can operate and train their fighters there, Anderson says.

What`s the status of the Sadr-led insurgency?

Coalition forces closed down Sadr`s newspaper Hawza al-Natiqa ("the vocal seminary") in Baghdad March 29, saying it was inciting violence. That act, along with the arrest of Sadr lieutenant Mustafa al-Yacoubi, sparked a bloody insurgency that began in April. After 10 weeks of fighting U.S. forces in Najaf, Kufa, Karbala, and other southern cities, Sadr issued a statement June 16 calling on his troops to go home. "Each of the individuals of the Mehdi Army, the loyalists who made sacrifices ... should return to their governorates to do their duty," a Reuters translation of the statement said. Many experts say Sadr, whose outspoken resistance to the U.S.-led occupation has made him a hero to Iraqis, now plans to become a legitimate political figure who will run in the expected January 2005 elections. Sadr`s fighters are "quiescent, very much simmering below the surface, and ready to spark again at a moment`s notice," Katzman says.

How are U.S. forces reacting to the insurgency?

White says the U.S. military in Iraq has moved into a defensive mode after months of aggressive offensive operations to find terrorists and fight the insurgency. He calls the new role a `hedgehog` strategy: dig in and try to get through the transition process. "[U.S. troops] are going to retreat to their garrisons, and they`ll only be called out if there`s real rebellion," says Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Some experts warn that strategy will not deal with the roots of the violence. It is "basically tantamount to surrendering control to the insurgents and giving them a free hand," White says.

Are the Iraqi security forces ready to stop the insurgency?

Most experts say no. "On a scale of one to ten, they`re a one," says William L. Nash, the John W. Vessey senior fellow and director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. By the end of next year, Nash says, the Iraqi security forces could improve to "maybe a six." In the April violence nearly half the Iraqi police and civil defense corps--an American-trained Iraqi security force--deserted their posts, according to news reports. Nash estimates it will take two to five years before Iraq`s armed forces are capable of guaranteeing security in Iraq with no international assistance.

What is the status of the Falluja-based insurgency?

After insurgents killed and mutilated four contractors working for the coalition March 31, U.S. forces led an incursion into the city that left some 100 U.S. soldiers and several hundred Iraqis dead. U.S. forces backed off May 1 with a truce deal that placed Jassim Mohammed Saleh, a Sunni Baathist and former general in Saddam Hussein`s army, in charge of a new, 1,000-member Falluja Brigade responsible for the city`s security.

Are insurgents now using Falluja as a base of operations?

Experts disagree. Falluja today is "an insurgent camp and safe haven," Katzman says. Anderson calls the city "a hotbed and a sanctuary" for foreign fighters, who are more willing to die for their cause than the Baathists charged with containing them. "The Falluja Brigade is not strong enough to go in and get rid of [the insurgents]," he says. But Trainor says the insurgents are not using the city as a base of operations against coalition forces. "They can call it a victory, but we`re big enough to take that," he says.

Will the interim government disband private militias?

It seems unlikely, many experts say. On June 5, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) issued Order 91, which states that some 100,000 members of armed militias affiliated with the country`s nine major political parties would be integrated into the national military, police forces, or state-controlled private security companies. All other armed groups would be illegal. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, calls the order ineffective. He says that many of the militias will change their names or uniforms, but remain essentially intact. "The Kurdish peshmerga [fighters] will become members of the new Iraqi army, but have the same commanders," he says. "The Badr Brigade [a militia tied to a Shiite political group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq] is now the Badr Reconstruction Corps, and they have `licensed` their weapons." The Mehdi Army, which was not included in the agreement, is intact, he says. "We`re moving forward with armed militias. It`s an agreement on paper only," Gardiner adds.

What are the prospects for security after the handover?

Many experts are not optimistic. After June 30, "there won`t be security, except where we provide it," Gardiner says. "We`ve unleashed the factors inside Iraq so that they are beginning to jockey for power." Trainor agrees, saying, "I think there will be a great effort to destroy the new government as each party moves to secure their own goals." But retired Marine Corps colonel Anderson says that if the new government can control the security situation enough to hold elections and show Iraqis some real improvements, "we`ve got a chance of muddling through this thing."

--by Esther Pan, staff writer, cfr.org

Copyright 2004

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June 20, 2004
A Transition Under Fire in Iraq

One Bush administration forecast about Iraq is clearly coming true. As the days count down to next week`s transfer of limited powers to an interim Iraqi government, things are getting worse. Attacks against Iraqis working with the American occupation authorities seem increasingly frequent and audacious. Last Thursday, Iraq`s deadliest car bombing in months killed at least 35 people waiting to sign up for the new national army and injured more than 100 others.

Without a turnaround in the security situation, significant progress toward a self-governing, let alone democratic, Iraq is unlikely. So far, neither increasing American troop levels nor crash efforts to recruit and train reliable Iraqi security forces have helped. Improving the Iraqi military and police forces is critical, but increasingly problematic now that recruitment offices have become a prime target for attack.

Control over Iraq`s small and wobbly national army is one of the few scraps of real power Washington has agreed to hand over to the interim government, and last week Iraq`s newly named interior minister floated the idea of declaring martial law. Given the state of the Iraqi forces, the gesture was both politically jarring and militarily futile.

The ceremonial passage of power on June 30 is unlikely to usher in any immediate improvement in the security situation. With millions of Iraqis resentful of American occupation and attendant horrors like Abu Ghraib, residential neighborhoods terrorized by kidnappers and other criminals, another stifling summer under way without adequate electric power and economic revival a distant dream, it takes only a few thousand armed insurgents to generate an atmosphere of random carnage and rampant anarchy.

With this in mind, the Pentagon now plans to keep 138,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, almost 25,000 more than it was projecting a few months ago. Even more may be needed, although the idea of a larger and more visible American military presence will not be popular with Iraqis. According to a recent poll commissioned by the occupation authorities, increasing numbers of Iraqis would like to see American troops go home.

The road that got us to this point will be fully examined during the American election cycle. But there is no way to avoid the current reality. Iraqis are being protected — to the degree they are protected at all — by American troops they do not want and Iraqi soldiers who have shown a disturbing tendency to melt away in battle. Building a reliable Iraqi military and police will take time, and will depend on how well the country`s interim leaders can establish their own authority and win the trust of a highly skeptical Iraqi population.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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"America as the do-gooder has been hurt, but America as the goods-doer is still there."

June 20, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Love Our Technology, Love Us
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

BEIJING

If anti-Americanism is on the rise around the world, no one told the kids in the student visa line at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The quest among Chinese students for visas to study in America, say U.S. Embassy officials, has become so intense that it has spawned Internet chat rooms, where Chinese students swap stories about which arguments work best with which U.S. consular officials and even give them names like "Amazon Goddess," "Too Tall Baldy" and "Handsome Guy."

Just how closely Chinese students strategize over the Internet on how to get visas to America — at a time when fewer are being given for security reasons — was revealed to the embassy recently when on one day one consular officer had scores of students come through with the same line, which some chat room had suggested would work: "I want to go to America to become a famous professor." After hearing this all day, he was surprised to get one student who came before him and pronounced, "My mom has an artificial limb and I want to build a better artificial leg for my mom and that is why I want to study in the U.S." The consular officer was so relieved to hear a new line that he told the young man: "You know, this is the best story I`ve heard this morning. I really salute you. I`m going to give you a visa."

You guessed it. The next day every other student who showed up at the embassy said he or she wanted to go to America to learn how to build "a better artificial limb for my mother." Said one U.S. official: "We have to be so careful what we say, because it gets into the chat rooms right away."

Hearing stories like this, you have to wonder: are Bush officials right when they dismiss all of this talk that President Bush has made America more unpopular in the world now than at any other time in postwar history? Do people really hate us? Don`t those visa lines say otherwise? This is worth a closer look.

To begin with, there a few "technical" reasons why anti-Americanism generally does not have the same edge in Asia as in Europe and the Middle East. Asia`s leaders, as a group, have much more legitimacy than leaders in the Arab world, either because they have come to power through free elections or because they have delivered on their core promise to their people of economic growth. Because of that, they don`t need to demonize America regularly to deflect their people`s anger from them. Also, Asia generally is focused like a laser on economic development — and countries like China see investment and technology transfer from America as critical to their growth. "People in Asia do not hate the United States," Singapore`s elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, said to me. "Big countries like China and India are focused right now on their economic development and they see in America an enormous well to draw technology and economic growth from."

But here`s the problem: Young people want American education and technology more than ever, but fewer and fewer want to wear our T-shirts anymore — want to be identified as "pro-American." As one former U.S. diplomat in Beijing put it to me: "They want to cherry-pick us, not line up with us. We`ve lost prestige."

The idea of America as the embodiment of the promise of freedom and democracy — not just of technology and high living standards — is integral to how we think of ourselves, but it is no longer how a lot of others think of us. They are now compartmentalizing. The unilateral war in Iraq, the postwar mess there, the walk-away from Kyoto and other treaties, the Abu Ghraib scandal have taken a toll. The idea of America as embodying the charisma of democracy has been damaged. As the political theorist Yaron Ezrahi put it, "America as the do-gooder has been hurt, but America as the goods-doer is still there."

Fortunately, this situation is not irreparable. The longing for an America that exports hope, not fear, and that is an example of the best global practices and values, runs really deep in the world. In fact, it is one reason that some people abroad are so angry with President Bush — because they blame him for taking that America away from them. I`m convinced a different approach or different administration would elicit a big response from the world. But for now, we will pay a price, because when people want to line up for our visas but not for our policies, it means Americans alone will have to bear the burden and the price of those policies.

That is not good for us. When you lose your status as a power with values, you weaken your ability to fight those powers without values.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 20, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Because They Could
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

In his "60 Minutes" interview, Bill Clinton calls his intern idyll "a terrible moral error," illuminating "the darkest part of his inner life." Not to mention the hardest part on his back since, astonishingly, he says he spent months sleeping on the couch. (Was the Lincoln bedroom always occupied by donors?)

"I did something for the worst possible reason," he told Dan Rather about his march of folly with Monica. "Just because I could. I think that`s just about the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing anything."

Just because he could. What a world of meaning is packed into that simple phrase. His "could" reflects a selfish "Who`s gonna stop me?" power move, stemming from a droit du seigneur attitude, as opposed to "should," signifying obligation, or "must," indicating compulsion.

The former president engaged in a relationship of choice, not necessity.

As a friend of mine explains: "It`s a guy thing. We`re not likely to get up off the couch if we don`t have to. We might cheat with a chick who just happens to be there if we feel we could get away with it."

In his memoirs, Mr. Clinton complains about Republican droit du seigneur, writing that impeachment was driven neither by "morality" nor "the rule of law" but, as Newt Gingrich said: "Because we can."

The Clinton alpha instinct on Monica, fueled by a heady cocktail of testosterone and opportunism, was the same one that led W. into his march of folly with Iraq. After 9/11, the president, vice president and secretary of defense wanted to go to the Middle East and knock the stuffing out of somebody bad — because it would feel good, because it would put our enemies on notice, and because it would make the president look strong.

The folks at 1600 Pennsylvania didn`t have Osama`s address. They couldn`t go after Iran or North Korea because those countries could defend themselves and retaliate, maybe with nukes. They couldn`t invade Pakistan or Saudi Arabia because they`re our "allies." But the Bush team knew that it wouldn`t be hard to get rid of the second-rate dictator and romance novelist who posed no real threat.

They went after Saddam just because they could. Last week, the 9/11 commission debunked the White House attempt to suggest an axis of evil between Saddam and Osama.

Like Mr. Clinton, the president engaged in an enterprise of choice, not necessity. John Kerry`s biggest applause line now is: "The United States should never go to war because we want to. We should only go to war because we have to."

Huffing and puffing Dick Cheney comes across as barking mad when he keeps lassoing Saddam and Al Qaeda. Tricky Dick may actually believe in his concocted connection, but he must also realize that the administration can`t lose the terrorist-linkage argument for war, having already lost the W.M.D. argument.

If our leaders didn`t lead us there, why did 69 percent of Americans, in a Washington Post poll last September, believe that Saddam was involved in the attacks? And a University of Maryland study last October showed that 80 percent of those who mostly watched Fox believed at least one of three misconceptions: that W.M.D. had been found; that Al Qaeda and Iraq were tied; or that the world had approved of U.S. intervention in Iraq.

Osama, suffering from what one C.I.A. shrink termed "a narcissistic explosion," also struck America because he could. It was a jihad of choice, not necessity.

Thursday`s 9/11 commission report cited the dissent among Al Qaeda leaders who were worried about Pakistan`s reaction or U.S. retaliation. Osama overruled the doubters, arguing that it would reap a bonanza in Al Qaeda fund-raising and recruiting.

So far, partly because of the Bush crowd`s solipsistic fixation on Saddam, Osama has gotten away with his heinous power play — and reaped a bonanza in recruiting.

Mr. Clinton, though he was vilified by the right, tittered at by the world and dolled up in pink-and-black suede shoes as a toddler by his mom, is selling a zillion books.

As Republicans keep saying, with fingers crossed, W. has stayed even with John Kerry despite the litany on Iraq, terrorism and domestic affairs that has turned out quite differently than promised.

But one thing you can say for Bill Clinton: His "Who`s gonna stop me?" Oval Office power surge produced a much lower body count.

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A bombed-out telecommunications building in the Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad is one of many reminders of how much Iraqi infrastructure remains to be rebuilt.
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washingtonpost.com

Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears
Missed Opportunities Turned High Ideals to Harsh Realities

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A01

First of three articles

BAGHDAD -- The American occupation of Iraq will formally end this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority.

The ambitious, 15-month undertaking stumbled because of a series of mistakes that began with an inadequate commitment of resources and was aggravated by a misunderstanding of Iraqi politics, religion and society in occupied Iraq, these participants said.

"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University`s Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it`s impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."

Viewed from Baghdad since April 2003, the occupation has evolved from an optimistic partnership between Americans and Iraqis into a relationship riven by frustration and resentment. U.S. reconstruction specialists commonly complain of ungrateful Iraqis. Residents of a tough Baghdad neighborhood who welcomed U.S. forces with cold cans of orange soda last spring now jeer as military vehicles roll past. A few weeks ago, young men from the area danced atop a Humvee disabled by a roadside bomb, eventually torching it.

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who come to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. entity that has administered Iraq, cites many successes of its tenure. Nearly 2,500 schools have been repaired, 3 million children have been immunized, $5 million in loans has been distributed to small businesses and 8 million textbooks have been printed, according to the CPA. New banknotes have replaced currency with ousted president Saddam Hussein`s picture. Local councils have been formed in every city and province. An interim national government promises to hold general elections next January.

But in many key quantifiable areas, the occupation has fallen far short of its goals.

The Iraqi army is one-third the size U.S. officials promised it would be by now. Seventy percent of police officers have not received training. When violence flared across the country this spring, many soldiers and policemen refused to perform their duties because U.S. forces had failed to equip them, designate competent leaders and win trust among the ranks.

About 15,000 Iraqis have been hired to work on projects funded by $18.6 billion in U.S. aid, despite promises to use the money to employ at least 250,000 Iraqis by this month. At of the beginning of June, 80 percent of the aid package, approved by Congress last fall, remained unspent.

Electricity generation remains stuck at around 4,000 megawatts, resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes, despite pledges from U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer to increase production to 6,000 megawatts by June 1.

Iraq`s emerging political system is also at odds with original U.S. goals. American officials scuttled plans to remain as the occupying power until Iraqis wrote a permanent constitution and held democratic elections. Instead, Bremer will leave the Iraqis with a temporary constitution, something he repeatedly promised not to do, and an interim government with a president who was not the Bush administration`s preferred choice.

The CPA, which had 3,000 employees at its peak, will dissolve on June 30, the date designated to confer sovereignty on Iraq`s interim government. U.S.-led military forces -- 138,000 U.S. troops and 23,000 from other nations -- will remain, free to conduct operations without the approval of the interim government. The management of reconstruction projects and other civilian tasks will be handled by a new U.S. embassy.

Over the course of the occupation, the relationship between the CPA and the military has become increasingly bitter. Soldiers have blamed civilians for not rebuilding the country quickly enough to pacify the country, while civilians have blamed the military for not providing enough security to enable the rebuilding. In the view of several senior officials here, a shortage of U.S. troops allowed the security situation to spiral out of control last year. Attacks on U.S.-led forces and foreign civilians now average more than 40 a day, a threefold increase since January. Assassinations of Iraqi political leaders and debilitating sabotage of the country`s oil and electricity infrastructure now occur routinely.

On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.

Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA`s headquarters inside Baghdad`s protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. "Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."

This account is drawn from interviews with a score of current and former CPA officials, several in senior positions, other U.S. government officials and Iraqis who work with the CPA. Most spoke on the condition they not be identified by name because of rules barring people working for the CPA from speaking to journalists without approval from CPA public affairs officials.

In an interview last week, Bremer maintained that "Iraq has been fundamentally changed for the better" by the occupation. The CPA, he said, has put Iraq on a path toward a democratic government and an open economy after more than three decades of a brutal socialist dictatorship. Among his biggest accomplishments, he said, were the lowering of Iraq`s tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws and the reduction of import duties.

Bremer acknowledged he was not able to make all the changes to Iraq`s political system and economy that he had envisioned, including the privatization of state-run industries. He lamented missing his goal for electricity production and the effects of the violence. In perhaps the most candid self-criticism of his tenure, he said the CPA erred in the training of Iraqi security forces by "placing too much emphasis on numbers" instead of the quality of recruits.

"When I step back, there`s a lot left to be done," he said.
A `Naive` Blueprint

Bremer said that when he arrived in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, he was shocked by what he saw.

Policemen were not at work. The capital`s two antiquated power plants were barely running. Looted government buildings were smoldering. Prominent exiles who had returned with the intention of running the government were unwilling to share power with Iraqis who had lived under Hussein.

With no significant security threat to attenuate their ambition, Bremer and his staff set out trying to reconstruct Iraq from the bottom up, focusing on long-term solutions instead of short-term fixes. They announced that Iraqis would have to achieve a series of political milestones before the United States would return sovereignty.

Instead of reconstituting the Iraqi army, they decided to build a new defense force from scratch. Bremer directed his advisers to restructure government ministries. He advocated expansive free-market economic reforms. As a sign of the break with the past, Bremer issued an order banning many members of Hussein`s Baath Party from participating in government.

Several current and former CPA officials contended that key decisions by Bremer favored a grandiose vision over Iraqi realities and reflected the perceived prerogatives of a military victor. Critics within the CPA also faulted Bremer for working to advance a conservative economic agenda of tax cuts and free trade instead of focusing on the delivery of basic services.

"There was this grand idea that we were going to turn Iraq into a model nation, a model democracy, with an ideal constitution and an ideal economy and an ideal military," said a State Department official who spent several months working for the CPA. "It was just naive."

Despite the scale of their plans, and Bremer`s conclusion by last July that Iraq would need "several tens of billions of dollars" for reconstruction, CPA specialists had virtually no resources to fund projects on their own to create much-needed local employment in the months after the war. Instead, they relied on two U.S. firms, Halliburton Co. and Bechtel Corp., which were awarded large contracts to patch Iraq`s infrastructure.

The CPA also lacked experienced staff. A few development specialists were recruited from the State Department and nongovernmental organizations. But most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad`s stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House. "It was loyalty over experience," a senior CPA official said.

By late summer, as car bombs rocked Baghdad and ambushes were on the rise, Bremer and his advisers decided to scale back their ambitions. Privatization plans were dropped. Instead of thorough screening and training for Iraqi police officers, military commanders were ordered to hire and arm as many officers as they could find. Faced with objections from Iraqi religious leaders and impatient local politicians, the White House and the CPA reversed course and promised to hand over power before a permanent constitution was written.

But Bremer remained committed to reconstruction. He went to Congress in September and pleaded for a massive aid package, arguing that rebuilding the country, an endeavor that could employ hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, would help to achieve long-term stability.

"The plan was to have Iraqis step up to protect and govern their country and leave it to the Americans to help them with reconstruction," the senior CPA official said. "It was great in theory. But in reality, it was untenable."
Economic Miscalculations

The Daura Power Plant in southern Baghdad was supposed to be a model of the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq. Bombed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and neglected by Hussein`s government, the station could operate at no more than a quarter of its rated capacity, leading to prolonged blackouts in the capital.

After CPA specialists toured the decrepit facility last summer, they vowed to bring it back to life. German and Russian firms were hired to make repairs, and it was placed atop a list of priority projects intended to achieve a 6,000-megawatt goal for national electricity production. More power, Bremer hoped, would improve the economy and daily life enough to reduce violence and stabilize Iraq.

Today, the Daura plant is indeed a model -- of how the U.S. reconstruction effort has failed to meet its goals.

The German contractors fled for their safety in April. The Russians departed in late May, after two of their colleagues were shot to death by insurgents as they approached the plant in a minivan.

Inside the facility, parts are strewn on the floor, awaiting installation. Iraqi technicians in blue coveralls lounge around, smoking cigarettes and waiting for guidance. In the turbine room, graffiti on the wall reads: "Long Live the Resistance."

The CPA intended for the Daura plant to be producing more than 500 megawatts of power by June 1. But the best it can do at the moment is 100 megawatts -- half of its output of last summer.

"We were supposed to have improved," said Bashir Khallaf, the plant director. "But we have gotten worse."

The failure to fix Daura and other plants, coupled with sabotage attacks on power lines, have renewed the debilitating blackouts that plagued Iraq last summer. The situation is not much better for other services. Attempts to fix water-treatment plants and oil refineries also are far behind schedule, forcing the country -- which has the world`s second-largest oil reserves and two large rivers -- to import gasoline and bottled water. Recent attacks on fuel convoys and pipelines have depleted stockpiles, resulting in lengthy gas lines.

Several CPA officials said the Bush administration has long underestimated reconstruction costs. In its war planning, the administration devoted $900 million to reconstruction despite reporting by the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations that depicted a far greater need. In the first months of the occupation, an additional $1.1 billion was committed by the White House. It was not until September that the administration asked Congress for billions more.

Although the $18.6 billion reconstruction aid package was approved by Congress in November, the Pentagon office charged with spending it has moved slowly. About $3.7 billion of this package had been spent by June 1, according to the CPA. Many projects that have received funding have slowed or stopped entirely because Western firms have withdrawn employees from Iraq in response to attacks on civilian contractors.

CPA officials contend the money should have been earmarked and spent far sooner. Had that happened, they argue, the CPA could have retained much of the goodwill that existed among Iraqis after the U.S. invasion and possibly weakened the insurgency.

"The failure to get the reconstruction effort launched early will be regarded as the most important critical failure," said one of Bremer`s senior advisers. "If we could have fixed things faster, the situation would be very different today."

By starting late, the adviser said, the CPA got "caught in a security trap." More than $2 billion of the aid package will be spent hiring private guards for contractors, buying them armored vehicles and building secure housing compounds, CPA officials estimate. "If we had spent this money sooner, before things got bad, we could have spent more of it on actually helping the Iraqi people," the adviser said.

Because many of the 2,300 projects to be funded by the $18.6 billion are large construction endeavors that will involve foreign laborers instead of Iraqis, they will result in far less of a local economic boost than the CPA had promised, another senior official involved in the reconstruction said. The projects were chosen largely without input from Iraqis.

"This was supposed to be our big effort to help them -- 18 billion of our tax dollars to fix their country," the senior reconstruction official said. "But the sad reality is that this program won`t have a lot of impact in it for the Iraqis. The primary beneficiaries will be American companies."
Security Miscalculations

When anti-occupation militiamen converged on the Rafidain police station on April 4, officers inside the blue-walled building sprang into action.

They grabbed their possessions and ran home.

The militiamen were members of the Mahdi Army, an untrained but well-armed force inspired by Moqtada Sadr, a firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric deemed an outlaw by the U.S. military. Incensed that U.S. troops had shut down his newspaper and arrested one of his top deputies the day before, Sadr`s followers seized government buildings in Shiite holy cities south of Baghdad and in Sadr City, a Shiite slum in the capital.

The militiamen met surprisingly little resistance. Rafidain, in central Sadr City, was no exception.

"To shoot those people would have been wrong," said Sgt. Falah Hassan, a lanky veteran whose uniform consists of rolled-up jeans and a rumpled blue shirt. "If a man comes with principles and I believe in those principles, I will not shoot him."

The collapse of police and civil defense units in the face of the Sadr offensive stunned CPA officials, who had expected them to put up a fight. A few days later, the CPA was surprised again when a battalion of Iraq`s new army mutinied rather than obey orders to help U.S. Marines fight Sunni Muslim insurgents in the streets of Fallujah.

Bremer and senior CPA officials concluded that the creation of new Iraqi security forces was in trouble. The decision to hire back as many former policemen as possible, even without training, had been meant to reassure Iraqis by putting more officers on the street. But it also put thousands of ill-prepared men, some with ties to the insurgency, into uniform -- a problem that the CPA long feared but did not fully grasp until the Sadr rebellion.

"Quantity overrode quality," said Douglas Brand, a British police commander who has served as a senior CPA adviser to the Iraqi police force. "We scooped up a whole lot of people who didn`t meet our criteria and put them into the police force."

Of nearly 90,000 police on duty now, more than 62,000 still have not received any training.

But Iraqi political leaders and several CPA officials contend that the problems with security were more fundamental than training police. The U.S. military came to Iraq with too few soldiers to maintain order and guard the country`s borders against foreign terrorists, they said. "I don`t know anyone who thinks there`s enough troops here," the senior adviser to Bremer said.

These officials said the troop shortage was compounded by the decision to disband the Iraqi army. Not only did it deprive the U.S. military of tens of thousands of armed and uniformed men to help restore order, but scores of unemployed soldiers joined the ranks of insurgents fighting the occupation forces.

"We should have brought them back and vetted them over time instead of saying, `We don`t want you,` " a senior U.S. military officer in Baghdad said.

Bremer said that the army fell apart after Hussein`s defeat and that it was not practical to order units back into service. And as with the police, there were questions about the loyalty and competence of the soldiers.

Another major mistake, Iraqi and U.S. officials said, was the failure to provide enough equipment to the police and the Civil Defense Corps, a 40,000-member paramilitary force. At the Rafidain station, only half the 140 officers have handguns. There are only 10 AK-47 assault rifles in the armory, three pickup trucks in the parking lot and two radios in the control room. Body armor is nonexistent, save for a few U.S. military vests worn by guards at the front door.

"How can we defend ourselves if we don`t have guns and radios and cars?" said Maj. Raed Kadhim, the senior officer at the station. "The Americans promised us all of these things. Where are they?"

The sympathy for Sadr today at the Rafidain station -- on Fridays, officers pin his picture to their uniforms before going to the mosque -- suggests that the odds of getting the police to resist the cleric`s militia have not improved. The scope of the confrontation could have been smaller, according to several CPA officials, had U.S. forces moved against Sadr in August, when an Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant for him. Instead, they allowed him months to build support for his anti-occupation views.

By April, with the CPA`s internal polling showing 80 percent of Iraqis holding positive views of Sadr, the CPA should have sought a political solution, the officials contend. At the very least, they argue, CPA strategists and military commanders should have realized that many Iraqi security officers would side with the cleric.

"The Americans misunderstood us," Kadhim said. "We will fight for Iraq. We will not fight for them."
Political Miscalculations

From the start of the occupation, the American effort to transform Iraq`s political system was challenged by another Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a cleric far more established than Sadr. The CPA`s inability to deal with him forced a series of compromises that will affect Iraq long after Bremer departs.

Sistani is a man in his seventies with a snowy beard who has lived in isolation for the past six years in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. With millions of followers, he is seen as the most influential leader of Iraq`s Shiite majority, a man whom Shiite politicians do not want to cross.

Sistani`s position was straightforward: Iraqis, not Americans, should determine the country`s political future. In June 2003, he issued a religious edict calling for Iraq`s constitution to be written by elected representatives -- a demand that was in direct conflict with the Bush administration`s political transition plan.

Bremer and his staff initially underestimated the influence of his edict, assuming that Shiite political leaders would be able to persuade Sistani to change his position. It was not until November that Bremer concluded there was no way to sway Sistani -- whom Bremer has never met -- and that the Bush administration`s plan to have a group of appointed Iraqis write a constitution would have to be scrapped.

After hurried meetings at the White House, Bremer unveiled a new transition plan on Nov. 15 that abandoned the goal of a permanent constitution and general elections before a handover of sovereignty. Instead, the Iraqi Governing Council, the 25-member body picked by Bremer, was assigned to produce a temporary constitution. An interim government would be selected through caucuses.

Nobody bothered to run the details by Sistani first. He objected a few days later, forcing another series of changes and leading President Bush to ask U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to select the interim government. In the end, Bremer did not get the president he wanted: His favored candidate, Adnan Pachachi, withdrew after Shiite politicians threatened not to work with him, prompting Brahimi to choose Ghazi Yawar, a tribal sheik with no experience in government before serving on the Governing Council.

Sistani also objected to the temporary constitution. Ethnic Kurds, who had been living in an autonomous region since 1991, had insisted on a clause that would protect their rights with veto power over the language in a permanent constitution. But because Shiites are about 60 percent of Iraq`s population and Kurds make up only 20 percent, Sistani was concerned that a minority not be allowed to overrule the wishes of the majority.

Bremer did not want to budge. If the provision were expunged, the Kurds would bolt. He persuaded Shiite members of the Governing Council to sign the interim constitution, leaving Sistani`s basic objections unaddressed.

Then, earlier this month, the Bush administration proposed having the U.N. Security Council include an endorsement of the interim constitution in a resolution on Iraq`s future. Sistani quickly issued a statement: The interim constitution, he said, "was written by a nonelected council under occupation" and is "rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people."

But when the administration expunged the reference to the interim constitution, Kurdish leaders were incensed. Iraq`s top two Kurdish officials sent a letter to Bush threatening to pull out of the interim government formed earlier this month.

The dispute means Shiites and Kurds will have to hash out their differences on their own. Among the options Shiite leaders favor is dispensing with the interim constitution and writing a new version, a potentially embarrassing outcome for the administration, which has held up the document as one of the CPA`s most significant achievements.

Iraqi leaders and foreign diplomats fault the CPA for not grasping Sistani`s clout soon enough. Senior CPA officials said Bremer did recognize Sistani`s power, but the problem was communicating with the cleric: Because Sistani refused to meet anyone from the CPA, messages were conveyed by Shiite politicians who skewed statements to suit their interests.

Although some in the CPA say they believe it is better to let Iraqis resolve the dispute over the interim constitution after June 30, others argue that the occupation authority should have ensured it had a document supported by Sistani.

"We were supposed to leave them with a permanent constitution," a senior CPA official said. "Then we decided to leave them with a temporary constitution. Now we`re leaving them with a temporary constitution that the majority dislikes."
Out of Touch

Life inside the high-security Green Zone -- what some CPA staffers jokingly call the Emerald City -- bears little resemblance to that in the rest of Baghdad. The power is always on. Shiny shuttle buses zip passengers around. Outdoor cafes stay open late into the night.

There is little effort to comply with Islamic traditions. Beer flows freely at restaurants. Women walk around in shorts. Bacon cheeseburgers are on the CPA`s lunch menu.

"It`s like a different planet," said an Iraqi American who has a senior position in the CPA and lives in the Green Zone but regularly ventures out to see relatives. "It`s cut off from the real Iraq."

Because the earth-toned GMC Suburbans used by CPA personnel and foreign contractors have become a favored target of insurgents, traveling outside the Green Zone -- into the Red Zone that defines the rest of Iraq -- requires armored vehicles and armed escorts, which are limited to senior officials. Lower-ranking employees must either remain within the compound or sneak out without a security detail.

Although the CPA has tried to bring Iraqis into the CPA headquarters for meetings and other events -- there has even been an "Iraqi Culture Night" in the Green Zone -- the inability to mingle with Iraqis has isolated the Americans. "We don`t know the outside," the senior adviser to Bremer said. "How many of us have gone out to buy a bottle of milk or a pair of socks?"

Instead of building contacts at social events in the city, CIA operatives in Baghdad drink in their own rattan-furnished bar in the Green Zone. Instead of prowling local markets, CPA employees go to the Green Zone Shopping Bazaar, where the most popular items are Saddam Hussein memorabilia.

Limited contact with Iraqis outside the Green Zone has made CPA officials reliant on the views of those chosen by Bremer to serve on the Governing Council. When Brahimi, the U.N. envoy, asked the CPA for details about several Iraqis he was considering for positions in the interim government, he told associates he was "shocked to find how little information they really had," according to an official who was present.

The CPA official who got around the most was Bremer, who travels with an entourage of private guards, most of them former Navy SEALs, equipped with helicopters and a fleet of armored vehicles.

Bremer`s willingness to travel and to work 18-hour days has won him respect within the CPA. The chief criticism of his tenure within the former Hussein palace that serves as CPA headquarters was that he failed to recruit enough seasoned diplomats with experience in the Middle East.

In the final days of the CPA, many officials have succumbed to bitterness. Some blame military commanders for not asking for more troops to stabilize the country. "They had enough soldiers to ensure that Saddam`s men didn`t come back to power, but there were nowhere near enough to make the country safe enough for us to do our work," a CPA reconstruction specialist said.

Military officials say CPA personnel spend too much time in the 258-room headquarters. "Nobody has any idea what they do back in that palace," a senior Marine commander in Fallujah said recently. "We certainly don`t see any results."

Several veterans of other reconstruction operations characterized civilian-military relations in Iraq as the worst they have encountered. "It has been poisonous," the reconstruction specialist said.

The other major conflict within the occupation bureaucracy has set the legions of young staff members chosen for their loyalty to the Bush administration against older, more liberal diplomats from the State Department and the British Foreign Office. Several of the diplomats said they regarded the young staffers as inexperienced and eager to pad their résumés during three-month tours.

These diplomats singled out the Office of Strategic Communications as unsuccessful in its efforts to disseminate information to Iraqis. Instead of creating an all-news television station that would compete with other Arab broadcasters that the CPA deemed anti-occupation, the communications office, with several employees straight from Republican staff jobs on Capitol Hill, set up a channel that aired children`s programs and Egyptian cooking shows.

"It didn`t put any effort into communicating with the Iraqi people," a British CPA official said. "Stratcom viewed its job as helping Bush to win his next election."

Even within the communications office, there is a sense that the occupation has not gone as well as everyone hoped. "It`s a time of introspection," one press officer said.

Elsewhere in the palace, the sense of regret is far more pronounced. The senior adviser to Bremer said he felt "a sense of opportunity that slipped away."

"The ambition for us was a grand one. We had great things in mind for them. We believed we could do it," he said. "But we didn`t keep our promises."

NEXT: Learning the hard way

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9/11 Panel`s Findings Vault Bush Credibility To Campaign Forefront

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A01

The White House`s swift and sustained reaction last week to the preliminary findings of the Sept. 11, 2001, commission showed the potential threat the 10-member panel poses to President Bush`s reelection prospects.

After the commission staff released its findings Wednesday that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda -- challenging an assertion Bush and Vice President Cheney have made for the past two years -- Bush declared again that there was, in fact, a relationship.

Democratic and Republican strategists agree that many details of the controversy do not pose a grave threat to Bush`s reelection chances.

The significance, rather, is whether Bush`s Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), can use the commission`s findings to split the Iraq war from the war on terrorism in the public`s mind, and, more broadly, raise doubts about Bush`s credibility and competence by building on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the miscalculations about the Iraqi resistance.

Bush has long sought to link the Iraq invasion to his popular war on terrorism after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With the commission`s final report due on July 26 -- as the Democratic convention begins -- Kerry is already trying to use the panel`s findings to his advantage to decouple the Iraq war from the post-9/11 U.S. retaliation in Afghanistan.

"The 9/11 report is just one more issue that casts doubt on the truthfulness of this White House," said Stephanie Cutter, Kerry`s campaign spokeswoman. "This White House is operating under a cloud of secrecy, and the American people have lost the ability to trust them."

Late last week, commission leaders invited Cheney to provide intelligence reports that would buttress the White House`s insistence that there were close ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, a commission member said. Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton told the New York Times they wanted to see any additional information in the administration`s possession after Cheney said Thursday in a television interview that he "probably" knew things about Iraq`s ties to terrorists that the commission did not.

The panel also wants to follow up its questioning of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and outgoing CIA Director George J. Tenet. The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that Tenet, who leaves office in July, had agreed to be re-interviewed, and the commission might submit written questions to Rice.

Many Republicans are furious about the commission -- though its members are evenly split between the two parties and it is chaired by a Republican appointed by Bush. They say that Bush was right to oppose the commission in the first place, and that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was right this year when he unsuccessfully fought an extension of the commission`s deadline.

The panel has become "a tool for partisan politics," Rep. Eric I. Cantor (Va.), a member of the House Republican leadership, charged in an interview last week. "With the latest commission finding coming out that there were allegedly no ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, I think they are totally off their mission, and I think that`s indicative of the political partisanship."

Bush so far has survived challenges to his war rationale, and most Americans believe the war in Iraq was worth fighting. Still, the debate over the war, and the credibility of Bush`s justifications, has kept the president`s reelection campaign on the defensive and limited coverage of favorable news domestically such as a steady improvement in the economy and jobs growth. "We`re challenged by the fact that there`s been so much in terms of world events that we haven`t gotten much out" on the economy, a senior Bush campaign aide said. "How do we fight this wave of events in a very crowded news climate?"

Indeed, the past four announcements of expanding payrolls have been overshadowed. The commission and its related disputes, said Republican pollster David Winston, are "complicating things, because this administration wants to get out information about how the economy is doing."

Bush aides have sought to blunt the Democratic offensive not by challenging the commission`s findings but by arguing that Kerry and the media have mischaracterized the findings. The White House issued a 1,000-word document titled "TALKING POINTS: 9-11 Commission Staff Report Confirms Administration`s Views of al-Qaeda/Iraq Ties."

"The 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion as the administration regarding ties between Iraq and al Qaeda," campaign communications director Nicolle Devenish said. She said this is Kerry`s "desperate attempt to put a negative spin on what was broad consensus between the administration and the commission."

Similarly, Cheney, on CNBC, said the media had been irresponsible in reporting the commission`s findings. "What they [the commission] were addressing was whether or not they [Iraq] were involved in 9/11," he said. "They did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in other areas, in other ways."

In fact, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg on Friday confirmed that the commission was addressing the broader relationship. "We found no evidence of joint operations or joint work or common operations between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein`s government, and that`s beyond 9/11," he said.

One reason for this sensitivity can be found in a poll last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The poll found improved support for Bush and for the Iraq war -- in large part because Americans have been paying less attention to the war and more to other issues, such as the death of Ronald Reagan. The commission, however, has helped to return national attention to the disputed justifications for the Iraq war.

In particular, the poll showed that Americans are beginning to decouple the war in Iraq from the war on terrorism -- a belief that could be aided by the commission`s dismissal of cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. Still, Andrew Kohut, who directs the poll, predicts Bush will be able to keep al Qaeda and Iraq tied in the public`s mind; about half believe such a connection has been proved, various polls indicate. "So many people believe it because he`s saying it," Kohut said. "Bush`s hanging tough on this gives him the credibility he has."

Democrats, however, hope to gain critical mass in their effort to convince the public that Bush is untrustworthy by extending the charge that Bush has misled the country not just about al Qaeda but about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction, the torture of prisoners in Iraq, and even the U.S. economy. In one sign of the assault, 27 former diplomats and military commanders -- some Republicans -- issued a statement last week condemning Bush`s foreign policy as "overbearing," "insensitive" and "disdainful," and urging Bush`s defeat.

Jim Jordan, Kerry`s former campaign manager and now coordinator of an anti-Bush advertising effort, said the commission painted "a pretty startling portrait of administration fecklessness" -- and one that Democrats think they can turn into a major campaign theme.

"The issue," Jordan said, "is trust and [Bush`s] competence."

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Clinton Backs Bush on Iraq War But Questions Invasion`s Timing

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A04

Former president Bill Clinton said he agreed with President Bush`s decision to confront Iraq about its potential weapons programs, but thought the administration erred in starting a war in 2003 rather than allowing United Nations weapons inspectors longer to carry out their work.

"In terms of the launching of the war, I believe we made an error in not allowing the United Nations to complete the inspections process," Clinton told CBS News`s Dan Rather in a "60 Minutes" interview to air tonight.

Clinton made similar comments in an interview with Time magazine, in which he said he "supported the Iraq thing" but questioned its timing. Portions of both interviews -- part of the publicity campaign in advance of this week`s release of Clinton`s memoirs -- were distributed in advance by the news organizations.

The Time excerpts, in particular, leave Clinton`s views on Iraq somewhat jumbled. He both defends Bush for confronting a threat of which Clinton also spoke in dire terms while president, and minimizes the size and urgency of the problem posed by Iraq`s suspected weapons programs.

Noting that he has "repeatedly defended President Bush against the left" on Iraq, Clinton dismissed the notion that the Iraq war was principally about protecting petroleum or financial interests.

Instead, he asserts that Bush acted primarily for ideological reasons and that the president was under the sway of Vice President Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. "We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis" that defeating Iraq would help transform the greater Middle East toward democracy.

Clinton`s own rhetoric while president emphasized the commitments to allow unfettered weapons inspections that Iraq had made under the terms of surrender in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the likelihood that then-President Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction that he planned to use.

In February 1998, after Hussein blocked U.N. inspectors from entering Iraq, Clinton warned: "What if he fails to comply, and we fail to act? Or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he`ll use the arsenal."

In the Time interview, Clinton said "I never really thought" Hussein would use his weapons but did worry that Iraqi weapons might be sold or given away.

Clinton ordered missile strikes against Iraq in December 1998 but did not press aggressively for U.N. inspectors to return. Bush administration officials said this was precisely the "ambiguous third route" in Clinton`s warning. But Bush has been embarrassed by the failure of inspectors after Hussein`s fall last year to find major weapons programs.

In the Time interview, Clinton suggested that he was concerned after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that Iraq had "a lot of stuff unaccounted for." But in the same interview he seemed to warn against exaggerations about how many weapons were ever suspected.

He said at the time the United Nations pulled out the weapons inspectors in 1998, not to return until after Bush came to power, "there were substantial quantities of botulinum and aflatoxin, as I recall, some bioagents" in addition to some "chemical agents" such as VX and ricin that were "unaccounted for."

"Keep in mind," Clinton urged Time interviewers Michael Duffy and Joe Klein, "that`s all we ever had to work on. We also thought there were a few missiles, some warheads, and maybe a very limited amount of nuclear laboratory capacity."

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The Allies Must Step Up

By Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan

Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page B07

Critics of the Bush administration at home and abroad have long called for an early return of Iraqi sovereignty coupled with the internationalization of the assistance effort. The U.N. resolution that was passed unanimously June 8, though late in coming, does just that. What`s more, the resolution reflects significant efforts by the Bush administration to meet the concerns of key nations that opposed the Iraq war in 2003. Iraq will enjoy full sovereignty after June 30, not limited sovereignty. Iraqi forces will be under Iraqi command, not the command of the multinational force. The mandate of the multinational force will expire once the political transition has been completed. And the forces will be withdrawn if the Iraqi government so desires.

One would think, therefore, that the new U.N. consensus on Iraq would offer real hope not only for putting Iraq on the right track but also for healing some of the rifts between the United States and its European allies. France and Germany demanded a significant U.N. role, and they`ve gotten it. They demanded a rapid turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis, and they got that, too. With the two countries having gotten their way in the negotiations on the resolution, the time has come for them to pitch in and join in the effort to build a peaceful, stable, democratic future for Iraq. After all, French, German and other European officials have insisted all along that the success or failure of Iraq is as much a vital interest for them as for the United States. They`ve also insisted, understandably, that if the United States wanted their help, it would have to give them a say over policy in Iraq.

Unfortunately, now that the Bush administration has finally acquiesced to their requests, it appears that France and Germany are refusing to fulfill their end of the bargain. Leaders of both countries have declared they will not send troops to assist in Iraq under any circumstances. Still more troubling was French President Jacques Chirac`s declaration at the Group of Eight summit last week that he opposed any NATO role in Iraq, even though the resolution France supported explicitly calls on "Member States and international and regional organizations to contribute assistance to the multinational force, including military forces."

The positions staked out by the French and German governments are an abdication of international responsibility.

Everyone knows success in Iraq will require a greater effort on the part of the international community than has so far been forthcoming. The United Nations will have to establish a major operation on the ground if it is to assist the Iraqi government through a difficult political transition over the coming months. Security inside Iraq will have to improve significantly for elections to proceed on schedule and for the economy to begin to grow. An intensive training and equipment program for Iraqi security forces -- including police, civil defense and regular military forces -- will ultimately enable the Iraqis to maintain security. But until then the task will fall mainly on the multinational forces. Thanks to bad planning by the Pentagon, there have never been enough troops in Iraq. At least in the short run, real security requires additional troops. Most of those troops need to come from the United States. But American friends and allies should be sending more forces as well.

Beyond the needs in Iraq, there are broader issues at stake. Above all, there is the question of whether there is any meaning left in the term "alliance." Admittedly the United States hasn`t been the best of allies over the past two years. We have missed opportunities to work more closely with NATO countries. But it takes more than the United States to make the transatlantic alliance work. If some of the strongest NATO powers refuse to participate in vital security missions, such as that in Iraq, then it should hardly be surprising when Americans and their leaders begin to dismiss those nations as serious strategic partners. Good allies don`t join only the causes that they choose and that are already going well. When the United States sent troops to Bosnia and later fought the Kosovo war, it was not because the Europeans had handled those situations well. Nor did a majority of Americans believe that Bosnia and Kosovo were their concern. Much of the reason the United States fought in the Balkans during the 1990s was for the sake of the alliance itself.

NATO officials, as well as some allied countries, argue that with the alliance already involved in Afghanistan, taking on Iraq as well is beyond the organization`s capacity. But the truth is, if NATO cannot take on a mission such as Iraq, when the United States is providing 90 percent of the forces, then why should Americans continue to value the organization? Germany may be tapped out in Afghanistan and the Balkans, which is a sorry commentary on the state of that enormous and wealthy country`s military capabilities. But surely France has several thousand troops to spare, if the French government wants to provide them.

Now that the Security Council has opened the door to internationalization in Iraq, the Europeans would be wise to step through. Alliance leaders meeting in Istanbul later this month should agree to take over the security training and equipping mission immediately, with a country such as Germany (which is already involved in training some police) perhaps taking the lead. They should also agree that NATO will take command of the Polish-led sector in southern Iraq immediately and begin planning for eventually placing the entire multinational force under NATO command.

It will be a deadly blow to transatlantic relations if NATO does not become involved in providing security in Iraq. Many Europeans believe their problem is only with the Bush administration. That`s a dangerous miscalculation. If John Kerry wins in November, one of his first acts will be to request Europe`s help in Iraq. If France and Germany are intent on saying no, then future American administrations, including Kerry`s, will have to reconsider the value of the alliance. Do Europeans really want to sever their strategic ties to the United States? If not, they need to understand that the ball is now in their court.

Ivo Daalder is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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US air strike on Fallujah poses new threat to Iraqi handover
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

20 June 2004

The handover of power in Iraq - now a mere 10 days away - appeared to be in a state of renewed crisis yesterday after a US air strike on homes in Fallujah brought to an end a week in which large-scale violence once again boiled to the surface.

Around 20 civilians, including eight women and children, are said to have died in the attack, which follows Thursday`s devastating car bomb outside a Baghdad army recruitment centre.

The two incidents come after a string of smaller car bombings, the assassination of two government officials and the security chief of the main oil company in Kirkuk in the north, an escalating series of clashes between US forces and Iraqi militants around Baquba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, and a concerted series of attacks on the country`s oil supply system which have temporarily cut off all exports from the southern fields around the port of Basra.

These events have made for the bloodiest period in Iraq for several weeks and underline what US and Iraqi officials have known all along - that the 30 June handover is fraught with risks as well as political opportunities.

The stakes have been raised because more than one country`s future depends on the outcome. Iraq is the biggest vulnerability facing George Bush in his battle for re-election in November.

After the disastrous - and continuing - revelations of torture inflicted on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, after the damaging conclusions of the commission looking into the attacks of 11 September 2001, which has dismissed White House claims of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa`ida, after the embarrassing failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, President Bush desperately needs to offer the US electorate some indication that things are progressing in the right direction.

For several weeks, he could plausibly make the case that the violence in Iraq was abating. A disastrous few weeks in April and early May - when Fallujah was under siege, the revelations were made about Abu Ghraib and the first spate of kidnappings and killings of western contractors took place - was followed by a relative lull. The US withdrawal from Fallujah, in particular, appeared to ease tensions and even led to a de facto truce earlier this month with the Sunni resistance figurehead Muqtada al-Sadr.

The better news has had an effect on President Bush`s approval ratings. An opinion poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press last week showed that 57 per cent of Americans thought things were going well in Iraq - a sharp increase from the 46 per cent found a month earlier.

Bush`s sunny optimism on the campaign trail may, however, become harder to maintain if the violence continues. Yesterday`s raid on Fallujah is troubling because of the raw memories it has stirred up of the hundreds of Iraqi civilians killed there by the Americans in April. It bore the hallmark of a revenge attack straight out of the Israeli book - engendering an incensed reaction similar to that of Palestinians on the receiving of Israeli air raids in Gaza and the West Bank.

The United States has blamed the suspected al-Qa`ida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for the recent car bombings, including Thursday`s attack in Baghdad. US officials have also been saying for several days that they suspect al-Zarqawi is hiding out in Fallujah.

The impact of these events on US public opinion remains to be seen. Media coverage of the Fallujah raid was relatively muted yesterday, in part because the US military refused to comment or give details of what happened and in part because the news was dominated by the beheading of the kidnapped military contractor Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia.


20 June 2004 14:43

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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ZNet Deutschland Interview, Teil 2
Israel/Palästina
von Noam Chomsky und Michael Schiffmann
ZNet Deutschland 24.05.2004
Was diesen letzten Bereich betrifft, gibt es eine Frage, die von der deutschen und der europäischen Linken fast automatisch gestellt wird: Wie kann man seinen eigenen Staat, sobald er einmal eine unabhängigere Rolle spielt, daran hindern, seinerseits eine neue imperiale Rolle zu spielen? So habe ich z.B. eine Veranstaltung geleitet, auf der Palästinenser den Vorschlag machten, Deutschland solle Truppen in den Nahen Osten entsenden. Ich musste ihnen sagen, dass dieser Gedanke völlig absurd ist.

Ja, das ist verrückt, total absurd. Aber eine internationale Truppe an sich ist keine schlechte Idee. In Israel werden sie es niemals zulassen, das kann man also vergessen, aber in den besetzten Gebieten wäre es möglich. Eine internationale Truppe in den besetzten Gebieten, die den vollständigen israelischen Rückzug oder die Umsetzung einer Lösung im Stil der Genfer Initiative überwacht. Das wäre sehr sinnvoll, es würde den Palästinensern Schutz bieten, es würde sie vor den Angriffen der Israelis beschützen, warum also nicht? Dass Deutschland daran teilnimmt, ist natürlich ausgeschlossen.

Und wie hindert man ein vereintes Europa daran, eine imperiale Rolle zu spielen? Indem man etwas dagegen tut – die Tendenz wird es immer geben, damit muss man rechnen. Das ist kein Argument gegen die Unabhängigkeit Europas, es gleicht eher der Frage: „Wie gehen wir damit um, dass das Nach-Apartheid-Regime in Südafrika schreckliche wirtschaftliche Bedingungen durchsetzen wird?“ Auch das ist keine einfache Frage. Tatsächlich geht es den Menschen dort jetzt wahrscheinlich größtenteils schlechter als vor dem Ende der Apartheid. Aber das ist kein Argument für die Beibehaltung der Apartheid. Es heißt nur, dass man weiß, nun ja, wir machen hier diesen kleinen Fortschritt, und dann kommt der nächste Berg, den wir bezwingen müssen.

Ich würde gerne noch bei diesem Punkt bleiben. Demnächst wird es eine Konferenz in Köln gegen den Bau der Mauer in Palästina geben, wo diese Frage von besonderem Interesse ist. Wie könnte die Zusammensetzung einer solchen internationalen Truppe aussehen? Ich bin mit dir einer Meinung, dass das eine vernünftige Idee wäre, aber die Zusammensetzung ist natürlich eine wichtige Frage.

Als erstes kämen hier Europa und Lateinamerika in Frage. Südasien nicht, in diesem Fall, in manch anderem Fall schon, aber nicht hier. Die arabischen Staaten sind natürlich sowieso ausgeschlossen. Europa wäre eine Möglichkeit. Lateinamerika ist weit von der Region entfernt, es könnte einen Teil der Truppe stellen. Auch das wirft Probleme auf, weil Lateinamerika weitgehend unter Kontrolle der USA steht. Hier gibt es sicher keine perfekte Antwort, aber vor allem sollte die Truppe unter dem Kommando der Vollversammlung der UN stehen, damit sie nicht direkt von den Großmächten kontrolliert wird.

In Wirklichkeit glaube ich gar nicht, dass eine starke internationale Truppe nötig wäre. Wenn Israel zu einem Abzug bereit wäre, wäre der größte Teil der Probleme schon gelöst. Sie wären nicht alle gelöst, es wird dann immer noch Probleme innerhalb Israels geben, und das Problem, wie man Israel daran hindert, die palästinensischen Gebiete anzugreifen. Aber eine internationale Truppe könnte positive Wirkungen haben. Die extrem schwache UN-Truppe im Südlibanon hatte ebenfalls ihre Wirkung; sie konnte zwar nicht dafür sorgen, dass alles perfekt war, aber eine Wirkung hatte sie doch. So musste Clinton die Israelis bei ihrer Invasion 1996 im Südlibanon zurückpfeifen, nachdem die Israelis begannen, die UN-Truppen anzugreifen. Diese Truppen hatten keine militärische Potenz, es waren nur ein paar Soldaten aus den Fidschi-Inseln und ähnlichen Ländern. Das war eine sehr schwierige Situation, und diese Truppen waren eine Art Puffer. Sie gaben der Bevölkerung im Libanon einen gewissen Schutz, und das ist in solchen Situationen wichtig.

Die Trennungsmauer ist eine unglaubliche Grausamkeit. Was Europa jetzt tun könnte, wäre, die Menschen zu unterstützen, die dagegen protestieren. Ich weiß, dass es dort Leute gibt wie Tanya Reinhart, die auch für ZNet schreibt: Sie protestiert dort vor Ort, genau in diesem Moment.

Demnächst findet diese Konferenz in Köln statt, und eigentlich sollte der Bildungsminister von Nordrhein-Westfalen die Eröffnungsansprache halten, aber dann wurde er zusammen mit seinem gesamten Kabinett zum Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland bestellt. Dort sagte man ihm, diese Konferenz sei eine totale Beleidigung für die Juden und ein Affront und die Eröffnung durch den Minister komme nicht in Frage – und der Minister sagte ab.

Deutschland ist natürlich in einer schwierigen Position. Israel und die jüdische Gemeinschaft dort benutzen ganz offensichtlich den Holocaust als Rammbock, um Kritik an Israel zu verhindern, und sie wissen, dass Deutschland gegenüber Angriffen aus dieser Richtung verwundbar ist. Ich habe euch ja erzählt, dass ähnliche Argumente auch gegenüber katholischen Universitäten in den Vereinigten Staaten benutzt werden. Sie gehen auf diese Art vor, wo sie nur können, und das ist wirklich schändlich – ich meine, die Idee, den Holocaust dazu zu benutzen, diese Dinge zu rechtfertigen, ist völlig indiskutabel. In Deutschland sollte man sich nicht darauf einlassen, aber wie man sieht, wird das nicht einfach sein. Man muss einen Weg finden. Die Ablehnung dieser Mauer sollte jedenfalls von überall her kommen. In den Vereinigten Staaten gibt es Widerstand dagegen – sogar so viel Widerstand, dass die New York Times mich, sehr zu meiner Verblüffung, gebeten hat, einen Artikel über die Mauer zu schreiben. Das passiert ausschließlich dann, wenn es starken Widerstand innerhalb der Elite selbst gibt. Und es gibt diesen Widerstand.

Ich bin sicher, dass die Times-Herausgeber sich dabei Sorgen machten, ob man nicht vielleicht dabei ist, das Kommando über die Anstalt an die Leute in den Zwangsjacken zu übergeben – oder etwas in dieser Richtung. Aber die Mauer ist schlicht und einfach Irrsinn, und selbst wenn man sie nicht als Irrsinn betrachtet, ist sie auf jeden Fall eine schreckliche Idee. Sie hat nichts mit Sicherheit zu tun; sie sperrt die Palästinenser in den Käfig. Was hier vorgeht, ist schlimmer als Südafrika. Zum Glück gibt es gewaltlosen Widerstand dagegen, der natürlich niedergemacht wird, weil niemand sich dafür interessiert. In dieser Hinsicht könnten zum Beispiel deutsche Journalisten etwas tun, einfach, indem sie hingehen. Sie brauchen nicht mehr zu tun als zu fotografieren – das dämmt die Gewalt ein. Man wird sie verhaften und ausweisen, aber auch das geht in Ordnung, denn umbringen wird man sie nicht.

Hier gibt es eine sehr wichtige Frage im Hintergrund, die von Palästinensern, mit denen ich spreche, immerzu aufgeworfen wird. Ich meine die Frage der palästinensischen Flüchtlinge; wie soll sie gelöst werden? Wie ist es möglich, die Flüchtlinge als handelnde Akteure ihres Schicksals mit einzubeziehen?

Ich muss sagen, dass das ein Punkt ist, über den ich mich mit vielen palästinensischen Freunden seit 35 Jahren streite. Die Palästinenser haben die Wahl, sich auf Prinzipien zu versteifen und die Folgen einer solchen Haltung für die Opfer zu ignorieren – was sicher ganz gut funktioniert, wenn man in Europa oder den Vereinigten Staaten lebt, wenn man an einer Universität lehrt und Seminare abhalten kann, in denen man eine völlig prinzipienfeste Haltung einnimmt. Aber das verdammt die betroffenen Menschen zu Not und Elend. Es gibt eine reale Welt, und man kann nicht so tun, als wäre sie nicht da, weil sie einem nicht gefällt. In der realen Welt werden die Flüchtlinge, außer vielleicht in symbolischer Zahl, nie nach Israel zurückkehren – das ist einfach eine Lebenstatsache. Es gibt keine internationale Unterstützung für eine solche Rückkehr. Und wenn sich eine solche internationale Unterstützung entwickeln würde, was im übrigen äußerst unwahrscheinlich ist, würde Israel mit Sicherheit zur Abwechslung einmal aufhören, amerikanischen Befehlen zu gehorchen. Israel würde das niemals zulassen, und es würde sogar zu Atomwaffen greifen, um es zu verhindern. Die Israelis werden sich nicht damit abfinden, ihr Land aufzugeben, ebenso wenig, wie die Bevölkerung von Massachusetts sich bereit finden würde, ihr Land der Ursprungsbevölkerung zurückzugeben, die daraus vertrieben wurde. Es gibt einfach Dinge, die niemals passieren werden, und da ist es dann besser, sich das gleich einzugestehen. Man tut den Flüchtlingen keinen Gefallen, wenn man ihnen Hoffnungen vorgaukelt, die sich niemals erfüllen werden. Man muss etwas unternehmen, um ihnen dabei zu helfen, sich mit der Situation in der wirklichen Welt abzufinden. Es kann symbolische Rückkehrkontingente geben, und sie können auf jeden Fall Entschädigungen gezahlt bekommen. Wenn es jemals einen palästinensischen Staat geben sollte, können sie dorthin zurückkehren, obwohl die meisten von ihnen nicht direkt aus diesem Gebiet stammen. Oder man muss ihnen die Möglichkeit geben, selbst zu entscheiden, wo sie sich sonst niederlassen wollen. Gerade das ist ein Punkt, an dem Europa sehr leicht aktiv werden könnte, indem es sie nach Europa einlädt. Die meisten Flüchtlinge würden wahrscheinlich lieber nach Europa kommen, als unter grausamen Bedingungen in einem Flüchtlingslager zu bleiben. Das wäre ein konkreter Schritt.

In Wirklichkeit sollten die USA diese Schritte unternehmen, weil sie die größte Verantwortung für die Lage tragen. Aber das werden wir vermutlich nicht zustandebringen. Doch den Flüchtlingen Hoffnungen auf eine Rückkehr zu machen, ist meiner Ansicht nach in Wirklichkeit eine Beleidigung für sie, und außerdem blockiert es jede Aussicht auf eine politische Lösung, weil es in Israel keine einzige Gruppe mit mehr als vielleicht fünf Mitgliedern gibt, die bereit wäre, einer Rückkehr der Flüchtlinge zuzustimmen. In Wirklichkeit ist diese Forderung ein Geschenk an die israelische Rechte. Sie ist ein Argument, das sich die Rechten dort zunutze machen können, indem sie sagen: Seht ihr, die Palästinenser wollen uns von hier weghaben, und deshalb müssen wir ihnen zuvorkommen und stattdessen sie vertreiben. Darauf läuft es im wesentlichen hinaus. Und es bringt nichts, sich vorzumachen, es wäre anders. Leider muss ich sagen, dass ich mich hierüber schon seit ungefähr 35 Jahren mit meinen palästinensischen Freunden und mit israelischen Dissidenten streite – und es ist mir nicht gelungen, sie zu überzeugen.

Diese Auseinandersetzung kommt immer wieder auf, und das Interessante ist vielleicht, dass viele der Leute, die das Argument vorbringen, aus Europa kommen und sich in sicherer Distanz vom Geschehen befinden.

In sicherer Distanz, ja. Wenn man dagegen in einem Flüchtlingslager oder auf der West Bank ist – dort verhindern solche Forderungen eine Lösung und liefern stattdessen weitere Argumente dafür, eine Mauer zu bauen, auf die Leute zu schießen und so weiter und so fort.

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Simon Henderson: Why Osama backs Bush
Saudi power struggles are holding back attempts to defeat terrorism

20 June 2004

Picture the scene: in November, as polls close across the United States, an anxious Osama bin Laden awaits the first predictions of the result. If President Bush loses, will the world`s most famous terrorist claim victory? No. He will more likely be despondent. Bin Laden sees his struggle with the US in apocalyptic terms.

The US is the supporter of the House of Saud, the Saudi royal family, which Bin Laden and his al-Qa`ida followers regard as both politically and religiously corrupt.

It is hard to work out whether Bin Laden either grossly overestimates his own strength or is cannily playing his limited hand as part of some grand scheme. After so many setbacks, much of his strength is the continuing perception that he is a Lenin-like figure, seeing only progress in chaos.

The world vision of John Kerry, Bush`s challenger, as much as it can be discerned, does not involve the apocalypse. If international diplomacy in 2005 switches to trying to understand militant Islam, Bin Laden will have to work harder to find new recruits. Kerry`s world will still be anathema to al-Qa`ida but the global nature of the problem may appear to diminish for a while. By this analysis there is a curious coincidence between what is good for Bin Laden and what is good for George Bush. The President`s strategists probably consider another attack on the US as beneficial to his chances. Equally, capturing or killing Bin Laden might be perceived as ending the "War on Terror" and allowing for a change in domestic political preferences.

To President Bush`s credit, he probably doesn`t think like this. His world is more good versus bad; black and white. Hence his comments late on Friday after learning of the beheading of the American hostage, Paul Johnson: "We must pursue these people and bring them to justice." Bold words, good for the American electorate, but potentially embarrassing for the Saudi authorities that even in better times preferred American support to be low-key.

Diplomatically, the Americans are in a quandary. Relations with the Saudis are already poor. Yet the House of Saud cannot just be ignored. The kingdom has a quarter of the world`s oil reserves and accounts for 11 per cent of world oil production. If the Saudis are no longer able or willing to produce oil at current levels, the consequences are almost too scary to imagine: world energy crisis leading to world economic crisis, leading to calls for military intervention.

Washington`s challenge is made worse because the senior princes appear to be disconnected from reality. While thousands of police searched Riyadh in a desperate search to find Johnson before the hostage-takers` deadline expired, Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler, was in Jeddah to watch football.

Saudi Arabia`s security appears to be in the hands of Abdullah`s younger half-brother, Prince Nayef, the interior minister. He guards his control of the police and security forces jealously. His reputation for toughness is matched only by his apparent tolerance of inefficiency, incompetence and even treachery in his own ranks.

Nayef`s motives are assumed to be twisted by his determination that the ailing King Fahd is not succeeded by Abdullah but rather by Prince Sultan, the defence minister and a full brother of Nayef. Fahd, Sultan and Nayef are all members of the so-called Sudairi Seven, the most important sub-group of many sons of the kingdom`s founder, Ibn Saud, who seem to think the crown belongs them alone.

Poor old Fahd, who suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes in 1995, is widely assumed to owe his continued life to the determination of the Sudairis that he should be kept alive. Sultan`s recent 18-day hospital stay, reportedly for the removal of a stomach polyp, would not worry Nayef so much. Diplomats widely assume he is number four in the line of succession, although chanceries across the world prefer another, but younger, brother, Salman, the governor of Riyadh province.

Washington wants tough police action to continue. With the reported death of Abdul-Aziz al-Muqrin, the leader of the al-Qa`ida cell that murdered Johnson, the immediate problem might be over. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador in London, said last week that only one cell was still operating in the kingdom. Saudi police are also blaming al-Muqrin for the attack on the BBC crew that left cameraman Simon Cumber dead and correspondent Frank Gardner seriously injured.

But journalists trying to cover the kingdom and expatriates living there are learning the hard way that the initial Saudi version of an event often turns out to be far from the truth. After the terrorist incident in al-Khobar at the end of May, in which 22 died, the initial version was that helicopter-borne commandos had ended the siege, SAS-style. It later turned out that the terrorists had been allowed to walk free hours earlier in a deal "to avoid further casualties". A wounded terrorist, left behind, was nearly sprung from his hospital bed a few days earlier in another attack that was not opposed.

The Saudi royals appear to be hoping that, apart from an occasional shoot-out, the threat from al-Qa`ida can be overcome using Saudi traditional methods of defusing crises - the involvement of the militants` own families and tribes.

The House of Saud is also seeking to delegitimise the Islamic credentials of the terrorists. The Saudi religious leadership keeps issuing fatwas (religious rulings) against them. The Saudi princes calls them "deviants" or, eye-poppingly in an international context, "Zionists".

The key to predicting the future may well be in gauging sympathy for al-Qa`ida and Bin Laden in the kingdom. The Saudi authorities say the terrorists have little support; anecdotal evidence suggests the contrary.

Al-Qa`ida can tap into a deep xenophobic seam in Saudi society, especially towards non-Muslims. The conservative nature of the average Saudi also suggests that government proposals for "reform" are either misplaced or merely insincere gestures towards local liberals. Proposed changes have so far turned out to be musings rather than promises.

If recent Saudi history is anything to go by, crises slip by rather than develop. The socio-economic indicators - high-birth rate, few employment opportunities - remain gloomy in the long term. But the crucial tests will be an absence of al-Qa`ida attacks for a while and the return of expatriates after vacations in the cooler climes of Europe.

Like Iraq, President Bush does not want Saudi Arabia to be an issue in the November polls. Better to campaign on the notion that the world is potentially a dangerous place than a really dangerous place. Bush needs to force more effective, albeit low-key, security co-operation on the Saudis, preferably securing Nayef`s replacement. And keep going after Osama bin Laden so that his dying thought might be that he miscalculated American determination.

Simon Henderson is a London-based associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of `After King Fahd - Succession in Saudi Arabia`


20 June 2004 14:50


© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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A car destroyed in one of a series of explosions in Baghdad on April 24. A top Iraq official warned of martial law if violence persists
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June 20, 2004
FIGHTERS POUR IN
Iraq Is a Hub for Terrorism, However You Define It
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A superpower invaded an impoverished Islamic nation. Guerrillas responded with AK-47`s and rocket-propelled grenades. A generation of warriors was born, eager to wage jihad.

That was Afghanistan in the 1980`s. It became a breeding ground for terrorists - most infamously Osama bin Laden - who exported their deadly skills throughout the world. In Iraq, some of the same conditions that nurtured terrorism in the mountains of Afghanistan have emerged in the power vacuum created by the American occupation, Iraqis and terrorism experts say.

"Unfortunately Iraq has become a cause célèbre for radical jihadists the way that Afghanistan did a decade and a half ago," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst at the RAND Corporation. "You`ve got a lot of the same conditions that allowed Afghanistan to become a hub for terrorists."

Those include porous borders, swaths of lawless land and regions of the country harboring well-armed groups that are neither part of the government nor under its control, Mr. Hoffman said.

He defined terrorists in terms of tactics - using suicide car bombs rather than conventional weapons, for example. Since the civil war in Lebanon, the line between terrorism and insurgency has blurred, he said, with Iraq being a perfect example.

There has been an average of one car bomb a day this month. More than 100 civilians have been killed.

Assassinations of Iraqi government officials and sabotage of crucial sites like oil pipelines are on the rise. American and Iraqi forces seem unable to prevent the carnage, fueling hatred of the occupation among the population.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces, said that reconstruction work like opening health clinics and renovating schools had brightened the lives of Iraqis. But "are we satisfied with the level of instability in this country right now?" he said. "Absolutely not."

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was subjected to a reign of terror, but terrorism did not exist here in the manner it does now.

An independent commission in Washington investigating the attacks of Sept. 11 reported last week that there was no evidence of a working relationship between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda, as the Bush administration had said in pressing its case for war.

The failure now to control borders has allowed foreign fighters to enter Iraq. Unguarded overland crossings exist between Iraq and its neighbors Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, each of which has its share of radical Islamic groups.

Falah al-Naqib, the new Iraqi interior minister, said the suicide car bombs were a sign that foreign fighters had infiltrated Iraq, and that "some parties and countries want to demolish this country." He said Iraqis do not use such tactics. And he added that he "won`t hesitate" to declare martial law if more deadly bombings take place.

Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the United States Naval War College who studies the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, also attributed much of the violence to the porous borders and the fact that the American presence has become a magnet for jihadists.

"I think terrorism has come to Iraq as a result of the war," he said. "The country has unpatrolled and open borders, so all kinds of extremists who want to fight America have an excellent playing field to do so now."

A senior American military official wrote in an e-mail message that the fighters enter through old smuggling routes that follow tribal connections. These are like the routes used by mujahedeen to enter Afghanistan.

"The U.S. military continues to see small numbers of foreign fighters coming through the porous borders of Syria and Saudi Arabia," the official wrote. "Financial support continues to come from Saudi Arabia through various financiers to terrorist networks and through Syria via couriers."

Inside Iraq, these forces find fertile ground. By deciding that Baath Party members could not participate in the rebuilding of Iraq, the Americans essentially dismantled much of the state without installing a suitable replacement. L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator here, disbanded the Iraqi Army, leaving behind a pool of disgruntled men trained in killing.

The new American-trained Iraqi security forces can often be ineffective, as demonstrated by the mass defections during the uprising in April. Just last Monday, Baghdad policemen stood by as Iraqis danced atop the charred vehicles of a convoy carrying foreign contractors that had been hit by a suicide car bomb.

Nadhim A. al-Jassour, a professor of international relations at the University of Baghdad, said that the American evisceration of the Iraqi state had taught Iraqis to disrespect the government, perpetuating the lawlessness.

"If you beat a father in front of his children, do you think the children will respect the father?" Professor Jassour said. "That`s an insult. At the same time, you ask the father to carry out duties in his house."

The Sunni-dominated city of Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, has become a safe haven for terrorists and insurgents. In late April, marines turned over control of the city to a militia composed partly of guerrillas. Since then, Falluja has become a mini-Islamist state, with all manner of anti-American fighters roaming the town.

While Iraq is not run by warlords, as Afghanistan has been, armed groups exist that do not answer to the government.

One of the largest is the Mahdi Army, led by Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who rallied a revolt against the occupation in April. Though Mr. Sadr called last week for his fighters to leave the holy cities of Najaf and Kufa, he did not commit to disbanding the militia.

A recent poll ordered by the Coalition Provisional Authority showed that a majority of Iraqis look up to Mr. Sadr. Last Sunday, he said through a spokesman that he wanted to start a political party.

As the United States occupation approaches its official end on June 30, many Iraqis say that the future will be defined by the legacy the Americans are leaving the interim government - the birth of terrorist and insurgent groups and the struggle to control them.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Freedom Rider

American Extremists

by Margaret Kimberley


The South will rise again, and again and again. There is no end in sight to the effort to redeem the Confederacy and promote white racism and supremacy. Our late and now endlessly lamented 40th president, Ronald Reagan, began his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi by calling for “states rights.” He then gave a sheepish “Did I offend anyone?” when he was called on the carpet for using this blatantly racist language at the scene of the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.

Despite this very obvious appeal to the worst instincts in Americans, the GOP faces a quandary when admiring white supremacists take them at their word and run for office as Republicans. The latest to cause embarrassment is Ron Wilson, national commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who is running for a seat in the South Carolina State Senate. The Southern Poverty Law Center has given Wilson the dubious distinction of being named one of the top 40 white supremacists in need of constant monitoring.

If history is any indication, Wilson’s candidacy will have an all too predictable response. Republican pundits will demand that the bum be thrown out of their ranks. Black Republicans will whine that their brethren’s hearts and minds will never be won over if the commander of Sons of the Confederacy is a Republican elected official.

The GOP`s southern ascendance coincided with both overt and covert appeals to white racism. Unfortunately the unspoken bargain that says racists must stay in the closet is sometimes broken. Louisiana’s David Duke was the first such troublemaker for Republicans. The former Klansman must have been just a little confused by all the fuss. The Republicans make racist appeals and then grow anxious when the less subtle want to come along for the ride.

The poor Republicans cry and scream that they do not have a racist bone in their collective body and that it is slander to think otherwise. Poor Senator Trent Lott got the boot as Majority Leader when he went over the top in praising the nearly moribund Strom Thurmond (who had been literally propped up for yet another Republican love fest). We can feel Lott’s pain. He hadn’t said anything he hadn’t said before and neither Democrats, nor the press, nor other Republicans had ever said a word against his racist diatribes. Lott may have gotten the last laugh, however. He is now free to say that prison abuse is a fine idea and remain in synch with his party.

Not only is Ron Wilson destined to become the GOP pariah, but he has managed to alienate the southern cultural heritage crowd to such an extent that some were forced to form a counter organization, Save the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Let’s call them Confederate light. They want to remember southern heritage, but take great pains to disassociate themselves from the white power group. Recalling that great-great-grandpa’s regiment took a hill at Gettysburg is acceptable, but membership in the KKK is not. The distinction is probably without a difference. We are talking about people who exalt the effort to preserve slavery. If some are racists with smiling faces the rest of us should not be impressed but the amusement factor is too good to resist.

Are white supremacists getting an undeserved bad rap? The facts are as follows. America wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for white racism. Black people wouldn’t be here instead of in Africa if white racism had not been sanctioned and institutionalized from the very beginnings of this country’s history. America would not have the world’s highest rate of incarceration if there were no white racism. But alas, if an overly exuberant Confederate re-enactor has the nerve to give a salute a la Hitler and yell “white power” then he is cast out, forced to live with the Aryan Nation in Idaho alongside others who thought that the nation was serious about putting one group on top and all others at the bottom. It is little wonder they are so angry.

The ascendancy of David Duke, Ron Wilson and their ilk is inevitable, particularly when the appeal to domination and supremacy get the proverbial thumbs up from the powerful. Republicans may moan that these people have nothing in common with them, but how is it that white supremacists continue to emerge from Republican ranks? Do they get the wrong idea about the GOP over and over again?

The answer is that they do not. Republicans are very extreme. What else would one call a group that allies itself with a chemical weapons terrorist? Yes, Saddam Hussein was once a friend of current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials. When Rumsfeld was Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East he met Hussein in Baghdad in 1983. At that time a search for Weapons of Mass Destruction would have been successful. Saddam Hussein not only had WMDs but he was using them against Iranians and Kurds. These atrocities didn’t stop Rumsfeld and the Republican party from shaking hands with the devil.

The Republicans even put in writing that torture is not so bad after all and maintain that if a pesky Congress asks for the information they are just out of luck. Perhaps they will begin advocating torture for Senators who ask too many questions.

The Republicans should welcome Ron Wilson with open arms. He is one of their own and it would all be so much easier if they would just admit the mutual affection. Extremism is as American as apple pie and everyone knows that Republicans are the best Americans of all.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in . Ms. Kimberley is a freelance writer living in New York City. She can be reached via e-Mail at [e-mail]. You can read more of Ms. Kimberley`s writings at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/

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Published on Sunday, June 20, 2004 by the Boston Globe
Global Shifts Raising Issues of Income Equality
by Robert Gavin


BREWER, Maine -- In a fast-moving global economy, driven by technology and fierce competition, there was no longer a place for Eastern Fine Paper, a century-old mill on the Penobscot River here. The same might be said for Jim Bracy.

Bracy, 47, is a high school dropout who, after losing his job at bankrupt Eastern, quickly learned that 27 years in a paper mill qualified him only for service jobs that paid a fraction of his old paycheck. Today, he works at a local Home Depot, earning just over half what he made at the mill, but enough, he said, ``to at least get by."

It`s a different story for Joel Graber and Lindsay Shopland in nearby Bar Harbor, where the worldwide boom in biotechnology has meant expansion at The Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit genetics research institute. Not long before Bracy lost his job, the married couple, both scientists with PhDs, took positions at Jackson at a substantial boost to their income as postdoctoral researchers. Shopland`s salary alone jumped 50 percent.

This tale of the scientists and the millworker illustrates how globalization and technology are not only reshaping the US economy but also widening income inequality among workers. With traditional middle-class jobs vanishing along with factories, some economists worry that the nation`s labor force is stratifying into a skilled, well-paid elite and a mass of lesser-skilled workers struggling to hold on to their standard of living.

The underlying cause: supply and demand. In a global market, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com in West Chester, Pa., those with specialized skills benefit from the larger pool of bidders for their services. Those without must compete with low-cost workers around the world.

``We have people who are doing very well and people who aren`t, and that polarization is intensifying," Zandi said. ``The distribution of income and wealth is more unequal than ever. The prospects are that it will become even more unequal."

While economic fairness is always a concern in the United States` egalitarian culture, the issue has taken on a new urgency in the wake of a recession that led to the loss of nearly 3 million jobs, concentrated not only in traditional middle-class occupations such as manufacturing, but also newer ones in technology sectors. Many of these job losses are permanent.

Not all economists agree that a growing income gap is cause for worry. David R. Henderson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative California think tank, said that the focus on income distribution tends to neglect a key characteristic of the US labor market: workers who start in lower-income groups can, and typically do, move up the ladder as they gain skills, education, and experience.

Ultimately, what matters is not how one group compares to another, but that their economic conditions improve, Henderson said. Over the long run, the standard of living in the United States has risen for all groups -- rich, poor, and the middle.

Meanwhile, this debate over economic fairness is front and center in a presidential campaign being fought, at least in part, along class lines. Democrats, including the party`s presumptive nominee, Senator John F. Kerry, have ripped Bush administration policies, such as the sharp cut in taxes on earnings from stock dividends, as favoring the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

President Bush argues that such tax cuts spur economic growth, and that provides jobs and opportunities for all Americans to prosper.

Still, the benefits of economic growth are increasingly concentrating in the upper reaches of the income scale, according to Northeastern University`s Center for Labor Market Studies. Over the last decade, in both the United States and New England, only the best paid workers expanded their share of total earnings, and much of that gain came at the expense of middle-income workers. Northeastern`s analysis was based on Census Bureau data on full-time employed people, 20 to 64 years old.

By the end the 1990s, the highest-paid 20 percent of workers had increased its share of the nation`s earnings to 48 percent from 44 percent at the end of the `80s. The middle 40 percent, meanwhile, saw its share fall to 30 percent from 32 percent. In New England, the shift was more pronounced: The earnings share of the highest-paid workers grew to 48 percent from 42 percent, while the middle`s share fell to 30 percent from 33 percent.

This erosion of what Andrew Sum, the Northeastern center`s director, calls the ``rich middle" is largely caused by the loss of manufacturing jobs, which, for more than a half century, boosted workers, like Bracy, to the middle class. Since 1990, when income inequality began to accelerate, the US has lost one-fifth of its manufacturing jobs. New England has lost a third.

The Eastern Fine Paper mill is just one of those casualties, shut down because its outdated plant and equipment could no longer keep up with more modern and productive competitors in the United States, or lower-cost ones abroad.

Bracy, who dropped out of Bangor High School after a year, began working at Eastern in 1975, at the age of 18, making just under $3 an hour ``hustling broke," collecting scrap paper to be remixed with pulp. Before he lost his job as a millwright in May 2003, he was making just over $18 an hour, which, with overtime, put him at more than $40,000 a year.

In between, he was able to buy a home, 28 acres of adjacent land, new cars, and a pop-up camper. He took vacations and played golf regularly.

``I had a good job," said Bracy. ``I knew I couldn`t replace the wages."

He was right. He first looked into janitorial jobs, which paid just $8 an hour, and then applied at lumber mills, where the hourly wage was no more than $9. He eventually found his job at Home Depot, which paid a somewhat better hourly wage, enough that allows him to earn just under $25,000 a year.

But he spent the first several months there working part time, pleading for more hours and plowing through his savings. Adding to the financial predicament: Melissa Spencer, his partner of 15 years, lost her job at the mill, too. With a high school diploma, Spencer, 40, is training to become a child-care worker, which pays about half what she made at Eastern.

``The shoe shops are all gone. The mills are gone," she said. ``There are no jobs, unless you`re a waiter or a gas attendant."

Or a genetics scientist.

The same forces putting Maine paper workers out of jobs -- advancing technology and fierce competition -- are helping boost the demand for and earnings of the highly educated and skilled, widening the income gap, economists say.

In Maine, for example, only men with a master`s degree or higher made significant economic gains in last decade, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies. Their inflation-adjusted earnings rose 6 percent in the 1990s.

Inflation-adjusted earnings for men without college degrees fell at least 2 percent in that decade. For men without a high school diplomas, inflation-adjusted earnings plunged 6 percent.

Graber, the Jackson Laboratory scientist, specializes in computational biology, also known as bioinformatics, an emerging field that uses information technology to investigate the exponentially increasing amount of biological data. About two years ago, as he was finishing a postdoctoral project at Boston University, he sent out 15 job inquiries and ended up with two job offers. He chose Jackson, where scientists at his level average about $80,000 a year.

Shopland, his wife, a cell biologist, was hired as a scientist at a University of Maine biophysics program based at Jackson. After spending more than a decade as either financially struggling graduate students, or somewhat less struggling postdoctoral researchers, Graber, 40, and Shopland, 38, are enjoying some of the material rewards they put off during their studies, including buying their first home, a three-bedroom, 2-bath on nearly two acres.

As globalization and technology continue to restructure the labor force, the government is trying to help workers made the transition from old- to new-economy jobs. Maine, for example, has recently revamped its technical college system, which primarily provided vocational training, into community colleges that are steppingstones to four-year schools.

Such transitions won`t be easy. About one-third of the more than 300 workers laid off from the Brewer mill have yet to find a job or enter a retraining program, according to local union officials.

Bracy feels lucky to be working, particularly for an employer that provides health insurance.

© Copyright 2004 Boston Globe Company

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O`Reilly: Iraqi people are "primitive," "prehistoric group"

Radio host and FOX News Channel host Bill O`Reilly told listeners that he has "no respect for" the Iraqi people; that he thinks "they`re a prehistoric group"; that they are "primitive"; and that the lesson from the Iraq war is that "we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them." His remarks on the June 17 broadcast of The Radio Factor came during a discussion of a recent poll -- commissioned by the Coalition Provisional Authority and obtained by the Associated Press -- that found that only 2 percent of Iraqis view U.S. troops as liberators and 55 percent would feel safer if U.S. troops left the country immediately.

From the June 17 broadcast of The Radio Factor with Bill O`Reilly:

O`REILLY: Because look ... when 2 percent of the population feels that you`re doing them a favor, just forget it, you`re not going to win. You`re not going to win. And I don`t have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they`re a prehistoric group that is -- yeah, there`s excuses.

Sure, they`re terrorized, they`ve never known freedom, all of that. There`s excuses. I understand. But I don`t have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it`s time to -- time to wise up.

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain`t going to work.

[...]

They`re just people who are primitive.

— G.W.

Posted to the web on Friday June 18, 2004 at 4:06 PM EST

Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.

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2 Allies Aided Bin Laden, Say Panel Members
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan let terrorists flourish before 9/11, apparently in return for protection from attacks by Al Qaeda.
By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer

June 20, 2004

WASHINGTON — Pakistan and Saudi Arabia helped set the stage for the Sept. 11 attacks by cutting deals with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden that allowed his Al Qaeda terrorist network to flourish, according to several senior members of the Sept. 11 commission and U.S. counter-terrorism officials.

The financial aid to the Taliban and other assistance by two of the most important allies of the United States in its war on terrorism date at least to 1996, and appear to have shielded them from Al Qaeda attacks within their own borders until long after the 2001 strikes, those commission members and officials said in interviews.

"That does appear to have been the arrangement," said one senior member of the commission staff involved in investigating those relationships.

The officials said that by not cracking down on Bin Laden, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia significantly undermined efforts to combat terrorism worldwide, giving the Saudi exile the haven he needed to train tens of thousands of soldiers. They believe that the governments` funding of his Taliban protectors enabled Bin Laden to withstand international pressure and expand his operation into a global network that could carry out the Sept. 11 attacks.

Saudi Arabia provided funds and equipment to the Taliban and probably directly to Bin Laden, and didn`t interfere with Al Qaeda`s efforts to raise money, recruit and train operatives, and establish cells throughout the kingdom, commission and U.S. officials said. Pakistan provided even more direct assistance, its military and intelligence agencies often coordinating efforts with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they said.

Such efforts allowed Al Qaeda`s network of cells to burrow deeply into the social and religious fabric of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, enabling the organization to survive the U.S.-led demolition of its headquarters in Afghanistan in 2001, to regroup and to launch new waves of attacks — including the kidnapping and beheading of an American engineer in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, last week.



Only after Pakistan and Saudi Arabia launched comprehensive efforts to take out their domestic Al Qaeda cells — as late as last year, in the case of Saudi Arabia — did the two nations become victims of terrorist attacks. And officials in both countries acknowledge that Al Qaeda`s fundraising, recruiting and training structure is now so firmly rooted that it will be extremely difficult to eliminate.

*

Rumors of Collusion

For years, there have been unsubstantiated allegations that the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia intentionally ignored Bin Laden`s efforts in their countries or even cut deals with him, either out of sympathy with his efforts or to protect themselves from attack. That claim is made in a lawsuit by the families of Sept. 11 victims against Saudi Arabia.

Both governments have strenuously denied this, and did so again Saturday.

"President [Pervez] Musharraf has been taking serious steps against extremism from the day he took power in October of 1999," including trying to purge the government of Al Qaeda sympathizers, said Talat Waseem, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani government.

A senior Saudi official acknowledged that Sept. 11 commission investigators and members asked about such matters during two visits to Saudi Arabia and in interviews with Prince Turki al Faisal, the longtime intelligence minister who is now ambassador to Britain.

"This whole notion of us buying off Bin Laden is nonsense," said the Saudi official, who declined to be identified. "It`s nuts. Do you trust a thug and a murderer like Bin Laden? You can`t."

But commission investigators have come to believe that these allegations are credible, based on their exhaustive review of all of the classified intelligence data known to the U.S. government. The commission`s 80 staffers also conducted thousands of interviews in the United States and abroad, and had access to the interrogations of Al Qaeda`s most senior operatives in U.S. custody, including accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

"There`s no question the Taliban was getting money from the Saudis … and there`s no question they got much more than that from the Pakistani government," said former Sen. Bob Kerrey, one of the congressionally appointed commission`s 10 members. "Their motive is a secondary issue for us."

Kerrey said the commission officials believed that the Saudi government had a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban that bought Riyadh safety from attack.

"Whether there was quid pro quo with the Saudis, we don`t know. But certainly the Pakistanis believed that there was. They benefited enormously from their relationship with the Taliban and Al Qaeda."

Kerrey said the findings were based almost entirely on information known to officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, most of it as early as 1997 — just months after Bin Laden moved his operations from Sudan to Afghanistan.

Now, the bipartisan commission is wrestling with how to characterize such politically sensitive information in its final report, and even whether to include it. Some commission members also believe that U.S. officials didn`t do enough to force Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to sever their ties with Bin Laden and the Taliban.

"All we`re doing is looking at classified documents from our own government, not from some magical source," Kerrey said. "So we knew what was going on, but we did nothing."

From 1998 through 2000, Clinton administration officials pressured Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to help force the Taliban to surrender Bin Laden, and to crack down on the growing presence of Al Qaeda in the two countries.

Both governments refused to sever diplomatic relations with the Taliban or to help investigate Al Qaeda`s growing empire, officials said.



The Clinton administration also learned that Taliban efforts to extort cash from Saudi Arabia "may have paid off," a commission report states.

More recently, several commission members noted, leaders of both countries, Pakistan`s Musharraf in particular, have taken steps to counter Al Qaeda at great political and physical risk.

The Saudi royal family also has declared war on Al Qaeda, although commission members noted that it did so only after it came under attack May 12, 2003, in a trio of suicide bombings in Riyadh that killed at least 34 people, including the militants.

But a second commission member argued that the Saudi and Pakistani governments played important roles in the growth of Al Qaeda. "The origins of that are very important to us," he said.

As such, the findings could renew the debate over whether Saudi Arabia has been as close an ally of the United States as the kingdom claims, or whether it has clandestinely tried for years to appease both Washington and Bin Laden. They could raise additional questions about the United States` alliances with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in its war on terrorism, particularly because many U.S. officials believe that both governments have been slow to purge their ranks of pro-Al Qaeda, pro-Taliban elements.

The commission staff alluded to its findings, but only briefly, in a report issued last week during a hearing on the origins of Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 plot.

That report said that it had no convincing evidence the Saudi government had directly supported the Sept. 11 attacks but that Riyadh had engaged in "very limited oversight" of the religious and charitable entities that have long been accused of being key financial backers of Al Qaeda.

Pakistan, the report said, "significantly facilitated" the Taliban`s ability to provide Bin Laden a haven despite international sanctions against Al Qaeda, including the freezing of its assets and prohibitions on travel.

*

Report Is Tip of Iceberg

In interviews with The Times, the senior commission members said their investigation had uncovered more extensive evidence than the report suggested.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, commission investigators believe that Riyadh made overtures to Bin Laden soon after his arrival in Afghanistan in May 1996.

At the time, Saudi officials feared that Bin Laden was responsible for two recent terrorist attacks in the kingdom, including the killing of 19 U.S. servicemen at the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran. The Saudi leaders were desperate to avoid further attacks and to silence Bin Laden, a vocal critic of the monarchy since it revoked his citizenship in 1994.

A formal delegation of Saudi officials met with top Taliban leaders, including Mullah Mohammed Omar, and asked that a message be conveyed to "their guest," Bin Laden.

"They said, `Don`t attack us. Make sure he`s not a problem for us and recognition will follow.` And that`s just what they did," according to the senior commission staff member.

Shortly afterward, Saudi Arabia became one of only three countries to formally recognize the Taliban as the rightful government in Afghanistan. The others were Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

More Saudi delegations followed, including several in 1998 led by Prince Turki at the request of the United States. U.S. officials wanted him to negotiate the surrender of Bin Laden. But Richard Clarke, the former Bush and Clinton counter-terrorism czar, and a second senior Clinton administration official said U.S. officials suspected that Turki merely ensured that Saudi Arabia would remain out of Al Qaeda`s crosshairs.

Pakistanis, meanwhile, were in with the Taliban and Al Qaeda "up to their eyeballs," said the senior commission staff member.

He said Bin Laden, for instance, negotiated his 1996 move to Afghanistan with Pakistan`s powerful military-intelligence leadership, which held considerable influence over the various warlords struggling for control of Afghanistan at the time.

"He wouldn`t go back there without Pakistan`s approval and support, and had to comply with their rules and regulations," the official said. He said Pakistan opened its airspace to Bin Laden and his flying flotilla of operatives.

Pakistani intelligence officers also allegedly brought Bin Laden to meet Mullah Omar soon after his arrival in Afghanistan, and then helped forge an alliance between the men that enabled the Taliban to trample competing factions and take over much of Afghanistan.

Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, also was instrumental in helping Al Qaeda set up an infrastructure in its own country and in Afghanistan, and the two outfits jointly operated training camps along the border where militants were taught guerrilla warfare, the official said.

"It started day one," the official said of Pakistan`s involvement. "They controlled the Taliban; they controlled the border."

Officials from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia acknowledge that there were significant interactions between their military and intelligence agencies and the Taliban while the Afghan regime provided Al Qaeda with sanctuary from 1996 through the post-Sept. 11 military campaign. But they said they consisted of routine diplomatic matters.

Bin Laden has had personal relationships with top intelligence officials from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia dating to the early 1980s, when they became involved in the decade-long war that expelled the Soviet occupying army from Afghanistan.

The U.S. and Saudi governments spent billions of dollars each on that effort, funneling the money and supplies through Pakistan`s military and intelligence agencies to the Afghan mujahedin, including Bin Laden.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Candidates Strive to Overcome Privilege
High social standing has played different roles in Kerry`s and Bush`s political careers.
By Robin Abcarian
Times Staff Writer

June 20, 2004

He is a scion of American aristocracy whose path through life has been strewn with privilege.

Born to a family with deep roots on the Eastern Seaboard and a powerful place in U.S. history, he was pushed out of the nest into a boarding school where he often felt out of place. But that school — and his name — would help pave the way into an Ivy League college.

At Yale, he was tapped for an exclusive secret society. The first-born son of a father who was a World War II pilot, he too learned to fly and served his country during wartime.

His first run at political office was a disaster. Accused of carpetbagging, he was badly thumped. But he dusted himself off and went to work. Years later, he would again try his hand at politics. This time he would succeed, and spectacularly.

Now he is running for president of the United States. And that`s the curious thing: While this thumbnail biography describes President Bush to a T, it also describes his presumed Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

Indeed, the lives of both candidates, in broad strokes, paint a classic portrait of American privilege. "These people are definitely in the American hereditary upper class," said Gary Boyd Roberts, a Boston genealogist who has traced Bush`s and Kerry`s lineages and discovered they are distantly related. (Branches of their family trees cross eight times, said Roberts; at the closest point, they are ninth cousins). They are also descended from medieval kings.

How has privilege played out in their lives? Very differently, as it turns out.

Bush, a true social and political aristocrat, has spent much of his life publicly distancing himself from his patrician roots, while quietly availing himself of family connections. "Privilege completely and utterly defines George Bush," said his biographer, Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio. "I don`t think it`s pejorative to point that out."

Kerry, whose family glory lies in an illustrious and historic past, has worked energetically to secure his place in the upper reaches of American society, and twice married heiresses. "His parents came from modest wealth," said his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley. "He was always a little cash-poor for the milieu he was running around in. He`s like the F. Scott Fitzgerald figure looking into that world with one foot in and one foot out."

The novelist Christopher Buckley, an acerbic social observer who wrote speeches for Bush`s father when he was vice president, said of the two political rivals: "Bush set out to distance himself from the world of Eastern establishmentarian privilege…. The funny thing is that Kerry sort of looks more like the guy who was born with the silver spoon, but economically, his circumstances were far less golden. That`s the paradox."



The Bush family, which prizes loyalty, has a nearly genetic aversion to being portrayed as privileged or highfalutin. The president`s grandmother, Dorothy Walker Bush, so disapproved of displays of what she called the "la-di-das" that her son George Herbert Walker Bush took to leaving the first-person pronoun out of sentences. That led, some think, to his famously tortured syntax.

The Bushes are deeply sensitive to any portrayal that implies their success is not due to hard work. But their triumphs — on Wall Street, in the oil business, in real estate — have gone hand in hand with long-standing social and financial connections that have been nurtured and handed down in the family with the sort of loving care that other families take with precious heirlooms.

The Bushes are famous for making friends — and for keeping them and calling upon them when launching businesses and political campaigns. In their new book, "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty," Peter and Rochelle Schweizer call this phenomenon "the amazing Bush family money machine."

Although George W. Bush has striven mightily to purge traces of the patrician from his bearing — at Harvard Business School, where he earned a master`s of business administration, he chewed tobacco, eschewed opera for country music and wore cowboy boots — his family`s illustrious history is an inescapable fact. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut; his father, of course, was the 41st U.S. president. His younger brother, Jeb, is governor of Florida. At least three recent Bush biographies contain the word "dynasty."

"I know they have a stated aversion to what I think they call the D-word," said Buckley. "It`s a becoming modesty, but as a practical matter … if it walks like a dynasty, talks like a dynasty and quacks like a dynasty, it seems to me it`s a dynasty."

"Dynasty, schmynasty," Jeb once snapped.

Still, the perquisites of growing up in a family named Bush are considerable. George Bush was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and though a mediocre student, he was accepted to Yale as an undergraduate, where his grandfather and great-uncle were on the board of trustees. When he applied to law school at the University of Texas and, according to biographers, no family strings were pulled, he did not get in. In 1973, however, he was accepted by Harvard.

"Being the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, right there, that is helpful," Nathaniel Butler, a Harvard classmate, told Minutaglio.



Kerry and his family are far less familiar to Americans than the Bushes. On his mother`s side, Kerry is descended from two important early American families, the Winthrops and the Forbeses.

Pilgrim leader John Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Forbeses made a fortune in shipping. Kerry`s grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was a successful international businessman with a vacation home in Brittany, which is still in the family.

By the early 20th century, much of the wealth had dissipated, but some vestiges remained. Naushon Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, is owned by a Forbes family trust. Kerry also receives a modest amount of money from three family trusts.

Kerry`s father, Richard, was the son of a Czech immigrant who changed his name from Kohn to Kerry and converted from Judaism to Catholicism before immigrating to the U.S., as the Boston Globe discovered and revealed to Kerry. The Globe also discovered that Kerry`s grandfather, a successful businessman, killed himself in a restroom in Boston in 1921, when Kerry`s father was 6.

The family was left with enough money that Kerry`s father was able to attend boarding school at Andover, Yale as an undergraduate and law school at Harvard before he embarked on a career in the foreign service.

John Kerry, one of four children, attended prep schools (in Switzerland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire), lived with his family in Berlin and Oslo and spent holidays at the 300-acre Massachusetts estate of his uncle and aunt. A great-aunt, Clara Winthrop, paid Kerry`s tuition. At St. Paul`s School in New Hampshire, where Kerry finished 12th grade, he was surrounded by very rich classmates.

"We were comfortable," Kerry told Brinkley. "But by St. Paul`s standards, I would never have called myself rich."

"The Bushes have real wealth," said Brinkley. "The Kerrys never saw a million dollars in their life."

But Kerry palled around with millionaires. The summer before college, he dated Jacqueline Kennedy`s half sister, Janet Auchincloss, and was invited sailing with President Kennedy, the boyhood idol whose initials he shares. During summers, Kerry sold encyclopedias and loaded trucks, jobs he says he found for himself.

Bush`s summer jobs were procured by his father — including work on an oil rig and in an inner-city mentoring program.

Like their fathers, Kerry and Bush would go to Yale.

Bush did not love Yale, as his father and grandfather and many uncles had. He has blamed his disaffection on the intellectual arrogance he perceived on the campus. He was caught between worlds in some sense, graduating in 1968, a time when his well-known father was closely allied with the Nixon administration and the antiwar movement was gaining steam on campus. At Yale, he encountered liberal guilt, which he found offensive.

He was turned off, he told the Dallas Morning News in 1994, by "people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering, or people who felt guilty because they happened to inherit a whole bunch of money and they hadn`t done a dang thing to deserve it."

While Bush spent a good deal of his time at boarding school and college socializing, Kerry was more of a striver, wearing his ambition on his sleeve, even when it was uncool to do so.

"To be fully accepted at St. Paul`s," wrote Brinkley, "you were supposed to be slightly cynical, laid-back, condescending and arch…. Such raw ambition rubbed classmates the wrong way. The sentiment was that anybody who excelled at everything he tried had to be a phony."

At Yale, Kerry led the debate team, became president of the Political Union and was tapped, as Bush would be two years later, for Skull and Bones. Many of his friends understood that he wanted to become president.

"I have always found it very curious that some people hold Kerry`s ambition against him," Brinkley said in an interview. "It`s what [historian] Richard Hofstadter called `the anti-intellectual strain in American politics` … You are supposed to become an accidental president."

Indeed, some speculate that this is the secret to Bush`s success. No one expected him to be president; Jeb was supposed to run, according to family lore. George W. Bush, as many have noted, was a case study in the power of lowered expectations. His protracted boyhood did not truly end until he turned 40, stopped drinking and became a born-again Christian.



After Kerry graduated from Yale in 1966, despite trepidations about the war in Vietnam, he enlisted in the Navy. He spent four months on a swift boat commanding a crew that was considerably less affluent and well-connected than the people he had known at Yale. When he returned, he became deeply involved in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and gained national attention as its spokesman. Some admired him; others criticized him as an opportunist.

In the early 1970s, Bush spent his military stint during the Vietnam War stateside, service that in his political life would spark controversy. He gained admission into a unit of the Texas Air National Guard that was dubbed the "Champagne Unit" because its members included the scions of other well-connected Texas political families.

Bush`s first full-time job was as an executive trainee for a large agricultural concern called Stratford of Texas. In a typical example of the web of Bush family ties, Stratford was owned by Robert Gow, who had come to Texas to head up George H.W. Bush`s oil exploration company, Zapata Offshore. Gow had roomed at Yale with a Bush cousin, Ray Walker. "It was turnabout that George came and worked for me," Gow told Minutaglio.

When Bush launched his oil exploration company, Arbusto Energy, he had little trouble raising money. "I introduced him to clients. I marketed his firm," his uncle, New York financier Jonathan Bush, told Minutaglio in 1999.

Bush would never hit it big with Arbusto. But when he was offered a chance to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989, during his father`s presidency, he turned to family and friends to raise money. At the time, Bush was candid about his advantageous position: "Being the president`s son puts you in the limelight," he told a reporter. "While in the limelight, you might as well sell tickets."



During their careers, Kerry and Bush have had to fight accusations that they are privileged snobs.

In 1978, after Bush`s entry into politics was marked by losing his race for a House seat in Texas, he said of his opponent, "He out-countried me. He created a doubt in people`s minds about my authenticity."

When he rekindled his political career with his successful gubernatorial run in 1994, Bush`s stewardship of the Rangers had bestowed on him the kind of home-state credibility he had lacked.

Kerry, too, lost his first race, a 1972 bid for a House seat in Massachusetts. In a largely working-class district, many saw him as a carpetbagger using his national stature as a war protester.

He went into a funk, then to law school, and became a prosecutor before winning his Senate seat in 1984.

When Kerry was still a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Garry Trudeau lampooned him in the comic strip "Doonesbury," showing him in front of a microphone with a thought bubble over his head: "You`re really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppie."

Around that time, a newspaper headline on a story that compared Kerry`s antiwar testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with that of a veteran who supported the war described the pair this way: "2 vets with medals, 1 with silver spoon."

And while Kerry may not have been born with a silver spoon, he has married into substantial wealth. His first wife, Julia Stimson Thorne, is an heiress who once described her upbringing as "palaces, princesses and privilege." Kerry`s second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, inherited part of the Heinz food company fortune. Money from both wives has helped Kerry propel his political career.

"Think left, marry right," joked Buckley.

In contrast, Bush`s wife, Laura, was a product of West Texas` middle class. Their marriage has survived at least one rocky period, caused by his drinking.

His subsequent sobriety and his devotion to Christ is the story that Bush has used to define himself to voters — a narrative that has helped him neutralize the role that privilege has played in his life, according to Evan Cornog, whose book "The Power and the Story" examines how presidents craft their personal stories and how voters respond.

"If you look at his life story … a guy trading off privilege and taking advantage of his father`s connections, a wild and not very responsible person, his central story is the renunciation of alcohol," said Cornog. "Sin and redemption. And he`s made amazing use of that story."

While Bush has avoided references to his privileged life, Kerry seems to have embraced it — though in the context of reminding voters that he volunteered to serve his country in wartime. "I thought it was important," he says in a recent TV commercial, "when you had a lot of privileges as I had had, to go to a great university like Yale — to give something back to your country."

Emphasizing his Vietnam service, said Cornog, "does for Kerry what the turn-away from alcohol did for Bush: It distances him from that upbringing of privilege."

Ultimately, Cornog added, most voters have seemed to care little whether a presidential contender has come from modest circumstances or great wealth. Instead, he said, "We look at them and say, `Is this person comfortable in their skin?` "




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A Kurdish State Within Iraq Would Benefit the Region
Turkey must be shown that it has nothing to fear from a new federal entity that would counterbalance a Sunni-Shiite Arab coalition.
By Henri J. Barkey
Henri J. Barkey, chairman of the international relations department at Lehigh University, was on the State Department`s policy planning staff (1998-2000).

June 20, 2004

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — The United States prefers a unified, democratic Iraq organized along federal lines after sovereignty is transferred on June 30. But one likely outcome could be a country split into two, with Sunni and Shiite Arabs coalescing against the Kurds, whom they increasingly see as U.S. collaborators. Already the Kurds have threatened to quit the new caretaker government if it alters the interim constitution`s provisions on Kurdish autonomy. Yet a strong federal Kurdish state in northern Iraq could be a significant plus for U.S. — and Turkish — interests, especially if it developed in an environment of improving U.S.-Turkey relations.

Turkey is deeply mistrustful of U.S. intentions in northern Iraq, where Kurds operate autonomously. Turks in general and the Turkish media are convinced that the U.S. is on the verge of sponsoring an independent Kurdistan for the explicit purpose of dividing Turkey, where Kurds amount to 20% of the population. Turkish officials fear that an independent Kurdish state, even a federal one, in northern Iraq would encourage Turkish Kurds to revive their secession campaign.

Conspiracy theories abound. One has it that thousands of Israelis are buying up chunks of northern Iraq to establish a self-ruling Kurdish entity or just to control the area`s oil resources. The currency given such theories is odd but telling, because Washington is Turkey`s most ardent supporter on many fronts, including its quest to become a member of the European Union.

Turkish displeasure over U.S. policy goes back to the eve of the Iraq war. One Turkish official recently complained to me that Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar ibn Sultan had been informed of the plan to attack Iraq but that Turkey was left in the dark. Similarly, he said, Washington has been stingy about the details of the June 30 transition. The U.S. is withholding information, he said, "because the U.S. thinks we have an agenda in Iraq."

The truth is, the Turks do have an agenda in Iraq: no federal or independent Kurdish entity in northern Iraq. That forces the U.S. to choose between not riling Turkish sensitivities and its moral commitment to the Kurds. Turks also complain that the U.S. administrators of Iraq have ignored the Turkmens, a Turkish-speaking minority that, along with the Kurds, claims the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Interestingly, Turkish support for the Turkmens is new. When they were uprooted by Saddam Hussein or when their rights were trampled, Ankara did not so much as whimper. Turkey`s sudden affection for Turkmens has raised suspicions in Washington and Iraq, which led last year to a raid by U.S. troops in which a number of non-uniformed Turkish special forces were arrested and hooded. The Turks have not forgotten this humiliation.

Still, both countries have an immense incentive to work together and overcome mutual suspicions. U.S. failure in Iraq would be disastrous for Turkey, which would directly experience the aftershocks of any radical regime in Iraq. If the U.S. is to rely on Turkey to bolster its Iraq policy, it has to address the question of the Kurds.

Turkey has to be helped out of its Kurdish neuralgia. A Kurdish federal entity on its borders would be unlikely to lead to further violence inside Turkey. Most Iraqi Kurds understand that Turkey is their best potential ally and thus would welcome their Turkish brethren`s renouncement of secessionist goals. Turkey`s new reform-oriented government understands that improving conditions for its Kurdish minority would facilitate its entry into the European Union. A Turkish appeals court recently released four Kurdish members of parliament convicted 10 years ago of belonging to an outlawed separatist party. Last week, Turkey`s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, received the four in his office, a sign that the government was willing to consider alternative policies vis-a-vis the Kurdish minority. For Iraqi Kurds who are Western-oriented, Ankara, because it wants to be a part of Europe, is their best conduit to the West. They have already gone out of their way to invite Turkish business groups to invest in their region, hoping that economic ties will lead to stronger political bonds down the line.

A robust, autonomous Kurdish entity in northern Iraq is in Ankara`s interests for two simple reasons. As counterintuitive as it may seem to the Turkish establishment, a strong friendship with such a federal state would go a long way toward diffusing Turkish Kurds` anger at Ankara. Turkish Kurds care a great deal about their brethren across the border and would not do anything to endanger a state that would serve as a buffer against Hussein-like regimes in Baghdad. Ironically, the late Turkish President Turgut Ozal had figured this out and was maneuvering to help support Iraqi Kurds when he died in office in 1993.

Moreover, the Kurds are unlike the Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq. They are much more secular and, after 12 years of quasi-independence under U.S. protection, they have made tremendous progress toward democracy and responsible self-government.

The U.S. still has work to do for this Kurdish federal entity to be a success for all concerned. First and foremost, it has to deal with the remnants of the Turkish Kurdish insurgent group holed up in the mountains of northern Iraq near the Iranian border, something it has promised Ankara to do. It also must convince the more nationalistic Iraqi Kurds to abandon their Kurdistan rhetoric, which upsets Turks. Finally, the U.S. has to demonstrate to Ankara that Turkey counts.

One major obstacle is Ankara`s dysfunctional national security system. The powerful military establishment fears both Turkish and Iraqi Kurds, as well as its own pro-Islam government. Yet the U.S. has good relations with all sides in Turkey and with northern Iraq, which enables it to go the extra mile in productively reengaging the Turks in Iraq. Toward this end, John Negroponte, the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, should begin his trip to his new post by stopping over in Ankara for a chat. He should not be bashful about discussing a joint U.S.-Turkish umbrella over a democratically ruled northern Iraq. Paradoxically, it is only such reassurance that would convince the Iraqi Kurds not to seek complete independence any time soon.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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How Many Members of the Bush Adminisration Does it Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?


The Answer is SEVEN: (1) One to deny that a lightbulb needs to be replaced, (2) one to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who has questions about the lightbulb, (3) one to blame the previous administration for the need of a new lightbulb, (4) one to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of lightbulbs, (5) one to get together with Vice President Cheney and figure out how to pay Halliburton Industries one million dollars for a lightbulb, (6) one to arrange a photo-op session showing Bush changing the lightbulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag, (7) and finally one to explain to Bush the difference between screwing a lightbulb and screwing the country. -- from a viewer who is a member of the Republicans For Kerry
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Sunday, June 20, 2004
War News for June 20, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: City councilman assassinated in Tikrit.

Bring ‘em on: Ten Iraqis killed in firefight with US troops near Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi policemen killed in Baghdad bombing.

Bring ‘em on: Ten Iraqi Arab taxi drivers kidnapped by Iraqi Kurds near Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqis wounded by roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis killed in mortar attack near Diyalah.

Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqi police officers killed in US airstrike in Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: British troops foil attempted car bombing near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: One US Marine killed in action in al-Anbar province.

Bring ‘em on: Seventeen Iraqis killed in attempted assassination of Health Minister in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: British troops engaged in firefights near Amarah.

Ethnic cleansing. “The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread misery, with Arabs complaining of expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded camps. American officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces.”

Insuring contractors in Iraq. “Federal law requires government contractors to take out some death, disability and medical insure for workers assigned overseas, and reimburses insurers if a worker is killed or injured. Mounting deaths and injuries to contract workers in Iraq threaten to cost the federal government far more than the $1 million to $2 million it usually pays out per year under the law. But some contractors also are footing much larger than expected bills. Many have taken out more insurance than required by law as a way to attract and reassure workers, and then were forced to keep workers in the country months longer than planned because of circumstances including violence and sabotage.”

Reporter in ambush near Fallujah. “The point of this or almost any story from Iraq these days is how completely the conflict between the United States and the violent opponents of U.S. occupation is closing in on anyone who lives here. For a long time, rebel targets have included Iraqis who work for the foreigners, who work in government and even who labour for Iraqis in business or government. For the past few months, Americans and other foreigners working in Iraq have also been victims of ambush. There is virtually no discrimination, and the narcotic sense of immunity that gave reporters the notion they could go into a war zone, talk to people and get back safely has been shattered.”

Lieutenant AWOL’s fantasy world. “Two days later, Bush dismissed a wave of violence and sabotage that has killed more than 180 people this month and halted oil exports for at least five days, saying US-led forces were "making progress" towards a democratic Iraq.”

Spencer Ackerman at TPM has some insightful observations on the demise of the CPA. “A consequence of all this is something that undercuts an implicit premise of the Post’s excellent coverage: That the occupation is in a significant sense ending. What appears more likely to happen is abdication. The U.S. will be declaring that it`s not responsible for the deteriorating course of the country while Iraqis suspect (with significant foundation, as Brown points out) that the U.S. is the real power broker in Iraq. As retired State Department official Richard Murphy writes in his Post article, ‘Washington has oversold the significance of the June 30 handover.’ All this makes the actual fulfillment of our strategic objectives increasingly remote. Which is a euphemism for failure.”

Commentary

Editorial: “The ceremonial passage of power on June 30 is unlikely to usher in any immediate improvement in the security situation. With millions of Iraqis resentful of American occupation and attendant horrors like Abu Ghraib, residential neighborhoods terrorized by kidnappers and other criminals, another stifling summer under way without adequate electric power and economic revival a distant dream, it takes only a few thousand armed insurgents to generate an atmosphere of random carnage and rampant anarchy. With this in mind, the Pentagon now plans to keep 138,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, almost 25,000 more than it was projecting a few months ago. Even more may be needed, although the idea of a larger and more visible American military presence will not be popular with Iraqis. According to a recent poll commissioned by the occupation authorities, increasing numbers of Iraqis would like to see American troops go home.”

Editorial: “In short, the Iraq war was fought on bogus grounds. It never was about fighting 9/11 terror. If anything, it was a distraction. Nearly three years after 9/11, bin Laden is still on the loose. Al Qaeda still threatens the continental U.S. and the group continues to attack U.S. interests in Iraq and elsewhere.”

Analysis: It is still unclear why Mr Bremer and the CPA showed such poor judgement. The swift overthrow of Saddam Hussein showed few Iraqis supported him. But Mr Bremer disbanded the army and persecuted the Baath party pushing their members towards armed resistance. By last summer he had alienated the Sunni Arabs (20 per cent of Iraqis) and by this spring he had infuriated the Shia (60 per cent). He turned the hitherto marginal Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr into a respected martyr and the hillbilly city of Fallujah into a patriotic symbol. Many able and intelligent CPA officials are mystified by the extent of the failure, perhaps the greatest in American foreign policy. ‘Bremer stuffed his office full of neo-conservatives and political appointees who knew nothing of the country or the region,’ one said. ‘They actively avoided anybody who did.’”

Casualty Reports

Local story: New Jersey Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: South Carolina Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Nebraska soldier wounded in Iraq.


Monkey Mail!

From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]

Subject: you need to put our country down

It would seem to me that you should live elsewhere. This is our country, our President and our code of living standards. If you do not like it....leave it. Our president needs us now and it is really like a spiritual war. We will win, but whose side will you end up on? Those people come over here, use our resources, thanks to people like you, get an education and turn it against us. You apparently are so busy kissing foreign butt that you can`t see that will be your permanent job in hell. Learn to defend what you have. They came over here with their ideas of grandiosity and now, they and their tribes are going to reap the benefit of some good ol American kick-butt.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:19 AM
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Iraq: Credibility at breaking point
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - In a direct challenge to recent assertions by both President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the special bipartisan commission investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against New York and Washington has found "no credible evidence" of any operational link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

While the commission, which has had access to highly classified US intelligence, said that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had sought contacts with and support from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein after his expulsion from Sudan in 1994, those appeals were ignored.

Contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda after bin Laden moved to Afghanistan "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship", according to the commission`s report, which was released Wednesday morning. It added that two senior al-Qaeda officials now in US custody "have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaeda and Iraq".

The report is the first of a series expected to be released over the coming months as the commission winds up its work, most of which deals with al-Qaeda`s evolution beginning in the 1980s. Echoing the administration, the commission warns that "al-Qaeda is actively striving to attack the United States and inflict mass casualties".

Its conclusion about the absence of any operational link between al-Qaeda and Saddam not only further undermines the administration`s case for going to war against Iraq, but also deals a sharp blow to the already-strained credibility of Cheney, who on Monday asserted without elaboration during a speech to a right-wing institute in Florida that the Iraqi leader had "long-established ties" to the group.

Cheney insisted as recently as January that Washington had obtained "conclusive" evidence that Saddam had biological weapons in the form of two customized truck trailers that he said was for their production.

The claim, which he has not repeated since, was discredited by, among others, outgoing Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet, as well as the head of the US task force in charge of searching for alleged weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq, David Kay.

Asked about Cheney`s most recent remarks at a Tuesday press conference, Bush declined to answer directly, insisting instead that Saddam had ties with "terrorist organizations", of which he cited only the late Abu Nidal, a Palestinian who split from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the 1970s and created his own terrorist group.

Bush also suggested that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who is identified by US officials as a leader of resistance to the US occupation of Iraq, might also have had ties to Saddam and al-Qaeda.

"Zarqawi is the best evidence of [Saddam`s] connection to al-Qaeda affiliates and al-Qaeda," Bush said. "He`s the person who`s still killing."

The commission`s conclusion on the absence of ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda is also certain to further discredit the so-called neo-conservatives both inside and outside the administration who led the march to war. Many of them were behind what appeared to be an orchestrated campaign to implicate Saddam in the September attacks themselves.

Within the administration, the principals appear to have included Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney and his national security adviser, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, among others in key posts in the National Security Council and the State Department.

Outside the administration, key figures included close friends of both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, including Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey - both members of Rumsfeld`s Defense Policy Board; Frank Gaffney, head of the arms-industry-funded Center for Security Policy; and William Kristol, editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and chairman of the Project for the New American Century, among others.

A close examination of the public record indicates that all of these individuals were actively preparing the ground within days, even hours, after the September 11 attacks for an eventual strike on Iraq, whether or not it had any role in the attacks or any connection to al-Qaeda.

A hint of a deliberate campaign to connect Iraq with September 11 and al-Qaeda surfaced one year ago in a televised interview of General Wesley Clark on the popular public-affairs program, Meet the Press. In answer to a question, Clark asserted, "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.

"It came from the White House, it came from other people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, `you got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.`"

While Clark has not yet identified who called him, Perle, Woolsey, Gaffney and Kristol were using the same language in their media appearances on September 11 and over the following weeks.

"This could not have been done without help of one or more governments," Perle told The Washington Post on September 11. "Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don`t think that can be done without the assistance of large governments."

While Kristol and company were trying to implicate Saddam in the public debate, their friends in the administration were pushing hard in the same direction. Cheney, according to published accounts, had already confided to friends before September 11 that he hoped the Bush administration would remove Saddam from power.

But the evidence about Rumsfeld is even more dramatic. According to an account by veteran CBS newsman David Martin in September 2002, Rumsfeld was "telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks" five hours after an American Airlines jet slammed into the Pentagon.

Martin attributed his account in part to notes taken at the time by a Rumsfeld aide. They quote the defense chief asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at the same time, not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. The administration should "go massive ... sweep it all up, things related and not", the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying.

Wolfowitz shared those views, according to an account of the September 15-16 meeting of the administration`s war council at Camp David, provided by the Washington Post`s Bill Woodward and Dan Balz. In his "I-was-there" style for which Woodward, whose access to powerful officials since his investigative role in the Watergate scandal almost 30 years ago is unmatched, is famous:

"Wolfowitz argued [at the meeting] that the real source of all the trouble and terrorism was probably Hussein. The terrorist attacks of September 11 created an opportunity to strike. Now, Rumsfeld asked again: `Is this the time to attack Iraq`?"

"Powell objected," the Woodward and Balz account continued, citing Secretary of State Colin Powell`s argument that US allies would not support a strike on Iraq. "If you get something pinning September 11 on Iraq, great," Powell is quoted as saying. "But let`s get Afghanistan now. If we do that, we will have increased our ability to go after Iraq - if we can prove Iraq had a role."

Despite the secretary of state`s reservations, the neo-con campaign was remarkably successful. As recently as eight weeks ago, a survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that 57% of the US public believed Iraq was either "directly involved" in carrying out the September 11 attacks or had provided "substantial support" to al-Qaeda. Fifty-two percent said they believed that concrete evidence of a Saddam-al Qaeda link had been uncovered by US investigators since the war.

Retired senior US diplomats and intelligence officials have long doubted any operational link between al-Qaeda and Saddam, as noted by former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman, who signed a statement by former top-ranking diplomats and military officials that was released on Wednesday, denouncing US policy in Iraq and the Middle East.

"[Saddam] and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were mortal enemies during this period," Freeman told reporters, adding that administration assertions that the two had such links before the war were regarded by specialists in the region as "ludicrous".

"Why the vice president continues to make that claim beats me," said another former top diplomat, ambassador Robert Oakley. "I have no idea."

(Inter Press Service)



Jun 18, 2004

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Sunday, June 20, 2004

Controversy at UC Irvine over Muslim Witness to Faith

The Orange County Register reports a controversy over graduation ceremonies at the University of California Irvine, where 11 Muslim students had been planning to wear green stoles with Islamic inscriptions over their robes. One side would say "Lord, increase my knowledge." The other would have the shahadah or Muslim confession of faith: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger." The Register reports that:


` Jewish students and outside groups that have gotten involved in the controversy, such as the American Jewish Congress, say the wearing of a garment with that word implies approval of terrorism and suicide bombings. "I am offended by that," said Larry Mahler, president of the UCI chapter of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. "What they are doing is ratifying the suicide bombing that killed innocent people." `



Rumors also swirled that the inscriptions involved support for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organization, the paramilitary wing of which sponsors suicide bombings against Israeli targets as a way of fighting Israeli occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.

I can`t say how upset I am by the gross bigotry displayed by anyone in the American Jewish Congress who would attempt to associate the Muslim confession of faith with terrorism.

The shahadah or confession of faith is a universalist statement. It begins by saying "La ilaha illa Allah." "La" means "no" in Arabic. "Ilah" is god with a small "g", a deity of the sort that is worshipped in polytheistic religions like those of ancient Greece and Babylon. It is a cognate of the ancient Hebrew "eloh," which also means "god." One of the names for God in the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible is Elohim, which literally means "the Gods." Some scholars believe that the use of this plural is an echo of the process whereby a council of gods in ancient Near Eastern religion gradually become merged into a single figure, the one God.

So "La ilaha" means that there are no gods or small deities of the polytheistic sort. The ancient Arabs worshipped star-goddesses such as al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat. These are the equivalents of Venus, Hera and Diana in classical mythology. The Muslim witness to faith denies that such deities exist.

"Illa Allah" means "except for God." So there is no deity except The Deity. This part of the shahadah is a pure expression of monotheism. Monotheism`s basic characteristic is its universalism. It asserts that one, single divinity underlies all of Being. This point is why it is wrong to insist on using the word Allah in English rather than God. Allah is not a proper name. It is simply the Arabic word for "the God." A god is ilahun. The God is al-Ilahu. The close proximity of two "L`s" in al-Ilah caused them to be elided together so that the word became Allah. But it just means "the God," i.e., "God." Christian Arabic-speakers also use Allah to refer to the God of the Bible.

And, the Koran also identifies Allah or "God" as the God of Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Moses, David, John the Baptist and Jesus, as well as of Muhammad. So, "there is no God but God." There is no difference in sentiment between this statement and the phrase, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord." (Dt. 6:4).

The other part of the Muslim witness to faith is, "and Muhammad is His Messenger." (Muhammadun rasul Allah [or, transliterating by pronunciation: Muhammadu`rasulu`llah]. The word rasul or messenger is used interchangeably in the Koran with nabi or prophet. The Arabic nabi is cognate to the Hebrew word, which is the same. When Jesus said, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own country," he certainly used the word nabi in his original phrasing. The Koran does not represent Muhammad as the only prophet or recipient of divine revelation. Even the bees receive a form of wahy or revelation from God. God has sent a prophet "to every city," it maintains. Not only are all the biblical figures prophets, but so are John the Baptist and Jesus, and even ancient Arabian prophets are accepted. In India, many Sufi Muslims were perfectly comfortable accepting Krishna and Ram as prophets. Of course, committed Muslims believe that Muhammad is the most recent messenger and the most appropriate one in which to believe, but they don`t deny the validity of others such as Moses. And, in traditional Islamic law, it is perfectly all right for human beings to follow other prophets of the one God, whether they be Christians, Jews or members of some other monotheistic religion. This tolerance was implemented for the most part, though there were lapses, and some serious ones. It can be contrasted with medieval Christianity, which often expelled Jews and Muslims or forcibly converted them.

So both elements of the confession of faith in Islam are universalistic. The one God is the God of all being, and Muhammad as prophet exists within a moral universe of many prophets, and comes in a long line of true prophets, with much the same message as they had, concerning the compassion and love of the one God for his creation.

As for the phrase, "Increase my knowledge, " it is literally "increase me in knowledge and make me one of the virtuous." The phrase is from a pilgrimage prayer: Rabbi zidni `ilman wa alhiqni bi`s-salihin. The salihun or righteous in the Koran are those who do good deeds. At one point the Koran says that Jews, Christians and others who are salih or righteous need have no fear in the afterlife.

For these Muslim graduates of the University of California to implicitly sacralize the secular learning they received there by associating it with the prayer that God should increase them in "knowledge" is another universalist sentiment. Many Taliban would have denied that there was any `ilm/knowledge to be had at the University of California.

So, the bigots should back off and stop demonizing the world`s 1.3 billion Muslims. In multicultural America, moreover, an atmosphere of religious tolerance is the only safeguard against pathologies like antisemitism.

posted by Juan @ 6/20/2004 02:11:21 PM

3 Wounded by Bomb at Central Bank;
22 Guerrillas Die in Fallujah Bombing

Guerrillas detonated a bomb outside Iraq`s central bank in Baghdad on Sunday, wounding 2 employees and a guard.

Guerrillas blew up another bomb in a crowded market in Baghdad on Sunday, injuring at least 5.

Fighting continued near the eastern city of Baquba between US troops and guerrillas, apparently a mixed Sunni and Shiite force. On Friday, one US soldier and three Iraqis had been killed there. The precise nature of this conflict remains frustratingly vague.

The US dropped two bombs on a poor residential district of Fallujah on Saturday, killing at least 22 and wounding 9. The F-16 destroyed two houses and damaged 6 others. Most of those dead, including 3 women and 5 children, belonged to the extended family of a local farmer, Muhammad Hamadi. The US maintained that the building hit was a safe house for the al-Tawhid terrorist group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Local Iraqis in Fallujah maintained that most of those killed were innocent civilians.

I don`t mean to be a killjoy, but for an Occupying Power to drop bombs on residential neighborhoods is a war crime. The three women and five children killed are not "collateral damage." They are human beings. They were killed by the United States. There are no such things as "precision strikes" in residential neighborhoods. Bombs not only throw off shrapnel themselves, they create lots of deadly flying debris, including flying glass from broken windows, that can kill and maim. Dropping bombs on an tank corps assembled in the desert and intending to do harm is one thing. Dropping bombs on a residential district is another.

We on the outside have no way of judging the various claims made in these sorts of situations. For all I know the Hamadi clan has a lot of blood on its hands and has been blowing up people. But if so, they should have been arrested by a special ops team cooperating with the Fallujah Brigade. You can`t go around bombing residential buildings and killing women and children if you are to retain any respect whatsoever from the local population or, indeed, the world community. Remember that when Bush puts pressure on India or Pakistan to send troops to help in Iraq, one of the implications is that he is asking their military officers to be an active party to things like bombing residential complexes. They have publics that are already angry about the US occupation of Iraq and how it has been (mis)managed. They need to be associated with this kind of action like they need a hole in the head. That`s the pragmatic argument. The legal argument against carrying out this kind of strike is that the pilots who conceivably be charged in some tribunal somewhere in the world, as, indeed, could everyone above them who approved the order to strike.

There were manifestations of public anger over all this in Fallujah, and presumably in the rest of the Sunni heartland. It doesn`t do any good to kill 15 guerrillas and their wives and children (if they were in fact guerrillas) if in so doing you create 30 more.

The case of 6 Shiite truck drives killed by a Sunni clan near Fallujah last week, which had threatened to provoke Sunni-Shiite violence, is still being mediated between Fallujah`s governing council and the Shiite Establishment. Some progress appears to have been made on defusing tensions.

In a similar conflict, Kurdish militiamen kidpnapped 10 Arab truck drives (from Samarra) in Kirkuk, in revenge for the recent kidnapping of 5 Kurdish soldiers in the region who were serving in the new Iraqi military. Tensions run high between Arabs and Kurds in the Kirkuk area and the place is a tinderbox.

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Iraq as the 51st state

20. Teil, Mehr s.# 17357 oder:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FF18Ak01.html

"He was a patron of terrorism ... He had long-established ties with al-Qaeda." - Vice President Dick Cheney on Saddam Hussein, June 14

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection." - Secretary of State Colin Powell, June 10

"We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." - 9-11 Commission, June 16

ANN ARBOR, Michigan - Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, has positioned himself as a virtually indispensable voice in the Iraq debate. His Internet weblog, Informed Comment, offers a stark contrast to the cacophony of uninformed armchair punditry on Iraq, not to mention talk-show hosts babbling about "wacky Iraqis". Professor Cole lived in Lucknow, India, and also in Beirut. He`s a fluent Arab speaker. The blog is uploaded daily, by himself (no staffers), and also offers extensive quotes from the Arab press. He gets as many as 200,000 fresh hits a week. Cole received this Asia Times Online correspondent in his fourth-floor office at the university`s International Institute in Ann Arbor.

ATol: Let`s start with the credibility of the Iraqi caretaker government vis-a-vis the Sunnis, Shi`ites and Kurds, more than vis-a-vis the US and the UN. Virtually everyone in the Sunni triangle and also in the Shi`ite south used to refer to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) as "the imported government". Will the same happen again to this American face of an Iraqi government?

Juan Cole: Everybody knows it`s an appointed government. It doesn`t spring from the rule of the Iraqi people. Grand Ayatollah [Ali al-]Sistani has issued a fatwa recently in which he openly said that. His view in this matter will be widely shared. It`s unfortunate that the Iraqi prime minister should have been a known CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] asset. I don`t think that it changes anything. The IGC, as you said, was seen as a puppet council by many people. There`s much more continuity between the IGC and this government than most people seem to realize. It`s pretty much the same cast of characters - either with regard to people who actually sat at the council and persons who represent factions who had a seat in that council.

ATol: What are the implications of what you`re saying for the Iraqi street?

JC: That nothing really has changed. These people are not getting anything like full sovereignty. I think it is a publicity stunt - without substance. The real question for a lot of Iraqis is not so much if it`s credible or not, but if it can accomplish anything for them. Since the Americans dissolved the Iraqi army, since it`s not entirely clear how do you get an Iraqi army back, one can be pessimistic ...

Army down, racism up
ATol: On the dissolution of the army: Do you think this was a blunder by proconsul Paul Bremer or was it carried out on purpose?

JC: On purpose in the sense of trying to make the Iraqis dependent on the Americans? Well, what Jay Garner said to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corp], I saw it with my own eyes, is that he believed one of the reasons the army was dissolved was that the Bremer team has as one of their primary goals in Iraq the imposition of Polish-style shock therapy. They wanted to transform Iraq into a capitalist state, as quickly as possible. This was part of the general plan to make Iraq a kind of model for the region.

ATol: This was the original neo-con plan?

JC: Yes, but the primacy of the economic policy is something that I don`t think is generally recognized. One of the reasons for getting rid of the Ba`ath army, according to Garner, was that they were afraid that the survival of any large Ba`ath institution like that might be an obstacle to the extreme liberalization of the economy. You can just imagine a situation in which the Americans wanted to denationalize Iraqi companies. If you had kept the Ba`ath army, they would come to the coalition and say, "No, you can`t sell off these companies, my cousin helps to run them"... They [the Americans] thought that the army would remain a power center able to intervene in policy debates, on the side of state control of the economy. So they dissolved it not based on security purposes, but to remove a potential obstacle to Polish-style shock therapy. They brought Polish economic advisers - that`s the reason for the Polish military involvement in Iraq. They tried to replicate the Polish experience. I don`t believe that the neo-cons at the Defense Department wanted to use the US military to supplant the Iraqi army. In fact, [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz had told Congress that it`s likely the US would be back to having only one division in Iraq by October 2003. They thought they could dissolve the army and just use the police to maintain order, and then they could do whatever they wanted to do with the economy: sell it off, bring in the big companies, open Iraq to Western investment. They hoped that the Iraqi bourgeoisie would emerge, there would be productivity gains, the country would be rich, and everybody else - the Iranians, the Syrians - would want to follow them.

ATol: Was that a mix of arrogance and incompetence, plus lack of knowledge of society and culture in Iraqi and the Middle East?

JC: Certainly the plan was born out of enormous ignorance of the Middle East. Remember, people with training in economics and political science very frequently stay away from knowing details. They have a set of principles, they think they are physicists, so the people planning this out, most of them knew no Arabic or anything really about the history and culture and society of the Arab world. Except for Wolfowitz, who had some knowledge of Indonesia when he was there as an ambassador ...

ATol: But Islam in Indonesia and Southeast Asia has very little to do with Islam in the Middle East.

JC: I would say it`s very substantially different. And Indonesia is not a sufficient background for planning out how to run Iraq ... And moreover Wolfowitz was the only one amongst them who had this kind of knowledge. So it`s clear to me that first of all they were very ignorant, also extremely arrogant because they were playing with people`s destinies. Some of the neo-cons of course are very close to the Likud Party in Israel, and I think that many of them have imbibed this kind of Israeli racism towards Arabs, that Arabs only respect force, that you can get them to inform on each other because of all the internal clan feuds ... People like Douglas Feith and Richard Perle have thought along these lines for a long time. Frankly, Israeli racism towards the Arabs is not a good guide to dealing with a society like Iraq, or with any society. Unlike the Palestinians, Iraq is a society that has not been dominated by a foreign power since 1932.

ATol: And the Iraqis expelled the British.

JC: The British were expelled and very decisively, in 1958. And there were many rebellions before that. This generation of young Iraqis grew up in Ba`ath schools, learning about nationalism, learning about anti-colonialism. What their identity really is about is asserting themselves vis-a-vis the West. The idea that they would be supine before a Western occupation was always crazy, and any of us who knew anything about the region predicted there would be a lot of trouble. Iraq was a modern, industrial society, with relatively high rates of literacy, run down in the 1990s very substantially but still not a society easy for foreigners to come and dominate.

Roads to hell
ATol: Assuming that the neo-con dream - the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad - is now in tatters, would it be the case that now the road through Baghdad leads back to Crawford, Texas?

JC: There`s some question of whether that could cost [President George W] Bush the election. A year ago, it didn`t seem likely to me that Iraq would be able to affect an election. But the steady drumbeat of violence, the mounting toll of dead and wounded, the miscalculations regarding the siege of Fallujah, provoking the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr`s militia, and then the Abu Ghraib scandal, the cumulative factor of all these events, according to opinion polls, really have taken a toll on Bush`s standing. If he were to be re-elected it would be historic: no one has been re-elected with these kinds of poll numbers. I think Iraq has become an albatross for the Bush administration. This so-called turnover of sovereignty - they`re hoping that the US press stops covering Iraq like it is doing now, very intensively, as though it is the 51st state, which essentially is being run by the American government. Everyone will have noticed that when Hamid Karzai was elected by the Loya Jirga, the very next day Afghanistan fell off the front page and went to page 17.

ATol: And now it has fallen off the papers entirely.

JC: Now you can have several American servicemen killed and they are not even reported. I discern an unwritten rule among American journalists, that the American public is not interested in places which have their own government. The real significance of the so-called handover of sovereignty is that the Bush administration and its political advisers are hoping that the American press will take this moment as a cue to turn to reporting about Laci Peterson and other nonsense stories, local murder mysteries.

ATol: Do you think this might work? With Fox News maybe, but what about the Washington Post and the New York Times?

JC: Actually, it might. It might push Iraq off the front page. I don`t agree with you that it would work most of all with Fox News. Because of its militarism and its attempt to get viewers from the American right, Fox pays more attention to Iraq than most of the other networks do.

ATol: In terms of sensational images.

JC: Sensational images, but it`s just inevitable that if the US military very largely votes Republican, and you want those people watching Fox programming, they`re interested in what`s going on in Iraq. I think capitalism in a way swings Fox towards doing more Iraq reporting than some of the other networks. If there`s a firefight in Baqubah, it seems that Fox is more likely to report it than the other networks.

ATol: But they report only the Pentagon side of the story.

JC: I agree that Fox is very slanted, but the way mass media work can often be ironic. Although Fox thinks it is reporting news of interest to its right-wing viewers, reporting this firefight in Baqubah and the way the US is putting down those insurgents, anybody who actually watches this will come out with a double message: one is the Fox message, and the other message is "Jesus, a lot of trouble in Iraq".

ATol: We have learned from the resistance, from some former Saddam Hussein generals, that the resistance will actually increase after June 30, that the postwar had been planned for years, and that everyone associated in some form or another with the Americans and the new caretaker government will be a target. So there will be even more bloodshed. How will this bloodshed rebound on the US? And what about the media: will they report it?

JC: This is the problem: it`s difficult for the insurgency to target the Americans. They can get some RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] against an American base, they do this every day, it usually results in some casualties, relatively light. They`ve mainly turned to soft targets, Iraqis, so they blow up a market in Baghdad, or police stations. They are attempting to just foment a feeling in the country that the Americans are not actually in control. That will continue and may as well increase. I read a lot about these incidents in the Arabic press - they never get reported in the Western press.

ATol: But the important point is that these incidents are reported on alJazeera and al-Arabiya and watched every night by millions in the Arab world.

JC: AlJazeera is excellent on Iraq news, and it reports all of these incidents where there are casualties. But as far as the American public is concerned, I think that it may well be that casualties among US servicemen in Iraq, that`s going to be on page 17. But if you did have an increase in the number of incidents, it`s possible that it would get more coverage. It`s up to the journalists now. Are they going to take this bait, are they going to be manipulated in this way as they have been manipulated all along?

ATol: Maybe it`s the case that everybody has been manipulated: the American press, and now also the United Nations, forced to approve a new Iraq resolution. For millions of Iraqis, the UN is synonymous with sanctions.

JC: This is different from the rest of the Arab world, where they associate the UN with peacekeeping and a more even-handed policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the UN itself is not unaware of this, and they don`t want to get heavily involved in Iraq. The problem for the world community is that the US has presented them with a fait accompli. It`s not in anybody`s interest in Europe, for instance, for Iraq to descend into chaos. Europe is heavily dependent on Persian Gulf petroleum, it could be deindustrialized if things get too bad. So when the Americans come and say, "If you pass a resolution of this sort, we`ll set the process back to order," who`s going to argue with them?

The Muqtada factor
ATol - Let`s examine the move against Muqtada al-Sadr. Was it another blunder by the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority)?

JC: These things are not transparent. It`s amazing to me, we supposedly live in a democracy in the United States. And yet, once the election has occurred, the public gives up a lot of right to know. And so the CPA has been run in a very untransparent way, we never know why they do anything, they never say, and they are constantly putting out those kinds of propagandistic statements, they`re always trying to find demons to blame everything on, Saddam, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and then Muqtada al-Sadr. My own impression is that the Americans provoked this uprising by Muqtada, that he had not done anything in particular that might suggest he was a military threat. He had given strict orders to his militia not to fire on Americans. When the Americans came after Muqtada, he launched this uprising. I think the Shi`ite clerics made a decision to stay out of it, retreat from their positions and have the Mahdi Army have Najaf and Karbala. The Mahdi Army was not strong in those two places. I still think that it`s plausible that it was Muqtada`s reaction to the assassination of Sheikh [Ahmed] Yassin that caused the CPA to go after him. We must remember that the CPA is dominated by neo-conservatives, that twentysomething people like [neo-con pundit] Michael Ledeen`s daughter [Simone Ledeen] have been running the Iraqi economy. Decision-making would be coming from people who are very close to the Likud Party and who were extremely alarmed when Muqtada al-Sadr said he was like the right arm of Hamas and would avenge the death of Sheikh Yassin.

ATol: Have you read any similar analysis in any of the Arab papers at the time?

JC: No. I haven`t. But it`s possible. I know Hezbollah called for revenge for the murder, and also did call for Iraqi solidarity about this. But this analysis, I have never seen it in the Arabic press.

ATol: You were arguably one of the few, if not the only one, in the West who wrote that the Shi`ites would never forgive America for the bombing of Karbala, and you also cared to explain why.

JC: Most Americans and Westerners don`t understand what Karbala means. During the Iranian revolution there was a slogan that "every day is Ashura". Karbala is what an anthropologist called a paradigm in people`s lives. The idea of American GIs firing tank missiles anywhere near the shrine of Imam Hussein in major battle with Shi`ites is unbearable, even considering that the Mahdi Army and Muqtada al-Sadr are not liked around Karbala, they are considered lower-class thugs. I compare them to gangster rappers. So I`m not saying they were popular. I`m saying that the Shi`ites look at them as their own problem. And if there is a choice between them and the Americans, symbolically at least, regardless of what they actually do, they could never make that choice for the Americans. People are very upset all over the Shi`ite world that there was this desecration of the shrine cities. The amount of rage among the Shi`ites towards the Americans now is greater than I`ve seen since the Iranian revolution. It`s a cost of these kinds of frankly stupid policies the Bush administration has been pursuing in Iraq. I don`t believe the general American public is even aware of this. They keep asking things like "Why do they hate us?" ...

ATol: What about the role of Iran in this new Iraqi configuration?

JC: They have been behind Ayatollah Sistani. But the Iranians are badly split - between the hardliners and the reformists. For the reformists, Sistani is a godsend. He rejects the theory of clerical rule, the velayat-e-faqih. And in Iran it is illegal to reject it. Ayatollah [Hossein Ali] Montazeri was put under house arrest for rejecting it. From that point of view, Sistani is much more like the reformists. He`s not a Khomeinist. There have been reports of some of the reformists actually declaring themselves as followers of Sistani - because you can choose, in Shi`ite Islam, which ayatollah to follow. So I think this is a problem for [Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and the hardliners if Iraq becomes an alternative center of religious authority and undermines their position. From this point of view, they`re nervous about Sistani. On the other hand, he is part of the club, he`s got excellent credentials, training, he speaks their language. What he wants for Iraq is something they can live with; he wants a parliamentary government, which would be Shi`ite-dominated, in which the Shi`ite clergy could intervene to shape legislation by their fatwas, by appealing to the consciousness of the Shi`ite legislators. I`d compare this vision of Sistani`s for Iraq with 1950s Ireland and the position of the Catholic Church there. There was a secular, elected parliament. If the parliament took up any issue like divorce, the bishops would state their position and put enormous pressure on the representatives to vote their way.

ATol: So it would be nothing like a Khomeinist system.

JC: Nothing like that. On the other hand, from the point of view of the hardline Iranians, it would not be a terrible system either. It would be a Shi`ite-dominated state, it would be friendly to Tehran inevitably, the Shi`ite clergy would have a great deal of influence. And you probably could not get Khomeinism in Iraq because of the 40% of the population which is Sunni. So actually Sistani`s vision is the best Iran can hope for. It would be much better than, say, a return of the Ba`ath. Moreover, Sistani wants to eliminate the presence of American troops, and this also pleases the Iranians. These are status quo people: they don`t like a lot of trouble. Although the Americans keep depicting Iran as a source of trouble in the world, they haven`t gone around beating their neighbors. They`ve been a much less turbulent revolutionary country than one might have expected, or that Saddam was. What I`m saying about them being status quo is that Muqtada makes them nervous. He`s clearly a revolutionary of some sort. He`s clearly got in mind to cause a lot of trouble.

The al-Qaeda factor
ATol: Wildly disparate estimates of the presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq range from 600 to 7,000. Do you discern any pattern, any strategy of al-Qaeda in Iraq? And do you buy the myth of al-Qaeda as this major SPECTRE-like, all-enveloping evil organization?

JC: First of all you have to begin with the definition of what al-Qaeda is. There`s a technical definition of al-Qaeda: fighters who gave their loyalty to Osama bin Laden. Those are very few: a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. Then you could say people oriented towards bin Laden`s way of thinking who have been Arab-Afghans, who had fought in Afghanistan: this is a much larger group, like 5,000. I`ve seen an estimate of 15,000, when you include groups such as the one responsible for the attacks in Casablanca. Relatively few of those had any links with Osama bin Laden - they were local, radical salafi groups. If we`re talking about radical, violent salafis, they might reach 15,000. But then again there are 1,2 billion people in the Muslim world. These are small local networks, you cannot talk of an organization. Bin Laden has a general policy of not putting resources into situations that are already in turmoil. He`s never done anything in the West Bank. He`d be much more interested in getting something going on in Indonesia or Malaysia. My information is that bin Laden is not interested in Iraq. I don`t think there are even 600 al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq. There are foreign fighters but they are not technically al-Qaeda: rather Muslim Brotherhood types. The vast majority of the resistance is composed by Iraqis: not only ex-Ba`athists, but Sunni nationalists, salafis ... I suspect there are 25,000 or so insurgents in Iraq, doing something at least occasionally. Even if there were 400 or 500 foreign fighters, they would be a drop in the bucket.

ATol: How could the neo-cons engineer a victory next November, by using this period of illusion of the next four months in Iraq? Supposing it goes terribly wrong, as it might, how could they still get Bush re-elected?

JC: I know they are upset and depressed by Ahmad Chalabi being sidelined. And there is pressure from the Republican Party: it wasn`t a wise thing to drag the president into another war that would then spill over into the election year. However you look at this thing it is a political disaster: even if Bush survives it. Some of the neo-cons at the Pentagon are now thinking of putting the Sunnis and the Kurds together and playing them off against the Shi`ites - as if the Kurds would cooperate with ex-Ba`ath Sunnis ... There is going to be a Shi`ite-dominated Iraq. The neo-cons assumed that the Sh`ites in Iraq might not be so sympathetic towards the Palestinians. Looking at your question, what they may try to do is this: they have managed to get Iyad Allawi as prime minister - although he wasn`t the United States` first choice. These last few weeks Bremer has reversed the de-Ba`athification policy, there are a number of ex-Ba`athists in this new government. And they may attempt in some way to bring back the Ba`ath army, as a security instrument for the government to establish control.

ATol: But most of these generals are part of the resistance. They would never work for the Americans.

JC: If you gave them their jobs back to work for Allawi they might not be part of the resistance anymore. Allawi for the past 15 years has been organizing ex-Ba`ath generals. If anybody could handle them, it could be him. I`m not, by the way, saying this would be a bad thing. I think the extreme de-Ba`athification program, pursued apparently at the insistence of the Chalabi clique, was itself a mistake. It wasn`t what the US military had planned on doing.

ATol: In sum, another total blunder by the CPA - a Pentagon decision implemented by Bremer.

JC: Yes, I think it was a decision by the Pentagon. I think it was done for many reasons. Initially the Pentagon planned on turning Iraq over to the Chalabi clique. For Allawi to reverse it somewhat, and to succeed in getting back some semblance of a military, three divisions, 60,000 men, this could be a good thing, it could contribute to order. The danger, of course, is that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI], the Da`wa party, the Shi`ite forces which have spent the last 35 years fighting the Ba`ath, they`re not going to like this. It could even cause more trouble.

ATol: So is there a risk of civil war in Iraq?

JC: No, not civil war. I lived in Beirut during the early years of the civil war there, and you had these militias which set pitched battles and so forth - I don`t think that can happen in Iraq because the Americans are still powerful enough through their air force to stop it. What the Americans wouldn`t be very good at stopping would be if you had mass urban turmoil. If you had Sunni-Shi`ite riots between Adhamiya and Kazamiya for instance, in Baghdad. You can`t send attack helicopters to stop that. Or Kirkuk, which seems to me to be a tinderbox. If there is urban turmoil in the country, this is something I think the United States cannot deal with. That seems to me to be the real nightmare scenario.

Iraq as Bush`s nightmare
ATol: There`s a more realistic scenario of the resistance increasing in the next few months.

JC: It will, but the Americans are hard targets. I don`t expect the insurgency to be able to hit the Americans and make a difference. Whether Iraq has a big impact on the election will depend very much on what`s going on in Iraq in September and October, because people have short memories in elections. I think the Bush administration will be very careful not to provoke another Fallujah this fall. You could have a low-level guerrilla [war] going on, not terribly well reported in America, Iraq could well fall off the front page, it might not be a big issue in the election, so Bush may get away with it. But if he`s re-elected, it`s still going to be there. You simply cannot have a big, important oil producer at the head of the Persian Gulf in a state of turmoil. In a way, if Bush is re-elected, it would be poetic justice that he continues to spend a lot of energy [on] putting Iraq back together. If [Democratic presidential candidate John] Kerry were elected, he would have the same problem. Kerry being elected is not a solution.

ATol: Do you detect any Iraq policy at all from the Kerry side?

JC: Well, he says he wants to internationalize, and the real question is whether it`s not too late. If Kerry is elected in November and he goes back to France and Germany and says, "OK, it`s a new ball game, won`t you come in with me?" are the French and German governments really going to be eager to send their troops? By then also, as the Sistani fatwa makes clear, all traces of the occupation should have been erased. There may be a building demand from the Iraqi side that foreigners just get out of their country. So Kerry`s internationalization will not even be welcomed in Iraq by that point. The question is: has Bush ruined the situation beyond repair so that Kerry`s policy is difficult to implement?

ATol: What would you say?

JC: I think it is very difficult for Kerry to have his policy implemented.

ATol: Finally: Will Osama be captured next October?

JC: If the Bush administration knew how to capture Osama, he would have been captured. If they could do it now, they would do it. It would become a campaign slogan. They don`t have good intelligence, and even the Pakistanis don`t have good intelligence. So I don`t think there will be an October surprise.


(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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unday, Jun. 20, 2004
New Abuse Charges
Classified sections of the military`s prisoner abuse report detail sexual assaults on women detainees
By VIVECA NOVAK AND DOUGLAS WALLER

Could the abuse of prisoners in Iraq have gone beyond the beatings and sexual humiliation already alleged? Unreleased, classified parts of the report on prison abuse from Major General Anthony Taguba, which were read to TIME, contain indications of mistreatment of female prisoners. In a Feb. 21 statement to Taguba, Lieut. Colonel Steven L. Jordan, former head of the Abu Ghraib interrogation center, said he had received reports "that there were members of the MI [Military Intelligence] community that had come over and done a late-night interrogation of two female detainees" last October. According to a statement by Jordan`s boss, Colonel Thomas Pappas, three interrogators were later cited for violations of military law in their handling of the two females, ages 17 and 18. Senate Armed Services Committee investigators are probing whether the two women were sexually abused. The Pentagon declined to comment.

Meanwhile, a class action filed in California on behalf of former detainees raises the specter of brutal physical abuse.

One plaintiff, identified only as Neisef, claims that after he was taken from his home on the outskirts of Baghdad last November and sent to Abu Ghraib, Americans made him disrobe and attached electrical wires to his genitals. He claims he was shocked three times. Although a vein in his penis ruptured and he had blood in his urine, he says, he was refused medical attention. In another session, Neisef claims, he was held down by two men while a uniformed woman forced him to have sex with her. "I was crying," said Neisef, 28. "I felt like my whole manhood was gone." The class action also claims that detainees were raped in prison. On June 6, Neisef was released, after a U.S. civilian told him, he says, that he had been wrongly accused by informants. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad confirms that a prisoner with Neisef`s ID number was released on that date, and TIME has obtained a copy of his release order. But the Pentagon would not comment on the specifics of Neisef`s account.

With reporting by Mark Thompson


Copyright © 2004 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

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Politics: Agent Provocateur
Behind Michael Moore`s new Bush-bashing bonanza

Eyeing the undecided: Michael Moore on the poster for his new movie

By David Gates
Newsweek

June 28 issue - Michael Moore`s "Fahrenheit 9/11" isn`t even out till late this week, and you probably already know what you think about it. Some of the advance reaction has been what you`d expect: Madonna recommending it to her audiences, a conservative group trying to pressure theaters not to show it. True, Fox TV posted a rave review on its Web site—"a tribute to patriotism"—while Tina Brown`s column quoted a Kerry supporter in Hollywood comparing Moore to Goebbels. (That Goebbels? And they say Moore is over the top.) But mostly it has been the usual suspects taking the usual sides. For the right, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a scurrilous attack on the commander in chief in a time of war. For the left, on the other hand, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a scurrilous attack on the commander in chief in a time of war—and it was about time, though no prudent mainstream Democrat would want to come out and say so. For everybody else ... well, is there anybody else?

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is that rare documentary that`s getting action-flick distribution, opening on 500 screens—and in case you miss it in the theater, the DVD should be out well before the election. Disney`s Miramax division, headed by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, bankrolled the film, but Disney head Michael Eisner refused to release it, citing Disney`s tradition as a "nonpartisan company"—you know, the sort of nonpartisan company whose ABC Radio division gives a forum to Rush Limbaugh. Moore`s camp points to Disney`s need to do business in Jeb Bush`s state—and since the film is nearly as harsh about Saudi royals as about Jeb`s brother, isn`t it suspicious that money from one of them, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, is keeping the financially troubled Euro Disney afloat? Or is that an-other conspiracy theory? If, as some observers believe, Eisner`s real motivation was to stick it to his archrival Harvey Weinstein, it backfired. "Every press break that mentions `Fahrenheit 9/11` is another pin in a Michael Eisner voodoo doll," says a source close to the situation. To make a long story short: Eisner looks like the Bushes` poodle and Canada`s Lions Gate will distribute the film—just in time for July 4. Disney will offer a counterdocumentary called "America`s Heart and Soul," with panoramic vistas, soaring music and heartwarming profiles of cowboys, gospel singers and handicapped athletes.

RELATED STORY:

An exploration of Europe`s Fascination with Michael Moore. From our International Edition

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5251867/site/newsweek/

The core narrative of "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a lot less uplifting. It goes like this: the Bush administration seized power by a fraudulent vote in Florida and exploited the September 11 terrorist attacks to pump up fear, tamp down dissent, enrich its cronies and, ultimately, to launch an ill-advised war against Iraq—on the dubious grounds that Saddam Hussein was somehow in league with Al Qaeda. (Those darn conspiracy theories!) If this narrative sounds familiar, that`s because it`s basically what the Democratic Party will be arguing in this fall`s election (though it`ll cool its grudge about Florida to keep from looking like a sore loser). And since just under half of Americans now approve of Bush`s performance—presumably not just because he balked at the Kyoto Protocol—this reading of recent history is hardly a seditious salvo from the extremist fringe. Last week alone, two mainstream bipartisan groups—the 9-11 Commission and a delegation of retired diplomats and generals calling for "regime change" in Washington—made some of the same points Moore does, though without the entertainment value.

RELATED STORY:

Isikoff: Do Moore`s Allegations Add Up?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5251769/site/newsweek/

And that`s the real problem with "Fahrenheit 9/11": not the message, but the method. Lefties love Moore because he`s willing to fight as dirty, and with as much contemptuous relish, as the Limbaughs of the world—which is why the right hates him. No one will forget that footage, apparently from a satellite feed, of Paul Wolfowitz putting his comb in his mouth to slick down his hair or of the sub-"American Idol" vocalist John Ashcroft belting out "Let the Eagle Soar" or, far more relevant and damning, of a dazed-looking Bush, filmed by a teacher, continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to Florida schoolchildren after he`d been told of the 9/11 attacks.

VIDEO GALLERY

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5251768/site/newsweek/

True, Moore is playing to a mass audience conditioned by nuance-free entertainment. For some viewers, simply to see Bush in that classroom with his thousand-mile stare would be persuasive enough: they don`t need Moore`s voice-over saying "Was he thinking, `I`ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd`? `Which of them screwed me`?" For many others, a spoonful of crudity makes the medicine go down. Moore shows uncharacteristic restraint in covering the 9/11 attacks, in which we hear explosions and cries and see only a blank screen. His default mode, though, is overkill: he even notes that on the night before the attacks Bush slept on "fine French linen." Surely scratchy muslin wouldn`t have stopped the evildoers.

Is it unfair to ridicule Wolfowitz`s hygiene, Ashcroft`s unctuously unhip musical taste or Bush`s deer-in-the-headlights stare in order to jazz up a serious argument over whether they`re leading America in the wrong direction? Sure it is. Is it fun? Depends on where you stand—or on whether you`re afraid that too much fun will discredit a serious cause. Will Moore`s heavy-handedness persuade anybody who isn`t already persuaded? That`s where you come in—if you`re one of the 27 Americans still in the undecided camp. So sit back and enjoy. Or sit home and boycott. The future of—who knows? Harvey Weinstein? Michael Moore? democracy itself? the minimum-wage dude selling popcorn at your local multiplex?—hangs in the balance.

With David Jefferson
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

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Prisoners captured in Afghanistan aboard an American plane bound for Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, early in the detention program.

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June 21, 2004
U.S. Said to Overstate Value of Guantánamo Detainees
By TIM GOLDEN and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, June 19 — For nearly two and a half years, American officials have maintained that locked within the steel-mesh cells of the military prison here are some of the world`s most dangerous terrorists — "the worst of a very bad lot," Vice President Dick Cheney has called them.

The officials say information gleaned from the detainees has exposed terrorist cells, thwarted planned attacks and revealed vital intelligence about Al Qaeda. The secrets they hold and the threats they pose justify holding them indefinitely without charge, Bush administration officials have said.

But as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legal status of the 595 men imprisoned here, an examination by The New York Times has found that government and military officials have repeatedly exaggerated both the danger the detainees posed and the intelligence they have provided.

In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said only a relative handful — some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen — were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization`s inner workings.

While some Guantánamo intelligence has aided terrorism investigations, none of of it has enabled intelligence or law-enforcement services to foil imminent attacks, the officials said. Compared with the higher-profile Qaeda operatives held elsewhere by the C.I.A., the Guantánamo detainees have provided only a trickle of intelligence with current value, the officials said. Because nearly all of that intelligence is classified, most of the officials would discuss it only on the condition of anonymity.

"When you have the overall mosaic of all the intelligence picked up all over the world, Guantánamo provided a very small piece of that mosaic," said a senior American official who has reviewed the intelligence in detail. "It`s been helpful and valuable in certain areas. Was it the mother lode of intelligence? No."

In September 2002, eight months after the detainees began to arrive in Cuba, a top-secret study by the Central Intelligence Agency raised questions about their significance, suggesting that many of the accused terrorists appeared to be low-level recruits who went to Afghanistan to support the Taliban or even innocent men swept up in the chaos of the war, current and former officials who read the assessment said.

Nearly two years later, military officials said, the evidence against many of the detainees is still so sparse that investigators have been able to deliver cases for military prosecution against only 15 of the suspects, 6 of whom have already been designated as eligible for trial by President Bush. Investigators are now preparing 35 to 40 other cases for the military tribunals, those officials said.

In interviews, officials at Guantánamo and in the Pentagon defended the intelligence-gathering effort and said it continued to produce useful information. "Every single day we get some piece of information that`s relevant to now," said Steve Rodriguez, who oversees the interrogation teams at the base.

Officials said the intelligence had allowed them to piece together a more detailed picture of Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001, including how young jihadis were recruited and screened, how the organization moved funds and how it related to other militant groups. They said some were important Qaeda operatives, including financiers, a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden and — a recent discovery — a militant who they say helped recruit 9/11 hijackers.

Yet even as he argued the importance of that information, the commander of the task force that runs the Guantánamo prison, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, acknowledged disappointment among some senior officials in Washington.

"The expectations, I think, may have been too high at the outset," he said. "There are those who expected a flow of intelligence that would help us break the most sophisticated terror organization in a matter of months. But that hasn`t happened."

In recent weeks, the Pentagon has initiated a broad study of prison operations, including an examination of the criteria used to determine which detainees are held there, officials at Guantánamo said. "Everything is on the table," said Col. Tim Lynch, the chief of staff at Guantánamo.

The Pentagon`s determination to hold the detainees as "enemy combatants" — beyond the reach of United States law and unbound by the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war — has also come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of the scandal over abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Defense Department officials have acknowledged that American jailers in Iraq, under pressure to produce better intelligence, adapted some new, more aggressive interrogation techniques that were approved by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo.

While refusing to discuss specifics, Pentagon officials called the interrogation methods used at Guantánamo humane and said they had applied more severe methods only sparingly. In at least one of those cases, they said, the techniques prompted an important Qaeda member to give up vital information.

But new details of that case, which involved a 26-year-old Saudi man who apparently tried unsuccessfully to enter the United States as the 20th hijacker in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, call some of those assertions into question.

Several officials familiar with the case said that for months, no one at Guantánamo even knew who the detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, was and that he was identified only after the Federal Bureau of Investigation stepped in. The officials also said that the harsher interrogation methods used against him were largely unsuccessful, that he had little sense of other Qaeda plots, and that he had been most forthcoming under more subtle persuasion.

Even now, officials acknowledge that they have been unable to get any information from at least 60 detainees — including in some cases their identities. Those uncertainties, the officials said, leave open the possibility that more serious terrorists may be among Guantánamo`s detainees.

"We weren`t sure in the beginning what we had; we`re not sure today what we have," said Gen. James T. Hill, the head of the Army`s Southern Command. "There are still people who do not talk to us. We could have the keys to the kingdom and not know it."

The problems of collecting information about the detainees have also hampered their screening for possible release. As a result, some of the men are being held apparently as much for what officials do not know about them as for what they do.

Officials said they had cautiously vetted the 146 detainees who have been freed, including the 16 who had been transferred to the custody of their home governments. Even so, at least a handful of serious mistakes have already been made.

New accounts from officials in Afghanistan and the United States indicate that at least 5 of the 57 Afghan detainees released have returned to the battlefield as Taliban commanders or fighters. Some of the five have been involved in new attacks on Americans, officials in southern Afghanistan said, including a notorious Taliban commander, Mullah Shahzada, who was reportedly killed in a recent accident.

American and foreign officials have also grown increasingly concerned about the prospect that detainees who arrived at Guantánamo representing little threat to the United States may have since been radicalized by the conditions of their imprisonment and others held with them.

"Guantánamo is a huge problem for Americans," a senior Arab intelligence official familiar with its operations said. "Even those who were not hard-core extremists have now been indoctrinated by the true believers. Like any other prison, they have been taught to hate. If they let these people go, these people will make trouble."

First Wave

Initial Screenings Were Flawed

As the Taliban government crumbled, American officials braced themselves for what they expected would be waves of hardened terrorists captured in the Afghanistan war. Military officials said they had culled the most dangerous of the roughly 10,000 prisoners caught there and shipped them to Guantánamo Bay.

"These are people who would gnaw through hydraulic lines at the back of a C-17 to bring it down," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as the first 20 shackled prisoners arrived in Cuba on Jan. 11, 2002.

The first makeshift prison at Guantánamo, called Camp X-Ray, was built and run accordingly. Inmates were dressed in Day-Glo orange jump suits and shackled whenever they were moved, their eyes covered by blacked-out goggles or hoods. Fearing that the terrorists among them might somehow seek revenge, officials instructed military police guards to cover their name badges and avoid any mention of their families, hometowns or outside jobs.

"We really didn`t have a good feel for who we were dealing with," Gen. Rick Baccus, who took over command of the military police units two months after the camp opened, said in an interview. "We had to err on the side of security."

But almost immediately, questions began to emerge — in Afghanistan, at Guantánamo and eventually in Washington — about the pedigrees of some of the men and why they had been selected to go to Cuba.

At a sprawling detention camp at the airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan, military intelligence officers, F.B.I. agents and others scrambled vainly to keep up with the torrent of prisoners, officers who served there said, making it nearly impossible to weed out the most dangerous.

"It was like trying to catch guys as they ran by," a former Kandahar interrogator recalled. "Some you were going to miss."

C.I.A. operatives took their pick of prisoners turned over by commanders of the Afghan Northern Alliance. They also took custody of some military prisoners in whom they had interest, military officers said.

"Anybody who we thought was going to have significant value we had priority in debriefing," said a former senior C.I.A. official. "We focused on the individuals we got in Afghanistan and elsewhere who we thought were linchpins in the process. D.O.D. got stuck processing the rest."

Officials of the Department of Defense now acknowledge that the military`s initial screening of the prisoners for possible shipment to Guantánamo was flawed. It was not until hundreds of detainees had arrived here that the classified criteria even referred directly to the threat that they might represent, military officials said.

But some clues were obvious. Some of the detainees were elderly or infirm. One of those was Faiz Muhammad, a genial old man with a long wispy beard whom interrogators nicknamed "Al Qaeda Claus." Another, who was able to make the trip only after extensive medical care from Army doctors in Afghanistan, quickly became known as "Half-Dead Bob."

"You had a group of people who didn`t come with ID cards, who weren`t wearing uniforms, who were of all kinds of different nationalities, gathered up off various parts of the battlefield in a very chaotic environment," General Hill, the Southern Command chief, recalled. "We were all in very uncharted waters."

A former secretary of the Army, Thomas E. White, who supervised a team of senior Pentagon officers at Guantánamo, said he was told by a senior military official at the base on an early visit that only a third to a half of the detainees appeared to be of some value and that sorting through them would be a considerable problem.

In late summer 2002, a senior C.I.A. analyst with extensive experience in the Middle East spent about a week at the prison camp observing and interviewing dozens of detainees, said officials who read his detailed memorandum.

While the survey was anecdotal, those officials said the document, which contained about 15 pages, concluded that a substantial number of the detainees appeared to be low-level militants, aspiring holy warriors who had rushed to Afghanistan to defend the Taliban, or simply innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Senior military officials now readily acknowledge that many members of the intelligence team initially sent to Guantánamo were poorly prepared to sort through the captives. During the first half of 2002, they said, almost none of the Army interrogators had any substantial background in terrorism, Al Qaeda or other relevant subjects.

One Army intelligence reservist had previously been managing a Dunkin` Donuts. Many younger Army interrogators had never questioned a real prisoner before. As in Afghanistan, interrogators at Guantánamo asked the same basic questions again and again, many former detainees recalled.

"They asked me, `Do you know the Taliban? Do you know Mullah Muhammad Omar? Do you know bin Laden?` " said Jan Muhammad, 37, a farmer from Helmand Province who said he had been forcibly conscripted into the Taliban. "I said, `I have never seen bin Laden; I have not even seen bin Laden`s car driving past.` "

Interpreters were in such short supply that the Army turned to private contractors, most of whom knew nothing about intelligence. The Southern Command, responsible for military operations in Latin America, had no particular experience with Al Qaeda or Afghanistan, either. Nonetheless, its intelligence analysts often rewrote reports on the detainees as they saw fit, former interrogators complained.

One of the few American intelligence sectors to show any early interest in the detainees was an obscure defense intelligence unit that traced weapons around the world, one interrogator said. As a result, interrogators were required to question detainees about the serial numbers on rifles they had used and the markings on their bullets. "Of course, they had no idea," the interrogator said.

Military intelligence units at Guantánamo managed to solve some of the shortcomings, gathering available experts — a Lebanese-born F.B.I. counterterrorism specialist and an Afghan interpreter, for example — and having them conduct a daylong seminar on Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other relevant subjects.

But senior defense officials grew frustrated with the shortage of compelling information. "At the beginning, the process was broken everywhere," said Lt. Col. Anthony Christino III, a recently retired Army intelligence officer who specialized in counterterrorism and was familiar the Guantánamo intelligence. "The quality of the screening, the quality of the interrogations and the quality of the analysis were all very poor. Efforts were made to improve things, but after decades of neglect of human intelligence skills, it can`t be fixed in a few years."

Defense officials ultimately ordered a broad review of the intelligence-gathering effort. That assessment, in September 2002, led to a series of changes including a major overhaul of intelligence databases and the addition of 30 days of basic training for interrogators and analysts at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., a course quickly nicknamed "Terrorism 101."

Around the same time, faced with continuing resistance from many detainees, some military intelligence officers urged that they be allowed to take advantage of the suspension of Geneva Conventions to try more coercive methods — a step that led to bitter conflicts between military intelligence members and military criminal investigators assigned to prepare cases for the tribunals.

"As time went on, people wanted to do more," a senior officer who served there said. "The detainees were resistant. They knew we weren`t going to torture them. So we needed to come up with a Plan B for the small group of people who wouldn`t talk and who we thought did have intelligence."

The 20th Hijacker

It Took Months to Identify Kahtani

For interrogators at Guantánamo looking to score a high-profile intelligence victory, Mr. Kahtani, the Saudi who was the so-called 20th hijacker, appeared to be their man. In the end, though, his case instead came to illustrate some of the problems they faced in determining who they were holding and what they knew.

According to several officials familiar with the case, military intelligence officers had no idea who the young detainee was when he arrived in Cuba from Afghanistan, where he had been captured on the battlefield in December 2001. For some weeks, the officials said, Mr. Kahtani — like most of the detainees — refused to cooperate with interrogators, withholding his name and denying their suspicions that he was Saudi.

Then, in July 2002, a routine check by F.B.I. agents matched his fingerprints to a thumbprint from a man who had been turned back by an immigration official after flying into Orlando International Airport in Florida from London on Aug. 3, 2001, without a return ticket or hotel reservation.

Members of the F.B.I. unit investigating the Sept. 11 attacks were immediately intrigued, officials said. On that same day in August 2001, they noted, toll records showed calls from a pay phone at the Orlando airport to Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a Qaeda member in the United Arab Emirates who served as a logistical coordinator for the attacks, the officials said.

Checking surveillance camera recordings for that day, the agents found that a rental car used by the hijackers` leader, Mohamed Atta, entered an airport parking lot shortly before Mr. Kahtani`s Virgin Atlantic flight arrived from London, officials said.

In July 2002, about a week after Mr. Kahtani`s identity was discovered, military officials invited the F.B.I. to question him, officials said.

The bureau sent a longtime counterterrorism specialist who is fluent in Arabic and worked extensively on investigations of Al Qaeda. Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, declined to comment on the Kahtani case, other than to request that the agent`s identity be withheld from publication to ensure his safety.

Over a series of interrogations that extended into the fall of 2002, the agent slowly built a rapport with Mr. Kahtani, approaching him with respect and restraint, officials said. "He prays with them, he has tea with them, and it works," a senior official said, speaking generally of the agent`s approach to terrorist suspects.

Mr. Kahtani began to open up, officials said. He disclosed that he attended an important Qaeda planning meeting with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, in January 2000. Mr. Kahtani also said he had a relative he thought might be living near Chicago.

The relative, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, is believed by officials to have been planted in the United States as a Qaeda "sleeper" agent. He was taken into custody as a material witness shortly after arriving in the country on Sept. 10, 2001, and was later confined to a Naval brig in Charleston, S.C., with two American citizens charged as "enemy combatants," Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi.

One official said that Mr. Kahtani had admitted that he had intended to join the hijackers but that he had given up little or nothing about other Qaeda plans. To some F.B.I. experts, officials said, his ignorance seemed credible: he had been recruited to be what the plotters called a "muscle" hijacker, someone to subdue passengers rather than pilot a plane. Officials said such lower-level operatives were generally only minimally informed even as to the details of attacks in which they would take part.

But military intelligence officials were skeptical, believing that new approaches to Mr. Kahtani might well reveal plans for attacks that were to follow the hijackings or that might have involved Mr. Marri. In late November 2002, Pentagon officials informed the F.B.I. that they would take over interrogations of Mr. Kahtani, an official said.

A list of 17 new interrogation techniques — the first such addition since the Army field manual was issued in 1987 — was approved by Mr. Rumsfeld in early December. Ten of the techniques were used on Mr. Kahtani before complaints from some military officials prompted Mr. Rumsfeld to retract his approval for the more extreme methods, military officials said.

Military officials refused to say which techniques had been used on Mr. Kahtani, but the list, contained in a memo dated Jan. 8, 2003, included hooding prisoners during questioning, placing them in "stress positions" like standing or squatting for up to four hours, aggravating phobias like fear of dogs, and "mild noninjurious physical contact," officials familiar with the memo said. Another detainee was also subjected to methods from the same list, they said.

General Hill, the Southern Command chief, said the tougher techniques used on a detainee he would not identify — but who was identified by others as Mr. Kahtani — "were successful." Last month, a senior Bush administration official told The Times that Mr. Kahtani had provided information to interrogators "about a planned attack and about financial networks to fund terrorist operations." But several other officials disputed that characterization, saying he had not given any new information about plots by Al Qaeda.

Carrot and Stick

Hard Treatment and Favored Treatment

As the Pentagon built a more permanent prison at Guantánamo, fashioning cell blocks from double-wide trailers, the intelligence-gathering effort changed under Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who took over in November 2002.

Military police and intelligence units that had often been rivalrous were fused into a single task force. Interrogators, linguists and analysts were divided into "tiger teams" to interview detainees. Guards were encouraged to observe the prisoners closely, trying to detect the leaders among them so they could be isolated or marked for interrogation. Pentagon officials say the changes produced more intelligence.

Foreign intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were brought in to interview some detainees who refused to talk to American interrogators. Since early last year, intelligence gathered at Guantánamo has been entered into a new database shared by 42 government agencies worldwide.

Questions about the treatment of prisoners linger. Several detainees who have been released said coercive interrogation methods used at Guantánamo had constituted abuse, charges American officials have denied. Among the allegations are complaints of druggings, invasive body searches, sleep deprivation and other mistreatment.

Parkhudin, a 26-year-old Afghan farmer who was held at Guantánamo from February 2003 to March 2004, said in an interview in Khost that he had been questioned for up to 20 hours at a time under uncomfortable conditions at Guantánamo. He said he had been shackled with a small chain during questioning. "They made me stand in front of an air-conditioner," he said. "The wind was very cold."

In a visit to Guantánamo this week, several military officers disputed accounts of harsh treatment and said the most useful interrogation tool was a reward system put into effect in 2003, in which more cooperative detainees were accorded privileges like more comfortable quarters or occasional ocean swims.

The most cooperative detainees are moved to "Camp 4," a medium-security facility where they are permitted to wear white uniforms, rather than the standard prison orange. In Camp 4, cells hold 10 prisoners each, and the detainees can spend up to nine hours a day outside their cells. They can also play soccer, eat meals outside and watch "family oriented" films in their native language. Last week, a half dozen Camp 4 detainees went on a field trip — to the beach.

"We try to keep people hopeful," said Col. Nelson J. Cannon, the commander of the joint detention operation at the base. "Camp 4 is the place they aspire to get to."

In interviews, Mr. Rodriguez, the head of Guantánamo`s intelligence-gathering effort, and two interrogators said valuable information continued to be produced. "We`ve had new openings just in recent weeks," Mr. Rodriguez said. "After two years, my team still has fresh fields to plow."

One morning last week, a reporter was allowed to observe — but not listen to — two interrogations at Guantánamo from behind one-way glass. In one room, an elderly detainee with a long white beard played chess with his interrogator. The chess game was a "reward" for 90 minutes of "fruitful" discussion, an interrogator said. In another room, a detainee in his late 30`s wearing an orange jump suit looked despondent as his interrogator spoke calmly to him through an interpreter. In a period lasting nearly 10 minutes, the detainee appeared to say nothing.

Intelligence and law-enforcement officials outside the Defense Department generally agree that the compendium of narrow, personal accounts from detainees has deepened the intelligence sector`s historical understanding of Al Qaeda`s recruitment and training activities. But there are limits to the historical information.

"It`s like going to a prison in upstate to find out what`s happening on the streets of New York," a counterterrorism official with knowledge of Guantánamo intelligence said. "The guys in there might know some stuff. But they haven`t been part of what`s going on for a few years."

Other investigators describe the value of the detainees more narrowly: for hundreds of intelligence and law enforcement officers now working on terrorism, stints at the camp have offered a rare chance to study committed Islamic militants. "We haven`t had this broad of access to true believers ever," a senior counterterrorism official said. "It has taught people how to go face-to-face with them. If we see can them as they see themselves, it makes us stronger."

As public criticism of Guantánamo has increased, the Pentagon has intensified its public-relations campaign on the importance of intelligence from the base. General Miller, who left Guantánamo in May to take over prison operations in Iraq, has claimed repeatedly — although without specifics — that the quality of the intelligence gathered from detainees had improved the longer they had been imprisoned.

Paul Butler, who was the senior Pentagon official for detainee policy until recently becoming Mr. Rumsfeld`s chief of staff, was even more expansive. At a briefing on Feb. 13, Mr. Butler described the Guantánamo detainees as "very dangerous people" who included "senior Al Qaeda operatives and leaders and Taliban leaders." In the most detailed public accounting yet of important detainees at Guantanamo, he also briefly profiled 10 unidentified Qaeda members or "affiliated" militants. But several senior officials with detailed knowledge of the Guantánamo detainees described Mr. Butler`s portrait of the camp as a work of verbal embroidery, saying none of the detainees at the camp could possibly be called a leader or senior operative of Al Qaeda.

Value of Detainees

Some Challenge Claims of Success

Mr. Rumsfeld has repeatedly cited the importance of Guantánamo to the fight against terror, saying the detentions there had helped prevent attacks.

"We are keeping them off the street and out of the airlines and out of nuclear power plants and out of ports across this country and across other countries," he said in a speech in February.

In interviews with reporters, officials have repeatedly pointed to two operations against foreign militants whose success they attributed to interrogations at Guantánamo. One, they said, involved a plot in which Saudi militants in Morocco were to attack British and American ships in the Strait of Gibraltar with small, explosives-laden boats. The other involved breaking up a terrorist cell in Milan that same year.

A closer look at both, however, indicates that the role the Guantánamo information played was overstated, as was the nature of the threat the two cases posed.

According to interviews with European, North African and American officials, small teams of law-enforcement and intelligence officials from both Italy and Morocco visited Guantánamo several times in 2002 and 2003 to interview detainees from those countries.

In the Moroccan case, an important tip came from one of nine Moroccans who were initially held there. In March 2002, the detainee told a Moroccan interrogator about a Saudi man who had recruited young men in Morocco on behalf of Al Qaeda in the late 1990`s. The detainee knew the man only by the name "Zuher," an Arab counterterrorism official said. He also provided the full names of the man`s Moroccan wife and sister-in-law.

Moroccan investigators were able to track down the sister-in-law. She then pointed the investigators to her brother-in-law, who was living in Morocco.

The authorities quickly began surveillance of the man, whom they identified as Zuher al-Tbaiti, 35. With the help of Saudi intelligence officials, the Moroccans learned that Mr. Tbaiti had attended a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the late 1990`s and had been in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan in December 2001, during the United States bombing campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden.

The Moroccan authorities arrested Mr. Tbaiti along with two Saudi associates in June 2002. A Casablanca prosecutor later disclosed that Mr. Tbaiti and his two associates had intended to load a small boat with explosives to attack an American or British warship in a plot modeled after the attack that killed 17 American sailors aboard the American destroyer Cole in October 2000.

Both American and Moroccan officials have at times suggested that the plot was thwarted in its final stages. In recent interviews, however, counterterrorism officials from both countries acknowledged that the Saudis and their Moroccan associates were in the earliest planning stages when they were arrested.

"I don`t believe the attacks were anything more than an idea," a senior American official said. "They were far from pulling it off."

What Moroccan investigators did not learn from Guantánamo — or were not particularly interested in — is also revealing.

By the time Moroccan investigators made a second trip to Guantánamo in September 2002, the number of Moroccan prisoners had grown to 18 from 9. Nearly all of them had trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but investigators said only five had any useful information — and that was about recruitment and links between other Moroccan extremists and Al Qaeda. One official also said a lead developed during the trip had been given to British officials, which helped bring about the arrests of several men in possession of the toxic agent ricin in a north London apartment in January 2003.

That same month, the Moroccans traveled again to Guantánamo for a new round of interrogations. This time, however, the detainees not only refused to cooperate but also began lying about their activities.

"By then they were discouraged and cynical and realized they were not getting out any time soon," an official with knowledge of the interviews said.

As with the Moroccan case, the episode in Milan involved the authorities who were already well into their investigations. American officials have pointed to it as a trophy of the intelligence effort at Guantánamo, but other senior officials say the information developed there had a limited impact on counterterrorism investigations in Italy.

Italian investigators first traveled to the camp in July 2002 to try to learn more about a militant cell in Milan. The cell`s suspected leader, Yassine Chekkouri, had been under arrest in Italy for more than six months on charges of possession of explosives and chemical weapons. After they arrived in Guantánamo, the investigators discovered that Mr. Chekkouri`s brothers, Redouan and Younes, were being held there. Ultimately, however, the two detainees were not helpful with the case, the officials said.

The Italian investigators did have some other useful conversations at Guantánamo, officials said, speaking to about 10 other detainees — Tunisians, Moroccans, an Egyptian — who had passed through Italy at various times and offered some background information about some of the dozen Islamic militants who had been arrested in the Milan investigation over the course of 2001. They also provided some information on the reputed head of Al Qaeda`s operations in Italy, Essid Sami Ben Kehmais, a Tunisian convicted last year.

None of the information led to new suspects, however, or prevented any attacks, officials said.

One European official familiar said the Guantánamo interrogations "confirmed a lot of things" that had already been under investigation. But an American investigator familiar with the case was even less generous.

"It was part of the overall picture, but there was other evidence, I think, that helped," the official said. "This was also a logistical cell, not an operational cell."

Releases

Hopes for Spies Vs. Returned Foes

Government officials initially hoped to do more at Guantánamo than extract information from detainees they had captured; they hoped they might be able to turn some of them into intelligence "assets" in their fight against terrorism.

According to several officials, the C.I.A. has carried out an active effort to recruit some of the detainees as spies for the agency, offering to help them get out of Guantánamo and resettle in their home countries in return for information about militant activities.

The success of those efforts is unknown; Bill Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, declined to comment on the matter. What is more certain, though, is that American officials have freed at least a handful of captives who turned out to be dangerous — another indication of how difficult it has been for officials to get a firm assessment of just who they have imprisoned at Guantánamo.

"Let me put it this way," Mr. Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing on March 9. "I`ve been told by senior people in this department that of the people that have been released, we know of at least one who has gone back to being a terrorist."

Pressed for details, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I can`t give you any more information because I don`t — I`ve forgotten."

Military and police officials in southern Afghanistan were more forthcoming.

In interviews, the officials said at least five prisoners released from Guantánamo since early 2003 had rejoined the Taliban and resumed attacks on American and Afghan government forces. Although two American officials said only one of the former detainees had turned out to be an important figure, Afghan officials said all five men were in fact commanders with close contacts to the Taliban leadership.

"They are fighting again and killing people," said Khan Muhammad, the senior military commander in southern Afghanistan.

The most notorious of the former Guántanamo detainees, Mullah Shahzada, had been a lieutenant to a senior commander when he was first captured in the war, an American military intelligence official said. After his return to Afghanistan in March 2003, he emerged as a frontline Taliban commander, Afghan officials said, leading a series of attacks in which at least 13 people were killed, including 2 aid workers.

Senior Pentagon officials refused to explain how Mr. Shahzada had talked his way out of Guantánamo. But two other military officials with knowledge of the case said he had given a false name and portrayed himself as having been captured by mistake.

"He stuck to his story and was fairly calm about the whole thing," a military intelligence official said. "He maintained over a period time that he was nothing but an innocent rug merchant who just got snatched up."

Other detainees who are known to have been released and then taken up arms are Mullah Shakur and two men known only as Sabitullah and Rahmatullah. A senior security official, Abdullah Laghmani, described all five men as commanders with close ties to the outlawed Taliban leadership.

Afghan officials blamed the United States for the return of the five men to the Taliban`s ranks, saying neither American military officials nor the Kabul police, who briefly process the detainees when they are sent home, consult them about the detainees they free.

"There are lots of people who were innocent, and they are capturing them, just on anyone`s information," said Dr. Laghmani, the chief of the National Security Directorate in Kandahar. "And then they are releasing guilty people."

Tim Golden reported from New York and Washington for this article, and Don Van Natta Jr. from Guantánamo Bay. Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall, David Rohde, Lizette Alvarez, Clifford Krauss, Raymond Bonner and Jason Horowitz.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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An Iraqi girl on Sunday in Buhriz, a village northeast of Baghdad. The American military has returned security responsibility to local leaders.
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June 21, 2004
SECURITY
Iraq Government Considers Using Emergency Rule
By DEXTER FILKINS and SOMINI SENGUPTA

AGHDAD, Iraq, June 20 — Faced with violent resistance even before it has assumed power, Iraq`s newly appointed government is considering imposing a state of emergency that could involve curfews and a ban on public demonstrations, Iraqi officials said Sunday.

In his first news briefing here, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi offered no details of what emergency rule might include, only that a committee of cabinet members had been appointed to consider the issue.

Dr. Allawi, who worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency in opposing Saddam Hussein`s government in the 1990`s, said he would consider "human rights principles and international law," but made clear that he intended to act quickly and forcefully against the insurgency, using extraordinary methods if necessary.

"We will do all we can to strike against enemy forces aiming at harming our country, and we will not stand by with our hands tied," Dr. Allawi said. "The Iraqi people are determined to establish a democratic government that provides freedom and equal rights for all its citizens. We are prepared to fight and, if necessary, die for the cause."

Among the places where such measures could be applied include the city of Falluja, where United States forces have been battling guerrilla fighters for several weeks, and Sadr City, the restive eastern slum in Baghdad, where three Iraqis were killed Sunday in confrontations with the First Infantry Division.

Among the emergency rule provisions being considered are a curfew, a ban on public demonstrations, checkpoints to control public movement and changes to search and seizure laws, two cabinet members said in separate interviews on Sunday evening.

It remains unclear whether such measures would bring significant changes in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Under the United States-led occupation, occupation and Iraqi soldiers and security forces have been allowed to conduct raids without warrants, make arrests without charges, and hold suspects in detention indefinitely.

If some sort of emergency rule is imposed, it is possible that this situation could persist. Iraq`s new leaders have yet to work out the exact nature of their cooperation with the American military in the coming months, particularly on such issues as offensive operations and house-to-house searches.

However, Iraqi officials have often criticized American forces for the way they have conducted themselves here over the past 15 months. A frequent complaint of Iraqi leaders is that the Americans often alienate ordinary Iraqis by searching the wrong homes and detaining the wrong people.

The Iraqi leaders have said they know far better who the insurgents are. The restoration of sovereignty here on June 30 may give those leaders an opportunity to take the counterinsurgency in another direction.

Iraq`s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said the potential measures were prompted by a tide of attacks by "global terrorists" as well as Hussein loyalists who, as he put it, "will not let the country go through the transitional process towards democracy peacefully."

"They will try to derail the political process," Mr. Rubaie said. "It is our responsibility to protect our people from these terrorists. If you bear all this in mind, then some sort of exceptional rules, if you like, need to be adopted to deal with the exceptional circumstances."

Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said he hoped that if emergency rule were imposed, it would happen only in particularly fractious areas and for no more than two to three weeks at a time. He also hinted at the delicate political balance that the interim government must strike, between winning the confidence of ordinary Iraqis and crushing what has already proven to be a powerful armed resistance.

"We have disturbances in the whole country, but many areas could be controlled very easily, and others will be a little more difficult," Mr. Naqib said. "But also we have to work politically with many groups. We don`t want to use force very much. If we have to use it with certain terrorists like Al Qaeda or anyone else, then we will not hesitate to use it."

Neither he nor other officials would say when a decision would be made about emergency rule.

The head of the Iraqi bar association, Kamal Hamdoon Mulla Allaw, said he hoped that such measures would be imposed only for a short period. Hamza al-Kafi, of the Iraqi Human Rights Society, said he too hoped that any such measures would be limited in scope and time and that they would not be used for political advantage.

As the transfer of sovereignty approaches, insurgents have stepped up attacks on interim government officials and security forces.

/>On Sunday morning, the interior minister`s house in Samarra was attacked and four bodyguards were killed. Last Thursday, a car bomb ripped through an army recruitment center in Baghdad, killing at least 41 people. Dozens of local officials and many senior members of the government in Baghdad have been assassinated.

Prime Minister Allawi also announced a significant expansion of the Iraqi Army and its rededication toward internal threats. The army, which currently has about 3,000 soldiers, would take control of more than 37,500 troops who make up the existing Iraqi Civil Defense Corps as part of a new National Guard.

Together with the new Iraqi antiterrorism force now being trained here, the armed forces available to combat insurgents could total more than 60,000 soldiers.

The decision to use the army against the insurgency represents a change to American policy, which had intended the force to be directed against foreign threats and, most important, to be small. American policy makers had wanted to ensure that the Iraqi Army, which has played a significant role in shaping the country`s political history, could be kept out of domestic politics.

Dr. Allawi acknowledged that concern but said the extraordinary circumstances presented by the insurgency demanded a special response. He said that for the "foreseeable future," the army would be fighting insurgents, rather than guarding borders.

"Our army`s priority will continue to be national defense," he said. "However, in these difficult times, substantial elements of the army will have to assist in the struggle against internal threats against national security."

The reconstitution of the army amounts to another step away from the American decision of spring 2003 to dissolve the Iraqi Army. That decision has been roundly criticized, by Dr. Allawi and others, as having contributed to the insurgency by pushing thousands of young men with military training into unemployment.

In response to that criticism, American officials announced last month that they would begin rehiring higher-level army officers who had earlier been banned from serving in the armed forces.

"Disbanding the Iraqi Army was a big mistake," Dr. Allawi said. "We are fixing the mistakes of the Americans, aren`t we?"

Together, redirecting the army toward internal threats and possibly imposing emergency rule illustrated the grim choices Dr. Allawi and his cabinet feel they have to make in their early days in office.

Dr. Allawi said the United States had agreed "in principle" to transfer custody of Iraqis suspected of involvement in the insurgency and for criminal acts to the Iraqi government after June 30.

He offered a vigorous vision of combating the guerrilla insurgency, which he said was "systematically destroying the country."

"The enemy we are fighting is truly evil," he said. "They have nothing to offer the Iraqi people except death and destruction."

He appealed to foreign countries to help protect the United Nations staff members who would be working in the country to prepare for elections later this year or early next.

Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, the young Shiite cleric who led an uprising against the American occupation, has been invited to attend a national conference that will select a quasi-legislature to advise the interim government, Agence France-Press reported Sunday.

The invitation appears to be part of a broader effort to bring Mr. Sadr into the political mainstream. His insurgent force, the Mahdi Army, took heavy losses from American forces over the past three months, but Mr. Sadr soared in popularity, according to recent opinion polls.

The council that will be selected during the national conference will have a wide array of powers, including authority to approve the national budget and to question ministers.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Iraqis with rocket-propelled grenades in front of an image of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, father of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

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June 21, 2004
Clinton Book Puts Familiar Foe Back in Conservatives` Sights
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

s a core of Democratic partisans cheer the return of their champion, Bill Clinton, to the limelight in time to pitch in on the campaign trail, many of his old antagonists are gearing up again.

Mr. Clinton appeared on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" last night to promote the release of his book, "My Life," tomorrow, and his foes were ready with a rebuttal.

Citizens United — a conservative lobbying group whose president, David Bossie, Mr. Clinton writes, helped to foment the Whitewater scandal — bought advertising time in several markets during Mr. Clinton`s interview on "60 minutes" to argue that the former president was responsible for failing to prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"Here is what you might miss in Bill Clinton`s new book," the advertisement begins, reciting a list of terrorist attacks abroad during his presidency.

In the buildup to the release of "My Life," the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, another villain of Mr. Clinton`s narrative, has begun calling the book "My Lie." And a column in the American Spectator, once the leading journal of Clinton-bashing and another target in his book, pronounced "a long hot Clinton summer is upon us" and derided Mr. Clinton`s expressions of contrition for his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

"Yes, it`s terrible to be caught," the Spectator wrote, "though rather delightful to commit moral error when no one is looking."

In the conservative Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes, the executive editor, called Mr. Clinton "Calvin Coolidge without the ethics and self-restraint."

Keith Appel, a Republican media consultant, said that the Web-based Drudge Report, which rose to prominence during the Clinton years, is playing a leading role again.

"That Web site is read by millions of conservatives and just about every conservative talk radio host in the country," Mr. Appel said, noting a headline that said, "After Reagan Week, Now Comes Clinton Summer." "The airwaves are hot with it already, bringing back all the bad news about the Clinton impeachment, lying under oath, the stain he has brought on the presidency. It helps remind people that the Bush administration is the antithesis of Clinton."

To drive home the point, Bush campaign allies are reviving talk about the honor and dignity of the Oval Office in thinly veiled references to the Clinton years.

"I have found that the best way to get a rousing response from a crowd is to say that whatever disagreements you may have with President Bush on one issue or another, nobody can argue that he hasn`t restored honor to the White house," said Gary L. Bauer, chairman of the organization American Values. "I think there is a reason that the Kerry people were not all that excited about this book coming out now."

The book`s official release on Tuesday, has stirred an avid debate on its potential impact on the November election . Few, if any, political memoirs have matched its blockbuster potential, and even fewer blockbusters have such overtly political content.

Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said he considers Mr. Clinton an asset to his campaign, and the former president plans to use his promotional appearances to praise Mr. Kerry and to deprecate Mr. Bush. But some conservatives argue that reminders of the Clinton years may hurt Mr. Kerry, especially if public discussions of the book give Mr. Bush`s allies a chance to re-direct attention toward the Clinton administration`s failures in the fight against terrorism.

Grover G. Norquist, a conservative strategist and chairman of Americans for Tax Reform, said that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 the Bush administration had failed to blame the Clinton administration enough, thus leaving Mr. Bush vulnerable to criticism from the federal commission investigating. Now, Mr. Norquist said, the discussion of Mr. Clinton`s book offered Republicans another chance to blame him.

"Somebody had to step out and say there were eight years of neglect and eight tears years of destruction of our intelligence capabilities," he said. "If Clinton comes out with a book whitewashing, ignoring and lying about what happened, then it is fair comment."

Attacking Mr. Clinton`s personal life, Mr. Norquist argued, was less helpful to Mr. Bush or to conservatives. "It isn`t necessary for anybody to put out a press release for the first question in everybody`s mind to be, what does he say about Monica Lewinsky?" he said. "If somebody leaps up to ask it, everybody`s reaction will be, the right is obsessed with Monica Lewinsky."

Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant, argued that what would hurt Mr. Kerry most was standing to the left of Mr. Clinton. "The comparison between a centrist Democrat and a more traditionally Northeastern liberal kind of Democrat should be of far greater concern to the Kerry campaign than anything involving Monica," Mr. Ayres said.

"That`s yesterdays` news, and nobody is asserting that John Kerry has the kind of character flaws that bedeviled Bill Clinton."

But some conservatives argued that it was impossible to talk about Mr. Clinton or his book without focusing on his affair. "That is his legacy," said Bob Barr, the former congressman from Georgia who led the effort to impeach Mr. Clinton. Mr. Barr will be promoting own book about the impeachment, "The Meaning of Is," when it appears later this summer.

"I can`t imagine that it delights the Democrats to have Clinton out there talking Clinton right now," he said. "It simply raises what have to be unpleasant memories."

Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, called Mr. Clinton`s critics out of touch. "These groups are stuck in a time warp. The fact is that people are tired of the political blame game. They want their elected officials to be talking about solutions to their problems. John Kerry`s campaign is focused on laying out an agenda for the American people, and no matter how many commercials these groups buy they won`t get in the way of that effort."

Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, said attacking him for his personal life was a tactic that had already failed. "Similar false attacks from the right wing in the election of 1998 led to Newt Gingrich`s downfall, not the Democrats," Mr. Kennedy said in an e-mail note.

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign declined to discuss the book. "The race is going to be between President Bush and John Kerry," he said.

A spokesman for Mr. Clinton`s publisher, Knopf, declined to comment. The spokesman, Paul Bogaards, has acknowledged in the past that he and Mr. Clinton`s advisers convened for daily conference calls to plan the promotional campaign to defend against potential attacks by his enemies as well as to try to reach his fans. But Mr. Bogaards declined to discuss specifics.

All the bookstores on Mr. Clinton`s tour have prepared for heavy security, and some are expecting protesters as well. "There doesn`t seem to be any middle road about Clinton," said Vivian Law and, publicity director of Chapter 11 Books, a small chain in Atlanta that will host a book signing for Mr. Clinton later this summer. "Either you love him or you hate him. The conservative element here in the South despise him."

Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of conservative direct mail, said he still guessed Mr. Clinton`s book tour would help Mr. Kerry more than hurt him. "Nobody energized the Democratic base like Bill Clinton, and with their upcoming nominee being John Kerry being less than an exciting figure, Clinton can fill that roll quite nicely," Mr. Viguerie said.

Still, he and other conservatives also say that Mr. Clinton`s tenure in office was a powerful stimulant to fund-raising. For those potential donors not fully convinced that Mr. Clinton`s liberal policies on abortion or gay rights would contribute to the decline of the traditional family, conservatives say, the scandals of his personal life provided an illustration.

Mr. Bossie of Citizens United appeared cognizant of Mr. Clinton`s fund-raising power. In an e-mail message alerting potential supporters to the advertisement during "60 Minutes," Mr. Bossie noted, "As you can probably imagine running such campaigns is not inexpensive, and this is why we have to ask all of your support."

Mr. Bossie said the advertisement ran on local stations in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Washington, St. Louis, Des Moines, Wheeling, W. Va., and Springfield, Mo. But stations in New York and Pittsburgh declined to air it, he said.

Mr. Bossie also appeared on the Fox News channel on Sunday to discuss his advertisement and recently published a book, "Intelligence Failure," blaming the Clinton administration for leaving the country vulnerable to Sept. 11. In an interview, Mr. Bossie said he had been working on "uncovering the truth" about the Clinton administration for 10 years. "I am going to make sure people remember the facts, not just what he wants people to remember."

Mr. Clinton, for his part, chronicles in his memoirs what he calls a "cabal" of "right-wing" operatives — including Mr. Bossie — that hounded him through his administration. But, in the end, he wrote that he had tried to forgive them.

"After all the forgiveness that I have been given for Hillary, Chelsea, my friends and millions of people in America and across the world, it`s the least I can do."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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An Educator Learns the Hard Way
Task of Rebuilding Universities Brings Frustration, Doubts and Danger

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 21, 2004; Page A01

Second of three articles1.Teil s. gestern

BAGHDAD -- John Agresto arrived here nine months ago with two suitcases, a feather pillow and a suffusion of optimism. He didn`t know much about Iraq, but he felt certain the American occupation, and his mission to oversee the country`s university system, would be a success.

"Like everyone else in America, I saw the images of people cheering as Saddam Hussein`s statue was pulled down. I saw people hitting pictures of him with their shoes," said Agresto, the former president of St. John`s College in New Mexico. "Once you see that, you can`t help but say, `Okay. This is going to work.` "

But the Iraq he encountered was different from what he had expected. Visits to the universities he was trying to rebuild and the faculty he wanted to invigorate were more and more dangerous, and infrequent. His Iraqi staff was threatened by insurgents. His evenings were disrupted by mortar attacks on the occupation authority`s Baghdad headquarters.

His plans to repair hundreds of campus buildings were scuttled by the Bush administration`s decision to shift reconstruction efforts and by the failure to raise money from other sources. His hope that Iraqis would put aside differences and personal interests for a common cause was, as he put it, "way too idealistic."

"I`m a neoconservative who`s been mugged by reality," Agresto said as he puffed on a pipe next to a resort-size swimming pool behind the marbled palace that houses the occupation authority.

"We can`t deny there were mistakes, things that didn`t work out the way we wanted," he added. "We have to be honest with ourselves."

Agresto`s candor is unusual among the staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. bureaucracy responsible for the civil administration of Iraq until June 30. He is one of the few American officials here to speak on the record at length about the shortcomings of the occupation. In his case, the frustration comes from the sense of a missed golden opportunity: to reconstruct Iraq`s decrepit universities and create an educational system that would nurture and promote the country`s best minds.

Iraq`s institutions of higher learning were once the most modern in the Middle East. But they were asphyxiated under Saddam Hussein, then further devastated by the looting that engulfed the country after Hussein`s government was toppled last year. In his initial travels around Iraq, Agresto observed students sitting on the floor in burned-out classrooms. He visited technical colleges with no tools. He saw academic journals from the 1960s kept under lock at an agricultural college because the school did not possess any more recent books.

"It`s difficult to describe how bad things were," he recalled.

Agresto concluded that the universities needed $1.2 billion to become viable centers of learning and reap immediate goodwill for the American rebuilding effort. But of the $18.6 billion U.S. reconstruction package approved by Congress last year, the higher education system received $8 million, a tiny fraction of his proposal. When Agresto asked the U.S. Agency for International Development for 130,000 desks, he got 8,000.

Embittered, he sent the desks to the southern city of Basra, which was hard hit by the looting. He earmarked the $8 million for the construction of new science labs, leaving scores of other needs unmet.

"I really thought this would have been valuable money -- well spent and sorely needed," he said. "We`re not buying books for the libraries. We`re not buying saws and nails for the technical institutes. We`re not replacing the computers that were stolen. I can`t be anything but sad about it."

Agresto, a lifelong Republican and political conservative, does not regard himself as a turncoat. He still believes in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Despite his disappointment with the lack of reconstruction, he is proud of the changes the Coalition Provisional Authority instilled in Iraq`s universities, including the promotion of academic freedom and a purge of senior officials of Hussein`s Baath Party. He says he feels the CPA accomplished "a lot of good under very difficult conditions."

While acknowledging American mistakes, Agresto aimed some of his most pointed criticism at Iraqis. In his view, the Americans toppled a dictator and prepared the ground for democracy, but Iraqis have not stepped up to build on that start.

"They don`t know how to be a community," he said. "They put their individual interests first. They only look out for themselves."
Invited by the Pentagon

Agresto, 58, has thinning silver hair, a gray-flecked mustache and a prominent nose. He has a stocky build and a fondness for self-deprecating comments about his appearance that usually begin with comparisons to Groucho Marx.

Garrulous and energetic, he came to work for the CPA in the same way most other senior-level officials did: He was invited by the Pentagon because of his experience and his political connections.

The son of a Brooklyn dockworker, he was the first in his family to go to college. He went on to earn a doctorate in political science from Cornell University. After a brief teaching career, he joined the National Endowment for the Humanities during the culture wars of the 1980s, and was deputy to two prominent chairmen, William J. Bennett and Lynne V. Cheney. In the 15 months between their tenures, he was the organization`s acting chairman.

After leaving the endowment, he spent 11 years as president of St. John`s, a small, classical liberal arts college in Santa Fe known for its Great Books curriculum. He retired in 2000 and set up a consulting company. He spent his spare time preparing homemade Italian sausage and relaxing with his wife in their cabin near the Pecos River in New Mexico.

After U.S. troops rolled into Baghdad, he got a call from his predecessor at St. John`s, who asked whether he`d be interested in serving as the CPA`s senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education. Intrigued, he placed a call to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose wife had served on the board at St. John`s.

"I said, `Do you think I`d be appropriate?` And he said, `Yes. Absolutely,` " Agresto recalled. Agresto said he thought, "I`m almost 60 years old. I don`t have that many years left to do good." And he accepted.

"This is what Americans do: They go and help," he said. "I guess I just always wanted to be a good American."

He knew next to nothing about Iraq`s educational system. Even after he was selected, he did not pore through a reading list. "I wanted to come here with as open a mind as I could have," he said. "I`d much rather learn firsthand than have it filtered to me by an author." He did a Google search on the Internet. The result? "Not much," he said.

His training from the Defense Department was no more extensive. "They taught me how to put on a gas mask, how to get the helmet snug, how to button up your flak jacket," he said. "That`s it."

None of that fazed him. He assumed, he said, that Iraq would feel like a newly liberated East European nation, keen to embrace the West and democratic change.

Not until he arrived in Baghdad on Sept. 15, and was assigned to live in a metal trailer with three other CPA staffers, did he realize how complicated his job would be.
Fundraising Failures

Looters began ransacking Mustansiriya University on April 9, 2003, the day Hussein`s government collapsed. By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day.

When Agresto saw the damage to Mustansiriya and the nearby College of Technology -- where 3,000 computers and every bit of laboratory equipment were stolen in a four-hour period -- he was shocked. "What the looting did to the capacity to teach was incredible," he said. "The Americans don`t want to talk about it because we did so little to stop the looting."

Soon, Mustansiriya was limping back to life. The school, which takes its name from a 13th-century Baghdad institution considered to be the first university in the Arab world, was being rebuilt by Iraqis, who were paid with donations from local mosques and charities. But the professors lacked the funds to replace computers, books and laboratory gear.

Agresto was determined to help. President Bush was preparing to ask Congress for billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance. Universities, Agresto figured, had to be among the most worthy candidates for American funding. He calculated that he could also attract money from an upcoming conference of international donors in Madrid.

After receiving reports from each of the country`s 22 universities, whose collective enrollment is more than 375,000, CPA number crunchers estimated that Iraq would need $1.2 billion to "take its rightful place in the world`s intellectual, cultural, economic, and political communities."

Agresto and his staff of 10 sent funding requests to the CPA officials who were compiling the administration`s aid package. But word came back that the administration would focus its request on rebuilding Iraq`s security services and electrical infrastructure. The White House planned to ask Congress for only $35 million for higher education. The rest would have to come from foreign donors.

Agresto put together what he hoped was a persuasive plea for international aid. It included plans for "a nationwide electronic library network" and a "Western-style graduate business school." "We now have the opportunity to make a new start, and to supply Iraq with, for example, some of the best classrooms, laboratories and libraries possible," the CPA wrote in its pitch to donors.

At the conference in October, donor nations pledged in excess of $400 million for Iraqi universities. But none of that money has arrived in Baghdad.

"There was a lot of talk," he said, "but little follow-through."

The same thing occurred on Capitol Hill. The $35 million request was whittled down to $8 million.

At Mustansiriya, where the labs are devoid of equipment and the student union is in a charred building, acting President Taki Moussawi said he has stopped waiting for help from the Americans. "We`ve had so many promises, so many hopes," he said as he walked through a gutted structure that used to be the president`s office. "We don`t believe the Americans anymore. We`re just disappointed."

Some American academics who are familiar with Iraq`s university system blame the Bush administration, and Agresto, for failing to secure more independent funding. They said that in choosing Agresto, the White House shunned scholars with greater acceptance in academic circles, many of whom had opposed the invasion, in favor of a conservative loyalist who had spent much of his career criticizing the U.S. academic establishment.

"Had it been someone different than Agresto, the possibility of that would have been so much better," said Keith Watenpaugh, an assistant professor of Middle East history at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., who traveled to Baghdad last year to assess Iraq`s university system. "The politics of the occupation were so divisive, and the American academy felt so disempowered by the way things were happening, that when such political creatures like Agresto came asking for things, it was too difficult to put aside those politics. If the administration had really been committed to rebuilding Iraq`s education structures, they wouldn`t have sent Agresto."
Rethinking Assumptions

At 8 a.m. on the morning of Jan. 18, a white pickup truck loaded with 1,000 pounds of plastic explosives and several 155mm artillery shells exploded at the main public gate to the CPA`s headquarters. More than 20 people were killed and at least 60 were wounded. Almost all of them were Iraqis and many of them worked for the CPA.

Agresto, who was inside the palace and heard the blast, assumed that the attack would provoke widespread revulsion at the taking of innocent life, and would rally popular sentiment against the insurgency and in favor of the goals of the occupation.

"What I expected was the Mothers March for Peace or the Don`t Kill Our Kids movement or somebody to come out and say: `Stop this. We want democracy,` " he said. But that never occurred. Iraqis held funerals and went on with life. U.S. troops erected even larger concrete blast walls in front of the gate.

When he asked Iraqis working for the CPA why there was not more outrage, he sensed apprehension. Everyone he talked to was too scared to condemn the insurgents in public.

"I saw people still afraid," he said. "I saw how easy it was to speak against the Americans and how dangerous it was to speak for democracy and liberty."

The aftermath of the bombing led Agresto to rethink some of his most fundamental assumptions about the American effort to transform Iraq. Suddenly, a goal that had appeared attainable seemed so far from reach. Perhaps, he concluded, U.S. planners should have settled for something less than full democracy.

He reasoned that the occupation`s chief goal should have been to restore security, and only later to begin other work in earnest.

"We`re trying to establish a democratic government without a democratic people," he said. "I don`t know how possible that is."

Agresto`s views are a break from those of his allies in the Bush administration, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who argue that Iraqis are ready for democracy.

"We should have been less ambitious," Agresto said. "Our goal should have been to build a free, safe and a prosperous Iraq -- with the emphasis on safe. Democratic institutions could be developed over time. Instead, we keep talking about democratic elections. If you asked an ordinary Iraqi what they want, the first thing they would say wouldn`t be democracy or elections, it would be safety. They want to be able to walk outside their homes at night."
Academic Freedom

As his white Toyota Land Cruiser pulled out of the Green Zone one day earlier this month and entered what CPA staffers call the Red Zone, Agresto took a deep breath. He was in the middle of Baghdad`s hurly-burly morning rush-hour traffic. And he was exposed.

Instead of traveling in an earth-tone GMC Suburban with armed guards as many of his colleagues do, Agresto had chosen a lower profile. His Land Cruiser had blue Ministry of Higher Education license plates. He was not wearing a flak jacket or helmet. He hoped his Mediterranean complexion would allow him to pass for a fair-skinned northern Iraqi.

As his vehicle crossed the Tigris River and sped through central Baghdad, he betrayed a pang of nervousness. "There`s no safe way to travel here," he said, looking out the window.

Even higher education in Iraq has been dangerous business. A soldier guarding Agresto`s predecessor, Andrew Erdmann, was shot dead at Baghdad University last summer. Agresto`s translator received repeated death threats over the telephone for collaborating with Americans. An Italian in his office who had volunteered to teach at the informatics college was accosted in May by students who pounded on his car and shouted, "American! American!"

After a 15-minute drive, Agresto pulled up at the ministry`s temporary offices at the National Informatics Commission. The ministry`s headquarters -- an imposing, 12-story building in central Baghdad -- was gutted by looters and has not been rebuilt.

After a round of hugs with ministry officials, Agresto settled into the first meeting between the newly appointed minister of higher education and university presidents. In the past, such gatherings involved the minister lecturing to the presidents. But the new minister, Tahir Bakaa, the former president of Mustansiriya University, announced new procedures.

"The minister will not interfere with the universities," Bakaa told the 25 presidents and institute directors. "The heads of the departments, the deans and the university presidents are in charge of the higher education system. It`s not the ministry."

Agresto smiled. It was just what he wanted to hear.

Agresto had made academic freedom a top priority. He believed that the minister of higher education, a political appointee, should not have the power to fire a university president. Students, he insisted, should be protected from religious or political intimidation.

These new policies were included in an academic bill of rights, which the university presidents endorsed this spring. Agresto saw the document as one of his most significant achievements.

Later in the meeting, Agresto distributed copies of a revised education law written by the CPA that included the rights document. He said the CPA had decided not to promulgate the law and instead was giving it to the ministry with the hope that it would be approved by the university presidents and the minister. The changes would have more legitimacy, Agresto figured, if they were enacted by the new minister, rather than the occupation authority.

Bakaa did not endorse the CPA draft, but he promised to take "what`s best" from it. It seemed enough to satisfy Agresto.

"When I look at the rest of Iraq, sometimes I get very discouraged," he told the presidents. "But here at this meeting, I`m not discouraged at all."

But in a more reflective and private moment next to the pool, with pipe in hand and Iraq`s future on the table, Agresto was far more sober. He said he still believes Iraq will become a democracy, but not the sort of democracy the Bush administration envisions.

"Will it be a free democracy? A liberal democracy?" he said. "I don`t think so."

NEXT: Barriers to democracy

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Clinton`s Focus on Personal May Have a Cost

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 21, 2004; Page A01

For a dozen years, Bill Clinton and his aides have been urging people to get over the obsession with his personal side and pay more attention to his policies. Clinton complained regularly that his achievements got too little notice and the partisan wars being waged against him too much. His aides lectured reporters about playing amateur psychologists, forever analyzing what made him tick.

The publication of "My Life," his memoir, and the unprecedented publicity rollout it has received put the old complaints in an odd new light. This time, Clinton himself enthusiastically has put the spotlight on his inner life and what he describes as his psychological ordeals. In a publicity campaign carefully orchestrated by the former president and his publisher -- and, by several accounts, in the book that goes on sale tomorrow -- the official side of his presidency frequently has been reduced to a supporting role.

The memoir and promotional campaign have revived an issue that Clinton and his aides often confronted while he was president: How much should Clinton give vent to his personal grievances and feed the insatiable public curiosity about his private life? As president, Clinton usually -- though not always -- decided that doing so was against his political interest. As author, he and his publisher have decided that their interests lie in revelations about adultery, marital crisis and coping with the adult consequences of childhood dysfunction.

But this focus has come at a potential cost. Some Clinton aides who read advance copies of the book concluded that the half about his youth and pre-presidency was told with more flair and evocative detail than the half about his presidency, which was written this spring under the pressure of an approaching deadline.

A book that runs for 957 pages has room for both personal drama and policy, and aides who have read the book as well as news accounts based on leaked copies say the former president deals in detail with such topics as his efforts against Osama bin Laden and his decision to sign a major overhaul of welfare in 1996. But a New York Times writer called the book "a hodgepodge of jottings" that puts an emphasis on "pscyhobabble mea culpas."

Several aides close to Clinton said they hoped that readers drawn to the book by the gossipy appeal of reading what the former president says about his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky or the ups and downs of his marriage to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) will stick around to read Clinton`s argument for the larger significance of his presidency. But they acknowledged there is a tension between historical argument and personal soap opera.

Interviews conducted as part of the publicity campaign have leaned emphatically toward the latter, with Clinton showing little self-consciousness about being on the psychologist`s couch. He talked with Time magazine about his lifelong habit of living "parallel lives," one of public accomplishment and the other of private shame, about his "struggle with my old demons." He attributes his affair with Lewinsky to his "unresolved anger" that made him do "non-rational destructive things." Last night on CBS`s "60 Minutes," Clinton talked about his marital counseling and also accused former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and his staff of unscrupulously waging a "big political operation designed to bring down the presidency."

"They indicted innocent people because they wouldn`t lie," he said. "And they exonerated people who committed crimes because they would lie."

Although the book represents Clinton`s most extensive effort to date to explain and defend his life and presidency, he has given similar tours of his emotional landscape many times. After his 1998 admission that he had misled the country about Lewinsky, Clinton stood before ministers at a White House annual prayer breakfast and said he had reached "rock-bottom truth" about his moral failings and announced that he was starting regular spiritual counseling.

That same week, he had a meeting with Cabinet members, widely reported at the time, in which he told them that beneath his genial surface he had harbored deep anger during much of his presidency, and that this had led to his lapse with Lewinsky.

Of his anger, Clinton remarked to Time, "I hid it pretty good, didn`t I?"

Not that well. His August 1998 speech to the nation admitting that he had an improper relationship with Lewinsky also contained a blast at Starr, despite unanimous urgings from his political advisers that this was not the right time or venue. He challenged Starr then to "stop the pursuit of personal destruction and prying into private lives."

Nor did Clinton disguise his real feelings about former FBI director Louis J. Freeh, another person who takes a drubbing in Clinton`s memoir. In 1999, when a reporter asked him about a campaign fundraising controversy, the president shot back, "Yeah, the FBI wants you to write about that rather than write about Waco."

Even the environment of family dysfunction, marked by an alcoholic and sometimes violent stepfather, has been given prominent attention by Clinton before. In the 1992 campaign video, "The Man From Hope," Clinton described a fateful showdown with his stepfather and speculated that growing up in an alcoholic household made him eager to please.

Hillary Clinton, in a 1999 interview with now-defunct Talk magazine, suggested her husband`s childhood -- including having a mother and grandmother who tussled jealously over the young boy -- may have led to his sexual indiscretions.

Still, people who have read "My Life" say Clinton deals with more depth and self-awareness about his upbringing than he ever has previously.

Clinton will tape an interview today with talk show host Oprah Winfrey about the book.

His spokesman, Jim Kennedy, said Clinton is eager to talk candidly about his personal background and feelings but asserted that the spine of Clinton`s story is about public issues.

"It`s not surprising that the media chooses to focus on some things early on," Kennedy said, adding that the "vast majority of the book is squarely focused on matters of substance and history and politics and policy."

He said Clinton`s aim was to write a book of "substantial historical and political and literary value that will stand the test of time."

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Pfc. Adam Krum of the 1st Marine Division mans a Humvee-mounted TOW missile during a mission near Fallujah.
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U.S. Forces Plan Lower Profile
Shift Intended to Give Iraqis More Visibility After June 30

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 21, 2004; Page A15

TIKRIT, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders here are calling it Operation New Dawn.

Starting July 1, with the transfer of limited sovereignty to Iraqi authorities, military helicopters will switch to flying "friendly approaches" instead of menacing ones, U.S. soldiers will go on patrol only when accompanying Iraqi security forces, and any shooting of U.S. weapons meant to harass or interdict will require higher-level approval than before, military officers here said.

In Mosul, Army Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, who leads a brigade of armored Stryker vehicles and other forces, said he expected that his troops would assume a much lower profile.

"On July 1, what I want Iraqi people to say is: `Where are the airplanes? Where are the Strykers?` " Ham said last week. "What they`ll see instead will be Iraqi forces."

For U.S. troops in Iraq, the coming political change -- from occupying power to supporting partner -- is supposed to be accompanied by a major shift in military mission and tactics. While legally still authorized under a U.N. resolution to use "all necessary means" to ensure security in Iraq, U.S. commanders say they intend to reduce combat operations, concentrate on training and assisting Iraqi forces, and promote local governance and economic development.

U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledged in interviews and in briefings to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz last week that their plan was sure to be complicated by two main factors.

First, many of the 215,000 members of Iraq`s fledgling forces are far from ready to take over much of the security burden. And second, the deadly insurgency that emerged shortly after the U.S.-led invasion last year continues to bring fresh waves of violence, most recently a surge of assassinations and attacks on oil facilities.

Under such uncertain circumstances, U.S. military authorities are trying to show at least their willingness to step back and let Iraqi forces take the lead, but are hedging their bets by keeping U.S. troop levels at around 140,000 and girding for a gradual turnover of operational responsibility.

"If Americans are in danger, if there`s a really bad person we`ve got to go after, it`s the same old rules," Wolfowitz told reporters traveling with him, making clear that U.S. forces had no intention of withdrawing from the fight. "But we would like people to see that something has changed. In the first few weeks, a lot of the challenge is how to create some optics when the underlying substance hasn`t changed that much."

At the headquarters here of the 1st Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. John Batiste and his staff showed Wolfowitz a timeline last week that charted two lines through February. One line, which fell gradually across the page, represented the U.S. military profile; the other, which rose steadily, represented the Iraqi security services.

The lines intersected in September, which is when Batiste said he estimates that Iraqi forces will be able to take full charge of combat operations and policing in the region. By January, when national elections are scheduled, he is counting on Iraqi forces to be completely responsible for securing voting facilities, he said.

Commanders here and at other bases throughout Iraq offered assurances last week that recently intensified efforts to train and equip the Iraqi forces were beginning to bear fruit. Vehicles, communications gear and other equipment for the new forces that had been in short supply have begun to flow in. Recruits are being better vetted. Authorities are placing greater emphasis on ensuring the quality of the forces rather than their quantity.

The commanders also provided accounts of insurgent cells being uncovered and broken up, of public works projects being advanced and of Iraqis coming forward with crucial tips about the location of roadside bombs.

"This is the theme of this briefing: Glass is half full, things are headed in the right direction," one senior commander told Wolfowitz.

But the commanders also said there were signs for worry, particularly regarding the continued strength of the insurgency. For instance, in Baghdad`s Sadr City neighborhood, which has been a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, the number of insurgent fighters was reported by U.S. military authorities to be largely unchanged despite the deaths of hundreds in battles since April. The dead have been replaced by other fighters, many of them teenagers, U.S. authorities said.

Commanders also warned that U.S. forces were being spread thin. In the northern city of Mosul, military authorities noted that roadside bomb attacks rose after some U.S. troops were sent south for other duty, as the drop in the American presence allowed insurgents more time to plant the bombs.

Iraq`s long borders with Syria and Iran also remain largely uncontrolled because of a shortage of patrols, according to U.S. commanders in Mosul and Tikrit.

"I`m stretched about as thin as I`d want to be with 22,000 troops," a senior officer told Wolfowitz in a briefing attended by reporters on the condition that names not be cited.

Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the second-ranking commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, acknowledged that as U.S. forces shift to more supporting tasks in Iraq, such as training Iraqi forces and protecting leaders of the new interim government, they will be even more hard-pressed to muster troops to conduct combat operations.

"By the time you put troops to task, the troops available to do offensive actions are less," Metz told reporters in an interview last week.

Still, Metz rejected the idea that more U.S. troops should be sent to Iraq. Instead, he said, greater efforts would be made -- through improved intelligence-gathering and other means -- to use available troops more efficiently.

The shortfall that appeared to concern Wolfowitz the most was not in troops but in the money that U.S. commanders have used to pay for schools, hospitals and other smaller-scale local projects that have improved community services and fostered goodwill. The funds, known as the Commander`s Emergency Response Program (CERP), have been parceled out by the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ceases to exist with the transfer of sovereignty.

Wolfowitz said Iraq`s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, had expressed a willingness to provide "bridge funds" for "CERP-like" projects.

The offer was indicative of the kind of cooperation that U.S. and Iraqi authorities said would be needed for the next phase of relations to work smoothly, replacing the days when U.S. commanders could operate unilaterally.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com

Torture Policy (cont`d)



Monday, June 21, 2004; Page A18

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Donald H. Rumsfeld expressed dismay on Thursday about editorials in which "the implication is that the United States government has, in one way or another, ordered, authorized, permitted, tolerated torture." Such reports, he said, raised questions among U.S. troops in Iraq, reduced the willingness of people in Iraq and Afghanistan to cooperate with the United States, and could be used by others as an excuse to torture U.S. soldiers or civilians. This was wrong, he said, because "I have not seen anything that suggests that a senior civilian or military official of the United States of America . . . could be characterized as ordering or authorizing or permitting torture or acts that are inconsistent with our international treaty obligations or our laws or our values as a country."

Since Mr. Rumsfeld referred directly to The Post, we believe we owe him a response. We agree that the country is at war and that we all must weigh our words accordingly. We also agree that the consequences of the revelations of prisoner abuse are grave. As supporters of the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have been particularly concerned about the ways that the scandal -- and the administration`s continuing failure to come to terms with it -- could undermine the chances for success. We also have warned about the uses that might be made of it by captors of Americans. What strikes us as extraordinary is that Mr. Rumsfeld would suggest that this damage would be caused by newspaper editorials rather than by his own actions and decisions and those of other senior administration officials.

What might lead us to describe Mr. Rumsfeld or some other "senior civilian or military official" as "ordering or authorizing or permitting" torture or violation of international treaties and U.S. law? We could start with Mr. Rumsfeld`s own admission during the same news conference that he had personally approved the detention of several prisoners in Iraq without registering them with the International Committee of the Red Cross. This creation of "ghost prisoners" was described by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who investigated abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, as "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine and in violation of international law." Failure to promptly register detainees with the Red Cross is an unambiguous breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention; Mr. Rumsfeld said that he approved such action on several occasions, at the request of another senior official, CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Did senior officials order torture? We know of two relevant cases so far. One was Mr. Rumsfeld`s December 2002 authorization of the use of techniques including hooding, nudity, stress positions, "fear of dogs" and physical contact with prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay base. A second was the distribution in September 2003 by the office of the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, of an interrogation policy that included these techniques as well as others, among them sleep and dietary manipulation. In both cases lawyers inside the military objected that the policies would lead to violations of international law, including the convention banning torture. Both were eventually modified, but not before they were used for the handling of prisoners. In the case of the Abu Ghraib prison, the policy apparently remained in effect for months.

Did senior officials "permit" torture? A Pentagon-led task force concluded in March 2003, with the support of the Justice Department, that the president was authorized to order torture as part of his war-making powers and that those who followed his orders could be immunized from punishment. Dictators who wish to justify torture, and those who would mistreat Americans, have no need to read our editorials: They can download from the Internet the 50-page legal brief issued by Mr. Rumsfeld`s chief counsel.

The damage caused by the prisoner abuse cases is already enormous, and it is not over. We believe there is a way to mitigate and eventually overcome the debacle, but it is not by asking newspapers to go mute. What is needed is a full and independent investigation of the matter, including the decisions made by Mr. Rumsfeld and other senior officials, and a forthright and unambiguous commitment by President Bush to strictly observe U.S. and international law in the future. That pledge should be accompanied by a return to the public disclosure of U.S. interrogation policies. If U.S. soldiers, Iraqi citizens and foreign leaders can see for themselves that American doctrine excludes illegal abuse, then the dangers Mr. Rumsfeld cited will be greatly lessened.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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In Vietnam, a Clear Line to Avoid

By John Stuart Blackton

Monday, June 21, 2004; Page A19

The Justice Department has advised the White House that President Bush (and those who follow his orders) may contravene treaties, U.S. law and international law under the broad doctrine of "necessity."

This advice contrasts sharply with that of an earlier White House, under Lyndon Johnson, during the Vietnam War. In that war, the decision was made to employ the full powers of the commander in chief to buttress and reinforce the Geneva Conventions and the criminal sanctions under the U.S. Code that followed from these conventions. Attorney General John Ashcroft and others in the administration have suggested that the recent disclosures about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison are simply a reflection of the universal "hard side" of war. It was ever thus and will forever be is the implication. Yet the record of the U.S. military in Vietnam, not our most glorious military undertaking, suggests otherwise.

Far more attention was paid in Vietnam than in Iraq to ensuring an environment in which every American combatant understood the basic rules of the Geneva Conventions. These principles were part of universal military training, reinforced by the chain of command in the field and largely, although certainly not universally, adhered to by the troops.

The International Red Cross sought assurances in December 1964 from the U.S. and Vietnamese governments that their armed forces were abiding by the Geneva Conventions. These requests prompted a policy review that led the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam to appoint a joint U.S.-Vietnamese military committee in September 1965 to work out details on the application of the Geneva Conventions in Vietnam. Every draftee and volunteer was given, during basic training, mandatory instruction in the principles of the conventions. Soldiers were tested on that training, and the results were recorded in their personnel jackets. This training was repeated at successive stages, and all soldiers arriving in Vietnam received orientation in the Geneva Conventions during their initial processing.

Every soldier also received a plastic pocket card bearing the signature of our commander in chief, Lyndon Baines Johnson. It was headed "The Enemy in Your Hands" and summarized the conventions in simple, clear language. Item No. 3, "MISTREATMENT OF ANY CAPTIVE IS A CRIMINAL OFFENSE. EVERY SOLDIER IS PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ENEMY IN HIS HANDS," was followed by this unambiguous guidance: "It is both dishonorable and foolish to mistreat a captive. It is also a punishable offense. Not even a beaten enemy will surrender if he knows his captors will torture or kill him. He will resist and make his capture more costly. Fair treatment of captives encourages the enemy to surrender."

A program of instruction for all U.S. and Vietnamese military units was established in Vietnam to teach the basic rules for handling prisoners. Regulations were promulgated instructing U.S. units and advisers to identify and keep records of all captives turned over to the Vietnamese, including specifying to whom the captives were transferred.

The signed order from President Johnson in our pockets was a critical element of accountability and personal responsibility. In the event that any of us might be instructed to treat prisoners in an inhumane manner, we were in a position to recognize and refuse an unlawful order that contravened a signed direct order from the president.

There were, of course, American abuses in the handling of prisoners in Vietnam, as there were in World War II and all other wars. But U.S. soldiers who violated the policy on torture and prisoner abuse in Vietnam knew precisely where the lines were drawn, and they knew that they could not hide behind either an ambiguous Army policy or the defense that they were "just following orders." Serious departures from policy were far more prevalent in the undeclared and covert theaters of the Indochina war (Laos and Cambodia), where accountability was reduced, the lines of military authority often obscure, and external oversight from the legislative branch and from the press nonexistent.

The Defense Department has established a military environment in Iraq that is more reminiscent of those covert wars than of the overt war in Vietnam. The White House legal counsel`s written opinion that the Geneva Conventions are now "obsolete" and have been rendered "quaint" diminishes accountability and personal responsibility for our soldiers in Iraq. The suggestion that the doctrine of "necessity" has broad application to our military interrogation of prisoners in Iraq is worrisome.

The Indochina war was not the U.S. Army`s finest hour, but the occupation of Iraq may, in at least some respects, be remembered as one of its darkest.

The writer is a retired senior foreign service officer and a veteran of Army service in Southeast Asia. He was also a professor at the National War College. His e-mail address is [e-mail].

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Backing Bush`s Mideast Vision

By Jackson Diehl

Monday, June 21, 2004; Page A19

The Bush administration`s initiative on Middle East democracy has been widely portrayed as ending with a whimper at a trio of international summits this month. Opposition from France and other European skeptics forced a watering down of the democracy initiatives by the Group of Eight and NATO; several big Arab governments, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, spurned what was left. In Washington, foreign policy "realism" is back in fashion, thanks to the trouble in Iraq: Both the Democrats around John F. Kerry and a number of powerful Republicans are saying Bush`s vision of spreading democracy is a naive and even dangerous illusion.

All true -- but there`s more to the story. Though Bush`s mismanagement of Iraq has put his democracy advocates on the defensive, there nevertheless now exists the beginning of a broad pro-reform coalition in and outside the region. It includes a handful of people in Arab governments, but many more outside, in rapidly growing civic and human rights movements. There are European parliamentarians and policymakers in expanding numbers, especially in Germany. And in Washington, there are not only Bush`s neocons but an important group of Democrats.

A lot of these people don`t think much of George Bush, which is one reason why the coalition hasn`t entirely coalesced. But almost all of them say that Bush`s preaching on democracy over the past year, and the modest action that has come with it, has changed the terms of debate about the future of the Middle East, both in and outside the region. Bush`s campaign "frightened people," King Abdullah of Jordan said in an interview here last week. "But it also allowed some of us to say that if we don`t come up with our own initiative, something will be forced on us. And once you say you are going to reform, you trigger a process that you can`t turn back."

Abdullah`s optimism was one indication that Bush`s program is likely to survive the backlash of recent months. Though the king is skeptical that Iraq will manage to hold the elections now planned for January, he is moving steadily ahead in his own country. He has appointed a committee to draw up amendments to the electoral and political party laws, orchestrate a loosening of state control over the media, create a "youth parliament," and upgrade the judicial system. His government was one of several that pushed reluctant neighbors into accepting a recent endorsement of reform by the Arab League.

Another indicator comes in the release of a paper this week by a cross section of parliamentarians and policymakers from the United States and Europe, few of them supporters of Bush but all of them ardent advocates of democratic change in the Middle East. The Americans are mostly Democrats: former Clinton administration officials such as Ronald Asmus and Kenneth Pollack and democracy advocates Michael McFaul and Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution. The Europeans come from all over: Britain, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the Czech Republic; all three of Germany`s largest political parties are represented.

In essence the group`s paper calls for a more muscular version of the Bush policy -- without the compromises forced by transatlantic tensions and the blow back from Iraq. While it acknowledges the need for homegrown Arab reform movements, it emphasizes that these are most likely to arise outside existing governments. It argues that the West should focus on supporting these movements while linking aid, trade and other cooperation with governments to concrete progress on reform -- particularly in those countries, such as Egypt, where the regimes are both U.S. clients and entrenched autocracies.

"The West cannot export democracy as such. At the same time, the West can and in our view, must play a critical supporting role from the outside -- as it has in democratic breakthroughs and transitions in other parts of the world," says the paper, which was developed in months of transatlantic discussions sponsored by the German Marshall Fund. "This is a generational project for which we must summon historic staying power."

If it all sounds a lot like Bush`s vision, that is part of the point -- to show that there is a constituency for a Middle East democracy movement extending well beyond this White House. "What we were trying to do is demonstrate that it`s possible to build a bipartisan coalition for this vision across the aisle and across the Atlantic," says Asmus. "The Bush administration has made a start. The question is will we follow up and will we come up with a long-term blueprint."

The next step is unlikely to come from an administration preoccupied with Iraq and the upcoming election or from Arab governments. Progress on Middle East democracy will depend on independent movements seizing on the space Bush has opened and widening it. The German Marshall coalition aims its paper at similar groups of activists and intellectuals in the Arab world, some of which have produced their own groundbreaking manifestos in recent months. Taken together, the voices of these pro-democracy networks are still drowned out by the naysayers and skeptics, in the region and even in Washington. But time, and history, are probably on their side.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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ZNet Deutschland Interview, Teil 3
Lateinamerika
von Noam Chomsky und Christian Stache
ZNet Deutschland 24.05.2004
Könntest du uns etwas über die Lage in Lateinamerika sagen? Wie ist die Situation seit der Umsetzung des Colombia-Plans und seit dem Machtantritt der Uribe-Regierung?

Seit Beginn der Durchführung des Colombia-Plans haben die Gräuel rapide zugenommen, die Kämpfe haben sich militarisiert, die Zahl der Ermordeten ist gewachsen, die Zahl der ermordeten Gewerkschaftsaktivisten hat massiv zugenommen, so sehr, dass Kolumbien – ich weiß die Zahlen im Augenblick nicht genau – einen Großteil der ermordeten Gewerkschaftsaktivisten weltweit stellt. Die Zahl der Menschen, die von ihrem Land vertrieben wurden, ist gestiegen, immer mehr Leute werden in die städtischen Slums getrieben. Einige Zahlen darüber finden sich in meinem Buch Hegemony or Survival.[1] Und dabei hinken die Statistiken immer ein Jahr hinter der Realität her. Eine weitere Auswirkung der Umsetzung des Plans ist, dass inzwischen auch die FARC nur noch eine weitere paramilitärische Kraft ist. Ich meine, was immer die FARC einmal war – ursprünglich hat sie sich tatsächlich aus den Nöten und Forderungen der Bauern entwickelt, und sie hatte ein politisches Programm, das auch eine Bedeutung hatte. Mit all dem ist es jetzt vorbei. Heute ist die FARC nur noch eine weitere terroristische Kraft, die den Bauern im Nacken sitzt. Der Plan hat also zu einer Militarisierung des Konfliktes geführt. Für die Menschen in Kolumbien ist das natürlich nicht gut. Ich war vor ungefähr einem Jahr dort, in Südkolumbien.

Die Leute dort haben Angst, darüber zu sprechen: Bauern, die durch die Programme chemischer Kriegführung im Rahmen des Colombia-Plans von ihrem Land vertrieben worden sind. Und inzwischen haben sie genauso viel Angst vor der FARC wie vor den Paramilitärs.

Kannst du das ein bisschen genauer ausführen?

Der Colombia-Plan führte zu einer Intensivierung des Krieges, und in Reaktion darauf nahm die FARC einen verstärkt militärischen Charakter an und ließ ihr soziales Programm fallen. Das ist eine ziemlich naheliegende Reaktion, wenn man militärisch angegriffen wird. Und die militärischen Angriffe auf sie wurden verschärft. Sie wurde aus einigen der von ihr kontrollierten Gebieten vertrieben, und sie reagierte darauf, indem sie mehr und mehr zu einer militanten terroristischen Kraft wurde, eine Veränderung, die deutlich sichtbar war. Inzwischen hat sie kaum noch ein soziales Programm. Ich glaube nicht, dass die Bauern und die Menschenrechtsaktivistinnen und -aktivisten, die ursprünglich gewisse Sympathien für die FARC hegten, sie noch als soziale und politische Kraft betrachten. Die ELN vielleicht schon, ja sogar wahrscheinlich, aber das ist eine ziemlich kleine Gruppe. Es gibt jetzt Bemühungen, die paramilitärischen Kräfte in die Gesellschaft zu integrieren, was bedeutet, dass ihre Rolle als Vollstrecker der vorherrschenden Machtverhältnisse formalisiert wird. Wie das im einzelnen aussehen wird, kann ich nicht sagen.

Es ist sehr schwer, irgendetwas über die öffentliche Meinung in Kolumbien zu sagen, weil es dort zwar Meinungsumfragen gibt – die aber total wertlos sind. Die Umfragen werden größtenteils telefonisch gemacht, und drei Viertel der Bevölkerung kennen so etwas wie ein Telefon nur vom Hörensagen. Selbst in Bogotá waren die Vorhersagen für die Wahlen völlig falsch. Das erinnert an das, was gerade in Indien passiert ist – man weiß nicht, was der größte Teil der Bevölkerung denkt, weil diese Menschen außerhalb des Systems der Reichen stehen. Ansonsten hat der Colombia-Plan wohl einfach eine Intensivierung aller hässlichen Züge der Gesellschaft bewirkt. Was seine Auswirkungen auf die Kokainproduktion angeht – um die es ohnehin gar nicht geht –, nun, in dieser Hinsicht scheint er gar keine Auswirkungen gehabt zu haben. Wenn man eine Einschätzung davon bekommen will, wie viel Kokain produziert wird, muss man sich die Preise in New York und London ansehen. Und diese Preise sinken. Als ich vor ein paar Tagen in England war, las ich dort in der Presse, dass die Kokainpreise jetzt die niedrigsten seit Menschengedenken sind, was bedeutet, dass die Produktion enorm gestiegen ist. Wenn man die Produktion im einen Gebiet unterbindet, verlagert sie sich eben an einen anderen Ort. Der Gedanke, auf diese Art gegen Drogen zu kämpfen, ist ohnehin grotesk. Aber selbst wenn man ihn aus welchen Gründen auch immer akzeptiert, stellt sich heraus, dass diese Form der Drogenbekämpfung wahrscheinlich wirkungslos ist. Sie bewirkt einzig und allein, dass die Bauern von ihrem Land vertrieben werden. Sie werden vertrieben, die Bergbaugesellschaften übernehmen das Land und betreiben dort Tagebau, die großen Agroge­sell­schaften kommen und produzieren für den Export, und so wird das übliche Wirtschaftsmodell eingeführt.

Die indianischen Gemeinschaften und die Bauern leisten an verschiedenen Orten Widerstand, was angesichts der Situation wirklich erstaunlich ist, aber ohne Hilfe von außen haben sie keine Chance.

Kannst du uns etwas über die Rolle der USA bei dem Putschversuch gegen Chavez und bei den Aktivitäten gegen seine Regierung in letzter Zeit sagen?

Wir wissen nicht, ob die USA den Putsch organisiert haben. Ich wäre nicht überrascht, wenn es so wäre, aber es gibt keine direkten Beweise dafür. Unterstützt haben sie ihn, das ist völlig klar. Sie haben die Putschregierung sofort anerkannt. Dann mussten sie wegen der lateinamerikanischen Reaktionen zurückrudern. In Lateinamerika war man entschieden gegen eine Anerkennung des Putsches, und so nahmen auch die USA wieder Abstand davon. Danach wurde der Putsch binnen weniger Tage niedergeschlagen. Aber das ist noch nicht das Ende der Geschichte. Der Oberste Gerichtshof Venezuelas, der ein Überbleibsel des früheren Regimes ist, verweigerte der Regierung die Erlaubnis, den Führern des Putschs den Prozess zu machen, und erstaunlicherweise nahm die Regierung das hin und stellte die Anführer des Putsches nicht vor Gericht. Darüber wurde nicht berichtet, weil es das Bild von der totalitären Chavez-Regierung in Frage stellen würde. Einige Wochen später gab es einen terroristischen Bombenanschlag in Caracas, und die Untersuchung des Anschlags führte zu zwei Militäroffizieren, die sich am Putsch gegen Chavez beteiligt hatten. Sie flohen aus Venezuela nach Florida und beantragten dort politisches Asyl. Venezuela beantragte ihre Auslieferung, damit sie angeklagt werden können – das sagt uns einiges darüber, wie wichtig den USA der Kampf gegen den Terror ist. Das war Anfang März – ich habe in den USA keinen Mucks davon gehört, und soweit ich weiß, ist in den Medien überhaupt nicht darüber berichtet worden. Fakten wie diese sind sehr schwer herauszufinden, weil nichts darüber berichtet wird.

Justin Podur hat darüber geschrieben. Er brachte einen Artikel über Kolumbien und verband seinen Bericht mit der Situation in Venezuela. Dabei sprach er auch von den kolumbianischen paramilitärischen Kräften, die vor Kurzem in Venezuela aufgetaucht sind...

Wir wissen nicht wirklich, was da vorgefallen ist. Wir haben zwei Seiten, die widersprüchliche Versionen davon geben. Die Behauptungen der venezolanischen Regierung hören sich völlig plausibel an, aber Kolumbien bestreitet sie, und wir haben keine unabhängigen Beweise. Wir haben keine Beweise, niemanden, der Nachforschungen durchführt, und so können wir im Moment nur spekulieren. Vom Standpunkt der USA aus gesehen ist die gesamte Region, von Venezuela bis Argentinien, außer Kontrolle geraten. Und dieses Phänomen findet sich überall. Das gefällt den USA gar nicht, aber in Wirklichkeit können sie nicht viel dagegen tun. Man kann sich vorstellen, was sie versuchen werden, aber sie befinden sich in einer ziemlich schwachen Position. Wenn sie den Krieg im Irak problemlos gewonnen hätten, wovon ich eigentlich ausging – ich dachte, das würde ihnen gelingen, aber erstaunlicherweise war dem nicht so –, wenn sie also im Irak erfolgreich gewesen wären, hätte ich damals vermutet, dass sie sich als Nächstes die Andenregion in Lateinamerika vornehmen würden. Die Region ist voll von Streitkräften, Militärstützpunkten, Truppen überall. Sie ist enorm wichtig für die USA. Es gibt sogar Öl dort. Aber momentan glaube ich, dass die USA zu schwach sind, ihre Pläne durchzuführen. Sie werden es vielleicht mit Subversion versuchen. Ich glaube nicht, dass die Bevölkerung in den USA derzeit, nach dem Fiasko im Irak, irgendwelche militärischen Aktionen dort tolerieren würde.

Außerdem gibt es für die USA noch andere Probleme, wie zum Beispiel Argentinien, das sich weigert, die Anordnungen des Internationalen Währungsfonds IWF durchzuführen – und ohne dass der IWF wirklich etwas dagegen machen kann. Er kann nicht einfach die Wirtschaft dort zusammenbrechen lassen, weil US-Banken und US-amerikanische Kreditgeber dort zu viel investiert haben. Und so finden sie sich so halbwegs mit der Weigerung Argentiniens ab, weil ihnen nicht viel anderes übrigbleibt. Und Argentinien fährt ziemlich gut damit.

Vor einigen Wochen hatten wir einige Leute aus Argentinien in Hamburg, die uns erklärten, dass die Kirchner-Regierung gar nicht so großartig ist, wie sie in einigen deutschen Zeitungen hingestellt wird. Sie unterdrückt die Piqueteros und anderes mehr.

Ich bin sicher, dass das stimmt, aber sie weigert sich auch, dem IWF zu gehorchen. Niemand geht davon aus, dass das eine linke Regierung ist. Sie mag die Piqueteros nicht – aus Gründen, die auf der Hand liegen. Keine Zentralregierung mag es, wenn die Leute unabhängig von ihr handeln.

Anmerkungen:

[1] Zu Kolumbien, siehe Hegemony or Survival, S. 52-53 und S. 59-61; deutsch Hybris, S. 68-69 und S. 76-78. In Hybris heißt es auf S. 69: „Die bekannteste kolumbianische Menschenrechtsorganisation schätzt die Zahl der gewaltsam Vertriebenen auf 2,7 Millionen, wobei jeden Tag 1000 weitere dazukommen. In den ersten neun Monaten des Jahres 2002 sollen 350 000 Personen, mehr als im gesamten Vorjahr, mit Gewalt aus ihren Wohnstätten vertrieben worden sein. Die Zahl der politischen Morde ist auf zwanzig pro Tag gestiegen, während es 1998 noch zehn waren.“

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Interview`Mandela helped me survive Monicagate, Arafat could not make the leap to peace - and for days John Major wouldn`t take my calls`

On the eve of the publication of his eagerly anticipated $10m autobiography, Bill Clinton speaks exclusively to Alan Rusbridger and Jonathan Freedland in New York
Alan Rusbridger and Jonathan Freedland
Monday June 21, 2004

The Guardian
The stars have come out, just as they always did. There`s Uma Thurman, hair beacon-blonde. Glenn Close gives a little wave, taking up her place just a few seats away. Spike Lee is here somewhere. Officially, they`ve all come to the Skirball Center in New York`s SoHo district for a movie premiere. But the truth is that tonight is only peripherally about a film. The performance this starry, liberal crowd really want to see is by the man who became the most divisive figure in American life since Richard Nixon, the man who was hailed, even by his enemies, as the most gifted politician of the post-war era. They`re here to witness the rebirth of Bill Clinton.

First, comes the movie, The Hunting of the President, a highly partisan documentary which sets out to confirm the truth of Hillary Clinton`s famous declaration that her husband was the victim of a "vast rightwing conspiracy". The film recalls it all: the Whitewater land deal; the Arkansas state troopers who claimed to have procured women to feed the then Governor Clinton`s garguantuan sexual appetites; Paula Jones; Monica Lewinsky; and finally Kenneth Starr, the witchfinder-general bent on joining all these dots and turning them into a legal offence grave enough to unseat the president. The audience, Democrats all, hiss the villains and cheer the heroes.

Until the lights come up and there, on stage, is the hero himself. He looks like an ageing nightclub singer, as he saunters to the front of the stage, microphone in hand, hair now soft-white. The room is an ovation, of course, and Clinton basks in it. It`s like the campaign rallies of old which is appropriate because, in a way, that`s exactly what this is.

For Clinton, who has spent all his adult life campaigning, is once again out to sell himself to the American people. This time he is not asking for high office. Instead he seeks vindication, pleading his case in a 957-page autobiography. Starting today, he will embark on a round of TV events and public appearances, criss-crossing the US with the same packed itinerary as a presidential candidate.

Part of it is given over to an exclusive interview with the Guardian, which is also the only British newspaper granted access to the book, published tomorrow. In a hotel near his home in Chappaqua, New York, he speaks of the scandal that nearly brought him down and how he learned to let go of his rage. He talks about the war in Iraq and his quest for peace in the Middle East. He speaks of his friend, Tony Blair - and the wife who might one day succeed him into the White House.

The Middle East - from triumph to failure

He may no longer be in office, but he still lives on CST - Clinton Standard Time. Aides pop in and out of the anonymous hotel conference room to explain that "The president is running about half an hour late." They`re back 20 minutes later to explain that he is now an hour behind schedule. Finally, we are told to ready ourselves an hour and a half after our appointment was due to begin.

He is still preceded by a flurry of activity: his secret service detail acting as the advance guard who enter any room before he does. Like all previous US chief executives he will keep the 24-hour protection - and the title, Mr President - for the rest of his life.

And then he is there, tall, slimmer than he was in office, and with a face craggier than you remember. When he first ran for president in 1992, rivals teased him as a chubby "Bubba", a good ol` boy from the south with a taste for junk food and a waistline to match. He cuts a different figure now: the international statesman in sharp navy suit, salmon-pink tie, Oxford shirt and shoes brought to a military shine.

Nor does he turn on the megawatt smile and charm that used to be a feature of his every campaign appearance. His handshake is not the full body grip so memorably described by Joe Klein in Primary Colors: it is cordial. The eyes seem faraway. Perhaps the great campaigner never turned on the klieg-light charm for mere journalists. Or maybe, now that he is no longer an office-seeking politician, his style has changed.

He brightens though when the initial smalltalk turns to a pastime that is a passion: golf. He has just spent two hours with Klein: the two men are both weekend players, and he reels off details of Klein`s home club. He knows every fairway. Then it`s time for business. "OK, guys," he says. "Shoot."

We start with the one area that came tantalisingly close to handing him a golden legacy: the Middle East. With trademark Diet Coke in hand, Clinton rattles off the details of the Israel-Palestine conflict as confidently as he did when he was leading the global effort to end it. Percentages of territory, death tolls on both sides - he is a walking database. It`s hardly a surprise. The attempt to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians was one of the constant threads of his presidency, bringing one of its greatest successes - the 1993 handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn - and a lethal failure, the ill-fated peace talks at Camp David in 2000.

My Life is full of fond reminiscences of the early days of that effort: how he advised Arafat not to wear a pistol for that signing ceremony, how he and his aides devised a physical manoeuvre that would prevent the Palestinian leader attempting to kiss Rabin as well as shake his hand.

But he also details the deterioration of the process, giving his account of the Camp David debacle that led to the outbreak of the intifada that still rages. Clinton`s version is that Israel`s Ehud Barak was ready to make enormous concessions but that Arafat was not able to "make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman ... he just couldn`t bring himself to say yes".

Just before Clinton left office, Arafat thanked him for all his efforts and told the president he was a great man. "`Mr Chairman,` I replied, `I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.`"

We ask whether that leaves Clinton convinced, as the Israelis are, that so long as Arafat is there, there is no Palestinian partner for peace. No, he says, President Bush and Ariel Sharon make a mistake if they think they can ignore the veteran Palestinian leader.

"Unless they just want to wait for him to become incapacitated or pass away or unless they seriously believe they can find a better negotiating partner in Hamas ... then they need to keep working to make a deal."

He adds that the Israeli hope, also backed by Bush, of bypassing Arafat and dealing instead with a new Palestinian prime minister - Abu Mazen in the first instance - was fine in principle but it was "a step too far to expect a new prime minister, who had no following remotely equal to Arafat`s, to, in effect, take his power away."

It was no good asking the prime minister to "publicly neutralise Arafat and render him ceremonial because he still controls too much of the security forces. He won`t let that happen. He`s too smart."

A power-sharing arrangement with Arafat was the most Bush and Sharon should have aimed for. Sidelining Arafat completely is, even according to a man who has good reason to resent him, not an option.

All this comes in long, detailed answers - often delving into deep history, with a detour on the way - structured into "three main goals" or "four reasons". Suddenly you understand why the Clinton White House - especially in the new president`s first few months - became notorious as a talking shop, with policymaking meetings turning into late-night "bull" sessions. The habit extended to Clinton`s dealings with world leaders: face-to-face encounters stretching to three or four in the morning. This is a man who can talk.

But at times there are also flashes of what, the previous night, one supporter had called "a hideous indiscipline". He was speaking about Clinton`s impromptu post-movie appearance on stage, intended to last no more than 10 or so minutes, but stretching to an often-rambling 35.

There was the same mix of intellectual brilliance - a riff summarising the entire sweep of American political history - and looser passages where he almost seemed to lose the thread. Four years out of office, the former president had seemed a bit like a prize fighter no longer quite at his peak.

But here he is, now, wielding perfect recall and a searching anaylsis. What of Sharon`s plan unilaterally to withdraw from the Gaza Strip? "If it`s done in the right way, I think it`s a good thing. The idea that Israel as the stronger partner ... is strong enough to unilaterally make concessions, I think that is a very good thing - with two provisos. One is I don`t think it should be done in a way that humiliates the Palestinians. If they`re going to do it, they ought to just do it and do it in a dignified manner. Figure out what to do with the settlers and settlements, and if America needs to help financially to relocate them, then we ought to do that, whatever needs to be done.

"The second thing is, it cannot appear that `This is the scrap we are throwing you from our table.` What the message of the Gaza withdrawal needs to be is, `Here is a demonstration of our good faith ... Now if you will give me security and give up the [Palestinian refugees`] right of return` - as Arafat`s already said he would do when he accepted my parameters - `if you will do these things and work with us in good faith, more will follow.` Then I think good things will happen." In other words, Clinton welcomes the Israeli pullout plan if it is Gaza first, rather than Gaza only. He recognises that this might not be how Sharon sees it; the former president admits that the Israeli PM still regards the West Bank as crucial to Israel - a view not shared by Rabin or Barak or, he adds, himself.

Either way, Israel has to act. Clinton explains that continued occupation is a "loser" for Israel. "If they don`t let the Palestinians in the occupied territories vote the way they let the Palestinians in pre-67 Israel vote, then they`re an apartheid state. If they do let them vote then they won`t be a Jewish state after a while." So they have to act. Besides, "I still think there`s a deal to be had."

Iraq - low on the danger list

One of My Life`s most arresting passages describes the handover meeting Clinton had with his successor in December 2000. George Bush reckoned the biggest security issues he would face would be national missile defence and Iraq. "I told him that, based on the last eight years, I thought his biggest security problems, in order, would be Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida; the absence of peace in the Middle East; the standoff between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, and the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al-Qaida; North Korea; and then Iraq."

Besides advertising his own prescience, Clinton seems to be making a point - that Iraq was fairly low, fifth, on the list of priorities, and that, by implication, his successor went on to slay the wrong dragon.

Yet when we ask the former president about Iraq, his answer is not so straightforward. Like the Democrats` nominee for the White House, John Kerry, Clinton`s position is nuanced. The unkind would say it is confused, or at least political - designed to stay firmly on the fence.

On the one hand, he says, he would have acted like Kerry. "I would have voted, I confess, if I had been a senator, I would have ... voted to give [the president] the authority to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein in the past had never done anything that he wasn`t forced to do. And we were in this post-9/11 era and I thought it was imperative that we find out whether he had this stuff."

Clinton knew from his own time in office that there were "unaccounted-for stocks of chemical and biological agents [in Iraq] which could be weaponised" and that they could fall into the wrong hands.

That much might comfort the pro-war camp. But opponents will also find much to cheer in Clinton`s remarks. The day we meet, initial reports from the independent commission investigating 9/11 conclude that there was no link between Saddam and the attacks on New York and Washington. "That`s what I always thought," says Clinton, his gaze firm and steady. "From the minute it happened, I was virtually positive it was al-Qaida. I don`t think Iraq had the capability to pull it off."

Clinton reckons the danger list he had given Bush still remains the most accurate. "In terms of their own ability to act against us or the Israelis, I always felt that al-Qaida and bin Laden were a much bigger threat and that the Middle East was a bigger problem, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because it fed all this other stuff."

In his view, Iraq was worth inspecting for WMD, but the United Nations was the way to get the job done. "My view was that we shouldn`t attack until the UN inspectors are finished and they can say, `He [Saddam] did or did not comply.`" For that reason, and to help Blair, Clinton started working the phones, lobbying the leaders of Mexico and Chile to vote for the famous second UN resolution on Iraq - because it would have given Hans Blix and his team a few more weeks and might have got "America to defer military action".

Clinton`s wariness of US engagement in Iraq had another source. "I worried we`d be underdeployed in Afghanistan - and might make the same mistake as we made in the 1980s when the US walked away after the Soviets left."

But don`t Republicans keep saying that toppling Saddam was Clinton policy too? "Our policy had been, since 1998, regime change, but our policy toward Castro had been regime change, too, and we hadn`t invaded Cuba! There is more than one way to pursue that objective."

The special relationship - Blair`s dilemma

The conversation moved naturally to his old friend Blair, for whom he clearly retains a warm regard. He`s at pains to tell "British readers" how they should understand the nature of Blair`s dilemma.

Nevertheless, asked if the "special relationship" was strong enough to bear a British prime minister speaking his mind frankly on issues that divided the two countries, he answers with an immediate and unequivocal: "Yes."

Clinton said he had much sympathy over the fix Blair was in over Iraq. "He had a very bad Hobson`s Choice. If he says, `Well, the UN didn`t ratify this` and he walks away, it makes Europe happy but it imperils the transatlantic alliance and it still doesn`t do anything to strengthen the UN. If he stays with President Bush - at a minimum, he`s gonna have to do something about whatever it is there on the WMD side, and he gives himself the chance to be the person who put the transatlantic alliance back together - and he hasn`t hurt the UN any more than it`s going to be hurt anyway.

"I think he thought: `In for a dime, in for a dollar. There`s no good answer, this is the less bad alternative.` I think some of the criticisms he got in Britain didn`t appreciate how hard he had tried to get that other UN resolution through."

Clinton also defends Blair by highlighting the positions the prime minister had taken against Bush on a number of issues. "Tony`s been in favour of the comprehensive test ban treaty, he`s for the international criminal court - you know, he didn`t advocate abandoning the ABM treaty. He`s for the Kyoto accord on climate change and has done far more than America has to meet his targets.

"As far as I know Tony Blair`s never embraced the new nuclear policy developed by President Bush - small-scale nuclear weapons and a new one that breaks concrete bunkers. So I don`t think it`s quite fair to see all of his foreign policy through the lens of Iraq."

Clinton`s admiration for Blair does not exclude his predecessor, especially over Ireland. "I particularly admired John Major because it was harder for him than it was for Blair because he needed the Unionists in parliament to sustain a narrow majority and yet he consistently tried to do the right thing. So I always thought Major never got enough credit for what he did on Ireland. He had a weaker hand to play than Margaret Thatcher in her heyday and I thought he played it about as well as he could."

But he does not conceal moments of tension in the relationship - moments where the two fell out publicly without any significant damage to the transatlantic alliance. "He had to be critical of my visa for Gerry Adams because it put him in a very difficult position. He wasn`t politically able to say anything good about it, even if he thought it had any merit. For days he refused to take my phone calls. The press reported I was mad at him [over allegations that the Major team had helped George Bush`s 1992 campaign, by seeking to dig up dirt on Clinton from British files relating to Clinton`s two-year stint at Oxford.] I was never mad with John Major, though I didn`t mind people thinking I was mad because, you know, it always gives you a little psychological advantage."

Monica - the couch months

There is a flash of anger only once in our exchange - at the mention of his chief persecutor, Kenneth Starr. It had been the same night before, as he railed against Starr`s pursuit of his friends and former colleagues.

Clinton`s book describes his agony as "the darkest part of my inner life" was dragged into full public scrutiny - initially as he tried to outwit Rutherford Institute [a rightwing foundation] lawyers acting for Paula Jones as they delved into his personal life. It was these lawyers who first advanced a legal definition of "sexual relations" which, in Clinton`s mind, "seemed to require both a specific act and a certain state of mind on my part and did not include any act by another person." Clinton`s decision to adopt this strict legalistic definition later cost him dearly.

"What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish," he says in the book. "I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn`t want it to come out. In the deposition [in which he denied "sexual relations"] I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity."

He sees the affair as a resurfacing of "old demons", dating back to his earliest years. "I didn`t like everything I learned about myself or my past, and it pained me to face the fact that my childhood and the life I`d led since growing up had made some things difficult for me that seemed to come more naturally to other people."

The book sheds some light on that, not only lovingly recalling the characters and adventures of a boyhood in 1950s Arkansas, but also revealing the pain of a boy unconfident about his looks and weight, raised in a household riven by "abuse" - chiefly at the hands of his alcoholic and violent stepfather Roger Clinton. The former president says that it was at this young age that he learned to lead "parallel lives". "When I was a child my outside life was filled with friends and fun, learning and doing. My internal life was full of uncertainty, anger and a dread of ever-looming violence. No one can live parallel lives with complete success; the two have to intersect."

When faced with the Lewinsky allegations, he soon realised his tactic of denial was "a terrible mistake" - but became determined not to let Starr use his sexual misbehaviour to drive him out of office. What appalled him most was that - as he fought on many legal fronts - he also found himself lying to his family and closest supporters.

"I was misleading everyone about my personal failings. I was embarrassed and wanted to keep it from my wife and daughter. I didn`t want to help Ken Starr criminalise my personal life, and I didn`t want the American people to know how I`d let them down. It was like living a nightmare. Though she was right about the nature of our opposition, seeing Hillary defend me made me even more ashamed about what I had done."

He finally broke the truth to Hillary after a "miserable, sleepless night" on August 15 1998. "She looked at me as if I had punched her in the gut, almost as angry at me for lying to her in January as for what I had done. All I could do was tell her I was sorry ... I still didn`t fully understand why I had done something so wrong and stupid; that understanding would come slowly, in the months of working on our relationship that lay ahead."

Later the same day he talked to Chelsea. "I was afraid that I would lose not only my marriage, but my daughter`s love and respect as well."

That same day, the news was dominated by the Omagh bomb, which killed 28 people. In the following days Hillary and Chelsea were supportive in public. In private they were barely speaking to Clinton, who was now sleeping on a couch in a small living room adjoining the couple`s bedroom. "I deserved a kicking, all right, but I was getting it at home, where it should have been administered."

When pressed, Clinton offers a political analysis for the "hysteria" which led to his impeachment. He describes an ever more bitter fight between the right and the left over the role of government, a picture complicated by the rise of the fundamentalist Christian right. He argues that, rather than fight on ideology, the right increasingly targets the personal lives of progressive public figures, whom they genuinely believe morally unfit for office. He urges Democrats to stick to arguments - which they can win - rather than personal vendettas.

We ask whether, as a Christian himself, he had been able to forgive Starr. "I couldn`t have done it without two people, both in Africa," he says. "One was a Rwandan woman, a survivor of the slaughter. She lived next to a Hutu couple. Their children played together for 10 years. The couple rat `em out. They come and crack her across the back with a machete and she`s left for dead. She wakes up in a pool of blood and looks around and her husband and her six children are dead. She`s the only survivor. And she said, `I screamed at God for letting me live with all them dead and then I realised I must have been spared for some purpose. It could not be something as mean as vengeance.`

"What was the lesson for me? What I went through was a tea party compared to that woman. I lost nothing compared to what she did. You know, I had my reputation in tatters, I was bankrupted, I was enraged because other people were persecuted who were completely innocent. It was nothing.

"The other person who helped me was Nelson Mandela. He told me he forgave his oppressors because if he didn`t they would have destroyed him. He said: `You know, they already took everything. They took the best years of my life, I didn`t get to see my children grow up. They destroyed my marriage. They abused me physically and mentally. They could take everything except my mind and heart. Those things I would have to give away and I decided not to give them away.`

"And then he said: `Neither should you.` And he said when he was finally set free he felt all that anger welling up again and he said, `They`ve already had me for 27 years ... I had to let it go`. You do this not for other people but for yourself. If you don`t let go it continues to eat at you."

Clinton was finally allowed back off the couch at some unspecified time after admitting his infidelity to Hillary and being cleared by the Senate. "I almost wound up being grateful to my tormentors: they were probably the only people who could have made me look good to Hillary again."

Hillary - the next Clinton presidency?

The current book tour is the latest Clinton campaign - but it`s unlikely to be the last. What of the former president`s wife, now in the Senate representing New York? Does she have what it takes to be president?

He smiles at the thought. She considered running this year, he admits, but instead "wanted to honour her commitment to the people of New York" to serve a full term in the senate. Political convention demands that he say Kerry will triumph this year? "He has a slightly better than 50-50 chance to win," says Clinton - and that therefore there will be no Democratic vacancy for eight years. So maybe that could be Hillary`s moment?

"We have no idea what the future holds. If, you know, eight years from now or sometime in the future she got a chance to serve, I have no doubt about her skills. She is the ablest person I`ve ever known in public life. And she does some things better than I do, better than I ever do. She is very well organised, she is very strong ... I have no doubt she could do it ... Who knows what will happen in the future?"

We ask him about the red and blue crocheted band around his right wrist - an incongruous clash with the statesman attire. For the first time in the interview he becomes emotional, the voice catching and his eyes redening. "I`ve worn it for two years. I went there [to Colombia] and met these unbelievable kids from a village on the edge of the rainforest where the narco-traffickers are dominant," he says. "They sang and danced for peace and I fell in love with these kids. I asked them to perform at the White House one Christmas. They came with the culture minister, a magnificently attractive woman called Consuelo. The bad guys hated these kids because they made them look like what they are. The guerillas couldn`t kill these children, so they murdered her ... I can still hardly talk about this.

"Two years ago they asked me back and I said, `I`ll come, but you`ve got to bring those kids to see me.` So I turn up - and the children greeted me at the airport, along with the new culture minister - the niece of the murdered woman. And they gave me this bracelet, which I`ve never taken off."

And, with that, he is up on his feet, posing for a photograph and out - ready for the next stop in the campaign that never ends.

· From tubby child to a handshake with Castro - Bill Clinton in his own words

On the influence of his grandmother

[My grandmother] Mammaw`s main goals for me were that I would eat a lot, learn a lot and always be neat and clean ... These early instructions probably explain why I now read a lot, battle my weight and never forget to wash my hands and brush my teeth.

On being a fat child

The rope in the playground was tied at one end to a tree and at the other end to a swing set. The kids would line up on one side and take turns running and jumping over it. All the other kids cleared the rope ... Me, I didn`t clear the rope. I was a little chunky anyway, and slow, so slow that I was once the only kid at an Easter egg hunt who didn`t get a single egg, not because I couldn`t find them but because I couldn`t get to them fast enough. On the day I tried to jump rope I was wearing cowboy boots to school. Like a fool, I didn`t take the boots off to jump. My heel caught on the rope, I turned, fell and heard my leg snap.

On his violent stepfather

One night [my stepfather`s] drunken self-destructiveness came to a head in a fight with my mother I can`t ever forget ... They were screaming at each other in their bedroom in the back of the house. For some reason, I walked out into the hall to the doorway of the bedroom. Just as I did, Daddy pulled a gun from behind his back and fired in Mother`s direction. The bullet went into the wall between where she and I were standing. I was stunned and so scared ... I can still see them leading Daddy away in handcuffs to jail ... I`m sure Daddy didn`t mean to hurt her and he would have died if the bullet had accidentally hit either of us. But something more poisonous than alcohol drove him to that level of debasement.

On standing up to his stepfather

One night Daddy closed the door to his bedroom, started screaming at Mother, then began to hit her ... Finally I couldn`t bear the thought of Mother being hurt and [brother] Roger being frightened any more. I grabbed a golf club out of my bag and threw open their door, Mother was on the floor and Daddy was standing over her beating on her, I told him to stop and that if he didn`t I was going to beat the hell out of him with the golf club. He just caved ... it made me sick.

The books that he says got him through Monicagate

The Imitations of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (classic Christian text that deals with pride, suffering, self-centredness, materialism and anxiety).

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (putting Stoicism into practise as a means of coping with adversity).

Seventy Times Seven by Johann Christoph Arnold (reflection on the stories of "real people" who have dealt with injuries from crime and betrayal and abuse, that stresses forgiveness as the only way of surviving life`s deepest hurts).

John 8:7 ("Let he that is without sin...")

On shaking hands with Castro

[At the UN a giant Namibian official] moved on, revealing a last greeter who had been invisible behind him: Fidel Castro. Castro stuck out his hand and I shook it, the first president to do so in more than 40 years. He said he didn`t wish to cause me any trouble, but wanted to pay his respects before I left office. I replied that I hoped that someday our nations would be reconciled.

On tactics for avoiding attack at Islamabad airport

We went into two small planes, one with US Air Force markings, the other, in which I was riding, painted plain white.

On the Queen

I was taken with her grace and intelligence and the clever manner in which she discussed public issues, probing me for information and insights

· My Life by Bill Clinton is published by Hutchinson.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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How Mandela helped Clinton survive scandal

Jonathan Freedland
Monday June 21, 2004

The Guardian
Nelson Mandela counselled Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky scandal, helping him to survive the ordeal that nearly saw him removed from office, the former US president reveals today.

In an interview with the Guardian, his only one with a British newspaper, Mr Clinton tells how the advice of the hero of the anti-apartheid struggle saw him through the toughest months of the scandal that threatened to engulf his presidency. The key exchange came during a presidential visit to South Africa in March 1998 - at the height of the "Zippergate" controversy - which included a tour of Mr Mandela`s one-time prison cell on Robben Island.

"[Mandela] told me he forgave his oppressors because if he didn`t they would have destroyed him," Mr Clinton said. "He said: `You know, they already took everything. They took the best years of my life; I didn`t get to see my children grow up. They destroyed my marriage. They abused me physically and mentally. They could take everything except my mind and heart. Those things I would have to give away and I decided not to give them away.` And then he said `Neither should you`.

"[Mandela] said when he was finally set free he felt all that anger welling up again and he said: `They`ve already had me for 27 years ... I had to let it go`."

Speaking of his own attempts to forgive the former independent counsel Kenneth Starr and the rest of his legal tormentors, Mr Clinton adds: "You do this not for other people but for yourself. If you don`t let go it continues to eat at you."

The interview comes on the eve of publication of the ex-president`s 957-page autobiography, My Life, which industry insiders expect to be one of the biggest selling titles in publishing history. The Guardian has gained exclusive access to the book.

In it he details how, despite their united front in public, relations with his wife Hillary became part of a living "nightmare". Consumed with shame for his "selfish stupidity," the then-president was banished from the marital bed and forced to sleep on a couch.

Today`s interview also sees Mr Clinton set out his analysis of current international events - in ways that may discomfort his successor, George Bush, and his old friend and partner, Tony Blair.

In a departure from current US and UK policy, the former president warns that it is a mistake to sideline Yasser Arafat from the Middle East peace process.

Speaking of Mr Bush and the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, he says: "Unless they just want to wait for him to become incapacitated or pass away or unless they seriously believe they can find a better negotiating partner in Hamas if they destroy the PLO, which I don`t think they do believe, then they need to keep working to make a deal."

The remarks have extra force given Mr Clinton`s clear personal disdain for Mr Arafat. His book lays chief blame for the collapse of the 2000 Camp David peace initiative on the Palestinian leader, and even suggests that Mr Arafat occasionally seemed no longer in full control of his mental capacities.

The ex-president tells the Guardian that Mr Arafat was "emotionally incapable" of making the leap "from revolutionary to statesman".

He reveals that just before he left office, Mr Arafat thanked him for all his efforts and told the president he was a great man. "`Mr Chairman,` I replied, `I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one`."

In a further departure from the official Bush-Blair position, Mr Clinton insists that support for Mr Sharon`s proposed withdrawal from Gaza should come with strings attached.

First, "I don`t think it should be done in a way that humiliates the Palestinians". Israel needs to stage a "dignified" exit, he says, with the US providing financial aid for the relocation of Jewish settlers if necessary.

Second, Mr Clinton, says, "it cannot appear that `This is the scrap we are throwing you from our table`. Israel needs to signal that, if the Palestinians crack down on terror, more [territorial withdrawal] will follow."

Equally awkwardly for Mr Blair, Mr Clinton declares that the prime minister could have voiced criticism of the US over Iraq without damaging the special relationship - contradicting the prime minister`s insistence that only public unanimity guarantees the stability of the transatlantic alliance.

While at pains to stress he understood Mr Blair`s acute political dilemma, he does offer veiled criticism of the war, noting that when he held a handover meeting with Mr Bush, he listed Iraq fifth out of five on his list of international priorities. Al-Qaida, he insists, was always the much bigger threat.

He also comes out against the rush to war in the spring of 2003.

"My view was that we shouldn`t attack until the UN inspectors are finished and they can say he [Saddam] did or did not comply."

In a bid to "defer US military action", if only by a few weeks, Mr Clinton further reveals that he engaged in behind-the-scenes lobbying, telephoning the leaders of Mexico and Chile, urging them to vote for the much-vaunted second UN resolution on Iraq.

He believed it was vital to give the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and his team a few more weeks.

The president tells the Guardian that his own future is now focused on his charitable foundation, which works to combat Aids, especially in Africa, but he says he sees a different possibility for Hillary.

Asked if she has the skills to be president, he says: "If, you know, eight years from now or some time in the future she got a chance to serve, I have no doubt about her skills. I just think she`d be great. There`s nothing she can`t do."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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PLAN B
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
As June 30th approaches, Israel looks to the Kurds.
Issue of 2004-06-28
Posted 2004-06-21

In July, 2003, two months after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, the war, far from winding down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had been among the war’s most enthusiastic supporters, began warning the Administration that the American-led occupation would face a heightened insurgency—a campaign of bombings and assassinations—later that summer. Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. The Israelis urged the United States to seal the nine-hundred-mile-long border, at whatever cost.

The border stayed open, however. “The Administration wasn’t ignoring the Israeli intelligence about Iran,” Patrick Clawson, who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has close ties to the White House, explained. “There’s no question that we took no steps last summer to close the border, but our attitude was that it was more useful for Iraqis to have contacts with ordinary Iranians coming across the border, and thousands were coming across every day—for instance, to make pilgrimages.” He added, “The questions we confronted were ‘Is the trade-off worth it? Do we want to isolate the Iraqis?’ Our answer was that as long as the Iranians were not picking up guns and shooting at us, it was worth the price.”

Clawson said, “The Israelis disagreed quite vigorously with us last summer. Their concern was very straightforward—that the Iranians would create social and charity organizations in Iraq and use them to recruit people who would engage in armed attacks against Americans.”

The warnings of increased violence proved accurate. By early August, the insurgency against the occupation had exploded, with bombings in Baghdad, at the Jordanian Embassy and the United Nations headquarters, that killed forty-two people. A former Israeli intelligence officer said that Israel’s leadership had concluded by then that the United States was unwilling to confront Iran; in terms of salvaging the situation in Iraq, he said, “it doesn’t add up. It’s over. Not militarily—the United States cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq—but politically.”

Flynt Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst who until last year served on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, told me that late last summer “the Administration had a chance to turn it around after it was clear that ‘Mission Accomplished’”—a reference to Bush’s May speech—“was premature. The Bush people could have gone to their allies and got more boots on the ground. But the neocons were dug in—‘We’re doing this on our own.’”

Leverett went on, “The President was only belatedly coming to the understanding that he had to either make a strategic change or, if he was going to insist on unilateral control, get tougher and find the actual insurgency.” The Administration then decided, Leverett said, to “deploy the Guantánamo model in Iraq”—to put aside its rules of interrogation. That decision failed to stop the insurgency and eventually led to the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison.

In early November, the President received a grim assessment from the C.I.A.’s station chief in Baghdad, who filed a special field appraisal, known internally as an Aardwolf, warning that the security situation in Iraq was nearing collapse. The document, as described by Knight-Ridder, said that “none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an ability to govern the country” or to hold elections and draft a constitution.

A few days later, the Administration, rattled by the violence and the new intelligence, finally attempted to change its go-it-alone policy, and set June 30th as the date for the handover of sovereignty to an interim government, which would allow it to bring the United Nations into the process. “November was one year before the Presidential election,” a U.N. consultant who worked on Iraqi issues told me. “They panicked and decided to share the blame with the U.N. and the Iraqis.”

A former Administration official who had supported the war completed a discouraging tour of Iraq late last fall. He visited Tel Aviv afterward and found that the Israelis he met with were equally discouraged. As they saw it, their warnings and advice had been ignored, and the American war against the insurgency was continuing to founder. “I spent hours talking to the senior members of the Israeli political and intelligence community,” the former official recalled. “Their concern was ‘You’re not going to get it right in Iraq, and shouldn’t we be planning for the worst-case scenario and how to deal with it?’”

Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, took it upon himself at this point to privately warn Vice-President Dick Cheney that America had lost in Iraq; according to an American close to Barak, he said that Israel “had learned that there’s no way to win an occupation.” The only issue, Barak told Cheney, “was choosing the size of your humiliation.” Cheney did not respond to Barak’s assessment. (Cheney’s office declined to comment.)

In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. Several officials depicted Sharon’s decision, which involves a heavy financial commitment, as a potentially reckless move that could create even more chaos and violence as the insurgency in Iraq continues to grow.

Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel’s clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.

Asked to comment, Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said, “The story is simply untrue and the relevant governments know it’s untrue.” Kurdish officials declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the State Department.

However, a senior C.I.A. official acknowledged in an interview last week that the Israelis were indeed operating in Kurdistan. He told me that the Israelis felt that they had little choice: “They think they have to be there.” Asked whether the Israelis had sought approval from Washington, the official laughed and said, “Do you know anybody who can tell the Israelis what to do? They’re always going to do what is in their best interest.” The C.I.A. official added that the Israeli presence was widely known in the American intelligence community.

The Israeli decision to seek a bigger foothold in Kurdistan—characterized by the former Israeli intelligence officer as “Plan B”—has also raised tensions between Israel and Turkey. It has provoked bitter statements from Turkish politicians and, in a major regional shift, a new alliance among Iran, Syria, and Turkey, all of which have significant Kurdish minorities. In early June, Intel Brief, a privately circulated intelligence newsletter produced by Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, and Philip Giraldi, who served as the C.I.A.’s deputy chief of base in Istanbul in the late nineteen-eighties, said:

Turkish sources confidentially report that the Turks are increasingly concerned by the expanding Israeli presence in Kurdistan and alleged encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state. . . . The Turks note that the large Israeli intelligence operations in Northern Iraq incorporate anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian activity, including support to Iranian and Syrian Kurds who are in opposition to their respective governments.

In the years since the first Gulf War, Iraq’s Kurds, aided by an internationally enforced no-fly zone and by a U.N. mandate providing them with a share of the country’s oil revenues, have managed to achieve a large measure of independence in three northern Iraqi provinces. As far as most Kurds are concerned, however, historic “Kurdistan” extends well beyond Iraq’s borders, encompassing parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. All three countries fear that Kurdistan, despite public pledges to the contrary, will declare its independence from the interim Iraqi government if conditions don’t improve after June 30th.

Israeli involvement in Kurdistan is not new. Throughout the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Israel actively supported a Kurdish rebellion against Iraq, as part of its strategic policy of seeking alliances with non-Arabs in the Middle East. In 1975, the Kurds were betrayed by the United States, when Washington went along with a decision by the Shah of Iran to stop supporting Kurdish aspirations for autonomy in Iraq.

Betrayal and violence became the norm in the next two decades. Inside Iraq, the Kurds were brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein, who used airpower and chemical weapons against them. In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., initiated a campaign of separatist violence in Turkey that lasted fifteen years; more than thirty thousand people, most of them Kurds, were killed. The Turkish government ruthlessly crushed the separatists, and eventually captured the P.K.K.’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Last month, the P.K.K., now known as the Kongra-Gel, announced that it was ending a five-year unilateral ceasefire and would begin targeting Turkish citizens once again.

The Iraqi Kurdish leadership was furious when, early this month, the United States acceded to a U.N. resolution on the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty that did not affirm the interim constitution that granted the minority Kurds veto power in any permanent constitution. Kurdish leaders immediately warned President Bush in a letter that they would not participate in a new Shiite-controlled government unless they were assured that their rights under the interim constitution were preserved. “The people of Kurdistan will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq,” the letter said.

There are fears that the Kurds will move to seize the city of Kirkuk, together with the substantial oil reserves in the surrounding region. Kirkuk is dominated by Arab Iraqis, many of whom were relocated there, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, as part of Saddam Hussein’s campaign to “Arabize” the region, but the Kurds consider Kirkuk and its oil part of their historic homeland. “If Kirkuk is threatened by the Kurds, the Sunni insurgents will move in there, along with the Turkomen, and there will be a bloodbath,” an American military expert who is studying Iraq told me. “And, even if the Kurds do take Kirkuk, they can’t transport the oil out of the country, since all of the pipelines run through the Sunni-Arab heartland.”

A top German national-security official said in an interview that “an independent Kurdistan with sufficient oil would have enormous consequences for Syria, Iran, and Turkey” and would lead to continuing instability in the Middle East—no matter what the outcome in Iraq is. There is also a widespread belief, another senior German official said, that some elements inside the Bush Administration—he referred specifically to the faction headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz—would tolerate an independent Kurdistan. This, the German argued, would be a mistake. “It would be a new Israel—a pariah state in the middle of hostile nations.”

A declaration of independence would trigger a Turkish response—and possibly a war—and also derail what has been an important alliance for Israel. Turkey and Israel have become strong diplomatic and economic partners in the past decade. Thousands of Israelis travel to Turkey every year as tourists. Turkish opposition to the Iraq war has strained the relationship; still, Turkey remains oriented toward the West and, despite the victory of an Islamic party in national elections in 2002, relatively secular. It is now vying for acceptance in the European Union. In contrast, Turkey and Syria have been at odds for years, at times coming close to open confrontation, and Turkey and Iran have long been regional rivals. One area of tension between them is the conflict between Turkey’s pro-Western stand and Iran’s rigid theocracy. But their mutual wariness of the Kurds has transcended these divisions.

A European foreign minister, in a conversation last month, said that the “blowing up” of Israel’s alliance with Turkey would be a major setback for the region. He went on, “To avoid chaos, you need the neighbors to work as one common entity.”

The Israelis, however, view the neighborhood, with the exception of Kurdistan, as hostile. Israel is convinced that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, and that, with Syria’s help, it is planning to bolster Palestinian terrorism as Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip.

Iraqi Shiite militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr, the former American intelligence official said, are seen by the Israeli leadership as “stalking horses” for Iran—owing much of their success in defying the American-led coalition to logistical and communications support and training provided by Iran. The former intelligence official said, “We began to see telltale signs of organizational training last summer. But the White House didn’t want to hear it: ‘We can’t take on another problem right now. We can’t afford to push Iran to the point where we’ve got to have a showdown.’”

Last summer, according to a document I obtained, the Bush Administration directed the Marines to draft a detailed plan, called Operation Stuart, for the arrest and, if necessary, assassination of Sadr. But the operation was cancelled, the former intelligence official told me, after it became clear that Sadr had been “tipped off” about the plan. Seven months later, after Sadr spent the winter building support for his movement, the American-led coalition shut down his newspaper, provoking a crisis that Sadr survived with his status enhanced, thus insuring that he will play a major, and unwelcome, role in the political and military machinations after June 30th.

“Israel’s immediate goal after June 30th is to build up the Kurdish commando units to balance the Shiite militias—especially those which would be hostile to the kind of order in southern Iraq that Israel would like to see,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Of course, if a fanatic Sunni Baathist militia took control—one as hostile to Israel as Saddam Hussein was—Israel would unleash the Kurds on it, too.” The Kurdish armed forces, known as the peshmerga, number an estimated seventy-five thousand troops, a total that far exceeds the known Sunni and Shiite militias.

The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that since late last year Israel has been training Kurdish commando units to operate in the same manner and with the same effectiveness as Israel’s most secretive commando units, the Mistaravim. The initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the Kurds, the former officer said, was to allow them to do what American commando units had been unable to do—penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq. (I was unable to learn whether any such mission had yet taken place.) “The feeling was that this was a more effective way to get at the insurgency,” the former officer said. “But the growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began upsetting the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same Kurdish commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate and attack in Turkey.”

The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably expanded, the Israeli said. Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer said, “Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way—as balance against Saddam. It’s Realpolitik.” He added, “By aligning with the Kurds, Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.” He went on, “What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush Administration.”

Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that their intelligence community also has evidence that Israel is using its new leverage inside Kurdistan, and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria, for intelligence and operational purposes. Syrian and Lebanese officials believe that Israeli intelligence played a role in a series of violent protests in Syria in mid-March in which Syrian Kurdish dissidents and Syrian troops clashed, leaving at least thirty people dead. (There are nearly two million Kurds living in Syria, which has a population of seventeen million.) Much of the fighting took place in cities along Syria’s borders with Turkey and Kurdish-controlled Iraq. Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, told me that while the disturbances amounted to an uprising by the Kurds against the leadership of Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, his government had evidence that Israel was “preparing the Kurds to fight all around Iraq, in Syria, Turkey, and Iran. They’re being programmed to do commando operations.”

The top German national-security official told me that he believes that the Bush Administration continually misread Iran. “The Iranians wanted to keep America tied down in Iraq, and to keep it busy there, but they didn’t want chaos,” he said. One of the senior German officials told me, “The critical question is ‘What will the behavior of Iran be if there is an independent Kurdistan with close ties to Israel?’ Iran does not want an Israeli land-based aircraft carrier”—that is, a military stronghold—“on its border.”

Another senior European official said, “The Iranians would do something positive in the south of Iraq if they get something positive in return, but Washington won’t do it. The Bush Administration won’t ask the Iranians for help, and can’t ask the Syrians. Who is going to save the United States?” He added that, at the start of the American invasion of Iraq, several top European officials had told their counterparts in Iran, “You will be the winners in the region.”

Israel is not alone in believing that Iran, despite its protestations, is secretly hard at work on a nuclear bomb. Early this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is responsible for monitoring nuclear proliferation, issued its fifth quarterly report in a row stating that Iran was continuing to misrepresent its research into materials that could be used for the production of nuclear weapons. Much of the concern centers on an underground enrichment facility at Natanz, two hundred and fifty miles from the Iran-Iraq border, which, during previous I.A.E.A. inspections, was discovered to contain centrifuges showing traces of weapons-grade uranium. The huge complex, which is still under construction, is said to total nearly eight hundred thousand square feet, and it will be sheltered in a few months by a roof whose design allows it to be covered with sand. Once the work is completed, the complex “will be blind to satellites, and the Iranians could add additional floors underground,” an I.A.E.A. official told me. “The question is, will the Israelis hit Iran?”

Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A. director, has repeatedly stated that his agency has not “seen concrete proof of a military program, so it’s premature to make a judgment on that.” David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is an expert on nuclear proliferation, buttressed the I.A.E.A. claim. “The United States has no concrete evidence of a nuclear-weapons program,” Albright told me. “It’s just an inference. There’s no smoking gun.” (Last Friday, at a meeting in Vienna, the I.A.E.A. passed a resolution that, while acknowledging some progress, complained that Iran had yet to be as open as it should be, and urgently called upon it to resolve a list of outstanding questions.)

The I.A.E.A. official told me that the I.A.E.A. leadership has been privately warned by Foreign Ministry officials in Iran that they are “having a hard time getting information” from the hard-line religious and military leaders who run the country. “The Iranian Foreign Ministry tells us, ‘We’re just diplomats, and we don’t know whether we’re getting the whole story from our own people,’” the official said. He noted that the Bush Administration has repeatedly advised the I.A.E.A. that there are secret nuclear facilities in Iran that have not been declared. The Administration will not say more, apparently worried that the information could get back to Iran.

Patrick Clawson, of the Institute for Near East Policy, provided another explanation for the reluctance of the Bush Administration to hand over specific intelligence. “If we were to identify a site,” he told me, “it’s conceivable that it could be quickly disassembled and the I.A.E.A. inspectors would arrive”—international inspections often take weeks to organize—“and find nothing.” The American intelligence community, already discredited because of its faulty reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, would be criticized anew. “It’s much better,” Clawson said, “to have the I.A.E.A. figure out on its own that there’s a site and then find evidence that there had been enriched material there.”

Clawson told me that Israel’s overwhelming national-security concern must be Iran. Given that a presence in Kurdistan would give Israel a way to monitor the Iranian nuclear effort, he said, “it would be negligent for the Israelis not to be there.”

At the moment, the former American senior intelligence official said, the Israelis’ tie to Kurdistan “would be of greater value than their growing alliance with Turkey. ‘We love Turkey but got to keep the pressure on Iran.’” The former Israeli intelligence officer said, “The Kurds were the last surviving group close to the United States with any say in Iraq. The only question was how to square it with Turkey.”

There may be no way to square it with Turkey. Over breakfast in Ankara, a senior Turkish official explained, “Before the war, Israel was active in Kurdistan, and now it is active again. This is very dangerous for us, and for them, too. We do not want to see Iraq divided, and we will not ignore it.” Then, citing a popular Turkish proverb—“We will burn a blanket to kill a flea”—he said, “We have told the Kurds, ‘We are not afraid of you, but you should be afraid of us.’” (A Turkish diplomat I spoke to later was more direct: “We tell our Israeli and Kurdish friends that Turkey’s good will lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions.”)

“If you end up with a divided Iraq, it will bring more blood, tears, and pain to the Middle East, and you will be blamed,” the senior Turkish official said. “From Mexico to Russia, everybody will claim that the United States had a secret agenda in Iraq: you came there to break up Iraq. If Iraq is divided, America cannot explain this to the world.” The official compared the situation to the breakup of Yugoslavia, but added, “In the Balkans, you did not have oil.” He said, “The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give one country independence everybody will want it.” If that happens, he said, “Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis.”

In Ankara, another senior Turkish official explained that his government had “openly shared its worries” about the Israeli military activities inside Kurdistan with the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “They deny the training and the purchase of property and claim it’s not official but done by private persons. Obviously, our intelligence community is aware that it was not so. This policy is not good for America, Iraq, or Israel and the Jews.”

Turkey’s increasingly emphatic and public complaints about Israel’s missile attacks on the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip is another factor in the growing tensions between the allies. On May 26th, Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, announced at a news conference in Ankara that the Turkish government was bringing its Ambassador in Israel home for consultations on how to revive the Middle East peace process. He also told the Turkish parliament that the government was planning to strengthen its ties to the Palestinian Authority, and, in conversations with Middle Eastern diplomats in the past month, he expressed grave concern about Israel. In one such talk, one diplomat told me, Gul described Israeli activities, and the possibility of an independent Kurdistan, as “presenting us with a choice that is not a real choice—between survival and alliance.”

A third Turkish official told me that the Israelis were “talking to us in order to appease our concern. They say, ‘We aren’t doing anything in Kurdistan to undermine your interests. Don’t worry.’” The official added, “If it goes out publicly what they’ve been doing, it will put your government and our government in a difficult position. We can tolerate ‘Kurdistan’ if Iraq is intact, but nobody knows the future—not even the Americans.”

A former White House official depicted the Administration as eager—almost desperate—late this spring to install an acceptable new interim government in Iraq before President Bush’s declared June 30th deadline for the transfer of sovereignty. The Administration turned to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy, to “put together something by June 30th—just something that could stand up” through the Presidential election, the former official said. Brahimi was given the task of selecting, with Washington’s public approval, the thirty-one members of Iraq’s interim government. Nevertheless, according to press reports, the choice of Iyad Allawi as interim Prime Minister was a disappointment to Brahimi.

The White House has yet to deal with Allawi’s past. His credentials as a neurologist, and his involvement during the past two decades in anti-Saddam activities, as the founder of the British-based Iraqi National Accord, have been widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—Saddam became President in 1979—is much less well known. “Allawi helped Saddam get to power,” an American intelligence officer told me. “He was a very effective operator and a true believer.” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, “Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug.”

Early this year, one of Allawi’s former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a “big husky man . . . who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students.” Allawi’s medical degree, she wrote, “was conferred upon him by the Baath party.” Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975.

“If you’re asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does,” Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. “He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff.” A cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi’s personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat “hit team” that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay.

The Saban Center’s Flynt Leverett said of the transfer of sovereignty, “If it doesn’t work, there is no fallback—nothing.” The former senior American intelligence official told me, similarly, that “the neocons still think they can pull the rabbit out of the hat” in Iraq. “What’s the plan? They say, ‘We don’t need it. Democracy is strong enough. We’ll work it out.’”

Middle East diplomats and former C.I.A. operatives who now consult in Baghdad have told me that many wealthy Iraqi businessmen and their families have deserted Baghdad in recent weeks in anticipation of continued, and perhaps heightened, suicide attacks and terror bombings after June 30th. “We’ll see Christians, Shiites, and Sunnis getting out,” Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, reported. “What the resistance is doing is targeting the poor people who run the bureaucracy—those who can’t afford to pay for private guards. A month ago, friends of mine who are important landowners in Iraq came to Baghdad to do business. The cost of one day’s security was about twelve thousand dollars.”

Whitley Bruner, a retired intelligence officer who was a senior member of the C.I.A.’s task force on Iraq a decade ago, said that the new interim government in Iraq is urgently seeking ways to provide affordable security for second-tier officials—the men and women who make the government work. In early June, two such officials—Kamal Jarrah, an Education Ministry official, and Bassam Salih Kubba, who was serving as deputy foreign minister—were assassinated by unidentified gunmen outside their homes. Neither had hired private guards. Bruner, who returned from Baghdad earlier this month, said that he was now working to help organize Iraqi companies that could provide high-quality security that Iraqis could afford. “It’s going to be a hot summer,” Bruner said. “A lot of people have decided to get to Lebanon, Jordan, or the Gulf and wait this one out.”

[Joerver]

Siehe #17904
Israelis `using Kurds to build power base`

Gary Younge in New York
Monday June 21, 2004

The Guardian
Israeli military and intelligence operatives are active in Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Iraq, providing training for commando units and running covert operations that could further destabilise the entire region, according to a report in the New Yorker magazine.

The article was written by Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who exposed the abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib. It is sourced primarily to unnamed former and current intelligence officials in Israel, the United States and Turkey.

Israel`s aims, according to Hersh, are to build up the Kurdish military strength in order to offset the strength of the Shia militias and to create a base in Iran from which they can spy on Iran`s suspected nuclear-making facilities.

"Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way - a balance against Saddam," one former Israeli intelligence officer told the New Yorker. "It`s Realpolitik. By aligning with the Kurds Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq and Syria. The critical question is `What will the behaviour of Iran be if there is an independent Kurdistan with close ties to Israel? Iran does not want an Israeli land-based aircraft carrier on its border."

By supporting Kurdish separatists, Israel also risks alienating its Turkish ally and undermining attempts to create a stable Iraq. "If you end up with a divided Iraq it will bring more blood, tears and pain to the Middle East and you will be blamed," a senior Turkish official told Mr Hersh.

Intel Brief, an intelligence newsletter produced by former CIA chiefs, noted early this month that the Israeli actions are placing increasing stress on their relationship with Turkey, which was already strained over the war. "The Turks are increasingly concerned by the expanding Israeli presence in Kurdistan and alleged encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state."

According to Mr Hersh, Israel decided to step up its role in Kurdistan last summer after it was clear that the United States incursion into Iraq was failing, principally because it feared the chaos would strengthen Iran. The Israelis are particularly concerned that Iran may be developing a nuclear capability.

Iran said on Saturday it would reconsider its suspension of some uranium enrichment activities after the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a resolution deploring Iran`s limited cooperation with the agency.

In the autumn the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak told the US vice president, Dick Cheney, that America had lost in Iraq. Israel "had learned that there`s no way to win an occupation," he told Mr Cheney, and the only issue was "choosing the size of your humiliation".

From July last year, argues Mr Hersh, the Israeli government started what one former Israeli intelligence official called "Plan B" in order to protect itself from the fallout of the chaos prompted by America`s failure ahead of June 30. If the June 30 transfer of sovereignty does not go well, "there is no fallback, nothing," a former National Security Council member tells Hersh. "The neocons still think they can pull the rabbit out of the hat in Iraq," a former intelligence official says. "What`s the plan? They say, `We don`t need it. Democracy is strong enough. We`ll work it out.`"

Israel has a longstanding relationship with the Kurds, whom they regard as one of the few non-Arab allies in the area. The Iraqi Kurds, who played a key role in providing the United States with intelligence ahead of the war, have been angered by the United Nations resolution on Iraq earlier this month. The resolution did not affirm the interim constitution that granted them minority veto power in a permanent constitution and so could potentially leave them sidelined.

One Turkish official told Mr Hersh that Kurdish independence would be calamitous for the region. "The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give one country independence everybody will want it. Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Joerver]

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan
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http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108…
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Monday, June 21, 2004

US Marine Killed; 23 Iraqis Killed in Separate Attacks;
US Helicopters mistakenly Kill 5 Policemen at Samarra`

Wire services report several violent incidents on Sunday.

Anbar province: Guerrillas fighting US troops in Anbar Province, which covers Ramadi and Fallujah, killed a US Marine on Sunday. The Marines killed 4 of the guerrillas.

Baghdad: Guerrillas ambushed a convoy of American and Iraqi troops on the road to the Baghdad airport, killing two Iraqi soldiers of them and wounding 11. (The Americans had already passed when the bomb went off). In an attack launched near the central bank in downtown Baghdad, guerrillas fired a mortar round that injured 6 police officers and killed 4 Iraqi civilians, including two bank employees, a bank guard, and a passer-by [-az-Zaman]. The attack occurred at al-Rashid Street, an area with lots of shops. Meanwhile, behind the Palestine Hotel, downtown, shots rang out and hotel security returned fire. No casualties were reported. A lot of Westerners stay at the Palestine Hotel.

Samarra`: Something happened in this mixed Sunni-Shiite city north of Baghdad,but the reports are very mixed and it is hard to know what. The US military maintains that its base near Samarra` took mortar fire, and that it replied with helicopter gunships to the source, killing at least 4 Iraqi guerrillas. The Bahrain Times says that the mortar fire went into a "residential neighborhood," not a US base. Az-Zaman maintains that the US forces mistakenly targeted Iraqi police guarding the home of interim Interior Minister Faleh al-Naqib, killing 5 of them. Earlier, the US helicopter gunships had destroyed the Samarra` police station. Iraqi police told the newspaper they did not rule out friendly fire on the part of the US. I have no idea which of these stories is correct. Will advise when I can sort it all out.

Tikrit: Assassins killed Sheikh Izzuddin al-Bayati, a leader of the al-Bayat tribe and a member of the provincial governing council for Salahuddin. This killing stands in a line of assassinations of mid-level government officials in the past two weeks. Al-Bayati had been a Baath official in Najaf. His tribe has both Turkmen and Arab branches (which demonstrates once again that a "tribe" is often based on fictive kinship and is a little like a political party, which can be joined or left over time). In Tikrit, a poster was distributed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi`s group, threatening death to officials who collaborate with the occupying authorities and singling out Jasim Jabbarah, an Iraqi official in Salahuddin working with police intelligence against the insurgents.

Baquba: Guerrillas fired mortar shells into a residential neighborhood. They hit a civilian home and killed a husband and wife.

Fallujah: Residents of Fallujah continue to maintain that the US bombs fell on a popular neighborhood in Saturday`s F-16 attack, not on a terrorist safe house. Rescue workers digging through the rubble report glimpsing bodies of women and children below. The Mayor of Fallujah promised residents of the neighborhood that he would cut off relations with the US over the incident. In contrast, Newsday reports that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi gave his blessings to the strike:

"We know that a house which had been used by terrorists had been hit," Allawi said. "We welcome this hit on terrorists anywhere in Iraq." His comments are likely to generate anger among Iraqis, who already are suspicious of Allawi because of his close ties to the CIA and British intelligence during the more than 20 years he spent in exile.



Sy Hersh is reporting that hundreds of Israeli intelligence agents are operating in and from Iraqi Kurdistan, gathering information on Iran`s nuclear program and stirring up Syrian Kurds to make trouble for Bashar al-Asad in Syria. I have talked about the likelihood of such a presence here in the past. The nexus of disinformation about the Saddam government and about terrorist activity in Iraq may lie in tales fed to Mossad by the Kurds, who in turn passed it to Washington. The Kurds have steadily and implausibly alleged a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection.

posted by Juan @ 6/21/2004 09:15:33 AM

National Congress Planned; Muqtada Invited
Chalabi mediates with Kurds

Al-Hayat: On Sunday, the preparatory board met to begin planning a national congress of 1000 notables, politicians, religious leaders and tribal sheikhs to be held in July. It will involve twenty members of the old Interim Governing Council, including Sheikh Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, against whom an arrest warrant has been issued in an alleged murder case. An invitation has also been issued to the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who observers thought might well be elected to the advisory council. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi called on Muqtada to come to the congress.

Iyad Allawi had dispatched Ahmad Chalabi to mediate between him and the Kurdish leadership in the north. Despite Allawi`s attempt to dissolve the militias, the Peshmerga or Kurdish militias are refusing to be put under central Baghdad control. Chalabi met with Jalal Talabani. Al-Hayat reports a rumor that the Coalition Provisional Authority had an arrest warrant issued for Chalabi.

The American attempt to destroy Chalabi politically, and to destroy Muqtada al-Sadr physically, has so far failed miserably. Allawi is clearly eager to do business with both, and to pull them into his orbit. Both are now poised to gain seats in the proto-parliament, the national advisory council, and they have made an improbable and wholly cynical alliance with one another, according to an informed Iraqi observer. The two of them could well show up in the government to be formed in January, 2005.

posted by Juan @ 6/21/2004 08:43:27 AM

Thousands of Indian Shiites Protest US Policies in Iraq

Thousands of Indian Shiites came out into the streets of New Delhi Sunday to protest harsh US policies in Iraq and to demand that the United Nations take the leading role in putting the country back on its feet. They were supported by Hindu friends. The Indian Shiites were angered at the US because of its desecration of the holy shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. Indian Shiites have in recent decades been moderate and politically timid, but this issue has clearly galvanized them. Among the many stupid actions undertaken by Mssrs. Bremer and Sanchez (i.e. by Mr. Bush), having US troops fire tank shells and call in air strikes in the vicinity of the shrines of Ali and Husayn has to be right up there at the top.

The Shiite International has turned anti-US, and we will see trouble out of it.

posted by Juan @ 6/21/2004 08:15:28 AM

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Iraq Might Welcome a Strongman
Many appear optimistic that tough-talking homegrown leadership will overcome violence.
By Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writer

June 21, 2004

BAGHDAD — On the eve of sovereignty, Iraq is a nation in disarray, riven by bombings, assassinations and sabotage. Yet many people here appear cautiously optimistic that a tough-talking new government run by Iraqis can confront the withering cycle of violence better than their U.S.-led occupiers.

Talk of imposing martial law or restoring the death penalty has been welcomed by many among a war-weary populace.

"We need a tough ruler," said Burwa Tayyeb, who owns a boutique in Baghdad`s Mansour district. "I have very high hopes and am looking forward to the 1st of July."

On Sunday, in his inaugural news conference, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi pledged to "crush" Iraq`s enemies and said the nation`s resources would be directed against terrorism. He said he was considering imposing "emergency law" in some areas, but he didn`t elaborate.

Other Iraqis are skeptical that Allawi`s tough talk can translate into effective action and fear that things may only get worse.

Many are wary that the new government may be nothing more than a front for Washington — the charge frequently leveled at the now-defunct and widely discredited Iraqi Governing Council, appointed by outgoing U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III.

"Power will rest in the hands of the United States," said Uday Mohammed, co-owner of a women`s cosmetics shop here. "It will be nothing more than a puppet government. Words are not enough."

Outsiders agonize about whether Iraq is even governable now that the Pandora`s box of ethnic and religious conflict has been opened — accompanied by a roiling insurgency confronting the world`s strongest military force.

But, with some exceptions, many Iraqis profess less concern about whether the nation is governable than about the need for independent Iraqis, not outsiders or U.S. puppets, to do the job.

"These are our people. We know how to handle this," explained Hamid Rubai, an advisor to the interim leadership.

"He needs to be strict and firm," Fawzia Abdul-Jabbar, a widowed homemaker, said of Allawi. "This is the only way he could bring security to this country. We are tired of living in fear."

Relatively few Iraqis are familiar with Allawi, a physician and former Baath Party member who split with Saddam Hussein, spent decades in exile and was later associated with CIA attempts to overthrow the dictator. But the interim prime minister`s stern statements and pedigree have already won him allies — despite misgivings about his close CIA ties. His government is due to guide Iraq through a crucial period, including elections scheduled for January.

"If he was a Baathist, this means he was familiar with the ins and outs of Iraqi society," said Tayyeb, the boutique owner, who as an Iraqi Kurd is part of an ethnic group that suffered greatly under Hussein. "This is to his credit."

Others see Allawi as simply benefiting from being the new big man on the block after thorough disenchantment with the U.S. occupation.

"I would be happy if Mr. Allawi managed to bring tranquillity to this country," said Wamid Nadhmi, a prominent political scientist. "But when I think about it objectively, I reach the conclusion that things are getting worse."

It is now conventional wisdom among Iraqis that the top-heavy U.S. proconsul style exemplified by Bremer has been a failure, if not a disaster. Iraqis and Americans alike see the pressing need for an Iraqi way of running the country, whatever that might entail

"We`ve got to get away from this Douglas MacArthur the occupier, generalissimo thing," said Col. Dana Pittard, the 1st Infantry Division officer who commands the Baqubah region northeast of the capital. "We don`t want to have to fight our way out of this place. This has to be an Iraqi show."

Even Bremer, in an interview with USA Today, expressed the hope that ending the occupation would "take some of the poison out of the system."

Last week he called the fledgling Iraqi administration "the best government Iraq has had in 50 years" — though Allawi`s team had hardly done anything beyond issuing get-tough pronouncements.

At the end of a troubled 14-month occupation, most Iraqis and Americans appear to agree on one thing: the less direct U.S. involvement the better.

Sovereignty is somewhat illusory, with about 150,000 U.S.-led foreign troops in the country and the new U.S. Embassy that will eventually employ 1,000 foreign service officers, a behind-the-scenes powerbroker with vital control over the purse strings of reconstruction. U.S. advisors will be sprinkled throughout key ministries.

To outsiders, it may seem counterintuitive — a nation reeling from more than three decades of despotic rule appears to yearn for authority. But the carnage of the last year seems to have drained many Iraqis of their enthusiasm for noble experiments in government and left them craving a peaceful nation in which their lives may proceed without the pervasive fear of random killings.

Not only politically motivated attacks but common crimes — notably kidnappings and slayings — have skyrocketed since the fall of Hussein`s regime.

"One thing I wish from Iyad Allawi is that he reinstates capital punishment," said Tariq Sargon, a Christian record shop owner in Baghdad`s Harithiya district. "All these crimes are unaccounted for. [Criminals] have to get what they deserve."

Iraqis suffered greatly under Hussein, but the dictator and his pervasive Baath Party apparatus did provide a sense of security that many look back on with nostalgia. Iraqis dreaded Hussein`s security men, but car bombs, roadside ambushes and mortar attacks on the streets of the capital were not a daily occurrence.

What turn the interim government will take remains a matter of speculation.

One possibility is the emergence of Allawi as a strongman who would deal harshly with inflexible enemies but reach out to co-opt insurgent forces and Hussein loyalists.

"If those ex-Baathists have no blood on their hands and haven`t committed any crime against this nation, they are Iraqi nationalists and we are going to give them a chance," said George H. Sada, Allawi`s spokesman, signaling a conciliatory attitude.

The new government, however temporary, must weigh every move. Any misstep could risk alienating significant elements of the Iraqi population — including seething Sunni Muslim masses in the center and west, autonomy-minded Kurds in the north and sellout-wary Shiite Muslim ayatollahs based in Najaf.

Already, Kurds are alarmed about the United Nations` decision not to acknowledge the wording of the interim constitution, which gave Kurds an effective veto of a permanent constitution to be written next year after the elections. This omission was widely attributed to concerns among the Shiite mullahs of Najaf, who, like most Arabs, are suspicious about what they perceive as a Kurdish power grab.

Among the seemingly intractable problems that U.S. authorities are bequeathing to the Iraqis are an insurgent Sunni Muslim enclave in the western city of Fallouja and a still-simmering Shiite uprising that stretches from the streets of Baghdad south to the nation`s Shiite heartland. In both cases, U.S. forces who were fearful of causing a bloodbath and delaying the June 30 turnover of power backed away from threatened confrontations but left instability in their wake.

"Fallouja is going to go to hell in a handbasket quick," said one U.S. Marine officer working near the city who asked not to be named. "We left a lot of unfinished business there."

But officials of the new government have spoken of reconciliation with the rebellious sheiks, fire-and-brimstone imams and disenfranchised former Baathists of Sunni Iraq.

"Fallouja is not a problem for us," said Sada, the prime minister`s spokesman.

The new government has laid out no concrete plan to deal with Fallouja or other pressing issues. It is unclear how much sway the government will have, because its primary weapon is a U.S.-led military force not subject to Iraqi command. Iraqi security forces remain ill-prepared and, in some cases, their loyalty is suspect.

Already, the new leadership has diverged with U.S. authorities on a number of points, including the timing of the turnover of Hussein to Iraqi custody and the participation of militant Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr in Iraqi politics. Bremer has declared Sadr ineligible for future governing posts, but Iraqi leaders have practically invited him to participate — and President Bush himself has said it is for the Iraqis to decide.

"He has supporters, he has constituents, he should go through the political process, and I commend this smart move on his side," interim Iraqi President Ghazi Ajil Yawer said last week when asked about Sadr`s moves to form a political party.

But Sadr and others who remain in the insurgent camp may not find the new government any friendlier than the U.S. There has been rampant speculation that U.S. forces will have greater leeway to act to crush violent elements once they are responding to a request from a U.N.-recognized Iraqi government rather than acting unilaterally.

"Let the terrorists know that their brutal acts against our people will not affect national unity," Yawer`s office declared last week after six Shiite truckers were slaughtered in Fallouja for transporting goods to U.S. forces. "We are determined to develop a free democratic Iraq and capture these enemies."

*

Times special correspondent Said Rifai in Baghdad and staff writer Peter Y. Hong in Samawah, Iraq, contributed to this report.






Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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RONALD BROWNSTEIN / WASHINGTON OUTLOOK
Using and Abusing 9/11 Fears to Set National Security Policy
Ronald Brownstein

June 21, 2004

During a Senate debate last week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) reached for the most powerful weapon in any argument over national security for nearly the last three years.

The issue was a proposal from Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) to bar private contractors from interrogating military prisoners. Dodd played his high card by arguing that such a ban could reduce the odds of another black eye for America such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. But Sessions trumped him by suggesting the ban might increase the chances of another terrorist attack such as Sept. 11.

What if, Sessions asked, "the very best interrogator in the United States of America" was not a military officer but a retired detective who had "the ability to [obtain] information that can save thousands of lives" through skilled interrogation? Could America really deny itself an asset that might help prevent another terrorist attack?

Partly because of that argument, the Senate on Wednesday rejected Dodd`s amendment. That was little surprise. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the best way to build support for any national security initiative has been to portray it as a new line of defense against a repeat of that tragic day.

That was the justification for the Senate passage of the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded Washington`s ability to monitor suspected terrorists. Those arguments drove the creation of the Department of Homeland Security a year later.

The same logic turns up more explicitly in memos from Justice and Defense department attorneys before the Abu Ghraib scandal loosening the limits on acceptable coercion during interrogation.

Writing to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on March 6, 2003, top Pentagon lawyers acknowledged that "even in war, limits to the use and extent of force apply." But citing Justice Department memos, they concluded "the nation`s right to self-defense has been triggered" by the Sept. 11 attacks. And that meant harm to those under interrogation could be justified "to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist network."

This argument, of course, made its most dramatic appearance in President Bush`s drive to win support for war with Iraq. The report last week from the staff of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks rekindled the debate over whether Bush misled the nation before the war about the extent of the links between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

While finding indications of some contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the commission concluded that Saddam Hussein "apparently never responded" to requests from Osama bin Laden for help in acquiring weapons and establishing training camps. In all, the staff said it did not find evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

These conclusions have opened the administration to charges that Bush, and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, exaggerated the previous connections between the dictator and the terrorist. But Al Qaeda`s role in the president`s case for war was always more about the alliance that might develop in the future than the cooperation that had occurred in the past. Like Sessions, Bush leaned heavily on the conditional and those two resonant words: what if.

Regardless of whether Hussein cooperated with Al Qaeda in the past, Bush often suggested, what if he did so in the future. "Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own," Bush declared before the invasion. "Imagine those 19 hijackers [on Sept. 11] with other weapons and other plans — this time armed by Saddam Hussein."

The defeat of Dodd`s amendment last week shows that the "what if" argument still has power. But there are signs a correction is setting in.

Hardly anyone disagrees that the world changed on Sept. 11; the grim evidence continues to arrive in outrages such as the killing of American Paul M. Johnson Jr. in Saudi Arabia on Friday.

But much of this year`s election debate is pivoting on how much the world changed on Sept. 11 — and whether, in its responses, the administration has moved too far from the values, principles and strategies that guided America before.

It`s no exaggeration to say that the central issue before the voters in 2004 is whether Bush`s responses to the attack — from the Patriot Act to the invasion of Iraq — represent an appropriate answer to Sept. 11 or an overreaction that has carried the nation into dangerous waters.

To a degree unimaginable before the Iraq war, critics are now forcefully pressing that latter case. Robert V. Keeley, ambassador to Greece under Ronald Reagan, was part of a group of 27 high-ranking former officials called Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change who issued a statement last week charging that Bush`s policies had left the nation dangerously isolated in the world.

"It has become a mantra that 9/11 changed everything," Keeley said at the group`s news conference. "In fact it didn`t. The fundamentals of protecting … our national security have not changed…. What has happened is that mantra has been an excuse to say the president can do anything he wants because … 9/11 changed everything."

Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate, probably wouldn`t go that far. Through his support for expanding the size of the military, increasing homeland security spending and redirecting NATO toward combating terrorism, he`s made clear he thinks Sept. 11 does demand important changes in America`s priorities.

But in his criticism of the Patriot Act and the way Bush went to war in Iraq, Kerry is clearly signaling that he would tilt away from some of the most aggressive elements of the administration`s response to Sept. 11.

What if, Kerry seems to be arguing, Bush`s answers to the toughest "what if" questions have actually made America less secure? It`s too early to say how America will answer that question, but already a safe bet that nothing else will shape the result in November more.

*

Ronald Brownstein`s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns at latimes.com/brownstein.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/177862_loveus20.html

Arab and Muslim world wants to be friends with us -- just not our government

Sunday, June 20, 2004

By LARRY JOHNSON
P-I FOREIGN DESK EDITOR

President Bush has answered the question "Why do they hate us?" by saying that "they" hate us because we are a democracy, that "they hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

It seems like it never occurred to the president that Osama bin Laden and his supporters hate us because of our foreign policy in the Middle East -- our first Persian Gulf War with Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the second Persian Gulf war and for what is seen as our blind support for Israel.

But judging from a recent trip to Lebanon and Syria, two countries that have been identified as harboring terrorists, that is exactly why we are hated.

However, also judging from last month`s trip with senior editors and producers from media outlets across the United States, Bush was asking the wrong question. He should have asked, "Why do they still love us, despite our foreign policy?"

The trip was short, but almost every waking moment of the 10 days we spent in Lebanon and Syria was filled with meetings with key thinkers and decision-makers. From early morning to late at night we met with political scientists, public servants, government officials and ex-government officials, religious leaders, journalists and publishers, a filmmaker, Western and Middle Eastern diplomats, human rights activists, United Nations officials, former political prisoners, university students and some of the students` parents and one head of state -- President Bashar Assad of Syria. We also had a chance to talk with ordinary people in shops and markets.

I came back with the impression that people there don`t hate "us" at all. They hate our government. They hate U.S. foreign policy.

Ellis Goldberg, director of the Middle East Center of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, said the Arab world`s feelings probably isn`t even hatred.

"I think it`s not so much hatred but anger toward our government`s foreign policy," Goldberg said in an interview shortly after I returned to Seattle. He said the policy is seen as hypocritical -- with the United States viewed as not living up to its talk of freedom and democracy in its dealings with the Arab world.

My impression is that people in the Arab and Islamic world still have considerable admiration, at least for our ideals, and for what they see as our life of individual and economic freedom -- and that the minority that really hate us, enough to do us in at any given opportunity, are a very small minority.

After talking with Goldberg, I ran these impressions by Samer Shehata, a professor of Middle East and Arab politics at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Shehata had briefed our group before our trip.

"I am in complete agreement," Shehata said, "and the polling data (from the region) bears this out."

Even the Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Fadlallah of Lebanon, one of the most revered Shiite religious leaders, told our group, "We should be clear that we distinguish between the U.S. administration and the American people. We would like to be friends with the American people. Our problem is with the American administration."

Fadlallah, based in Beirut, is most popular among followers of Hezbollah, a militant group that is best known in the Arab world for its resistance to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which continued in various forms from 1978 to 2000.

The Hezbollah, however, is best known in the West as a "terrorist" group and is so listed by the U.S. State Department.

In 1982, at the request of the Lebanese government, the United States and France sent a peacekeeping force to help end the fighting between Muslims and Christians in Beirut. The Muslim forces, however, viewed the move as an intervention in the civil war on the side of their enemies, and frequently attacked the U.S. and French forces.

On Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide bomber crashed through the main gate of the U.S. Marine Headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen. Almost at the same time, another attack at a French military base nearby killed 58 soldiers. Hezbollah, whose political wing today includes elected members of the Lebanese government, carried out those attacks.

"The majority of Arab and Islamic people do not believe the United States is serious about freedom (for people in the region)," Fadlallah told us. "They believe it to be one of the slogans used for dominating the region."

It seems that the democracy and freedom we enjoy in the United States are the main reasons that people still love us. Love us, not our government. Over and over we were told that the foreign policy of our government (and the Bush administration was singled out repeatedly) has made it the most hated in the world.

It appears that what the Arabic and Islamic people want is that we keep those ideals in the forefront of our foreign policy. Freedom and democracy, we were told, doesn`t come from an invasion or from unilateral support of Israel`s aspirations in the region at the expense of all other people in the region.

But we also heard that they love our universities and many students still want to come to the United States, although some students complained that because of new restrictions on visas for people from the Mideast, fewer students will have that opportunity. They also love our economy, our movies, our music and fashions. McDonald`s and Starbucks are popular in downtown Beirut as are top designer stores from Europe.

On any given night, American movies and sitcoms were playing on local cable TV stations. Even Hezbollah, which has its own satellite TV network, shows soap operas, although they are locally produced and stick close to Islamic family values.

Goldberg said he thinks many people in the Arab world have an idealized view of life inside the United States and that is what fuels their "admiration and desire for the U.S. internal experience." But the distrust of our government, especially regarding its actions in the Arab world, is still strong, he said.

And, of course, I realize there are those who will hate Americans no matter what we do. But I believe they are such a minority of the people in the Arabic and Islamic world that, statistically, they barely register. The only reason they are taken seriously is that they have and are ready to again use any method to attack the object of their hatred.

Ahmad Moussalli, a professor in the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University in Beirut, said there are those relatively few people who are convinced that the West, led by the United States, is out to destroy not just Arabic governments but Islam itself.

"They believe that there is a plot against Islam," said Moussalli, an author of numerous books on Islam and Islamic movements. He said these people see the invasion of Afghanistan, of Iraq and the continued support of Israel as part of a new crusade led by the United States.

The use of the word "crusade" when Bush first spoke of America`s war on terror just days after 9/11 barely made a ripple here in the United States, but it created a tidal wave in the Middle East, especially among the radical minority of Islamists.

It was seen as part of the "clash of civilizations," Moussalli said, between Islam and Christianity. Moussalli said he did his best to explain to people that the word, as Bush used it, only meant a "campaign" and that Bush did not mean to give it a historical or religious meaning, but that for that radical minority who were already inclined to think of the West as the enemy, this was more proof of the West`s intentions.

At the time of Bush`s remarks, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Soheib Bensheikh, the Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseilles, France, said the use of the word "crusade" was unfortunate.

"It recalled the barbarous and unjust military operations against the Muslim world," by Christian knights, who launched repeated attempts to capture Jerusalem from Muslims over the course of several hundred years, Bensheikh said.

But if we are still loved by the majority of people in the Arab and Islamic world, the question remains. How long can that feeling last?

Syria`s President Assad gave some indication during a 90-minute meeting at his "Palace of the People" in Damascus, the day after Bush slapped economic sanctions on Syria to get it to, among other things, work more closely with the United States on the war on terrorism.

In response to a question about the possible effects of the photos of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Assad, said, "For a long time we have had problems with the American administration, not the American people, (but) I am afraid these things will accumulate, and people will no longer distinguish between the U.S. administration and its people, and this is dangerous."

Asked if it would be good for the Mideast if Bush would be voted out of office, Assad said, "We`re not looking for a regime change; we`re looking for a change of policy."

P-I Foreign Desk Editor Larry Johnson was in Lebanon and Syria on a Gatekeeper Editors Fellowship from the Washington, D.C.-based International Reporting Project. He can be reached at 206-448-8035 or [e-mail].

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Über den Film "Fahrenheit 9/11" und frühere Arbeiten von Moore und auch wie ernst Moore es mit der Wahrheit nimmt.
Eine Gratwanderung zwischen Satire und Fakten.

Fahrenheit rising
Critics are already attacking Michael Moore for his new movie, which is aimed squarely at derailing Bush`s re-election bid
- Jonathan Curiel, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, June 20, 2004

Michael Moore`s latest movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be released in five days, and already a familiar pattern has emerged: Film critics have raved about it, news stories have given it major buzz, and Moore`s detractors have labeled it a distortion of the truth.

For 16 years, ever since Moore made his acclaimed work about General Motors` plant closings in Flint, Mich. ("Roger and Me"), the cycle has been continuous, but never has so much been at stake as it is with "Fahrenheit 9/11. "

Instead of a critique of gun violence in America ("Bowling for Columbine") or a jab at Nike and other U.S. corporations ("The Big One"), Moore`s new film is a biting denunciation of President Bush -- an orchestrated attempt to sway the November election by turning more voters against a president Moore despises.

A Bush spokesman has already said the film is more fiction than fact, and Moore has already defended "Fahrenheit 9/11" as rigorously researched. But the debate misses the bigger point: Moore doesn`t make documentaries totally dependent on static fact. He makes cinematic essays that employ humor, "gotcha" interviews and indelible video footage to shock audiences into fits of apoplexy. It doesn`t matter to Moore if he bends journalistic rules or plays with other people`s interpretation of the truth to support his arguments.

"Roger and Me" is a case study in Moore`s approach. The movie, which grossed more than $6 million, is a narrative of Flint`s economic demise (and Moore`s life). In 1986, GM closed scores of plants throughout Michigan, including Flint. The closings had an undeniable impact on Flint, where evictions became rampant and whole families were left on the street.

Moore shows this sorrow in disturbing detail, but "Roger and Me" states that the 1986 closings eliminated 30,000 jobs in Flint, when the number was closer to 5,000. "Roger and Me" also uses footage to imply that Ronald Reagan visited Flint after the 1986 closings, when he told residents they should think about moving to another city to find work. Reagan did say that, but it was apparently in 1979, when he was a White House candidate, not a sitting president.

Then and now, Moore`s explanation is that "Roger and Me" is not an exact time-line of events but a blend of scenes that state higher truths: General Motors CEO Roger Smith really didn`t care about the suffering of people in Flint; as president, Reagan really did think it should be easy for anyone to find a job (Reagan once famously pointed to a newspaper`s want ads to support his claim there were plenty of jobs available); and rich people around Flint - - those who were unaffected by the plant closings -- really did think the fired workers had little to complain about.

"I think a lot of them take the easy way out," one well-to-do woman tells Moore in "Roger and Me" as he interviews her at a golf course.

The uncaring people in Michael Moore`s works are usually white and privileged. That golfer happened to be a woman, but she could otherwise be a stand-in for the archetypal figures in Moore`s "Stupid White Men." The book has a chapter called "Kill Whitey," a hilarious, 28-page attack on Nazis, slavery, Fox TV host Bill O`Reilly and (this will be no surprise) the practices of corporate America. Moore`s tome has sold more than 4 million copies around the world and spent 59 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, where "Dude, Where`s My Country?" Moore`s latest screed, was perched.

Moore`s critics, who are often conservatives who don`t like his message, accuse him of fudging the facts liberally.

After "Bowling for Columbine" was released two years ago, an army of critics said Moore was too tough on National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston (who then had Alzheimer`s symptoms) and that Moore misrepresented how easy it was to get a gun from a Michigan bank that was giving them away to encourage people to open accounts.

Mike Wilson, a first-time filmmaker from Minnesota, is making a documentary titled, "Michael Moore Hates America."

"The ideology that Michael Moore uses and the vision that he`s created of the country," Wilson said, is that "we`re all sort of doomed to a life of poverty and a lack of success."

One prominent academic says Moore has much in common with O`Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, conservative commentators whose misstatements have been well- documented. Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, says Moore, O`Reilly and Limbaugh all stoke their audiences with a mix of rhetoric and reality.

"They`re in this category of commentators and public personalities who are not journalists of the old-fashioned stripe but entertainers who are ... using nonfiction as their major source," Thompson says. "They`ve converted contemporary issues and politics into something that`s both documentary, entertainment and all the rest of it."

"Talk radio hosts have become enormous political influences -- not just on radio but on TV," Thompson adds. "Bill O`Reilly is the No. 1-rated show on 24-hour cable. (But) there`s a book that just came out called `The Oh Really? Factor,` which goes through a bunch of things that Bill O`Reilly has said, then actually goes through and tells you what (he misstated). It`s a corrective thing. We`re seeing the same kind of thing with Michael Moore."

Moore, of course, bristles at any comparison to O`Reilly or Limbaugh, both of whom he holds in contempt -- especially O`Reilly, whose embarrassing misstatements were chronicled in Al Franken`s book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

"I operate in a different place than they do," says Moore, whose Web site has a detailed rebuttal of criticism aimed at him. "They don`t get their facts straight -- that`s the big difference. .-. . Everything in my books and movies and TV shows is true. It`s absolutely true. And anyone who says otherwise is lying.

"I used to just take it in stride and laugh (my accusers) off. Now I`m going to take them on. If they libel me -- if they tell a lie they know is a lie, if they do it with malice, and I can prove the malice -- I`m going to sue them."

People shouldn`t underestimate Moore or his popular appeal. "Bowling for Columbine" grossed more than $50 million around the world, and "Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the top prize at last month`s Cannes Film Festival, is sure to take in even more money.

For his new film, Moore found evidence supporting his thesis that Bush is an out-of-touch president who (like Roger Smith) cares little about the working class. In this way, "Roger and Me" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" are really cinematic bookends. For "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore even returns to Flint, where he interviews a mother whose son fought and died in Iraq -- though not before writing home and questioning Bush`s policies. Seeing the mom read her son`s words is heartbreaking, which is what Moore wants.

To balance his film, should Moore have interviewed people who support the war? He actually does: A few soldiers in Iraq tell Moore`s film crew why they believe in their mission, but Moore quickly gives us more disturbing footage of U.S. soldiers who have suffered amputations as a result of battle in Iraq. We also see Iraqis being abused and moments that make Bush and his appointees look like imbeciles:

Bush -- minutes before announcing the United States will go to war in Iraq -- acting like a goofy fraternity member; Bush saying at a golf course, "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers," then saying, "Now watch this drive" as he swings a golf club; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz putting a comb in his mouth, then through his hair; Attorney General John Ashcroft, singing a tune he wrote himself about an eagle and the sky, trying to sound like Frank Sinatra.

Moore didn`t invent this footage, much of which has never been seen in the United States. Moore wants his version of the truth exposed. He wants Americans to understand the connections between Bush`s family and the family of Osama bin Laden (a connection that many journalists and authors have previously made). In typical Michael Moore fashion, he has connected a lot of dots into a bigger, sweeping statement about Bush and the war on terror.

Rep. Mark Kennedy , R-Minn, says some of those dots are questionable. Kennedy was interviewed by Moore for the trailer of "Fahrenheit 9/11" (which can be seen at www.michaelmoore.com) and the film. The trailer shows Moore stopping Kennedy on a Washington street, then telling him, "We`re trying to get members of Congress to get their kids to enlist in the Army and go over to Iraq."

Kennedy looks at Moore as if he`s crazy. It`s a kind of "Are you kidding me?" response that supports Moore`s contention that members of Congress are loath to send their own children into combat even though they authorized the war on Iraq.

"In our conversation, he said that only one member of Congress had a family member in Iraq, where as comprehensive reports have talked about children of (other Congressmen) in the military or in Iraq," says Kennedy, who complains the interview was selectively edited and that Moore didn`t use his response in the trailer. "I told him I have a nephew in the military. . . . The trailer reflects the patching together of pieces to give a distorting picture."

But Kennedy forgets an important distinction. As Moore details on his web site, the filmmaker told Kennedy that only one member of Congress had a kid fighting in Iraq, which was true: Sen. Tim Johnson, a Democrat from South Dakota. And Kennedy, who says Moore "is a master of the misleading," admits he`s never seen Moore`s movies or read any of his books. He apparently didn`t even know who Moore was when Moore walked up to him.

Other congressmen were smarter. They practically ran away from Moore when this heavyset man in a baseball cap approached them. "Fahrenheit 9/11" shows them in full flight from Moore. Moore didn`t make this up. He didn`t have to. More often than not, truth is stranger than fiction.

E-mail Jonathan Curiel at [e-mail].

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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More than a third of the American public believes George W. Bush will go down in history as a below average or poor president.
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Monday, June 21, 2004
War News for June 21, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Four US soldiers killed in ambush near Ramadi.

Bring ‘em on: Two ICDC soldiers killed, 11 wounded in roadside bomb ambush near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Turkish truck driver killed in ambush in Iraq.

Bring ‘em on: Home of Iraqi interior minister mortared near Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: Explosions and gunfire reported in Samawah.

Bring ‘em on: Four insurgents killed in fighting near Samarra.

Military judge declares Abu Ghraib a crime scene. “A military judge on Monday declared the notorious Abu Ghraib prison a crime scene that cannot be demolished as President Bush had offered. He also refused to move the trial of a soldier accused of abusing inmates.”

Wolfie’s sock puppet spews RNC talking points about media coverage. “New Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawer explained his belief that 90 percent of what`s happening in Iraq is good news, and 10 percent in bad. ‘The media is magnifying the 10 percent, ignoring the 90 percent,’ Yawer said. He said the scandal surrounding detainee abuses at Baghdad`s Abu Ghraib prison is a perfect example. The issue is clearer to people like him who have lived in the United States and understand American values, he said. ‘I know this is outrageous to the American public (and) to the American administration as much as it is outrageous to the Iraqis,’ Yawer said.” Why is the Armed Forces Information Service propagating this drivel?

Wounded soldiers. “For those survivors, their tours of duty were jolted to a sudden halt with bright flashes, searing heat and noises drilling into their heads. Some had limbs blown off, internal organs shredded. Some lost their hearing or sight. Some had brain damage. The aftermath of surviving such an attack has many complexities, according to Associated Press interviews with survivors and the medical specialists who are treating them.”

Saddam’s pistol. “’It`s the phallic equivalent of a scalp - I mean that quite seriously,’ said Stanley A. Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political scientist at the City University of New York who has just completed a book, to be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in September, called ‘In His Father`s Shadow: The Transformations of George W. Bush.’”

Some people might call this stealing. “The spending program, which was started unannounced, has been undertaken in consultation with Iraqi ministers, despite misgivings that the oil revenue belonged to Iraq and that it should be set aside for use when Iraq`s sovereignty is restored, scheduled for June 30.”

Mortar attack. “Insurgents lob mortar rounds and launch rockets at U.S. camps throughout Iraq almost daily. It can happen at any time at any camp. Wednesday, a rocket hit the PX at Balad, killing three troops. Even the coalition’s headquarters in Baghdad, known as the Green Zone, comes under frequent attacks.”

Blame anything except a failed ideology. “Agresto, a lifelong Republican and political conservative, does not regard himself as a turncoat. He still believes in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Despite his disappointment with the lack of reconstruction, he is proud of the changes the Coalition Provisional Authority instilled in Iraq`s universities, including the promotion of academic freedom and a purge of senior officials of Hussein`s Baath Party. He says he feels the CPA accomplished ‘a lot of good under very difficult conditions.’ While acknowledging American mistakes, Agresto aimed some of his most pointed criticism at Iraqis. In his view, the Americans toppled a dictator and prepared the ground for democracy, but Iraqis have not stepped up to build on that start. ‘They don`t know how to be a community,’ he said. ‘They put their individual interests first. They only look out for themselves.’” Good article on how a conservative ideologue rationalizes failure.

Commentary

Editorial: “Some reports suggest that al Qaeda wants President George W. Bush in the White House for another four years. Why? Well, for starters, Mr Bush’s Middle East policy is providing a bonanza of new funding and new recruits for al Qaeda. Almost three years after the September 11 atrocity, al Qaeda is flourishing. Instead of being pounded into dust, it’s stronger. Another reason for al Qaeda to back the Republican ticket is the gulf emerging between Europe and the United States.”

Editorial: “It is true, as the President stressed last week, that he never flat-out said Saddam Hussein helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks. It is also beside the point. He said many other things, misleading things, to plant the idea that invading Iraq was a logical extension of - rather than a fatal distraction from - the effort to dismantle al-Qaeda…Now, ask yourself, along with those 27 American diplomats and warriors: Have the last two years made America more secure, more respected? The answer is obvious and appalling. The answer is no.”

Analysis: “The Justice Department memo assured the Bush administration of three things: First, that interrogators could cause a lot of pain without crossing the line to torture. Second, that even though the United States criminalizes torture and has signed a treaty outlawing it, interrogators could torture prisoners as long as the president authorized it. Third, that even if those interrogators were later prosecuted for engaging in torture, there were legal defenses they could use to avoid accountability. Bybee`s conclusions rest upon three stunning legal contortions, requiring no less than an entirely new definition of torture, a distortion of fundamental constitutional law and a new approach to the application of international law.”

Editorial: “Since Mr. Rumsfeld referred directly to The Post, we believe we owe him a response. We agree that the country is at war and that we all must weigh our words accordingly. We also agree that the consequences of the revelations of prisoner abuse are grave. As supporters of the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have been particularly concerned about the ways that the scandal -- and the administration`s continuing failure to come to terms with it -- could undermine the chances for success. We also have warned about the uses that might be made of it by captors of Americans. What strikes us as extraordinary is that Mr. Rumsfeld would suggest that this damage would be caused by newspaper editorials rather than by his own actions and decisions and those of other senior administration officials.” I`m impressed. WaPo`s editorial board finally administered Rummy a well-deserved bitch-slap. I guess the editors are finally reading their own news articles.

Awards and Decorations

Local story: Massachusetts sailor decorated for valor in Iraq.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



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Published on Monday, June 21, 2004 by GregPalast.com
One Million Black Votes Didn`t Count in the 2000 Presidential Election
It`s not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost
by Greg Palast


In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them -- half of the rejected ballots -- were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

This year, it could get worse.

These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-`round.

How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It`s easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.

While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played -- with black voters the predetermined losers.

Florida`s Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state -- and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in "Al Gore." Optical reading machines rejected these because "Al" is a "stray mark."

By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee`s white-majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.

In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

But let`s not get smug about Florida`s Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.

Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, "It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. -- about 1 million votes -- were cast by nonwhite voters."

This "no count," as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush`s office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures.

Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the "spoiled" votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It`s not surprising that the First Brother`s team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled.

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation`s worst spoilage rates. That`s not surprising. Boss Daley`s Democratic machine, now his son`s, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago`s black vote.

How can we fix it? First, let`s shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida`s black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote.

This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county`s procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage.

In other words, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame. Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking.

It is about to get worse. The ill-named "Help America Vote Act," signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.

California decertified some of Diebold Corp.`s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.

And once again, the history of computer-voting glitches has a decidedly racial bias. Florida`s Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.

Going digital won`t fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts.

In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote-spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing 1 million black voters` ballots.

Greg Palast is the author of `The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - the New Expanded Election Edition," from which this article is taken.

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Slaughter on the street

By Lech Mintowt-czyz

21 June 2004 "Evening Standard" --
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This is the latest picture to shock America and pile even greater pressure on George Bush over Iraq.

Sprawled on the floor with their kit strewn around them, these four US Army soldiers were killed in an ambush in the Sunni Muslim city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

Still in their uniforms, the men died as they patrolled a building site, local residents said.

The image emerged today after videotape of the corpses was delivered to the offices of an American press agency but it was unclear exactly when they had died.

No group has claimed responsibility for the killings but Ramadi is part of the so-called Sunni triangle outside Baghdad which has been at the heart of an insurgency bent on expelling US-led troops from Iraq.

There was no comment from the US military command on the deaths, which bring to 619 the number of US soldiers killed in action since the start of the Iraq war last year.

The pictures from the videotape are the latest in a long line which have shaken the American public`s support of US involvement in Iraq.

They come just two days after US engineer Paul Johnson was decapitated in Saudi Arabia by an al Qaeda group and after another American hostage, Nicholas Berg, was beheaded in Iraq last month.

Images of a US civilian worker strung up from a bridge and of physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison have also haunted the American public conscience.

The latest pictures came as a military judge refused to give the US administration respite ahead of the formal transfer of sovereignty to a new interim government on 30 June by allowing the demolition of Abu Ghraib. President Bush had offered to tear down the Iraqi prison and build a new detention centre to eliminate the legacy of torture and abuse.

But during a pre-trial hearing for one of the US prison guards accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners at the site, judge Colonel James Pohl said it must be preserved indefinitely as
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evidence against American soldiers.

He also ruled some of the highestranking US Army staff in Iraq should be called to give evidence.

Lawyers acting for Sgt Javal Davis succeeded in demanding the presence of the top US general in Iraq, Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, along with the chief of the US Central Command-General John Abizaid. A request to seek testimony from higher-ranking witnesses including US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was refused. Sgt Davis, from Maryland, is to stand trial for charges including rendering false official statements and assault as well as maltreatment of detainees.

Army reports quote a witness as saying that he hit prisoners while they were stacked in a pile and stamped on their hands and fingers.

He faces court martial in Iraq along with Specialist Charles Graner and Staff Sgt Ivan "Chip" Frederick.

All three were charged after the CBS television programme 60 Minutes II aired photographs of hooded and naked prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison.

A hearing for 21-year-old Private Lynndie England, the first soldier to be identified in the pictures, will be held separately on Tuesday at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where she is now stationed.

As the court hearing took place al Qaeda terrorists prepared to carry out their threat to behead a South Korean hostage after his government refused demands to withdraw its troops from Iraq.


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Torture`s dark allure
It gives its practitioners a drug-like rush. But it leaves a legacy of destruction that takes generations to undo. First of two parts.

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By Darius Rejali

June 18, 2004 | Few things give a rush quite like having unlimited power over another human being. A sure sign the rush is coming is pasty saliva and a strange taste in one`s mouth, according to a French soldier attached to a torture unit in Algeria. That powerful rush can be seen on the faces of some of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, a rush that undoubtedly changed them forever. The history of slavery tells us that one can`t feel such a rush without being corrupted by it. And the history of modern torture tells us that governments can`t license this corruption -- even in the cause of spreading democracy -- without reducing the quality of their intelligence, compromising their allies and damaging their military and bureaucratic capabilities.

The abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison were originally blamed on a few American soldiers. Various investigations into the exact chain of command are underway, but they already point to policy decisions made at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Indeed, the recently revealed memos written by Justice Department lawyers in August 2002, at the request of the CIA and the White House, concerning treatment of al-Qaida suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by Pentagon lawyers in March 2003 (in which it was argued that the president and those he has empowered to conduct torture of foreign prisoners are immune from prosecution under international law) are evidence that the government was seeking ways to legally circumvent the Geneva Conventions. "The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it" is how Anne Applebaum put it in the Washington Post Wednesday. It turns out that many of the severest interrogation techniques used in Iraq were sanctioned by top military officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the former commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. And this week, we learned that Rumsfeld had ordered a "high-value" detainee in Iraq held in secret, in part to keep him from being seen by the International Red Cross.

I learned how torture fit into modern life while growing up in Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose government relied on Savak, a secret intelligence agency formed with the help of the CIA in 1957. Savak arrested and detained indefinitely people suspected of opposing the shah and tortured and executed thousands of political prisoners during his rule.

In the course of 20 years of research on modern torture and the bureaucracies that sponsored and practiced it in Germany, Japan, France and Britain, I have studied the "stealthy" methods, those that leave few visible marks (i.e., blood or scars) on the victim. I noticed that stealthy techniques appeared more often in the wars of democracies than in those of dictatorships. Democratic states that use torture to gain intelligence or as punishment obviously prefer methods -- such as electroshock, torture by water and ice, tying victims in agonizing postures, sonic devices and drugs -- that cause pain but do not result in lasting injury, so that the torture cannot be verified by journalists, human rights monitors or congressional committees. The advantage of stealth torture is that it reduces adverse publicity and finesses democratic oversight.

After 9/11, the warning signs of what the United States was up to were there, but then the events from Abu Ghraib brought all of it to the surface, revealing that the U.S. military was employing some of these stealthy techniques in Afghanistan and Iraq.

My research shows, however, that torture during interrogations rarely yields better information than traditional human intelligence, partly because no one has figured out a precise, reliable way to break human beings or any adequate method to evaluate whether what prisoners say when they do talk is true. Nor can torture be done in a professional way -- anyone who tortures is necessarily corrupted by the experience and is often turned into a sadist. The psychic damage to the soldiers who conducted the torture at Abu Ghraib is likely to be permanent.

What`s more, a democracy that legalizes the use of torture in its desperation to gain information loses something more important -- the trust of its people, the foundation of a democracy. In Iraq, the United States was desperate as it sought to find and stop those responsible for the insurgency. When "intelligence" was not forthcoming from prisoners, senior U.S. Army officials decided to turn over interrogation to military intelligence personnel, who were instructed to use aggressive, even brutal techniques. These methods were rationalized as necessary in the overall global war on terrorism, but as my research has shown, institutionalizing torture in such a manner only ends up destroying all the individuals involved -- and the military and political goals of the government in whose name torture is carried out.

Aside from its devastating effects and the wasted time and resources, does torture actually work? Organizations can certainly use torture to intimidate prisoners and to produce confessions (many of which turn out to be false). But the real question is whether organizations can apply torture scientifically and professionally to produce true information. Does this method yield better results than others at an army`s disposal? The history of torture demonstrates that it does not -- whether it is stealthy or not.

Advocates of torture believe that more physical pain stimulates more compliance, but this view is not based on science; it is medical nonsense. Pain, as noted clinical psychologist Ron Melzack has shown, is far more complex than that. Injury does not always produce pain. In one study, 37 percent of people who arrived at an emergency ward with injuries such as amputated fingers, major skin lacerations and fractured bones did not feel any pain until many minutes, even hours, after the injury. Similarly, soldiers with massive wounds sometimes do not feel their pain for a long time.

In addition, human beings differ widely in their ability to endure extreme pain. Clinical psychologists and some torturers in colonized nations agree that past experiences and cultural beliefs (for example, "suffering is divine") enable some human beings to endure pain others could not. People also vary in their ability to use psychological states like distraction or anxiety to reduce pain.

Moreover, pain, unlike heat, is not a single sensation but, as Melzack observes, can variously feel like burning, throbbing or cutting. Victims can play these different sensations against each other, using one pain to distract themselves from another, much like a person might bite his hand as someone extracts a thorn.

Last, pain is not constant. As the body is damaged, its ability to sense pain declines. Torturers run out of places where they can apply pain effectively.

Unlike the physics of boiling water, in which one knows how much heat to apply, there is no way to calculate in advance how much torture is needed to obtain compliance from a prisoner. Science and technology can help with the conduct of torture: Modern instruments reduce the hard labor of torture, helping ensure that it is not lethal; and they guarantee that few marks will be left as evidence. But science and technology cannot predict the precise amount or kind of torture that will work with each human being. Opportunistic use of technology does not make torturers scientific any more than wearing a white lab coat makes torturers scientists.

If torture can`t be scientific, can it at least be done professionally? To think that professionalism is a guard against causing excessive pain is an illusion. Instead, torture induces a dynamic that breaks down professionalism. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram has shown that professionalism can serve to excuse ever more violent behavior. The myth of the professional torturer is also shattered in "Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities," by Martha K. Huggins, Philip G. Zimbardo and Mika Haritos-Fatouros.

As a victim feels less pain, torturers have to push harder, using more severe methods to overtake the victim`s maximal pain threshold. And because victims experience different types of pain, torturers have to use a scattershot approach. No matter how professional torturers may think they are, they have no choice but behaving like sadists. Even though many of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were using techniques approved by their superiors, it is no surprise that they went far beyond these techniques, trying anything that worked.

Competition among torturers also drives brutality. As one torturer put it, each interrogator "thinks he is going to get the information at any minute and takes good care not to let the bird go to the next chap after he`s softened him up nicely, when of course the other chap would get the honor and glory of it." Torture, as New York University economist Leonard Wantchekon has said, is a zero-sum game.

What`s more, coercive interrogation undermines other professional policing skills: Why do fingerprinting when you`ve got a bat? Which means investigators rely on even more torture to get information, increasing the degree of brutality.

Finally, competition between intelligence agencies that conduct torture tears bureaucracies apart. Competition between intelligence agencies is a normal phenomenon, and usually a good one, producing multiple sources of information. But when agencies turn to torture, the competition to get first crack at the victim leads to unprofessional behavior and bureaucratic fragmentation. Brazilian police raided each other`s prisons. The Nazi intelligence machine fragmented under the intense competition among the Kripo, Sipo, and regional Gestapos.

Is this way of applying pain more effective than other investigative methods? Torture is definitely inferior. The interrogation manual of Japanese fascists put it this way: "Care must be exercised when making use of rebukes, invectives or torture as it will result in his telling falsehoods and making a fool of you." Torture "is only to be used when everything else has failed as it is the most clumsy [method]."

Since the 1970s, a large body of research has shown that unless the public specifically identifies suspects to the police, the chances that a crime will be solved falls to about 10 percent. Only a small percentage of crimes are discovered or solved through surveillance, fingerprinting, DNA sampling and offender profiling.

Police in long-term dictatorships like China and the Soviet Union also know the importance of public cooperation for solving crimes. Where they can`t get public cooperation for certain crimes (such as against state property), they create an alternative human intelligence system -- informants. Although such police states use torture for intimidation and false confessions, they also know that good intelligence requires humans willing to trust government enough to work with it.

Even guerrillas know this truth. An internal report from Iraq, quoted by Seymour Hersh in the May 24 New Yorker, states that the insurgents have depended mainly on "painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance" by the Iraqi police force, "which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents" and "pro-insurgent individuals working within the [Coalition Provisional Authority`s] so-called Green Zone." Not surprisingly, the insurgents` "strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good."

Torture is a sign that a government either does not enjoy the trust of the people it governs or cannot recruit informers for a surveillance system. In both cases, torture to obtain information is a sign of institutional decay and desperation -- as Saddam Hussein`s Iraq clearly demonstrates. And torture accelerates this process, destroying the bonds of loyalty, respect and trust that keep information flowing. As any remaining sources of intelligence dry up, governments have to torture even more.

But perhaps torture for something, anything, is better than sitting on one`s hands. Maybe, somehow, one can retrieve a nugget of true information.

The problem is that "anything" needs to be verified, and as the Vietnam-era CIA Kubark manual explains, "a time-consuming delay results." In the meantime, the prisoner can think of new, more complex falsehoods. Intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to this. In police work, the crime is already known; all one wants is the confession. But in intelligence, one must gather information about things that one does not know.

What`s more, even prisoners who tell the truth under torture normally provide less detailed information than that obtainable through noncoercive interrogation. Damaged, sleep-deprived bodies remember information inaccurately, unable to make fine distinctions. Consider the case of a prisoner who wanted to tell the Chilean police an address: "Although I knew the street name, I had no idea of the number. Still furious, they realized that in truth I could not tell them where to go and once more they untied me."

Sometimes when prisoners provide true information, interrogators refuse to recognize it, since they assume most victims lie. So they continue torturing until they are satisfied. The notion that one will stop when one hears the right information presupposes that one has gathered circumstantial information that allows one to know the truth when one hears it. But that is precisely what does not happen with torture. Torturers spend so much time on torture that they have no time to gather supplementary evidence.

Finally, even when torturers think they know what they are looking for, they sometimes can`t believe true information. One prisoner in Chile broke down several days into torture and revealed the names of the nuns and priests who had sheltered her. But the conservative and devout interrogators could not believe they were involved and continued torturing her.

What if time is short, as with a "ticking bomb"? Does torture offer a shortcut? Real torture -- not the stuff of television -- takes days, if not weeks. Even torturers know this. There are three things that limit torture`s value in this context.

First, there is the medical limit. Physical methods, like psychological methods, take time. In the face of extreme pain, human beings faint and, as one French resistance fighter said, this "gives you a reprieve between blows" and delays interrogation. As the interrogation proceeds, victims become less sensitive to pain. After undergoing four torture sessions, a Norwegian resistance fighter concluded that "pain had reached its limit -- when it could hurt no more, what did it matter how it was inflicted?" In addition, as torturers push harder, they sometimes cause inadvertent death. And dead men, like unconscious men, don`t talk.

Second, there is the resource limit. For decades, guerrilla organizations have had "torture contracts" with their members: If you get arrested, keep the interrogators busy for 24 hours and let us change the passwords and locations. Give them false information mixed with half-truths. Make them waste their time and resources, and then after a day say whatever you want, since it will be useless then. Remember that you will become unconscious when the pain is extreme, and consider feigning unconsciousness.

Last, there`s the psychological limit. The CIA Kubark manual notes that coercive investigation requires compiling a psychological profile, which can take days to write. Without a psychological profile, the manual says, torture is a "hit or miss" practice and "a waste of time and energy." Shot-in-the-dark torturing brings to mind the torturer`s paradox. If he tortures first, he may be unable to get information by gentler means later. But if he tortures at the end, the prisoner may conclude that he is getting desperate and hold out longer.

Hardcore believers, including presumably the common terrorist, don`t break quickly. Torturing them just gives them an excuse to prove that they`re stronger than you. Even the Gestapo discovered that with members of the resistance in World War II: Few resistance fighters gave accurate information.

In fact, as George Browder explains in his powerful book "Hitler`s Enforcers," "the Gestapo, like police anywhere, could not do its work without public support." The Gestapo`s enormous success against the resistance, first in Germany and then elsewhere, depended heavily on bureaucratic files, police informants (G-men or V-men) and collaborators in foreign countries. "Increased reliance on interrogation through torture during the war years reflects the declining professionalism of an overextended staff much watered down with neophytes," Browder writes.

The priority in America`s war on terror should be on developing human intelligence. Working one`s way into a terror cell is not unlike working one`s way into organized crime in the United States. One has to turn potential terrorists into double agents and to win the confidence and cooperation of the communities that shelter them. Technology is no substitute for this. Nor is torture.

Abu Ghraib should teach us what America`s founders would have told us: that we are our own worst enemy. Leaders of dictatorships sign on to the Geneva Conventions only out of prudential fear of what other states might do to their POWs. Leaders of democracies sign on to them because they understand the evil that lurks in the heart of all human beings. Those who choose to abide by the rules do so not simply to restrain others but to restrain themselves.

Unrestrained power leaves behind a legacy of destruction that takes generations to undo. Torture, like incest, is the gift that keeps on giving. Democratic societies that legalized torture or tried to constrain its use have come to two ends. Some, like the Greeks and Romans, created tiered societies where authorities could torture whole classes of people (slaves or lesser citizens) and those who were beyond torture. Others, like the Italian city-states, were unable to prevent the executive branch from torturing more and more citizens and in the end fell to its dictatorial power.

The first result is hardly a model for modern democracies, and the second serves as a warning. In modern times, France routinized torture in Algeria, producing a racist, tiered society and an aggressive military government that almost overthrew French democracy. Proponents of torture would argue that destroying democratic institutions -- and the individuals involved -- is worth it if torture, as for the French in Algeria, succeeds in defeating terrorism.

Next: The example of military victory against terrorism by a democracy that used torture

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About the writer
Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College, was a 2003 Carnegie scholar. He is the author of "Torture and Democracy," to be published by Princeton University Press in 2005.

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Does torture work?
The French military`s use of torture in Algeria is often cited as a success story. But the real story is more complex. Second of two parts.

Editor`s note: Read Part 1. siehe #17932

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By Darius Rejali

June 21, 2004 | Torture apologists point to one powerful example to counter all the arguments against torture: the Battle of Algiers. In 1956, the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) began a terrorist bombing campaign in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, killing many innocent civilians. In 1957, Gen. Jacques Massu and the French government began a counterinsurgency campaign in Algiers using torture. As English military theorist Brian Crozier put it, "By such ruthless methods, Massu smashed the FLN organization in Algiers and re-established unchallenged French authority. And he did the job in seven months -- from March to mid-October."

It is hard to argue with success. Here were professional torturers who produced consistently reliable information in a short time. It was a breathtaking military victory against terrorism by a democracy that used torture. Yet the French won by applying overwhelming force in an extremely constrained space, not by superior intelligence gathered through torture. As noted war historian John Keegan said in his recent study of military intelligence ("Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy From Napoleon to Al-Qaeda"), "it is force, not fraud or forethought, that counts" in modern wars.

The real significance of the Battle of Algiers, however, is the startling justification of torture by a democratic state. Algerian archives are now open, and many French torturers wrote their autobiographies in the 1990s. The story they tell will not comfort generals who tell self-serving stories of torture`s success. In fact, the battle shows the devastating consequences of torture for any democracy foolish enough to institutionalize it.

Torture by the French failed miserably in Vietnam, and the French could never entirely secure the Algerian countryside, so either torture really did not work or there was some additional factor that made the difference in Algiers.

Among many torture apologists, only Gen. Massu, with characteristic frankness, identified the additional factor. In Vietnam, Massu said, the French posts were riddled with informants. Whatever the French found by torture, the Vietnamese opposition knew immediately. And long distances separated the posts. In Algiers, the casbah was a small space that could be cordoned off, and a determined settler population backed the army. The army was not riddled with informants, and the FLN never knew what the army was doing.

And the French had an awesomely efficient informant system of their own. Massu took a census in the casbah and issued identity cards for the entire population. He ordered soldiers to paint numbers on each block of the casbah, and each block had a warden -- usually a trustworthy Algerian -- who reported all suspicious activities. Every morning, hooded informants controlled the exits to identify any suspects as they tried to leave. The FLN helped the French by calling a general strike, which revealed all its sympathizers. What made the difference for the French in Algiers was not torture, but the accurate intelligence obtained through public cooperation and informants.

In fact, no rank-and-file soldier has related a tale of how he personally, through timely interrogation, produced decisive information that stopped a ticking bomb. "As the pain of interrogation began," observed torturer Jean-Pierre Vittori, "they talked abundantly, citing the names of the dead or militants on the run, indicating locations of old hiding places in which we didn`t find anything but some documents without interest." Detainees also provided names of their enemies -- true information, but without utility to the French.

The FLN military men had also been told, when forced to talk, to give up the names of their counterparts in the rival organization, the more accommodationist MNA (National Algerian Movement). Not very knowledgeable in the subtleties of Algerian nationalism, the French soldiers helped the FLN liquidate the infrastructure of the more cooperative organization and tortured MNA members, driving them into extreme opposition.

Unlike in the famous movie, which portrays the Algerian population as united behind the FLN and assumes that torture is why the French won the battle, the real Battle of Algiers was a story of collaboration and betrayal by the local population. It was, as Alistair Horne describes in "A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962," a population that was cowed beyond belief and blamed the FLN leadership for having brought them to this pass.

Gen. Massu`s strategy was not to go after the FLN bombers but to identify and disable anyone who was even remotely associated with the FLN. It was not a selective sweep. The smallest interrogation unit in Algiers possessed 100,000 files. Out of the casbah`s total population of 80,000 citizens, Massu arrested 30 to 40 percent of all males.

Torture forced "loyal" Algerians to cooperate, but after the battle, they either ended their loyalty to France or were assassinated. Torture forced a politics of extremes, destroying the middle that had cooperated with the French. In the end, there was no alternative to the FLN. As Paul Teitgin, the police prefect of Algiers, remarked, "Massu won the Battle of Algiers, but that meant losing the war."

The judicial system also collapsed under the weight of torture. Judges and prefects found themselves unable to deny warrants to armed men who tortured and killed for a living. Police records show that Teitgin issued 800 detention orders (arrêtes d`assignation) for eight months before the battle, 700 for the first three months of the battle and then 4,000 a month for the remaining months. By the end of the battle, he had issued orders to detain 24,000, most of whom (80 percent of the men and 66 percent of the women) were routinely tortured.

And "what to do with these poor devils after their `use`?" asked a French soldier. Many torturers preferred to kill them, though, one soldier conceded, genocide was difficult. "There isn`t enough place in the prisons and one can`t kill everyone ..., so one releases them and they`re going to tell others, and from mouth to mouth, the whole world knows." Then, he observed, their relatives and friends "join the resistance." By the end of the battle, about 13,000 Algerians (and some Frenchmen) were in detention camps and 3,000 "disappeared."

Doctors, whose task it was to monitor torture, were themselves corrupted by the torture. "Our problem is," remarked a doctor attached to a French torture unit, "should we heal this man who will again be tortured or let him die?" As oversight failed, the French military government arrested more people for flimsier reasons.

Use of torture also compromised the military. Lt. Col. Roger Trinquier, the famous French counterinsurgency expert, believed that torturers could act according to professional norms -- applying only the pain necessary to get information and then stopping. But the stories of rank-and-file torturers confirm previous studies of the dynamics of torture. "I realized," remarked a French soldier, "that torture could become a drug. I understood then that it was useless to claim to establish limits and forbidden practices, i.e. yes to the electrotorture but without abusing it, any further no. In this domain also, it was all or nothing."

Torture drifted headlong into sadism, continuing long after valuable information could be retrieved. For example, soldiers arrested a locksmith and tortured him for three days. In his pocket, the locksmith had bomb blueprints with the address of an FLN bomb factory in Algiers. The locksmith bought time, the bombers relocated and the raid by the French three days later fell on open air. Had the soldiers been able to read Arabic, they would have found the bomb factory days earlier. But they were too busy torturing. As one would predict, engaging in torture prevented the use of ordinary -- and more effective -- policing skills. (Incidentally, the French could not believe that the most wanted man in the casbah had spent months only 200 yards from the headquarters of the army commandant.)

The French military also fragmented under the competition associated with torture. Parallel systems of administration emerged, and infighting occurred between the various intelligence agencies. Officers lost control of their charges, or the charges refused to follow higher command. And in the end, the soldiers blamed the generals for exposing them to torture, noting its pernicious effects on their lives, their families and their friends -- a sense of betrayal that has not diminished with the years.

Yves Godard, Massu`s chief lieutenant, had insisted there was no need to torture. He suggested having the informant network identify operatives and then subject them to a simple draconian choice: Talk or die. This would have produced the same result as torture without damage to the army.

The British successfully used precisely this strategy with German spies during World War II. British counterespionage managed to identify almost every German spy without using torture -- not just the 100 who hid among the 7,000 to 9,000 refugees coming to England to join their armies in exile each year, not just the 120 who arrived in similar fashion from friendly countries, but also the 70 sleeper cells that were in place before 1940. Only three agents eluded detection; five others refused to confess. Many Germans chose to become double agents rather than be tried and shot. They radioed incorrect coordinates for German V missiles, which landed harmlessly in farmers` fields. But for this misdirection, British historian Keegan concludes, in October 1944 alone close to 1,300 people would have died, with 10,000 more injured and 23,000 houses destroyed.

The U.S. Army`s field manual for intelligence (FM34-52) notes that simple direct questioning of prisoners was 85 percent to 95 percent effective in World War II and 90 to 95 percent effective in the Vietnam War. What about those 5 percent at the margin? Couldn`t savage, unprofessional, hit-or-miss torture yield some valuable information from them? Actually, there was one case in the Battle of Algiers in which torture did reveal important information.

In September 1957, in the last days of the battle, French soldiers detained a messenger known as "Djamal." Under torture, Djamal revealed where the last FLN leader in Algiers lay hidden. But that wasn`t so important; informants had identified this location months before. The important information Djamal revealed was that the French government had misled the military and was quietly negotiating a peace settlement with the FLN. This was shocking news. It deeply poisoned the military`s relationship with the civilian government, a legacy that played no small part in the collapse of the Fourth Republic in May 1958 and in the attempted coup by some French military officers against President De Gaulle in April 1961.

The French won the Battle of Algiers primarily through force, not by superior intelligence gathered through torture. Whoever authorized torture in Iraq undermined the prospect of good human intelligence. Even if the torture at Abu Ghraib served to produce more names ("actionable intelligence") and recruit informants, torture in the end polarized the population, eliminating the middle that might cooperate. Dividing the world into "friends" and "enemies," those who are with us or against us, meant that we lost the cooperation of those who wished to be neither or who were enemies of our enemies.

Whoever authorized torture in Afghanistan and Iraq also destroyed the soldiers who were ordered to perform it. Studies of torturers show that they would rather work as killers on death squads, where the work is easier. Torture is hard, stressful work. Many torturers develop emotional problems, become alcoholics, beat their families and harbor a deep sense of betrayal toward the military brass that hangs them out to twist in the wind. The soldiers at Abu Ghraib had dreams, dreams that democracy promised to fulfill, dreams that now may never be fulfilled thanks to the arrogance of their superiors.

Those who authorize torture need to remember that it isn`t something that simply happens in some other country. Soldiers trained in stealthy techniques of torture take these techniques back into civilian life as policemen and private security guards. It takes years to discover the effects of having tortured. Americans` use of electric torture in Vietnam appeared in Arkansas prisons in the 1960s and in Chicago squad rooms in the 1970s and 1980s.

Likewise, the excruciating water tortures U.S. soldiers used in the Spanish-American War appeared in American policing in the next two decades. For those who had been tortured, it was small comfort when, on Memorial Day 1902, President Roosevelt regretted the "few acts of cruelty" American troops had performed.

Some believe that judges can issue selective torture warrants to security officers in important cases. But the rapid increase in the number of torture warrants issued during the Battle of Algiers is evidence enough that civil servants can exercise little selective control once they have licensed unlimited power.

Others believe that torture occasionally is necessary and that when it is, one should have to answer for one`s actions before the law. But "morally justified" torture does not resemble morally justified civil disobedience. Civil rights protesters break the law in public and then submit their behavior to juries and courts. But I know of no modern torturer who voluntarily submitted to public scrutiny and took the heat. Like boasts of bravery, this opinion is too easy to hold when there is no danger of it being tested. Modern torturers operate in secrecy and specialize in techniques that leave no marks. What would we really know of Abu Ghraib in the absence of the photographs?

And once soldiers get away with torture, they repeat it. Few things predict future torture as much as past impunity.

It is easy to criticize the leaders and torture apologists who misled us and continue to do so. What is harder is to determine how to repair the damage. One crazy man can block the well, but it takes the whole village to remove the stone, an Iranian proverb says.

We can learn from the mistakes of other democracies that have tortured. These democracies lost their wars because the brutality they licensed reduced their intelligence, compromised their allies and corrupted their military and government, and they could not come to terms with that.

When the politicians first heard of the torture, they denied it happened, minimized the violence and called it ill treatment. When the evidence mounted, they tried a few bad apples, disparaged the prisoners and observed that terrorists had done worse things. They justified the torture as effective and necessary for the extreme circumstances and countercharged that critics were aiding the enemy. As time passed, they offered apologies but accepted no consequences and argued that there was no point in dwelling on past events.

The torture continued because these democrats could not institutionally recommit themselves to limited power at home or abroad. The torture interrogations yielded the predictable results, and the democracies remained mired in their wars despite overwhelming military superiority against a far smaller enemy. Soon the politicians had to choose between losing their democracy and losing their war. That is how democracies lose wars.

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About the writer
Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College, was a 2003 Carnegie scholar. He is the author of "Torture and Democracy," to be published by Princeton University Press in 2005.

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June 21, 2004
Judge in Abuse Case Will Allow Questioning of Top Officers
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 21 — A military judge ruled today that the top American commanders involved in the Iraq war will have to submit to questioning by lawyers for two defendants in the Abu Ghraib prison case. The lawyers said they planned to show that the most senior military and civilian officials had approved interrogation methods that violated the Geneva Conventions.

The judge, Col. James Pohl of the Fifth Judicial Circuit in Germany, also called Abu Ghraib a "crime scene" and ordered the government to "take all steps possible" to preserve the prison, 15 miles west of Baghdad.

The judge`s order, despite an earlier offer by President Bush to raze the prison, was in response to a civilian defense lawyer who had said he wanted members of the court to be able to "smell the fecal matter and the urine that service members who worked inside the prison and who are accused in this case had to live with."

The Iraqi government has also said it wants to preserve the prison, arguing that its destruction would be a waste of a building.

In the western town of Ramadi, the bodies of four American soldiers were discovered, bringing to at least 841 the number killed here since the start of the war. The men mysteriously did not have the helmets and body armor that soldiers routinely wear.

Judge Pohl gave his orders during pre-trial motion hearings for Sergeant Javal S. Davis and Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., whom investigators call a ringleader of the seven military police officers accused of torturing prisoners and photographing them while doing so. A third scheduled hearing with another defendant described by the authorities as a ringleader, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, did not go forward because the civilian lawyer for Sergeant Frederick failed to show up, citing the extreme danger here.

The hearings gave the clearest picture so far of the ambitious argument the defense lawyers plan to make during the trial — that the most senior officials in the White House and Pentagon and the top generals in Iraq had created an atmosphere that encouraged the flouting of the conventions of war in interrogating prisoners.

"I feel that all seven M.P.`s are being made scapegoats," Guy Womack, the civilian lawyer for Specialist Graner, told reporters after his client`s hearing. "No one can suggest with a straight face that these M.P.`s were acting alone."

The three defendants, dressed in their tan desert uniforms, sat quietly the entire day in a makeshift courtroom inside the fortified American headquarters in central Baghdad. Their lawyers did the talking. Mr. Graner, a former corrections officer with an alleged history of abuse, stared at the black-robed judge from behind silver-rimmed glasses.

Among other things, Mr. Graner is accused of ordering prisoners to masturbate in front of each other and punching an Iraqi so hard in the head that he lost consciousness. If found guilty, he faces a maximum sentence of up to 24 1/2 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge.

Last month, Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in prison.

Mr. Womack, the defense lawyer, said the seven military police officers were following instructions from military intelligence officers who ran the prison. But he added that the ultimate responsibility lay with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, both of whom indicated after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that the Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of prisoners do not apply to the "war on terror."

"Because of the war on terrorism, the highest levels of government authorized an unusual proceeding," Mr. Womack said. In this atmosphere, he added, officials "lessened the normal restraints on interrogations."

American commanders have sought to portray the seven soldiers as a rogue outfit acting on their own.

Mr. Womack said he had evidence that a senior male Army officer was present during several of the interrogation sessions captured in the infamous photographs whose release started the prison scandal in April. The officer tried to hide the interrogations from outsiders, Mr. Womack said. He declined to name the officer but said his identity would emerge during the legal process.

Mr. Womack also asked the judge to order the government to release several memos written at the top levels of the Bush administration that showed officials trying to stretch the allowable limits for prisoner interrogations. Recent news reports have said the memos — including one by the White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzalez, calling the Geneva Conventions "quaint" — were written to advise President Bush that international laws concerning torture did not apply to "unlawful combatants" captured during the "war on terror."

Judge Pohl denied the motion, saying that discussions taking place in Washington did not appear relevant to the immediate cases.

The judge also denied a similar request by Paul Bergrin, a civilian lawyer for Sergeant Davis, who said L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, had written a memo asking for a definition of interrogation methods for prisoners in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld and his top aide for intelligence policy, Stephen A. Cambone, had written memos asking for the same thing, Mr. Bergrin said.

But Judge Pohl did say the American government had to make available for interviews all the top commanders involved in the Iraq war. That includes General John P. Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of American ground troops in Iraq; Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, who is taking over for General Sanchez; Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who controls American-run prisons in Iraq; and Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, in charge of intelligence operations here.

Depending on what emerges in the interviews, lawyers could call the commanders to the witness stand or ask to depose them to get sworn testimony.

The issue of interviewing the commanders was first raised when Judge Pohl said he realized the defense lawyers intended to file motions to dismiss their cases based on the possibility of "unlawful command influence." That refers to commanders creating bias in a legal proceeding through their statements or actions. Interviewing the commanders in this case would allow the lawyers to establish whether that has happened, and to look for evidence that senior officers created an atmosphere that encouraged the torture of prisoners.

Mr. Womack also said there was "a good chance" he would try to question Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Bergrin`s plans were even more ambitious: "We will ask to have the president of the United States as a witness," he said. "Whether that`s granted, that`s a different story."

The two lawyers asked the judge to move the venue out of Iraq, arguing that the dangers here will dissuade potential civilian witnesses from attending the trials. While soldiers who are witnesses can be ordered to travel anywhere, civilians can only be compelled through a subpoena to attend trials in the United States. Lawyers involved in trials outside the United States must rely on the good will of civilian witnesses.

Judge Pohl denied the motions on the grounds they were "speculative," but said he would revisit the situation if hostilities here changed.

The prosecutor, Capt. Christopher Graveline, agreed to some demands made by the defense. The government will turn over copies of background files on the prisoners after the files are cleared of any classified material, he said. It will also declassify all parts of the Army report written by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who recently concluded a three-month investigation into events at Abu Ghraib.

Judge Pohl ordered lawyers for both sides to file all motions to him via e-mail by July 31. He also rescheduled Sergeant Frederick`s hearing for July 23, despite denouncing the sergeant`s civilian lawyer for not showing up today.

Mr. Womack said the trials are not likely to start before October at the earliest, after both sides have interviewed possible witnesses.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Die Zahlen:

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washingtonpost.com

Support for Bush`s War on Terror Slips, Poll Shows

By Richard Morin and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, June 21, 2004; 5:45 PM

Public anxiety over mounting casualties in Iraq and the doubts about long-term consequences of the war continue to rise and have helped to erase President Bush`s once-formidable advantage over Sen. John F. Kerry on who is best able to deal with terrorist threats, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Exactly half the country now approves of the way Bush is managing the U.S. war on terrorism, down 13 points since April, according to the poll. Barely two months ago, Bush comfortably led Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, by 21 percentage points when voters were asked which man they trusted to deal with the terrorist threat. Today the country is evenly divided, with 48 percent preferring Kerry and 47 percent favoring Bush.

With less than 10 days to go before the United States turns over governing power to a new government in Iraq, the survey shows that Americans are coming to a mixed judgment about the costs and benefits of the war. Campaign advisers to both Bush and Kerry believe voters` conclusions about Bush and Iraq will play a decisive role in determining the outcome of the November election.

The shift is potentially significant because Bush has consistently received higher marks on fighting terrorism than on Iraq. If the decline signals a permanent loss of confidence in his handling of the campaign against terrorism, that could undermine a central part of Bush`s reelection campaign message.

Overall the poll had mixed news for both candidates. Bush`s marks for handling the economy and Iraq both rose slightly during the past month, but his overall approval rating remains below 50 percent. Kerry leads Bush in a three-way test that includes independent Ralph Nader and is seen as more honest and trustworthy than the president, but those surveyed question whether he has a plan of his own for Iraq.

Fewer than half of those surveyed -- 47 percent -- say the war in Iraq was worth fighting, while 52 percent say it was not, the highest level of disapproval recorded in Post-ABC News polls. Seven in 10 Americans now say there has been an "unacceptable" level of casualties in Iraq, up six points from April and also a new high in Post-ABC News polling

A majority say the United States should keep its forces in Iraq until the country is stabilized, but the proportion who want to withdraw now to avoid further casualties -- 42 percent -- has inched up again to a new high. Two in three Americans say the war has improved the lives of the Iraqi people and a growing number of Americans say the United States is making significant progress toward a democratic government there. Last month, only 37 percent said they saw significant progress but 50 percent say so now.

The public is now sharply divided over whether the war contributed to the long-term security of the United States, with barely half -- 51 percent -- saying it has, a new low in Post-ABC polls. Three in four say the conflict has damaged the image of the United States throughout the world and a majority believe the war has not improved prospects for long-term peace and stability in the Middle East.

Virtually all of the recent movement against the war has occurred among political independents. Among those with no firm party ties, the proportion who said the war was "not worth fighting" increased from 48 percent in May to 59 percent in the latest poll.

Bush`s approval rating on his handling of Iraq remains negative but rose slightly in the past month to 44 percent, with 55 percent saying they disapprove.

On the key domestic issue of the economy, 46 percent give Bush positive marks, up seven points since March and his best showing since January. The survey also found that close to half the country currently rates the health of the economy as "excellent" or "good," up six points from March and the highest since July, 2001, and follows a succession of positive economic statistics.

But improved marks on Iraq and the economy did not translate into a rise in Bush`s overall approval rating, nor did they improve his standing against Kerry in a hypothetical November match up.

Bush`s overall job approval rating held steady at 47 percent, at its low point in Post-ABC News polls, while his disapproval rating reached a new high of 51 percent. That leaves Bush in a shaky position politically, based on the rankings of other recent presidents seeking reelection.

In a November ballot test, Kerry leads Bush 48 percent to 44 percent among registered voters, with 6 percent currently supporting independent candidate Ralph Nader. Last month, Kerry and Bush were tied. With Nader out of the race, Kerry`s advantage swells to eight points, clear evidence of the continuing threat that the Nader candidacy poses to the Democrat.

Interest in the campaign remains high while the proportion of persuadable voters is low. Voters are paying attention to this race earlier in the campaign than they did four years ago when Bush ran against Al Gore.

Currently eight in 10 registered voters said they are following the campaign -- slightly higher than the proportion that were paying similar attention to the 2000 campaign three weeks before the election. Just one in 10 voters say there was a "good chance" they could change their minds between now and November.

The survey found that Kerry`s advantages over Bush extended to a range of issues. When asked which they trusted to do the better job, Kerry held a double-digit advantage over Bush as the candidate the public preferred to deal with health care (21 points), taxes (13 points), education (10 points), prescription drug benefits for the elderly (12 points) and smaller leads on handling international affairs (8 points), the economy (5 points) and the federal budget deficit (4 points).

In only one area -- Iraq -- was Bush more trusted, but by a narrow 50 percent to 45 percent margin.

The president is viewed as a stronger leader than Kerry and as the candidate who can be most trusted in a crisis. He is also seen as best able to "make the country safer and more secure" and the one who "takes a position and sticks with it."

But by a 52 percent to 39 percent margin, Kerry is seen as more honest and trustworthy -- a troubling finding for Bush whose truthfulness in the run up to the war in Iraq has been called into question.

The survey also found that eight in 10 Americans support the transfer of power from the U.S. led coalition to an interim Iraqi government on June 30. Nearly half -- 48 percent -- said it should be Iraqis who have the final say over the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, while just as many say it should be the United States. Big majorities say that the new Iraqi government and not the United States also should control Iraqi`s oil industry and handle the distribution of aid from other countries.

A total of 1,201 randomly selected adults, including 1,015 self-described registered voters, were interviewed June 17-20 for this telephone survey. Margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Assistant director of polling Claudia Deane contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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June 22, 2004
DETAINEE TREATMENT
U.S. Rules on Prisoners Seen as a Back and Forth of Mixed Messages to G.I.`s
By DOUGLAS JEHL

The following article was reported by Douglas Jehl, Eric Schmitt and Kate Zernike and was written by Mr. Jehl.

WASHINGTON, June 21 — Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration`s new rules governing treatment of foreign prisoners have been contradictory and have sent mixed messages to American soldiers, according to military personnel and documents.

Six investigations are under way into abuses of detainees; none are expected to produce any conclusions soon. A close review of recently disclosed documents and interviews with soldiers, officers and government officials find a broader pattern of misconduct and knowledge about it stretching into the middle chain of command. But there is no clear evidence to date that the highest military or civilian leaders ordered or authorized the mistreatment of prisoners at American-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Still, the ever-shifting rules, in which lists of accepted interrogation tactics were widened drastically before being reined in over 17 crucial months, helped foster a climate in which abuse could flourish.

Starting with the 17 interrogation techniques approved in a standard Army manual, commanders at the Guantánamo prison doubled the permitted methods by late 2002, before shrinking the list. In Iraq last fall, directives on treatment of prisoners were changed at least three times in six weeks. Some of the procedures authorized in Iraq had been banned as too harsh months earlier at Guantánamo.

Some officers skirted international treaties governing prisoner treatment, some soldiers have said, instructing subordinates to hide detainees from monitors sent by the International Committee of the Red Cross. In one instance, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved an order to hold a suspected Iraqi terrorist but to keep his name off the prison rolls, effectively shielding the "ghost detainee" from Red Cross inspectors.

Lacking clear guidance, soldiers at various jails were apparently confused about the rules. In Iraq, some guards were such sticklers that they demanded paperwork to take away detainees` blankets, while others did not understand that they needed written authorization to intimidate prisoners with dogs.

Many guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said they had been told by intelligence officers to "soften up" detainees, but some thought that meant making them do calisthenics to tire them out, while others took it to mean forcing them to crawl naked on leashes for hours.

Beatings were accepted enough at Abu Ghraib that some soldiers recorded the number of stitches their victims required with tack marks on the wall. In the worst cases in Afghanistan and Iraq, abuse resulted in deaths, including 10 cases now being investigated as homicides.

While President Bush has portrayed the events at Abu Ghraib as the actions of just a few soldiers at one prison, the picture emerging from documents, interviews and Congressional testimony points to a broader pattern of misconduct and knowledge about it stretching up the chain of command.

While the mistreatment did not go entirely unnoticed, many soldiers who had hints of the abuse did not report it. In a chaotic environment in the midst of a war, some soldiers said later, they assumed it must have been authorized.

"It was confusing the way the place was run," Sgt. Samuel Jefferson Provance III, who worked in interrogations at Abu Ghraib as part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion, testified at a military hearing last month. "It was a shocking experience."

For military officials at the highest levels, the administration`s fight against terrorism was a new kind of war. As Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military`s Southern Command, said, describing the government`s post-Sept. 11 effort to rewrite longstanding practices about prisoner treatment, "we really were moving into uncharted waters."

Geneva Rules Didn`t Apply

Soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as planning began for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon asked Justice Department lawyers to assess whether detainees held in Afghanistan or in the new American-run prison at Guantánamo Bay could claim they had been mistreated under the Geneva Conventions and federal and international laws.

The lawyers concluded that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, because Guantánamo was outside the territorial United States, and because Al Qaeda and the Taliban were not legitimate states, so were not parties to the agreements. One memorandum argued that the president could authorize even "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment to protect national security, as long as it did not cause "great suffering or serious bodily injury" to detainees, like "killing or torturing them."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and State Department lawyers fired back objections, but apparently lost. An August 2002 memo on interrogation standards from the Justice Department to the White House counsel further whittled down the definition of torture. To qualify, the document said, mistreatment had to inflict pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Military officials have described those legal arguments as theoretical and removed from the decision making about rules for interrogation and treatment of prisoners.

But first in Guantánamo and Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, commanders authorized procedures harsher than those spelled out in the Army`s interrogations field manual. The 17 general techniques, like manipulating a prisoner`s emotions or persuading the prisoner that it was futile to resist, formed a boundary that the American military had heeded in the recent past.

Like the legal memorandums, the decision to go beyond the field manual was based on the ground that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. For prisoners in Iraq, the reasoning was that the protections were not as restrictive as previously interpreted by the United States.

Harsher Procedures Added

At Guantánamo, the first clear widening of authority came in December 2002, when commanders asked the Pentagon for more latitude in interrogating a Saudi Arabian prisoner believed to be the planned 20th hijacker of Sept. 11.

The authorities thought the man, Mohamed al-Kahtani, had information about possible future attacks, but he had resisted standard interrogation techniques.

In response, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized at least 17 new procedures beyond those in the field manual, a senior Pentagon official said. They applied to all Guantánamo prisoners.

Those harsher techniques included hooding; exploiting a prisoner`s phobias, sometimes using muzzled dogs in interrogations; removing some of a detainee`s clothing; and the use of "minimum physical contact" like poking or grabbing.

Even though these harsher techniques were approved, senior military officials said last week that those four specific practices were never used at Guantánamo. Still, interrogators at the site and military lawyers in Washington objected. Just over a month later, Mr. Rumsfeld ordered a group of military lawyers, intelligence analysts and policy makers to review the rules.

On April 16, 2003, Mr. Rumsfeld narrowed the list of approved techniques. He permitted 24 methods at Guantánamo, including 17 from the Army manual, but stipulated that 4 of them required his explicit approval. They involved using incentives to cooperate, like offering hot showers in the winter, segregation for more than 30 days, good-cop-bad-cop interrogation and an approach called "pride and ego down," which exploits a prisoner`s loyalty, intelligence or perceived weakness.

Defense officials said those more aggressive techniques had been used with only two prisoners at Guantánamo and did not constitute torture.

In Iraq, there had been no formal interrogation rules in place beyond those in the Army manual until late August 2003.

Then, officers at Abu Ghraib sought to give interrogators more freedom and proposed a set of rules drafted by an Army unit that had recently arrived from Afghanistan. The unit, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, had a questionable record. Two prisoners under its supervision at Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan died in December 2002, apparently in homicides that are still being reviewed by criminal investigators.

The battalion`s commander, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, proposed 30 interrogation techniques, and two lawyers working for Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, approved them. Defense officials have refused to say exactly what procedures were authorized under the proposal or under later directives put into effect in Iraq. A senior Pentagon official said last week that it was unclear whether those additional techniques had ever been used in interrogations.

Wider, Then Narrower Policy

Meanwhile, another crucial chain of events had already been set in motion. Stephen A. Cambone, Mr. Rumsfeld`s top intelligence official, encouraged Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo, to visit Iraq to find ways to improve the quality of intelligence extracted from detainees about the growing anti-American insurgency.

On Sept. 9, General Miller completed a review of operations in Iraq and recommended a detainee interrogation policy that borrowed heavily from the procedures approved for Guantánamo. He proposed establishing a new interrogation and debriefing center and ensuring that military police officers were assigned to help set the conditions for questioning.

On Sept. 14, General Sanchez authorized variations on what General Miller had recommended. Those rules allowed the use of harsh procedures banned from Guantánamo, including using sleep deprivation, to as little as four hours` rest each 24 hours, and making prisoners stand or crouch in positions for up to an hour, according to Senate aides who have read the confidential document.

As in Guantánamo, the policy ignited a debate among military lawyers, with particular objections coming from the Central Command.

So on Oct. 12, General Sanchez issued a much narrower policy. Most of the harsher methods automatically authorized in the earlier directive, like segregating a prisoner for more than 30 days, would not be permitted without the general`s approval.

According to General Sanchez`s top lawyer, Col. Marc Warren, the new procedures were consistent with the Geneva Conventions. But the policy still allowed interrogators to improvise if they received approval, according to a senior military official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon last month.

It remains unclear whether the changes were communicated through the ranks of interrogators and guards, particularly those at Abu Ghraib. Rules posted on the wall in the prison`s Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, for example, were apparently outdated.

Some troubling practices were clearly tolerated, soldiers said in interviews and sworn statements. Forced nudity was common in the prison`s highest-security area, or "hard site," overseen by military intelligence officers. One interrogator told investigators that he "generally" threw tables around a room holding detainees, while another said she did not regard slapping a detainee as abusive.

Several soldiers said in interviews that Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who was in charge of the interrogation center, had handcuffed and hooded detainees who had been beaten and had hidden them in a cell during a Red Cross visit. Others said Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the prison, had permitted them to intimidate detainees with dogs. None of the dog handlers have been charged with wrongdoing, and two of them have said they were following orders from Colonel Pappas.

By the accounts of the seven soldiers now charged, the abuses seen in the notorious photographs from the prison began as an attempt to encourage prisoners to talk.

Pfc. Lynndie R. England, telling investigators last month about what was going on in prison photographs, said making prisoners crawl with leashes was intended as a "humiliation tactic" to get them to tell more about the rape of an Iraqi boy.

But several of the soldiers charged said later acts depicted in photographs, like piling prisoners naked or forcing them to masturbate, had nothing to do with interrogations. "We thought it looked funny, so pictures were taken," Private England told investigators.

Senior Army officers in Baghdad say they did not learn about those abuses until a soldier came forward in January. But several senior Army officers knew by last November that the Red Cross had complained about problems at the prison, including forced nudity and physical and verbal abuse of prisoners.

Among those aware of the concerns were General Sanchez`s top deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski; his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara G. Fast; and his top lawyer, Colonel Warren. In addition, a small unit inside the prison began reporting beatings and other abuses last fall in documents sent to military lawyers in Baghdad and a review board of colonels, according to military intelligence officers.

The role played by General Sanchez remains a particular focus of investigators. He authorized interrogation procedures in September that he banned 28 days later, and he visited Abu Ghraib at least three times in October, when the worse of the abuses occurred. He has said he did not learn of the incidents until January.

Last month, in response to growing concerns in Congress, General Sanchez narrowed the interrogation rules in Iraq once again, barring virtually all coercive tactics.

In early June, the general removed himself as the officer overseeing an inquiry into the role of military intelligence soldiers in the prisoner abuse, clearing the way for an Army general to interview him for the investigation.

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W, die Pistole und Saddam!
June 21, 2004
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
The President and the Gun: To the Avenger Go the Spoils
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON

The story of how President Bush ended up with Saddam Hussein`s pistol mounted in his private study off the Oval Office has dribbled out in the last few weeks, and it is a good one.

As first reported in Time magazine, the soldiers who captured Mr. Hussein in December presented the mounted sidearm as a gift to Mr. Bush in a visit to the White House. They were members of the Army`s Delta Force team, Mr. Bush later told reporters, and they had confiscated the unloaded pistol from Mr. Hussein`s lap when they pulled him out of his spider hole near Tikrit.

"It`s now the property of the U.S. government," Mr. Bush said at a news conference this month in Savannah, Ga., when asked specifically about the pistol and whether he would return it to the people of Iraq. What the gun tells us about the president, the war and the relationship of the Bush family to Mr. Hussein is another story entirely. It is in many ways better, or at least more interesting, than the first.

The Iraqi dictator, after all, tried to assassinate Mr. Bush`s father in 1993, when he was only a year out of the White House, as payback for the 1991 Persian Gulf war, which the first President Bush had waged on Mr. Hussein. In other words, the gun is more than a gun, at least according to the Freudians.

"It`s the phallic equivalent of a scalp - I mean that quite seriously," said Stanley A. Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political scientist at the City University of New York who has just completed a book, to be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in September, called "In His Father`s Shadow: The Transformations of George W. Bush."

In Mr. Renshon`s view, Mr. Bush went to war for geo-strategic reasons, but there was a powerful personal element as well. In short, Mr. Hussein`s gun is a trophy that symbolizes victories both military and psychic.

"There are a lot of different levels at which this operates," Mr. Renshon said. "The critics say this is all about finishing up Daddy`s mess. I think that is way too off base to be serious. But psychology operates regardless of party line, and this seems to me to be a case in which psychology can`t help but express itself, because it`s a natural outgrowth of what he`s been through and how he feels about it. It`s perfectly normal to me."

Michael Sherry, a military historian at Northwestern University, noted that there was a long record of soldiers seizing the weapons of vanquished enemies as the ultimate symbols of defeat. (Even so, it is illegal for American soldiers to take guns off an enemy and keep them for themselves, which is almost certainly why the president declared that the pistol was United States government property rather than his own.)

Relinquishing weapons has historically been part of surrender ceremonies, even though Ulysses S. Grant chose not to ask for Robert E. Lee`s sword at Appomattox Court House in 1865 and excluded officers` sidearms from the weapons that the Army of Northern Virginia was expected to turn over to him.

Mr. Hussein`s pistol, which Mr. Bush shows off to visitors, is a different matter altogether, Mr. Sherry said, because it was presidential acquisition by force. "Whatever specific symbolism Bush may privately attach to this token, it does make it look to the external viewer that he sees this in very personal terms," Mr. Sherry said. In the end, he said, "I`m left feeling that it sounds kind of childish."

Other presidents, Theodore Roosevelt in particular, have had guns, and many others have kept tokens of what they consider the most historic moments of their presidencies. The Ronald Reagan Library displays a graffiti-covered section of the Berlin Wall, which Mr. Reagan famously ordered Mikhail S. Gorbachev to tear down; George Washington kept a key to the Bastille sent to him after the French Revolution by the Marquis de Lafayette, who served under Washington in the American Revolution and considered him an inspiration for French liberty.

Mr. Bush keeps at least one other war-related token: the badge of George Howard, a Port Authority police officer who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, given to him by Mr. Howard`s mother. Mr. Bush held up the badge in his address to a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks and declared, "This is my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end."

In that context, Mr. Hussein`s pistol is a bookend of sorts, the prize of a president who viewed the badge as reason for waging two wars. To the Delta Force that brought it back, the gun is a piece of history representing nothing less than mission complete.

"These kinds of experiences you only have a few times in your life, and they`re very powerful," said Maj. Gen. David Grange, a retired commander who was in Delta Force during the gulf war. "It`s `Sir, we got him.` "

As to whether Mr. Bush will ever give the gun to the Iraqis, he didn`t say.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 22, 2004
White House Plans to Release Interrogation Documents Today
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON -- The White House plans to release a thick file of papers documenting its internal deliberations on rules for interrogating prisoners in facilities from Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The two-inch stack of papers was to be released late Tuesday. It is intended to counter what White House aides fear is a growing perception that the administration authorized torture as an interrogation technique, a senior administration official said.

White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales intended to brief reporters on the documents, said four administration officials, asking to speak on grounds of anonymity because Gonzales was to talk on the record later Tuesday.

The documents are meant to show "the White House`s deliberative process" in arriving at rules for complying with the Geneva Convention and rules on interrogation techniques, one senior official said. The administration decided to release the papers to fight the "constant drip on this issue" -- a continuous stream of leaks and accusations that the administration had stepped outside the bounds of international law, the official said. "Everyone reached the conclusion that the administration had authorized torture," he said.

The official, saying the United States is facing a new kind of war with an enemy that does not respect or operate under the rules of the Geneva Convention, pointed to the kidnapping and beheading of American civilian engineer Paul M. Johnson Jr. in Saudi Arabia last week. The papers being released Tuesday show that the White House and other agencies are wrestling with "how best to address that foe," one official said.

The documents cover a period of several months and were generated by several agencies, including the Department of Justice. One set of papers alone spans 50 pages.

Among the papers are some that have already been seen by the public, including previously confidential memos in which Justice Department lawyers concluded that Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are not protected by the Geneva Conventions because they do not satisfy four main conditions of the treaty itself.

Democrats criticized those memos as laying the legal foundation for Iraqi prisoner abuses, but administration officials said they were aimed mainly at showing that international treaties banning torture do not apply to al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners.

At a June 10 news conference, President Bush sidestepped questions about whether he had seen or authorized the Justice Department papers.

"The authorization I issued was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations. That`s the message I gave our people," Bush said in Savannah, Ga. "I can`t remember if I`ve seen the memo or not, but I gave those instructions."

That memo, which surfaced earlier this month, intensified criticism from congressional Democrats and human rights activists about what they consider a concerted effort to circumvent U.S. and international laws against torture during the fight against terrorism.

Human rights lawyers took the unusual step of filing a racketeering lawsuit this month against U.S. civilian contractors who worked at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The suit alleges contractors conspired to execute, rape and torture prisoners during interrogations to boost profits from military payments.

A series of government lawyers` memos, many of them still secret but leaked to the media this month, said the president had the legal authority to allow torture of detainees during interrogations. Administration officials, however, said such a policy never was adopted.

But some of the papers to be released Tuesday have never been disclosed, a senior official said.

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June 22, 2004
For Clinton Fans, No Line Is Too Long at the Bookstore
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

With all of the publicity it has received recently, it may seem as if Bill Clinton`s memoir, "My Life," a chronicle of the years leading up to his presidency and his time in the White House, had already been in circulation for weeks. But anyone passing by the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Rockefeller Center this morning would guess from the banner bearing the former president`s name, the images of Mr. Clinton in the windows and the line of people snaking from Fifth to Sixth Avenues, that the book`s official release date is today.

Even before the clock struck midnight, Clinton fans, history buffs and those who were simply curious were lining up to get a wristband, which would guarantee them entry to Mr. Clinton`s signing appearance at 12:30 this afternoon.

Some had secured their spot by spending the night in sleeping bags while others sat on the sidewalk in neon-colored lawn chairs reading Mr. Clinton`s memoir as if they were seaside. Books went on sale at some locations beginning at 12:01 a.m. today.

"I love Bill Clinton," said Joyce Morales, 52, who got up at 4:30 this morning and traveled into Manhattan from Staten Island. "I think he was a great president. I got Hillary`s book last year."

Patrick Moriarty, 21, who arrived on line at about 6:45, is also a Clinton supporter. "He`s a very electric personality," Mr. Moriarty said. "It`s not every day that you`re able to get within a couple of feet of one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century."

Sesh Nidamarti, 45, took a bus in from New Jersey this morning and got on line at about 5:45. "This is a big event," he said. "I want to be part of the history. He`s a very charismatic person and I was a big supporter all through eight years of his presidency."

Not everyone however, was fond of Mr. Clinton.

Shawn Cutler, 31, a Republican, said he was seeking Mr. Clinton`s autograph for a pastor he studies with in Connecticut. The pastor is a Democrat.

"I`m a die-hard Republican," said Mr. Cutler. "But I don`t say that too loudly here."

Politics aside, Mr. Clinton`s magnetism was enough to pull many a sleepy New Yorker out of bed before the sun had a chance to warm the city.

For Allan Hollander, 50, and his son Steven, 17, the morning was something of an extended Father`s Day outing.

"My son felt it was important to come today," said Mr. Holland. "This is a nice thing to share, so it was worth getting up at four in the morning."

Steven Hollander said that "to meet a president is a once in a lifetime thing." And there would be the added pleasure of telling his peers about it at school.

A security guard for the event estimated that about 70 people were already on line as of 10 o`clock Monday night.

One of those asphalt campers was Michelle Fischer, 18, who was visiting New York from Wisconsin and planning to get a signed book for her younger brother.

"My nine year old brother back at home is a kind of history fanatic," she said. "He loves presidents and politics."

Last night more than 1,200 people joined Mr. and Mrs. Clinton for a gala celebrating the release of "My Life" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Clinton`s next stop today is at 6:30 p.m. at the Hue-Man bookstore in Harlem. Tomorrow he will be at Borders Books in SoHo at 12:30 p.m. He then takes his book tour to the rest of the country.

Yolanda Blanco, 50, who at 8 a.m. found herself at the end of the line, hopes that she catches the former president before the tour moves on.

Ms. Blanco came to the United States from Nicaragua in 1985 and among her citizenship certificates was a welcome letter signed by President Clinton.

"It would be nice to have something else signed by him," she smiled.

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Bill Clinton Reads From `My Life`
In a selection from the audiobook, read by the author, the former president recalls his lifelong quest to learn more about his father.
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June 22, 2004
FIRST CHAPTER
`My Life`
By BILL CLINTON

Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri- State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend`s ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered "no"-she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.

Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldn`t move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.

That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All my life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who gave me life.

When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy`s porch in Hope, a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, "You`re Bill Blythe`s son. You look just like him." I beamed for days.

In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to her and said, "I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night." He then told Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.

In 1993, on Father`s Day, my first as President, the Washington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and many smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didn`t know, including the fact that my father had probably been married three times before he met Mother, and apparently had at least two more children.

My father`s other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written me during the `92 campaign but had received no reply. I don`t remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the other bullets we were dodging then, it`s possible that my staff kept it from me. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern California. We had a happy visit and since then we`ve corresponded in holiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish I`d known about him a long time ago.

Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents` marriage license, a photo of my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about "our baby" to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor`s office. I`m sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I`ve never met her.

This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that my father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, that`s all she needed to know as her own life moved toward its end. As for me, I wasn`t quite sure what to make of it all, but given the life I`ve led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was more complicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century.

In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, several newspapers published a story on my father`s war record, with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letter from Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing him how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by what he had learned from the soldier who called him "Little GI Joe," he opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the American dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn`t had the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had happened to him. Then, he said, "On Memorial Day of this year, I was thumbing through a copy of the New York Daily News with my morning coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the United States."

In 1996, the children of one of my father`s sisters came for the first time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and brought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from her congressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. It`s just a short form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of the day, but I hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting his first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on the second floor of the White House, and looked at it every night.

Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttle in Washington for New York when an airline employee stopped me to say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with my father and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vet`s phone number and address, and the man said he didn`t have it but would get it to me. I`m still waiting, hoping there will be one more human connection to my father.

At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say goodbye and thanks to the American people. One of them was Chicago, where Hillary was born; where I all but clinched the Democratic nomination on St. Patrick`s Day 1992; where many of my most ardent supporters live and many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare, and education were proved effective; and, of course, where my parents went to live after the war. I used to joke with Hillary that if my father hadn`t lost his life on that rainy Missouri highway, I would have grown up a few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My last event was in the Palmer House Hotel, scene of the only photo I have of my parents together, taken just before Mother came back to Hope in 1946. After the speech and the good-byes, I went into a small room where I met a woman, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She told me she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, then had gone north to Indiana to work in a war industry, married, stayed, and raised her children. Then she gave me another precious gift: the letter my twenty-three-year-old mother had written on her birthday to her friend, three weeks after my father`s death, more than fifty-four years earlier. It was vintage Mother. In her beautiful hand, she wrote of her heartbreak and her determination to carry on: "It seemed almost unbelievable at the time but you see I am six months pregnant and the thought of our baby keeps me going and really gives me the whole world before me."

My mother left me the wedding ring she gave my father, a few moving stories, and the sure knowledge that she was loving me for him too.

My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn`t sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.

Excerpted from My Life by Bill Clinton. Copyright © 2004 by Bill Clinton. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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une 22, 2004
Iraqi Militants Reportedly Behead Korean
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 1:03 p.m. ET

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- An Iraqi militant group has beheaded its South Korean hostage, Al-Jazeera television reported Tuesday.

The pan-Arab station said it had received a videotape showing that Kim Sun-il had been executed.

Kim, 33, worked for a South Korean company supplying the U.S. military in Iraq and was abducted last week, according to the South Korean government.

Al-Jazeera, which had not broadcast the tape, said the execution was carried out by the al-Qaida-linked group Monotheism and Jihad.

Kim`s kidnappers had initially threatened to kill him at sundown Monday unless South Korea canceled a troop deployment to Iraq. The Seoul government rejected the demand, standing firm with plans to dispatch 3,000 soldiers starting in August.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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June 22, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Noonday in the Shade
By PAUL KRUGMAN

In April 2003, John Ashcroft`s Justice Department disrupted what appears to have been a horrifying terrorist plot. In the small town of Noonday, Tex., F.B.I. agents discovered a weapons cache containing fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs and a chemical weapon — a cyanide bomb — big enough to kill everyone in a 30,000-square-foot building.

Strangely, though, the attorney general didn`t call a press conference to announce the discovery of the weapons cache, or the arrest of William Krar, its owner. He didn`t even issue a press release. This was, to say the least, out of character. Jose Padilla, the accused "dirty bomber," didn`t have any bomb-making material or even a plausible way to acquire such material, yet Mr. Ashcroft put him on front pages around the world. Mr. Krar was caught with an actual chemical bomb, yet Mr. Ashcroft acted as if nothing had happened.

Incidentally, if Mr. Ashcroft`s intention was to keep the case low-profile, the media have been highly cooperative. To this day, the Noonday conspiracy has received little national coverage.

At this point, I have the usual problem. Writing about John Ashcroft poses the same difficulties as writing about the Bush administration in general, only more so: the truth about his malfeasance is so extreme that it`s hard to avoid sounding shrill.

In this case, it sounds over the top to accuse Mr. Ashcroft of trying to bury news about terrorists who don`t fit his preferred story line. Yet it`s hard to believe that William Krar wouldn`t have become a household name if he had been a Muslim, or even a leftist. Was Mr. Ashcroft, who once gave an interview with Southern Partisan magazine in which he praised "Southern patriots" like Jefferson Davis, reluctant to publicize the case of a terrorist who happened to be a white supremacist?

More important, is Mr. Ashcroft neglecting real threats to the public because of his ideological biases?

Mr. Krar`s arrest was the result not of a determined law enforcement effort against domestic terrorists, but of a fluke: when he sent a package containing counterfeit U.N. and Defense Intelligence Agency credentials to an associate in New Jersey, it was delivered to the wrong address. Luckily, the recipient opened the package and contacted the F.B.I. But for that fluke, we might well have found ourselves facing another Oklahoma City-type atrocity.

The discovery of the Texas cyanide bomb should have served as a wake-up call: 9/11 has focused our attention on the threat from Islamic radicals, but murderous right-wing fanatics are still out there. The concerns of the Justice Department, however, appear to lie elsewhere. Two weeks ago a representative of the F.B.I. appealed to an industry group for help in combating what, he told the audience, the F.B.I. regards as the country`s leading domestic terrorist threat: ecological and animal rights extremists.

Even in the fight against foreign terrorists, Mr. Ashcroft`s political leanings have distorted policy. Mr. Ashcroft is very close to the gun lobby — and these ties evidently trump public protection. After 9/11, he ordered that all government lists — including voter registration, immigration and driver`s license lists — be checked for links to terrorists. All government lists, that is, except one: he specifically prohibited the F.B.I. from examining background checks on gun purchasers.

Mr. Ashcroft told Congress that the law prohibits the use of those background checks for other purposes — but he didn`t tell Congress that his own staff had concluded that no such prohibition exists. Mr. Ashcroft issued a directive, later put into law, requiring that records of background checks on gun buyers be destroyed after only one business day.

And we needn`t imagine that Mr. Ashcroft was deeply concerned about protecting the public`s privacy. After all, a few months ago he took the unprecedented step of subpoenaing the hospital records of women who have had late-term abortions.

After my last piece on Mr. Ashcroft, some readers questioned whether he is really the worst attorney general ever. It`s true that he has some stiff competition from the likes of John Mitchell, who served under Richard Nixon. But once the full record of his misdeeds in office is revealed, I think Mr. Ashcroft will stand head and shoulders below the rest.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com

Death Stalks An Experiment In Democracy
Fearful Baghdad Council Keeps Public Locked Out

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A01

Last of three articles: 1.u. 2.Teil gestern und vorgestern.

BAGHDAD -- The weekly meeting of the Rashid district council began last Wednesday with a prayer for two of the group`s 33 members. One was in critical condition at a U.S. military hospital after being shot seven times in an assassination attempt. Another was in hiding after gunmen attacked her house and killed her brother.

"Let us remember our martyrs," Sami Ahmed Sharif, the council chairman, intoned as his fellow members stood, turned their palms to the ceiling and bowed their heads.

There were no other residents of the Rashid district to observe the moment of silence or the rest of the proceedings. Council members voted to close the meeting to the public because of fears that assassins would slip in and mark members for death. To enforce the decision, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers surrounded the council building and stationed snipers on the roof.

The nascent political institutions designed to replace the U.S. administration of Iraq are beset by challenges to their popular legitimacy and effectiveness, and by grave risks to Iraqis who have joined the experiment in representative government. As Iraqis prepare for their country to regain sovereignty, it is uncertain how much their political future will be shaped by the $700 million program in democracy-building that has been at the core of the U.S. occupation.

Inside the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, which will dissolve with the handover on June 30, some officials express doubts that Iraq`s political system will conform to the American blueprints. "Will this develop the way we hope it will?" a CPA official involved in promoting democracy said. "Probably not."

New political institutions to replace Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party dictatorship are among the chief legacies of the U.S. occupation. Every city and province has a local council. New mayors, provincial governors and national cabinet ministers have been chosen. The Shiite Muslim majority, shut out of power in Hussein`s government, is widely represented, as are religious minorities and women. Hundreds of political parties have formed, and thousands of people have participated in seminars on democracy.

But Iraqis criticize the local councils and the interim national government as illegitimate because their members were not elected. The country`s top Shiite cleric has repudiated the interim constitution drafted by the U.S.-appointed Governing Council. In several recent meetings about the country`s political future, Iraqis who favor a Western-style democracy have been drowned out by calls for a system governed by Islamic law.

The cabinet, appointed by a U.N. envoy three weeks ago, has had little time to prepare to govern. Local councils, whose authority had been restricted for months by U.S. military commanders, are also stepping into uncharted areas, uncertain about their responsibilities and powers under a system whose inauguration is a week away.

Yet these uncertainties are overshadowed by the imminent threat of violence. Local council members who once welcomed constituents into their homes now keep armed guards at the front gate. Leaders of the national government travel in armored vehicles and work inside Baghdad`s fortified Green Zone, an area off-limits to ordinary Iraqis. Many foreign contractors hired by the U.S. government to promote democracy have either relocated to Kuwait or hunkered down in protected compounds.

Despite those precautions, more than 100 Iraqi government officials have been killed during the occupation, including two members of the Governing Council. Over the past two weeks, the deputy foreign minister and a senior official in the Education Ministry have been assassinated. On Sunday, masked gunmen shot and killed the council chairman of Baghdad`s Rusafa district and his deputy as they sat in a cafe.

Teaching Iraqis about democracy has also been risky. Scott Erwin, a 22-year-old CPA staff member, was critically wounded in an ambush this month as he drove away from a Baghdad university where he was teaching a class on democracy. Two CPA employees who worked on civic education initiatives, Fern Holland and Robert Zangas, were shot to death in March near the city of Hilla.

"Iraq may get to a semi-democratic outcome. But the more-democratic outcomes that were possible a year ago are much more difficult to imagine now because of the security situation," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University`s Hoover Institution who worked on democracy issues for the CPA before leaving Iraq this spring, in part because of concerns about safety. "This is the biggest tragedy of Iraq."
The Central Mission

The transformation of Iraq from dictatorship to democracy was the central mission of the CPA. Everything else -- the efforts to rebuild infrastructure, train police, revise the school curriculum -- was aimed at building a democratic government that would be a model for the rest of the Middle East.

The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, initially planned to supervise the entire process. He wanted the CPA to oversee the drafting of a constitution and the convening of general elections. Bremer insisted last summer that the United States would relinquish sovereignty only to a stable, independent, democratically elected Iraqi government.

When escalating violence and dissent by Iraqis led the Bush administration to abandon that plan in November and accelerate the handover, Bremer ordered the CPA to advance democratic goals as far as possible by June 30. He promulgated an interim constitution that included a bill of rights and a commitment to hold elections by January. Local councils whose members had been chosen by the military were authorized to select new members through caucuses. Bremer augmented the $30 million set aside by Congress for democracy promotion with another $700 million to fund political parties, nongovernmental organizations and civics programs to advocate such political values as the separation of church and state, women`s rights and federalism.

A key component of the U.S. strategy, starting at the beginning of the occupation, was to create effective grass-roots government. When Hussein was in power, governors, mayors and even municipal police chiefs were appointed by Baghdad. The CPA wanted to change that, starting in the capital city.

The CPA`s plan for Baghdad envisioned three tiers of local government: a city council, eight district councils and dozens of neighborhood councils. The councils were limited to advising U.S. officials about reconstruction needs in the city. They had neither the power to enact legislation nor budgets for municipal improvements.

Despite calls from Iraqi politicians for the participants to be chosen by popular vote, the CPA deemed municipal elections too risky last summer. They worried that religious extremists and Baathists would manipulate the process. Instead, the CPA asked the Research Triangle Institute, which had a U.S. government contract to promote democracy in Iraq, to organize neighborhood caucuses to select the councils.

Participants in the caucuses were screened by Americans who supervised the entire process. As a result, the councils were filled with people who owed their jobs more to the CPA than to the public. "The community saw us as tools of the Americans," said Ali Aziz, the secretary of the Rashid council. "It was the beginning of our problems."
Nurturing New Leaders

American officials hope local council members, almost all of whom lived in Iraq while Hussein was in power, will emerge as prominent political figures and potential challengers to the clique of national politicians who opposed Hussein from exile.

"The councils have been a very successful experiment in democracy," said Andrew Morrison, a U.S. diplomat who speaks Arabic and has served as the CPA`s governance coordinator for Baghdad.

The composition of the Rashid district council would seem to bear out that assessment. The council, responsible for a large swath of Shiite-dominated southern Baghdad, includes several members with doctoral degrees. Others have important tribal and business connections. Four of the 33 members are women.

Despite their aspirations to seek an elective seat in an eventual national parliament, several council members said that the CPA`s limits on their authority had kept them from building the respect they needed to earn the trust and respect of their constituents.

"How can we win the support of the people if we have no money?" said Sharif, the council chairman, a voluble real-estate broker who was encouraged to participate in politics by his friends and neighbors. "If we cannot help them, they will not support us."

When not focused on security, the council`s meetings are devoted to discussing work they want the Americans to perform, instead of work they can accomplish themselves. Although they will shed their advisory status to the Americans after June 30, members worry that their limited influence could weaken because there will be fewer U.S.-funded projects and they will have no budget of their own. Over the past four months, the CPA has consulted with the council in allocating more than $56 million for public works projects in the district.

Members faulted the CPA for not keeping a commitment to give a large share of power to local officials. The Rashid council has no control over police officers or many other government employees because they report to national ministries.

Morrison said the division of power between national and local officials would be decided when Iraqis write a permanent constitution. "The Iraqis are going to debate this out over the course of the next year," he said. "We tried to give them the building blocks, but it`s one area I`m not sure where it`s going to come out."

Among the things the Rashid council plans to do after June 30 is assert its independence from its American sponsors. It has politely disinvited U.S. civilian and military officials, who have attended every council meeting so far, from sessions after that date.

Council members said they envisioned a democracy different from what they have read about the United States, suggesting that many of the concepts Americans have been preaching here have not been accepted. For instance, many said that a separation between religion and the state makes little sense in Iraq.

"We can`t act this way," insisted Murthada Younis, the deputy chairman. Outside the room in which he was speaking, several photocopied pictures of a deceased Shiite cleric were taped to the wall. "Religion is part of our life and it should be part of government," he said.

Men on the council said they supported allowing women to vote and hold elective office, but several scoffed at the notion of giving women the same personal freedoms they enjoy outside the Arab world. "In the West, women have absolute freedom to do what they want," said Abbas Taie, an X-ray technician who has attended several U.S.-sponsored democracy workshops. "The Iraqi women refuse such kinds of freedom."

Sharif, the Rashid chairman, said one of the most important items before the council after June 30 will be scheduling local elections. "Right now, many people do not think we are legitimate," he said. "That would change if we were elected by the people."

But Sharif said he recognized that holding an election before the end of the year would be impossible because of the security situation. Campaigning for a January national election will be hard enough, he said. Right now, he said, only a fool would attempt to go door to door or hold a community meeting to meet with constituents. "It`s far too dangerous," he said.

Asked who he thought his chief rival would be, he did not pause.

"Terrorism," he said.
`We Need Protection`

After the prayer and the approval of the previous week`s minutes, the Rashid council got down to work. The first order of business was to hand out military permits to each member allowing them to carry handguns.

"Our lives are in jeopardy," Sharif said as he distributed the laminated cards.

The U.S. Army had given council members .38-caliber pistols for their protection. But the licenses had expired on April 30, exposing members to arrest if they were searched at a military checkpoint. Sharif said he had continued to pack his pistol, as well as carrying two unlicensed AK-47 assault rifles in his car.

"I`m the chairman, but I violate the law so I can protect myself," he said.

For months, the Rashid district council avoided the violence that had plagued other groups. In the district as a whole, five neighborhood council members have been assassinated this year. In Sadr City, a large Shiite slum, the chairman of the district council was killed and strung from a pole. A sign hanging from his neck accused him of being an American spy.

Rashid council members learned to live with threats and close calls. Yacoub Youssef, the chairman of the education committee, said he had received 14 threats, some written and others by telephone, accusing him of collaborating with U.S. forces. Younis, the deputy chairman, said he was almost gunned down on his way to work last month. "We had been very lucky," he said.

This month, the luck ran out. On June 5, gunmen opened fire on council member Ali Ameri, a professor at Baghdad University, as he drove to work, killing two of his bodyguards and leaving him near death. On June 11, assailants sprayed bullets into the house of a colleague, biologist Nisreen Haider, killing her brother and forcing her into seclusion.

"Serving on this council has become very risky," said Adel Fahdil, a contractor. Although Fahdil insisted he was not worried because he had 20 guards, all armed with AK-47s, other members were not as confident. Most cannot afford a large security detail and are forced to rely on one or two relatives with weapons. They have asked for protection, but U.S. officials answered that they did not have the resources to guard more than 1,200 district and neighborhood councilors across the capital.

"We need someone to help us," said council member Majid Mamouri, who said he could not pay for guards with his salary as a professor of veterinary science. "We need bodyguards. We need protection."

At Wednesday`s meeting -- held at a former hunting lodge once run by Hussein`s son, Qusay -- only 18 of the council`s 33 members were in attendance.

Reached in hiding, Haider said in a telephone interview that she had no intention of returning to the council. "I will not work there anymore," she said. "The people do not deserve to be served."

She said she could no longer live in the Rashid district and planned to move elsewhere in Iraq. "They are watching me, and I expect to be killed," she said.
Ideals and Necessities

Despite the threats, some council members said they were uneasy about excluding the public from their meetings.

"We`re working in the name of the citizens," said Youssef, who also serves as a senior official in the Education Ministry. "The public should be able to attend even if we`re afraid of them. The citizens have a right to hear what we`re doing. We should not be having secret meetings."

But Sharif, a trim man with close-cropped hair and large glasses, argued that the safety of the members was more important. "We must protect the council," he said. "This is not ideal but it is necessary."

These days, he said, "we must do what is necessary for democracy, not what is ideal."

Sharif said he expected the threats to abate after June 30, when the occupation ends and the council assumes greater authority in southern Baghdad. He said he hoped residents and the insurgents would change their opinions of the members when they are working without Americans in the room.

"I don`t have any trust in the Americans anymore," Younis said. "I trust my nation to achieve democracy despite terrorism. People know what they want."

While the threats and attacks have scared off some members, they have strengthened the resolve of at least a quorum on the council. With the CPA dissolving and U.S. troops assuming a lower profile, they regard themselves as front-line fighters for democracy.

"If we quit now, the terrorists win," said Youssef, who has been threatened 14 times and was shot at on his way to work last month. Each attempt at intimidation, he said, "gives me the strength to be more determined."

Special correspondent Huda Ahmed Lazim contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Grand Delusion
Two Leaders Who See What They Want to See

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A17

I believe Cheney.

I believe the vice president when he claims that there was a link of some sort between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda -- and by intended implication with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. I believe, that is, that he is not necessarily lying, not making things up. I believe, in other words, that Cheney`s -- and President Bush`s -- insistence on this association is just more evidence that the two of them are blinkered by ideology and seeing precisely what they want.

I`ll tell you a story. There was a man who went to see a psychiatrist. First, the shrink showed him a picture of crossed sticks and then one of hundreds of little dots. "What`s that?" the shrink asked. Snakes and ants having sex, the man replied. The shrink told the man he was obsessed with sex. "What do you expect," the patient replied, "when you keep showing me dirty pictures?"

In life as in jokes, you see what you want. Cheney and Bush (protocol would insist on Bush first, but we know better) always saw a link between Hussein and al Qaeda. That link was tenuous at best, but it was supported by this or that meeting or sighting or the presence of someone in Iraq with links to Osama bin Laden. Aficionados of the Mafia will recognize the telltale signs. This person is linked to this person who is associated with that person who is married to yet another person who was once in business with the brother-in-law of yet another person. Once you have that mind-set, the Mafia is everywhere.

It is the same with intelligence. Very little of it is definitive. We have learned that the hard way. Even the mobile chemical labs in Iraq precisely identified by spy satellites turned out to be something else. Human intelligence can be even more problematic. It turns out, after all, that we knew next to nothing about what was going on in Hussein`s inner circle.

Were there contacts between Hussein`s regime and al Qaeda? Maybe. It`s not inconceivable that someone in the regime wanted to keep an ear open. Were those contacts nefarious? Who knows? Did they lead in some way to the events of Sept. 11? It appears not. No evidence suggests that`s the case, and the lack of such evidence is not proof of anything. It is not up to the critics of the war to prove the negative any more than it is up to astronomers to prove that the dark side of the moon is not made of green cheese. A little intellectual discipline is in order here.

It`s not surprising that an administration already bent on war would interpret every dot, every squiggly line, as evidence that Hussein and bin Laden were in cahoots. This made sense to Bush and Cheney since, as we have found out to our dismay, they cannot distinguish between one kind of evil and another. Every possible suggestion of cooperation somehow became proof. This was particularly the case with Cheney when it came to weapons of mass destruction. He seized on the murkiest of reports to proclaim that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, which, lo these many months later, has yet to be found. So deluded were our top guys that they invaded Iraq expecting that the major problem would be how to clean up after all the victory parades.

Was Cheney lying or was he merely so driven by ideological or intellectual conviction that to him the occasional tree became a forest? It`s hard to say. As my colleague Al Kamen reports, the vice president did indeed say it was "pretty well confirmed" that one of the Sept. 11 terrorists, Mohamed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official. Actually, that meeting has never been confirmed, and Cheney, for obvious reasons, has recently unconfirmed his statement, insisting he was never so definitive. Kamen confirmed he was.

But just as Cheney and Bush missed the forest for the trees, so do those who defend them and insist that the Sept. 11 commission overstated the case by reporting (in a draft) that "no collaborative relationship" existed between Iraq and al Qaeda. The fact remains that Hussein`s fingerprints are not on the attacks of Sept. 11 and that the United States went to war for stated reasons that have simply evaporated -- weapons of mass destruction and that vaporous link between two very bad men. This brings me not to a joke but to the wisdom of the late Don Quixote, who says something to remember when this or that intelligence report is trumpeted by Cheney or Bush in justification of an unjustified war.

"Facts are the enemy of truth."

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Court OKs Class-Action Against Wal-Mart
The suit, originally filed on behalf of six women workers, alleges Wal-Mart often pays female workers less than their male counterparts.
By Jesus Sanchez
Times Staff Writer

8:34 AM PDT, June 22, 2004

A lawsuit claiming that retail giant Wal-Mart Stores discriminated against its female employees today became the largest civil rights case ever filed after a U.S. judge in San Francisco granted the legal complaint class-action status.

The ruling by U.S. District Court judge Martin Jenkins means that as many as 1.6 million current and former female Wal-Mart employees can now be represented under the 2001 lawsuit filed on behalf of six workers. The world`s largest retailer is charged with discriminating against women in promotions, pay and job assignments in a far-reaching lawsuit.

The class-action lawsuit applies to female employees who have worked at Wal-Mart or its sister companies since December 26, 1998.

In granting class-action status, Jenkins rejected Wal-Mart`s argument that the huge number of women who could join the lawsuit would make the case impossible to manage. The court found that federal employment laws do not make an exception for big companies.

"Insulating our nation`s largest employers from allegations that they have engaged in a pattern and practice of gender or racial discrimination — simply because they are large — would seriously undermine these imperatives," Jenkins wrote.

The judge, noting the significance of the case, pointed out that he granted the class-action status on the 50th anniversary of U.S. Supreme Court`s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. "This anniversary serves as a reminder of the importance of the courts in addressing the denial of equal treatment under the law whenever and by whomever it occurs," he wrote.

Wal-Mart, which has denied the charges, said that today`s ruling "has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the case" and deals only with the legal requirements related to class-action status.

"We strongly disagree with his decision and will seek an appeal," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams in a statement.

The original lawsuit, which was organized by a national group of lawyers and public-interest law firms, that while women made up more than 72% of its workers, females accounted for fewer than a third of all store management jobs. In addition, a study commissioned by the plaintiffs found that female workers were paid 4.5% to 5.6% less than males doing similar jobs and with similar experience between 1996 and 2001.

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., has disputed those figures.

"Certification of this class shows that no employer, not even the world`s largest employer, is above the law," said employees` co-co-counsel Joseph M. Sellers in a statement. "This decision sets the stage for women at Wal-Mart to get their fair share of pay and promotions which have been denied them for years."



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY
Truth About Iraq Finally Has Its Pants On
Robert Scheer

June 22, 2004

"We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States," reports the staff of the bipartisan 9/11 commission in demolishing one of the Bush administration`s main arguments for invading Iraq. Now the administration and its spinmeisters are reduced to playing cheap semantic tricks to justify one of history`s great bait-and-switch operations, arguing that they never said explicitly that Iraq was collaborating with Al Qaeda to harm the U.S.

The administration was perfectly happy when more than four out of five Americans polled, as we went to war, said that they believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. We are now to believe that the dozens of prominent references by President Bush and his top officials to "linkages" between Al Qaeda and Iraq were all taken out of context by a confused public.

For example, the administration is now saying that when Bush announced on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that the defeated Hussein was "an ally of Al Qaeda," he didn`t mean they actually helped each other. When Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that Al Qaeda was operating inside Iraq, he apparently assumed people knew that he was referring to an affiliate called Ansar al Islam that was operating in the northern "no-fly" zone patrolled by the United States and outside Hussein`s control.

And when Vice President Dick Cheney said on "Meet the Press" that by attacking Iraq "we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11," he was only helpfully pointing out that Iraq is in the Middle East too.

Yeah, right. The reality is that Bush and company have turned the language of lying into a fine art, always leaving themselves a shred of deniability in case the truth catches up. For example, Cheney has repeatedly cited as a smoking gun an always shaky report about 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta possibly meeting with an Iraqi official in Prague only months before the attacks, telling the nation that this sole claim to direct evidence linking Iraq with 9/11 had "been pretty well confirmed."

The 9/11 commission staff, however, begs to differ, saying Atta was in Florida: "We have examined the allegation that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague on April 9. Based on the evidence available — including investigations by Czech and U.S. authorities, plus detainee reporting — we do not believe that such a meeting occurred."

The fact is that while the administration has been doing its utmost since 9/11 to convince us that Iraq is "the central front" in the war on terror, our security goals have been terribly compromised by expending our political, military and moral capital on the wrong enemy. As the 9/11 commission interim report makes clear, Osama bin Laden`s allies before 9/11 were Afghanistan and the only two countries that recognized its Taliban regime: our "allies" Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In no meaningful sense were the religious fanatics in Afghanistan and the secular dictator of Iraq allies.

Indeed, what the staff report says is, "Bin Ladin had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan." Later, in 1994, Bin Laden made overtures to an Iraqi intelligence officer requesting "space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."

"Never responded" does not a relationship make. Yet Bush, not one to let the facts get in the way, said last week, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

It`s the Big Lie technique — never flinch in the face of truth. That`s why Bush will never admit that he got it wrong when he told the nation on the eve of going to war: "Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with Al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training."

There`s a saying that "a lie can get halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on." Well, thanks to the many brave Americans who pushed so strenuously, against the wishes of this administration, for a legitimate investigation of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the truth has its pants on now and maybe can finally enlighten the 40% of Americans who still believe that Iraq played a role in the attacks.

*

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).



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Iraq-al Qaeda `link` probably unfounded
White House official suspects name mix-up
- Walter Pincus, Dan Eggen, Washington Post
Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Washington -- An allegation that a high-ranking al Qaeda member was an officer in Saddam Hussein`s private militia may have resulted from confusion over Iraqi names, a senior administration official said Monday.

Former Navy secretary John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, said Sunday that documents found in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam`s Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda." Although he said the identity "still has to be confirmed," Lehman introduced the information on NBC`s "Meet the Press," countering a commission staff report that said there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no "collaborative relationship."

Monday, the senior administration official said Lehman had probably confused two people who have similar sounding names.

One of them is Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, identified as an al Qaeda "fixer" in Malaysia. Officials say he served as an airport greeter for al Qaeda in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, at a gathering for members who were to be involved in the attacks on the U.S. destroyer Cole, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Iraqi military documents, found last year, listed a similar name, Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, on a roster of the Saddam Fedayeen militia.

"By most reckoning that would be someone else" other than the airport greeter, said the administration official, who would speak only anonymously because of the matter`s sensitivity. He added there is continuing study of the identification but "it doesn`t look like a match to most analysts."

In an interview Monday, Lehman said it`s still possible the man in Kuala Lumpur was affiliated with Hussein, even if he isn`t the man on the Fedayeen roster.

"It`s one more instance where this is an intriguing possibility that needs to be run to ground," Lehman said. "The most intriguing part of it is not whether or not he was in the Fedayeen, but whether or not the guy who attended Kuala Lumpur had any connections to Iraqi intelligence. ... We don`t know."

Allegations that Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi was under Iraqi intelligence control were raised last year in an article in the Weekly Standard by Stephen Hayes, but were later discounted by U.S. intelligence officials. No such tie was indicated in the commission report.

The commission staff report, released Wednesday, prompted a vigorous response from the Bush administration, which had cited since 2002 an al Qaeda- Saddam Hussein link as one reason for going to war.

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Tuesday, June 22, 2004
War News for June 22, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers wounded in two ambushes near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, six wounded in mortar attack near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqis killed in roadside bomb ambush near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Fifty insurgents storm and demolish Iraqi police station near Iskandariyah.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi bomb disposal expert wounded near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: City council member assassinated near Tikrit.

Bring ‘em on: Two local council members assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi university dean and spouse assassinated in Mosul.

Up shit creek. The perfect image of Lieutenant AWOL`s Iraq policy.

Cowards. “The Bush administration`s policy of barring news photographs of the flag-covered coffins of service members killed in Iraq won the backing of the Republican-controlled Senate on Monday, when lawmakers defeated a Democratic measure to instruct the Pentagon to allow pictures.”

Crooks. “Auditors working for the United Nations have strongly criticised the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority for its management of the 20 billion dollar fund from oil sales, which it said is ‘open to fraudulent acts,’ the Financial Times said. KPMG International experts also ‘encountered resistance from CPA staff’ in its attempts to oversee the fund`s spending, according to an interim KPMG report obtained by the financial daily.”

South Korea evacuates businessmen and workers from Iraq.

Charades. “The United States plans to turn over legal, but not physical, custody of Saddam Hussein and some other prisoners to the Iraqi interim government soon after it takes over on June 30, a senior official said on Tuesday.”

Lieutenant AWOL the uniter, not a divider. “Thousands of Ukrainian protesters on Tuesday demanded the government bring troops home from Iraq, saying politicians had no right to spill the blood of others for their own gain. About 2,000 Communists holding red flags and 5,000 Orthodox believers, who carried icons, swarmed the central independence square in Ukraine`s capital Kiev and then marched to parliament, where speaker after speaker called for the troops` return.”

Commentary

Opinion: “When Clinton was in office we were preoccupied with DNA stains on dresses, not bloodstains on the streets of Baghdad, Mosul or Najaf. Nothing close to 150,000 American troops were dispatched to fight a foreign war during the Clinton administration, although I suspect there will be critics this week who will find a way to hold that against him, too. At least I hope so.”

Analysis: “America`s make-do policy in the Iraqi endgame was outlined by a senior administration official. From his account it`s clear that Bush and his advisers have been improvising for the past few months, struggling to craft an exit strategy. The grand designs that launched the war are now long gone, replaced by a process of trial and error.”

Opinion: “It`s not surprising that an administration already bent on war would interpret every dot, every squiggly line, as evidence that Hussein and bin Laden were in cahoots. This made sense to Bush and Cheney since, as we have found out to our dismay, they cannot distinguish between one kind of evil and another. Every possible suggestion of cooperation somehow became proof. This was particularly the case with Cheney when it came to weapons of mass destruction. He seized on the murkiest of reports to proclaim that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, which, lo these many months later, has yet to be found. So deluded were our top guys that they invaded Iraq expecting that the major problem would be how to clean up after all the victory parades.”

Opinion: “Yeah, right. The reality is that Bush and company have turned the language of lying into a fine art, always leaving themselves a shred of deniability in case the truth catches up. For example, Cheney has repeatedly cited as a smoking gun an always shaky report about 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta possibly meeting with an Iraqi official in Prague only months before the attacks, telling the nation that this sole claim to direct evidence linking Iraq with 9/11 had ‘been pretty well confirmed.’”

Casualty Reports

Local story: California soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Virgin Islands soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Washington State Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: California Marine dies in Iraq.

Local story: Two Vermont Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Connecticut soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Hawaii soldier injured in Iraq.

Local story: Minnesota soldier wounded in Iraq.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:36 AM
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Tuesday, June 22, 2004

10 US Servicemen Die in Iraq, 11 Iraqis

Monday`s toll (still incomplete but more complete than any one article I saw in any one language):

Guerrillas sent a videotape to Associated Press with views of four US Marines lying dead in a walled compound in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The bodies appear to have been looted. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt confirmed the deaths.

Elsewhere in al-Anbar province, according to the US military spokesman, "Four US Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were killed on the 21st of June in the Al-Anbar province conducting security and stability operations."

In Baghdad, guerrillas launched a mortar attack that killed one US soldier and wounded 7 others, according to AP.

At 9:35 am in Gayara near Mosul in the north, a roadside bomb killed 5 Iraqi contractors who were apparently with a US military convoy at the time.

Also in the north, just south of Kirkuk, Arab and Turkmen militias fought a half-hour gunbattle with one another, leaving one dead on each side, at Majma` al-Nahrawan. (This according to al-Hayat. Most Arabs in that area had been settled there by Saddam Hussein in an attempt to Arabize the north, and to marginalize the Kurds and Turkmen who predominated there. Now the latter are returning to their homes and taking back their property, and 10,000 Arabs are said to have been expelled. The local police chief confirmed that the fight was over land occupied by immigrant Arabs, the original ownership of which the Turkmen claim. The incident is more evidence that the Kirkuk region, with its Turkmen, Kurdish and Arab populations, is highly volatile. Arabs and Kurds have clashed. Shiite Turkmen and Sunni Kurds have clashed. And now Arabs and Turkmen are fighting. So far only the Christians and Yazidis haven`t fielded militias, and even the Christians are demanding a semi-autonomous zone in Ninevah province.

A huge gang of 50 masked Iraqi guerrillas, among the largest paramilitary forces that has operated in the Sunni areas aside from the siege of Fallujah, blew up a police station at Jur Askar, south of Baghdad. Kimmitt reported, "Approximately 50 armed insurgents wearing black masks dismounted their vehicle by the Iraqi police station in Djor Askar. . . When coalition and Iraqi security forces approached the station, they saw five vehicles matching the description of the attackers. Forces engaged and destroyed one of the vehicles and pursued another vehicle to a residence, where they found a wounded attacker, an AK-47 shotgun and blueprints of the police station."

In Samawah in the south, guerrillas fired mortar rounds at a Coalition base, wounding one person, and four guerrillas were killed by return fire. Guerrillas that far south are likely to be either Mahdi Army, Marsh Arab Hizbullah, or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

A US soldier wounded at Buhriz near Baquba on Friday died on Monday.


posted by Juan @ 6/22/2004 08:15:39 AM

Iraq War not Worth it: 52% of Americans

A new Washington Post/ABC poll shows that a majority of Americans now feels that the Iraq War was not worth it. It cost too many US lives, according to 70% of them, and 51% thought that it had not made Americans any safer. Not only has President Bush`s approval rating on the war on terror fallen to 50%, but the public now prefers Kerry to handle terrorism, 48% to 47% (Bush has lost 20% on this issue since March). Three-fourths of Americans say the war has damaged America`s image in the world.

A majority of Americans disapproves of Bush`s job performance over-all at 51%, while 47% approve. Kerry would win the election if held now by the same margin, even factoring in the Nader vote, the poll found.

Why has Bush lost so much confidence with regard to handling the war on terror? The fall in numbers is precipitate. As late as April, he led Kerry on it by 20 points.

I wish the pollsters had asked "why?" But what makes sense is that Bush hit the trifecta: Fallujah, Najaf and Abu Ghuraib. His brutal siege of a whole city, with some 600 Iraqis killed is one element. His decision to go after Muqtada al-Sadr and the obvious unpreparedness of the US military and the Bush-appointed CPA for the Shiite backlash is another. The revelation of the prisoner torture at Abu Ghuraib and the obvious revulsion it produced throughout the world, including the Muslim world, is the third.

The American public is not so foolish that it cannot see that the Bush administration is infuriating the Muslim world at the US gratuitously. If people thought it had been necessary to take that risk in order to stop Saddam from having weapons of mass destruction, or in order to stop him from colluding with al-Qaeda, they might have soldiered on. But it has become increasingly clear to them that the pretexts for the war were false. And therefore all the subsequent scandals and chaos were both unnecessary and reckless.

These numbers show that Bush has lost a significant number of independents. When his approval rating had sunk to 42% not so long ago, it suggested that he had begun to lose committed Republicans.

After all, a lot of Republicans could not be at all happy to see the US Department of Defense become the major purveyor of sensational internet pornography to the world. And, many Republicans may feel as Gen. Zinni does, that it was unwise to go after Fallujah and Muqtada al-Sadr, but going after them and then backing off made the administration look feeble and invited attack. The trifecta not only hurt Bush with independents, but the way he handled it probably hurt him with hardcore Republicans.

This brings us to the issue of Bush`s flip-flops. He tried to hang the charge of flip-flopping on Kerry. But Bush said he wanted heads to roll at Fallujah, and then had to bring in the Baath to run the city. Bush said he wanted Muqtada al-Sadr dead or alive, and now Muqtada is set to be a prominent parliamentarian. Bush said he would bring decency to the White House, and now his DoD is purveying pictures of Arab men being made to masturbate in front of prancing servicewomen.

The American public knows flip-flops when they see them. It is Bush that is engaging in them.

posted by Juan @ 6/22/2004 08:01:50 AM

Najaf Calming; Police to be Trained in Urban Warfare

Al-Hayat reports that previous disputes between Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and junior cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have now been completely resolved. One last step has been the appointment of a new prayer leader at the mosque connected to the shrine of Ali, who would be neither a follower of al-Sadr nor a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The new incumbent is Sayyid Muhammad Rida al-Ghurayfi, a seminary professor close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani. In summer of 2003 the Sadrists and SCIRI had fought for control of the shrine in Najaf, and SCIRI won. In the past month, the preaching there of Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of SCIRI has caused turmoil with the Sadrists in the congregation, producing at least one major riot at the mosque. On one occasion about three weeks ago, al-Qubanji criticized Iran in his sermon for not condemning Muqtada and his militiamen for fighting at the shrine with the Americans and so desecrating it, and was not allowed to continue. Afterwards shots were fired in his direction. More recently there was a big altercation between SCIRI and Sadr supporters that prevented Friday prayers from being held at all.

An al-Sadr spokesman said Muqtada is considering a proposal that he attend the national congress slated for the end of July. An Iraqi official clarified that no one has yet been invited to the actual congress, where 1000 notables will elect 100 persons to an advisory council to advise Prime Minister Allawi. (This congress was Lakhdar Brahimi`s idea--he felt it would give a wide swathe of Iraqi political society a sense of participation in the caretaker government). But there is a preparatory committee planning the congress, and Ali Sumaysim of the al-Sadr movement has been invited to serve on this committee, according to organizer Fuad Masum.

Australian Broadcasting reports that a hard core of Mahdi Army militiamen still holds the shrine of Ali in Najaf, but that the US military has decided against trying to go in and sweep them out. (Good move.) The young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his militiamen to leave Najaf, and substantial numbers have, but the US military fears that some may form sectarian groups and defy Muqtada. (This possibility is real; the Sadrists who follow Muqtada`s father already have several sects or parties among them). The hard core Mahdi Army fighters have nothing but contempt for the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, seeing it as a tool of Washington. In response to continued insecurity in Najaf, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus (the one certified hero to come out of the higher ranks of US officers in Iraq) is committing to giving Najaf police training in urban warfare and to providing them with rocket propelled grenades and flack jackets.

Al-Hayat says that Shaikh Ahmad Shaibani, a spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr, gave the newspaper the following statement: "Sayyid Muqtada will not form a mobile political party, and will not join any of the parties now existing on the Iraqi scene at the present time, nor will he throw his support behind any of them." He rejected the idea of folding the Army of the Mahdi into the Iraqi army, emphasizing that "The Mahdi Army is not an organized army, but rather popular groups that resist the occupation. Its members will return to the pursuit of their daily, natural lives when the Occupation ends." He said he was prepared "to help the forces of the police and army to keep order in Najaf and other Iraqi cities." He said that "The decree dissolving the militias was stillborn" and said he thought it was unlikely that it would be implemented at the present time. Mssrs. Bremer and Allawi have attempted on more than one occasion to dissolve the militias in the country, but with no success.

posted by Juan @ 6/22/2004 07:17:44 AM

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Bill Gallagher: `Dry-drunk president losing his grip?`
Date: Tuesday, June 22 @ 09:42:23 EDT
Topic: Commander-In-Thief

By Bill Gallagher, Niagara Falls Reporter

DETROIT -- The lies, delusions and deceptions of George W. Bush have reached a point where the "dry drunk" madness and the "stinking thinking" in his frighteningly flawed mind are what drives all his remarks on the bogus al-Qaida-Iraq connection and the president`s rigid, judgmental world view.

In the best of times, George W. can be impatient, self-important and prone to irrational, contorted rationalization. Now that his crazy, unnecessary war in Iraq and grandiose plans to change the Middle East with more violence have clearly failed and he fears that he might get bounced from the White House like his daddy, our president`s mental pathology is gaining more control over his behavior.

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks set off the president`s panic attack. The commission -- which Bush first opposed and then ostensibly supported, while his minions thwarted its work -- arrived at a conclusion that sent the White House into white heat.



In vividly clear language, the commission reported, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States." That fact is well known to anyone who takes time to pursue the truth and is not blinded by partisan fanaticism.

Even Bush said as much himself in one of the most under-reported stories of our times. Last Sept. 17, the president admitted publicly for the first time that there was "no evidence Hussein was involved" with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The admission got little play in the media. The Wall Street Journal and New York Post didn`t even bother to mention it, and many other papers buried it far away from the front page.

But the commission rekindled the issue. Since the panel did exhaustive research and its chairman and half of its members were named by the president, the panel`s refutation of the Saddam-al-Qaida connection enraged Bush, and the emperor struck back.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," Bush told reporters at the White House after the commission`s findings were announced.

Bush said his most significant evidence of this link is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist the president claimed worked with the Iraqi government as a "senior al-Qaida terrorist planner." He failed to mention that then-CIA Director George Tenet testified before the Senate that Zarqawi is a rogue operative who doesn`t work with al-Qaida and was not associated with the Saddam regime.

I noticed Bush had that same look on his face, that same smirk, defiance and "How dare you question me?" pose when he met last year with Polish reporters, who asked him about the phantom weapons of mass destruction. Bush snapped impatiently, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." Bush then went on to cite some mobile trailers his own inspectors had already dismissed as harmless weather labs.

Bush then went on a twisted attempt to redefine the record he and his people had deliberately clouded -- aided, I should add, by most of the mainstream media. Wait a minute, Bush cautioned, saying, "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida."

While that is technically correct, Bush chose to ignore the torrent of rhetoric he and his supporting cast of warmongers used to create just that impression. The administration convinced 70 percent of the American people before the war that Saddam Hussein was linked to Sept. 11 and now Bush is trying to distance himself from the lies and successful propaganda campaign he orchestrated.

Bush said flat-out, one year after bin Laden`s terrorists attacked, "You can`t distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

Condoleezza Rice tossed in her contribution to the company line, saying, "Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged."

And, of course, there was Donald`s Rumsfeld`s wild, unfounded claim that "within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qaida."

Bush likes his enemies evil and simple. Since Saddam was a personal irritant for Bush and sat on the world`s second-largest oil reserves, he was going to be the target no matter what.

Unwilling to admit the real reasons for war and with his phony ones now exposed, the president is growing more angry and resentful. In public he can still put on a cheery and likable face -- as he did when unveiling the Clintons` official portraits at the White House -- but privately there is another picture.

Bush has been displaying "increasingly erratic behavior and mood swings," reports Capitol Hill Blue, an Internet news site. Doug Thompson and Teresa Hampton, who once wrote a scathing piece about Bill Clinton`s serial groping and sexual attacks on women, have written a chilling account that raises serious concerns about Bush`s state of mind these days.

"It reminds me of the Nixon days," one longtime GOP political consultant with White House links told the reporters. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That`s the mood over there."

White House aides told Thompson and Hampton that Bush is now micromanaging to the extreme, spending hours reviewing attack ads against John Kerry and denouncing Democrats he calls "enemies of the state."

The report notes Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen from grace because of his doubts about the war against Iraq. One White House aide reveals, "We lost focus. The president got hung up on the weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link to al-Qaida. We could have found other justifiable reasons for the war, but the president insisted on those two tenuous items."

But George W. Bush is an unyielding, inflexible and extreme man, who, by his own admission, follows the dictates of his "gut" rather than careful thought and reflection. Bush may be showing more signs of being a "dry drunk," according to Katherine van Wormer, co-author of "Addiction Treatment: A Strengths Perspective." In an article in "Counterpunch" magazine, she writes, "Dry drunk is a slang term used by members and supporters of Alcoholics Anonymous and substance abuse counselors to describe the recovering alcoholic who is no longer drinking, one who is dry, but whose thinking is clouded. Such an individual is said to be dry but not truly sober. Such an individual tends to go to extremes."

She also observes that Bush`s obsessions, tunnel vision, single-mindedness and grandiosity point to the "stinking thinking" commonly found in dry drunks. Bush will claim forever that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qaida, that there were weapons of mass destruction, and that his war with Iraq is all about doing God`s work and spreading freedom. That`s how his damaged mind is programmed.

Dick Cheney is another case. He sets his own course and says what he pleases. The vice president -- or enabler in chief -- has nurtured Bush`s obsessions. Cheney is the most strident propagator of the al-Qaida-Iraq-link lie and is sticking with his story in a futile attempt to save his fallen reputation and in the hope that continuing the deception for five more months will salvage the Bush administration`s chances for another term in office. His clinging to power and his addiction to his discredited reasons for war drive Cheney.

Two days before the 9/11 Commission debunked the al-Qaida-Iraq connection, Cheney, who surely was tipped off, made a pre-emptive strike, claiming Saddam Hussein "had long established ties with al-Qaida."

Cheney was so enraged with media reports about the commission`s findings, he ventured from his usual protected forum, the Rush Limbaugh show, to CNBC, territory where he might even be asked a question.

Asked if Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, in his oh-so-solemn tones, "We don`t know." And then, with a smugness that goes with power addiction, Cheney was asked if he knows information the 9/11 Commission does not know. He crowed, "Probably."

Well, if he does, why didn`t he share it with the commission? Why doesn`t he tell the American people about the previously unknown smoking gun on the al-Qaida-Iraq connection? Will Cheney provide new evidence? Probably not.

With the power-drunk Cheney navigating and the dry-drunk Bush at the helm, our ship of state is in distress. We should throw them both overboard.

Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is [e-mail].

Reprinted from Niagara Falls Reporter:
http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher169.html

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Published on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 by Reuters
NY Promoter Wants Springsteen to Upstage Bush


NEW YORK - A New York concert promoter has mounted an online campaign to "draft" Bruce Springsteen to headline a rock `n roll show to upstage the Republican National Convention on the night it nominates President Bush to run for another term.

The "Concert for Change," would be held Sept. 1 at Giants Stadium, across the Hudson River from the Republicans` meeting at Madison Square Garden, said promoter and Democratic activist Andrew Rasiej, who has reserved the date at Springsteen`s New Jersey home venue that he routinely sells out when he tours.

"This is a simple idea that captures the imagination of Americans opposed to George Bush," Rasiej told Reuters.

An online petition at http://www.draftbruce.com/ has been signed by about 50,000 people in 10 days since it was launched, Rasiej said, adding he had also reached out to acts such as REM, The Dave Matthews Band, Bob Dylan and Carlos Santana.

"When it gets to half a million or so I would formally try to deliver the petition to Bruce`s people directly," he said.

"I`ve spoken to the manager of REM, to Bon Jovi`s people and the rest of the names I`ve mentioned and they all said, `if you build it, we will be there."`

Rasiej said he envisions drawing a big TV audience, but only if he can get a star of the magnitude of Springsteen to get on board and encourage other big acts to take part.

Springsteen`s publicist was not available for comment.

Republicans and Democrats both asked to use his 1984 hit "Born in the U.S.A." -- a song about how unwelcoming America was to returning Vietnam veterans but often mistaken for a patriotic anthem -- for use in political campaigns. Springsteen declined the requests.

The New Jersey rocker has typically stayed out of politics, but in May posted the text of an anti-war speech by former Vice President Al Gore on his official Web site, calling it "one of the most important speeches I`ve heard in a long time."

Rasiej, founder of popular New York rock club Irving Plaza, said a "VoteAid" show could win a large TV audience, raise money to support voter registration and deliver a message that could affect the November presidential election.

© Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd

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Democracy isn`t working

It is the west`s calling card, but its global applicability is now in doubt
Martin Jacques
Tuesday June 22, 2004

The Guardian
However implausibly, President Bush continues to reiterate his commitment to the early introduction of democracy in Iraq. Indeed, the idea of democratic reform in the Arab world has been central to the Anglo-American position on Iraq. There should be nothing surprising in that. Democracy has become the universal calling card of the west, the mantra that is chanted at every country that falls short (when politically convenient, of course), the ubiquitous solution to the problems of countries that are not democratic.

The boast about democracy is largely a product of the last half-century, following the defeat of fascism. Before that, a large slice of Europe remained mired in dictatorship, often of an extremely brutal and distasteful kind. The idea of democracy as a western virtue was blooded during the cold-war struggle against communism, though its use remained highly selective: those many dictatorships that sided with the west were happily awarded membership of the "free world"; "freedom" took precedence over democracy, regimes as inimical to democracy as apartheid South Africa, Diem`s South Vietnam and Franco`s Spain were welcomed into the fold. Following the collapse of communism, however, "free markets and democracy" became for the first time - at least in principle - the universal prescription for each and every country.

Democracy is viewed by the west in a strangely ahistorical way. It is seen as eternal and unchanging, neither historically nor culturally specific, but a kind of universal truth. But, of course, nothing is eternal. The western model of democracy, like everything else, is a distinct phase in history, which depends upon certain conditions for its existence. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it should not be assumed that it is of universal application, nor that it will always exist.

Russia is a classic test of the western shibboleth. For the west, the simple answer to Russia`s ills after the collapse of communism was a combination of the free market and democracy. The free market never happened; worse, the attempt to engineer it under Yeltsin produced, with western blessing, the theft of Russia`s most valuable natural resources by its leader`s cronies. The country is paying a terrible price for following western advice. Meanwhile, democracy has been shaped and constrained by the personal power of Putin, a reminder of the country`s long, despotic past. The lessons? History and culture leave an indelible imprint on the nature of any democracy; the market similarly.

The west, in its enthusiasm for democracy, suffers from historical amnesia. Britain has only enjoyed universal suffrage for about 80 years, by which time it was already highly industrialised. For many west European countries it was even later. The great majority of countries that have experienced economic takeoff, including Britain, have done so under forms of authoritarian rule. The most successful recent examples of takeoff, those in east Asia, were similarly achieved under authoritarianism: the legitimacy of these regimes has depended on economic growth rather than the ballot box.

Democracy, historical experience suggests, is not that well-suited to achieving the conditions necessary for economic takeoff. Given that democracy is now the universal western prescription for developing countries, this is rather ironic. It does not mean, of course, that authoritarian rule is necessarily good at achieving takeoff: the Latin American model has proved extremely poor, the East Asian very effective. Nor does it mean that democracy can`t deliver economic takeoff: India is a case in point. Clearly, though, democracy is not a universal formula for economic success, irrespective of a society`s state of development.

The west is the traditional home of democracy. The fact that western countries share various, usually unspoken characteristics, however, is often ignored. They were the first to industrialise. They colonised a majority of the world, invariably denying their colonies democracy. They were overwhelmingly ethnically homogeneous. Developing countries, for the most part, have faced the opposite circumstances: takeoff in the context of an economically dominant west; the absence, in the context of colonial rule, of indigenous democratic soil; and far greater ethnic diversity.

The west remains oblivious to the profound difficulties presented by ethnic diversity. As Amy Chua points out in World on Fire, democracy is far from a sufficient condition for benign governance in the kind of multiracial societies that are common in Africa and Asia. Democracy, the politics of the majority, allows the majority ethnic group to govern, potentially without constraint. Multi-ethnic societies, like Malaysia or Nigeria, require, for their stability, a racial consensus: democracy, resting on majorities and minorities, is deaf to this problem.

Moreover, democracy works very differently in different cultures. In Japan, the Liberal Democrats have formed every government, apart from a brief interruption, since democracy was introduced more than 50 years ago. The political arguments that count take place between unelected factions of the governing party rather than between elected parties. The Japanese model of democracy - or the Korean or Taiwanese - may have the same trappings as western democracy, but there the similarities largely end.

If it is mistaken to regard western democracy as a universal abstraction that is equally applicable across the world, it is also wrong to see it as frozen and unchanging. Indeed, there are grounds for believing that western democracy, as we have known it, is in decline. The symptoms have been well-rehearsed: the decline of parties, the fall in turnout, a growing disregard for politicians, the displacement of politics from the centre-stage of society. These trends have beenobservable more or less everywhere for at least 15 years.

The underlying reasons are even more disturbing than the symptoms. The emergence of mass suffrage and modern party politics coincided with the rise of the labour movement, which drove the extension of the vote and obliged political parties to engage in popular mobilisation. The rise of the modern labour movement, moreover, provided societies with real choices: instead of the logic of the market, it offered a different philosophy and a different kind of society. The decline of traditional social-democratic parties, as illustrated by New Labour, has meant the erosion of choice, at least in any profound sense of the term. The result is that voting has often become less meaningful. Politics has moved on to singular ground: that of the market.

The influence of the market is manifest in multiple ways. The funding of parties now moves solely to its rhythm: big business and the rich are as important to New Labour as they are to the Conservatives. The same interests fund, and therefore influence, the parties. Big money calls the tune. Nowhere is this truer than in American politics, which has become a plutocracy mediated by democracy, rather than the reverse. As the media has displaced traditional forms of discourse and mobilisation, ownership of the media has become increasingly important in the determination of political choices and electoral results. The most dangerous example is in Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi`s ownership of the bulk of the private media has enabled him to transform Italian democracy into something verging on a mediaocracy, leaving politics and the state besieged by his immense personal power and wealth.

Perhaps these developments point to a deeper problem incipient in western democracies. Far from the free market and democracy enjoying the kind of harmonious relationship beloved of western propaganda, democracy grew in fact as a constraint on the market, holding it at bay and enabling a pluralism of values and imperatives. What happens when this healthy tension becomes a dangerous imbalance, in which the market is dominant and consumerism is established as the overriding ethos of society, permeating politics just as it has invaded every other nook and cranny of society? Democracy comes under siege. In Italy it is already gasping for breath. In the US it is deeply and increasingly flawed. Democracy is neither a platitude nor an eternal verity - either for the world or for the west.

•: Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre

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June 22, 2004
U.S. Corrects Report to Show Rise in Terrorism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:23 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Correcting an inaccurate report, the State Department announced Tuesday that acts of terror worldwide increased slightly last year and the number of people wounded rose dramatically.

The department also reported a decline in the number of people killed -- to 625 from 725 during 2002. But in April, the department reported 307 people had been killed last year -- a much bigger decline.

``The numbers were off,`` Secretary of State Colin Powell said, and ``we have identified how we have to do this in the future.`` He also said the initial report was not designed ``to make our efforts look better or worse.``

The findings had been used by senior Bush administration officials to bolster President Bush`s claim of success in countering terrorism.

Responding to the corrected version, Phil Singer, spokesman for Sen. John Kerry`s presidential campaign, said it was ``just the latest example of an administration playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to the war on terror.`` The administration ``has now been caught trying to inflate its success on terrorism,`` he said.

Initially, 190 acts of terror were reported in 2003, a slight decrease from the 198 attacks reported for 2002. On Tuesday, the State Department said there were 208 acts of terror last year, a slight increase from 2002.

Thirty-five U.S. citizens died in international terror attacks last year. The deadliest incident was a suicide bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May in which nine Americans were killed.

The report did not include U.S. troops killed or wounded in Iraq, or the incidents there, in its report ``because they were directed at combatants.`` Attacks against civilians and unarmed military personnel were included.

A total of 3,646 people were wounded worldwide in terror attacks last year, the report said. This represented a sharp increase from the 2,013 wounded in 2002.

In April, the department had said that 1,593 people were wounded in 2003, a sharp decline from the previous year.

The initial report was issued April 28. On June 10, the State Department acknowledged the findings were inaccurate. Powell attributed the errors partly to a new data system and said there was no attempt to manipulate the figures to buttress Bush`s argument.

When the report was issued, senior administration officials claimed that it showed Bush`s counter-terror campaign was a success.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the report was based ``on the facts as we had them at the time. The facts that we had were wrong.``

The April report said attacks had declined last year to 190, down from 198 in 2002 and 346 in 2001. The 2003 figure would have been the lowest level in 34 years and a 45 percent drop since 2001, Bush`s first year as president. The department is now working to determine the correct figures.

Democratic Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California had challenged the initial findings. He said he was pleased that officials ``have now recognized that they have a report that has been inaccurate, and based on the inaccurate information they tried to take self-serving political credit for the results that were wrong.``

But Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., was sharply critical on Tuesday.

``Funny things happened on the way to the printer,`` he said. ``Unfortunately, this is not the first, second, or third instance, for that matter, of a Bush Cabinet secretary having to rewrite a report from their own department.``

Emanuel cited inaccurate reports on racial disparities in health care, misleading estimates of the Medicare prescription drug bill and the Environmental Protection Agency`s proposed mercury emissions rules.

``The first draft reflects the administration`s ideology and political objectives and the rewrite reflects the facts,`` Emanuel said in a House speech.

And Raphael Perl, a terrorism analyst for the Congressional Research Service, said ``the numbers add up.``

But, he said, ``there is no doubt that the credibility has been damaged, but the administration has come out clean and hopefully has rehabilitated the report.``

Among the mistakes, Boucher said, was that only part of 2003 was taken into account.

Powell said, ``I can assure you it had nothing to do with putting out anything but the most honest, accurate information we can.``

``Errors crept in that, frankly, we did not catch here,`` Powell said. The report showed both a drop in the number of attacks worldwide in 2003 and the virtual disappearance of attacks in which no one died.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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The brown vote

21.Teil (20.Teil # 17875)

EL PASO, Texas - Samuel Huntington`s current vision of hell is something like being stranded on the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez border crossing, forced to pay the 40-cent pedestrian toll to the other side of the Bridge of the Americas, with no possibility of a return ticket, and condemned to an everlasting diet of tacos and fajitas.

Huntington, a professor of government at Harvard, has built a half-a-century career out of pitting the "good" (us) against "evil" (them) to the benefit of his American-ruling elite employers. In the 1960s, he was convinced that napalm and Agent Orange bombing of the Vietnamese countryside was depriving the Vietcong of its rural base of support, so the US would win the war over time. In 1975, on granting equal rights to black Americans, he said, "There are ... potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy." During Ronald Reagan`s presidency in the 1980s, Huntington was in favor of Star Wars, Reagan`s missile-defense program to reduce the threat of nuclear attack by destroying missiles from space.

Totalitarian states tend to coalesce first by stigmatizing a foreign enemy, then an enemy within, capable of corrupting the integrity of a "pure and united" nation. Huntington - who stole the concept of the "clash of civilizations" from conservative academic Bernard Lewis - first stigmatized Arab civilization in 1993 as "The Great Menace". Now, in 2004, he finally switches to the enemy within: Hispanics. Latinos, in his view, are guilty of being excessively attached to their culture, and their galloping demography prevents their assimilation to the "Anglo-Saxon Protestant node". Huntington, in his book Who Are We? The Challenges to America`s National Identity, calls for the preservation of the messianic project of the original American settlers.

It`s all color-coded, of course: after the red menace (communism), the yellow peril (Asia) and the green peril (Islam), now the terror alert (elevated) has been switched to the brown peril (Latinos).

The brown peril
Mexico starts in sprawling El Paso before one even crosses the US border. The carnival atmosphere along the Rio Grande (known as the Rio Bravo in Mexico) is similar to the Brazilian-Paraguayan border - which, for Washington neo-conservatives, is teeming with al-Qaeda, with the US-Mexico border being taken over by Zapatistas and assorted evil Latin American drug lords. The best analogy would rather be with the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border, with its legions of Mexican/Cantonese working in maquiladoras in Mexico/Guandong province. Most people crossing the Bridge of the Americas live in Mexico and work in Texas, or live and work in Texas and have left their families back in Mexico.

This is the thrust of Huntington`s thesis: "The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream US culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves - from Los Angeles to Miami - and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril."

Huntington claims that Mexicans are essentially invading, exploiting and creating poverty in the US. World-famous Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, a former diplomat, responds: "Hispanics are not the `balkanizers` of the US, as Huntington wants it. They cherish their traditional values, as Americans of Italian, Irish or Chinese extraction do. But they are not preparing a reconquista of the territories lost in 1848." Huntington claims as evidence of subversion the widespread use of Spanish. Fuentes argues: "He should know that most European populations speak many languages, and that it is isolation that forces cultures to perish. Hispanics enrich American culture, and to reduce their presence would also hurt America`s economy."

Huntington is against multiculturalism, and most of all immigration. He is convinced that America is not a nation of immigrants but, at least initially, a nation of settlers who reached the New World not to found a new nation but rather to relocate from Britain. Call it a case of extending its own backyard. Later, regardless of religion or nationality, says Huntington, every immigrant engaged in an Anglo-Protestant makeover of some sort, were they Germans, Irish, Italian or Chinese.

But Mexicans specifically - not Latinos, not Hispanics - are the exception, according to Huntington. They are now invading the US: "Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s." Californians and New Yorkers always joke that it would be a good idea to give back Texas - although they doubt Mexicans would want it. Anyway, according to Huntington, the new immigrants are "blurring the border between Mexico and America, introducing a very different culture, while also promoting the emergence, in some areas, of a blended society and culture, half-American and half-Mexican".

After September 11, 2001, the "clash of civilizations" mumbo jumbo became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same might apply to the brown peril warning if the American economy does not pick up. And needless to say, the "solutions" will all come from the military mould: more border repression, fewer social services for immigrants already in the US, a heavily militarized Fortress America all over the southwest.

Huntington is essentially saying that America must never abandon its original set of 16th century Anglo-Protestant values: and this "back to the roots" mode implies no immigration, protecting the English language and no secularism. No wonder the neo-cons love it.

It`s easy to dismiss the latest Huntington ramblings as pure racism or puritanical intolerance. Someone instead should offer Huntington a tour of Ellis Island in New York harbor. During its peak, from 1892 to 1924, Ellis Island was the gateway for more than 12 million immigrants to America: their descendants now make up more than 40% of the US population. Ellis Island symbolizes the dominant self-image of most Americans: the land of eternal promise, the beacon of light on the world stage. The US still remains the promised land for many of the world`s poor. The immigrant workforce represents 14% of the active US population. Without them, entire sectors of the US economy, such as distribution, agriculture or the restaurant business, would come to a complete halt - something that every Californian knows well.

Let`s go to jail
The attraction of the promised land can be contemplated in all its might from the top of a hill overlooking the Rio Grande River in the El Paso suburbs. Increasing numbers of Mexicans attempt to cross the river, day or night, as they have no papers to cross the Bridge of the Americas. One reason is glaringly obvious: the abyss between the US median per capita income - US$32,000 - and Mexico`s, $3,700. But after 20 years of repression at the border, the difference is that now almost everyone is getting arrested. In the past six months, arrests along the 2,000-mile US southern border rose 25% over the same period in 2003. This is happening for at least three reasons.

# The Mexican economy is in dire straits, afflicted by drought and non-stop layoffs, while there is a perception that the US economy may be finally starting to pick up.
# George W Bush`s January proposal to give legal status to somewhere around 7 million undocumented migrants already working in the US has increased hopes of amnesty in the future. His program would allow illegals to work in the US for three years. The text will be examined by Congress in 2005. Last April, Democrats introduced their own plan calling for legal residence for illegal immigrants.
# There`s a huge crackdown going on along the border, with more agents and more high-tech equipment in all border states. This means more arrests, but it does not necessarily reflect a new wave of illegal immigration.

As expected, there is tremendous controversy involving major actors in this drama, Mexican and American government officials, human rights advocates and people in favor of immigration repression.

Officials at the US Customs and Border Protection say there are more arrests because of more agents and more high-tech equipment. Almost 10,000 of the total 11,000 Border Patrol agents are now deployed along the US southwest border. The Arizona border, for instance, is getting an extra 110 agents, dozens of motion detectors, four new helicopters and the first-ever unmanned aircraft to patrol the Arizona desert. Agents in El Paso speak of improved cooperation among federal, state and local agencies. The numbers are staggering. According to the Border Patrol, there were 535,000 arrests along the entire Southwest border in the past six months.

What do the prospective immigrants say? They say they don`t want to be citizens. They just want a temporary work permit - because there are no jobs in the Guatemalan countryside or in Tegucicalpa, Honduras` capital, not to mention all over Mexico. News of jobs spreads like wildfire: a teacher says he read in a newspaper in Honduras that Austin, Texas, needed 5,000 teachers.

Robert Donner, the US Customs and Border Protection commissioner, does not believe that border crossing has increased because of the possibility of a guest-worker program. But it`s hard to imagine how he knows that - considering that agents never ask immigrants why they are coming to the US.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, a bland name that disguises an organization that is against immigration, says that the real impact of Bush`s proposed guest-worker program will be on the illegal immigrants who are already working in the US, because they all hope to qualify. A border patrol in El Paso shares this sentiment: "What they are really getting off on is the guest-worker program."

Reverend Robin Hoover, head of the immigrant-relief group Humane Borders, is more straight to the point: the problem is the slump in Mexico`s economy. "I don`t agree that immigrants are rushing over here to get amnesty. Whenever I ask them about it, they don`t even know what I`m talking about."

But it is Michael Wyatt, a legal aid attorney who has spent years defending immigrant farm workers, who sums it all up: "If anyone in Washington wants to address immigration ... they should focus on assisting Mexico in rebuilding its economy. It doesn`t matter if we have a 10-foot-high electrified fence topped with coiled barbed wire surrounding our entire country, people are still going to come here if that`s what it takes to feed their family."

There`s only one consensus: immigration will continue to rise. And sooner or later these immigrants will be wanting to vote.

Hasta la vista, elector
As many as 1 million Latinos are going to vote for the first time in 2004 - and the absolute majority will do so in crucial swing states like Arizona, New Mexico and Florida. According to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, a non-partisan group representing about 6,000 Hispanic officials, a record 7 million Hispanics are expected to vote in November. This means 6.1% of the total American electorate - more than enough to decide the final outcome.

There`s a perception that Latinos overwhelmingly vote Democrat - apart from the Bay-of-Pigs-generation Cuban-Americans in Florida. In 1996, Latinos voted for Bill Clinton (72%) against Bob Dole. And in 2000, they voted Al Gore 62% against Bush 35%.

Florida`s non-Cuban Latinos are another matter. In 2000, they voted Gore 75% against Bush 25%. But in the 2002 Florida election for governor, 55% of their vote went to Jeb Bush over his Democrat rival. And these numbers exclude Florida`s Cuban-Americans, who vote Republican in their majority. Arnold Schwarzenegger got similar numbers in California.

This is the reason why Republican Machiavelli Karl Rove has devised a no-holds-barred assault strategy to capture the swing Latino vote in Florida, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. Bush got 35% of the Hispanic vote in the 2000 election. Rove wants much more in 2004. Jeb Bush himself kicked off the Bush-Cheney 2004 Spanish-speaking campaign in Florida last April, when Bush began airing Spanish television and radio spots in Florida, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. But this was before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

The Democrat`s counter-strategy is the Democratas Unidos project, which is also financing ads on Spanish-language television in key swing states. There are only two Spanish-language stations of note in the US: Univision and Telemundo. And the ads, conceived in Spanish, really have a lot of, well, swing.

What`s more, they work. According to some results, Latinos in Las Vegas were 58% for Kerry and 32% for Bush last December. In April, Kerry was up to 64% and Bush down to 24%. In New Mexico, Kerry was 52% against Bush`s 37% last December. In April, Kerry was up to 60% and Bush down to 30%.

Antonio Villaraigosa, national co-chairman of the Kerry campaign, has been promising that "we`re going to speak to the hearts and minds of Latino voters". Kerry is learning Spanish via language tapes. But as El Pasoans are now fond of saying, he still has to hang out in New Mexico and Texas and eat some tacos with the locals.

Most Hispanic immigrants to the US don`t physically cross the border: they arrive legally by plane, in Los Angeles, Miami or New York, where they are duly photographed and fingerprinted. California itself is living proof that Huntington`s alarm is bogus. In 1990, California was 57% Caucasian and 25% Latino. In 2040 it will be 48% Latino and 31% Caucasian. A third of American Latinos live in California. Last year, most babies born in California were Latino. There are now as many Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles as whites. Ethnicity in California is already a non-issue. It`s a case of total assimilation. California is awash with impeccably bourgeois, middle and upper-middle class Latino families. No one has made an attempt to go for political separatism, or to set up Spanish-language schools, as Chinese immigrants always do. By the third generation, two-thirds of Mexican immigrants speak only English.

Rove and his Machiavellians are sure that they can win in November if they keep Bush`s support with Latinos at 35% at least. Democrats want at least 75%. An alarmed Samuel Huntington might want them all deported south of the Rio Grande River. But the fact is, in the real world, the brown vote is a vital key for victory in November.

Also in this series:

The Spirit of Detroit (Jun 16, `04)
Bush against Bush (Apr 30, `04)
Kerry, the Yankee muchacho (May 7, `04)
You have the right to be misinformed (May 8, `04)
An American tragedy (May 11, `04)
In the heart of Bushland (May 12, `04)
The war of the snuff videos (May 13 `04)
The Iraq gold rush (May 14, `04)
The new beat generation (May 15, `04)
Taliban in Texas: Big Oil hankers for old pals (May 18, `04)
Life is a beach. Or is it? (May 19, `04)
Cuba libre (May 21, `04)
Miami vice and virtue (May 22, `04)
Georgia on his mind (May 27, `04)
Free at last? (May 28, `04)
Highway 61 revisited (May 29, `04)
Now gimme those heartland votes (Jun 3, `04)
Nerves of steel (Jun 4, `04)
A Warhol moment (Jun 5, `04)
Saint Ronnie (Jun 8, `04) #17357
Iraq as the 51st state (Jun 18, `04) #17875

(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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June 23, 2004
INTELLIGENCE INSIDER
Book by C.I.A. Officer Says U.S. Is Losing Fight Against Terror
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, June 22 — A new book by the senior Central Intelligence Agency officer who headed a special office to track Osama bin Laden and his followers warns that the United States is losing the war against radical Islam and that the invasion of Iraq has only played into the enemy`s hands.

In the book, "Imperial Hubris," the author is identified only as "Anonymous," but former intelligence officials identified him as a 22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999.

The 309-page book, obtained by The New York Times, provides an unusual glimpse into a school of thought inside the C.I.A., and includes harsh criticism of both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

"U.S. leaders refuse to accept the obvious," the officer writes. "We are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency — not criminality or terrorism — and our policy and procedures have failed to make more than a modest dent in enemy forces."

The author says the threat is rooted in opposition not to American values, but to policies and actions, particularly in the Islamic world.

It is rare for a C.I.A. officer to publish a book while still serving at the agency and highly unusual for the book to focus on such a politically explosive topic. Under C.I.A. rules, the book had to be cleared by the agency before it could be published. It was approved for release on condition that the author and his internal agency not be identified.

The book itself identifies "Anonymous" only as "a senior U.S. intelligence official with nearly two decades of experience in national security issues related to Afghanistan and South Asia." It identifies a previous book, "Through Our Enemies` Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America," as being written by the same author.

Former intelligence officials identified the officer to The Times and noted that he was an overt employee of the C.I.A., but an intelligence official asked that his full name not be published because it could make him a target of Al Qaeda.

The senior intelligence official said the book had been vetted to insure that it not include classified information. "We still have freedom of speech," the official said. "It doesn`t mean that we endorse the book, but employees are free to express their opinions."

In a report issued in March, the staff of the Sept. 11 commission described the bin Laden unit as a place where a "sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities." Another new book, "Ghost Wars," by Steve Coll of The Washington Post, was based in part on interviews with the officer, identified by his first name, Mike.

Mr. Coll reported that the White House sometimes complained to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, that the officer was "too myopic" in his approach to manage the bin Laden group.

In the book, the author denounced the American invasion of Iraq as "an avaricious, premeditated unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat," and said it would fuel the anti-American sentiments on which Mr. bin Laden and his followers draw. "There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq," he writes.

In warning that the United States is losing the war on terrorism, Anonymous writes: "In the period since 11 September, the United States has dealt lethal blows to Al Qaeda`s leadership and — if official claims are true — have captured three thousand Al Qaeda foot soldiers." At the same time, he adds, "we have waged two failed half-wars and, in doing so, left Afghanistan and Iraq seething with anti-U.S. sentiment, fertile grounds for the expansion of Al Qaeda and kindred groups."

The bin Laden unit, or "station" in agency parlance, is part of the C.I.A.`s Counterterrorism Center. It was established in 1996 at the agency`s headquarters in Virginia as part of an organizational experiment that marked the first time the agency had dedicated a station to an individual instead of a country. A staff report issued by the Sept. 11 commission in March, based in part on extensive interviews with the former station chief, described leaders of the station as having been deeply frustrated when a plan to capture Mr. bin Laden in the spring of 1998 was not recommended by the C.I.A.`s leadership for approval by the White House.

The chief and other leaders of the the bin Laden station were transferred from it in mid-1999, according to the Sept. 11 commission report, after morale in the unit sagged and President Clinton was informed by his national security adviser that covert actions against Mr. bin Laden had not been fruitful.

In the book`s preface, the author appears to direct criticism not only at policymakers but also at his superiors in the intelligence agencies, including Mr. Tenet, who fended off criticism after the attacks before announcing this month that he would resign on July 11.

The author expresses "a pressing certainty that Al Qaeda will attack the continental United States again, that its next strike will be more damaging than that of 11 September 2001, and could include use of weapons of mass destruction."

"After the next attack," he adds, "misled Americans and their elected representatives will rightly demand the heads of intelligence-community leaders; that heads did not roll after 11 September is perhaps our most grievous post-attack error."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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June 22, 2004
Q&A: Richard Betts on Intelligence

From the Council on Foreign Relations, June 22, 2004

Richard K. Betts, director of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and a widely published author on intelligence matters, says the failure to prevent 9/11 and misjudgments about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction were "not among the worst or most unusual" intelligence mishaps. "The problem with most intelligence failures is that they are obvious after the fact. But before the fact, there are lots of reasons that a mistake in judgment gets made," says Betts, an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Betts views proposals to create a new director of national intelligence skeptically. "A new director of national intelligence could have a revolutionary impact if he or she were given authority to direct the missions, the priorities, and the activities of all of the 15 intelligence agencies throughout all the departments of the government," he says. "But I will believe that when I see it."

He was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on June 21, 2004.

How do recent intelligence failures--the 9/11 attacks and erroneous assertions about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction (WMD)--compare with intelligence missteps of past years?

As bad as they are, they`re not among the worst or most unusual. The problem with most intelligence failures is that they are obvious after the fact. But before the fact, there are lots of reasons that a mistake in judgment gets made. The September 11 case is one where if we had connected all the dots in a way that now seems logical, it could have been prevented.

There was enough information available in different places that, if it had been shared in a more efficient way and if people had been smarter in making deductions from it, conceivably this could have led to some sort of action that would have interfered with the plot. But those are two very big "ifs," and it`s entirely possible that even with more efficient sharing of information, the critical leap to an investigation of flight schools might not necessarily have been made. But at least there was a chance. This now looks in hindsight like something for which there`s no excuse for missing, but I think it was a lot harder, obviously, to see that before the fact.

On the weapons of mass destruction, it appears that the biggest scandal was not that intelligence was misrepresented or misunderstood, but that there was so little positive intelligence. Circumstantial evidence that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction was overwhelming, but what it looks like now is that there wasn`t much beyond the circumstantial evidence. And the circumstantial evidence was how they had obstructed inspections during the 1990s, played cat and mouse with UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission], and blocked the inspectors so much that they had to withdraw. That didn`t make much apparent sense unless they were trying to hide the weapons we knew they once had. There`s no dispute that the Iraqis did, before the 1991 war, have chemical and biological weapons of some sorts and of some quantity. What it now appears happened is that Saddam Hussein may have been telling the truth when he said they were destroyed after the war.

Could you give some examples of worse episodes of intelligence failure?

The sad but common fact is that surprise attacks often succeed despite warnings of enemy preparations. They succeed because the warnings are ambiguous, or misinterpreted, or get lost in the noise and confusion of diplomatic maneuvering, or are simply disbelieved.

Recurrent mistakes include dismissing warnings because an attack seemed to be an irrational choice for the enemy; the "cry wolf" problem, when several false alarms make policymakers take subsequent warnings less seriously; guessing correctly that an attack will occur, but guessing wrongly about exactly where, when, or how; having warnings held up too long in the communication chain between operators in the field, processors in the intelligence organization, and policymakers; judging that an attack is likely, but waiting too long for more information before deciding what to do; or being misled by enemy deception operations.

For reasons like these, major countries have fallen victim to surprise numerous times in past decades, for example: the French, British, and Russians before the German blitzkriegs of the 1940s; the Arabs in 1956 and 1967; the Israelis in 1973; and the United States before Pearl Harbor, the invasion of South Korea, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. If anything, U.S. and allied intelligence has probably done better overall in breaking up terrorist plots in the past 10 years than governments have done in avoiding conventional surprise attacks in the past century.

It looks, to some people at least, that Bush administration officials pushed to have intelligence that would support the case for war.

I`m sure they wanted the intelligence community to come up with as good a case as it could. But I think most people in the intelligence community really believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because of that circumstantial evidence. There`s a powerful tendency for intelligence estimators to assume that an enemy is going to behave rationally--at least, what seems rational in our terms. And the Iraqi behavior didn`t seem rational in our terms. We would have thought if they really didn`t have any, they would have let the inspectors go anywhere they wanted forever in the 1990s, rather than stonewalling and appearing to hide things.

Former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay has theorized that Saddam Hussein wanted people to believe he had these weapons in order to keep his country together.

Now we can figure out the rationales the Iraqis or Saddam Hussein personally may have had for pretending, implicitly, to have the weapons even while they were officially denying it. Once you see what appear to be the facts, then you can find some rationale that makes sense: that he was trying to play it both ways to get the deterrent benefit of having us think he had the weapons while getting the diplomatic benefit of denying it. Before we had the current evidence, or the lack of evidence, of weapons being in Iraq, that would not have seemed very logical, so that`s why I think intelligence estimators honestly agreed with the administration that it was almost certain [Iraq had WMD].

What is surprising is that there seems to have been so little even fragmentary information to support that deduction. I assumed before the fact that we didn`t know everything about where these weapons were, but we had enough clues to find some parts of their program pretty quickly or tell the U.N. inspectors, when they were finally let in right before the war, where to look. And the fact that that wasn`t true, I think, is one of the bigger surprises of the intelligence failure.

You warned in 2003 that Iraq might use WMD.

Yes, I believed, like everyone else. I believed before the war that they had them, again, on the basis of that circumstantial evidence, although I also, perhaps naively, assumed that there was more positive evidence on the inside than I had access to.

Is U.S. intelligence-gathering as flawed as some of its critics say?

It may sound like a cop-out, but I think the question is, "Is the glass half full or half empty?" [Intelligence-gathering] is in terrible shape if your standard for what is good intelligence is never missing an important event or never failing to predict an enemy attack before it occurs. It`s in good shape if you think the odds are stacked against intelligence to begin with and if [intelligence officials] do it right three out of four times or even two out of three times, that`s doing pretty well. What should our standard be? Realistically, it should be more the latter; that is, when you`re dealing with enemies who are trying to outwit you and who know a lot about what you do to get information on them and who try to adjust their behavior to try to prevent you from doing that, then finding out about a majority of plots, even if you don`t find out about a significant number of others, is doing pretty well.

The intelligence community gets very little credit on the outside for all of its successes. If you go back through the press and you look on the bottom of inside pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post every few months, you will see a plot being reported broken up as a result of getting information on the plotters before they could actually execute it. But that doesn`t register with most people. It`s sort of taken for granted: "Great, that`s what they`re supposed to do."

But I liken it to the problem of improving a batting average. If somebody is trying to get the ball past you, even if you are a tremendous hitter, they are going to strike you out occasionally. That`s not something that people like to hear. It sounds defeatist; it sounds like it`s not asking enough of our public servants. I think it`s realistic. Things could always be done better. Any batter who strikes out realizes he might have adjusted his stance, he might have swung at one pitch rather than taken it, he might have done this or that [in order to] avoid the problem. I think to believe an adequate and properly functioning system will never have a serious error is just not giving enough credit to the enemies who are working pretty hard to outwit you.

You have written about the importance of human intelligence. In Iraq, it doesn`t seem as if the U.S. forces have much solid information on where the violence is coming from or how to prevent it. Is that because they are foreign occupiers?

For one thing, we can hope that some of the intelligence is better than we know on the outside. But, assuming that it`s not and we don`t have very good sources on various parts of the resistance, I think it`s due to a number of problems. First, we are an occupying power, which limits the number of people in the country who are going to jump at the chance to inform on thugs who are plotting against us.

Second, even the ones who want to help us, if they have information, have reason to fear for their lives, and it`s pretty obvious that they can`t count on us to protect them. If we had a better a security situation in Iraq and the threats to people who collaborate with us were under control, we probably would get a lot more cooperation and a lot more sources pouring in.

Also, we don`t know who to trust when we do get human intelligence. The constant, age-old problem with human intelligence, which really is something that all the James Bond mythology and spy movies we grew up on do not convey, is that human intelligence sources, when they do exist, are widely distrusted because they very often prove to be either flaky or dishonest or working both sides of the street. It`s hard to tell if a source is real and giving you the truth, rather than trying to play you for a sucker. In Iraq, we probably don`t have many sources to begin with; our confidence in the ones we do have is limited.

And finally, things are fast moving. If you don`t have many people who are your own trusted agents, who speak the local language, and who have contacts built up over the years, what you are going to get comes in bits and pieces and may come in too late to give you the kind of intelligence you need to avoid things like bomb plots.

Some have called, as you mentioned in a recent Foreign Affairs article, for the appointment of a director of national intelligence. I don`t see how that position would differ from the director of central intelligence (DCI).

Bingo. You broke the code. If people really wanted to give authority over all these intelligence agencies, they do not need a new grand design to do it; they could have given that authority to the DCI years ago. And the reason that he doesn`t have as much authority as some critics now believe he should have is that it has always been resisted for reasons that are both good and bad.

Good reasons: there are benefits to having independent centers of collection analysis in the community; also, each department that has its own intelligence unit has its own specific needs and needs to have a unit that is very responsive to them. Bad reasons: all the normal bureaucratic turf wars and jealousies that go with any complex organization like the U.S. government. A new director of national intelligence could have a revolutionary impact if he or she were given authority to direct the missions, the priorities, and the activities of all the 15 intelligence agencies throughout all the departments of the government. But I will believe that when I see it. The risk is getting legislation that creates a new director of national intelligence with a fancy title and a vague mandate to exert more authority but who doesn`t have the actual last word on what all these agencies will do. It`s very hard for me to believe that the departments--the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Energy Department, and most especially, the Defense Department--will allow that sort of complete authority over a unit within their department to be given to somebody outside of their department.

How does the current system work in practice? The DCI, of course, runs the Central Intelligence Agency. He also chairs interagency meetings on intelligence, but does he have any authority over the Pentagon`s huge operation?

He has a lot of control over budget allocations and organizing programs because of previous legislation and because [the DCI`s] authority has increased over the years. He doesn`t have complete control over everything the National Security Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency or the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the State Department--everything that they do from day to day. He does have a lot of influence over resources, but it`s not complete control. If you want to give him complete control, you might as well have a Department of National Intelligence, just like the departments of State and Justice, in which all the intelligence agencies are taken out of those other departments and put into this new department with one secretary of intelligence. But [even though] many are promoting this big reform of a director of national intelligence, I don`t know anyone who`s actually advocating taking these units out of the other departments.

Who have been the best directors of central intelligence? And who would make a good one now?

There`s no one answer to the last question. Because the job is so complex and involves so many different kinds of skills, no one individual is going to have all of them, and therefore, it depends on what you think is the highest priority. One could make a case for a number of things: a business manager, a consummate analyst, a spy master. Choices among [those] priorities would probably lead you to different choices of directors.

One of my favorites is James Schlesinger, who was only in the job for a few months [in 1973], back in the Nixon administration. I like him for parochial reasons. Being an academic, I put high priority on the importance of analysis, and he was about the only professional analyst we had in the job. He also had a lot of administrative experience in several areas of the national security bureaucracy--the Atomic Energy Commission, the Bureau of the Budget, and elsewhere--so he brought a breadth of experience and sensitivity to intelligence problems from the government as a whole and from within the intelligence community. That, I think, is an ideal combination of analytic skills and managerial and policy background.

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June 23, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
For Iraq`s Shiites, Faith Knows No Borders
By YOUSSEF M. IBRAHIM

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — While Iraq`s Sunni Muslims continue their insurgency and the Kurds threaten to secede, America at least seems to have reached an accord with the country`s largest group, the Shiites. The most respected religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has approved of the Shiite-led transition government set to take over in Baghdad next week, and the militias loyal to the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr have peacefully abandoned their occupation of the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

It would be a mistake, however, to consider the Shiites a problem solved. Rather, Bush administration strategists should undertake an in-depth analysis of the entire Shiite phenomenon, which since the Iranian revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power in Iran in 1979 has repeatedly upset America`s plans in the Persian Gulf. It is vital that Washington understand that it cannot consider the Shiites of Iraq to be an independent, national body. Shiism, forged during more than 1,500 years of persecution at the hands of the Islamic world`s Sunnis, is a phenomenon that transcends borders and domestic politics.

Iran, with its 65 million Shiites, its powerful army and its ancient civilization, is the de facto master of the Persian Gulf. Tehran is clearly pleased that Iraq`s 15 million Shiites will more or less control their country eventually. In Lebanon, with one million Shiites, the well-armed Hezbollah militia has proved itself a most effective military-social-political group, which even forced both American and Israeli armed forces from the country. There are 400,000 Shiites in Bahrain and several million more in pockets from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. Just as important, there are communities of sophisticated and shrewd Shiite merchants spread all over the Persian Gulf region, commanding billions of dollars in wealth and a fierce sense of solidarity with their brethren.

And that is the big point: Shiites stick together. Their formidable official religious establishment, or Hawza, acts as one entity, even though its members may be in Najaf, in Qom in Iran (the other major center of learning), or any other place with substantial numbers of Shiites. Unlike, say, the Vatican, the Hawza is not an organized theocracy with clear hierarchies and chains of authority. Rather, it is bound by fervor, consensus and the utter devotion of its leaders and followers. This makes it a tricky institution to predict.

Shiite religious leaders are not handed their titles as a pope may appoint Roman Catholic bishop. Rather, a cleric rises in status depending on how many followers believe in his interpretations, be they religious or political. This is called ijtihad, which can be roughly translated as "intellectual initiative." Shiism encourages debate and questioning. The rewards for clerics who thrive at ijtihad are an increase in followers and financial donations. Religious titles like ayatollah are thus conferred by the faithful to the cleric, in recognition of scholarship, leadership, wisdom and courage.

Ayatollah Khomeini was the perfect example of how one can succeed in this system. When he led the Iranian revolution in 1979, he was not viewed as the most learned among the grand ayatollahs (although, having written the equivalent of 15 doctoral dissertations, he was quite an authority). But he had other qualities — a personal magnetism and undaunted conviction — that attracted the masses, and before his death they elevated him to ayatollah al uzma, the highest rank, and gave him the lofty title of naeb al imam, or "deputy of the imam."

This helps explain why the simple-minded American formula of dividing Iraq`s Shiites into good guys (followers of Grand Ayatollah Sistani) and hoodlums (followers of Mr. Sadr) is tragically mistaken. Mr. Sadr is not just a firebrand or militant. He has religious and political qualities that have given him a legitimate following. More important, his father was the most revered Shiite figure in Iraq during the Baathist regime and was assassinated by Saddam Hussein`s goons in 1999.

Martyrdom is a powerful force in Shiism: the sect was born of defeat in 661, when the Prophet Muhammad`s son-in-law Ali was killed and Sunnism became the dominant force in Islam. Thus his family history confers considerable legitimacy on Mr. Sadr. Any efforts by the Americans or the new Iraqi government to marginalize or imprison him would cause reverberations from Iran to Lebanon to Pakistan. Remember that Iran shares hundreds of miles of open borders with Iraq. Inside Iraq there are thousands of armed and trained Shiite militia fighters taking their signals from Iran. The last thing we want is battle within Shiism, because the war would go well beyond Iraq itself.

There is little question that Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who served his exile in Iran, is aware of all this. While Mr. Sadr eventually succumbed to his calls and pulled his forces out of Karbala and Najaf, the older man will no doubt carefully consider Mr. Sadr`s popularity before putting pressure on him in the future. The Americans` assumption that they have the grand ayatollah in their pocket could not be more misguided. He will do what is good for Shiites, not America. And besides, the Hawza is much larger than one man.

My modest advice to American authorities is not to get in the way if Mr. Sadr manages to carve a role for himself in a democratic Iraq. Any hopes for a secular Iraq should also be abandoned — the Shiites will dominate by force of numbers. That isn`t necessarily a bad thing, or a sign that they will be pawns of Iran. But dealing with it requires some knowledge and and a sense of history that the Bush administration`s neoconservatives haven`t shown much inclination to acquire. They started a war in a country they didn`t understand, and over the last year they have paid a heavy price. On June 30 the political dynamic will change unalterably as the Shiites move slowly, deftly and surely to consolidate power. Let`s hope that this time Washington takes the time to gain some understanding.

Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for The Times, is a risk consultant to energy and investment companies.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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•White House Documents on Detainee Treatment Legal memos and policy directives from the White House, Justice Department and Defense Department provide new insight into the administration`s internal debate over how far it should go to gain information from terrorism suspects.
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Memo on Interrogation Tactics Is Disavowed
Justice Document Had Said Torture May Be Defensible

By Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A01

President Bush`s aides yesterday disavowed an internal Justice Department opinion that torturing terrorism suspects might be legally defensible, saying it had created the false impression that the government was claiming authority to use interrogation techniques barred by international law.

Responding to pressure from Congress and outrage around the world, officials at the White House and the Justice Department derided the August 2002 legal memo on aggressive interrogation tactics, calling parts of it overbroad and irrelevant and saying it would be rewritten.

In a highly unusual repudiation of its department`s own work, a senior Justice official and two other high-ranking lawyers said that all legal advice rendered by the department`s Office of Legal Counsel on the subject of interrogations will be reviewed.

As part of a public relations offensive, the administration also declassified and released hundreds of pages of internal documents that it said demonstrated that Bush had never authorized torture against detainees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, the administration revealed details of the interrogation tactics being used on prisoners, an extraordinary disclosure for an administration that has argued that the release of such information would help the enemy.

The legal memos and policy directives provided a new level of insight into the administration`s internal debate and decision-making over how far it should go to gain information from terrorism suspects, including:

� A Feb. 7, 2002, memo signed by Bush saying that he believed he had "the authority under the Constitution" to deny protections of the Geneva Conventions to combatants picked up during the war in Afghanistan but that he would "decline to exercise that authority at this time."

"Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm -- ushered in not by us, but by terrorists -- requires new thinking in the law of war," Bush wrote.

The memo, which had not been scheduled to be declassified until 2012, settled a bitter dispute between the State and Justice departments over the issue. It outlined Bush`s rationale -- announced the day he signed it -- that some of the Geneva Conventions would apply to fighters for Afghanistan`s Taliban but not to members of the al Qaeda terrorist network. Bush added that "our values as a Nation . . . call for us to treat detainees humanely."

� New details on the range of severe interrogation techniques approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including stripping detainees to humiliate them, using dogs to scare them and forcing them to remain in stressful positions. Those measures were later curtailed after military lawyers in the field questioned their legality.

� Documents showing that U.S. military interrogators were driven to seek more aggressive interrogation techniques because, in the words of Army Gen. James T. Hill, chief of the U.S. Southern Command in October 2002, "some detainees have tenaciously resisted our current interrogation methods."

� Military lawyers and policy officials alike were preoccupied during their deliberations by the possibility that officers, intelligence officials and law enforcement authorities could be prosecuted for violating the constraints of U.S. law or international conventions protecting detainees.

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters yesterday that Bush`s aides decided to make the disclosures, because they "felt that it was harmful to this country, in terms of the notion that perhaps we may be engaging in torture." The steps followed a string of polls showing sinking public confidence in Bush`s handling of the war on terrorism.

None of the documents provided by the White House governed practices at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons in Iraq, although some of the ideas approved at least temporarily -- such as stripping prisoners -- would be mirrored in the graphic photos that drew international condemnation and heavy scrutiny of U.S. detention practices.

Earlier yesterday, Bush said Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, a U.S. ally in Iraq, had brought up the practices at Abu Ghraib. Bush said he had "assured him that these soldiers do not represent what Americans think."

"Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country: We do not condone torture," Bush said. "I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being."

In the White House briefing, the aides took the extraordinary step of publicly questioning advice provided by top administration lawyers, with Gonzales saying that the internal administration debate included "unnecessary, over-broad discussions."

At issue was an Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Justice Department`s Office of Legal Counsel to Gonzales. A Justice Department official said yesterday that the administration planned to scrap a provision in it opining that interrogators who torture al Qaeda or Taliban captives could be exempt from prosecution under the president`s powers as commander in chief. "I don`t believe it was necessary," the official said. "The president never asked us to overrule" laws barring torture, he said. Bush has not authorized any interrogations that would employ methods outside the law, he said.

Gonzales said that memo and a related Pentagon memo had been meant to "explore the limits of the legal landscape," and to his knowledge had "never made it to the hands of soldiers in the field, nor to the president." He acknowledged that some of the conclusions were "controversial" and "subject to misinterpretation."

The documents that were released and the White House briefing focused on military interrogations and left many questions unanswered. Gonzales refused to comment on techniques used by the CIA, beyond saying that they "are lawful and do not constitute torture." He also would not discuss the president`s involvement in the deliberations.

Democrats on Capitol Hill said they would continue pushing for more documents. "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "Now, responding to public pressure, the White House has released a small subset of the documents that offers glimpses into the genesis of this scandal."

The administration had argued that supplying details of interrogation techniques would make it easier for detainees to resist. Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II said that there was "some value in having some uncertainty" for terrorism suspects but that "under the circumstances, this was the right thing to do."

Staff writers Dana Priest and R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Wolfowitz Says Iraq Stay Could Last Years

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A16

The U.S. military could remain in Iraq for years, but with the passage of time it should be able to step back into more of a supporting role for Iraqi security forces, the Pentagon`s number two official said yesterday in a hearing notable for sharp partisan exchanges.

"I think it`s entirely possible" that U.S. troops could be stationed in Iraq for years, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee. But, he added, as the Iraqi army and new national guard develop, "we will be able to let them be in the front lines and us be in a supporting position."

Wolfowitz said it is possible that U.S. troops could be used to enforce Iraqi martial law after the partial transfer of power a week from now. Ayad Alawi, Iraq`s interim prime minister, has said martial law is possible to crack down on insurgents.

Helping impose martial law, Wolfowitz said, "might actually be something that we might mutually agree was necessary to bring order in a particularly difficult place."

But much of the hearing was devoted to a series of unusually pointed discussions between Wolfowitz and Rep. Ike Skelton, a centrist Missourian who is the committee`s senior Democrat.

Skelton told Wolfowitz he senses two Iraqs: "One is the optimistic Iraq that you describe, and the other Iraq is the one that I see every morning, with the violence, the deaths of soldiers and Marines." He added, with some emotion: "I must tell you, it breaks my heart a little bit more every day."

Skelton also was dismissive of White House comments about "staying the course" in Iraq. "I don`t think anyone here questions your resolve or questions the resolve of the president to succeed in Iraq," he said. "But there`s a difference between the resolve on the one hand and competence on the other." He said he now fears that the United States is descending into "a security quagmire" in Iraq.

The two men went back and forth several times.

"From your description, Mr. Secretary, I don`t see an end in sight," Skelton said. "We`re stuck."

"We`re not stuck, Mr. Skelton," Wolfowitz replied. He said that the U.S. strategy in Iraq clearly is to develop Iraqi forces that can take over security from U.S. and allied troops.

At another point, Skelton said he did not see a plan to bring about success in Iraq. He added, "We broke it -- we must do our best to fix it."

Wolfowitz shot back, "We didn`t break Iraq. Saddam Hussein broke Iraq." The Pentagon official, just back from a four-day visit to Iraq, said, "It is going to be a big job to repair it, but I feel much more confident than before this trip, after spending many hours with the new prime minister and members of his government, that there is an Iraqi team ready to take charge on July 1st and committed to fixing that damage."

As the hearing went on, Wolfowitz sought to temper his initial presentation. "Maybe it`s optimistic compared to the total gloom and doom that one otherwise hears, but I in no way mean to minimize the security problem," he said. "I agree with you, it is the obstacle to all the other progress that has been made." He said he is worried especially about the next six months, as insurgents seek to derail the Iraqi elections being planned for January 2005.

Wolfowitz also said the media are part of the problem in Iraq. "Frankly, part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors," he said.

Reporters in Iraq recently have restricted their movements, sometimes at the recommendation of U.S. officials, because of widespread violence.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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